Designing a Fighting Fantasy Inspired Superhero Game

Last time I laid out a gaming gap that I wanted to fill for my own enjoyment. I’m a fan of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and the mechanics used in those books have been proven, by Puffin and then by Arion, to provide a solid skeleton for a real set of tabletop role playing game rules, but primarily for fantasy and Star Trek style science fiction. The one superhero gamebook in the line, Appointment with F.E.A.R., has never been officially turned into a fully realized set of role playing game rules. In its own way Fighting Fantasy is in its “Superhero 2044” stage, where it has mechanics that work well but has no robust character design rules.

I have argued in the past, and still believe, that the reason these rules don’t exist isn’t due to laziness or a lack of desire. It’s that it’s hard to design a set of rules to emulate all the powers comic book heroes display on a regular basis. Additionally, superheroes ask more of the 2d6 engine than fighting dragons typically does. When Superhero 2044 was released, it was inspired by a superhero game that “Mike Ford” (aka John M Ford the author of The Dragon Waiting) ran for his friends. Mike supposedly used the D&D rules as a basis for that game, but that’s not the system that ended up getting designed. Donald Saxman’s rules are revolutionary and move beyond the twenty-sided die and the game uses multiple systems to emulate different kinds of combat. As complex as it is though, Superhero 2044 doesn’t have rules for designing superpowers.

It took work by Wayne Shaw to create a fully flushed out power system, although a small power system was published in a very small print run “Deluxe Edition” that Lou Zocchi printed in the 2010s. Those are hard to find, but most of the “Deluxe” material was printed from ’s complete history article, the Super Rules for Superhero 2044 and other articles at Thoul’s Paradise, Different Worlds #23, and my own 2010 blogpost about the game. Yes, my more recent review is an update of that older blog post. The Deluxe Edition did include a small set of powers, but Wayne Shaw’s rules were robust enough to inspire the Champions role playing game.

Superhero 2044 needed the addition of a power system before it could be a fully playable game. While it ended up inspiring many other games, it never got its fully playable edition. That’s a future project for me, and I got permission from Wayne Shaw to update his specific rules for that purpose. I eventually want to take those rules and build a retro-clone of Superhero 2044 that is fully playable. Before I do that, though, I want to try making a superhero game based on the simpler Fighting Fantasy system. Keeping in mind the limitations of the game’s mechanics, I’d like to do it as a template/selection power system, rather than point based, system, I think working with Fighting Fantasy a good place to start on a collaborative design, and I’d like you to join along. So this post is about the first and, I’d argue, the most important foundation for a superhero game: powers.

Where Do You Start Conceptually With Powers?

Let me start where I always start when I think about superhero games. I start with Captain America, and with a designer who understood him better than most.

In his introduction to Marvel Heroic Roleplaying‘s Premium Civil War event book, Mike Selinker tells a story about an earlier project of his, the Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, and confesses a deliberate piece of design heresy. He had made Captain America the single most effective hero in that game. Not Thor, not the Hulk, not Doctor Strange. Cap. The powerhouses had powers; Cap had something Selinker rated higher, which he called heart, and the way heart cashed out at the table was beautifully concrete. Cap, he wrote, “used that heart to power through more options than any other hero.” When the chips were down, the hero you wanted to be playing was Captain America.

Hold onto that phrase… more options. It is going to turn out to the core piece of my answer to the design problem in this post. That’s probably no accident as Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game is one of my favorite superhero games. Heck, it’s one of my favorite games, period. Its card based mechanics enable both random failure and player agency in extremely interesting ways, but that is fodder for a future post.

Having a system that makes a character like Captain America matter is the primary game design job for anyone attempting to tell superheroic tales. A superhero game does not succeed because it can model Galactus. At its most basic modeling Galactus is easy, you just write big numbers. Superhero games succeed when the man with a shield and a plan is as worth playing, at the same table, as the god with the hammer. If your system can’t do that, nothing else about it matters. And the thing standing between the Fighting Fantasy engine and that goal is exactly the way it would instinctively want to handle a “power.” It’s one of the things that I’ve been less that satisfied with in more recent editions of Mutants & Masterminds. In the first edition, you could make both Batman and Superman as Rank 10 characters who focused on different things but operated within the same mechanical restraints, kind of like how early Champions assumed all superheros were built on 250 points an where the “Brick” and “Martial Artist” were equally effective in combat. In Champions, Obsidian and Seeker the amount of damage (Obsidian does 12d6 and Seeker 12d6 w/his Triple Irons), but Seeker is more likely to hit his opponents while Obsidian is more likely to resist damage. And there’s the little fact that Obsidian can lift 100 tons. The game is balanced so that Cap Matters.

Powers Aren’t Merely a Skinning of Gear…or Are They?

In the gamebooks, almost everything a hero can do runs through the same small set of numbers. Your sword is a SKILL check. The locked door is a SKILL check. The pit you leap is a SKILL check, maybe a Test of Luck if you’re feeling generous. Equipment, in this engine, is mostly a permission slip or a modifier. Equipment either lets you do something you couldn’t do without it (use a rope to climb), make a roll you couldn’t otherwise make (Thieve’s Tools for a lock), or it bumps the roll you were already making.

In some ways a superpower is a different conceptual animal. A fantasy hero carries a sword, but a superhero is their power. When Energy Blast goes off, it shouldn’t feel like “+2 to your attack.” It should feel like the world and the situation around the characters just changed. There’s suddenly a way to hit the gunman across the rooftop, to blow the door off its hinges, to end the fight from forty feet away, or to produce fire that can burn a book the villain is holding. Powers belong in the same conceptual drawer as magic spells and possibly “special” weapons, not in the drawer with ordinary swords and lockpicks. They alter what is possible, not merely what is probable. If they are a kind of equipment, and if we follow a Knave or Mausritter model they can be, then they are equipment that can alter the environment and are more than bonuses. They are special effect driven, even if they involve mechanics.

So the design problem splits cleanly into three questions, and I think the should be answered in this order:

1. What does the power actually do. What new possibility does it put on the table? (The Effect)

2. How does it turn on? What does it cost to use, and can it fail? (The Cost)

3. How is it balanced? Both against the other powers, and against that narrow, treacherous 2d6 curve. (The Challenge)

The middle question is the one I initially underestimated, so I want to give it the spotlight.

How Does a Power Turn On?

Every superhero RPG, whether it admits it or not, picks an activation model. There are four primary models, and each one has a narrative or mechanical price.

Always-on. The power is just there. Super Strength means you are strong, full stop. You add it to the relevant rolls and never think about it. You can lift more than mortal men. Maybe it costs endurance to use, but that depends on the game. This is how the gamebook and AFF would instinctively handle Super Strength and some other powers. In AFF, Super Strength would basically be a Special Skill that’s always live. Of course, if there’s no cost, this can become a problem. A power with no cost and no off-switch quietly becomes the correct answer to everything, and the player who took it stops making interesting decisions. (We’ll come back to how badly Super Strength in particular breaks the Fighting Fantasy math as it currently stands.)

Roll-to-activate. In Advanced Fighting Fantasy you would Test against SKILL, or a dedicated power attribute, every time you want the power to work. This is dramatic and it feels uncertain, which is appropriate for many settings. However that can be a fatal flaw in design for this genre. Nothing kills the four-color mood faster than your one defining ability whiffing. Spider-Man does not roll to see whether he sticks to a surface. That just happens, unless there is a specific narrative reason it doesn’t. If the Silver Crusader’s Energy Blast fizzles on a bad 2d6, the table wouldn’t feel tension, it would feel cheated.

Resource-cost. The power always works, but using it spends something from a pool. This can be Hero Points, Endurance, an energy track, or whatever. This is the model that Champions uses and one that could be incorporated in a game inspired by Appointment with F.E.A.R. if we shift what Hero Points represent. In Appointment, they were merely a way to track how well you performed as you played the game, but maybe they are a resource you spend instead. I like this because it falls between activation and a complex endurance system. It solves the whiff problem and the always-on problem at once. Your power is reliable but finite. You will get your dramatic blast; you just can’t get it eleven times in a row. In Champions, most well designed characters have plenty of Endurance, but some have Charges and the players who have that limitation tend to not be as one note in combat.

Narrative permission. Some effects shouldn’t be a roll or a cost. Instead, they should just be things you can now do because of who you are. Flight isn’t a check. If you have Flight, you can fly. ESP doesn’t fail, but there is a question regarding what it’s allowed to tell you, and that’s a ruling, not a die. The trick is knowing which powers are “permissions” and which are “actions.” See…powers kind of are equipment.

My strong opinion, and the one the game I’m building (and hope you will help design) runs on, is that I want a hybrid rather than a single model. A power’s baseline use should be reliable. I want four-color feel and so with rare exception powers should require no roll to turn on, because reliability is what makes a hero feel heroic. However, pushing a power past its baseline should cost a resource. If you want to use a called-shot Energy Blast, do a Super Strength feat that should be impossible (like hold up a mountain range), engage in a deep telepathic dive, that’s where you let the dice back in. Ideally as a Test made with Advantage/Disadvantage rather than a coin-flip. You get reliability for the signature move and tension for the reach. Cap always throws the shield. He doesn’t always make the impossible throw, but he makes it frequently enough that he regularly attempts it.

The Tyranny of the Flat Curve and Why I Don’t Want d20

I know that a lot of modern gamers are used to the d20 default, so I’d like to wander into how different mechanics alter probabilities and how d20 based games have a specific feel.

In Part 1 (well, Part 3a, but who’s counting?) I went down a probability rabbit hole discussing the 2d6 bell curve, because it’s a foundation of Fighting Fantasy’s game system. On 2d6, a flat numeric bonus alters the probability of success very differently depending on where you sit on the curve. A +2 near the median of 7 is gigantic, but the same +2 out at the top of the scale barely moves the needle. Heroes, by definition, sit near the top of the scale. At least if we want to have our game be “portable” to other Fighting Fantasy games, but that’s a different conversation. Because heroes are at the top of the scale, it means the single laziest way to build a power (“this power gives +2 to SKILL”) is also the worst, because it does almost nothing for the people most likely to have it, right up until the moment it does too much.

This is why I couldn’t use the same step-die mechanic of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying using the Fighting Fantasy engine. It just can’t effectively adopt a step-die system with its basic assumptions. Margaret Weis’s designers (Hi Cam, Rob, Mtt, Will, Phillipe, and Jesse!) threw out fiddly realism and gave each tier of ability its own die size. A character was Captain America strong at a d8 and the Thing strong at a d12. The gap between a strongman and a powerhouse was represented by the dice you rolled, and they layered Affiliations (Solo, Buddy, Team) and a plot-point economy on top of the step-die system. This made it so even a street-level hero could still grab the spotlight, especially if his or her Solo Affiliation was high enough (like the d10 for Moon Knight).

Marvel Heroic used a step-die system where attribute increases are represented by higher dice. I can’t do that with the Fighting Fantasy system. I am welded to two six-sided dice and a flat stat, and no amount of wishing changes the shape of that curve. In large part because Skill works on a “roll + to roll over” mechanic in combat, but SKILL and LUCK works on a “roll under” mechanic in other situations. If we did a die step mechanic, then the more effective you were at combat, the less lucky and the less skilled you would be in general. While that mechanic might work for some versions of The Hulk, it doesn’t work for Iron Man or Superman.

So my Fighting Fantasy inspired supers engine has to solve the spotlight problem a different way, and one of the best ways is to remember that powers aren’t merely stat bonuses. I need to stop expressing powers as flat bonuses to the core stats. A good power on this chassis should do one of two things. Either it grants a new option such as a thing you can now do that no roll on the standard table could accomplish (fly, read a mind, drop a force wall between the bus and the bomb). The other way could be that it changes the dice themselves in a narrower lane than a die step system. Maybe you roll with Advantage, reroll a failure, auto-succeed at a thing others must Test. Options and dice-shaping scale gracefully on a bell curve. Flat modifiers do not. That single principle quietly resolves most of the balance headaches before they start.

The Action Economy and the Currency

Which brings us to the concept of Hero Points. They are a mechanic that is used in many ways in many systems. Whether they are Fate Points as they are in Warhammer Fantasy, Bennies as in Savage Worlds, Hero Points like in DC Heroes, or Marvel’s Karma, super hero games love Hero Points. And the wonderful thing about Hero Points is that they help address another of baseline Fighting Fantasy’s weaknesses. The default in Fighting Fantasy is that 0 Stamina means death, and four-color heroes (even when they are the best at what they do) don’t kill...just ask the hardcore FASERIP player.

Here’s the elegant thing about choosing the resource-cost model for powers, it hands you the enforcement mechanism for the hero’s code for free. If Hero Points are both the fuel for your biggest powers and the reward for behaving like a hero then “a hero doesn’t kill” stops being a sentence in the introduction that everyone ignores in the first fight. It becomes the thing that lets you blast again next round. The four-color morality isn’t a lecture in this case, it’s the action economy. Players are rewarded for pulling the punch, for saving the bystander instead of stopping the villain, and for finding the non-lethal way to solve a problem. But that’s a whole post of its own, and I’ll address it when I finally get to actually building heroes.

For now, the takeaway is the question in the title. Before you stat a single power, before you draw up a single hero, you have to decide how powers turn on. You have to decide it knowing that this engine can’t widen its dice the way the big supers games do. If I get that right, then I can design a system that builds outward from reliable baselines and option-granting effects that are paid for out of a heroic currency. That action economy would let the Silver Crusader (regardless of build) can stand at a table next to a brick and a blaster and a telepath and matter. If I get it wrong, I’ve just built a fantasy game where one guy is inexplicably strong. That’s the difference between a superhero game and a game with superheroes in it. Champions, Marvel, DC Heroes, and more are superhero games, but GURPS Wildcards is a game with superheroes in it.

So here’s my question for you this time, because I genuinely go back and forth on it. Do you want me to design a game where your powers can fail? Some of you will want the drama of a blast that might not fire. Others will say a hero’s signature move should never whiff, and the only real cost should be how often you can reach for it. Tell me in survey or in the comments, because the answer will change how the whole power system gets built, and you’re helping me build it.

Next in the series: Building Heroes. I’ll cover origins and discuss the point-buy-versus-dice fight all over again. Then I’ll get more specific regarding how the Hero Point economy turns “a hero doesn’t kill” into a rule with teeth.

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If you liked this post, you might consider buying Tiny Supers. It’s one of the games that will be informing my design choices as we go through this series and it’s a very playable game that also approaches Supers with a very constrained mechanical foundation.

A while back I discussed what I called “My First Real Roleplaying Experience." Because my first in person role playing experience was terrible, and served as the source material for my entry in The Munchkin Book, my early experience with role playing games was through fantasy gamebooks like the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series. Sure, there were very good computer role playing games available when I was a kid, but you had to own a computer to play those and I didn’t get my first computer until I was an undergraduate. This experience gave me a life long love of gamebooks and I’ve played a lot of them over the years. The aforementioned Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series are great, and both are still in print today with Steve Jackson Games releasing a very nice new edition of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and Holmgard Press publishing (and continuing) the Lone Wolf series.

Writers like , Joe Dever, Ian Livingstone, and Steve Jackson (both US and UK), Gary Gygax, Flint Dille, Rose Estes, Ken St. Andre. and many more authors provided me with countless hours of fun, both before and after I finally found a table top role playing group that “fit” my style of play. Even as in person gaming came to dominate my role playing experiences, the love of the gamebooks remained and a big reason for that is that (in addition to engaging writing) they often had excellent underlying game mechanics. I started my Adventure Gamebooks as RPGs series as a kind of defense of these books as games. I think the writing is of high enough quality, more so with some than others, that that needs no defense. It’s the game aspect I’ve always believed got short shrift in people’s assessment.

When I put The Warlock of Firetop Mountain under the microscope a while back, I left a promise sitting on the screen. I noted that the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks had eventually thrown off two complete tabletop rule sets. Puffin first published a standard paperback version of Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-Playing Game that was supported with an adventure book called The Riddling Reaver, a setting book called Titan, as well as a “monster manual” called Out of the Pit. They followed this up with the larger format Advanced Fighting Fantasy series that included Dungeoneer, Blacksand!, and Allansia. If you look at the prices of those links and say “Good Grief Christian! You expect me to buy those?!” No, I don’t. Thankfully, there has been a fresh edition of the latter published by Arion Games in 2016 that you can buy cheap in pdf or affordable in hardcover. Arion has reprinted all of the original material and has greatly expanded the line and I’ll be reviewing some of their books in the relatively near future.

I wrote that article promising to write another one later two years ago, so I think we can say that later has arrived. This series is overdue for its next installment, and in the spirit of full disclosure I have an ulterior motive in writing that next Gamebook as RPG article, but I’ll get to that a little later. The question driving these posts has always been the same one: “how much fun would this particular rule set be as the foundation for a campaign?” With most gamebooks, the honest answer was “promising, but you’d have to build a lot yourself.” The Advanced Fighting Fantasy rulebooks are what happened when somebody actually did the building and this series is my small way of emulating what that series did, but with gamebooks that have been overlooked as role playing games.

A Quick Refresher (and an Old Diagnosis)

If you missed the Warlock entry, here’s a brief glimpse at the underlying engine of the system. Every Fighting Fantasy character lives or dies by three basic attributes: SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK. Combat is a beautifully simple opposed roll. Both sides roll 2d6, add SKILL, and the higher total lands a blow for 2 points of STAMINA. Out of combat, you roll 2d6 and try to come in at or under a stat in order to succeed but only SKILL and LUCK are used in these tests. If you test your LUCK, the stat ticks down by one whether you succeed or not. Those are the mechanics of the game. They are elegant and a great introduction to roleplaying games, but they are far from granular.

I had two critiques when I asked whether you could build a campaign using solely the rules in the gamebook. First, a single all-purpose SKILL stat does everything from fighting, climbing, balancing, picking locks, which means the character with the highest SKILL is quietly the best at the entire game. On a 2d6 bell curve, a two-point SKILL gap isn’t a small edge. It’s the difference between a hero who shines and a hero who watches. Second, rolling 1d6+6 for that all-important number bakes the disparity in at character creation, before anyone has made a single decision. My suggested fixes were to break SKILL into more granular areas so different heroes could be good at different things, and to move from random generation toward point-buy so nobody got stuck as the table’s understudy. I still like the idea of breaking up SKILL into a couple of categories, but I’m less bothered by the random roll now…so long as we can have character advancement later.

Fighting Fantasy Grows Up

The gamebooks were not meant to be a multiplayer RPG when they were originally published. They were a solo experience, a Game Master made of paper. They were hugely popular when they were initially published and still have a fan base, so the demand for a group version is obvious, and it arrived in the two waves mentioned above.

The first was Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-Playing Game written by Steve Jackson in 1984. It provided a gentle on-ramp that took the gamebook engine and added a referee and a party, but not much else. The second, and the one that inspired this series, was Advanced Fighting Fantasy. The first edition of Advanced Fighting Fantasy was developed by Marc Gascoigne (one of the most underappreciated figures in gaming history and I’ll need to do a post on just him some day) and Pete Tamlyn in 1989 and it greatly expanded what could be done with the Fighting Fantasy engine.

Arion Games revised, rewrote, and re-released the second edition of Advanced Fighting Fantasy penned by Graham Bottley in 2011. This initial release was expanded into the current Deluxe edition. Arion did us all a great service when they rebuilt and published the system you can use to run adventures for other people. Larger publishers have been publishing the solo gamebooks for decades, but it took a small company that started as a provider of paper miniatures to bring back the full table top experience to the public.

Advanced Fighting Fantasy was explicitly designed to hand the Game Master the keys and say now go write your own Titan. Arion have published a ton of brand-new material built for the system, though they do have couple of conversions of the famous gamebook stories like Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Citadel of Chaos, and Forest of Doom. One of the best new products is their Adventure Creator System that can be used as a Game Master or for your own solo play. It gives the full Fighting Fantasy experience allowing gaming with friends or playing when “You are the Hero!” They’ve got books for fantasy and for science fiction, but there’s a hole I’ll be addressing.

What AFF Actually Did to the Engine

Crack open Advanced Fighting Fantasy and the foundation is reassuringly familiar. SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK are still the holy trinity. Combat is still 2d6 + your number versus 2d6 + theirs. If you played the gamebooks, you already know 80% of how to play AFF. The other 20% is where the design earns its “Advanced.”

Change one: Special Skills. Instead of one stat resolving everything without modification, AFF layers a set of Special Skills on top of that foundation. Players spend points on skills like Swords, Stealth, Awareness, and dozens more. The value in these special skills are added to your SKILL for the specific thing you’re doing. A Hero with SKILL 7 and a Swords skill of 2 attacks at an effective 9, but only when swinging a sword. Their lockpicking is still a 7. They also added another basic attribute MAGIC that is used for the mystical arts, which is a good move. I do wish they’d split SKILL up a bit more, but this allows for far more variation of characters and is a significant improvement for a home game.

Change two: Point-buy instead of dice. Second-edition character creation isn’t random anymore. SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK start at base values and you spend a pool of points to raise them, then distribute your Special Skills and choose a Talent. Starting SKILL is deliberately lower than the old 1d6+6 heroes, which leaves room to grow over a campaign. No more rolling an 8 while your friend rolls a 12 and spending the next year as the sidekick.

The book doesn’t stop there. Talents function like feats or edges. These are small rule-benders such as a damage-boosting Strongarm or a Dodge-enhancing Swashbuckler that give heroes greater variety. The game also features a real magic system at last (Minor Magic, Wizardry, Sorcery, and Priestly abilities), which neatly answers the “Warlock has no magic” critique, though it should also be pointed out that magic is much expanded from the Fighting Fantasy books that did include magic like Citadel of Chaos. Combat gains decisions beyond “swing again” by including rules for dodging, weapon groups, an armor system that actually reduces damage.

So, how would I evaluate Arion Games’ work with regards to the series question of how much fun would Advanced Fighting Fantasy be as the foundation for a campaign? This time the answer is unhesitating. It keeps everything that made the gamebooks feel alive at the solo table, the fast, legible, tense system, and bolts on exactly the differentiation and fairness a group game needs. It is, to my mind, the best argument that the Fighting Fantasy engine was always a real RPG wearing a paperback disguise.

The One Hero Nobody Adapted

But this isn’t just a review of how someone else took a gamebook and turned it into a role playing game. This is a part of a series where I discuss how I would convert a gamebook if I was to turn it into a full role playing game and there is still room to do that in the Fighting Fantasy series.

Advanced Fighting Fantasy adapted the fantasy engine (with sourcebooks for Science Fiction), because fantasy is what the gamebook line overwhelmingly was. Most of the books told stories of swords, sorcery, and dungeons that took place in the world of Titan, but the Fighting Fantasy catalog had one glorious outlier. In 1985, Steve Jackson (the British one) wrote Appointment with F.E.A.R., the only entry in the series to cast you not as a nameless adventurer but as a costumed superhero named the Silver Crusader. In the adventure you spent your time, patrolling Titan City, hunting the Federation of Euro-American Rebels and their leader, the Titanium Cyborg. At the start of that book you got to choose a single super-power: ESP, Energy Blast, Super Strength, or Psionics. That choice rippled through the entire book. Different powers opened paragraphs closed to every other build. This also affected how many Hero Points you could earn during play. These were points given out in some sections that let you compare how heroic you were during each replay of the book and they added greatly to replayability.

Appointment with F.E.A.R. is a superhero RPG hiding inside a gamebook, and you know how much I love superhero roleplaying games. Other than one series of posts I found online where a fan shared their own homebrew rules, nobody has ever turned Appointment with F.E.A.R. it into a multiplayer game in the past 40 years. Advanced Fighting Fantasy will happily help you run a barbarian or a wizard, but it has nothing to say about running the Silver Crusader at a table with three friends.

That’s the gap and, to be fair, it’s a genuinely hard gap to fill. But I think that this challenge is half the fun of this series. How do we expand a simple role playing game skeleton so that it can emulate other stories in the same genre? The Fighting Fantasy engine has at least three weaknesses when it comes to emulating superheroes:

• Powers aren’t gear. A fantasy hero carries a sword, but a superhero is their power. How does a power get declared, activated, and paid for, without turning every turn into bookkeeping? The gamebook hand-waved this with a single chosen ability and a campaign can’t. Powers should feel different than +2 to SKILL or LUCK. Like Magic spells, they should affect the world around the characters.

• The genre is replete with power gaps. Comic book heroes run from a guy in a trench coat to literal gods, and they hang out with one another. My favorite classic Marvel team, The Champions (of Los Angeles) have one of the craziest rosters of all-time. We’ve got Angel, who can fly but is a mid-fighter and is as strong as…a regular person. Black Widow who is a trained assassin and martial artist. Ghost Rider, the Spirit of Vengeance whose stare causes even the bravest to quake. Iceman, because two X-men mean a title will sell, and Hercules the Prince of Power. Hercules is a literal god who will “Bestow the Gift of Battle” on foes well out of the league of his companions.

  

  This is a viable team in the comics, but 2d6 is a narrow band. The same bell curve makes it so that a two-point SKILL gap feels enormous in Warlock of Firetop Mountain. This disparity is merely a bug in a fantasy setting, because 2d6 produces a bell-shaped curve rather than a flat line. A +1 to SKILL isn't worth the same amount everywhere, as it is in a d20 game like D&D. It all depends on where your stat sits on the curve. The benefit of each extra point is largest in the steep middle of the range, around the median roll of 7, and shrinks as you move toward either extreme. A +1 when you have a SKILL of 6 swings your odds far more (+16.67%) than a +1 when you already have a 9 (+8.33%). At the top of the scale the curve flattens and extra SKILL buys less and less. That same mechanic, a nuisance when you're just trying to balance a party of adventurers, becomes a genuine design constraint you have to engineer around in a supers game, where the whole point is to make a god and a street-level brawler share a roster.

  

• The line you won’t cross. Appointment with F.E.A.R. gave us Hero Points and a hero’s code because it is deeply rooted in Four Color comics aesthetics and morality. It is a Comics Code Authority compliant adventure, which is interesting coming from an English design team. How do you make “a hero doesn’t kill” an actual mechanic, something with teeth, rather than a sentence in the introduction that everyone ignores in the first fight?

Where I’m Headed

Boy, that’s a lot of set up for my plans for “Part 3” in the Adventure Gamebooks as RPGs series. Because this is already getting long, I’m going to have to cheat on this being a solo part 3 and make this a kind of part 3a…did you notice the “a” in the title. That’s there because I need your help. It has already been established that the Fighting Fantasy engine can absolutely carry a campaign. Puffin proved that back in the day and Arion made it even better. What I want to do is to find out whether it can carry a superhero campaign, the one application that very few have actually attempted. Over the next few posts I’ll work through it in public and I’ll want your feedback. Here’s the basic outline of articles:

1. The Superpower Problem — how powers get built, activated, and costed on a 2d6 chassis, and why “how does a power turn on?” is the question that makes or breaks a supers system.

2. Building Heroes — character creation, origins, and the point-buy-versus-dice question all over again, now with capes.

3. The Game Itself — the full rule set, presented and playable, inspired by Appointment with F.E.A.R. but standing on its own two feet. By the time we are done, we’ll have filed enough of the serial numbers off that this will be its own game.

4. The Stress Test — Here I will stat up a handful of Marvel and DC icons and throw them at the system to see where it soars and where it falls.

One question to send you off, because I genuinely want to know before I start designing: back in the day, which power did you pick in Appointment with F.E.A.R.? I was an Energy Blast kid myself, and I’ve always suspected your answer says something about the hero you wanted to be. Tell me in the comments — your votes may very well shape how powers work when we build the thing.

You can purchase the Deluxe Version of Arion’s Advanced Fighting Fantasy rulebook at DriveThruRPG. The pdf is affordable, but the hardcover is a bit pricey.

The Adventure Gamebooks as RPGs Series

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Vincent Price was born on May 27th, 1911 and I meant to post this then, but I was submitting my dissertation for review by both my committee and grad division. Vincent Price is one of the most important pop culture figures of the 20th century. His charm, good looks, and ability to commit to even the campiest of roles with sincerity enabled him to have a highly successful career that spanned genre. While often associated primarily with horror films, as even I did in the title, he was truly one of the great actors of his era. He gave strong performances in films directed by some of the best directors in the history of film (Michael Curtiz, Otto Preminger, Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang, and Ernst Lubitsch to name a few) and brought equal professionalism to lower budget genre films by directors like Mario Bava and Roger Corman. He was what my wife and I call a “worker.” These are actors who perform as if they truly believe there are no small roles. He was extraordinarily charming and his charm made him ideal to play villainous roles ranging from Cardinal Richelieu to Dr. Anton Phibes, roles that required charisma and subtlety.

While Price starred in many non-horror roles, and of those I highly recommend watching Laura. It’s a masterful film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, and Dana Andrews. Tierney was one of th great leading ladies of her era, and stars in one of my favorite Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies Heaven Can Wait (no relation to the 70s film which was based on Here Comes Mr. Jordan…which is also wonderful). Laura is that rarest of film noir productions. It’s one that manages to zoom in on the corruption in society, while still providing hope. I won’t go into too much detail because you should really watch it and Price’s performance as Shelby is a large part of why the film works so well.

As much as I like Price’s whole filmography, it is his horror roles that I most often think of and watch on an annual basis. That’s because there is something special about a Vincent Price horror film that sets them apart from many entries in the genre. The horror films that Vincent Price starred in were not the violent shockfests people today often imagine when they thing of the words “horror film.” His films were not about gore, or quick cathartic release of tension, rather they were about fear. H.P. Lovecraft, a pioneer in American “Weird Fiction”, wrote in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature :

This horror of the unknown is the kind of horror that permeated the films of Vincent Price. To be sure some like the Tingler had moments of visual shock and gore, but even here the build up is slow and filled with tension. When the visual shock appears, it also includes what is a kind of shift in reality as a brilliant red color comes to fill the screen in an otherwise black and white film.

Most of the horror in Price’s films was internal to the viewed characters. The audience felt the horror not as an immediate thing which passes when the musical sting chimes, but as a lingering afterthought which remained with the viewer long after the film had been viewed.

Vincent Price and Roger Corman’s screen adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe tales are some of the best examples of this lingering kind of fear. With modern special effects making the imagery in The Pit and the Pendulum tame, possibly completely enervated of shock value, in comparison to the slaughter a Jason Voorhees is capable of committing. It is not the violence in Pit which horrifies, it is the thought of what man is capable of doing. This is the best kind of fear, the fear that reminds us as we look into the abyss that the abyss is looking back into us. True fear is horror at the possible meaninglessness of existence and the potential cruelty of man. How horrible is the realization in Fall of the House of Usher that Roderick Usher had accidently put his living sister prematurely into the tomb? The audience who watches this film can imagine both having to dig oneself free of an early grave and the terror of realization Roderick comes to when he realizes what he has done. There but for the grace of God go I.

When Price died many years ago, I wondered if the rising trend of slasher films would mean that the “lingering fear” horror tale was dead. I “feared” that all I would be able to watch were gorefests made purely for shock value, but I should have known better. History had already demonstrated that many filmmakers knew what kind of fear was most valuable. In John Carpenter’s version of The Fog, the horror wasn’t that the dead had come back for revenge. It was why they came back, and that it didn’t matter who they killed to get the requisite number of victims in compensation. Even a child would have sated their lust for vengeance. There were other films as well, but I would like to focus on what has come since Price died.

First and foremost among these films, in my mind, is The Blair Witch Project. This “found footage” film was released in 1999 and it perfectly encapsulates the lingering fear kind of horror over the rising trend of slasher films and body horror. What makes it more remarkable is that as a found footage film, it was in a genre that has been largely dominated by more visually graphic horror in the past. While I think that later generations will never get the full Blair Witch experience that I got as an undergraduate in college, where the television marketing was as much a part of the film as the film itself, I do think that the film stands on its own.

I remember leaving the theater to watch the movie with my friend Jay. We planned on reviewing it for the Sparks Tribune. I’m pretty sure that Jay and I gave the film a relatively negative review in our first draft as I didn’t think I’d experienced any real sense of dread. I do remember that as I was getting ready to fall asleep, I was absolutely terrified. I wasn’t scared while watching the film, but the seeds of fear had been planted and they lingered. Jay and I had to revise the review before we submitted it to reflect that later experience.

Since that time, many worthy dread based horror films have been released.

The Others, starring Nicole Kidman, is a wonderful example of personal realization bringing horror. Sure there are moments of suspense, but what keeps you talking about the film is the moment of realization. The same goes for Sixth Sense, but I think that the The Village with its demonstration of what people will do to create a “just” society is more horrifying. Even if you guess the “twist” in The Village the lengths the Elders go through to maintain the serenity of the village is frightening. When I talk about my love of The Village, or my enjoyment Lady in the Water, I often get pushback or eye rolls, but they are all films I enjoy. The first because I like its commentary on helicopter parenting and the second because it is a new fairy tale.

Eric Kripke’s story about the Boogeyman isn’t about gore, it is about how we give power to our fears and it gave Kripke enough clout to get the Supernatural series launched. The same can be said for the numerous Japanese horror films which have come our way over the past few years. They often contain shocking images, but it is the lingering thoughts of the spitefulness of the dead which have value in the long term. The most Lovecraftian of recent horror tales was The Forgotten in which humankind were naught but play pieces for aliens in a Godless materialistic universe. Julianne Moore, and all the other characters, were truly helpless against the antagonists and the resolution that she was “okay” isn’t cathartic because the threat remains for everyone else.

Of all of the recent and semi-recent, and there have been many, fear based horror films that have been produced since Vincent Price died, my absolute favorite is Woman in Black. Not only did the film demonstrate a triumphant return of my favorite horror film studio, Hammer Films, it also contained a wonderfully terrifying commentary on parenting. I mentioned above that The Village was about paternalism/helicopter parenting and the damage it can do to society. Woman in Black is about parents who are not willing to make personal sacrifices for their children.

Though the film has been out for a while, I don’t want to spoil the ending though that solidifies my central argument. However, I will point out one feature of the film. All throughout the movie, children’s lives are put at risk and parents cry out for help. There is only one character who is willing to risk death to save the children, both currently and previously dead, and that is the lead character portrayed brilliantly by Daniel Radcliffe.

It is also a film that touches deeply on the real experiences of parents. I could never have predicted how my life would change when my wife first called me to tell me she was pregnant. A switch was flipped. Where in the past, I had only had to deal with my own stresses and knew from my own perspective all the dangers I faced, I now lived in a world of constant ambiguity.

My emotional life since first learning that History and Mystery were on the way has been one that alternates between two states. The first is a steady underlying sense of dread. This dread isn’t a large feeling. It is background noise that is always there. It is a tension building soundtrack that fills my every moment. It’s not hard to adjust to, and the rewards of having children far outweigh the dread, but it is a constant companion.

The second state is rare, but very dramatic. It is a state of extreme panic that occurs anytime I sense my daughters are in any kind of real danger of harm. It is heart-stoppingly terrible and it happens at the oddest moments like the first time one of my daughters wanted to walk down the stairs or when Jody called to tell me that my daughters had to be tested for cystic fibrosis because they had significant constipation for a time and that was a symptom. We were blessed in that they tested negative and we merely needed to add some additional fiber to their diet, but I still remember that fear. It wasn’t paralyzing, but it was painful.

That’s the kind of fear that I need catharsis from and that’s the kind of fear that Vincent Price specialized in providing.

My twin daughters just graduated from high school and as one of our gifts to them, I took them to Denver for an overnight trip to see their favorite band, Good Kid. It was a marvelous experience and we were close enough to the stage that I could see myself in the Instagram post they did of the show we were at.

Since I entered graduate school, people have been telling me that “Rock is dead” and that Hip Hop and rap had pushed them aside forever. Obviously, Pop and Country remain as strong as ever. Pop’s focus on melody and vocal is a strong combination that has lasted 100 years so it’s not going anywhere. Sure, there are differences between Dean Martin and Bruno Mars, but there are also melodic and textural similarities. I never bought into this kind of doomerism.

I was always able to find new Rock, Punk, Pop Punk, Metal, and Alternative Bands. Heck, Guitar Hero and Rock Band on their own kept a lot of great music in kids minds. It did become harder for me to find new music as the modes of distribution exploded though. The combination of YouTube, Soundcloud, TikTok, Streaming, and you name it made it hard for me to find music as I was holed up working on my dissertation and working. There was a brief moment when I almost sank beneath the waters of “Oh, no! I’m too old to like the music of the kids today!” Then my daughters, and students, began talking about the bands they liked and my world has been filled with a bunch of new stuff. So what is some of this stuff?

Obviously, Good Kid tops the list. I still remember the day my daughters History and Mystery asked me if I would tell them what I thought about this band they liked. I felt proud that they thought enough of me to ask, but I was an instant fan. Good Kid is a great combination of several streams of Indie Rock and Pop Punk and they are very fan forward. Cicada is a typical feel good Good Kid tune.

I first encountered The Warning when a friend sent me their Enter Sandman cover. It was a good cover, but I thought their original stuff was much better. Their new song Kerosene is getting a lot of play, but I prefer their other new song Ego. I often say that Ke$ha’s song The Beautiful Life is one of the most truly cyberpunk songs ever written. It captures the vapid despair of the future that Walter Gibson and Bruce Sterling argued was around the corner. It’s one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard. Ego isn’t as sad, but it sounds like what Skinny Puppy and Ministry hinted the music of a cyber future would sound like and with the age of AI finally on the rise, we are entering the real cyberpunk future. Their song “Hell You Call a Dream” echoes the emotional beats of Ke$ha’s dance of despair, but from a metal perspective.

I have no idea how MEMI(매미) showed up in my YouTube feed, but I am glad she did. Her sound is a nice combination of Grunge and Pop that makes for an interestign mix. It’s as if Soundgarden and Toni Basil got together to form a band and I’m very much into that vibe.

President shares some sonic qualities with Sleep Token in the way they use electronic layering as well as some vocal elements that are similar to Jared Leto and 30 Seconds to Mars. The combination of hard hitting guitar riffs and electronica adds them to my list of modern cyberpunk (cyberrock?) artists. They’ll be performing in Garden City later this year and I’ll try to check them out.

Def Leppard recently did a cover of Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode and it really demonstrates how Depeche really was an industrial band at heart. Phil Collen’s flawless performance of the guitar highlights how solid the riff that forms the core of the song is. Very cool cover that deserves more than the 41,000 views it’s received so far.

I’m always down for some new Pop Punk…always…but I was surprised to see a great new Pop Punk band come out of Atlanta. It’s a great music city, but its know for Indie, Rap, and Country and the rebellious suburban vibes of Pop Punk don’t seem to fit a place as deeply rooted in Southern Gothic as Atlanta can be. Just goes to show that the influx of film and television productions in the early 2000s helped create a Southern Orange County that could produce a band with a perfect name The Paradox. Yes, it’s a Paradox that Atlanta could create a Pop Punk band, but they are great.

The Belair Lip Bombs keep growing on me. They very much capture the sounds of late 1990s Pacific Northwest rock mixed with classic Shoegaze. Not bad for a band from Australia. Their sound isn’t that of the bands that broke out of the Seattle scene, rather the bands who formed the heart of it and I’d like to thank KEXP (a Seattle station I listen to) for introducing me to their sound. In Hey You, you can hear a little echo of INXS. It’s subtle, as is are the U2 notes, but they are there.

That’s just some of what I’ve been listening to lately. What have you been listening to.

While Manly Wade Wellman is listed as one of the inspirational reading recommendations in Appendix N of the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (sic), I discovered his works while I was an undergraduate in college. My friend J and I were talking about our favorite fantasy authors one day and he mentioned Wellman and his John the Balladeer stories. I had never read these stories or heard of Wellman. Heck, though I owned a copy of the DMG I hadn’t taken more than a glance at Appendix N at that time. I did, however, trust J’s literary taste. J (his real name is John Ford, but his nickname is J…yes, the letter J and not Jay) and I had talked extensively about movies and for a time wrote a review column in the Sparks Tribune called Celluloid Say-So. I had great fun writing those with him as we’d sit by my computer and rotate paragraphs in an attempt to write a simulated conversation about our experience with a movie. I knew what he liked; and I knew I tended to like most of what he enjoyed. I also, eventually, learned that one of my favorite science fiction and fantasy authors was close friends with Wellman.

On March 17, 1970, David Drake, law student, soon-to-be Vietnam draftee, future author of Hammer’s Slammers, walked into a writing office above a drugstore in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and introduced himself to the man Karl Edward Wagner would later call “the dean of fantasy writers.”

Drake recorded the meeting in his journal that night writing that Wellman was “heavy, iron-grey with a brush mustache, wearing a sport coat, dark blue shirt & tie.” They talked about the John the Balladeer stories, about Charles Fort, about Lord Dunsany (whom Wellman had met), and about Oscar Wilde. Drake would later describe it as “pretty typical of the hundreds of others I had with Manly in later years.” Conversations with Wellman covered wide ground and were digressive, ricocheting across the whole of literary and human experience.

Drake had been putting the meeting off for years. He was embarrassed, he said, “and didn’t want to seem pushy to such a great figure.” He finally picked up the phone two weeks before he was going to be shipped out to Southeast Asia. Drake reasoned with the bleak practicality of a man facing serious odds that “there was a very good chance I was going to die in the next year” and that he would feel like an idiot in his final moments if he hadn’t taken the chance.

He made it back. For the next fifteen years, until Wellman’s slow death from infection in 1986, Drake was a fixture in “the Triangle’s” small world of professional fantasists. The Triangle is the nickname of the part of North Carolina that contains Duke, NC State, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At the center of this geographic triangle lies Research Triangle Park, the largest research park in the United States. It’s an academic and intellectual hub, even more today than it was in 1970. It was in this milieu that Drake found himself socializing regularly with Wellman and his wife Frances, and with the young Karl Edward Wagner, who had already sold “That Robert E Howard stuff” and dropped out of medical school to write full time. Three writers at different stages of their careers, different temperaments, different lanes. bit bound together by geography, affection, and a shared conviction that the pulp tradition was worth taking seriously.

That friendship is very interesting and it provides one of the few windows we have into what Manly Wade Wellman was actually like as a person. It also gives us a glimpse into a different triangle. A literary triangle that is an odd mix of literary styles and a T.S. Eliot style transmission of genre ideas that passes from Wellman to Wagner to Drake. It is a real literary lineage that the fantasy field has mostly failed to acknowledge, largely because the writers were so different in their topics. Wellman was a fantasist who is most famous for his folklorist fantasy and though he wrote horror stories, they echo of the Holler and Southern Tradition. Wagner may have written “That Robert E Howard stuff,” but his Kane stories are brutal and not for the light of heart and his horror is often disturbing and fully embraces the Gothic in Southern Gothic. His short story “Sticks” is a must read and it is featured in a number of anthologies, including the one I just linked. Drake’s stories draw tend on classical mythology (Babylonian in addition to Greek and Roman) or his own experience as a Vietnam veteran. His book Redliners, the book he is proudest of, is a harrowing story about the link between veterans and civilians the writing of which served as a kind of therapy for Drake. Both Wellman and Wagner recommended that Drake draw on his experiences in Southeast Asia for his fiction, and you can see shadows of Vietnam throughout his Hammer’s Slammers stories.

Though they were very different people from different generations, Wagner founded Carcosa Press in 1973 specifically to rescue Wellman’s work in hardcover at a moment when Wellman’s collected horror fiction was effectively inaccessible. Wagner later served as literary agent for Wellman’s estate. Drake visited Wellman nearly every day during the last ten months of his life, listening as the old man used him “as a dump for his memories about old girlfriends, books he’d known and loved, and all the other fragments of his long life that were most vivid to him.” When Wellman died, Drake wrote: “So long as I live, so does a little bit of Manly Wade Hampton Wellman.”

That is what literary preservation actually looks like. Not institutions. Not syllabi. Three writers in a college town who loved each other’s work and showed up. Sadly, all three are now dead and it is up to us to keep up the legacy of an oft forgotten author.

The Problem of Wellman

Here is the problem with writing about Manly Wade Wellman in 2026, he doesn’t fit easily into our check box genre lists. Every other major figure in Appendix N fits somewhere recognizable. Robert E. Howard IS sword and sorcery. He is the wellspring and you can shelve him easily. You can explain him in a sentence, you can point to Conan and be done, or at least that is the common understanding. Fans of Howard know that Conan barely scratches the surface and that the rest of Howard’s work suffers a the same problem Wellman does. Lovecraft is cosmic horror. Jack Vance is dying-earth picaresque. Fritz Leiber is the sophisticated, ironic, urban fantasy of the Gray Mouser. Even the more obscure entries have a lane. Margaret St. Clair is paranoid underground SF, A. Merritt is lush pulp adventure, Lord Dunsany is mythopoeic fairy tale. As with Howard, these are all reductive. My favorite Leiber stories, for example, are his urban fantasy tales like Conjure Wife or Our Lady of Darkness, but he is best known for the Twain (Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser).

Wellman has no lane. He has a territory, and it is vast, and it is strange, and it covers roughly 70 years of fiction across at least four distinct registers that have almost nothing in common except their author. Let’s take a moment and consider what we are actually looking at when we look at the Wellman bibliography:

John the Balladeer (aka Silver John) is a wandering folk musician in the contemporary Appalachian mountains who carries a guitar strung with silver strings and encounters the demons, witches, and old things that persist in the hollows and ridges of the Carolina highlands. The John stories are intimate, wry, rooted in authentic Appalachian folklore that Wellman absorbed through his friendship with the scholar Vance Randolph, who took him on field trips through the Arkansas Ozarks to collect folk traditions directly from communities still practicing them. Silver John is not a wizard. He is not a warrior, exactly. He is a man who knows old songs, knows old customs, knows that iron and silver and running water and righteous faith have real purchase in a world where old things have not gone away. The horror in these stories is communal and survivable. The faith that defeats evil is specifically, deliberately Christian. It’s not the Catholic ritual we see in so many modern horror films. It’s not ceremonial magic. Instead, it’s the Baptist and Methodist piety of mountain people who never stopped believing in demons because they never stopped believing in God.

John Thunstone is a New York occult investigator. He’s big, powerful, and carryies a sword-cane with a blade of silver. He operates in a world of secret societies, ancient sorcerers, and creatures from pre-history that have endured into the modern era. The Thunstone stories are more urban, more adventurous, closer to the heroic pulp tradition. They belong on the same shelf as Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, and they are generally better. In my own headcanon, he and the Balladeer are the same person but the mood of their tales is very different.

Judge Pursuivant is an older occult detective, a retired jurist with white hair and white mustache. He’s the Judge Holden of supernatural inquiry. Except unlike McCarthy’s Judge, Pursuivant is fundamentally decent and specifically faithful. He and Thunstone appear in the same stories occasionally, crossing paths like detectives in a shared fictional universe.

Kardios of Atlantis wanders the ancient world in a series Wellman wrote in the 1970s and ‘80s — a lone hero navigating a world of Greek mythology as it actually was before the myths were tidied up, where the gods are real and ambiguous and the monsters are genuinely monstrous. These stories are lighter in tone, closer to sword and sorcery, written with a scholar’s knowledge of classical sources and a storyteller’s instinct for what makes a good yarn.

Hok the Mighty goes further back than any of this. Hok is a Cro-Magnon hero — a man of bone and spear, the first and most literal of all warriors, fighting in a world before agriculture, before cities, before writing, where the enemies are Neanderthal kin-rivals and the great predators of the Pleistocene and, sometimes, things that have no name. The Hok stories were among Wellman’s earliest, and they are still striking: lean, hard, imagining human beginnings not as paradise but as a condition of constant, creative, violent survival.

One writer. Four registers. Horror, myth, prehistory, the occult. Faith, humor, violence, wonder. And that’s before you get to the historical fiction, the detective stories, the journalism, the non-fiction, the westerns. The guy did write a story where Sherlock Holmes teams up with Professor Challenger to investigate what is happening in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. He cowrote that last story with his son Wade (1937 - 2018).

What Wellman Knew That Lovecraft Didn’t

The comparison to Lovecraft is unavoidable because it clarifies what is actually at stake in the John the Balladeer stories and how Wellman approached the horror tale.

Lovecraft is one of Appendix N’s most influential figure and is likely its most discussed one. That discussion has increasingly focused on what makes Lovecraft’s horror work so well. His cosmic horror presents a universe of alien power that is genuinely indifferent to human suffering because it is so vast that humans are significant. The horror works because the protagonists are alone, because the old knowledge is fragmentary and corrupted, because the traditions that might have helped have been destroyed or forgotten, because there is no community capable of standing against what comes from outside. Lovecraft was responding to Nietzsche’s claim regarding the last man that they are indifferent to the vastness of space. Lovecraft argued that man’s principle fear is of the unknown, and that the big questions Nietzsche’s last man blinks at are the source of terror.

Wellman’s horror is built on exactly the opposite architecture of both of these authors. Man, in Wellman’s view is neither the nihilist nor the craven. In the Balladeer stories, for example, the old knowledge is intact. The folk traditions are real, and people still practice them. When John encounters a witch or a demon or a thing older than naming, he is not alone. Instead, he is embedded in a community of mountain people who remember things and who will stand with him when the time comes. The songs he sings are not incantations he has to rediscover from corrupted manuscripts. They are folk songs that have been kept alive because folk songs are kept alive by being sung, by being passed down, by being loved. The faith that defeats evil is not occult knowledge reserved for initiates. It is the faith of common people who never abandoned it.

This is not naive. Wellman knew how hard mountain life was. He knew the darkness in the hollows (Hollers) was real darkness, not metaphor. He understood the cruelness of those who lived there as much as Raylan Givens. He earned the ethnographic knowledge that grounds these stories through actual fieldwork with Randolph, not through armchair scholarship. The result is horror that is, paradoxically, more frightening in some ways than Lovecraft, because it takes place in a world where the human community has real resources and still sometimes loses.

But it is also horror that is, fundamentally, hopeful. Not in a saccharine way. In the way that faith is hopeful. The characters in Wellman stories have the conviction that there is something worth defending, that the right song at the right moment matters, that the silver string on the guitar is not just metal but meaning. That’s why I made the Raylan Givens reference. Raylan is a hero in a dark world. Many of the criminals he opposes would be equally at home in Breaking Bad, but Givens isn’t alone when he stands against these forces.

This is the road not taken in American horror fiction, and it is the road not taken in D&D. The game that drew on Appendix N reached for Lovecraft’s cosmic horror and Howard’s heroic violence far more than it reached for Wellman’s communal, faithful, folk-rooted darkness. It is easy to understand why. Cosmic horror scales well to dungeon design, and heroic violence is the grammar of the combat encounter. But something was lost in that choice. The John the Balladeer stories suggest a fantasy gaming tradition where the party is embedded in a real community with real stakes, where the songs and customs and beliefs of ordinary people are the actual tools of supernatural resistance, where faith is not a character class but a lived practice with mechanical teeth. It’s a sentiment also on display in the Paksenarrion novels by Elizabeth Moon where more time is spent discussing what it means to be good and how it is important for champions of goodness to know and experience the suffering of the average community member and it’s one that deserves its own game.

The Man Himself

Drake’s account of Wellman, assembled across multiple essays on his website, is irreplaceable because it captures someone who is genuinely hard to categorize, as hard to categorize as his fiction. The primary essays are “Manly Wade Wellman, Reporter,” “Hammer’s Slammers (1979),” and “Manly Wade Wellman,” but there are many more because Wellman loomed large in Drake’s life.

Wellman was born in 1903 in Portuguese West Africa, where his father was a medical officer. He grew up between Angola and the American South. He played football on scholarship at college. He worked as a crime reporter in Wichita in the late 1920s, accompanying police on raids because he was big and athletic and on good terms with the department. He tramped through the Arkansas Ozarks with Vance Randolph in the early 1940s, listening. He wrote for Weird Tales and Unknown and Planet Stories and every other pulp of consequence. He moved to Chapel Hill after the war and stayed for forty years.

