An Interview with Zzarchov Kowolski

One of my favorite guilty blogging pleasures has been using interviews as an excuse to have conversations with game designers whose work I enjoy. A guilty pleasure I hope to indulge a bit more as I get into the home stretch of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes project.

Today's interview is with Zzarchov Kowolski, one of a handful of gaming folk that share a single walkable community called Canada (or so I am told). On again/off again in various Google Plus games I have run into Zzarchov and found him to be hilarious, anarchic and creative, but it's his adventure design that I admire the most, in the main because he eschews the D&D as a Straight Guy school of thought, never fails to write a memorable adventure site, and doesn't seem afraid to experiment with out-of-the-box forms.

Hill Cantons: How did you get involved with all this? What drove you into game design and publishing? What have you found to be most challenging about DIY design/publishing? 

Zzarchov Kowolski: NGR (Neoclassical Geek Revival) was my own collection of house rules to run a game in the vein I wanted to run (a focus on stealth, more gameable priest mechanics, more explicit hitpoint mechanics).  At a certain point, especially when bringing new players on board,  it became easier to just teach it as its own thing.  So I began to work upon streamline and better plugging things in together.

Eventually I figured I may as well make this work available to others in case they could provide any feedback or playtesting. Google+ and Constantcon really kicked that into high gear by letting me run with multiple groups which consisted almost entirely of GM’s in their own right, which is a very unique opportunity.  People like Kyrinn S. Eis, Tim Shorts, and Ian Burns were really helpful during the first release.

From there I just kept putting out more and more things.  

HC: What are some of the important things you learned about honing your craft? Did the lessons come in big leaps or bit by bit?

ZK: Once you’ve run through the gauntlet the first time it gets much much easier for the second release.  As a corollary your first release is going to be pretty bad when you look back at in in five years no matter what.  If it didn’t it would mean you hadn’t learned anything in the last five years.  Also, invest heavily in good layout and try to find someone who is good at it if you don’t have the skill.

The greatest challenge boils down to scheduling.  Things always take longer when you get a bigger and bigger team. DIY publishing is very few people’s day jobs and the work has to navigate around people’s schedules.  The more people who are needed at any given point the more likely that someone will experience a nasty dose of life and will need to slow the project to a halt. Keeping small teams for any individual project and/or a hefty dose of patience is really helpful.

HC: Dear lord, tell me about it. What are some other ways you find to cope or work around that kind of delay chain?

ZK: There are limited things you can do to change delays unless you want to become a taskmaster boss or a demanding client  (which I do not aspire to be during my off periods). Finding a good pool of talented freelancers that you have a good relationship with will do wonders. A pool is key,  life will happen to people and if one person is involved in everything you are doing then when life happens to them everything grinds to a halt for everyone.  That in turn means you might not be able to keep things afloat in the interim, and you’d just end up screwing them over even more by not having anything for them to work on when their life calms down.

HC: Many of your adventures feature procedural experiment, innovative bits that set them apart from traditional adventure design. Scenic Dunnsmouth had the randomly-changing, ever-replayable map, Under the Waterless Sea (a personal favorite), alongside its fresh, fun Polynesian setting and weird/beautiful pearl-based economy, had a dynamic mechanic for changing the adventure if you switched sides and aided the Deep Ones. Gem-Prison of Zardax (your most recent baby) has an intriguing series of puzzle diagrams. Can you talk some about those experiments. What were you aiming for? How did they work out in writing and most importantly at the table?

ZK: Whenever I write an adventure for publishing I am trying to focus on a specific reason for the adventure to exist on people’s shelves and be used over and over again.  Scenic Dunnsmouth was designed to showcase how you can build replayable adventures for use with the same game group each campaign without getting stale.

I have run Dunnsmouth probably 8 or 10 times, with the same group at least 4 times. I always stick a version of it somewhere in any game I run.  My home game is a post apocalyptic one at the moment, and you can bet Dunnsmouth is there somewhere.  One of the games with my home group didn’t involve the “main adversary” of the adventure.  They burned the town to the ground trying to find out where “they” were.  It was great when I told them after the fact.

Under the Waterless Sea was on the one hand a way to showcase how to handle the impact of PC shenanigans on large scale events

HC: By doing a weighted point system?

Yes, but also in having a number of different “commando” actions (including some that just worked out as wartime looting) that would have an impact.  That makes it easier to fairly adjudicate what happens without letting your own moral compass shade reactions to PC generated chaos. That is all secondary though, as far more importantly to me it was a way to make a “water level” that everyone doesn’t hate.  

In another example Thulian Echoes was showing how to replace the dreaded GM infodump for past expeditions. The ability to “play through” the past dungeon delve in the past is a repeatable way to make research into adventurers of your campaign world’s past something more interesting than a sage roll. It also lets you generate some neat consequences to surprise the GM a bit.  Much like Dunnsmouth,  I think there needs to be some interesting gameplay mechanics for the GM.

Similarly, Lamentations of the Gingerbread Princess was an alternate wish system,  The Gem Prison of Zardax is a showcase of how you can have a dungeon spanning set of interlocking puzzles. In addition to its spoiler based goal,  The Pale Lady was also a good test of how much of a song’s lyrics I can get into an adventure without anyone noticing (a lot).  That last one is really more of an author game mechanic.

HC: You've also experimented with trying different funding models. With Under the Waterless Sea you attempted to try and use something like the Steam early access model. Tell me about that. Did it work? Would you try it again?

ZK: The “Buystarter” for Under the Waterless Sea worked,  but it was still a tempered success.  On the one hand it no doubt might have exploded larger if I could have allowed a kickstarter process where people could pledge higher than the initial low amount (I had more than a few people asking how they could do this),  but it also had very low risk.  No one was going to be left waiting for 4 years wondering if they would ever get their adventure (I am not immune to the risk of life happening after all).  I might end up doing it again for a small release.

It ironically hasn’t done much better than my ill-advised surprise release for The Gem Prison of Zardax where I posted about it once on April 1st and then just released it later with no additional pre-release announcements. 

HC: Word of mouth and the power of reviews—especially by “opinion leaders” (for lack of a better word)--seem hugely important to micropublishers.

ZK: Absolutely, there are a lot of things released and no one has time to read them all.  The opinions of trusted reviewers are a big sway to most people.

HC: What kind of reservations do you have about Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general?

ZK: To follow up on the earlier questions,  life happens.  Delays happen. With your own project, you and you alone as responsible for those delays.  Once you take someone's money,  you now have other stakeholders that you have obligations to.  It doesn’t help that the project can easily spiral beyond your control to manage it.  To pick, pack, and ship 50 books is a lot different than 1,000 books.

HC: So what's next? You have a revision of NGR coming down the pike? Anything else?

ZK: I have an updated layout and art version of NGR ready to go,  but I am looking to go for a larger project of breaking it down into a core and full rule book.  I might go for the dreaded kickstarter for that project, with a guaranteed release of at least the updated layout and art versions.

Talking Special Snowflakes and Strange Stars with Trey Causey

Resplendent in its Star Frontiers-homage, full color cover, Trey Causey's Strange Stars setting book has finally hit the virtual stands both in PDF and print form. Having watched this product grow from a wee germinal of an idea--and had any number of rambling, tangential conversations with Trey along the way--I feel entirely to close to give the book a decent, critical review. (But really you should buy this thing, it's one of the best pieces to come out of the tsunami wave of DIY hobbyist products in recent months).

