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. 

Keep on the Hyborian Borderlands?

For a good long while now I have been toying with doing a post about one of the giants of historical miniatures Tony Bath. Bath was one of the great popularizers of ancient and medieval wargaming in the 1960s and is remembered typically these days for running his long-standing Hyborian campaign, a years-long miniatures campaign that had strong proto-rpg elements.

Next week I will be doing a fuller analysis of Bath's Setting Up a Wargames Campaign with an eye to looking at it as a snapshot of the stew of ideas that were floating around the late 1960s and early 1970s—and of course how they came to influence (or evolve in parallel to) our own great game.

But today I wanted to leave you with this uncanny similarity I noticed today when starting to prepare next week's post. The first picture below should be familiar to many of our readers as the mini-setting map of B2: Keep on the Borderlands.

Now check out the second map from Bath's book (this would be a border fort in the Hyborian campaign). Also keep in mind that this is from a book printed in May 1973, while the former went to press in December 1979. Hmm...

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

Sadly, in the past few years we've seen the sudden passing of a number of our great hobby's pioneer members. I find it doubly sad that more efforts weren't made to collect more complete oral or written histories of the early days of RPG play. (I am especially feeling that recently with Dr. Holmes, whose creative brain was even less picked over directly in the Internet hotspots, leaving us with great big question marks about his body of work.)

Recently, I had the great fortune though to interview Jeff Berry, an early participant in D&D's eldest first cousin, Empire of the Petal Throne. Jeff's own blog (named after his first character in M.A.R. Barker's campaign), can be found here. Further interesting (and highly amusing to yours truly) accounts by Jeff of EPT and Dave Arneson can be read in his Q&A sticky over at the Comeback Inn.

Hill Cantons: What's a good way to introduce you? I know that you were among the first to play in Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne campaigns and a co-author of EPT's most re-published miniature rules set. What else would be interesting to tell people?

Jeff Berry: No idea! Seriously, while I've been involved with Tekumel since 1975, I've never been part of what might be called "mainstream" gaming. I've always been a model builder and painter, and the games I've done over the years have been more or less an excuse to put cool stuff on the table.

I started playing out at Phil's (Prof. Barker, of course) sometime in early 1976. I was introduced to him by Gary Rudolph, who had seen my painted Tekumel figures at the local game shop, and I was brought out to Phil's to be more or less the guy who painted figures for Phil.

Phil had been gaming Tekumel for about two years, and EPT had been out for one; I rolled up a character, and my very first night of gaming out there was set in the Hall of the Petal Throne. Quite a way to get started, and a really good night.

There was just the one large group of eight to ten people at the time, and we soon split into the "old guard" of"'power gamers" who went on to become Prince Mirusiya's "New Men"; our original Thursday Night Group spent our time exploring Tekumel with Phil, and traveled all over the maps of the continent.

I wrote Qadardalikoi after I'd bought the line of Tekumel figures form Ral Partha; they'd taken the line out of production due to low sales, and didn't want to run a batch of the figures specially for me. They sold me the line, instead, right at the time that both Missum and Legions of the Petal Throne were both going out of print.

Phil wasn't entirely happy with either set of rules, feeling that they didn't really reflect how he thought Tekumelyani warfare was waged; he sort of challenged me to write a new set, which I did with his help and cooperation. He even did some little drawings for me, which was quite generous of him.

I'm currently at work on a new edition of the rules, called Qadardalikoi: Advance Standards!, which will bring the rules into this century; they were written almost thirty years ago, after all!

HC: Mega-dungeons have been a big topic in the more old school-oriented blogs. By giving good, interesting, culturally-grounded reasons for the existence of massive underworlds in Tekumel, EPT seemed to present one of the best examples of a deeper approach to presenting the mega-dungeon. Anything you care to share about what the underworld expeditions were like in the Barker campaign. Any memorable incidents? Funny? Dramatic?

JB: All of the above. Phil is a tremendous story-teller, and when he was on a roll he could scare the kilts off of us.