There’s one anecdote from Drake’s writing that has always stuck with me and demonstrated the difference between Wellman and his young proteges Wagner and Drake. Wellman got into an argument over whether cocaine was addictive or medically beneficial. Wagner, fresh out of medical school, was “sneeringly certain of the medical opinion that cocaine was non-addictive.” Drake, impressed by the Wagner’s assertion of a scientific consensus, agreed. Wellman, who had experience watching the Wichita drug trade as a working crime reporter in 1930, was adamant that cocaine destroyed people. “Now,” Drake wrote, looking back decades later, “I can only nod to Manly’s memory. Manly was right; I was wrong. And that was generally true when we differed on matters of opinion.”

The lesson Drake draws is interesting and is evidence of his humility. According to Drake, Wellman was smarter than he, in his arrogance, had given him credit for. The old man who wore a sport coat to meetings in his office above a drugstore, who talked about Dunsany and Oscar Wilde and Charles Fort in the same conversation, who wrote stories about a mountain musician with a silver guitar. That was a man who knew things the younger writers hadn’t learned yet, because he had learned them the hard way.

It was this knowledge from experience that Karl Edward Wagner understood when he named Wellman “the dean of fantasy writers.” Not the most famous. Not the most commercially successful. Not the most influential on the game that would define the genre’s commercial future. The Dean. Wellman was the one who had been there from almost the beginning, who had seen the so much, who carried much of what was worth carrying, and who loved to share his knowledge with the next generation.

Wagner spent years making sure that the carrying continued. Carcosa Press where he published the excellent anthologies Worse Things Waiting and Lonely Vigils, which were briefly made available again by Shadowridge Press but which are now out of publication again. He ran the literary estate. He made sure that every hardcover edition began with careful introductions. What Wagner did was not glamorous work. It was the work of someone who understood that the tradition doesn’t survive on its own, that it survives because particular people make particular choices to preserve particular things. Wagner, the rebel who challenged tradition and the status quo worked hard to make sure that a stodgy advocate of that very tradition was lovingly preserved.

Drake understood it too. He showed up. Day after day, in the last ten months, listening to the old man talk about old girlfriends and books and fragments of a long life. Not because it would help his career, but because it was the right thing to do. As I read the newsletters Drake wrote in the final two years of his own life, after he’d suffered a head injury in a motorcycle accident, I could see him attempting to give all of his readers the same gift Wellman had given him. Yes, Drake being there for Manly was a gift, but so too was the insight and wisdom that Wellman gave to him. As Drake struggled to write, something that had always been easy for him, the power of his words hit harder than ever. I miss him and I miss his tales of Wellman.

The Games That Were Built for This, and the Ones That Should Have Been

What game should you use if you want to play in the waters that Wellman mapped out? There are a few good answers and here’s a brief rundown.

Game One: The Chained Coffin and the Shudder Mountains

The most direct gaming response to Wellman already exists and is a wonderful tribute to the author. The Chained Coffin (DCC adventure #83), written by Michael Curtis for Goodman Games, is set in the Shudder Mountains which are an Appalachian-analogue hill country of backwoods superstition, old evil, and folk tradition that Curtis built explicitly from the John the Balladeer stories. Thanks to Goodman Games, Wellman got the same institutional treatment Fritz Leiber has received many times, but too few people have noted it. Joseph Goodman read all of Appendix N when he was doing research as he designed Dungeon Crawl Classics and he’s published products for many of the overlooked authors on that list.

The Shudder Mountains setting does something mechanically interesting in the DCC context. It leans on the patron system and on the game’s relationship to luck and divine favor in a way that rhymes with Wellman’s folk architecture. The magic here doesn’t come from mastery of arcane systems. It comes from knowing the right words, the right songs, the right names. John does not memorize spells in his stories. He carries silver strings and knows what they mean. DCC might seem an odd fit for Wellman’s fiction. After all the DCC funnel, where zero-level characters die in job lots until a few survivors emerge hardened and defined is a defining and brutal feature of the game. However, characters who have levels in DCC are much more capable than zero-level characters and this allows it to fit the Wellman register of community survival better than it might first appear. The people of the Shudder Mountains are not heroes by birth. They are heroes because they endured.

If you are already in the DCC ecosystem, start here. Curtis did the work.

Game 2 — The Hybrid: Shudder Mountains Setting, Savage Worlds Engine, Holler Soul

If you want to run Wellman’s full range, John the Balladeer and Thunstone, folk horror and pulp action, intimate community dread and a big man throwing villains like javelins. I think the best answer is a three-part combination that none of its components fully achieves alone.

The first component is the Shudder Mountains setting material from the DCC boxed set. Use it as a sourcebook regardless of system. The geographic and folkloric detail Curtis assembled is fantastic. The regional monster ecology, the backwoods social texture, the specific way old evil nests in specific places is valuable independent of DCC’s resolution mechanics. Strip the system and keep the world.

The second component is Holler: An Appalachian Apocalypse, Tim Earley’s folk horror setting for Savage Worlds Adventure Edition is an official Pinnacle product. Shane Hensley, who was raised in Appalachia himself and recognized in it something true. Holler is set in a sealed-off version of the Appalachian mountains threatened by the Blight, a toxic fog, and beset by demons, cryptids, haints, and roguish fey. Its heroes are everyday Appalachian folk like miners, moonshiners, granny women, holy rollers, roustabouts, and bluegrass pickers. That last archetype is John the Balladeer to the bone. The granny women are the keepers of the folk tradition Wellman spent decades documenting. The holy rollers are the Baptist and Methodist faith that John’s world takes seriously as a supernatural tool. Holler builds Wellman’s community architecture directly into the setting premise, The heroes are outmanned and outgunned, and they win through kinship bonds, wits, and the old knowledge and not through power levels.

The third component is the Savage Worlds Adventure Edition engine itself because it allows for the kind of casual heroism I think is necessary for a Wellman-esque role playing game. Savage Worlds has Wild Cards. These are Player characters and named NPCs who roll an extra d6 on every trait roll and keep the better result. Wild Cards are meaningfully, mechanically more capable than ordinary people. They survive things that kill extras, they act with a decisiveness that lesser characters cannot match. This matters because Thunstone, and other Wellman heroes, are Wild Card in the precise sense the game intends. He is described in the same breath as Doc Savage and Tarzan. He beats monsters with his fists. He is wealthy, physically imposing, and possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of the occult that he uses as a tactical asset rather than a source of dread. Essentially, he’s a Lovecraftian “hero” if Robert E. Howard had created him. Anyone who has read “The Challenge from Beyond” knows what I am talking about. It’s a shared tale where each author writes a section and passes it on to the next author to navigate the section ending challenge. Lovecraft leaves the protagonist a wriggling mass horrified by what he has become, but Robert E. Howard has him take it in stride as a new adventure.

As with Robert E. Howard’s version of George Campbell (the protagonist of Challenge) running Thunstone in Call of Cthulhu, where investigators are structurally fragile and sanity is a declining resource, fights his entire character concept at the mechanical level. Running him in Savage Worlds, where the Wild Card system says this person is exceptional and that exceptionalism is real and has teeth, is correct.

The three together form something none of them are individually. It provides a Wellman table that handles the intimate folk horror of John the Balladeer, the pulp action of Thunstone, and the community-rooted survivability of Hok in the same session, without switching systems, without the GM fighting the mechanics to reach the fiction.

Game 3: Chill, and Why It’s the Philosophical Answer

For groups who want the Thunstone and Pursuivant register specifically ( the occult detective, the investigation, the urban horror), the game you want is Chill, and the reason is not mechanical but architectural. Since it’s out of print, you’ll have to settle for Cryptworld by Daniel Proctor, but it’s a worthy successor.

Chill, originally published by Pacesetter in 1984, puts players in the role of Envoys of SAVE. Player characters are ordinary people dedicated to fighting the Unknown, the animating force behind all supernatural evil. The Envoys have access to the Art which is a collection of folk techniques, spiritual disciplines, and hard-won practices that give them real, reliable purchase against the Unknown. The Art is not spellcasting in the D&D sense. It is closer to what John the Balladeer does when he selects the right song for the right moment, or what Thunstone does when he inscribes the Latin from Judges on his blade and trusts that it means what it says. Sic pereant omnes inimici tui. Thus perish all your enemies. He believes it. The game should too.

More importantly, Chill is structurally hopeful. The Unknown is dangerous and the Envoys are human, but the game is built around the assumption that good people with the right knowledge can face down evil and win. This is the assumption Lovecraft’s fiction explicitly rejects and Wellman’s explicitly requires.

Game 4: The Problem Call of Cthulhu Cannot Solve

Call of Cthulhu is the obvious answer for the Thunstone and Pursuivant register, but it is wrong in an instructive way.

Let’s take a look at the first John Thunstone story. “The Third Cry to Legba” (1943) opens with a hidden cult performing ritual invocations of a powerful supernatural entity. There’s a secret congregation, a gate being opened, something terrible on the other side. If you described this to a CoC player they would recognize it immediately. It maps directly onto the Louisiana bayou cult from Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” It’s a similar structure of hidden worship, the same sense of an older world pressing through into the modern one, the same thrill of uncovering what should have stayed buried.

The difference is where the focus of the story lies and what the source of evil is. Lovecraft’s Louisiana cult calls something genuinely alien and the invesigators who encounter the cult are a part of the background narrative and not the real action of the story. The foe the cult wants to summon is a thing that erodes investigator sanity by proximity alone, because the human mind cannot process what it is. Wellman’s cult invokes Legba who is the Vodou lwa who opens the gate for other spirits. This is a figure with a real name, a real tradition, specific known vulnerabilities, and a counter-tradition that Thunstone has studied because he did his homework before arriving. This is not an imagined new horror, but a supernatural being from our world. The Necronomicon is referenced in the first Thunstone story, but as an aside. The reference is a knowing nod to Lovecraft’s universe that Wellman acknowledges exists and then declines to find particularly alarming. Wellman’s response is that of Howard. Why should I be afraid of this? I can learn from it. Thunstone has read the Necronomicon. He finds his saint-forged silver sword considerably more useful.

This is the architectural difference. CoC’s sanity system exists because Lovecraft’s worldview requires it, The more you know, the worse it gets, because what you learn is unbearable and true. Thunstone’s worldview is the direct inversion of Lovecraftian dread. The more you know, the better equipped you are, because correct knowledge of the right name and the right counter is exactly how you win. You can run Thunstone in CoC if you fight the system hard, but I think Kenneth Hite’s Trail of Cthulhu, the GUMSHOE variant, handles competent investigators better and rewards knowledge rather than punishing it. but you are still rowing against the current.

The Shonokins are where this distinction becomes sharpest. Wellman’s pre-human race. The cat-eyed, long-fingered, aliens who claim that North America was theirs before the first human set foot on it, feel at a glance like a Mythos race. They have the deep uncanniness that Lovecraft associated with the inhabitants of Innsmouth or the things beneath Dunwich, but they are not cosmic horrors. They are opponents. They have a specific, exploitable weakness. They cannot bear the sight of their own dead. Thunstone knows this and uses it with brutal efficiency. Running them as CoC Mythos creatures is a category error. It imports cosmic despair into a story built on the premise that the right knowledge, applied correctly and sometimes with a silver coated sword stroke, is enough.

While AD&D mentions Manly Wade Wellman, it’s a poor fit for his fiction in many was. To properly play a Wellman inspired game you need Chill, you need Savage Worlds. You need a system that agrees with him that faith is a tool, that folk knowledge is real power, that a big man with a silver sword and something worth defending can walk into the dark and come back out. The game built for Lovecraft’s universe is the wrong game for Wellman’s and knowing why tells us something about different people can approach horror as a genre.

Where Should You Start?

If you have read nothing by Wellman, start with Who Fears the Devil?, the Karl Edward Wagner edited John the Balladeer, or the Complete John the Balladeer. The story that usually opens these anthologies is “O Ugly Bird!”, and it is as good an entry point as exists in American horror fiction. It’s lean, funny, frightening, and quietly devastating. It contains everything Wellman does that nobody else does. It’s also a joy to read aloud because Wellman captures the voice of the Holler so well.

After you’ve finished with the Balladeer, I recommend Worse Things Waiting, the Carcosa Press collection that was also published by Shadowridge Press. This gathers Wellman’s Weird Tales horror across the full range of his work. It features Thunstone, Pursuivant, standalone horror, and other stories ranging the breadth of a career. It is hard to find and worth finding.

The Kardios stories are in print from DMR Books, which has done serious work bringing Wellman’s prehistoric fiction back into circulation. Read them as a companion to Howard’s Kull stories. They demonstrate same fascination with the deep past, with a very different conception of what that past means. Kardios is a classical scholar’s idea of adventure fiction, which is either a recommendation or a warning depending on your tolerance for myth rendered straight.

And if you want to understand what it felt like to be inside the community of writers who took Wellman seriously, read David Drake’s website. The essays are brief and personal and irreplaceable. A man remembering his teachers.

Manly Wade Hampton Wellman was born on May 21, 1903, in Kamundongo, Angola. He died on April 5, 1986, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His ashes are scattered in the yard of the house he shared with Frances for fifty years. She said she still saw him around the house after he was gone. She died in 2000. Their ashes are together now.

He was 122 years old yesterday. He deserves more readers than he has. Go remedy that.

Wellman at the Table: A Gaming Companion

Stat Blocks and Adventure Seeds for Savage Worlds Adventure Edition and Chill (Pacesetter 1st Edition, 1984)

The Heroes

Silver John (John the Balladeer)

Korean War veteran. Wandering musician. The silver strings on his guitar are not affectation, they are the same silver that turns werewolves and drives off the old things. He plays them with the same deliberateness that a man chambers a round. He knows the old songs, the old customs, the old names. He has faith the way mountain people have faith. His faith is not a theological position but a working assumption, tested daily against a world that contains real darkness.

SAVAGE WORLDS ADVENTURE EDITION — Wild Card

Pace 6 · Parry 5 · Toughness 5

Edges: Arcane Background (Miracles), Connections (Appalachian mountain communities), Strong Willed, Woodsman

Hindrances: Heroic (must aid those in need), Poverty (wandering musician — owns what he carries), Vow (Minor — never use the old knowledge for personal gain)

Arcane Background (Miracles) — Faith d10 · Power Points 15

Special Equipment: Silver-strung guitar. Functions as a holy symbol; John receives +2 to all Faith rolls when actively playing against supernatural evil. A creature with a specific musical vulnerability (GM’s discretion) may suffer an additional −2 to its Fear check when John plays.

Designer’s Note: Silver John is not a fighter, and running him as one misses the point. His Spirit and Faith are the load-bearing stats. He wins by knowing the right thing and doing it at the right moment. He should feel like a Chill Envoy wearing SWADE boots.

CHILL 1ST EDITION (Pacesetter, 1984) — Human Character / SAVE Envoy Equivalent

STR  58        PCN  66
DEX  54        STA  60
AGL  56        LUCK 60
WPR  76
PER  70

Sense Unknown: 13 (PCN 66 ÷ 5) Unskilled Melee: 57 ((STR 58 + AGL 56) ÷ 2)

The Art: Qualified (PCN 66, WPR 76). John begins with one free discipline and has earned others through years of practice.

Silver strings: When John plays and sings as the action for a Protection discipline, add +10 to his base chance. This bonus is lost if he is interrupted, struck, or forced to stop playing. The guitar is not enchanted. It is consecrated by use and faith. The Unknown knows the difference.

Notes: John’s WPR of 76 is his defining characteristic. He resists fear, persuasion, and Evil Way Subjection disciplines better than his Stamina and Strength suggest. Folk Lore & Custom at 101 means he nearly always identifies what he is dealing with. In Wellman’s stories, knowing a thing’s name is most of the battle.

John Thunstone

Scholar. Playboy. Enemy of evil. He is large the way a working man is large. He’s the Doc Savage of Occult Detectives. His sword-cane carries a blade of silver inscribed with Latin from Judges: Sic pereant omnes inimici tui. Thus perish all your enemies. He believes it. Rowley Thorne bald, burly, based on Aleister Crowley is Thunstone’s Moriarty. They have met four times and Thorne has lost four times. This was not because Thunstone is luckier. It was because Thunstone came in knowing what he was dealing with. He knows he is living in a horror story and, as Supernatural has shown us, that changes everything.

SAVAGE WORLDS ADVENTURE EDITION — Wild Card

Pace 6 · Parry 7 · Toughness 9

Edges: Brawny, Combat Reflexes, Filthy Rich, Investigator, Scholar (Occult; History of Religions), Strong Willed, Sweep

Hindrances: Code of Honor (will not use knowledge of evil to commit it), Enemy (Major — Rowley Thorne, recurring and durable)

Special Equipment: Silver sword-cane (Saint Dunstan’s blade). Damage Str+d6. +2 damage against supernatural creatures. Counts as a blessed weapon against undead, demons, and entities of the Unknown. While Thunstone holds the blade and speaks the inscription aloud, he gains +2 to Spirit rolls for the remainder of the round. The words have meaning and power in Wellman’s fiction, and the game should reflect that.

Designer’s Note: Thunstone’s physical dominance is a part of the narrative and Strength d10, Vigor d10, Brawny, and Sweep together mean he handles groups of Extras efficiently and without drama. Against Wild Cards and genuine supernatural threats, Smarts and Occult become the decisive factors. He is built to win. Wellman wrote him to win. The GM should not apologize for that.

CHILL 1ST EDITION (Pacesetter, 1984) — Human Character / SAVE Envoy (Veteran)

STR  76        PCN  74
DEX  66        STA  78
AGL  68        LUCK 62
WPR  72
PER  70

Sense Unknown: 14 (PCN 74 ÷ 5) Unskilled Melee: 72 ((STR 76 + AGL 68) ÷ 2)

The Art: Qualified (PCN 74, WPR 72)

Silver sword-cane: Str+d6 damage. Against Unknown creatures with silver or holy vulnerabilities, wounds are one category more serious. The inscription Sic pereant omnes inimici tui functions as an active Ward (Protection) when Thunstone holds the blade and speaks the words. When he does this there is no WPR cost, and the ward cannot be disrupted, but it’s only usable once per session.

The Antagonists

Rowley Thorne

He is based on Aleister Crowley the way a scalpel is based on a kitchen knife. Bald, burly, seemingly unkillable — he bargains with outer powers for abilities he turns on anyone who gets in his way, and Thunstone has been in his way four times. This has not improved his disposition. He dresses well, speaks well, and is genuinely learned: a better occultist than most of the people who call themselves occultists, and a worse human being than most of the people who call themselves villains.

SAVAGE WORLDS ADVENTURE EDITION — Wild Card

Pace 5 · Parry 6 · Toughness 8

Edges: Arcane Background (Magic), New Powers ×3, Power Points 20, Scholar (Occult; Forbidden Systems), Strong Willed

Hindrances: Arrogant (he has been right about nearly everything — this is not entirely unfounded), Enemy (Major — Thunstone), Overconfident

Arcane Background (Magic) — Spellcasting d12 · Power Points 20

On recurring survival: Thorne should escape the first encounter… and the second. Wellman structured the Thunstone stories around a nemesis who does not stay dead in the conventional sense. The mechanism whether it is a prepared contingency, a pact with something patient, or a vessel waiting elsewhere should never be fully explained until the campaign’s equivalent of The School of Darkness. His Power Points regenerate at the standard rate, but the GM should note: something is always paying attention when Thorne draws on these powers. Something is keeping a ledger.

CHILL 1ST EDITION (Pacesetter, 1984) — Human Villain / Major NPC

Thorne is human, which means the Evil Way is technically not available to him — the Evil Way is the province of the Unknown. Thorne has solved this by making arrangements with things that should not be arranged with. Treat his Evil Way access as illegitimate, expensive, and never quite reliable. Something always knows when he uses it. Something always takes note.

STR  62        PCN  74
DEX  52        STA  66
AGL  46        LUCK 40
WPR  80
PER  70

Sense Unknown: 14 (PCN 74 ÷ 5) Unskilled Melee: 54 ((STR 62 + AGL 46) ÷ 2)

The Art: Qualified (PCN 74, WPR 80) and deeply corrupted

Evil Way access (illegitimate): Thorne uses the following at EWS 85 (the minimum score). The CM should never explain exactly how he acquired this access.

• Harm (Distortion, Column 2, Cost: 2 wpr/use, Range: Sight, Area: 1 character) — on a C result, the target loses 1d10 STA immediately

• Influence (Subjection SP, Column: Will, Cost: 10 wpr/use, Range: Sight, Area: 1 being) — long-term mental compulsion; Thorne’s preferred weapon for acquiring allies and silencing witnesses

On survival: His LUCK of 40 is deliberately low. Whatever keeps Thorne alive is not luck. The CM decides the mechanism and keeps it vague. He returns, slightly changed, never quite explaining what it cost him.

The Shonokins

They were here before we were. They say so, and they are not lying. Their eyes catch light wrong. Their ring finger is longer than their index. Their nails, their teeth are different. They dress in homespun wide-brimmed hats and walk roads that appear on no map. They have been waiting for the agreement that displaced them to expire. Every Shonokin is a sorcerer. They have one weakness so specific and so strange that it seems almost designed to be found. They cannot bear the sight of their own dead. Thunstone figured this out and he uses it with what the source fiction calls brutal efficiency. So should your players.

SAVAGE WORLDS ADVENTURE EDITION

Shonokin (Extra)

Pace 6 · Parry 6 · Toughness 5

Special Abilities:

Ancient Sorcery: Once per round a Shonokin may use one of the following without a Spellcasting roll against unresisting targets; resisting targets make an opposed Spirit roll:

• Bolt: 2d6 damage, range 12/24/48

• Blind: target at −2 to all trait rolls for 1 round (vision-based)

• Fear: target makes a Fear check at −1

Domain Awareness: +2 to all trait rolls in territory the Shonokins claim as their own. They are always aware when someone enters their domain.

Weakness — Their Own Dead: When a Shonokin can see the corpse of another Shonokin, it must make a Spirit roll (TN 6). Failure: Shaken and must move away from the corpse at full Pace. Critical failure (1 on the Wild Die): Panicked. A panicked Shonokin flees the area entirely and will not return this encounter. A Shonokin cannot use Ancient Sorcery while subject to this Weakness. The Shonokins know this. They collect and remove their dead as a matter of strategic practice.

Shonokin Shaman (Wild Card)

As above but: Spirit d10, Occult d10. Additional powers via Spellcasting d10: Puppet (full SWADE mechanics, resisted by Spirit), Curse (−2 to all of target’s trait rolls for 1 hour, resisted by Spirit). The Shaman is the community’s strategist and negotiator. Treat as a named NPC. Wild Card (d6 Wild Die on all trait rolls).

CHILL 1ST EDITION (Pacesetter, 1984) — Unknown Creatures / Pre-Human Intelligences

The Shonokins sit awkwardly in Chill’s taxonomy — they are not demons, not undead, not spirits. They are something older. Treat them as a distinct category of Unknown with their own relationship to the Evil Way. The CM should resist explaining them further than the source fiction does.

STR  4 (60)      PCN  5 (75)
DEX  4 (60)      STA  4 (60)
AGL  4 (60)      EWS  95
WPR  5 (75)      FEAR 4
PER  3 (45)      ATT  1/60%

Movement: L 90’ A NA W NA Sense Unknown: 15 (PCN 75 ÷ 5) Unskilled Melee: 67 ((60+75)÷2)

Disciplines: Harm (Distortion, Column 2, 2 wpr/use, Sight range, 1 character), Influence (Subjection SP, Column: Will, 10 wpr/use, Sight range, 1 being), Cloak (Distortion — supernatural concealment; −30 to all PCN checks to detect the Shonokin, cost 1 wpr/round)

Collective Influence: A Shonokin community exercising Influence simultaneously adds +5 to the base EWS check for each Shonokin beyond the first. This is how they take territory. They don’t do it by force but with coordinated, invisible pressure.

Manipulation: Yes — through Influence.

IPs: 750

Weakness — Their Own Dead: When a Shonokin sees a dead member of its kind, it must make an immediate WPR check (against WPR 75). Failure: all Evil Way use ceases instantly; the Shonokin flees and will not return while the body remains. On S or L only: shaken but present — at −20 to all checks until the body is out of sight.

The investigation’s central goal in any Shonokin scenario is finding a body before the community retrieves it.

Shonokin Shaman (advanced): EWS 110, WPR 6(90), PCN 6(90). Additional disciplines: Sleep (Subjection, Column: Will, 25 wpr/use, Room range), Steal Memory (Subjection SP, Column: Will, 10 wpr/use, Sight range, 1 being). The shaman is the community’s last resort. Treat as a named NPC with individual history and motivations.

Adventure Characters (The Big Bad)

Everett Caul

Everett is a graduate student in theology. Twenty-six years old. Brilliant, methodical, and genuinely convinced that what he found in the missing professor’s office represents an opportunity rather than a warning. He is not evil in any conventional sense. He is simply the kind of person who reads do not perform this ceremony and asks whether that applies to him specifically.

He has performed two-thirds of the ceremony. He believes he is binding something dangerous and making it safe. He is probably wrong. He is not certainly wrong. The players will have to engage with his argument on its own terms and you can decide the outcome.

Caul is dangerous not because he is a skilled sorcerer but because he is operating machinery he does not fully understand, on a schedule that is nearly complete, in a building that has been quietly wrong for a hundred and thirty years.

SAVAGE WORLDS ADVENTURE EDITION — Wild Card

Pace 6 · Parry 4 · Toughness 5

Edges: Arcane Background (Magic), Scholar (Theology; Folklore), Investigator

Hindrances: Curious (Major — he cannot leave a mystery alone; this is the whole problem), Overconfident, Stubborn

Arcane Background (Magic) — Spellcasting d10 · Power Points 10

Caul’s powers are partially improvised from Thorne’s fragmentary notes. They work, mostly, in the sense that a gun assembled from mismatched parts works/ It is functional until the moment it isn’t.

Bind (Custom Power): Caul’s partial ceremony has given him limited access to a binding ritual. When used against the entity in The School of What Remains, this power acts as Puppet (resisted by the entity’s Spirit d12) but requires two consecutive successful Spellcasting rolls in the same round to activate. The first succesful roll first begins the binding, the second completes it. If the second roll fails, the first roll’s PP are spent and the effect does not occur. This is the nature of incomplete ritual work.

On running Caul: He should be an antagonist the players can talk to, argue with, and if they are persuasive enough, turn. A Persuasion roll at −2 against his Smarts d12 opens genuine dialogue. Two successive successful Persuasion rolls against his Spirit d8 creates the possibility of his cooperation. He will not cooperate unless he believes the players’ alternative is better than his own plan. This means they need an actual alternative, not just an objection.

If the players allow him to complete the ceremony, it works. Imperfectly. The entity is bound, not destroyed, in a containment that will last thirty to fifty years by Caul’s estimate. This is probably accurate. What happens in thirty to fifty years is a future campaign arc.

Adventure Seeds

I. “THE THIRD GATE” (Chill 1e — Urban Investigation)

Thunstone / Pursuivant in tone. One session, expandable.

The Setup: A jazz club in lower Manhattan has been open for four months. The music is extraordinary. The bandleader, a man named Constant Mabry, seems to have found something in the music that nobody else has. Audiences leave changed. They quieter, more compliant, and subtly “wrong.” Three patrons have gone missing. A fourth was found dead in the river, his expression peaceful, his hands arranged as if playing an instrument he was not holding.

An Envoy with Investigation (Occult specialization) recognizes the club’s name, the Legba Room, and understands what it means. Legba opens the gate. Mabry has found half of an old Haitian ceremony and has been performing it nightly, calling something through, and the something has been answering.

The Unknown: Mabry is not the threat. He is merely the conduit, and he does not fully understand what he is doing. The threat is what has been coming through. It’s a loa-adjacent entity (EWS 100, FEAR 5) that is using the music to accumulate Influence over a growing number of New Yorkers. It cannot be banished while the ceremony continues. The Envoys must find the counter-ceremony (Occult Scholarship check at −20 without a specialist in Haitian folk tradition), locate someone who can perform it (a scholar in Brooklyn, not an Envoy, not entirely cooperative), and perform it in the club while the entity is present and hostile.

Thunstone as NPC: Thunstone appears midway through, having followed the same thread independently. He knows the counter-ceremony but will not share it immediately. He wants to assess the Envoys first. A Communication roll (or a good reason, which he accepts in lieu of a roll) wins his cooperation. He will handle Mabry if the Envoys handle the entity. Bring him in only if necessary or if you feel it will add to the story. The Envoys should be the heroes if possible.

The Complication: Mabry has begun to understand what he opened. He is terrified. He is also, genuinely, one of the finest musicians alive, and the entity knows this and is keeping him alive specifically. Shutting down the ceremony means shutting down Mabry’s music permanently. This is not a mechanical question. Let the players decide what they think that is worth.

II. “WHAT THE HOLLOW HOLDS” (Savage Worlds — Folk Horror)

John the Balladeer in tone. Two sessions. Uses Shudder Mountains geography and Holler folk horror framework.

The Setup: The Garner family settlement, twelve households, three generations, one of the oldest communities in the Shudder Mountains, has gone quiet. No one comes to market. No letters. A cousin who went to check came back three days later and will not say what she saw, only that the hollow is not right and the people are still there and she does not think they want to leave anymore.

The players are local people the Garners know and trust. One should play music and fill the Balladeer slot, whether or not they are John literally. One might be a granny woman with working knowledge of the old protective traditions. They are from here, which means they know what the hollow has always been, and they know something has changed. If you are using pre-generated characters, use those two character seeds. If not, try to encourage those kinds of characters.

What Actually Happened: The Shonokins have reclaimed the hollow. They have not harmed the Garners. The agreement, as they understand it, permits them to assert presence in unceded territory, and this hollow appears on no map and no deed that counts in their reckoning. The Garners are under a sustained Puppet effect that makes them content, peaceful, unwilling to leave. Seven Shonokins hold the hollow, including one Shaman Wild Card. None of them will initiate visible conflict. They will present their case that they were here first, the agreement permits this, and the Garners are not being hurt as a defense for why they should be allowed to stay and corrupt the hollow. The thing is, they are not exactly wrong and this should be the unsettling part. The players need to know what the cost of letting Shonokins control the area really means.

The Key: There is a dead Shonokin in the root cellar of the oldest Garner house. The eldest Shonokin died two weeks ago of causes unrelated to the settlement. The community brought the body here because the hollow felt right. They have not retrieved it because they cannot enter that house. They say it is the humans’ space, which is technically correct, and they also cannot enter without risking the thing in the cellar.

The Garners do not know the body is there. Neither will the players, until they ask the right questions and make the right Notice rolls.

The Climax: Once the players find the body, the Shonokins know. The shaman attempts to negotiate immediately. He tells the PCs that they will release the Puppet effect and withdraw if the body is returned. Whether the players accept, what conditions they extract, and whether they trust the Shonokins to hold to the agreement is a moral question the scenario does not answer for them. There is no clean offensive resolution. There is no clean trusting resolution. This is Wellman’s territory. The encounter is survivable, communal, but not without cost.

The Music: At some point during the investigation the Balladeer equivalent player should get a moment to use Performance. When the right song is played in the right place at the right time, the Shaman’s Spirit roll to maintain the Puppet effect suffers a −2 penalty. This is not decisive. It is meaningful. In Wellman, those are the same thing.

III. “THE SCHOOL OF WHAT REMAINS” (Savage Worlds or Chill 1e — Hybrid)

Thunstone / Pursuivant in tone. Three sessions. Either system with minimal adjustment.

The Setup: Dunstan College is a theology and liberal arts school in the North Carolina mountains that was founded 1887 and has an enrollment of 340 students. Three students have recently withdrawn without explanation. The folklore professor has not been seen in two weeks. The college president, Dr. Eleanor Hayne, has sent a letter to the players’ organization because she does not know what she is dealing with and knows she does not know.

The college was built on the site of something older andt he folklore professor found records of that oldest layer. She should not have started translating them, but she did and the costs have been high.

The Antagonist: Everett Caul (see stats above). He found Rowley Thorne’s notes in the professor’s office and has performed two-thirds of a binding ceremony that might protect the college. The professor interrupted him at the critical moment and she is now in a state that Caul describes, when pressed, as a necessary pause.

The Wellman Element: The professor is alive, in the college’s oldest building. She’s in a room that does not appear on the current floor plan and she’s in a condition that Thorne’s notes describe how to reverse. Finding the records, translating the relevant section, and applying the counter while Caul attempts to complete his ceremony is the three-session arc. Can the player’s get Caul to give them access to the notes and stop the binding? Should they stop the binding? Is there a better solution?

The Moral Question: Caul is not summoning anything. He is attempting to bind something that came through in 1887 when the college’s founders built on this site without knowing what they were building on. He believes binding it will make it safe. He is probably wrong. He is not certainly wrong. The players must engage with this argument before they can answer it.

Cross-System Notes:

In Chill 1e: The entity has EWS 115 and is partially manifested. Its disciplines function but it cannot yet take physical form. The counter-ceremony requires an Occult Scholarship check at Teacher rank and two uninterrupted turns. The entity will attempt Influence on any character attempting the counter. Dr. Hayne has a Sense Unknown of 12. She has been aware something was wrong for months and is a better asset than she appears.

In SWADE: Use Caul’s full stat block above. The entity manifests physically in the final session with Spirit d12, Toughness 12, Fear −2, and immunity to non-silver, non-blessed weapons. The professor’s counter-ceremony, when performed correctly, reduces Toughness to 8 and removes immunity for the scene. This is the players’ window. If Caul completes his ceremony instead, see the note under his stat block.

The Ending Wellman Would Write: The entity is bound, not destroyed. Caul is shaken, humbled, and possibly salvageable. The professor recovers but carries something with her, a knowledge she cannot unlearn. Dr. Hayne thanks the players and asks no further questions, because she has decided to know exactly as much as she needs to know and no more. The oldest building on campus remains the oldest. The hollow under the foundation is still there.

But the immediate crisis is over, and the people who needed protecting are protected. In Wellman, that is what a win looks like.

An Era that Alternated Between Low Budget and Brilliant and Sometimes Managed Both

There are those who look at the 1980s fantasy film landscape and find it easy to romanticize that era and honestly I’m one of those people. It was a decade that gave us leather-clad barbarians, sorcerers with impractical headgear, and enough magic swords to stock a small armory. It’s an era that gave us The Beastmaster (1982), in which Marc Singer’s Dar communes with ferrets and a pair of mischievous raccoons while Rip Torn chews every available piece of scenery. It’s a film that played so often on HBO in the 1990s that it became a running joke that HBO stood for “Hey, Beastmaster’s On” and it seems like I watched every broadcast. The 1980s also gave us Hawk the Slayer (1980), which had no business being as entertaining as it is, armed as it was with a miniguns-as-rapid-fire-crossbow budget and a synth score that sounds like a Casio keyboard achieving sentience. These are films that know their lane and occupy it with cheerful disregard for critical opinion.

I still find myself quoting Crow the elf from time to time. Heck, I’ve even wrote up stats for Crow in the old Blogger days for both the Savage Worlds and Shadow of the Demon Lord role playing games.

As much as I have a fondness for the era, I have to admit that genuine film making craft was rare for films in the genre. For every Hawk the Slayer, (trust me it’s a high point) there were ten films that didn’t have its sincerity or energy. There were hundreds of low budget, low effort, films capitalizing on the Sword & Sorcery boom after the film Conan the Barbarian was released. They were dollar budget films that rarely accomplished more than being an excuse for John Normanesque nudity. Every now and then though, there was a film that aimed at true greatness. Dragonslayer (1981) is the best of these and it is among the best fantasy films ever made. Dragonslayer remains astonishing and fresh. It is a genuinely dark, morally complex fairy tale that gave us Vermithrax Pejorative, arguably the finest practical-effects dragon in cinema history and certainly one of the best dragon names ever, and a story that dared to show us a high fantasy film where magic was dying. It trusted its audience and yet it bombed in the box-office. It cost $18 million to make and only made $14 in sales. Add to that that Conan, in 1982, provided a model that lower budget studios could copy and itt’s no wonder studios opted for Blood & Loincloth. The return on investment was higher.

It took almost a decade before someone other than Ray Harryhausen picked up the gauntlet and attempted to make a sincere attempt at a classic and ambitious fantasy film. Willow (1988), released thirty-eight years ago today and it was that film.

The World George Lucas Imagined and Ron Howard Brought to Life

Credit where it’s due is complicated here, because Willow emerged from a specific and sometimes uneasy collaboration. George Lucas conceived the story, rooted in the archetypal Hero’s Journey that had defined his career since Star Wars, and his fingerprints are unmistakable. You can see it in the chosen one (the baby) who must be protected, the reluctant and underestimated hero with hidden reserves of courage, and the mercenary with a heart that eventually turns. These are Lucas signatures. In 1988, with the exception of Howard the Duck, he still had the Midas touch in popular adventure cinema so his name was at the forfront of marketing.

But it’s Ron Howard’s direction that elevates the material from blueprint to lived-in world. Howard had spent the preceding years establishing himself as a filmmaker of unexpected range, from Grand Theft Auto to Splash to Cocoon to Gung Ho, and he brought to Willow something that Lucas-produced fantasy sometimes lacked. Howard’s direction gave us genuine emotional attentiveness to the characters in the foreground. Watch any Ron Howard film and you’ll see that his directoral skill set is much broader than “faster, more intense.”

The grand sweep is also there, courtesy of John Toll’s cinematography and the spectacular landscapes of Wales, New Zealand, and the UK, but Howard’s camera keeps finding its way back to faces and giving us gentle character driven moments.

This matters because Willow is, at its core, a film about a small person in a big world. Willow Ufgood is played by Warwick Davis who brings brilliance and depth to the role. Though Davis was only twenty-one years old when the film was shot and he carries the film with a warmth and comic precision that never tips into mugging. His depictions of fatherly emotions are spot on, as is the way he grapples with failure and insecurity. His Willow is genuinely brave not in a chest-puffed fantasy-hero way, but in the way of someone who is frightened and does the thing anyway. He does things because they are the right thing to do, even when no one else is willing to do them. He’s willing to do the right thing, even if it costs him his farm. He is one of the great heroes in filmic fantasy and he is far from “the chosen one.”

The Genre’s Conventions on Proud Display

The fantasy films and novels of this era had a shared vocabulary, and Willow speaks it fluently. There is a prophecy. There is a chosen one. In this case, the chosen is an infant named Elora Danan who is “destined” to bring down the dark queen Bavmorda. There is a wise old sorcerer and an aspiring warm-hearted one whose only magic is the kind you see Penn & Teller perform. There is a mercenary who doesn’t believe in prophecies. There is a warrior woman. There are creatures both practical and proto-digital. The film does not pretend these conventions don’t exist, it simply executes them with more care than most. Even when it inverts the tropes, as it does in the case of Elora Danan, it does so with sincerity rather than cynicism.

Like the best films of the era Willow is sincere, but it is better than most because it has a more fully developed narrative. Let’s take a moment to compare it to The Beastmaster. Don Coscarelli’s film is a genuine pleasure, in large part because Singer is so charismatic. Add to Singer’s charm, animal companions who are a delightful gimmick (with some surprising emotional depth), and Tanya Roberts and John Amos providing solid performances, and you’ve got a recipe for many a rewatch. But The Beastmaster is ultimately a collection of sequences in search of narrative momentum. The threat recedes and advances without much internal logic and the film survives on charm. Hawk the Slayer is even more episodic, essentially a proto-RPG adventure module translated to film. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a part of why I love Hawk the Slayer and it is a significant part of its appeal, but it does mean that Hawk the Slayer lacks a real emotional core.

Willow has actual dramatic architecture. The beginning establishes stakes that are personal before they are epic. Is Willow going to be able to keep his farm? Will he be recognized as the town’s seer? These are personal questions that persist even as the stakes escalate. The middle of the film is a genuine road movie with escalating complications. The emdomg delivers on all of the film’s promises. I have always found the antagonist, Queen Bavmorda as played by Jean Marsh, to be genuinely menacing. She’s not campy-menacing in the way of, say, Tim Curry in Legend or Jeremy Irons in Dungeons & Dragons (magnificent as they are). Instead, Bavmorda is coldly, administratively evil in a way that feels almost bureaucratic. She doesn’t rant. She simply decides that things will be a certain way and sets about making them so. Even when she chews the scenery, it feels more like genuine anger than scene chewing.

Val Kilmer, Having the Time of His Life

Speaking of crewing the scenery, there is Madmartigan.

Val Kilmer in 1988 was coming off Top Gun. He’d paid his dues with Top Secret! and Real Genius, both underreated in my opinion, and was becoming a big star. Of course, he was also heading toward Batman Forever and the difficult reputation that would eventually overshadow his talent. In Willow, he is simply incandescent. He brought the charismatic joy he exhibited in Top Secret! and added the depth he demonstrated in Top Gun and gave audiences a roguish swordsman of zero fixed principles, enormous self-regard, and, it turns out, genuine heroic capacity buried under layers of expedient cowardice. Ron Howard was wise enough to let him be funny. The sequence in which he, under the influence of a love powder, declares his passion for the enemy general’s wife is the kind of set piece that shouldn’t work. It’s stale and is more fitting in an old Jerry Lewis film and yet Kilmer makes it work, because Kilmer commits to it completely and unironically.

The chemistry between Kilmer and Joanne Whalley (as the warrior Sorsha, Bavmorda’s daughter) is also worth noting. It’s also worth noting how Sorsha is presented in the film. She’s beautiful, but her armor is functional and her character is much more than mere decoration. Sorsha is written and performed as a character with an actual arc. Her turn from antagonist to ally is motivated by something more than the protagonist’s handsomeness. This kind of sincerity was common in the best fantasy films of the era. Whether it was Sandal Bergman as Valeria, Cailtin Clarke as Valerian, or Chloe Salaman as Princess Elspeth (an truly honorable and tragic heroine in Dragonslayer), the best fantasy films of the 1980s featured some fantastic women who exhibited agency and heroism.

The Special Effects and Their Moment

Willow sits at a fascinating threshold in cinematic technology. ILM produced effects work that was state-of-the-art in 1988 and remains largely impressive today. The most impressive special effects are the practical creature work and a morphing sequence involving a sorceress named Fin Raziel. Where some of the digital work in the film frays on the edges, the shapechanging duel represents one of the earliest uses of the digital morphing technology that would explode into ubiquity with The Abyss and Terminator 2. The two-headed dragon, Eborsisk (a Lucas joke at the expense of film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel), is a magnificent practical puppet. The magic itself is rendered with real imagination and spells feel costly in a way that much fantasy-film magic doesn’t.

Where the effects show their age, the film absorbs the damage, because the majority of the storytelling doesn’t depend on spectacle to compensate for emotional vacancy. The film is a useful reminder that effects are a tool, not a foundation.

Getting It Right and the Failure of Sequels

It’s worth dwelling on how unusual Willow‘s quality actually was, not as a backhanded compliment but as genuine context. The late 1970s and 1980s produced an enormous volume of fantasy cinema. Post-Conan the Barbarian (1982), every studio wanted a piece of the sword-and-sorcery market. The results ranged from inspired (Labyrinth, 1986) to enjoyable-if-modest (Krull, 1983 which regular readers know I love) to sincerely inexplicable. Dragonslayer stood apart because it was genuinely dark and intelligent about its darkness. Willow stood apart for a different reason. It was genuinely warm and intelligent about its warmth and owned that it was cheerful and inspirational fairy tale. There is not an ironic bone in the film’s “body.”

The focus on hope, and the lack of irony, are what made the original better than later attempts to expand the series. The Chronicles of the Shadow War trilogy is entertaining in its own right. Chris Claremont is a talented writer who wrote some of the best X-men stories ever published. All of that being true, from the first few pages of Shadow Moon, I never felt like I was reading a tale in the Willow-verse. In an interview on Big Shiny Robot!, when asked if the Shadow War books should be used as the basis for a movie sequel, Chris Claremont laughed and then revealed he hadn’t recorded the collaboration with Lucas and instead wrote his own story because he wasn’t allowed to use most of the characters. The book series is almost Grim Dark and gives us an Elora who isn’t, initially, worth rooting for.

The recent (2023) television series suffers from a similar problem. It abandons the fairy tale quality of the film where a regular person does what is right because it must be done. It replaces resigned heroism with youthful rebellion. In the series, Sorsha and Madmartigan have twin children named Airk and Kit. Madmartigan has disappeared and his children are dealing with some psychological trauma as a result. Even so the children have regular sibling rivalry, with Kit seeming to be tempermentally more like her father and is clearly written to be the focus of the show. So far, so good. It is only after Airk is kidnapped by the Big Bad where we get to see Kit’s true character. She has to be forced by her mother Sorsha to go off and rescue her brother.

Okay, let’s pause here for a minute so I can really impress upon you how stupid this is. We are in a fantasy story where one of the heirs of a kingdom has been kidnapped so the sovereign, Sorsha, immediately decides to send the only other heir to the throne off on a risky and potentially fatal quest to find the sibling. This is stupid. It is stupid beyond credulity. There is no way that a parent says, “oh, one of my children is missing. I know what I’ll do. I’ll send my only other child out to find them.” That’s not going to happen. Add to this, Kit doesn’t want to go. Not because of a lack of responsibility, but because she just doesn’t like Kit that much and she “doesn’t want royal duties.”

Once again. This is stupid. I’m not normally this mean, but her only royal duty would be to stay alive and that’s what she is doing by not wanting to go. The show is aiming for a duty vs. rebellion arc, but the set up inverts the whole thing. Sorsha should be telling Kit that she has a DUTY TO STAY and Kit should be fighting tooth and nail to sneak out. Jonathan Kasdan’s set up screenplay launches the quest on the weakest of premises and the actors struggled with mixed character motivations. While most of the online outrage about the show has focused on the actors, I always thought they were doing the best they could with pretty weak material. Ruby Cruz (Kit) has charisma and charm when given the opportunity, but it is really Amar Chadha-Patel (Boorman) and Tony Revolori (Graydon Hastur) who kept me watching the show. Though their characters also suffered from inconsistent motivation, they were both able to maximize their best moments in ways that mattered.

To be honest though, I don’t think any of the actors did a bad job. The show’s failure was its lack of faith in the classic and sincere fairy tale formula. It wanted to add a little edge to the whimsy of Willow, forgetting that for all it’s whimsy Willow the film had heart. When Airk asks Madmartigan to win this war for him, it is a moving moment because it is sincere. I kept waiting for the TV show to give me some sincerity and it never did. That’s all on the writers, who included the screenwriter of Far and Away and the original Willow. I cannot understand how the screenwriter of two of the most sincere “heart on the sleeve” movies of all-time could have written television screenplays this morally gray, but here we are.

The film works because it believes in its hero’s decency. It believes that courage is meaningful even when the outcome is uncertain. It believes that the bonds formed on a hard road are real. These are not complicated ideas, but they are ideas that have to be earned through craft, and Willow earns them.

Thirty-eight years later, that’s still worth something. If only those who hold the legacy could understand that worth.

Willow (1988) was directed by Ron Howard from a screenplay by Bob Dolman, based on a story by George Lucas. It stars Warwick Davis, Val Kilmer, Joanne Whalley, Jean Marsh, Patricia Hayes, and Billy Barty. John Barry’s score deserves a separate essay entirely. Hopefullly by someone who is better about writing about how music moves us emotionally than I am.

Gaming Appendix 1: The Willow Sourcebook, B/X D&D, and Getting It Right

Note: This appendix is occasioned by a happy bit of recent news. The Moldvay Basic rulebook , the “B” of B/X, is now available in print-on-demand from DriveThruRPG, joining the Cook/Marsh Expert set (available in POD since 2023). For the first time since the 1981 boxed sets went out of print, both halves of what is arguably the most elegant version of D&D ever published are available to purchase as official reprints. If you’ve been running Old School Essentials and want the originals on your shelf beside it, now is the moment. I’ll be writing a full review of B/X later as I see it as the well-spring of modern “folk” D&D.

The world of Willow has been codified for tabletop gaming once before. The Willow Sourcebook (Tor Books, 1988), written by Allen Varney with additional material from Greg Costikyan, is a system-neutral character compendium covering every significant person, creature, and location in the film. Its gaming notes use a generic stat block built on the familiar 3–18 attribute range and the classic six. The architecture is TSR to its bones. The conversions below use the Moldvay Basic / Cook Expert rules (1981), with ascending AC equivalents in brackets for Old School Essentials and similar retroclones.

But we should be honest about the sourcebook’s numbers before we work with them. In 2013, Varney himself commented on a review of the book that “The publisher, packager, and I all regarded the gaming stats as a thin but necessary wrapper to comply with the letter of our gaming license.” This is refreshingly candid, and it shows. Several of the sourcebook’s attribute assignments read like first-draft estimates made without serious examination of what the numbers actually mean in play. Varney is one of my favorite game designers and he put real work into the portraits, but didn’t do as much hard work on the stats themselves.

The stats below take Varney’s character portraits, which are as I said genuinely excellent, as the design brief and build outward from there, referencing the original numbers where they work and departing from them where they don’t. The original figures are noted for comparison throughout.

HEROES

WILLOW UFGOOD Magic-User, 4th Level

AC 8 [11], HD 4d4, hp 13, MV 120’ (40’), #AT 1 (dagger or by spell) Dmg 1d4, Save MU4, ML 9, AL Lawful, XP 75

STR 9, DEX 13, CON 12, WIS 14, INT 17, CHR 13

Spells (2/2): Sleep, Magic Missile / Phantasmal Force, ESP

On the numbers: The sourcebook gives Willow DEX 16, CHR 8, WIS 12. The CHR 8 is the the one I take most issue with. Though Willow isn’t yet a full leader at the beginning, he inspires loyalty. Willow is warm, persuasive, and genuinely likeable. After all, he talks Madmartigan into taking Elora, earns the loyalty of the brownies, and maintains the trust of everyone in his party despite having almost nothing to offer them materially. That is not an 8 Charisma. I’ve set it at 13, which is above average but not exceptional. He’s not a court diplomat, he’s a farmer who turns out to be good with people who will make a good leader for them someday.

DEX 16 similarly overstates what the film shows. Willow is quick-handed. His stagecraft is real, and he moves quietly through the world, but his DEX in the sourcebook is high enough to make him a genuinely agile combatant and he’s far from one of those. DEX 13 reflects a careful, stealthy Nelwyn who has excellent fine motor control without implying the combat reflexes of a trained thief. WIS 14 reflects his consistently good judgment under pressure. His INT 17 stays because he defeats his opponent through intelligence alone in the end.

For spells, Sleep is a reach but vital for starting magic users in B/X, Magic Missile represents his growing offensive capability, Phantasmal Force covers the pig-vanishing trick that defeats Bavmorda’s Ritual in a “real magic” way instead of the way it was depicted in the film, and ESP reflects his surprising perceptiveness about people and situations. This is a natural extension of a character whose Wisdom is his real gift. You could design Willow as a Thief or Halfling, but I’ve opted for having him use real magic. Let’s imagine this is him at the end of the movie.

Morale note: Willow’s ML 9 means he occasionally hesitates and needs a moment to recover. That is specifically the point of him as a character. He is frightened almost continuously and does the thing anyway.

MADMARTIGAN Fighter, 14th Level

AC 2 [17], HD 9d8+10, hp 68, MV 60’ (20’) in armor, #AT 1 (longsword +2 to hit) Dmg 1d8+4, Save F14, ML 9, AL Neutral, XP 1,350

STR 16, DEX 18, CON 16, WIS 9, INT 13, CHR 17

On the numbers: The sourcebook lists Madmartigan as a 20th-level fighter, explicitly the finest swordsman the players will meet, with a note to set him three levels above the best fighter in the campaign. B/X caps at 14th level, which is where Name Level fighters have become something beyond ordinary heroic, and it suits him if you accept that he’s rejecting a part of what is granted at that level. He is not an abstraction. He is a specific, irreplaceable human being who happens to be nearly impossible to kill with a sword. He has also refused to take on his responsibilities as a “leader.” It isn’t until the death of Airk that we can see him setting up a stronghold and having followers. People want to follow him, so level 14 is right mechanically, but he hasn’t set things up yet.

