Caverns of Thracia & Dark Tower

Goodman Games reprints
Caverns of Thracia, published in 1979 by Judges Guild stands as one of the great play aids in the history of our hobby. Author Jennell Jaquays writing under the name Paul Jaquays, gives us a dungeon with a theme, monsters that make sense in the environment, multiple entrances and exits, multiple paths around each level and multiple ways to go up and down between levels. In other words, she teaches us how to do a dungeon adventure.
Caverns of Thracia is a pseudo ancient Greek mini-campaign setting that includes a ruined polis and four-level dungeon beneath. There are competing factions, the Death Cult of Thanatos and lots of other challenges to entertain players. Quite popular still and long out-of-print, Caverns of Thracia demands a pretty high price when it can be found on the secondary market.
Dark Tower, also originally published by Judges Guild in 1979 and authored by Ms. Jaquays is another classic dungeon adventure and well deserves a reprint. Dark Tower is the creation of an evil god set on destroying the forces of good, who conveniently live nearby. The Play aid draws the adventurers into the conflict between good and evil, fought out by cultists and priests, adventurers and monsters, and the gods themselves. Before I make this sound like there is more plot than sandbox, there isn't. The play aid is basically a situation and an area, competing factions and a place for adventurers to make choices.
Goodman Games has been steadily re-releasing some of the better Judges Guild products over the last couple of years. These are play aids written for the Original and early Advanced versions of the game we love and have not been "updated" to the current edition. These modules are tough in terms of PC death and assume large parties of 6-10 characters. Fortunately, I think editions such as White Box are ideal for experienced players to handle two or even three PCs at a time. Having two or three PCs makes it less of a problem when one (or two) meet death in a dungeon delve. Most of my high-level PCs have died at least once, after-all there are spells in the old game to bring the dead PC back to life.
It is my opinion that Jennell (Paul) Jaquays is one of the unsung heroes of our hobby. I say this for a number of reasons, foremost is her considerable talent in writing Play Aids. In an era when we didn't get much from TSR in terms of dungeons or play aids, Ms. Jaquays wrote play aids for several different tabletop games systems before moving on to the computer industry and in the process gave us some excellent examples of how to do adventures and dungeons. I have heard the term Jaquaying a dungeon used to indicate "making it the right way". The few early TSR dungeons published were designed for tournament play which meant they were linear, deadly and often had little or no rhyme-or-reason to their "ecology". 

Working Stiff and Special Snowflake

Making it all work together
Literature plays a significant role in influencing the type of story we are interested in telling at the game table. If our literary tastes run to superheroes saving the world from an evil plot or to the charming noble winning the hand of a true-love, we all tend to at least start out the hobby making characters who resemble our imaginary idols. To be sure, these "idols" take many forms and represent a multitude of "power levels", everything from the common peasant/working stiff to off-planet alien superheroes able to fly between planets.
In many ways it is difficult for a campaign to accommodate both superhero and working stiff. Perhaps less troublesome is the unique "special snowflake" PC, which may fit in power-wise with the rest of the campaign, but is so unique and unusual in other ways as to be problematic. I am talking about characters that run counter to type, the ONLY good example of an evil race, the LAST member of a race thought extinct for centuries. It is perhaps human nature to wish to stand out in a crowd, it can be more of an issue to draw a crowd where-ever one goes.
The art of crafting a unique and interesting PC that fills a niche in the party and is both interesting to play and to witness being played, is probably developed only over time. Modeling a PC on a character drawn from popular media is much easier. I prefer to run low-powered games and that seems the default of White Box and many other systems. As PCs gain levels and power the game changes, but most PCs start more in line with common people regarding power. Obviously a little above "normal", but not "super". Like-wise, I tend to prefer working stiff type PCs which blend into the milieu nicely over the special snowflakes that require extensive explanation and backstory, which frequently requires repeating every time the PCs encounter a new NPC. Yes, I play this out. It seems a necessary part of maintaining verisimilitude in the campaign.
The role-playing game is an implied social contract, to borrow a phrase, and as such each player is both entitled to play the game they want while also expected to fit into and be an active part of the collective endeavor. If it sounds like a balancing act, I think that is exactly what it amounts to. Balancing everyone's fun against the fun of everyone else.
The same can be said for a referee's setting or world. Some settings are definitely "working class", some more "special snowflake". One of the most important aspects of setting to me is that players be able to make meaningful choices and alter the world, if even in modest ways. As early designers noted it is also desirable for the PCs to fit into the setting and be a part of the make-believe society. Setting a destructive fire or taking out the head of the local thieve's guild should be within the realm of possibilities. The world should be changing and PCs should be able to be a part of that change.

