Polyhedron: Issue #29

Issue #29 of Polyhedron is another April Fool's Day issue, though it actually appeared in May of 1986. The issue features a cover by Tom Wham, which is always a delight. I wish the same could be said of its content. I readily admit that I'm not an ideal audience for issues like this, but that's not because I lack a sense of humor. Rather, I simply dislike forced humor and this issue is full of it. Needless to say, I didn't enjoy re-reading this one. Apologies in advance if my frustration gets the better of me.

"Notes from HQ" is typically ephemeral and focused on RPGA matters. The only genuinely interesting thing in it is the announcement of the Gamers' Choice Awards. "Unlike other gaming industry awards, for which the winners are chosen by manufacturers and special panels, these awards are given to those companies whose products are judged the best by the most qualified judges of all – the gamers themselves." I must be old, because I don't recall ever hearing of these awards before. On the other hand, I was never much of a con goer, so that might explain my ignorance. 

Skip Williams gives us "The Lighter Side of Encounters II," a sequel to his article in the previous year's April Fool's Day issue. Like its predecessor, what makes the article interesting is not so much its content as the origin of the content, namely AD&D campaigns run by the Lake Geneva staff of TSR, in this case Williams himself and Frank Mentzer. Williams presents two different encounters, one involving a mad dash through a dungeon and another about trying to prevent a pit fiend from regenerating, that aren't exactly humorous in context, but that seem so when presented in isolation. They're the kinds of things that happen in any RPG campaign played with friends and I love them for that reason. This article is probably the best in the issue and it's because it's the most "serious."

"The Camel's Nose" by Mike Selinker is an AD&D adventure that takes up 16 pages – half of the issue. It's a humorous scenario for six pregenerated player characters, all of whom are valley elves with ridiculous names like "Tattieboggle Spauldrocky" or "Arglebargle Collieshangle." These characters are tasked with protecting a talking camel (a cleric of the Camel Lord, Camelopardus), on his journey across the Burning Desert to a shrine of his deity. He brings with him a sacred rock called the Camel's Nose and ... well, I think you can probably guess where this is going. The adventure is filled with puns and humorous allusions and general silliness, like the Camels Oasis shopping center. I'm sure someone might find it funny, but that someone is not me.

Selinker returns with "The Ecology of Tiamat," which is a rambling dialog between Feargall the All-Noxious and Greenhorn the dim as they "humorously" discuss Feargall's many encounters with Tiamat. It's strange, self-referential, and fourth wall-breaking and, again, I just found it tedious. Your mileage may vary. "Fractured Spells" by Rick Reid is a collection of goofy spells for all magic-using classes, from neutralize person to detect chum to continual lice and more. As you can see, they're all based on puns or misreadings of pre-existing spells. I'll give the author points for cleverness, but not much else.

"The Gods of the Gamma World Game" by James M. Ward is a very strange article. Ward presents five larger-than-life characters from the setting of Gamma World, each of which represents "a different ideal." For example, Ren – there's that name again – is the archetypal scientist, while Tobor the Unstoppable is the archetypal robot. If I squint, I can sort of see what Ward's getting at with these characters. They're more akin to "tall tales" like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill than "gods" in the usual sense. That's kind of interesting. However, Ward saddles them all with absurd Gamma World game stats akin to what you'd find in Deities & Demigods and serendipitously provide additional insight for my recent post about that very book and the drawbacks of its presentation.

The issue ends with Roger E. Moore's "Savage Sword of Lugnut the Barbarian," another "humorous" story, this time about a mighty-thewed barbarian and his quest to save a princess from Skuzzdrool the Ultra-Necromancer. It's not very funny, even as a parody of Conan, but's thankfully short, which is more than can be said of "The Camel's Nose." I still cannot understand why half the issue was devoted to that adventure ...

Oh well. One more issue to go before this series ends, which is probably for the best. My patience is wearing thin, especially after this issue.