A little more interesting is to open that conversation stream a little to a broader audience (as I did with his Weird Adventures) to hear the what and why that went into the making of SS.

Hill Cantons: Let's talk Strange Stars. I will admit to being deeply fascinated watching you grow these worlds and products bit by bit from the floor level via posts on your blog, From the Sorcerer's Skull. The sepia/black and white images and little digressions that came out with Weird Adventures sucked me in and kept me pulling for you all the way to press time. Tell me about how SS came to be and how it developed on the blog. What moved you to do this and what was the process like doing it in this slow reveal-by-blog type way?

Trey Causey: With doing a blog six days a week at one point (now roughly five), I spend a lot of time brainstorming/daydreaming content. I had toyed with a couple of science fictional concepts that didn’t quite take off (though I’d sort of like to return to them one day) like an alt-history pulp space and a science fantasy Greek mythology thing. One sort of fun (I thought) but largely throwaway post I did was on Talislanta as a space opera setting. That post got some positive feedback, which always tends to prompt me to expand on an idea a bit more.

I got maybe three more posts out of it and in the comments to one of those, Brutorz Bill of the Green Skeleton Gaming Guild suggested I ought to do my own sci-fi thing, like “Weird Adventures in Space.” Thinking about doing my own thing (but with Talislanta Space ideas still in my brain), I wound up writing the first of the Strange Stars posts—though it didn’t have that name or any name, at that point. It grew from there, becoming more and more its own thing as it went on. Ten posts and about a month later, it was christened “Strange Stars.”

As anything would that’s developed in bite-size bits over a period of a couple of years, Strange Stars sort of lurched in somewhat different directions at times. The earliest posts are trying hard to rationalize science fantasy concepts into something a little harder sci-fi. Then there came a bit of weirdness probably inspired by Prophet and revisiting old issues of Heavy Metal, and here and there, small doses of “serious” science fiction brought on by my reading Alistair Reynolds and Charles Stross. All the time though, I knew I wanted it to mix the stuff I read in modern science fiction novels with the stuff I saw in mid-60s to mid-80s sci-fi comics, films, and paperback covers. The aesthetic was always important—which is often a frustrating thing when you are not yourself an artist.

HC: We've talked a good deal one on one about immersive worldbuilding and setting work as part of the DIY rpg scene--both of us seeming to fall down on being fans of those kinds of efforts. I rather like how SS hits a sweet spot balance: it's unashamedly and purely about setting/worldbuilding but it breaks info-dump down into tiny bites and leaves a lot of evocative questions off stage. How do you see SS fitting into the discussion of so-called Special Snowflake settings?

TC: Looking at the stuff produced on blogs and in publications by the DIY crowd we’re both somewhat associated with, I think it’s clear people like setting stuff, despite what’s sometimes said about it in the abstract. I think the real issue isn’t “setting versus no setting” but the suggestive leanness of a pulp fiction novella versus the over-elaboration of a multi-volume, doorstop fantasy epic.

The debate often framed as “setting detail versus freedom” is really something more like “inspiring setting versus constraining setting.” If I'm right, and the second issue is the real one, then there are things we can do about it. The traditional, prose heavy ways of delivering setting information are the prevailing style, not necessarily the best way to do it. I wanted to try something at least a bit different.

There’s always a balance to be sought, though. The things that some people complain about regarding settings are exactly the things other people like about them. I got minor complaints about stuff that Weird Adventures didn’t address, and I don’t doubt I will get some of that with Strange Stars which leaves even larger lacunae. Sometimes I left things out due to space considerations, and other times because I hadn’t thought to include it. What I would really love to see is Strange Stars not as one special snowflake, but a number of them because people take it and come up with totally different stuff to fill in those holes. I want to read a G+ or a blog post and catch myself thinking: “but--but that’s not how I would do it at all!”

HC: The Terran Trade Authority and Galactic Encounter books of the late 1970s were huge aesthetic influences on my young brain (as were the Star Wars fan booklets and comics). Classic Traveller was free of any illustrations for years and those books filled in the blanks. There clearly seems some linkage to those image-rich books in your inspiration stew. Can you tell me about that and the other inspiration points?

TC: There is, indeed. The Galactic Encounters book, Aliens in Space, was the only one of these I read in childhood, but it made quite an impression. I bought it a few years ago and a couple of books from imitator series. I have also always been a fan of reference works for fictional worlds (particularly well-done, fan-made ones) like the Star Fleet Technical Manual, and the Starfleet Medical Reference Manual, but also more recent things like the image-heavy Dorling Kindersley Star Wars and Star Trek books. Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials is there, too. A lot of 70s comics like The Legion of Superheroes by Grell and Cockrum, and stuff by Chaykin and Starlin were on my mind, too.

A lot of these things have design aesthetics that seem a bit silly at times, perhaps. Certainly they never seem “cutting edge.” That was part of the reason I liked them and wanted to draw from them. The future is never going to be exactly how we view it in the present; like the past, it’s a different country. Using outdated styles, I feel like, gets us past what’s currently cool in to something just a bit alienating—like the real future is likely to be. Also, I wanted the future to seem “lived in” and grubby, but again not the lived in and grubby of dystopian futures of the 2000s. The seventies is the point where science fiction first moved from sterile and shiny to grubby and worn, visually.

HC: Layout and design wise SS is impressive for a one-man DIY outfit. What did it take to get it to that point?

TC: Thanks. Mostly, I would say it took the technical acumen of Lester B. Portly. Before that, though, the conception was a long time in coming. I had been sort of trying to write something “Strange Stars” since late 2013, but it just wasn’t flowing. Sometime in early 2014, I got the idea to do a whole setting book in pictures. I’m sure it wasn’t from nowhere; there was probably some discussion on G+ or something that inspired it.

Anyway, this panel in Prophet was the first thing I thought of.

I realized, of course, I wasn’t going to be able to afford enough art to do a whole setting book like that, so I looked to the Dorling Kindersley books as the primary model. I put sample pages from several of those, and sample pages from some pages from comic books like DC Secret Files and Handbook of the Marvel Universe and started talking to Lester. His initial thought was that what I wanted was too expensive, but was willing to provide his help to paring it down.

Once we had a vague idea of the basic template (which Lester would keep refining as we went on), I picked out the fonts I wanted and made a style guide. Before the design was finalized, I already had the artist working on the images. The first few pages (the Vokun and Alliance spreads) were the hardest, but after that we pretty much had it down.

HC: You have some mechanically-minded supplements coming up the pike that will translate SS into something that can be run straight out of the box. Tell me about those.

TC: I knew from early on that I wanted to do implementations of the setting in multiple systems. John Till of Fate SF stepped up and offered his services to do the Fate supplement, and he’s been putting a lot of work into it. I think Fate fans will be pleased. I’m compiling and rounding out the Stars Without Number based stats that I used with most of the blog posts in the setting, plus adding some random generators for orbital habitats, adventures,  and the like.

I got an email the other day from a guy wanting to do a Traveller supplement; I would love to see that and anything else that gets somebody fired up enough to do it.

HC:So what's next? What other projects have you been mulling?

