What better time to reminisce about an ancient Star Trek game, than on the 60th anniversary of the airing of the first episode?

I’ve worked a lot of interesting jobs in my life ranging from a 21/Craps dealer to a construction supply delivery driver, from movie theater Assistant Manager to Non-Profit Program Director. One of my favorite memories comes from when I was working as an undergraduate in the university’s IT department. I wasn’t studying computer science. I was a Political Science and English dual major. That didn’t stop me from applying for a job in the IT department. As is true of a lot of people my age, I grew up programming in BASIC and eventually C++. It’s a background that made the transition to doing data analysis in R pretty smooth and that has inspired me to build a SmartyKit with my daughters this upcoming winter break. We will be building it and it will be glorious.

I will also probably try to add memory to the basic system and upload BASIC so we can do a bit of BASIC programming for fun as well. After all, what better way to spend Christmas break of your Freshman year of college than building an outmoded 8-bit computer with your dad?

When I worked in the IT department, I became friends with a couple of the admins and I remember chatting about Asimov’s Foundation books, Iain Banks’ Culture series, Tolkien, D&D, and more with them. It was almost enough to get me to change my major and had things gone a little differently in those early undergraduate days I might have. That I am currently employed as a data analyst and research analyst doing statistical analysis in the R programming language is a sign that I was on that path anyway.

In one of these conversations, I talked about how much I absolutely loved Interplay’s Star Trek 25th Anniversary game. I first played the game on the copy of Interplay’s 10th Anniversary Collection I owned. I bought it for Bard’s Tale and kept playing it for Star Trek 25th Anniversary because it was such a great adventure game that captured the best of the adventure game genre with the feel of Original Series Star Trek.

During that conversation, one of the staff said, “You know, we have an ancient Star Trek game on the server. You’ve likely never played it before.” I was intrigued, so I asked how to access it and loaded it up to play. It was a completely text-based game. Not text-based in the sense that it was a narrative game, rather in that ASCII characters represented graphics like they do in early NetHack/Hack and Rogue games.

While the interface was primitive, it was also functional and fun. It created a kind of “theatre of the mind” presentation of the Star Trek universe and I was an instant addict. I played the game during almost every moment of downtime I had. I also probably played it when I should have been doing other things, like actual work in the office.

Super Star Trek, or as I knew it at the time Star Trek, was based on a 1971 game by high school student Mike Mayfield. Mayfield’s original code is believed lost, but you can access code Mayfield wrote in 1972. Bob Leedom expanded the game, and gave it the name Super Star Trek, in 1974. The game was once again updated in 1978 by David H. Ahl and Mary Cole. This “final” version was published by Ahl and Cole in the book BASIC Computer Games.

It’s amazing that Ahl and Cole were able to publish a version that thousands of people could hand type into their personal computers only seven years after Mike Mayfield was coding it on the SDS Sigma 7 mainframe computer using paper tape. Does anyone know what paper tape is anymore? Ahl and Cole’s initial updating of Mayfield’s and Leedom’s games is very similar to the originals, but they did add a significant change in the 1978 version by finally secured the rights to use the Star Trek brand name.

You can find a text copy of the game in David H. Ahl’s 1978 book BASIC Computer Games and you can find the original BASIC code here. If you have an emulator, you can copy and paste it. Personally, I plan on manually programming this, or at least manually copying it onto our “The C64,” in the coming weeks using the code in Ahl’s book. If you don’t want to spend all that time typing into an emulator or onto a retromachine you can play a Commodore 64 version of the game right now on Internet Archive. The old game is tons of fun, but it recently got an update.

Emanuele Bolognesi, an amateur game designer and programmer from Florence, Italy, programmed an updated version of Super Star Trek a couple of years ago. He then further refined the game by merging the classic BASIC game with the Interplay adventure game’s aesthetics. He calls his second game Super Star Trek meets 25th Anniversary. It’s free to play and absolutely fantastic. The image below was taken from his Super Star Trek and you can see how faithfully he merged the two games using the 25th Anniversary edition’s view screen as the playing area.

I’ve already spent more than a few hours playing this excellent adaptation of Super Star Trek and it’s a great demonstration of how Old School Gaming/Retrogaming is active, and creating great content, in the video game community as well as in the tabletop roleplaying game community.

The Background

In 1977, Steve Jackson revolutionized the gaming industry when he published his classic wargame OGRE through Metagaming Concepts. What made OGRE revolutionary wasn’t that it was a balanced science fiction roleplaying game that built upon the premises in the Bolo and Hammers Slammers books. Instead, it was the bang for the buck. Wargames, even chit and map wargames, have always been a bit pricey and OGRE was cheap and it created a MicroGame revolution. That revolution included games like Melee and Wizard (The Fantasy Trip) and eventually created the foundation for Steve Jackson Games when he left Metagaming.

While we think of Steve Jackson games as the company that Munchkin built, this isn’t the case at all. Yes, they are as big as they are today due to Munchkin, but before they were the company that Munchkin built, they were the company that GURPS built. Before that, they were the company that Car Wars built. In reality, they are the company that OGRE and The Space Gamer built. When Steve Jackson left Metagaming, he wasn’t able to take The Fantasy Trip with him, but he was able to take OGRE, GEV, and The Space Gamer and those formed a solid basis for a company that exploded in popularity with Car Wars.

OGRE has a simple premise. At some point in a post-apocalyptic future an artificially intelligent tank battles human forces on a blasted and irradiated battlefield. One player takes the role of the unstoppable and heartless killing machine and the other takes the role of the relatively helpless human opposition who try desperately to stop the OGRE from destroying their Command Center. It’s a castle defense game with asymmetrical forces and it is brilliant. The game is currently on its 6th edition, which is a lot prettier than the original version, but the tense gameplay remains the same. It is a must own game for even the casual wargamer. While the 6th edition is a bit pricey at $49.95, it is worth it because the game is extremely replayable and has tremendous tactical depth. If you want to get the game cheaper, you can always search the internet for used copies and older editions. I’m a particular fan of the OGRE/GEV set that was packaged in a VCR box.

The Lost Opportunity

While the game is currently available from Steve Jackson Games, in part because it looks like their 80/20 Munchkin to everything else ratio is sliding into 70/30 territory requiring them to have strong titles in the 30 percent of non-Munchkin sales, there was a time when OGRE was completely out of print and that’s when a neophyte game illustrator named Kwanchai Moriya decided to make a print and play version of the game reskinned to a Science Fictional World War II with Giant Robots. Kwanchai is a big name in board game illustration today, but that wasn’t the case back in 2009 when he produced his amateur print and play edition and released it on Board Game Geek.

His amateur version quickly went viral due to its unique look and theme. That theme included a cover inspired by Avalon Hill’s classic Cross of Iron expansion for Squad Leader. That Cross of Iron cover is one of the best examples of the excellent work that Rodger B. MacGowan produced in the wargaming hobby. Rodger was a frequent illustrator for Avalon Hill and eventually became Art Director for GMT Games LLC and was the Founder and Art Director for C3i Magazine, which contained support materials for many GMT games and frequently included full games in the issues with high end components. MacGowan was inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame in 2006 and passed away tragically due to pneumonia in February of 2025, an event that hit the fan community hard because his home and studio (where much of his work was stored) were burned down in the Palisades fire in January of that year. While many of the originals were lost, GMT published a hardcover collection of his art just as these tragic events unfurled.

Kwanchai’s work was years before MacGowan’s death, but it paid homage to one of the great illustrators of the hobby. The game itself was a great tribute to one of the classic games of the hobby, but it also had one major problem. He did more than create new counters and a new map, he reprinted the entire rulebook and did several other things that violated copyright and trademarks owned by Steve Jackson Games. As Kwanchai himself describes it:

He hadn’t licensed the homebrew and went far beyond what is standard practice for fan versions under fair use and Steve Jackson Games brought the hammer down. When they did it wasn’t in a mean or insincere way. Sure, they used the full legal authority they had, but they (as we would soon find out) were about to release a new and even more beautiful Designer’s Edition of OGRE. They had every right to come down on Kwanchai and remove the files from Board Game Geek. They weren’t acting in bad faith, and I am a very strong advocate of intellectual property, so I agree with what they did morally.

But, and it’s a BIG BUT (sorry, not sorry), I don’t think they should have merely required BGG and Kwanchai to remove the files from the internet. I think that stopping there was a bad business decision. Unlike Wizards of the Coast’s OGL fiasco, Steve Jackson Games didn’t get a lot of hate from fans for their action because they were within their rights. They got some from the copyleft to be sure, but most people understood. What Steve Jackson Games did wrong was in failing to BUY the files from Kwanchai and enter into a contract with him to publish them. There was clear demand for this product, and they could have offered it as a pdf stretch goal for their Kickstarter. They never did and that was a HUGE missed opportunity. Had they done so, even the critics on the copyleft would have had little to complain about.

The story isn’t an unhappy one for Kwanchai, but it was a slightly unhappy one for fans. Kwanchai went on to become a highly desired artist in the board game industry. We fans got the beautiful 6th edition of OGRE, but imagine if Steve Jackson Games had worked with Kwanchai to design an alternative edition of OGRE (both physical and pdf). Just imagine what a fully refined version of the game, with feedback from Andrew Hackard and Steve Jackson…and maybe Rodger MacGowan, could have been. It’s a real missed opportunity and I wish fans had been able to see that game.

It’s early September and that means that the Scary Season has begun for those who celebrate the prolonged season. These are the Halloweeners who celebrate the true spirit of the season, like the good old youth of yore. This is when kids really knew how to celebrate the season by breaking into people’s houses to steal furniture for the bonfire in the town square. Damn those late 19th and early 20th century kids knew how to celebrate. We really have lost a bit thanks to the TikTok era. Sure, we have moderately vandalous challenges, but these kids were committed.

I’m not quite in that camp, but I do like to begin watching horror movies starting on September 1st. My wife has informed me that this year, I will have to wait for the more traditional October 1st because I failed to properly celebrate Christmas in July. She is correct. I only watched a couple of Christmas themed films, and I think only one (gasp!) Hallmark movie, this July because I was watching every American Revolution movie and/or series I could get my hands on. It did mean that I got to watch the magnificent musical 1776 again, as well as The Scarlet Coat which is one of my favorite films.

Just because I cannot watch the movies at home though, doesn’t mean that I cannot begin sharing recommendations for other people to watch during the Scary Season. Those who have been readers for a long enough time know that I am always resistant to do “Top 10 Lists” (though I enjoyed ’s recent RomCom list and will have a reply post of my own soon), and I’m even more opposed to the “List of Films You are Supposed to Like.” This is that, largely, unwritten list that almost singlehandedly explains the gap between critics and audiences.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t movies I don’t think you should have seen in order to get an overview of a genre. I do. I just understand that such lists are subject to revision and should avoid being elitist whenever possible. Those caveats aside, I have decided the time is ripe for a Five-Foot Geekshelf of Horror Films from the 1960s and 1970s.

What is the Five-Foot Geekshelf?

Welcome to the sixth entry in my Five-Foot Geekshelf series where I create lists of 13 entries highlighting what I think are things that every geek should own or experience. These lists aren’t meant to be a comprehensive or “best of” lists, rather they are meant to be starting points. They are meant to include frames of reference that we can use to discuss the category the list represents.

I was inspired to do these lists when I was reading through some old genre magazines last year. I came across a short two article series that ran in the May/June and July/August issues of Twilight Zone Magazine in 1983 entitled The Fantasy Five-Foot Shelf that had some very interesting recommendations and recommenders and I thought it might be fun to attempt a series of lists for all the various parts of pop and geek culture that I love.

The authors of the Twilight Zone magazine articles were themselves inspired by the famous nickname for the Harvard Classics series created by Charles William Eliot when he retired as President of Harvard University. Eliot’s collection of 50 books, which took up approximately Five Feet of shelf space, contained everything that Eliot believed was necessary for a person to read in order to have a “liberal arts” education. Given that one of Eliot’s main efforts as Harvard President was to minimize the status of liberal arts and transform the university experience from a liberal education to a practical scientific research education, you can imagine that Dr. Eliot had some significant holes in the series.

It must be acknowledged that any list, no matter how long, will always have holes within it that anyone with a level of familiarity will notice with minimal effort. Because of this, I am willing to forgive Dr. Eliot for leaving out The Republic of Plato, even if his leaving it out meant that Karl Popper’s analysis became the common opinion of the dialogue for generations. Anyone who has actually read The Republic begins to doubt that Dr. Popper read more than a couple of undergrad papers on the book. I have a great deal of respect for Popper analysis in the Philosophy of Science, but his interpretation of The Republic leaves a lot to be desired.

That’s just my fancy way of saying that my lists, including this one, will have holes in it and that’s where you the discussant come in.

The first few entries in the series included a discussion of 13 Martial Arts films that belong in everyone’s video/movie library and a list of 13 roleplaying games from the 1970s I think you should own. Today’s list will focus on horror movies from the 1960s and 1970s. I could have started with the Universal era, but there is something very interesting about this particular period in time. It was a time where audiences pushed back against the Gothic horror of the early 20th century (to their detriment), while also pushing the boundaries of horror in ways that paralleled the New Hollywood films of the era with their raw grit and sepia tones.

While I don’t consider myself an expert on horror films, my friends J and know a lot more than I do; I really love horror films as a genre. Horror films capture our anxieties in ways few other genres can, and they provide us with a sense of cathartic release. If you were to ask me how much I love horror films on a 1 to Rebekah King, I’d be somewhere about the John Landis level, with my true love being the Amicus and Hammer films produced from the 1950s to the 1980s (with a new blessed resurgence). There will be some “obvious” films missing from the list like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and Halloween (1978). Of course I think you should watch these, but I also assume you probably already have. With those caveats in mind, here’s my list of 13 Horror Films from the 1960s and 1970s I think every geek should watch. Later in the month, I’ll be doing a follow up to this article where I provide game stats for a number of the films in a variety of roleplaying game systems.

Geekshelf Time!

1) Nothing But the Night (1973)

Christopher Lee has starred in at least three iconic roles across many generations. For the Baby Boomers, he will always be known as Dracula, but he was also Saruman and Count Dooku. If you read up on his life, he’s definitely in the running for the most interesting man in the world during his lifetime. While he did a lot of work with Hammer Studios, he and fellow Hammer alum Anthony Nelson Keys teamed up to create Charlemagne Films where they produced one and only one film Nothing but the Night.

Watch Nothing but the Night on Amazon

Nothing but the Night is an interesting horror film that touches on the fear of death that we all have and combines it with a bit of intergenerational hatred. Where Children of the Corn and The Children contained explicit “the kids are dangerous” messages, Nothing but the Night turns that on its head a bit. Given that there is a mystery at the core of the story, I will offer only one spoiler. The film was partially an inspiration for Get Out. The terror is different here, but…

2) The Asphyx (1973)

The Asphyx, ah, The Asphyx. I have such fond memories of this film. When I was a child I used to spend the night at my Oma and Opa’s house every other weekend. My Opa was a HUGE fan of genre fiction of all kinds and he introduced me to Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and The Asphyx.

Watch The Asphyx on Amazon Prime

Like Nothing but the Night, this film has as its central theme the battle against mortality, but in this case asks the question “what if we could kill (or at least capture) death and thus live forever?” What are the costs of such a life and is it worth living? The movie is wonderfully weird and while it was made in the 1970s, it perfectly captures the Victorian tone in both imagery and narrative. If you’re running a Victorian, or even modern, horror roleplaying game session for Halloween, this film is rich with ideas to inspire you.

3) The Beast Must Die (1974)

What do you get when you combine The Most Dangerous Game, The Wolfman, and the classic Cozy Mansion Mystery? The Beast Must Die is what you get. Amicus Productions, a competitor of Hammer Studios, produced this one and it is a tone of fun.

Millionaire Tom Newcliffe is a monster hunter who has invited a group of people to his home in order to reveal that one of them is a werewolf who must be killed. The mystery portion of the film is directed in much the same manner as a typical Agatha Christie tale and includes a famous “Werewolf Break” where the film is paused so that viewers can make their final guess regarding which guest bears the curse of lycanthropy. It’s a ton of fun and you can see echoes of its influence in films like Ready or Not and Werewolf by Night as well as other mansion murder mayhem films. Calvin Lockhart is wonderful as Tom Newcliffe and is my personal mental model for Blade the Vampire Hunter. He’s cool, calm, collected, and on the prowl to kill a werewolf.

Watch The Beast Must Die on Amazon

4) Day of the Triffids (1963)

John Wyndham’s 1951 novel Day of the Triffids is a classic science fiction tale that has vast influence in both the science fiction and horror genre. Like many horrific science fiction stories, this film catalogs how the world shifts after an apocalyptic event and the decline of civilization is as much the story as the actual monsters. People are, as they say, the real monsters. You can see echoes of Day of the Triffids in 28 Days Later, It Comes at Night, The Walking Dead, Bird Box, and The Quiet Place. If the apocalyptic story is more about how society changes than it is about jump scares, it’s been inspired by Wyndham’s tale. In the cases of 28 Days Later, Bird Box, and The Quiet Place the connection is pretty explicit.

Buy Day of the Triffids on Amazon

5) Burn, Witch, Burn (1963)

I’m a huge fan of Fritz Leiber. After my introduction to fantasy fiction via Michael Moorcock, Leiber was my transition from deconstructive Sword & Sorcery into Sword & Sorcery proper. His Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories are among my favorite tales, but Leiber’s writing extended beyond the narrow confines of Sword & Sorcery and into literary horror. His novel, Conjure Wife, is among my favorite modern urban fantasy tales. It tells the story of a University Professor and his wife, a story that pre-sages David Mamet’s play Oleanna with regards to campus politics and the lives of professors and which pre-sages Bewitched with the use of a supernatural wife. Like Bell, Book, and Candle this is a tale of a witch in love, but unlike that light hearted story this is one with dark undertones.

The film stars Peter Wyngarde as Norman Taylor, the naive university professor who is about to have his entire world disrupted. You may remember Peter Wyngarde as the actor who played sexy spy Jason King of Department S in two ITV series or as Klytus in Flash Gordon. He’s magnificent here. He manages to be sexy and charming while also seeming distant and academic. Janet Blair plays his wife, who begins innocent and complies with his requests, but in the end shows a ruthlessness in defending her family that hints at Leiber’s (and the film maker’s) critique of early 1960s patriarchy. It’s a fun film and a very different from the other tales that inspired Bewitched. As much as I like I Married a Witch (which is good enough to have a Criterion edition) and Bell, Book, and Candle it’s Burn, Witch, Burn that I make sure to watch every year.

Watch Burn, Witch, Burn on Amazon Prime

6) Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter (1974)

As I mentioned above, I’m a big fan of the British horror movies of the 1950s through 1970s. I cut my teeth on films like the Quatermass Xperiment and the Cushing and Lee revitalizations of Universal’s Classic Monsters. The saturated colors, sensuality, and passion on display in these films made horror feel as vibrant as the Greek and Norse Mythology I was reading at the time. There was depth of world building and more importantly, though I didn’t notice it at the time, engagement with the underlying fears experienced by society at large.

Captain Kronos was directed by Brian Clemens and was released in 1974. Clemens has written a couple of films I greatly enjoy (The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and The Watcher in the Woods) and is credited with the story on one film that doesn’t exist (Highlander II: The Quickening) and with Captain Kronos he shows that when he’s in control of story and direction, the results are extremely entertaining.

Horst Janson stars as the eponymous Kronos who is summoned by his former brother-in-arms Dr. Marcus to investigate a series of deaths involving young women who have died of rapid aging. Kronos determines that these deaths are the work of a vampire, but not the blood drinking vampire we are used to seeing in films. This vampire feeds on youth directly.

While the film was not well received critically, and it was one of Hammer’s last films before its revival, the film is rich with inventive vampire lore and has a compelling story. Hammer films at the time were venturing from the sexy and serious into the sexy and camp with films like Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and Dracula A.D. 1972, so the more sincere, but still sexy as it starred Caroline Munro as the romantic foil, Captain Kronos was a bit discordant with the productions at the time. I like the camp era of Hammer, but it was definitely an era when Hammer was following rather than setting trends. Classic Gothic horror was, for a time, on the way out of the zeitgeist and tended to be relegated to camp. It’s a cycle that happened before. After all, Frankenstein met Abbott and Costello as Universal’s horror dominance waned. For all that it came out at the wrong time, Captain Kronos is an entertaining and engaging vampire film that deserved as many sequels as there are kinds of vampire.

7) The Devils (1971)

When I was a kid, I loved watching the various film adaptations of The Three Musketeers. In my mind the G.O.A.T. is the Richard Lester version starring Oliver Reed, Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, and Frank Finlay as the Musketeers and Charlton Heston as Cardinal Richelieu. At the time I had no idea how horrifyingly brutal the Thirty Years War was or even an inkling of the terrible events of St. Bartholomew’s Day in the century prior. All I knew was that there was swashing of buckles going on and that was enough for me as a kid.

When I got older, I came to appreciate the events that surrounded the film and it added greater context to the political tensions underpinning all the adaptations I’d seen. I still have a soft spot for the Gene Kelly version, with Vincent Price as the Cardinal, but now I see where it fails on numerous levels to show with any veracity the sinister political machinations of His Excellency. Vincent Price is perfect casting for the role, but the film is far too bright in tone and technicolor to capture the cruelty of the period.

I also didn’t know how ironic it was for Richard Lester to cast Charlton Heston as the Cardinal in a version starring Oliver Reed. You see, when Oliver Reed was interviewed about the controversies surrounding the excesses of the Ken Russell film The Devils, he responded, “We never set out to make a pretty Christian film. Charlton Heston made enough of those.” As with the Three Musketeers stories, one of the chief antagonists of The Devils is Cardinal Richelieu, and though this Richelieu remains primarily in the background he is crueler and more ambitious than most interpretations of the character.

Ken Russell’s film The Devils is a dramatized account of the accusation, trial, and execution of Father Urbain Grandier for the crime of witchcraft. This particular account is based on Aldous Huxley’s non-fiction work The Devils of Loudun. Historically Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) is accused of witchcraft and sexual depravity by Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave). This accusation spreads and transforms into a mass hysteria in the convent. Events unfold and there is a trial after which Grandier is executed. The inciting incident that leads Sister Jeanne to accuse Grandier of wrongdoing is when he secretly marries Madeleine (Gemma Jones), a woman he falls in love with after giving her mother the last rites. Jeanne had been fantasizing about him and this triggers her envy, envy that gets used by those who want to destroy Grandier. With the exception of the secret marriage, these are all documented historical events and thus are not spoilers.

The Devils is an interesting, important, and disturbing film. It is disturbing on two levels. The first is in the way it depicts acts of sexual and violent depravity in the film. Even though the film as it exists in modern edits isn’t tremendously graphic, these moments can be very difficult to watch. Russell understands that believing is seeing and there are moments when you can imagine exactly what is happening as your mind fills in the gruesome gaps. When you read about the actual events surrounding the Grandier trial, and the 30 Years War in general, you realize that Russell is not trying to be exploitative in a Grand Guignol fashion. Instead, he is trying to get you to see how horrifying a totalitarian state can be.

Because the state in this case is the Kingdom of France during a period when the government and the local Catholic Church were heavily intertwined and dominated by Cardinal Richelieu’s influence, many might think that this is an anti-religious or anti-Catholic film. While Russell has said that The Devils was the “last nail in the coffin of [his] Catholic faith,” his treatment of Grandier as the film progresses is more a critique of French Political Catholicism as political institution than religion itself. Grandier’s faith and piety grow as the film progresses. When it comes to the 30 Years War, one must keep in mind that France was fighting not only Huguenot, but Spanish Catholics as well. The English would soon be fighting their Civil War, where Puritans would fight against a Protestant (though Catholic sympathizing) king. When I teach about the Colonial Period of America in my introductory classes, I remind my students of what was happening in Europe to explain how unique our vision of religious liberty was at the time.

Russell has stated that this film is about state power and the main argument of the film is that tyranny could happen under any regime and that it is even worse when the tyranny is supported by institutions who should resist them. Grandier’s opening speech is about how religious toleration and his priestly guidance has saved the city from the ravages of war. This point is made even more explicit in Grandier’s final moments at the stake and in the last shot of the film where the Grandier’s wife Madeleine leaves the now destroyed town of Loudun. In some ways the film is a more brutal and sexual version of The Crucible because it seeks to convey a similar message about the state, power, and manipulation.

The second way it is disturbing is in the odd visual and audio contradictions within the film that destabilize the viewer and push them out of their comfort zone. In this case, I don’t mean the late-Sixties/early-Seventies exploitation material. I mean the way that Ken Russell is simultaneously pushing brutality and camp in a discordant mix that makes the unseen brutality all the more horrific. In this manner Ken Russell’s direction is an intersection of three filmic movements. With The Devils, he combines the sexploitation camp of films like Hammer’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, and a host of other late-Sixties and early-Seventies films capitalizing on the sexual revolution for film revenue, with the rawness of a Sam Peckinpah film, and a focus on using score and sound to manipulate the audience similar to Hitchcock in Psycho.

A key example of Russell’s use of sound is in an early scene featuring Grandier. He has previously praised his town for resisting the secular conflict that has ravaged most of Europe and in this moment he is leading a funeral procession for plague victims. During the procession a version of the Dies Irae plays, the same one that is echoed in Camille Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre. Both songs feature a musical interval called the “tritone”,” which is a dissonant and disturbing musical tone often called the Devil’s Interval. Russell, whose films include The Music Lovers, Mahler, and Lisztomania knew his music and he uses it here to make you feel uncomfortable. You don’t see much violence, but your eardrums feel it.

It is a film that pushed boundaries in a variety of ways and as a result received an X rating and was banned in some countries. For a long time it was difficult to find a copy to watch. Though controversial and difficult to find, it has been a very influential film. As I watched the movie, I was reminded of scenes from later films. I cannot imagine that the director of the Timothy Hutton film Taps, wasn’t thinking of the scene, in the trailer below, where Grandier’s crossbowmen confront some of the Cardinal’s guard.

It’s interesting to me that Russell’s “depravity camp” seems to be a part of an honored tradition among English directors when depicting the crimes of France, regardless of whether it is Richelieu’s Catholic or Napoleon’s Imperial France. Where Russell’s film opens with a scene where the King of France enacts the Birth of Venus with himself as Venus in what is essentially a burlesque, Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon focuses more on Napoleon’s sexual relations with Josephine while ignoring any political savvy the real Napoleon had. Similarly, Almost all of Russell’s villains have external physical, or behavioral, manifestations of their evil. Richelieu is wheeled around and Vanessa Redgrave’s Jeanne has a hunched back. Meanwhile, Oliver Reed is a charismatic sexual dynamo who may be morally gray in breaking rules on chastity, but is morally forthright when it comes to valuing peace. When one compares this imagery with that of the French film La Reine Margot, which covers the horrific St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, it’s easy to see the contrast. Neither flinches away from the horrors of the day, but only Russell’s engages in depravity camp.

I don’t often issue caveats when recommending films, but I cannot recommend Ken Russell’s The Devils to everyone. It is a film that will offend many people. Not everyone will agree with me that the film isn’t as heretical as critics of an earlier era found it to be. For me it’s a film that begins as exploitative camp, but when it hits Grandier’s trial and Oliver Reed takes over the film it transforms into something powerful and horrifying. The Criterion Channel is currently showing the unrated version that Shudder has shown in the past as a part of their Nunsploitation collection. If you are up for it, it’s a disturbing way to spend a day. All the more disturbing because as camp and over the top as this film is at times, it is nowhere near as brutal as the reality.

8) Night of the Living Dead (1968)

I don’t think any discussion of horror films can be complete without George Romero’s classic horror film Night of the Living Dead. Not only did the movie change the zombie genre film forever, it showed how a director on a shoestring budget could return to older film techniques (including filming in Black and White) to create a real sense of dread. Romero uses the film to comment not only on the fear of conformity that was prominent in the horror films of the 1950s and 1960s, but to expand the commentary to questions of familial fidelity versus communal responsibility and race relations. The film ends with a gut punch, that is all the more powerful for how casually the event is treated in the film. One part of what makes it work is the powerful message about race, but the other reason it works is the casual nihilism it expresses. That nihilism elevates the film and takes the horror from gore and tension into the realm of cosmic horror where we wonder what the point of anything really is.

The film was shot outside of Pittsburgh, and like films in the late 1970s and early 1980s that took advantage of New York’s urban decay, the architecture alone speaks of a breakdown of the social order. The film has also been deeply influential in the comic book and gaming industries with titles like Marvel Zombies and games like All Flesh Must Be Eaten building on the mythos that Romero transformed.

Buy Night of the Living Dead on Amazon

9) The Devil’s Rain (1975)

You ever wonder where the William Shatner mask they used in Halloween came from? It was manufactured from a life cast of Shatner taken for The Devil's Rain and used to very good effect. The Devil’s Rain was directed by Robert Fuest, who provides the bridge across the Atlantic with this film. Fuest had worked on the Dr. Phibes films, as well as an adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novel The Final Programme. While British horror can have a downbeat ending from time to time, it is rare that they are able to capture the hopelessness of the Satanic Cult films US production companies were churning out in the 1970s. If you were a character in one of these films, things were not going to end well for you. There were no Final Girls in the vast majority of these films, just the bleak disappointment that you would be killed last. The depressing endings of the New Hollywood films, as well as the New Hollywood Satanic Cult Horror films, were so predictable that I’ve come to call any downbeat ending a 70s ending. The Devil’s Rain has a self-sacrificial ending that hits a bit differently than most of the genre.

The Devil’s Rain is a very 1970s film. I chose it as to represent the Satanic wave because it’s a bit off the beaten path. Most people might have recommended Race with the Devil, which is essentially Steven Spielberg’s Duel but with a Satanic Cult instead of a pissed off trucker. The Devil’s Rain is more Lovecraftian with Ernest Borgnine starring as the priest of a Satanic Cult who transforms into a goat headed demon, William Shatner plays the devout Christian Mark who attempts to defeat the Satanic Cult, and there are appearances by Tom Skerritt, John Travolta, and Anton LaVey. That last one giving the film a touch of “authenticity.”

Buy The Devil's Rain on Amazon

10) Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

When I was a kid, Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the film that everyone bragged about being brave enough to watch. It held an almost mythical status as the most frightening and gory film ever made and that status prevented me from watching Tobe Hooper’s original film until I was well into my 30s. When I did watch the film, I still found it scary, but I also found it to be an interesting film that may have taken some inspiration from the story of Ed Gein’s life but took that into entirely new directions. Thematically it shares an element with Nothing but the Night. Both films are about some social group seeking to extend itself and traditions through the destruction of the young. The cultures being preserved are very different, but neither deserves to be maintained.

When I was younger, I followed the common trend of asserting that Tobe Hooper didn’t direct Poltergeist because of the vast differences in style between that film and Chain Saw. I still think it’s impossible to argue that Spielberg had no influence on Hooper’s direction, but over time I’ve come to see Poltergeist as Hooper’s film. Repeated viewings of Hooper’s film Lifeforce have beaten all resistance out of me. Did Hooper learn from Spielberg? Absolutely, but he applied those same lessons to Lifeforce and they retain a similar Hooper-ness.

11) Suspiria (1977)

For years I heard about the brilliance of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspiria and I avoided watching it because the people who recommended it tended to be the kinds of people who dismiss mainstream films and enjoy sitting through repeated viewings of Ulysses Gaze. Who am I kidding? No one wants to live through that. That’s real horror. See, I can be mean every now and then.

When I finally watched the film a decade ago, I was extremely disappointed in myself for waiting so long. It contains so many of the elements that I enjoy in film, not just in horror films, and is a masterpiece of the horror genre. The use of saturated color provides both a reminder that what the viewer is seeing “isn’t real” as well as creating a deeply disturbing visual environment. The combination of imagery and score keeps the viewer in a constant state of unease. The story is relatively straightforward. Young ballet dancer (speaking of which, you need to read ’s latest piece on horror in the ballet) Suzy Bannion seeks to study at an exclusive Tanz Academie, only to discover sinister things are afoot. She flees, returns, and all Hell breaks loose. The film makes a nice companion piece to Burn, Witch, Burn because both deal with witchcraft, but Suspiria does so in ways that create real dread beyond the social commentary.

12) The Exorcist (1973)

Mike Oldfield’s album Tubular Bells contains some of the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. It’s a masterpiece of progressive rock and I listen to it frequently when I am writing. I find it quite relaxing, which actually surprises me because it is used as the music in one of the most frightening films I have ever seen. William Friedkin hadn’t initially planned on using Oldfield’s song in the film and had hired Lalo Schifrin to compose a score that included elements that evoked Brahms’ Lullaby. Schifrin’s career is filled with memorable scores ranging from Bullitt (1968) and Mission: Impossible (the show) to Magnum Force (1973) and Black Moon Rising (1986), but his composition did not appeal to Friedkin and he selected a beautiful, and at times haunting, obscure progressive rock song instead. It works brilliantly.

I think the reason that the Oldfield song doesn’t fill me with dread is that it isn’t featured at the moments that scare me most in The Exorcist. While a good deal of the film focuses on the eponymous event where Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) and Father Karras (Jason Miller) attempt to exorcise the demon from Linda Blair’s young Regan, those moments don’t frighten me. Father Merrin’s strength in the face of evil, and his knowledge that evil can be defeated, provide hope in the supernatural scenes. Those scenes do generate dread and shock, but I “know” the priests will win in my heart of hearts because of Merrin’s strength. Even Karras’ lack of faith only cracks that armor so much, but it provides room for the truly frightening element…psychiatry in 1973. What the medical profession puts Regan through is as horrifying as anything in Cuckoo’s Nest. The misapplication of science is the real horror and it scares the shit out of me.

The supernatural elements in The Exorcist are handled beautifully, and in a way that makes them feel real. At no point am I pulled out of the film, as I was when a possessed Patricia Arquette asked Gabriel Byrne “how is your faith now” in Stigmata (1999). He stands there stunned, but in the back of my mind, all I can say is “pretty good now. I mean, it’s not faith anymore, it’s knowledge.” The Exorcist doesn’t have a lazy shock moment like that. Karras’ weakness is his desire to prevent an innocent from suffering anymore. He begins a doubter, sees the power of faith, but is still overwhelmed by watching the suffering of the innocent. Friedkin’s film takes faith, and the potential terrors of science, seriously and it is possibly the greatest horror film ever made.

Purchase The Exorcist on Amazon

13) Theatre of Blood (1973)

I had a really difficult time choosing between Theatre of Blood and The Devil Rides Out for my final recommendation. In the end, it was the lack of Vincent Price depth on this Geekshelf that pushed me towards Theatre of Blood. Price is the Maestro of the Macabre and I could create an entire Geekshelf of Vincent Price Films Every Geek Should Watch, and his 1960s partnership with Roger Corman produced some of the best films Corman ever made. Vincent Price’s charisma and talent elevate Corman’s well edited, but very low budget, films from B-Movies to Absolute Cinema. Masque of the Red Death is a phenomenal film and Price is absolute perfection in that film.

In Theatre of Blood, Price plays aged actor Edward Lionheart, an actor who maintains the older tradition of acting with its perfectly performed Received Pronunciation. When he is passed over for an award, he decides to enact his vengeance on the critics who spurned him. He does all of this while delivering what argues is the best version of a Shakespeare speech, the famous ‘to be or not to be’ speech that marks Act III, Scene I of Hamlet. Dr. King argues that the combination of the character’s motivation, and Price’s channeling of that emotion, make it her favorite delivery of that particular speech.

Dr King's Curiosities

Why the best version of a Shakespeare speech is in camp horror classic 'Theatre of Blood'

One of the most irritating experiences I’ve ever had in a theatre was when I saw Written on the Heart, a 2011 play about the creation of the King James Bible produced at the Royal Shakespeare company for the 400th anniversary. Every time one of the characters started quoting a verse, the couple in front of me would nod at each other and…

Read more

2 years ago · 47 likes · 11 comments · Rebekah King

I hadn’t thought of this before I began to write these couple of paragraphs praising Theatre of Blood, but Price’s performance of Lionheart is similar in many ways to that of Boris Karloff as Byron Orlok in Peter Bogdanovich’s underappreciated classic Targets. Price channels all of his acting talent to create an actor who terrifies his victims by reading their damning reviews of his performances. His acting becomes a force of terror. Where Price is the villain of Theatre of Blood, Karloff is the hero of Targets. Bogdanovich’s film makes an argument for the importance of cinematic horrors in a world of very real horrors. The plot of Targets was inspired by the shootings by Charles Whitman at the University of Texas and the real villain of the film is Bobby Thompson, who goes on a killing spree for unspecified reasons. Where some might have the film blame horror films for breaking Bobby’s mind and causing him to choose violence in a Satanic Panic kind of way, Bogdanovich does the opposite. He argues that cinematic horror has a place and when Orlok faces down Thompson in the lot of a Drive-in Theater, he goes even further but I’ll leave it up to you to interpret the final confrontation of Targets.

Brief Final Thought

That’s the list. I think it’s an interesting one that might contain a couple of films you’ve overlooked. The 1960s and 1970s were a rich era for horror films and these only scratch the surface. In fact, they barely nick the surface and the list is a bit Brit heavy. I’ve constrained myself to the Geekshelf rule of 13 though and these are my 13 from the era. They might not be the same tomorrow, but they are what they are today.

Oh, and I think it’s interesting that some of Price’s best work, as well as what is arguably Karloff’s best performance, were in Corman productions. These were low budget affairs that allowed actors towards the end of their careers, and lives, to show us their true talent. Corman may have been a cheapskate, but he provided many a gift to film fans.

An Old Post Revisited

I’ve been at this Substack thing for a while now and my audience has grown significantly. It hasn’t grown as fast or as large as any of the outrage mongers who have migrated here from other spaces and begun to affect the writings of so many voices here in what was a largely collegial discursive space (including some I really care about and read). I still curate and write for collegiality, but with that comes a lack of virality and profit sharing. Such is life, but while my space may lack the topicality and rage that is so popular I believe it will better stand the test of time. Speaking of time, lately I’ve been reading a lot of posts by writers like at , older articles by at , and a number of other solo gamebook and rpg authors lately (more will be mentioned later in the piece).

All of this reading got me thinking about a piece I wrote early in my Substack days, back when I had only 25 subscribers (thank you all). It was a brief essay talking about my first “real” experience playing a roleplaying game. That experience shares a bit with what P.J., Patrick, and others write about, so I thought I’d share my experience in an updated article.

RPGs Don’t Require a Group to Be Fun

My very first experience with roleplaying games was a session of Dungeons & Dragons in which I experienced the full horror of a certain kind of bullying DM. I have discussed that experience in the past and will update it with some of the lessons it taught me about how to DM in the next couple of months. That experience was truly awful, but at least the memory of it resulted in me having ample material when I was hired to write a piece for The Munchkin Book. Needless to say, the most recent D&D movie featured a creature that induced flashbacks to that dreaded first game and not from the creature you are probably imagining.

That horrible Dungeons & Dragons experience wasn’t my first “real” experience with roleplaying games. It was my first “group” experience to be sure, but it was such a bad experience and so unreflective of the hobby that I don’t think of it as my “real” first experience. The honor of first “real” experience goes to Citadel of Chaos by Steve Jackson. This is Games Workshop’s Steve Jackson, and not the Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games, though Steve Jackson Games’ Steve Jackson did write (also discussed here) the Scorpion Swamp adventure. The dual Jacksons Steve isn’t confusing at all, especially now that Steve Jackson Games is republishing all the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and even has a Satanic Panic post up about them today.

Citadel of Chaos was the second volume in the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series created by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, but it was the first volume that I purchased. I bought the book at a local bookstore shortly after my parents purchased me the D&D Basic Set for Christmas. I had read the D&D rulebook several times, but I had not yet played the game so there were some gaps in my understanding of just how roleplaying games worked. Sure, there was the excellent example of play within the Basic Set, but it was still hard to imagine the array of choices that are available within a roleplaying game and it was Citadel of Chaos that provided the perfect demonstration of how rules affected narrative.

By the time I picked up Citadel, I’d already read a number of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I was comfortable with interactive fiction as a concept, so the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks would have interested me even if I hadn’t received the Basic Set as a gift, but there was something that set the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks apart. They didn’t just have a pick your path narrative, they also had rules for combat, magic, and interacting with the world. At least, Citadel of Chaos did. Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first Fighting Fantasy Gamebook only has rules for combat and interacting with the world, it lacks a magic system and is more of a Sword & Sorcery tale compared to Citadel of Chaos’ more high fantasy feel. I’ve discussed how well Warlock of Firetop Mountain works as a “full” roleplaying game in a past essay. It works, but only within the magic-less constraints of the tale.

