Warning: Rant in Progress

Sadly, this last post on Hyboria will have to be postponed as I am off to the memorial service for a compadre, Carlos Guerra, one of San Antonio's most uppity of citizens.

Guerra was an “old school” advocacy journalist. Before being edged into an early retirement, he wrote the only column that made our local daily worth picking up. Tough and edgy he often spoke truth to power.

But for all that troublemaking, he was also always a rigorous and ethical journalist. He checked and rechecked facts, quotes, and names before filing. If he skewered the corrupt dealing of city politicos with a local hotel chain he had done his homework eleven times over—and he sought out, considered, and printed the views of those he took to task. He took this approach forward with him into his recent alternative media site, NewsTaco.

Tooling around the small niche of the blogosphere dedicated to older edition D&D and other rpgs today I kept thinking there is a lot here in common with what some call the citizen media, grassroots media outlets mostly run by amateurs (gifted or not). It explodes at times with creativity and I truly dig many an informal conversation.

But frankly there is also a lot of crap too: speculation trumping actual research; bandwagon mentality over measured reviews with rigorous standards; secondary commentary over firsthand reporting or interviewing; anonymous “satirical” sniping over actual debate; inflated ego posturing over creative inventing (or even re-inventing); etc.

Truly tiresome dreck for a space in our lives dedicated to the sweet joy of fantasy gaming escape, no?

Frankly, we need a lot more Guerra cowbell over here in the outer reaches. I'm not a Pollyanna. I know “we can't just all get along.” There is a place for passionate disagreement and boundless exploration, but hell let's step up our game as media providers (albeit small and niche ones).

Apologies in advance for the editorializing. I will step off the soapbox and promise to go back tomorrow when the black cloud passes to the more fun work of playing around with all the whirly bits of our hobby. In fact, I look forward to some sweet, sword-swingin' (virtual of course) escape tonight at our Skype game.  Let's get some game on. 

Session Reports: Are They Worth a Hoot?

I am of mixed opinions when it comes to session reports of tabletop gameplay. Some accounts—like much other bad gaming fiction—make me shift uncomfortably in my chair or have an instant eye-glazing effect. But session reports by others totally grab me and make for some of my favorite lazy-day gaming reading.

Why this is so I can't rightly put a finger on. Actual game play, in theory, should be the basis of all our navel-gazing on what makes our hobby tick, so why does so much of our reportage on it come up so painfully short? 

My question to you the unwashed masses is: do you read and/or enjoy session reports? If not, why not? If so, what kinds of specific reports to you enjoy? Do you like reports that read more like short stories or ones that break down the so-called “fourth wall” and touch on social interactions, the art of GMing, the success or failures of rules mechanics, etc? A mix of those two? Or some other beast completely?

Inquiring minds want to know.

(For those nudging me behind the scenes, our series finale for Tony Bath's Hyboria is being duly finished today. Look for it tomorrow my ever-so patient brethren.)

You Know You Are Reading too Much M.A.R. Barker When...

...walking through your closest local park (this would be Hemisfair Park in San Antonio) and everything suddenly reminds you of Tekumel. Is that smell of musty cinnamon coming from the convention center?

...you see earth-shattering synchronicity in finding out that one of the blogs you admire published this very day a year ago snippets of one the documents you'd most like to see, the pre-TSR Empire of the Petal Throne rules, make it to print.

Maybe my next read after Lords of Tsamra shouldn't be The Book of Ebon Bindings after all?

Tony Bath's Hyboria, Part III: Conan and Emergent Story

A small detour before diving back into Bath's world-building.

I was reminded by HC player Mack aka Desert Scribe that Phil Barker, the author of Hordes of Things and countless iterations of WRG and Dbxx (not to be confused with my other favorite Phil Barker of Tekumel fame), was also a player in Hyboria—a veritable “Dream Team” of old guard wargamers. Barker mentions in HoTT that the greatest of the Hyborian "cardboard characters", Conan himself, played a recurring role in the game. It's an easy fact to omit as Bath fails to mention this completely in the original campaign book!

But fortunately he does make mention of it in a series of dispatches to Battle For Wargamers magazine in the late 1970s (these may be included in the Hyborian Legends in the new omnibus, but I'm still waiting not-so patiently for the new edition to arrive in my mailbox). Here's a choice section from the early days of the campaign when it was still a two-side affair:

“...Don Featherstone and I launched into the first real Hyborian map campaign. I had begun populating my countries with a few characters taken from Howard's stories, beginning of course with his hero, Conan, the Cimmerian barbarian who had become King of Aquilonia. For this campaign I decided that Conan had formed a coalition of the Western kingdoms with a view to conquering and civilizing the dangerous areas on their northern borders his own old homeland of Cimmeria. I, of course, took the part of Conan (for years I never allowed anyone else to do so) while Don had Cimmeria.”