The sourcebook’s STR 14 is the one number here I’ve changed . In Moldvay, STR 13-15 gives +1 to hit, damage, and opening doors. So the sourcebook’s Madmartigan is not without a Strength modifier in a B/X game, but STR 13 undersells someone described as a 20th-level physical specimen who lifts armored soldiers and powers through ranks of opponents. I’ve set STR 16, which gives +2 to hit, damage, and opening doors. He’s still not Conan or Kael, but this is a meaningful step up, making his longsword hit for 1d8+2 (STR) plus the +2 to hit from exceptional skill (I’ve taken the Sourcebook’s “+4 to hit” and converted down to B/X’s tighter modifier scale). The result: 1d8+4 damage per hit from a character who connects with nearly anything he swings at by 14th level.

His DEX 18 shows off his combat dominance, dropping him to AC 2 in chain without a shield. His WIS 9 let’s us know why he has all of those personal disasters. These stay exactly as written. His CHR 17 is correct and important narratively. He’s the most immediately magnetic human in the film, and players should feel that.

Equipment: Chain mail (default), longsword, occasionally a shield (AC 1 [18] with DEX). At Nockmaar Castle he acquires plate; adjust AC to 1 [18], or 0 [19] with shield.

VILLAINS

QUEEN BAVMORDA Magic-User, 14th Level (see note)

AC 5 [14], HD 9d4+5, hp 55, MV 120’ (40’), #AT 1 or by spell Dmg 1d4+1 (staff) or by spell, Save MU14*, ML 12, AL Chaotic, XP 3,000+

STR 10, DEX 14, CON 18, WIS 12, INT 18, CHR 14

*Bavmorda may reroll any failed saving throw once, keeping the second result. She has spent decades hardening herself against magical interference.

On the numbers: The Willow Sourcebook presents Bavmorda as a 36th-level magic-user. That works in BECMI, but B/X has no mechanism for this, so her level functions as a narrative declaration that she is beyond the standard advancement table. I used 14th level as the mechanical floor and understand that her actual capability exceeds what those numbers represent.

The sourcebook’s attribute spread is CON 18, INT 18, WIS 17, CHR 18. She is, as kids will say for the next six or seven days, attributemaxxing. She has four near-maximum scores, with only STR (10) and DEX (16) falling below the ceiling. As David Pretty joked in the review I referenced earlier, Varney might be “the sort of DM who lets you roll 4d6 and drop the lowest.” I think it was just a matter of assigning high numbers rather than considering what WIS 17 and CHR 18 actually mean in terms of what happened in the movie.

I really disagree with the WIS 17 score because Bavmorda underestimates Willow Ufgood repeatedly throughout the film. She dismisses him as beneath her attention, fails to anticipate the pig-vanishing trick, and never adjusts her threat assessment despite mounting evidence. That is not the behavior of a character with Wisdom in the upper percentile of human capability. Wisdom in B/X governs judgment, perception, and willpower. Bavmorda’s strategic blindspot, her inability to take seriously the possibility that someone insignificant could outthink her, is precisely a failure of Wisdom. I’ve set it at 12, which is average. I don’t think she has below normal wisdom, but she is susceptible to the arrogance that comes with being the most powerful person in the room for thirty years.

I also think the CHR 18 is similarly difficult to defend. Bavmorda commands through fear and magical compulsion, not personal magnetism. She doesn’t need Charisma to generate obedience when she is the most powerful wizard in the world. She inspires obedience because the alternatives are monstrous, not because people genuinely want to follow her. CHR 14 is still above average, she has genuine authority and presence, but it separates “people comply” from “people want to please her.” She gained her position of power because she was powerful, not because people were inspired or compelled by her leadership abilities.

If B/X had Lichs in the rule book, I’d probably make her a Lich and have that explain a lot of her resilience. Since it doesn’t, I’ll keep the CON 18. Decades of high-level spellcasting require extraordinary physical endurance. The INT 18 also stays because she is unambiguously the most formidable magical intellect in the world. She’s smart but, as we’ve seen, she isn’t wise.

HP 55 is a reasonable B/X calculation for a 14th-level MU with CON 18 (which grants +3 per Hit Die through level 9, giving 9d4+27 plus five flat HP for levels 10–14 at average rolls). The sourcebook’s 75 is overly generous for a lower hit point game like B/X. The reduced HP makes her no less dangerous, she will likely never be defeated in direct magical combat, but it means the climactic physical confrontation with Fin Raziel carries real stakes.

When it comes to Bavmorda’s actual spell casting abilities, I’m going to break the rules a bit. Bavmorda carries no spellbook in any conventional sense. She has no spell slots. Treat her as having access to any Magic-User spell of levels 1–6 at will, with the narrative caveat that her most powerful spells require elaborate ritual preparation. She cannot mass-transform an army in a moment of improvisation, but use your discretion when thinking about what spells she can cast in a “combat time.”

The Ritual of Obliteration

The Ritual is not a spell in the B/X rulebook. In fact “rituals” don’t exist at all in B/X. They were one of the additions in 4th edition that I thought was a genuine benefit to D&D mechanics. The ritual belongs to a category of magic that Varney himself handled well in the sourcebook, and that the module Curse of Xanathon handles similarly, where the effect is real and mechanically grounded, but the source lies outside the standard spell list. The Ritual is a ritual. It has requirements, a process, and a specific vulnerability.

Requirements: A prepared ceremonial space (minimum one week to consecrate), twelve druid/wizard celebrants acting in concert, and an uninterrupted casting period of approximately one hour. The target must be physically present in the space. The Ritual cannot be rushed, and disrupting any of the twelve celebrants during the final phase will abort it.

Effect: On completion, the target’s soul is permanently obliterated. The victim is not merely killed, but annihilated. No resurrection, no afterlife, no recovery. This effect is absolute.

The Vulnerability: If the target is removed from the ritual space at the exact moment the final lightning bolt would strike, not before, not after, but in the instant of obliteration, the bolt has no target to consume and rebounds back upon its source. In the movie Bavmorda had to make a Saving Throw vs. Death Ray at this moment and she failed. If you play this out in your game, have it be that she automatically fails.

This last clause is not a rules hack. It is the literal logic of the film. Willow’s pig-vanishing trick works because the Ritual’s magic cannot distinguish between “target has been transported” and “target does not exist.” The bolt returns because Bavmorda’s own spell has nowhere to go. It is, in the sourcebook’s own elegant phrase, a case of the prophecy being “surprisingly fulfilled.”

GM note: Bavmorda should not feel like a combat encounter. She should feel like a weather system with a specific structural weakness that only becomes apparent at the moment of maximum crisis.

GENERAL KAEL Fighter, 14th Level

AC 2 [17], HD 9d8+10, hp 72, MV 60’ (20’), #AT 1 (longsword +2 to hit) Dmg 1d8+5, Save F14, ML 12, AL Chaotic, XP 1,350

STR 18, DEX 15, CON 18, WIS 14, INT 16, CHR 14

Special — The Death Mask: At the start of the first round of any combat encounter in which Kael is visible, all opposing combatants who have not previously faced him must make a Saving Throw vs. Spells. Failure means the character suffers –2 to attack rolls during that first round only, as the skull-faced helmet and Kael’s sheer physical presence triggers a momentary freezing of nerve. Characters who have faced Kael before are immune. The DM may waive this check for player characters who have been explicitly established as exceptional in courage or military experience.

Special — Nockmaar Command: All Nockmaar soldiers within 60’ of Kael gain +1 to all Morale checks.

On the numbers: If Madmartigan is the film’s argument for what a fighter looks like at his most brilliantly alive, Kael is the argument for what a fighter looks like at his most perfectly formed. The sourcebook’s numbers for him are the most defensible in the book. The reviewer noted that reversing his INT and WIS would approximate a typical first player-character fighter, which is funny and accurate. I do think one attribute needs adjustment.

The sourcebook gives Kael DEX 17, almost identical to Madmartigan’s 18. This flattens the distinction between them. Madmartigan’s whole fighting style is reactive, acrobatic, improvisational. The battle between them is a conflict between speed and flow and the ability to redirect force and a mechanism that is precise, overwhelming, and inevitable. A DEX of 17 makes Kael feel like a slightly slower Madmartigan. DEX 15 makes him feel like a different kind of fighter entirely. He still receives an AC benefit, but it also reflects why he buys the heaviest armor money can command (+1 DEX to AC 3 plate = AC 2 [17]).

In compensation for downgrading his DEX, I decided to upgrade is WIS. The sourcebook gives Kael WIS 12, average, which undersells one of his most important traits. Kael is a strategically brilliant commander who understands power, loyalty, and the geometry of large-scale conflict. He never overreaches, never makes the obvious ambitious mistake, and has the unique military discipline to serve Bavmorda faithfully precisely because he understands that her power exceeds what he could acquire by betrayal. WIS 14 reflects a character who is genuinely wise about the world, where Madmartigan’s WIS 9 reflects someone who is genuinely not.

This creates a mechanical mirror that matches the film nicely. Madmartigan has the higher DEX and CHR; Kael has the higher STR, CON, and WIS. Madmartigan is faster, more charismatic, more unpredictable. Kael hits harder, absorbs more punishment, and makes better decisions under strategic pressure. The only way Madmartigan beats Kael is to be smarter in the moment, which is exactly what the film’s climax demands.

Kael’s HP 72 tracks the B/X math cleanly: 9d8 with CON 18 (+3 per die through level 9) averages 67.5, plus 5×2 for levels 10–14 = 77.5 average at maximum, 72 at a reasonable median.

Equipment: Full plate, the Death Mask (bound-spirit skull helmet), longsword, warhorse. His sword skill applies to any one-handed weapon — the +2 to hit functions the same as Madmartigan’s.

The Willow Sourcebook (1988) by Allen Varney with additional material by Greg Costikyan is a great book. It’s sadly out of print, but it is very much worth reading. The combination of Allen Varney, Greg Costikyan, and Eric Goldberg as authors makes this a gaming hall of fame publication. Maybe it will be reprinted some day. The Moldvay Basic Set Rulebook (1981) and Cook/Marsh Expert Set Rulebook (1981) are both currently available in print-on-demand from DriveThruRPG.

A Second Gaming Appendix: Shadow of the Weird Wizard

Shadow of the Weird Wizard (Schwalb Entertainment, 2024), Robert J. Schwalb’s “kid friendly” successor to Shadow of the Demon Lord, uses a set of mechanics that has evolved many editions away from B/X. It’s one that illuminates these characters in different ways. Where B/X rewards careful attribute assignment on a 3–18 scale, SWW builds around four attributes (Strength, Agility, Intellect, Will) with explicit modifiers, a Difficulty rating for encounter budgeting, and attacks expressed as dice pools with boons and banes. The system is explicitly cinematic, and Willow is an explicitly cinematic film which makes it a very good fit. Given that Schwalb’s “Shadow” games are inspired by 4th edition D&D, they are familiar enough to D&D players in general but different enough that they deserve some discussion.

The most useful difference in adapting Willow from screen to TTRPG is that in SWW, Will governs both magical power and mental fortitude, while Intellect governs knowledge and problem-solving. Since this is not the same attribute as D&D’s Wisdom, Bavmorda can be assigned a very high Will. Her magical force is absolute, and we can stat her up appropriately without that assignment implying good judgment. The arrogance that blinds her to Willow is a trait, not a low score. This is a more honest representation of the character than any single-number stat.

Stat blocks use the Secrets of the Weird Wizard bestiary format. Ascending Defense (higher = harder to hit), variable Health pools, and encounter Difficulty ratings replace B/X’s descending AC and hit dice. I’ll provide stats for Willow and Madmartigan in a final section as player characters. That’s right! This post gets 3 appendices.

HEROES

WILLOW UFGOOD HUMAN (NELWYN) · DIFFICULTY 3

Defense: 11, Health: 22 Strength: 9 (−1), Agility: 12 (+2) Intellect: 14 (+4), Will: 13 (+3) Size: 1/2, Speed: 4 Languages: Common (Nelwyn dialect)

Nelwyn Stealth: Willow makes Agility rolls to hide and move silently with 1 boon.

Quick Study (Magical): Once per round, when Willow observes a magical effect, he makes an Intellect roll. On a success, he understands its general nature.

ACTIONS

Melee Attack—Dagger · Thrown 5: Agility (+2) (1d6)

Sleep Hex (Magical): Willow hurls an enchanted acorn at a target within 10 yards, making a Will (+3) roll against the target’s Agility. On a success, one creature of Size 3 or less falls asleep until it takes damage or another creature uses an action to rouse it. Willow loses access to this talent for 1 minute after using it.

Phantasmal Deception (Magical): Willow creates a convincing illusion within 5 yards. Until a creature interacts with it or the round ends, the illusion appears real. A creature that interacts with the illusion makes an Intellect roll; on a failure, it believes the illusion is real until the end of the next round.

REACTIONS

Improvised Solution: When Willow or an ally within 5 yards would be hit by an attack, Willow can describe a quick improvised response. The Sage decides if the action is plausible; if so, the attacker rolls with 1 bane.

On the design: SWW’s Size 1/2 is exactly right for a Nelwyn. It reflects Willow’s physical smallness without making him mechanically helpless. His Agility 12 (+2) drives both his stealth (a racial trait) and his dagger attacks. His Intellect 14 (+2) represents his magic learning, while Will 13 (+1) represents his determination and growing magical force. The gap between Intellect and Will is meaningful. He’s clever before he’s powerful, which is precisely the arc of the film.

Willow’s Difficulty 3 makes him a workable novice-tier challenge on his own, useful if the Sage wants a scene where separating the party becomes dangerous, but his real value is as an allied NPC. His Phantasmal Deception and Sleep Hex reward creative play and narrative solutions over direct combat, which is exactly how Willow wins.

MADMARTIGAN HUMAN · DIFFICULTY 6

Defense: 16 (chain), Health: 50 Strength: 14 (+4), Agility: 16 (+6) Intellect: 11 (+1), Will: 9 (−1) Size: 1, Speed: 5 Languages: Common

Peerless Swordsman: Madmartigan’s Sword attacks roll with 2 boons rather than 1.

Stalwart: When Madmartigan becomes confused or frightened, he makes a luck roll. On a success, the effect ends immediately.

Reckless Courage: Madmartigan makes Will rolls to resist temptation, seduction, or provocations to personal conflict with 2 banes.

ACTIONS

Melee Attack—Sword · Slashing: Agility (+6) with 2 boons (3d6) Critical Success: The target takes an extra 1d6 damage, and Madmartigan makes a free attack against the same or an adjacent target.

Two Attacks: Madmartigan makes two Sword attacks.

FURY

Make a Sword attack. Move up to his Speed.

On the design: Madmartigan’s Agility 16 (+6) is reflective of his combat style and in SWW terms Agility drives both attack and Defense for a mobile fighter, so his entire combat profile flows from a single attribute. This is more elegant than B/X’s separate to-hit and AC calculations. His Will 9 (−1) is the mechanical expression of every bad personal decision he makes, and Reckless Courage makes it concrete: he is specifically susceptible to provocations and temptations in ways that cost him. Stalwart keeps him from breaking in genuine crisis. He can be goaded, but he doesn’t break.

The Fury entry is deliberately restrained. Madmartigan’s power comes from exceptional precision, not supernatural speed; giving him a Fury that mirrors the Knight’s “Two Attacks” as a bonus action would overpower him at Difficulty 6. Instead his Fury gives him a free sword strike or repositioning, which rewards players who set up flanking or create tactical openings for him.

VILLAINS

QUEEN BAVMORDA HUMAN · DIFFICULTY 10

Defense: 12, Health: 70 Strength: 10 (+0), Agility: 11 (+1) Intellect: 16 (+6), Will: 17 (+7) Size: 1, Speed: 5 Languages: Arcane, Common, Kingdom

Supreme Sorceress: Bavmorda adds 1 boon to all magical attack rolls.

Undeniable Will: Bavmorda is immune to the confused, frightened, charmed, and compelled afflictions.

Contemptuous of Inferiors: Bavmorda makes Intellect rolls to detect threats originating from creatures of Difficulty 4 or less with 1 bane. She simply does not take small things seriously.

ACTIONS

Melee Attack—Staff · Bludgeoning: Strength (+0) with 1 boon (1d6)

Lightning Wrath (Magical): Bavmorda hurls a bolt of lightning at a target within 20 yards. Make a Will (+7) roll with 1 boon against the target’s Agility. On a success, the target takes 5d6 damage. Once Bavmorda uses this talent, she loses access to it until the end of her next turn.

Mass Transformation (Magical): Bavmorda transforms up to six creatures she can see within 15 yards into harmless animals. Each target makes a Will roll against Difficulty 15. On a failure, the target becomes the animal until it makes a successful Will roll at the end of each of its rounds. Once Bavmorda uses this talent, she loses access to it for 1 minute.

FURY

Cast Lightning Wrath (if available). Move up to her Speed.

END OF THE ROUND

Magical Surge: Bavmorda regains access to Lightning Wrath if she has lost it.

The Ritual of Obliteration

The Ritual functions identically to the version described in the B/X appendix above, with the following SWW-specific notes. The Ritual requires twelve celebrant druids (each Difficulty 2 Ordained Priests, effectively) and an uninterrupted preparation period of one hour of game time. The target must remain within the ritual space.

The Vulnerability: When the Ritual’s final effect resolves, if the target has been physically removed from the ritual space in that same round, by any means, the bolt has no target and rebounds. Bavmorda must immediately make a Will roll against Difficulty 20. She automatically fails. She takes the Ritual’s full effect herself, which incapacitates her instantly and permanently.

Sage Note: The Ritual should never feel like a combat encounter. It is a ticking clock. The characters’ objective is to extract the target before the final round of casting, not to fight Bavmorda directly. Bavmorda’s Contemptuous of Inferiors trait is the key. She fails to adequately watch Willow because she does not believe he is capable of disrupting the Ritual.

On the design: Bavmorda’s Will 17 (+7) is the highest Will score in this appendix, and it should feel like it. Her Lightning Wrath is a Difficulty 15 Agility check for targets and most novice-tier characters fail that roll routinely. Her Magical Surge end-of-round effect means she fires at full power every turn, which makes the characters’ impulse to engage her directly a losing proposition.

Contemptuous of Inferiors is the heart of the design. It does not reduce her power. She is still the most dangerous creature in any scene she enters, but it creates a specific, exploitable vulnerability at the narrative level. She fails to perceive the threat that defeats her because it comes from someone she does not consider worth watching. The trait makes the film’s resolution feel inevitable rather than lucky.

GENERAL KAEL HUMAN · DIFFICULTY 8

Defense: 20 (plate, shield), Health: 60 Strength: 15 (+5), Agility: 13 (+3) Intellect: 13 (+3), Will: 13 (+3) Size: 1, Speed: 4 Languages: Common, Kingdom

Weapon Master: Kael’s melee attacks deal an extra 1d6 damage.

Terror of the Death Mask: When combat begins, each enemy that can see Kael makes a Will roll against Difficulty 13. On a failure, the creature becomes frightened until the end of its next turn. A frightened creature makes attack rolls with 1 bane.

Iron Commander: Each Nockmaar soldier within 10 yards makes Will rolls (including morale) with 1 boon.

ACTIONS

Melee Attack—Sword · Slashing: Strength (+5) with 2 boons (3d6 + 1d6 from Weapon Master)

Melee Attack—Mace · Bludgeoning: Strength (+5) with 2 boons (3d6 + 1d6 from Weapon Master)

Two Attacks: Kael makes two Sword attacks.

FURY

Make a Sword attack. Move up to his Speed.

REACTIONS

Iron Parry: When Kael is hit by a melee attack, he can make a Strength (+5) roll against the attacker’s attack result. On a success, Kael takes half damage.

On the design: He was designed to be in direct contrast with Madmartigan. Madmartigan’s combat profile is built almost entirely on Agility 16 (+3). He’s fast, precise, and acrobatic. Kael’s is built on Strength 15 (+3) plus Weapon Master, which adds 1d6 to every hit. Where Madmartigan wins through skill and speed, Kael wins through mass and inevitability. Their total damage output is comparable, but the texture is completely different.

Kael’s Defense of 20 (plate and shield) is the highest in this appendix. At Difficulty 8 he’s the hardest straight combat encounter. The highest possible defense in SWW is 25 and this gets him close to that. Bavmorda is the most dangerous presence in any room she enters, but Kael is the hardest person to physically kill. The finale of the film requires both problems to be addressed simultaneously, which is exactly the kind of layered encounter SWW is built for.

Iron Commander is deliberately limited to the tactical radius. Kael’s army is unbeatable with him leading it. Separated from his troops, he’s still dangerous but not impossible. The film’s resolution requires getting to him past the army, which means the army has to be dealt with first.

A Third Appendix! What is Christian Thinking?! Building Willow and Madmartigan as Player Characters

The opposition stat blocks represent these characters as the Sage needs them. They are calibrated threat levels with mechanical precision, but what if you want to play as Willow? Shadow of the Weird Wizard is a player-facing game, and both characters have arcs that map cleanly onto the novice to expert to master path chain. The builds below represent full level-10 progressions. A Sage running a Willow-adjacent campaign could hand either sheet to a player on day one and say “start here.”

One note on ancestry before diving in: the core book’s novice paths assume human-scale Size 1. Willow is a Nelwyn who are roughly halfling-sized. The Weird Ancestries supplement covers small folk ancestries with Size 1/2, the Slippery trait, and natural stealth. Apply whichever small-folk ancestry fits your table’s needs. The path builds below are ancestry-agnostic and don’t assume owing the Weird Ancestries rulebook.

MADMARTIGAN

Fighter to Swashbuckler to Battle Master

The three-path chain almost writes itself. The Swashbuckler description reads: “In combat, you’re the one who swings on the chandelier. You yank the curtain down to entangle your foes, or scale the cliff with a dagger clenched in your teeth to rescue your one true love from the blackguard’s clutches.” That is Madmartigan, sentence for sentence.

Novice: Fighter

Starting attribute set (Roll 6): STR 12, AGI 12, INT 9, WIL 10.

Attributes at level 10: STR 14, AGI 16, INT 9, WIL 11.

Combat Training (level 1) gives him attack rolls with 1 boon from the start and the ability to roll damage twice on a critical success, so his precision is already above the baseline. Combat Recovery is his resilience; he takes serious damage and keeps fighting. At level 2 he picks his Fighting Style:

Armiger is the only real choice. Choose three weapons (longsword, short sword, dagger) and roll with 1 boon on all three. At level 5, once per combat he can treat any success on an Armiger weapon attack as a critical success (luck ends). Combined with Combat Training’s double-damage-on-crit, this means Madmartigan can choose his moment to deal devastating damage. All of which is precisely how his big fights play out on film.

Expert: Swashbuckler (level 3)

Apply both attribute increases to Agility (14). Health +12. Bonus Damage +1d6.

The Bravado pool is the mechanical heart of the build. At the start of combat, roll a number of d6s equal to level, six dice at level 6, nine at level 9. Note each result and spend them to activate:

• Bold Defense: Subtract a Bravado result from an enemy’s attack roll. Madmartigan is hard to hit because he’s actively spoiling the attempt.

• Derring-Do: Add a Bravado result to any attribute roll. This is his improvised stunts: leaping gaps, catching falling objects, talking his way through a checkpoint.

• Evasive Maneuvers (level 4): Spending any Bravado result makes him Slippery until end of next turn. He’s a ghost in the middle of a melee.

• Cutting Quip (level 4): When an enemy fails an attribute roll, spending a Bravado 3+ weakens them until end of his next turn. The trash talk is mechanically load-bearing.

• Courageous Strike (level 6): On a successful attack, spend a Bravado result to add twice its number as extra damage. A Bravado 6 becomes 12 bonus damage.

• Dashing Recovery (level 9): When he expends his last Bravado, make a luck roll. On a success, gain one extra action next turn. He burns everything and keeps going.

Master: Battle Master (level 7)

Apply three attribute increases: AGI to 16 (modifier +6), STR to 14 (+4), WIL to 11 (+1). Health +18. Bonus Damage +1d6 (now 3d6 total pool).

• Certain Strike: When the d20 shows 5 or less, add level to the result. At level 10 that’s a floor of 15 before modifier. Almost nothing resists him.

• Glancing Blow: On a failed attack, deal 1d6 damage anyway. He always draws blood.

• Storm of Strikes (level 8): Use an action to attack every creature within 5 yards. Each takes 1d6 per two Bonus Damage dice. Against massed infantry this is cinematic.

• Battle Mastery (level 10): Impose 1 bane on all attacks against him. Make Agility rolls to avoid or mitigate harm. The finest swordsman in the world is simply difficult to damage.

The complete picture at level 10: AGI 16 (+6), Bravado pool of 10d6 at combat start, Armiger 1 boon on sword attacks, Combat Training 1 boon on all attacks (net 2 boons), critical success on demand once per combat, Courageous Strike for explosive burst damage, Storm of Strikes for crowd control, Battle Mastery imposing 1 bane on all incoming attacks. He is the most dangerous human combatant at a table of novice-tier adventurers, and he should feel like it from level 1 onward.

WILLOW UFGOOD

Mage to Wizard to Abjurer

Willow’s arc is not “discovers he’s powerful.” It’s “discovers he’s capable of protecting others.” The path chain needs to end somewhere and Abjurer seems perfect for him. After all the Ritual climax a moment defines what Willow will become when he finally achieves his destiny. Though he won’t fulfill that destiny until years after the events of the film.

Novice: Mage

Starting attribute set (Roll 3): STR 9, AGI 10, INT 13, WIL 11.

Attributes at level 10: STR 10, AGI 10, INT 17, WIL 13.

Languages: Arcane and Common (Nelwyn dialect).

Traditions (two at level 1, one more at level 2): Illusion and Enchantment at level 1; Protection at level 2. Illusion covers his phantasmal deceptions throughout the film; Enchantment covers the sleep hex; Protection is what he’s actually building toward.

Starting spells (four novice): Draw from Illusion (a basic phantasmal figment), Enchantment (a sleep-adjacent confusion effect), Protection (a minor ward), and a utility divination. His grimoire grows.

Mage Implement: His enchanted acorns are the implement. Not a wand, acorns. The implement produces charges equal to level; spending one gives 1 boon on a spell roll (Augment Magic), reveals nearby magic (Mage Sense), or lets him resist a magical effect with 1 boon while taking half damage (Mage Shield). The acorn-as-implement is mechanically identical to a wand but thematic in a way I think is appropriate. Yes, he has enchanted acorns in the movie and I’m rolling with that gimmick.

The Source of Magic table (d6): Roll 3 reads “You apprenticed under a famous wizard or attended a magical university. Then again, you might have found a magical trout who whispered terrible truths about the world, thus opening a door to great magical power.” The magical-trout option is not metaphorical, it could be Fin or some other mystical power.

At level 2: Spell Recovery lets him heal half his damage total and regain all expended novice castings. This keeps him in the fight without requiring the party to spend resources on him.

At level 5: Spell Expertise — when he casts a spell requiring an attribute roll, he rolls with 1 boon. When a spell enables a creature to resist, it rolls with 1 bane. His magic becomes harder to shake off.

Expert: Wizard (level 3)

Apply both attribute increases to Intellect (15). Health +4. Two expert spells added.

The Wizard Grimoire is the build’s structural center. It holds four extra novice spells from any tradition he knows, expanding his toolkit considerably. It grows at levels 4 and 6 (one expert spell each) and level 9 (one master spell). He can swap spells after an hour of study. This represents him after years of learning from experience.

Carrying the grimoire gives 1 boon on Intellect rolls and imposes 1 bane on attacks targeting his Intellect. He’s focused, difficult to rattle intellectually, immune to the Intellect impaired affliction. The Book of Magic is doing real mechanical work.

Wizard Sight (level 4): An action or reaction to see magical auras, perceive invisible magical creatures, and prevent hidden magic from concealing itself.

Burn the Page (level 6): Cast any spell from the grimoire as if it were an inscription, but it disappears from the book afterward. Emergency casting at a resource cost, spending knowledge for a one-time effect. Feels exactly right for Willow’s improvised solutions under pressure.

Magic Savant (level 9): After each rest, choose one novice, one expert, and one master spell from his known repertoire. Increase their castings by the spell’s normal amount. He has studied long enough that certain effects flow easily.

Master: Abjurer (level 7)

Apply three attribute increases: Intellect to 17 (+7), Will to 13 (+3), STR to 10 (0). Health +6. Protection tradition deepens; one master spell added.

The Abjurer’s opening description: “You confronted manifold dangers in your career, witnessed terrible things that had the worst intentions toward you and yours. Whether you faced hostile magic or ravenous monsters, you triumphed over these challenges by making the protection of your allies and yourself your highest priority.”

That is Willow’s entire arc.

• Defensive Sigil (level 7, Magical): Place a protective sigil on a creature in reach. For 1 hour, attacks against the target roll with 1 bane. When it takes damage, it can end the effect to halve that damage. Five uses per rest. Willow marks Elora. He marks the party. He marks whoever needs protecting this round.

• Turn Magic (level 8, Magical, Reaction): When a creature within 5 yards would be targeted by a magical effect, make an Intellect roll. On a success, the magic has no effect. At level 10, a critical success lets him redirect that effect to any target within 10 yards. This what he learned from his experience combatting the Ritual.

• Disjoin Magic (level 10, Magical): For 1 minute, become immune to all magical effects. Cannot cast spells or use magical talents in return. The ultimate defensive tool where he can step entirely outside the magical conversation. Used sparingly, because while active he cannot protect anyone else either.

The complete picture at level 10: INT 17 (+7), Grimoire with 4 extra novice spells plus expert and master additions, Spell Expertise (1 boon on all spell attack rolls, targets roll with 1 bane), Defensive Sigil protecting five allies simultaneously, Turn Magic as a reaction to negate or redirect hostile magic, Disjoin Magic for absolute magical immunity. His Health is modest (12 base + 4+4+6 from expert + 6 from master = 32), his Defense is low (8 natural, no armor), and he hits nothing in melee. He wins by making everything around him harder to harm, and by being in the right place at the right moment with the right spell.

Of course, this represents a Willow many years removed from the film, but the development shows the choices along the way allowing you to give players a Willow at any level.

Shadow of the Weird Wizard and Secrets of the Weird Wizard are © 2024 Schwalb Entertainment, LLC. Both are available at DriveThruRPG.

Yesterday was the birthday of an underappreciated Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction author, but it was also my wedding anniversary so there was no way I was going to spend time writing when I could spend it cuddled up on the couch drinking Christmas Spiced Old Fashioneds while watching Twister with my wife. That’s right, Twister. Some couples have a song. My wife and I have a movie and we watch it every year. It’s a true classic of the remarriage genre, with added tornados.

All of which means that my article acknowledging one of my favorite genre authors had to wait a day, but today is that day. Fred Saberhagen was born in Chicago on May 18, 1930, and he spent a lot of his literary life doing something that is more common now than it used to be. He told familiar stories from a new angle. Before there was Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies, there was Saberhagen.

He retold the tales of Dracula and Frankenstein from a sympathetic perspective. He didn’t do this as a mere act of deconstruction, but in part because, as he mentioned in an interview with Ken Rand, he tends to write in the first person and thus seeks to find places where he can find common ground with the character. That personal connection is what led to the more heroic Dracula in his novels.

He even rewrote the entire history of planet Earth with his Empire of the East trilogy. That trilogy (now tetralogy) takes place in a post-nuclear world where the laws of physics have changed and technology is indistinguishable from magic. It’s a setting Gary Gygax read and liked well enough to put it on the reading list that would become Appendix N and it’s a reminder of how much the fiction that influenced early D&D merged science fiction and fantasy.

Stories that re-evaluate villains have become a trend of late with Disney and others giving us sympathetic versions of Maleficent, Cruella, and the Wicked Witch of the West. It’s become so common as a trope that I find it exceedingly dull and evidence of creative laziness, and this makes me a bit sad. It’s a trope that I once loved and was at the core of my literary journey. I am still a big fan of John Gardner’s Grendel and of Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape, because what separates the older pieces from the newer villainous hagiographies is that Grendel and Dracula are unreliable narrators. They are telling their story, but in the case of Grendel it is clear he is a sociopath. In Dracula’s case though…well Saberhagen blurs the lines nicely.

The Dracula Tape: The Defense That Van Helsing Never Allowed

The underlying premise of The Dracula Tape (1975) is that everything we read in Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the product of motivated reasoning, self-justification, or misperception. Everything we were told through the journals of Jonathan Harker, Dr. Seward, Mina Murray, and the correspondence of Abraham Van Helsing was shaped by their perceptions. It is a mosaic of testimony, assembled to construct a comprehensive account of the hunt for and destruction of Count Dracula. Every major participant gets a voice, except Dracula.

Saberhagen took the opportunity to fill this gap by letting the Count tell his own story, and he did it one year before Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire was released. Like Dredd and The Raid (which are essentially the same film), it’s another example of great minds thinking alike. In Saberhagen’s telling, several decades have passed since the events of Stoker’s novel and Dracula records his version of events on a cassette tape found in the back seat of a car that had died somewhere on a remote road. The owners of the car, Arthur and Janet Harker, have been hospitalized for reasons that will be discovered later. For on that cassette tape a man claiming to be Dracula goes through Stoker’s book scene by scene, moment by moment, and offers his account of what actually happened. He never outright contradicts the original version of events, but he does add “context.”

Saberhagen’s Dracula is not a monster. He is a man of ancient codes and genuine feeling who has been badly misrepresented by frightened and fanatical adversaries. The twist on Lucy’s illness is one of my favorite changes in the novel and it fits well with imagery in the 1970s Frank Langella version of Dracula. Lucy isn’t ill because Dracula attacked her. Instead, her illness is the result of incompatible blood transfusions administered by Van Helsing. Saberhagen uses the lack of scientific knowledge regarding blood types during the Victorian and Edwardian eras to great advantage here. Van Helsing was killing Lucy. Dracula turned her because it was the only way to save her life (wink, wink).

As for the relationship with Mina? Well Saberhagen relies on the now overplayed trope that she and Dracula were in love. This is the weakest part of the novel and undermines the real hero of Stoker’s tale in ways that often aren’t appreciated. If you come at it assuming Dracula is an unreliable narrator it still works, and once I got deeper in the series I came to forgive it. The novel’s strongest elements are in how it addresses Van Helsing and his allies. Saberhagen presents Van Helsing as well-meaning in the worst possible way. He’s the kind of righteous zealot who causes catastrophe while absolutely convinced he is preventing it. Every piece of damning evidence in Stoker’s novel gets reinterpreted. Every sinister act gets a rational explanation. And Dracula, as a narrator, is droll, patient, and possessed of a dry wit that makes the whole enterprise immensely readable.

As I mentioned, the book predates Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire by a year and I mention this because I think it matters. The sympathetic vampire is often credited to Rice. We are often told that she is responsible for showing us the monster with an inner life, with a genuine perspective, with grievances the reader might actually find reasonable, but Saberhagen got there first. Or, given that Rice had been working on the idea for years before the publication of Interview, he arrived at it at the same time. Saberhagen’s Dracula is more courtly and less tortured than Rice’s Louis. He is more confident in his own nature, and frankly more fun to spend time with. He’s a less hedonistic Lestat, though we don’t get his side in Rice’s first novel. Where Rice’s vampires tend toward the operatic and the self-lacerating, Saberhagen’s Count has the unflappable dignity of someone who has lived through enough centuries to have developed perspective on human hysteria.

The thing that keeps me returning to the book, is that Saberhagen never quite resolves the question of whether Dracula is telling the truth. The Count himself acknowledges that his account is self-serving. He knows you might not believe him. He asks you to consider the evidence and judge for yourself. He is, in other words, an unreliable narrator who flags his own unreliability, which is a different and more sophisticated thing than an unreliable narrator who doesn’t know he’s unreliable. The book is structured as a legal brief from a defendant who concedes that defendants always shade their testimony, but argues that this doesn’t make the testimony false. Though I have to say, there are moments like his description of the Demeter that show he’s willing to be the blatant fabulist when it suits him.

The rest of the Saberhagen Dracula sequence builds upon this foundation. The Holmes-Dracula File (1978) is my favorite of the sequels and it pairs the Count with Sherlock Holmes in alternating chapters. Holmes is, as always, narrated by Watson and Dracula narrates his own experiences as the two iconic figures adventure in a London threatened by a different kind of vampiric predation. Holmes and Dracula make an extraordinary team. We get the world’s greatest detective and the world’s oldest predator, both of them operating by codes that the ordinary world can’t quite parse, and both of them more interested in justice than in the law’s opinion of justice. Saberhagen’s alternating chapters maintain an excellent tonal contrast between Watson’s earnest reliability and Dracula’s sardonic self-awareness. The effect is genuinely funny and it’s easy to see why an author who wrote so many novels featuring Dracula never thought of himself as a horror author.

Saberhagen would return to Dracula repeatedly over the following decades and wrote ten novels in the Dracula sequence before his death in 2007. The quality is uneven across the run, as it tends to be with any long series, but the foundational idea holds up. The series is not widely read today. Though entries have been published by Tor, the biggest fantasy/sf publisher in the industry, it languishes so much that the current kindle book covers are bland and unwelcoming. When your cover makes the Baen cover look good, and Baen are notorious for their covers, you know you are languishing in the forgotten pile.

Why the Dracula Tape Matters Beyond the Horror Shelf

The revisionist-narrator novel is a common enough form now. We’ve had Jean Rhys’s post-modern Wide Sargasso Sea giving Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre her own story. Gregory Maguire gave us the Wicked Witch of the West’s perspective in Wicked. Tom Stoppard sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to center stage while Hamlet played out behind them. We even have marketing campaigns selling Wuthering Heights as a romance for the ages. It’s a great book, but Heathcliff isn’t the ideal romantic partner. The “what was the villain’s actual experience” novel has become its own genre.

But in 1975, the genre was still in its relative infancy. Saberhagen’s execution of the idea has a specific quality that the later iterations often lack. He never loses track of the fact that Dracula is actually a vampire. This Dracula is sympathetic, but he is not defanged. He lives by a code that is genuinely alien to ordinary human morality. He has done things that are, by any human standard, monstrous. Yet he provides the reader explanations for them that he, though not always the reader, finds adequate. The book is not a rehabilitation in the sense of making Dracula good. It’s a rehabilitation in the sense of making him comprehensible from the inside, which is a different and more interesting narrative than we are often given in the genre.

This is a useful approach for fiction writers and game masters alike. One of the recurring problems in tabletop RPGs is the villain who is evil because the adventure says he is evil. The novice DM will often run the monster in the dungeon as if his sole motivation is that “he’s a monster.” Saberhagen’s method is a corrective to this approach. Every antagonist has a version of events in which they are the protagonist. The vampire hunter who stakes an innocent creature is a murderer in that version of the story. The ancient evil defending its lair is protecting its home. The game master who has internalized The Dracula Tape asks, for every villain they create: what does this character’s version of the tape recorder transcript sound like?

Changeling Earth and the Appendix N DNA

Now for the other Saberhagen, the one Gary Gygax put on the list.

Changeling Earth (1973) is the third volume of the Empire of the East trilogy, following The Broken Lands (1968) and The Black Mountains (1971). Gygax’s choice to cite the third volume specifically, without mentioning the first two, has puzzled Appendix N scholars for quite some time. The most likely explanation is simply that Changeling Earth is where everything the series has been building toward finally detonates, and it’s where the big idea of the trilogy is fully revealed. The Reactor review of the novel, which I used as a refresher before writing this article only to find that it contains one big error, doesn’t mention that modern versions of the tale aren’t the version originally published. If you can, track down a copy of Changeling Earth and not the revised version which is entitled Ardneh's World. It’s not that the revision is bad, it isn’t and it’s what you get in the Empire of the East compilation volumes, but that’s not the version Gygax read when he was inspired to add it to Appendix N.

The big idea driving the narrative in Empire of the East is that fifty thousand years in our own future, a global nuclear war triggered a change in the fundamental laws of physics. Atomic weapons ceased to function. Technology failed or became unrecognizable. In their place, magic arrived. This was real magic, or at minimum psionics, with all the implications that carries. However, the technology didn’t simply vanish. Instead, it transformed. Nuclear weapons have become entities of pure destructive supernatural force. One of them even shares a name with a major Dungeons & Dragons Big Bad Guy. Most importantly, ARDNEH (Automatic Restoration Director — National Executive Headquarters) became a benevolent god, a vast protective intelligence that has been quietly guiding humanity through the dark ages that followed the Change. ARDNEH maintains the conditions under which civilization might eventually recover.

In Changeling Earth, ARDNEH faces off against his opposite number. Orcus, I told you there was a D&D Big Bad, is the physical embodiment of the other side’s nuclear arsenal and the demon king of the East. He is a force of pure destruction, in both desire and form. Their confrontation is the climax of the trilogy and it is fought on a scale that makes human military campaigns feel like footnotes.

As Tim Callahan points out in the Reactor review I told you to read after you read the book, Changeling Earth is listed in the proto-Appendix N that Gygax published in the fourth issue of The Dragon magazine. The question of why Gygax loved it is worth sitting with. Callahan found the human-scale action of the novel less compelling than the cosmic stuff and I think that’s the right read. It’s a reminder that when playing early D&D, the cosmic stuff is exactly the point. From Elric’s multiversal struggles to Changeling Earth’s god-like super-intelligences, Gygax wanted D&D to be more than elves and dwarves.

Consider what Saberhagen is actually doing in the Empire of the East. He is taking the familiar materials of pulp fantasy like the evil empire, the plucky rebel, the sword-wielding hero, the ancient evil in the citadel and grounding them in a cosmology that explains why these things exist. The demons are not supernatural intrusions into a natural world. They are what happens when human technology exceeds human wisdom. The gods are not arbitrary authorities. They are the systems humanity built to protect itself, grown vast and strange over millennia. Magic is not mysterious. It is physics operating under different rules, rules that human ingenuity created and can never take back.

Reading these books, one can easily see the influence on Dungeons & Dragons, with its early penchant for mixing-and-matching elements from both traditional fantasy and science fiction literature. The Greyhawk setting, from its earliest days, had a similar quality. Oerth was a world where the categories of “fantasy” and “science fiction” were more porous than the genre labels suggested. Dungeons in D&D have always been full of things that don’t quite belong to a single genre. A golem that operates like a machine (or is a machine in the case of Barrier Peaks), a spell that behaves like a technology, a demon that seems to follow rules more consistent with nuclear physics than with medieval cosmology. The Empire of the East is one of the clearest sources for that aesthetic, the place where the Dungeon Master who asks “what if the demon IS the bomb?” can see it fully worked out.

The inclusion of Changeling Earth in Appendix N, while omitting the two earlier volumes of the same trilogy, tells you something about what Gygax was actually responding to. He wasn’t cataloguing the Empire of the East as a series. He was pointing at a specific quality that detonates in the third book. He wanted to focus on the moment when the cosmological stakes become undeniable, when ARDNEH and Orcus face each other and the full implications of Saberhagen’s world-concept become clear.

How much did Gygax love Empire of the East? In October 2007, when a poster named “loseth” on ENWorld’s long-running Gygax Q&A thread asked him to rank the authors most influential on D&D, he produced a list of ten. That list had Saberhagen on it, ahead of Tolkien, ahead of Poul Anderson. Many Appendix N authors like Burroughs, Farmer, and Gardner Fox are missing from the list even as their influence is clear.

ENWorld Chat with Gary Gygax April 2007 to the End

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When another poster expressed surprise at Saberhagen’s high placement, Gygax clarified: “Saberhagen is listed for his ‘Empire of the East’ that I very much liked. None other of his novels struck me in this regard.” He added that Empire of the East called to mind Stanley Weinbaum’s The Black Flame. He provided us with two science-fantasy novels in dialogue with each other across thirty years, both making the same argument about what happens when technology becomes mythology.

There is one more thing from that thread worth knowing. Fred Saberhagen died on June 2, 2007. When Gary was asked about a heraldic detail in Greyhawk on July 13th, 2007, he made a connection that was swift (he responded to the message board question within 4 hours) and personal, “With the sad news of Fred Saberhagen’s passing fresh in my mind, I must say that the Great Kingdom I pictured as akin to John Ominer’s Empire of the East.” The decaying empire where “wicked insanity rules” in 576, the Great Kingdom, was conceived in the image of Saberhagen’s fiction. It is a book about what happens when you push a fantasy world’s cosmology to its logical extreme and find that the extreme is stranger and more interesting than the starting point.

The Books of Swords that followed take place after the events of Empire of the East and explore what that extreme looks like from the inside, after ARDNEH has become legend. Those books are easier to find and were my entry point to the series, rather than the Empire of the East. But the Empire of the East is the foundation, and it reads like a D&D campaign that someone played without ever calling it that. So much so that Goodman Games produced licensed supplements for Dungeon Crawl Classics based on Saberhagen’s Empire of the East novels.

Running the Count: Saberhagen’s Dracula as a DCC Patron

I’ve done a couple of bonus game content features now and they are usually B/X or AD&D, but this time I’m going for Dungeon Crawl Classics for a couple of reasons. First, it’s built on Appendix N DNA. Goodman Games even released an officially licensed Empire of the East sourcebook for DCC, which brings the full weight of Saberhagen’s cosmology into the game’s gonzo science-fantasy idiom. More to the point, DCC’s Patron system was designed precisely for beings like Saberhagen’s Dracula. These are powerful, morally complex entities who operate by codes the players can learn but never fully predict, who grant extraordinary abilities in exchange for a relationship that is never quite comfortable. It helps to fix the Deities & Demigods problem where a list of powerful entities becomes nothing more than a list of monsters to kill. Saberhagen’s Dracula isn’t a foe to be fought, but he might be a patron to serve.

What follows is a full patron write-up for Saberhagen’s Count. He is not Stoker’s monster or the Hammer Horror sexually powerful predator, but the figure from The Dracula Tape. He’s ancient and honorable after his own fashion, possessed of genuine feeling, and deeply tired of being misrepresented.

A wizard who bonds with the Count is not pledging service to evil. They are entering into a relationship governed by the oldest social contracts in human history. They are binding themselves to the principles of hospitality, reciprocity, the obligation of the host and the guest. The Count keeps his word. He does not deceive those he has acknowledged. He will not ask those he patronizes to do anything he considers dishonorable, and his definition of honorable is both more expansive and more alien than most humans expect. He will, however, expect to be consulted eventually. He keeps records of everything.

THE COUNT

Patron of the Old Blood, The Dragon Unjustly Maligned, Lord of Shadows and Thresholds

Invoke Patron check results:

1: Lost, failure, and worse. Roll 1d6 modified by Luck: (3 or less) corruption + patron taint; (4-5) corruption; (6+) patron taint. Corruption will typically be in a vampiric direction.

2-11: Failure. Unlike other spells, invoke patron may not be lost for the day. Depending on the results of patron bond, the wizard may still be able to cast it.

12–13: The Count is aware of your need but occupied with older concerns. He sends a fraction of his attention. You gain the ability to see perfectly in total darkness for 1 hour. Additionally, you may ask one yes/no question and receive an honest answer. The Count does not lie to those he has acknowledged, though he reserves the right to decline and the truth will reflect his understanding.

14–17: A shadow peels away from the nearest wall and interposes itself between you and one attacker. The shadow absorbs up to 1d8+CL points of damage from a single blow before it dissipates. For the remainder of the encounter, your footfalls make no sound. Stealth checks are made at +4, and enemies attempting to track you by sound alone automatically fail.

18–19: The Count’s voice speaks through you; not in words, but in presence. You gain the ability to issue one Dominate command (as per Charm Person but with no duration limit) that persists until the target is commanded to harm themselves, their loved ones, or their deepest-held principles, at which point the compulsion breaks. Additionally, for 1d4 rounds you radiate an aura of absolute social authority. All NPCs who are not actively hostile must make a DC 12+CL Will save or treat you as their superior in any dispute currently underway. Fanatical zealots, professional inquisitors, and Van Helsing-types receive +4 to this save. The Count finds them tiresome but respects their conviction.

20–23: Blood of the Old Country. The Count lends you a fraction of his vitality. You immediately recover 2d6+CL hit points. For the next 24 hours you require no food, water, or sleep. Any mundane poison or disease currently affecting you is suppressed, not cured, but silenced, for this period. When it returns it will do so all at once. The Count considers this a loan, not a gift, and will remember that your body required the assistance.

24–27: The shadows are his domain, and for a moment, yours. You and up to CL companions step into a shadow of any size and may emerge from any other shadow within 300 feet as a single movement action. Creatures witnessing your disappearance must make a DC 15 Will save or be shaken (−1 to all rolls for 1d4 rounds). If used to escape pursuit, all tracking attempts against you in the next hour are made at −4. Bloodhounds and similar supernatural trackers simply find nothing.

28–29: The Count moves through you. For 1d4+1 rounds you take on aspects of Saberhagen’s Dracula at his most formidable. You gain +4 to all melee attacks, unarmed strikes deal 1d6 damage and drain 1 point of Stamina from targets on a hit (recovered after a full night’s rest), and you are immune to fear effects of any origin. Additionally, one enemy within 60 feet who meets your gaze must make a DC 18 Will save or stand completely motionless for the duration. They are not unconscious, not unaware, simply unable to move. They can watch everything. The Count considers this mercy.

30–31: The Count calls in an old obligation from the night itself. 2d6 giant bats materialize from the darkness (use stirge statistics; they obey your commands for 3 rounds before departing on their own business). Simultaneously, a dense fog rolls in from no visible source, reducing all ranged visibility to 10 feet. You and your companions are unaffected. When the bats leave, they take the fog with them. The Count will not explain where either came from.

32+: The Count himself takes notice. A figure in archaic formal dress stands at the precise edge of where the lamplight fails, watching. For the remainder of the encounter, you function as an extension of his will. You are immune to all mind-affecting effects. You may make a single Dominate attempt (DC 20 Will save) against every sentient creature you can see simultaneously. Any undead in the area immediately recognize you as acting under the Count’s authority and will not attack you or your companions unless commanded to by a force more ancient than the Count himself, which is rare. After the encounter, the Count will want to discuss the circumstances that required this degree of direct involvement. This is not a threat. It is an expectation.

Patron Taint: The Count

When a Patron Taint is indicated, roll 1d6:

1. The smell of blood becomes intoxicating. When you witness bloodshed, any creature taking damage within 30 feet, make a DC 10 Will save or spend your next action moving toward the source of the blood rather than your intended action. This compulsion worsens with each subsequent taint: DC 12, then DC 14. On a third result of this taint, the compulsion becomes permanent unless the Count intervenes.

2. Your shadow begins to behave independently. It gestures when you are still. It points at things you haven’t looked at yet. It occasionally refuses to follow you into direct sunlight, pooling at the threshold like a reluctant dog. NPCs who observe this react with unease (−1 to all reaction rolls with strangers). The Count considers this an aesthetic bonus. You may not agree.

3. Direct sunlight becomes genuinely uncomfortable. You take 1 point of damage per round of unobstructed sun exposure. Shade, cloud cover, glass, and indoor lighting are all fine. This is not undead vulnerability, you are not undead (yet). It is simply what happens when you spend too long at the margins of mortality.

4. You may not enter any private dwelling without an explicit invitation. Public spaces, inns, taverns, temples, and ruins are unaffected. If you attempt to cross an uninvited threshold, you cannot. You are stopped as surely as by a wall of force. You may stand in the doorway and speak. You may request entry. You may wait. This is, the Count would note, basic courtesy made law. He has always followed it voluntarily.

5. Your connection to ordinary sustenance weakens. Food provides only half its usual restorative benefit. Water tastes of nothing. You find yourself noticing blood. You do not crave it, not yet, but you are aware of it in a way you were not before. The Count has made no request. He is simply watching to see what you do with the awareness.

6. A figure has been observed near your companions’ lodgings. It is not threatening, simply watching from a polite distance, in formal dress. The Count is evaluating whether you warrant his deeper investment. He will not explain his criteria. Your companions have noticed the figure. They have opinions about it. The Count will expect you to handle their concerns without troubling him.