Retrospective: Greyhawk Adventures

Although D&D's Bronze Age in the early to mid-1990s is quite rightly associated with the plethora of pre-packaged campaign settings TSR published for the game, this strategy had its origins in the dying days of the Silver Age. This was the period immediately prior to the release of David Cook's second edition of AD&D, when the company was throwing a lot of spaghetti against a lot of walls to see what might stick. The time was equal parts "experimental" and "desperate" and you can see that in the unevenness of the products TSR created.

Being the unrepentant TSR fanboy I was, I naturally picked up almost everything the company produced, even when it wasn't something out of which I thought I'd get much use. That's what led me to buy Dragonlance Adventures in 1987 and, the following year, Greyhawk Adventures. In 1988, I was no longer making use of Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk setting, having developed my own setting during my high school years. Even so, there was no way I wasn't going to grab a new hardcover AD&D book, especially one written by James M. Ward, creator of my beloved Gamma World. 

As it would turn out, Greyhawk Adventures is not the work of James M. Ward – or, rather, it's not solely his work. The volume is instead the work of many different writers, some of whose names I recognize and others completely unknown to me: Daniel Salas, Skip Williams, Nigel Findley, Thomas Kane, Stephen Innis, Len Carpenter, and Eric Oppen. The content of the book is itself a mixed bag, consisting of seven chapters and two appendices. The chapters describe (in order) the deities and clerics of Greyhawk, new monsters, significant named NPCs, magic spells, magic items, unusual locales, and a series of adventure outlines and random encounters. Meanwhile, one appendix enumerates the spells named after Greyhawk magic-users and the other introduces the concept of playable 0-level characters.

The section on deities and clerics was of great interest to me in my youth, in part because I had a lot of fondness for the gods of Greyhawk. Each god is described in some detail, along with the statistics for his "avatar" or physical manifestation in the realm of mortals. I suspect this concept was introduced here in order to obviate the problems that arose from the way the gods had been presented in Ward's earlier Deities & Demigods. Clerics, on the other hand, were presented in a way similar to Dragonlance Adventures, with each god's priesthoods operating according to their own unique rules, including weapon and spell restrictions. I thought then as I do now that this only makes sense and probably should have been introduced into Dungeons & Dragons sooner. If nothing else, it's an excellent example of game mechanics doubling as worldbuilding.

Sadly, after a strong first chapter, Greyhawk Adventures stumbles and never really recovers. The sections on monsters and magic items, for example, are fairly bland, with only the thinnest of Greyhawk veneers to justify their inclusion in this book. The section on named NPCs, many of whom are the rulers of the setting's city-states and countries, is a little better in that there's a stronger connection to the setting but most of these NPCs are so powerful and influential that the likelihood of a DM ever making use of them in play is small. The book's many new spells, like everything else in this book, vary in quality, their main characteristic being that all of them are associated with a famous Greyhawk spellcaster. If you ever wanted more Bigby's Hand spells, for example, Greyhawk Adventures has got you covered. 

After all these years, I still can't make up my mind as to whether the idea of playable 0-level characters is insanity or genius. The basic idea is that a 0-level character is an apprentice adventurer, one who hasn't yet decided on his character class. Through his choices, the 0-level character slowly determines his alignment, abilities, proficiencies, and so on. He can also seek out instructors to teach him more, thereby advancing along the road toward full membership in a traditional character class. It's a genuinely interesting idea, particularly since 0-level characters can and indeed will have a smattering of skills associated with multiple classes. It's almost an attempt to present a class-less AD&D, albeit one with lots of caveats and limitations in order to preserve one of the game's foundational design elements. (It's worth noting, too, that there are also rules for allowing characters of 1st level and above to pick up the abilities of other classes at the cost of an XP penalty.)