Had Warlock been my first encounter with the genre, I don’t think I’d have had the same excited reaction to the concept. In addition to lacking a magic system, the adventure in Warlock has only a single solution. There is only one way to complete the adventure successfully and the adventure is quite challenging. When I finally played Warlock, it took me more than a few playthroughs to get it right and I still died the first couple of times I was on the proper path for the solution.

That wasn’t the case with Citadel. There are a couple of ways to have a happy ending playing Citadel and this fact kept me coming back to the book and replaying the adventure several times. By having a magic system and multiple paths to a successful conclusion Citadel gave me a better sense of how roleplaying games worked.

Sure, the mechanics of the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks are simple to the point of being almost simplistic, but they are surprisingly flexible and have resulted in a complete roleplaying game that holds its own and that has a good fanbase. That fanbase has expanded to include members of the Troika! community. Troika!’s mechanics are heavily influenced by Fighting Fantasy and that’s a really cool legacy.

I don’t want to reveal too much about Citadel, only to say that it is worth checking out and that by bridging the gap between Choose Your Own Adventure books and full Roleplaying Games, it makes a perfect introduction. Steve Jackson, unlike that cruel first Dungeon Master, wasn’t arbitrary in his plot design. He wasn’t cruel at all. That doesn’t mean Jackson didn’t provide challenges, he did. He also created an interesting and fun narrative that allowed sufficient choices that multiple plays resulted in different experiences. This fact alone, that the same book could result in different stories, was the revelation I needed to completely understand roleplaying games as a kid. They were stories, often starting in the same place and with the same modules, but where the players shaped what the end story would be.

After that, I was hooked.

A Temporary Genre or Just for Kids?

When I was a kid, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe the genre that Steve, Ian, and Steve had introduced me to. I hadn’t yet discovered Tunnels & Trolls, with its solo adventures, so I didn’t know that Citadel of Chaos had introduced me to what was to become a rich and sophisticated branch of the roleplaying hobby, solo roleplaying. Even after I discovered Tunnels & Trolls, and had a name for this category of gaming, I thought that I’d leave it behind when I found a regular group to play with. I initially thought it was a genre of gaming that was purely introductory and just for kids. When I did eventually find a regular group to play “elf games” with, I never stopped playing solo games and thankfully neither did the hobby.

The solo side of roleplaying games has continued to grow in options and sophistication and is currently the healthiest I’ve ever seen it in my lifetime. In recent years you’ve seen a rise in not only traditional game books, but new mechanics as well. There are journaling games, oracle-driven adventures, and an entire “#soloRPG” corner of the internet that exploded in size during the pandemic when fans couldn’t meet in person. Though that corner developed during the pandemic, it shows no signs of slowing down in its growth. The benefits of solo gaming that appealed to me when I was younger, are as powerful as they ever were. Solo roleplaying games don’t require a group and so there are no scheduling problems. The rules are often simple on their own, or streamlined versions of more complex games, and thus have a low barrier to entry. Then there’s the greatest benefit, your imagination gets to do all of the work. There is no “misinterpreting” of what happened, no disagreement between players, because you are the only one experiencing the story. Your experience IS the story.

What has changed is the amount of player agency involved in solo games. Where Fighting Fantasy games have a fairly rigid branched path structure that is constrained by the 400 entries in every book, branches that often have a single solution, new games like Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn allow for tremendous agency. The Jacksons Steve are no longer the authors in games like Ironsworn, you are thanks to a combination of “oracles” (read…tables) that provide the odds of something being yes or no and provide evocative prompts that you can expand upon. You aren’t merely choosing among existing paragraphs on a branch; you are randomizing events and creating the story as you go. You, and the dice, are the Dungeon Master and not an unseen author. The addition of dice as co-author takes the concept of “random dungeons” in the old Dungeon Masters Guide (sic) and transforms it into narrative game play. Products like the Mythic Game Master Emulator allow you to play nearly any game on your shelf as a solo roleplaying game.

Many modern games, and I’m thinking of Dragonbane in particular here, have expanded on the older solo play examples like those featured in the Mentzer Basic Set (you still suck Bargle and I’m glad you are dead) or Black Box Basic and expanded them into fully solo playable adventures, there for the story and not just the pedagogy. I’ve written at length about the origins of Dragonbane, but I didn’t mention Alone in Deepfall Breach, the solo adventure included in the box to teach you the basics of the game. That adventure is far from a simple pick-a-path adventure and includes an oracle table and a complete set of inspiration tables. In a few short pages, you’ve got a mini campaign of fun. A decade ago, this kind of solo support would have been something a fan created on their WordPress or personal website, maybe their itch.io page, but now it’s something a major publisher thinks is central to the play experience.

One thing to keep in mind about playing Dragonbane, solo or in groups, is to not let the inclusion of Donaldesque Ducks fool you. Bloggers and Substackers who play the game, solo or in groups, have been honest about this. This game can be brutal. It has the potential for high character mortality that was common in Old School games but is rarer today. Even so, it is such a delight to read through the monster attack tables and see how merciless they can be when your character is the only target available. The fact that Dragonbane’s mythical monsters choose their attacks based on evocative and delightful tables, rather than the choices of Game Masters, makes the game highly playable as a solo game. It also makes it fun to run as a GM because if things go bad, players know it wasn’t personal. Sure, Orcs and other humanoid monsters are still fully controlled by GMs, but Dragons and other really lethal foes have their attacks decided by fate. It’s a really nice feature and one that makes it rich for solo play.

Of course, that lethality means that many a solo player has watched their promising characters die fast and early in a gout of Dragon fire or pierced by dozens of Manticore spikes. None of this is a reason to avoid the game. I love the sense of danger and desperation it evokes, but you do have to go in with open eyes and reading reviews of people who’ve actually played the game is much better than basing your expectations on a few “readviews.” Dragonbane can be lethal, but it’s a blast if you know what you are facing.

There are two newsletters I highly recommend following if you are interested in how Dragonbane plays, or in solo gaming in general. ’ Substack has sadly migrated away from the Stack, but it contains a wonderful look at how solo procedures produce meaningful game play in his “Lantern of Solitude” campaign. If you like those, you can follow him to his new site (The Lone Bard) where you can follow his coverage of a multitude of game systems. I’d also recommend ’s site where he’s done a great job discussing Dragonbane, and has been sharing his attempts to complete Caverns of the Snow Witch…a classic Fighting Fantasy Gamebook. Between these two sites, as well as those I mentioned at the top of the piece, you’ll get a good look at the solo gaming hobby.

A Brief Genealogy of Solos

As much as the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series was my introduction to solo roleplaying, it wasn’t the progenitor of the genre of play. Flying Buffalo shipped Buffalo Castle, the first solo roleplaying game module, six years before Warlock of Firetop Mountain hit the shelves. Rick Loomis, owner of Flying Buffalo, had been running play by mail games (and eventually computer moderated PBM games) since 1970 when he used a Raytheon computer to run games for paying customers. It’s no accident that someone who turned play by mail into a profession would be the one to translate roleplaying games into a solo experience. Ken St. Andre’s and Mike Stackpole’s later T&T adventures, especially Arena of Khazan and City of Terrors, might have been superior play experiences, but they wouldn’t have happened without Loomis’ vision. Loomis himself was building on the Diplomacy PBM games and Tony Bath’s campaign models, but his Starweb PBM game is possibly the first true 4X game.

When I cracked open Citadel of Chaos as a kid, I was joining a gaming tradition that had already existed for decades. The line of solo gaming goes back further than we know, and if we include journaling goes back over a century. That genre gave me a look at how rich the roleplaying game hobby is and I’m still rolling dice alone today.

I think that, more than anything else, is what I’ve come to love about the hobby. The hobby isn’t about games and game styles dying and being replaced, it’s a hobby that keeps so much history alive and builds on the beauty of the past. At least that’s what the best of the hobby does.

What was your first real RPG experience?

Longtime readers of Geekerati Media know that I have long been a fan of Superhero role playing games. It is my absolute favorite roleplaying game genre and I have yet to find a superhero game that hasn’t inspired me in some way as a game master, designer, and player. While there was a time when I could claim to “own every Superhero RPG in print,” those days have long passed into memory. Now, there are so many independent games that it is nigh impossible to keep up with them all. I’m sure there is someone who has managed to “collect them all,” but it’s not me.

Nevertheless, I still own a very large selection of Superhero RPGs that ranges from Superhero 2044 to DC Heroes to the new Invincible RPG (review coming soon), but there are so many Superhero games out there that it is hard to keep up. I’ve read all of the games I own and have played most of them, but there are a few that stand out as able to withstand the test of time. Among those games that I return to again and again is the Classic Marvel Superheroes Roleplaying Game which uses the FASERIP system. The system has a lot of fans, and I’m one of them, but the FASERIP system isn’t perfect and can break down a bit when trying to run an Avengers style lineup facing Avengers style foes. It really struggles with Champions or Defenders style play. Unless you add the Advanced rules, street level heroes have to stay to the sidelines. With those rules, street level (and slightly tougher) characters matter a bit more but are still pushed to the sidelines. There is a reason that Mike Selinker took the approach he did when designing TSR’s next Marvel game (Marvel SAGA). He wanted Cap to matter, and he never really seems to matter as much as I think he should in FASERIP Marvel.

This very small flaw is easily addressable with House Rules, and the overall system is very flexible. In fact, it has quite a few “genius moments,” and is great for getting people gaming quickly. There is almost no learning curve to begin playing the game and it has enough depth that players continue to learn how to bend the system in ways they never imagined possible. This is particularly true with the Advanced version of the rules, but it’s also true of the core set. One key mechanic is the Karma experience system in the game. You get experience (Karma) for behaving heroically, as well as for actually paying attention to your secret identity and your character’s personal life. This experience can be spent to perform better in combat, and one of the ways that Street Level heroes actually excel is that they tend to have more Karma because they tend to have more responsibilities in their private lives. They are the characters who worry about paying rent, and making a work deadline can net you as much Karma as punching Doctor Doom in the face…in THE FACE!

I’ve been trying to convince my daughters and their gaming group to give the game a run for a while and I think that after their recent fantastic experience with B/X (I will be writing about that) they are more amenable. FASERIP is a system that I want to use at the table, but I want to use in a modified form that is even more accessible to the modern gamer. Even though tables and charts like the one FASERIP uses were created to make gaming easier and more accessible “Back when Tigers Used to Smoke” (thanks for a phrase I now frequently use), they don’t vibe with modern gamers. Modern players are used to target number systems and a chart/table, even an easy to interpret one like FASERIP, is out of their normal wheelhouse.

To that end, I’ve been contemplating using a d20 based mechanic that is partially inspired by The Black Hack (which was the Shadowdark of 10 years ago). I want my d20 based mechanic to replace the Universal Table while being intuitive to modern gamers. The Universal Table tells players what they need to roll to get a basic success (green), a substantial success (yellow), and a critical success (red). The division of success into different categories is one of the “genius” moments of the game, but needing to look at the chart to see if you’ve hit the next color (for those who haven’t memorized the chart) can distract from game play.

What I am thinking about doing is taking the character ratings on the chart (which are the names and numerical values of characters’ attributes and powers) and assigning them a Target Number in a range of 1 to 20. As with The Black Hack, players want to roll equal to or less than that number to succeed. Now here is the twist, in the House Rule I’m thinking of adopting, players will roll 3 Twenty-Sided Dice against that target number. If one die is equal to or less than the number, it’s a Green result, if two are then it’s Yellow, and three means a Red result. The idea isn’t completely original to me and was originally proposed a decade ago by Zak Smith for his blog. One of the problems of the basic system is that it makes superheroes less superheroic.

Faserip Universal Table

8KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

Download

If you take a look at the basic Universal Table, you can see that a person with a “Shift 0” ability in something still has a 35% chance of achieving a Green result or better. When testing success on mundane actions, this means that even low caliber characters can push themselves from time to time when it comes to lifting weights. This allows even Street Level characters to push themselves and works particularly well when you include the “Intensities” rules from Advanced and Revised Marvel rulebooks. In a fight, this means that a person with Fighting of Shift 0 still has a 35% chance of hitting his/her opponent. This somewhat high level of success seems to match with the heroic nature of Supers gaming. The same person has only a 6% chance of some level of improved success (a Yellow or Red result). Low capability characters can push themselves, but extreme successes are rare…though not impossible.

3d20 Pool Success Table

8.45KB ∙ XLSX file

Download

Download

When you look at the table above that shows the probabilities resulting from the 3d20 system, there are some interesting results. The first is that Shift 0 really sucks. It used to be bad, but now it’s pretty punishing. The second is that at the higher end, the probability of getting a Red result drift away from those of the traditional FASERIP system.

First, let’s look at the chance to succeed at all (you can look at the image below or check out the widget on the Marvel page on my personal website). There are some notable differences at the low and mid-ranges, particularly with regard to Green results. In traditional FASERIP, a character with a Remarkable Fighting score has a 65% chance of a Green result or better and has a 72.5% chance in the 3d20 system. When scores are lower than Good, characters are less frequently successful under the 3d20 system and above Good they are more frequently successful until you get to Shift Z (which is an NPC value anyway). I’m fine with that. It makes the “Street Level” heroes more impressive than they are under the regular system (when facing thugs) and the distinction between tiers continues.

The chance of a basic success is higher, but Yellow and Red results are much more rare in the standard 3d20 system. A person with a Remarkable ability has a 40% chance of a Yellow or better in standard FASERIP, but only a 28.2% chance in the 3d20 system. That’s a reduction of 11.8% and means that the system is pushing heroism down, at least for Street Level characters. They have a higher chance to succeed at the baseline, but a lower chance of “being cool.” That’s not the feel I want for the system. In fact, the disparity gets worse when we look at Red results.

A person with a Remarkable ability in FASERIP typically has a 20% chance of a Red result. That’s a reasonable level and represents how “remarkable” a Remarkable ability score is and lets Street Level characters dominate Typical foes. That’s a good thing and that’s what FASERIP was designed to do. That is not what happens with the 3d20 system. In this simple system, the Remarkable character only has a 4.3% chance of a Red result and this gap persists as the characters become more powerful. There are far fewer critical results in the 3d20 system. If you are playing a more realistic game, that’s probably a good thing. However, I don’t think it’s a good fit for a heroic game.

So what is a game master to do? Well, I played around with a couple of alternatives. One was a 3d6 plus bonus mechanic that I kind of like and might use elsewhere, but I am fond of the elegance of rolling 3d20. So I took a page from the Year Zero Engine. In the baseline version of that system, any roll of 6 or higher is a success. The average character has d6 rank in their attributes (though they may roll more than one), but better characters can roll higher die values like a d10 or d12. In these cases, if a player rolls 10 or more then they score 2 successes.

Yze Standard Reference Document

950KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

That’s an interesting mechanic and can be tweaked to fit the 3d20 system. In this case, I decided to see what would happen if a die that rolled one half or less of the Target Number at a given level (the target levels are in the pictures and excel files above), then it would count as two successes and not one. This system aligns closely at the green level with those who are of Shift 0 to Poor rank doing slightly worse than in standard FASERIP, but with the middle and upper tiers doing slightly better. Under this system, the Remarkable character is still 7.5% more likely to have a Green or better result because the major changes of the “one-half equals two successes” modification has the greatest effect on Yellow and Red results.

This heroic trend continues with both the Yellow or better (with a 7.2% bonus) and Red result (0.4% better at remarkable and increasing from there). If Marvel didn’t have a “stutter” on the Universal Table at Monstrous they would be much closer, but the modified 3d20 roll at the Monstrous level ends up getting a Red “critical” result 10.6% more often than the standard system. This modified system makes most superheroes more likely of getting a Yellow and high end heroes more likely to get a Red. The effect is opposite of the straight 3d20 roll where everyone is less likely to get a critical roll, so the GM would have to choose whether they wanted a more realistic or a “more heroic/wilder” game. I think this demonstrates the flexibility of shifting from the percentage with a table to some form of 3d20 roll. I am still playing around with it, but I am wondering what the difference would be if you added 5 to one die (a “Marvel Die”) in a straight 3d20 roll if the character had the right talent or the GM thought the circumstances were good.

I think the system is intuitive, flexible, and works to a certain degree and I’m likely to use a modified version of it as I try to persuade my daughters to play. I might also use it for a straight adaptation of The Black Hack to the Superhero genre. There are a couple of previous attempts at Black Hack Supers (The Super Hack, The Super Hack Deluxe, and there used to be one called The Powers Hack), but none of those rules sets are as complete as I would like for a rules set intended for campaign use. The first two were written by Simon Burley, who was a co-author (along with Peter Haines) of the very fun Games Workshop Superhero game Golden Heroes, (which I should probably review in both its self-published and final Games Workshop form). Simon’s designed quite a few Superhero RPGs over the past couple of decades and I always love seeing what he comes up with next.

What I want to do is take the “roll under” system from The Black Hack as the base, as I’ve done for my simulations above, in order to have higher stats mean better results and have stats and results be the same number. As with FASERIP, I’ll likely have the damage equal to the set number but that will take some playtesting as having a “Remarkable” power do 7 points damage is very different than having it do 30 points of damage. Some of that is balanced by the fact that a Remarkable Endurance would only add 7 points to Health, but the whole damage curve is flattened at the higher end because the jumps in effect size from Remarkable (30) to Monstrous (75) is a 45 point increase in the older system and would only be 3 points more in my current system. So that would have to have real play experience to fully evaluate and that means it will have to wait until the next time my daughters and their crew are available to play. That is, unless I can find a new gaming group and now that the dissertation is finished I can begin that process.

Since I’m not one to end on a normal “summation” concluding paragraph, I might as well mention that I’m also contemplating adding the “roll x or y and add an interesting effect” rule from the Cypher System to whatever the 3d20 superhero game ends up being. The “x” or “y” in this case would be Yellow or Red results and they will allow the automatic use of some reality bending Power Stunt. I might even do a straight up mix of Cypher’s 1 - 10 difficulty range and “pool expenditure” system, since I think that would mix with FASERIP’s Karma system nicely.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be fleshing out a full system but I will be using the 3d20 system as the base of whatever system I end up with.

Back in May, I discussed how useful it can be to approach D&D magic from an effects-based or special effect design philosophy as both a player and a DM. Using this approach allows for gamers to add a little of narrative magic without the need to have a deep understanding of the mechanical balance underlying the game system required to make new spells from whole cloth. This is an approach used by the Champions role playing game and by Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s Savage Worlds rpg. The Savage Worlds Adventure Edition rule book describes this approach in the following way:

For Savage Worlds, and for older editions of Champions, the particular manifestation of a spell is primarily descriptive. It allows characters to be “cool” in the way they want to be while being mechanically balanced with other player characters in the game of similar power levels. The baseline damage is the same, but there is some play around the edges when a creature or villain has a particular vulnerability. This is why SWADE, and Champions, require the special effects to be static once chosen and not be variable, though one could create a system for allowing them to be mutable at a cost in both of these games. In D&D games, I have my Wizards “memorize,” and Sorcerers “know,” particular expressions of spells and have those be fixed. Since Wizards can change their spells when they memorize them the next day, they can memorize different “effects” from day to day but only if they’ve got those expressions in their spell books.

All of this may make it seem like coming at magic from a special effects approach is an intimidating process, and you might have begun to doubt my assertions that it can be done without creating a lot of work for players and DMs, but I’m going to attempt to show you how it does just the opposite. It allows for the creation of a lot of imaginative and narrative effects without the need for creating new mechanics. As a part of this argument, I have decided to write a series of D&D 5e Wizards (I’ll also update to 5.5/6e later) based on Power Themes that reflect the use of effects-based spells.

My first character is a Wizard who has dedicated her studies to lightning focused magic. In the Forgotten Realms, she might be a worshipper of Talos or just a character who believes that lightning is really cool…because it is. I haven’t included any magical equipment for this character but have renamed the “reskinned” spells with lightning themed versions. There will be a bit of a discussion of how this interacts with game balance after the stat bloc.

Mystrael Shawk

Human Lightning Wizard (Soldier)

Level 5

Str 8 (-1) Dex 14 (+2) Con 14 (+2)

Int 16 (+3) Wis 10 (+0) Cha 12 (+1)

HP (5d6+10) 32

AC 12 or 15 (Dex; Crackling Aura + Dex)

Init +2 Speed 30 Proficiency Bonus +3

Attacks: Dagger +5 (1d4 piercing), Dagger (ranged) +5 1d4 piercing, Spells +6
Senses: Investigation 16, Perception 10
Saves: Intelligence +6, Wisdom +3
Skills: Arcana +6, Athletics +2, Intimidation +4, Investigation +6, Sleight of Hand +5
Feats: Keen Mind
Human Traits: Bonus Skill (Sleight of Hand), Bonus Feat (War Caster)
Wizard Traits: Spellcasting, Arcane Recovery, Arcane Tradition (Abjuration), Lighting Ward (13 HP)
Spell Casting Ability (Known: 3, 6, 6, 4; Slots: 4, 4, 3, 2; DC 14)

Cantrips: Lightning Ball (Acid Splash), Crackling Illumination (Light), Shocking Grasp

Spells

1 - Arc of Lightning (Burning Hands), Crackling Aura (Mage Armor), Electric Shield (Shield), Synaptic Shock (Sleep), Static Tickle (Tasha’s Hideous Laughter), Plasma Arc (Magic Missile)
2 - Lightning Cloud (Cloud of Daggers), Immobilizing Shock (Hold Person), Electrify Weapon (Magic Weapon), Mystral’s Lightning Arrow (Melf’s Acid Arrow), Clinging Field (Spider Climb), Electrical Flash (Blindness/Darkness)
3 - Electrical Animation (Animate Dead), Sphere of Lightning (Fireball), Ride the Lightning (Fly), Lightning Bolt

As you can see, merely by renaming some of the spells the descriptive effect in play of certain spells is altered without changing their effects. Take Crackling Illumination as an example here. When it comes to game effects, it doesn’t matter whether light is produced by illusory fire, real fire, crackling electricity, or radiant illumination. All that matters is that the spell produces the effect of light. Similarly for Mage Armor, since we aren’t categorizing any kind of damage, the appearance of Mage Armor doesn’t affect game play.

When the character later learns Fire Shield (which will be Lightning Shield natch), there might be some mechanical considerations regarding resistances and immunities. Mystrael’s focus on lightning themed damage spells means that there are mechanical considerations for spells like Lightning Ball (Acid Splash). Any reasonable DM should have their “but that spell already features typed damage, and it might matter” alarm flash a warning. It is very true that there might be some mechanical differences of consequence. Some DMs might merely hand wave such concerns and point out, as Michael Shea at Sly Flourish often does that Dungeons and Dragons isn’t designed to be a balanced game and that imbalance is a part of what we like. As a fan of games like Champions that are heavily playtested to ensure mechanical balance, I won’t do such hand waving here, though it is a perfectly “Folk D&D” thing to do.

Instead, I’m going take a look under the hood of Acid Splash to see what kind of damage it currently does, who is resistant to that, and whether reskinning it as a lightning effect changes anything significantly. No, I’m not going to run a full t-test to determine significance, but I am going to see if there is face validity to the claim that they are pretty much the same.

Range: 60 feet
Damage: Save or Take 1d6 Acid Damage
# Creatures affected: 1 or 2 within 5 feet.

Range: 60 feet
Damage: Save or Take 1d6 Acid Damage
# Creatures affected: All Creatures in a 5 ft. Sphere.

You’ll notice that the 5e version allows for only one or two creatures, while the 6th edition version could affect up to 9 foolish creatures in tight formation. In 5e and 6e, a 5-foot radius is typically treated like a 5-foot cube. If you wanted to treat it more like a true sphere, you could still affect 5. This is a significant increase in power from 2014’s rules set and is one of a thousand minor changes that make 2024 a truly new edition.

While the newer edition is more powerful, the Acid Splash reskinned as Lightning Ball only changes one aspect of the spell, the damage type. In fact, since the spell already can damage up to 2 creatures (5 to 9 in 6e) in close proximity the spell’s mechanics fit nicely with the reskin. The question here becomes, “Does the spell significantly improve if it becomes lightning based?” There are after all different creatures who are resistant/immune to different damage types and affecting a disproportionate number might affect game balance. This criticism only holds so much weight since the Elemental Adept feat allows casters to ignore type resistance (though not immunity). This feat is yet another example of power creep in the latest edition of D&D because in addition to the old benefit, it now includes a stat bump.

So...what are the differences between Acid and Lightning regarding number of creatures affected? Is a lightning skilled spell significantly better than an acid skinned spell?

Here is the rundown of the number of monsters in the Monster Manual (5e) who are resistant (takes half damage), immune (takes no damage), and vulnerable (takes double damage) to Acid and Lightning damage.

5e Acid Resistance/Vulnerability
Creatures Resistant to Acid in Monster Manual: 17
Creatures Immune to Acid in Monster Manual: 15
Number of Creatures Vulnerable to Acid: 0

5e Lightning Resistance/Vulnerability
Creatures Resistant to Lightning in Monster Manual: 34
Creatures Immune to Lightning in Monster Manual: 19
Number of Creatures Vulnerable to Lightning: 0

Since there are no creatures in the 5e Monster Manual who are Vulnerable to Lightning or Acid damage, there is no real effect there. However, the Lightning damage type, the spell is more limited with regard to the number of creatures it can damage. There are 19 creatures immune to Lightning damage vs. only 15 immune to Acid and there are twice as many “resistant” creatures. What about in 6e?

6e Acid Resistance/Vulnerability
Creatures Resistant to Acid in Monster Manual: 25
Creatures Immune to Acid in Monster Manual: 18
Number of Creatures Vulnerable to Acid: 0

6e Lightning Resistance/Vulnerability
Creatures Resistant to Lightning in Monster Manual: 38
Creatures Immune to Lightning in Monster Manual: 19
Number of Creatures Vulnerable to Lightning: 0

The 6e effect is similar. Choosing Lightning over Acid is a net detriment, though the biggest detriment is choosing the Poison damage type. Poison was a frequent tool in earlier editions of D&D, but over 100 of the monsters in the modern game are straight up immune to poison. Woe unto the poison lord in a land of Skeletons. In the end, these are negligent effects and I believe we can see that this won’t change game balance too much in the player’s favor. Though reskinning poison spells as lightning would be a benefit and so might be discussed.

Regardless of the mechanical considerations when analyzing the impact of damage type, describing Sleep as an effect that results from a quick electrical burst that disrupts the circadian rhythm of a foe or Spider Climb as a static field that surrounds the hands and feet of the caster does nothing other than add a narrative touch to play. The same is true for describing Animate Dead as electrical impulses arching through corpses to control their movements.

There are some damage types that are clearly better or worse than average when it comes to this kind of analysis. Very few creatures are resistant to Radiant damage and approximately 100 monsters (in both editions) are immune to poison, for example, and you would have to decide whether or not to do the “it doesn’t really matter” hand wave or ban those as reskinnable trappings in your games. One thing to consider for spells like Sleep is that you might have the creature’s resistance apply to the hit points rolled against the spell. That significantly reduces the power of that particular spell against certain foes, but it adds the illusion of unpredictability to your magic and makes magic more magical.

If I get good response to this, I might stat up some more themed wizards and maybe do multi-system adaptations.

I’m a big fan of the old social media “list” memes. They still show up from time to time when someone shares “Four Books to Know Me,” but their heyday has long since passed. It’s too bad because they were/are a part of what makes social media genuinely social. So much of today’s online communication is the sharing of ragebait stories or attempts to gain virality through controversial statements or cruelty. These kinds of behavior are built into the various algorithms, and toxicity is favored over connection. This is as true of BlueSky as it is for Twitter, and I even see it creep into Substack from time to time as the ragerati wander into these creative social shores.

As you all know, I subscribe to a lot of different writers here on Substack. Some, like , I follow because their poetry and humor remind me of lost friends. I lost some of those friends due to time and distance, but others died far too soon and reading essays and poems by these authors helps me remember the best of those lost friends. Others I follow because they are academics like or who write about areas I study or have interest in. I don’t always agree with their takes/analysis, but that is what academics at their best are about. There are “pop” academics I avoid here, though they tend to be among the ragerati and that hint might give you a clue of whom I mean. Because of my work in non-partisan youth civic engagement and study of polarization, I don’t filter my follows by partisanship. I follow liberal and conservative alike.

While I don’t “like” everyone I follow/read, there are many I do. People like , , , , , and many others are people I either know in real life and care deeply about or are people I consider internet friends. If they are ever in town, I would want to go out of my way to hang with them. falls into this group, first by association, but as time has progressed through online interaction.

Sarah is a part of the “hip journalist” crowd I’ve always envied a little bit. She’ll probably push back and say, “I’m not a hip journalist! That’s reserved for people like Thomas Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson…maybe Legs McNeil!” She’d be correct, as far as that goes, but it’s also true that she has been able to make a career commenting about society in some way…often by commenting on things she thinks are cool and having others agree. That’s what I mean by being “hip.” The hip journalists I really envy are those who make a career reviewing films or games, in part because I think I often know more about the subject (and sometimes even imagine myself as a better writer) than many of those who make a living at the gig. Let’s just say that my rage at most of Indiewire’s critical team burns with the fire of 1,000 suns, even as Anne Thompson (editor-at-large of said publication) is someone I like and admire. I don’t dislike most hip journalists, but a part of me envies them in the “I am completely fantasizing how carefree their lives are” kind of way. I know most of them work extremely hard, but their profession is SO COOL.

Anyway, Sarah has a new book out called The Only Thing There is to Want: A Memoir of Three Loves. The book, which I will be reading and reviewing at some point that is too late to be topical, engages with the challenges many people (and especially women) face in trying to have it all in career and companion. To promote the book, Sarah has created a new Substack called that unlike so many Substackers today, she is offering for free. Yes, it’s aimed at marketing her book, a book that is distinctly hip journalist because who gets to sell memoirs, but it is free and gives a sense of her humor and charm. In her most recent post, she shares the “Ten Best Love Songs” according to her.

Love Anyway

The Ten Best Love Songs, According to Me

Tom Waits did not make this list. No Beatles, no ELO, no Old 97’s. You have no idea how painful this was for me, and all I can say is that some artists write so many classic love songs that ONE never quite rises to the top. I tried to be thorough, but of course this list is arbitrary…

Read more

a month ago · 38 likes · 52 comments · Sarah Hepola

It’s a good list, meaning that it’s filled with good songs, and I thought of sharing it as a part of a not-so-Weekly Geekly, but it included a song by Fleetwood Mac (no not that song) and so my mind wouldn’t settle for a mere paragraph or two in response. My mind demanded, demanded I say, that I share a full list of 10 Great Love Songs (you all know how I feel about “best” lists, which is to say that I prefer recommendation lists to top 10s etc.). In other words, I read her combination of community building and marketing as if it was one of those old internet memes. Look at that, I tied it all back together.

So…without further ado, here is a list of 10 songs in no particular order that I think are great love songs.

One Million by Rocket

I’m a sucker for a good Shoegaze band and Rocket is a fantastic shoegaze band. The textures of their musical tone, combined with the haunting voice of Alithea Tuttle, make for a wonderful contrast. You’ve got the fuzzy grind of shoegaze with the lilting high tones of dreampop, and it works beautifully. Their song One Million is about unrequited love and wanting to be noticed and it was one of the reasons I became and insta-fan of this band.

How Long Will I Love You by The Waterboys (as performed by Jon Boden, Sam Sweeney and Ben Coleman in About Time)

About Time is on my list of perfect films. It is a wonderful story of love and time travel. It is a romantic comedy. It is a coming-of-age story. It is a tale of loss and love. It is a tale of familial love. Richard Curtis has directed many wonderful films about love, but this is the one I’ve watched the most. The performance of How Long Will I Love You featured in the film is magnificent and you can see why Curtis chose it over the Ellie Goulding one that is featured on the soundtrack. That’s right, the version of the song in the film is not the one featured on the CD or playlist, which is too bad. The folk version is so much better and heartfelt. The sequence that uses it in the film (not what is in the video) is true Gesamtkunstwerk.

I’ll Follow You Into the Dark by Deathcab for Cutie

It’s hard to believe this song is almost 20 years old. This is a sad and dark song about love and the eternal commitment possible even in the face of uncertainty. It’s a song that says that no matter what comes, the one who loves you will be there if possible.

Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy

While Pachelbel’s Canon is one of my wife’s and my favorite songs, and played at our wedding eons ago, it is a bit overdone now and so I chose Debussy’s Clair de Lune. While Debussy is Edward’s favorite composer, and I’m Team Edward, this song stands strong because it is one of the most beautiful songs ever written. While its subject matter isn’t one of passionate love, it features prominently in the film Frankie and Johnnie and ties together the simple romance at play in the film. The movie is romantic, but only a comedy in the sense that the protagonists become a couple by the end. The dramatic moments overshadow the humorous and this is the song that unites the romance. There is a sadness and mystery in the song that is a fitting musical description of love.

While the songs are very different, I think there is a similar intimacy in Roberta Flack’s performance of First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. Such a beautiful song.

Operator by Jim Croce

Jim Croce’s Operator is one of the saddest love songs out there and a prime example of how fantastic the singer songwriter era of the early 1970s was at giving us songs that were musically complex while telling a story. The song has the requisite pop hook, but there’s depth there that is often lacking in pop of any era.

Always Something There to Remind Me by Naked Eyes

Burt Bacharach wrote banger after banger and Always Something There to Remind Me is just one example. It’s hard to beat a Dionne Warwick version of a song, but this 1980s alt-pop version of the song rises to the top. From its operatic beginning to its much more intimate chorus, this version hits all the right beats. Other versions of the song use backup singers to add depth to the chorus, but this version proves that’s unnecessary.

Farther Down by Matthew Sweet

From the cover albums he did with Susanna Hoffs to his album Girlfriend where he attempted to connect with the MTV crowd, Matthew Sweet has long been one of my favorite artists. He never hit it really big, he did partner with Susanna Hoffs and Mike Myers to create one of the best movie theme songs ever BBC by Ming Tea.

That’s not a romantic song though, for that I’ll go to his song Farther Down from the film Can’t Hardly Wait. When I think about the films released during my daughters’ high school years, it makes me kind of sad. While there is a lot of content aimed at their cohort, there aren’t many films “about” their life experience. Being a teenager in any era is hard, but in the era of polarization and Covid it can be even harder. Generation X had John Hughes films and Millennials had She’s All That, Can’t Hardly Wait, and many more. I think that one of the reasons that the new Spider-Man movie, and Obsession, have done so amazingly well is that they are films about Gen Z (and this is true of It Follows for Millennials). Every generation needs films about their experience. We’ve seen tons of films about the Boomer experience and Gen X had Hughes films (and eventually films like Swingers and more when they began making their own films), but Gen Z has had a hard time of it.

There’s quite of bit of cringe (I know I’m Unc for even using that outdated phrase, but dads are always Unc) in Can’t Hardly Wait, but there’s a lot of truth. It captures all the anxieties that dominate the high school experience but also shows how shallow they really are. Many of the people I thought disliked me in high school, due to high school politics, ended up being great friends later in life. At my reunions, you could tell those who peaked in high school, but it wasn’t many people. Most had moved on and remembered everyone fondly.

Kiss Me by Sixpence None the Richer

Okay, I’m really picking too many songs from romantic comedies. I mentioned She’s All That in the prior post, but it’s a great romantic comedy and it features a lovely song by Sixpence None the Richer. Sure, the film is implausible in that it tries to present Rachel Leigh Cook as anything other than stunningly beautiful. I’m sorry, glasses and overalls don’t take away from her beauty, they just make her a beautiful tomboy. The film’s performances are fun, but simple. The song on the other hand is one that will endure.

Fire and Rain by James Taylor

Not all love songs are about romance. Some are about friendship and James Taylor’s sad Fire and Rain is one of the best in that genre. Like Croce, Taylor is a powerful singer/songwriter. If you had asked me in 1970 (if I had been alive then) which of the two would live to be 78 (and hopefully even older), I would have picked Croce. James Taylor struggled with heroin addiction and his song Carolina in My Mind is a song about his longing for home as he felt isolated and contemplated his struggles with heroin addiction. It’s a song about the love he has for his home and family; Fire and Rain is a song of love about those he lost far too young. It’s the musical equivalent to the Author’s Note Philip K. Dick wrote for A Scanner Darkly:

A Lifetime by Better than Ezra

While the official meaning behind the band name Better than Ezra is still a mystery, there is no mystery to what A Lifetime is about. The song was inspired by the theft and cremation of Gram Parson’s body, but the story this song tells is a little different. Like James Taylor’s song this is a song about a dead best friend, but the cause of death is unknown, and it doesn’t matter. I’ve lost friends to age, disease, and suicide. All of them were gone too soon. Of all of them, the one that hit the hardest was my friend Ron Peck. He was the coolest guy I ever knew. He was self-assured and had truly refined taste. He had a wonderful sense of humor, but he had an eternal melancholy. Years before he died, he told me how he would kill himself. He described it in great detail as a criticism of someone who had attempted and failed. He said they chose the wrong method and described how he would do it right. That’s what he did, and I miss him every day. We are getting close to October 7th, the anniversary of my mom’s death from heroin addiction, and Ron helped me get through some of the initial pain of that when we reconnected after a couple of years of “I’m in college now” distance. That made losing him even harder, but we had a lifetime of fun together.

As is often the case here, I am a little late on finishing off a series of posts, but I am still within my regular “one article a week” schedule. I’ll be aiming for two a week starting in September, but I am adjusting to a new job and my daughters are starting college so there are a bunch of life changes going around.

As I mentioned before, I have picked up on Professor Dungeon Master’s concept of July as Independent Gaming Month and curated a list of games that appeal to the whole spectrum of gamer types that Robin Laws presents in Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering. Dividing gamers into this kind of taxonomy originated with early game theorists and roleplaying enthusiasts in the California Scene. Steven Horst and Glen Blacow discussed the concept in Different Worlds #10, where Horst described gaming styles using the term “Theory of Play,” while Glen Blacow called them “Aspects of Adventure Gaming.” In issue #11 of Different Worlds, Jeffrey A. Johnson (who would later go on to design the Temple of Apshai series of games) used Blacow’s “Aspects” as dimensions for a kind of “ideological gaming space” where players weren’t seen as absolutist in their aspects, rather as falling somewhere in an ideological map. Essentially, the roleplaying game equivalent of the famous DW-Nominate Scores we use in political science. Tools like this let you see if politicians have multi-dimensional beliefs or if their beliefs (measured by voting patterns) change over time.

While I really like the Cartesian model that Jeffrey A. Johnson designed, I think that broad classifications are much easier to imagine and design for than specific places on a grid. I might have my students take the Political Compass survey every year, but it is much easier for them to understand Pew’s categories than placement on the Compass. Feel free to take these quizzes and report your results, you’ll get no judgement from me.

Looking at the various articles, you can see a nice expansion of the concept over time, and I tried to provide games for all these groups.

Steven Horst's "Theory of Play"

     1. Personality Projection
     2. Role-Assuming
     3. Directed Development
     4. Undirected Development

Glenn F. Blacow's "Aspects of Adventure Gaming."

     1. Power Gaming
     2. Role-Playing
     3. Wargaming
     4. Story Telling

Robin Laws’ Player Types:

     1. The Power Gamer
     2. The Butt Kicker
     3. The Tactician
     4. The Specialist
     5. The Method Actor
     6. The Casual Gamer

Discussion of what each of these types means within each taxonomy will be the topic for a future post, where I will also likely add a couple additional types to Robin’s list in order to incorporate more recent developments in roleplaying like what the BROSR are doing with perpetual Braunsteins and adversarial play. This style of play is unique enough to warrant its own term, even as it would fall somewhere within a Cartesian ideological space.

It’s the Final (Indie) Countdown!!!