TC: So many possibilities, so little time! I’ve got science fiction/science fantasy jones at the moment. I’d like to compile my Baroque Space (space travel in a solar system governed by alchemical science) posts and maybe go back and do the same with Gods, Demigods & Strangeness (the Greek myth thing I mentioned). The past couple of days, I’ve been contemplating a Heavy Metal –style psychedelic space opera universe design kit. I would love if Strange Stars was so successful that I was able to do a deluxe edition with pages and more art.

Of course, there’s my Baum/Dunsany/Adventure Time Land of Azurth campaign—and the Weird Adventures Companion that I want to get out before I die. That’s about all the dreaming for this month.

Interview Series Index

When you run a blog for several years--and spend too many years abusing your head as a young man--a terrible thing starts to occur: you start losing touch with the things you wrote about. It comes way too often these days but long into gaming-related conversation in a strike of blindingly internal light I will suddenly find myself thinking “waitttt, didn't I write a whole mother-flippin' series of blog posts about that three years back?”

To stave off that “all that is solid melts into air” feeling, I've finally started on my long-procrastinated annotated blog index. As I do each chunk—and they are pretty much going to follow in the order of what I consider the best or most useful of the posts here—I will post about them and add them to a larger index page. Likely next is the long index of pointcrawl and wilderness posts. 

First up is one of my favorite (and neglected) groups of posts: the on-again/off-again interview series. A series which under pretext of presenting ideas, recollections, and analysis to a broader audience, selfishly allowed me to dig into the brains of people I have found interesting or critical to our hobby.

The Interview Series (in Chronological Order)

Jeff Berry

The first interviews on the HC where with Jeff Berry aka Chirine Ba Kal, a longtime player in M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel campaign and for a time a mover and shaker in its business end. I had originally reached out to him with the intention of doing a one-shot little piece on what the early Tekumel games were actually like. The ongoing conversation was so incredibly rich with insight and Jeff's memory so exact in the amounts of detail that it spilled over into several encores, all of which I still enjoy reading today.

Tales from Tékumel's First Campaign:An Interview with Jeff Berry

Exploring the Jakallan Underworld,Playing with Arneson, and More: Jeff Berry Interview Part II

Tékumel in Miniature: Jeff BerryInterview Part III

Why the Barker-Tékumel Collection isWorth Paying Attention To

David Dunham

If you pressed me for all my all-time favorite computer game it would have to be King of Dragon Pass. Not only was it a near-perfect blend of handpainted art, strategy, roleplaying and big ticket mythic themes it was set against the worldbuilding of Glorantha that I love (mostly from afar) so well. A huge treat to interview David Dunham, creator of the game, and pick his brain about the connections to KoDP to tabletop roleplaying.

Interview with the Man Behind the King(of Dragon Pass)

Magira

Digging into the altnerative paths that roleplaying could have taken in the 1960s and 1970s led me to places I had never known about notably such great “world games” as that of Magira in Germany. An interview with one of its participants.

Follow-Up Interview on the German Worldgame Magira

Jeff Dee

Looking back at this interview three years ago which focuses on Jeff Dee's then beginning drive to get his Tekumel rpg published, it makes to happy to see that it is not only sitting on my shelf right now but is helping re-raise the flag of Tekumel after Barker's passing.

In the Pocket With Jeff Dee

Kyrinn Eis

Kyrinn Eis talks about her fascinating worldbuilding and quirky attendant game.

Urutsk Rising: An Interview with KyrinnEis

Urutsk Rising Part II

Robert Kuntz

One of the more controversial outings of the blog but one I am still proud of running. The interview sprawls over great length but there are fascinating bits spread through out. While one may like or dislike the man, his recollections are important to our understanding of the early days of the hobby.

No Borders: A Conversation With RobKuntz

Dan Boggs

A look at Champion of Zed and its creator before it became another casualty of the rpg crowd-funding bubble. 

The Champion of Zed

Trey Causey

One of my favorite interviews with one of my favorite people from our side of the hobby. Trey on his post-Weird Adventures victory lap. You better believe I will be banging on his door again when his 70s space opera book Strange Stars sees the light of published day.

Beyond the Weird: an Interview withTrey Causey

Beyond the Weird: an Interview with Trey Causey

One of the most hackneyed of interview cliches is to introduce someone as a “man that perhaps needs no introduction.” If you are reading this blog, though, my gut says you've already encountered Trey Causey and his blog From the Sorcerer's Scroll.

If you haven't, boogie over to that link above, poke around a bit and then come back here before you read the interview. My second hunch of the day tells me you are likely to have a similar experience to what I did when bumping into his blog more than a year ago.

At that first sitting, I read through blog posts for hours immediately developing a strong appreciation for its pulpy thematic unity; the quirky (and quite funny) setting write-ups; the achingly appropriate photos; and the underlying sense that fantasy is something truly weird and unbounded—something other than a stock genre.

At the tail end of last year, Trey finally made good on his threats to publish Weird Adventures, a setting sourcebook detailing the City and matching world his fantasy Pulp-era setting. I make no pretense at an objective review. I'm generally not much of a “buyer” or “joiner” when it comes to new rpg products, but seeing bound it together in a hardcover was exciting enough to make me want to play something riffing off it again. 

Curious readers can find it here for themselves in PDF, softcover, and hardcover form.

So with no introduction, ahem...

Hill Cantons: Tell the readers a bit how you got into all this. What led you to make the leap from being just a gamer to someone creating content for gaming? Where did the vision for the City begin and how did it take off? What broke in your head?

Trey Causey: It’s the fault of my friend and sometimes collaborator, Jim Shelley. We’d email back and forth during the workday as time permitted about comics, movies, or whatever. At times, I’d want to discuss setting ideas and what not better suited for gaming than anything else. Jim wasn’t (at that time) a gamer. He suggested I start a blog, at least partially so he could get out of having to listen my gaming ideas! I had also started reading Grognardia, Monsters and Manuals, and some other blogs around the same time, so they were an inspiration, too.

The kernel of the idea that would become the City predates the blog. I don’t remember when it began to come together, but it was born of consideration of China Mieville’s comment about “lancing the boil” of Tolkien’s influence of on fantasy. What he may have meant in a more antagonistic way, I viewed as just the expression of the need to open things up a bit, to expand the boundaries. Still, setting-wise, Mieville’s solution was basically to move from the Medieval to the Victorian. I felt like Steampunk had been done, too.

I wanted a fantasy setting that was going to be based on distinctly American tropes, because that we haven’t seen much of. We’ve got our own legends and fairy tales: tall-tale characters, Oz, Forteana, superheroes. I wanted to go something with those sorts of ingredients. The two eras of American history most mythologized in pop culture are probably the Old West and the “Pulp Era”—the Great Depression, mainly. To my mind, it was this latter era that encompassed more of the elements I wanted to work with.

Anyway, this was just an idea that I didn’t do anything with for some time. After starting the blog, I gave some thought to the D&D influences on Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. There are some nice quotes about adventurers in it, which somehow I missed when I first read it. The idea of making use of D&D tropes collided with the older idea of a Pulp era fantasy in my brain, and the City was born.

The main aesthetic was to be the "mean streets" of the hard-boiled detective novel.  If we ignore the Western (at least for a minute), Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, and their fellows, are the American equivalent to the Arthurian knights.  Of course, the streets of the City aren’t just mean—they’re weird.  Movies like Dark City and City of Lost Children had some of that feel.  The fiction of Lovecraft, Leiber and Clark Ashton Smith played a part.  So did Golden Age comics (particularly Captain Marvel and the Spirit) and more recent comics like The Goon, Sandman, and The Invisibles. 