Spellburn: The Count

When a wizard under the Count’s patronage burns Strength, Agility, or Stamina, roll 1d4:

1. Your veins darken visibly beneath the skin as the Count draws on your vital energy directly. The burned points represent a debt of blood. It is not extracted now, but registered. The Count does not forget what is owed. He has never, in six hundred years, forgotten what is owed.

2. Your eyes shift to a deep crimson for the duration of the spell’s effect. Animals within 30 feet react to you with either terror or submission (your choice, once per scene) for 24 hours after the casting.

3. You age momentarily and visibly. Maybe a lock of hair turns white, the lines at your eyes deepen, or your hands look older than they did this morning. Then it passes and you are yourself again. The Count has accelerated your mortality by the precise amount required and redirected that energy. You felt the years move through you. Some of them were interesting.

4. The burned stats represent vitality drawn from the Count’s own reserves and lent to you. You will feel it return over the coming days as the score recovers: a warmth that moves against the direction of your heartbeat, arriving just slightly after it should. The Count has said nothing about this. He will say nothing. It is, by his standards, a small favor between people who have an understanding.

Patron Spells: The Count

Level 1 — The Vindicating Tongue

The wizard speaks the Count’s truth into a contested situation. This is not deception, the Count does not deal in deception, but it is reframing. The wizard gives a presentation of events from the perspective most favorable to the caster’s position, delivered with the full weight of six centuries of practice. All creatures within 30 feet who hear the wizard speak must make a Will save (DC 10 + CL) or believe, at a bone-deep level, that the wizard is the wronged party in any current dispute. This does not compel action. It shifts disposition: hostile creatures become wary, wary creatures become neutral, neutral creatures become sympathetic. Duration: 1 turn per CL. Fanatical inquisitors, professional witch-hunters, and those who have already decided the wizard is guilty receive +4 to their save. The Count finds such people tiresome but respects their consistency.

Level 2 — Blood Remembers

The wizard touches freshly shed blood, from any creature, any amount, and reads its history. A successful spell check reveals the following, depending on the result:

• Result 1: Lost, failure, and worse! Roll 1d6 modified by Luck: (0 or less) corruption + misfire + patron taint, (1-2) corruption, (3) patron taint (or corruption if no patron), (4+) misfire.

• Result 2-13: Lost. Failure.

• Result 14–17: The creature’s approximate age, general health at time of injury, and emotional state in its final moments.

• Result 18–21: The above, plus one significant sensory memory from the creature’s last 24 hours . From the blood, the caster gets a memory of a face seen, a place visited, a conversation overheard.

• Result 22–25: The above, plus the caster may ask one direct question of the blood. Where was this creature going? Who sent it? What was it afraid of? The blood answers from the creature’s own knowledge, honestly, without interpretation.

• Result 26+: The above, and the blood volunteers information the caster did not know to ask for. The Count considers this a courtesy. He believes people deserve to know the relevant facts of the situations they are in.

Level 3 — The Old Invitation

The wizard extends the Count’s own hospitality to a target creature, invoking social contracts so ancient they predate every civilization currently operating in the campaign world. The target must make a Will save (DC 12 + CL) or be bound as follows for 24 hours. They must answer one question put to them honestly and completely; they must accept one gift from the wizard without causing it harm; and they may not commit violence against the wizard or the wizard’s explicitly designated companions for the duration. This is not mind control. The Count finds mind control a vulgarity. It is the enforcement of hospitality. The target will remember every word of what transpired. They will know they answered honestly. Whether they resent this is a matter between them and their own conscience. The Count is unavailable to adjudicate that particular dispute.

The Hidden Story, Both Ways

Fred Saberhagen worked in two registers that seem different but share a deep structural commitment. In the Dracula books, he takes a villain’s story and asks what it looks like from the villain’s perspective. In the Empire of the East books he takes the world we know and asks what it would look like from fifty thousand years of distance, after the categories we use to organize it have been transformed beyond recognition.

Both projects are exercises in estrangement. Both ask you to look at something familiar and find it strange. Both reward readers who are willing to suspend their certainty about who the protagonists and antagonists are. Both, in their different ways, left marks on the imaginative DNA of tabletop roleplaying.

That is not a small legacy for a writer who remains, despite Gygax’s endorsement and a genuinely distinguished bibliography, somewhat underread outside the circles where his name gets cited. He deserves a better fate than “the Appendix N author you haven’t gotten around to yet.”

May 18 was his birthday. The Empire of the East omnibus edition is in print. The Dracula Tape is available. Worlds await you.

Further reading: For more on Appendix N and the literary DNA of D&D, see the growing Geekshelf series that starts with 13 RPGs from the 1970s You Should Own.

For more on sympathetic monster narratives in RPG design, the Amber Diceless piece covers related terrain. What happens when you build a game around the possibility that the “villain” is the one telling the truth.

Roll for Initiative! Go First Dice Let You Roll for Initiative in All Kinds of Situations!

As someone who has played a lot of games, one of the things I like to examine in a rules set is how it addresses the issue of which player goes first. There are almost as many ways to answer this question as there are games and My Kind of Meeple has a rundown of 140 ways that different games answer this very question. Some of these solutions can be a game in and of themselves and end up using time you’d rather spend playing the game. Who wants to spend half-an-hour debating who has read more history books, when there is a game to be played?

As much as I love playing other games, the games I play most frequently are role playing games and a lot of the alternative ways of figuring out who goes first don’t work there. That’s where “Go First Dice” come in. They are dice that you can roll to determine who goes first that are fair, but that have no possibility of two people rolling the same number. You just roll and go. Mathematician James Grime has a very good video up at the Numberphile YouTube page discussing these dice, their application, and the challenges of creating dice that work for larger and larger playing groups. James doesn’t go into the mathematics of permutations in great detail, but does mention how those are at play here.

To be fair, outside of James, GameTek , and me, there probably aren’t a lot of people who care about the underlying math, even as the results of the problem are really cool. On a side note, at the beginning of the video you can see a game set up that uses the Einstein (monotile) that GameTek mentioned a couple of years ago. You can buy a set of these tiles at MathArtFun. I haven’t purchased a set of the Einsteins yet, but I have purchased a set of “Go First Dice.”

The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson

’s had a banner week this week. His Good Omens Season 3 review became his most-read post and gave Luke a much needed boost. The traffic seems to have come thanks to some virality on twitter, but he hasn’t tracked down the culprit yet. This is the algorithmic paradox of the modern internet in miniature. You can do careful, sustained work for eighteen months and then have your biggest day because of a social media chain reaction you didn’t start and can’t trace. It reminds me of my Peanuts post last year. It went viral, for me, and I even got a couple of new subscribers out of it. Luke’s been one of the most reliably honest voices on film and pop culture for as long as I’ve been reading him, and it’s genuinely good to see the work finding the audience it deserves.

Mortal Cinema

Good Omens Season 3 Review: Gay Angels Good, Gaiman Bad

We can’t really talk about Good Omens “Season 3” – which is technically now a streaming movie, and not really a season – without talking about Neil Gaiman, cowriter of the original novel and the teleplays. Gaiman has been a writer of many wonderful things, alongside collaborators who still seem to be wonderful in and of themselves, including Henry Selic…

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a month ago · 14 likes · 1 comment · Luke Y. Thompson

has been buried in the first draft of his upcoming second edition of Thousand Suns for the past few weeks, and rather than go quiet he’s been doing something I always appreciate. He’s been providing brief, honest check-ins that treat his readers like collaborators rather than an audience waiting for a product drop. His current focus is finalizing the rules for the “High Struggle,” the ship combat and extended conflict system he first outlined back in March, and early internal playtesting is apparently going well. I’ve been watching this project develop since Maliszewski first announced the Thousand Suns revival over at , and the methodical transparency of his design process is a model for how small publishers should communicate with their readership. I’ve been a fan of James’ for a long time and own the original Thousand Suns rulebooks as well as his Dwimmermount mega-dungeon. Check in on his progress over at Grognardia Games Direct.

Grognardia Games Direct

The High Struggle (Part II)

I’m still deep in the salt mines of completing the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns, so today’s post will be brief. However, as I did at Grognardia last week, I wanted to pop in to let everyone know that my silence over the last couple of weeks is not an indication of anything dire but rather …

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a month ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · James Maliszewski

Grognardia Games Direct

The High Struggle

High Struggle (Tera Lingvo: La Alta Lukto…

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3 months ago · 27 likes · 5 comments · James Maliszewski

’s dropped its 74th issue a couple of weeks ago and as always it’s a great resource if you want to know what’s happening in the OSR. This issue includes Ten Foot Pole naming both Fortress Tomb of the Ice Lich and City of the Ape-Men the best of the month. Ten Foot Pole says Ape Men, compares favorably to Isle of Dread. This is high praise indeed for anyone who grew up on that module. Between the adventure roundups, the product news, and Milton’s own editorial asides, the Glatisant does more useful work for the hobby in one newsletter than most gaming sites manage in a month. In fact, Glatisant was one of the inspirations for The Weekly Geekly.

The Glatisant: A Questing Beast Newsletter

The Glatisant: Issue #74

Sales DriveThruRPG has a huge sale on nearly everything from Dungeon Crawl Classics. Only a few days left…

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a month ago · 43 likes · 6 comments · Ben Milton

I’ve been a fan of Jim Zub’s since before he was writing on the Munchkin comic book. His Zubstack highlights his current work, like his upcoming Free Comic Book Day releases Conan: Tides of the Tyrant-King (Prelude) and the Manga Classics: Journey to the West book. The news that really caught my eye this time was buried in the gaming section. Monolith has announced a new Kickstarter for the Conan Board Game and the Hyborian Age tabletop RPG. I’ve got both and I’ll be reviewing the newest Tabletop RPG soon. Zub has been writing Conan comics for Titan and Heroic for a while now and the accumulated weight of that work is starting to produce some genuinely interesting crossover projects. The thing I’ve enjoyed most about Zub’s run is how he understands how important “Weird” elements are to Sword & Sorcery fiction.

The Zubstack

Zubby Newsletter #155: Ready For Battle

This Saturday, May 2nd, is FREE COMIC BOOK DAY and I have two giveaway titles available on the big day- CONAN: TIDES OF THE TYRANT-KING Prelude and MANGA CLASSICS: JOURNEY TO THE WEST Prelude…

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a month ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Jim Zub

Dr. posted an entry this week that made me both happy and sad. I was thrilled to hear she’s making such great progress on her Monograph (that’s academic for book on a single topic) based on her dissertation. It will be wonderful to see how she changes and expands the dissertation for a wider audience and I very much look forward to reading the book when it finally hits the shelves. On a sadder note, this means that she’s pulling back from two articles a week to one. She’s framing this as a quality-of-life adjustment and is asking her readers what they want more of going forward and I think this is the right choice, even as I selfishly want more Curiosities. Of particular note in her video, was that she said that one of the reasons she wanted to slow down (in addition to workload and quality assurance) was that she wanted to make sure she was a more active member of the Substack community.

Rebekah’s a valuable voice, in her own essays and in comments, and I was happy to hear that she values being a “reader” as much as being a writer here. There are too many academics and journalists (I’m not naming names but they include some of the most popular Substacks) who want us to read and pay, but who aren’t even willing to read and comment on others work here. Her horror history work is some of the most smartly contextual stuff in the Geekosphere, and whatever she publishes at one piece per week will be worth the wait. Oh, and as far as the video she posted was concerned, I thought the “meta” artwork in the background was to die for. That “inspiring view” was truly remarkable and the whole set up was a great deconstruction of Dark Academia. It was far better than the deconstruction I did with Matt Thompson a while back where I work a cardigan and sipped coffee from my Beholder Mug.

Dr King's Curiosities

I'm Changing my Substack

Hello curious friends…

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a month ago · 46 likes · 42 comments · Rebekah King

As always, reading ’s musings over at , "America's Only Rock 'n' Role Playing Magazine," is like having a conversation with a life long friend. Matt and I share so many interests and it was an honor to chat with him on video a while back. He has a piece this week that hits me right in the fandom. He covers the odd event that transpired last week when there were two TTRPG announcements involving Elric drop within moments of one another. Given the history of Michael Moorcock properties in the IP wars of early TSR and Chaosium, the fact that two companies (one using an adapted version of Chaosium’s Worlds of Wonder Magic World rules set and the other using an alternate D&D rules set) are once again licensing Elric simultaneously is hilarious. Of course, unlike the Chaosium and TSR “deals,” I imagine Moorcock is actually getting residuals this time…and yes if you read Moorcock’s interview in Kobold Quarterly #5 you’ll see that he wasn’t paid until the new Chaosium crew took over.

Thompson uses this news as a launchpad for a six-song countdown of the best Elric-related music in the rock canon : Blind Guardian, Cirith Ungol, Hawkwind, Diamond Head, Smoulder, and BÖC's "Black Blade," which Thompson notes is sung from the point of view of Stormbringer rather than Elric. That last observation is the kind of thing that rewards close reading of liner notes, and it's exactly the sort of connective tissue between music and gaming history that makes Critical Hit Parader worth following.

Critical Hit Parader

Elric RPGs & Songs

Sci-fi/fantasy author Michael Moorcock is one of the patron saints of Critical Hit Parader. He is a genuine Appendix N author who has collaborated with Blue Öyster Cult and Hawkwind, while also leading his own Michael Moorcock & The Deep Fix music project. Moorcock’s most famous character is the doomed albino emperor, Elric. Last week marked an auspicio…

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a month ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Matt Thompson

has me waffling regarding whether I want to hunt down a copy of the 1984 Dune board game from Parker Brothers. Reading his article, and the reviews on Board Game Geek (ever overly pretentious and filled with presentism), I am leaning heavily towards buying a copy. It sounds like an easy to play and enjoyable game. It isn’t asymmetrical like the Avalon Hill version, which is an adaptation/variation of Cosmic Encounter, and looks like a good introductory game. I love the asymmetric version of the game, but I am also a fan of quality main stream games like Candy Land and Risk. Yes, I said those were quality main stream games.

The Retroist

The Dune Board Game (1984)

My friend got the Dune board game as a Christmas gift. He was extremely excited about it and called us all over to play. We managed to work out the rules well enough, but the game was a lot more special to him than it was for the rest of us. He had seen the movie and loved it. Most of us had not see it yet. Without that connection, the game was just a b…

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a month ago · 37 likes · 8 comments · Retroist

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. 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 role playing 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).

My daughters are graduating from High School this year. Good God! Time flies so quickly. Anyway… as a part of their graduation gift, I took them to Denver to see Good Kid live. Good Kid have been on the family play list since the twins were in Middle School and they are a musical bridge between me and the girls. While I have always been a poor man’s “soc,” in that I wore polos and played baseball, soccer, and wrestling in High School and joined a fraternity (even as I was poor), I’ve also been a fan of punk (in all forms from hard core to pop) since at least my own middle school days. I remember when my friend Steven, at Crow Canyon Middle, first introduced me to Minor Threat. They captured my youthful, but respectful, rage just perfectly. Good Kid are a pop punk/indie band that prove that traditional rock is far from dead among the younger generation.

The show was exactly what a Good Kid show should be. The music was fast, tight, joyful in a slightly desperate way, and built for rooms that are too small for how loud the crowd gets. Though in this case the venue (Mission Ballroom) was exactly the right size and the crowd was big enough for crowdsurfing. Good Kids are a Canadian indie rock quintet who built their audience through Fortnite streams, Twitch, and letting anyone who wants to use their songs online. This sounds like a gimmick until you hear the songs and realize the music is the kind of high energy rock you thought died a decade ago. Their debut full-length, Can We Hang Out Sometime?, came out in April after years of numbered EPs, and the tour supporting it has been selling out rooms across North America and Europe.

Here are two songs to start with if you don't know them:

"Alchemist" is one of their best-loved deep tracks, though it didn’t make the cut during the fan participation Guitar Hero segment of the concert…yeah, there’s fan participation at a Good Kid show like you wouldn’t believe. Solid fan interaction like you would expect from an Indie band. Alchemist is also a song that tends to convert people. The title is a nod to Fullmetal Alchemist, which tells you something about where this band lives culturally, but the song itself is just a perfect piece of guitar-driven indie rock with a chorus that does exactly what a chorus is supposed to do. Alchemist is one of their less punk pieces and you can hear the influence of Snow Patrol, Modest Mouse, and Jimmy Eat World in this one.

”Mimi’s Delivery Service” — like “Alchemist” is influenced by anime, but it’s also a love song written by a husband who is saw his wife struggling emotionally with meaning and the challenges of creative work. It’s a beautiful song and the discussion of the song at the concert was one of the funniest moments all show. One of the band members wanted to write a song for his wife and had a melody, but didn’t think they were a good lyricist and so asked their band mate to help out. Needless to say, the joke was that it was an interesting experience writing a love song to your bandmate’s wife.

And now for some Good Kid-adjacent recommendations:

Bloc Party — “Helicopter” Good Kid cite Bloc Party as a direct influence and you can hear it, particularly in the guitar interplay. “Helicopter” is Bloc Party at their most urgent. This is a song that convinced me they were worth paying attention to back in the early 2000s and I think the song has held up remarkably well. There are so many bands at the end of the Shoegaze and Indie Rock era, before it was displaced fully by Nu Metal, that never got as much attention as they deserve and this song belongs on your play list next to Arctic Monkeys.

Speaking of Arctic Monkeys, you can definitely hear the influence of Fluorescent Adolescent in Good Kid’s various songs.

“Seventh Heaven” — INOHA opened the Denver show and called Good Kid “one of our biggest inspirations.” This was the first time I saw the band and the four-piece indie/punk band from San Antonio impressed me almost as much as Electric Frankenstein did the first time I saw them, and that’s high praise indeed. They got the crowd warmed up and got the crowdsurfing started. “Seventh Heaven” was the song that everyone in the audience knew the words to and it has pulled over four million YouTube views. That’s enough views that made me feel slightly foolish for not having heard them before the show. It’s their signature track for good reason. It’s got the kind of chorus that seems like it must have already existed somewhere, which is the highest compliment I know how to pay a song.

I think my favorite INOHA song is “A Next Time.” You can hear influence from the Orange County (CA) and Long Beach alternative scenes from the 1990s smashed together with Silicon Prairie punk.

Point Blank (1967)

John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), just received a new Criterion Collection 4K release that has instantly jumped to the top of my want list. As much as I love Excalibur, and it just got an amazing Arrow release, this film just edges it out because of the way Boorman pushes crime film boundaries.

Lee Marvin plays Walker (yet another name for Richard Stark’s Parker), a man who gets shot by his partner and left for dead. Walker has come back, as a force of nature or spirit of vengeance, to collect the $93,000 he’s owed. The plot is a simple revenge thriller premise and Boorman treats it as an excuse to make something genuinely strange. His version of this story (also adapted in Mel Gibson’s Payback) is non-linear, dreamlike, and features French New Wave influence and a preternatural calm at its center that is, according to Jim Jarmusch (see below), entirely due to Marvin’s performance and broader influence.

The film’s modernist locations, the Huntley House, the Brewery, the concrete geometries of late-60s LA, are not incidental. Boorman is explicitly using the architecture to say something about the corporate crime organization Walker is dismantling, which is a reading that the new release makes easier to sustain. The stark modernist archetecture also helps demonstrate why LA is the second most noir of all cities, with only San Francisco beating it out for dread and despair. Many tragic noir tales take place in New York city, but as Coyote Ugly shows us, you can always take the train back to New Jersey to recover and be safe. That’s not true with LA. When you leave your safe home in Kenosha, WI or Haddonfield, NJ to make your way and become a star in LA, there’s no train home. There is do or die and Covenant House and the banks of the channelized LA River are filled with people who were devoured by the beast that is LA. It’s my favorite city, but it’s a place where dreams decay and where the most famous hotel is haunted with enough secrets to inspire a season of American Horror Story.

I want to stake a claim right at the top of this piece, before I get into the weeds of world-building and military logistics and the peculiar genius of Elizabeth Moon. Sheepfarmer’s Daughter is one of the most important fantasy novels written in the past forty years, and it has been absurdly underserved by the broader cultural conversation about the genre. When people talk about the books that changed fantasy, they talk about Tolkien, Jordan, Martin, and Le Guin. Sadly, Moon’s name rarely makes the list. That’s wrong. It’s been wrong since 1988, when Baen Books first published this novel, and it keeps being wrong every year that passes without someone shouting it from a rooftop.

So here I am, on a rooftop, shouting.

Let me tell you why this book matters, why it should matter to you as a fantasy fan and even more if you are a fantasy role playing gamer. After the review, beecause this is Geekerati and I’ve have decided to follow the old Google+ rule of providing gaming content when appropriate, I’ll give you stats and an mini-scenario so you can bring a piece of Paks’s world into your own campaigns.

Fantasy Authors and the Authenticity Problem

It is often said that writers should “write what you know,” but I find that far too many authors write about things they know absolutely nothing about in ways that hinder the experience. Yes, I know we are talking about fantasy and no one has actually encounter elves or fairies. At least not since Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths met faeries outside the village of Cottingly in 1917. But even fantasy authors should have some knowledge about the mundane elements within their fiction. They don’t have to have lived experience, but genuine scholarship goes a long way and is greatly appreciated on my end.

As much as I love Brandon Sanderson, the “heist” in the first Mistborn novel felt flimsy in large part because he didn’t have any real understanding of how conspiracies and heists work. Heck, he didn’t even seem to have an Oceans Eleven level understanding. What he does understand, and this very much saved the novel, is how people interact with religion. Most of his fantasy is grounded in rich theological cosmology that draws on his real beliefs, and it shows. Authors like David Drake, Glen Cook, Jerry Pournelle, and Gene Wolfe have real world military experience and it shows in their writing. Heck, the fact that David Drake did his own translations of Ovid carries over into his fantasy Lord of the Isles series. When I read a hand to hand combat scene written by Steven Barnes, his long history of martial arts training shines through.

Like many of those I listed above, Elizabeth Moon has prior military service and is a former United States Marine. She also has degrees in biology and history. You can see her experience in these areas in both her fantasy and science fiction writing. That’s right, she’s one of those authors who is as comfortable writing personal stakes fantasy fiction as she is writing sweeping military science fiction. She is, by any reasonable measure an accomplished author and she is also one of the most versatile science fiction and fantasy writers of the last half century.

Sadly, she is not talked about enough. Late last year there was an attempt to crowdfund a role playing game based on her Deed of Paksenarrion saga and it failed on the first attempt. When it did succeed, it did so at a very modest level that is low enough I’m not certain that Brittannia Game Designs be able to deliver all of what they promised. Thankfully, they are fulfilling the game through DriveThruRPG, so I am probably being overly pessimistic.

I think part of the reason Sheepfarmer’s Daughter gets undersold is because it solves a problem that a lot of readers don’t realize fantasy has. The problem is the authenticity I mentioned earlier. Specifically, fantasy literature has always had a complicated, often fraudulent relationship with military life. The default mode of fantasy military fiction, from pulp sword-and-sorcery through the high epic tradition, is to treat soldiering as a series of dramatic moments strung together by logistics-free travel. Heroes fight, heroes win, heroes rest up and do it again. The grinding daily reality of actual military service, the training, the hierarchy, the boredom, the institutional culture, the specific and detailed ways that violence breaks human bodies, gets compressed or skipped entirely.

Like David Drake and Glen Cook, Moon makes sure to not skip any of it.

This is a woman who knows what basic training feels like from the inside, and she incorporates that into her protagonists journey. She knows what it means to subordinate your individual judgment to unit cohesion. She knows what a chain of command looks like when it’s working and when it isn’t. And when she sat down to write a fantasy novel about a young woman who runs away from an arranged marriage to become a soldier, she brought all of that knowledge with her.

The result is a book that feels, in a very specific and irreplaceable way, true.

What the Book Is, and Why It Hits Different as The Kids Said a Decade Ago

Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter, Paks, to her friends and to the reader almost immediately, is the daughter of a Three Firs sheepfarmer who decides she would rather march to war than marry. She defies her father and flees until she makes it to Duke Phelan’s recruiting sergeant, impresses him, and joins his mercenary company. Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, the first volume in The Deed of Paksenarrion, follows her through roughly two years of actual soldiering. We accompany her through her initial training, her first battle, a promotion, a physical assault and its aftermath, a long campaign in the South, capture, escape, and finally the confrontation with a villain called the Honeycat whose predations have been the operational context for much of the book’s second half.

What I want to emphasize is how unglamorous a great deal of this is, and how that unglamorousness is the book’s whole point. Paks makes beds. She digs ditches. She learns to march in formation without breaking step. She gets promoted to file leader and then has to figure out what that means for her relationships with the people she was a recruit alongside. She buys a horse for her friend Saben with her first real pay. She learns to barter. She sits watch. She is exhausted, and muddy, and professionally competent in ways that mount up slowly across hundreds of pages until you realize you have been reading a masterclass in what it actually means to become a soldier.

This is the achievement the genre almost never pulls off. The process of military professionalization is rendered so convincingly that you feel like you’ve been through part of it yourself. The first book is the opposite of modern “progression fantasy” where we can almost count the experience points our protagonists earn, if they aren’t given to us outright, as they go from zero to hero. This first novel is truly low fantasy and very down to Earth. Yes, there is magic. At first, it looms in the background and it emerges more and more as the threat of the Honeycat grows, but Paks is digging ditchs and suffering the aftereffects of concussions.

It’s refreshing to read something that portrays the mundane, and mundane threats, in a real and thoughtful way. Paks is a protagonist we worry about, even as we know from the opening (and the fact that there are more books) that she will survive. When Patrick Rothfuss wrote his novel of a young man’s experience with homelessness and the acquisition of student loan debt (The Name of the Wind), he was following in the Moon tradition. She was there first, and she finished her series.

The D&D Connection

A lot of commentators discuss the connection the second novel in the series, Divided Allegiance, has with the AD&D adventure The Village of Hommlet. Since, I’m reading that section right now, I can see that connection, but the D&D elements are deeper than mere inspiration in my mind.

Sheepfarmer’s Daughter reads, in certain crucial respects, like what happens when someone who actually understands military history and culture sits down to write the fantasy novel that presents the world Dungeons & Dragons kept gesturing at but that modern gamers ignore. I mean that as a compliment to both Moon and the game as it was once played. recently discussed hearing some one call modern D&D (and by extension modern progression fantasy) “Pop Fantasy,” Like him, I agree that this is what the genre has become.

Pop fantasy happens when your inspirations and frames of reference is wholely within self-reflective as a genre. In the case of D&D, it was initially inspired by Burroughs and Howard with Tolkien being added to that mix as flavoring early on. Eventually, later versions of D&D (and D&D fiction) were inspired by D&D. Ask a modern gamer what their favorite Burroughs story is or what they think of Lin Carter’s Ballantine series of fantasy novels and you’ll likely get blank stares. Ask them about Drizzt or Matt Mercer and you’ll have a wonderful conversation. I like both the Carter era and the modern one, but I do wish the modern one would engage with the past a bit more.

D&D, especially the Basic/Expert game I grew up with, the one Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson built and Tom Moldvay, Dave Cook, and Steven Marsh refined, has always been animated by a kind of romantic militarism. You play warriors, you join companies, you march through hostile territory, you fight, you loot, you survive. The game gives you a Fighter class with hit points, a good to-hit progression, and a list of weapon proficiencies (not called proficiencies in B/X because Fighters in that game are proficient with all weapons), and it gestures at a whole life of professional violence that it doesn’t have the bandwidth to fully simulate. That’s fine. Games have to abstract. That’s what games are for. The whole point of my recent article on Charisma as “power stat” is that player characters were companies, not parties. They were more Black Company than Fellowship. So much so, I can see why Gygax constantly bristled when people said D&D was Tolkienesque.

But Moon doesn’t have to abstract. She can show you every single thing that the Fighter class represents in actual embodied practice. When Paks struggles with spear training and excels at marching, she is demonstrating in lived narrative form exactly the kind of differentiation that hit dice and proficiency slots are trying to capture. When the trial of Corporal Stephi plays out through two chapters of careful institutional procedure, Moon is illustrating the whole social infrastructure that keeps a mercenary company from devolving into chaos. She is showing us the stuff that happens between the adventures and giving us a fiction outline for how to role play downtime.

Sergeant Stammel, who is one of my favorite characters in the book, is what a really good NPC sergeant should look like. He’s competent, fair, genuinely invested in his recruits’ development, capable of both warmth and iron severity. He is the idealized NCO that every good DM is trying to channel when they run a military campaign. Moon gives him to you in full color and lets you watch how he actually works. He’s not the stereotypical NCO played by R. Lee Ermey. He reminds me far more of my Sgt. Major Opa. He’s tough and demanding, but there to guide you in a stern but positive way.

The Honeycat, Count Siniava, the villain of the book’s second half, is what high level monster design is trying to get at when it builds a villain with political power, personal menace, magical resources, and a genuine strategic intelligence. He doesn’t just threaten Paks. He threatens the whole operational situation. He is the kind of antagonist who makes everything harder without ever being in the room. He demonstrates the value of “domain play,” which was a major focus of earlier editions of D&D but has faded away with newer editions of the game.

And the world itself, Paksenarrion’s world, is constructed with exactly the kind of internally coherent economic and political logic that the best D&D settings aspire to. The mercenary company system makes sense. The way cities are distributed along trade routes makes sense. The relationship between mercenary ethics and the proto-just-war agreements between companies makes sense. This is not a fantasy economy bolted onto a video game map. This is a world that could have existed.

The Escape Sequence (Chapters 14-18): Where the Book Becomes Something Else

I want to pay particular attention to the central sustained narrative in the book’s second half, because it is where Sheepfarmer’s Daughter shifts registers in a way that I find genuinely remarkable.

Paks, Saben, and Canna Arendts are sent by Duke Phelan to garrison a fort called Dwarfwatch in the middle of the book. It’s meant to be an easy duty rotation, but they end up encountering the forces of another mercenary force (the Halverics) who defeat them and hold them for ransom. It’s an interesting sequence because it highlights how the “Lawful” mercenary companies behave. Paks and her allies surrender and give their parole, after which they are given a great deal of freedom until their ransom is paid. That ransom is never paid though because when Paks and her friends are picking berries outside their garrisoned fort the Honeycat’s forces attack the fort and kill almost everyone outside the fort. Those aleady inside are undersiege and Paks and her friends are cut off. They are unarmed except for daggers. Canna has an arrow wound that might get infected, and they have to travel through enemy-held territory to find Duke Phelan in order to break the siege.

What follows across four chapters is a sustained survival narrative. We are there for every moment of their evasion, foraging, and improvisation under pressure. This section reads nothing like the action sequences that dominate the rest of the book. It reads like medieval version of Lone Survivor. The stakes are intimate. The decisions are granular. The tension comes not from set-piece combat but from the ongoing problem of determining where they sleep, what they eat, how they get past that patrol.

Canna Arendts, and not Paks, is the hero of this section. The “Deed” may be Paksenarrion’s, but the moment is Canna’s, and she doesn’t survive it. She is a veteran soldier whose knowledge keeps the other two alive. She knows how to read the enemy’s movements, how to use terrain, how to pace a march with a wounded member. Her death, which only gets revealed later, hits with real force because Moon has made her real. Canna Arendts is the Michael Murphy of Paksennarions Deed. The book is filled with characters who like who might not make it to the end of any encounter. Paks makes it to the Duke alone uncertain of her friends’ fates.

The scene at the lone trading post, where the woman running the shop tries to rob them and the confrontation turns violent, is particularly good, It’s a reminder that the civilian world is not automatically safe, and that exhausted, unarmed soldiers are vulnerable to ordinary human predation as well as military threat. Moon earns Paks’s grief for Saben and Canna. She earns it across four chapters of detailed shared survival. That’s good writing.

And then there is the scene I want to single out, because it is the key to everything about how this book should be read by anyone who cares about what class Paksenarrion Dorthansdotter actually is.

Canna’s wound is infected, or heading that way. She needs a healer. They have no healer. Paks says she wants to try praying to Gird using Canna’s medallion. Canna is skeptical, “It takes a Marshal or a paladin to heal, though.” Then she says, in a tone that contains one of the novel’s most important lines: “What are you, a paladin in disguise? You aren’t even a Girdsman.”

She says it almost sarcastically. She says it as if it’s absurd.

Paks holds the medallion over the wound and prays anyway, stumbling, unpracticed, not even a proper Girdsman invoking a god she doesn’t officially follow. Canna says “Ouch! What did you poke it for?” Paks didn’t poke anything. The sharp pain is gone. Canna can breathe easier. The next morning, the wound is dry and pink. There is no inflammation, no fever, no infection. It’s better than it has any right to be.

Neither Paks nor Canna names what happened. Neither of them says another word about it. Moon doesn’t explain it either. She trusts the reader to understand that Canna asked the right question, and that the answer was yes. The depiction of the paladin, even a nascent one as Paks is, in Sheepfarmer’s Daughter is second only to Poul Anderson’s depiction of Holger Carlsen in Three Hearts and Three Lions. Sadly, these are two novels too rarely read today.

The Bottom Line

Read Sheepfarmer’s Daughter. Read it if you love fantasy, read it if you love military fiction, read it if you play D&D and want to understand what your Fighter character’s life actually looks like between the dungeon sessions. Read it if you want to see why you don’t need a detailed backstory and want to see how the adventures you play at low levels ARE your backstory. It is one of the genre’s genuine accomplishments, and it has been waiting patiently on the shelf for decades for more readers to find it.

The sequels, Divided Allegiance and Oath of Gold, take Paks in directions that this first book doesn’t obviously predict and that might eventually satisfy fans of progression fantasy. Though, Paks suffers a lot more than your typical protagonist in LitRPG or progression fantasy novels. I’ll be reviewing those two later, but start here. Start with the sheepfarmer’s daughter who ran away to be a soldier and ended up becoming something considerably more than that.

What’s her backstory? She’s a sheepfarmer’s daughter, and that’s enough.

And now, for the two Appendices!

Game Appendix A: The Paladin

A Character Class for B/X Dungeons & Dragons

Designed for use with the World of the Deed of Paksenarrion and compatible with any B/X campaign. BECMI already has its Paladin class.

Overview

The Paladin is a holy warrior, a fighter touched by divine favor, serving Law and the gods who uphold it. In the world of Paksenarrion, this most often means a follower of Gird or another Lawful deity, though the divine connection may not be understood by the Paladin herself, or by anyone else, for many years.

Paladins fight as Fighters, but their divine gifts set them apart: they heal by touch, resist disease, sense evil, and can in time pray for miracles. They are not Clerics. They do not turn undead. They do not serve the church institutionally. They serve through the church, or alongside it, or sometimes far ahead of it, doing what needs to be done.

A Paladin class is difficult to achieve, the divine chooses who it will, and demands much of its members. A Paladin who falls from Lawful alignment loses all class abilities until atonement is made. A Paladin who commits an act of Chaos loses them permanently, reverting to a Fighter of equivalent level with no divine gifts.

Prime Requisite: CHR and STR. All Paladins are required to have a CHR 17 or higher, so they only receive bonuses when their STR is sufficiently high.

Races: Human only, in the tradition of B/X. The divine call in this setting is particular to human experience; Referees may allow exceptions at their discretion.

Class Features

Hit Dice: d6 per level, up to 9th level. +2 HP per level from 10th onward (no Constitution bonus applies to these fixed HP gains).

Attack Progression: As Fighter. Paladins advance in combat at the same rate as Fighters.

Weapons and Armor: Paladins may use any weapon and any armor, including shields. They are not restricted by weapon type.

Saving Throws: As Cleric. The Paladin’s divine protection manifests in exceptional resistance to magic, poison, and petrification. The Cleric’s saving throw table best represents this.

Special Abilities

Lay on Hands
Once per day, a Paladin may heal a touched creature by laying hands upon it. The Paladin heals 2 HP per character level (so a 3rd-level Paladin heals 6 HP; a 9th-level Paladin heals 18 HP). This healing may be used on the Paladin herself. The Paladin may choose to split the healing between a disease cure and hit point restoration (see Cure Disease below).

Cure Disease
Once per week (at levels 1–8) or twice per week (at levels 9–14), a Paladin may cure any natural disease by touch. Magical curses, lycanthropy, and supernatural afflictions are beyond the reach of this ability unless the Paladin is of high enough level to pray for the appropriate Cleric spell (see Spells).

Immune to Disease
A Paladin cannot contract any natural disease. They may carry and transmit diseases (if this is relevant to the Referee), but they do not suffer the effects.

Detect Evil
A Paladin can sense the presence of Evil (Chaotic intent, creatures aligned with Chaos, or items imbued with dark magic) within 60’. This ability requires concentration. The Paladin must declare she is focusing her attention, and cannot move faster than a walk, attack, or cast spells while doing so. The ability reveals the general direction and rough intensity of Evil in range, but not its precise source until she approaches within 10’. Duration: as long as the Paladin concentrates, up to 1 turn per level per use. No daily limit.

Referee note: In B/X terms, “Evil” often means Chaotic alignment (or Chaotic creatures and items). Neutral creatures do not register unless they are actively committing Chaotic acts at that moment. Lawful creatures do not register.

Cleric Spells (6th level onward)
Beginning at 6th level, a Paladin may pray for and cast Cleric spells. These work exactly as described for the Cleric class. The Paladin has access to the complete Cleric spell list and selects spells through prayer each morning, as a Cleric does. The number of available spell slots is given on the table below.

The Paladin does not receive reversed (dark) versions of Cleric spells. A Paladin who prays for a reversed spell immediately loses all class abilities until she undertakes atonement (as adjudicated by the Referee). This is not a punishment, it is how the divine connection works.

Lawful Alignment (Required)
A Paladin must maintain Lawful alignment. Performing a Chaotic act results in the immediate loss of all Paladin class abilities. Minor transgressions can be atoned for through service, charity, or a quest determined by the Referee. A single deliberate and premeditated act of Chaos costs the Paladin all class abilities permanently; she becomes a Fighter of equivalent level and retains all physical skills and HP, but the divine connection is severed.

Referee note: This is a serious consequence and should not be applied for momentary lapses of judgment under stress. A Paladin who kills a prisoner in panic is not the same as a Paladin who tortures a prisoner for information. Use this rule with care.

CON bonus applies to each d6 rolled at levels 1–9. No CON bonus applies to fixed HP gains at levels 10–14.

Paladins use the standard B/X combat matrix as Fighters of the same level.

Starting at Name Level (9th)

At 9th level, a Paladin reaches Name Level and may found a chapter house or small temple. The divine authorities governing the Paladin’s faith will provide nominal support, enough to establish a modest structure, but the Paladin is expected to finance construction from her own resources or those of her companions.

A 9th-level Paladin may attract followers: 1d6 × 5 men-at-arms (0-level humans) and 1d4 Aspirant-level Paladin candidates (level 1 Paladins who seek mentorship). These followers serve the Paladin’s holy cause, not her personal wealth. They will not perform Chaotic acts. If the Paladin falls from grace, her followers disperse.

Paladin Spells Available

Paladins draw from the standard Cleric spell list. They do not have access to reversed spells.

Suggested First Spells for a New Holy Warrior (Level 6): The following are the most dramatically appropriate choices for a Paladin just coming into her spellcasting ability. The Dungeon Master and player should discuss which divine tradition the Paladin follows; the spell selection should reflect that.

• Cure Light Wounds — the most common choice and usually the right one

• Detect Evil — she already has an innate version; the spell version reaches farther and gives more information

• Protection from Evil — extends her natural shielding to companions

• Light — practical and symbolically appropriate

• Purify Food and Water — useful in the field, often overlooked

The Unrecognized Paladin

In the spirit of Paksenarrion herself, the Referee may choose to have a Paladin character not know she is a Paladin until later in her adventuring career. Under this variant:

• The player knows the character’s class and abilities.

• The character in the fiction does not have a name for what she is.

• Lay on Hands manifests as something she “wills” by stubborn intent. She doesn’t discuss it.

• Detect Evil presents as a vague unease or certainty that “something is wrong here.”

• The excellent saving throws are attributed to constitution and luck by her companions.

A Marshal, Patriarch, or high-ranking divine figure may eventually recognize the Paladin’s nature. Perhaps this happens after witnessing her survive something she should not have survived, or after observing Lay on Hands at work. This recognition is a campaign event, not a mechanical trigger.

Canna Arendts asked the right question once, in a tone she meant as a joke: “What are you, a paladin in disguise?” She did not know she was asking the most important question anyone would ask for the next several years.

Design Notes

This class is designed to fit the tone of Elizabeth Moon’s Sheepfarmer’s Daughter and the larger Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy. Key decisions:

Why no Turning? The Paladin’s divine power in this setting is expressed through protection, healing, and combat and not spiritual authority over undead. Turning is a Clerical function specific to the church hierarchy. A Paladin is a warrior first; the spiritual authority comes later, if at all. While there is a scene in the second novel of a Paladin wielding a Holy Sword and doing some amazing things, it doesn’t include turning undead.

Why Cleric saves instead of “+2 to all saves”? The “+2 bonus” is an AD&D 1e mechanical layer that doesn’t translate cleanly to B/X’s class-based save tables. Using the Cleric table is functionally similar (Cleric saves are generally better than Fighter saves in the critical categories), simpler to apply, and removes the need for a house rule.

Why d6 HP instead of d8? The Paladin is not a fighter’s fighter, she is a person of faith who fights. The Cleric’s d6 represents this. She survives through divine grace and tactical intelligence, not brute endurance.

Why spells at 6th, not 9th? The AD&D 1e Paladin gets spells at 9th level, which in practice means most campaign Paladins never cast a spell. B/X campaigns rarely go past level 9. Moving spells to 6th level ensures the ability sees actual play and reflects the divine development arc of Paks’s story across all three books.

What about higher levels? This class goes to 14, the B/X maximum for humans. The Deed of Paksenarrion spans three books and a substantial level range. If you’re running a full trilogy campaign, consider what lies beyond 14th and consider using BECMI. The Companion Set has rules for Paladins that are quite good and reflective of that edition’s baseline mechanics. The Referee’s discretion applies, and the divine escalation in Oath of Gold suggests that the story goes places no table can cleanly map.

Game Appendix B: Characters, Stats, and an Adventure

Because we’re gamers, and the best reviews leave you something to play with. I am providing B/X D&D, AD&D 1st Edition, and Dragonbane Stats.

Key Character Statistics

The following stat blocks cover Paksenarrion, Saben, Canna Arendts, The Honeycat (Count Siniava), Sergeant Stammel, and Duke Phelan as they appear at the time of the escape sequence (Chapters 14-18). I’ve noted where equipment differs from standard due to the circumstances of the scenario.

PAKSENARRION DORTHANSDOTTER (”Paks”)

Human Paladin (unrecognized), Age 18. A sheepfarmer’s daughter turned soldier, roughly one year of professional military experience. Private in Duke Phelan’s company. Promoted for battlefield performance. Paks is a Paladin who does not know she is a Paladin yet. Her divine gifts manifest as what she and everyone around her takes for exceptional luck, constitution, and will. The High Marshal who meets her later suspects, but no one yet confirms it and she has received no training. At the time of the escape she is unarmed except for a dagger, unwounded at the start, suffers a broken rib during a hilltop skirmish (Chapter 16) and an arm wound in the trading post encounter (Chapter 17).

B/X Dungeons & Dragons

Class/Level: Paladin 3 (”Warrior” — per the B/X Paladin class in this article)
Alignment: Lawful
Experience Points: 7,000 (mid-3rd level; needs 10,000 for 4th)

Hit Points: 17 (3d6 + 3 CON bonus; CON 15 grants +1 per die)
Armor Class: 9 (unarmored; 5 in full military kit: leather + shield + Dex Bonus)
Movement: 120’ (40’)
Attacks: 1 (as Fighter)
Damage: 1d4 + 1 (dagger); 1d8 + 1 (sword, when available); 1d6 + 1 (spear)
Saving Throws (Paladin 3, as Cleric levels 1–4):

These are meaningfully better than a Fighter 3’s saves across most categories. This is the most observable sign of Paks’s nature, and no one yet has a name for it. She is shown to be very resistant to poison in the novel.

Paladin Abilities (as of 3rd level):

• Lay on Hands: Heals 6 HP (2 HP × level 3) once per day, by touch. This is the ability Paks channels through Canna’s Gird medallion during the escape. She does not understand what she is doing. The Referee should apply it quietly and let the fiction discover it. It is likely, based on the combat descriptions, that she used this on herself during battles. She took blows that should have killed her, but lived with only injuries.

• Cure Disease: Once per week, can cure any natural disease by touch. May be used in place of or in addition to Lay on Hands in the same day.

• Detect Evil: Active within 60’, requiring concentration. Paks cannot move faster than a walk, attack, or cast while using it. Duration: up to 1 turn per level (3 turns at 3rd level). This presents as unease, certainty that something is wrong, a pulling sense of wrongness she cannot explain. No daily limit. Until she gets Canna’s amulet of Gird, she never uses this ability.

• Immune to Disease: Cannot contract any natural disease.

• (Cleric spellcasting begins at 6th level — “Holy Warrior” on the Paladin advancement table. Paks has no awareness of any divine connection at this point in the story.)

Languages: Common
Equipment (escape): Dagger, traveling clothes, minimal rations
Equipment (full kit): Chain mail, shield, short sword, spear, dagger, military pack

Special Notes:
The Referee should apply Paks’s Paladin abilities as silent features of the world. They are real, they work, and nobody in the fiction announces them. The excellent saves are attributed to luck and constitution. The Lay on Hands is something she tries on a whim, but doesn’t believe in. The Detect Evil is a bad feeling she can’t shake or a weight from Canna’s necklace. Canna asked the right question once and didn’t know it.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition

Class: Paladin
Level: 3rd
Alignment: Lawful Good

STR     INT     WIS     DEX     CON     CHA
 16         11         13         14         15          17

Hit Points: 24 (Paladin uses d10; CON +1 bonus applies)
Armor Class: 9 (unarmored); 5 (leather armor, shield, Dex bonus)
Movement: 12” / 9” in armor
THAC0: 18
Number of Attacks: 1
Damage by Weapon: By weapon type; +1 STR damage bonus at STR 16

Saving Throws (Paladin 3rd — all categories +2 from class ability):
Paralyzation/Poison/Death Magic: 12 | Rod/Staff/Wand: 14 | Petrification/Polymorph: 13 | Breath Weapon: 15 | Spell: 15

Paladin Abilities:

• Lay on Hands: 6 HP (2 × level 3) healed, once per day. She does this for Canna during the escape. She has no name for it.

• Cure Disease: Once per week by touch.

• Detect Evil: 60’ continuous, 1 round concentration to identify source.

• Protection from Evil: 10’ radius, continuous. All companions in her immediate presence benefit.

• Turn Undead: As Cleric 1st level (untested — she has not encountered undead in this narrative).

• Immune to Disease.

• (Cleric spell access begins at 9th level.)

Weapon Proficiencies: Sword (long), Spear, Dagger
Non-Proficiency Penalty: -2

Special Notes:
Paks does not know she is a Paladin. No one in her chain of command has recognized it yet. The Marshal who encounters her later is the first to form a theory. The Referee applies these abilities as features of the character, not as announced powers. Her exceptional saves are the most visible sign; the healing is something she does quietly and does not discuss.

Languages: Common (one dialect), Trade Tongue (partial)

Dragonbane

Type: Human Holy Warrior (Unrecognized)
Movement: 10
Hit Points: 15

Attribute     Score
STR                  14
CON                15
AGL                 14
INT                  11
WIL                 14
CHA                 17

Armor: None (escape scenario); Studded Leather (full kit) — DR 3/5

Skills:
Swords 16 | Spears 14 | Knives 13 | Evade 13 | Sneaking 10 | Awareness 12 | Endurance 14 | Persuasion 13 | Healing 13

Traits:

• Brave: Paks never makes a WIL check in the first round of combat, regardless of circumstances.

• Lay on Hands: Once per day, Paks may touch a wounded character and restore 1d6 HP. She does not understand this as a divine ability. This is how Canna receives some relief from her wound during the escape.

• Blessed Resilience: Paks gains +2 to all Conditions saves against poison, disease, and magical effects. She is immune to natural disease. This is the ability her comrades have noticed without explaining.

• Hard Marcher: Paks may travel one additional hex per day of wilderness travel without fatigue penalty.

Weapons: Knife (1d6), Sword (1d8, +2 push), Spear (1d8, reach)

Special Conditions (Escape Scenario):
Broken rib: AGL reduced to 11, movement reduced to 8. Arm wound: Swords and Knives skills reduced by 3.

SABEN

Human Fighter, Age 19. Fellow recruit and close friend of Paksenarrion. Cheerful, dependable, deeply loyal. At his best, he is a competent soldier one step behind Paks in terms of raw talent but her equal in courage.

B/X Dungeons & Dragons

Class/Level: Fighter 2
Alignment: Lawful

STR     INT     WIS     DEX     CON     CHR
  14        10        11         13          13          14

Hit Points: 13
Armor Class: 9 (unarmored)
Movement: 120’ (40’)
Attacks: 1
Damage: 1d4 (dagger)
Save As: Fighter 2
Morale: 11

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition

Class: Fighter | Level: 2nd | Alignment: Lawful Good

STR     INT     WIS     DEX     CON     CHA
  14        10        11          13         13          14

Hit Points: 16
Armor Class: 9 (unarmored)
Movement: 12”
THAC0: 19
Attacks: 1
Damage: By weapon type

Saving Throws: As Fighter 2
Weapon Proficiencies: Spear, Short Sword, Dagger

Dragonbane

Type: Human Soldier
Movement: 10
Hit Points: 13

Attribute     Score
STR               13
CON             13
AGL              13
INT               10
WIL               11
CHA              14

Armor: None (escape) / Light leather DR 2 (full kit)

Skills:
Spears 13 | Swords 12 | Knives 12 | Evade 12 | Sneaking 10 | Awareness 10 | Endurance 12

Traits:

• Loyal: When fighting alongside Paks, Saben gains +2 on all WIL checks.

• Steadfast: Saben will never voluntarily leave a wounded companion.

Weapons: Knife (1d6), Spear (1d8, reach)

CANNA ARENDTS

Human Fighter, Age ~28. A female veteran of Duke Phelan’s company, several years Paks’s senior in both age and experience. Practical, unsentimental, possessed of exactly the kind of hard-won tactical wisdom that keeps people alive in bad situations. She is the group’s de facto leader during the escape, despite being its most severely wounded member. She dies covering Paks’s final run to safety.

B/X Dungeons & Dragons

Class/Level: Fighter 5
Alignment: Lawful

STR     INT     WIS     DEX     CON     CHR
  14        13        14          14          14          12

Hit Points: 30 (currently 18 — arrow wound)
Armor Class: 9 (unarmored; arrow in shoulder, movement penalty applies)
Movement: 90’ (30’) (wounded)
Attacks: 1
Damage: 1d4 (dagger)
Save As: Fighter 5
Special Notes:
Canna provides a +1 bonus to all navigation and evasion decisions made by the group if you use the optional ability check rule from The Art of Dungeon Mastering section. She is more experienced than either Paks or Saben and her tactical judgments are sound. She knows the general layout of this region from earlier campaigns.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition

Class: Fighter | Level: 5th | Alignment: Lawful Good (Girdsman

STR     INT     WIS     DEX     CON     CHA
  14        13        14         14          14          12

Hit Points: 35 (currently 21 due to arrow wound)
Armor Class: 9 (unarmored); 2 (full kit: chain mail, shield, Dex bonus)
Movement: 9” (reduced from 12” due to wound)
THAC0: 16
Number of Attacks: 1
Damage: By weapon; no STR bonus

Saving Throws: As Fighter 5
Weapon Proficiencies: Sword (long), Dagger, Spear, Crossbow (light)

Special Abilities:

• Multiple attacks (5 per round against opponents of fewer than 1 HD)

• Tactical assessment: Canna has an effective Intelligence of 15 for purposes of evaluating military situations (battlefield experience)

• She may roll once per day to recall relevant knowledge of the region from prior service (Referee discretion)

Special Disadvantages:
Arrow wound: -2 to all attack rolls, -3” movement, cumulative fatigue effects on long marches prior to being healed by Paks.