July 1 — Colonial Gothic (It’s the 250th Anniversary of the United States after all. His Kickstarter didn’t succeed, but it’s a great game and you should 100% check it out.)
July 2 — Good Guys Finish Last
July 3 — Champions
July 4 — Dragon Warriors (I’m a big fan of Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson’s work and will be reviewing their Blood Sword gamebooks and the RPG I backed on Kickstarter back in the day soon. I’ll also be reviewing Mortal Combat and Dagon Warriors.)
July 5 — Troika
July 6 — Savage Worlds
July 7 — Castle Falkenstein
July 8 — Fantasy AGE role playing
July 9 — Inspectres
July 10 — Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (Which will have a new edition soon)
July 11 — Traveller
July 12 — Hero Kids (Gaming isn’t just for Grownups)
July 13 — Beach Patrol (Combine this and Tiny Spies and you’ve got Miami Vice)
July 14 — Runequest (from the creator of the Perrin Conventions)
July 15 — Dragonbane
July 17 — Villains & Vigilantes Monkey House Games Edition 2.1 (I’ll be reviewing all three editions soon)
July 18 — Age of Sigmar: Soulbound (I honestly don’t know why Brandon Sanderson didn’t just license this system for his Cosmere RPG)
July 19 — Masks: A New Generation (Second edition coming soon)
July 20 — Mazes
July 21 — Symbaroum (Traditional “Faerie” Fantasy done right)
July 22 — Leagues of Adventure (Paul “Wiggy” Wade Williams is one of my all-time favorite designers)
July 23 —My Life with Master
July 24 — Shiver
July 25 — Mothership
July 26 — Never Going Home
July 27 — Tunnels & Trolls may technically break the “in
July 28 — Vaesen

July 29 — Lasers and Feelings

Lasers and Feelings

With the recent release, and disappearance of Critical Role’s Candela Obscura roleplaying game, there has been a bit of chatter about John Harper as a game designer. I know people who play a variety of games, but I don’t know anyone who plays Candela Obscura. Even Beadle & Grimm’s support, a pdf expansion, has been lukewarm. All that said, I think it is an interesting game, but it’s hard to compete with Call of Cthulhu and Vaesen in the horror space.

Harper was discussed because he designed Blades in the Dark, a game that stands on the shoulders of many indie rpg giants like Apocalypse World and Inspectres (see the earlier entry above). Blades in the Dark incorporates a number of player agency and troupe play mechanics in a way that deeply merges mechanics and genre. If you haven’t checked that game out, do so. It was one of the major mechanical and style influences for Candela Obscura and is worth your time, so much so that many accused Critical Role of ripping it off. This accusation tied to the fact that early release pdfs of the game did not include reference to Harper’s creation, but as noted in the section on Inspectres Harper himself neglected to mention all of his influences. Controversy aside Candela Obscura is worth checking out, but I don’t know if it will catch on.

As for John Harper, when he isn’t designing independent games that result in very successful Kickstarter campaigns, he’s out there providing robust roleplaying game material for free. One of the best examples of his design philosophy, and of a subset of story gaming in general, is his game Lasers and Feelings. This game is a one-page role playing game that allows you to play adventures that explore strange new worlds and go where no one has gone before in minutes.

The base conceit for design in Lasers and Feelings is that most of the conflicts in everyone’s favorite weekly version of Wagon Train among the stars are resolved either with Lasers or with Feelings. Our rogue captains, be they Kirk, Burnham, or Pickard, are either blasting the crap out of foes, engaging in romantic interludes, or persuading the aliens to be peaceful with heartfelt appeals. It really is an elegant, if reductive, examination of the genre.

Because of this assumption, the game only needs one statistic, LaserFeelings. This is a number that ranges from 2 to 5. Any roll above that number succeeds at actions that require lasers (fighting etc.), which any roll below that number succeeds on actions that require feelings (romance/persuasion). If you roll the number exactly, you experience “Laser Feelings” and not only succeed but get some additional insight into the conflict/story you are engaging in at the moment. It’s a very simple, but very powerful system. There is a little more to the system, but the key innovation and genius is in this part of the mechanic. One could have designed it it by having two complementary stats (Lasers and Feelings) that must total 7, mirroring Pendragon’s Pagan vs. Christian virtues, but having it be a single number is quite elegant.

There are a HUGE number of Lasers and Feelings derivative games, including the superhero game Zam! Pow! Spork! and tons of games on itch.io. This is a game designed with the Method Actor in mind.

July 30 — When the Wolf Comes

I love me some Ragnarok themed roleplaying games and When the Wolf Comes by Ian Stuart Sharpe takes that them and combines it with Robert Schwalb’s excellent Shadow of the Demon Lord role playing game. After Rob Schwalb left Wizards of the Coast, post-4th edition D&D, he did two things. First, he wrote a great article that convinced me that one of the major reasons people “hated” 4th edition so much was the layout. The other major reason I believe people hated 4e was that it had marketing that told D&D fans that they sucked. The more things change, the more they stay the same (I’m looking at you OGL debacle). The second thing Rob did was design a game that proved his point.

Shadow of the Demon Lord is one of three excellent games based around mechanical innovations in the 4th edition D&D game, the other two are 13th Age and the 4e based Gamma World. Interestingly enough, Schwalb’s game may be based on, and inspired by, the mechanical innovations of 4e, but the game plays vastly differently. Yes, both use d20s and players gain levels which give them powers, and that’s a lot of similarity, but it is very much a different game. One of the key differences is in the initiative system. In traditional D&D, you roll for initiative. That is not the case in Shadow powered games like When the Wolf Comes. In Shadow games players select whether they want to act “Fast” or “Slow.” If they chose to act fast, their characters go first but must choose between moving and taking an action for their turn. If they choose to go slow, they can both move and take an action, but they go after GM characters. It’s a simple system that adds player agency while also making players take tradeoffs into account.

Thematically, When the Wolf Comes really shines. Imagine if you will that Odin wanted to stop/delay Ragnarok and so he gifted his worshipers the gift of gunpowder in the 9th Century, at the peak of Viking exploration. The “Dane” raiders subsequently wipe out Christianity and explore the stars. It’s a great premise and the combination of back story and art give the game a very Cosmic Kirby feel. Imagine if Kirby’s version of Asgard had started on Midgard and you’ve got a slight sense of what the game looks and feels like. I admit that I have a soft spot for “Odin stalls Ragnarok” stories. I played in a GURPS Supers game where we played the Asgardian Gods fighting Ragnarok in modern America, only to discover that we were clones fighting a false Ragnarok and in doing so we delayed the real one. It was a campaign that echoed the Eternals crossover storyline in the Thor comics in Thor Annual #7 and The Mighty Thor #283. My own personal take is that the Völuspá is all a ploy by Odin to fool the giants into thinking they will win Ragnarok no matter what so that Odin can buy time to build the armies of Valhalla large enough to win. He is a trickster after all, like his blood brother who may just be in on the ruse.

All that aside, I love the setting for this game and have enjoyed reading the pdf. I cannot wait until the physical version is available.

July 31 — Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game

I’ll be posting a review of Free League’s Invincible Roleplaying Game soon, but it is entering the market in an era of strong superhero inspired competition. Matt Forbeck’s Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game is the latest entry in a long string of high-quality games based on the property. The game was written and designed by my friend Matt Forbeck, so take my recommendation with a dose of “friend flavored salt.” Matt has worked on a ton of roleplaying games that include the TSR Marvel FASERIP system, Champions/Hero System, Brave New World, and the more recent Marvel Heroic Role Playing Game from Margaret Weis Productions.

The new Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game is a fantastic combination of the concepts and mechanics of all of those games in a way that allows for both tactical and theatre of the mind play. I promise that I will have a long, very long, formal review of the game soon where I will touch upon many of its influences and address why I think some of the people critical of the game are wrong. When the majority of complaints are disagreements regarding stat blocks, and not how the game plays, you know one of two things. Either the game plays just fine and is encouraging discussion, or that too many people only read roleplaying games and don’t actually play them anymore.

What’s Coming Soon on Geekerati

In the coming weeks, I’ll be reviewing two movies (Private Detective 62 starring William Powell and The Lady in the Lake starring and directed by Robert Montgomery). The first is a depression era detective story that includes a dash of prewar espionage, romance, and a twist on a classic con artist plan. William Powell is, as always, delightful, but you’ll have to wait for the rest of my commentary.

Robert Montgomery’s film is an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel of the same name, and it features Chandler’s iconic detective Philip Marlowe. The basic plot of the film is solid, but what sets this film apart for good or ill is the fact that it is filmed entirely in the first person. That’s right, before there was Hardcore Henry, there was The Lady in the Lake. The film has received a lot of flak for the gimmick, but like most such criticism the critics are making too much of the gimmick while ignoring the craft behind it. And there is craft behind it. Is it enough the save the film? You’ll have to wait for the review.

Last, but not least is my upcoming review of the Invincible Roleplaying Game. While the game is based on the comic book and Amazon series, the game is designed to be flexible enough to play any comic book setting. I’ll have comments on the quality of the game, how it plays, and some character write ups from Marvel and DC. The Kickstarter raised enough money that the company promised to release an Open License for the Superhero adaptation they did to the Year Zero Engine, but that has yet to be included in the current System Reference Document. When it is, I might just use it for my own game, though I am currently working on a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook inspired system.

A few years ago, Games Workshop launched two new Warhammer related book series under the Warhammer Adventures label aimed at younger readers. One of the series took place in the Age of Sigmar dimensional fantasy setting and the other took place in the GrimDark expanses of the Warhammer 40k science fiction setting. Games Workshop has a long history of publishing media tie-in fiction for their game lines, and you can find Warhammer related novels and short stories dating back to the late 1980s with titles like Ignorant Armies and Konrad. As of this blog post there are well over 100 Warhammer related novels with a number of standout series like Gotrek & Felix (though I still haven’t forgiven them for what they did to Felix) and Dan “Guardians of the Galaxy” Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts. Games Workshop, like TSR/Wizards of the Coast, have shown themselves to be excellent providers of genre fiction.

The publication of a new line of books often passes without controversy. Maybe there’s some discussion about how it might affect the metafiction or change canon (I’m looking at you again Gotrek & Felix), but these books were Games Workshop’s first foray into Young Reader Chapter Book fiction. Past Games Workshop fiction has been aimed at an older reading audience, but these new series are aimed at readers aged 8-12. At the time, the publication of these books caused a bit of a stir on social media as some longtime fans complained that children’s stories might dilute the brand. Since I grew up on TSR’s Endless Quest and Super Endless Quest series, I was a little less skeptical. Heck, old TSR even had Heart Quest YA pick a path romantasy books. I don’t know if those brought any new people into the hobby, but of all the things that have led D&D away from its Sword & Sorcery roots those books aren’t in the top 10 offenders.

Whether TSR reached out to young readers or not back in the day is beside the point in many ways because Games Workshop has not reached out to this audience in the past. The company’s founders did with the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook series, but Games Workshop itself has shied away from younger readers. There is a pretty good reason that GW has not appealed to this audience historically.

Game Workshop’s settings are very iconic examples of the “GrimDark” genre in fantasy and science fiction. GrimDark tales feature settings that are filled with despair and violence and leave little room for hope and niceties. Some pre-GW authors who informed this genre before Games Workshop entered the publishing world are Michael Moorcock with his Elric Saga (let’s just say your average parent wouldn’t want their 10- to 12-year-old reading Neil Gaiman’s introduction to the latest omnibus) or better yet Karl Edward Wagner with his Kane stories. Though the GrimDark genre predates Games Workshop, there can be little doubt that the neologism GrimDark has its origins in the tagline of the Warhammer 40k Universe, “In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there is Only War.” That line sets the tone for all of Games Workshop’s game universes, so what room does that leave for fiction aimed at Chapter Book readers?

The simple answer to this question is, “plenty.” As grim and dark as the Games Workshop settings are, they also have a history of adjacent silliness. Games like Blood Bowl and GorkaMorka take place in horrifically terrifying worlds, but they are extremely lighthearted. Games like these show a more kid friendly face, but this kind of appeal isn’t limited to spinoffs.

Games Workshop Grognards who followed the development of the Brettonian army in Warhammer Fantasy can testify to how the game became more kid friendly in the 90s. While the Brettonia of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Game of the 1980s was a place of corruption, debauchery, and vice that made Game of Thrones look civilized, by the time the Brettonians received their own book for the Warhammer Fantasy Battle Game they had been transformed into the noble knights of Howard Pyle and Roger Lancelyn Green rather than extras from Flesh + Blood. The company has always pursued younger players and has altered the tone of their setting to accommodate both young and old. I call their most successful attempts to bridge this gap “DimDark.” It’s grim enough that adults can enjoy it and see that it reflects the overall setting, while also being innocent enough that 9-year-olds don’t get nightmares.

So how do they fare this time? Do these new books manage to capture the feel of the setting, while still being “appropriate” for younger readers? The answer to this question is, “Yes, for the 40k inspired series and we’ll have to see how the series develops for the Age of Sigmar inspired series.” In a way, the answer reflects the depth of the settings themselves. The Warhammer 40k setting is long-standing and rich with detail, where the Age of Sigmar setting is newer and was not completely flushed out when the novels were being written. To demonstrate this, I’ll be reviewing the first book in the Age of Sigmar young reader series in this post. I’ll be reviewing the 40k series later. I think it demonstrates the balance of DimDark better and gives a glimpse of what it’s like to live in the Imperium from an actual citizen’s perspective, rather than the anti-Imperial Chaos driven propaganda that oozes in the rule books.

Warhammer Adventures: The City of Lifestone

Because it’s the weaker of the two storylines, I’ll start with Warhammer Adventures: The City of Lifestone by Tom Huddleston. Not to be confused with the actor who plays Loki who has a similar name, Huddleston is an established author of young reader fiction who has written original fiction and media tie-in fiction for the Star Wars setting. Capturing DimDark in a setting as new and controversial as Age of Sigmar was at the time is a more difficult hurdle to clear, and of this series manages then it bodes well for the other series.

The City of Lifestone begins its tale on a world of fire and fury called the Plane of Aqshy. For those not versed in SF/F lore, a plane is a universe in its own right. Aqshy is one of the many “Mortal Realms” of the Age of Sigmar setting and it is also known as the Plane of Fire. The book’s protagonist, Kiri, is currently enslaved by Chaos worshiping Darkoath Barbarians. These barbarians are similar to the Bloodreavers featured in the Shadespire Boardgame. Kiri’s mother is dying and tells her that she must flee this realm and find the city of Lifestone, located on Ghyran the Plane of Life, using the Realmgate recently unearthed by the Darkoath Barbarians. Lifestone is a place of scholarship and healing from which Kiri’s mother fled due to a mysterious, and as yet unexplained, cataclysm. Though under normal circumstances, such an escape would be impossible, a company of Stormcast Eternals arrive and attack the Darkoath Barbarians providing a perfect distraction. The Stormcast Eternals, Champions of Sigmar and Opponents to Chaos, want to keep the gate out of the hands of the Darkoath Barbarians. This conflict provides Kiri with a chance to escape, even as she leaves her dead mother behind.

As an aside, this also provides a perfect segue into the Shadespire Boardgame, since that game’s introductory units are the very Darkoath-esque Bloodreavers and the Stormcast Eternals. Though the game takes place at a location far from Kiri’s slave camp, it really does make a nice tie-in to bring in new gamers, and the Shadespire game is young gamer friendly in the highest.

After fleeing Aqshy, Kiri eventually finds the City of Lifestone, only to find that the city is not the vibrant and happy paradise she imagined. It is a solemn and dying city, who’s once great fountain of healing has long since dried up. Kiri is on the edge of despair when she gets caught up in the machinations of two individuals a mysterious hooded woman and a sinister Shadowcaster. The hooded woman warns Kiri that the Shadowcaster kidnaps children, including her own child, but when Kiri meets those children (Kaspar, Thanis, Alish, and Elio) they don’t behave like kidnap victims and instead tell her that they are fated to be together. Was the hooded woman a liar, or is the Shadowcaster using magic to enslave the children as a kind of wizardly Fagin?

The book is engaging on many levels and has at its core a good adventure spark. There are suggestions that the children are indeed linked by marks they bear, one for each of the Mortal Realms, and that their link might be connected with the cataclysm that overcame Lifestone a generation ago. The character mix has all the elements of a fantasy party.

There is our protagonist Kiri, who is untrusting of others and wants to go it alone.

She is joined by the warrior girl/woman Thanis, who sadly only has armored gloves and no sword.

The mechanically minded Alish, who has a giant hammer that she uses to good effect.

The sneaky Kaspar, who may or may not be the child of the mysterious hooded woman.

Finally there is Elio, the proto-witch hunter though a more scholarly witchhunter than one typically imagines in the Warhammer Universes.

It’s a good mix of characters for an epic adventure, but due to the young age of the protagonists Huddleston’s adventurer’s actions are decidedly non-lethal. Kiri, for example, wields a slingshot (called a catapult in the book) which is effective at hurting, but not at killing, foes. Given that the setting is DimDark, this lack of lethality hurts the plausibility of the storyline and undermines an otherwise epic tale. Edgar Rice Burrough’s Martian books are perfectly appropriate for kids of the same age, and they feature deaths a plenty. The key to DimDark is to not wallow in the description. For some storylines, the lack of lethality by young protagonists would be fine, but this particular story has a scene where the adventurers fight a pack of Skaven. Given that the Skaven are portrayed as a lethal threat, the characters non-lethal weaponry seems unrealistic. It’s a small flaw given that the book is written for 11 and under, but it is a flaw nonetheless. The book needs a little more “Grim” on the part of the protagonists to successfully pull off the new “Dim-Dark” genre.

Overall, the book is a quick and engaging read, but it suffers from the fact that the Age of Sigmar setting was still lacking in mythopoetic worldbuilding at the time. The setting has grown since then, but the “Mortal Realms” diverges from many standard fantasy tropes, even as it uses them as a foundation. The Mortal Realms require more exposition of the mythic setting than is possible in a book this length. One cannot, for example, use their rough knowledge of the Holy Roman Empire to serve as a proxy for The Empire when reading these books. The “Celestial Realm” where the Stormcast Eternals live shares more with Marvel’s Asgard than with any other proxy, and even then, the connection is not strong enough for the reference to serve as a real proxy. The closest fiction I can pull from my mind that is analogous to the Mortal Realms is Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere. The Stormcast Eternals are very similar to Roshar’s Knights Radiant, but I don’t know a lot of 10-year-olds who’ve read deep into the Cosmere lore. 14-year-olds? Sure, but 10? If this series really wants to work, then as the series continues the author will have to bring in more lore to make the world feel real. It can be done, and I enjoyed the book and look forward to reviewing the rest and the 40k series.

What do you think? Is it a mistake for roleplaying game companies to write books for kids? Share your answer in the survey and your thoughts in the comments.

Three X-Men, Fresh Out of the Box

I recently reviewed the single short book version of the Superworld setting that was released as a part of Chaosium’s Worlds of Wonder boxed set. Though Chaosium has released a lot of their older roleplaying games, that boxed set lies gathering dust on the shelf. When I mentioned I was working on that review in a post on Twitter (it will always be Twitter to me), Sandy Petersen responded that Chaosium sold the Worlds of Wonder name to the company that eventually released Teddy Ruxpin. I’m sure that Sandy meant trademark, rather than copyright, but the end result is the same. That result is that we’ll likely never see a 1:1 reprint of Worlds of Wonder. It’s too bad, because it’s a great game and due to its concision, it’s the best introduction to the Basic Role*Playing1 engine produced to date.

In that review of Superworld, I wrote that I would provide a short gaming supplement for the game in order to highlight how well the system works. Long time readers know that I consider the 23rd issue of Different Worlds (August 1982) magazine to be the single best issue of a gaming magazine ever published. This is in large part because of the rich content it provided for several superhero roleplaying games. It included reviews, errata, and even statistics for some of our favorite comic book characters, including Marvel’s now classic post-Giant Size X-Men lineup. It included stats for those characters for both Champions and the Worlds of Wonder version of Superworld. The Superworld stats were put together by Karl Maurer and have design notes by Steve Perrin, along with some pretty cool illustrations by Steve’s wife Luise Perrene. I’ve never understood the difference in spelling of the last name, but I strongly believe that Luise is one of the underrated artists of early RPG history.

Anyway, the statistics Steve and Karl provided presented the X-Men as experienced characters who had skills that had grown via experience to 80–90% over imagined years of play. The powers were paid for out of the actual combination of starting power points and disabilities, but I think there was a bit of stat fudging there to ensure characters could be emulated. Even though the powers are relatively modest compared to what they could have been, the characters presented in the issue are the veteran versions. This is especially odd for a character like Kitty Pryde who made her first appearance in X-Men #129 in January of 1980. That was a relatively short time before the Different Worlds issue was published and I’d like to present some “Young X-Men” that are closer to what players can expect to start a campaign with, rather than experienced versions. Assuming that skills have increased due to experience, means that more points would have been available for power purchases.

So, the three characters I am creating are the opposite of what Karl and Steve presented. These are merely seedling characters. Each X-Man was generated using only the rules presented in the book. They are RAW newbs where I didn’t estimate attributes beforehand and instead, rolled 3D6 down the line and added 3 to any score under 11 if appropriate. I took the total of the seven starting characteristics as the Hero Point total and spent them. Nothing on these starter character sheets comes from experience, or the assumption of experience. I wanted to create true starting characters. The characters will have the mutant powers of their comic book name sakes, but the characteristics are unremarkable and the skills sit near their Basic Role-Playing base. This does mean that the characters I am providing are not pure adaptations of existing characters, rather they are attempts to emulate characters within the constraints of the rules as written. I’m not worried about having high starting skill values, because skill growth is one of the benefits of actually playing in a campaign.

The results are every interesting. You can recognize the characters, but they are not iconic veteran versions. The rookie Cyclops I put together projects a 7D6 optic blast, which is very impressive, but not as impressive as the “official” 9D6 one. The rookie Wolverine’s claws are sharp, but he hasn’t developed all the durability, speed, or full suite of sensory powers that he gains as writers keep adding to his abilities. My rookie version of Nightcrawler can teleport himself and a little cargo a couple hundred meters, but there is no way he could teleport an entire car across a city block.

Rules Used

As I mentioned earlier, I designed the characters using the rules as written in the short Superworld setting guide. Here’s a quick breakdown of the rules, to give you a strong foundation for evaluating my feeble attempt to work within the constraints.

• Characteristics: Attributes were determined by rolling 3D6 each for STR, CON, SIZ, INT, POW, DEX, CHA down the line, no roll then pick. If any score was under 11 I had the option to raise it by +3, but I didn’t have to do so. (The book also lets players scrap a hopeless spread and roll a new character, and I took advantage of that as you’ll see with Nightcrawler’s note.)

• Total Hero Points = the sum of the seven characteristics (after the +3 option), plus bonus points from Disabilities. This is one of the rules I’ll change in my retroclone, but it was fun to play around with.

• Hit Points = CON.

• MOVE = 24 meters per round. I did not buy increased movement for any of the characters, except the teleportation for Nightcrawler. After all, none of these three characters fly.

• Buying up a characteristic costs 1 Hero Point per point of STR/CON/SIZ/DEX; 3 Hero Points per point of INT/POW/CHA. The errata in Different Worlds #23 applies a cap that you can’t spend more Hero Points on a stat than its original rolled value at character creation.

• Skills cost 1 Hero Point per +5%. I did not spend a lot of points on skills and kept it deliberately light here. These are rookies after all and will gain skill later via normal skill increase rolls. This is one area to minimize with new characters as spending points on powers is a ton of fun.

• Damage bonus: I calculated damage bonus using the Magic World rules Perrin actually used rather than the damage bonus described under Size Change in the Superworld rulebook. My interpretation is that the Size Change modifications only apply to characters with that power. This means that a STR or SIZ of 15+ adds +1D6 to melee and natural-weapon damage, 31+ gives +2D6, and 46+ gives +3D6. I always used the higher of STR or SIZ and remembered that unlike later BRP games, they neither stack nor are they averaged. Martial Arts is a power and adds its own benefits separately.

• Power and disability costs are taken from the Superworld booklet and the issue #23 errata. I bought touch-range “natural weapon” powers (Wolverine’s claws) using Kinetic Projection with no range, and following Perrin’s own discussion of Maurer’s Wolverine, I took both the STR based damage bonus and Martial Arts.

Each block lists the dice as rolled, then the build, so that you can see that every Hero Point is accounted for.

WOLVERINE (Logan)

Stats Rolled: STR 11, CON 8, SIZ 13, INT 8, POW 11, DEX 7, CHA 8
Stats (Post +3): STR 11, CON 11, SIZ 13, INT 11, POW 11, DEX 10, CHA 11

This was a very average spread. I used +3 option to lift CON, INT, DEX, and CHA to reasonable levels. In order to meet what I thought were Logan’s bare minimums, I did use Hero Points to increase some stats. The rookie Logan has the claws, the healing, and the sharp senses, but the conditioning, speed, and full suite of sensory powers that the veteran has are months or years of play away.

STR 15 CON 14 SIZ 13 INT 11 POW 11 DEX 13 CHA 11
Original Hero Points – 78 Total Hero Points – 98 (78 + 20 disability)

MOVE: 24
HIT POINTS: 14
ARMOR: Kinetic 2
ABSORPTION: None
ENERGY POINTS: Personal 60

POWERS:
Claws (Kinetic Projection, No Range, 2D6). Hero Points: 6
Martial Arts 1. Hero Points: 20
Regeneration 1: Hero Points: 13
Supersenses: Smell 1, Hearing 1, Vision 1, Touch 1, Infravision 1. Hero Points: 15 Armor: Kinetic 2. Hero Points: 2
Energy: 60. Hero Points: 6
Characteristics: STR +4, CON +3, DEX +3. Hero Points: 10

SKILLS: Fist 70%, Grapple 45%, Climb 70%, Listen 70%, Spot Hidden 50%, Move Quietly 45%, First Aid 50%, Dodge 65%, Hide 55%

DISABILITIES (bonus points):
Mutant, a hunted minority (5)
Berserker: must make an INT×2 roll or go berserk when a teammate is hurt or he is humiliated (5)
Loner, surly and insubordinate (5)
Claws function only at touch range (5)

SPECIAL: Regeneration restores 1 Hit Point per melee round while energy lasts. This is not the instant healing of the comics. His energy pool runs out at 60 and needs to be spent on a variety of actions. His senses are far keener than human, but he carries only five of the veteran’s seven.

Compared to the Different Worlds #23 Version: In issue #23, Wolverine has CON 28, 4D6+2D6 claws, seven heightened senses, Speed for faster movement, Adaptability, Armor 9, and Recharge to get his Energy back quicker.

CYCLOPS (Scott Summers)

Stats Rolled: STR 11, CON 12, SIZ 6, INT 13, POW 13, DEX 13, CHA 11.
Stats (Post +3): STR 11, CON 12, SIZ 9, INT 13, POW 13, DEX 13, CHA 11.

The +3 option lifts the tiny SIZ to 9, which explains why they called Scott “slim” in the early issues of X-Men when Professor X was in love with Jean Grey in highly inappropriate ways.

This is a slight and wiry Scott who will become stronger as he works out more in the Danger Room. He has good values for POW and DEX. I made the optic blast the primary focus of the character.

STR 11 CON 15 SIZ 9 INT 13 POW 15 DEX 16 CHA 11
Original Hero Points – 82 Total Hero Points – 102 (82 + 20 disability)

MOVE: 24
HIT POINTS: 15
ARMOR: Kinetic 3, Electromagnetic 3, Radiation 3
ABSORPTION: None
ENERGY POINTS: Personal 180

POWERS:
Optic Blast (Kinetic Projection 7D6, +15m range, to 30m). Hero Points: 21 + 3 Optic Blast Parry (Parry Armor 15). Hero Points: 15
Armor: Kinetic 3, EM 3, Radiation 3. Hero Points: 9
Energy: 180. Hero Points: 18
Characteristics: CON +3, POW +2, DEX +3. Hero Points: 12

SKILLS — Throw 70% (Throw is Used for Optic Blast Attack Base Roll), Acrobatics 30%, Grapple 45%, Climb 65%, Listen 60%, Spot Hidden 40%, First Aid 55%, Dodge 80%

DISABILITIES (bonus points)
Mutant, a hunted minority (5)
The optic blast is always on and uncontrollable without his ruby-quartz visor. This is a full-time condition that denies a normal life and endangers everyone around him (10)
Rigid sense of duty, compelled to lead and to follow the rules (5)

SPECIAL: Remember that the blast never switches off. Scott must wear the visor (or sealed ruby-quartz goggles) at all times. If it is removed or shattered, the beam fires continuously at full force until Scott passes out from lack of energy. The Parry Armor lets him deflect one incoming attack per round with a precise beam, on a successful parry roll. It operates as a parry per the rules, but with a cool special effect.

Compared to the Different Worlds #23 Version: The more veteran Cyclops fires 9D6 and has a 21-point beam-parry. He also has skill in Martial Arts. The rookie version one hits for 7D6, has a weaker but still potent parry, and hasn’t trained in hand-to-hand combat yet. He does already have all of the important signature abilities though.

NIGHTCRAWLER (Kurt Wagner)

A note on my die rolls for this character. The first two spreads I rolled for this character included a DEX of 4. That’s right, I rolled 4 for DEX twice and while Nightcrawler may have lost out to Spider-Man in Secret Wars, this low DEX was unplayable for an acrobat. So, I allowed myself to scrap the rolls per the book (after all even a 7 DEX is too low) rolled a third fresh character. This time, I got a workable if weird spread.

Stats Rolled: STR 9, CON 17, SIZ 12, INT 13, POW 9, DEX 13, CHA 15
Stats (Post +3): STR 12, CON 17, SIZ 12, INT 13, POW 12, DEX 13, CHA 15

I felt a little guilty using the +3 option because it lifts his STR and POW, even as his other stats are VERY GOOD.

I ended up buying up a lot of DEX, because agility is Kurt’s angle…see what I did there?

STR 15 CON 17 SIZ 12 INT 13 POW 12 DEX 18 CHA 15
Original Hero Points – 94 Total Hero Points – 114 (94 + 20 disability)

MOVE: 24
HIT POINTS: 17
ARMOR: Kinetic 3
ABSORPTION: None
ENERGY POINTS: Personal 200

POWERS:
Teleport 16 (moves his SIZ plus up to 4 SIZ of cargo, up to 200m). Hero Points: 16
Wall Walking 14. Hero Points: 14
Prehensile Tail (Stretching 2l, 2m reach). Hero Points: 6
Invisibility 12 (only in shadow, no energy cost). Hero Points: 12
Leap 5 (+10m horizontal/+5m vertical). Hero Points: 5
Armor: Kinetic 3. Hero Points: 3
Supersenses: Vision +15m. Hero Points: 3
Energy 200. Hero Points: 20
Characteristics: STR +3, DEX +5. Hero Points: 8 (I know he’s not all that strong, but I wanted the extra damage, and he didn’t have enough points for Martial Arts).

SKILLS — Acrobatics 30%, Climb 70%, Hide 75%, Move Quietly 45%, Jump 60%, Fine Manipulation 20%, Grapple 40%, Throw 55%, Dodge 90%

DISABILITIES (bonus points)
Mutant, a hunted minority (5)
Demonic Appearance: blue fur, fangs, tail, glowing eyes; full-time, cannot pass as human, denies a normal life (10)
Code against killing (5)

SPECIAL: At this time, Kurt must see or clearly know his destination to teleport. He cannot attempt blind jumps and arrives in a sulfurous puff of displaced air, which can give away his location. His shadow-blending only works where there are shadows to use because it is due to his fur. While it’s not in his skill set, because this is early BRP and not later iterations of the game, he is a native German speaker.

Compared to the Different Worlds #23 Version: The veteran version of Nightcrawler teleports up to 30 SIZ points, which is very potent indeed. He can vanish completely in shadow at no cost and has Acrobatics 90%. My version moves himself and a little cargo and tumbles is very much a rookie acrobat at 30%.

How They Grow Up

One of the great things about Basic Role*Playing experience system is that every time you successfully use a skill in play you get to roll to improve that skill after the game session. This is supposedly how the issue #23 versions reached their 70–90% skill values. Players can save or earn new Hero Points to buy the rest of the missing abilities over time. After he buys another level of Regeneration, Wolverine will start shrugging off wounds mid-fight. An additional two dice of Optic Blast damage and Cyclops is blasting through walls like no one’s business. Buy a couple dozen more levels of Teleport and Nightcrawler is Bamf-ing the whole team across the city, or even into space.

I think these are a pretty good start. What are your thoughts?

1

I prefer to use the term Roleplay, but the game was originally released as Basic Role*Playing.

While there’s a bit of preamble before I get to Gary’s first adventure, let me give you a little teaser. It features FOUR BALROGS!

What was Early Gaming Like?

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about what Old School D&D was “really like” and how modern gaming styles diverge significantly from the way that D&D was originally designed. I find these discussions interesting for a number of reasons and have articulated some of my feelings about these debates in my recent post (linked below) discussing how “Dragonlance Killed D&D.”

The TL;DR version of that post, and my position, is that D&D has always been played in a variety of play styles. From the moment the game was created, the fans made the game their own and created a Folk version of the game that is very different from the Rules as Written. It is true that the rules for AD&D were written in response to the rise of “Folk D&D” and they provided the foundation for a rich and meaningful gaming experience where player characters started out very weak and where resource management was at a premium. That resource management included time management as a very central component and adventures like Keep on the Borderlands reinforced this style of play. One does not journey to the Caves of Chaos planning a long stay with sleepovers in the Caves. Instead, one plans careful and well-timed quick strike raids into different sections of the Caves. These strikes destabilize certain parts of the Caves while strengthening the player characters, even as the monsters will shuffle around.

Here is how Gary describes how a Dungeon Master should approach running forays into the Caves. The Caves are a living thing that only makes sense if you are keeping careful track of time.

The focus here is clearly on careful resource management, not just by the players but by the Dungeon Master as well. Notice how Gary advises the DM to “make adjustments” to the areas the players have visited. This advice assumes that some of the monsters, if not most, will have survived the player characters’ first attempts to explore the are and will create tactics in response.

Professor Dungeon Master, in his video about “Fake Orcs,” discusses one potential way a DM might incorporate his advice. In the case of Professor DM, it results in a highly lethal encounter in area B of the Caves of Chaos. Thankfully that encounter is 50 feet higher (at a 32° degree angle of incline) so it’s unlikely that players will choose that as their first area to explore when area A is at ground level. Though I’ve found most DMs fail to mention the how steep the slopes of the Valley in which the Caves are located.

That short bit of advice isn’t all the advice Gary gives. He gives some advice regarding the stocking of the Caves in general and advice for each sub-section of them. The advice for how to manage all the Caves is as follows.

Note here that Gary says that a cleared location will be deserted for 1-4 weeks and will only find new inhabitants if there are no further intrusions. The advice here is that in general monsters who survive will prepare, but if an area is cleared out it will remain empty so long as player characters return on a frequent basis. This allows for the eventual clearing of the whole complex, which is the eventual goal of the adventure. After all, once the threat behind the threat behind the threat has been eliminated, following the typical Gygaxian tiering of adventure, there is no longer pressure on any survivors to expand into human lands.

But that’s just the general advice. Gary gets very specific in ways that show that the resources of the opposition in the Caves are limited. In both the Orc area and the Goblin area, Gary informs DMs that “losses cannot be replaced.” That’s not entirely true based on the ecosystem Gary has set up because most areas have children, but it would take years for the children to replace the adults so it’s effectively true. In both cases, there is the option for the foes to flee the area for good if they need to.

Keep on the Borderlands is a great introductory adventure that can provide months of fun for your gaming group if you play it as it was written. It is intended to be a tactical challenge with resource management, risk, and loss being a baked in part of the fun. It’s very “wargamy” in the sense that it is almost as if the players are a small specialized military unit infiltrating, destabilizing, and eliminating a hostile encampment. It’s the gaming equivalent of the SAS Rogue Heroes in the North African Campaign.

I know I mentioned that this can provide months of fun in the above paragraph, but I’d like to reiterate that I LOVE this kind of gaming and it is very much a style of D&D that I have enjoyed again and again.

But is it how early D&D was played or were initial experiences a little different?

Stages/Styles of Game Play

Last year, when the readership of this Substack was much smaller, I recounted my first experience playing D&D. It was terrible.

As terrible as that first experience playing D&D was, it was relatively typical for what I consider to be the stages/styles of role playing game experiences. I was going to go with just “stages,” but I realized that there is no hierarchy of which one of these is best and that these eventually become styles of play. I am keeping it as part of the definition because I do think there is a kind of order to when they are first experienced, at least there was for me. So what are the “stagyles?” of D&D gameplay?

1. Monte Haul Time — The first gaming experience is a kind of wild gonzo experience where you are inspired by the possibility of the game and want to make sure to cram as much of that experience into your game play as possible. This is the feeling you get when you open the Monster Manual see the full menagerie of mayhem and then you read the magic items in the Dungeon Masters Guide for the first time. You know you may never get to play this again, so it’s straight to the all you can experience buffet. You have a great time.

2. Time to Get Serious — After your first 100th level character, you realize that there is actually something more going on with this game and that it should be a little harder and more serious. For my group, it was after I had my players travel to the 1st level of Hell to kill Tiamat where my players’ characters proceeded to threat it like a cake walk, that we realized that Monte Haul time was over and we needed a challenge. While Tomb of Horrors marks the most austere of this kind of reaction, it clears the slate of all those over powered characters, Keep on the Borderlands is an ideal place to start a new campaign. This time, it’s about exploration and caution. Things are lethal. You are careful. You have a great time.

3. What About the Story? — Just about half way through clearing the Caves of Chaos, your DM finally reads up on some of the inhabitants of the Keep and realizes that there is more than mere miniatures marching (that’s a Thomas Jefferson reference) going on here. There are motivations! At this point, the blacksmith starts negotiating with you and your conversations with the Castellan become more lively. You might even realize that Charisma is one of the most powerful statistics in B/X D&D, if you use the Reaction Table. It’s also when you notice that your Elf speaks Goblin so should have known what “Bree Yark!” means in the first place. Your stories are “emergent” and come from what happened in gameplay, but you make sure to try to create moments for story. You have a great time.

4. It’s all About Story! — At this point, your players begin to show more interest in random PCs with interesting descriptions that were only meant to be background characters. They want STORY FIRST and you oblige. You begin outlining adventures. Your gaming sessions try to emulate Critical Role and other troupe style play streamers. You are playing Vampire the Masquerade and Camarilla, Powered by the Apocalypse games, and have maybe even ventured into the world of Amber Diceless. Rules? Where you’re going, you don’t need rules. The campaign becomes your DM’s published fantasy novel (maybe). You realize this shares a lot with the first stage. You have a great time.

5. Return to other Stagyles or Invent New Ones — At this point you realize that these weren’t stages of game play, but styles. Your game play wasn’t “evolving” and “improving” as it became more narrative. Instead, you realize that each stage had something to offer. You were always having a great time. You feel nostalgic for the old. You do a deep dive into what it is actually like to play the game using the rules as they were written. This leads you to realize that playing with weapon to-hit modifications, multiple initiative systems, and keeping strict track of 1:1 time like and has merit that opens up entirely new ways of playing that are richer than you imagined. Maybe you examine the possibility of playing D&D using the Chainmail rules. You might even mix Amber DM advice with Chainmail. You have a great time.

At least that’s my journey, but from what I’ve seen it’s pretty typical. There might be stages I missed. You might have experienced the stages in a different order. You might have been introduced to the gonzo first stage long after your initial introduction. Not only do players go through these stages, so too does game design. Look at the waves of game design. Look at the Fantasy Heartbreakers and Indie Heartbreakers and what they focus on and how that reflects stages of play.

Okay Smartypants Did Early Gamers Go Through the First Stage?

In thinking about how I was going to present Gary Gygax’s first D&D experience, as described by Robert Kuntz (and I’m getting there I promise), I read up on some of the early days of the gaming hobby. A key resource for this was the APA-L, the official fanzine of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. LASFS was founded on Oct. 27, 1934 and is the world’s oldest continuously active science-fiction and fantasy club. It’s membership has included Forrest Ackerman, Robert Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Jerry Pournelle, and pretty much any Los Angeles based Science Fiction or Fantasy author since 1934. One of its most important members, especially for the gaming community, is Lee Gold. Lee is the archivist of our hobby and the creator of the Alarums and Excursions fanzine. That fanzine came into being because SF/F fans who weren’t gamers got sick of reading about D&D in APA-L and the amount of gaming related content needed an outlet.

The first mention of D&D in the APA-L comes from Mark Swanson in the October 24th 1974 issue of APA-L (Issue 493). In his Kyth Interstellar Bulletin, written on October 10, 1974 but published later because the fanzine was made up of mailed in entries in the pre-internet world of the 70s, Mark describes his experience playing Dungeons & Dragons. This is mere months after the game had been created, though he is already talking about some campaigns having lasted for “years” which lets us know people were playing something akin to D&D before the official publication.

Let’s have a look at how he describes the “Basic” game.