Compare that to this next section about Conan taken from later in the campaign. What I think is especially interesting is how rich “the story line” has become—and just like the best of D&D campaigns not as a pre-written GM-exercise fixated on acting out Bath's or Howard's plotlines but as a story emerging from the rich experience of game play itself:

“The [combined Vanaheim, Asgard and Cimmeria] Empire's borders were naturally strong, and were now strengthened by a program of fort building to command vital passes through the mountains. Since a lasting peace with Namedides the Fox of Hyperborea seemed unlikely, the Emperor sought to secure his Southern border by a defensive-offensive alliance with King Conan of Aquilonia. This alliance also was bolstered by a political marriage.

Conan's position was already very strong, the more so as he sought no new foreign conquests and was interested only in giving just but firm government to the lands under his control. The biggest problem was that portion of Nemedia held by Aquilonia, and here the King made every effort at conciliation, recognizing a Nemedian noble, Riach Glyndwyr, as its Duke, and giving him virtually independent control of the country, Aquilonian troops being withdrawn.With his northern border secure, he could turn his attention elsewhere, and his first step was a political coup--the marriage of his son and heir Ban Cruach to Queen Taramis of Khauran, thus extending his influence well to the south of his old enemies, Namedides and his ally Valbroso of Corinthia, and establishing a common frontier with Vendhva, of whose alliance he was assured by his close friendship (some said more than friendship!) with the Devi Yasmina. Less certain of the future of Shem, he re-insured by effecting certain other political marriages with both the ruling family and that of Thoth-Mekri, who was second in power only to the Emperor."

As Hyboria became a more robust multi-player affair, Conan would become something of an NPC wild card as Mack mentions. Before each campaign year, Bath would roll to see which side the ever-mercurial Cimmerian would join.

Tony Bath's Hyboria, Part II

Today I will be looking at the details of game play in Tony Bath's Hyboria—and how that game by the end of its run walked like a rpg duck, quacked like a rpg duck, and was...well I leave the word-choice game up to you fine readers. (Check out this interesting parallel thread on DF if you want the backstory.)

In most miniature wargames from the hoary, old days of Kriegspiel and Little Wars to today players play a collective side. The player is most often not just the general or hero but the controller of the actions of all or most of the actions of all the figures or forces represented. Discounting morale rules, special events, or team play more often than not he is the omniscient controller of vast array of little metal or plastic surrogates. This often hold trues even for most skirmish games on a man-to-man scale.

Though Hyboria was in many ways a traditional wargames campaign played through the large-scale clashes of armies and political/economic management, it evolved into a radically innovative a game-play scale familiar to most rpg players today.

For sure, it all started fairly conventionally side vs. side basis, albeit with a creative twist:

“...with Neville Dickinson, I devised a new scheme for Hyboria in which we ran the continent together, worked out events and movement on a joint basis and, when a battle was imminent, tossed up to see which side we espoused. Thus I might command a Vendhyan army in one battle, only to the find the next that I was leading Hyrkanians against my former command.”

As the campaign took on new players—and Bath became more and more immersed in the dynamic of ever-granular world-building—the sea change began in game play:

“I later expanded [the previous system] into my present system, under which I asked various other wargamers to take on the parts of various rulers of Hyboria and to make all the decisions and movements, while I as Controller, Umpire, or Tin God ran the whole affair; made the necessary movements on the master map, fought the battles, etc. Each campaign week every player is provided with a situation report giving him all the information to which he is entitled; he then issues his instructions, based on this information, and I put them into practice.”

In other words the players weren't the controllers of their side, but were shrunk down to the role of a player character complete with all the limitations of only knowing as much as the ref thinks you might know. And the ref now goes from being an arbiter between sides to being the master game master empowered with running all the world's mechanics—and interpreting how the players' actions have an impact on it. 

Sound familiar?

With this shift in role, the players (many who were other titans of British wargaming at the time such as Donald Featherstone and Charles Grant) played the game in the increasingly more devious “out of the box” ways that D&D veterans do:

“...in running a campaign you have to learn to be as unbiased as possible, and to find methods of solving tricky problems, of setting up scales by which to decide just how successful a certain move by a player will be. An example of this is a situation that cropped up quite a while ago in Hyboria, my own mythical continent. Control of the Sea of Vilayet is vital to the interests of Hyrkania, which naturally maintains a large navy; they heard that Turan, on the other side of the sea, was building warships in the port of Agrapur. Hyrkania and Turan were at peace, so Hyrkania could make no overt move, but Charles Grant, the ruler of Hyrkania, gave orders for some old merchant ships to be scuttled in the harbour mouth to effectually block in the Turanian ships. He was of course prepared to deny having any hand in this fortuitous accident! I then had to sum up the chances of success of such an operation, considering the possibilities of challenge by the harbour defences, the accuracy of the scu ttlings, etc. On this basis I set up a dice scale of from 2 to 12, 2 being complete failure and 12 being complete success, and rolled two dice. The result gave Charles a nearly complete success which prevented the larger Turanian ships getting out of port for many months, and the whole thing was an enjoyable little exercise for me.”

This change in game play to out and out first-person role playing was accentuated by Bath's creation of a vast supporting cast of non-player characters, who he called “cardboard characters”. Further he provided elaborate sub-systems for character generation for all the lineages, personalities, expertise, etc. of this cast. Chapter 6: Characterization of the campaign book is a walk through these great systems (many frankly are crying out to be adapted by “modern” rpg gamemasters wanting to play large-scale “end game”).