Compared to Dragonlance Adventures, Greyhawk Adventures is a letdown on multiple levels. The strength of Dragonlance Adventures lies in its integration of rules and setting so as to present a version of AD&D tailored to the world of Krynn. Greyhawk Adventures does nothing of the kind. It's a grab-bag of fairly generic – and often unimaginative – material released under the Greyhawk masthead but without any significant connection to Gygax's campaign setting. The most interesting stuff in the book, aside from the material on the gods and their clerics (which was simply an adaptation of what Dragonlance Adventures had already done), is the appendix on 0-level characters and even that is half-baked and tentative, as if its designer (whoever he was) didn't quite have the courage of his conviction to upend D&D's class system entirely.

The end result is a book that is by turns meandering, trite, and directionless – much like TSR before the publication of Second Edition gave the company a short-lived injection of energy and enthusiasm. As a well known hater of Dragonlance, I hope others will recognize the significance of my stating here that Dragonlance Adventures was a superior book to Greyhawk Adventures in almost every way. Indeed, it's possible that Greyhawk Adventures might well be the worst hardcover volume ever published for the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which is saying something. 

Interview: Skip Williams

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm keenly interested in living connections between the early days of the hobby -- and the fan cultures out of which it grew -- and the present day. Sadly, those connections are becoming fewer and fewer as the years take their toll, which is why it's always a pleasure to speak with someone who was a young person in those days.

Skip Williams was still in school when D&D was released in 1974 and thereafter found himself playing in the legendary Greyhawk campaign, the second RPG campaign in history. He subsequently worked at TSR in a variety of capacities before moving on to Wizards of the Coast, where he was involved in the design of the third edition of Dungeons & Dungeons. Together these experiences give him a unique perspective on the history of the hobby and its most famous game.

Mr Williams agreed to answer a few questions I put to him and his answers are presented below. I'd like to ask that anyone who comments do so in a respectful fashion, whatever your disagreements might be with the responses here. While I recognize that some of what Mr Williams says might be at odds with the received wisdom of the old school community, that's no excuse for rudeness and I will not hesitate to delete comments that I feel step over the bounds of common courtesy, so please rein in your enthusiasms before I have to do it for you.

1. I usually begin by asking my interviewee how they entered the hobby of roleplaying. In your case, I suspect you became involved in the hobby because you went to school Gary Gygax's son, Ernie. Is that correct?

Mostly correct. I've told this story before, so I'll keep it short.

I first became aware of gaming one summer when I saw a picture of of some people playing a game with tanks. It turned out it was an article about Gen Con, which was held in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, my home town at the time. I soon discovered that several of my school classmates were playing various wargames (D&D had not been invented yet). When D&D hit the shelves, I was soon involved in a couple of campaigns, and my classmate, Ernie Gygax approached me about getting involved in an even newer game, Warriors of Mars. That, in turn, got me introduced to the Gygax household and to the fledgling TSR.

2. Were you a participant in the original Greyhawk campaign refereed by Gary and Rob Kuntz and, if so, which characters did you play?

Ah, you're giving me a chance to split hairs here.

Gary ran the very first Greyhawk campaign using the map from the Outdoor Survival game and his notes for the future D&D Game (the very first D&D suggests getting Outdoor Survival and using it for your campaign map). After TSR published D&D, Gary drew a campaign map of his own and that became the Greyhawk setting everyone knows. I was involved in that campaign pretty much from the start, having seen the map laid out on Gary's dining room table.

In "New Greyhawk," I had several characters. The most famous of these was Rufus of Hommlet (or Rufus of Skipperton as Gary named him in one of his novels). Rufus explored the Temple of Elemental Evil and eventually became a bigwig in Hommlet. He's mentioned in the modules Gary wrote about the Temple of Elemental Evil campaign.

I also had a halfling thief (these days D&D players would call him a rogue) called Phalangas, or "Fingers," who ran around the City of Greyhawk causing as much trouble as he could, and picking pockets on the way. I only ever played Phalangas when Rob Kuntz, Gary's co-DM decided to run a pickup game, so no one has heard of him until now.