He could also reduce us to tears laughing, like the time one of the more arrogant players found a device of the Ancients deep in the Jakalla Underworld. It was a domed cylinder with a flexible metal hose coming out of one side that had a flat nozzle at the end, and two jewels on the top of the dome; one was green and the other red.

The guy pressed the green gem, it lit up, and the device started to whirr; after a couple of seconds, vapor started to come out of the nozzle, so the guy hit the red gem and the machine stopped. The guy then announced to all of us that the thing MUST be a weapon of the ancients, and lugged it all over the underworld for the rest of the night.

Sure enough, we got jumped by Grey Ssu, and the guy fires up his mighty 'death vapor' weapon to kill them. Well, of course, it didn't kill any of the Ssu; the warm moist vapor just took all the wrinkles out of their parchment-like skin, and they looked all nice and presentable. We ran for it, with the freshly-pressed and wrinkle-free Ssu in hot pursuit...

A lot of the players had real trouble figuring out that Tekumel wasn't your stock-and-standard D&D version of Tolkien "Middle Earth": it was unique, and much more in tune with Edgar R. Burroughs "Barsoom", Robert E. Howard's "Conan", and the eldritch works of Lovecraft and A. Merritt. If one had read those, which were pretty obscure at that time, one was usually able to "get" Tekumel. Phil had grown up reading those books by those authors as they were being published, and he was of that generation or world-builders.

Keep in mind that in a six-week period in the summer of 1974 he'd written EPT, rolled up 1,000 NPCs on 3 x 5 cards, and drawn up at least three levels of the Jakalla Underworld.

He could do it, as well as all the books he created in the space of two years, because he'd been writing about Tekumel since high school. I've seen the original map of Tsolyanu from the middle 1940s, and I have copies of his Tsolyani language materials and histories from the 1950s. The earliest art that we have in the collection is from 1949, and illustrates a plot-line/story arc that we played in ourselves and which is still going on.

Part II of our interview will be posted tomorrow. 

Split Classes and Holmes Expert

Jim (aka the Wampus) asked yesterday what I meant by saying that split classes were a likely design choice for our hypothetical Holmes Expert set. My line of reasoning flows back to 1984 when Frank Mentzer's third boxed set for D&D, the Companion set, reared its head.

In that edition, a number of new classes were introduced, not as stand-alone classes in which a player starts at first level and works as usual up the ranks, but as a career choice for certain qualifying characters of the basic classes as they reached name level. (BTW Grognardia had a recent interesting discussion on this whole topic.)

Thus in BECMI-flavored D&D you didn't start play as a Paladin; it was instead something a Lawful fighter earned by reaching 9^th level. Similarly a Neutral fighter could choose to become the Knight class and a Chaotic one an Avenger (not quite as cool as the dreaded Anti-Paladin that was invariably played by That Guy). Neutral clerics could opt to become Druids with their own unique spell sets.

Later Gazetteers would even add some options for the demi-humans that topped out so early, such as the Halfling Master class.

The more I thought about the more the logic behind going the split class route seemed more and more rock solid to me as a design choice for an expansion to a Basic boxed set since:

1. It's awkward retroactively introducing new low-level-starting classes in a product that is supposed to expand play to levels 4-12. It undermines the standalone simplicity of the Basic set and a slower introduction to greater levels of complexity.
2. It gives players an interesting carrot for higher levels of play. “When Mogg the Mendicant gets to 4^th level, dude, he's going to go all Witch Doctor and rock out the dungeon.”
3. It allows a designer to introduce a smaller, simpler set of the inherently fiddly new abilities, spell, and other goodies that come with a new class in D&D.
4. It further distinguishes the new line as something different from both AD&D and OD&D without being wildly divergent.

Got it?

In my own dream Holmes Expert it would work something like this. Players start levels 1-3 with the usual range of race and class choices (perhaps throwing in the demi-human thieves that creep into the pre-generated character list of B1).

