Weekly Geekly Rundown for January 19, 2024

Loss, Rebirth, and Nostalgia

RIP Jannell Jaquays (1956 -2024)

Dungeons & Dragons will be celebrating its 50th Birthday soon and the role playing game hobby is only slightly older than that. How much older depends on whether you consider the Braunsteins of Minnesota or the Hyborian Age of the U.K. gaming scene to be the genesis of the hobby. These communities interacted and shared membership, so it’s hard to make a claim as to when a part of the war gaming hobby became the role playing game hobby. What is known for certain is that the number of creators of the hobby still with us is ever decreasing and one of the most influential early creators died earlier this month.

Jennell Jaquays began her career in the gaming hobby illustrating and designing adventures for scrappy young game companies like Judges Guild (who made support products for D&D) and Chaosium (who made competitive products). She went on to work for almost every major game company from the 70s to the 2000s. Her work is iconic and includes classic gaming supplements the she wrote and illustrated like her Central Casting series of books for Catalyst (aka Flying Buffalo) and large publisher cover art such as the painting she did for TSR’s Dragon Mountain campaign setting. She was a giant in the field and the web will be filled with loving obituaries from friends and fans, such as this one from Chaosium.

While a full bibliography of her work would take several months to discuss and write about, there is one odd corner of the hobby that I always associate Jannell very strongly. It’s the introduction of anthropomorphic races in role playing games. There was a time when I was resistant to allowing animorphs into my game sessions, but it was Jannell’s work in Runequest and Bruce Heard’s work in Mystara products that brought me around. In particular, it was the Duck race in Runequest.

I’m not sure what the first humanoid animal player character option was, but the oldest I can think of are the Duck race that have been a part of Runequest since the first edition in 1978. Tunnels & Trolls (1975) and Monsters! Monsters! (1976) come close in time and concept to beating out Runequest, as both provide options for “monster” characters, but none of the options included are as explicitly anthropomorphic animals as Runequest’s Ducks.

According to Chaosium President Rick Mients (2020 and 2024), Ducks have been a part of Runequest since the initial playtests and served as a proxy for Hobbits. Though Ducks are described in the 1st Edition of Runequest (see above from page 78), Mients asserts that the earliest drawing of the Duck species was the cover illustration of Wyrm’s Footnotes #8 (1980) by Jennell Jaquays. She certainly played a part in popularizing the species as she also co-wrote and illustrated the Runequest adventure The Legendary Duck Tower for Judge’s Guild. The adventure was a play on her popular D&D Adventure The Dark Tower, which was recently reincarnated in a Deluxe Edition Kickstarter by Goodman Games. That adventure will be out soon and my copy will be shipped when the game is released. Sadly, Jannell won’t be around to see the new edition, nor will she see how her work will continue to inspire a new era of gamers.

I currently run a D&D campaign for my teenage twin daughters and their friends. We are currently playing the Dragonlance campaign published for the 5th Edition of D&D, but the group is already pitching what the next campaign should be. They want it to be an all anthropomorphic game and I’m going to recommend that someone play a Duck, maybe a Duck named Jannell. I cannot thank her enough for the inspiration she brought to my gaming table over the decades, but I can make sure to acknowledge and share that inspiration with a new generation.

News in Animation

I’ve mentioned a couple of times how my wife is my favorite cartoonist, and that she’s won a couple of awards for her work, but I’ve never mentioned the creation that inspired her to create her own content. When Jody was a kid, she was a HUGE Elfquest fan. She read every issue and even purchased the Chaosium role playing game based on the series. The work of Wendy and Richard Pini (WaRP), and their success in the independent comic book market, inspired her to make her own creations. Yes, she had other inspirations, but if you look through her sketchbook you’ll find a lot of youthful sketches of Elfquest inspired characters.