The City of Terrors

UK print of a T&T solo
I have mentioned before my fondness for fantasy solo adventures. Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo wrote the very first one, Buffalo Castle (1976), for Ken St. Andre's Tunnels & Trolls (T&T) rule system. I saw these fine gentleman again at Origins over the weekend.  They were gracious enough to both autograph a hardcover copy of the new Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls. The popularity of the solo adventure peaked before hand-held devices made video gaming more portable, but in their day they were very popular.
The T&T solos were first published by Flying Buffalo Inc. using a standard 8 1/2" x 11" softcover format. In 1982 Puffin Books of the UK published their first Fighting Fantasy adventure game book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, in standard mass market paperback format. The Fighting Fantasy series were sold alongside science fiction/ fantasy novels in bookstores and reached a wide audience, both in the UK and overseas. About this time, Corgi Books, another UK publisher, entered the market with a series of digest sized paperback editions of the T&T rules and solos. The City of Terrors (1986), pictured above, is one of the Corgi T&T solos. In addition to resizing, the Corgi editions have new artwork and include an abbreviated version of the T&T rules, so The City of Terrors is a complete product. Unlike the Fighting Fantasy books which were just about fighting, this T&T adventure book includes rules for magic and has a list of spells that can be cast while adventuring in the solo. There are also a number of weapons and armor types to choose from, all adding variety and improving replay-ability.
The City of Terrors is written by Michael Stackpole, who did a few T&T solo titles for Flying Buffalo before moving on to novels. Mr. Stackpole is one of the many unsung heroes of our hobby. In addition to his work as a designer of games and solos, Mr. Stackpole authored several defenses of the hobby when it was under fire from some radical haters who wanted to equate it with devil worship. His articles "Devil Games? Nonsense", "The Truth About Role-Playing Games" and especially "The Pulling Report" (1990) effectively discredited the hostile opposition and quieted the nonsense criticism.
The City of Terrors, in its Corgi edition, is 96 pages, including 17 pages of rules, broken into numbered paragraphs where the decisions the reader makes together with some combat and saving throw dice rolls determines which numbered paragraph the reader turns to next. A number of illustrations connected to the paragraphs are scattered about the book, many are "inspired" by the original illustrations for the American edition and I find it amusing to compare the two. Flipping through the pages, I am reminded of the gonzo nature of this particular solo. Mr. Stackpole would go on to write a number of Star Wars novels and his interest in space is evident here through the encounter with a spaceman, complete with a selection of high-tech devices.
No urban adventure setting would be complete without an encounter with the criminal element. The City of Terrors does not disappoint my expectations, in fact it's hard to avoid such an encounter, but it's entertaining and provided you survive , worth the trouble. There is a lot more to do in The City of Terrors and I shall not spoil any more of the discovery. As a final note to this post, next week I will be traveling for work and I always throw in a couple solos when packing. Maybe it's time for another visit to The City of Terrors...

Complex or Rules Lite?