Breathing life into these characters created a way to give the game roleplaying motivations that helped sustain the overall illusion of a real world with a dynamic of its own. An observation Bath makes explicitly throughout the book. He quotes the following colorful story as an example:

“The situation had arisen in Hyperborea that a certain noble, Lodivarman by name, had raised a revolt with the aid of a large force of mercenary soldiers left unemployed at the close of a campaign... when Lodivarman's money ran out, [the mercenaries] began to loot and ravage the countryside. Lodivarman therefore attempted to disband them.

We—the Controllers, that is—assumed that the leaders of the mercenaries would not be too keen on this and would hold a council to decide what to do. There were eight of these leaders; and since I had gone to the length of setting up characters for everyone down to regimental commanders, it was perfectly easy to look up each leader's character and see what his feelings would be...As it happened two, being cruel, greedy types voted simply to cut Lodivarman's throat; three others, being just as greedy but with considerable cunning, voted to imprison him but to keep him as a figurehead to take the blame for their crimes; the other three were undecided...As a result the vote went 5-3 in favor of Lodivarman's imprisonment, so this is what happened.”

In the next installment in the series I will go back in and peer under the hood at some of Bath's mechanics on character generation, world building, domain management, and other goodies. 

Tony Bath's Hyboria, Part I

Today we return to exploring the work of Tony Bath in his ground-breaking Hyborian campaign. As I noted before Bath's book, Setting Up A Wargames Campaign, is a fascinating glimpse into an era where innovative miniature wargamers' campaign play was growing into elaborate, sophisticated affairs—with strikingly deep explorations of some of the robust roleplaying elements we've come to think of as unique to D&D and its successors.

(Which, of course, is not to deny or belittle the uniqueness of what Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz and the other original D&D pioneers created—that powerful witches brew of elements rightfully grabbed hold of the imagination of millions of players in a way that miniature wargames even at their height never did on their own.)

Bath's Hyboria was never a fantasy role-playing game full stop. His Hyboria had no overt magic. There were no dwarves, elves, dragons, and all the rest. The nation's of Hyboria were stand-ins for real world equivalent armies of Celts, Romans,Medieval Europeans, Indians, Numidians, Aztecs, etc.

For all that, it's also hard not to notice that Bath was as into pulp fantasy as some of the D&D founders were. Sprague de Camp's Tritonian Ring and Krishna books; Edgar R. Burroughs Barsoom; Fritz Leiber's Newhon and Andre Norton's Witch World all get tips of the hats as possible locales for people to base their campaigns in the very first chapter. Telling little details pop in the book such as Vance's Dying Earth characters sneaking in the middle of a chart laying out all the many nobles of Hyrkania (Kandive the Golden) or in the section on why you should have nicknames for characters (Liane the Wayfarer and Kandive again).

Perhaps more importantly he brought to his campaign such an immersive fictionalized world-building style that it's hard to deny that his Hyboria had the living, breathing feel of the deeply-imagined fantasy world—and a player-character game-play style that would foster out-of-the-box roleplaying as a central feature. Passages throughout his book read less like the usual straight-laced, geared-down prose of most wargamer advice and more like the kind of breathless, no-holds-to-your imagination words of an excited fantasy gamemaster to another:

“Another advantage of this mythical continent is that, if your original creation was properly done, it will last you for not just one campaign but for as many as you like, and in the course of these the continent will develop a life of its own. Precedents will be created for future actions, traditions of both friendship and enmity arise, and all these will help you later in running the continent. Finally you will probably reach the stage when you wonder just how much control you have or whether you have created a Frankenstein's monster!”

Similarly other accounts by him (this from White Dwarf #4) run over with that flush of fantasy world-building excitement likely familiar to many readers:

“As it happens, I enjoy organizing things...so working out systems of military service, taxation, family lineage and such items came easily to me and in fact gave me many hours of enjoyment. I had the advantage to start with that Howard...had worked into his stories far more background detail than exists in the normal fantasy. He had provided an outline map, superimposed on one of the present day world--for Hyboria is not a different world but a theoretical age of our own world, thousands of years in the past--and while the geographical picture was rather vague, featuring few cities, there was a wealth of ethnological detail available. On this I proceeded to build.

One of the first things I did was to take Howard's map and blow it up to a reasonable size, 4' x 4'. 1 then proceeded to fill in a vast amount of geographical detail tracing in rivers and mountains, founding new cities, and dividing his countries up into smaller provinces. Later, when I founded a tax system, I went even further, coloring the whole map to represent grasslands, hill country, cultivated regions, forests and suchlike.”

Enough for today, in the next part of the series we will explore in greater detail his approach to world building, how the Hyborian game play I mentioned above paralleled later rpg play in its inventiveness; how the campaign distinguished player characters from non-player characters and other yummy bits.

In the good news department, the Society of Ancients (which Bath founded) has released , Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming, a nifty omnibus edition that not only includes the campaign book but a copy of his ancient mini rules and an entire new section titled "Hyborian Legends". A nice deal that you can find here in the US and (much cheaper) in the UK here.