Weekly Geekly Rundown for the Week of January 26, 2024

Happy 50th Birthday Dungeons & Dragons (Yes, that means this is all D&D all the time this week)

Dungeons & Dragons Turned 50!

According to historian Jon Peterson, Dungeon & Dragons’ “official” publication date was the last Sunday in January of 1974. You can read Jon’s various blog posts at Playing at the World to see the archival research he did in order to come up with that as the date. I’ve found it very convincing and happily posted my personal copy of the White Box Collector’s Edition published in various printings in the 1970s. Jon also argues that it is the 200th Anniversary of Bernhard Reiswitz’s Krieg-Spiel, the book that marks the true origin of the role playing and war gaming hobbies. That game was a continuation of Bernhard’s father’s work in 1812, a copy of which can be downloaded from the Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin.

Because of the father’s more abstract work having seen print, I’m not quite as convinced of this being both a 50th and 200th anniversary of our hobby. Though I might be being overly pedantic here (what gamer’s being pedantic?!) since the father’s version looks to be more of a “beta” version and the son’s work is more developed. Maybe we can think of the dad’s version being akin to the Braunsteins (based on Strategos which Book 1 and Book 2 can be found at HathiTrust) or Tony Bath’s Hyboria. It has almost all of the elements, but not quite the substance of what was to come. Ask a player what rules Dave Arneson used in his Blackmoor pre-D&D role playing game and there is some detail, but not enough to write a full game.

The game we play today is both mechanically far removed from the original Little Brown Books that were published 50 years ago and a natural evolution of them. There is little of the “Use Chainmail as your combat system” left in D&D’s DNA, but the “Alternate Combat System” included in the LBBs contains within it the basic mechanic that came to define the rules. We all now “roll a d20 and hope to roll high” when determining success or failure in our D&D games.

My very first Geekerati post was a brief discussion of how to use the original Chainmail rules system to run D&D games. It highlights some of the OSR designers who have discussed using Chainmail to run an RPG and the difficulties that entails. Chief among those difficulties is that Chainmail contains three distinct combat resolution systems and a DM has to decide how, when, and whether to use any of those systems. My own thoughts tend towards using only the Man to Man rules and refining them to the point of real utility.

One of these days I really want to put the effort into creating a viable game system based entirely off of the Little Brown Books and Chainmail that takes a different direction than Gygax, Arneson, Moldvay, Cook, and Mentzer ended up taking. What if the game had remained reliant on six-sided dice for combat and spell casting, only used twenty-sided dice for saving throws, and had high level fighters with 8 attacks a round? (Wait…we can already have high level fighters make 8 attacks a round in 5e. The more things change, the more they stay the same)

Anyway I’d like to find out and I think the 50th anniversary is the time to do it. It won’t interfere with my Heroes of Karameikos “1e Basic/Expert Gaming with 4e Feel” project, and if you’re looking forward to the next post along those lines we’ll be seeing that later this week.

Before I continue my “all D&D all the time” Rundown entry, it’s time to promote some of the regular weekly programming and share Substacks I follow and some of Luke Y. Thompson’s and Courtney Howard’s recent film reviews.

Around the Substack Community

Rediscovered Realms by J.Q. Graziano has an interesting recent post that is not only a good Substack read, but happen to fit in with the D&D anniversary theme. It’s a discussion of the high quality art in Cubicle 7’s role playing adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

There have been many attempts to adapt the title to rpg format, but I think that Cubicle 7 with their The One Ring and Adventures in Middle-Earth products managed to do what others had failed to accomplish. They made games that read and played semi-Tolkienesque (pretty darn Tolkienesque in the case of The One Ring).

Two of Cubicle 7’s key “innovations” were to use mechanics that attempted to emulate what happens in the tales, rather than to shoehorn the tales into existing rules, and to shift the timeline away from the War of the Ring so that the players’ characters could shine. To be fair in my criticism, there is a bit of shoehorning going on in the mechanically 5e based Adventures in Middle-Earth, but where conflict between D&D mechanics and Tolkien’s world design happened Cubicle 7 erred on the side of Tolkien. It’s less shoehorning than syncretism and as the two projects I’m thinking about might suggest I’m a big fan of syncretism.