Is White Box a complex game or a rules-lite game?
I haven't given much thought to such things until recently. I notice that some systems bill themselves as "rules lite" like it is a good thing. Gamers talk about crunchy mechanics and most of us have been through the "more complex equals more realistic" hoop. Verisimilitude gets brought into the equation and sometimes I'm not sure what we are talking about anymore.
Complexity can come about for more than one reason. While learning White Box, I recall thinking it was very complex (teaching it can be complex too). There are a number of dissimilar subsystems, seemingly incomplete explanations that assume knowledge I didn't have and not much in the way of examples. The game changes somewhat each time the PCs level up and at certain levels the whole scheme changes, examples include when the party gains access to "invisibility" and "raise dead".
Putting that aside and looking at the game as a "one-off", there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle. Before the game can begin, there is preparation necessary above that of figuring out the rules. A referee must build a world, or at least a dungeon level for the players to explore. Then there is character generation and equipping the character, i.e. shopping and spell memorization. The perils of exploration, resource management - light source, surviving traps - making saving throws, mapping and getting through stuck doors. Once an encounter happens, there is the possibility of combat, which may involve spell casting. Morale may affect hirelings and monsters as things go badly. Providing things go well, there will be treasure and experience gained. All this is likely to take place in a single evening of play. In a campaign all the pieces are in constant motion.
While it is true that the basic concept is to "describe what you want your character to do and roll the die", which is simplicity itself, having rules to make sure things are handled consistently from one similar situation to the next and make things fair between players adds complexity. White Box depends on the referee to handle many things that will occur outside the scope of the written rules and this may be seen as a kind of complexity, one requiring a more experienced referee. As incomplete as they may be, the original three little brown books together number 110 pages of rules. This is no easy body of material to master and commit to memory since many of the sub-systems use unique mechanics.
Perhaps a truly rules-lite system would be one without levels where character play remains the same from session to session. There is no universal mechanic in White Box to apply to all situations, but perhaps rules-lite systems are marked by such a universal mechanic. We generally think the labels "rules-lite" and "rulings not rules" go together, but maybe that isn't necessarily true either.
It seems I am a bit shaky on just what a "rules-lite' system is or isn't, so how can I tell if White Box is complex or rules-lite? Maybe it's both? Maybe it doesn't matter?

New Game

Some thoughts on how we got where we are...
It all started with the White Box - well, maybe before, with the idea that led to the White Box - with some innovative wargamers, who painted miniature figures, who wrote rules for how to play games with the miniature figures and played those games around a table in a social setting with friends, usually rolling some dice.The games were based on shared interests in history and games, so the figures and rules were researched and based in history. Some of these guys - gamers were mostly men in those days - also liked to read science fiction and fantasy (sword & sorcery) stories. Also some of the wargames were man-to-man where each figure represented a single person, often with an individual name. The idea that led to the White Box was simply to combine this man-to-man style wargame (which is almost role-playing) with their interest in fantasy tropes.
At this point the hobby is born and our collective journey begins with this simple idea to mix the tabletop game and an interest in fantastic stories. Centered around Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the gamers in Lake Geneva and Minneapolis/St. Paul started to experiment. Chainmail got a fantasy supplement, a few pages in the back of the book, so miniature wargaming could be done with dragons, etc. Dungeon, the boardgame by David Megarry is evidence that the boardgame side of tabletop gaming was also experimenting with the new idea. Those early games led by Mr. Gygax, Mr. Arneson and friends would result in the Little Brown Books - White Box.
With publication the idea gained a wider audience and a new hobby was off and running as word spread quickly among several related groups - tabletop gamers, science fiction fans, etc. that there was this new "game thing" related to what we already know we like. Word spread that it was fun and fresh and like nothing else and lots of people wanted to try it. The target audience was (and is) bright, imaginative people who do what bright, imaginative people do - they they come up with even more ideas, variations on a theme, one might say, rule additions, new mechanics, whole new games which branch out into settings not covered by a fantasy role-playing game. Games about space travel and exploration, games about comic book superheroes, about cowboys of the old west and more.
The following steps were to broaden the scope of the new idea to encompass just about every way to play as a character in a story collectively told in a group. Then some of these bright, imaginative folks started to ask questions about the nature of this new thing, role-playing. How could it be used to develop useful real-life skills like teamwork, what value did it have in maturation and character building, problem solving. The internet allows a whole new level of communication, idea sharing and interfacing and sites like The Forge started talking about role-playing games in an analytical way. Theories developed and questions posed. Interfacing with social sciences, the discussion about the role stories play in our identity as individuals and groups began to include role-playing.
So now the question may be asked..."Where are we?"  Hasn't the idea grown beyond a simple game? I can't imagine that Mr. Gygax or Mr. Arneson or anyone else involved in the early days of the hobby could imagine what the idea would grow into. The popularity of the role-play game, in all its many forms, has resulted in the original idea directly influencing popular culture. So, we have come this far, and are still wondering where we are?