Needless to say, she’s pretty excited with the recent news that Fox has announced an Elfquest animated series is in the works. Almost as excited as she was to learn that Wendy and Richard allow you to read the series for free on their website. The show far enough along development road that they’ve sent out press releases to major venues like Deadline, so it looks like this might actually happen.

Development Hell is a real thing though. I’m still waiting for a certain Jim Henson project a friend worked on to get released and Wendy Pini fans still wish she’d been able to get her Elric animated film produced. A lot of great projects die after they are announced, but official announcements like this most recent one tend to come to fruition. I cannot wait to see what is coming down the pipeline.

Role Playing Game Recommendation and a Wishlist Item

Before I take you down a long memory lane, I’d like to recommend an upcoming crowdfunding campaign from Pinnacle Entertainment Group. The team that brought you Deadlands and Savage Worlds has a new role playing board game coming out called Doom Guard. This board game takes place in the Necessary Evil supervillains step up after all the superheroes are dead Savage Worlds setting and looks like a ton of fun. Where in Necessary Evil, the players take the role of supervillains who are the last defenders of the Earth against an Alien invasion (think Doctor Doom fights the Aliens from Independence Day), in this board game the villains are fighting the eldritch horror that is Cthulhu. Looks like a blast.

Now for a defense of a much maligned game and a mention of a game I wish had come out.

There are a couple of areas where my gaming opinions vary from those of the average gamer. My feelings about Candyland, as my recent post on the game show, are certainly different from those of the typical hobby gamer and those feelings also shape how I feel about Board Game Geek ratings. I tend to evaluate games not only against some concept of “the perfect game,” but also upon how well they achieve their stated goals and meet the needs of their particular audience.

I don’t, for example, evaluate Powered by the Apocalypse games by the same standards that I would a highly mechanical game like GURPS. The design intents are different and while I prefer one type of design over the other (I am not a big PbtA fan), I set my preferences aside as much as possible and focus on how I view the intended audience would accept the game. It’s why I love games like Hero Kids and but it doesn’t explain why I have a deep love of the TSR board game DragonStrike. That requires more elaboration, but love it I do.

I love it so much that there was a time when I required anyone playing in my D&D campaigns to watch the introductory video that was included in the DragonStrike boxed set. I absolutely loved the goofy balance of love for role playing games, Saturday Morning Cartoon scripting (the screenwriter of the video was a big name in SMCs), and a dash of American Gladiators. The game, and video, were intended to be an introduction to the role playing game hobby for people who had no idea what “those kids were doing with those strange dice and books with satanic images in them” were doing. It was intended to take up the space between a pure Dungeon Crawl board game like Heroquest and help players transition to more complex games like Dungeons & Dragons. It doesn’t quite meet the mark.

DragonStrike is a passable Dungeon Crawl game. It has cool maps and figures and interesting mechanics, but unlike Heroquest it didn’t expand beyond what is in the initial box. Once you’ve played the game, you are done with the “campaign” and your only choice is to transition to D&D. As Ben Riggs points out in his excellent book Slaying the Dragon, the entire reason this game was created was to be a gateway to D&D. Instead, Ben Riggs argues, it ended up being overprinted and helping bankrupt TSR. In Rigg’s analysis of DragonStrike, he seems to combine the failure of DragonStrike and Dragon Dice into a single event. Both were failures, of a kind, and both ended up having massive stockpiles in the warehouse, but it was both of them combined and not just DragonStrike as Riggs implies. Given how accurate Riggs was regarding other aspects of TSR’s failure, this was a pretty big oversite in my opinion. It’s an oversite that I think was partially fueled by his disdain for DragonStrike as a game, a disdain that comes across in droves in the book.

A part of his disdain must be rooted in how poorly it transitions into the D&D game. For a product that’s supposed to be a transition from board game to role playing game, it bears almost no mechanical similarity to the end goal. One does not use a twenty-sided die for any purpose in DragonStrike and there are no real “levels” etc. It’s a fun fantasy game, in my opinion dammit and I’m sticking with it, but it isn’t a good introduction to D&D. It was part of a wave of expensive introductory products released by TSR that included Black Box D&D and Dungeons and Dragons: Dragon Quest.