Dragonbane

Type: Human Veteran Soldier
Movement: 8 (injured; normally 10)
Hit Points: 14 (currently 8 — arrow wound)

Attribute     Score
STR                13
CON              14
AGL               13
INT                13
WIL               14
CHA              12

Armor: None (escape) / Chain DR 4 (full kit)

Skills:
Swords 16 | Spears 14 | Knives 15 | Evade 13 | Sneaking 13 | Awareness 15 | Endurance 14 | Healing 13 | Leadership 14 | Lore (Military) 14

Traits:

• Veteran: Once per combat, Canna may reroll any single die result (attack, defense, or damage).

• Tactical Mind: When the group makes a group decision about evasion, navigation, or ambush avoidance and follows Canna’s recommendation, they gain advantage on the relevant check.

• Self-Sacrifice: Canna will never abandon an ally who cannot move under their own power. This trait cannot be overridden by morale or fear.

Weapons: Knife (1d6), Short Sword (1d8)

Current Condition: Arrow wound in shoulder. All STR and AGL-based checks are made at -2. She is losing 1 HP per day without medical attention. A successful Healing roll halts this progression. All penalties are removed when/if Paks heals her.

THE HONEYCAT (Count Siniava)

Human Fighter (Lord), the book’s primary antagonist. A southern count who has built a career on manufacturing conflicts that he then profits from. He hires out his troops to multiple parties, manipulates political situations, and vanishes before consequences arrive. He is charming, intelligent, militarily capable, and utterly ruthless. He holds a dark pact that grants him one supernatural ability. He can assume the form of a large predatory cat. He travels with a personal mage who handles his arcane requirements. He is the kind of villain whose menace is largely institutional. You feel the weight of his organization before you ever meet him in person and that is exactly the right design for this kind of antagonist.

B/X Dungeons & Dragons

Class/Level: Fighter 9 (Lord)
Alignment: Chaotic

STR     INT     WIS     DEX     CON     CHR
  17        17         14         16         14          18

Hit Points: 58
Armor Class: 1 (plate mail +2, Dex bonus, ring of protection +1)
Movement: 60’ (20’)
Attacks: 1
Damage: 1d8+4 (magic sword +2, STR bonus +2)
Save As: Fighter 9
Morale: 11 (12 commanding his troops; 8 when personally cornered with no prepared escape)

Dark Pact — The Cat’s Form:
Once per day, Siniava may transform into a large predatory cat. This is not a spell, but it can be dispelled. Due to the weakness of the cat form, in comparison to his real attributes, he will revert to human form if attacked.

In cat form:

• AC: 5 | MV: 180’ (60’) | Attacks: 2 claws (1d4+1) / bite (1d6+1)

• He retains his own Intelligence and WIS but cannot speak or use weapons or items

• He may return to human form at will; doing so takes one full round

• He uses this ability to escape, not to fight. Siniava is a general and a politician. Shapeshifting when cornered is an admission that the plan has failed.

His Mage:
Siniava keeps a personal mage (Magic-User 6, Chaotic) on his staff who handles all arcane requirements. The mage is a member of the Lender’s Guild and casts battlefield spells, communications enchantments, minor divination. In particular, he uses Sleep on Duke Phelan’s troops to aid him and Siniava’s escapes. Any magical effects not attributable to the dark pact should be sourced to this figure. He also has allies who are Clerics of Liart, the god of torture.

Treasure: Plate mail +2, magic sword +2, ring of protection +1, various gems and political correspondence of significant intelligence value.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition

Class: Fighter
Level: 10th
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

STR     INT     WIS     DEX     CON     CHA
  17        17         14         16         14          18

Hit Points: 74
Armor Class: -1 (plate mail +2, ring of protection +2, Dex bonus)
Movement: 6” (armored)
THAC0: 11
Number of Attacks: 3/2
Damage: 1d8+5 (+3 STR bonus for STR 17, +2 magic weapon)

Saving Throws: As Fighter 10

Special Ability — Dark Patron Grant (The Cat’s Form):
Once per day, Siniava may assume the form of a large predatory cat. This functions as Polymorph Self but is a granted power, not a memorized spell. It requires no components, but can be dispelled and is available to him as a gift from the dark pact he made with evil gods. In cat form: MV 18”, AC 5, attacks 2 claws (1d4+2) / bite (1d6+2), retains INT and WIS. He uses this to escape, not to fight. The distinction matters for how the Referee runs him. The cat form is weaker than his normal form, but it can allow him to sneak out at night.

Special Defenses:
Ring of protection +2; effectively never surprised in situations his intelligence network has been monitoring (1-in-10 chance of surprise rather than standard).

His Mage:
A personal Magic-User (8th level, Chaotic Evil) travels with Siniava’s inner retinue and provides all arcane support. Any magical effects encountered in Siniava’s operations that go beyond the dark pact ability are this figure’s work, or the work of one of the many evil Clerics allied with Siniava. Make sure that one of his spells is Sleep because he uses that spell in the final battle.

Magic Resistance: Nil
Intelligence: Exceptional (17)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Weapon Proficiencies: Sword (long), Sword (broad), Dagger, Crossbow (heavy), Mace, Lance

Personality: Charming, politically sophisticated, and apparently reasonable. He is not reasonable. Personal morale 10 in command situations. This drops to 7 in direct, uncontrolled combat where his political leverage is absent.

XP Value: 5,200 + 14/hp

Dragonbane

Type: Dark Nobleman / Sorcerer-Warrior
Movement: 10
Hit Points: 14

Attribute     Score
STR                 16
CON               14
AGL                15
INT                 17
WIL                16
CHA               18

Armor: Plate Mail — DR 6

Skills:
Swords 18 | Evade 15 | Persuasion 18 | Awareness 17 | Sneaking 14 | Manipulation 18 | Lore (Magic) 15 | Leadership 17

Traits:

• Shapeshifter (Dark Pact): Once per day, Siniava may transform into a large predatory cat. In cat form: MV 14, HP as normal, Armor DR 2 (natural hide), attacks Claws 1d8 / Bite 1d10. He retains his INT and WIL but cannot speak or use items. He returns to human form at will (one action).

• Dark Patron: Once per combat, Siniava may call upon his patron for a Fear effect on all enemies within 10 meters. All affected must make a WIL check or spend their action fleeing.

• Commanding Presence: Enemies who attempt to directly defy Siniava’s verbal orders must make a WIL check at -2 or hesitate for one action.

• Political Web: Siniava always has a prepared escape route in any situation he has had time to plan. Catching him unprepared is the only reliable method.

His Mage (Companion NPC):
Siniava’s personal mage travels with his inner retinue and handles all arcane requirements. Referees should assign this figure MV 10, HP 9, Armor DR 1, INT 16, WIL 14, Lore (Magic) 18, and the following spells usable once per combat each: Sleep (WIL vs. 14, 2d4 HD affected), Hold (WIL vs. 15, one target), Phantasm (creates an illusory threat, Awareness vs. 15 to disbelieve). The Sleep spell was used in the final battle with Siniava.

Weapons: Longsword (1d10, +1 push/sweep), Dagger (1d6)

SERGEANT STAMMEL

Bonus inclusion because leaving him out would be criminal. I might do a full write up later, but Stammel is a great example of a Lawful non-paladin character. At the beginning of the second book, he is troubled by many actions taken by Duke Phelan but unlike Paks he doesn’t get physically ill and remains with the company.

B/X D&D

Class/Level: Fighter 7 | Alignment: Lawful | HP: 42 | AC: 3 (chain +1, shield) | MV: 90’ | AT: 1 | D: 1d8+2 | SV: F7 | ML: 12
STR 16 | INT 13 | WIS 15 | DEX 12 | CON 15 | CHA 16

AD&D 1e

Fighter 7 | Align: LG | HP: 52 | AC: 1 | MV: 9” | THAC0: 14
STR 16 | INT 13 | WIS 15 | DEX 12 | CON 15 | CHA 16
Proficiencies: Sword (long), Spear, Dagger, Crossbow (light), Mace

Dragonbane

MV: 10 | HP: 15 | Armor: Chain DR 4
STR 14 | CON 15 | AGL 12 | INT 13 | WIL 15 | CHA 16
Swords 16 | Spears 15 | Leadership 18 | Awareness 15 | Persuasion 15
Traits: Inspiring Leader (allies within 10 meters gain +2 on WIL checks), Veteran, Never Quit

The Long Road to Phelan

A Mini-Adventure for 3 Characters (Pregenerated or Player-Created), Levels 2-4

Adaptable for B/X D&D, AD&D 1st Edition, or Dragonbane. System-specific notes provided where relevant.

Background

Three soldiers of Duke Phelan’s Company are on the wrong side of a military catastrophe. Their garrisoned fort of Dwarfwatch has fallen to the forces of Count Siniava, the Honeycat. The soldiers were deep in the brambles south of the fort picking berries when the attack came. Siniava’s troops killed everyone they could find. The portcullis crashed down before the characters could reach the gate. Their own men are visible on the walls, armed by their once foes, and now allies, the Halverics. The fort is holding, but the group is cut off. The Honeycat’s sweeps are already moving through the surrounding area. He’s preparing to take the majority of his army south and leave a contingent to siege Dwarfwatch. It’s up to the PCs to get word to the Duke.

The PCs are in a rough spot though. All they have their daggers and the small amount of provisions they brought for lunch. Canna has an arrow wound in the big muscle between her neck and shoulder from when Siniava’s troops fired arrows blindly into the brambles. Canna remained silent when she was hit, so the PCs are undetected. Paks and Saben pulled the barbed head out and bandaged it with a strip of cloak and a folded section of the berry sack. Thankfully, the arrow hadn’t gone in deep enough for the barbs to do their work but the injury is serious. They have waterflasks, a tinderbox in Canna’s pouch, and a pail with some berries left in it. That is all.

Duke Phelan is to the south, at the siege of Rotengre. A city that is somewhere between six and eight days’ march through country that Siniava now controls.

This adventure works as a narrative scenario for one Referee and three players (each running a pregenerated character from the stat blocks above), or as a solo scenario with the Referee running Saben and Canna as NPCs and the player controlling Paks. The pregens are provided with this article; stat blocks appear in the Game Appendix. You can also run the scenario allowing your players to use their own characters. I think this might be a great way to start a campaign, in medias res.

Tone: This is a survival thriller, not a dungeon crawl. Resources matter acutely. Evasion is preferred over combat at almost every point. Every fight costs something the group doesn’t have to spare. Each encounter costs them in health, equipment, time, or noise. The Referee’s job is to make the pressure felt without making the scenario feel hopeless. Moon’s version of this story is tense and cold and hungry and ultimately worthwhile. That’s the target.

Party Resources at Start:

• Three daggers (belt daggers, standard issue)

• Canna’s tinderbox

• Waterflasks (full)

• The berry pail (mostly full — food for one day for three people, or less)

• Canna’s tactical knowledge and Gird medallion

• No armor. No swords. No shields.

Canna’s Wound: She has lost blood and is operating at reduced capacity. Apply her wounded statistics from her stat block. Without treatment (binding, cleaning, wound ointment), she loses 1 HP per day as infection sets in. The wound is the adventure’s primary clock; not Siniava’s column, not the patrol schedule. It’s Canna.

Encounter 1: First Night — Hiding in the Woods

The first night after the fort falls. The group has made it into the tree line south of the fort. Fog settles in. Horse patrols move through the area.

The group overhears two of Siniava’s horsemen riding through the fog nearby, complaining to each other. This is how they learn the enemy’s name:

“My lord Siniava will be up to his usual tricks, no doubt.”

Canna recognizes the name. “The Honeycat,” she says quietly.

The Situation: No combat is likely this night if the group is sensible. The challenge is noise discipline, cold management, and watch rotation. Canna is feverish and losing heat fast. The fog both hides them and disorients movement.

Key Decisions:
Do they move at night? If she’s an NPC, Canna says no. The fog will cause them to blunder and make noise. They sleep in shifts. (If players insist on moving: each hour of night movement requires a DEX check in B/X or an AGL check in Dragonbane. A failure means audible noise and a Siniava patrol check. Roll 1d6; on a 1-2, a patrol investigates.) If the party fights and kills a patrol, all future patrol rolls are on a 1-3.

Who keeps watch? Paks should take first watch; she is the least wounded. Canna needs sleep more than anyone.

Canna’s prayer at night: Canna asks both of them to join her in a prayer to Gird. “He welcomes all honorable warriors.” Paks and Saben both repeat the prayer after her: “Courage to our friends, and confusion to our enemies.” This is not a mechanical effect, it’s a character moment, and the Referee should play it as one. How they respond in this moment will affect the special scene below. If the Paks player (you probably should make a fake character sheet for that player) agrees to pray, then she can attempt the healing later. If not, she cannot.

Siniava’s Mounted Patrol (2 horsemen passing nearby):
B/X: AC 5, HD 1, HP 5, MV 240’ mounted, #AT 1, D 1d8 (sword), SV F1, ML 8, AL C. If they hear the group, they investigate and call out; they will not dismount to chase into thick woods.
AD&D 1e: AC 5, 1 HD, HP 5, MV 24” mounted, THAC0 20, D 1d8. ML 8.
Dragonbane: MV 12 (mounted), HP 5, Armor DR 2, Swords 12, WIL 10. If they hear noise: Awareness 12 check. On success, they stop and call out; if no answer, they investigate with torches.

Note: Canna should not take a watch this night. If the Referee runs her as an NPC and she insists, she collapses partway through and you should make another Patrol check. She’s more hurt than she’s letting on.

Encounter 2: The Raided Farm — Scavenging in Silence

The next day. In the afternoon they smell woodsmoke and see a farmstead in a clearing. It’s a cluster of huts, a barn, a stock fence. Saben scouts and comes back gray-faced.

Read or paraphrase:

“They’re there,” Saben says in a strange choked voice. “I counted twelve horses—they’ve killed the farmers—and their families. The bodies are just—lying around. Like old rags—”

The soldiers, twelve horses’ worth of them, are there eating a cow they’ve slaughtered and roasted over the farm’s fire. But wait! One horse arrives hard at a gallop. A messenger. Twenty minutes later, all twelve horses are gone, ordered back to the fort. The messenger told them they’re marching south in the morning.

The farm is empty of soldiers. And there is an entire half-roasted cow cooling over a dying fire, and bread baking in the huts.

The Situation: This is a scavenging encounter under time pressure. The soldiers are gone, but they might return. Leaving obvious signs of their presence is dangerous. Siniava will know someone got out. Taking too much, or leaving clean knife cuts in the meat, will give them away. Don’t tell the players this. Let them make their own decisions and increase patrols in accordance with need.

Canna’s decision: She sends Saben. One person only, to minimize their footprint. Paks and Canna wait in the tree line.

The Saben Scavenging Roll:
B/X: DEX check to move through the farm quietly. WIS check (Intelligence-adjacent) to take food without leaving obvious evidence (no clean cuts in the meat; scatter the bread you take; leave some chaos behind). Failure on either means Saben is spotted by a passing patrol (2-in-6 chance, roll each 10 minutes).
AD&D 1e: Dexterity check at -2 (unfamiliar environment) for quiet movement. Intelligence check to scavenge without leaving traces. Success on both = full haul; success on one = partial; failure on both = patrol check.
Dragonbane: Sneaking check (Awareness vs. Sneaking from any patrol within 200m). Lore check (any relevant background) to scavenge intelligently.

If Saben succeeds: He returns with: three round loaves of dark bread, half a small cheese, six apples, eggs (Careful! They break), onions, a few redroots, strips of half-roasted beef from the cow, additional cheese, strips of soft linen (Canna’s wound gets properly wrapped and this slows daily HP loss to every other day), a small crock of wound ointment (treated as a healing poultice: restores 1d4 HP to Canna when applied properly, takes one turn), a short sword (now Canna has a real weapon).

If he’s caught or forced to flee: He brings only what he could grab; one cheese, some bread. The patrol is alerted. Siniava’s column will be more aggressive in screening the woods.

Wound treatment: With the linen strips and ointment from the farm, Canna’s wound can be properly dressed for the first time. This is a meaningful moment because the infection risk is reduced. In game terms: daily HP loss slows down to every other day. The wound is not healed, but it’s stable.

Siniava’s Patrol Soldiers (if encountered — 2-4 men returning to check the farm):
B/X: AC 7, HD 1, HP 5 each, MV 120’, #AT 1, D 1d6, SV F1, ML 8, AL C
AD&D 1e: AC 7, 1 HD, HP 5, MV 12”, THAC0 20, D 1d8, ML 8, XP 15 each
Dragonbane: MV 10, HP 5, Armor DR 2, Swords 12, WIL 10

Special Scene: “What Are You, a Paladin in Disguise?”

Dawn of the second full day. They have camped in a rock hollow. Canna fell during the evening’s march; she seems weaker than she lets on. Paks and Saben are looking at her as she wakes.

This is not a combat encounter, but it is a pivotal scene if the players qualify to play it. The Dungeon Master should take it seriously and only run this scene if the Paks or Saben player has prayed with Canna and if they think of it.

In the book Paks had been thinking. an old friend, back at the stronghold, venerated Gird. Canna has the medallion and says “It takes a Marshal or a paladin to heal,” Paks, in desperation responds, “But we need you to be well.” s

Canna handed her the medallion, a metal crescent on a chain. “If you want to,” she said. She sounded doubtful. “It can’t do any harm.”

Paks took the metal crescent and held it a moment, thinking. Then she laid it on Canna’s shoulder, over the bandaged wound.

“St. Gird,” she began. “Please heal this wound. This is Canna, who is your follower, and she was hurt by an arrow. We are trying to escape to tell our Duke of the Honeycat’s treachery, and we need Canna’s help. In—in the name of Gird—I mean, St. Gird.”

“Ouch!” said Canna. “What did you poke it for?”

“I didn’t,” said Paks. “I just laid your symbol on it; I didn’t push. What happened?”

“It must have been a cramp, then. That hurt. It’s easing now. It seems—I can breathe a little easier.”

The next morning, when Canna’s wound is examined: it is “dry and pink.” The swollen, infected redness is gone. She moves more freely.

Before the prayer, when Paks first says she wants to try, Canna looks at her with an expression Paks doesn’t quite understand.

“What are you, a paladin in disguise? You aren’t even a Girdsman.”

That’s how it played out in the novel, but in a game you should let the players think of this themselves. You might even allow Saben to try and become the Paladin. Your game shouldn’t railroad the choice of the benefit, though you might have to modify Saben’s stats if he does attempt to heal instead of Paks.

Mechanical Effect (all systems):
Canna regains 1d4 HP. More importantly, her wound condition resets, the daily HP loss from infection is permanently halted (not just slowed). She wakes with genuine improvement: movement is no longer reduced.

Referee Note: The character who prayed does not know they did anything. They think the prayer was “just in case.” Canna thinks the same, she says “I didn’t expect a cure.” Neither of them says another word about it. The Referee should not explain it. The players may discuss it; the characters do not. This is a player vs. character knowledge moment and is a great way to introduce new players to that concept.

Encounter 3: The Hilltop Scout — Improvisation Under Pressure

The group is working up a long hill through thick pines and cedars. The trees provide excellent cover. Paks, slightly ahead of the others, pushes through the last screen of branches onto the cleared summit.

She comes face to face with one of Siniava’s mounted scouts. He has been posted here as a lookout and he can see the road and the surrounding countryside. He is turning toward the noise she made as she comes into the open.

“So there is something here besides rabbits, eh?”

He is reaching for his reins to sound an alarm.

The Scout (Siniava’s Column Lookout):
He wears chain mail under a yellow surcoat, a flat helmet with a brim, has a sword at his side and a short-thonged whip at his belt. He is mounted.
B/X: AC 5 (chain, mounted), HD 1+1, HP 7, MV 240’ (mounted), #AT 1, D 1d8 (sword), SV F1, ML 9, AL C
AD&D 1e: AC 5, 1+1 HD, HP 7, MV 24” mounted, THAC0 19, D 1d8. He has a sword; if he gets a moment he will shout.
Dragonbane: MV 12 (mounted), HP 7, Armor DR 4 (chain), Swords 13, WIL 11. If not silenced in the first round, he shouts (Awareness 14 check for any patrol within 500 meters).

What happens in the novel, for Referee reference:
Paks shrugs the food pack off her shoulder and throws it at his horse. The horse shies. He nearly falls as he grabs the reins and draws his sword. She charges the horse (which backs further), dodges to his unarmed side, and grabs his arm. The horse spooks sideways and he overbalances. He slides out of the saddle on top of her. She is stunned by the fall with him on her. Canna and Saben pull him off and Canna knifes him in the throat before he can make a sound. Saben catches the horse and ties it to a tree (so it doesn’t return to the road and alert anyone).

How to run it:
This is a one-round surprise encounter. Players who think creatively (throwing something at the horse, grabbing the rider’s arm, using the terrain) should be rewarded. The goal is silence. If the scout shouts, the adventure becomes significantly harder. Give players information about his proximity to the road and the implications of noise.

If the players replicate the novel’s solution (or something like it): It works exactly as described. One round. No alarm.

If they try to fight him conventionally with daggers: He gets a sword swing (1d8) before they can close, can call out as a free action on his initiative. Fighting a mounted man in chain with daggers is a losing proposition and the Referee should make this obvious from his armament.

Outcome:

• The scout is dead and silenced. His horse is tied.

• Paks acquires a broken rib (in the book) — If a PC acts in a way similar to what Paks did in the book, they are fallen on, on rocky ground and acquire a broken rib too. Apply broken rib penalty from stat block.

• The food pack — whatever food they were carrying might be scattered depending on what happens. Some is salvageable.

• The horse — If it is left tied; they take nothing from it (it will be found eventually but not linked to them immediately). If they take it, it will be thought of as missing and increase Siniava’s patrolling activity.

Encounter 4, Part A: The Boy with the Swine

A day later. A morning in light woodland. They hear a snuffling and a grunt, and a sounder of swine crashes through the undergrowth. It’s a big boar with bristles raised, sows and piglets scattering.

The boar faces them, small gold-hazel eyes fixed, pink nose twitching. A long moment. Then it grunts, wheels, and follows the pigs.

A boy about fifteen who is short, muscular, redheaded, pale-eyed, rough clothes jogs in after the pigs and stops dead. He reaches for his dagger.

The Situation: Social encounter. The boy is not dangerous but he’s observant and he knows this countryside. If he’s scared badly, he’ll run and tell someone. If he’s handled right, he knows exactly where they can get food.

Running the boy:
He calls Paks a girl and sounds surprised that she’s a fighter. She owns it, asks about his swine, offers coin. He relaxes. He tells them about “uncle’s place” This is a collection of shanties on the river, not really an inn, that serves the local farmers with untaxed ale. Off the road. He’s had no reason to love tax collectors or military types.

If the party gives him a copper, he grins and says, “All I seen in these woods is swine — that’s all.”

Mechanics:
B/X: CHR check. On success, the boy gives them directions and stays quiet. On failure, he gives them directions but tells the first person he sees (1-in-6 chance this reaches Siniava’s men within a day).
AD&D 1e: Charisma reaction check. Hostile: he flees. Indifferent: he’ll take the copper but may talk. Friendly or better: cheerful, stays quiet, gives good directions.
Dragonbane: Persuasion check at +2 (he has no reason to love soldiers either, and Paks isn’t threatening him). On failure: he takes the copper and tells someone for another copper.

What he provides: Directions to uncle’s place. These are river shanties, half a mile south through the woods. “Not on the road. My uncle’s brew and no tax.” This is where they get food.

Encounter 4, Part B: Uncle’s Place

River shanties on the bank consist of three or four buildings, the largest with two chimneys, a wattle fence with a dooryard. Children playing outside. The smell of baking bread.

Canna’s first move: If she’s an NPC, scouts ahead and spots a tall man in rough leathers, carrying a heavy bow, already creeping to the tree line with his eyes fixed on the clearing. She says nothing. She eases back and makes her way behind him. If Canna is a PC then one of the PCs should scout ahead. If so have them make some kind of Perception Check or role play how they are looking. If they succeed or describe how they scout sufficiently, have them notice the bowman.

NPC Canna sends Saben in. Not Paks. Saben.
This matters: if the players try to send Paks or all three together, Canna overrides them. One person. Less risk. Saben goes to the gate openly. Paks and Canna take cover in the hedge.

The Woman (the proprietor):
She is not stupid. She sees a big tired-looking soldier who wants food. She begins to engage him with banter. The conversation is good-natured, indelicate, drawing him closer toward the fence. She wants him to lean in close enough to grab. In the book, Saben plays the game better than she expects, maintaining cheerful distance. When she hands over the sack of food and reaches out to pull him in for a “farewell kiss,” he steps back with a polite smile and declines.

She screams: “Dirty thief! Robber! Liar! Help!”

Two men rush from the dooryard at once. In the book, Paks comes out of the hedge at a run.

The Woman (Margit):
B/X: AC 9, HD 2, HP 9, MV 120’, #AT 1, D 1d4 (kitchen knife or club), SV F2, ML 8, AL N. She has no remorse and no shame.
AD&D 1e: Fighter 2nd, AC 9, HP 9, MV 12”, THAC0 20, D 1d4. She will scream continuously unless gagged.
Dragonbane: MV 8, HP 9, Armor DR 0, Clubs 11, Manipulation 15, WIL 11. She is loud. Every round she spends screaming rather than fighting, the Referee rolls 1d6: on a 1, someone on the road hears it within 1d6 turns.

The Dooryard Men (2):
One has a longsword (notched, old but serviceable). The other has a curved blade.
B/X: AC 8, HD 1+1, HP 7 each, MV 120’, #AT 1, D 1d8 (sword) or 1d6 (curved blade), SV F1, ML 9, AL N.
AD&D 1e: AC 8, 1+1 HD, HP 7 each, MV 12”, THAC0 19, D by weapon. ML 9.
Dragonbane: MV 10, HP 7, Armor DR 1 (rough leather), Swords 13, Evade 10, WIL 10.

The Bowman (in the tree line):
In the novel, Canna has already gone to deal with him before the fight starts. In play, you can run this as a separate brief scene where Canna gets behind him with her knife while the players manage the yard. He has the bow, a knife, no armor. Canna gets the bow.
B/X: AC 9, HD 1, HP 4, MV 120’, #AT 1, D 1d6 (bow, if strung), SV F1, ML 7, AL N. Not strung when Canna reaches him.
Dragonbane: MV 10, HP 4, Bows 13, Knives 11, WIL 7.

Inside the building (Paks enters the back door while Saben handles the woman):
A gawky youth with a club — Paks grabs a poker from the fire and catches the tip of it on his hand. He drops the club, stumbles backward.
A heavy older man with two daggers — he throws one. It hits Paks’s left arm. She drops her guard. He rushes. She rolls away along the wall, comes up and drives the longsword she took in the yard between his ribs.

B/X (Interior defenders):
Youth: AC 9, HD 1, HP 3, #AT 1, D 1d4 (club), SV NM, ML 5. He flees if hit once.
Man: AC 8, HD 2, HP 9, #AT 1 (or 1 thrown dagger), D 1d4 (dagger), SV F1, ML 9. Thrown dagger at Paks on first round (range: 30’).

AD&D 1e (Interior defenders):
Youth: 1 HD, HP 3, AC 9, THAC0 20, D 1d4, ML 5.
Man: 2 HD, HP 9, AC 8, THAC0 19, D 1d4, one dagger thrown on round 1 (THAC0 19, D 1d4+2 at close range), ML 9.

Dragonbane (Interior defenders):
Youth: MV 10, HP 3, Clubs 9, WIL 7. Flees on first hit.
Man: MV 9, HP 9, Armor DR 0, Knives 14, WIL 10. Throws a dagger in the first round (Knives vs. Paks’s Evade).

Paks’s arm wound: If any PC gets hit by the thrown dagger inside the building, it will have hit their left arm. Apply -2 to all attacks and relevant Swords/Knives skill reductions (per Dragonbane). This wound is still bleeding when they ford the river.

Resolution and Loot:
In the novel, the very Lawful characters tie the woman up (cord from Saben’s pack). She is not killed and her children will free her in an hour. The Referee should note that killing her is something the group would not do. She’s not a soldier.

Food and equipment gained:
The sack Saben was handed contains three soggy loaves (dipped in boiling water to fake steam, she cheated him), a stinking cheese, a string of onions.
From inside the building: a small ham, six dark loaves, real cheese, a roll of cord.
Weapons: Saben takes the curved blade (shortsword) from the dooryard. Canna keeps the big bow. Paks has a longsword at last.

After the encounter: They cross the river at a cold ford, knee-deep, fast, icy. If they completed the special scene, the will find that Canna’s wound, when they unwrap it on the far bank, is “dry and pink.” The prayer worked better than anyone thought it would.

Encounter 5: The Brigands — Run

Near Rotengre. Deep forest. Afternoon, going on dark. They have been walking hard all day and the column is now behind them. They are exhausted, Paks and Canna both wounded, Saben carrying the pack. The goal is almost in reach.

The brigands do not announce themselves.

Eight heavily armed brigands in scale and chain mail, with good swords at their sides, seemed to spring from the trees to surround them. Two had shields.

These are not Siniava’s men. They are forest brigands. These are mere opportunists who prey on travelers near Rotengre. They have no interest in the intelligence Paks is carrying. They want equipment, coin, and possibly captives to ransom.

The Brigands (8, two with shields):
B/X: AC 5 (chain/scale, two with shields: AC 4), HD 2, HP 9 each, MV 90’, #AT 1, D 1d8 (sword), SV F2, ML 9, AL C. They fight to capture, not kill — at least at first.
AD&D 1e: AC 5 (two at AC 4 with shields), 2 HD, HP 9 each, MV 9”, THAC0 19, D 1d8. ML 9. They close immediately and try to grapple.
Dragonbane: MV 10, HP 9, Armor DR 4 (chain), Swords 14, Evade 11, WIL 11. Two have shields (+1 DR vs. melee). They surround the group — if any character is not in contact with an ally, they face two brigands alone.

What happens:
In the book, Canna is grabbed from behind and wrestled to the ground by two of them immediately. She has no time to string the bow. Paks faces three. Saben fences frantically with three others. The math is eight against three, two of whom are wounded. The players will have to decide what to do. In your session, maybe the PCs are more wary than the characters were in the book. That’s great. Let them have a fight then, but they should choose one character to flee given the odds here.

The Escape (as it happened in the book):
When Paks is backing away from three opponents when the ground gives way. She falls down a steep bank of earth and leaves into a shallow stream below. She loses the longsword in the fall and a brigand starts down after her slowly, picking his footholds. He is in no hurry: she dropped her weapon.

From above, Canna’s voice: “Paks! Run! Run for it!”

She runs upstream. The brigand throws his sword at her (it misses). Arrows come from the bank (none hit — the Referee should note this quietly; no one else walks away from that without explanation). She runs until she cannot run anymore.

Referee guidance:
Do not let whichever character flees fight their way through. They only have a dagger, a broken rib, and a wounded arm, and are facing a man coming down a bank at them. Their opponent’s leisurely descent is contemptuous, he thinks they’re caught. Let the player understand this. Running is the right answer. Canna said to run.

What happened to Saben and Canna (or the characters left behind): the Referee does not know, and neither does Paks. The Duke’s scouts find no trace of them. This is how the book ends for them, with Canna’s voice, and then silence, and then arrows in the trees. You can play this out after the other player gets to the camp. Let them find out the results just before the cavalry arrives.

Encounter 6: The Duke’s Camp

Hours later. Or maybe much later — time blurs when you’re running. She has left the forest. Fields. Mud. The twinkling of watchfires ahead.

The surviving PC staggers into the outer guard perimeter of the Duke’s camp.

The Situation: They have no password (it will have changed since the fort). They have no kit, no rank insignia. They are filthy, soaked, half-delirious with exhaustion. They have a cut on their arm and what appear to be old bruises. The guards think they are a straggler, or a drunk, or possibly an enemy spy dressed up as one.

The Challenge: Getting through to the Duke, fast enough that the intelligence still matters.

Stage 1 — The Outer Guard:
They are skeptical. They are not hostile. “Duke Phelan’s Company, must see the Duke” is not a password and is not normally sufficient to wake a general.

B/X: CHR check at -2 (condition). On success, they take the PC to Sergeant Vossik. On failure, they make them sit down and wait (”sober up, soldier”). They can try again in ten minutes (one more check; if this fails too, they pass out and are brought to the surgeon, who alerts Vossik anyway, just slower).
AD&D 1e: Charisma reaction roll at -2 for condition. Friendly or better: Vossik immediately. Indifferent: the PC waits. Hostile or Unfriendly: they hold the PC for the morning shift.
Dragonbane: Persuasion at -3. Success: Vossik. Failure: detained. They can still try again (once); or simply say the next word.

The Magic Word:
At any point, if the PC says “Honeycat,” just the word, no explanation needed, everything changes. The sergeant (Vossik in the novel) bawls the word back in shock and takes them to the Duke that instant. This should feel like a key turning in a lock. It is a key.

Stage 2 — The Duke:
He is woken from sleep. He is in mail in thirty seconds (he sleeps prepared). He looks at the wreck in front of him and says:

“Did you break your parole?”

They didn’t. They should explain what happened. Then they can return to find out the fate of the other characters.

Experience Point Awards:

B/X: Standard XP for any monsters defeated. Story award: 250 XP total for all surviving characters for reaching the Duke with the intelligence intact. Award the full 250 even if only one character survives. The mission succeeded after all.

AD&D 1e: Standard XP for monsters defeated. Story award: 600 XP divided equally among survivors for completing the escape mission. The person who delivers the message to the Duke receives the additional 100 XP, and only one should deliver the actual message, regardless of party survival.

Dragonbane: Each player marks experience for each skill meaningfully used. Referee awards one bonus skill mark to Paks in Endurance and one in Healing. If Saben survived, he gets a mark in Sneaking. If Canna survived, she gets a mark in Leadership.

A Note on Running This Adventure

The tonal target of the adventure is specific. These are not heroes completing a quest. They are three exhausted, underprepared soldiers trying to do the minimum thing that their duty requires. They are cold and hungry for most of it. They improvise badly and recover. They lose people. I’m trying to capture actual, old school, low level play here. The PCs should be cautious. The fights are not balanced.

If the players win every encounter cleanly and arrive well-supplied and fully healthy, the Referee has been too gentle. If they run from the brigands in the final encounter and arrive at the Duke’s camp with nothing but the intelligence and each other, or less than each other, then something close to the real thing has happened.

The adventure succeeds when a PC stands in front of the Duke, alone, covered in mud and someone else’s blood, and gives their report in a steady voice.

This scenario is designed as a standalone or as the middle act of a longer Paksenarrion-setting campaign. I plan to develop more material from this world for future Geekerati issues. The characters around Duke Phelan alone could fill a campaign. If there is interest, let me know. I might even buy the Paksworld RPG when it becomes available.

The Deed of Paksenarrion (omnibus). Elizabeth Moon. Baen Books, 2003. Original publication: Sheepfarmer’s Daughter, 1988. Available in print and ebook. The first chapters of Book I are available free at Baen’s website.

I have been thinking about magic systems again.

This happens periodically, usually when I am deep in design work on something ostensibly unrelated, and the underlying questions surface anyway because they are, it turns out, not questions about magic systems specifically. They are questions about what rules are for, about the relationship between mechanical precision and imaginative freedom, and about where a game’s rules should end and where gamemaster design decisions should begin. They are questions about when it’s time for “rulings” and not rules, to use the OSR slogan.

The immediate reason I started thinking about magic systems this time is a superhero roleplaying game I’ve been developing. Superhero games face this problem in an especially acute form. Superhero comics have produced roughly a century’s worth of powers, variants, and combinations, and any rulebook that tries to enumerate them comprehensively will fail. This isn’t not because the designers aren’t talented, or because they lack sufficient understanding of the lore, but because the project is structurally impossible. At some point, every superhero RPG designer has to decide whether they are going to try to list everything or whether they are going to give players the tools to build anything.

The best superhero games, in my experience, chose the second path. The standard of standards when it comes to tools over lists is a game I keep returning to for design wisdom no matter what genre I am working on: Champions. While I believe that the 4th Edition of Champions is the apotheosis of the game, the 2nd Edition of the game has a fantastic breakdown of what is meant by “special effect” or an effects based approach.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up to Dungeons & Dragons, which is where this argument started.

The Very Large Spellbook Problem

There are too many spells in Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, and this proliferation actively reduces the sense of wonder in the game.

I want to be careful about how I frame this, because I am not making a simple “less is more” argument. Magic in fiction resists quantification almost by definition. Magic in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series works differently than magic in Elizabeth Moon’s Deed of Paksenarrion which is different from Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories. What makes magic feel magical is frequently its resistance to being fully understood or categorized, and yet roleplaying games require some mechanical grounding for magic to be adjudicated fairly at the table. The question isn’t whether to quantify magic; the question is how much to quantify, and what specifically to quantify.

The approach D&D typically takes, what Jeff Grubb called in his “Colors of Magic” article in the Kobold Guide to Magic (available at Amazon or DriveThruRPG) the “Very Large Spellbook,” tries to solve the wonder problem through sheer volume. If you flood the zone with enough spells so that no one knows what everything does, it makes the wonder of discovery possible again. There’s something to this, but the approach has a failure mode Grubb also identifies. As designers lose track, as much as players, you end up with five different spells that all turn a target’s bones into liquid, and once you’ve seen that the mechanical effects are essentially the same across all five, the proliferation stops producing wonder and starts producing clutter. Worse, it produces lookup overhead, to borrow a business term. These are moments at the table where the game stops while someone searches the many “sources” on DnD Beyond or flips through a rulebook trying to establish what a spell actually does. I’ve watched this happen. It is, to put it gently, a momentum killer.

There’s a better approach, and it has been sitting in the hobby for decades. It just happens to have originated in a superhero game rather than a fantasy one.

What Champions Understood

Whether or not you have played it, the Champions roleplaying game by Hero Games is one of the most instructive games ever designed for thinking about what rules are for. My first encounter was the Revised (2nd) Edition, and I spent an embarrassing number of hours building my version of the X-Men for it, only to be informed by more experienced players that I had done more or less everything wrong. This did not diminish my affection for the game and I still stand by my interpretations all these years later. Which reminds me, I have to do a post discussing the X-men stats from Different Worlds #23.

What struck me then, and still strikes me now, is the effects-based approach to power design. The core insight is simple but profound: the rules govern what a power does in the game, not what it looks like in the fiction. Mechanical effects are rigorously defined. Narrative presentation is left entirely to the players.

This idea developed gradually across editions. The first edition, published in 1981, gestures at it in the Energy Blast description and in a brief note about using Multipower to model shapeshifting through special effects. The second edition states it more directly, explaining that “powers in Champions have been explained thoroughly in game terms, but the special effects have been left undefined… The special effects of your Power can contain minor advantages and disadvantages.” By the third edition, the designers had moved the discussion of special effects to the beginning of the Powers chapter, establishing it as a foundational principle rather than an afterthought: “When choosing powers in Champions, always start with the effect and work back to the cause.”

The Champions philosophy is simple. Start with the effect. Work back to the cause.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because it is the most useful piece of design philosophy I have ever encountered in a rulebook, and it applies far beyond superhero games.

What this instruction tells you is that a power defined as “does 6d6 energy damage at range” is mechanically complete. What that energy is, whether it’s electricity, fire, pure kinetic force, psychic pressure, sonic vibration, radiation, the concentrated will of a vengeful god, is a creative decision that belongs to the player and the fiction, not to the rules. The rules tell you what happens mechanically in the game. The players tell you what it looks like. And because the presentation is separable from the mechanics, an effectively infinite number of fictional explanations can map onto a finite set of mechanical effects.

This is what I have come to call the special effects approach, to distinguish it from the increasingly granular effects approach that later editions of Champions developed. Later editions, beginning with the 4th, which is otherwise my favorite, began quantifying more and more presentational elements, which for my tastes moves in the wrong direction. The earlier versions were more freeform, and that freeform quality is precisely what made them generative. In 3rd edition Champions and earlier, if your character had a light based (or fire based) Energy Blast, it was common for the GM to let you use it to create light in order to see things. In 4th edition, you had to purchase "Change Environment.” Your mileage will vary, but the principle I’m extracting here is the earlier one: only quantify what must be quantified, and leave the rest to imagination.

So what happens when you apply this principle to D&D?

The Lost Brigade, Theronna Wolfmancer, and the Rats That Never Came

The best illustration I have encountered in actual play comes from Episode 8, Part 1 of the Saving Throw Show’s series The Lost Brigade (a lost remnant of DungeonTube when games looked and felt like those at our home tables). Around the 41:37 mark, Havana Mahoney’s Druid, Theronna Wolfmancer, attempts to cast Summon Swarm against some creatures the party was fighting. The Dungeon Master, Mason McDaniel, initially handles this beautifully. When Havana asks what the spell looks like, Mason offers several possibilities (do the rats burrow from the earth? Are they vomited from her mouth?) while leaving the final choice to her. It’s exactly the right instinct. It’s generative, it’s evocative, it rewards the player for an inspired fictional choice.

Then the group tries to find the spell in the rules.

Several minutes of lookup ensue. It is eventually established that the spell Havana wanted is a Pathfinder spell, not a D&D 5e spell. She asks whether she can use it anyway. After some discussion, this is declined. Havana sighs and casts Call Lightning instead.

I have never heard a player make a using a lightning based D&D spell sound so resigned. It was the most discouraged “KABLAM” in the history of druidic combat magic. Call Lightning is an epic spell, but here it is cast by a disappointed player.

The fix seems obvious in retrospect. Someone (I’m looking at you Mason) at that table could have asked “what mechanical effect does Havana want?” rather than “does this spell exist in this rulebook?” The answer would have been: an area effect with ongoing damage to creatures that move through or within it, flavored as a rat swarm. In D&D 5e terms, that spell already exists. It’s called Spike Growth and it’s not even high level. It’s a 2nd level spell, just like the Summon Swarm spell that Havana wanted to cast, so power balance is not an issue.

Spike Growth, in the rules, transforms a 20-foot radius area into difficult terrain covered in sharp thorns. Creatures take 2d4 piercing damage for every 5 feet they travel within or into the area, and the transformation is concealed so enemies don’t know it’s there until they’ve taken damage. Mechanically, the spell is:

• 20-foot radius area, Range 150 feet

• Difficult terrain

• 2d4 piercing damage per 5 feet of movement

• Concealed

• Concentration, up to 10 minutes

Now strip away the flavor text and ask, “what could generate those effects?” Thorns, yes, but so too could a sudden surge of rats erupting from the earth. There are a host of other effects that could have those mechanics:

• A field of ice needles

• A pocket of low-lying toxic spores that pierce the lungs with each breath and slow movement to a crawl.

• A circle of cursed ground where vengeful spirits claw at anything that passes.

• Semisolid shadow with barbed edges.

• Magma brought dangerously close to the surface.

Each of those descriptions produces identical mechanical outcomes. Each of them feels completely different in play. And none of them require looking up a new spell.

More Reskins: A Working Vocabulary

The Spike Growth example is a good one, but the principle becomes more useful the more spells you apply it to. Let me work through a few others.

Thunderwave

As written, Thunderwave sends a wave of thunderous force sweeping out from the caster in a 15-foot cube. Each creature in the area takes 2d8 “thunder” damage and is pushed 10 feet away, with a Constitution save to halve the damage and avoid the push. Unsecured objects are automatically pushed. The spell is audible up to 300 feet away.

The mechanics:

• 15-foot cube, originating from caster

• 2d8 thunder (force) damage

• Pushed 10 feet on failed save

• Moves unsecured objects

• Loud

These effects are certainly a good representation of a thunderclap, but once again there are other effects that can be represented by those mechanics with a mere change is trappings. It could be any of the following:

• A psychic scream from a character who channels emotion as kinetic energy

• A religious caster calling down a moment of divine expulsion, the wrath of a god, briefly made physical.

• A character with plant-based magic releasing a burst of spores under pressure that simultaneously blinds and repels.

• A necromancer releasing a shockwave of necrotic cold, so intense it flash-freezes the air and blasts anything nearby.

The loud component is flavortext that we coudl adapt depending on the special effect. In a reskin “loud” might become “obvious.” It could be a burst of divine light visible at distance, a shockwave of visible psychic distortion, a cloud of spores that hangs in the air for a moment. The mechanics require that the effect be detectable; what it is detectable as is a creative decision.

The pushing mechanic is particularly evocative. An Edritch Knight who gains this spell could describe it as an acrobatic kick that releases a burst of supernatural force; all flash, momentum, and style. An artificer who finds this spell might describe it as the discharge of a pistol loaded with something that isn’t quite powder and isn’t quite lightning.

Entangle

Entangle covers a 20-foot square originating from a point within range with writhing, grasping plants. The area becomes difficult terrain for the duration. Creatures in the area must make a Strength save or become restrained until the spell ends. Restrained creatures must spend their action to attempt a Strength check against your spell save DC to free themselves.

The mechanics:

• 20-foot square area

• Difficult terrain for the duration

• Strength save or restrained

• Restrained creatures must spend their action on a Strength check to escape

• Concentration, 1 minute

The fictional presentation here is wide open. Grasping plants are the default, but the core mechanical event is the ground (or space) grabs you and holds you there, and you must exert force to escape. The action cost for the escape check emphasizes that this isn’t just inconvenient, it is a genuine contest that demands your full attention.

Once again, this does a good job of mechanically representing actual plants, but it could also represent:

• Ice that flash-freezes around the feet and lower legs.

• Chains of spectral force. A sudden intensification of gravity localized to a 20-foot square.

• A wave of spiritual compulsion that plants each creature’s feet with religious certainty. The creatures will not move because they suddenly, viscerally believe they should not. In this case, you could change it from a Strength save to a Wisdom one.

• A swarm of rats that cling and weigh and slow and grab rather than biting as they would in the spike growth adaptation.

• In a more gonzo game, it could be a momentary dimensional adhesion — the very fabric of space briefly becomes sticky.

The Strength check is somewhat of a mechanical “dial” when reskinning the effects. That particular mechanic implies that the primary method of escape is physical exertion. While you could shift to an Intelligence or Wisdom check, it isn’t necessary. Here, I’m reminded of the battle between Nekron and Darkwolf in Fire and Ice. In that movie, it looks more like physical Strength or Constitution are doing the work to resist Nekron’s mental manipulation. The caster’s magic doesn’t care that the chain is psychic; it still takes muscle to break.

A note for those playing under the 2024 rules: the updated Player’s Handbook makes the caster immune to the restraining effect of Entangle. You no longer have to save against your own spell. The escape check also tightened from a straight Strength check to a Strength (Athletics) check, meaning creatures with Athletics proficiency have a somewhat easier time breaking loose. Both changes quietly make the reskin argument even stronger. Imagine Theronna Wolfmancer casting her rat swarm under the 2024 rules. In this situation, the creatures surge up from the earth and engulf the battlefield, but they part around her instinctively, obediently, as if she were something older and more patient than they are. She walks through the swarm untouched while her enemies flail against it, spending their actions trying to tear free. The strong ones, the ones trained in Athletics, can fight their way clear. Everyone else stays put. The plants were never the point. The restraint was the point. And now the caster gets to look cool while it happens.

Hex

Hex is a 1st-level warlock spell that lets you place a curse on a creature you can see. The target takes an extra 1d6 necrotic damage whenever you hit them with an attack. You also choose one ability score; the target has disadvantage on checks using that ability. The curse lasts up to an hour with concentration, and if the target drops to 0 hit points, you can move the curse to a new creature.

The mechanics:

• Mark a target

• +1d6 damage on each of your hits against that target

• Disadvantage on one ability score’s checks

• Transferable on target’s death

• Concentration, 1 hour

This is one of the most reskin-friendly spells in the game because the mechanics are almost purely relational. What matters is the link between you and the target, not any particular physical phenomenon.

The standard presentation is a necrotic curse, shadowy and ominous, but imagine the following reskins::

• A ranger-adjacent character who “hexes” a target is really just marking them as a target. They are subject to the ranger’s heightened attention, studied vulnerability, the predator’s eye. The extra damage isn’t dark magic, it’s the result of knowing exactly where to strike. The ability disadvantage is knowing exactly where not to let them have room. In this reading, Hex becomes a hunter’s mark that doesn’t require the Hunter’s Mark spell.

• A fire-themed warlock might describe Hex as placing a sympathetic link through a burning coal. The target’s necrotic damage is heat-damage, or at least is flavored that way narratively even if the type doesn’t change mechanically. Though remember, a part of reskinning is just changing the energy type. A fey warlock might describe it as stealing the target’s luck. Here the ability disadvantage comes from the creature’s fortune being redirected elsewhere.

• A divination-flavored caster could describe Hex as reading the target’s future and finding its weakness. Here the Warlock knows every move the victim will make slightly before they make it, which explains both the accuracy bonus to damage and their hampered abilities.

Class Design as Special Effects: The B/X Connection

I have been working for some time on class designs for B/X Dungeons & Dragons. I recently published an article featuring the Swashbuckler and am working on one for the Greatcoat of Sebastien De Castell’s swords and powder fantasy series. The more I do this work , the more I realize that the special effects philosophy is as applicable to class design as it is to spell design.

In B/X, classes are mechanical frameworks. The Fighter gets a certain attack progression, certain hit dice, certain saving throws. These mechanics define what the class does in play. They don’t determine the fiction that surrounds that class in your specific campaign, or even at your specific table. A Fighter is defined by the fact that they are good at hitting things and surviving being hit , and that definition turns out to be generative rather than limiting, because an enormous range of fictional archetypes share those mechanical traits.

When I design new B/X classes, I try to apply the same discipline. Start with the effect. Work back to the cause.

The Swashbuckler class, as developed it, is built around a set of mechanical behaviors surrounding the particular relationship between mobility and combat. The class has a reliance on positioning and tempo rather than raw durability and a set of social abilities that reflect the class’s inherent flair. Those mechanics were defined first. The question “what is a swashbuckler, exactly?” Is it Zorro? D’Artagnan? Inigo Montoya? Jack Sparrow? Firefly’s Saffron? This was a question the mechanics answer in part, but don’t fully determine. The class is designed so that all of those characters could be played through it, each with different fictional coloring but identical mechanical structures.

The Greatcoat follows a similar logic. The Greatcoat is, at its mechanical core, a fighter-adjacent class defined by preparation, resource management, and improvisation under pressure. It has certain combat abilities, certain skills, a particular toolkit. It is Swashbuckler adjacent, but not exactly the same thing. What the Greatcoat is in YOUR campaign is determined at the table, not in the rulebook. Where De Castell’s are the fallen servants of the King, yours could be wandering soldiers of fortune, supernatural investigators, or revolutionary pamphleteers who are better at violence than they’d like to admit.

This is not a new idea in class design. It’s implicit in the best OSR work, and in the original B/X classes themselves, which are far more open-ended than their later editions would suggest. A Thief in B/X is a set of mechanical capabilities that could describe a pickpocket, a trained assassin, a spy, an acrobat, or a confidence artist, depending on what the player brings to the table. The rules don’t preclude any of those. The rules enable all of them by defining the mechanical space and leaving the fictional space open.

What the special effects approach gives us, in both spell and class design, is a usable principle for deciding where to stop. You stop quantifying when you have captured the mechanical effect. Everything after that is improvisation, and improvisation, when it is given clear mechanical ground to stand on is where the best moments in this hobby live.

What This Looks Like in Play

I want to close with a practical observation rather than a theoretical one.

The special effects approach is not primarily a design philosophy, though it is that. It is a table habit. It is the Dungeon Master asking “what do you want the spell to do?” before asking “which spell is that?” It is the player who says “I want to summon rats” getting to summon rats because the Dungeon Master knows that Spike Growth, described differently, is rats. It is the new class that gets used at a dozen different tables by players who make it look like completely different characters, all because the mechanics were defined clearly and the fiction was left alone.