He’s playing in a game that has 1st level characters facing “four Balrogs.” JFC?! Really?! Apparently enough of these 1st level “Veterans” subdue two dragons and take them to the market to sell. That’s gonzo and Monte Haul as all get out. I accidentally edited out the first sentence, but it says “In the basic version the gamemaster rolls dice to determine what you meet.” I noticed two things here. The use of gamemaster predates where I thought it might first be used and Mark and his crew relied completely on random tables to determine encounters. It was only in the “advanced” game where the DM actually designed a dungeon. This is straight up stagyle 1 play and it sounds like a blast. It’s no wonder that this led to D&D talk taking over the APA-L.

But What About Gary?!

Okay, I’ve been promising you since my old essay on Dragonlance “killing” D&D that I was going to share with you a description I found of Gary Gygax’s first D&D experience. Did Gary’s game start out at stagyle 1 or was it more like the tactical stagyle? After all, Gary had a long experience playing miniatures games rooted in the English miniatures tradition, an honorable tradition featuring members like Donald Featherstone and Peter Cushing.

According to Robert Kuntz, author of Gods Demigods and Heroes as well as a Greyhawk DM, his and Gary’s first experience was straight up over the top stagyle 1. In issue 1 of Fantasy Games Unlimited’s short lived gaming magazine Wargaming (it only had 4 issues), Robert Kuntz describes David Arneson running a game for him and Gary. The issue was published in 1977, pre-AD&D, and is not included in the large D&D legal case file that recently surfaced as far as my initial perusal of that collection of documents shows. That’s too bad, because it does more for David’s case than the issues of Different Worlds that were included.

Here’s an excerpt from his article D&D: Past, Present, and Future:

What is it with these early games and characters encountering FOUR BALROGs?! Good grief! One thing to note here is that Gary’s experience, and Rob’s, is very much a stagyle 1 experience. Their brand new characters are fighting, and defeating, Balrogs. They are using Wish spells held within stasis in a magic sword awaiting use. Too bad the “hapless troll” didn’t use the wish on the players, or maybe too good. Had they not survived all this mayhem, we might never have gotten D&D as a game.

It’s amazing to see that my own early gaming experiences are reflected in the early gaming experiences of those who created the hobby. Nothing says “It’s Styles not Stages” more than realizing this connection. I wish I’d been at that table, even if it lacked careful tactics and resource management or a plotted story, because it sounds like a great time!

Before I Get to the Games, Here’s a Mini-Geekly Rundown

When I started this Substack, I used to do Weekly Geekly Rundowns where I highlighted things from around the internet and the Substackosphere. I put a lot of work into them, and I really like doing them, but a full-time job and finishing my dissertation took priority and limited my writing time. The first kind of article that suffered was those Rundowns because they take a lot of cognitive load due to the amount of outside reading and viewing each one entailed. They may have been 20-to-30-minute reads from time to time, but some took as long as six hours to write, typos and all.

In the past couple of days, I’ve seen a couple of really cool things that I really have to share, so here is the mini rundown.

Blade Runner 2099

I’m pretty excited about this preview for Blade Runner 2099 because it is, in some ways, closer to Philip K Dick’s original Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep thematically than Ridley Scott’s post-theatrical edits of Blade Runner. It always annoyed me that he transformed Deckard into a replicant in later edits, in part because one of the points of the novel was that many humans had become less capable of empathy than the artificial lifeforms they created. To minimize the spoiler, I’ll just say, “Mission Street Station” and leave it at that. This trailer screams Mission Street Station.

Stan Lee and Elder Abuse

has a review of the new documentary about Stan Lee as well as a written interview with the director. They make interesting reading and have me interested in watching the film. has been doing a series of articles about the exploitation of the elderly that was inspired by her interactions with the people “taking care” of her mother, and it reveals the lack of empathy (maybe there is a theme here) that people have when motivated by greed. The manipulation of Stan Lee and his name dates back to at least the late-90s and early-00s when Lee’s partner at Stan Lee Media used shares in the company to secure a loan to throw a fundraising gala in support of Hillary Clinton’s run for Senate. That partner, Peter F. Paul, claimed that he launched the fundraiser in the hopes of raising Stan Lee Media’s profile, but it only ended up contributing to the company’s collapse.

Mortal Cinema

Comic-Con 2026: Stan Lee - The Final Chapter Movie Review

To a casual observer over the years, Stan Lee conveyed the persona of a benevolent carnival barker and perennial hype man. Those of us with long enough memories can remember him saying that he thought, for example, that David Hasselhoff would be the perfect Nick Fury and his TV movie would be great; it soon became clear he would say that about anything …

Read more

2 months ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Luke Y. Thompson

Mortal Cinema

Comic-Con 2026: Jon Bolerjack Speaks About Stan Lee

The moment I was done watching Stan Lee: The Final Chapter, I knew I wanted to talk to the director. Jon Bolerjack gave me the closest look I’d seen behind the hype of Stan Lee, to the extent that he could be separated from the hype, and left me with many questions…

Read more

2 months ago · 2 likes · Luke Y. Thompson

Accidental Time Travel to the Jurassic Era

One of my favorite novel series is Eric Flint’s “Ring of Fire” series in which the entire modern city of Grantville, West Virginia is transported back in time into the middle of the 30-Years War. The first book in the series, 1632, is available for free from Baen Books. Steve Jackson Games recently ran a crowdfunding campaign for a GURPS roleplaying game sourcebook for the series, late pledges are still open, and one of the first pdfs I purchased from RPGNow (now DriveThruRPG) was a roleplaying game in the setting from Battlefield Press. I’ll review that soon because it used the Action! roleplaying system as its mechanical foundation.

Needless to say, that puts me right in the middle of the target audience for The End of Oak Street. In this upcoming film, a suburban neighborhood is transported back in time to the Jurassic Era where the residents must quickly do battle with dinosaurs. I don’t know if the movie will go the route of 1632 where the modern residents use their knowledge of science and technology to change history, or whether the answer to what happens to everyone is in the title of the film, but I’m eager to see it either way.

Now…on to the games.

After Missing Two Weeks of Recommendations, Here is a Flood of Games

As I mentioned in the article from July 6th, Professor Dungeon Master announced a few years back that July should be promoted as Independent Tabletop RPG Month on his YouTube channel.

Professor Dungeon Master wants gamers and reviewers to avoid discussing the World’s Largest Roleplaying Game and to focus their attention on independent creators. Since my DriveThruRPG library currently has 9,284 (soon to be 9,294) pdfs, I’m pretty sure I can consider myself am an ardent supporter of independent RPGs.

Before you ask, no I haven’t read all of them. I agree with Umberto Eco that the books we own aren’t just for us to read but are also there for us to be able to use for research if we should ever need them. Nassim Taleb called this kind of collection an “antilibrary,” but I think that’s a misnomer. I think that the traditional term of library is the right word and that the neologism minimizes the concept and forgets what libraries are for. We don’t go to the city or university library to find things we’ve already read; we go there to find things we want to read or need for research. If you can afford to turn your home into a library, then you should do it as much as you can. I also believe that you should share your library with others and be ready to share it with posterity. My shelves at home are filled with books upon books. I’ve read most of them, but not all. Even in my office at work there are books I haven’t read, though those are there specifically because I know they contain information I might have to reference. It’s more likely that I’ve read the entirety of my copy of The New S Language (a book containing an old programming language that became the basis for the modern language R) than my copy of The R Cookbook. It’s not only more likely, but also the actual truth. I read one out of curiosity of the history, but I’ve only read snippets of the second as I’ve needed them.

I treat my DriveThruRPG library in a similar way. Some of the games I’ve read repeatedly and deeply, usually after either printing them out or buying a print version. The rest serve as reference documents that I go to when looking for new or old ideas. I’m not likely to play Sir Pellinore’s Game, but I will eventually write a blog post about old Fantasy Heartbreakers and then I’ll need that copy. So it waits in my virtual bookshelf until the day of that article comes.

All of which is to say that I support indie creators for a variety of reasons, including that I might want to use their designs for research or reference at a later point. Speaking of Professor Dungeon Master and supporting independent game designers, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention he’s in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign for his own Deathbringer roleplaying game.

My main recommendation goal is to be serious in promoting things different from the familiar paths of “d20+ability+proficiency bonus vs target number.” None of the games I will be recommending will be D&D retroclones or D&D with only a small change. I am a big fan of Fantasy Heartbreakers in general, they don’t break my heart, as they are a demonstration of incremental game design, but I want to look at other systems entirely. I will still mention retroclones and Fantasy Heartbreakers in the descriptions of the games I recommend, as I did last article in the Savage Worlds recommendation with Savage Pathfinder, but detailed descriptions and reviews will have to wait for August and every other month of the year.

My official criteria for what constitutes an Independent RPG are:

1. That the game is not produced by Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro

2. That the game is not a D&D clone or directly D&D adjacent.

3. The game must be currently available for purchase in either print or pdf form from a legal seller.

I had considered excluding Games Workshop inspired RPGs as well, but after thinking about it I decided against excluding them for two reasons. Games Workshop may itself be large, but it hasn’t published RPGs itself in decades and the companies that do publish Warhammer based games are not powerhouse publishers with armies of attorneys. Rather they are well run smaller companies composed of talented superfans (and sometimes former employees) of Games Workshop. What do you think?

Before we jump into this week’s list of games, here is a rundown of the games from the Week 1 article.

July 1 — Colonial Gothic (It’s the 250th Anniversary of the United States after all.)
July 2 — Good Guys Finish Last
July 3 — Champions
July 4 — Dragon Warriors (I’m a big fan of and Oliver Johnson’s work and will be reviewing their Blood Sword gamebooks and the RPG I backed on Kickstarter soon.)
July 5 — Troika
July 6 — Savage Worlds
July 7 — Castle Falkenstein

As you can see, there are a number of small publishers represented in the last article’s picks and a variety of game systems. Most of those game systems are quite different from D&D. As we move forward, there will be some that have some similarities but with enough differences to make them more than clones.

July 8 — Fantasy AGE by Green Ronin Publishing

The hardback copy Green Ronin Publishing’s second edition of the Fantasy AGE role playing game is a book I keep going back to as a pleasure read because it is a beautifully illustrated tome with well written rules. The cover of the book was painted by Wayne Reynolds whose paintings gave signature style to both D&D 4th edition and Paizo’s Pathfinder role playing game. In this particular illustration, Reynolds has captured a moment of action in Green Ronin’s City of Freeport setting, a setting so deeply influenced by pulp sword & sorcery tales that it includes sinister Serpent Folk.

It should be no surprise that the cover of Green Ronin’s house fantasy role playing game features the City of Freeport, as the Death in Freeport module for the d20 system was Green Ronin’s first product. While Green Ronin, and Freeport, may have started out as a d20/3rd edition D&D company, they quickly branched out. First with the Mutants & Masterminds role playing game, which is nominally d20 but isn’t really and shares more DNA with Champions and DC Heroes than with D&D (more on that in a later review). Then with the True 20 system which took the foundation of the Mutants & Masterminds system and transformed it into a multi-genre system. Finally, with the publication of the Dragon AGE role playing game based on the Dragon Age computer rpg.

The AGE system (Adventure Game Engine) that underpins the Dragon AGE role playing game has continued to grow with the publication of Modern AGE (a contemporary RPG), Fantasy AGE, and role playing games based on The Expanse and Fifth Season properties (you can find a list here of some AGE games).

The AGE system has some elements that will be familiar to players of D&D, but it is a far cry from that game mechanically. It is in no way D&D adjacent in the way an OSR ruleset or Fantasy Heartbreaker is. My gaming group playtested the Blood of Ferelden adventure and the Dragon Age 2 and 3 boxed sets. You can see our credits (after I redacted other playtesters to remove clutter) in the Dragon Age 2 boxed set below.

I mention that I playtested the game, not only to point out that I have a personal connection, but also to highlight how much I like the game. You see, I wasn’t in on the playtest for the first boxed set. It was my enjoyment of the initial game that prompted me to request that my group be allowed to playtest other materials for the game. I fell in love with the game instantly because it offered some really distinct mechanics that I believe make gameplay more dynamic and rewarding.

Two of these mechanical innovations are rooted in the basic resolution mechanic in the game, which is based on rolling three six-sided die against a target number. This is similar to Champions, but with one big twist. One of these dice is called a “stunt die” and so needs to be distinguishable from the other die and it is the source of the two innovations I want to discuss as the die has two different effects.

The first effect that the stunt die has is to determine how successful your character is on an action. Instead of the game having the intensity of success determined by how high the overall result is (say a 15 vs a 19 total being “less successful”), AGE has that intensity determined by the value of the stunt die. So your total could barely hit the target number, but because the stunt die was a 6 you succeeded extremely well. Even though this means that very high rolls will always be very successful (they will have a high stunt die too after all), it means that even lower rolls can be large successes. I like that and think it adds a nice heroic feel.

That brings me to the second innovation, the one that the stunt die is named for and that’s the “stunt system.” If any two of the three six-sided die come up as doubles, then the action generates a number of stunt points equal to the value of the stunt die. Overall, some form of doubles occurs approximately 44.06% of the time meaning that stunts are relatively frequent occurrences.

You can spend these stunt points on a variety of effects, for example if you are in combat you might choose to Disarm your opponent (see the partial list of combat stunts below). There are a wide variety of combat stunt options, and these really make combat dynamic, but stunts exist for non-combat tasks as well and the mechanic is open for expansion in a number of ways.

The stunt system makes Fantasy AGE, and other AGE games, truly unique and worth your time.

July 9 — Inspectres from Momento Mori Tactics

Inspectres is Momento Mori Tactics’ game of reality shows and monster hunters and it is one of the foundational games in the storytelling game marketplace. Modern storytelling games would not exist as they do today without the contributions of game designer Jared Sorenson.

Like many Sorenson designs the mechanics are simple, but tied strongly to the game’s theme. In this case, the players are owners of an Inspectres franchise that have their attempts to fight supernatural monsters broadcast on television in an attempt to earn profit for themselves and for the corporation.

While storytelling games predate Inspectres, see last article’s discussion of Good Guys Finish Last for one earlier example, this is one of the games that most modern mechanics have some connection too. For example, in the recent Candela Obscura kerfuffle, Critical Role were criticized for borrowing ideas from John Harper’s Blades in the Dark game. To be certain, Harper’s creations influenced the design, but his own game was a product of influences that date back to Inspectres as you can see from this Reddit discussion where Harper specifically laments having excluded Inspectres from the list of inspirations.

If you look at the skill roll result chart for Inspectres, you can immediately see the influence it had on later games where player agency takes the forefront of gameplay and where tactical combat mechanics take a back seat to dramatic performance and interaction. I highly recommend checking it out and will go into more discussion of the game when it gets a full review in the future (and when I address the Candela Obscura game in full). If the idea of combining MTV’s Real World with Ghostbusters appeals to you, then this is the game for you.

July 10 — Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition

I’ve been a fan of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for as long as I can remember. I’ve played every edition of the game ranging from Games Workshop’s original edition, and Green Ronin’s second edition (there’s that publisher again) to the much maligned (but beloved by me) third edition of the game. Each edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has stayed true to Games Workshop’s combination of grim dark and satire, and each has develop mechanics that reflect that combination in slightly different ways. Though none have deviated as much from the first edition as Jay Little’s designs for the third edition, designs that became the foundation for Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars line of games and which got the praise they deserve in that incarnation.

The first edition of the game was a percentile based game that was very lethal, but where careful players had the potential for long term success. I experienced genuine fear of character loss on multiple occasions. The percentile system underlying Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was a nod back to Rick Priestley and Richard Halliwell’s wargame Reaper, a percentile based wargame that influenced the creation of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. A detailed examination of how mechanically one can adapt a percentile system to six-sided dice (as Warhammer Fantasy Battles does) can be found in Rick Priestley’s book Tabletop Wargames.

Needless to say, the fourth edition is a return to the classic percentile system with some fantastic innovations on contested challenges that speeds up the game and makes the game slightly more heroic. While players won’t be fighting Bloodthirsters any time soon, they are slightly less fragile than in the first edition of the game and since “relative success” matters in combat you end up with fewer “I swing and miss” rounds of combat. The fourth edition is an improvement in almost every way over the first edition, while remaining very faithful to the tone and mechanical feel of the original game. Check it out.

July 11 — Traveller

I’ve already done a pretty thorough rundown of why you should check out Traveller in my annual Mayday! Mayday! post. Read that and then give the game a spin. I’m sure I’ll do a full review at some point, but lists can’t get too in depth.

July 12 — Hero Kids

If you are looking for a fun fantasy game to play with your kids, then Justin Halliday’s Hero Kids is worth checking out. When my twin daughters were five to seven years old, I was looking for games to play with them that would introduce role playing in an easily accessible manner, but that would also provide a good foundation for later play. Steven “Stan!” Brown’s Pokemon Jr. game for Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro was a fantastic game for this purpose, sadly Wizards dumped it like a hot rock.

Because of that failure of foresight by the monolith, there was a large vacuum to be filled by independent creators. Halliday was one such designer to step up to the challenge and the result was his Ennie winning role playing game Hero Kids. Mechanically, it’s a simple game that only requires six-sided dice to play, but it is one of the best supported independent games on the market and has sufficient material for YEARS of game play. It also has a robust community who have released a variety of products across many genre. Check it out!

July 13 — Beach Patrol by Gallant Knight Games

Alan Bahr’s Beach Patrol is the first Tinyd6 engine game I’m recommending this month, but it won’t be the last. I chose it for inclusion this week for a variety of reasons. It covers a genre not often addressed in role playing games, and so is a step away from dungeon crawls and haunted houses. In Beach Patrol, players take on the role of lifeguards engaging in the kinds of high octane, slow motion action we see them participating in on television and film. That’s right, this is what Baywatch the game would look like if it was designed by someone with a vision for what makes that show work.

The key innovation in Beach Patrol is a mechanic called SLO-MO MODE that I think could, and should, be adapted to a number of different role playing games. SLO-MO MODE is a player empowering mechanic that gives a player the opportunity to describe their character being a real badass, but the action has to take place in SLO-MO.

Both the Gamemaster and players have access to the SLO-MO mechanic, so you want to make sure to keep in mind any protocols your group has in play for fairness. It’s the kind of mechanic that can be wonderful to add, but can lead to negative feelings if used in a way counter to your group’s norms and expectations.

While Beach Patrol is tongue and cheek in many ways, it is an excellent role playing game that actually has a lot of potential for campaign play. Whether you want to go more noir and transform it into Miami Vice meets Baywatch or whether you want to add Supernatural elements to your game, and who doesn’t want spellslinging surfer cultists, there are mechanics for you here and you can supplement them with the entire Tinyd6 line. Not all Tinyd6 games are on the same “scale” (supers characters are more powerful for example), the basic mechanics are the same and only require minor tweaking to get it to work.

Buy and have some summer fun!

July 14 — Runequest from Chaosium Games

This list has gone on for some time, so I’m not going to go into as much detail on this game as I have on past entries, but you absolutely MUST check out Runequest if you want to expand your role playing game library. The most recent edition of the game is beautiful and certainly worth your time and money, but I’m recommending that you check out the second edition of the game in this particular post.

What makes Runequest such a breath of fresh air in the gaming marketplace is its combination of extremely tactical combat, influenced by designer participation in the Society for Creative Anachronism and provides a more detailed blow by blow combat system than D&D, with the fantastic mythological setting of Glorantha.

When it comes to combat, parries and dodges are real things in Runequest while, depending on the edition of D&D they are merely modifiers. Similarly, in Glorantha your character’s faith matters in ways far beyond that of Clerics in D&D. While there is no formal “alignment” system in Runequest, a system that too often gets transformed mistakenly into a morality system, there are allegiances. Your characters become members of actual faiths and membership in faiths can lead to tremendous benefits and power. No game captured the epic heroism of bronze age tales better than Runequest. If you wanted to make a character based on Achilles, it wasn’t long before your character felt like Achilles…Runelord of the Cult of Thetis and all. The game managed to emulate the grim and gritty lives of the common man with the godlike powers of the chosen of the gods and that was quite the feat.

In fact, if I wanted to play a game that could emulate Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series of books, Runequest is among the first games I would pick up for that adaptation. Cults and Order of Radiants are pretty good analogies for one another and the importance of mythic origins to character abilities also makes it a good fit. I’m not saying that Chaosium should try to convince Brandon to abandon his own game and get Chaosium to make a version using the Basic Roleplay system, but I am saying that someone deeply versed in the Cosmere should give it a shot.

July 15 — Dragonbane from Free League

Dragonbane from Free League/Fria Ligan is the latest edition of Sweden’s equivalent to Dungeons & Dragons, in popularity, Drakar och Demoner. Drakar och Demoner is a fantasy role playing game heavily based on Chaosium’s Basic Roleplay Engine that underpins Runequest and Call of Cthulhu. I wrote a pretty extensive article about the development of the game earlier this year and you can check that out, but I’ve included a nice synopsis below.

The game was originally published by Target Games, a Swedish company founded in 1980 by Fredrik Malmberg, Lars-Åke Thor, Johan Arve, Klas Berndal, and Roger Undhagen as a game store. Like Games Workshop in England, Target Games quickly expanded into publishing and the company was active from 1980 to 1999, when the company filed for bankruptcy at the tale end of the collectible card boom.

Target Games produced role playing games, war games, and a collectible card game based on one of their most successful “meta” products went on to produce a number of excellent role playing and war games that have had significant influence on the overall roleplaying game market. Target Games is one of the most important publishers in the history of role playing games and Fredrik Malmberg is the Swedish equivalent of Ian Livingstone in my opinion. They released most of their roleplaying games under the Äventyrsspel (adventure game) brand and they published both in house and translated role playing games. Their in house games included Mutant, Mutant Chronicles (very different from Mutant), and Kult, while their translated games included Drakar och Demoner, Chock (a translation of Pacesetter Games’ Chill), Sagan om Ringen (a translation of ICE’s Middle Earth Role Playing), and Stjärnornas Krig (a translation of West End Games’ Star Wars Role Playing Game).

The original version of Drakar och Demoner was a fairly direct translation of Chaosium’s Magic World supplement for the Worlds of Wonder boxed set, with the primary difference being that Drakar och Demoner included rules from the Basic Role Play core rulebook in order to be a fully playable role playing game. One of the best places to see this is in the selection and translation of monsters included in Magic World. Take a look at how they translated Skeletal Guardians.

The game has evolved over the years and the latest edition, Dragonbane, shifts away from a percentile system into one that uses a 20-sided die roll below system. The basic mechanics are the same, but skills are now in 5% steps rather than including the possibility of individual percentages. Given that most skills and rolls in Drakar och Demoner were in steps of 5% to begin with, this change makes sense and it works smoothly.

When Target Games went out of business, Target founder Fredrik Malmberg formed Paradox Entertainment as an intellectual property management company. This IP included Target Games’ catalog, but quickly expanded to include the works of Robert E Howard and others. All of these brands were eventually brought together under Cabinet Entertainment which is managed by Fredrik Malmberg. That’s right, the publisher of Mutant Chronicles and a ton of really cool role playing games is the person in charge of the Conan brand right now and I think overall this means that Conan is in good hands.

Paradox Entertainment licensed the rights to Drakar och Demoner to RiotMinds in 2000 and sold the rights to them in 2005. RiotMinds produced a couple of versions of the rules including the Trudvang Chronicles and Ruin Masters role playing games before eventually these rights to Free League. The art is beautiful and I’ll have a more in depth review when my boxed set arrives (I’ve been using the pdf, but prefer physical).

July 16 — Villains & Vigilantes edition 2.1 by Monkey House Games.

There are three primary ways of emulating superheroes in roleplaying games, point based systems, level based, and narrative. Point based systems aim at ensuring that all characters are mechanically balanced. Characters are given an identical pool of points to build characters and campaign guidelines regarding what an “effective” character looks like. This is the approach that Superhero ‘44 (the first superhero RPG) and Champions used.

Other games attempt to allow for all players to have some impact while accepting the fact that hero power levels vary wildly. A game like Marvel Super Heroes (FASERIP) does this by having rules for characters ranging from street level martial artists to cosmically powered characters like the Silver Surfer. Through mechanics like Karma and tweaks on the edges like the mechanics for the various martial arts, the game tries to make it so that lower powered characters still matter in cosmic brawls. The results are a bit mixed in the original core rules, but get much better in the Advanced Marvel Rules.

More recent games have created strongly narrative systems that minimize differences in combat ability and focus on storytelling. Games like Smallville, Masks, and Marvel Heroic did using a modified version of either the Cortex+ system or being “Powered by the Apocalypse.”

July 16th’s selection, Villains & Vigilantes, has taken the second approach in all of its editions but it hit the ball out of the park with it’s second edition. The Monkey House Games Edition 2.1 published in 2010 is my favorite version of the game rules and it also happens to the one that is published by the creators. Find a copy. Buy it and play.

July 17 — Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound by Cubicle 7.

As I argued above, I still count Warhammer games as independently published because they are the work of an independent outfit and not the megalith that is Games Workshop. In this case, I chose their controversial Age of Sigmar setting. Many longtime fans of Warhammer Fantasy, in both its Battles and Role Play versions, are very critical of the Age of Sigmar setting and dismissively call the Stormcast Eternals “Sigmarines,” referencing their similarity to Space Marines in 40k.

While I see that connection, especially in one of the sculpts for the Eternals, I find the connection between Stormcast Eternals and the Radiants of Brandon Sanderson’s epic Stormlight Archive series to be much stronger, and much more appealing. This is a relatively unique setting that uses interesting mechanics (I’ll give a full review later in the year) to create a fun experience. I’ve read through the new Stormlight Archive RPG and I think that Soulbound is a better fit for the setting, and I think that’s saying something.

July 18 — Masks: A New Generation

Sheesh. I love superhero role playing games. I’m not a big fan of Powered by the Apocalypse games in general because the math of the mechanics isn’t well thought out, they are too “jargony” in a hobby that has enough hard to understand jargon, and they don’t tend to acknowledge the fact that the mechanics are a modified version of Inspectres and FATE. All that aside, the pure love of the genre that comes across in the writing as well as the well thought out character archetypes make Masks a fun game to play.

I still think that the game is a little too jargony in mechanics. I find the use of the term “Moves” instead of abilities/actions to be unnecessarily obscure and I don’t like that Critical Role’s new game Daggerheart has also adopted this terminology. In play, I’ve found that “moves” tend to narrow down how players describe their actions in play because they use the “move name” rather than describe what they are doing. I’d much rather hear, “I attack it with my broadsword” a hundred times in a session than “I directly engage the threat” again and again and again.

July 19 — Mazes by 9th Level Games

Give me a game where the mechanics and setting blend together to create a unique experience and I’m all in. Mazes has an interesting polyhedral based system that connects which die (d4, d6, etc.) that a player’s character uses to resolve actions with a specific kind of play. All die rolling is done by players, like the next game, which makes the game easy to run and focuses play on the player characters and their actions rather than on NPC/Monster actions. The link is for the pdf, but track down a physical copy.

July 20 — Symbaroum by Fria Ligan

Did you ever want to play a game where the Dark Forest seemed really dark? That had a robust setting where the magic system and mechanics reflect a very particular world? That has mechanics that are player focused, players roll all the dice, and which has some of the most beautiful art in any RPG? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then Symbaroum is for you. It’s a fantasy setting that captures the dark mystery of older and more dangerous fantasy and merges it with a touch of Sword & Sorcery. Rich and thematic.

Symbaroum is a game that I keep going back to again and again for inspiration as I design my own game setting. It has the right balance of dire stakes and potential for high heroics and draws deeply on a very specific mythology to create a tight and moody setting with a very good mechanical foundation. Even including little oddities in translation, the game is easy to learn and understand and really fun to play.

July 21 — Leagues of Adventure from Triple Ace Games.

Paul “Wiggy” Wade-Williams is almost single-handedly the reason I came to love Savage Worlds as a game system. He was a prolific creator in the early days of that system and his ability to mash together ideas to create high concept adventures amazed me. I bought everything with his name on it and was never let down. After a while, he launched his own game company called Triple Ace Games and used the Ubiquity engine as the mechanics for a number of settings.

Among my favorites is Leagues of Adventure, a Steampunk game that perfectly captures the fun and excitement of the Secret Adventures of Jules Verne series or your Steampunk book/show of choice. It’s right up my alley and the Ubiquity system is easy to learn and requires only the dice you already have to play. You can use any sized die to resolve actions because all that matters is even and odd.

July 22 — My Life with Master

My Life with Master is a game that was designed by Paul Czege and embodies a lot of the preferences of the story gaming community in the early 2000s. Many story games migrated away from tactical combat and focused on mechanics that examine interpersonal relationships and humanity, often in disturbing ways. My Life with Master is a potentially deeply disturbing game where the players take the role of minions for a villainous “Master” (played by the GM) who is the cause of fear and dread over a local village. Your first thought might be that you are portraying Igor to the GM’s Frankenstein. That’s one possibility for a PC. Another possibility is to play The Creature itself as well. The players try to gain enough humanity, self-possession, and “love” to rise up against the Master, but must do his will as they grow. I don’t think it’s an accident that a lot of modern role playing game safety tools came out of the story gaming community, though discussions of such tools date back much further and include discussions in Interactive Fantasy in the early 90s. When you are dealing with subjects as dark as what many story games were focused on, you need to make sure that everyone is on board and to set norms of what is acceptable in your group. I’ll do a discussion on the “Magic Circle” and its relationship to safety tools at a later date, but in a game like My Life with Master it is vital that everyone know the boundaries of play. This is not a game to play with an edgelord, unless everyone in your group is an edgelord.

July 23 — Shiver

Shiver from Parable Games is a game I hadn’t heard of prior to backing the Kickstarter for the “Gothic” expansion to the game, but I’m glad I discovered it. Stylistically, I think it’s a really cool game, but I am most fond of its mechanics. It’s a simple die pool system where players have statistics with an “Attribute” rating and a “Talent” rating. These are combined to create die pools of differing types and you try to roll successes to achieve actions. All fine and good and typical so far, but when you look at the talent die you notice a little echo of John Harper’s Lasers & Feelings. The talent die has different possibilities when used on mundane or arcane actions. I will do a longer review later, but this is a very cool game.

Speaking of cool, Parable Games just released stats for Jimothy the Raccoon as a cryptid for use in Shiver. You can follow their latest crowdfunding project to get a pdf of those stats.

July 24 — Mothership

Mothership It’s not often that a game builds a huge community, expansions, and spinoffs when you’ve only printed a part of the full game, but that’s what Sean McCoy’s Mothership has done. The only rules available so far, unless you backed the Kickstarter or did a late pledge, are those in the Player’s Guide. The game incorporates three different die mechanics, but the primary one is percentile based and there are enough rules in the Player’s Guide and sample adventure to build off from, and boy did the community do just that. Mothership made it clear that there were a market and community for horror games outside of It Which Shall Not Be Named because it’s the dominant game in the genre.

July 25 — Never Going Home

Never Going Home isn’t a horror game where you experience a lot of jump scares, though I guess that could happen, but it is one where you imagine the horrors of a very real and terrible war with the addition of supernatural elements. It’s Gallipoli without the laughter. Because the game makes it easy to create new characters, and is unit rather than individual focused, the terror comes not from a single loss but from repeated loss as the game moves forward. It’s the kind of dread you feel as you realize, around hour 15 of playing Darkest Dungeon, that you’ve come to think of the adventurers as disposable resources to be managed and begin to wonder why that doesn’t upset you more, but of course in wondering you are beginning to feel the real sense of dread.

July 26 — Tunnels & Trolls

Tunnels & Trolls may technically break the “independent creator” rule at the moment. Rebellion Publishing just bought the game rights from Webbed Sphere Inc. who bought the rights from the Rick Loomis estate in 2021. Webbed Sphere Inc. didn’t really do anything with the property; Rebellion Publishing looks like they will do more with the property. The game provides an opportunity for them to dive deeper into the tabletop gaming space, something they’ve already shown a desire to do with their republishing of older Judge Dredd board games and an in-house magazine based RPG series called Adventure Presents. I’ll be posting reviews of the Adventure Presents games later this month.

Tunnels & Trolls is one of the earliest roleplaying games ever produced and it was created as a direct response to Dungeons & Dragons. Lawrence Schick wrote that the game was the second role playing game ever published in the invaluable history of rpgs Heroic Worlds, but Jon Peterson’s analysis regarding the Rules to the Game of Dungeon demonstrate that it was beaten to the punch by another small print run game.

Tunnels & Trolls was created as a reaction to Dungeons & Dragons. Some friends of Ken St. Andre wanted to play D&D and handed him a copy to run. He couldn’t understand the rules, and having read the “Little Brown Books” many times I can see why. Ken St. Andre describes how he created the game in the introduction to the preprint of the 1st edition as follows:

The key point here is that he wanted a simple game that was not derived from miniature gaming. In that way, his game is very different from Dungeons & Dragons. While we may play D&D with a theatre of the mind approach, or not, the mechanics of the game are very much rooted in miniature skirmish rules. I’ve got an extensive work on this coming soon that includes references to Geoff Engelstein’s excellent Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design.

Tunnels & Trolls isn’t based on skirmish rules, instead combat (when it’s done at all) is based on abstract die roll comparisons where the higher roll wins and the difference is the damage. For example, a player character might roll 4d6 and add 12 to the roll for high attributes, while a monster might roll 4d6 and add 20 to the die roll for its monster rating (only in the first round in some editions after which it would be +10). It’s very abstract and open to interpretation.

The Saving Throw mechanics of T&T are also very different from D&D at the onset. First, because they were attribute rather than attack type based (modern D&D “borrows” from T&T in this respect) and second in that they are given a “level of difficulty” so you might have to make a 2nd Level Strength (or Luck) Save in Tunnels & Trolls. The basic formula for a saving roll on 2d6 in T&T is:

or for higher levels the following equation minus the stat.

So, a first level character with an average (11) Luck would need a 9 or better on 2d6 to save. That might seem very unlikely at first (approximately 28%), but the fact that Tunnels & Trolls is the first “exploding die” system (in this case exploding on doubles) increases the likelihood significantly and adds a nice random element to the game.

I highly recommend the 5th edition edited and partially illustrated by the very talented Liz Danforth.

July 27 — Vaesen

Vaesen A beautifully illustrated game from Fria Ligan that uses their Year Zero game system, the same system underpinning Tales from the Loop, and that focuses on Nordic horrors. While many modern horror games focus on cosmic horror, it’s nice to play a game that is deeply rooted in a particular mythology…a real mythology. It provides not only a role playing game experience, but an educational one as well. One of the best things that has come out of the internet age is that Americans get the opportunity to experience some of the really cool stuff Sweden has been doing in the hobby space.

July 28 — Cryptworld (aka CHILL)

Cryptworld Before Gary Gygax was ousted from TSR, he moved to Los Angeles in order to try to get a development deal for Dungeons & Dragons and other TSR properties as the head of Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment. While he was out there, two of his early partners (the Blume brothers) ascended to manage TSR’s day to day business. As a result of their management, TSR posted a net loss of $1.5 million and had to fire 75% of their staff. This is one of the reasons Gary returned in an attempt to take back control of his company, a task he hoped that Lorraine Williams (the sister of his friend and collaborator Flint Dille) would help him accomplish. That didn’t work out as Gary had hoped/expected and that has been the topic of a number of books. I won’t go into discussion of that here, but will recommend Jon Peterson’s books as a good place to start. I did say he was a great historian after all.

Among the 75% of TSR staff that were fired were Mark Acres, Andria Hayday, Gaye Goldsberry O’Keefe, Gali Sanchez, Garry Spiegle, Carl Smith, Stephen D. Sullivan, and Michael Williams. This talented group of game designers went on to form Pacesetter Games, one of the most ambitious game companies of the 1980s and one of the most creative game companies in the history of the hobby. Among their creations was an excellent game called Chill, a horror game with a very different vibe than The Game That Shall Not Be Named. Where that other game focused on cosmic horror and the death of player characters etc., Chill had players play characters who were members of an organization called SAVE that battled the supernatural and protected regular people like you and me. The world wasn’t ready for the game, even with its solid mechanics the “fighting against evil” vibe didn’t appeal to the horror rpg fans of the day. I guess we’d have to wait a decade for Buffy and the Winchesters to create the fanbase. Chill’s first edition is a great game that is not easily available today, except thanks to Dan Proctor and the folks at Goblinoid Games. They acquired the rights to a number of Pacesetter games, and to the mechanics, and used those to create Cryptworld. Cryptworld isn’t identical to Chill, though it plays very similarly, but it is a very worthy successor. Much more so than the 3rd edition Chill that funded on Kickstarter. If you are looking for a game to play this Halloween, make it Cryptworld I know I will be playing it.

I know that there are some Dungeon Masters who spend hours upon hours on prep-time and world-building. I admire these people for their creativity, but I’ve never been one of them. There is a part of me that believes that these people would be better served spending all of that energy on writing actual fantasy novels instead of campaign material and adventures for their players. A roleplaying session isn’t an opportunity for Dungeon Masters to watch their players act out their novels. A session is a time for collaborative and interactive storytelling where every participant, human and mechanical, works together to create an emergent story over time.

My two favorite roleplaying campaigns each lasted over a decade and neither had pre-planned story arcs. Sure, they had story kernels that became full-fledged narrative forests, but they all went in unplanned directions. More importantly, neither of them ended when one particular story came to an end. These were campaigns, and in my grognard mind campaigns only end when the group stops playing. The campaign can span generations of characters and the world can change significantly. I’ve long resisted the modern trend of calling an Adventure Path (that’s what they were called in the naughty aughts) a “campaign.” It isn’t. It’s part of a campaign. The campaign includes not only things that are happening outside the adventures the PCs are experiencing, but also includes stories and heroes/heroines who exist before and after that adventure is complete.

Those sentences shouldn’t be read as a critique of playing in a game that is player character focused with contained adventures. Rather, it is an assertion that those events are different from campaigns and those who think of “seasons” and stories as campaigns are missing out on something really special. I also understand that real campaigns are something rare. For a variety of reasons, which in my case tend to be the extraordinary time constraints of adult life, I spend most of my time running shorter adventures where the players make characters specifically for story arcs. I meant it when I said I am not critical of story arc gameplay, just that those are different from campaigns in my mind. I also happen to play a wide variety of game systems, so my games tend to be three or four shots rather than even a full “story.”

Since I don’t have a lot of prep time and have never been one who focuses on planning and plotting, I crowdsource my work. In actual campaigns, I’ve crowdsourced a lot to my players, but for shorter get-togethers, I look elsewhere. Sometimes I have found professionally published adventures very handy, but I largely use them for the launching points for adventures and rarely have my games stayed “on task” when I run them. I think I’ve started at least five gaming groups with B6 The Veiled Society and it has never told the same story twice. The villains have changed. The allies have changed. Heck, one run through the real villain was a Vampire Lord from Glantri sent to undermine the partnerships that Grand Duke Stefan was making with the three major families. All of this was based on me giving the players a seed and then running wild with their speculation rather than with the written text. Yes, I have had the adventure run once exactly as written and it was the third or fourth time I ran it, but it usually goes its own way.

I don’t always like to use published adventures though, because players have often read them and want their experience to align with the adventure as written. Sometimes, and the time I ran the original Dragonlance modules is one example, the players want the railroad. I don’t want that. I’ve read the books and enjoyed them, but the characters have their own voices in my mind and I don’t want to overwrite them with my players’ voices.

One of the things I do when I shift away from published adventures is to implement James Dunnigan’s Second Rule of Game Design from his Wargames Handbook: How to Play and Design Commercial Wargames. That rule?

“Plagiarize.”

Dunnigan doesn’t mean to actually plagiarize by taking something and copying it verbatim. What he means is that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel when designing a new game. You can build on what has been done before. We Dungeon Masters can do something similar when we design the adventures run for our players. Role playing is a narrative storytelling experience, but not every DM can be Walter Gibson and crank out tens of thousands of words a week. That doesn’t mean that we DMs can’t be creative, but it does mean we have a plethora of sources available to us where we can apply the Second Rule of Game Design.

I’m particularly fond of using television and film. I’m also famous for giving my various gaming series names like “CSI Sharn” or “Invasion of the Brain Moles.” As I mentioned above, when applying the Second Rule of Game Design you shouldn’t copy something verbatim. Instead, use your source as inspiration for something new. The movie or TV show you’re thinking of didn’t have audience interaction, but your game will. Let your imagination, and the imagination of your players, take over.

Today I am offering you 10 films from outside the sword-and-sorcery aisle.

And before you read onward…This Way Be Spoilers.

10) You’re Next

wrote a thorough review of You’re Next back in 2013 in which he mentioned that it was the kind of horror film in which the victims have an opportunity to turn the tables on the bad guys. In some ways he understates the case, because the character of Erin (Sharni Vinson) clearly has character levels in a world filled with level-0 commoners. She’s not just a character in a film; she’s a player character (PC) with loads of experience who is more than happy to take bad guys to task.

