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

What was Early Gaming Like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stages/Styles of Game Play

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay Smartypants Did Early Gamers Go Through the First Stage?

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

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

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

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

But What About Gary?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blade Runner 2099

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

Stan Lee and Elder Abuse

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

Mortal Cinema

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

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

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5 days ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Luke Y. Thompson

Mortal Cinema

Comic-Con 2026: Jon Bolerjack Speaks About Stan Lee

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

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4 days ago · 2 likes · Luke Y. Thompson

Accidental Time Travel to the Jurassic Era

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

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

Now…on to the games.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My official criteria for what constitutes an Independent RPG are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 8 — Fantasy AGE by Green Ronin Publishing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 9 — Inspectres from Momento Mori Tactics

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

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

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

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

July 10 — Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition

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

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

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

July 11 — Traveller

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

July 12 — Hero Kids

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

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

July 13 — Beach Patrol by Gallant Knight Games

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

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

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

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

Buy and have some summer fun!

July 14 — Runequest from Chaosium Games

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

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

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

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

July 15 — Dragonbane from Free League

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 18 — Masks: A New Generation

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

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

July 19 — Mazes by 9th Level Games

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

July 20 — Symbaroum by Fria Ligan

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

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

July 21 — Leagues of Adventure from Triple Ace Games.

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

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

July 22 — My Life with Master

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

July 23 — Shiver

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

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

July 24 — Mothership

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

July 25 — Never Going Home

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

July 26 — Tunnels & Trolls

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

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

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

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

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

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

or for higher levels the following equation minus the stat.

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

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

July 27 — Vaesen

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

July 28 — Cryptworld (aka CHILL)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Plagiarize.”

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

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

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

And before you read onward…This Way Be Spoilers.

10) You’re Next

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

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

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

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

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

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

9) Escape Plan

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

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

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

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

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

8) Assault on Precinct 13 (Rio Bravo)

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

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

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

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

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

7) Quantum of Solace

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

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

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

6) The Warriors

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

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

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

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

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

5) Alien

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

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

So here’s how I’d adapt Alien:

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

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

4) Point Blank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3) The Art of the Steal

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

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

2) The Siege

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

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

1) The Most Dangerous Game

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

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

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

* * *

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

What films do you think are ripe for ripping off?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Connecticut Yankee, Run Backward

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competence is Cultural, not Technological

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thumós, and the Cultures that Misplace It

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chronicler and the Machine

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

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

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

Why this is a Gaming Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Verdict

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

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

Epilogue

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

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

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

Champions Release Happened at a Really Cool Location

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Narrative Spaces and Engaged Lives by Andrzej Zarzycki

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

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

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

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

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

1. Colonial Gothic

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

How the 12° System Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Good Guys Finish Last

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

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

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

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

3. Champions: The Super Hero Role Playing Game

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

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

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

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

4. Dragon Warriors

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

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

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

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

5. Troika!

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

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

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

6. Savage Worlds

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

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

7. Castle Falkenstein

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

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

Some Background on Steve Perrin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Which Superworld are we even talking about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Did Chaosium Publish Superworld?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally After All the Pontificating: The Mechanics

So how does Superworld actually work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Champions Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Geekerati Verdict

So… should you own Superworld?

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

Where this goes next

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TL;DR?

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

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

Encountering The Eye of Argon for the First Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Osfan 10 Malon Watson 1970

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

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

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

He was publicly ridiculed for over 40 years.

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

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

Background

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Vigilance?

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

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

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

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

Two licenses, one with a logo

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

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

D20 System Guide v 3

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d20 System License v 4

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Open Gaming License 1.0a

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

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

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

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

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

The d20 Bloat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What actually works: d20, bent toward the cape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the mechanics fight the genre

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

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

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

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

The Verdict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Series So Far

A couple of years ago, I rekindled my interest in making a game inspired by the Moldvay/Cook Basic and Expert boxed sets for Dungeons & Dragons. I had been aching to do a game inspired by the excellent B/X rules that incorporated some of what I thought were the stronger elements of Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. In particular, I wanted to bring in elements similar to the two Essentials player books (Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms) and the very thematic books that came after the Essentials launch (in particular Heroes of Shadow and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos). Eventually, work and my dissertation led to me petering out before I could really get into stride, but recent comments by someone I follow on Twitter about how running an OSR game for their group didn’t work out because of how most OSR games lacked cool abilities that set each character apart. That gamer’s lament reminded me that I was not alone in seeking a game that balanced new and old. The Essentials tier of 4th Edition had a lot of cool abilities that distinguished each character and if those are combined simplicity of B/X it could be something truly magical.

I discussed a lot of the original inspiration for the project in my “Combining New School and Old School” article, where I mention that one of the people who inspired me was George Strayton, who had worked on West End’s Star Wars role playing game. George was also a writer on Xena/Hercules for a period of time, I’ll have to ask him if he wrote before or after West End published the Xena/Hercules role playing game, as well as the Dragonlance animated movie. While I know that my love of that film is in the minority, the one thing I can assert with full confidence is that whatever the flaws of the film are it was written by someone who played a lot of D&D on Krynn.