When I am working on the superhero RPG that pulled me back to these questions, the same discipline applies. Superhero powers are mechanical effects. The spider-bite, the alien heritage, the experimental accident, the ancient curse, the rigorous training. These are special effects. The rules need to know what the power does. The fiction gets to decide what the power is.

That is, ultimately, the whole argument. The rules should be as precise as they need to be and no more precise than that. The imagination should have room to move.

Theronna Wolfmancer deserved her rats, and in my game she’d have had them.

What spells have you reskinned at your table? I’m particularly interested in cases where the reskin changed how players related to a class or a character — where the fictional presentation made a mechanical difference to how people played. Drop it in the comments.

A note regarding potential paid subscriber benefits: The Swashbuckler and Greatcoat classes referenced here are part of ongoing development for what I hope will become published Geekerati Zine (print and pdf). I am also working more on my own Black Powder Fantasy setting, Dar ul’Ilindith. It’s a world where the doors to Elfland are reopening and with them, magic and faith are returning to the world . More on both coming soon.

All posts on the Geekerati Newsletter are free and will never be behind a paywall. If you’d like to support my work here, please think about becoming a paid subscriber or making a purchase through the Amazon and DriveThruRPG links in my articles.

A Quick Self-Depricating Preface

I know what you are saying. “Yay! Christian is finally doing a movie review after a couple of weeks of mostly gaming material! Oh, wait?! It’s an old, relatively obscure Western? Yep, that’s totally on brand for Christian. Let’s check it out.” For the record, there will be game related material for this review, but I wrote so much of it that it will get its own post and we’ll just let this one stay as a pure movie review for my fellow cineastes.

Why So Many Westerns in the Retro-Reviews?

I have long been a fan of Westerns. I remember watching episodes of The Lone Ranger in syndication with my father on many a weekend and watching John Wayne Westerns with my Opa. They are one of America’s many mythologies. Just as Europeans have their three major literary cycles (The Matter of Britain, The Matter of France, and The Matter of Rome), so too does America have its own literary cycles that include Southern and New England Gothic stories, Tall-Tales, and Westerns. Both Europe and the United States have other rich literary cycles, but these six are wonderful starting places if you want to begin to understand the culture underpinning each of these societies.

The Tall-Tale and the Western are narrative expressions of William Jackson Turner’s taxonomy of exploration and rough and tumble rugged individualism. No character better exemplifies the American spirit than John Henry, a tale both about the inevitability of progress and the beauty of the human spirit. Those who think such ideas are dated, or that they don’t resonate with modern audiences, would do well to watch Gattica or Project Hail Mary. While the endings of each are different, the soul of both is that of John Henry or the Western hero.

One thing that separates the Western from most mythologies is that it has always been a deconstructive mythology. When John Wayne starred in Stagecoach (1939), a film so iconic that it is now cliché, he was already starring in a film that subverted heroic narratives. John Wayne’s Ringo kid is no hero in the traditional sense, he’s a man seeking revenge. His final shootout is cold-blooded he acts like a calculated killer. The camera cuts away to add tension, and there is some great editing to add to that uncertainty, but we know now how it turns out. At the time, given Wayne’s status as a minor actor, the result was in question and you can feel the real tension. It’s a wonderful scene and one that is echoed in the pistol vs. rifle conversation and showdown in A Fistful of Dollars (1964).

Even if you are rolling your eyes at my assertion that Stagecoach was already deconstructing the genre, you’ll have to accept that Destry Rides Again, also released in 1939, is a deconstruction of the genre. When Mel Brooks used Destry Rides Again as the foundation for so many gags in Blazing Saddles (1974), he was deconstructing a deconstruction. There is a joke in Blazing Saddles, where Mel Brooks’ Governor William J. Le Petomane, faced with a crisis requiring moral courage, turns to his advisors and asks: “Why don’t we do what they did in the old days?” The answer, delivered with complete sincerity is, “You’d do it for Randolph Scott.”

I laughed the first time I heard it, but I was only laughing at the excellent delivery. The joke works better if you understand the premise. When I first watched Blazing Saddles, I didn’t really know who Randolph Scott was. Outside of the more recent Westerns of my youth (Silverado for example), my mental corral of Westerns was largely limited to episodes of The Lone Ranger as well as the Westerns of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. My first experience with the Westerns of Randolph Scott came when one of my mentoring undergraduate Political Science professors asked if I’d ever attended the Lone Pine Film Festival. He knew I loved movies and was regularly driving to the Bay Area (from Reno) on the weekends to catch Hong Kong action films at theaters in San Francisco. I told him I hadn’t and he mentioned that the Alabama Hills outside of Lone Pine had been the filming location for some of the best Westerns ever made, including those by Randolph Scott.

Wanting to maintain my film fan cred, I did not immediately say “Who?” But I thought it. A quick Google search later and I had a list of movies to start my education. The first film on the list was Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country and after watching it, I was an instant fan of Scott’s. My thoughts were along the lines of that saying kids said about ten years ago, “Randolph Scott? I was not aware of your game.” Scott is charming, charismatic, and funny. His characters are also very interesting.

Even when they are on the wrong side of the law, a character played by Randolph Scott stands for something. You could rely on these characters the way you relied on a good rivet or a solid fence post. They were the men you wanted when things got serious. Whether it’s the gunslinger in Ride the High Country or the man in pursuit of vengeance in 7 Men from Now, a Randolph Scott character gets things done and people trust him to do it. Mel Brooks understood this, which is why that throwaway gag in a film about the absurdity of Western mythology is also, quietly, a tribute to one of the genre’s genuine pillars. Scott has a large filmography, but it can be difficult to find good copies of some of his “smaller” non-Boetticher Westerns. The Boetticher ones, rightfully, get a lot of respect and even have Criterion editions. The Man Behind the Gun was directed by Felix Feist, who also directed Donovan’s Brain and The Man Who Cheated Himself. Feist was a competent director, but not an auteur. Taking all of that in, you can imagine the delight I felt when I was browsing HBO for something to watch over the weekend.

The Man Behind the Gun (1953)

The Man Behind the Gun (1953) is not a film that you will find on anyone’s list of essential Westerns, which is a bit of a shame. It is a Warner Bros. programmer that was merely meant to churn people through the theater 82 minutes at a time. Of course, The Tall T (1957), is a 78 minute Columbia Pictures programmer starring Scott and it’s in the National Film Registry. When The Man Behind the Gun steps out of the studio and into the wild, you get some beautifully shot Technicolor images of the Simi Valley. The rock formations of Simi Valley are as recognizable as those of the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, but the mountains are older and smoother. One doesn’t see the jagged granite spike of Mt. Whitney blocking the sun with its summit of near 15,000 feet. The rocks of Simi were deposited by a different flood and the mountains are more windworn and smooth.

The majority of filming was done at Bell Ranch and you can see the lake that is part of the near by day K’uik’ui Ranch in the shot above. Bell Moving Picture Ranch was a great location, but all of the sets were removed in the 1990s. The film features a script by John Twist that earns its surname. The plot is a bit wild to the point of being improbable in places, and the shift from the red herring villain to the real villain is done in a way that saps the tension from a premise that should crackle. The twist is a great one, but the execution doesn’t quite hit the mark. Like Frontier Marshal before it, the film is saved to the point of actually being elevated into something special, by the sheer force of Randolph Scott’s presence. It’s also saved by the fact that the plot stumbles, almost by accident, into one of the truest stories the American West ever told.

The Setup Is Strange, and That’s Part of the Appeal

Major Ransome Callicut (Scott) is an undercover Army officer dispatched to 1850s Southern California, disguised as a traveling schoolteacher, to investigate a secessionist conspiracy. There were a number of films in the 1950s that had storylines about the intersection of the Civil War and the West. Gary Cooper’s excellent Springfield Rifle comes to mind as does the Durango Kid entry Frontier Outpost (1950). In The Man Behind the Gun, the potential villains are a group of well-heeled insurrectionists who are led by the corrupt Senator Mark Sheldon (Roy Roberts) and his enforcer menacing Bram Creegan (Morris Ankrum) who, we are told, want to detach Southern California from the Union and establish it as a pro-slavery state on the eve of the Civil War.

This is not pure fantasy. The Bear Flag Republic was barely a decade old in 1853. The question of California’s political identity, slave or free, unified or fractured, was genuinely unsettled in the years following the Compromise of 1850. Southern California, then a sparsely populated rancho territory with economic and cultural ties to the old Mexican land grant aristocracy, had a different character than the gold rush north. The idea that ambitious men might try to carve out a separate fiefdom is not historically absurd. Screenwriter John Twist reaches for this history and then mostly ignores it in favor of stagecoach chases and saloon brawls, but the premise has real bones.

What the film does with that premise, though, is what makes it interesting. The heart of Sheldon’s criminal operation is not, at bottom, about political ideology. It is about water.

Water Is Always the Story

The climactic action sequence, a spectacular raid on what we find out is the “water pirates’ camp,” reveals what the so-called secessionists are actually protecting. They weren’t interested in any potential Civil War. Instead, they wanted to control the water in 1850s Southern California and he who controls the water controls everything. The cattle ranches, the farmland, the emerging settlements. Everything runs on water access in a landscape that gets perhaps fifteen inches of rain a year if it’s feeling generous. The political conspiracy is a ruse for what is in the end a resource war. Like Quantum of Solace, the villain is interested in man’s first most precious resource and not in the politics of the day.

Audiences in 1953 may not have fully registered this, but anyone who grew up in the West, as I did (Reno, Nevada), understands in their bones what water means in that landscape. William Mulholland didn’t invent the idea, he merely executed it at scale. The Owens Valley was drained to slake Los Angeles not because anyone was malicious in some cartoonish way, but because the logic of water in a semi-arid basin is ruthless and absolute. You control the water or you lose the West. Take that people who think Dune is about Oil. What are the Fremen up to in those cisterns? An author who saw the beginnings of the terraforming of dunes in Oregon knows all about water.

One of the best examples of the water wars genre is John Sayles’ film The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), where a single man’s decision to illegally irrigate his beanfield ignites a war between a rural New Mexico community and developers who have quietly monopolized the local water supply. The beanfield is not really about beans. It is about who gets to exist in a landscape that cannot support everyone who wants to live in it. The water is the whole argument.

Water is central to one of the quintessential Westerns. George Stevens’ film Shane was released the same year Man Behind the Gun was released (1953) and while Ryker’s cattle operation and the Starrett homesteaders are fighting a war that looks like a personality conflict, it is really a water and grazing rights argument with guns attached. Ryker is not simply a villain. He is a man who arrived first, built his operation around access to open range and water, and now watches fences go up around the resource base his livelihood depends on. The homesteaders are not simply victims. They are a competing claim on the same scarce commons. Shane doesn’t resolve that argument. Shane just ends it, which is a different thing entirely. Stevens is too honest a filmmaker to pretend the valley is big enough for both and the book makes the point even clearer.

The Man Behind the Gun is not as sophisticated as either of those films, but it is, in its blundering B-picture way, telling the same story. The insurrectionists need secession because secession means no federal oversight, and no federal oversight means the water is theirs. Callicut isn’t just stopping a political plot. He’s stopping the privatization of a commons that Southern California’s future depends on.

It is a remarkable thing to find in a film that also features Alan Hale Jr. as a strong man and Dick Wesson as “Monk” a sidekick who swings a bullwhip.

The Landscape Knows What the Script Doesn’t

Part of what makes this message so strong is where the film was shot. Bell Ranch in the Simi Valley overlookes the nearby Ball Ranch Loop (K’uik’ui Ranch) which is now largely preserved as part of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. This is a stunning landscape of rolling oak-studded hills, golden grassland, and that particular Southern California light that turns everything amber in the late afternoon. It is beautiful in a way that is entirely different from the jagged volcanic drama of Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills, where Scott spent so much of his career. You can see the preserved watershed behind Scott as he rides up the hill as he journeys to the schoolhouse where he will “teach.”

In Frontier Marshal, the Eastern Sierra Nevada locations do moral work. The stacked granite boulders, the looming crags of Mount Whitney, the hardness of that terrain. All of that matches the film’s relatively dark material and Scott’s occasionally alarming interpretation of Wyatt Earp as a genuinely decent man in a landscape that seems designed to punish decency. Lone Pine is a landscape of confrontation.

The Simi Valley is a landscape of promise and serenity. Those green and gold hills look like the California of the land grant dreamers. They are soft, fertile, and generously lit. It is, in other words, exactly the landscape worth fighting over. When the water pirates establish themselves in the film’s final act, they are parasites on precisely this: the seemingly abundant but actually fragile resource base of Southern California’s pre-aqueduct promise. Cinematographer Bert Glennon, a veteran who shot Stagecoach for Ford, knows what he has, and he uses it.

Randolph Scott and the Women of the Film

Randolph Scott in 1953 is a man in transition. The Boetticher Westerns are still a few years away. The Ranown productions that will cement his legacy, Seven Men from Now, Ride Lonesome, Comanche Station, are on the horizon but not yet visible. What we have here is Scott at a curious midpoint. He’s too big a star for the programmer Western having featured prominently in films like My Favorite Wife, but he is not yet in the films that will fully use all of his talents.

His Callicut has the characteristic Scott contradiction. He’s warm, disarming, almost implausibly likeable, and capable of sudden precise violence that makes you believe he has always been exactly this dangerous. This is not an easy combination to sell. Scott sells it every time. It is his hallmark. He’s deceptively dangerous in the same way he manages to be deceptively sexy. After all, a 1940 audience had to believe he was a genuine sexual threat to Cary Grant in My Favorite Wife, which is no small ask, and the diving scene in speedos is the film making that argument as directly as the Production Code would allow.

What surprised me in The Man Behind the Gun is what the film attempts, imperfectly, to do with its women. The conventional reading of early-50s Westerns is that they overused the damsel in distress trope where women exist to be rescued, to provide romantic motivation, and to represent Civilization’s stake in the outcome. I think this is largely overblown. Westerns like The Naked Spur highlight that the critics making this claim seem to have watched 1950s Westerns in the same way that Karl Popper read Plato. Which is to say that they probably didn’t, otherwise they wouldn’t be saying things that gets disproven so easily by repeated examples. The women in Westerns are harder than they are given credit for, but they do “play” with the damsel in distress notion. The Man Behind the Gun is a good example of how this trope is subverted.

There is what appears to be a damsel in distress C-storyline threading through the love square that drives much of the film’s romantic geometry, but it is undermined before it happens when Lora Roberts (Patrice Wymore) produces the gun that Callicut gave her earlier and uses it at exactly the right moment to save his hide. It is not a grand feminist statement. It is a small, practical beat. She was given a tool, she learned to use it, she used it. It is enough to signal that the film sees Lora as a person with agency rather than a passive prize. Viewers have this scene in the back of their mind when the villains take Lora hostage. They know she’ll find a way to escape on her own and she does, even as the cavalry comes to rescue her.

Lina Romay as Chona Degnon is often praised as the film’s real revelation. Romay plays the saloon singer/villain’s consort with a knowing energy that most of the film’s heroes can’t match. She is operating in full awareness of her situation. She understands the men around her, the power she has, the limits of that power and she is an interesting character played by a charismatic actress. The consensus is that she walks away with the film, but that’s misguided. She lacks the power of Marie Windsor in The Narrow Margin, or the seductive quality of Barbara Stanwyck in…well everything. She’s great, but highlighting her is the staid and easy choice. Wymore’s Lora is the truly strong woman in the movie, but like Grace Kelly’s Quaker in High Noon she seems weak on the surface. Chona appears strong on the surface, but is actually weak because she measures her worth in how a man sees her. She needs the saloon to survive, she needs “the City.” Lora doesn’t. She’s the kind of woman who survived on the prairie.

The love square itself, Lora and Chona both entangled with Captain Giles (Philip Carey) and Callicut, is messier than the film intends. As flawed as it is, it generates genuine dramatic heat in a way that the secessionist conspiracy, which needed a stronger villain, does not. Morris Ankrum is a reliable heavy who is given almost nothing to do. The film’s antagonist problem is real.

Felix Feist and the Grammar of the Journeyman

Director Felix Feist is not a name that comes up in the auteurist conversation about Westerns, and The Man Behind the Gun does not change that. He is efficient, occasionally stylish, and fundamentally in service of the material rather than in dialogue with it. He would migrate to television soon after this, The Man Behind the Gun has the pacing and visual grammar of a prestige TV movie twenty years before that was a category.

What he does well is action. The opening gun fight and the raid on the water pirates’ camp have real momentum. The final shootout earns its release. Feist also has the sense to let the cast do their work without interference, which is the most important directorial skill in a film like this. Randolph Scott charms and Alan Hale Jr. clowns and it works. Let them work their wheelhouse.

The Verdict

The Man Behind the Gun is messier than Frontier Marshal. It has more moving parts than it can fully control, a villain scaffolding that collapses under weight, and a romantic geometry that is interesting in theory and chaotic in execution. It is not the Randolph Scott film you show someone to explain why Randolph Scott matters.

It is, however, a film that rewards attention. The locations are beautiful and historically resonant in ways the script doesn’t fully earn but the landscape provides anyway. Lina Romay and Patrice Wymore have good tension. As for Scott, he’s doing what Scott always does, which is making you believe in a man who is both completely trustworthy and genuinely dangerous, a combination that turns out to be exactly what Southern California needed in 1853.

The water pirates had to lose. The question of who controlled the water in Southern California would be answered differently, and more durably, a few decades later. But that’s a story about William Mulholland and the Owens Valley, and that’s a darker Western than Warner Bros. was making in 1953.

Whenever I see a new Western available on a streaming service, I always look to see if it stars Randolph Scott. Because when it comes to choosing whether to watch it or not…

I’ll do it for Randolph Scott.

The Man Behind the Gun (1953) is directed by Felix E. Feist, stars Randolph Scott, Patrice Wymore, Lina Romay, and Philip Carey, and is streaming on HBO Max.

Why Are So Many B/X Articles in Christian’s Draft Article Queue?

One of the things I love about the Moldvay, Cook, and Marsh versions of the D&D Basic and Expert sets is how they approached character archetypes in play. The original version of Dungeons & Dragons had Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, and Clerics as the core archetypes to build from, but things became a bit muddy when someone wanted to play an Elven character. They could start as a Fighting-Man or Magic-User and freely switch between them, “from adventure to adventure, but not during a single game.” What this meant, and how it worked, has been much discussed on the Dragonfoot and other forums, so I won’t go into detail. I’ll just say that it led to enough published differences between gaming groups in places like Alarums & Excursions that Gary Gygax made significant clarifications on how multi-class characters work when he wrote the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook (sic).

Gary’s solution is wonderful, but like a lot of AD&D it adds tremendous complexity to the mechanics of the game. AD&D was designed with the specificity that Gary believed large scale convention play needed so that players at one table had the same experience when they played at another table. That’s a noble goal and AD&D largely succeeds at it. The interesting thing is that both the Moldvay, Cook, and Marsh and Mentzer BECMI versions of D&D manage to do it too, but without the complexity. This is what makes old school D&D so wonderful. You can play an easy to learn and master version (1981 and later Basic D&D) or a rich and deep version with wonderful subsystems that aid in developing a fully realized world. One is broad (D&D) and the other is granular (AD&D), but both allow for consistent play in ways that OD&D didn’t offer. I won’t dive into the how to use Chainmail for combat discussion here, but I have written on it in the past and some early players thought saving throws were rolled on 2d10 added together creating a bell curve (Lee Gold in Alarums & Excursions #2) or that spell casters could cast the spells they memorized an unlimited time each day (Ted Johnstone APA-L 513) . It’s no wonder they thought Magic-Users were too powerful in the early days of the game.

These kinds of misinterpretations were common, and easy to do, given the vagueness of those early rules. Both Basic D&D (Moldvay and later as Holmes has his own vagaries where everyone should wield daggers) and AD&D made huge improvements in rule clarity and I love both editions of the game. There is something that keeps calling me back to the clear simplicity of B/X and BECMI where each new interpretation of an archetype gets its own class. Moldvay’s Elf is a combination fighter/magic-user and gains all the benefits all the time. Moldvay’s Halfling is a fighter, but with nature abilities that make him a fantastic outdoor companion. So much so, I based my B/X Ranger on the class.

I’m not the only one to have a soft spot for the B/X and BECMI focus on archetypes over add-ons. Alexander Macris’ Adventurer, Conqueror, King System takes the B/X approach, as does JV West in his gonzo Black Pudding zines and his Doomslakers! roleplaying game. Where D&D 3rd edition and 4th edition use things like feats and prestige classes to emulate narrower interpretations of archetypes, these newer games (and 4e) take the B/X and BECMI approach and develop new classes modeled on existing ones for each new archetype. It’s a kind of “common law” approach to class design instead of the engineer’s approach of 3e and 5e. In the common law approach, you ask the player (or speculate as the DM) what they want their character to be like. Then you look at existing classes to see if they do the job. If not, you find one to serve as a foundation and make adjustments to the theme while trying to keep some balance. That balance is different in B/X and BECMI, with BECMI allowing multiple attacks for higher level fighters while B/X never does, so that has to be taken into consideration when making a B/X character class.

Like West and Macris, I love the older approach, so I’m writing up a bunch of classes for B/X inspired by the fiction and genres I enjoy. It’s all part of an effort to include more gaming content in this newsletter. I’ll still be writing reviews and scheduling more interviews, but I’ll be upping my “White Dwarf” game and bringing in more game content too. Oh, and I’ll probably bring in some BECMI versions of the classes I’m making later, but today’s class is Moldvay, Cook, and Marsh all the way.

Let me present to you…The Swashbuckler.

The Swashbuckler

When I think of literary and cinematic Swashbucklers, there are four characters who immediately come to mind to capture this archetype.

The first is Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche aka André-Louis Moreau. He was born a nobody, becomes one of the finest swordsmen in France not through noble blood or magical talent but through intelligence, observation, and a particular willingness to be laughed at while he learns. He studies his enemies and beats them at their own game. Along the way he is, at various points, a lawyer, a playwright, a circus performer, a revolutionary politician, and a fugitive. Sabatini puts it in the first sentence, quoted at the top of the article. He has the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad. That is the swashbuckler’s core. The world is absurd and dangerous, and the swashbuckler has decided to find this funny and to act with panache.

Peter Blood, also a Sabatini creation, is the second who comes to mind. Okay, it’s Errol Flynn who comes to mind and this is one of his iconic swashbuckling roles. Peter Blood is a physician pressed into slavery who becomes a pirate captain and eventually, against his own better judgment, a defender of the English crown in the Caribbean. He is educated, principled within limits, possessed of a dry wit that functions as both weapon and shield, and absolutely lethal with a blade when pushed past those limits. Blood is the gentleman outlaw with a code. He doesn’t have Robin Hood’s code of righteous redistribution. Instead he has a private moral ledger that he maintains regardless of which side of the law he currently inhabits.

Maybe my favorite swashbuckler is Sir Percy Blakeney. He’s the foundation for so many heroic characters and is perhaps the most sophisticated version of the swashbuckling archetype because he is operating on two levels simultaneously. As the Scarlet Pimpernel he is one of the most daring operatives in Europe, extracting aristocrats from Revolutionary France under the noses of Fouché’s agents. As Percy Blakeney he is a famous fop. He’s vain, slow-witted, obsessed with his cravat. He’s the model for the Bruce Wayne and Batman dichotomy. The gap between those two personalities is the core of the conflict in the first novel and shows the genius of Baroness Orczy’s creation. Blakeney isn’t just a swashbuckler. He’s a swashbuckler who has thought through the social mechanics of being a swashbuckler and built a disguise around the expectations everyone has of what he ought to be. His moral code, and the fear that the woman he loves doesn’t share it, almost cost him his life, yet he remains a happy warrior.

And then there is the Gray Mouser, the most “D&D” of swashbuckling characters. He is featured in Fritz Leiber’s contribution to the Appendix N canon that underlies a lot of the articles I’ll be writing in the coming months. He is Fafhrd’s partner, the urban half of one of fantasy literature’s great double acts. The Mouser is a former hedge-wizard’s apprentice who found that a quick blade and quicker wits served him better in the alleys of Lankhmar than any cantrip. The Mouser is the archetype at its most stripped-down and honest. No noble birth, no physician’s education, no aristocratic double life. Just a very small man with a very fast sword and the permanent conviction that he is probably the smartest person in any given room, which is often enough correct to be dangerous. In Tunnels & Trolls, he serves as the foundation for the Rogue class and he is why D&D’s Thief Class can read scrolls. He’s too good a swordsman to be a mere Thief though, so I’ve never found that adaptation quite satisfying.

These four characters don’t share a class in the B/X or BECMI versions of Dungeons & Dragons that truly captures them. They should, but the one attempt (the Rake) didn’t cut the mustard for me.

The Problem with the BECMI Rake

The Dawn of the Emperors boxed set introduced the Rake as “the non-thief thief.” It is a swashbuckling variant for characters from the Pearl Islands of Thyatis who admire the Thief’s agility without wanting the profession’s criminal associations. The Arena of Thyatis module improved on the base version by replacing Backstab with a Dodge ability (equal to Hide in Shadows percentage) and adding a Charisma bonus in an attempt to make the class more playable.

The general concept is right. It is an attempt to create a combat-capable social operator who uses skill and wit rather than raw muscle is exactly what the swashbuckler archetype requires, and Aaron Allston and John Nephew deserve credit for identifying the need. Nephew’s version in Arena of Thyatis is pretty good, but I wanted something that had a little more action oriented.

The execution is the problem. The Rake is built entirely on the Thief chassis and that’s a very weak combat chassis in Basic D&D. The Rake has the same 1d4 hit dice, same THAC0 progression, and the same XP requirements. Stripping out Pick Pockets and Backstab and adding one combat option makes it mechanically worse than the Thief in almost every situation except dodging spells. You end up with a character who can’t take a hit, can’t fight effectively, has fewer skills than a Thief, and gets a Dodge ability that only works when they’re not attacking. The Rake as published is less a swashbuckler and more a description of what a swashbuckler might theoretically be, without any mechanical support for actually being one.

Common Law Class Creation: The Mystic and Halfling as Starting Points

When I built the Venusian Scout, I used the Elf as the chassis with its hybridization of the Fighter/Magic-User because the Scout needed genuine Fighter combat ability paired with a secondary toolkit. The Swashbuckler needs the same thing, but the secondary toolkit is different and the flavor is entirely different.

Taking the common law class creation approach I discussed above, the first class I looked to as a foundation was the Mystic from the BECMI Rules Cyclopedia. The Mystic is a martial artist class that gets Fighter combat progression, 1d6 hit dice (between the Fighter’s 1d8 and the Thief’s 1d4), can’t wear armor, has a limited weapon selection, special combat abilities that unlock at various levels, and a small set of thief-adjacent skills. It is, in other words, a Fighter/Thief hybrid with class-specific special abilities. This provided a good model for the architecture the Swashbuckler needs. It’s also the model I used in my first draft of rules for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, though I’ve got a revision of those coming soon.

The differences between the Mystic and the Swashbuckler are substantial. The Mystic is an unarmed specialist whose special abilities are oriented around open-hand combat, deflecting missiles, and moving without sound. The Swashbuckler is a weapon specialist whose special abilities are oriented around blade control, social manipulation, and maintaining a persona. The Mystic is ascetic and inward. The Swashbuckler is theatrical and outward. But the mechanical skeleton is the same: Fighter combat + restricted gear + special unlocking abilities + a few thief skills.

The Halfling also serves as a reference point, as it did for the Ranger. The Halfling’s attack-based hiding mechanic is an example of how B/X can encode a class’s particular survival strategy into a special ability rather than just borrowing wholesale from the Thief table. The Swashbuckler’s Riposte ability (see below) does something similar. The Riposte encodes the swashbuckler’s fundamental combat logic, use the opponent’s aggression against them, into a mechanic rather than borrowing the Thief’s Backstab.

Designing for My Four Reference Characters

The four characters I mentioned earlier share specific demonstrable capabilities. They are all exceptional swordsmen, have some prowess in social situations, are light and mobile, and good at improvization.

Exceptional swordsmanship — The Swashbuckler is a skilled duelist. Their approach not Fighter-level hack-and-slash of Liam Neeson’s Rob Roy, but precision and technique of Tim Roth’s Cunningham. André-Louis Moreau’s fencing scenes in Scaramouche are specifically about exploiting openings. Captain Blood’s dueling reputation is what makes him dangerous.

Social performance — Blakeney’s fop is the clearest example, but all four operate in social environments where how they’re perceived matters. The Mouser’s “innocent” face and quick tongue often get him out of trouble that his sword got him into.

Light and mobile — None of them wear plate armor. None of them fight shield-and-sword. They’re fast and they stay that way.

Improvisation — Captain Blood improvises constantly. The Mouser uses environmental features. Blakeney’s plans depend on reading a situation and adapting.

A private moral ledger — This is tonal rather than mechanical, but all four operate outside conventional law while maintaining their own code. The class needs to feel like it belongs to a person with principles rather than a hired blade.

None of these characters have significant supernatural abilities (though Mouser has Hedge Magic so I’ll likely keep the Read Scrolls ability), tracker skills, religious connections, or any particular interest in wilderness survival. This class is urban and social in the way that the Ranger is rural and solitary.

The Swashbuckler

Requirements: DEX 9, CHA 9
Prime Requisite: DEX and CHA
Hit Dice: 1d6
Maximum Level: 10
Armor: Leather armor only; no shield. At higher levels the Dueling Blade stance (unarmored, off hand empty) surpasses leather (See Special Abilities). Weapons: Any sword, dagger, hand axe, short bow, crossbow; no two-handed weapons, no pole arms, no military weapons requiring Strength to wield effectively
Languages: Common plus one additional language of the player’s choice reflecting the character’s background in addition to bonus languages from Intelligence.

Prime Requisite XP Bonus

Experience and Level Advancement

After level 9, the Swashbuckler gains +2 HP per level and no longer rolls HD. All other advancement is frozen at level 10 values. The title “Captain” at level 9 is intentional. Captain Blood reached that level.

Attack Bonus / THAC0

The Swashbuckler attacks as a Fighter of the same level through level 10.

Saving Throws

Swashbucklers use the Thief saving throw table, reflecting the lightning reflexes and situational awareness that keep them alive where a Fighter would rely on armor and toughness.

Thief Skills

The Swashbuckler has access to a narrow set of Thief skills reflecting the practical skills of a person who lives by wit and observation rather than burglary. They have no access to Find/Remove Traps, Open Locks, Climb Walls, or Backstab. Move Silently and Hide in Shadows are available but advance more slowly than for a Thief, reflecting that the Swashbuckler’s survival toolkit is social rather than stealthy.

Design Note: Pick Pockets for the Swashbuckler represents sleight of hand broadly. This includes things like palming objects, concealing weapons on their person, lifting a key without detection, slipping a document from an inside pocket. It is less about petty theft and more about the manual dexterity of someone accustomed to operating in close social quarters.

Special Abilities

Dueling Blade

When fighting with one weapon in the primary hand and the off-hand completely empty, the Swashbuckler may choose to fight without armor. While unarmored in this stance, they gain an AC bonus. This bonus is from superior footwork, reading an opponent’s center of gravity, and simply not being where the blade arrives that accompanies increases in character level.

All AC values before DEX modifier. DEX bonus applies in any case and stacks with the Dueling Blade bonus.

Design Note: Through level 4, leather armor (AC 7) provides better protection than the Dueling Blade stance (AC 8). A Swashbuckler in their first years of practice wears leather and learns. At levels 5–6, the stance brings unarmored protection exactly level with leather; the choice is the player’s. At level 7, the calculation inverts and a Swashbuckler in the Dueling Blade stance (AC 6, plus DEX modifier) outperforms anything leather can offer. Most Swashbucklers at this point hang the armor up for good. Rings and Cloaks of Protection are the main protective items at this point.

This progression mirrors the Mystic’s AC bonus from the BECMI Rules Cyclopedia, which improves by 1 per level through bodily discipline. The Swashbuckler’s improvement is half that rate because their protection comes from technique rather than transcendence but technique, at its apex, is a protection the body builds by doing the same things correctly ten thousand times until they become automatic. The Mystic trains their body to be armor. The Swashbuckler trains their body to be elsewhere when the armor would have been struck. Additionally, it the “jewelry and finery” nature of a lot of protective magic items fit with the class thematically and I wanted to encourage their use.

Riposte

When an opponent in melee misses the Swashbuckler with an attack roll, the Swashbuckler may immediately make one free attack against that opponent. This costs no action and is a reactive strike exploiting the opening created by the missed blow.

Restrictions: The Riposte only applies to melee attacks. Missile attacks, spell effects, and area attacks do not trigger it. The Swashbuckler may only make one Riposte per round regardless of how many opponents miss. The Swashbuckler cannot Riposte if they are wearing medium or heavy armor (leather and buckler remain eligible).

Design Note: This is the mechanical expression of the fencing tradition all four reference characters embody. André-Louis Moreau wins his crucial duel not by attacking harder but by reading the moment his opponent is vulnerable. The Riposte encodes that the Swashbuckler is most dangerous when their opponent is overextended.

Social Ease

+1 to all reaction rolls with intelligent beings. This increases to +2 at level 5 and +3 at level 9.

Design Note: Unlike the Venusian Scout’s similar ability, which reflects Venusian racial charm, the Swashbuckler’s Social Ease is entirely cultivated. It is the result of practice, observation, and the kind of confidence that comes from being very good at something that could get you killed. It applies equally in taverns, noble courts, and criminal dens, because the Swashbuckler has learned to read rooms.

At Level 3: Feint, Disarm, and Persona

Feint

At 3rd level, the Swashbuckler gains the ability to Feint. Once per round, instead of attacking, the Swashbuckler may declare a Feint against one opponent in melee range. The target must make a saving throw vs. Spells. On a failure, the target’s AC is treated as 2 points worse for the Swashbuckler’s next attack against them (this round or the next). On a success, the Feint has no effect and the Swashbuckler’s action for the round is spent.

At level 5, the saving throw penalty improves to 3 AC points on a failure. At level 8, it improves to 4.

Design Note: The Feint is Percy Blakeney’s weapon applied to combat. The fop persona is a Feint. The confused look, the dropped handkerchief, the apparent incompetence. All of this is misdirection that creates the opening. In mechanical terms the Feint is an investment that is common in D&D combat actions, you sacrifice an action to impose a condition that makes your next attack more likely to land.

Disarm

Starting at 3rd level, once per combat, the Swashbuckler may attempt to disarm an opponent wielding a weapon. This replaces their normal attack. The Swashbuckler makes a normal attack roll against the opponent’s AC. On a hit, no damage is dealt. Instead the target must make a saving throw vs. Paralysis or their weapon is knocked free, landing 1d6 × 5 feet away in a random direction. Creatures of greater than human size (ogres, giants, etc.) save at +4. Creatures with no discernible grip (undead, slimes) are immune.

Design Note: Captain Blood doesn’t just want to win the duel. He wants the other man to leave alive, ideally humiliated and aware of how close they came. The Disarm is the mechanical expression of that preference. a swashbuckler who chooses not to kill is not weaker than one who does, just differently motivated.

Persona

At level 3, the Swashbuckler may establish and maintain a false identity, a Persona, with a completely different apparent personality, mannerisms, and social standing from their own. Maintaining a Persona requires preparation (at least one day establishing the disguise and backstory) and is broken if the Swashbuckler fails a saving throw vs. Spells when placed under direct, sustained scrutiny from someone who knows them in their true identity.

The Persona does not require a physical disguise, though one helps. It is primarily a performance. Percy Blakeney’s fop is not a physical transformation, it’s a character he inhabits completely.

A Swashbuckler may maintain one Persona per 3 levels (one at level 3, two at level 6, three at level 9). Established Personae do not need to be rebuilt from scratch. They exist as available identities the Swashbuckler can slip into.

Design Note: This is the ability that separates the Swashbuckler from the Venusian Scout most clearly. The Scout has supernatural awareness. The Swashbuckler has social engineering. Blakeney’s genius isn’t that he’s the best fencer in England, plenty of men are good fencers. His genius is that he built a cover identity so convincing that his own wife didn’t see through it.

At Level 4 (Optional): Read Languages and Read Magic Scrolls.

A Swashbuckler who reaches 4th level can read languages (including simple codes, dead languages, treasure maps, and so on, but not magical writings) with an 80% chance of success. If the attempt to read a piece of writing fails, the Swashbuckler must gain at least one level before another attempt to read it is allowed. At 8th level, the Swashbuckler gains the ability to read magic-user or elf scrolls of levels 1 to 3. However there is a 20% chance the spell will backfire, creating an unexpected result due to the Swashbuckler’s imperfect understanding of magical writings. This ability only allows the Swashbuckler to cast spells from existing magic scrolls.

Design Note: The Gray Mouser is a former Hedge Wizard and Swashbuckler’s are dabblers. This is less useful than the Thief version of the ability, but it may not fit your vision of the class. If it doesn’t abandon it, but I’d recommend keeping the non-magical reading of languages and maps regardless.

At Level 9: The Company

A Swashbuckler who reaches level 9 and establishes a base of operations attracts a small band of loyal followers. These followers include 2d6 characters of levels 1–4 that will be a mix of fighters, thieves, and other swashbucklers drawn to the character’s reputation. These are the crew of the Arabella, the League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the companions who follow because they believe in the person leading them.

Unlike the standard Fighter stronghold followers, these companions are not professional soldiers. They are loyal, capable, and personally invested. They are more dangerous in situations requiring improvisation and discretion than in formal siege warfare. Their Morale is based on the Charisma of the character as per usual.

Design Notes

Why max level 10 instead of 8? The Ranger and Venusian Scout classes I designed capped at 8 because they’re designed around classes that tend to remain solo and name level and higher classes often have followers. Captain Blood commands a pirate fleet. Blakeney runs a covert intelligence operation across national borders. Level 10 reflects a longer career arc without pushing into the superhero territory that B/X generally avoids.

Why Thief saves instead of Fighter saves? Same reasoning as the Venusian Scout from earlier in the week. Thief saves are better against Death/Poison and Paralysis, worse against Breath and Spells. The Swashbuckler’s survival model is reflexes and awareness, not armor and endurance. One might argue that the Save vs. Breath should be better due to the reflexes component, but I’ve always imagined Prince Philip vs. Maleficent and his use of the shield is heroic, but not Swashbuckler in nature.

Why no Backstab? Because Backstab is the Thief’s defining combat feature and giving it to the Swashbuckler collapses the distinction. More importantly, none of the four reference characters are backstabbers. The Mouser occasionally gets the drop on someone but he fights face-to-face. Blood insists on honorable dueling conditions in his most important fights. André-Louis wins by being better, not by striking from behind. The Riposte does more to capture how these characters actually fight than Backstab ever would.

The Scaramouche Problem: Levels 1 and 2. André-Louis Moreau spends the first half of Scaramouche being terrible at swordsmanship. He is intelligent, observant, and determined, but he has not yet learned the technique that will make him dangerous. This is worth naming explicitly because it is a legitimate feature of the class, not a flaw. A level 1 Bravo has Fighter combat rolls (so does everyone else in B/X), few special abilities, leather armor, and 1d6 hit points. They are survivable but unimpressive. That is the learning-on-the-streets phase. The Riposte and Dueling Blade unlock at level 1, though the Dueling Blade ability is worse than the protection offered by Leather Armor. These is the first techniques a student of the blade learns, exploiting an opponent’s missed swing and defending one’s self, but the Feint, Disarm, Persona, and improved Dueling Blade all require experience to fully develop. A Swashbuckler is not born. They are made through accumulated close calls and deliberate practice. Referees should read the early levels as the Scaramouche arc. At this time they represent a character who is already more capable than most but has not yet become the person the later levels describe.

On the Rake again. The Arena of Thyatis Rake is a genuinely interesting design idea and it deserves the acknowledgment it gets. The Dodge mechanic is clever. The problem is that it’s trying to be a swashbuckler class without giving the character Fighter combat, which means you’re building on a foundation that can’t support the structure. With this particular Swashbuckler design, I attempted to create something that was roughly equivalent in combat power to a Fighter at the same level. The character has slightly less HP, slightly better saves, and meaningfully more interesting things to do in a fight.

A note on the Mystic comparison. If you’re running a BECMI game and want Swashbuckler characters in the mold of Scaramouche as a trained swordsman, the Mystic unarmed combat abilities can serve as an optional variant. You’d have to re-theme them to reflect the use of a dueling weapon of some sort, but there is room for lifting more from that class if you wish.

Sample Character: The Gray Mouser

Fafhrd’s companion, Lankhmar’s most self-satisfied survivor. 8th-level Swashbuckler (Swordmaster)

STR 11 | DEX 17 | CON 12 | INT 15 | WIS 10 | CHA 14

HP: 29 | AC: 4 (unarmored, DEX −2, Dueling Blade +3) | THAC0: 14 Save: Death 12 / Wand 13 / Paralysis 11 / Breath 14 / Spell 13

Thief Skills: Pick Pockets 69% | Move Silently 50% | Hide in Shadows 31% | Hear Noise 1–4 on d6

Attacks: Scalpel +2 (thin sword, treat as short sword: 1d6+2); Cat’s Claw +2 (dagger: 1d4 +2).

Special:

• Riposte: free attack when opponent misses in melee

• Feint: target saves vs. Spells or -3 AC on next attack (level 5+)

• Disarm: attack roll, target saves vs. Paralysis or weapon flies free

• Social Ease: +2 to reaction rolls (level 5+)

• Persona: can maintain two false identities simultaneously (level 6+)

• Dueling Blade: +3 AC when fighting unarmored (level 7–8)

Languages: Common, Thieves’ Cant, enough Lankhmarese to get into trouble

Notes: The Mouser is currently waiting for Fafhrd to finish whatever ill-considered scheme he’s hatched this week. He has two Personae established: a minor Lankhmarese merchant named Kreshmar, and a Mingol horse-trader he uses for dealing with people he doesn’t trust. He has just abandoned his priest identity, having reconnected with Fafhrd. He is currently wearing his usual grey cloak and does not wish to discuss any previous adventures.

A note for future consideration. Since Leiber’s Mouser served as apprentice to a Hedge Wizard in the first story, and used some pretty nasty magical abilities, I might put together a future variant for just him. It might be called the Hedge-Blade, and might trade the Persona ability for a small cantrip list of 1st and 2nd level Magic-User spells, representing that residual apprenticeship. The Mouser as statted above is the version who has put the magic mostly behind him. The version who hasn’t would be a different class entirely and deserves its own article.

Sample Character: Cyrano de Bergerac

Cadet of Gascony. Poet. Duelist. The most accomplished swordsman in Paris and the least willing to say so to the one person whose opinion he values. 10th-level Swashbuckler (Legend)

STR 12 | DEX 16 | CON 13 | INT 17 | WIS 12 | CHA 15

HP: 41 | AC: 2 (unarmored, DEX −2, Dueling Blade +5) | THAC0: 12 Save: Death 10 / Wand 11 / Paralysis 9 / Breath 12 / Spell 10

Thief Skills: Pick Pockets 83% | Move Silently 60% | Hide in Shadows 37% | Hear Noise 1–5 on d6

Attacks: Rapier + 3 (treat as sword: 1d8+3)

Special:

• Riposte: free attack when opponent misses in melee

• Feint: target saves vs. Spells or -4 AC on next attack (level 8+)

• Disarm: attack roll, target saves vs. Paralysis or weapon flies free; resets after landing a hit

• Social Ease: +3 to reaction rolls (level 9+) — see note below

• Persona: can maintain three false identities simultaneously (level 9+): see note below

• Dueling Blade: +5 AC when fighting unarmored (level 10)

Languages: French, Spanish, Latin, enough Italian to insult a man in his own language

Social Ease (Special Note). Cyrano’s +3 reaction bonus applies fully with soldiers, poets, philosophers, rivals, and enemies. He charms essentially everyone, with one key exception. Roxane, with whom he imposes a -4 penalty on himself, as though her were working actively to undermine his natural Charisma. This is not a mechanical rule. It is a character note. A Referee running Cyrano as an NPC should apply this self-sabotage only when Roxane is directly involved; in every other social situation he is exactly as charming as the numbers suggest, which is formidably so.

Persona (Special Note). Cyrano has three Personae established at level 10. The first is himself. This is not a disguise, but a conscious performance of “Cyrano de Bergerac” that he maintains with full awareness that he is playing a character who happens to share his name. The second is Christian de Neuvillette, the young Gascon cadet whose love letters Cyrano writes, whose words under Roxane’s balcony are Cyrano’s words spoken by another man’s voice. Cyrano does not wear Christian’s face. He writes Christian’s soul. In this case the Swashbuckler is building an identity not for himself but for someone else, and inhabiting it one step removed. The third Persona is that of a Spanish nobleman useful for moving through besieged Arras without attracting attention and it is more conventional and sees less use.

Equipment. One rapier, worn smooth at the grip. An inkwell and several sheaves of paper, always. A plume for his hat that he has replaced four times. No money.

Notes. Cyrano is currently in the Siege of Arras with the Gascon Cadets. He is intercepting the letters Roxane sends to Christian, adding to them, and then personally running the Spanish lines every night to deliver them. His level 9 Company consists of the Cadets of Gascony, who would follow him into hell with good humor and have been doing so for several years. He has not told Roxane anything. He will not. He is working on a poem.

If you read last year’s article, there’s not a lot of new ground covered here, but this is a game worth celebrating annually and there is a new version coming out based on the D&D 5e engine that is currently on Backerkit. I prefer the original rules set, there are links for those (including one that’s free and legal) below, but I am always happy to see the Imperium introduced to a new audience. I liked it when they did the d20 and GURPS versions and I’m happy they are doing this new version too. Do I want people to explore new game systems, and get out of their comfort zone? Heck yeah I do. I also understand how intimidating new systems can be. I will say though, that if you like ’s excellent Sword & Sorcery stuff, you’ll really like Traveller.

Today is MayDay!

May 1st of every year holds a special place in the hearts of fans of the Traveller roleplaying game. This isn’t because it is the anniversary of the publication of the game, that was around July 22, 1977 at the Origins III gaming convention1, instead it’s because of the hook that inspired people to try the game at all. That hook is the brief message on the cover of the box that held the original Little Black Books.

That short box cover message contains a lot of information about the Traveller setting, all without going into any expository. There is enough content in that distress call alone to run a detailed and rich science fiction campaign.

Think about that for a moment. A marketing message that contains sufficient background information to run an entire science fiction campaign! That’s remarkable and the reason it is possible is that it builds on existing well known lore in science fiction fandom.

Fans of Asimov’s Foundation stories would instantly recognize from this message that Traveller is a science fiction role playing game. The references to “Free Trader” and “losing cabin pressure” echo the “The Traders” of the book series like Master Trader Eskel Gorov who was imprisoned by the people of Askone for interfering in local politics.

What Kind of SF Setting Does this Brief Broadcast Reveal?

Even for those who haven’t read Asimov’s tales, there is a lot of content to be mined. I think it would be fair to say that the original little black books of the Traveller roleplaying game are filled with suggestions for an implied setting, even as there is very little explicit setting material in those short pamphlets and you can get a free replica of the content of those LBBs right now.

The first thing we learn about the Traveller Universe from this brief blurb is that this is a science fiction setting where “free traders” exist. What “free trader” means exactly, if you aren’t an Asimov fan, may not be clear but it is a jumping point. There are people who do trade between worlds who are not affiliated with an established government.

It is also clear is that this is a dangerous job. We know this not because the crew of the Beowulf are losing cabin pressure and might perish, though that makes it clear enough. Instead, we know it because this free trader has more than one turret mounted on the space craft and they are under attack.

Is it by pirates? Is it by an interplanetary navy? We don’t know. We do know that the trader does think it is possible that someone who can help them might be within radio distance. Why else would they be broadcasting? We also know that this isn’t necessarily likely, because they are asking for “anyone” to help them.

That’s a lot of information and fuel for the imagination in one small blurb and that’s how Traveller, especially in the Little Black Books, rolls.

After you download and read the opening sentences of the Introduction, you’ll begin to get a more detailed picture of just how dire the situation is for the Beowulf.

No subspace broadcasts in Traveller, so the crew had better hope an ally is close by. Of course, that ally/”rescuer” might just be your group’s PCs. What better way to start a campaign than with this desperate call for help?

One Reason Traveller Caught On…Star Wars. MayDay and May the Fourth Be With You.

While it’s abundantly clear to any fan of Science Fiction’s Golden Age that Traveller was in part inspired by the tales of Isaac Asimov, but the game was published in 1977. While this publication date meant that Traveller was the third published science fiction roleplaying game, it also meant it came out at roughly the same time as Star Wars and was able to use that to build a core audience.

The first Science Fiction role playing game was James Ward’s Metamorphosis Alpha which combined science fiction “ark salvation” stories with post-apocalyptic sensibilities. The second was Ken St. Andre’s Starfaring that is a thematic mashup of Ralph Bakshi’s counter cultural animation, the underground comics of the late 60s and early 70s, and John Carpenter’s Dark Star making it very much a game of its time. I’m excluding Ken St. Andre’s Rollerball. Even though it was published in February of 1977, it was printed as a limited edition zine and not a full blown entry into the rpg marketplace.

Both Metamorphosis Alpha and Starfaring were published before the release of Star Wars, and neither had a setting or rules set that was a good fit for the film franchise. Traveller wasn’t a perfect fit either, but it was close enough for it to become the go to system for those who wanted to play something approximating Star Wars.

While the original Little Black Books didn’t have a full blown setting, the implied one was painted in broad enough strokes that Star Wars fans adopting seems a natural fit.

The abandoned Free Trader Beowulf may as well be the Millennium Falcon for those more versed in Star Wars than Foundation, or even those equally so. Once you crack open the Little Black Books, there are even more parallels.

There is a some form of Galactic Empire, a fact that is only implied in the original rules which are very open ended, but made explicit later. It’s implied by the sheer volume of military career choices provided in the lifepath character generation system, a system in which your character can die prior to even being able to be played. Military service, or being a scout in outer space, is very dangerous business. The lifepath system is a hallmark of the game and very influential to later roleplaying games.

There is also “The Psionics Institute” which can train certain characters to use various mental powers (read as Jedi Powers) and that Institute is viewed with suspicion by the masses. Additionally, psionic potential diminishes as you age if you didn’t receive training at a young enough age. It’s important to note that the scope of psionics in Traveller isn’t exactly Star Wars-esque. Certain powers like teleportation can grow to extraordinary levels, while telekinesis will never get as powerful as Yoda in Empire Strikes Back.

There is the typical array of science fiction weapons like blasters etc., but more importantly characters might actually learn the “Blade” skill during character creation and swords in the equipment section. This alone makes it seem a perfect fit, even if the rules don’t include “laser” or “lightning” swords.

So, not a perfect fit, but if you are willing to do a little game design on your own and craft house rules, then it’s a good proxy in a time before there were other systems.

I could go on and on about Traveller, and a topic worthy of investigation is its lack of exponential character power growth that you see in other roleplaying games, but I’ll just finish by saying you should do yourself a favor and buy a copy. Oh, and you can make a couple of characters before hand to see if any die during character creation even before you buy the books.

Two years ago, Patrick Buechner published a celebration of MayDay in his The Soloist - an indie RPG newsletter. Check it out!

The Soloist

🚀 The Sci-Fi issue

1. Interview: Marc Miller, creator of Traveller Traveller Day on May 1 celebrates the sci-fi tabletop RPG created by Marc Miller and published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) in 1977. It’s a reference to the original box cover which incorporated a "Mayday" distress call…

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3 years ago · 18 likes · 2 comments · Patrick Buechner

The Mechanics

Given that Traveller was originally released in 1977, and given how closely its “format” matched that of D&D, it’s amazing how different the mechanics are from those of D&D. While the lifepath system does include a number of careers that player characters might have participated in before becoming adventurers, Traveller has no character class system. It is purely a skill based game, but even here it is unique.