When they reach 4^th level--and yes, I would introduce them much lower given the 12^th level ceiling to the whole project—they are allowed to choose any number of new quasi-classes attached to their starting class that they qualify for by alignment, attribute, race, or whatnot.

My own druthers would be to introduce a largish range of sub-classes with very short lists of new goodies. Go wide and shallow in other words rather than the AD&D way of creating longer and longer sets of new stuff to deal with in an individual class.

It would be doubly fun to draw on a wide range of sources contemporary to the OD&D era, stripped-down, more Basic-ish versions of all the classes in Strategic Review, The Dragon, and the many wackier classes of the constellation of zines from that time (can we say Pyrologist and Dwarf Craftsmen?).

More on the Holmes Expert Set

Thanks to all who sent me their thoughts—and cool Holmes expansion documents—on and off-blog. It struck me in the exchanges that I should clarify the thought experiment scenario from yesterday.

Imagine it's the early months of 1980. Holmes' Basic set is selling way past expectations and TSR honchos see the chance to develop a new game line of simplified rules to parallel AD&D. Fresh off the farm/campus/mental institution you've be drafted to be co-editor on this new Expert boxed set with the good doctor.

Here are the guidelines you are given to design this new line.

The “must do” list:

1. The boxed set is to include a 48-page rulebook and a module designed to introduce Basic players to higher level play. Crappy dice/chits, geomorphs, etc. are optional.
2. All the rules in the printings of the Blue Box up to 1980 are done deals (you're expanding an existing product after all). They cannot be annulled even if Dr. Holmes stated a preference against. You are stuck with five-fold alignment and all the rest.
3. Though rules can't be annulled new rules can be added as elaborations to existing rules or short optional rules—especially if they were historically proposed by Holmes (or inferred from his material) or from existing TSR material like B1 and B2. Thus you can introduce knockout rules as an elaboration to the combat section or optional rules like spell points for magic users.
4. You must also introduce new and unique material to distinguish this new line. Gygax's throwaway line in the previously-mentioned Dragon article is a commandment. There must be new classes, monsters, magic, etc.--and all this new content must be sufficiently different and simpler than the fledgling new AD&D line. Special preference to be given, of course, to classes and races mentioned by Holmes in his writings (samurai, witches, witch doctors, centaurs, werebears, dragons, vikings, amazons, and the like are all fair game as PC races and classes, for instance).
5. Simple rules or guidelines to help DM's create new classes and races.
6. You need to introduce wilderness exploration rules, stronghold and building construction rules, more hireling rules and generally expand play up to 12^th level. Level caps must be determined for non-human races.
7. You can use any of the material from the three LBBs and OD&D supplements, but any adapted rules should be kept simple and brief.

Now assume that many of the design choices made by B/X and BECMI editors are choices you might make such as:

1. Introducing wilderness rules by providing a snapshot of a campaign world at the end of the rulebook and in the accompanying module. Material from The Maze of Peril, the Basic introductory adventure, and locales mentioned in Holmes' short stories likely should be used. (Here's a cool run-down from Doc and others on the OD&D forum).
2. Possibly introducing new classes as split classes ala Mentzer's Companion rules. Players all start 1-3 levels with the standard starting classes from Basic and can switch to a sub-class or whatever. 

Holmes Expert Boxed Set: What If?

Old school D&Ders seem to love “what if” intellectual excercises. What if D&D had been modeled on classical Greek myths rather than medieval Europe (Mazes and Minotaurs)? What if Traveller had cornered the market first and fantasy rpgs where modeled after it? What if the B/X series had been completed by Companion rules, rather than Mentzer?

My own head was spinning last night from a similar line of questions after reading a very intriguing passage in Dragon magazine #35 (March 1980). In Gygax's then-monthly column, “Sorcerer's Scroll”, he discusses at great length the various business decisions of TSR as it went gangbusters at the turn of the 1980s.

About halfway through he starts talking about about the internal debate at TSR about whether the Holmes Basic edition should have a product that pointed back to OD&D (as Holmes intended when he volunteered) or forward to AD&D as it began to be rolled out as a system. We all know which vision won. Thus the strange hybrid beast that was that first blue box set came into being.