George was also the lead designer on the one Fantasy Heartbreaker project I worked on as a developer, The Secret Fire. The game was written expressly to be a Heartbreaker, though we hoped it would be a successful one, in that it evoked the narrative style of many of those that came before. Since it is a product of the self-publishing era, rather than the print a ton of books and lose money era, it isn’t truly a Heartbreaker since what led Ron Edwards to call them that was his lamenting over how much money people often lost in the production of the older games. That’s not the case with The Secret Fire, from which I will be borrowing a couple of ideas (since I contributed them), but the game never did catch on as much as I wish it had. Playing it, and playtesting it, was one helluva good time though because George is a fantastic DM.

In my second post on Heroes of Karameikos, I moved out of storytelling and justification mode and began to present both my basic philosophy and how I was going to treat character attributes in my B/X inspired game. Like did with his upcoming Blades of Power game (back it on Kickstarter like I did), I am starting with B/X but know I’m going to end up somewhere very different. James talks about how he began with B/X and ended up making his own thing in an interview with Agranak Studios, and I imagine I’ll end up in an equally different place.

Anyway, the nuts and bolds of my second post were that I wanted to design a game that had defined roles, abilities that interact with each other and the environment, and to provide a feeling of being heroic while still having it feel like the characters are in danger. I wanted options, but I didn’t want an avalanche of powers, feats, and magic items that could turn character building and advancing into a spreadsheet. Fourth edition has options and choices, but B/X has archetypes and I believe if I use archetypes to frame options I can create something really interesting. A example of how I wanted the characters to feel heroic, but still vulnerable, was in my recommended attribute system. I recommended picking a class first, which empowers the player. After that, the player gets to roll 4d6 and pick the best three dice for ONLY their Prime Requisite attributes. That means that the characters are better than average at the things that fit their archetype, but are more than likely average everywhere else.

I also talked a bit about when and how characters can die, but hadn’t flushed that out mentally yet. In fact, I’m still working on that as I am writing this. I’ve got a few ideas I still want to try out…and convince you all to playtest. One thing I’ve been putting a lot of thought into is the skill system I want to use. One of the critiques of 4e was that it didn’t have rules for “role playing,” but I’ve already responded to that accusation when I wrote about how 3rd Edition brought in a lot of the feel of GURPS and Hero with a mechanics based mindset. In doing so, gamers who were used to “roll playing” where you roll to see if you persuade or find a secret door using a skill, thought that a game that minimized those all of a sudden didn’t have role playing elements when the exact opposite was true. That’s a discussion to return to another time though, in part because I really like GURPS, Hero, and 3rd Edition style roll playing.

Having done all of that other leg work though, it’s time to finally start putting together the underlying structure of the game. It’s time to present the foundation and my philosophical design pillars.

Opening the Door to the Four Pillars of Heroes of Karameikos

The purpose of this article is to we build the skeleton upon which all of my game design articles for Heroes of Karameikos will add layers of muscle. I want to lay out everything the basic class entries do. What are the primary roles for the Fighter, Thief, Magic-User, and Cleric. How does this change when I eventually bring in the Elf that is several classes combined? While I may have written about how abilities work in the last entry, this is where the true work begins and I’ll be covering several topics. I want to provide the design pillars, add a small handful of universal rules that produce the 4e feel, give a brief overview of what full character-creation will look like, and provide a template for every class article that will follow.

I’m want to make one promise right up front though. I want to make sure that the B/X rules I love stay B/X. I am keeping descending Armor Class, the attack matrix, race-as-class, Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic, and the prime-requisite XP bonus. I am not throwing any of that out. The new-school feel comes from a thin layer added on top, not from rewriting the engine underneath. I want to be clear. The 4e additions are going to be chrome adding to the game, but not overwhelming it. The key is to keep it simple and allow for fast and fun gaming experiences. If you want furious, you’ll have to play Savage Worlds.

The Four Pillars

Everything in this game answers to four core design pillars. When I wonder if a rule is should be included or not, these pillars are how I will break the tie and decide.

1. Old bones, new muscle. The B/X engine is the engine. I will add muscle. I’ll clarify roles, add signature maneuvers, a provide a new survival mechanic, but I won’t replace the skeleton. If a thing already works in Moldvay (it I think most usually do), it stays.

2. Everyone has a role. This is the heart of the 4e feel. Every character has a clear job in a fight. That version of D&D used the language of Massive Multiplayer RPGs to describe the roles (Defender, Striker, Controller, or Leader), but those were already there under different concepts from the table top days. We either called them different things like “meat shield” or had yet to fully classify them in D&D terms, though Champions by Hero games moved a long way towards creating official definitions with things like Brick and Blaster. I want to use these newer definitions of roles because they are easy for non-table top gamers to understand, they allow for me to create different archetypes within the four classes (something Daggerheart does too), and I want to make sure that the things characters do make the party better, not just the individual characters. It’s the kind of balance that Dr. J. Eric Holmes, author of the original Basic Set, argued that D&D used to create meaningful play experience in his book Fantasy Role Playing Games. He argued that a “balanced” party wasn’t one where everyone was just as powerful as everyone else, rather that every character filled a role. The four core B/X classes already embody the four roles almost perfectly, though I’ll be tweaking here and there and creating different roles within the classes. Using these “roles” mostly just renaming concepts that have been there form the beginning and sharpening them.