Black Box D&D is my absolute favorite introductory boxed set for the game. It used cutting edge (for the time) educational pedagogy to confuse new players via an arcane system of cards until they finally relented and just read the rule book. I kid, I kid. The cards are actually useful, but they are reminiscent of the various Grammar Kits I experienced as a child in English class and they really are based on cutting edge pedagogy.

Image from Timothy Brannan’s Excellent Blog The Other Side

Dragon Quest, on the other hand, was in reality what Dragon Strike purported to be. It was a board game that was close enough to D&D mechanically to be used as a foundation for playing that later game. It was also VERY expensive. Like Heroquest, it had a reusable and customizable cardboard map. It had mechanics very similar to D&D (the attribute bonuses are identical to B/X D&D) and was easy to play.

The fact is that TSR already had several games out that did what DragonStrike was designed to do. It’s a game that shouldn’t exist. It doesn’t fit its niche and even using my very forgiving standard evaluation rules, I should rate it fairly low. I don’t though. I love it and in large part that is Flint Dille’s fault, and Malibu’s. Like later gamer filmmakers, like the Dead Gentlemen, Dille managed to capture the kinds of stories that actually happen at the game table. He did so with performances that match the kinds of acting that happen in most gaming groups. Most of us don’t have award winning voice actors to hang out with. We’ve got Jan and Steve who remember doing Dramatic Interpretation competitions in Speech and Debate. They didn’t win much, but man were they committed. That’s what we have at our tables, and it is glorious. I love every minute of hammy overacting and bizarre side treks my gaming groups have done over the years and DragonStrike captures that vibe perfectly. When the Cleric says his prayer, “Summon all of you life force,” I’m all in. When the Wizard alternates between an American, Posh British, and Scottish? accent, I’m all in. It is D&D, even though it’s so far away from it.

That’s why, and boy did it take me forever to get here, I really wish that the sequel could have seen the light of day. As much as I love DragonStrike, I think I would have loved WildSpace even more. Given how thematically close it is to Baldur’s Gate 3, I wish Hasbro would pull the schematics out of the broken hard drives and launch a new version of the game. It is time.

Around the Substack Community

Ever since my dad introduced me to the amazing world of Doug Henning, I have adored illusion and illusionists. The ability of these entertainers to craft stories and to trick their audiences with a wink and a smile is truly magical. I’ve seen great shows in Vegas and celebrated Wedding Anniversaries at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles. From time to time, I’ve practiced card tricks. There is not better use of deception than to entertain and delight the way illusionists do. I am also a fan of Sword & Sorcery fiction and films (even the hokey ones). That’s why I was so intrigued by

Charlotte Pendragon

’s recent entries on Stunt Illusions on her Substack. They are a delightful look behind the curtain and demonstrate how sometimes, just sometimes, having the veil of illusion lifted makes the show even better.

The World of Stunt Illusions

Ben Milton’s Substack

The Glatisant: A Questing Beast Newsletter

highlights a lot of role playing games that are on sale with the new year. Ben’s own Knave should be arriving at doorsteps soon and this month’s Newsletter highlights one of the best RPG bargains ever with the Call of Cthulhu Humble Bundle.

New Year's OSR DnD Sale

I’m pretty sure that

J.Q. Graziano

has a spy camera in my house. His recent posts on Mayfair Games Role-Aids Fantastic Treasures books and the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Yearbook were topics I had planned for a future date. Needless to say, our senses of nostalgia align fairly closely.