HC: What other literary/aesthetic/gaming influences went into the mix?

TC: There are a lot of influences as different parts are inspired by different things. The conception of God and the Heavens, and a bit of how the “planes beyond” work, is tonally informed by Cabell's Jurgen.  The misshapen, bootlegging Ogres were born of “Faces of Meth” scare posters and "yokel horror" like The Hills Have Eyes and Wrong Turn. The City's tax collectors emerged from a stew composed of a Daffy Duck cartoon about a frighteningly persistent little man from the draft board, Brazil and the general British portrayal of civil servants, and the fact that the SRD had a monster called an "Inevitable" (as in “two things in life are..”) that they were misusing.

HC: Circling back to the blog, one of the most interesting and compelling things about Weird Adventures is that I feel like I have been watching it unfold one bit at a time over there for more than a year. Often you get content teasers from designers about what they are working on, your approach felt much more organic and engaging.

How did you get started down the road of using the blog in this manner? Did you have your eyes on doing it that way from the get go or did it just develop?

TC: When I started the blog there wasn’t any idea of Weird Adventures. The first four months or so of posts were devoted to my then-current setting, which was the latest iteration of my D&D world that had been constantly mutating since middle school. In April 2010, I wrote a post called “Toward A Hard-boiled Fantasy Sandbox,” and from there the idea grew a lot more quickly than I let on in the blog posts. Archeology of my Google docs show that, within a week of that post, I’d written a rough outline of what I was then calling “The City Guide.” Looking back at it, I’m surprised how many elements are already there that wouldn’t make it on to the blog for months to come.

As far as the content on the blog goes, I wasn’t trying to tease (at least, not primarily). At first, I wanted to drum up interest so that there would be a fanbase for a theoretical product. Later, I had the idea that blog content and book content would be mostly the same to cut down on the writing workload. A good idea, but it didn’t work out so well. There just wasn’t always a good blog post “angle” for a lot of the stuff the book needed. Plus, I wanted there to be enough original content so people felt like they got their money’s worth. Several of the sections in WA are mostly material that had appeared on the blog, but the vast majority of the City section was written expressly for the book (though a bit of it did appear on the blog before the book came out).

HC: Let's talk a little about the making of WA. How long were you expecting to get it over and one by? How long did it actually take? What was the most difficult thing you felt like you had to overcome?

TC: It took a lot longer than I thought! I’m afraid to look back at the blog; I know that--even though I tried to stay vague--I gave tentative release dates at various points that wound up being way off. Even though I had started planning it in April 2010, the oldest actual content files I have date from September. I don’t know what I was doing in the months in between. Still hoping just writing for the blog would do it, I guess. I did start commissioning artwork, though, which wound up being a bit of mistake. I think it’s hard to know what pieces of art you might need until you’ve got a good bit written.

The hardest thing was probably just doing all the damn writing. The City section went on forever! I was getting up on weekend days at 6am like they were week days and writing for an hour or so before doing anything else. It complicated dating as well, as I had a couple of distance relationships during the period I was working on it. It was sometimes tricky to explain how important it was to me to write this thing I wasn’t getting paid for about goblins and wizards. The fact that I tried might explain why I’m still single.

HC: What's next? Any plans for expanding WA? Moving on to other projects? And if so, what?

TC: I’m not sure yet. I think there are definitely more things in the City and the Strange New World left to explore. It doesn’t seem like any consensus has emerged yet as to what people would like to see more of, so crowdsourcing hasn’t really helped up to this point. The prospect of some sort of collaboration has been raised, so that might help me decide. That discussion is in the early stages, though, so it might not come to anything. I have some other projects that I’ve thought about (like my Pulp Space posts), but no firm plans yet. I’m open to suggestions.

For now, all I can say definitively is that I’m going to be continuing to explore the City’s world on the blog—and hopefully soon in games both in-person and online.

[Editor's Note: all the illustrations above are drawn from WA, with permission natch.]

The Champion of Zed

The interview series keeps chugging along this summer and I am happy with its overall direction. I was proud to have hosted the recent exchange with Rob Kuntz--even with some of the axe-grinding conniption fits over in nooks like Knights-n-Knaves. The interview, at the least, got people discussing and debating, one of its primary aims.

But really friends, the series is also an extended excuse for me to have focused talks with people that interest me in our hobby.

I started noticing over the past year that I've really enjoyed reading or hearing from a small set of classical gamer folks I dub--for lack of a better pigeon hole--“the historians”. These are bloggers and others with some internet presence who really dig into a tight range of subjects from the early days of our hobby with a certain focused rigor. Folks like Allen Grohe/Grodog, Scottsz, Grendelwulf, Harami/Dave, and others who deliver things that I sometimes feel is lacking in the “editorializers” (of which I am probably one.)

Dan Boggs, aka D.H. Boggs, is a fella I think of being in that category. His Dragons at Dawn, an homage to Arneson's pre-D&D unpublished rules, and his upcoming Champions of Zed situate him in that “historian” orbit and I was glad to track him down a couple weeks ago for an interview.

Hill Cantons: How would you best identify yourself to readers?

Dan Bogg: I’ve dug up a fair few graves. Kids graves are the worst. I’ve pulled charred stones out of 4,000 year old hearths and read love poem scrawled on a cowrie shell discarded in the privy of a 19^th century whore house. I’ve stared at a delicate thumbprint in a 1000 year old native American pottery and spent day after day walking through fields, and forest digging holes and looking for stuff.

Kinda puts life in perspective. I think about time and the big picture a lot. Things that enrich my life, gaming being one of them, matter much more to me than hype and sophomoric posturing buzzing about the world.

I grew up in the “Laurel Highlands” of SW Pennsylvania, basically like West Virginia light (yeah, country boy), but I’ve lived a in a lot of different places and various cities. My father was from the hills of east KY and my mother was from Pittsburgh, both from old families. Now, I got a house in a nice small town not too far from the Adirondacks and here my wife and I are raising two girls.

HC: You seem to take a lot of care in your gaming work to ground it in Dave Arneson's legacy. What got you down that road and why the care in trying to keep it as close to the original material as you do in Dragons at Dawn?

DB: Gravity, I suppose, and the preservationist instincts that comes of being an archaeologist. My first set of D&D rules was B/X and I glommed on to the AD&D stuff pretty much like everybody else, although I thought a lot of the rules were stupidly complex and mostly just used the good stuff. 

When 2E came out I bought the line that it fixed all the nonsense and I liked the greater emphasis on flexibility.

By the time 3e came out I was traveling around a lot, living in hotels and apartment working as an archaeologists so there wasn’t much time for gaming, let alone buying a whole new system. Anyway, I had long had an interest in knowing more about “the other guy”. 

Gygax was a very big presence in the game but all I knew of Arneson was the little I heard from Gygax’s comments in Dragon mag (this is all pre-internet, keep in mind). I specifically bought DA 2 Temple of the Frog when it came out to see what a module from “the other guy” was like.

Fast forward to about 2007, my new wife and I buy our first house. For the first time in my life I’m “settled” and I thought it a great time to get back into gaming. Long story short and for various reasons – one of them being an interest in understanding the original purpose of the ability scores – I started to find out more about this Arneson fellow and was fascinated by the history there and by both what a great guy he was and great ideas he had. My timing was terrible, as it turned out, for just as I was really getting into his gaming products, he passed away.