3. Heroic but mortal. I want the survivability of High Fantasy without removing the teeth of Sword & Sorcery. My favorite setting, Mystara, has steam-powered gnome zeppelins AND gritty back alley executions. The player characters in Mystara are not 0 level characters going through a Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel, they are something more. A wizard dying in a fight with a common house cat due to a graze feels wrong for that world. So characters will get a little more cushion, but death is still on the table and bad luck still bites. I also want a mechanic that stays relatively flat in its benefit across levels in a narratively interesting way.

4. Archetypes over algebra. This is the Essentials lesson. A player should make a few evocative choices and then go play, not optimize a build across forty splatbooks. Classes get a small number of strong, flavorful options. I want archetypes instead of feat trees. I don’t want players to have to pour through books every level in order to go power shopping. If you can’t fit a class on a couple of pages, it’s too complicated. If players want more options, then design classes that fit them. Kind of like I’ve done with my Swashbuckler, and other, classes for B/X already.

The Skeleton: Five Rules that Provide the Foundation

I want to keep the old school as much as possible, so here’s the entire “new-school” layer in five easy pieces. Five rules. That’s it. Read them once and the class entries will make sense immediately.

Rule 1 — Roles

Every class has a role, and the role tells you what your abilities are for. The four core classes as presented in Basic and Expert line up like this. It is important to note that these are as presented in B/X and not the later BECMI. Fighters in BECMI eventually get multiple attacks, that never happens in B/X… which adds to the critique the group I read about on Twitter gave. I want to do a version of this game based on BECMI later, but for right now I want to stick as close to B/X as possible.

Notice what this isn’t. This is not four new subsystems. I am merely doing a quick breakdown of the classes using the “role” lens. Looking at them briefly, I think that the Fighter is the only class that needs genuinely new toys in order to make modern gamers feel they have options. Yes, they can pick different weapons and armor, and those choices matter, but that’s still more limited than a lot of modern gamers like. The baseline in Moldvay is that fighters “have no special abilities” and I want to shift that a little. Everyone else mostly needs their existing kit framed as a role and given one signature interaction. That signature interaction is what makes each new archetype (combining class and role) feel a little different. In my first pass, each class entry will define exactly one of them. As I expand design, I might add new signature interactions to each role, but most archetypes will only get one…even when we are talking about race as class cases like the Elf.

• Defender → Mark. When you mark an enemy, it’s worse at attacking anyone but you, and you get to punish it for trying.

• Striker → Quarry. Pick a target and you do more damage to it under the right conditions (backstab, generalized).

• Controller → Hinder. Your area effects don’t just damage the opposition. They also impose conditions and shape the battlefield. I want a little bit more than Breach, Sleep, and Clear to happen for these roles, but that combination is iconic and will remain. We all love kicking open the door (breaching), using Sleep, and clearing (murking the gobbos) Rainbow Six style.

• Leader → Inspire. You can hand out your healing and your luck to your allies. You can increase the morale of retainers and followers on a temporary basis.

We’ll define the way the signature interactions work precisely in the corresponding class entry. For now, just know that “role” is a real, mechanical thing here, not flavor text.

Rule 2 — Second Wind

I want a couple of rules that increase survivability and extends adventuring beyond the single encounter workday at first level. Breach, Sleep, and Clear only happens once a day when you are starting and characters can get hurt in combat. I have lifted from 4e and tuned to make Constitution matter for every class (Pillar 3, and remember: no dump stats).

Second Wind. You can catch your second wind a number of times per day equal to 1 + your Constitution modifier (minimum 1, maximum once per encounter).

You may take an action on your turn to catch your second wind. You regain hit points equal to one roll of your Hit Die Type + your Constitution modifier (minimum 1), and you gain +2 to Armor Class until the start of your next turn as you guard and recover.

I am considering limiting this to just defender archetypes, but it does two things that I might want every class to benefit from. First, it gives every character a self-rescue button, so one unlucky round doesn’t end someone’s day. Second, it turns Constitution into the survival stat for everyone. The high-Con Fighter is a rock, and the low-Con Magic User gets some benefit from it but can’t lean on it. That’s exactly the “every attribute matters” texture B/X is quietly famous for and it provides a real benefit to the lucky Magic User who has a high Con.

This isn’t too far removed from the Basic OSR design. Moldvay Basic already prints an optional survival rule on page B6 where you reroll a 1 or 2 for first-level hit points. I’m just being more generous about it and besides taking an action to roll 1d4 plus Constitution modifier isn’t game breaking at low levels and it doesn’t scale upward. It’s only a single die worth of recovery. At higher levels, this isn’t even a round of attacks from a monster but it makes a big difference at lower levels.