The “defining” game of skill-based systems, Runequest, has a huge skill list and every player character has some level of proficiency with the vast majority of the skills. In other words, players have some level of skill in a wide variety of areas in Runequest and other Basic Role Play games. Not so in Traveller. Your character will be lucky to have 3 to 6 skill selections and if you keep re-enlisting to learn more skills, your character might just die in the character creation process. Yep, your characters can die as you create them in old school Traveller.

The lifepath system creates backstories that matter for beginning PCs. Your character might die during creation, but it will have a backstory and that backstory will affect play. In D&D games, I’ve started thinking that handling backstories the way they are handled in BG3 might be the best modern approach, post on that soon, because I don’t like the disconnect between an epic backstory and starting at first level. In Traveller, there are no levels but if your character has lived long enough, and traversed the lifepath, they will have a backstory and it will determine how good they are at tasks.

The game uses a very simple task resolution system that it then proceeds to make complex via the addition of several modifiers and wargame terminology. Sure, the basic mechanic for Traveller is “roll 2d6, add your skill bonus, and compare that to a target number.” Very simple, but then the modifiers come into play or should I say DMs. In D&D the term DM means Dungeon Master. In wargames, it means Die Modifier. DM+ means a bonus and DM- means a penalty. How much of one depends. Are you strong enough to use that sword really well? DM+ 1. Are you too weak DM -2. How about the dagger? Those numbers are different for daggers you know.

As complex as they make the very simple system, it’s still a simple system at heart and that makes it fun and easy to teach and play. I highly recommend Traveller.

And Now for Some Bookkeeping

Hello everyone! Thanks for subscribing! It means a lot.

Before I get into the article proper, I wanted to do a bit of book keeping.

1. Denis McCarthy was the winner of the Warlocks & Warriors anthology of Sword & Sorcery fiction. I’ll be sending him an email to work out shipping etc.

2. I have been accepted as an Amazon Associate and am setting up my Storefront. The link for that is here and I’d ask you to consider checking it out from time to time. I’ll be adding more lists as time goes on.

3. I’ll be posting an article on what I’d like to provide my paid subscribers soon and a part of that vision is going to be to include gaming content in more articles. When I write a book or film review, I will now have a game content section towards the bottom. It will follow the pattern set by the Northwest Smith reading guide post. That one included B/X stats, and a new class, for characters and monsters in the Northwest Smith stories.

Now Back to Our Regular Programming. It’s Your Turn

What are you doing between MayDay and May the Fourth Be With You?

“Smith’s errand in Lakkdarol, like most of his errands, is better not spoken of. Man lives as he must, and Smith’s living was a perilous affair outside the law and ruled by the ray-gun only.” — C.L. Moore, Shambleau, 1933

Why am I Adding Game Material at the End of this Article?

I really like reading and writing about fantasy and science fiction stories and so do a lot of my readers. A lot of my readers also love playing role playing games and discussing the fiction that surrounds them. I’ve been thinking about the book and story reviews I’ve written over the years and I realized that I was violating one of the old Google+ OSR rules: “If you are going to write a long article, you should include game content at the end.” Today, that changes. From now one, when I write a review of material from Appendix N it will have accompanying role playing game material at the end of the article. That way, those readers who are just interested in the book material won’t be distracted by game material; and those who want game material related to the fiction will have it available. I think it captures the “Old White Dwarf/Dragon” feel I’m aiming for pretty well, which brings me to a series of articles I’ve been writing discussing the stories of Northwest Smith by C.L. Moore.

Why You Should Read the Northwest Smith Stories and Why I’m Writing a Series of Articles

The easiest way to introduce C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith stories to a new reader is to compare him to Han Solo. If you do a quick Google search, you’ll see that the comparison has been floating around geek culture for decades. It’s about as accurate as The Hidden Fortress connection with Star Wars that David Ehrenstein wrote about in his discussion of The Hidden Fortress for Criterion in 1987, a connection that is reinforced in a 2001 interview that Lucas did with Criterion. Interestingly, it was John Milius (of Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn fame). Anyone who has actually watched The Hidden Fortress sees the connection, but also sees that a lot of the commentary around the connection is hyperbolic. There’s as much Flash Gordon and Kurosawa in Star Wars, but cineastes are going to cineaste. That’s all beside the poing because, in the case of Northwest Smith the comparison does the basic job. Both are space outlaws with a quick gun, a checkered past, and a loyalty problem that turns out to be loyalty after all. If that framing gets someone to pick up Shambleau or a Northwest Smith collection then it has earned its keep.

But the comparison undersells what Moore was actually doing, and I've noticed that readers who come in through the Solo door sometimes bounce off the stories precisely because they're expecting something different. Northwest Smith is not a swashbuckler. He is not triumphant. He moves through the solar system the way a man moves through a landscape that is trying to consume him. Since Moore’s tales include more than a few elements of cosmic horror, Smith comes close, more than once, to letting it consume him.

What Moore built between 1933 and 1940 is a peculiar and unreplicable thing. She wrote stories that had a Weird Fiction engine running on Planetary Romance fuel. The solar system she imagined draws on the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Shas an ancient Mars, lush and dangerous Venus, but instead of it being populated with the Edwardian ideal of heroism, she populates it with something closer to genuine dread. Her Mars is exhausted and full of things that predate human civilization by geological ages. Her Venus is beautiful in the way that things are beautiful to attract the unwary to become dinner.

There is a heavily Western influenced element that is real and worth highlighting. Smith moves through this setting like a gunfighter, which is to say like a man who has substituted speed and nerve for the kind of moral order that other people depend on. There's a reason the stories feel like they take place in frontier country even when the frontier is the Martian desert. But where the Western gunfighter usually maintains a certain heroic (or ironic) distance from the darkness around him because he sees the world clearly because he's seen it all, Smith does not. Where John Wayne’s Quirt Evans from Angel and the Badman would suss out danger at a moment’s notice and take quick action to prevent getting trapped, Smith gets drawn in. If Quirt believes someone is pure of heart, they are. If Smith does, he’s got a good chance to be wrong and if it’s a fatal temptress seeking to destroy him he’ll nearly succumb. The stories are, repeatedly, about what happens to a man who thought his toughness was a wall and discovers it has gaps in it.

That is what makes them worth reading. That is what I have been writing about.

The Series So Far

The Encountering Northwest Smith series launched in October 2023 and has now covered six of Moore's original stories. Here is where we've been.

1. "Encountering Northwest Smith: 'Shambleau'" (October 30, 2023) starts with the tale that set the pattern. "Shambleau" is the story that introduced Moore to Weird Tales readers in November 1933, and it remains the essential text. It is the story that establishes the template and includes one of the most terrifying monsters in the series. Smith rescues a creature being hunted through the streets of a Martian town, brings her back to his quarters, and ends up endangering himself in the process. The piece examines what kind of story Moore was telling. She isn’t giving us a horror story in the Lovecraftian mode, where the terror is the vast indifference of the cosmos. Instead she provides us something more intimate and more disturbing. She writes a horror story about innocence and temptation and about the parts of a person's inner life that toughness can't protect.

2. "Encountering Northwest Smith: 'Black Thirst'" (December 12, 2023) moves the action to Venus and to one of the stranger villains in Moore's solar system. The Alendar is a being of immense age who has spent centuries distilling and consuming the essence of beauty itself. He’s a vampire who feeds not on blood, but on beauty. "Black Thirst" is Moore at her most operatic. In the piece I look at how Moore constructs the Alendar as a figure of genuine horror rather than mere menace. I also look at the logic of what he is, and why that logic, once grasped, is so unsettling. My piece explores how Moore uses Venus as a setting. Venus isn’t an inhospitable alien world but a place of dangerous abundance, where the lushness of everything is part of what makes it lethal.

3. “Encountering Northwest Smith: ‘Scarlet Dream’” (June 5, 2024) is the outlier of the series in the best possible way. The story concerns a cloth, a shawl, that transports its wearer to a dimension that is not quite a place and not quite a dream. “Scarlet Dream” is where Moore’s prose texture becomes the argument. The piece examines how she creates a sense of wrongness not through explicit description but through accumulated atmosphere, and why the story’s resolution is more disturbing than most horror endings that are trying harder. Where other stories merge the Western and Cosmic Horror, “Scarlet Dream” mashes up tales of Faerie with Lovecraftian dread. It’s fantastic.

4. “Blogging Northwest Smith: ‘Dust of the Gods’” (July 25, 2024) brings Yarol, Smith’s Venusian partner and an interesting secondary character in the series, to the center of the story. “Dust of the Gods” is driven by a drug that induces visions of things that predate the human solar system, and it is one of the clearest expressions of what I think Moore was doing with the cosmic horror element. Her universe is not Lovecraft’s universe of malign emptiness, but something older and stranger and not entirely malign. Like Lovecraft, she evokes the cosmology of Lucretius’ de Rerum Natura, but the shift away from malign emptyness adds a horror that is in some ways is worse than nihilistic indifference. The piece examines Yarol as a character in his own right and what his perspective adds to the series that Smith’s perspective alone cannot provide.

5. “Encountering Northwest Smith: ‘Julhi’” (August 26, 2024) is the series at its most formally experimental. Moore is pushing at the edges of what the Weird Fiction story can do with point of view and the nature of the entity Smith encounters. The piece examines how Moore constructs Julhi as a genuinely alien presence rather than a monster in the conventional sense, and why that distinction matters for the horror the story generates.

6. “Encountering Northwest Smith: ‘Nymph of Darkness’” (September 4, 2024) covers the story Moore co-wrote with Forrest J. Ackerman. It’s a collaboration that raises questions about authorship and the degree to which the Northwest Smith voice is Moore’s specifically. I explore the co-authorship question as an entry point into what makes Moore’s solo prose distinctive, and what the Nymph herself represents in the context of the series’ ongoing interest in entities that interact with human consciousness in ways that bypass the will. I also touch upon Ackerman’s complex legacy and how that intersects with modern fandom. I don’t go too much into detail there, because Forry’s positive contributions are vast, but I do acknowledge them.

Where the Series Is Headed

Six stories down, and the series is not finished. Moore wrote eleven Northwest Smith tales in total before the character was effectively retired, and there are several that deserve the same close attention. I am very much looking forward to reading “Yvala,” “Lost Paradise,” “Werewoman,” and I'm especially excited to read and discuss the late collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner, “Quest of the Starstone,” which introduces Jirel of Joiry to the Northwest Smith universe and is one of the more remarkable cross-pollinations in the pulp tradition.

The plan is to continue through the full corpus, maintaining the same approach. I will continue reading Moore’s stories as serious genre work, paying attention to what she was doing with the conventions she inherited, and arguing for her importance as a writer who has not yet received the canonical attention she deserves.

And Now for the Game Content!

Moore’s work is Appendix N material at its best. Gary Gygax’s famous reading list in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide mentions her alongside the authors who shaped what Dungeons & Dragons was imagining. The Northwest Smith stories share a lot of DNA with the game. There are frontier settings, encounters with entities whose nature is uncertain, the tension between a character’s individual toughness and the vastness of what they’re up against. It’s often under-appreciated how much early D&D was a mashup of all kinds of fantasy. Today’s game focuses a bit too much on the mashup of Tolkien’s Heroic and Leiber’s Picaresque, with a dash of Romantasy on the side, but it leaves out so much of the weird. Early D&D was weird and that’s what makes the game so great!

For Old School Moldvay/Cook Basic readers who run games, or who want to, here are some B/X compatible stat blocks for the three main figures in the first story. These are intended less as direct conversion tools and more as thinking aids. I tried to translate Moore’s characters and monsters into the mechanical vocabulary that lets you put them at the table. I also designed a character class for Yarol the Venusian called The Venusian Scout.

Oh, and Moldvay Basic is now available as a Print on Demand book. Times are great indeed.

Northwest Smith

Human Fighter, Level 6

STR 13 | DEX 15 | CON 14 | INT 12 | WIS 9 | CHR 13

Armor Class: 7 (leather jacket, quick reflexes) Hit Points: 32 Movement: 120’ (40’) Save As: Fighter 6 Morale: 10 Alignment: Neutral

Attacks:

• Heat gun: 1d6 damage, range 60’/120’/180’ (treat as heavy crossbow for rate of fire)

• Knife: 1d4+1 damage

Special: Smith saves at +2 against charm, fascination, and mind-affecting effects. Smith’s seen enough to be harder to beguile than most. This bonus does not apply against the Shambleau’s Psychic Embrace (see below) or any creature he believes is “innocent” at the onset. Have the player make a Wisdom Check (per page B60 of Moldvay Basic) if they assert they are wary when you think they should think the creature is innocent.

Notes for the Referee: Smith is not a hero in the conventional sense. He operates in moral grey zones, has a warrant or two outstanding in more than one jurisdiction, and his loyalty to Yarol is one of the few things about him that is entirely uncomplicated. He can function as an ally, a contact, or a rival depending on the campaign. If you put him in as an NPC, he should feel like a man who has survived things that should have killed him — which means he should act like someone who takes nothing for granted.

The Shambleau

Ancient Predator / Life-Force Vampire

Armor Class: 7 Hit Dice: 4 (18 HP) Movement: 90’ (30’) Attacks: See Lure Form and True Form below Save As: Fighter 4 Morale: 6 No. Appearing: 1 (solitary; encountered in pairs or groups only in the rarest legends) Treasure: None Alignment: Chaotic XP: 450

Description: The Shambleau is one of the oldest races. It is older than recorded history, older perhaps than humanity itself. Yarol the Venusian, who knew of them through ancestral memory, suggests they may be the origin of the Gorgon legend: “The Gorgon, Medusa, a beautiful woman with snakes for hair, and a gaze that turned men to stone.” What the ancient Greeks encountered was likely a Shambleau; what killed them was not petrification but the combination of paralysis and the Psychic Drain.

The Shambleau does not hunt, it lures. Maybe a PC gets separated from the party and finds one in distress, being pursued by people who know what it is. The creature feeds on life-force, not blood, by wrapping its victims in the living mass of its tentacle-hair and drawing out what Yarol calls the “life-forces of men.” The experience is intensely pleasurable for the victim. This is not incidental; it is the mechanism.

Lure Form: The Shambleau’s assumed form is a humanoid female with smooth brown skin, green slit-pupil cat-eyes, three-fingered clawed hands, four-toed clawed feet, and typically some form of head covering around her head to conceal the tentacles. You can also have them use some form of illusion spell to hide their appearance, though Venusians should see through it. She moves silently, makes no unnecessary sound, and has a half-sweet, half-sickening odor that those with relevant experience (Venusians, certain spacers) may recognize. In this form she is no more physically dangerous than an unarmed human.

True Form: Beneath the turban is the Shambleau’s feeding apparatus, a mass of wet, warm, scarlet tentacle-hair, each strand thick and round as a worm, all writhing with independent life. When fully released this mass can reach to her feet. She does not reveal it until she is ready to feed.

Special Abilities:

Hypnotic Gaze. The Shambleau uses eye contact to initiate feeding. Any creature that meets the Shambleau’s eyes in her true form must save vs. spells or fall into a trance. Even on a successful save, the creature suffers -2 to all rolls for 1d4 rounds from the partial psychic contact. Creatures who deliberately avert their eyes (closing them, turning away, using a mirror or reflection to observe indirectly) are not required to save, but fighting or maneuvering while averting the eyes imposes a -4 penalty to attack rolls.

Tentacle Embrace. Once a creature is tranced, the Shambleau’s living hair wraps around it completely. The tranced creature’s body becomes rigid and immobile, “stony as marble” in Moore’s words, though the victim remains conscious and aware. A creature in the Embrace cannot take any action, cannot call for help, and does not perceive the contact as harmful. It experiences intense pleasure. The Embrace can reach and ensnare more than one creature per round at the referee’s discretion, though it concentrates on one primary victim.

A non-tranced creature in physical contact with the tentacle-hair must save vs. spells each round or become tranced; even on a success, it feels a “shock of repulsive pleasure” and must save again the following round if still in contact. Kicking or stamping hard on the tendrils forces them to recoil for one round (Yarol’s method), buying time to move without triggering a save.

Psychic Drain. Each full turn (10 minutes) a creature spends in the Embrace, it loses 2 points of Wisdom. A creature drained to Wisdom 3 or below appears to outside observers as dead-alive: gray-faced, ecstatic, completely unresponsive. Northwest Smith was in this state for three days before Yarol found him. Wisdom lost to Psychic Drain recovers at 1 point per full day of rest away from the Shambleau’s presence.

Addiction. Any creature that has lost Wisdom to the Drain must save vs. spells each day or spend that day seeking out the Shambleau and submitting to the Embrace willingly. Some men, Yarol notes, “take to it like a drug” and never recover their will. This compulsion persists until full Wisdom is restored, and even then some characters may require additional saves at the referee’s discretion.

Ancient Presence. Venusians and others with ancestral race-memory of the Shambleau save against the Hypnotic Gaze at +4 and automatically recognize the Shambleau in her lure form on a successful WIS check. This is not a learned skill. Instead it is some deeper ancestral or genetic memory, which is why Yarol described it as a prayer to a god he had forgotten.

A New B/X Character Class: The Venusian Scout

When I wrote the B/X Ranger a while back, I argued that using the Halfling as the structural foundation made sense because of the combination of abilities reflected in the B/X Halfling class. I wanted to follow that example and reskin an existing class for The Venusian Scout. I wasn’t quite able to do that because I thought Yarol, and other Scouts, should have a slightly different set of abilities than the B/X Ranger I put together.

This time I went another direction when finding the right combination that this Fighter/Thief hybrid needs. Yarol is slim, preternaturally quiet, charming past the point of decency, trained with a needle gun, a capable fighter in his own right, and carrying ancestral racial memory of the kind of supernatural entities that populate Moore’s solar system. He is not the Thief. He is not the Fighter. He is something in between, with a particular flavor that neither pure class captures.

Looking for a Foundation: The Creature Crucible Answer

My first instinct was to search the Creature Crucible series, PC1 through PC4, to find a Fighter/Thief hybrid I could use as a foundation the same way the Ranger used the Halfling. I couldn’t find one there.

The PC series (Tall Tales of the Wee Folk, Top Ballista, The Sea People, Night Howlers) takes non-human races and builds their classes around a Fighter chassis with magical or nature-based abilities grafted on. Centaurs, Faenare, Tritons, Lycanthropes are all variations on the Fighter with supernatural add-ons. My quick look didn’t find the Thief’s skill set a hybrid component anywhere in PC1–PC4. If you want stealthy agility in the Creature Crucibles, you get nature magic, not thief skills.

The closest existing class I could find in the BECMI expanded line is actually the Rake from Dawn of the Emperors: Thyatis and Alphatia. The Rake is described as “the non-thief thief.” It’s a culturally based swashbuckling variant for Pearl Islands characters who admire the Thief’s agility but not their profession. The Arena of Thyatis version adds a Charisma bonus and a dodge ability (equal to the character’s Hide in Shadows percentage) in place of Backstab. It’s a genuinely interesting concept, but it’s far from perfect.

The problem is the execution. The Rake is built on the Thief’s chassis, same HD (1d4), same THAC0 progression, same XP cost. It’s a better Thief in a narrow context but it was never a Fighter. It’s a worse Thief than a Thief and a much worse Fighter than a Fighter. For a class that needs to function as a genuine combat partner for Northwest Smith, that isn’t going to work.

So I looked at another key hybrid class in the B/X core rulebook, the Elf, for inspiration and took a leap from there.

The Elf as Template

The Elf class in B/X is a Fighter/Magic-User hybrid. It uses both classes’ abilities simultaneously. The Elf fights as a Fighter and casts spells as a Magic-User, but progresses more slowly than either pure class and is capped at level 10. The XP cost is correspondingly higher and the hit points are the mid-point between the two.

That structure is exactly what a Fighter/Thief hybrid needs. The Venusian Scout fights as a Fighter and operates as a (partial) Thief simultaneously, progresses more slowly than either pure class, is capped at a lower maximum level, and has armor restrictions that reflect the need for mobility over protection.

The Halfling remains a useful secondary reference as a hybrid class. Its static hide-in-wilderness ability, missile weapon bonus, and fighting progression showed that you could make a hybrid class with some unique abilities rather than just the best of both worlds that the Elf is. I’ve kept the same maximum level cap (8) that I used for the Ranger, for the same reasons I kept it there. In B/X (which is capped at level 14), the most interesting play happens between levels 3 and 7, the game doesn’t require characters to become superheroes to feel significant, and the cap creates a natural ceiling that encourages players to retire or transition characters rather than grinding indefinitely. If I was to adapt it to BECMI, I’d likely follow what Frank Mentzer did for the demi-human classes there and increase abilities but not hit points.

Yarol as the Model

From the text of Shambleau, Yarol has the following demonstrable capabilities:

• Fights effectively at range (needle gun with a sleep agent) and in close quarters (knife)

• Moves with preternatural silence, “even the lightness of his footsteps was loud” against Yarol’s

• Has a face of “cherubic innocence” that is “wholly deceptive,” with a +4 to reaction rolls across species lines

• Carries ancestral Venusian racial memory of supernatural entities including the Shambleau

• Has been in enough tight spots to have the “most hated and most respected” name in the Patrol’s records, next to Smith’s

• Improvises under pressure (using the cracked mirror to aim his gun without direct eye contact)

The class needs to capture all of this without becoming overloaded. In adapting a B/X class, the key isn’t just what you add but in what you leave out. The Venusian Scout has no Find/Remove Traps, no Open Locks, no Backstab. Those abilities belong to the specialist Thief and keep that class useful. What the Scout has is the combat backbone of the Fighter, the mobility and stealth toolkit of the Thief, and a set of special abilities that are specific to the Venusian pulp-fiction setting rather than generic dungeon-crawl utility.

The Venusian Scout

Requirements: DEX 9, CHA 9 Prime Requisite: DEX and CHA Hit Dice: 1d6 Maximum Level: 8 Armor: Leather armor only; no shields Weapons: All weapons Languages: Common plus two additional (Venusian and one language of the player’s choice reflecting the Scout’s spacer background)

Prime Requisite XP Bonus

Experience and Level Adjustment

Attack Bonus / THAC0

The Venusian Scout attacks as a Fighter of the same level through level 8.

Saving Throws

Venusian Scouts use the Thief saving throw table. Additionally, they receive a +2 bonus to saves vs. charm, fascination, hold, and other mind-affecting supernatural effects (see Charm Resistance below).

Thief Skills

Venusian Scouts train in a subset of the Thief’s skills — those appropriate to a mobile, socially adept spacer-scout rather than a specialist burglar. They have no access to Open Locks, Find/Remove Traps, or Backstab. Their available skills advance at the standard Thief rate.

Special Abilities

Supernatural Awareness. When the Venusian Scout first encounters a being with supernatural charm, lure, or psychic feeding abilities, undead with mental powers, sirens, entities like the Shambleau, demons with fascination effects, roll 1d6 before the creature has a chance to act. On a 1–2, the Scout recognizes the danger from ancestral racial memory and is not required to make an initial saving throw against the creature’s passive or triggered abilities during that first round. This improves to 1–3 at level 5. If the creature has already acted (surprise round, or the Scout was not the first to encounter it), this ability does not apply.

Design note: This is not a general immunity. It’s a single-round warning system that gives the Scout and their companions time to respond. It is deliberately narrow. Yarol was almost taken by the Shambleau even with ancestral knowledge. The ability represents recognition, not protection.

Charm Resistance. +2 to all saving throws vs. charm, fascination, hold, and mind-affecting supernatural effects. This represents generations of Venusian racial exposure to such entities. It does not stack with Supernatural Awareness. The Awareness either prevents the initial save or it doesn’t, and if the Scout is forced to save normally, the +2 applies.

Needle Weapon Mastery. Venusian Scouts are trained with needle weapons. These are thin-barreled delivery devices that fire dart-sized projectiles carrying a contact agent. A needle gun uses the following statistics:

• Damage: 1d3

• Range: 30’ / 60’ / 90’

• Rate of Fire: 1/round

• Special: On a hit, the target must save vs. Poison or fall asleep for 1d6 turns (unconscious, cannot be woken by normal means for the duration)

The Scout can prepare a number of loaded darts equal to their level per day without special facilities; with access to a Venusian apothecary or equivalent, double this number. Unused prepared darts lose potency after 24 hours.

At level 5, the Scout may also prepare paralytic darts: on a hit, the target saves vs. Poison or is paralyzed for 2d4 rounds instead of sleeping. They remain conscious but cannot move or act.

In fantasy settings without firearms, the needle gun can be reflavored as a needle crossbow (a small, compact crossbow firing dart-like bolts) or a blowgun with a wider effective range reflecting the Scout’s expertise.

Light-Footed. Even when not actively attempting Move Silently, the Venusian Scout moves with unusual quiet. Venusian Scouts surprise their opponents on a roll of 1-3 rather than 1-2.

Social Ease. +1 to all reaction rolls with intelligent beings. At level 5, this increases to +2. This reflects both the natural Venusian charm, Yarol has “the face of a fallen angel, without Lucifer’s majesty to redeem it,” and the Scout’s experience moving through diverse planetary cultures and ports of call.

At Level 8: The Safe House

A Venusian Scout who reaches level 8 and chooses to establish a base. This might be a discrete apartment in a space port city, a contact point in a smugglers’ network, or a safe house on the fringes of settled space. This Safe House attracts 1d6 followers of levels 1–3. These followers are a mix of fellow scouts, informants, couriers, and spacers looking for someone with a reputation. They are loyal but not soldiers; they will carry messages and share information but will not take serious physical risks unless treated as genuine partners.

Design Notes

Though I gave some explanation of my design choices above, here is a quick Q&A explaining my logic.

Why max level 8? The same reason I capped the Ranger at level 8: the class is powerful enough within that range. A level 8 Venusian Scout has Fighter-level combat, five Thief skills at solid percentages, a sleep-dart weapon that neutralizes many threats outright, charm resistance, and a passive early-warning system for the kind of supernatural entities that kill fighters dead. They don’t need to be a superhero. Neither did Yarol, and he was one of the most dangerous people in Moore’s solar system.

Why Thief saves instead of Fighter saves? Thief saves in B/X are better against Death/Poison and Paralysis but worse against Dragon Breath and Spells. This is the right tradeoff for a spacer-scout. Yarol has clearly survived enough poison and close calls that he skews toward those resistances, and the additional +2 vs. charm on top of that reflects Venusian heritage specifically. A Fighter’s saves lean toward the big existential threats (breath weapons, powerful magic) which are appropriate for someone who regularly fights things that size; less appropriate for someone who moves like Yarol does.

Why no Backstab? Because Backstab is the Thief’s defining combat ability and giving it to the Venusian Scout would push the class into overlap territory with a pure Thief and given how weak the Thief is in B/X I tend to be very permissive with that ability for balance purposes. The Needle Weapon Mastery is a different thing entirely. It’s incapacitation rather than damage multiplication, it has meaningful resource management (prepared doses per day), and it reflects what Yarol actually uses in the story. A sleep dart is not the same as a knife in the back, and that difference matters mechanically and fictionally. It’s pretty powerful, it’s like a sleep spell per level but with a save, but it does have limitations in that you have to hit with it etc.

On the Rake. The Rake from Dawn of the Emperors is the obvious comparison point, and I want to acknowledge it directly and why I didn’t use it. The concept is exactly right. The class is presented as a combat-capable social operator who isn’t really a Thief, but the execution is thin. Building on a Thief chassis with a Dodge ability grafted on gives you a worse Thief with one interesting defensive option. Building on the same Thief chassis with Fighter combat, selected Thief skills, and class-specific special abilities gave me something that actually plays differently from both parent classes. That’s the goal.

Yarol the Venusian

7th-level Venusian Scout (Shadow)

STR 10 | DEX 17 | CON 12 | INT 14 | WIS 13 | CHA 16

HP: 28 | AC: 6 (leather, DEX bonus) | THAC0: 15 Save: Death 11 / Wand 12 / Paralysis 11 / Breath 14 / Spell 13 (+2 vs. charm) XP Required (this level): 80,000

Thief Skills: Pick Pockets 45% | Move Silently 50% | Climb Walls 93% | Hide in Shadows 40% | Hear Noise 1–4 on d6

Attacks: Needle gun (1d3 + save vs. Poison/sleep 1d6 turns, range 30/60/90); knife (1d4); up to 7 prepared darts per day (sleep or paralytic at level 5+)

Special:

• Supernatural Awareness: recognizes charm/lure entities on 1–3 before they act (level 5+)

• Charm Resistance: +2 vs. charm/mind-affecting saves

• Light-Footed: Surprises opponents on a roll of 1-3.

• Social Ease: +2 to reaction rolls (level 5+)

Languages: Common, Venusian, Martian Low

Notes: Yarol has the face of a fallen angel and the record of someone who deserved the fall. His name appears in the Patrol records immediately after Northwest Smith’s, usually in the same incident report. He is currently flying the Maid and awaiting Smith’s return from whatever trouble Smith has gotten into. The needle gun holds four loaded sleep darts; he has three paralytic darts in reserve in a belt pouch.

I chose the above Rick Hershey image to represent Yarol because I liked it and because the way Jirel of Joiry reacts to Yarol’s appreance in “Quest of the Starstone” suggests that Yarol appears inhuman to a medieval European. I wanted to show that. My version isn’t canonical, but I think it is cool.

I can’t quite remember it like it was yesterday, since it was some time ago, but I do remember the first time I encountered the concept of solo role playing. My friend Mark, who would eventually become my nemesis in the Sweet Pickles wars of 7th grade, told me that he had just purchased a new game that had modules you could play by yourself and that you didn’t need a Dungeon Master to have the full role playing game experience. I didn’t believe him at first, but then he showed me City of Terrors and showed me how it used a conceit similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure books to create an interactive role playing game experience. It was for a game called Tunnels & Trolls written by a designer named Ken St. Andre and I was a fan from that moment.

I went to my friendly local game store that weekend to try to buy a copy of Tunnels & Trolls and City of Terrors, but they didn’t have them in stock and I had to special order them. When they finally arrived, I devoured them and soon had played through the City several times and had purchased a couple more adventures. My personal favorite is Arena of Khazan because it is one of the most replayable, in part because it encourages you to create an entire library of gladiators as opposition. While Mark and I both liked D&D, most of our friends did not and between Baseball, Soccer, and other extra-curricular activities I didn’t play a lot of D&D in middle school. My friend Sean, with whom I most frequently played D&D, went to a different middle school. My family had moved to a different part of Sparks, Nevada and though Sean and I were still close friends, we also each had our new middle school friend circles. The halcyon days of 5th and 6th grade D&D weekends were long gone. I did, however, play a lot of Tunnels & Trolls in middle school, even more when my family moved to the Bay Area.

Let me tell you that those solo adventures made the move much easier and I owe a debt of gratitude to Ken St. Andre for his game. As I grew up, I continued to play Tunnels & Trolls as a solo game, even as I played Champions and Call of Cthulhu with the friends I made in high school. Eventually, I was able to thank Ken St. Andre for all of the fun he provided me over the years. First, as a subscriber to his personal fan website Trollhalla in the early 2000s. That’s right. Ken St. Andre was doing a subscription Substack long before Substack existed. His site was a combination of blog, message board, and micro video game site that was unique and wonderful. I created a character for that website named Dupin who was the World’s Leading Troll Detective, and my wife Jody drew up an avatar for me to use.

Ken was a great host for the Trollhalla community and we communicated enough that I began to think of him as a friend, a feeling that increased when I was able to play Tunnels & Trolls with him at Gen Con. That was the one and only time I’ve played Tunnels & Trolls as an in person role playing game. It was very interesting to see how the game “really” played. It was a wonderful experience, a definite bucket list item.

Today is Ken St. Andre’s 79th Birthday and a bit has changed since those early days, but he is still producing game material. The owner of the company that published Tunnels & Trolls, Rick Loomis and Flying Buffalo, passed away and the rights to Tunnels & Trolls were sold. Ken got a bit of money and the right to draft adventures for the game, but he lost control of that property. Given how much time he spent maintaining and building a community via Trollhalla and Facebook, I find that a little sad. So I’d like to take a moment to recommend you check out a game that he DOES own and control, Monsters! Monsters!

Monsters! Monsters!

In 1975, Ken St. Andre published his own vision of what a fantasy role playing game should be. He called the game Tunnels & Trolls and it was a set of rules that he came up with after attempting to unravel how to play Dungeons & Dragons. Given how different the mechanics are, I often wondered how he came up with his rules, but then I began thinking about how to play D&D using the Chainmail rules and it all became clear how brilliant Ken St. Andre’s adaption/innovation was.

That game is currently owned by Rebellion Publishing who bought the game rights from Webbed Sphere Inc. after they bought the rights from the Rick Loomis estate in 2021. Webbed Sphere Inc. didn’t really do anything with the property, Rebellion Publishing is doing more with the property and they just ran a successful Kickstarter for a new version of Tunnels & Trolls. The new version provides an opportunity for Rebellion to dive deeper into the table top 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 that includes two games Tartarus Gate and Tiny in The Tower. Tartarus Gate is a science fiction horror game meant to be played in four sessions and Tiny in the Tower is a cozy fantasy adventure where the players take on the role of shrunken down adventurers. It’s a fun game and the rules are free for download.

Tinyinthetower Howtoplay Pg

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If things go according to plan, I’ll be posting reviews of the Adventure Presents games in the near future. I like the mechanics and think they are fun scenarios, perfect for infequent play and busy schedules.

By the look of Rebellion’s marketing materials and playtest rules, I’m not sure if their version will capture what makes Tunnels & Trolls a unique gaming experience. While the rules of Tunnels & Trolls have an elegance that makes it easy to pick up and quick to play, that’s probably what draws me to the game least. For me, it’s always been the slightly punk nature of the game. Not only has Tunnels & Trolls been a largely DIY endeavor, and remained one over time, it’s also had the ironic edge you often see in punk culture. Where D&D eventually came to take itself “seriously,” Tunnels & Trolls never did. People might complain about spells with names like “Take That You Fiend!” but that’s always been a part of the charm of the game. The marketing image Rebellion shared this month lacks that charm. I think that the character in the ad might be “Fang the Delectable” (that’s the name of the sample character used to show you how to play the game), but I’m not sure. Compare the above illustration with Liz Danforth’s rendition of Fang.

I can see certain similarities, but Danforth’s Fang looks much more unprepared for the horrors he’s certain to encounter. After buying his equipment, per the rules, he doesn’t even have shoes. Now that’s a low level character if I’ve ever seen one.

While I’m not sure whether Rebellion’s Tunnels & Trolls will be a worthy successor to the original, that’s not a problem because Ken St. Andre has already provided us with a worthy successor. In fact, he provided it almost 50 years ago when he created Monsters! Monsters!. Here’s a description of the game from the DriveThru RPG entry:

Tunnels & Trolls and Monsters! Monsters! are two of the earliest role playing games ever produced and they were created as a direct response to Dungeons & Dragons. Lawrence Schick wrote that T&T 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 may have been beaten to the punch by another small print run game.

As I mentioned earlier, 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 reprint 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’m working on an extensive post on this that includes references to Geoff Engelstein’s excellent Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, but it will be some time before I run it.

What is important here is that T&T and D&D have different mechanical DNA. Tunnels & Trolls and Monsters! Monsters! aren’t based on miniature 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.

Given that Rebellion’s new version of Tunnels and Trolls is yet to be published, and because I want Ken St. Andre to see some royalties on my recommendation, I’m shifting away from recommending Tunnels & Trolls and into recommending Monsters! Monsters!. This game is a mechanical spinoff of Tunnels and Trolls, it has the same DNA and foundation, but the players take on the role of monsters instead of humans. Have you ever wanted to play a Reverse Dungeon where the monsters take out their frustrations on Humanity? Then this is the game for you. I highly recommend buying Monsters! Monsters! and giving it a spin.

Happy Birthday Ken! You truly are the Trollgodfather.

Charisma: The Most Important Attribute in D&D

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article about how my friend Sean McPhail and I used Basic Dungeons & Dragons as the mechanical foundation for our shipboarding actions when we played Broadsides & Boarding Parties. It’s a wonderful boardgame designed by Larry Harris (who also designed Axis & Allies) that was published as part of The Citadel’s Game Series in the U.K. in 1982 and updated with tons of “toy” elements by Milton Bradley in 1984 as a part of their Gamemaster series of wargames. Typical of a Larry Harris design, the game introduces wargaming mechanics in a way that makes sense to a broader audience. His rules tend to be elegant, but sometimes have a weakspot.

In the case of Broadsides and Boarding Parties, that weakspot was the boarding action rules. While the limited information, simultaneous movement system of the “broadsides” is a very simple system, it is elegant and fun. The battles of the boarding parties, however, are a bit dull and amount to little more than a sereis of bland die rolls where each player rolls a d6 (and adds a couple of modifiers…maybe) and the higher roll wins and kills one of the other crew. The fights happen in groups and even though your Captain adds a minor bonus, the action never evokes the feel of an Errol Flynn duel. That’s were our inclusion of the D&D Basic rules comes in. The moment we incorporated the basic combat system, it transformed the game entirely, but that was only the beginning of the wonders than using D&D combat added to the game.

You see, before I began playing Dungeons & Boarding Parties, I had largely ignored Charisma (abbrieviated as CHR in the Days When Tigers Used to Smoke as shared many seasons ago) in my early D&D gaming experiences. My first game session, where my character was ignobly turned into an Axe Beak, made me reticent to play any magic user characters for quite some time. So much so that the first D&D character I ever rolled up (the Axe Beak was a borrowed character) was a fighter named Darg. He had a 17 Strength and I never once took his Charisma into consideration when playing him. I can’t even remember what his Charisma score was.

All I cared about with Darg, and a host of characters after him, was that his physical attributes (Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution) were high. In those early days of Moldvay/Cook play, I barely gave Wisdom and Intelligence a second thought. As for Charisma, I wondered why it was even there. I it didn’t do anything meaningful. Playing Dungeons & Boarding parties taught me how wrong this mindset was.

How?

Well, you see…we started using the Morale rules from the combat section for all non-Captain characters. We rolled up entire pirate crews of 1st level fighters, and eventually other classes as well, of which only the Captain was a player character. Yes, they earned experience and if the Captain died one of them would replace him next game, but they were still merely “Retainers.” We had recently read the section on retainers in the Basic Rulebook and it opened up a whole new world of play for us. No longer did one of us have to kill all of the pirates on the other ship, or even just the Captain, to win the battle. All we needed was for the crew to fail a morale check.

That’s were Charisma came in.

Charisma affected not just how many Retainers you could have, or as we called them “loyal crew,” but it determined their morale as well. The higher your Charisma, the more of your crew were loyal crew members and the higher their Morale. Having a high Charisma in Dungeons & Boarding Parties was suddenly as important as having high physical stats. This is because all crew (loyal and unloyal crew) had to make morale checks with the first casualty, when your side experiences their first death and when half of your side has been incapacitated.

Since the death of the Captain was an automatic loss in Dungeons & Boarding Parties, we didn’t need to check at that time but we did need to check in the other circumstances and it made a HUGE difference. We gave different morale values to the loyal and unloyal crew, with unloyal having a morale score 1 point lower than the loyal crew. This led to huge swings in the battles and sped up combat immensely. And morale was only the first way that Charisma mattered, and boy did it ever matter for that in Dungeons & Boarding Parties. It also mattered that way for Dungeons & Dragons too and it has since the White Box. The primary reason for this is that D&D was based on miniature wargames and morale is a central mechanic in those, but the secondary reason is that low level characters need retainers (more on that in a minute).

If you look at the Men & Magic book for the old White Box Dungeons & Dragons rules, there is something that sticks out to the modern gamer. While you roll up your six attributes the same way as you do in later versions of the game (3d6 all the way down natch!), they don’t have as much impact on combat as they do in later rules. While the Greyhawk Supplement eventually makes Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution matter in combat, they get short shrift in White Box D&D. In fact, the only effect Strength ever has in straight White Box is to make it so a character goes up in level faster due to an expereience point bonus. Charisma on the other hand has it’s own table that allows for more hirelings on the high end and a higher loyalty base than Moldvay Basic. Note that the description says that the players “will, in all probability, seek to hire Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, and/or Clerics to strengthen their roles in the campaign.” This is because low level characters are very weak and hirelings let you field little platoons.

Charisma does more than let you hire poeple though, it also lets you parley with people and monsters and have them react on the reaction table. First, there’s the reaction table for hiring retainers. There is no guarantee people will want to work for you, so you need to roll. The rules are slightly different between D&D (which has “loyalty base” rather than just morale, though it determines morale) and the rolls work differently.

But wait…there’s more. Charisma doesn’t just determine how many people you can hire, whether they will work for you, and how loyal they are. It also determines whether monsters will attack you in the first place if you decide to try talking your way out of a situation first. In White Box, Charisma might not come into play.

However, as the earlier B/X table mentions above, it does help with Monster Reaction rolls in Basic D&D. You see where it says, “see Monster Reactions, page 24?” This is that table.

That’s right, high Charisma characters in B/X can talk their way out of fights with monsters. Charisma is not only NOT a dump stat, it’s a freakin’ superstat. More space is devoted to this one attribute than any other attribute in White Box and Moldvay/Cook D&D. The Holmes version pretty much ignores it, but Molvay, Cook, and Marsh knew what was up and they wrote at length what Charisma could do. It let’s you hire multiple retainers, have them be loyal and unafraid in the face of danger, it makes it easier for you to hire good retainers, AND it let’s you defeat monsters without even fighting.

As I mentioned above, this is all a legacy of D&D coming from miniature wargames where morale is very important and a lot of early D&D adventures were skirmish miniature battle scenarios more than just narrative adventures. While one might be able to argue that B1: In Search of the Unknown and B3: Palace of the Silver Princess are narrative scenarios made for a small band of adventurers akin to that in Hawk the Slayer or the Dungeons & Dragons movies. The same cannot be said of B2: The Keep on the Borderlands. The premise of Keep on the Borderlands is that the player characters are adventurers who arrive at a Keep, deep in the wild frontier, close to the Caves of Chaos. The caves are filled with several small bands of monsters who are raiding the countryside and preventing farmers from moving in and bringing the first elements of civilization with them. This isn’t a fetch quest, this is a semi-military expedition. It’s an adventure that expects you to hire retainers to aid you on your adventures.

Take a moment to look at the encounter sizes in the Caves of Chaos, these are not for a party of 4 to 6 first level characters. They are just going to die and die again and you are going to end up rolling up a lot of characters. If you want to see how many, you can run a quick and tactics free simulation of the encounter on one of my handy dandy combat simulators. This one simulates a combat, but also incorporates the effects of Sleep and Backstab have on combat. The Backstab mechanics are rough. I essentially let it roll move silently to benefit from back stab. The assumption here is that combat is fluid and not on a map, so you just have to be quiet to remain unseen in the mayhem.

I’ve put together a number of B/X widgets that I’m currently beta testing. These aren’t for sale, they are free for use as fan toys, but if you want to play test them I’d greatly appreciate it. These include applications that let you generate a random character of 1st to 3rd level. This character will have no equipment or anything, but will be completely random. I also put together a B/X Character Builder that lets you make a 1st level character and buy equipment. A widget that generates retainers that a character can hire based on their Charisma. A widget that let’s you roll to see if you can hire those retainers and test their loyalty and monster morale later. One that deals only with Monster reactions, retainer loyalty, and monster and NPC morale. There are also two additional combat simulators. One that is for a single character vs. monsters and the other that simulates combat without Sleep or Backstab.

All of these include the effects of morale on monsters and demonstrate how vital morale is as a combat mechanic. I don’t include morale rolls for retainers in the combat simulators, because these are for parties without henchmen, but that makes them better for showing you how tough fights would be without a squad.

When I look at B/X and my own experience, I am now baffled by how I ever considered it a dump stat. It is very powerful and more time is spent in the rulebooks on that single attribute than on any other.

As the kids say today, a good D&D character has Aura.

Is It Possible that AI Might Be Fun?

Something happened while I was deep in my scholastic cave editing the chapters of my disseration that has thrown me for a bit of a loop and caused me to question my priors in a very real way. Since Midjourney poked its ugly head out and initiated the trend of AI slop imagery dominating book covers and memes, I’ve been largely opposed to AI. I think that artists, of all kinds, are amazing and deserve credit for what they are doing and I think most AI companies committed massive copyright infringement when they created their initial “learning data” for their various AI engines. I still think both of those things are true. I am also becoming a bit of a fan of AI as a tool.

You see, it all started when I took a break from running regression analysis of Youth-Parent dyads in order to rest my brain. I decided to look at my Substack feed and read some of the articles from newsletters I subscribe to and to some that had been shared on Notes. Someone shared a post by where he discussed his experiments using Claude.ai to help him with his research. Scott’s an Economist and Professor at Baylor University and as I watched him engage with Claude in a couple of his videos, I began to notice a couple of things. First, that while Claude was giving him output in the form of data analysis and slide decks, Scott was doing all the conceptual work and correcting numerous mistakes (in both coding and analysis) that Claude would make along the way. For the most part, Scott was interacting with Claude the same way that I interact with R (or Python) except instead of writing something that looks like this…

hypothesis.3.i <- lm(
  youth.rep.dem.diff.norm ~ father.rep.dem.diff.mc +
    mother.est.rep.dem.diff.norm + parents.agree.norm +
    parent.political.activity.mc,
  data = analysis.data |> filter(is.father == 3))

…he said to Claude that was something like, “Hiya, I’d like to run a linear regression model with the a youth’s difference in sentiment between Republicans and Democrats is the dependent variable and the father’s and mother’s differences, as well as whether they agree politically are the independent variables. Oh, and add the measure of political activity too.” At that moment, I realized that while many of the critiques of Claude and other AI’s were very accurate, it can let you just tell it to do stuff and it will do them, they were also slightly off base. You see, what Scott was doing was programming, iteratively through conversation, with something that translated his English language requests into a programming language.

Scott's Mixtape Substack

Claude Code Changed How I Work (Part 1)

I think this will be a multi-part series about using Claude Code because there’s too much to cover in one post. So this is part 1…

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6 months ago · 133 likes · 19 comments · scott cunningham

Yes, you can be lazy and have Claude be the primary driver in this relationship, but Claude and other AIs aren’t really good at thinking in the same way as the human mind. Claude produces better code and better results from someone who knows how the code works and the theoretical foundations of any analysis being done. Claude might forget to mean-center variables (which isn’t actually necessary, but might be prudent) in the right way or might misinterpret a codebook or just make up a variable or information. Heck, it might even make major blunders in creating the code and leave ugly artifacts behind. All of those problems can only be addressed if the person working with Claude knows the material. Working with Claude for analysis is like being handed a Graphing Caluclator you can talk to with all the benefits and dangers. If you hand kids calculators too soon in the process of learning Calculus, they won’t really understand the intuitions and rules. However, once they have a foundation, it speeds things up. In other words, Claude can either make you dumber, or more productive. It is in how the tool is used and not the mere existence of the tool that determines the morality of the act in question. How and why you are using AI is important and so too is the way it got the information from which it learns. I’m still pissed about the copyright stuff, and still think using living artists is better for a lot of reasons, but using Claude to aid in analysis, to copy edit, and to make tools for my home gaming are things I am entirely sold on now.

Let’s start with that first possible use of AI, that of aiding me in analysis. I recently saw a tweet about a paper published in Theory & Society by James Manzi that used a large language model to analyze 600,000 social studies abstracts and place them on a uni-dimensional (that’s on a single line) political ideology scale. The paper found that, “the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period. Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024.” The paper got some immediate pushback from Pippa Norris, a highly respected scholar of democratic institutions, for using “oddly multidimensional” anchors and forcing them into an “invalid unidimensional scale.” Dr. Norris was also shocked at the use of the New York Times as “Progressive” and the Heritage Foundation as “Conservative.”

I won’t go into a lot of detail regarding why her initial complaint about how it is inappropriate to force a multidimensional construct into a unidimensional one, except to say this. Keith Poole designed an innovative way of analyzing partisanship and ideology in “political space” via a method called Nominate. It approaches political views as essentially multidimensional constructs that exist in multiple imaginary dimensions, hence the term political space. His theory combines Hotelling’s analysis of consumer choice in real space, driving distance maps, and probability to create a two-dimensional measure of ideology.

Hotelling Stabilitycompetition 1929

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While Poole’s model is multidimensional, he found that due to polarization “a single score that measures how liberal/conservative a member is accounts for most of the choices members make” and thus that it behaved like a unidimensional score. As much as I like what UCLA is doing with their VoteView website, which builds on what Poole did, I find Poole’s clunky old website to be much more useful for learning about polarization and what the heck I mean by “political space.”

Mcpr Extreme Chap2 July 2009

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My reflexive pushback to Dr. Norris is relatively minor, but that was not the case with Sean Westwood. He’s an Associate Professor at Dartmouth and Director of the amazingly useful Polarization Research Lab and who’s work has been cited FAR more than mine. I’m not doing an appeal to authority there as both he and Dr. Norris are highly regarded, I’m just being humbled by looking at his Google Scholar page. Anyway, Dr. Westwood pushed back by saying that all of Dr. Norris complaints were true of her own V-Dem scale as well. In fact, he was actually being kind to the V-Dem scale by saying it was “just as true of V-Dem” since V-Dem’s only publications admit they use a methodology that creates results that are “overstated and lacking in nuance” due to their subjectivity. That Dr. Westwood gave such strong pushback, led me to ask whether Dr. Norris was right or wrong to say that The New York Times wasn’t “Progressive” and that the Heritage Foundation wasn’t “Conservative.” I haven’t done analysis of The New York Times yet, I’m still looking for “anchors” for data, but a quick look at AllSides’ rating of them has their Opinion Page placed on “The Left” of the scale.

I have, however, done some analysis of The Heritage Foundation and I “dove into Poole” to do it. I followed the work done by Poole and combined it with ideas from Tim Groseclose, Steven D. Levitt (of Freakonomics fame), James M. Snyder, and Jeffrey Milyo to generate Nominate scores for The Heritage Foundation based on how they scored various members of Congress. I used Claude to help me, but all I had it do was run regression to get a coefficient based on the connection between there scores and DW-Nominate (and Nokken-Poole scores which are for individual sessions of Congress) and to use that to get Heritage’s score. Based on that Analysis, they were fairly conservative, but not the most conservative. Certainly, they are Right of the Conservative “center.” I don’t know if I would anchor them at 2 or 3, but it’s close enough for horseshoes. The widget I designed includes four tabs: Estimated Scores & Plots, Overlay: Heritage on Congress (see below), Regression Coefficients, and Methodology. I did it with Claude’s help and I think it wsa very worthwhile and not “slop.”

One the more “fun” side of things, I’ve been designing a number of Moldvay/Cook D&D game aids using Claude. The first was a character creator that determines everything except your equipment. That’s available on my personal website too and I formatted it to be in the brand colors my friend Darran used when he made the new Geekerati logo. I’ve designed a couple of other tools too, but I haven’t uploaded them yet, and am working on an old school dungeon crawl game through an iterative design process. All of these are, and will continue to be, free for your use.

So…I’m thinking Claude.ai and I can be pretty good friends, but if he makes me mad I’m sending Sweet Pickles Bus learning kits to his house and I still think Anthropic should be paying residuals when it uses other people’s text.

The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson

One of my favorite old Strong Bad bits was when he did the Olde Timey Radio impersonation and said, “Stay tuned for partial excitement” in a canned 1920s voice. It’s a joke I go back to again and again when I comment on things I only kind of like. Luke channels a bit of that same energy with the headline for his review of the resurrection of American Gladiators from Amazon. That’s right, there’s a new Blaze in town an is the best person on Earth to review it.

Mortal Cinema

American Gladiators (2026) Review: Are You Not Mildly Entertained?