HC: Champions of Zed is taking a bit of a different tack, but still seeks to situate itself pretty close to the roots of the hobby. Can you tell us about that project and your goals there?

DB: Yeah, after writing Dragons at Dawn, the last thing I wanted to do was tackle another set of rules. It is soooooo time consuming, particularly when it is a research project involving lots of sources. But, in a sense, I felt like I didn’t have a choice.

I had the great fortune to be trusted with a copy of what turned out to be a draft of the D&D rules prepared by Arneson, and I’m fairly confident in my assessment of them being the “final” draft he mentioned in Different Worlds mag. I was sent the rules because the owner hoped I would be able to shed some light on them. Indeed I can!

But that story will have to wait till all parties concerned are agreeable to more being said. Having this draft in my hands though, and having had my head buried in the FFC and the rest of Arneson’s work and having a keen interest in OD&D in general, well I felt like I had to bring it all together, all these disparate threads. I wanted these rules first and foremost for myself, but I also knew that there would be lots of people who would find them as liberating and fun as me.

At the time I started writing CoZ, there was a real need being expressed on various forums for an OD&D “clone” that brought in its quirks and uniqueness–like the exploratory hex-crawl, and the options for different Chainmail style combat. The OD&D based “clones” or supplements for other games really just add some OD&D stylings to what is otherwise a B/X game.

My goal wasn’t to clone the 3LBBs or the obscure Arneson manuscript, but to use them both, along with a careful selection of Gygax/Arneson OD&D house rules and the FFC, to edit together the game that might have been had Gygax and Arneson brought in an editor to harmonize the material.

In some sense CoZ, may be the “truist” version of OD&D out there, in that it brings a balance between the OD&D of Gygax and Arneson that exists no where else.

HC: I know that you mentioned that the First Fantasy Campaign is one of your primary sources, one of my major inspiration points for Borderlands,in that project. How do you see that fitting in?

DB: I treat the FFC as an equal to the 3LBBs [OD&D books], Chainmail, and Arnesons OD&D draft. It’s not a comic bastard stepchild. Of course, I’m talking about the relevant, rules driven parts of the FFC that have analogs in the 3LBB’s, so, for example, The magic swords section, or the monster section are taken as seriously as a source as the same sections in the 3LBB’s – provided no weird contradictions arise.

Of course, the part of CoZ already published in Fight On is a blend of the wilderness and map rules found in the FFC and the rules and tables of 3LBBs, and that’s the way it should be – these things were literally made to work together, but piecing it together can be challenging. Not to worry, CoZ does that work for you.

There’s also value in the anecdotal information in the FFC. We’re told, for instance about two of the original characters being an orc and a balrog. While balrog may be a bit much, there’s no good reason orc shouldn’t be one of the standard PC races, so I give rules for that.

[In a recent email, Dan revealed that he went ahead and added the balrog player class. Que awesome, in the opinion, of this humble reporter.]

Q&A Time with Rob Kuntz

The interview I posted earlier today with Rob Kuntz covered a lot of mileage. Rob encouraged me to tell readers that he is interested in answering direct questions you might have (there was some questions I noticed earlier--some in good faith and some likely not--in forum spaces discussing it).

Here's your chance to step up to the mike. Questions for the Lord of Green Dragons?

No Borders: A Conversation With Rob Kuntz

To call the following piece an “interview” is a bit inadequate.

What follows below is more of a “cease-fire agreement”: a stopping point in a long zig-zagging conversation with Rob Kuntz that stretched over many months. A conversation that was never “easy” in the conventional sense—though my interviewee acted as a class act throughout—for there wasn’t a moment in the rapid fire of each faltering, scratchy Skype phone call that I didn’t feel challenged to re-think assumptions about the evolution of our hobby.

Simply writing out the standard dry intro also seems to fall short; to only say spit out the list of professional credits, terse wiki-like biographical lines and perhaps a few fawning superlatives just doesn’t seem right. Rob is not an easy person to pin down or pigeon hole in convenient terms both professionally and personally.

For sure Rob was one of the pathbreakers in the creative gaming ferment of the late 60s and 70s that culminated with D&D and the birth of the modern role-playing game. As a virtual member of the Gygax family in Lake Geneva, he almost literally grew up with the game. He went from being an early play-tester as a teen in the early 70s to a co-DM with Gary Gygax to a writer/editor with TSR—and then off to the rough and tumble of decades of freelance game design and writing. Fight On! magazine will be dedicating issue 14 to that career.

But better to hear it all from the man himself, so with no further ado…

Hill Cantons: Who is Rob Kuntz?

Rob Kuntz: Just like that? Poof?!

When I quit TSR for philosophical and personal reasons, both related to a changed atmosphere at the company, I closed myself out for the most part. But I kept a watchful eye on things as they changed; and I was always in contact with my peers.

The rest of my life is as a free-lance writer. Except for a handful of articles done for Dragon Magazine BitD, all that I’ve written has been free-lance. You could say that I did justice to old ‘Blue Eye’s’ song since, “I did it my way.” When you go that route there’s always a price to pay. On the positive side this reinforced my ultimate purpose and I strove harder to master the craft of writing in various forms. I realized through all the highs and lows that you succeed in something that you value only through sacrifice. There’s been a good measure of that in my adventuresome career, for which I am grateful, of course.

For the curious, or for those easily amused, here are some other “highlights” from my life…

…At 8 years of age I was reading the Harvard Classics and a set of Collier encyclopedias my far-sighted mother had purchased for my brother and I; and I was seeking access to the reserved books at the Lake Geneva Public Library, with many raised eyebrows from the librarians forthcoming in exchange…

…My father died in a head-on car crash when I was age 2; never knew him…

…Gary Gygax once referred to my memory as “phenomenal.” I still maintain a single memory from being in my highchair, age 1 or less, this based upon my brother’s size in the images…

Rob playing Little Wars
at the 1968 IFW Convention.

…At age 13 my mother suffered a nervous breakdown and that left me alone while being watched over by the neighbors. While flipping through a Playboy of theirs I discovered an advertisement for the Dog Fight board game by MB in the X-mas gift section. I petitioned my aunt who was checking in on me weekly to buy it. The hunt for it introduced me to AH games, as Larry Zirk, an assistant store-manager at Shultz Bro.’s 5&10 that stocked some AH titles, informed me of these and that some locals played them at Gary Gygax’s house. 