RPG Fantastic Treasures: Myth, Magic & Folklore

Dungeons & Dragons Yearbook 2024

Ryan Burge

who is a scholar that writes about religion and politics at his

Graphs about Religion

Substack, which has a “teacher” rate, but no “poor adjunct graduate student” subscription level, does excellent analysis of the intersection of faith and politics in modern America. His approach is heavily data driven and he’s a whiz with the R programming language. His recent discussion of how Evangelical’s view issues of Climate Change are worth a read and square nicely with Dan Kahan’s research on Cultural Cognition. Polarization, political polarization, has seeped in to almost every aspect of our lives, but Burge’s analysis reveals some areas where there are still cross-cutting issues that give this fan of the Columbia school some hope for the future.

Do Evangelicals Care About Climate Change?

Weekly Film Article Cavalcade

Luke highlighted an article written by his friend Jeffrey Harris, who I might add to the regular Film Article Cavalcade if this article is any hint. Harris points out how the Amazon show Reacher included a fun Terminator 2 Easter Egg in this season’s storyline. It was a laugh out loud moment for me when it happened and even though the season’s final episode was a bit uneven, it was a really fun moment in a good season. Writing is a tough gig, so check out Harris’ article and give the blue collar reviewer some love.

The Luketania is Still Sailing Along

Luke Y. Thompson wrote a very positive review of the new show Echo on Disney+ for SuperHeroHype. Echo is a spinoff of the excellent Hawkeye series that came out a little more than a year ago and explores the backstory of one of the more interesting characters in that series. I’m not as “all in” as Luke is for the show, but I am a fan of the character and would like to see more exploration of the Daredevil/Hawkeye-verse the show implies.

Luke’s been trying to find the right venue for some of his reviews. His “brand” is pretty genre oriented, but his knowledge and tastes go far beyond that. He posts his longer form reviews here, but he’s been testing the waters in TikTok land for his shorter reviews. You might want to check them out.

Courtney Fairchild Howard’s Forays into Fiction

Courtney has a review of Ariana DeBose’s new science fiction film I.S.S. over at A.V. Club. Courtney was less than impressed with the picture. As per usual, Courtney has some delightful grammatical constructs in her piece. In this case, I particularly enjoyed this piece of alliteration “Plus, there’s a whole cringey callback involving a chintzy trinket Christian gives Kira that’s essentially Chekov’s Gift Shop Purchase.” Cringy, callback, chintzy, Christian, Kira, Chekov. That’s a lovely list of c sounds and shows the effort she puts into writing her reviews.

Her positive review of The Beekeeper for FreshFiction.tv shows that any objections she had to I.S.S. were due to the film itself and not due to a resistance to pure genre fair. Courtney, like Luke, has highly varied taste in film. She likes the things you are supposed to like, there is a reason we are “supposed to like them” after all. She also likes things whether or not you are supposed to and that’s why I include her here.

Music Recommendation

We will keep things simple this week because the rest of the post has gone on a bit long, but that’s the price I pay for doing a variety Newsletter. Sometimes I rave on and on about things that others might merely mention and that takes away from time that could be spent discussing other things. Those other things will have to wait until next week. For now, I’ll just make this quick recommendation.

One of the things I love about internetelevision is how it highlights varied and creative individuals sharing their passions in fun ways. A favorite genre of mine is the “what if musical mashup” genre where online musicians ask “what if so and so had written this song at such and such time?” It leads to some pretty interesting songs, such as this Joy Division/Smashing Pumpkins mashup.

I first discovered Joy Division when my dear friend Ron Peck made me a tape of songs “I should be listening to.” It was filled with an eclectic mix of songs from the New Wave, Punk, and Post-Punk movements and it includes many songs I still have on my playlist, such as Colourbox’s Hot Doggie. Ron had an amazingly broad range of tastes in every medium. He always seemed to be able to find the underappreciated gem. He was the one who ran Cyberpunk when it first came out. He was the one who let me run a Swashbuckler Paladin in 2nd Edition AD&D. He was a great friend with whom I spent many a “Two for Tuesday” night eating a late night dinner at the Riverboat Casino with where we chatted for hours. When I think about him, my heart is filled with the love I have for him. I miss him deeply.