Shadow, Sword & Spell

Neo-Old School Sword & Sorcery RPG
Continuing to work through my stack of favorites from a couple years ago I have come to Shadow, Sword & Spell (SS&S) is written by Richard Iorio II, Looking through this 190 page digest sized book I am immediately reminded of why I placed it among my favorites. SS&S bills itself as "a humanistic, pulp fantasy game" with roots in the swords & sorcery genre of the 1930s to 1960s.  The authors listed as "inspiration" include some of my favorites, Fritz Leiber, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith as well as others. Tone and feeling, horror and discovery, secrets and mystery are described as what SS&S is about. These are all elements which I try to bring to my personal game as referee.
The tome pictured above is the Basic SS&S rulebook and in the tradition of B/X there is also an Expert rulebook in blue. Basic includes everything needed to play the game and Expert just adds more. The system mechanics of SS&S is Rogue Games' Twelve Degree engine (also used in other Rogue Games designs such as Colonial Gothic). The Twelve Degree system is a universal mechanic that involves rolling 2d12 equal to or under a Target Number (TN) to succeed. This is called a Test. There are three types of tests depending on whether your roll is opposed or against an ability or skill. Degree refers to how much difference there is between the roll and the TN, allowing one to refer to Degrees of Success or Failure. Characters are created with Hooks, which are story devices which can earn the player boons in the form of Action Points which in turn can be spent for free re-rolls, bonuses to TN and other advantages.
Chargen in SS&S is on the quick and easy side. Attributes, including sanity, are assigned values from a point pool. There are no classes, everyone is an "adventurer", but background does help define the character, such as being a user of magic. Hooks and skills round out the PC. Magic in SS&S is consistent with the sword & sorcery tradition therefore it is uncommon and practitioners pay a price. Each spell cast costs the caster vitality (health or hit points). Alchemy is offered as an alternative to spell magic, but even there one gets the impression the practitioner is delving into knowledge "man was not meant to know".
The last third of the Basic book is devoted to referee advice, setting and sample adventure. It is here that Mr. Iorio really catches my attention because he espouses the kind of game I strive for at my table. Gritty, challenging, focused on humans leading a hardscrabble, working stiff existence, the world of SS&S is as much about individual survival as it is robbing tombs, exploring lost cities and helping dispossessed rulers reclaim their crowns. While fabulous treasures await, it is assumed the successful adventurer will quickly squander (gambling, drinking and whoring away) any fortune gained. The publishing company is called Rogue Games and SS&S is all about rogues.
Mr. Iorio's Golden Vine Region is one of my favorite settings ever. It is part R.E. Howard, part renaissance Italy, and hits the sweet spot (in my opinion) with just the right amount of information to inspire the imagination and furnish lots of hooks and opportunities for sandbox play. Like in any good sword & sorcery setting, the Golden Vine Region bad guys are mostly humans and the author gives pages and pages of statted-out baddies of the human persuasion. There are a few "monster" type creatures here as well, just to add the occasional horror element (horror must be infrequent or it's not horror) and an introductory adventure that may suggest the mood in which the author games his setting. Though I didn't directly import the Golden Vine Region into my own Dreadmoor, I admit to borrowing heavily from what I found here.
While there are similarities to B/X, SS&S is its own game. It takes some of the traditional elements of the hobby and reinterprets them through a fairly narrow lens giving a system that has a lot of "personality" of its own. SS&S seems to know what it wants to be and I think does it quite well. The Twelve Degree system took a bit of thinking on my part to wrap my mind around, but I think now that I get it, it would produce a vary fast-paced, exciting combat where taking chances could pay off or result in injury to the PC.