THE ART of Adventures in Middle-Earth: Player's Guide

Patrick Buechner’s The Soloist - an indie RPG newsletter highlights some interesting solo role playing games and mentions that we are quickly approaching Zine Month. Historically, Zine Month has been pretty costly for me. It’s amazing how much you can spend on $5 RPG Zines when the community keeps producing interesting products. I’m taking a year off though, which some small exceptions, because I have a huge backlog of stuff to read. That shouldn’t stop you from checking out Patrick’s newsletter or heading over to Kickstarter to see what Zines are cooking this year.

📣 New solo RPGs, actual plays, Zine Month wrap-up, and more

While not a Substack article, Richard Baker has a rundown of his role in the creation of Birthright for the AD&D 2nd Edition role playing game on his personal blog. It’s an interesting peak behind one of my favorite game settings. Birthright will never see a reprint, but it was one heck of a concept.

Weekly Film Article Cavalcade

Nothing Kayfabe About the Notorious LYT

Luke’s weekly list of reviews includes an overview and review of the 4K release of Marvels. Even on his second viewing, Luke is more impressed with the film than I was. He likes the same things I liked about the film. Iman Vellani is a blast to watch and I cannot wait to see what future projects she chooses. She’s clearly a fan of the source material and her enthusiasm is infectious. I’m also a huge fan of the Kittens.

My critiques are two fold. the first is along the lines of what is typically a complaint about Superman adaptations. Marvel struggles with adapting its cosmic heroes to be emotionally believable. Captain Marvel is too aloof and lacks the tragedy (where she’s an alcoholic and where she almost died when Rogue stole her powers) or fun of her comic book counterpart. Similarly, they missed the boat on Monica Rambeau, who was (as the kids say) “my Captain Marvel.” I grew up reading Avengers tales where Monica Rambeau became the chairperson of the team during a time of emotional conflict between many of the characters and where her deeply rooted family connection provided a solid leadership foundation. By giving Rambeau the stereotypical “lost a parent” motivating trauma, even though they use that in the film, they take away one of the things that made her stand out for me. Of course, this is all a legacy of having Captain Marvel’s original movie take place in the 90s, something that Luke mentions in his review. It’s just something that bothered me. Overall, I think the film is okay but has within it films I’d like to see.

Over at his personal blog, a place Luke doesn’t write much at, he’s posted his second annual entry in what I think is a genius idea. Last year e created his “Best Picture Nominations as Wrestling Gimmicks” concept and he’s run with it again this year. Had he been willing to expand on the idea, his post just has names and images and leaves it up to us to determine why each fits, I think I’d have loved to see it here. It’s just a unique idea, let alone the thought of what each film would say in an Mean Gene interview.

Courtney Fairchild Howard Knows Her Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Over on the Book of Faces and on X-Twitter, Courtney made sure to remind me that today (January 29th) is the 65th Anniversary of the release of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. It’s her favorite Disney animated films and one of my favorite films of all time. It’s not only beautifully illustrated, and contains one of the most epic fantasy battle sequences of all time, one of its most famous song is an adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Ballet. Just a masterpiece.

Other than that, Courtney’s been busy watching the films at the Sundance Film Festival and I haven’t seen a full review in the stream. A lot of micro reviews on her X feed though that made me interested in some of the films coming out of Sundance.

Just a Little Scoop

As I’ve mentioned before, Scott Mendelson is one of my favorite analysts of the film industry. He’s got a couple of recent newsletter posts that are really worth highlighting. The first discusses how streamers might be more dependent on theatrical films and network TV than they care to admit. For all the talk of “cord cutting,” which usually amounts to what I think of as cord shifting, people’s favorite shows tend to be the things that air on regular old TV. The convenience of streaming matters, and I certainly love getting to watch ITV shows like Shetland via Britbox, but it isn’t a substitute for the creative work being done by the networks. There are still some bright minds working in “traditional” media and I’m of the opinion that we just live in a world of more options rather than substitutes.