 A week later I accepted his invite to play at EGG’s house on Center Street. This started my association with the Gygax family and was also my introduction to miniature- and board-wargaming in 1968…

…I have been the ward of the State of Wisconsin due to my mother’s mental health issues and was in two foster homes; and at age 16 the Gygax family suggested adopting me (as we were that close) since they were bound for Maine (Guidon Games was going to hire Gary full time), but the deal with Guidon fell through at the last moment and we remained in LG…

…I have worked jobs to keep me going so I could write. I have owned and operated two small businesses, have been a business manager, a marketing director and a top salesman for a national company whereat I landed the Saturn (GM) account. I have also flipped burgers, washed dishes and dug holes…

…I was married once, but the empty vodka bottles thrown at me (pre-emptied by my ex) speedily guided me to a divorce…

...I have hitchhiked over 1,000 miles, my longest trek being from northern Minnesota to southern Wisconsin…

…I have traveled extensively in Mexico, Guatemala and Western Africa, the last whereat I contracted malaria and where I had what I can only term as a “riveting” spiritual experience which I cannot “rationally” explain to this day…

…I miss nothing in my observations of life, even noting the cracks in sidewalks and their varying widths, depths and forms… The small, or what might be considered by others, insignificant, things of life have always maintained my attention in the grand sweep of things…

…I seem to instantly attract eccentric, mad or nearly insane people. My stories are endless involving these and would make for a full book in their own right. Some of my friends have joked about these circumstances, noting that you could put me in a coliseum of 60,000 souls, for instance, blindfold me, spin me about and then have me point at a random person in the crowd, and yep, It’d be the loony…

...I have lived in Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona (Tucson and the Grand Canyon, the latter whereat I was employed for 1½ years), Virginia and North Carolina… While employed at the Grand Canyon my “office” where I wrote my novella, “Black Festival,” was located in a very small, walk-in closet…

…Those close to me who have either heard of or experienced firsthand my crazy life stories have said that I’ve lived two lives and are convinced that some luck or greater charm was in force to get me through my many episodes relatively unscathed...

…I spent many years mastering different writing forms while working dead-end jobs to do so. I have a novel, 12 shorts, a novella and a screenplay plus tons of partials from that time, mostly from my four years spent in Arizona. Close friends have read them and think that they are great examples of different styles. I wrote to see if I could do it. It was practice and if they are published before I die, well, OK. Publishing what I write is not high on my list in every case, anyway, even if such matter twinkles with supposed gold. People might be perplexed by this attitude, though some artists might grasp the notion…

…I once held a shotgun to a person’s head and almost pulled the trigger over one-grand he’d stolen from me; getting the best of my rage I instead dropped the matter and went to a secluded country area and blew apart a fallen tree branch to unleash my angst. Yep, crazy days, I’ve lived them…

…Oh. I never get bored…

…I believe that nihilists should just commit suicide and be done with it… That is if they could find no worth in doing so…

…I don’t follow crowds…

…Several years ago I asked myself this question: “Am I living in the future tense of a past present?” Don’t worry, I’m getting to the answer, I’m getting to the answer, I’m…

…I love plants, animals and seclusion… And children, the flowers of the Earth, constantly challenged by a seemingly oblivious society…

…I hate loud noises; all of my senses have been remarkably acute since childhood…

…I (secretly) dislike giving autographs since I’ve reasoned (perhaps erringly) that the petition-to-act contains something akin to “worship,” which I despise. I give them anyway, and with a smile while siding on the 100% appreciated level at those times…

…I believe without question that creativity in the U.S. has been on the decline since the late 1970’s. I‘ve been gathering material on this subject for many years and am outlining a book on it. I hope to out race the collective now forming in uncreative publishing so that it might have some chance in the future of actually being “understood” by first readers…

…An interviewer once titled me the “Maverick of Dungeons & Dragons”…

… And… I have immensely enjoyed throwing myself into my life experiences no matter how “good,” bad,” “crazy,” or “sad” they turned out.

Next Question…

HC: You are of the opinion that D&D went astray from its initial goals. What went wrong?

RJK: The original game as envisioned saw the province of personalized creation on all levels as the only dominant purpose of the game as first play-tested, written, and promoted in commercial form. 

True historians of the game—there are many pseudo-historians promoting their version, primarily as guess work—note very clearly that the products published in the immediate wake of D&D were supportive of this view as embodied in the authors’ philosophy, such as Dungeon Geomorphs, Outdoor Geomorphs, Monster & Treasure Assortments, Player- and Non-Player character record sheets, graph paper and hex paper assortments, and the promotion of a unifying periodical, The Strategic Review, wherein continued additions and refinements, such as optional/variant rules for the game, could see purchase just as they had done in the original Supplements to D&D.

The philosophy/intent is clear as a clear sky at this point.

The actual philosophical change occurs when someone, I forget whom, sent Gary Gygax a copy of a pre-made adventure, Palace of the Vampire Queen. Many of us looked at it—I even picked up a copy for myself-- in a mode of perplexed inquiry. The majority of us were vocal about why anyone would want someone else creating things for them and their campaign worlds whereas all of the resources in primary and supportive categories were available to them to create their own material.

I’ll add a little context.

TSR was not given over to the idea of Dungeons & Dragons as other than another game then, which indeed supports their stated philosophy, and this is noted specifically in the many and varied types of games that their catalogs previewed for sale, which included those titles as I’ve noted and a wide variety of board games and miniature rules. TSR’s intent had been from the onset to be a game publisher, and D&D was but one of its many titles, then.

With the advent and adoption of the concept of pre-made adventures the whole back-end “support” mechanism took upon a new meaning and form and one, by comparison, that flew in the face of TSR’s original vision for its role-playing game. Whereas there was at that point a solid corps of DMs creating their games from the ground up and doing so with great gusto, TSR succumbed to an opposite path of doing the “creating” for them with such adventures.

This had two immediate effects: It created two polarized camps of consumers for the existing, and soon to be changed, product line (I now refer to these as the “dissenting creatives” and the “eager dependents”); and as the move to AD&D with its codification of rules took shape (in part for legal reasons due to its lawsuit with Arneson, in part for IP reasons real or imagined, and in large part due to a changed philosophy which would require absolute/immutable mechanics to be adhered to in order to sell consistently packaged and designed adventures and to promote these via conventions and the RPGA), the split reached its head with the promotion and marketing of the remade philosophy.

The emphasis on supporting the game in its titular and original form vanished. This move to a mass-market consumer model perforce "dumbed down" the game as TSR attempted to get onto retail shelves worldwide. This happened in the face of all original veterans of the philosophy one-by-one leaving the company (other than EGG) and being replaced by a second wave of designers (1978 forward) to accomplish its market goals as then outlined and re-envisioned.

From this point forward we see the promotion of a flagship line of AD&D products “For Your Imagination,” a consistent promotion of Basic D&D specifically aimed at the mass market and the abandonment, wholesale, of the original RP-Creative vision, and by such marketing dynamics, an equal abandonment of the idea of TSR as a diverse game publisher. This transition happened so fast and during a time when most customers were still mesmerized by the game’s potential that it went smoothly and was only seen and sensed in afterthought; and the newest body of consumers that this groomed were certainly not, at first, among the list of those screaming “counterfeit.’

This 2nd retconned marketing model continued to this very day and as a template for every major version of the game and, by comparison, has been emulated by many other companies then and now, including those fan-driven publishers currently publishing under the OGL. Take a close look. The majority of companies release their RPG rules and then what? Adventures. Scads of them. 

Thus the ongoing perception of D&D-RPG (past, present and future) is rooted in this predominant formula; but this is the antithesis of the original RP philosophy as honestly promoted before money, marketing and a formulaic approach won out and regulated D&D’s 100% creative form to a dismissed and diminishing minority who had been eager adherents in creating their own material and in supporting TSR’s original vision.

HC: How has this change influenced your own perceptions of design?

RJK: At the time it had no effect, as I was not inclined to publish an adventure. I have always thought that the DM’s route to any fantastic achievement in such literature was through a very personal course, most certainly inspired by reading and study or other such related matter, but not actually “implanted” or done for them. I see it as would an engineer who designs, tests and then builds a car. 