My longest-running character in the Greyhawk campaign was a human fighter named Boaric. Boaric was no great shakes, but he rubbed elbows with the big boys in the campaign (Tenser, Erac's Cousin, and Robilar to name a few) and was involved on some famous adventures. He was involved in an aborted expedition into the Tomb of Horrors. His biggest accomplishment there was dragging various bits and pieces of his former comrades back out. He also hacked and slashed his way through Against the Giants until coming toe to toe with Snurre Ironbelly. That episode ended badly for all, and it took a wish to get us back on our feet. Boaric also made a few trips to The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, and briefly owned the Invulnerable Coat of Arnd.

Boaric was the only character I played under both Greyhawk DMs, Gary and Rob Kuntz.

3. You're thanked by name in both the AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide. Were there any specific contributions you made to the writing or development of either?

In the early days of D&D, everybody did things his own way. I was involved in several campaigns in my high school days and I essentially found a different version of the game in each. I used to have talks with Gary about how the game ought to work (often during commercial breaks for televised football games). We talked about everything from how spells are cast and aimed to how much a DM ought to manipulate events in a campaign. It was those talks, I'm sure, that Gary was thinking of when he named me a contributor.

4. One of the many "lost" D&D supplements about which gamers still talk is Shadowland, a product that would have detailed the Plane of Shadow. According to Gary, this was to have been a collaboration between himself and you. Do you remember anything about this project or why it never came to pass?

I remember quite a bit abut the project, and I came very close to getting it rolling again a few years ago. It involved an expedition to the Plane of Shadow where the party would discover, shades, shadow dragons, and several of those enigmatic quasi-deities Gary was always pulling out of his hat. My notes on the plane eventually were co-opted for the Planescape setting.

What killed the project, mostly, was lack of time. Gary became interested in getting a D&D Movie off the ground, and I was interested in my college homework and eventually in running the Gen Con Game Fair. Somehow, the two of us never got back together to finish the thing.

5. Of the principal designers of Third Edition, you're the only one who had a direct connection to the earliest days of the hobby. Do you feel your longstanding, personal connection to those days informed your work on 3e and, if so, how?

Mostly what I brought to the design effort from those days was a sharp sense of how things can go wrong. Whenever we came to a place in the rules where I knew DMs and players were going to clash, I'd tell a "campaign from hell" story, in which a character (mine or someone else's) was in peril and the DM made the most illogical and completely off the wall ruling you could imagine. I tied to be very careful that all the loose boards in the system were well nailed down. Of course, people still found ways to pry them loose again.

6. For many years, you acted as "the Sage," providing official answers to questions about the rules of D&D in the pages of Dragon, a role you continue to assume for Kobold Quarterly. I remember Gary once complaining that, in the early days, fans of D&D would call him at his home to ask him rules questions and he was baffled as to why anyone needed him to come up with answers, a feeling many early TSR staffers apparently shared. Do you see any contradiction between the desire of many fans for official answers to their questions and the belief of many early designers that players should come up with their own answers?

It's a huge contradiction. The early designers were wrong. It comes down to this: If you want to be in control of your character, you have to have some idea how anything you might try is going to come out. and you can't know that unless you have some idea of how the rules are going to handle the situation. If the GM is making capricious decisions about what happens in the game, you're always shooting in the dark and you have no real control over your character at all. Think of how hard it would be to, say, learn to ride a bicycle if the laws of physics were constantly in flux. The game just works better if the DM and players have similar expectations about how the rules handle things.

7. I think most gamers are sympathetic to the concern about capriciousness by the referee, but some would nevertheless argue that having official answers can have the opposite problem of reducing the referee to being a less active participant in the adjudication of the rules than he might have been in the early days of the game. Given that, what do you see is the proper role for the referee as it relates to the adjudication of rules?

The referee is there to keep the game moving. As Patton once said, a good answer today is better than a perfect answer next week.

A well-written rules set is the best friend a DM can have. It helps manage the player's expectations and gives the DM a leg to stand on when things don't go the players' way.

8. What RPGs do you currently play?

D&D 3.5 and 4.0
Big Eyes, Small Mouth
High Adventure Role Playing