Rule 3 — Dying and Death

In B/X you die at 0 hit points. Sure, the module Keep on the Borderlands says that you can allow your players’ characters to be merely captured at this level, but the baseline is “above 0 = alive and fully healthy and zero and below = dead.” That’s really stark. I move the goalposts a little, but we keep the danger closer to old-school by leaning on a number already in the rules. Instead of having a death save be a 55% likely sucess like in 4e and 5e, a character makes a saving throw vs. Death Ray or Poison. I tie the death save to the iconic “am I about to die?” save.

Dying. At 0 hit points you fall Dying. You are unconscious and helpless. You are not dead until you take damage equal to your Constitution score, below zero (a Constitution 13 character dies at −13). Any single blow that drops you past that threshold kills you outright.

Death Saves. At the start of each of your turns while Dying, make a saving throw vs. Death Ray or Poison.

• Failure: you die.

• Success: you cling to life, but you are not safe. Roll again at the start of your next turn, and every turn after, until you are healed or stabilized.

• Natural 20: a surge of will. Spend a Second Wind, if you have one, and act normally this turn. If not, you stabilize and are unconscious.

Any healing ends the Dying condition and restores you to the hit points healed. An ally can also stabilize you with an ability like a cure spell, a Leader’s Inspire (see the Cleric later), or a successful Heal knack. This ends the need to roll. If you went below 0 hp, and the healing roll only increases you up to 0 hp or less, you remain unconscious at 0 hp until healed or the fight ends.

This shift of the 4e/5e death save does three jobs at once. It reuses an existing B/X saving throw instead of inventing a death save table or using the overly kind death save rules from modern editions (Pillar 1). It’s class-flavored. The sturdy classes (Cleric, Dwarf, Halfling) have the best Death Ray/Poison saves and cling to life longest, while the Magic-User who has the worst save and fewest hit points really should not be lying on the floor.The rule also scales the way I want. At 1st level your save target is 10–13, so an unaided dying character is on a roughly two-round clock and the party’s Leader had better hurry. As your save improves across the levels, veterans cling to life far more reliably, but they are still vulnerable to death from monsters because monsters do larger amounts of damage. Higher level characters die because of the one catastrophic blow that punches past their Constitution buffer and not to a goblin’s lucky scratch. Lower level characters, who fight monsters who do less damage, die from the scratch more than the catastrophic. The static negative Constitution cushion quietly shrinks in importance as monster damage climbs. It is generous exactly when you need it at low level, but no longer much of a net once the dragons come out. Just like the second wind rule.

Rule 4 — Skills, In Brief (full system later)

The second post in the series (the first with any mechanics) promised a skill system, and I am working on those, but I’ll be presenting the classes before the skills and combat articles so I want to give you a glimpse of what I am thinking. I’ve made another “informed by the modern” choice here that, more than any of the other choices, shifts whether this game feels like one more retroclone or like its own thing. At first, it’s going to look a little like Inspectres, or Powered by the Apocalypse, but then you’ll see it’s really B/X inspired.

I do not want to use the common roll a d20 under an ability score for skills. Instead, I’d like to roll 2d6.

The Skill Roll. To attempt something uncertain, roll 2d6, add the modifier of the governing ability (−3 to +3), and add any knack bonus from your class if you’re trained. Read the total on the table:

Difficulty shifts the roll: Easy +2 · Moderate +0 · Hard −2 · Brutal −4.

If that table looks familiar, it should. These are the exact breakpoints of the B/X reaction roll (2 / 3–5 / 6–8 / 9–11 / 12). The reaction die, the morale die, the loyalty die all use these. B/X has a resolution mechanic for a lot of uncertain human outcomes using 2d6. All I am doing is making this same table more universal in practice so that it applies to skills as well. This isn’t a mechanic imported from InSpectres, Dungeon World or the Powered by the Apocalypse family. It’s the reaction die B/X has used since 1981, promoted to full system integration. The bell curve does more than what a d20 can. It centers outcomes on the mixed result without needing a huge range of numbers. So the interesting answer (”yes, but…”) is the most common one, and a single point of modifier has massive effects rather than being a 5% a rounding error.

Two more things fall out of it, both of them features rather than flaws. The roll is roll-high-is-good, matching your attacks and saves instead of inverting them. And the math is flat across levels. In this case the modifiers come from abilities and training, not from a level-scaling table that cancels itself out. This explains how 0-level carpenters can be masters of their craft and doesn’t require every NPC to be superhuman just to do their job. That’s the same anti-treadmill instinct behind the whole project. It also pairs naturally with the one-tier B/X narrative frame. B/X characters don’t go from gongfarmer to gods like they can in BECMI or 3.x. They always remain vulnerable. So for this system, the difficulty axis is just Easy / Moderate / Hard (Brutal for the truly desperate). Anything beyond what 4e calls Heroic scale simply isn’t a thing mortals do in this game. (The eventual BECMI variant, climbing to level 36, will likely layer the Heroic/Paragon/Epic tiers back on, because across that range the narrative arc genuinely changes from gongfarmer to god. For B/X, one axis is plenty.)