You’re Next is a tale of a wedding anniversary that becomes a bloodbath when three masked home intruders make a violent visit. Family members drop one by one as they desperately attempt to survive the night. That may not sound like a good basis for a D&D adventure, but I think it is perfect in ways that are too often overlooked when we create sessions for our home games. Have your PCs made any NPC (non-player character) friends in their adventures? Are any of them engaged? Do your adventures take place in an urban setting where the players have developed connections in high (or low) places? If the answer to any one of those questions is yes, then you have your starting point. It also makes a great starting point for longer term play.

And before I give a brief synopsis of one way this film can be adapted, did I mention that one of the movie posters provides a bitchin’ map? Because it does, and you should use it.

One possible adaptation of You’re Next is the following. The PCs have been invited to a celebration by an up and coming politician in Sharn who has been performing charitable acts deep in the Cogs. It has recently been announced that he or she has been selected for a position on the City Council and wanted to celebrate with friends, the PCs, who have worked with the politician at some point in the past. As the evening progresses, the PCs notice that there are some conflicts between some of the guests because several rival factions are present. Just as a major argument between a representative from House Cannith and House Ghallanda rises to a crescendo, one of the participants is shot with a crossbow from outside the event. The celebrants are politicians and not combatants and react accordingly. Some members of House Deneith (the bodyguard house) begin securing some of the participants.

Things escalate from here as the players soon discover that some of the bodyguards are in on the slaughterfest and have been hired by one of the evening’s participants. The players manage to get their friend to a secure location…only to find out that friend was the one responsible for the slaughter as the politician was unwilling to return on the money and favors owed to the many attendees. Where does this leave the PCs? What happens next?

This was one of the story arcs I used in my home game as a part of my CSI: Sharn campaign. That game lasted about three years with the characters starting off as criminal investigators and eventually becoming political actors in the city. At the time, I had the players use Aaron Allston-style Blue Books to tell me what their individual patrons were doing between sessions and combined that with Ken St. Andre inspired (from Arena of Khazan) NPC pool management. I’d probably have the players actively play the patrons, rather than report on them as vassals, in the future.

9) Escape Plan

Escape Plan may not be the best break out of prison film ever made, for my money that title goes to either Escape from Alcatraz or The Great Escape. It may not even be the best break out of prison movie starring Sylvester Stallone. I actually prefer the completely gonzo Lock Up over Escape Plan because it’s peak ’80s action film. What Escape Plan does have going for it is that it is quite simply the “most D&D” of all break out of prison films.

The hook for an adventure based on the film is that the Player Characters are experts hired by prisons to help them become more secure. In a Danger International or Espionage game the PCs might be hired by the CIA to test how secure a secret prison is only to discover it’s all a lure to take the “escape masters” out of action forever. So far that’s not exceptionally D&D, but when you add to it the fact that a pro-democracy hacker head of a secret organization that robs from the rich to give to the poor is (SPOILER) in the prison you’ve got some room for a great D&D adventure. It is especially good for a first adventure that can be used to launch a campaign.

If you are writing the adventure for D&D, rather than an espionage-based RPG, have the players make characters as normal. However, you have to make sure that at least one of the characters has some link to the main campaign city’s slums. Maybe the player characters are all employees of one of the Dragonmarked Houses of Eberron, or have some equivalent patron depending on the campaign, and have been hired by House Deneith to investigate House Kundarak’s claims that no prisoners in have ever escaped the Dreadhold. The players are merely supposed to go to the prison, hang out long enough to get to know some of the players, and find out if certain NPCs have found a way out. When they get the answer, they are supposed to give one of the guards a special code and that’s it. Except, that’s when things go wrong.

It turns out that one of the lieutenants of the PCs’ current patron has partnered with a rogue faction of House Deneith and is running illegal gladiatorial games in the Cogs. Remember this is an adaptation of a prison movie. The lieutenant fears that the PCs’ connection to the people who live in the slums might lead them to discovering the connection between them and the gladiatorial games. The lieutenant needs the PCs out of action quick and is using his Kundarak allies to get the PCs out of action. The Dreadhold is impossible to break out of and no one has a means of escape. Or do they?

Turns out that a key political figure had been sequestered to the Dreadhold and has some means of getting out of the impregnable prison. The only problem is that this political figure cannot trust anyone currently imprisoned. It is a prison filled with the worst of the worst, after all. Using contacts outside of the prison, this figure discovered that the PCs had a connection to the Cogs and were new hires working for one of the villains responsible for the political figure’s imprisonment. The politician is the person responsible for leaking the PCs connection to the slums and thus responsible for their imprisonment. Do they help the politician? Do they attempt to escape on their own? Either way, they’ve got an antagonist or two on their hands and you have a great D&D adventure. If you are a Mystara fan, and I am, you can use the Veiled Society as your villains as well.

8) Assault on Precinct 13 (Rio Bravo)

The situations in Assault on Precinct 13 and Rio Bravo are similar in some respects to that of You’re Next in that they involve an encounter with individuals attempting to invade a building and murder the inhabitants. There are some key differences, though, that provide rich fodder for adaptation. Each of these stories features a small, rag-tag group of protagonists who must defend a person or location against a much larger force. In Assault it is a small group of police officers holding off a large gang on a killing spree. In Rio Bravo, the protagonists are holding off a gang who seeks to break out a prisoner. One could easily add 3:10 to Yuma, Straw Dogs, The Alamo, or 300 to this mix of films for inspiration. These are all tales of a smaller force holding off a larger one, where You’re Next is a tale of surviving until you find out who is responsible for the mayhem.

The most difficult choice to make in adapting this into an adventure is picking between keeping the motivation of keeping a prisoner secure for transportation/protecting someone that is used in the two initial recommended films or focusing on another factor like merely staying alive or even dying valiantly for a cause. While I might typically choose the original motivation, not in small part because I am a huge Leigh Brackett fan, for this recommendation I’ll choose the merely staying alive motivation.

The adventure begins with the player characters entering the town of Waybridge. The characters quickly discover that people are fleeing Waybridge for the more fortified city of Holdfast because a horde of orcs has been cutting a murderous swath across the countryside and the townsfolk want to get to a safer location. What the PCs know, that the townsfolk do not, is that the Keep at Holdfast recently had a wall collapse during an earthquake and will be unable to protect the growing influx of desperate commoners.

Holdfast is two days travel from Waybridge and is home to 2,000 citizens. The players have to choose between attempting to stop the horde at Waybridge, or at least delaying it, and riding ahead of the fleeing civilians to report about the incoming horde to the Keep at Holdfast. Given the size of Holdfast’s population, even if the players deliver the news in time for Holdfast to evacuate it won’t matter. Marching the 2,000 citizens, plus a thousand or so more from surrounding villages, the ten days to the next large city would likely result in a great deal of death as the orcish horde picks off stragglers and harries the refugees.

Brave player characters will find themselves stuck in Waybridge and must find a way to stop or delay the horde. Thankfully orcs tend to disperse if their leader is killed. It isn’t that they become afraid when the leader is killed, it’s just that they lose focus and split up into conflicting factions. It takes a strong personality to keep an orcish horde together and Grimnor Wolfbred has such a personality. Can the player characters turn Waybridge into a murder gauntlet that would make the 13 Assassins nod in awe?

7) Quantum of Solace

The second Daniel Craig entry in the long-lasting 007 series has received no small amount of criticism, but I think a lot of the criticism is misguided because many critics don’t understand what the actual narrative of the film is. This isn’t a movie about a secret agent who has seen the woman he loves die and then seeks revenge on the killers. That’s what the agency he works for thinks it’s about, but the problem is much larger than that. This film is about a secret agent who sees how vulnerable the head of the agency he works for, who is also a parental figure, is and decides to perform exploratory surgery throughout the global espionage community to find out who infiltrated that agency and how they did it. This is a film of investigating clues on a timeline of “needs to be known yesterday before M was attacked.” It is this narrative that makes for the perfect D&D adventure.

The PCs are celebrating a successful adventure and receiving acknowledgement from a noble or patron they have a close relationship with, either that or with a family member. During the celebration, their patron is attacked by his or her own bodyguards, characters the PCs know and trust. Maybe even characters the players have adventured with in the past. The players stop the attack with minimal damage, but as the attacker dies it is made clear that there are more murderers waiting in the shadows. The killers could be anyone, and the patron won’t be safe until the source of money and training is eliminated.

The PCs have only one small piece of information, a name, and must unravel the rest from there. In designing the adventure, pick four or five key locations you’d like to use, but don’t hesitate to riff off of the players’ ideas. Since anyone can be the enemy, let the players help you determine who it is. You can use Kenneth Hite’s ingenious Conspyramid as your framework filling it out as the narrative unfolds.

6) The Warriors

Every entry on this list so far has the player characters holding ground, taking a building, or climbing their way up a conspyramid. The Warriors turns things around. This time the characters have to get somewhere, and everywhere they turn it looks like the entire world wants them dead. They are deep in enemy territory with only one way out, and that’s to stick together and keep fighting through the gauntlet. They have to fight their way from the northern end of the Bronx all the way to the southern tip of Brooklyn.

Walter Hill’s 1979 picture opens with every gang in New York called to a truce summit in the Bronx. The meeting was called by a charismatic figure named Cyrus who wants to unite all the gangs of New York to overthrow the police and create a new city controlled by the gangs. His vision is never realized because he is murdered mid-speech, and the Warriors get blamed for it. They’re from Coney Island, all the way on the southern tip of New York’s boroughs. Their home is the far end of the subway line, and the word of their “crime” goes out over the airwaves before they’ve gone a mile. Radio waves travel a helluva lot faster than people on foot, so the Warriors find themselves immediately under threat. For the rest of the film, the small band works its way across a city where every few blocks belongs to a new enemy, with new reasons to see them dead and collect the reward.

If the story sounds a bit more epic than you might expect from a low-budget gangsploitation film, especially one with a gang called The Baseball Furies, then your intuitions are correct. Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel was inspired by Xenophon’s historical work the Anabasis. The work recounts Xenophon’s leadership of ten thousand Greek mercenaries who found themselves stranded deep in Persian territory after the man who hired them dies in the first battle. Xenophon has to lead his ten thousand from Persia to the Black Sea coast and the Anabasis is an epic account of his men fighting their way back to the sea. If you ever wondered if ancient stories, or in this case actual events, can speak to modern viewers remember that one of the oldest surviving adventure narratives in Western literature was easily translated into a cult movie about a gang in matching vests.

If I was running the game in D&D, I’d likely set it in the Mystaran city of Specularum. While Eberron’s Sharn, or Gygax’s City of Greyhawk, are also good fits, my love of The Veiled Society keeps me coming back to Specularum and its canonical organized crime set ups. In this adventure, the player characters are hired by Grand Duke Stefan Karameikos to observe a parley where every faction in the city, the Torenescu and the Radu and the Vorloi and whoever else you’ve been building up, have been called together to hear a pitch about taking the city (and Duchy) back from Duke Stefan. The envoy dies at the parley, publicly, and the PCs are immediately pointed to as the perpetrators. Within the hour the accusation is city-wide, and the PCs have to cross Specularum from the docks to whatever safe ground they’ve established in the campaign. The villain I’d choose is Baron Ludwig “Black Eagle” von Hendriks, who wins no matter what happens. It was unlikely that his emissary was going to unite all the factions, but if he can point to agents of the Grand Duke as assassins it might just work. The player characters have to find a way to stay alive and prove that von Hendrik’s notorious hatchet man Bargle is the real killer.

What makes this a fun run rather than a railroad-heavy slog is that every district is a different encounter design problem. So long as the Dungeon Master lets the players choose the route home, the key task is making each district of the city feel different and requiring different kinds of encounters to get through them. Sometimes it will be a combat encounter. Other times it will be a social encounter. At least one encounter should be an investigation-focused one where the PCs find out who the real villain is and a way to share the information. This is probably best run as a marathon rather than a sprint. A sprint is fine for a two-hour film, but the adventure will be a railroad if you make it a sprint. Maybe one area belongs to a gang who’ll only fight the party unarmed, because that’s their code. Another faction is a bought watch patrol that was allied with von Hendriks against Stefan. You will have to build six to eight districts and give each one something unique the party can encounter as well as clues to Bargle’s involvement in every district. That way, no matter what path they choose they can have the investigative encounter. It’s a great opportunity to let the map guide the adventure in a city setting rather than a dungeon one. You can make every waterworks, rooftop, and sewer matter in ways that make the city map work like a tactical encounter map.

5) Alien

As a source of inspiration for a D&D adventure, Alien is a perfect choice. It is a classic tale of man exploring the unknown and engaging in a monster hunt, with a touch of mistrust added in for good measure. One of the stories that inspired the film Alien, A.E. van Vogt’s Black Destroyer (the Black Gate magazine website has a nice overview of a collection that contains the story), has been an almost endless source of inspiration throughout science fiction and fantasy. In fact, it has had direct influence on D&D. The displacer beast, one of the iconic D&D monsters, is based on the coeurl as it is described in Black Destroyer. The classic Star Trek episode The Man Trap takes the coeurl and transforms it into a lonely shape-changing creature. Surprisingly, it’s not the monster hunt aspect that made me select Alien as a perfect film for adaptation. After all, most D&D adventures are monster hunts of a sort. Instead, it’s the vulnerability of the crew of the Nostromo that makes it ideal. It falls thematically in the liminal space between You’re Next, Escape Plan, and The Warriors.

I’ve run too many D&D adventures where the player characters are over-prepared for almost any obstacle. Between all the bags of holding, portable holes, pints of oil, 10′ poles, and vials of holy water, the player characters might as well be a wandering general store. It sometimes seems that there is no threat I can throw at the players that they haven’t already prepared for in some way. The question a Dungeon Master who is adapting Alien has to ask is “how do I separate my players’ characters from their stuff in a way they know is temporary, but which allows me to run a session that uses character vulnerability to create a sense of horror?” It’s a good question, but unlike in Alien this isn’t going to happen while on a foray into the unknown. That’s when PCs are most prepared and if you want to go that route you can use A4 In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords. PCs are least prepared when they feel safe and when they can be lulled into temporarily forfeiting their equipment.

So here’s how I’d adapt Alien:

The player characters are entering a relatively large village or city where the local constabulary requires that the characters leave their weapons and weapon-like equipment with the constabulary. All the weapons are stored at the town’s armory and this town has a reputation for being safe and lawful. It’s just standard operating procedure in the town, just like it was for Wyatt Earp when people entered Tombstone. It’s not that you’re not allowed to have weapons, just not in the protected areas of the city.

Here’s where one of the key components of the film Alien comes into play. In the film, the android Ash works against the interests of the crew and to the benefit of the monster. In the Star Trek episode, the monster can shape change. In the original story, the traditional means of restraining the monster are useless and interdepartmental rivalries prevent sufficient cooperation to handle the problem early. What we need is a traitor and a monster. Since I am a fan of The Man Trap and the original short story, let’s make the monster a vampire and let’s make it so that the constabulary is particularly resistant to the PCs getting their weapons back. This can be either because the constabulary doesn’t believe the PCs, or because they think they can handle the situation. How do the player characters battle a vampire without the use of their Sunswords and scads of vampire-hunting wares? What if the majority of their magical components were also confiscated? This is a great time for players to learn what the actual material components of their spells are, and the locating and acquiring of non-purchased versions of those components can be a nice subplot of its own.

4) Point Blank

John Boorman’s film Point Blank adapts Richard Stark’s novel The Hunter, about a crook named Parker who is betrayed by fellow criminal who wants to get the money he earned in a big score a few years ago. Stark’s Parker is the Mirror Universe version of your typical pulp action hero. He’s the anti-Continental Op, the goateed Philip Marlowe who lacks a traditional moral code. Yet, he does have a code and if it’s violated, those who betray him will be much the worse for wear.

As is typical of Parker adaptations, Parker has been renamed. This time he’s Walker. When Mel Gibson starred in Payback, he did so as Porter. I don’t know why they don’t use the character’s real name. Then again, when they have (I’m looking at you Statham), the results aren’t as good. In Boorman’s film, the setting is shifted from New York to Los Angeles, and I think this is a brilliant choice. To me, Los Angeles is the “noirest” of cities. Like New York, it is a place where people move to fulfill their dreams, but if things go wrong in New York, the train ride back to Hoboken is short and you probably won’t be able to afford a train ride home from LA. The myth of Hollywood entices people with bright glittering lights, only for those people to find out that the neon lights of Sunset Blvd. are a nuisance as they interrupt your attempts to sleep in the trash-strewn alleys.

Obviously, that’s an exaggeration of the grit of Los Angeles for most people. It is, in fact, my favorite city, but it is a city where hope can go to die. As the song Hotel California goes (there’s the urban myth that it was inspired by Camarillo State Hospital just outside the city which has now become Cal State Channel Islands), “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” There’s a bit of that not being able to leave in Point Blank and the tension and darkness of the film are palpable. The final confrontation in San Francisco in this film should remind you of the end of John Wick stylistically.

What makes Point Blank so intriguing is that Walker comes back wanting exactly one thing: the $93,000 he’s owed. He doesn’t want a penny more and he climbs the Organization’s conspyramid one rung at a time. The action could stop at any time, except that every man he leans on tells him that the money’s with the guy above me until Walker is standing at the top of the pyramid and finds that there is no there there.

The thing I find to be the most interesting thing to steal is the ruthlessness, not the revenge. What inspires me is the existence of a ruthless man who wants the exact sum he’s owed and waves off any bonus offered with a bullet to the head. He’s as much an Avatar of Death as Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh and is a more unnerving NPC than any berserker, because he can’t be bought off or bargained with.

Here’s my attempt at an Eberron adaptation of the premise. The PCs performed a job for a patron they trusted, or possibly with an NPC they’ve adventured with in the past, and the relentless force that is the Walker proxy (let’s make him a Warforged for fun) was a part of that deal. In between that job and a later job the player characters do for the NPC, that same patron/trusted NPC did a job without them that also involved Walker. At the end of that deal the NPC took the whole take and put a crossbow bolt in Walker and left him in the Cogs to slowly die. The NPC didn’t tell the player characters that he killed Walker, but he did invite them to a new deal. At the end of that deal, the patron/partner split the money so that the PCs got exactly the amount of money he cheated Walker out of and left some evidence that the PCs had extorted him in the Walker deal. The problem for the PCs is that Walker lived and has returned for his share, exactly his share.

Walker knows they are connected to the old partner and thinks that they were behind the betrayal. He has already shaken down the patron/partner, who didn’t have the money and fingered them as the real culprits. Not only that he gave Walker directions to the evidence he planted against them. In reality, that “old friend” spent the money buying his way into the Boromar Clan to protect him from money he owed another gang. If the player characters want to live, they are going to have to pay Walker his money back. If you inserted this at the right time in the campaign, the player characters will no longer have the money and will have to collect it themselves. Walker is coming for them as a relentless force and they will have to be cunning and relentless to collect on their own. This means that the PCs will have to climb Sharn’s crime syndicate one boss at a time in pursuit of the money. Every capo the PCs squeeze points them one level up the conspyramid and every level up is glad to hand over the next name and no one has the money.

There is a twist to the whole adventure and that’s the fact that once the PCs reach the top, there’s no one home. The Boromar Clan is a name and a set of ledgers that are merely a way of moving coin from one place to another. There is no single villain at the top to kill for the satisfaction of it. What do the PCs do when they’ve clawed up the whole structure and there’s no throat to put a blade to in order to get the money? What happens when the PCs can’t pay Walker?

3) The Art of the Steal

The Art of the Steal is a fun movie, but not a great one. It’s a heist movie that lifts a lot of imagery from Guy Ritchie’s film Snatch, but it does have something that sets it apart. That’s its use of a prior failed heist to establish the background for the current adventure and that’s what makes it a perfect film to adapt to D&D. Many movies or stories are either the first time something has happened, or they reveal the background piecemeal throughout the film’s narrative arc. The Art of the Steal gives us all the background we need in the first ten minutes. Interestingly enough, when I first watched the film, I treated this background as mere fluff and it wasn’t until halfway through the film that I realized it had established the motivation for almost all of the action of the film. While The Art of the Steal isn’t a sequel, it provides a good structure for a DM to use as a means of creating adventures that are sequels to past gaming sessions.

Does your D&D campaign have recurring NPCs? I don’t mean recurring big bad villains. I mean NPCs who are a regular part of the PCs lives, and who are sometimes a bigger pain in the ass than they are a benefit? That’s what we need here. In my adaptation of The Art of the Steal, I’d have the adventure be a followup to the Escape Plan adventure I discussed earlier. What if the PCs escape, but they don’t let their betrayer know that they know they were betrayed? What if they treat their escape from the Dreadhold as if it went exactly as it was supposed to with only a minor blip regarding the lower-level guards not having known about the password? What if the player characters decided to convince their former patron that they were still “on board” and that they wanted a piece of the action of the underground fighting league that House Deneith was running? Greed can go a long way to convince someone you’re being truthful. Obviously, this isn’t an adventure that is custom made for a Paladin, but it is good for almost any other group. Have the PCs team up with legitimate law enforcement to bring down the fighting league, while simultaneously ensuring that their former patron is imprisoned and impoverished.

2) The Siege

Edward Zwick’s film The Siege is a pre-9/11 look at how the United States would react to terrorism. It is off-target in a few respects, but in others it is remarkably close to predictive. In the film, terrorist attacks in New York City led to the detention of American citizens and the widespread use of the military on American soil. The protagonist of the film is trying to find out who is responsible for the attacks, while also trying to advocate for the rule of law. It’s an interesting conflict that the film kind of awkwardly stumbles around, which leaves a lot of room for adaptation into a D&D adventure.

Were I to adapt this adventure, I’d likely place it in the World of Greyhawk and have the Scarlet Brotherhood implement a series of murders while making it appear to be the work of dissatisfied Rhennee. The Lord Mayor might react reasonably at first, but if the attacks target a specific nation’s embassy, this might lead that nation to request additional authority in the Free City. Let’s say that the Lord Mayor allows Keoland some additional latitude to protect its delegation and hires the player characters to investigate the attacks. The player characters would have to simultaneously negotiate with the Ambassador of Keoland who seeks to bring in a cohort of knights, the Lord Mayor who is happy to give Keoland some rights of self defense but not as much as they are taking, and the Scarlet Brotherhood. Can the player characters discover that the Brotherhood is behind the attacks in time to prevent a new outbreak of war across the Flanaess?

1) The Most Dangerous Game

The Most Dangerous Game is one of my favorite adventure stories. The basic premise is that an insane big game hunter arranges for people to become shipwrecked on his private island so that he can hunt them. One thing I have to say about us Dungeon Masters is we just don’t have villains actively hunt down player characters for sport near as often as we should. As I mentioned in the discussion of Alien, player characters rarely adventure unprepared. They’ve got magic items, spells, and all the equipment they need in order to go off on a quest. It seems like every time they meet an NPC, it’s because the NPC wants to hire them, beg them to save some one, or send them on some kind of adventure. What if you use that assumption against your players? Have them think they are being hired by a wealthy NPC to recover a lost magic item like Blackrazor, only to discover when they wake up from their slumber that they are in the middle of a hunting ground and without their beloved swag?

If you want great example of how to adapt this story well, and keep the team vibe, watch Disney Pixar’s The Incredibles. In that story Mr. Incredible is hired to help a “brilliant yet reclusive” scientist recover his robot gone wild, but that’s not what is really going on. What’s really going on is that Mr. Incredible is being hunted by Syndrome who wants to see him dead. This is what you should do with your player characters. Have them enter into a situation with either someone they trust from past experience, or who they hear about from another source. Have the NPC offer to hire the heroes to recover Blackrazor, which will make the players think they are playing in an updated version of White Plume Mountain as good cover for your nefarious plan, and then run from there.

The key here is to have the players try to survive without their gear and using their wits. There should be opportunities for them to acquire equipment, but they should start without any. Let this be a test of the player’s creativity. Give them opportunities like the one Kirk has in the original series episode Arena to get what they need to win but let them role play the desperation of not having their usual arsenal.

* * *

Those are only a few movies that can be adapted into D&D adventures. Any film is great source material. I’ve never designed an adventure based upon a Jane Austen novel, but I think one could work pretty easily.

What films do you think are ripe for ripping off?

Most roleplaying gamers of a certain age are deeply familiar with Gary Gygax’s Appendix N. It is a famous list of recommended “inspirational and educational reading” that was included deep toward the back of the 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide (sic). The introductory paragraph of that essay begins with the words “Inspiration for all of the fantasy work I have done stems directly from the love my father showed me as a lad, for he spent many hours telling me stories he made up as he went along, tales of cloaked old men who could grant wishes, of magic rings and enchanted swords, or wicked sorcerers and dauntless swordsmen.” Just as Gygax’s father told him inspirational stories, so too did Gygax tell inspirational stories to his children (real and “gaming”). He very much took on the role of the father of a hobby and created a formal written road map for several kinds of play, some of which are only now being formally expanded upon by and what is sometimes called the BROSR movement.

Wargaming and, by extension, roleplaying games have long been dominated by a knowledge base similar to that of Child Folklore. People who had played the games passed them on to the next generation via stories. Robert Louis Stevenson’s wargame with his stepson in the early 1880s was described in an article published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1898, but there is only enough information to intrigue and inspire. There are no fully realized instructions on how to play. There are some very good descriptions, but some significant holes as well.

Readers, or collectors like me, of the British Model Soldier Society back issues will have a damnable time finding the wargame rules mentioned throughout the various issues. Some are available and playable (but very loose), while others are largely lost to time. John Curry at the History of Wargaming Project has done a tremendous amount of work to locate many of these games, and yet there are still many holes to be filled. I highly recommend his collections Tony Bath’s Ancient Wargaming: Including Setting up a Wargames Campaign and the Hyborian Campaign and More Wargaming Pioneers Ancient and World War II Battle and Skirmish Rules by Tony Bath, Lionel Tarr, and Michael Korns.

When I say that wargaming is a Child Folklore activity, I mean that the real rules of play are passed on via story and direct instruction without an authoritative text. Donald Featherstone, the Father of Modern Wargaming, changed this somewhat with his multiple books on wargaming and by inspiring others to write their own books. Yet as good as Donald Featherstone’s War Games: Battles and Manoeuvres with Model Soldiers is, it inspires as many questions as it answers. The same was true of roleplaying games and, in particular, Dungeons & Dragons when Gary Gygax began working on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. When Gygax wrote the Original Dungeons & Dragons game, he started with Dave Arneson’s “18 Pages of Notes” on how to play and run a fantasy adventure game.

Gygax had played in Arneson’s fantasy game, fought four Balrogs in that first experience, and wanted to create a complete game based on that experience. The notes Arneson sent him were not a complete rules set, but they were a good foundation and from that foundation Gygax wrote Dungeons & Dragons and began playing the game with all kinds of people. Thus began our hobby and the immediate explosion of Folk D&D, where play of the game diverged immensely from the rules from day one. One example is how Lee Gold misunderstood how Saving Throws worked. She believed that saving throws were rolled on 2d10 (check the link above for the excerpt from Alarums & Excursions), which changes the mathematics of the game significantly. If that could get lost between Lake Geneva and Los Angeles, nothing in the rules was safe. Another example is the spread of the Perrin Conventions that were designed to fill perceived holes in the D&D combat system. Even as Gygax codified the rules as much as he could at the time in the original little brown books, Child Folklore prevailed and the game transformed into Folk D&D.

Gygax initially embraced Folk D&D, but his experience with campaign play and convention play inspired him to write a formalized version of D&D that could be played with great consistency across all the Folk groups. He wanted to codify an official rules set that captured the best of his experience. Jeffro Johnson has done the lion’s share of work in making this argument, and I think he’s right. I think that looking at AD&D through this lens explains the shift in how Gygax wrote about what was and wasn’t D&D in play. He wasn’t merely protecting a brand, he was rejecting Folk D&D and seeking to create a formal version that stood apart. He was trying to do for roleplaying what the various governing bodies had done for sport, to take the Folk and make it formal. Just as there is “Association Football” aka Soccer, there is Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. While there are many ways to play “Football” that range from Rugby to American Football, there is only one way to play Association Football, and Gygax was attempting something similar. Given the era he wrote in, I doubt that a foreign sport was his underlying inspiration but it’s World Cup season and the metaphor works.

To that end, Gygax provided detailed rules for how to adjudicate almost everything imaginable as a Dungeon Master in his Dungeon Masters Guide. That initial volume is still one of the most coherent and cohesive books on how to play a roleplaying game, and too few actually read what it says in its entirety. Most read the book piecemeal to fill the gaps in their Folk D&D understanding, because try as hard as Gygax might, Folk D&D came to dominate and in particular a form of “heroic narrative” Folk D&D that set aside the wargaming roots of the game and the campaigns it was designed for. Ask someone of a particular age what a campaign is and they will talk about a never-ending game that spans generations of characters. Ask a modern gamer what a campaign is and the answer will sound more like a “season” or story arc.

I’ll admit that I am a Folk D&D player and that this has been my preferred way of playing the game, but I am inspired by the movement to bring the wargaming campaign elements back into the game. I’ve seen how wargame campaigns create inspirational play and story, and bring tremendous player agency at scale, and that has value in a fantasy roleplaying game. However, I have always been a fan of simpler rule sets (B/X) and of superhero games and for me narrative roleplay fits the bill. I do, however, recognize the value of playing games with the Rules as Written and AD&D played by Rules as Written is not Folk D&D. There is a right way to play AD&D and I’m not playing that way.

Just because there is a right way to play AD&D doesn’t mean that all games must feel or be thematically the same, and that brings me back to Appendix N where Gary Gygax placed three very different Poul Anderson titles right next to one another: Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Broken Sword, and The High Crusade. The first two get talked about endlessly, and rightly so. Between them they hand modern fantasy the alignment axis, the troll that regenerates, and the paladin as a playable idea. They are inspirational works for Folk D&D that is character focused and is adjacent to familiar fantasy stories.

The High Crusade tends to get read as the odd one out, the science-fiction lark that wandered into a fantasy reading list. I want to argue the opposite. I think it is the most instructive book of the three for anyone who builds worlds or runs games, and I think its neglected 1983 sequel, “Quest,” is the piece that finally shows you what Anderson was actually up to. This turns out to be something larger, and a shade darker, than a comic adventure about knights in space. The High Crusade is a book that shows you the kind of never-ending multi-faction campaign that AD&D was designed for. Gygax included it in Appendix N as one of the central examples of his intended style of play.

And with that extremely long introduction, I will now move on to the formal review.

A Connecticut Yankee, Run Backward

The novel takes place in the year of grace 1345, in the fictional Lincolnshire village of Ansby. A minor English baron named Sir Roger de Tourneville is mustering men to join Edward III’s war in France. The Hundred Years’ War has only recently begun and the longbow has recently done terrible things at the battle of Sluys and will shortly do worse at Crécy. Sir Roger, like every ambitious knight of his generation, is thinking about glory, ransom, and because he is a devout man of his age he is also thinking about the possibility that a successful French campaign might roll onward into a proper crusade to liberate the Holy Land.

That is when the most unexpected event happens. A spaceship lands in his village. That’s right. A spaceship lands in his village.

The ship belongs to what our chronicler calls the Wersgorix Empire. The Empire is a spacefaring dominion of blue-skinned and bureaucratically minded conquerors who have swallowed dozens of worlds and expect to swallow Earth next. Their method is standard and, until now, foolproof. They land a scout craft, terrify the primitives, catalogue the resources, and return with a colonization fleet to easily defeat the helpless primitive population. What the Wersgorix have never encountered, and this is the central conceit on which the entire book turns, is a population that responds to a landing craft not by fleeing but by storming it. Sir Roger’s men, assuming the silver vessel is some fresh deviltry and possibly a demonic invasion, put ladders to it, break in, and kill every alien aboard except one, a pilot named Branithar.

The novel was serialized in the July, August, and September 1960 issues of Astounding, and published in hardcover by Doubleday later that same year. It was eventually nominated for the Hugo in 1961 where it lost to Walter M. Miller’s excellent novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. Anderson himself later called it one of the most popular things he ever wrote, and it has stayed more or less continuously in print for six decades with some of the best editions released by Baen Books. There was a 1994 film adaptation that Anderson pointedly refused to watch, having been told on good authority that it was botchwork. I have yet to see the film, but I recommend reading the book before watching a low-budget, early ‘90s adaptation. The film may be enjoyable on some level as it stars John Rhys-Davies, but it aimed for Monty Python-style comedy when the book is doing so much more.

The obvious literary ancestor to the novel is Mark Twain, but there are some key differences. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court drops a nineteenth-century technician into the sixth century and lets him lord his modern know-how over the credulous medievals. The High Crusade inverts the trope from top to bottom. Here the technological future shows up in the medieval world, where it is shown the value of courage and the folly of decadence. The story is narrated not by a smug modern mind but by a medieval mind with its own view of how the world works. Anderson’s character Brother Parvus is a humble clerk of the Franciscan order who sets the events down years later at his baron’s instruction. He is mindful not to be overly elaborate in his descriptions, even when it would serve him well to do so. The book is far from silly in tone. In the older tale, Twain’s Yankee wins because he knows more, but Anderson’s Englishmen win despite knowing almost nothing. This leaves the reader with two interesting questions.

How do these technologically inferior Englishmen conquer an advanced civilization? And why?

Competence is Cultural, not Technological

I believe that the novel is advancing a very serious thesis. It’s a thesis that has led the book to outlive so many other books from the era. Anderson’s Wersgorix are not stupid, and they are not weak. They command energy weapons, star drives, and instantaneous communication. What they have lost, because their technology made it unnecessary generations ago, is an entire suite of human competences that the feudal English still practice every single day as a condition of survival. They have lost what the Greeks called spiritedness, Thumos (θυμός), and have become decadent.

Consider the specific faculties Anderson gives his knights, and notice that not one of them is technological.

The knights know personal violence at a level that the enemy cannot comprehend. A Wersgor soldier points a device and a thing dies at a distance. He has never in his life closed to arm’s length with an enemy who wants to open his belly. Yes, he has bayonets attached to long-arms, but has never needed to use them nor drilled seriously in their practice. Sir Roger’s men have done little else but train and kill since boyhood. When the fighting collapses to sword-range, and Anderson keeps arranging for it to do so, the aliens are not merely outmatched, they are in a category of experience they don’t possess.

The knights are also deeply familiar with the defensive art of fortification. The medieval mind understands walls, sieges, sally ports, mining, and the patient logic of reducing a strongpoint, because the medieval world is a landscape of strongpoints. When the English take the Wersgor world of Tharixan, they read its fortresses like Ganturath and Stularax (as well as the great base at Darova) the way a mason reads a cathedral. The defenders, who have never had to think of their own installations as besiegeable, have no answer. They have no stockpile of food that will allow them to endure a protracted campaign. Their weapons are designed for quick and decisive battles and not for the kind that require patience and a kind of cruel spirit that allows your enemy to slowly starve or die of disease.

Sir Roger and his cohort also know loyalty as an organizing technology. This is the one modern readers underrate most and where many misread Anderson’s message as comedic. Anderson is arguing that feudalism is not backwardness. Rather, it is a working system for binding armed men to a purpose through oath, land, and personal honor, and over the course of the novel we find that it scales to create a space-spanning empire. Sir Roger extends feudal rights to conquered alien species. He offers the subject peoples a place in a hierarchy of mutual obligation, instead of the mere subjugation the Wersgorix offer, and in doing so creates allies where the Wersgorix have only ever had subjects. The empire Sir Roger’s English build is stitched together with vassalage, and it holds together to create a large empire by the end of the novel.

The medieval mind is also deeply familiar with duplicity in diplomacy and Sir Roger knows how to lie about his competence with a straight face. My favorite running gag in the book is diplomatic. Sir Roger, negotiating with the Wersgor commander Huruga, invents an English interstellar dominion out of whole cloth. He uses the names of Earth cities and conflicts to fabricate a tale of conquest that includes the capture of Constantinople as if it were a star system rather than a city. When he tells tales of English empire to Huruga, a creature of a literal-minded bureaucratic culture, the creature cannot tell that he is being played. The Wersgorix have technology but no guile, no folk memory of a thousand petty barons bluffing one another across contested marches. While Sir Roger has never read Sun Tzu, he is a master of The Art of War.

There is an underlying philosophy for what Anderson is doing in his book. He is applying a Burkean (or possibly Lockean) argument inside a pulp SF wrapper. The Wersgorix are the abstract, rationalized, technocratic empire. The Wersgorix are efficient and brutal, but they are also fragile. Their every capacity was engineered long ago by architects unseen and thus their own technology could be lost if it became too automated. The English carry a thick inheritance of embedded, practical, un-theorized wisdom. They have inherited institutions and habits refined by centuries of hard use, whose value nobody can quite articulate until the moment it saves their lives. The book’s joke is that the “primitives” are actually carrying more usable civilization per capita than the empire that came to civilize them. The aliens live in an authoritarian empire where they submit to law without question and have traditions that subjugate the individual to the state, where the English have traditions that encourage individual liberty and the actions of “little platoons” to create society. You do not have to share Anderson’s politics to see that this is a serious idea wearing a comic mask.

Thumós, and the Cultures that Misplace It

Push the competence argument one step further and it stops being merely a Whig Enlightenment argument and becomes one of Classical virtues. The particular faculty the Wersgorix have lost has a name older than feudalism. The Greeks called it thumós (θυμός). This was the spirited part of the soul that was the seat of courage, honor, and righteous anger. It is the moral element that makes a person stand and fight rather than price the risk and withdraw. In The Iliad, it is Achilles who is the pinnacle of this virtue and it is the source of his rage. Achilles has no particular quarrel with the Trojans; he was recruited to fight in the war as a boy (that’s right, Achilles was younger than Patroclus and the Judgment of Paris happens at the time of the marriage of Achilles’ parents Peleus and Thetis). For more on Achilles and Patroclus, I recommend reading Plato’s Symposium. Speaking of Plato, he set thumós as a buffer between reason and appetite and it was the chief virtue of the guardians of the City in Speech. If you strip it out of society, you are left with exactly the Wersgor psychology. You get cool calculation on top, comfort-seeking underneath, and nothing in the middle willing to close the distance and put its own body in the way. The Wersgorix are not cowards in any melodramatic sense. They are a civilization that has engineered thumós out of itself, because for a thousand years its technology meant no one ever had to be brave in person. Sir Roger’s villagers are almost nothing but thumós, barely governed by anything else, and that turns out to be the decisive asset.

When you look at the book through the lens of thumós and Classical virtues, the book’s largest argument comes into focus. Cultures can decline, and the oldest diagnosis of how is the loss of thumós. This loss is an ancient anxiety with several historical lessons. Rome grew soft long before the vigorous barbarians opened her gates. The late empire of appetite and excess could not summon the virtue of the early one, and it was destined to fail. Anderson, writing in 1960 at the frozen height of the Cold War, appears to be arguing that the West might be sliding down the same slope.

The Wersgorix are a mirror held up to the modern technocratic state and to the industrialized centralized authority state. Anderson is simultaneously critiquing both the central planning of the Soviet Union and the loss of spiritedness of the West. While the United States has not yet become a fully centralized government, Anderson’s vision of America is that we have become casualty-averse and overly centralized. We rule by standoff firepower and administration and are so materially secure that we have forgotten the personal qualities upon which security finally rests. The historian Russell Weigley would later name that style of war, annihilation by overwhelming materiel rather than maneuver or nerve, the “American way,” and Anderson’s novel can be read as a critique that we will soon be staging our own defeat at the hands of the very virtues we let wither. Tocqueville had already named the civil version of the same softening and called it the “soft despotism” of comfortable, well-managed subjects who trade their spiritedness for security and never feel the loss.

I want to be clear that even as Anderson is trying to warn against the West sliding into decadence, it is not the West that is being defeated in the book. The decadent, over-centralized, bureaucratic empire reads just as naturally as a Cold War Soviet figure as a Western one. Indeed I would argue that the Wersgorix work best as an example of the Soviet model, but that Anderson chose medieval Englishmen as their conquerors because he viewed the West as having lost too much spirit in the aftermath of Korea. Anderson is working within a standard “vigorous young culture overruns the decadent empire” plotline that was an ingrained part of the house style of Campbell-era Astounding. For all that Campbell loved technology, he despised centralization even more. Campbell’s editorial hand tilts the theme toward a Spenglerian fable of vitality rather than a coded op-ed about any one government.