Non-Shocker: Most Streaming Viewers Are Watching Theatrical Movies And Network TV

Oh, and I would never have realized that Aquaman 2 did as well as it has done without him writing about it. Sure, it pales in comparison to the first one and isn’t a blockbuster, but it’s not exactly a flop.

'Aquaman 2' Passes $400M and 'Godzilla Minus One' Tops 'Hero' as 'Beekeeper' Wins Weekend

Dungeons & Dragons Themed Movie Recommendation

To date, there have been four feature length official Dungeons & Dragons movies. The first three were made on increasingly modest budgets, though the first entry starring Jeremy Irons did have a reasonably sized budget for a fantasy film at the time. The films on the list are Dungeons & Dragons (2000), Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God (2005), Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness (2012), and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) and each has its virtues.

Yes, you read that right. Each has its virtues. I’m recommending all four films.

The first Dungeons & Dragons film was a disappointment to most fans, especially since it came out just as the hype for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films was getting rolling. The film released on December 8th, 2000 and while Fellowship of the Ring was still a year from release, fans knew that more could be achieved in fantasy films. Besides, we all knew that good fantasy films were possible. We’d all seen Ladyhawke, Dragonslayer, and Willow. Though I know many differ on whether all those are high quality, I think they are, they all demonstrated an ability on the part of Hollywood to at least take fantasy seriously.

What fans tend to forget is that these diamonds were buried in a pile of fantasy crap. From Deathstalker, The Barbarians, Krull, and Hawk the Slayer to Barbarian Queen, Prisoners of the Lost Universe, Beastmaster, and The Sword and the Sorcerer, Hollywood presented fantasy as low budget schlock. I love most of those films, but they aren’t the height of craftsmanship. Krull’s director has a perfect film under his belt (Breaking Away is a masterpiece), but Krull is no Breaking Away. For every Excalibur, we got ten pieces of excrement.

In the grand scheme of things, 2000s Dungeons & Dragons is a mid-tier fantasy film. It’s problems lie mostly where it tried to do more than the budget allowed. The big dragon battle at the end would be great with a proper budget, but it doesn’t have one. The second problem with the film was that it wasn’t “D&D.” It didn’t take place in a recognizably D&D-esque setting. That’s what they tried to change in the sequels which directly reference D&D products. Heck, the second film even included a character based on the Frenzied Berserker prestige class. It was a film made by fans and for fans.

I’m not saying they are great cinema, but check them out. Also take some time to check out the animated Dragonlance film. The screenplay was written by a person I’ve played with. That’s right, he DM’d for me and so gets a special place in my heart. And, once again, if you watch that film, most of the problems are problems of budget and execution within a budget.

Dungeons & Dragons Themed Music Recommendation

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that there is no way that I can have multiple recommendations for D&D music. Well, yes I can and I’m going to give three recommendations from three separate decades.

1. First Quest: The Music 80s

Stu Horvath discusses First Quest one of the original “D&D Soundtrack” records over on his podcast. The music on the LP is wild and the copy of the album Stu is reviewing was my personal copy.

2. In the Garage by Weezer 90s
   
   Before there was Stranger Things, there was Weezer singing about rolling twelve-sided dice in the garage. The song is fantastic and it’s filled with nostalgia for me. Not only does it capture my childhood visits to my friend Sean’s house, but it reminds me of my role playing game sessions as an undergraduate where I played with my roommates. Good times.

3. The Official Dungeons & Dragons Soundtrack by Midnight Syndicate 00s

   
   Dungeons and/or Dragons may be “undermonetized,” but it sure has produced some interesting third party licensed content over the years and the Official D&D soundtrack by Midnight Syndicate was pretty cool. I mean if you haven’t started a game session with this score, have you really even played Dungeons & Dragons?