Now here's the part I didn't know, there were plans for an Expert set expansion for Holmes underway at TSR in 1980. According to Gygax: 

“...as Basic Set sales soared, so did our plans... Design is now hard at work on the second boxed D&D game, the Expert Set. It will take players through at least 12th level of experience, tie in the best of the “Original” material, and actually add some new classes, spells, magic, monsters and so on. That should satisfy all those fans who prefer the complete flexibility and open form of D&D over the more controlled and formalized structure of AD&D.”

Whoa. Now obviously these plans were folded into a different plan in which D&D evolved into a new toned-down and simplified system that would be the B/X and later the BECMI lines. But it does pose a very tantalizing what-if.

What if that Holmes Expert set was rolled out before or in place of the B/X revision? Now there have been several nicely-done Holmes expansion homebrews such as Meepo's Holmes Companion, but what if there was full-bodied expansion along the more ambitious lines above?

Imagine for a minute a Holmes Expert set that retained it's unique bits. Five-fold alignment, DEX determines initiative, unusual spell descriptions, no racial classes, generous magic-item creation rules, etc. grafted onto an expansion written by the quirky (and slightly incoherent) mind that was J. Eric Holmes.

Imagine a set of new classes and/or races written by the man who explicitly stated that players could start at just about anything a DM gave her nod to such as a “centaur, a lawful werebear, and a Japanese Samurai fighting man”?

Imagine new monsters from a guy so immersed in pulp fantasy roots as to actually write a follow-up novel to Edgar R. Burroughs strange and obscure Pellucidar series? It certainly would feature the Cthuloid and gonzo creations you get whiffs of in Mazes of Peril and his other stories. Were-shark anyone?

What about the module that would have accompanied it? Imagine a Holmesian mid-level adventure that would rival In Search of the Unknown or Keep on the Borderlands?

The mind boggles.

Arneson on Experience Points for Special Interests

It's been often noted in the nooks and crannies of old school spaces on the Internet that D&D co-creator Dave Arneson used a heavily house ruled system in his Blackmoor campaign that eschewed a simple gold for experience formula. Experience points were instead given for loot spent on player-chosen special interests, a notion that intrigued me enough to adopt myself.

I had assumed, based on many second-hand accounts, that Arneson's system was either something a bit abstracted and arbitrary based on the stated goals of the players or very class specific. Something like “my character's special interests are in power, so I get an experience point for each gold piece spent on my stronghold, hiring mercenaries and the like; or I am a fighter so gold spent on swords, armor, and training gets me experience.”

A close reading of that wonderful and jumbled mess of campaign notes, the First Fantasy Campaign, reveals, however, an interesting sub-system with some serious rules-specific crunch. I have no idea to what degree these rules were used in actual play--for all I know they could have been closer to my former view in reality. At any rate, they point to ways a GM can inspire crazy fun by tweaking the exp. carrot and stick.

For starters, the FFC system didn't just limit a PC's choice to one area of interest, it gave them seven separate ranges of choices that had varying percentages for treasure spent in a primary area of interest. Gold spent on somewhat related pursuits give smaller percentages of return (80-90 percent) and less related ones smaller percentages or none at all.

A player who chose to have his character specialize in a love of wine, for instance, received 100 percent for all the hard-earned loot spent on booze, 80 percent on women (!), and a mere 10 percent spent on religion.

The specific areas of interest are where Arneson's quirky and fun genius as a GM are really on show--as is the sheer gonzo enjoyability and pulp fantasy sensibility of Blackmoor. Witness the following highly-amusing definitions:

“A. WINE: Spirits with a relatively High Alcoholic Content that is immediately consumed by the player to the limits of his capacity. This MUST be repeated after recovery, by the player until all the alcoholic beverages purchased have been consumed BY THE PLAYER [Arneson's emphasis] before he can proceed on another expedition. An exception to this is if he comes into conflict with other players and loses the purchased WINE, whereupon he can proceed on an expedition...Experience gained while drunk does not count but treasure does.”