How a knack plugs in. Knacks are what I am calling skills in this rules set, because I like the sound of a player saying “I have a Knack for that.” Knacks are written using GAZ1’s own Skill (Ability) notation, so you’ll see things like Knowledge of City Guard Tactics (Int), Riding (Dex), Persuasion (Cha). The ability in the parentheses tells you which modifier to add. Being trained in the knack adds a flat +2 on top (a number we’ll tune in play because that might be too much of a benefit). If you have no knack for the task, you roll anyway, raw 2d6 plus the bare ability modifier, because in this game, as in Moldvay’s, there is always a chance. Each class grants a few knacks, and each character’s background grants a couple more. The Thief’s percentile skills survive intact as that class’s signature kit, untouched by all of this because I genuinely like that B/X is a game of multiple subsystems.

Rule 5 — Encounters and Exploits

Finally, we get to the 4e’s “cool thing every fight” mechanical feel without 4e’s binder of powers.

In my game, most of what a class does is at-will. Characters have basic attacks and might have a stance they adopt or the ability to use a role’s signature interaction. On top of that, each class gets a small number of Exploits. These are stronger maneuvers you can pull once per encounter (martial classes) or that cost a spell slot (casters). Following from Robert Schwalb’s article on formatting and his formatting template, I might just make this 3 times a day or 1 + Prime Requisite Bonus a Day, but I’m not sure yet. I discussed this dilemma last year.

Robert Schwalb's Reformatted Cleric

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“Once per encounter” is the resource that paces the cool benefits. Players want things like disarm, rallying shouts, and perfect backstabs, and an encounter is a good pace for that, but so is an x # of times per day mechanic and that might feel more old school and less 4e. One benefit to once per encounter is that so there’s no new bookkeeping. A typical low-level character in my game will have one stance and one or two exploits. I’m basing that on the Essentials presentation of 4e, which simplified things so that classes had a few pieces, all of them good, and didn’t need a spreadsheet.

Okay, that’s the skeleton. Now let’s build someone.

Making a Character

Making a character takes about ten steps. If you’ve made a B/X character, eight of these are from the earlier rulebook, but the new-school flavor is concentrated in Steps 1, 2, and 4.

Step 1 — Choose your class, and meet your role. Pick from Fighter (Defender), Thief (Striker), Magic-User (Controller), or Cleric (Leader). The first classes offered with be those combinations, but later classes will mix class and role to interesting effects. Players choosing first means they know which ability score to favor before they roll and players know your job within the party.

Step 2 — Roll your abilities. Roll 4d6, drop the lowest die, for your class’s prime requisite. Roll 3d6 in order for the other five abilities. If your class has two prime requisites (the Elf will), choose which one gets the 4d6 roll and the other is rolled straight 3d6 in order. This nudges you toward being good at the thing your archetype is about, while keeping you pleasantly average everywhere else.

Step 3 — Note your prime-requisite XP bonus. Unchanged from B/X:

The 4d6 roll in Step 2 exists partly to make this bonus more likely. Heroes should feel a little better than everyone else.

Step 4 — Roll hit points (with a heroic floor). Roll your class Hit Die and add your Constitution modifier (minimum 1 per die). At 1st level, take the maximum die result instead of rolling. First level is where B/X is cruelest, and a maxed first die is my preferred fix. If you prefer to roll, you can use the Basic book’s own option and reroll any 1 or 2. Your table, your call.

Step 5 — Set your Second Wind. Your Second Wind heals one Hit Die + Con modifier, and you have 1 + Con modifier uses per day (minimum 1). Write the value down and change it if your Con modifier ever changes due to magic.

Step 6 — Armor Class. Buy armor in Step 9, then read AC off the B/X armor table as normal (descending: lower is better). If your table prefers ascending AC, convert with Ascending AC = 19 − Descending AC, and “to hit” becomes “roll d20 + bonuses ≥ target’s ascending AC.” Both produce identical results. I default to descending because I want to pay homage to the original rules.

Step 7 — Attack and saving throws. Use the B/X Character Attacks table and the Saving Throws table for your class and level. Nothing changes here.

Step 8 — Pick a background. Choose a heritage. For Karameikos this will be Traladaran, Thyatian, or a demihuman people. Your heritage grants a language and one knack (a trained skill like fishing because a fisher knows rivers and weather where a Thyatian gentry-child knows letters and heraldry). Pick one more knack that fits your character’s history. These are your first entries in the skill system, and they’re the seeds of who this person is in the Grand Duchy.

Step 9 — Buy equipment. Roll 3d6 × 10 gold and shop the B/X equipment lists. Armor, weapons, torches, iron rations, a ten-foot pole. Don’t forget that ten-foot pole.

Step 10 — Alignment and name. Law, Neutral, or Chaos. Then name your hero. You’re done, and you should be able to do it in about the time it takes to make a Moldvay character.

The Class Template

So that the class entries stay consistent (and stay short), each one follows the same template. Here’s the outline, so you know what’s coming when the Fighter and Cleric arrive next entry:

• Role & Tagline — Defender/Striker/Controller/Leader, and the one-line description.