Was the original American Gladiators actually appointment viewing for anyone back in the day? It always felt like “the thing that came on after cartoons” or “the dumb fun we stay on while flipping through channels if nothing else is on.” Technically, there was a tournament every season, but given the crapshoot that syndication airings used to be, there …

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2 months ago · Luke Y. Thompson

Speaking of beats that were custom made for Luke, he’s got a very good review of the trailer for the upcoming Masters of the Universe film. I have my worries about the film and fear it will lean too heavy into Whedonisms. The first trailer had about 10% Whedonesque “Whoooo!” and snark, but the new trailer has even less Whedonslop and I’m trending towards ALL-IN. I think it’s interesting that Luke begins his review discussing the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd film, or rather the trailer, if only because I think I am the only defender of that film (and I don’t think Luke is a defender) in the world. I recently rewatched it and am working up a retro-review for it that will come out after a review of The Man Behind the Gun and Megaforce. Let’s just say that Stallone’s version better captures the actual vibes from 2000AD, and those in the Games Workshop Judge Dredd RPG that introduced me to the character, than the Karl Urban film. In fact, it actually filmically captures Brian Bolland images as moments. Urban’s movie is a better movie overall, but it’s essentially the same film as The Raid. The fact that those Dredd and The Raid are essentially the same plot, they were independently made and are both great. I also think Dredd is a better film than Judge Dredd, but only Stallone’s film captures the Angel family in fun fashion and it’s also the only film where the Dark Judges would fit in.

Mortal Cinema

Masters of the Universe Full Trailer Brings It Home

I know better than to get too excited by trailer music, because I learned that lesson the hard way. When the trailers for Judge Dredd — the Sylvester Stallone version! — were first out, they had some amazing music cues, and I went out and bought the soundtrack album, day one. Surprise! It wasn’t there, and to this day, I don’t know what that p…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Luke Y. Thompson

My buddy Darran Hight has a post about the highly underrated show Almost Human (2013) in his . While I consider myself a Firefly fan, yes even after groaning about Whedonslop because Firefly was MinearGold, the show I really think Fox betrayed. It’s a creative spin on Alien Nation with Karl Urban as a human cop who is partnered with a surprisingly human robot partner DRN-0167 (Dorian) played by Michael Ealy. I’ve been a big fan of Ealy’s since I watched him in Sleeper Cell. If I was to cast someone to play the John Wells character from The Faithful Spy series, he’d be first on my list. Heck, I’d cast him in a lot. he and Urban are great together and the show is rounded out with Minka Kelly, Michael Irby, Mackenzie Crook, and Lili Taylor.

Nerdstalgia Notebook

Almost Human (2013)

Almost Human came out in 2013 and disappeared quickly, but it stuck with people who watched it. It is a science fiction crime show set in 2048 where police officers work alongside android partners. The setup sounds familiar, but the show handles it in a way that feels grounded and character focused…

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2 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · DaЯRaN HighT

The good folks over at , , have done an interview with one of my professors where she discusses some of the ideas underpinning her new book How to Feel Loved. Sonja Lyubomirsky was one of the better mentors I had in coursework at UC Riverside and is one of two Psychology professors (the other being Danny Oppenheimer at Carnegie Mellon) who make me wish Political Science professors modeled themselves on the Psychology department model. As with most of Dr. Lyubomirsky’s mainstream books, they only scratch the surface on the depth of her scholarship. She’s done a great deal of interesting work on happiness and love. Taking her course on happiness built wonderfully on the philosophic baseline I had before on the topic and taught (reminded?) me that happiness is not a goal but a byproduct.

The Power of Us

How to feel more loved

Love isn’t just something we give or receive, it’s something we communicate. In HOW TO FEEL LOVED: The Five Mindsets That Get You More of What Matters Most, happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky and relationship scientist Harry Reis argue that many of us are already loved, yet still feel unseen and disconnected. The gap isn’t about effort or compatibility, but about how we show up in our relationships…

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2 months ago · 13 likes · Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel

Dr. touches on my favorite horror trope in her most recent exploration of Folk Songs and horror. As a fan of the John the Balladeer stories of Manly Wade Wellman (okay, all of his horror stories) and the mythos surrounding Robert Johnson’s short lived fame. So much so that I am probably the world’s greatest fan of Walter Hill’s Crossroads. Then again, I think Walter Hill is one of the great Hollywood directors. Rebekah does a great job engaging with the genre and ties it to one of the best films (period) of the decade (Sinners). Southern Gothic is one of the richest genres in all of literature and is a central genre to understanding America.

Dr King's Curiosities

The Devil at the Crossroads: Selling your Soul for Music

My ‘horror moments’ examine horror-inflected scenes and themes in unexpected places. They are published weekly on Thursdays and come out in series of ten articles focussing on a particular source e.g. ‘Wallace & Gromit,’ ‘Shakespeare,’ or ‘Kate Bush Songs’. Catch up with the current series on Folk Songs…

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2 months ago · 35 likes · 13 comments · Rebekah King

Speaking of Manly Wade Wellman, one of his best friends is one of the best authors of Horrific Sword & Sorcery ever published. The fact that Karl Edward Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman were friend is a bit of a mystery. Wellman was a relatively traditional fellow and Wagner was a hard drinking cocaine advocating Medical Doctor who looked like a biker. Wellman was a member of the Interbellum or Greatest Generation and Wagner was the personification of the Boomer’s darkest shadow. Both are giants on my bookshelf. Folk Music and Metal…yeah, that’s what they were. Just as I love John Ford and Sam Peckinpah, so too do I love Wellman and Wagner.

Critical Hit Parader

Karl Edward Wagner Music from Eternal Champion

Texas heavy metal band Eternal Champion has released a 2-song EP based on the novel Dark Crusade by Karl Edward Wagner. The novel features Wagner’s best known character, Kane. The album is called Friend of War, and the cover features an evocative oil painting by…

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3 months ago · 7 likes · Matt Thompson

Fantasy AGE by Green Ronin Publishing

The hardback copy Green Ronin Publishing’s second edition of the Fantasy AGE role playing game just arrived in my mailbox the other day and it is a beautifully illustrated tome. The cover of the book was painted by Wayne Reynolds who’s 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.

I’m working on my reviews of Judge Dredd, The Man Behind the Gun, and Megaforce, so I’ll be brief with this film recommendation. There are two films that shaped my childhood pretty strongly. One was introduced to me by my dad and the other by a friend. They both have a similar message about growing up and dealing with the emotional challenges of being a teenager and they both have almost exactly the same ending, with one exception. Both end with a scream and crashes. In one, the protagonist leaves rage behind and in the other sorrow. I’m picking the one where the protagonist leaves sorrow behind, because of the two films it’s the more beautiful. It’s soft and funny and about love. I’m picking Harold and Maude. Maybe you can guess the other film.

Welcome to another entry in the Five-Foot Geekshelf series! This time I’m doing something a little different. Rather than recommending games you should own I’m recommending books about games. Books about the history of the hobby that were written during that history. The list includes books about design as well as books about the culture that built the thing we all love.

I was inspired to write this list when I was researching “The Stanford System” for the article I published last week. When I was digging into who the Jeffrey A. Johnson who wrote the “Fourfold Way of FRP,” I noticed that he worked at EPYX on Temple of Apshai. I also noticed the names of one of the founders of EPYX, Jon Freeman, and I immediately looked to my bookshelf where I found three books on gaming written by him. One of those books was written under a pseudonym and the other two are an interesting pairing.

As I looked at those books I remembered a list of books I put together in a 2012 post I wrote on my old Cinerati Blogger site. In that post I recommended thirteen game books that I thought every gamer should own. I hadn’t even encountered the issues of Twilight Zone Magazine that inspired the Geekshelf series when I chose to provide that list of thirteen books. I’ve always believed that a baker’s dozen of recommendations was the perfect number, but it’s nice to see a bit of serendipity between my subconscious design preferences and those of people like Karl Edward Wagner.

Every gamer I’ve ever met has, at some point, aspired to design. As Gary Gygax points out in his book Role-Playing Mastery (find a cheaper copy than the Amazon one), to design well, you need to know what came before. In case you are wondering, Gygax’s book is not in this list but it will be on another. The books tjat are on this list are the ones I reach for when I want to understand where we came from, why certain design choices became standard, and how the hobby developed from a handful of wargamers in Lake Geneva and Long Island into what it is today. It’s also a place I look to to find recommendations and comments by people who are often overlooked in modern discussions of the history of gaming. A couple of the books are fairly obvious, even hagiographical, but newer gamers might not know about them. The rest you may not have heard of, and those are the ones I’m most excited to talk about.

The original article was one I’ve been meaning to expand those brief annotations into full entries for over a decade, and seeing Jon Freeman’s name again was the perfect excuse. It’s a perfect topic for a Geekshelf entry. So, consider this the version of that post that should have existed all along.

Don’t worry I’ll be getting back to game recommedation and film recommendation lists soon. The 1980s role playing game list is coming and it’s got a couple of games that deserve more love than they’ve received over the years.

1. Thirty Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons — (2004, Wizards of the Coast)

I put this book first because it is the most “pop” of the recommendations. I figured I’d get the pure marketing book out of the way as soon as possible. I also wanted to take a moment to remember how Wizards of the Coast used to think about their game. Thirty Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons is not an unbiased history of the game. Instead, it is the celebration of a brand. It is a marketing hagiography. It was published by Wizards of the Coast when they were already a Hasbro subsidiary, it was assembled to celebrate D&D’s thirtieth anniversary, and the history it tells is the history that the people with professional investment in that history wanted told. You will not find a balanced account of the TSR/Lorraine Williams era in these pages. You will not find Gary Gygax at his most candid. There are things this book simply will not discuss. Then again, you won’t find Wizards of the Coast expressing embarassment and apologizing for being associated with the creators of the game.

This is the kind of celebration book that should have been written, again, for the 50th anniversary of D&D and I am glad I own this book.

The essays are written by people like Dave “Zeb” Cook, Ed Greenwood, Jeff Grubb, Margaret Weis, and Skip Williams. What those essays give you is not objective history but something arguably more valuable, they give you what D&D felt like to the people who were inside it. The internal mythologies, the genuine affection, the sense of a community that had survived some genuinely difficult years and wanted to celebrate its own survival. That’s primary source material. A purely neutral history of D&D would not tell you what the players thought the story was, and that matters enormously for understanding why the game became what it became. This is a book filled with essays by people telling you how much they loved being a part of something. It is a celebration.

The book also functions as a bibliography in disguise. Every essay by a designer or writer from a particular era is an invitation to go deeper. They are asking you to hunt down the issues of Dragon Magazine they’re referencing, to track down the supplements they mention in passing, to learn the names you didn’t know you needed to know. If you want a starting place on the History of D&D as oral history, this is a good place to start. It isn’t as raw and honest as Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk is. Then again, while I might argue that the creation of D&D was punk in some respects, it was nowhere near as wild as the early punk music scene.

2. 40 Years of Gen Con — Robin D. Laws (2007, Atlas Games)

This is the second, and last, living history hagiography you will see in this list, but it’s one I go back to often. Robin Laws is one of the most thoughtful working designers in the tabletop hobby. His QuestWorlds (a generic version of his earlier HeroQuest/HeroWars work) alone would earn him a permanent place in any history of the hobby, and his Gumshoe system represents one of the clearest solutions to a long-standing problem in mystery RPG design that anyone has produced. He also writes extremely well and has written some great books that combine writing and game master advice. You really should check out his Hamlet’s Hit Points if you get a shot.

The argument that 40 Years of Gen Con makes, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, is that Gen Con is more than just a convention because it’s a living documentary representation of the hobby. The things that have happened at Gen Con over its history trace the arc of what the hobby has cared about, fought over, celebrated, and mourned. The game that launched in Lake Geneva. The years in Milwaukee. The move to Indianapolis. The rise of the collectible card game market in the 1990s, and the crash, are things reflected in the convention’s exhibitor lists as clearly as in any detailed historical or financial accounting. The board game renaissance of the 2000s. Gen Con has been there for all of it, and because it has, this book functions as a history of the hobby told through the story of a single institution.

I have a particular soft spot for convention history as a subject because conventions are where the hobby’s social networks actually exist. Games happen at conventions that never get published. Friendships form that shape decades of design decisions. The oral history of the hobby is inseparable from the history of the conventions where it was passed along. Laws is aware of this, as am I. The years I was able to attend Gen Con, both in Milwaukee and Indianapolis, forever changed how I experienced this hobby. I got to play Tunnels & Trolls with Ken St. Andre, meet Shane Hensley of Deadlands fame, and chat with Robin D. Laws and Ken Hite about H.P. Lovecraft over Old Fashioneds. It’s a magical place that is the true living history of the hobby and this volume is a wonderful celebration of that space.

3. The Complete Book of Wargames — Jon Freeman (1980, Simon & Schuster/Fireside)

You would expect a book about Wargames that was written by one of the most important computer role playing game designers of all-time would be extremely well know. Sadly, that’s not the case. John Freeman was one of the founders of Epyx Games and one of the designers of the DunjonQuest series that included Temple of Apshai. His wife Anne Westfall designed, and programmed, what is probably the best Chess spinoff video game ever designed (Archon), yet I rarely here Jon Freeman’s name mentioned in discussions of the role playing game hobby. When I first picked up The Complete Book of Wargames, for pennies, on eBay, I had no idea who the author was. I just knew that it was an overview of the wargaming hobby in the late 1970s.

The Complete Book of Wargames was written in 1980, which means it was written at the absolute peak of the commercial wargame hobby, just before everything changed. SPI was still publishing. Avalon Hill was still the Avalon Hill that had defined serious wargaming since the late 1950s. The hobby was as big as it had ever been commercially, and it would never quite be that big again. By the time the decade was out, SPI had been acquired by TSR under circumstances that grognards of a certain vintage still discuss with barely contained fury, and the commercial wargame market had contracted to a fraction of its former size.

What Freeman gives you is the taxonomy of that hobby at its height. The book discusses the systems, the designers, the debates, the games that defined each subcategory of the form. The review of the book in Dragon Magazine #46 by Tony Watson argued that the book was unnecessary for experienced gamers. That was probably true at the time. Those involved in the hobby knew more than what was provided in the book, and yet so many of the games discussed in this book are now forgotten.

Freeman’s selections are broad enough to appeal to both the casual and serious gamer and while the book is far from “complete,” it is a perfect primer for the hobby. I particularly like reading Freeman’s recommendations regarding ow to play games and his criteria for evaluating the quality of games is solid. I would expect no less from someone who helped design Temple of Apshai.

4. The Fantasy Role Playing Gamer’s Bible — Sean Patrick Fannon (1996, Prima Publishing and 1999, Obsidian Studios Inc.)

Get the first edition of sean Patrick Fannon’s The Fantasy Role Playing Gamer’s Bible if you can. It’s the one with the purple cover and the stick figure cartoons. I know that sounds like the kind of collector snobbery that drives sensible people out of hobby communities, but I mean it sincerely. The stick figures are part of the book’s charm, and they’re gone in the later edition. They’re earnest and slightly awkward in exactly the way that mid-90s RPG culture was earnest and slightly awkward, and they match Fannon’s enthusiasm in a way that the revised edition’s more polished presentation doesn’t quite capture.

The book occupies a niche that very few books have filled well. It’s not an explanation of what role-playing games are for complete outsiders. There were plenty of those and I might just do a Geekshelf of just those in the future. This is a book for people who already know what an RPG is and want to understand the hobby more deeply. Fannon covers a wide variety of topics with a comprehensiveness that I haven’t seen matched in any comparable volume. These topics include game selection, game mastering philosophy, worldbuilding approaches, group dynamics, and how to find a gaming community.

The hobby has changed a lot since the book was published in 1996 document, but much remains the same. The 1990s were an interesting time in the hobby. This was a time period after the satanic panic had largely wound down, after the CCG boom had started reshaping the hobby market, but before the internet had fully transformed how gamers found each other. Desktop publishing and pdfs were new phenomena. The social infrastructure Fannon describes is its own kind of history. He examines how gamers located other gamers, how information about obscure games circulated, how gaming communities formed and maintained themselves before the internet was widespread. The funny thing is, as the internet becomes more cluttered and worse at its job, these skills are just as needed today.

5. Game Design Vol. 1: Theory and Practice — Nick Schuessler and Steve Jackson (1981, Steve Jackson Games / SJG30-3101)

While the cover says “Vol. 1,” there was never a subsequent volume. Steve Jackson promised that Volume 2 was on the way and it was going to cover component design aids, hints on the best markets for your games, and maybe more. I still wish Volume 2 had been released, but I am greatful Volume 1 was published. The book comes at design from two different positions, one from Nick Schuessler and one from Steve Jackson.

Nick Schuessler was the publisher of The Journal of WWII Wargaming and had taught a University of Texas course in wargame design since 1976. He approaches design from the theoretical and historical end. He comes at game design from a mathematical and simulation-oriented position that is rooted in primary sources. Jackson, who by 1981 had already designed Ogre, G.E.V., Raid on Iran, and The Fantasy Trip, comes from the opposite direction. He learned to design by doing. He playtested until games broke and then patched them back together. The introduction is honest about this tension. Jackson describes shouting “Playability!” at Schuessler’s theoretical arguments while Schuessler shouts “Realism!” back. This book is the playability vs. realism argument made manifest. What is surprising about this setup is that in the end they almost always agreed on what made a good game. That productive friction is what makes the book worth more than either author could have produced alone.

The chapters cover theoretical foundations, historical background, mapping and movement, terrain, combat and play sequence, combat strength and resolution, advanced combat systems, research, components, playtesting, RPG design, designing for the market, and game evaluation. That’s the full arc from “what is a wargame” to “here’s how to get it published,” and the chapters on playtesting and game evaluation are worth the price of admission on their own. Jackson’s playtesting chapter is the single most concentrated piece of practical design wisdom in the hobby literature. His “try the dumb strategies” principle alone is something many designers, and all game masters, should keep in mind. As with Jon Freeman’s thoguhts on game quality, the game evaluation chapter, written from Schuessler’s more critical perspective, is a bracingly honest account of how and why game reviews fail to tell you what you actually need to know before buying something.

I should note something that will delight anyone who has already bought the other books on this list. In the bibliography, Jackson and Schuessler describe Jon Freeman’s Complete Book of Wargames as the best general work on commercial wargaming then in print.

SJG has reprinted it as a PDF and you can buy it for a mere eight dollars. There is no excuse not to own it.

6. Wargame Design — SPI Staff (1977, SPI/Simulations Publications Inc.)

To understand this book you need to understand SPI. Simulations Publications Inc. was, alongside Avalon Hill, one of the two companies that defined serious American wargaming in the 1970s. Where Avalon Hill was the older and more commercially cautious company, SPI was the more intellectually and ludically ambitious operation. While Avalon Hill published a significant number of games, their house magazine (The General) merely included support for existing games. I say merely because SPI’s house magazine (Strategy & Tactics) included a full wargame with every issue. SPI published Strategy & Tactics while simultaneously churning out a constant stream of complex historical simulations like War in the East, the notorious Campaign for North Africa, and the Napoleon at Waterloo series. SPI had ambitions that outran its business model, and it was acquired by TSR in 1982 in circumstances that the wargame community has never fully made peace with. They say that winners write history. If this is true then TSR was the big loser with the purchase and I’ve explained why in an earlier entry.

While SPI existed, it was producing some of the most serious thinking about game design happening anywhere. Wargame Design collects that thinking. It is part history, part design manual, and part manifesto. It reads like a document produced by people who genuinely believed that simulating historical conflicts was an act of intellectual and perhaps even moral seriousness. That sounds grandiose, but it was a real position that real designers held. If you could model Stalingrad accurately enough that players understood why the Germans lost, you had given them something that a history textbook couldn’t. The fact that many of their designs, and designers, have influenced real world military wargaming proves that they were right.

That doesn’t mean you need to believe that every war game should be a serious simulation or an argument about logistics or why and how medieval war changed over time. While the focus of Wargame Design is heavily on the simulation end of the ludic spectrum, the design advice in the book is sophisticated and still useful. Even more important than the design advice though is the history contained within the book. You get a rare glimpse inside the sales figures of SPI and their competitors. They give you a sense of how large the wargaming market was just as AD&D, and D&D Basic, were about to be released.

In 1976 there were at least 841,000 sales in the wargaming market. Business was booming, but by 1982 SPI would be owned by TSR and eventually Avalon Hill would be absorbed by Wizards of the Coast (who own TSR). Wargaming thrives today. There are a host of companies ranging from desktop publishing to medium sized business (GMT Games). While it thrives, it is not the giant it was trending to become. The thoughts on design from that time are an interesting read and are both informative and a cautionary tale.

7. A Player’s Guide to Table Games — John Jackson (1975, Chilton Books)

I don’t know why Jon Freeman wrote A Player’s Guide to Table Games under the name John Jackson. I don’t know if he was writing under a pseudonym or if he later changed his name from Jackson to Freeman. What I do know, because The Playboy Winners Guide to Board Games (see below) makes it clear on its copyright page, is that they are the same person. It’s also clear if you read The Complete Book of Wargames. The stylistic fingerprints are identical. The characteristic way the author situates a game within its historical context before evaluating it, the particular balance of enthusiasm and analytical distance, the breadth of knowledge that ranges comfortably from Monopoly to Squad Leader are not coincidental similarities. They are the same writer, writing for different publishers under different names.

Freeman wouldn’t form Epyx with his partner until 1978, so it’s pretty impressive that he got a book on Table Games published at all. Though once you’ve read the book you understand why. Jackson/Freeman knows his games and how to play them. He’s a great pitchman for the industry. His combination of enthusiasm and insight make the book a good read for any gamer, new or experienced. Keep in mind that the late 60s and early 70s were a boom period for Table Games.

The book predates The Complete Book of Wargames by five years, and it catches the tabletop hobby at an earlier moment, one where the line between mass market and hobby games is just beginning to solidify into the distinction we now take for granted. Jackson writes about Sid Sackson with the same seriousness he brings to hex-and-counter wargames, and that’s unusual enough to be worth noting. Sid Sackson’s designs like Acquire, Can’t Stop, Sleuth, and eventually Focus helped to supercharge not just “Ameritrash” gaming. His emphasis on elegant mechanics that reward deep play connected directly to what would become the Euro game tradition. In this book, Jackson/Freeman traces those connections before they were conventional wisdom. Where SPI’s book focused on the simulation side of playability vs. simulation, Jackson/Freeman is a huge advocate for playability.

8. Family Games: The 100 Best — edited by James Lowder (2010, Green Ronin Publishing)

There are two books in the Lowder 100 Best series, and I’m going to discuss them together across this entry and the next because they’re companion volumes that are best understood in relation to each other. Own both. Read both. Then play every game on both lists that you can find.

Family Games: The 100 Best is the more accessible of the two. Like A Player’s Guide to Table Games, it covers games that can be played with non-gaming family members, games that bridge mass market and hobby, games that serve as on-ramps. The contributors range across the hobby: designers, writers, historians, enthusiasts, each assigned a game they love and asked to make the case for it. The games range from 10 Days in the USA and Apple to Apples (you should be playing this instead of Cards Against Humanity which “is similar”) to Guillotine, Monopoly, and Zooloretto. That’s right. This volume defends Monopoly, and it’s Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson games who does the defending. Take that gaming purists!

The format is what makes both volumes more than lists. Each entry is written by a different person with a different relationship to the game they’re discussing, which means the book becomes a mosaic of perspectives on what games are for. One contributor emphasizes mechanical elegance. Another talks about family ritual. A third traces a game’s influence on everything that came after it. Read all the essays and you end up with something like a genuine theory of why tabletop games matter. You’ll learn game design theory through case study from a hundred individual arguments, none of which is making the whole case but all of which contribute to it.

9. Hobby Games: The 100 Best — edited by James Lowder (2007, Green Ronin Publishing)

Hobby Games: The 100 Best tilts toward the specialist end of the hobby. These are games with steeper learning curves, games aimed at dedicated hobbyists, games that were influential within the hobby even if they never crossed over to mainstream awareness. The contributors include many of the most significant designers and writers working in tabletop at the time of publication, and the games range from classic wargames to Euro imports to landmark RPG supplements.

Published three years before Family Games, this book has a slightly more urgent quality to it. You can feel the writers aware that they are making an argument at a particular moment in the hobby’s history. The board game renaissance was just beginning to gather the momentum that would eventually make tabletop gaming a mainstream leisure activity rather than a specialist pursuit. Some of these essays read like dispatches from the front lines of that cultural argument. There are arguments praising Button Men and Call of Cthulhu, Dungeons & Dragons and Gettysburg. If you want a book that serves as the foundation of a games collection, you could just buy every game in this book and you’d never need another game. This is a true list of bangers, written by some of the best designers in the history of gaming.

There is one caveat for the book some of the games included in this volume are out of print, unlikely to return, and receive no other substantial critical treatment anywhere. The essays written about them are the most considered accounts those games are likely to get. That’s its own kind of value, separate from the recommendation function the books are most known for. The hobby’s history is not well documented, and every serious piece of writing about a particular game is part of the documentation.

10. Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games — Lawrence Schick (1991, Prometheus Books)

Lawrence Schick is not just a historian of the RPG hobby, he’s a participant in it. He designed White Plume Mountain for D&D, did significant work at TSR during the early AD&D years, and later at other companies. His position inside the industry gave him access to designers, to primary documents, and to institutional memory that an outside historian simply could not have obtained. The result is the most comprehensive survey of the RPG hobby as it existed in the early 1990s that has ever been produced.

The book is organized as a reference work. It catalogs an enormous number of games and supplements with brief descriptions and assessments. but Schick’s analytical voice comes through clearly. His brief notes on individual games often contain more genuine critical thinking than much longer reviews from gaming magazines of the era. He has opinions, they’re grounded, and he’s not shy about expressing them. He has also translated a some very entertaining editions of The Three Musketeers, but that is a discussion for another time.

What makes the book indispensable now, in 2026, is precisely what might seem like its limitation. It was published in 1991. Vampire: The Masquerade had just come out. Shadowrun was in its first edition. The long shadow of the satanic panic was still visible. The games Schick catalogs are the games that defined what role-playing meant to the generation that built the hobby, and understanding that foundation is essential for understanding everything that has come since. It makes a wonderful companion guide to Shannon Appelcline’s history of the role playing hobby, with one added benefit. It is also an extremely good completist checklist for the collector. I’ve been using it as one for thirty years.

11. The Comprehensive Guide to Board Wargaming — Nicholas Palmer (1977, Hippocrene Books)

Palmer is an Englishman writing about what was, in the 1970s, largely an American hobby. That slight angle of outside observation gives the book a quality that insider accounts often lack. He is genuinely enthusiastic about wargaming but he’s not reverent, and he’s willing to say when a celebrated game is celebrated more for historical reasons than because it’s actually good. That makes his evaluative judgments more trustworthy than those of writers who were more deeply embedded in the hobby’s commercial and social networks.

The book covers the major game systems with unusual clarity. He examines the different approaches to combat resolution, supply, command and control, and scale. Unlike many reviewers, it is clear that Palmer has PLAYED these games. Palmer explains not just what these design choices are but why they matter, which is a harder thing to do and more valuable. His discussion of how you model historical uncertainty in a game where the player has perfect information about their own forces is as good an introduction to the fundamental challenge of wargame design as I’ve encountered anywhere.

He also presents a number of “problems” in the book related to the games he discusses. Palmer presents a series of tactical problems drawn from published games and asks you to work out the best approach, usually one per chapter with each chapter highlighting a design concept. They’re not just rules-application exercises, they’re genuine problems about how to balance competing considerations under time pressure and imperfect information. They illuminate, in a very direct way, what wargaming as a hobby is actually for.

12. The Best of Board Wargaming — Nicholas Palmer (1980, Hippocrene Books)

The Best of Board Wargaming is an excellent companion to The Comprehensive Guide. Where the Guide is organized around systems and concepts, this one is organized around specific games. These are the games that Palmer, and polls, consider the best the hobby has produced as of 1980. Where the Guide goes into detail regarding a few games, this one is a true survey which means the two volumes are best owned and read together.

The Simulation versus Playability debate gets its most extended treatment here, and Palmer’s version of the argument is worth sitting with even if you’ve encountered the same debate framed differently elsewhere. The basic question he keeps returning to is. “when does fidelity to historical reality start working against the game, and when does simplification for playability start working against the history?” There is no universal answer, which is why designers are still arguing about it, but Palmer maps the terrain of the disagreement more carefully than most.

Because of when they were released, these books end up documenting a specific moment in the history of a hobby that has since changed enormously. The commercial wargame industry Palmer was writing about in 1977 and 1980 has a thriving fanbase, but is not as mainstream as it once was. You saw those SPI numbers above. Modern wargames don’t tend to sell anywhere near those late numbers. The era of publishing giants with a relatively large fan base has been replaced by a smaller, more passionate community of hobbyists who support companies like GMT and MMP. You still see a lot of wargame DNA in video game strategy titles. I see echoes of it every time I play a Total War game, but the modern environment is different enough that Palmer’s world can feel like a foreign country. It’s a foreign country worth visiting.

13. The Playboy Winner’s Guide to Board Games — Jon Freeman (1979, Playboy Press)

This book is a reprint of the earlier published “John Jackson” book on table games, but I include it as its own entry for a couple of reasons. The first is because it was published 4 years later and adds additional material filling the time game. The second is that Jackson is now using the name Freeman, signalling he wanted to connect the book with his design work at Epyx. Third, because it is a “Playboy” branded paperback book, which signals that board gaming was WAY more mainstream by the late 70s than it was in the middle of the decade when the book was originally published.

The book is an anomaly by any measur. It is a serious, analytically rigorous treatment of tabletop games published under a Playboy imprint, which means that substantive discussions of hex-and-counter wargame design appeared alongside whatever else Playboy Press was publishing in 1979. Freeman acknowledges, with characteristic dryness, that there are no pictures. You are reading it for the prose. The prose justifies the reading. In this case, readers really were reading a “Playboy” for the articles. There wasn’t anything else in the book. Other than the branding, this book is Kindergarten appropriate.

The extension into role-playing games and the serious treatment of Squad Leader alongside Risk and Scrabble is where the book earns its place as an addition to the earlier volume. Freeman is doing something here that none of the other books on this list quite attempt: he is arguing that all of these games belong to a single tradition and can be understood by a single analytical framework. For him, the mass market ones your grandmother owns, the hobby games your game group argues about, the wargames that take six hours and a bookcase worth of rules, are kindred spirits. It’s an ecumenical position that I share. I love “Hobby Games.” I love Miniatures Games. I love Role Playing Games. Heck, I love Candyland. To me, these are all different forms of the spirit of Homo Ludens. We are creatures that play and all of these forms of play are in the same family.

Freeman discusses the Simulation versus Playability question in all three of his books on this list, but that discussion reaches its fullest expression here precisely because the scope is broadest. You can see the whole thing from up here.

That’s thirteen books, and I’ve already thought of several I left out. Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons series should probably be its own entry when I get to post-2012 game books. It’s the most comprehensive history of the RPG industry that exists and it belongs on every serious collector’s shelf. Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World is probably the single best book about the origins of D&D ever written, but it was published after the 2012 post this is expanding on, so it’ll wait for a future list. And Rick Swan’s Complete Guide to Role Playing Games should have been number fourteen here, but I’ve already written about it separately and I can only be so self-referential in a single post.

What else have I missed? Tell me in the comments. I’ll make sure to write about them in the future.

There’s a moment in the history of any hobby where the people who are going to change it haven’t quite changed it yet. They’re playing games in basements and dormitories, arguing about rules that don’t quite work, and writing things down for one another in typewritten fanzines that almost nobody outside their immediate circle will ever read. The California RPG Scene in the mid-1970s was full of those moments. Some of those moments, Cal-Tech’s Warlock, the creation of the Thief Class for D&D, Supergame by DAG Design, and The Arduin Grimoire, are relatively well-known in gaming historiography circles. There are probably far more that have been lost.

There is one that I think is for the most part lost and forgotten and I’d like to rekindle interest in it so that we can hopefully get the full picture. If I hadn’t been stopped in my tracks by an aside in an article in Different Worlds #11, and pursued a relatively long Google dive, I wouldn’t have known about this D&D variant at all and it’s possible you didn’t either.

How much do you know about “The Stanford System” for Dungeons & Dragons? They were the house rules that a particular community of Stanford gamers used in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They are rules that may, or may not, have influenced Epyx games’ Dunjonquest: The Temple of Apshai, because Jeffrey A Johnson (the author of the article in in Different World #11 that mentions the Stanford System) was one of the designers of Temple of Apshai. Prior to re-reading the Four-Fold Way article last December, I hadn’t known about The Stanford System at all.

Given how many times I’ve read Different Worlds #11, there really is no excuse for this oversight, but it remains true. I missed it and I thought you might have too. Different Worlds is, as I’ve mentioned many times, one of the most important gaming magazines ever to be published. While it was a Chaosium house organ, it covered the wider world of role playing games and, like Alarums and Excursions and Lords of Chaos, was at the center of the California Roleplaying Scene.

Jeffrey A. Johnson’s article “The Fourfold Way of FRP” in Different Worlds #11 was a response to Glenn Blacow’s article on Role-Playing Game Styles in issue #10 of the magazine. Both of these articles are cornerstones of roleplaying game design theory that you’ll see discussed widely, often by people who’ve heard of the articles but never actually read them. The articles are insightful and speak to many of the conflicts in the modern hobby as much as they spoke about the cleavages in the 1970s and 1980s. When it comes to gaming styles, it seems there is nothing new under the sun. Early in the article Jeffrey A. Johnson writes the following:

He writes that the “Stanford System” is heavily on the simulation/wargaming end of the pure fantasy/wargaming axis. The context in which he makes this statement implies that he expects his readers to know exactly what he is talking about, but after asking around my gaming circles I couldn’t find anyone who had any idea what this system was. To be fair, the article was written 46 years ago. I’ve reached out to Tadashi Ehara, the editor of Different Worlds, and George MacDonald of Hero Games and SSI who worked with Jeffrey A. Johnson, but I haven’t heard back from them on that.

After getting as much as I could out of my social network contacts, I decided to see if my Google-Fu could uncover anything. That’s when I stumbled across Tom Van Winkle’s 2020 blogpost on the topic. It’s a pretty rich discussion of The Stanford System and led me to another source of information, a personal zine called Phantasmagoria #1 written by Barry Eynon (whom I think I identified, but who didn’t respond to my LinkedIn attempt to connect). Another Google search later and I discovered that I could get a copy of Phantasmagoria #1 to examine on my own.

Phantasmagoria #1 was published in the Fall of 1977 as part of The Lords of Chaos #2, three full years before Johnson’s article in Different Worlds. This demonstrates a kind of staying power that should have made The Stanford System something that gets talked about more frequently The Lords of Chaos was an Amateur Press Association1 edited by Nicolai Shapero out of Belmont, California. Shapero, who also appears in gaming history under the names “Niall Shapero” and “Niall Shapiro,” was a contributor to Lee Gold’s Alarums & Excursions and would go on to create the science fiction RPG Other Suns for Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1983. When I lived in Southern California, I chatted with Shapero at a couple of science fiction club meetings down there. I’ve sent him a message to see if he knows more too.

At its peak The Lords of Chaos had around 200 subscribers, published every two months then quarterly, then running to 13 issues through 1981. It’s a wonderful trove of information and counted Steve Marsh, Steve Perrin, and Lee Gold among its contributors. Dragon #50 called its writers “some of the best writers from other APAs.” It was, in short, not a mere vanity project. It was a legitimate node in the California gaming network, even if it was too short lived. I say too short lived because it’s also where the Wayne Shaw developed his alternate rules for Superhero 2044. Those rules would go on to inspire the creation of Supergame and Champions.

The piece Shapero coaxed out of Eynon was addressed, in Eynon’s words, to “the rarefied tastes of those who indulge in the game of Dungeons & Dragons.” It is a brief document that is only four typewritten pages, but it contains a description of what Eynon and his fellow Stanford players called the “Stanford System.” This was a seat of D&D house rules, possibly near-complete rewrite like Cal-Tech’s Warlock, that addressed what they saw as D&D’s fundamental design problems.

As you know, I’ve been documenting the California RPG Scene here on Geekerati for some time. I think that games Supergame, Wayne Shaw’s house rules for Superhero 2044, and the Arduin Grimoire, are important documents in gaming history. I love to discuss the remarkable density of innovation that came out of the Bay Area and Southern California in those early years. The Stanford System belongs in that conversation. If anything, it belongs near the top of it, even as it remains in the shadows of the past.

Barry Eynon? Who Is That?

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I used to frequent Aero Hobbies as my go-to gaming store. Gary, the owner, was very generous with his time and connected me with a lot of other gamers in the community. Pretty soon, I was playing in 3rd Edition D&D groups and having a great time. Every time I visited the store, Gary would try to sell me on Runequest and he eventually won me over. I had a lot of chats with him, but it wasn’t until after he died that I found out that it was his call to Gary Gygax that facilitated the creation of the Thief Class in D&D. Now Gary didn’t create the Thief, it was the creation of one of the gamers at his store named Darrold Daniel Wagner, but it was Gary’s call that set the official publication ball in motion. Ever since then, I’ve had a desire to learn about the people behind the early ideas of the hobby.

In that spirit I’d like to spend a moment on the man who detailed what we have about the Stanford System, because he’s a person who has slipped almost entirely through the cracks of RPG history. Of course, so too have Jon Freeman and Jeffrey A. Johnson, who were both likely a part of the “Stanford Scene” and who created Temple of Apshai and other games only to be rarely discussed in modern gaming circles. It’s no wonder I keep reading new discoveries of long known facts in online discussions. We gamers do not share our history with each other near enough.

Have you ever noticed how often gamers assert their bona fides before they discuss their ideas? You probably have. You’ve read enough of my stuff and half of my entries are justifications for what I am writing. Well, Eynon makes sure to let the readers of Lords of Chaos know he is one of us/them. He points out that he is “a wargamer from way back.” Given the connection between wargames and roleplaying games, this was the default credentials for anyone designing games in 1977. He says he came to D&D about two years earlier through the Ryth Campaign, the Detroit-area campaign run by John Van De Graaf and Len Scensny that has its own minor legendary status among early D&D historians. He arrived in California for graduate study at Stanford in 1976, and by the time he wrote Phantasmagoria, he claims to have played under every major rules variant in circulation, from the Perrin System to Warlock, while collecting DMs for the Stanford unified campaign project.

I don’t know what he’s written since. I found a post on rec.games.board from the 1990s, but the Stanford System itself was never published. Unlike a lot of other Bay Area gamers, like Mike Pondsmith, Sandy Petersen, and George MacDonald, he doesn’t seem to have migrated over to video game design as a career. A huge number of computer role playing game designers came from the Bay Area scene. I guess it helps to be an early adopter of a hobby right in the heart of the computer revolution.

Why the Stanford System Exists

Thanks to the library holdings at UC Riverside, I have a copy of Phantasmagoria #1. I’ve created a recreated copy at the end of the post for research purposes. I’ll take it down if Barry asks. It’s a remarkable read and a great glimpse into house rule creation past and present. The opening invocation sets the tone immediately:

Fleeing from the hounds of Hell, pursued by the Lords of Chaos themselves, came I at last, as in a dream, upon the Word...

That’s the epigraph. The man knew how to open a fanzine. What follows is a clear-eyed, analytically rigorous critique of D&D’s underlying design logic, written by someone who had played enough variants to know what was structural and what was superficial.

Eynon’s core argument is deceptively simple. He argues that Gygax and Arneson wrote down rules for a game they were already playing, and the resulting system has some deep incoherences baked into it. We know now this this is only partly true, but what we know about the historical development of D&D only amplifies his comment regarding system incoherences from a certain perspective.

Unlike many critics, he’s careful not to be dismissive. Eynon acknowledges that D&D is fun and playable if you use common sense and aren’t afraid to call Lake Geneva for clarifications, but he thinks you can do better by starting over with slightly different assumptions. Remember, this is a 1977 zine and so pre-dates Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I love the old White Box rules, but they are easier to understand if you already know how to play D&D in some form.

He lists the problems he and his fellow Stanford DMs kept running into when they tried to unify their campaign:

1. No one ever gets tired. The game has no fatigue or endurance system.

2. Carrying treasure out of dungeons teaches you to throw spells and wield a broadsword. Gold-for-XP is modeling the wrong thing.

3. Getting better means you can survive being stabbed more times. Escalating hit points as an abstraction for skill doesn’t match intuition.

4. A fighter who has never touched a bow can suddenly shoot like William Tell at high level. Class-based uniform skill blocks ignore what you’ve actually done.

5. A mage goes up a level and a tome containing all his new spells is magically presented to him. Automatic spell acquisition without study or effort.

What I find striking about this list, and I’ve been looking at it for a while now, is that it’s essentially the same list of complaints that would drive independent game design for the next decade and continues to drive a lot of design discussion. Spend a day on X or Bluesky chatting about RPGs and you are likely to read one of these critiques even today. The endurance problem is something that Runequest and other games solve. The gold-for-XP problem is what the entire OSR has been arguing about since 2008 and is something no other role playing game has adopted. The hit point escalation problem is what the Arduin Grimoire addresses with its brutal damage tables. The uniform skill block problem is what the skill-based systems like Runequest, Champions, GURPS, eventually D&D 3rd edition’s skill system take a swing at. There’s a reason I say that D&D became GURPS with 3rd edition. The automatic spell acquisition problem is addressed by, among others, the magic guild system in Runequest and the Stanford System sounds a bit like Dragonbane’s.

Eynon and his Stanford colleagues were essentially identifying the exact fault lines along which D&D would fracture and reform over the next thirty years. In 1977. In a four-page fanzine.

The Stanford System: What It Actually Did

The group’s solution, informally called the “Stanford System,” had been in use in their campaign for more than six months by the time Eynon wrote Phantasmagoria. He notes it was maintained in a computer file for easy modification and expected to be available in print “toward the end of the summer.” It never was, as far as I have been able to determine. The document may be lost, but if it was actually kept in computer form it might still be around. Though the article was written in 1977, so Heaven only knows if it’s on an easily retrievable medium. If you have a copy, please contact me immediately.

Eynon gives us a sketch of the system’s salient features, and even the sketch is impressive:

1. An endurance system. Walking, fighting, and throwing spells all cost endurance points. Some can be recovered during an expedition by resting. This is the first published description of an endurance-based resource management system in a role-playing game, as far as anyone can tell. This was the claim that Tom Van Winkle made in his 2020 blog post on the Stanford System. I’d have to do some additional research but I find the claim credible. As always, I’d welcome pushback from anyone who knows otherwise. Crucially, hit points don’t escalate much. The damage you can take before dying stays fairly constant with level. Advancement instead increases how many endurance points you have in a given day. Endurance then, critically, determines how good you are at blocking blows in the first place. Better fighters don’t just absorb more punishment. They are better at avoiding it.

2. A split experience system. Fighters gain experience in specific weapon types from actually using them in combat. Mages progress individually in five categories of magic: Bewilder, Control Energy, Protection, Move & Reshape, and Detect & Enhance. There is also an overall category that determines magic resistance and total endurance. This is, functionally, a skill system, one of the earliest in role-playing games, predating the better-known BRP/Runequest approach by about a year, but coming after Traveller. It should be noted that character advancement in Traveller is very slow though and that skills don’t change much after your character survives character creation. If it survives.

3. Treasure doesn’t teach you to throw spells. The only way treasure affects ability is if it’s spent on training or better equipment. Mages have to study and pay for new spells from the Guild. The California scene was full of people rejecting XP-for-gold independently of one another; what’s notable here is the Guild requirement for spell acquisition, which is a specific and elegant solution to problem #5 above. It’s similar to the approach Tunnels & Trolls took and might have been influenced by Ken St. Andre’s design.

4. Damage stays roughly constant. As noted above, what scales with level is your endurance pool and your ability to avoid or block blows. This is the same intuition that drives Runequest’s hit location and armor system. The key idea here is that heroic characters survive because they’re skilled, not because they’re effectively made of more meat.

Correlated Characteristics: The Part That Makes Game Designers Sit Up

The most immediately distinctive feature of Phantasmagoria #1, and the part I think deserves the most attention, is a character creation section at the end called “Correlated Characteristics.”

The Stanford System used nine ability scores instead of D&D’s six. They took Dexterity and split it into Dexterity and Agility, a distinction that would reappear in many later games. They took Charisma and split it into Persuasiveness and Leadership. They added Size as a distinct characteristic, something that Runequest would also do.

The addition of Size is particularly interesting. Tom Van Winkle’s research suggests that Size as an explicit game mechanic may have originated at Stanford or at CalTech (the Warlock rules from 1975 also use Size, and the priority is genuinely unclear). What is clear is that Size appears in Runequest, where it directly modifies hit points, and in Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing system. Steve Perrin, co-designer of Runequest, was deeply embedded in the Bay Area gaming community during this period. He was a co-founder of the SCA, his Perrin Conventions were circulating as D&D house rules, and he almost certainly knew what people were doing at Stanford. The pipeline from the Stanford System to Runequest may not be direct, but it’s not imaginary either because the people were likely hanging out at the various Bay Area gaming conventions. As I’ll discuss in a later post on Superhero games, the use of a Size characteristic makes a lot of stuff very easy to DM.

One thing that really caught my eye was the concept of correlated characteristics. Eynon and company weren’t just using nine characteristics. They were also generating them in a way that created statistical correlation between related attributes. The idea is intuitive. You’d expect someone with an 18 Strength to be more likely to have a high Constitution than someone with a 3 Strength. Generating each characteristic independently doesn’t reflect that.

Their solution is elegant. They created a table, which I’ve recreated below in a form that I hope makes it a bit easier to read than the original typewritten version, that groups characteristics into dice-rolling pools. For each pair of boxes connected by a + symbol, you only roll one die and place the result in both boxes. This creates positive correlation between linked attributes. For the one pair connected by an = symbol (Size and Agility, which are negatively correlated because the game assumes larger characters tend to be less agile), you roll one D6 and place the result in the top box, then 7 minus the result in the bottom box. This gives you an inverse roll of the prior result, making Size and Agility directly negatively correlated.

The result is a set of nine characteristics that feel like they belong to the same person rather than a random collision of numbers. It takes a little longer to generate, but it produces what Eynon calls “nicer (less incongruous) sets of characteristics.”

I am +3 against anyone who reads that and doesn’t immediately want to use it.

The Stanford System Enters the Wider Conversation

Here’s the thing that I think seals the case for taking the Stanford System seriously as a historical artifact and not merely an interesting curiosity. It didn’t stay inside the APA fanzine network.

As I mentioned earlier when I discussed my inspiration for this article, Jeffrey A. Johnson mentioned the Stanford System in February/March of 1981 in the pages of Different Worlds #11. Different Worlds wasn’t a small fanzine. It was a Chaosium publication, meaning it had the institutional backing of the company that had just published Runequest and was the center of the Bay Area game design world. These two articles have became one of the most influential theories of game design published in the early hobby. Most people only mention Blacow, even though the framework is called “the Fourfold Way” which is the name of Johnson’s article, and it’s still cited today as a precursor to GNS theory and modern discussions of player types. So the Stanford System is discussed in an article that is a cornerstone of the indierpg storygame movement of the early 2000s, even though no one knows it by name.

That’s remarkable to me.

For a document that was never formally published, that never became a commercial product, that exists today as four typewritten pages in the back of an APA fanzine, that is a remarkable lifespan.

I am not completely certain who Jeffrey A. Johnson was. There’s a reason I say the Stanford System “may” have been connected to Temple of Apshai. Sure, Jon Freeman and Jeffrey A. Johnson are both D&D players from the Bay Area who played games with people at Stanford, but Johnson’s a common enough name (it is after all my pre-married name and I get a ton of emails for various Christian Johnson). I can’t be sure that the Jeffrey A. Johnson who wrote to Different Worlds is the same one who worked at Epyx and SSI. It would be cool to think that the Stanford System influenced not only Temple of Apshai, but Pool of Radiance and all the Gold Box D&D Games too. That would mean it influenced the first Baldur’s Gate and thus the most recent game, Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s a lot of influence for a fogotten and rarely discussed manuscript. I’ve not been able to identify him to my satisfaction, but whoever he was, he wrote for a Chaosium publication and assumed his readers would recognize “the Stanford System” without explanation. That assumption is itself the evidence. The Stanford System wasn’t a secret known only to the people who built it. It was part of the shared vocabulary of the California gaming scene.

I want to be careful not to overclaim. Phantasmagoria #1 is a four-page sketch of a system that was never fully published, written by someone who has never been a major figure in the history of the hobby. The Stanford System may have influenced Runequest or Runequest may have independently arrived at similar conclusions. Game design is full of parallel invention, and the California scene in the late 1970s was a remarkably fertile environment where a lot of smart people were working on a lot of the same problems at the same time.

What I can say with confidence is this. In the Fall of 1977, Barry Eynon and a handful of Stanford Dungeonmasters had identified many game design elements that people continue to discuss as problems with D&D’s design. They proposed workable solutions to all of them, and implemented those solutions in an active campaign. The solutions they proposed (endurance-based resource management, skill-based experience, treasure spent on training, non-escalating hit points, correlated ability score generation) were genuinely novel, and several of them would be independently reinvented by major commercial game designers over the following decade.

The California scene keeps delivering these moments: the Warlock rules at CalTech which were published by a game store in Long Beach, the Perrin Conventions, the invention of the Thief class by gamers at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica, the Arduin Grimoire, Supergame, Wayne Shaw’s house rules for Superhero 2044. All of these are significant parts of the history of roleplaying games and the California scene does not get talked about enough.

I want to take a moment to say how grateful I am that UC Riverside, where I’m completing my doctorate, has copies of many of these fanzines, because without institutions treating this material as worth preserving, it would be entirely gone.

Phantasmagoria #1 is a document that deserved better than near-oblivion. It still does.

I’ve put together a cleaned-up version of Phantasmagoria #1 as a PDF, which you can download at the link below. The text has been OCR-transcribed from the original scan and lightly corrected. The scan quality makes a few words genuinely ambiguous, but I have tried to stay as close to Eynon’s original language as possible. The Correlated Characteristics table has been recreated as a visualization rather than reproduced from the scan, both because the original is difficult to read and because I think a clean version makes the elegance of the system more legible.

Barry Eynon’s address and phone number, which appeared in the original colophon, have been redacted.

Phantasmagoria 1 Stanford 1977

13.9KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Thanks to Tom Van Winkle, whose 2020 blog post “The Stanford System of Role-Playing Games (1976-77)“ is the most substantial prior research on this subject, and who deserves considerable credit for bringing it to attention. Thanks also to Glenn F. Blacow, whose “Aspects of Adventure Gaming” (Different Worlds #10, Oct/Nov 1980) set the stage for Jeffrey A. Johnson’s “The Fourfold Way of FRP” (Different Worlds #11, Feb/Mar 1981) . Johnson’s piece contains, as far as I can tell, the only contemporary mention of the Stanford System in a nationally distributed publication. If you have any information about Barry Eynon, the complete Stanford System document, or other materials from the Stanford gaming community in the late 1970s, I would very much like to hear from you.

This is a greatly expanded version of an article that was originally posted at cinerati.blogspot.com.

There is a particular kind of book that does double duty. It entertains you on the surface and underneath, it makes an argument. Adventures in Time and Space, the 1946 anthology edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas, is that kind of book. It includes thirty-five stories of rockets and aliens and temporal paradoxes and creatures that shouldn’t exist in a single 900+ page volume. All of the stories came from the pre-war pulps, in particular Astounding Science Fiction, and presented for the neophyte and casual fan easy access to stories that might be otherwise difficult to track down. Okay, it technically contains 33 stories and 2 essays, but who’s counting? Adventures in Time and Space is not merely a collection of good science fiction stories. It is possibly, as Don Sakers argued in Analog magazine, the most important Science Fiction anthology ever published. It is Healy and McComas’ “35 Theses.” Along with Crown Publishers’ 1948 A Treasury of Science Fiction, it is among the only science fiction hardcovers to be distributed by a large mainstream publisher. As such, it is a treatise arguing that science fiction is Literature, with a capital L, and that people who dismiss the genre on principle are wrong.