Wow. I hope said character did not have to make a systemic shock roll for their liver between expeditions.

“B. WOMEN: The player will immediately-proceed to the local ESTABLISHMENT and expend all funds desired on ROOM plus EXTRAS at that place. Slaves of the appropriate type (left to player) may also be purchased with the funds and utilized to fulfill this classification. These slaves may then be sold at reduced value, the difference being credited to the players account. Money stolen does not count in this area.”

Ok this one is a little embarrassing. Could, ahem, stand for some post-millennial, post-feminist updating.

“C. SONG: The player proceeds to the local tavern and expends his wealth on other players present in either category A or B or C. Damages assessed by the tavern owner are counted towards the players expenditures in this area. Experience gained as a result of area C will count towards this area only if the player is not inebriated when this was done. Inability to pay all debts so incurred in this, or the above areas may result in imprisonment (if they can get you) or banishment (if you get away).”

Partying down to help out your buds. What's not to like with this one. But remember to stay sober to keep that exp award.

“D. WEALTH: Merely the stockpiling of Gold, Silver and similar items of value by the player, If these items are stolen, the player loses full value immediately upon discovery and may lose levels as a result.”

Maintaining said miserly hoard perhaps entailed the creation for strongholds—or dungeons—of your own. An interesting way to again get players busy in co-creation.

“E. FAME: This is gained by straight combat with creatures and players in the game. The qualifying factor is that there must be another player who attest to your prowess in public. Otherwise, no points are gained (referees may award partial point totals if bodies are discovered later by other players (who must also attest to your results up to 75% Normal value). Flunkies (non-Player Characters) can also attest to your success (you get half value then) but can also (depending on loyalty) attest to deeds that you did not do...”

So showing off finally has some in-game utility. Better make sure to hire up some retainers (and keep them alive) to spread word of your greatness.

“F. RELIGION or SPIRITUALISM: Awarded when the player gains experience points while engaged on a QUEST or otherwise co-operating with a Cleric (may be himself) on a task. Funds are given to the local Religious denomination (up to player) where upon he will gain the points. Real Player Clerics may refuse to accept the offering and the player will get no points. Refusal to accept may get the player in trouble, depending on what the CLERIC said. Money given to the denomination may be spent by the Clerical type once 40%-90% (roll six-sided die) is sent to H...See HOW TO BECOME A BAD GUY for other details.”

Leaving aside the puzzling, tantalizing incoherence (what or where the hell is the H that money is being sent to?) there are interesting implications. Clerics have clear obligations to religious institutions, but can also cash in on the piety of their PC brethren.

G. HOBBY: This is a catch all category left to the referee to award details on to the players. Examples of some of the more obvious pursuits would be SPELL research by Magic-Users specializing in say ANIMAL CONTROL or the raising and breeding of LYCANTHROPES. Even the taking of spare parts and building a new creature...One's hobby could even be the devising of better TORTURE machines, making GOLD, the building of flying machines, all up to the referee to outline and define within the limits of his campaign.”

Another simple wow. Who wouldn't want to be a player in this kind of campaign?

Empire of the Petal Throne, the “Gamist” Early Years

Empire of the Petal Throne is often referred to by old school D&D gamers as the “favorite game I never played”, a notion that I (sadly) cling to myself. Having developed a case of Tekumel fascination after an impulse buy of Barker's Man of Gold novel, EPT also became for me the one and only gaming system I bought in the entire two-decade period in which I swore off gaming.

At the time though, the fiddly-seeming, original D&D-flavored rules seemed far less interesting and evocative than the setting squeezed around. (Likely the nature of the Tekumel beast impels nearly all it's admirers—outside of the group still playing with Barker or other hardcore initiates—to be background-consuming admirers rather than hands-on practing admirers these days.)