I’m not just pulling this from the text itself in the manner of the New Critics, and I’m not applying Critical Theory to see where Anderson’s novel is a critique of colonialism (though it certainly is that in some ways). I am also pulling from Anderson’s personal philosophy. That philosophy shows that he, like Robert Heinlein, was at minimum sympathetic to a Decline of the West argument. Like many in the Campbell circle, he was a libertarian by conviction and a hawk by temperament. I know that libertarian and hawk are rarely combined in modern libertarianism, but they were far from rare in the mid-century libertarian mindset. After all, it was Anderson who a few years after the publication of The High Crusade would help organize the pro-Vietnam War statement that science-fiction writers ran in Galaxy.

Anderson built The Star Fox around the conviction that a free people must be willing to fight, a sentiment also advanced in Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers. If you read The High Crusade while keeping in mind Anderson’s lifelong political views, you can see a sentimental connection with the thumós argument. Making such an argument does not require me to put words in his mouth, and I won’t. The fact that I don’t have to only strengthens the argument.

The Chronicler and the Machine

The novel would not work without the narrative voice of Brother Parvus. He is our St. Bede, our Saxo Grammaticus. Brother Parvus is where Anderson’s craft shows most plainly. The decision to narrate a star-conquest in the voice of a pious, self-deprecating fourteenth-century friar is the conceit that makes the impossible premise plausible. It is what gets us to suspend our disbelief. Every marvel reaches us pre-translated by Parvus into the medieval mindset. The scout ship is a work of demons or of angels, depending on the day. The Wersgorix are blue devils, until it is seen that they bleed and then they are viewed as men like any other. The star drive is a wonder to be crossed with prayer, which comes to be understood as space becomes navigable by Astrologers. Because Parvus never once steps outside his worldview to wink at us, the reader is never given permission to find the whole thing silly. As readers, we are locked inside a mind for which conquering Heaven’s outer provinces is a perfectly coherent ambition. It is all for the glory of God and Parvus is sincere in his faith. Anderson never mocks Parvus and makes efforts to portray him as a fallible but, in the end, reliable narrator.

Anderson is doing here, on purpose and beautifully, the exact discipline that good worldbuilding demands and that bad worldbuilding fakes. He is not decorating a modern narrator with medieval vocabulary. He has reconstructed a medieval epistemology. He presents us with a whole set of assumptions about causation, hierarchy, salvation, and the proper order of things, and then runs his outrageous plot through it without cheating. This is the same skill that a Dungeon Master uses when a setting has to hold together under improvisational pressure. The focus of game play should not be on “what props are on the table,” or on creating a long list of people or places. Instead, a Dungeon Master should ask what the beliefs in the world are and what consequences follow from them. Anderson’s handling of Parvus is a master class in it. I’d put the book on a designer’s shelf for that alone. The ongoing space crusade is an argument for Jeffrogaxian play as different factions seek to control fiefdoms in planetary systems.

Underneath what some view as comedy there is also a real novel with a real spine, and the spine is Arthurian. Sir Roger loves his wife, the Lady Catherine, imperfectly and proudly. Catherine is drawn toward the charming, cultured, and faithless Sir Owain Montbelle. Everyone but Roger sees Owain’s faults, but Roger merely sees his martial prowess. In the end, Montbelle’s betrayal and his willingness to sell the whole enterprise for a chance to go home and take the hand of Catherine is the Lancelot wound at the center of the story. In this case, the Lancelot is far from virtuous and sows the seeds of discord for his own ends. Anderson is deliberately building the Matter of Britain in miniature into the tale. He gives us the war-leader who founds a realm, a queen, a favored knight who breaks faith, and the founding of a kingdom that will outlast all of them, but he gives us the end we all wanted as a child. A thousand years after the action of the tale, an Earth starship stumbles across the Holy Galactic Empire that Sir Roger’s people built among the stars, and finds a functioning, thriving, faintly absurd feudal-Catholic civilization that has entirely forgotten it began as one afternoon’s misunderstanding in Lincolnshire. It is Camelot, refounded on the far side of the galaxy by people too stubborn and too devout to know it couldn’t be done.

Why this is a Gaming Book

I promised an argument about why The High Crusade belongs on Appendix N as more than an oddity, so here it is in plain terms.

First, it is one of the purest presentations of high concept genre-mashup energy that tabletop roleplaying runs on. Gygax knew this and it’s why the DMG cheerfully offered rules for dragging your AD&D characters into Boot Hill and Gamma World. It’s also why Expedition to the Barrier Peaks put a crashed starship full of ray guns in front of dungeoneers who could only understand it as a magic-haunted ruin. The High Crusade is presented as a solid foundation for multi-faction campaign style play that synthesizes fantasy and science fiction. The High Crusade is, structurally, a roleplaying campaign in which the party wandered into the wrong genre and refused to be intimidated by it. What makes the book work is that it treats that refusal not as a joke but as the source of heroic competence. Every referee who has watched players solve a problem with a tool the module never anticipated will recognize Sir Roger de Tourneville immediately.

Second, it models the thing I keep begging designers to internalize. A setting’s power comes from its logic and not from an itemized list of names and places. Anderson establishes exactly how the medieval mind works and then lets that foundation generate every subsequent surprise. The plot is not a sequence of authorial rescues in the Burroughsian tradition. Instead, it is the disciplined examination of what these specific people, with these specific assumptions, would actually do if they encountered the unknown. That is what a living campaign feels like when it’s working, and The High Crusade is a 250-page demonstration of what a long-term campaign can look like, one that covers over 1,000 years of conflict. Long after Sir Roger and Lady Catherine are dead, adventurers are still questing in the campaign.

And third, Anderson took the games seriously enough to have written a story that accompanies a game based on his novel. In 1983, TSR published a wargame adaptation of The High Crusade. It ran in Ares, the science-fiction gaming magazine that SPI had launched and that TSR was then producing. This is the same magazine ecosystem that gave us DragonQuest and a shelf of tightly designed SF titles. In that issue, Anderson published a brand-new sequel set in the same universe as a companion piece to the game. The story was called “Quest” and it gives us a glimpse into the world after the conquest had begun. The fiction and the game arrived together, in a gaming magazine, as a single artifact. For a publication like this one, that meta connection of game and fiction is perfect fodder for an article, and I don’t think you can review the novel honestly without reviewing its sequel.

“Quest”: The High Crusade’s Version of the Grail Romance

If The High Crusade is Anderson focusing on King Arthur and his conquest of England with the founding of Camelot, the queen, the traitor, and all of that familiar narrative, then “Quest” is the Grail romance that is the natural extension. The first half of John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur focuses on the founding and fall of Camelot, but the second half covers the Grail Quest and the connection between the spiritual and the martial. Once you have built Camelot among the stars, there is only one story left to tell, and it is Galahad’s.

The setup is exactly as gloriously literal-minded as you’d hope. A generation or so after the events of the novel, the Holy Galactic Empire that Sir Roger founded is now a going concern with its own capital on a conquered world. This kingdom now turns its attention from worldly conquest to the spiritual as there are more knights than there are battles that need fighting. The short story shows us what would happen if Englishmen carried the Faith to the stars and runs straight to the proper conclusion. These knights would make sure that the most precious relic of that Faith should be found, and if it is no longer on Earth, then it must be somewhere out here, and a good knight is obliged to go looking. Anderson lets his medievals apply their airtight logic to the Grail the same way the novel let them apply it to a starship, and the result is a short and oddly moving story about a culture that has never once doubted that Heaven has a coordinate somewhere in the stars.

Anderson also switches narrators, and the switch is deliberate. Parvus’s humble monkish register belongs to the novel, but the short story is voiced from a different pen. This shift lets Anderson show us the same civilization from inside a different temperament, more knightly, less clerical, and a full generation removed from the original wonder. Our new author is, unlike Parvus, willing to add authorial flair to conversations. The novel was about founding a kingdom. “Quest” is about what a kingdom does once it has nothing left to conquer or found: it goes looking for the sacred.

Is it a minor work by Anderson? Yes, but it is also a very solid one. The piece is brief, its ending is abrupt, and it never pretends to have the same scope as the novel it spins off of. But it is minor in the way a good encore is minor. “Quest” exists to complete something larger and to send you back to the main work with fresh eyes. It also has one wonderfully clever theological trick at its heart. Anderson’s medieval characters construct a perfectly reasoned, internally airtight explanation for why the Grail might no longer be on Earth at all, an explanation that seems silly from our perspective, but is unassailable from a medieval frame of reference. My favorite part of “Quest” is when the characters are interrogating the guardians of the Grail and the priest, who is an alien and not an Earthborn Englishman, brings up numerous heresies during the conversation. I don’t want to spoil anything because this is a delightful and tight tale.

The Verdict

Sixty-some years on, The High Crusade has outlasted an enormous amount of science fiction that others might argue is more “respectable,” and I don’t think the reason is nostalgia. It has survived because its central argument is true, and truer now than when Anderson made it. We are, all of us, citizens of the Wersgor Empire. We are surrounded by capacities we did not build and could not rebuild, our competence increasingly outsourced to systems we no longer understand, mislaying the older human arts of nerve, loyalty, improvisation, and the well-told lie. We have students who use AI to translate A Clockwork Orange from “Old English” to “Modern English” because they never even took the time to read the introduction (which describes the language used in the text) or the lexicon at the back (which provides you the definitions of those words). We are a society that is in many ways losing our thumós, if you want the old word for it. We aren’t necessarily losing it in the bellicose way that a more conservative critique would argue. Rather, we are losing it at an individual level as we pass on our own actions and obligations to machines. Anderson’s free Englishmen are a standing rebuke to the comfortable assumption that the future belongs automatically to whoever has the better technology. Skills atrophy if people rely too much on others or on tools to do the work for them. Culture is the accumulated skill of everyone who came before us, and the fight to keep the best parts of that accumulated skill is what holds us together.

For the gamer and the designer, the lesson is the same but practical instead of philosophical. A world is not its props. It is its logic, and a logic that holds under pressure will generate more genuine surprise than any amount of clever hardware. I love my miniatures and maps, physical and virtual, as much as the next Dungeon Master, but it is the narrative logic that I and the players bring to the table that creates the best game moments. It is the actions and resolutions, and not the props. Anderson built a medieval mind, wound it up, and pointed it at the stars, and every marvelous thing that follows is simply that mind being consistent. Dungeon Masters should run their settings that way and their players will do to their “carefully planned campaigns” exactly what Sir Roger did to the Wersgorix Empire. They will take it in their own directions and you will be delighted, as Anderson clearly was, to be so thoroughly conquered.

Epilogue

Later this week, I’ll be providing a Savage Worlds based supplement for The High Crusade as well as a discussion of how to use ’s game Arathi Sector to run your own version of The High Crusade. Both of these systems are perfect for adapting to the setting because Savage Worlds has a large-scale battle system for the non-wargamer and Arathi has unit-scale morale and encounter procedures. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons works perfectly, as it should, for those who want to run the giant 10:1 combats, which probably does include me, but for those who want an abstract resolution of the grand campaign, Savage Worlds and Arathi Sector are perfect.

I recently posted that July 4th was the 50th Anniversary of the RuneQuest roleplaying game. It’s a game that revolutionized the hobby in many ways. One of the most significant ways it did this, something that is rightly lamented by game designers/critics like , was to move the hobby away from its wargaming roots (both chit and map and miniature wargaming with the shift away from miniature campaign play having the largest impact). It replaced that tradition with influences from mythic storytelling and combat rules influenced by the designer’s participation in the Society for Creative Anachronism. I’ll be writing about that shift in my eventual review of the Playtest Manuscript. In some ways, it’s ironic that RuneQuest led the way in this direction since it was inspired by two chit and map wargames (White Bear and Red Moon as well as Nomad Gods).

RuneQuest isn’t the only roleplaying game with a July birthday though and I’d like to write about the Champions roleplaying game, which is a game that manages to squeeze itself somewhere between the Gygaxian/Arnesonian wargaming design philosophy and the Staffordian “rpgs as art” philosophy. It’s a very mechanics heavy game, and extremely balanced mathematically, but it has only minimal advise for running campaigns where the players run different opposing factions even as one could readily see how having players run villain and hero groups (as well as individual characters) could make for a robust campaign with richer and more player involved stories than those created by a dictator Gamemaster. I was reminded to write about Champions when I saw Steve Peterson’s post that July 3rd marked the 45th Birthday of the game on LinkedIn.

Champions Release Happened at a Really Cool Location

The Origins Game Fair is one of the oldest role playing game conventions in the the world, having started in 1975. It currently takes place annually in Columbus, Ohio and has done so since 1995, but before it found its permanent home it was held at different locations around the United States each year.

While the logistics of having a large scale gaming convention in a different city every year are very challenging, there were a couple of advantages to doing exactly that. First, it help to support the hobby as a whole by creating excitement that was geographically diverse. It allowed for gamers have access to games and game companies that their local stores might not carry. Additionally, they served as important places to learn about new games in the hobby. Without the modern internet, it could be difficult to learn what games were coming out. Sure, magazines like Different Worlds, White Dwarf, and Space Gamer wrote up short articles on new releases, but they often got that news by attending these conventions.

On the weekend of July 3rd through 5th in 1981, the Origins Game Fair took place in San Mateo, California at the Dunfey Hotel. Those familiar with the Bay Area Gaming scene in the 80s through 90 are very familiar with the Dunfey and miss its pseudo-medieval stylings that just screamed, “This is a Place Where Role Playing Games are Played!” Just look at that crenellation and Fachwerk! How could you not what to game there?

San Mateo also happened to the home base of a small gaming company called Hero Games who had just published the first edition of a superhero role playing game called Champions. They released the game on July 3rd of 1981, making this the 45th anniversary of its release. Happy Birthday Champions!

The Champions Superhero Role Playing Game is one of the best superhero role playing games ever designed, so much so that it is THE game to which all superhero rpgs are compared. Champions wasn’t the first role playing game in the superhero genre, that honor goes to the game Superhero 2044 which I discussed in an earlier post. Champions even builds upon some of the ideas in Superhero 2044. Champions character creation has a foundation in the vague point based system in Superhero 2044. These vague rules were eventually improved by the creation of house rules by Wayne Shaw that were published in issue 8 of the Runequest (another Bay Area connection) themed fanzine Lords of Chaos Fanzine. George McDonald and Steve Peterson saw how Wayne Shaw had made the almost non-existent system of Superhero 2044 into something almost workable and was inspired to create a new detailed and easy to understand point based system that was mathematically balanced. I would argue that Champions’ combat system was influenced by the melee combat system presented in Superhero 2044. Both systems compare combat capabilities to determine the the target numbers on a 3d6 bell curve for “to-hit” rolls in combat.

While Champions wasn’t the first superhero rpg, it was the first that presented a coherent system that allowed a player to design the superheroes they read about in comic books. The first edition of Villains & Vigilantes, which predates Champions, did a good job of emulating many aspects of comic book action but the ability to model a character in character design wasn’t one of them. Because Champions was released at the Origins convention, one of the largest gaming conventions at the time, Aaron Allston of Steve Jackson Games was in attendance and it immediately captured his attention. Allston gave Champions a positive, but constructively critical, review in issue #43 of the Space Gamer magazine. That experience led to Aaron Allston running a Champions campaign back at home which led him to write several Champions articles for Space Gamer. He eventually became one of the most important contributors to the Champions line. Those contributions included the Strike Force Sourcebook, which is one of the most important role playing game books ever written…for any game system. You MUST own it.

Reading through the first edition of the game, can have that kind of effect upon a person. The writing is clear, if uneven in places, and the rules mechanics inspire a desire to play around in the sandbox provided by the rules. George MacDonald and Steve Peterson did more than create a great role playing game when they created Champions, they created a great character generation game as well. Hours can be taken up just playing around with character concepts and seeing how they look in the Champions system.

There are websites galore about Champions and many reviews about how great the game is, so the remainder of the post won’t be either of these. Rather, I would like to point out some interesting tidbits about the first edition of the game. Most of these will be critical in nature, but not all. Before going further I will say that though Champions is now in its 6th edition and is a very different game today in some ways, the 1st edition of the game is highly playable and well worth exploring.

One of the first things that struck me reading the book was how obviously extensively playtested the character design system was. This is best illustrated in the section under basic characteristics. In Champions there are primary and secondary characteristics. The primary characteristics include things like Strength and Dexterity. The secondary statistics are all based on fractions of the primary statistics and represent things like the ability to resist damage. Where the playtesting shows here is in how players may buy down all of their primary statistics, but only one of their secondary statistics. A quick analysis of the secondary statistics demonstrates that if this were not the case a “buy strength then buy down all the secondary stats related to strength” infinite loop would occur.

It’s striking how few skills there are in 1st edition Champions. There are 14 in total, and some of them are things like Luck and Lack of Weakness. There are no “profession” skills in 1st edition. To be honest, I kind of like the lack of profession skills. Professions in superhero adventures seem more flavor than something one should have to pay points for, but this is something that will change in future editions. This is one way that the game initially rejected the heavily skill-based philosophy advocated by RuneQuest as Champions limited skills to things that weren’t easily done through actual role play. One of the weaknesses of granular skill systems is that they can devolve into roll-playing instead of role playing. Do the players find the clue? In a skill based system, they can merely roll to find out. In a less skill based system, the players describe how they are searching. You can do that in a skill based system, but players will often feel cheated (and rightly so) if their plan to search was good and a mere roll ruined it for them. So eventually, these games can become more like statistical simulations that role playing exercises.

There are a lot of powers in Champions, but the examples are filled with phrases like “a character” or “a villain” instead of an evocative hero/villain name. It would have been more engaging for the folks at Hero Games to create some Iconic characters that are used throughout the book as examples of each power. The game does include 3 examples of character generation (Crusader, Ogre, and Starburst), but these characters aren’t mentioned in the Powers section. An example using Starburst in the Energy Blast power would have been nice. The second edition does name heroes and villains, but it also names characters we never get full statistics for and I spent many a day trying to figure out full character sheets for those partial listings. Since character design in Champions is a game in its own right, I didn’t mind too much, but I would have liked to see more stats for those evocatively named characters.

The art inside the book pulls readers in different thematic diretions. From time to time I’ve heard people criticize Mark “the hack” Williams for his illustrations, but his work is the best of what is offered in the 1st edition book and it is actually some of my favorite rpg illustration work ever. It’s no surprise that Mark Williams would go on to work on in the special effects industry on films like The Abyss and Terminator 2. Sadly, he died in May or June of 1998 of complications related to cancer. Mark’s work is more classically 4-color than that of his co-artists in the first edition, Victor Dal Chele and Diana Navarro. His strong 4-color vibe is probably why they decided to use Mark’s work extensively in the 2nd edition of the game. Williams’ art is evocative and fun while the work Vic Dal Chele and Diana Navarro was less “comic bookish.”

To be fair, Victor Dal Chele was a relatively young artist at the time and his craft improved significantly as he got older. At the time of Champions he was already a Storyboard Artist on The Kid Superpower Hour with Shazam! and he went on to work on GI Joe, Transformers, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and a ton of other cartoons. I have not been able to find more information on Diana Navarro, but as “non-comic bookish” as her art was there is definite talent there and I’d be interested to know where her career went.

The game provides three examples of character generation, but the designs given are less than point efficient and one outclasses the others. The three sample characters are built on 200 points. Crusader can barely hurt Ogre if he decides to punch him (his punch is only 6 dice), and his Dex is bought at one point below where he would receive a rounding benefit. Ogre has a Physical Defense of 23. This is the amount of damage he subtracts from each physical attack that hits and it is very high. Assuming an average of 3.5 points of damage per die, Ogre can resist an average of 6.5 dice of damage per attack. Yes, that’s an average but the most damage 6 dice could do to him would be 13. That would be fine, except Crusader has that 6d6 punch, and Starburst...oh, Starburst. All of Starburst’s major powers are in a multipower which means that as he uses one power he can use less of the other powers in the multipower. The most damage he can do is 8d6, but only if he isn’t flying and doesn’t have his forcefield up. Not efficient at all. One might hope that character examples demonstrate the appropriate ranges of damage and defense, these don’t quite achieve that goal.

The combat example is good, if implausible. Crusader and Starburst defeating Ogre? Sure. The mathematics don’t really support that outcome, but I’ll save that analysis for another post.

The supervillain stats at the end of the book -- there are stats for 8 villains and 2 agents -- lack any accompanying art. The only exception is Shrinker.

Speaking of artwork and iconics. Take a look at that cover.

Who are these people?! I want to know. The only one who is mentioned in the book is Gargoyle. It’s pretty clear which character he is, but I only know his name because of a copyright notice. Who are the other characters? Is that “Flare”? The villain is named Holocaust, but that cannot be discerned from reading this rule book. If you know who the Iron Man clone is, please let me know. I’d love to see the stats for that guy punching “Holocaust” with his energy fist. It might be Icestar, but he’s punching with energy and not cold so I have no idea.

Champions is a great game, and the first edition is a joy. If you can, try to hunt down a copy and play some old school super hero rpg.

Three years ago Professor Dungeon Master announced that July was going to be Independent Tabletop RPG Month on his YouTube channel. I’m not 100% sure that he invented the concept, but when I did a quick Google to read about it to help with guidelines for recommendations his was the first really informative link that showed up on my Daily Me (see Cass Sunstein’s excellent #Republic for what I’m on about there).

The creation of Independent Tabletop RPG Month was partially in response to all of the shenanigans and mishaps at Hasbro and because of these Professor Dungeon Master asked participants to avoid discussing the World’s Largest Role Playing Game and to focus on smaller games and creators. That’s a partially worthy goal that leaves out some very important games. This is because, as much as I really like a lot of the current batch of independent game designers, Professor Dungeon Master overlooked an equally important category of games, old and out of print games.

In my chat last year with Alan Bahr about his game Swords of Meropis, an entirely independent RPG, I talked about how when I was a kid it seemed that gamers were more ecumenical in their tastes. We were always looking for new games to play. Not just new genre, milieu, or settings, but entirely new mechanics. Even the publisher of the World’s Largest Role Playing Game at that time published numerous rules sets. There was no unified assumption of mechanical basis and I think that was a good thing. Most gamers today are satisfied with either a single game or in some venturous cases different games with similar systems.

I’m not just referring to fans of dungeons and/or dragons in this statement. Many Powered by the Apocalypse fans are more than happy to limit themselves to Apocalypse games. So too with FATE, Blades in the Dark, and it looks like it might become the case with Critical Role fans. All to rare is the modern multi-system gamer who plays DIY and Sell-Out games. I am not opposed to loving any of the games I just mentioned. In fact, I am advocating buying all of them right now and some of them will be featured in my weekly recommendations this month.

I want to make it clear that I am not not trying to shame people who feel more comfortable with their favored rule set. Time is precious and we only have so much of it. There is nothing morally wrong with limiting yourself to one core game foundation, nor is there anything morally superior about being an ecumenical gamer. Nevertheless, I do think those who focus on a single game are missing out on a lot of great experiences. When it comes to my love of a wide array of role playing games, I think it’s important to keep in mind how I am near obsessive in the breadth of the things I geek out about. After all, I discuss film and fiction genres, music, sports, comic books, video games, and pretty much anything else it is possible to geek out about on this site and in my private life.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you can buy and read games outside your core game solely for the purpose of making your core game play better. A lot of wonderful ideas that improve the hobby come from smaller games that a lot of people read, but that few people still play. For example, I’ll be posting a review of Daggerheart soon, having run more than a few sessions of it now, and the way it handles initiative is steeped in both improvisation culture and in mechanics like Shadow of the Demon Lord and Warhammer Fantasy Role Play Third Edition (the one with the fiddly bits that is sadly unavailable via pdf or any other means, and fiddly bits are another feature Daggerheart shares with Warhammer 3). While Shadow of the Demon Lord has a core group of fans, I’m pretty sure that I am the world’s only fan of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play Third Edition, even as the Genesys system it spawned has plenty of fans. That just goes to show you that what works with Star Wars and Twilight Imperium doesn’t necessarily appeal to Warhammer players. Mechanics matter. They shape play and how people view what is possible within play. They are a part of Huizinga’s Magic Circle, which was articulated in his book Homo Ludens. The concept is well known, though only loosely applied, in the video game industry. The ramifications of how a space for play has its own social rules is central to so many of the debates in modern gaming, and is also central to a lot of fandom in general but that is another discussion entirely.

Narrative Spaces and Engaged Lives by Andrzej Zarzycki

692KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

As with all forms of entertainment, there is more in the world worth experiencing than one can experience in a lifetime. We live in a rich world and I understand that even limiting oneself to one smaller slice of a geek topic can provide a rich lifetime of worthy pursuits with vast variety. That’s just not my vibe. I understand the value of a deep dive into a narrow area. I can talk political polarization (the focus of my career for 15 years in the non-profit sector and the focus of my Ph.D. studies) until the end of time. I also want more from the rich tapestry of life and I adore dabbling in the various corners of entertainment.

TL:DR: “It can be fun to step outside of the familiar from time to time.”

I wrote this long preamble because I wanted to highlight the fact that my lists of independent games will go beyond Professor DM’s request to promote “independent creators.” Instead, I will be focusing on games that I think are overlooked or, in the case of the out of print, forgotten. I love independent creators and support many, but if I am going to be serious in promoting things different from the familiar paths of “d20+ability+proficiency bonus vs target number” I am going to go into other systems entirely. I will still promote those creators during the month, as I’ll be talking about all kinds of games, but I will also be talking about the World’s Largest Game too at some point during the month.

What do I mean by independent games? Given that almost every RPG company is in reality a small business, with a couple of exceptions, my only defining characteristic on this is “Games that aren’t D&D or D&D adjacent mechanically.” This means that I won’t be recommending Pathfinder 2nd Edition (though I do recommend another game system that uses the setting), Shadowdark, or Old School Essentials. I really like all three of those games mechanically, but they are D&D based Fantasy Heartwarmers (that’s the inverse of a Fantasy Heartbreaker). Additionally, for me to recommend the game it must be available for purchase either physically or on pdf.

And with those caveats, let’s jump into Week 1.

1. Colonial Gothic

I’ve been a fan of Colonial Gothic for a long time. Not only does it utilize the most underused die of all (the d12) in what it calls the 12° system, but it is meticulously researched game that is a great introduction to US history as well as a great horror role playing game. An inside joke in my family, based on our experiences watching The Patriot, Brotherhood of the Wolf, and Last of the Mohicans, is that you should never make a veteran of the French and Indian War angry.

How the 12° System Works

Colonial Gothic is a target number task resolution system that resolves every action from swinging a tomahawk and sneaking past a sentry to haggling with a merchant with one universal roll: 2d12 + Governing Attribute + Skill Rank ± Bonus/Penalty. These systems have been relatively common since the publication of Traveller in 1977. While one might argue that D&D’s game system is a target number system, that’s only partially true of editions printed prior to 3rd edition because those had “floating” target numbers that could be looked up on tables. What Traveller did was to have a core target number for all combat actions of 8+, the numbers varied on other actions in inconsistent ways in early Traveller but that core 8+ number becomes central in later editions of Traveller. What this innovation does is anchor the game mechanics to an underlying assumption of average competence. The average person in Traveller (0 stat bonus and 0 skill bonus while not being “unskilled”) has to roll an 8+ on 2d6, which gives a baseline probability of 5/12 (15 ways to roll an 8 or higher out of 36 total possible outcomes). That’s approximately (≈) 41.7%. By having the basic probability for success before skills, attributes, or modifiers, are added anchored to 41.7%, Traveller signaled that it was not a game filled with galaxy spanning heroes, and was rather one of more grit. It wasn’t one of helpless characters, but it wasn’t one of guaranteed success either.

The universal TN in Colonial Gothic’s 12° system is 12, which signals that the baseline for this horror game is relatively heroic. The mean of 2d12 is 13, so an utterly unmodified character (attribute +0, no skill) already clears a standard TN 12 about 61.8% of the time before any bonuses.The game does shift the TN for tasks that are unusually easy (TN 6) or genuinely hard (TN 24) and allows the Gamemaster to add conditional modifiers, but under normal conditions the characters are fairly heroic. As a Target Number system any total that meets or beats the TN succeeds. This “meet or beat” detail is one of the first dials that Target Number systems play with. Some systems require you to roll higher than the TN instead of equal to or greater. I’ve always thought that was odd because that’s really no different than a meet or beat on a TN value one number lower.

So in most systems, it doesn’t matter whether you use equal or greater than, or just greater than when analyzing base assumptions of the game. That’s not true of Colonial Gothic because, Richard Iorio has added a nice addition to a mere binary success/fail result. In Colonial Gothic’s 12° system the amount you clear the TN by is your Degrees of Success (result − TN). Similarly if you fail there is a corresponding Degrees of Failure (TN − result) that can be applied. Degrees of Success and Failure tend to matter most in opposed tests and combats, but they are one of the meaningful innovations of the system and give DMs a bit of guidance for how to judge levels of success. They’re what the GM scales rewards against and, in combat, what drives damage. Rolling exactly the TN still succeeds, just with zero degrees (a bare success). Skills and attribute ranks are capped at +10, and situational Bonuses/Penalties run from Instinctive (+6) down to Heroic (−6).

The last wrinkle is the effect of training. A character with at least Base Rank +0 in a skill is Skilled and rolls normally. If a character attempts something they aren’t trained with, they must make an Unskilled roll that imposes a flat −2 penalty to the test. Because 2d12 produces a fairly wide, gently peaked triangular curve (rather than the steep bell of 3d6), each single point of modifier is worth a real, visible slice of probability. This is something you can see in the tool I designed for the game, which I’ve provide a picture of below and a link to here.

This is a game that lets you find out how these conflicts got to be so fear inducing. Colonial Gothic is a rich game that incorporates American supernatural mythology in a way that would make Manly Wade Wellman proud and his Shonokins might just be lurking in the Wilderness. A few years ago, Andrews McMeel Publishing did an adaptation of Colonial Gothic that used the Zweihander rules set called Flames of Freedom, but that game was it seemed a little too heroic and modern in many ways and it lacked some of the narrative charm of Richard Iorio’s 12° system. This isn’t to say that the 12° system is grim dark with player characters dropping off like militia facing a British infantry company, because it isn’t. I just believe that the 12°system is more flexible than the Zweihander version and accommodates many styles of play in a manner that is more narrative focused rather than mechanics focused.

I talked with Richard Iorio of about the base system for Colonial Gothic last year and he mentioned that he would be releasing a 20° System version of the game in 2026 to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the Birth of the United States. That Kickstarter launched on Independence Day and is very much worth a look. He calls this version the Revolution Edition and the game uses the more familiar Twenty-Sided die to resolve tasks. This version is fully compatible with the 12° System and is meant to be a gateway to the original game rather than a replacement. I’ll be backing the game soon and I think you should too. Richard Iorio is not a creator who publishes but never backs, he’s a backer who also publishes and those are the creators I think need the most support. While his 83 supported projects are reflective of a much more discriminating gamer than my own (1,163 projects) backed projects, that is not an insignificant number.

2. Good Guys Finish Last

As I’ve mentioned many times in the past, the folks at Better Games were vital in the development of modern storytelling role playing games. Yet this group of designers is rarely mentioned by that scene and they don’t get the credit as they deeply deserve. Their games were extremely innovative and remain vital today decades after they were created. Their base mechanical system is at the cutting edge of modern storytelling games and compare well with games that are Powered by the Apocalypse.

Characters in Better Games Free-Style Role-Play games have no numerical physical attributes in the traditional sense, instead they have a number of narrative descriptors that describe how their characters function that sometimes includes a die roll modifier. It’s an innovation that works in a number of settings ranging from Fantasy to Horror, but my favorite example of it was in Better Games two comic book inspired games Good Guys Finish Last and Villains Finish First that were published by Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer magazine when Better Games owned the rights to that title.

Good Guys Finish Last was rereleased by postworld games a couple of years ago with a much improved layout updated by jim pinto (sic) and I highly recommend checking it out. While I could go on and on about how important Better Games was to the storytelling game scene, I will share jim pinto’s introduction instead. Given that jim has gone on to design a number of excellent games in the storytelling game space, his praise speaks volumes about the direct influence Better Games had on the genre.

To give you another example of what characters in Free-Style systems look like, here is a glimpse at a character sheet in Good Guys Finish Last. You’ll notice that all of the abilities are named and the only number listed is the modifier. I wish jim had opted for the actual wound chart from the old games for each character, rather than listing numbers, as that shows which keywords add to which damage type and help give the game even greater narrative focus.

3. Champions: The Super Hero Role Playing Game

Yes, I know that this is two super hero role playing games on the same list, but I love super hero role playing games enough that I could do a list of just 31 super hero role playing games worth your time and have that be the list of independent rpgs. Since this is independent rpg month and not super hero rpg month. For me, every month is super hero rpg month, but that’s a post for another time.

As the above paragraph implies, there are a ton of super hero role playing games out there and most of them are worth checking out for one reason or another, but Champions stands above them all. I write those words even as DC Heroes is my favorite super hero game.

Champions wasn’t the first super hero role playing game, that was Superhero ‘44 which was quickly republished as Superhero 2044. I don’t consider Champions the best super hero role playing game either, that’s the aforementioned DC Heroes. It is, however, the most important superhero role playing game ever published. If you read old copies of Space Gamer magazine, available for purchase from Steve Jackson Games at an affordable price, you will be able to see some of the far reaching impact the game had. From its extremely balanced point based system, a point base system based on house rules for Superhero 2044 that were playtested and honed until they were rigorously mathematically balanced, to its robust combat system designed to emulate the panel by panel storytelling of the comic books, Champions is a masterpiece in every edition.

It’s available in multiple editions, but I recommend the Second, Third, and Fourth editions of the game and consider the Fourth edition to be the absolute peak of the game at release. Once you start adding some of the Fourth edition splat books, it begins to get overbearing but the core book is all you need for mechanics. Just it, Strike Force (maybe the best super hero supplement ever written it’s for Third edition Champions not Fourth but it is compatible), and Classic Enemies is enough material to run decades of super hero games.

4. Dragon Warriors

Are you looking for a game that is easy to understand, has tactical complexity, has room for significant free form storytelling, and has a robust Medieval European (England really) setting with heavy doses of influence from Michael Moorcock’s Elric Saga? Then Dragon Warriors is your game.

Dragon Warriors can be played in a manner that emulates light hearted or grim and gritty Fantasy fiction, but given the lethality of its combat system it does lean more towards the grim and gritty. The game has a number of innovations, the weapon damage system is something you really should check out. Weapons do a fixed amount of damage and after you roll to hit an opponent you roll penetration dice versus an armor’s protection value to see if you damage them at all. Only then do you apply weapon damage. It’s an interesting alteration on the armor as damage reduction paradigm and while it does make combat more tactical and sometimes slower, given the relatively low hit points that characters have in the game that never becomes an issue.

The game was initially released as a series of six paperback “pocket” sized rule books. The first book provides sufficient rules for an entire campaign, but if you wanted to add magic, greater character variety, and a rich setting, then the additional books were a must. I don’t know if it was the first game to be issued that way, but it is a pretty cool way to buy your books.

The game’s mechanics are deeply rooted in the world design, so this is not a generic Fantasy rpg in the traditional sense. The rules and setting have a particular feel to them and it is an interesting feel.

5. Troika!

Troika! is a game that thematically returns to an earlier era of role playing games when many of the designers didn’t feel constrained to emulating a single genre. Like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or Metamorphosis Alpha, Troika! is a science fantasy role playing game that mashes together ideas from multiple genre to create an intriguing experience.

Mechanically the game is based on the classic Advanced Fighting Fantasy game that expanded upon the mechanics in the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. As such, it is an extraordinarily simple game to play and is very much designed with free-form, rather than tactical, play in mind. Since the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks were designed to be played solo by young people reading a paperback novel, the rules had to be simple and more theatre of the mind focused. Troika! expands on that foundation with an interesting character creation system that includes some really interesting character options. Even if you don’t end up playing Troika!, there are ideas for you to use in any role playing game session.

Oh, and since the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks are still around you might want to check them out too. They are really fun.

6. Savage Worlds

The Savage Worlds role playing system has been around for 20 years and it is without a doubt one of the most flexible role playing game engines on the market today. It has a great community and a large catalog of interesting products. I could go on for days about this game, and will write a formal review of it later with mechanical analysis etc., but this is getting long. The most recent edition of the game is the Adventure edition, but unlike many other role playing games on the market the changes from edition to edition in Savage Worlds are minor balance tweaks rather than complete revisions.

The game’s motto is Fast! Furious! and Fun! and the mechanics keep getting faster and furiouser, it’s up to you to make them funner. Thankfully, they have great products like Deadlands, Pathfinder (yep, that Pathfinder setting in a new rules set), the Super Powers (okay, that makes three super hero games) and Fantasy Companions, Flash Gordon, and so much more.

7. Castle Falkenstein

Castle Falkenstein is, like most games designed and produced by Mike Pondsmith, way ahead of its time. Yes, in the post-success of the Cyberpunk video game world, R. Talsorian and Mike Pondsmith might seem a far cry from the scrappy independent designers you might be expecting here. But the truth is that Mike Pondsmith’s story is one of being an overnight success that took almost 40 years. His original Cyberpunk game was a masterful game inspired by both Champions and Traveller that synthesized those games into a lethal experience that had MOOD. Man could Mike Pondsmith evoke mood.

Castle Falkenstein is a Steampunk role playing game, designed before Steampunk took off, in which the setting and mechanics are deeply intertwined. Given how tactically oriented Cyberpunk was, and is, one might expect some of that to leak into this game, but it doesn’t. Pondsmith is one of the most talented, and for a long time underrated, designers in the role playing game market and this storytelling oriented game is a perfect example of how to mesh milieu and mechanics and the mechanics don’t even appear until page 181 of the rulebook. Pondsmith wants you deeply saturated in the setting before he brings in the mechanics. Those mechanics are card based, because cultured people don’t play with dice as those are for riff-raff and ruffians, and are easy to learn and execute. All of the supplements are excellent, but as a fan of the Wild, Wild, West television show, I highly recommend Six Guns and Sorcery.

Some Background on Steve Perrin

While I was giving a final editing pass on my recent article on Toxic Fandom, I was reminded of one of my favorite game designers and his final (unfinished) game design project. As regular readers know, I am a HUGE fan of superhero roleplaying games. It’s my favorite genre to play and the superhero games are some of the best mechanically designed projects in the table top gaming space. It’s a genre that constantly pushes the boundaries of game design into interesting paths. From the foundational granularity of Superhero 2044 that was expanded in Champions to the entirely narratively focused design of Marvel Heroic, each game attempts to simulate some aspect of the comic books.

Games like Champions and GURPS try to capture the imaginative slugfests that fill the pages. Games like DC Heroes and Marvel Superhero Adventure Game (Saga) try to capture the full breadth of power levels while allowing every player to “matter.” Marvel Superheroes (FASERIP) and Villains & Vigilantes attempt to capture the freewheeling nature of the source material and Mutants & Masterminds attempts to do all of the above. In my opinion, all of the games I’ve named have been successful. Okay, except for Superhero 2044, but even that succeeds IN PLAY even as it fails to have a character creation system. That failure led to an entire catalog of wonderful games.

One of those games was designed by Steve Perrin, and he’s the designer I was thinking about as I made that final editorial pass. Steve Perrin was introduced to the table top gaming hobby when his roommate Steve Henderson, whom he met through the letters columns in Marvel Comics, introduced him to wargames and then Dungeons & Dragons. Perrin soon became an integral part of the Bay Area gaming (and geek) scene where he helped Clint Bigglestone and Adrienne Martine produce a D&D convention called DunDraCon. By the time I was a kid, this was my go to convention every year and is where I first got a taste of how much gaming really is a close knit community. Perrin had already helped found the SCA, an organization that was sparked by a party at fantasy author Diana Paxson’s house and he jumped into the roleplaying community with gusto.

His first major contribution to “Folk D&D,” a contribution that influenced later published games, was a mimeographed set of house rules that came to be called “The Perrin Conventions.” You can find a copy of those rules in Chaosium’s 1977 D&D supplement All the Worlds’ Monsters Volume 2. “The Perrin Conventions” were well discussed in the early RPG circles (in the pages of Alarums & Excursions) and include rules for initiative, “Dexterity rolls,” and combat. The Dexterity roll mechanic pre-dates the inclusion of a similar mechanic in the Dungeon Masters Guide (sic) and might be the first time an attribute roll resolution was proposed for D&D in a professional publication. For those of you who are Tunnels & Trolls fans, Ken St. Andre provides guidelines for how to convert monsters in the book to T&T.