There is great worth in all of its many stages and definitely in the end result and it is all yours. Any alternate course offers no equal worth. By comparison, one might buy the car, as they do the adventure, and make it theirs with a little tinkering here or there (as with a car, by adding dual exhausts, chrome, etc.), but that’s not pure creation and the value added experience in this case is negated.

My first opportunity to design something specifically outside of dungeon adventures crafted for our gamers is when EGG needed assistance designing Expedition to the Barrier Peaks for Origins II; and I contrived the majority of the new encounters, monsters, tech and such for it.

The next was, again at his encouragement, to produce what he and I referred to as the “Iron Golem Adventure,” that is, WG5. I thought some time about this and agreed, though I had been on a different design path with several board games. I liked its non-linear beginning, as I had noted that many adventures were being designed A+ B + C, an ancient and unfortunately overused structure that I unlearned by reading a lot of fiction (and not always fantasy/sf genre fiction). 

The other thing I noted is that many of these adventures were just using old tropes and monsters, some in good ways, such as by placement or in concert with other encounters (thus tactical), but still many of these were rather dull. So, as with the Greyhawk and Kalibruhn adventures, my main point was to convey newness and that to me meant strange.

This mode is best exemplified in my previous works Garden of the Plantmaster, City of Brass, and in the majority of the Maze of Zayene series, Dark Druids, etc. So, I bought into the adventure crafting model if it broke and continued to break my established past creations. It’s a chore; and it seems that it takes longer and longer to conceptualize such elusive matter let alone pen it, but I do so. 

The Machine Level, now being crafted, is 100% all new material as realized from what I had in notation form and as built upon from there. That includes inhabitants, environments, all of what the adventurers will experience. In my estimation if designers are not aiming at this sort of creative level then they are either lazy or just want to publish to see their name on a book, none of which will survive for long as such matter will certainly not be thought of over-fondly in any case.

In summary, I am of the Hitchcockian School of fiction. Story to him was basically life with all the dull moments stripped out; and in my estimation that is best accomplished in adventure design by maintaining suspense, and one of the best ways to accomplish that is by maintaining a very high degree of player unfamiliarity with introduced RPG environments and their elements.

Thus my philosophical quandary was resolved by adhering to a design-path that will ultimately end when I see no more creative expansion within it. While adhering to this notion I have always hoped to inspire others to emulate a truly creative and mixed path that will in turn expose new possibilities in design for both DMs and aspiring designers. Unfortunately, and on the main over the years, I have instead seen raw regurgitation sold as “New” designs; and forget the improved.

Critical? Quite so.

Not all RPG adventure designs can be categorized as such; but it is also interesting in my experience that much of the new and improved material is more often overlooked, marginalized, ill understood or just outright ignored—and here I mean by “informed” reviewers or critics, or by folks with ill-conceived or biased opinions. The latter cases relate directly to the divisions that have existed in this industry for years. By comparison, and indirectly yet more importantly, this also points to what individual companies and their employed or free-lance designers vest in with each other by relation. By extension this also relates to my theory on “Hot Dogs” as you have inquired about, below.

HC: Why do you feel that the phrase ‘Golden Age’ is misleading when applied to the D&D game at any given time in its history?

RJK: It’s quite a silly affirmation, isn’t it?

How can we assume that in a creative medium of any sort that we’ve reached a pinnacle within it? It’s like an artist confirming that they’ve done their best work and that there are no more hurdles and challenges for them. Ask a true artist if that is the case with them and they will answer more often in the negative.

Secondly, and perhaps of equal import, is the fact that OD&D as a creative medium for its participants implied no such limits; it is only when, as I noted above, TSR’s philosophy changed to a mass market consumer model and drew in an ever expanding costumer base (however short-lived as a model, and I refer to it as the “Three Year In and Out”) which vested in their pre-made adventures did we get a dose of this, and this later on as those folks from that marketing era (the “eager dependants”) returned to the game for nostalgia reasons. But ask the “dissenting creatives” when that heyday was and the majority would emphatically state that it existed when the creativity was all theirs, that is, when TSR sold them on the idea of the OD&D game with its openly creative license to “do” and to “be”.

HC: What's so vital and important about Gary Gygax's afterword in Volume 3 of the original game?

RJK: I have no doubt as written that it was the unadulterated truth. His partial, “why have us do any more of your imagining for you?” should strike a deep chord or two in anyone so inclined to understand the import of that statement. This could have been alternately expressed as, “why have us do ALL of your imagining for you?” with no loss or change of meaning. The very soul of the game is embodied in that statement; and it’s right there for all to observe and to ponder over.

But believe my next words: it was to be hidden away and ignored, and therein resides a great pity. What is so vital now, in retrospect, are the “whats” that were effected by this curtailment, with the largest ”what” being what might have been for countless would be creators had that ideal found its greatest expression and continued to date?

HC: What effect did mass marketing have on the game?

RJK: On the main it castrated D&D’s greater glory, regulating it to just another entertainment vehicle. Today it’s just another choice among hundreds of such diversions.

HC: How does this relate to pre-published adventures and why did they become such a pillar of TSR's business plan?

RJK: The game in all forms begs content; at first the prescription was for creators to manage that need on their own; then that changed, as I’ve noted, to pre-made adventures which “coincidentally” occurred with a push into new and expanding markets and the marked codification of the rules to a set-in-stone understood. 

In truth this was a deliberate path taken to grow company markets and revenues. The mainstay of that plan—adventures—was adopted as a model for both TSR and the RPGA. “This is the way to do it,” could have easily been their slogan, then; and the majority of TSR’s customers followed, not wanting to be excluded. But this also had immediate negative results, as it dismissed the holistic aspects of the game and the creative (and vocal) minority who had supported it from the onset.

HC: What role did the three-year “in and out” marketing strategy of TSR and now WOTC play in undermining the game?

RJK: It has to do with fluctuating markets and when to position new market pushes within these to offset declining consumer purchases. Usually this amounts to starting a new market/sales push just as the last one is beginning to level off. The idea behind this is totally short term and runs the risk of negative bottom lines if there is lack of interest in an under-performing product line, if such products are being successfully challenged from serious competitors, and if there have been real consumer shifts in interest as measured by many factors, the main one being purchases.

All of these negative market factors existed with TSR, late 1980’s onward. Speaking with several ex-TSR employees, EGG included, confirmed my thoughts on this. The base age range for the majority of consumers had been on the decline by the late 80’s, and though I cannot state the range exactly, my best guess based upon the inputs is 13-16 years of age. 

The idea was to replace those lost through shifting interests and spending habits (a very volatile age range for that) with new waves gliding in behind the departures, thus maintaining a status quo. As noted, this is a short term and iffy way to maintain markets; and even with flagship sales leaders like FR and DL, TSR bit the bullet with this.

In 1988 TSR doubled their production and slashed retail prices 20% to pump up the tired market they had created. Saturation is always the last (and often, desperate) recourse to plug the bleeding hole of declining sales. In reality what TSR lacked was quality product (though Dark Sun was one of the exceptions, too little or too late, unfortunately). What WotC does today is unknown to me, though they have in the past maintained quite a long list of products; and I do not know their consumer median age range, though I suspect it is on the younger side as it was with TSR.

HC: What's the hot dog vendor approach?