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG

Adventure like 1974 intended you to...
No discussion of my OSR favorites would be complete without mentioning Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game (DCCRPG). I would say Dungeon Crawl Classics as a concept predates the OSR. The idea started with Joseph Goodman publishing old style dungeon crawl modules for 3rd Edition. The idea was an instant hit with old guys like me that never lost our love for the original game. I collected the entire line and have run DCC #1 Idylls of the Rat King (my favorite of the line) several times.
In 2012, Joseph Goodman published his own role playing game as pictured above. DCCRPG makes use of the OGL and is not am simulacrum of any old edition, but rather a game going back to the inspirations that led to White Box, Appendix N from the Dungeon Masters Guide. Mr. Goodman actually refers to his game as "Appendix N Gaming" and I think he is right on. DCCRPG is written so that it supports playing in the manner and style of the stories found in Appendix N.
So what's in this massive 470+ page book besides tons of old-style gaming art? The rule mechanics themselves build on everything up through at least 3rd Edition, but with a re-imagining of the game to make it feel more like it's literary roots. At its core DCCRPG is a d20 game using a twenty-sided die roll for most tasks, except when it's a d16, or a d24 or some other odd new shaped die. DCCRPG makes use of the usual polyhedron RPG dice and then adds in some extras referred to as "Zocchi Dice", referring to Lou Zocchi, hobby personality and dice salesman extraordinaire. Ascending AC, 3rd Edition saves, and class and level are all familiar mechanics. DCCRPG borrows race-as-class from B/X and it seems to work here as the emphasis is on human PCs.
There are some significant changes to the familiar mechanics, however. Clerics turn things that are unholy to their religion, not just undead and don't use-up their spells when cast, but may annoy their god if they cast too many spells. Wizards don't lose their spells automatically when cast, but roll-to-cast and may fail, succeed, fumble or crit with their spell. Magic is chaos, unpredictable, wild and potentially corrupting. Warriors benefit from better critical hit tables and can use "mighty deeds of arms" to dominate combat. Thieves, Dwarfs, Elfs and Halflings (walking luck charms) round out the available classes.
Before you get the idea this is a game of powerful characters doing epic deeds altering the history of the world, let's talk about the "funnel". Author Joseph Goodman has taken the low-level character death syndrome and made it a part of the rules. Players are encouraged to roll-up several PCs and send them through a funnel adventure. The PCs are zero level peasants with very little equipment. The point is many will die and the ones that emerge alive will level-up to become your 1st level characters. The survivors will presumably also have some personality developed through play at this point.
DCCRPG is a relatively big book. It is lavishly illustrated in a style that definitely reminds me of the oldest days of the hobby, which is the intent. A lot of space is devoted to tables. Each magic spell has a separate table with various effects depending on the roll of the caster. A spell may whiff, do as expected, do better than expected or go badly astray. Remember that magic is chaotic in DCCRPG. Patrons play a big part in magic, especially the more powerful magics. Patrons may be drawn from the gods, demons, elemental forces, aliens or just about anything the referee wants to invent. Several examples are given in the rules. The DCCRPG book is a complete game package with monsters, treasures and two introductory adventures, one is a "funnel".
I have not run DCCRPG, but it is not from a lack of trying. So far I have been unsuccessful in talking anyone into a "funnel" where two-thirds of the PCs die (in hopefully entertaining ways). I will admit, this sounds a bit dark - graveyard humor dark - especially in a hobby culture where character death hardly ever happens. "Why, way back in the day, sonny, we used to go through a stack of characters before midnight and be glad we had the opportunity to play."
"The times, they are a-changin'." Bob Dylan said that.