Eventually Perrin’s involvement in the community brought him into the circle that was playtesting a new roleplaying game that was set in Greg Stafford’s Glorantha setting. An initial attempt was designed by Dave Hargrave, of Arduin fame, but Stafford found the result too close to D&D and passed on Hargrave’s version. The draft that eventually evolved into RuneQuest was the one crafted by Art and Ray Turney and Henrik Pfeifer. It still had some D&D elements like classes and levels but then Stafford brought in Steve Perrin and Clint Bigglestone to look it over on July 4, 1976. Perrin seized on one feature that changed everything, the concept that any character could attempt anything. The version Perrin playtested soon transformed that game into one of the great mainstays of the hobby, RuneQuest, in an edition illustrated by his wife, Luise Perrin (another unsung contributor to the early hobby).

Unlike D&D, RuneQuest had no character classes and was completely skills based. After Lynn Willis and Greg Stafford extracted the core rules of RuneQuest to create the Basic Roleplaying System, Perrin was tasked with creating a product that demonstrated how flexible the mechanics for this game were. That product was called Worlds of Wonder and it contained three different settings that all used the Basic Roleplaying System as the foundation for the mechanics. Those settings were Future*World, Magic World (which would inspire Fred Malmberg to create Drakar och Demoner), and Superworld.

Perrin went on to become one of the giants of the roleplaying game field. Like many of those giants, he left tabletop for the far more lucrative world of computer game design and only returned to the tabletop in his later years. When he did though, he was hired to work on a game I was excited to back on Kickstarter. It was a reboot of the classic Superhero 2044, completely updated with high quality art and rules designed by Steve Perrin and Wayne Shaw. Wayne Shaw’s point-buy power system for Superhero 2044 was published in Lords of Chaos #8 and Shaw is credited in the first edition of Champions as being a significant influence on the game. The game had designer pedigree and the Kickstarter campaign was being run by Checker Book Publishing Group who had done excellent work (in my opinion) in their reprinting of the Flash Gordon comic strips. I backed the project in 2017 and the new version of Superhero 2044 has, sadly, never been published. The initial delays were due to events in the life of publisher Mark Christopher Thompson, who had some personal tragedies that affected his ability to work on the project as much as it needed. Then Donald Saxman, the author of the original Superhero 2044 died on March 24, 2018, which added additional delays to the project as this required the recruitment of someone new to write the introduction.

The biggest challenge was on the game design front though. Steve Perrin’s rules required a good deal of playtesting, far more than the five month timeline the original project proposed from funding to publication. We will set aside that it was only on the second pass that Superhero 2044 achieved sufficient funds to receive funding. The first attempt had been overly ambitious and wanted to include miniatures. That overly ambitious attempt was a sign of things to come though as Thompson continually strived for perfection on the project, even as the years passed by. Like Gareth-Michael Skarka’s Far West Kickstarter, delays due to reasonable causes led to delays due to a desire for perfection. As someone who recently finished his dissertation, I understand this dilemma well. Every deadline missed makes you want to make the product better, but that is a never ending cycle.

Needless to say, the delays led to angry and toxic fans coming out. See…I was able to bring this back to that introductory paragraph. These “fans” got angrier and angrier, though thankfully for Thompson never as angry as they did for Skarka. While I’ve had my own snobbish geek buttons, I’ve never been one to get mad at independent Kickstarter projects being delayed. When I back an independent project, whether it’s Superhero 2044 or ’s Arathi Sector project (which arrived the other day and like Kal-Arath looks SWEET!), I view myself as a patron supporting an artist/creator I like. Getting the books from them is a bonus. I am funding art here and not consumerism. My mentality is different when I am backing a project from a large company like CMON or Steve Jackson Games, but even then I am fairly forgiving of delays.

Steve Perrin got a lot of ire directed his way due to the failure to deliver a final draft of the Superhero 2044 rules. This is truly tragic because Steve was working very hard on the rules. I have playtest copies of the game at a couple of phases of development and they are solid, but not quite ready for printing. I think that a lot of supporters were offered the opportunity to playtest, but never did any (due to time etc.) and that this also contributed to the delay. While Perrin might have been a Chaosium luminary, I doubt he had the network that they do for playtesting and I think he wanted to make sure all the kinks were worked out. The game, as it stands now, is very playable and I’d like to see it published. If it never is, I know that there was a strong good faith effort put into the creation and that should be sufficient for fans. Sadly, that’s not typically the case and Perrin died before he could receive the thanks he deserved for the work he put into the book.

I am not in a place to fully review the revised edition of Superhero 2044, and any review would be a tentative one as it is, but I wanted to review a game by Steve Perrin that doesn’t get much attention so I chose to look at his original rules for Superworld from the Worlds of Wonder Boxed set.

Introduction

There is a particular kind of game that fails commercially but continues to be remembered because the story around it connects with the zeitgeist more than the game did. While there are many such games, my favorite example is Superworld. Like many superhero roleplaying games, it sold relatively poorly. As much as I love the genre, fantasy is king in the RPG space and the crossover between comic book fans and roleplayers is small enough that it can only support so many games. Superworld was discontinued after a relatively brief publication run that included a handful of supplements. The failure was likely due, in part, to the fact that at the time of its release the Superhero RPG market was a “Red Ocean” filled with excellent competitors like Champions & Villains & Vigilantes. All three of these games tried to engage in some coopetition to lift everyone’s sales by including conversion rules for the other games, but Superworld couldn’t compete against both Champions and Villains & Vigilantes. It had a point buy system inspired by the first and an indie edge that echoed V&V’s Bill Willingham influences.

Chaosium was in a big financial crunch in the 1980s, so Superworld’s relative failure was a loss for Chaosium at exactly the moment Chaosium could least afford one. And yet it is, almost certainly, one of the most consequential Superhero RPGs ever published. This isn’t because of how many people have played the game at their tables, but because of who was sitting at one particular table in New Mexico, rolling his dice.

There has been a lot of discussion of the literary legacy of Superworld, but I want to take it seriously both as a game and as a literary inspiration. The literary legend gets a lot of coverage, and I will certainly touch upon it in this review, but that legend has a way of unfairly overshadowing the game. I want to correct this because the game deserves better than to be remembered only as “the thing George R.R. Martin played that inspired him to create the Wild Cards series.” Because under the cape, Superworld is doing something none of its rivals were doing in 1982. It applies the gritty, consequence-heavy bones of Basic Role-Playing to four-color comics, and has some very interesting concepts that were only later picked up by other games.

Which Superworld are we even talking about?

First, a clarification on what game I am reviewing in this discussion. Since this is a deep dive geekspace, I want to review the version of Superworld that often gets overlooked. I am going to the out of print well-spring. I’ll review the later version in another post, but I want to do something similar to what I did with Magic World’s connection to Dragonbane. I want to dive into the small 16-page game that showed you could write a solid superhero game in a small space.

When collectors and retrospectives say Superworld, they almost always mean the 1983 standalone boxed set with its three saddle-stitched booklets that include a Superheroes book, a Superpowers book, and a Gamemasters book. These books combine for more than a hundred pages of mechanics and setting. The box has a really cool smirking robot illustrated by Michael Dooney and indie-inspired interior art by Chris Marrinan and Markus Harrison. If the boxed set were an Amazon streaming show, it would come with warnings that it contains Violence and Smoking. That’s the complete version of the game that received the three published supplements. That’s the version George ran for his New Mexico writing circle friends.

That is not the book in front of me at this moment.

What I am reviewing is the original Superworld. It’s the tightly written 16-page booklet from the 1982 Worlds of Wonder boxed set, written by Steve Perrin and Steve Henderson, with cover and interior art by Roland Brown. I find it to be a wonderful serendipity that two men who became roommates after a friendship they built in the letters pages of Marvel comics would come together and write a superhero roleplaying game. There are so many of these kinds of connections in the Chaosium circle that it makes you wonder whether Greg Stafford’s shaman personality didn’t somehow suggest real sympathetic magical powers. One of the playtesters of the game was Gigi Ward which brings two questions to my mind. The first is whether Gigi Ward was, in some way, an inspiration for Gigi D’Arn the “fictional” gossip columnist that Tadashi Ehara created for Different Worlds Magazine, and the second is whether she was the Gigi who married Steve Henderson. Since my relationship with my wife developed as we played Champions together in college, couples who deepened their relationships while gaming has a special place in my heart.

As with Magic World, Fred Malmberg was one of the playtesters of this version of Superworld but he never published a Superhero companion to Drakar och Demoner. You can hear some of Malmberg’s experience at Chaosium at minute 6:15 in the video embedded below. You can hear his real excitement about gaming in general. It’s something to keep in mind when you remember that this is the man who currently runs Conan Properties, Inc. Whether one agrees with all of his decisions or not in licensing Howard, and I agree more than disagree personally, there is no doubt that he’s a huge gamer geek. He is the Ian Livingstone/Steve Jackson of Sweden.

The Superworld book in Worlds of Wonder is the seed of a larger story, but it deserves far more attention than it receives in general. One must keep in mind that the 1983 box is an expansion of this booklet. The advertising of the era highlighted how the Superworld boxed set was a “total revision of the fun little game” included in Worlds of Wonder.

And it was a substantial revision indeed. The character generation got reworked significantly. The original Superworld creates starting characters that are more “average” statistically by having players roll 3d6 per characteristic. Yes, they get to add 3 to anything under 11, which makes the characters slightly more heroic than straight 3d6 (a mean, median, and mode of 12 instead of 10.5 and 10/11). It does strongly increase the number of characters in the middle though where the later boxed set switches to 2d6+6. This increases the mean, median, and mode to 13 but also creates a less curved distribution. These different averages lead to some variation in the number of points characters start with to purchase powers between editions. In both versions of Superworld you add all the attributes together to determine starting statistics, but more characters will have similar hero points to spend in the original version in comparison to the revised version.

The revised version also bolts on purchase restrictions, increases the number of powers available significantly, and patches a lot of rules that were vague or difficult to understand. My favorite little oddity about the original Superworld is that punches were considered a modified version of an “impaling attack” because they wanted punches to be able to go through objects.

I actually prefer the parrying rule from Worlds of Wonder’s Superworld to that in the boxed set. I know that George R.R. Martin and crew played the boxed set, but the impaling fists fit the battle between Carnifex and Mackie Messer in Book VI: Ace in the Hole better in my mind. Not because of how Messer’s knife hands work, but because of how Carnifex’s punches connect.

As much as the 1983 boxed set adds to the game, everything that makes Superworld Superworld is already there in the 16-pages of the Worlds of Wonder supplement. It’s all you need to play a very good superhero game and that’s even leaving out one of my favorite parts of the booklet. I’ve already said that the Superworld mini-setting is tightly written mechanically, but it also presents a wonderfully logical reason for a superhero setting in three short paragraphs on page 1.

In this Superworld setting the Earth has recently emerged from a forcefield that prevented the miracles of ages past. This has caused the physical laws of the universe to behave as they did in the Age of Legends. Why haven’t there been miracles during the age of emerging science? This forcefield prevented people from acquiring fantastic powers and we have entered a new age of miracles! That’s pretty badass. Your own campaign can determine when we first came out of the forcefield. Was it WWII? The American Revolution? The Steam Era? That’s all for you to decide, though Superworld suggests WWII due to the explosion of superhero comics at the time.

Why Did Chaosium Publish Superworld?

To understand why Superworld exists at all, you have to understand what Chaosium was trying to prove in 1982. Back in 1980, Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis had taken the engine Steve Perrin built for RuneQuest and boiled it down into the Basic Roleplaying System. This is a system that uses percentile dice in a way that makes the probability more intuitive than d20 rolls do. It’s a skill-based, classless system where, famously, any character can attempt anything. They took all the complexity of RuneQuest and boiled it down to the central components. Stafford’s instinct was to strip out the fiddly bits (Strike Ranks, Hit Locations) and print what remained as a sixteen-page booklet called Basic Role-Playing. The pitch was modest, but a wonderful move for the hobby. He wanted to create what I, as someone who uses ggplot in the R programming language would term the grammar of roleplaying. Where Leland Wilkinson created the grammar of graphics (gg in Hadley Wickham’s ggplot), Stafford created a grammar of roleplaying. He told Chaosium customers that this would be the grammar of every game they published, and in doing so created one of the first universal gaming systems.

Worlds of Wonder was the proof-of-concept. It provided multiple products in one box. There was the BRP booklet and three thin genre supplements that covered the major rpg genres of the era. There was Magic World for sword-and-sorcery, Future*World for science fiction, and Superworld for caped crusaders. The marketing claim was genuinely radical for 1982. This was the industry’s first multi-genre product running a single rules engine, where a character could, in principle, walk from one genre into another with minimal changes. In fact, the default setting of the boxed set (as opposed to the justification in Superworld) was that player characters could go from setting to setting from a single Westworld-like location.

It’s a concept Chaosium was also attempting with Questworld which they hoped would allow RuneQuest to be the rules set for multiple campaign settings that could all interact in a kind of shared universe. Chaosium created an anthology game with Worlds of Wonder and they wanted to create a shared anthology setting with Questworld to allow players to take their characters from one campaign to another (each with their own houserules) in a fluid manner. This multiversal view of home games was a common feature of discussions in zines at the time and Questworld was Chaosium’s attempt at a solution.

Perrin describes Stafford’s fantasy in his own history of the game. Characters would be residents of “Wonder Town,” the little connecting booklet, strolling up Fantasy Street one day, Future Street the next, and pulling on a cape to fly down Super Street the day after. The play-aids sheet that ships with the box provides the foundation for this kind of play. There’s a Weapon & Armor Equivalencies table that tells you when a Future*World blaster hits a Magic World knight, or a Superworld energy projector hits a Future*World battlesuit, whether the armor does anything at all. That table is the intended Rosetta Stone of the game, but it also demonstrates why Champions and the Hero System were more successful at creating a universal system, even as Chaosium created a universal grammar. This table was the attempt to transform the settings from the three separate worlds into one world with three neighborhoods.

I have a soft spot for this, because I’ve been inside this box before from the other direction. When I was chasing the lineage of Drakar och Demoner and running my own translation of the 1982 Swedish first edition against the originals with the help of Claude, I focused on the Worlds of Wonder BRP booklet and Magic World setting. The thing I wanted to prove to my own satisfaction was that Drakar och Demoner, and therefore its great-grandchild Dragonbane, descended from Magic World specifically and not from RuneQuest proper. It was a lot of work, well a lot of tokens anyway, to discover that the text was identical and this gave me greater appreciation of the evolution of the Basic Roleplaying System. In the US, the system has evolved into a 266 page long open source tome (down from the 400 pages of the prior edition). In Sweden it evolved into Dragonbane, which is a very simple game that could be presented as a simple 16 page grammar of roleplaying booklet if you took out setting specific material.

All of this means the engine humming under Superworld is the literal sibling of the engine that, four decades later, Free League would polish into one of the best-selling fantasy games in the current market. Same box. Same bones. One sibling became Dragonbane. The other is largely forgotten outside the legend.

Finally After All the Pontificating: The Mechanics

So how does Superworld actually work?

Similar to D&D, you roll 3d6 seven times to get your STR, CON, SIZ, INT, POW, DEX, CHA. So far it is exactly the same as you would do if you were creating a farmer’s child wandering into Shirtown. Because this is a supers-setting you can add three to any characteristic that is lower than eleven. This is Superworld‘s gentle admission that superheroes shouldn’t be statistically average, but that not all are iconic specimens of human perfection. Then comes the thing that transforms this into a superhero game. You add all seven characteristics together, and this total is your pool of Hero Points.

Hero Points are the currency of everything in the game, as they would be in Champions. You spend them to “buy” skills in 5% increments and powers in levels of effect. You spend them to push your rolled characteristics higher so that you can have super-strong and super-agile characters. When you’ve spent as many points as you want from your base, you can bank the leftovers to spend later as your character evolves. Powers come out of a list of roughly thirty entries in the original booklet. These powers include Energy Projection, Flight, Armor, Absorption, Telekinesis, Telepathy, Density, Insubstantiality, Martial Arts, and so on. Each of these powers has a Hero Point cost per level and an Energy Point cost to actually use. The example hero the booklet walks you through, Captain Stormcloud, is a photographer struck by lightning atop the Transamerica Building, and you read as his player spends points into Lightning projection, Flight, Absorption, and beefed-up reflexes across several pages. It’s a clean tutorial. The boxed set later renamed him Stormbolt and stretched the same example across thirty pages, which tells you how much the 16 page game’s design leans on “show, don’t enumerate.”

Two things make this engine feel different from every other supers game of its era. The first is the energy-type matrix, which parallels Steve Perrin and Gordon Monson’s Future*World design. Different armors in Future*World are effective against different damage types like impact, laser, and blaster fire. Superworld is even more specific and includes six types of energy that can be absorbed: Physical Impact (blows, falls, bullets), Electromagnetic (lightning, magnetism), Fire/Heat, Cold, Radiation (lasers, light, hard radiation), and Sonic. While the physicists out there might point out that Fire/Heat and radiation are really the same thing, in comics they are thematically different and Perrin runs with that. It’s something I’d change, but the damage types are more granular than the Physical/Energy of early Champions. Defensive powers like Armor and Absorption are bought per type. The consequence is wonderful and slightly cruel: heroes have holes. Your tank might shrug off bullets all day and fold the instant someone hits him with a laser, because he spent his points on Physical Impact armor and never touched Radiation.

Perrin loved this mechanic and stated that adopting multiple energy types based on Gordon’s design “left some characters with interesting holes in their defenses.” It is a more interesting categorization of defenses than the flat Physical/Energy split early Champions used, and it’s the one place where I think Superworld clearly builds on, rather than replicates, its “rival”. I put rival in quotes because the boxed set of Superworld was dedicated to Glenn Thain, who was a key figure in Champions circles and was the creator of Icestar and other core Champions characters. It’s more coopetition than competition, as I’ve already said.

The second is a thing nobody expects from a superhero game, a high level of physical consequences. Because Superworld sits on the BRP chassis, it inherits some of BRP’s lethality and BRP’s nastiest verb… the impale. Roll low enough on an attack with a pointed or projectile weapon and you don’t just hit, you drive the weapon deep and add maximum damage on top of your roll. A firearm in Superworld is a BRP firearm. A magnum impales, and an impaling magnum will end a SIZ-12 hero who economized on Kinetic armor. The melee round is the BRP melee round, which is roughly twelve seconds, Combat is resolved in descending DEX order after players have made their statements of intent up front, but are allowed parries and dodges as active choices. Knockback sends bodies through walls with real SIZ-versus-damage math. This is a superhero game where the referee’s bestiary can include a Magic World bear or a Future*World support gun, and where both can genuinely kill you. It is less lethal than RAW BRP, but it’s still more lethal than most Champions games.

The tension of gaudy four-color powers bolted to a system that treats a bullet like a bullet is Superworld‘s real signature. Champions abstracts violence into a bouncy, recoverable STUN and BODY economy precisely so the comic-book fistfight can rage for pages without anybody dying and as much as I love Champions its combats can take forever. Whether Superworld’s higher baseline potential for lethality is a feature or a bug depends entirely on whether you want your supers game to feel like Justice League or like Watchmen. In 1982, almost nobody was asking for the latter. Today, I’d argue it’s the most modern thing about the book.

The Champions Problem

Here is where I have to be honest on Perrin’s behalf, because he was relentlessly honest about it himself. Superworld lost the sales battle and it was not a narrow loss. It came to market against Villains & Vigilantes (Fantasy Games Unlimited, 1979, 1982), which already had a devoted base that only increased with its more playable second edition, and against Champions (Hero Games, 1981), which had effectively invented the modern point-buy superhero game and become the benchmark every later designer would be measured against. Superworld arrived a year before TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes and into a field that simply did not need a toolbox that fell between other games.

And Perrin knew exactly why his toolbox struggled, because the toolbox was, by his own admission, the wrong shape. In his history he says the Hero Games crew were local friends, that his non-Chaosium gaming buddies were “enamored” of Champions, and that “several design elements of Champions snuck into Superworld.” When Stafford pulled him off a planned Worlds of Wonder II to build the full boxed game, Perrin chose a point-buy toolbox approach that he concedes was “influenced entirely too much by the Champions system.” He still believed point-buy was the right general approach to powers. He also thought, looking back, that he could have routed those points through the BRP base in a way that fit it better, instead of grafting on a parallel economy.

You can feel that graft in the character generation. Superworld tells you, in its own design notes, to build heroes from concept rather than from haphazard point-spending and then hands you a system where you roll 3d6 for your characteristics and your budget for everything else is the sum of those rolls. Good rolls make a more powerful or varied hero and bad rolls make a less powerful or forced focused one. Poor rolling hurts you twice. It is a philosophically muddled handshake between random generation and concept-driven point-buy, and some players find it off-putting. I kind of like it, but I also understand resistance to it. If you are going to go point buy, go point buy and not random plus point buy. The boxed set tried to discipline it with the 2d6+6 reroll and purchase caps, but the seam is right there in the original booklet. This is relatively easy to fix. You can do what the current BRP rulebook recommends and give a fixed number of points that everyone gets. Then again, that might be too close to Champions and it might be better to keep the random as a quirk that separates the game.

The deeper challenges to players were mechanical, and again, Perrin aired them himself. He wrote them in his designer’s notes and errata that were published in Different Worlds #23 (August 1982), the magazine’s famous “Special Superhero” issue, and possibly the greatest single issue of a gaming magazine ever published. I mean, just look at that beautiful Bill Willingham cover.

Perrin opens the designer’s notes by naming the questions players kept throwing at him: Why is Martial Arts such a useless power? Why would anyone buy Armor when Absorption exists? Why do Smash attacks do no real damage? Why would anyone pay for great Strength when a “kinetic blast” does the same damage at a third the cost? Those aren’t just reviewer’s and consumer’s complaints. These are the designer’s complaints, published with the corrections attached. Martial Arts gets revised to add a full die of damage and a defensive avoidance ability. Smash gets a real damage formula. The power-advantage system (no-energy-use, energy reduction, radius effects) gets bolted on to give the toolbox greater flexibility in emulating powers from the comic books. A lot of this errata would be incorporated into the full boxed set, but a lot wouldn’t be needed due to how much changes between editions.

The candor wasn’t confined to the errata. The same issue of Different Worlds opens with a Perrin-written survey of the entire superhero-RPG field at the time. He discusses Superhero 2044, Villains & Vigilantes, Supergame, Champions, and his own Superworld. These are the five groundbreaking games laid side by side, and then he does something almost nobody does in print. He crowns the competition as king of the genre. Champions, he writes, is the leader of the field, the mark every other game will now have to match. And he introduces his own entry, a few sentences later, as a game that is by his own admission less complete than some of its predecessors, constrained by the page count it had to fit. As a designer he surveyed the battlefield, and plants his rival’s flag on the high ground while pointing at his own game down in the valley. You don’t have to wonder what Perrin thought Superworld‘s place in the pecking order was. He told you himself, on the record, in 1982. I think he’s a bit harsh, in part because combat is far more intuitive and fast in Superworld but Champions is still supreme in that list.

Champions was designed as a superhero game from the first keystroke and built upon the systems in Superhero 2044. Later entries in the Hero System, the universal gaming system Hero published, were based on the mechanics of Champions. Superworld was a fantasy-horror system wearing a cape. The official supplements, like Trouble for HAVOC and the Superworld Companion, shipped with stat conversions to and from Champions, and were marketed as cross-compatible. The message to a buyer was unmistakable, “you can run this with your Champions group.” Which is another way of saying that you probably already have a Champions group. Of course, it is also reflective of the coopetition of the Bay Area gaming scene.

I want to push back on Perrin’s verdict a little more, though. Lawrence Schick’s Heroic Worlds later ranked Superworld fifth among all comic-book superhero systems. He ranked it ahead of Villains & Vigilantes, ahead of Heroes Unlimited. The contemporary reviews were warm as well. White Dwarf gave it 7/10 and called it an intelligent attempt at a genuinely hard genre to simulate. Space Gamer concluded it would never supplant Champions but certainly supplemented it. “Good game, wrong decade” is closer to the truth than “bad game.” It lost a war it was structurally positioned to lose, and it lost it to a friend.

The Campaign that Foreshadowed George R.R. Martin’s Ability to Finish A Song of Ice and Fire

And then, none of that mattered, because of another letter in the Marvel letters pages.

Sometime after Chaosium’s money troubles forced the company to cut back, and to let Perrin himself go, ending any real future for the line, since he and Steve Henderson were the only developers who cared deeply about superheroes at the company, Perrin received an envelope. He tells the story beautifully in his history. It opened, roughly, “do you realize you’ve owed me a letter for seventeen years?”

The correspondent was George R.R. Martin. The two had been teenage pen pals in the comics-fandom scene of the 1960s, and Perrin, who had been busy with college, the founding of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and the small matter of getting married, had simply never written back. Now Martin was writing to report that Vic Milán had given him a copy of Superworld for his birthday and that the campaign it triggered had spent the better part of the last eighteen months devouring all his creative energy. Nothing that paid money was getting written. He wanted to know whether there was a way to turn all that gaming into a product he could actually sell.

There wasn’t, at least not through Chaosium, anyway. The axe had already fallen. So Martin fell back on his own resources, and turned the campaign into a shared-world prose anthology instead.

That campaign, and that anthology, is Wild Cards. It started in Albuquerque in the fall of 1983 with a gaming group that includes a science-fiction Murderers’ Row: Martin, Melinda Snodgrass, Walter Jon Williams, John Jos. Miller, Gail Gerstner-Miller, Parris McBride, Chip Wideman, Victor Milán. When Martin pitched it as a shared-world series, he pulled in Roger Zelazny, Pat Cadigan, Howard Waldrop, Edward Bryant, Lew Shiner and more. Eventually, Steve Perrin himself came aboard as a contributor to the game he’d built by writing characters of his own, including Cyclone and Mistral, into the early volumes. That core group produced the first seven books of a series that is still running today, decades and dozens of volumes later.

Wild Cards is not the campaign as played written up as stories. Martin is emphatic that they deliberately refused to simply transcribe their games. He has stated that doing so would have yielded, in his words, a bad comic book in prose. The alien virus that rationalizes every power, the elegant single cause that replaces the comic-book grab-bag of lightning strikes and radioactive animals and alien artifacts, came from Melinda Snodgrass over morning coffee. The “Jokers,” the deformed and unlucky majority who give the setting its real moral weight, never existed in the game at all. The whole timeline was wrenched back to a 1946 origin only because Howard Waldrop stubbornly insisted his opening Jetboy story climax in that year. What Superworld actually contributed was upstream of all of it. It created a room full of characters, the players who had built them, and a chargen system whose quirks left fingerprints all over the cast. It was the inspiration for the books, but those who wrote weren’t all players.

The flavor of Superworld play comes through in Perrin’s anecdotes too, and it’s gloriously unserious in a way the rulebook’s BRP grimness never hints at. Charlie Krank built Fusion Flea who is an actual flea with fusion powers. Perrin notes it would mostly menace the domestic dog population of the United States. Steve Henderson built a villain team called Spectrum, color-themed down to Purple Passion, a mentalist whose entire combat role was to remove one male hero from the fight, and who apparently did so with great reliability. This is the real texture of the game: a system gritty enough to kill you, played by people having the silliest possible time. That’s not a contradiction. That’s just roleplaying and that lethality IS visible in the novels. Over the years both GURPS and Mutants & Masterminds have created supplements for Wild Cards, but I still think Superworld captures the feel the best.

Steve Perrin died in August 2021. Chaosium’s tribute called him one of the company’s “Great Old Ones.” He was a coauthor on Joker Moon, a Wild Cards volume published that same year. The man whose superhero game lost the commercial war was still writing in the universe it spawned, four decades on, in the year he died. Reading his Superworld history now with its candor, self-deprecation, and obvious affection for a commercial failure plays less like a postmortem and more like a man cheerfully owning every seam in something he loved. He even floats, near the end, that he and Chaosium’s creative director, Jeff Richard, had been discussing a new edition that might wed superheroes to the narrative “heroics” of a HeroQuest. It never came. Neither did his reboot of Superhero 2044. The 1983 box remains the last word.

The Geekerati Verdict

So… should you own Superworld?

Yes. Own it and play it. Step away from the d20 glut. Step into something new and different. Because we are at a point where the old is fresh and the new is stale.

Where this goes next

Here’s the part that’s been nagging at me since I pulled this booklet out of the box.

I am wondering what would it take to do for Superworld what Dragonbane did for Magic World? Keep the things only this game has, the energy-type matrix, the BRP sense of consequence, the cross-genre portability. Fix the things Perrin himself flagged in the Different Worlds errata. Resolve the random-versus-concept muddle at the heart of chargen instead of patching around it. Convert the engine into the same d20 roll-under idiom its fantasy sibling now speaks, so a modern Dragonbane table could pick it up cold. Give it a tonal spine and a presentation worthy of the legend. Now that Chaosium is using the ORC licence, I might be able to use a mechanics crowbar to make it fit.

That’s a project I’d like to do. Not a retro-clone and not a tribute, but a Heartwarmer, in the sense I’ve used before. I want to write a modern game that loves an old one enough to bring it to a new audience with modern mechanics. I’d like to take this strange, gritty, half-finished little game and make it whole. It has been quietly owed this respect for forty years. I think there’s a real game in there. More on that soon.

Oh, and I’ll also be publishing a gaming supplement to this article soon with statistics for some of the Byrne X-Men. I have to do something now that I’m rereading the Death of Phoenix saga.

Starting in 2014, I began an odd tradition, I began reading Jim Theis’ The Eye of Argon every year. Some people read Jane Austen’s Persuasion every year, okay that’s also me, but I make room for this amateur oddity. Before I read a single word of the book, I had been informed, either in print or by word of mouth, that it was the worst fantasy novel ever written. I’ve read some pretty poor fantasy novels in my day and decided to give it a whirl to see if I agreed, and to see whether I wanted to join the chorus of those who have mocked Theis over the years. After I read the book, I began to rethink a lot about my relationship with fandom. People talk a lot about toxic fandom today, as if it is a narrow scope of the fanbase who hate that the thing they purport to love has found a wider audience. I’ve never found that to be the case. I have found that toxic fandom is often representative of broader fandom.

Reading The Eye of Argon, and listening to those critiquing it, removed a kind of scales from my eyes and a venom from my tongue. The foundation for the revelation had been set earlier, to be certain. When my friend J (the nickname really is just the letter) told me that he stopped attending Horror Movie Conventions because the conversations at them were dominated by people trying to one up one another and insult the taste of others, I heard him but I didn’t HEAR him. Yet those word lurked in the back of my mind. When I reread Watchmen and felt uncomfortable with the disdain it held for the genre I love, and remembered my own glee at reading those criticisms in the past, I still had the scales and justified my appreciation with statements that Watchmen was more literary than prior comics instead of acknowledging it as an anti-Ditko rant. That doesn’t mean that Watchmen is bad, and I don’t think it is, but it is a product of the “too cool for school” and “list of things you are supposed to like” mentality. When a professor teaching a class on Fantasy and Science Fiction literature critiqued a student for liking Dragonlance novels, I let that slide for similar reasons. I still love that professor, as a mentor and a friend, but they were cruel and wrong and I had yet to acknowledge that fully.

It took reading The Eye of Argon to make me realize that toxic fandom was the norm, rather than the exception, and that was really driven home when I read about how fans used the book…but more on that later.

Is The Eye of Argon actually “The Worst Fantasy Novel Ever Written” and what does the answer of this question have to do with fandom in general?

TL;DR?

It isn’t the worst fantasy novel ever written and I kind of like it. It is my The Room of fantasy fiction and those who have ridiculed it over the years have shown the real face of far too much of fandom.

Since I read it the first time, I find myself returning to the book once a year for pleasure and not to mock it. I enjoy reading the sincere imaginative thoughts of a forthright 16 year old and I find it inspirational. I wish other people did too. I wish most people would review things in ways that weren’t designed to tear others down. If you don’t like something as entertainment, it’s not a moral failure on the part of the author. If others don’t like the thing you like, that doesn’t make them immoral. The more of your review you spend discussing the people (either author, actor, or critics), rather than the art, the less the review is a review and the more it is a polemic against real people. I have very little time for that in my reviews, which is why you’ll see positive comments in reviews of things that are deeply flawed. If I choose to review something, it’s because I found something redeeming in it. I don’t have a lot of time for complaining about things, though I will make an exception when it comes to the industrialization of complaints that has occurred in the modern era or if it is Ulysses’ Gaze.

Encountering The Eye of Argon for the First Time

I’ve long been a fan of science fiction and fantasy, and I’ve long been a person who is pretentiously opposed to pretense. In a way, I’m like an angry Pollyanna who aggressively argues against those who mock the “juvenile” or “popular” things in SF/F. I love “skiffy” and have experienced no greater sense of wonder than reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ writings of John Carter. That’s right. I believe that ERB’s tales of Barsoom are as imaginative as (possibly more than) Iain Bank’s Culture novels, and I love those too. I’m the fan who loves both the Dragonlance stories and Malazan Book of the Fallen. I love the genre at its most literary, at its most imaginative, and when it falls into the “written by an over-enthusiastic fan” territory.

I’m so positive in my passion about genre fiction and geek culture that I wrote an approving review of I, Frankenstein and have been reminded by my editor at The Robot’s Voice that I need to bare the fangs every now and then because I am usually so enthusiastic.

As you might guess from the lead in to this piece, I did find something that really aggravates me after I read The Eye of Argon. It’s how cruel SFF professionals and fandom can be and how “toxic” fans are more the rule than the exception. There are plenty of examples I could pull out of a hat, often dealing with the treatment of female fans as being “fake geek girls.” As the father of twin girls who love Pirates, Pokemon, Paladins, and Princesses, I find that whole “controversy” infuriating. That’s why I’m not going to write about that topic. It would be very difficult for me to avoid expletives on what has been consistently a G-rated or PG-rated blog.

Instead, I want to focus on how professionals and fandom have treated on particular enthusiast of Sword and Sorcery fiction, Jim Theis the author of The Eye of Argon. Because, let me be clear, it is Jim Theis they treated this way…directly and indirectly, and not just the work.

When I first read the book I did nightly out loud readings of The Eye of Argon. I did one chapter, or half chapter as the book has half-chapters as well, per night. I thought it would be fun to do. I heard that the SF/F community had regular readings of this poorly written work of fiction that were the book equivalent of MST3K...and it had been mentioned by the MST3K crew...so I thought it would be fun to do my own midnight readings with my wife.

My takeaway from the experience was that the SF/F community are cruel, judgmental, and full of themselves. I also came to believe that I was part of the problem. By participating in my own personal midnight reading, I was being an SFF bully.

My sister bought me a the Wildside Press version of the book, which has a long introduction by Lee Weinstein that discusses the search and discovery of the real Jim Theis. There had been some speculation that Theis was not a real person and that Argon had been written by a published author as a joke. Weinstein mentions that the search eventually led to him finding an interview on a local (Los Angeles) radio show/podcast called Hour 25 where Jim stated, “that he was hurt that his story was being mocked and said he would never write anything again.”

I’ll be honest with you. I initially fluctuated in what I thought about this phenomenon. I thought that either the whole thing is a hoax, or SF/F authors and fandom are cruel. Scratch that. Even if the whole thing had been an elaborate hoax with false scholarship creating a plausible back story of a 16 year old writing the story for OSFAN, SF/F authors and fandom are still cruel. Some, like Lyssa Chiavari, have claimed that Jim was “in on the joke,” but his friend Walt responded to Lyssa’s post stating, “I have a lot more to say about this topic — including how I believe science-fiction fandom actually killed James Theis through its relentless ridicule — but that’s needlessly dramatic for now.”

It didn’t matter that Jim Theis turned out to be a very real person and not a fictional character created as part of SF fandom cosplay, what matters is that the community has spent over 40 years mocking him. I picked up the book intending to become one of those people and it makes me feel terrible. The anger I feel toward myself more than outweighs the joy from any of the small chuckles I experienced during my reading of the work. And I did enjoy reading the book. I would have bought more books by Jim Theis as his writing improved with experience.

After my first encounter with the text, and realizing that Jim Theis was a real person with real feelings and that I had been a jerk to want to relive the ritual mockery. I decided to track down that issue of OSFAN. I initially looked to see if the Eaton Collection at UC Riverside had a copy, but it did not. They had issue 11 thanks to a generous donation by former UCLA librarian Bruce Pelz, but no issue 10. I was eventually able to track down a copy at Fanac.org and am including it here for your perusal. His story starts on page 27, but he has a short zine earlier where you get a glimpse of his 16 year old personality.

Osfan 10 Malon Watson 1970

7.84MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

According to the Weinstein essay in the Wildside edition, Theis remained an active fan of SF/F for most of his life. Can you imagine what it would be like to attend conventions where there was a midnight event dedicated to mocking you? It would be one thing if Theis embraced that mockery and made it his own, finding some way to leverage it into a positive thing, but that Hour 25 interview seems to imply the opposite. Theis wasn’t able to pull off a Tommy Wiseau or James Nguyen and transform sincere amateurism into beloved cult status. Instead, the mockery killed Theis’ desire to become a writer. That’s right, the SF/F community’s mockery shattered a fan’s aspirations. To me, that is the biggest crime that any professional or fan can do. No matter how “bad” a writer is at writing, they are never wrong to aspire to become a published author. They may never become one, but the aspiration should remain.

Yes The Eye of Argon is poorly written, but not much more so than Lin Carter’s Thongor stories or Gardner Fox’s Kyrik tales. Unlike Theis, Carter and Fox don’t have the excuse that they were 16 when they wrote their books. Unlike Carter, Theis wasn’t a brilliant editor. Neither was he a foundational comic book writer and editor like Gardner Fox. But if an editor as brilliant as Carter was can write entertaining drivel (Thongor is very entertaining) and still be a vital contributor to the field as a whole, who is to say Theis may not have evolved into something more? I can tell you from experience that there are some sentences in Argon that hint at some talent, if only Theis could set aside his Thesaurus for a moment.

When my wife was in film school, one of her classmates stated that she wanted “to be one of those writers who writes terrible movies” and wanted to know how to do that because it seemed like an easy way to make money. It was a statement filled with pretense and disdain that also lacked an understanding of why and how things are created. I don’t think anyone writes with the intention of creating something terrible, baring those things that are done as parody. Instead, most writers are attempting to entertain others and to share their own personal feelings and joys. Jim Theis, like Lin Carter and Gardner Fox, clearly enjoyed his Robert E. Howard stories. Heck, he might even have enjoyed Carter’s Thongor stories. It seems that a 16 year old Thies wanted to share his love of those tales with others by creating his own version. What was his reward for exposing himself thus?

He was publicly ridiculed for over 40 years.

For a community to spend 40+ years making a game that amounts to nothing more than “Taking turns mocking one’s own” is something for which I have nothing but I have disdain. I’m not saying to end the readings of The Eye of Argon. There is humor to be found in the mixed metaphors and odd misuses of words that Theis clearly didn’t understand. But there is also an enthusiasm to the writing, a sincerity, that should be acknowledged. Readings of The Eye of Argon can be humorous and educational experiences, but they should exclude mockery for mockery’s sake. Acknowledge the enthusiasm of the author. Point out how his errors are the errors that many new authors make. And remember that the writing in The Eye of Argon is so “bad” that many of the early myths of its origin required that it be written by someone of respected talent.

Jim Theis died 24 years ago at the age of 48, but 10 years ago he acquired a fan. I hope that he can acquire more. He’ll never know that we exist, but he deserves the basic humanity that we should all aspire to give. So too do all those who create and all fans who critique. Critiquing The Eye of Argon for its writing isn’t cruel, but turning readings of it into performative mockings is.

Background

Okay, this one is an odd one. I decided to start going through my DriveThruRPG library (all 9,280 files) and begin reviewing those I’ve given a test run. I’ll also do some gaming “read”-views, but I wanted to start with one I actually played when it came out. It was during the early d20 boom and quite a few publishers, large and individual, decided to try their hand at designing a superhero roleplaying game and this is one of those early attempts.

Vigilance Superhero is a great example of the kind of products that were being released at a time when the pdf marketplace was just beginning to explode. It was a time when desktop publishing was starting to get more professional, but it was also a time when a lot of amateurs were jumping into the water. Some of those amateurs went on to become successful professionals, while others faded into obscurity. It was also a time that saw the death of the “True Fantasy Heartbreaker” and the dawn of the “Fantasy Heartwarmer.”

When Ron Edwards coined the term Fantasy Heartbreaker in March of 2002, he did so in an article where he shared his lament that so many gaming creators in the 1980s and 1990s put their time and fortunes into efforts that were doomed to fail. These games were doomed because they were often nothing more than existing fantasy roleplaying games (usually just D&D) with a couple of added fixes that the burgeoning designers thought improved the game. What prompted Ron’s criticism wasn’t that the games were bad or lazy, though some people use Fantasy Heartbreaker as a pejorative in just that way. Yes, he thought some rules were sloppy, but his heart was broken because they often contained genuine innovations that would go unnoticed by players and that the games would bankrupt their creators.