RJK: This also has to do with saturation. It happened during the d20 phase of D&D; prior to that, with TSR’s 2E splat-book phase, and can happen anywhere where the idea is to drive competitors out of a market that is dominated by a big publisher or by one that produces tons of products. As the award-winning author, Robert McKee, has stated, “90 % of what is written isn’t published” (i.e., because it’s crap; and he also makes the same assertion for all other artistic mediums). But his words don’t really apply to the RPG industry that is controlled for the most part by one company AND, that across the board, has no concrete standards of professional product review.

In an industry primarily dominated by one company that has no real competition, there is a high probability to get (as was the case with the latter-day TSR) mediocre, templated, slap-a-pretty-cover-on-it-and-get-it-out-the-door type of products. I call them “hot dogs”: easily made, served at mass functions. This leaves those designers with really good designs waiting in the wings with thumbs up their collective asses.

Why?

As the main courses being served again and again are hot dogs a publisher vested in that route doesn’t want to change the menu that is working for them until it stops working, which directly relates to a-nickel-up-your-ass-at-a-time planned obsolescence. So a really good designer (offering steak, let’s say) is really up against it. Most everyone is used to seeing, smelling and eating hot dogs and thus cannot sense the steak vendor, and even if they did, they can’t “get” what it is they’re offering.

Because? IT AIN’T A HOT DOG… There’s a lot more that dovetails into this, of course, and here I only expose the most evident component of “grooming a market.”

HC: Tell me a little about Kalibruhn. What was this imagined as?

RJK: It’s my World. It went through two design phases and I settled on the second. Both are top-down creations, but the first was, in my latter estimation, less realized than the second; but that’s not to say that the first had no detail, quite the contrary. It just worked out that it was a proving ground for designing the even more immersive second. I had a distant intention at first to see parts of it published, but I abandoned that route and have no desire at all to see it in published form. There’s not much more to tell unless I go into the details and that isn’t happening in this interview (smiles).

HC: How do we have a more honest and provocative discussion about the older editions of D&D (and our gaming history)?

RJK: A very broad question with many avenues left open for answer, so I’ll choose one. Finding what is common in all of the editions would be a starting point. Let’s see: editions, worlds, products. These are all passing ideas. The immutable survives these as the intrinsic core of the game. And the immutable part of this game in all its forms is the ability to create on all levels. By honestly seeking its core principle that remains unchanged even as the landscape it functions therein changes time and time again, this where we find its truth, its essence, if you will. The rest of it is just dressing it out as each one of us prefers.

HC: What do you find confounding with the current level of discussion on the Internet?

RJK: I do not participate in confounding discussions, so I don’t have an inside on this. I do get irritated by the pseudo-history of D&D being promulgated as fact. Then there are the many erroneous Wiki articles on various related subjects. There’s misinformation strewn over all types of fora, but recanting these fallacies would necessitate having ample time to do so. I just don’t have the time or the inclination to do that.

Some folks from the Acaeum, such as David Witts and Allan Grohe, are better positioned to keep an eye on such things and they do what they can to eradicate such failures in scholarship; and I lend time to answer their questions to further enhance their already mature knowledge base so they can do so without complication.

HC: Let's talk about your blog post “Taking D&D Back...”? What were you getting at with that? What were the pieces that went into the D&D stew? Why have those pieces been obscured over time? How do we get them back and how do we blend in new ones?

RJK: Is that all you wish to know (winks)?? Heh.

You ask me to describe the beginning, middle and future of the game. Indeed the post was explicit, deriving from my experiences and thoughts since the early 70’s onward. What more can I add? It was explicit: D&D derives from all imaginative literature and sources, not just S&S. Swords and Sorcery is a latter day addition to the whole field of speculative literature, anyway. I’m not taking anything away from Fritz Leiber who introduced the phrase, nor from those more modern day authors who have mined its terrain for the many fine stories we’ve seen. Our play tests certainly had many elements from this genre attached to them; but our imaginations were not exclusionary.

Taking back a thing presumes that it was lost to begin with. If there is obfuscation going on, it probably starts with the idea that this is a S&S game. “This game is strictly Fantasy,” is one of EGG’s most telling quotes from OD&D. So, I am not convinced that people are lost to these imaginative threads so much as siding with where their imaginations lead. Ours, BitD, led everywhere, there were no limits, no borders, for how could there be? It was Fantasy.

The game as published actually made mention of going to Mars as part of the world-building suggestions; and as I have noted, that indeed transpired in our campaign. Also, ERB’s books were the very first ones EGG recommended I read from his shelves. Not Conan, not Elric, not Kyrik. Greyhawk, and my own Kalibruhn, actually contain more Swords & Planet than the average “fantasy” campaign that you’d experience today. 

My first iteration of Kalibruhn, for instance, contains a stranded alien race known as the Whools (see picture right) which makes for some interesting drama, myth and story-adventure avenues as they seek exit from the planet while at the same time, being a very war-like race, attempting to control parts of it.

So I strongly believe that this relates less to regaining something that has been lost but in using what you have, which is imagination. And if people prefer to channel that along paths filled with S&S, then that’s their choice. But anything is possible in “Fantasy” D&D.

HC: What are you working on these days?

RJK: Immediately? Very little.

I’m just coming back up to speed and health from a very challenging 2010. My SO’s mother unexpectedly passed away, we moved right after that, I suffered a minor heart attack while moving, I came back from NTRPGCON 2 (2010) and suffered what we figured to be the swine flu and after recovering from that then proceeded to tear the rotator in my left arm (which has finally healed after many months).

All of this wore me down to a point where I actually feel older. I had a fine discussion with Allan Grohe at NTRPGCON 3 about future projects, including the Machine Level, and he has been aware of my health trials and recovery. NTX wore me out, though, and it wasn’t until now that I had energy enough to finish this interview. I’m starting to feel progressively more energetic, but my health comes first, of course, so projects will proceed as I rise to the occasion of confronting them again.

HC: Why is dissembling the ultimate art of the GM? Why is tone and presentation so important? Why do you lose such a vital level to RPGs when they aren't face-to-face? How do you build tension, uncertainty, and mystery? What are the tricks?

RJK: Let’s add some starch to the first question to “straighten it out”. I did not state in our phone conversation that dissembling is the ultimate art of the GM. That would be suggestive of a structure for every one of them; and GMs find their strengths in different ways. I will say that mastering story-telling with all of its nuances can only strengthen the route a GM takes in his or her adventure-crafting; and here I refer to the art of mastering the elements of story, including those you have named and others, and knowing intuitively when to use these particles to promote the ongoing adventure. Dissembling is but one element at the disposal of a crafty GM.

If you want to gauge the extent to which you have mastered story try winging an entire adventure as EGG and I did countless times (and as I instructed the participants to do in my workshop at this past NTRPGCON). Scripting an adventure and running it thereafter is not as telling in promoting such improvisational story matter; it’s only when you’re at the crossroads of doubt and choice, this is where you’ll find whether you are a true “story-crafter” or a mere “story-repeater”.

So there are no tricks, no shortcuts. You either master story--and thereafter know how, when and why to insert its elements into the forming adventure--or you don’t.

RJK Text Copyright 2011, Robert J. Kuntz. Permission to quote its parts must be secured from the author. Parts of this interview have been contextualized from two forthcoming works of non-fiction, including RJK’s Memoirs.