• Prime Requisite(s) — what gets the 4d6 roll.

• The B/X Core — Hit Die, allowed armor and weapons, save category, the XP/level table.

• Role Feature — the signature interaction (Mark, Quarry, Hinder, or Inspire), with mechanical specifics.

• Stance — an at-will choice that’s always on in an encounter after the player activates it.

• Exploits — the small set of once-per-encounter maneuvers (or spell-fueled tricks), gained as you level.

• Knacks — the class’s trained skills.

• Progression — what you get at each level, at a glance.

The game will start with four classes and four roles that use this template, but we already have the option for 16 classes by combining class and role. A party with one of each should feel like a 4e party while playing like a basic party. You’ll have the Defender holding the line, the Striker deleting a threat, the Controller bending the room, and the Leader keeping everyone upright. All with rules that play fast, are lethal-enough, and can be learned in an evening.

Next: The Fighter and the Cleric

I am starting with the Fighter in the first class article because it’s the class B/X left empty-handed without special abilities. This gives me the best opportunity to give a clean demonstration of my whole method. I’ll take the bare-bones Basic fighter and turn it into a proper Defender with a Mark, a stance or two, and a couple of exploits and I won’t alter the underlying mechanics significantly. If the Fighter works, the rest is downhill, because the other three classes are already better fits with the core roles.

Please tell me where I’ve got it wrong in your opinion. What would you change? The survivability dial in particular with maxxed first-level HP, Second Wind capped by Constitution, and dying at negative-Con is the one knob I’m most willing to dial down to more lethal or at least provide options. So if it feels too soft or too generous for the game you want to run, now’s the moment to say so.

There is a particular pleasure in watching a game begin as a translation and evolve into something completely new, that gets translated into the language of the game that originally inspired it. If you were to ask me what my current favorite role playing games are, the list would certainly include D&D Basic/Expert, DC Heroes, and Dragonbane. Two of those games are currently out of print, but Free League’s 2023 fantasy roleplaying game is currently in print and keeps gaining new fans. Dragonbane was published in English after a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised 7,820,052 kr (approximately $831,529) in celebration of the 40th Anniversary of “Scandanavia’s first and biggest role playing game.”

The end result of that campaign was a new and shiny boxed set with wonderful art by Johan Egerkrans that included monsters and mallard adventurers. The game featured a brisk d20 engine and the kind of production polish that has made Free League the envy of the hobby. The product was new, but the game itself was only truly new to English speaking audiences. It was advertised as a translation of Drakar och Demoner (Dragons & Demons), which was to Scandinavia what D&D was to much of the rest of the world. Dragonbane wasn’t the first attempt to bring Drakar och Demoner rules to English speaking gamers, that was attempted earlier by Trudvang and Ruin Masters. It was, however, the first that truly clicked with modern English speaking gamers. Why Drakar och Demoner became Scandinavia’s D&D, and what that means for the game mechanics, is itself a fascinating piece of secondhand Chaosium history. And the reason that Dragonbane succeeded where others failed, is related to the reasons for Drakar och Demoner’s initial success in Scandinavia.

Any honest review of Dragonbane must follow the game’s bloodline back about forty-five years, across an ocean and a translation, to two slim Chaosium booklets and a playtester who launched a game company. I had long heard that Drakar och Demoner was an adaptation of Chaosium’s Magic World rules from their Worlds of Wonder boxed set, but it wasn’t until I looked at a copy of the game myself (received in pdf form as a part of a RiotMinds Kickstarter project for an earlier English adaptation of Drakar och Demoner) that I began to suspect that early Drakar och Demoner wasn’t merely an adaptation of Magic World and Basic Role Playing, but a translation of them. This was something I was able to verify fully after working with Claude to translate the Drakar och Demoner first edition pdf.

What the First Edition of Drakar och Demoner Was

A while back I did something that only faintly obsessive gamers do. I followed up “gaming lore” and worked with Claude to produce a complete English translation of the 1982 first edition of Drakar och Demoner. In the process, I discovered that the game was not, as gaming lore often claimed, “based on RuneQuest.” It was a direct Swedish translation of two specific books that were a part of Chaosium’s Worlds of Wonder boxed set. Part 1 of Drakar och Demoner, aka Del 1, translated Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis’s Basic Role-Playing (the 16-page “BRP” booklet from the 1980 Worlds of Wonder boxed set) and Steve Perrin’s Magic World (the fantasy role playing game in that same boxed set).

You can see the seams if you put the books side by side. The 1982 DoD introduction, the dice-reading lesson, the farm-boy-goes-to-town example, the coal-shovel-versus-rat fight, the wagon-loading list of objects to lift against the Resistance Table, the arm-wrestling example with three named opponents are all there. These are not “inspired by” Basic Role-Playing, they are Basic Role-Playing, rendered into Swedish almost word for word. As with any translation, there is some localization in the rule book but other than that it’s a licensed clone…yes, licensed. Once the Swedish text moves past character basics into professions, magic, and monsters, in Part 2 (Del 2), it is just as plainly Magic World. The warrior/rogue/sage trio (lightly renamed warrior/outlaw/scholar when I translated it back into English, but that’s just Claude picking synonyms), the Sorcerer’s Guild, the spell list from Blast and Fire/Frost to Conjure Elemental, the chimera and manticore and demon-with-1d6+1-random-traits is all there, reorganized and localized.