And considering when most were published, before most printers changed their policies regarding small print runs, print costs must have been enormous, in the $6000-plus category for standard paperbacks. Some of the games contain cardstock inserts, too. Vanity is vanity, sure, but we are not talking about small sums…

…The basic notion is that nearly all of the listed games have one great idea buried in them somewhere. It's perhaps the central point of this essay - that yes, these games are not "only" AD&D; knockoffs and hodgepodges of house rules. They are indeed the products of actual play, love for the medium, and determined creativity. That's why they break my heart, because the nuggets are so buried and bemired within all the painful material I listed above…

…It is not fair to dismiss the games as "sucky" - they deserve better than that, and no one is going to give them fair play and critical attention unless we do it. Sure, I expect tons of groan-moments as some permutation of an imitative system, or some overwhelming and unnecessary assumption, interferes with play. But those nuggets of innovation, on the other hand, might penetrate our minds, via play, in a way that prompts further insight..

Ron later went on to argue that d20 and 3.x games, those based on the OGL, could not in any meaningful way be considered Fantasy Heartbreakers. This was in part due to the fact that the d20 license (and the OGL) created a new environment, but the other reason was that the market had shifted to facilitate these kinds of games in ways that wouldn’t break the bank of the creators. One of those ways was in the rise of pdf sales. It was now possible for designers to create games for a small niche of gamers, and to do so without taking out a home improvement loan. Designers could experiment, or publish their inspired but highly amateurish games. Thus we have the rise of what I call the Fantasy Heartwarmer. These are games with similar features to the old Heartbreakers, except that the cost to make and purchase them are so low that you can focus on the best parts of them. Better yet, some of these games manage to find people to actually play them.

In today’s Retro Review, I am looking at Charles Rice’s 2002 role playing game Vigilance Superhero as just such a Heartwarmer. Since superhero games are my favorite genre of role playing games, I feel an impulse to share and review the more obscure entries into the catalog.

Why Vigilance?

To channel my inner Walter Benjamin for a minute, and to reject him somewhat, there is a kind of artifact that rewards reading twice. First, you read it as the art that the artifact claims to be and then you read it years later as a fossil of the moment that produced it. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin argued that individual works of art are unique products of time and place and that reproductions, such as photographs etc., were lacking in one or more of the elements that made the work authentic.

His argument is even more compelling in an age of digital reproduction. The peak Napster era, the modern streaming era, and the pushback toward physical products have proven that he was right in many ways. Where I would push back is that I believe that even digital productions, as opposed to digital reproductions, retain the aura of time and place that makes them unique. My statement above about re-reading Vigilance Superhero is an example of exactly that phenomenon. My $5 pdf of Charles Rice’s Vigilance SuperHero is an entirely digital creation where every copy of the file is identical, yet every copy provides the full artistic experience. One might argue that having the original physical draft would have more artistic aura, and that would be true if there had ever been an original physical draft but there isn’t. It has always existed in multiplicity and it still has aura and value, and it has become something more as time has passed just as a physical object does.

When I read it through the lens of my initial encounter back in 2002, I see that as a game it is a competent, generous, frequently clever attempt to make men in capes out of the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. When I read it as a product of its time and place, I see a near-perfect core sample of the d20 boom. It helped provide a deeper understanding of the licensing arrangement that made it possible, the editorial roughness the boom tolerated, and the structural strain of bolting four-color heroics onto a set of game mechanics built for dungeon crawls. I’ll be discussing it in both ways in this review. In part, because it is as an artifact of the past that Vigilance Superhero has the greatest value.

The name turns out to be apt in a way Rice probably didn’t intend. “Vigilance” was the watchword of the whole open-gaming era. Not just for the heroes inside the book, but for every small publisher squinting at the fine print of a license that could be revoked at a corporation’s discretion. Hasbro may have later argued (probably incorrectly) that the OGL was revocable, but the earlier d20 license was explicitly revocable. It was a license that gave you the benefit of brand, but with relatively strict requirements.

Two licenses, one with a logo

Almost everyone who lived through the early 2000s remembers the Open Game License. Modern gamers may not know that there were two legal instruments that allowed publishers to make games that used D&D mechanics, and that the difference between these licenses explains a lot about why the games of the period looked the way they did.

The OGL was designed to be an open-source instrument. Wizards of the Coast carved out a chunk of third-edition D&D, the classes, monsters, spells, the core resolution mechanics, into a System Reference Document and licensed it under perpetual, royalty-free terms. Anybody could copy, modify, and redistribute that content, even commercially. The strategic logic, as brand manager Ryan Dancey argued it, was a desire to crowdsource a portion of the content creation in order to promote growth. It wanted to leverage the existing gaming network in order to expand the consumer base. According to this logic, D&D’s real asset wasn’t its rules but its installed base, and the way to make D&D the default was to make everyone else build on its structure instead of inventing their own. Get the whole hobby speaking d20 and players would migrate frictionlessly from product to product, learning one system and buying within one ecosystem. The supplements would be somebody else’s overhead; the evergreen core books would stay Wizards’ own. We can see the legacy of this strategy by how few modern gamers explored new systems after D&D hit its recent zenith. We are only now, after Hasbro attacked this very license, seeing younger gamers expand to new rules sets in large numbers.

D20 System Guide v 3

250KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

d20 System License v 4

69.2KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Open Gaming License 1.0a

64.7KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The d20 System Trademark License was a different animal entirely. It governed the use of the little “d20 System” logo. This was the official badge that signaled compatibility on a store shelf; and it came with strings the OGL did not. The most consequential string, for the purposes of this review, is that a product carrying the d20 logo was forbidden to include rules for character creation or advancement. That was not a quirk, it was the whole point of the d20 license. The SRD itself deliberately omitted chargen and leveling so that anyone using the trademark would have to send the player back to a Wizards’ published Player’s Handbook. Not that this stopped some publishers from creating “Pocket Player’s Handbooks” that had more information than was in the SRD. The logo was a marketing bulletin board that simultaneously gave your product credibility while pushing customers toward Wizards’ core book as well. There’s a reason nearly every fantasy d20 product of the era carries some version of the line “Requires the use of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook.”

If you take a look at Vigilance‘s imprint page, it does the standard dual-flag dance of the period. There’s an OGL declaration similar to what you’d see in a lot of modern books (”All material in this book derived from the SRD is OGC… Vigilance is always Product Identity”) and, separately, the d20 trademark notice (”the D20 logo are Trademarks owned by Wizards of the Coast and are used according to the terms of the d20 System license version 1.0a”), capped with the mandated tag, “This book requires the 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook.” There are several mistakes in the presentation in Vigilance. The statement requiring the use of the Player’s Handbook is in the OGL section, which doesn’t require it, and the d20 License is listed as version 1.0a when that is the version of the OGL at the time. I’ve included version 3 above for you to examine because it was released around the time Vigilance was published, but you can look at v 0.4 of the d20 License. Hasbro has made it difficult to find the pre-3.5 System Reference Document, but you can read it here.

Here is where the document gets interesting in showing how the system works. Vigilance includes a complete character generation and an advancement system that plays with the D&D system and points you to the PHB and DMG in most of the ways intended. Vigilance’s character classes and origins are unique and if you look at the character class files from the original SRD, you can compare them to the classes listed in the SRD. Vigilance doesn’t use any of these, and it even has its own origins (the equivalent of D&D races) that hand out ability bonuses at creation. It has altered the experience economy to incorporate disadvantages in an interesting way that lets you start at a higher level. You can also spend XP to build gadgets and forge psychic links. It refers you to the main rulebooks enough that you are dependent on them, but changes some things too in ways that would have been better served by a completely integrated rulebook…something the d20 License didn’t allow.

It’s worth remembering how this story ends, because it bears on how we should value the document now. The d20 License was a fragile instrument that implied quality and was unilaterally revocable. Wizards eventually retired the badge and many publishers fled it in order to have more complete games. By 2003 the more legally minded companies had already learned they could publish d20-compatible games under the OGL alone and skip the trademark entirely. This became even more necessary after the surprise 3.5 revision stranded warehouses of 3.0 stock and Wizards declined to update the d20 trademark to match. There were reasons the d20 license wasn’t updated that start with erotic and end with bloat. There was a lot of stuff being published by third parties that Wizards would have found offensive and other stuff they found to be unbalanced and were glutting the market. Many of these products had the d20 trademark, implying that Wizards endorsed them and Wizards did not have the resources to police them all and weren’t yet in their “Send the Pinkertons” era.

The OGL, by contrast, was supposed to be the permanent and irrevocable license. Of course Wizards tried to de-authorize OGL 1.0a anyway in 2023, before the backlash drove the SRD into a Creative Commons release and hurt Wizards/Hasbro in ways from which they still haven’t recovered. One of the licenses that made Vigilance possible nearly died two decades after Vigilance did. The five-dollar PDF outlived the trademark it mostly complied with. There’s a small, sharp irony in that, and it’s the kind of thing the book’s title keeps insisting we pay attention to.

The d20 Bloat

I’ve mentioned bloat a couple of times already and that is because bloat is the other word that looms large over this period, and it’s worth separating the two things people mean by it, because Vigilance is a case study in both.

The macro sense is the d20 glut. This is the flood of third-party product that the low barrier to entry produced. Dancey’s plan worked almost too well. There were dozens of new companies, hundreds of adventures, an explosion of creativity and, by Sturgeon’s iron law, a proportional explosion of dreck. Everyone was creating d20 content, just as they are creating 5e content today. Some companies, like Pinnacle Entertainment Group, issued d20 versions of their non-d20 games in order to promote their original material. The thought was that people would play the d20 version first, and then dive into the real thing. Then came the 3.5 revision of D&D at Gen Con in 2003. The game was similar enough to 3rd edition that players transitioned to it easily, but it also had some major changes that made a lot of earlier content (both official and unofficial) obsolete. Did you love the Oozemaster prestige class? Sorry, that’s not a legal class anymore and all of that money you spent on the affordable ($19.95) paperback class-based splat books needs to be spent again on $27 hardcovers.

Third-party publishers were given little warning, and the market choked on obsolete inventory. Many d20 houses folded or fled to OGL-only branding within a year. My local game store told me that Pinnacle Entertainment Group had gone out of business. This statement was based on an odd combination of rumors around the Cybergames fiasco and the collapse of the d20 market.

Vigilance sits at the purest, most democratic end of that flood. It’s a five-dollar PDF, written by one person, sold for pocket change and openly soliciting feedback (the book prints an AOL address and asks for comments). It was a far cry from the endless books that Mongoose was printing at the time, with very little playtesting, that took the 2nd edition “Complete” book concept and put it into overdrive. As bad as Mongoose’s output could be at times, I’m willing to forgive them because they also produced strong non-d20 work like Dragon Warriors and Lone Wolf and hired experienced designers for some of their material. The purer expressions of glut were Fast Forward Entertainment, who were cranking out books at an AI pace in a pre-AI era, and Valar Project, whose Book of Erotic Fantasy is tamer than you might imagine. It’s deeply rooted in a mechanics-based mindset. One would think a book like this would be more narrative and filled with material that appealed to the relatively narrow audience that would have interest in such a book. Instead, it’s very mechanically crunchy in ways that someone who would actually want to buy a book on this topic wouldn’t actually want.

Vigilance wasn’t the creation of someone trying to get a quick influx of revenue following a trend. The author wasn’t trying to get rich, instead this is a creative product from the bottom rung of a commercial ladder. This is the OGL’s promise and its peril in a single object. This is the modern Heartbreaker/Heartwarmer in its ideal state. The promise is that an individual with a word processor and a love of Uncanny X-Men could now publish a full superhero RPG and sell it. They could offer it on a digital storefront beside the professionals, at a price low enough to be an impulse buy. Rice’s dedication makes the fannish DNA explicit, by tipping the hat to Roy Thomas and Chris Claremont “for firing young imaginations.”

But which storefront you stood beside mattered as much as the price. I bought Vigilance from RPGNow, now DriveThruRPG, which was then only a year or two old. The digital market was still forming and the production standards varied widely. In this case, it’s a plain PDF that still opens today without any artifacting, but which looks like it was laid out in Word over a couple of hours. Around the time I bought this from RPGNow, I was buying ESDs, the “Electronic Software Downloads” that SV Games sold after Wizards handed it the keys to the official online store for the out-of-print TSR back catalog. SV Games had all the classic modules and rulebooks, scanned into PDFs of famously uneven quality and delivered inside a wrapper that unpacked to a standard file on your machine. It was a strange arrangement that existed because of the speed of the internet at the time, which was around 400 Kb/s and 1/500th the average internet speed today. I find it interesting that the heyday of Napster happened in an era of such slow data transferral.

SV Games ESDs often required you to download a couple of files, which the wrapper then combined to give you a readable pdf. At the time, SV Games held the prestige relationship in the pdf market. It was, in effect, Wizards’ outsourced digital storefront, and it charged independent publishers a punishing fifty-percent commission, which was double RPGNow’s rate. This commission might be one of the reasons that it went out of business. It shut its download program in April 2005 and any purchaser who hadn’t backed up their copies by that time lost them forever. The classic-D&D business migrated to RPGNow and DriveThruRPG. Wizards killed those PDFs entirely in 2009, only to have them rise from the ashes in the post-GSL crisis. The open, low-margin storefront outlasted the official one with the funky downloading scheme. Given the GSL and OGL scandals over the years, I think it’s fair to say that in the open-gaming economy, the terms outlive the pedigree. Gamers want to “own” things and they want to have access to creating new things related to the things they love.

What actually works: d20, bent toward the cape

As amateurish as Vigilance is in its presentation, it still looks like a word document with minimal formatting but it’s clearly an effort of love. It contains a handful of core conversions that are smart. Smart enough that you can see the designer who would, the very next year, build a much-improved commercial product out of this raw material. Though this game was released as a completed game with a $5 price point, it’s best in some ways to look at it as a beta release.

One of the things that I really like is how it handles Defense. Vigilance replaces Armor Class with a stat equal to 10 + your Fortitude save + your Reflex save. Other games with a similar mechanic tend to rely solely on Dexterity, just as AC normally does, but the use of two physical saving throws (one representing toughness and the other agility) is truly innovative and it presages the various typed defenses we’d see in 4th Edition D&D that replaced traditional categorical saving throws in that edition. The basic conceit is that a superhero avoids harm two ways, by not being where the blow lands, or by shrugging it off when it does, and folding both saves into one defensive number models exactly that. A nimble acrobat and an invulnerable brick arrive at high Defense by different routes, but they can both be hard to affect. Vigilance abandons the d20 Armor model for the RuneQuest and Tunnels & Trolls model where it has no effect on your chance to be hit and instead grants damage resistance by attack type, so a flak vest stops bullets but not psychic assault. One of the first posts I did for Geekerati was a discussion of how armor, even when it only alters the chance to hit, is always a form of damage reduction.

But in superhero games, the kind of damage matters a lot more than in a fantasy game. The Human Torch is much more resistant to Fire damage than Ice damage. So having Armor, both in physical and power form, affect different damage types differently is a genuinely good idea, and it’s the kind of idea that only emerges when a designer is willing to ask what the genre actually needs rather than what the SRD already provides.

The damage system is a combination of Vitality and Wound points, lifted from the broader d20 family. Wizards’ own Star Wars Roleplaying Game (2000) introduced the split, though one could argue Palladium and Hero got there first, and Spycraft carried it forward. Vitality scales with level and is used for most damage. Wounds are equal to your Constitution and only start taking hits once Vitality is gone. Critical hits skip straight to Wounds. This is closer to the comic-book damage model than normal hit points. In comics the hero trades blows across a two-page spread without consequence, and then the one lucky shot, the critical hit, overcomes resistance. Grafting it onto supers is a good call, though still a little more lethal than I like for my superhero games. I kind of wish Charles Rice had lifted from games like West End’s older Star Wars game or Paranoia that use damage categories.

I very much like how the game adapted traditional race categories into origins and integrated those into the new mechanics. Mutants must take the Prejudice disadvantage, so the rules enforce the X-Men’s central metaphor. Aliens must take an Enemy from their own people, hard-coding the doomed-last-survivor trope and its inevitable “actually there’s another one and he hates you” sequel. Artificial Life must take a Forbidding Demeanor and gets no XP for it, paying for its uncanniness in social currency. This is design with a point of view, and I like that. Not every game needs to be a generic game with infinite choices. I prefer it when the mechanics and the setting are tied together somehow. In my view, it’s more fun when all paladins are Lawful Good or when superheroes are incentivized to be four-color in tone rather than murderous vigilantes who claim the moral high ground. The mechanics aren’t neutral scaffolding in this game. They insist that an origin is a wound as much as a gift, which is the single most reliable truth of the superhero genre. Power should always come with a cost.

Three more conversions deserve credit, all of them imported from the superhero RPG tradition that predates d20. Rice brings in a Disadvantages-for-XP mechanic where you bank your phobias and dependents and secret identities into starting experience. This builds on the Champions/HERO system, but has it affect the starting level of the character rather than primarily providing additional build points. Like Champions, players are rewarded when disadvantages actually complicate an adventure, so the player who loads up on weaknesses that never bite gets no return. Rice’s Heroism and Villainy points are TORG’s drama points by another name. You can spend one to add an open-ended d6-per-five-levels to a roll, or to shrug damage, or if you spend five points you can convert your own death into mere unconsciousness. This mutes the damage system a bit and works well in play. The “Special Effects” rule, which formally decouples a power’s mechanical effect from its fictional look, is HERO-system thinking dropped cleanly into d20. You can create a Fortitude-resisted physical blast that is a stream of poison, a telekinetic fist, or a bolt of ruby force, and the rules don’t care which you do mechanically. That decoupling is exactly how you get an entire genre’s worth of powers out of a small number of mechanical templates. I’ve written how D&D should do this more often than it does currently. I’m a huge fan of effects-based design.

Comic books are built on archetypes, so comic-book teams based on classes work better than many critics might think. Brave New World wasn’t afraid to have archetypes play a big role, and neither should a d20 adaptation be. We all recognize the Brick up front, the Energy Projector as ranged artillery, the Acrobat dodging everything, the Psychic holding the squad’s minds together, the Detective who is very obviously the Batman clone (”a shadow among shadows… the dark shadow of the city”), and the Gadgeteer welding in his lab. These are all classic archetypes of the genre, so much so that even Champions (the most freeform build what you want game ever in the genre) had an entire line of “how to build the archetypes” books. The feats reinforce the archetype theme. Banter and Wit give you a Defense bonus and an enrage effect for running your mouth in a fight, which is Spider-Man or Ambush Bug rendered as a rules subsystem. When Vigilance is working, it’s because Rice clearly knows the genre and is translating specific four-color conventions into d20 grammar with real fluency.

Where the mechanics fight the genre

The game isn’t perfect though. The reason this is a fascinating document rather than a widely played game is that the d20 mechanics keep fighting the source material, and Vigilance can’t win without even more changes. Of all the attempts to lever d20 into superheroics, only Mutants & Masterminds did so with decent commercial success. That was in part because it did a lot of conceptual stretching when adapting the d20 system. It’s close enough that you know what to do, roll d20 and roll high, but different enough that it feels like Champions or DC Heroes.

Vigilance’s deepest problem is scaling. Four-color comics run on power curves d20’s linear math has trouble expressing. Vigilance‘s blast does 1d6 per four power points spent, so a committed projector is soon rolling fistfuls of dice, while Defense climbs off two saves and attack climbs off base attack bonus. These two escalating tracks don’t stay in productive tension. Their advancement isn’t parallel and damage ends up winning out over defense in ways that run counter to the source material. The result drifts toward rocket tag. You have big dice pools, swingy Vitality/Wound thresholds, and combats that resolve in a lucky crit rather than a war of attrition. The exploding Heroism dice and the open-ended damage feats (Chain Reaction rerolling every 10) only widen the variance. d20 is happiest in bounded systems and getting the superhero genre to work within such a system requires creating boundaries similar to what Mutants & Masterminds did. You have to have boundaries that the game lives within and eventually those boundaries shift the game away from familiar d20 territory.

Rice, to his enormous credit, knows this and says so. The book contains one of the more honest disclaimers I’ve read in a game of its era: the abilities here, it warns, are “not intended to be loosed in any regular d20 game,” and are “meant only to be balanced with each other.” That candor is admirable. It’s also a tell. When a designer has to cordon his own system off from the parent game because the power math won’t cohabit with it, the conversion is straining against its source. The disclaimer is Vigilance admitting that fantasy d20 and four-color supers are not, finally, the same shape. Of course, DC Heroes is my favorite superhero game and it suffers the opposite effect. It’s great at emulating superheroes, but requires significant fiddling to emulate Sword & Sorcery.

Another reason the game didn’t succeed as well as it might have otherwise is that 2002 also gave us the d20 superhero game that got everything right in Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds. M&M’s radical move was to keep d20’s roll-d20-add-modifier-versus-DC core and throw out almost everything else — no Vitality, no hit-point attrition, no classes, no Vancian scaffolding. It replaced hit points with a damage save, replaced classes with pure point-buy, and let power level cap the whole build so the math stayed coherent at four-color scale. If you read the DC Adventures RPG that Green Ronin built upon the M&M foundation, you’ll see that M&M has more in common with DC Heroes than it does with D&D. That’s the design Vigilance keeps reaching toward and can’t quite commit to, because Vigilance is too loyal to the parent system to drift as far away. Rice bolts superpowers onto D&D’s skeleton where Green Ronin kept D&D’s handshake and grew a new skeleton. The contrast is the whole argument of this review in miniature. The more of d20’s fantasy machinery you keep, the more the superhero genre fights you. Vigilance keeps a lot of it, and pays for every piece.

The Verdict

So what is Vigilance SuperHero worth, twenty-some years on?

As a game to run tonight, I’d play it but I wouldn’t play it often. Rice would likely agree, given that he superseded it himself with an improved edition a year later. The rough edges are real, the scaling is unstable above the low-to-mid levels the genre most wants to exceed, and there are cleaner d20-adjacent supers engines, Mutants & Masterminds chief among them, that solved its hardest problems by refusing to inherit them. If you want to play a campaign, this isn’t the book for you. If you want to play for an evening or two, I’d give it a shot.

But as a thing to read and learn from, it’s close to ideal, and I mean that as real praise. It is a clean core sample of the d20 boom drilled straight down through every layer. You can see first hand how the open source licensing and the trademark restrictions pulled in opposite directions. It gives you a nice solid amateur effort to compare with the macro flood of cheap enthusiast PDFs and “so-called” professional crud. The enthusiasts were often presenting better, and thus Heartwarming, games while bigger publishers like Fast Forward were filling the market with mass-produced and never played material. This is a work of love that lets you watch, in a single five-dollar document, both what the OGL made possible and why so much of what it made possible needed a second draft.

The license that let one fan put a five-dollar superhero RPG on a storefront was the same license Wizards tried to claw back in 2023, before the hobby’s vigilance, that word again, forced the core rules into Creative Commons for good. Vigilance is an early footnote in that story, but it’s the kind of footnote that tells you what the whole text was about. The open-gaming age was never a guarantee. It was a gift with fine print, revocable in theory, watched in practice, and ultimately defended by exactly the constituency of fans and small publishers that books like this one came from. Charles Rice named his game better than he knew. Constant vigilance was always the price: for the heroes inside the book, and for everyone who ever had to read the OGL.

Vigilance SuperHero, by Charles Rice is out of print, but you can buy Blood and Vigilance: Modern Superhero d20 (RPGObjects, 2003) to get a glimpse of what it would become. Still not perfect, but worth exploring if you love superhero games.

I don’t know when I first encountered ’s Substack, but I am glad I did. It’s filled with wonderful entries discussing the magic that is printed gamebooks. P.J. is very passionate about the genre and has written 24 entries in her Pick Your Own Quest® line of interactive adventure books, as well as a number of “Write Your Own” books that are designed to get young people excited about writing. One of the more recent entries in her Pick Your Own Quest® line added some puzzle elements that transformed the book from solely interactive fiction to interactive gamebook fiction. These game elements were necessary because she based the new book, Castle of Doom (great name), on a video game she wrote in PASCAL back in 1990. That original game had over 4,000 lines of code and you can still play the game either by getting a floppy from her at a comic con or playing an online Scratch version of the game on her personal website.

As I’ve been reading her posts, I was reminded of a series sitting on my shelf that claimed to be a gamebook. I’ve shared before how important game books were for my journey as a gamer, but they were in one way just as important in guiding me toward learning to program in BASIC, Python, and R. Yes, that’s right, I’m one of those who values programming in BASIC for the same reasons that John Kemeny created it. It’s one of the best languages to teach young people the logic of high end computer languages, a skill that will continue to be valuable even as interacting with Claude Code becomes one of the primary ways newer programmers develop projects. Vibe coding is, in many ways, programming with an extremely high level language, but if you want the results of that coding to match your actual vision it’s better to have a great foundation in programming. The thing, for me, that separates BASIC from Python (which is also fantastic) is the use of PEEKs and POKEs that encourage users to think about the architecture underpinning the computer’s operation in the same way that pointers do for lower level languages. It gets you thinking about what the computer is doing and not just the output the computer creates. I talked about this a little when I wrote about the old CARDIAC paper computer.

Okay, okay, enough of the digression. Back to what is supposed to be a review of a “gamebook” that discusses what I loved and what I would change.

There’s a particular shelf in the mental library of any Gen-X or Millennial who grew up near a home computer. On that shelf, jammed in next to the Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks and the dog-eared Dungeons & Dragons Endless Quest volumes, sits a strange hybrid called a “programming gamebook.” It’s a format that emerged from a specific technological moment where personal computers were common enough to show up in schools and homes, but still rare enough that being able to use one was a genuine skill that conferred status among kids. For me, it was an era where kids gathered around their school’s lone Apple IIGS, off in a dusty corner of the computer lab, having long been displaced by the shinier Macs and PCs the school had purchased. Those Macs and PCs were great if you wanted to play a game or write a paper, but the IIGS sat their asking you to make it do something. You turned it on, and all you got was a cursor daring you to tell it what to do.

My high school library had copies of all kinds of gamebooks from the 1980s and among that collection was a really bizarre series, Scholastic’s Micro Adventure series. This series was launched in 1984 with Eileen Buckholtz and Ruth Glick’s Space Attack. That Eileen Buckholtz and Ruth Glick were chosen to write these books is probably a story in and of itself. Buckholtz was an employee of the Department of Defense (an possibly the NSA) at the time and had a degree in Computer and Information Science from Ohio State University. That she also wrote romance novels under the names Amanda Lee and Rebecca York, makes her biography good fodder for a Romancing the Stone style film. Ruth Glick was a Scholastic contract writer who began her writing career with a book about how to make dollhouse furniture. She too went on to write a number of romance novels, and by a number I mean A LOT.

The Micro Adventure series belongs to that small and strange subgenre that includes books that ask you to read a chapter, then turn to your Apple II or TRS-80 or Commodore 64 and type in a BASIC program before the story would let you continue. It’s a premise that sounds almost unreasonable by today’s standards, when you can download an emulator and have a functioning 1984 computer environment up and running in seconds. Reading it again now, I find myself simultaneously charmed by its ambition and a little frustrated by how much further it could have gone with the tools already sitting in its own hands. I may have written that the story doesn’t let you continue until you’ve run the program, but that’s not technically true. The story continues regardless, you just miss out on a pretty cool interaction.

The programming gamebook was never a dominant format. There were only a handful of series that attempted it, and most burned out after a few volumes. Scholastic’s gamebook lines were a mass-market offering meant to be sold in those magical book club flyers they used to hand out in class before most schools moved to the book fair model. You used these pamphlets to pre-ordered books that were then delivered to your classrooms, and book delivery day was magical. Not only did you get your books, but you could talk about them with your friends. I know you can do this with the book fairs, but the delivery day always felt a bit like Christmas where the book fair feels more Farmer’s Market.

As a gamebook, this odd mix of code training and YA novel, had to compete for shelf space with Choose Your Own Adventure (which was already an established juggernaut by 1984) and with the Endless Quest D&D tie-in series, which offered a more familiar fantasy-adventure fantasy hook without requiring you to have access to a computer. As P.J. mentioned in one of her essays, the great things about traditional gamebooks was that they are a substitute for video games so throwing in a book that requires a computer is a bit of a curve ball. After all, what made the Micro Adventure series different was its explicit marketing to the computer-literate. These weren’t books that happened to include code as a gimmick, the way a 1980s sci-fi novel might reference “the computer” as a plot device. These were books that assumed you had a machine, that you knew how to use it, and that you wanted the story to be an excuse to get your hands on that machine and do something real with it to learn. One of the author team had a degree in CIS after all and these books were going to teach you the basics of BASIC and decoding.

The first book in the series, Space Attack, puts you, in the role of “Orion,” a teenage member of ACT (aka the Adventure Connection Team). ACT is a sort of junior intelligence agency that recruits computer-literate kids for missions too sensitive for adult agencies to touch. One of the nice ways this is referenced in the book is that an X-Men comic book is referred to as the key to a book code. Within the first few pages you’re whisked from your bedroom terminal into a newspaper van, then a cargo plane, then a rocket, and finally onto Rodeo I, a secret U.S. space station under attack from the inside. It’s pure Saturday-morning spy fiction that is structurally indebted to everything from the Hardy Boys to the yet to be published Alex Rider series, and it fully commits to the genre without irony. There’s a colonel who designed the station’s weaponry and talks to broken laser cannons like they’re sick children. There’s a 70-year-old polyglot linguist who can’t remember if he’s eaten lunch but speaks 128 languages. There’s a traitor wearing someone else’s face, a zodiac-themed clue stamped on a forged ID badge, and a villain who delivers his ultimatum from behind a purple Lone Ranger mask. None of this is subtle, and none of it is trying to be. It’s pulp adventure fiction written at a brisk, propulsive clip, clearly engineered to be read in one or two sittings by a kid who’d rather be doing something other than homework, but doesn’t mind learning something along the way.

What sets the book apart from its gamebook contemporaries, of course, is the programming. Eight times across the book the narrative stops cold and hands you a BASIC listing or asks you to write your own code. When it gives you a listing, you are expected to type it in and run it because the fate of the mission depends on what comes out the other side. The first program is a decoder routine that breaks the cipher on a garbled distress message. There’s a countdown program, buggy as written, that has to be debugged before the rocket can launch without overheating on the pad. There’s a combination-lock program that opens an air lock door with seconds left before Dr. Macron suffocates inside it. There’s even a pretty cool frequency-analysis routine, also buggy and needing to be fixed, that eventually reveals that the “alien” signals harassing the station are BRUTE (those are the bad guys and I totally want to make an RPG based on this now) transmissions in disguise. By the time you reach Program 7, which is a turn-based missile-defense minigame standing in for the station’s disabled weapons system, the book has fully committed to the bit. You cannot finish the story without sitting down at an actual keyboard and doing actual, if simple, computer science. Technically, you can, but more on that later.

I want to be clear about how unusual this is, because it’s easy to undersell from this distance. This is not a book that gestures at computers the way so much mid-80s media did, with green screens full of meaningless scrolling text standing in for “hacking.” These are real, runnable BASIC programs, several of which contain real, findable bugs of the kind any working programmer would recognize: a time counter that counts up instead of doing a countdown, a sign error in an ASCII shift, an array index that got hardcoded to 1 instead of tracking the loop variable, a stray assignment statement that overrides user input the instant after it’s read. Check out the code below. Can you find the error?

10 N=10
20 IF N <= 0 THEN GOTO 90
30 PRINT "T MINUS "; N; " AND COUNTING"
40 N=N+1
50 IF N >= 100 THEN GOTO 110
60 FOR I=1 TO 300
70 NEXT I
80 GOTO 20
90 PRINT "BLAST-OFF"
100 END
110 PRINT "ROCKET HAS OVERHEATED ON THE LAUNCH PAD"
120 PRINT "THIS HAS BEEN YOUR FIRST AND FINAL ACT"
130 END

What’s more, the bugs are pedagogically intentional. The educational intent is the structure of the entire book. Two of the eight programs contain bugs that you’re explicitly asked to find and fix as part of the story. The other programs work as written, but the book’s narrative never lets you mistake what you’re doing for mere reading. You’re not being told that you fixed the rocket. Instead, you’re fixing it, seeing the countdown tick down correctly this time, and only then does the book acknowledge that you’ve done the work. Buckholtz and Glick clearly understood that the appeal of “be the team’s computer expert” had to be backed up with something a kid could actually type in and watch fail, then fix it, so you could eventually watch it successfully run when the fix was done properly.

That’s a genuinely clever piece of pedagogy smuggled inside a spy thriller, and it holds up very well. The first program gives you a taste for how a program works, and the reference guide in the back gives you some details as to what is going on, but eventually you have to parse some logic yourself. I ran every one of these programs while putting this review together, bugs and all, and had a great time playing around with them. I did one of them on a C64 BASIC emulator online during a live stream, which did not help my subscription numbers let me tell you, only to be reminded of the unique way that keyboard works.

It was a ton of fun to run the programs and see how well they work. The countdown really does run away from zero and overheat the rocket. The frequency analysis really does report every count as zero until you find the one wrong array reference. The decoder genuinely shifts characters by the right amount. The keypad lock accepts the right combination and rejects the wrong one. Program 7’s missile-defense game actually tracks your hits and misses and calculates a final score. These are real programs that do real things when they are debugged correctly. Even better, the reference manual includes advice to get the program to work after you check an annotated cross-platform compatibility chart that shows which computers they’ll run on without modification. The notes for the changes needed are in the reference guide, and reading those notes helps you learn more about how basic works as a language. For a piece of 1984 mass-market children’s fiction, that’s pretty cool.

And yet, and here’s where I think the book fails to deliver on its full potential, the program-as-puzzle device sits almost entirely outside the story rather than woven into it. Every single program is gated behind a chapter break. You read prose, you hit a wall, the book tells you to go boot up your computer, and to return to the book only after you’ve typed in the listing and run it (successfully or not). The narrative then continues assuming that you solved it and moves on. There’s no branching like a traditional gamebook or pick a path adventure. There’s no moment where the program’s actual output, the specific combination you found, the specific garbled phrase you decoded, feeds back into a choice that alters the narrative. You don’t get to enter the wrong air lock combination and watch the story actually branch into “the alarm sounds, BRUTE finds you first.” The text just narrates the correct outcome regardless of what you typed, because there’s no mechanism for it to do otherwise. The computer work is real. The interactivity around it is almost entirely cosmetic.

That’s the missed opportunity that kept nagging at me as I read, because the bones of something much better were sitting right there, half-assembled. Micro Adventure is, after all, working in the shadow of the Choose Your Own Adventure format. This is the beautiful “turn to page 47 if you decide to...” branching that kids were familiar with, and gamers too thanks to Rick Loomis and Ken St. Andre. This was a mainstream gamebook convention by 1984, and CYOA itself had already been running for five years. Space Attack never makes that connective leap. Imagine a version of this book where, instead of a single hardwired path through each program, you had a genuine decision point before the keyboard ever came out. What if there was a paragraph that let you choose to ask Tinker for a second opinion on the door’s keypad before typing anything, with that choice unlocked a hint that shaved a guess or two off finding the combination? Or maybe the turncoat gives you bad advice that costs you a few precious seconds of Dr. Macron’s air supply. Imagine the frequency-analysis sequence branching on how many lines of sample intercept you, the reader, decided to bother typing in, with a CYOA-style page jump for “if you see no pattern, turn to page X” versus “if you saw a pattern in the code, turn to page Y.”

The missile-defense program is the clearest case of all, because it’s the one place in the book that’s already structured like a game and still doesn’t let that structure touch the surrounding narrative. As written, Program 7 tracks your hits and misses across ten rounds and prints a final score. It gives you ACT’s tally of blocked missiles against BRUTE’s tally of hits, but the story never asks what that score actually was. Whether you go three-for-ten or a clean sweep, the book moves on to the same next chapter, because there’s no page-branch keyed to your performance. A version of this puzzle built with gamebook logic in mind would have let a strong showing against the guidance system buy you something concrete two chapters later. Maybe your success results in fewer shots fired at the station during the climax, say, or an extra page of dialogue where the captain trusts your judgment a little further in the future. Maybe it gives you a new code to enter into the first program that gives you a secret ending, good or bad. None of that would have required more sophisticated programming exercises. It would only have required the book’s prose architecture to treat the programs as nodes in a branching tree instead of as toll booths on a single one-way road, with your actual inputs and outputs as the toll. The closest the book ever comes to making code and consequence the same object is Program 2’s countdown, which at least dramatizes failure (overheating on the pad) as a real narrative outcome if you don’t catch the bug before running it. Tellingly, that’s also one of the most memorable programs in the book, precisely because for once you can lose. I do also love the missile tracking program, even though the game is in solving the error more than playing the coded game.

What strikes me most about this missed opportunity is that the book is, on some level, already trying to teach debugging as a real skill. When you encounter a buggy program, the book doesn’t hand you a solution. It tells you to figure it out. There’s no accompanying section that says “here’s what’s wrong.” Instead, you have to actually look at the code, run it, watch it fail, form a hypothesis about what went wrong, and test your hypothesis by modifying the program and running it again. That’s the scientific method applied to code. That’s how real debugging works. But the book then throws away the pedagogical power of that approach by not letting your success or failure at debugging change anything about the story that follows. You’ve learned that you can read code and understand how it works, and that’s valuable. But you haven’t experienced as much as I’d like is that code-reading has consequences. The programs you write or fix actually affect the world around you in ways that matter. In a book explicitly framed around you being the team’s computer expert, not making that connection feels like a significant lost chance to reinforce what programming actually means: it’s not a puzzle you solve for points, it’s the mechanism by which you exert control over systems that affect other people’s lives.

None of this is a knock against what the book accomplishes within its chosen scope. For a piece of 1984 mass-market children’s fiction, getting eight genuinely functional BASIC programs onto the page, debugged correctly, annotated with a cross-platform compatibility chart for half a dozen contemporary home computers, is a real achievement, and one of the coolest “tie a story to a gimmick” ever attempted. Buckholtz and Glick, who wrote the entire eight-book Micro Adventure line together, clearly cared about teaching the code correctly, not just gesturing at pedagogy. I just keep wishing the narrative apparatus around the code had been built with the same level of craft as the code itself. I wish that the act of typing, running, and debugging a program had been allowed to actually matter to which page you turned to next, the way a Choose Your Own Adventure decision matters, rather than being a fixed-outcome detour the story takes for granted you’ll complete correctly.

What Space Attack represents, ultimately, is a fork in the road that never quite got taken. By 1984, the tools existed to create genuinely interactive fiction that treated code not as a detour but as the central spine of the narrative. It could have been a series where your program’s output fed directly into branching text, where a debugging failure had real consequences, where the act of writing or fixing code changed what happened next. The technology and the narrative structures were both available. Buckholtz and Glick had the craft to do it and the book was a mass-market gamebook from Scholastic, and Scholastic was in the business of selling books that worked like Choose Your Own Adventure. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the book doesn’t have branching components, a gamebook editor should have recommended it. Folding programming deeply into that branching logic would have required a fundamentally different editorial and design approach than what they went with, but I think it should have tried.

The programming gamebook as a format didn’t take hold, and by the late 1980s the Micro Adventure line had run its course. The gamebook market itself contracted sharply after the mid-1980s peak, squeezed on one side by video games that offered immediate interactivity at home, and on the other by the rising sophistication of RPGs and the growth of the hobby gaming industry. What remains is a small library of wonderful titles, Space Attack among them, that stand as weird, ambitious, slightly-off artifacts of a specific moment when personal computers were new enough to be exciting, but computing literacy hadn’t yet become the default assumption it is now. The book never became a classic or a foundational text for either gamebooks or computer education. But it should have been something more than it was. It had the pieces, but it just never quite brought them together.

If you want to experience the programs without digging up a Color Computer or an Apple II emulator, I built an interactive companion widget that lets you run all of the program. You can run them with or without the bugs and fixes right in your browser, dressed up with an appropriately retro green-phosphor terminal aesthetic. It won’t fix the branching problem I’ve spent the last few paragraphs complaining about, but it will let you feel, in about the time it takes to read this review, exactly what a 1984 kid felt staring at a CRT waiting to find out if BRUTE had won.

Space Attack is currently out of print, but used copies are available at very reasonable prices if you want to follow along at home, bugs and all.