I’m not highlighting this as a criticism, any more than I would knock Games Workshop for publishing their own English printing of Dungeons & Dragons (which they did and it features a beautiful John Blanche cover).

Translating a role playing game is perfectly honorable thing to have done in 1982. It’s also an honorable thing to do today, so long as you license the game and Target Games AB (yes, the same one that later made Mutant Chronicles) did just that. While it is true that Basic Role Play is an offshoot of Runequest, it lacks a lot of the granularity that often alienates people from that excellent game. Runequest melee combat can take a very long time to play and Basic Role Play streamlines that process and that streamlining is also why Dragonbane exploded while Trudvang and Ruin Masters had only limited success. Those two games included a lot of granular elements from Runequest combat, while Dragonbane took influence from the “Expert” editions of Drakar och Demoner and shifted from percentile to d20 (still roll low) and kept the combat system simple. Drakar och Demoner succeeded in Scandinavia because it was more coherent than early D&D, but also because it was easy to play. Dragonbane is also coherent and easy to play where Trudvang and Ruin Masters are arcane and take time to learn.

Why Does No One Talk About Fredrik Malmberg?

When I read histories of the role playing game hobby, there is one name that stands out to me for its absence in most histories. It’s a name that is associated with so many wonderful gaming products, and more than a few pop culture products. Not only was this person responsible for Drakar och Demoner, but he is the reason for the Mutant Chronicles role playing game (and connected board games and skirmish miniature games). He’s the Swedish equivalent of Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Steve Jackson, and Ian Livingstone, all rolled into one person. Yet most accounts of Dragonbane‘s heritage breeze right past his name. Which is all the more odd, given this person’s business acumen. Not only did he create a gaming company empire, that had its ups and downs like any other game company, but he eventually became the CEO of the company who owns the rights to Conan and a host of other Robert E. Howard characters. You can find him if you flip to the credits page of Magic World (1982) and look down in the playtester list. First, you’ll find the names Alan LaVergne, Keith DeBisschop, Charlie Krank, Tadashi Ehara, and the rest of the Chaosium Berkeley crowd, but you’ll also see another name, Fred Malmberg.

That’s the same Fredrik Malmberg, who is credited on the 1982 Drakar och Demoner as one of its Swedish adapters (alongside Tomas Björklund and Lars-Åke Thor). His copyright line sits on the bottom of the Drakar och Demoner title page. A man who helped playtest Magic World for Chaosium in California is the same man who carried that exact material across the Atlantic and turned it into the foundational Swedish RPG. The first edition of Drakar och Demoner wasn’t created by a stranger who stumbled across Chaosium’s work. He was a playtester who brought the game home for his friends and fellow countrymen to play. Whether he playtested the game at a convention, like GenCon, and thought it would be a better fit for his home market is something I can only guess. But that is, in fact, my guess.

So when Dragonbane opens its rulebook in 2023 and tells you, gently, that it has “one foot firmly planted in the heritage of decades of Swedish gaming,” understand that the heel of that foot is still standing on a Steve Perrin booklet that Fredrik Malmberg helped playtest.

How a BRP Game Learned to Roll a d20

The most interesting thing about Dragonbane mechanically, and the thing reviewers tend to either celebrate or quietly resent depending on which decade they started playing role playing games, is that it is a roll-under game played using a d20. You have a skill value that is usually somewhere in the 5–18 range. If you want to do something in the game, you roll a twenty-sided die and you want to come in at or beneath your number. A natural 1 is a “Dragon” (critical success), and a natural 20 is a “Demon” (fumble). It feels, to a Call of Cthulhu or Runequest veteran, like BRP wearing a borrowed jacket. You’ve still got the skill use based advancement and the roll under mechanics that are very Call of Cthulhu/Runequest in feel, but you also have a strange class-based foundational architecture and a lethal but not grinding combat that are all unmistakably Basic Role Playing. There is also one major difference, the percentile dice are gone.

This is not Free League’s invention, and it is important for understanding what Dragonbane is and why it connected so when with modern English speaking gamers. The d20 conversion happened in Sweden in one version of the Drakar och Demoner game. In 1985, Malmberg and crew published a product called Drakar och Demoner Expert (or EDD, as I imagine Swedish grognards still call it), which interestingly enough given recent developments features a familiar Albino Sword & Sorcery character.

Classic Drakar och Demoner like its BRP parent, expressed skills in percentages moved in increments of 5%. If every meaningful step on your skill ladder is a multiple of five, then your d100 is in practice no different than a d20 roll because a d20 will resolve exactly the same probabilities with one die instead of two and no mental arithmetic. The Expert rules swapped the percentile dice for a d20 roll-under, complicated a few subsystems, and effectively spun off into a self-contained game. From 1985 forward, most published DoD material was statted for Expert, and the later editions kept the d20 straight through RiotMinds’ sixth and seventh editions and the Ruin Masters remake. Eventually it came into Free League’s hands when they bought the rights and produced the English-language Dragonbane, though Dragonbane removed some of the more complex stumbling blocks from Ruin Masters and Trudvang. In some ways, Dragonbane is a Basic version of Drakar och Demoner Expert, which is a simpler (and more complex in some areas) version of Drakar och Demoner.

Free League did not graft a fashionable d20 onto a percentile corpse. Instead, they further adapted a forty-year-old Swedish design decision and modernized around it for modern gamers who liked the streamlined rules of D&D 5th edition and other recent role playing games. The new rules folded in a deck-of-cards initiative, a boon/bane advantage mechanic inspired by 5e, a tighter one-action combat economy, and a Year Zero Engine sensibility for conditions and pushing. The result reads, to my eye, as the most playable descendant the BRP family has produced for any genre. It starts with BRP’s skeleton but adds some interesting additions. The weapons of Dragonbane may hit harder and the armor protects less, but healing is far more forgiving than the brutal one hit point per week recovery the 1982 rules inherited from Magic World. Purists can mourn the loss of attritional grit. I find it a fair trade for a game you can actually convene four busy adults to play on a weeknight. I’m especially fond of the way that monsters work in Dragonbane. The rules don’t require the GM to be tactically cruel and use tons of cognitive load ensuring the monsters behave in optimal manners. Instead Dragonbane has “true monster,” as opposed to humanoids, use random charts to determine their actions. This ensures fairness and simplicity, and makes the game perfect for solo play as well. Make no mistake, dragons are still a nightmare for player characters, but statting them up and running them doesn’t take hours of investment.

Elric Comes Round Again

Remember when I said it was interesting that a certain Albino Emperor was on the cover of Drakar och Demoner Expert? In May of this year, Free League announced they would be releasing Legends of Stormbringer: Roleplaying in the World of Elric. It’s an officially licensed Michael Moorcock game built on the Dragonbane engine, with veteran Stormbringer hand Richard Watts leading the setting work. You can read the announcement straight from the press release. The preliminary cover art is the classic Michael Whelan cover of the Elric novel Stormbringer. is the same artist whose Elric featured prominently on those old Drakar och Demoner boxes for a decade. Now that same art is finally being featured on a version of the rule actually committed to that character.

That a Swedish BRP-derived d20 engine is now going to have an Elric role playing game is even more interesting because Elric and BRP were entangled from almost the beginning. That entanglement featured the same designer who wrote Worlds of Wonder and Basic Role Playing. Who is also the man responsible for the “Perrin Conventions” that form the core of D&D “folk” play, but that is a discussion for another time and post.

Elric’s first appearance in any roleplaying product was not a dedicated game at all. He first appeared in TSR’s Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes (1976) for the original Dungeons & Dragons. When he, more famously, appeared in the Melnibonéan Mythos chapter of Deities & Demigods (1980) for AD&D, a legal kerfuffle emerged. That section was soon subject to cease-and-desist letters from Chaosium because they believed they had exclusive rights to using the character in role playing games. I won’t go too deep into the weeds here, but I will say that the legal issues are more complex than many gamers imply. Michael Moorcock told both Chaosium and TSR that they could use his character and in the end didn’t receive any royalties (until recently because James Lowder is the best) for those early products.

Just in case you think that only Chaosium dropped the ball, TSR eventually pulled Elric from later printings for a kind of crappy reason. It wasn’t just because Chaosium already held the Moorcock license, because TSR and Chaosium came to an agreement that so long as TSR included a “Thank You” then they could use the characters. The Blume brothers thought this was too much, so they dropped the character from Deities & Demigods (though not the thank you for one printing which is odd in itself). In the end the first full roleplaying game built around Elric was Chaosium’s Stormbringer (1981), designed by Ken St. Andre and, once again, Steve Perrin. Stormbringer was built solidly on the pure Basic Role-Playing chassis, rather then the advanced Runequest one.

As I said at the beginning, it’s interesting to watch a game’s journey from one language to another and back again through both translation and rules evolution. Steve Perrin distilled RuneQuest into BRP and Magic World. Perrin then co-writes Stormbringer, the first Elric RPG, on that same BRP foundation. Fredrik Malmberg playtested Magic World, and then adapted it (with BRP) into Drakar och Demoner. DoD goes d20 with the 1985 Expert rules and uses Whelan’s Elric on its covers for ten years. Free League revives DoD as Dragonbane. And now Dragonbane will host Elric again, under a Whelan cover, forty-five years after Perrin first put the Black Sword to a percentile roll.

Dragonbane is a wonderful game on its own terms. It’s fast, lethal, charming, and genuinely easy to teach. It combines old school and new school mentalities in wonderful ways, but another reason to love the game is that it closes a loop much of the hobby, especially newer players, might not know was open. Buy the box for the ducks and the streamlined combat. Keep it for the fact that, in your hands, you are holding the long Swedish echo of a Steve Perrin booklet, and that the echo is about to start singing Elric’s doom-song one more time.

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.