These days my thoughts run about 180 degrees in a different direction. OEPT starts to look more and more as a fascinating set of tweaks and experiments building off a core of D&D rules and concepts when they were both still young and fresh. Which is why I find the remarkably well documented --if obscurely filed away--accounts of the game's early days so fascinating. It's a glimpse into a sweet-spot time when a richly-imagined setting firmly rooted in pulp science fantasy added to the excitement of an adventure game—a time before when acting out scenes from Tsolyani daily life became the end in itself.

Take the following account from M.A.R. Barker from the Runequest Con booklet I quoted from yesterday:

“When I first dragged my dusty tomes on Tékumel out of my basement in 1974, I thought of them as little more than background material for a “dungeon” to entertain my friends in our small gaming group at the University of Minnesota. I had been dissatisfied with the background-less, society-less “dungeons” then being played: when one came up out of a “dungeon,” what did one do? Go to a bar, drink, and fight? Go to a “hotel” and sleep until the next “expedition?” Wander around the streets of the “town” where very few buildings had interiors or even shopkeepers? Go to a “temple” to be healed or to “pray” for useful magical benefits, sorcerous weapons, etc.? Go on an “outdoors adventure,” using a set of rules designed to appeal to backpackers? The choices were limited...

The format of the game offered interesting complexities, but little was in print. One of our first referees, who had played with Gary Gygax and had introduced the game to our group, brought in a government. Being a medieval history major, his ruler was a Duke, and the social structure was feudal. The “church” for good folks resembled Catholicism, while the “temples” for “evil” characters were simplistic borrowings from Robert Howard’s Conan stories and the like. Admittedly, we had a great time.”

I love the telling honesty of that last line. The following, fascinating account from one of Barker's original players, Lady Anka'a, gives some texture to what the newly-synthesized campaign was like in its first year. One should note that this original OD&D-based campaign was not yet the OEPT version that was commercially published by TSR. Ironically it was Gary Gygax no less who convinced Barker to create the slightly more-divergent, percentile-diced based system.


(By the way all of this information was found on the Tekumel yahoo group. If you dig this stuff, you should mosey over there and join up. Among other things you can find an old email from the same lady that talks about how Barker developed the original manuscript after objecting to Mike Morand, of Old Geezer fame and the likely DM mentioned above, let his players ice the Archangel Michael. Whoa.)

“So it passed, that one August evening, hot and sticky, we all traipsed down to Klaeber Court--which was the office for the South Asian Studies Department, which Prof. Barker headed. It was not in the usual gaming place, because he wanted this to be private--he said then he planned to publish it and we said we would be discreet about it...

7:00 pm was the appointed time, but we got there and as usual, we hung around and chatted for a while. Eventually, Phil took out a number of green-covered mimeo booklets--two volumes each, and passed them around. Maybe 100 - 150 pages total.

We read through the booklets while Phil told us about the world, and we eventually started rolling up characters. In those days, it was pretty much a copy of D&D in stats and combat. We all got characters and looked through the books and decided what class we would be, fighter or priest or magic-user. It was different from D&D in that there were many more sociological things we had to deal with right at the start. Like picking a god to worship and alignment, though Prof. Barker said alignment was not as big a deal as in D&D, in other words stability and change were not automatically inimical...

Our origin, and that of all the original player characters, was that we originated from the Southern Continent (never seen on maps) and had decided to leave and cast our fortunes in the north. We were supposedly about 18-years-old or so. We each arrived on the shores of Jakalla in a small boat. We landed, sold the boat, and with the few coins we got from that and the clothes on our backs (and presumably a small pack of personal items) we entered the world of Tekumel, and the Tsolyani Empire...

At first the campaign was mostly a dungeoning campaign, with interesting twists. We first fought in the Tlakotani slave arenas for money and earned enough to outfit ourselves, to go into Jakalla's underworld, kill monsters and get gold--kaitars--so we could get better equipment and kill bigger monsters. And we would earn points and go up levels, and do more and better stuff. The usual D&D progression. The first six months or so was mostly that.

But it was fascinating. We encountered monsters we had never heard of before, and strange people and places. The idea this was a metal-poor world and such was made clear to us from the start, but we absorbed a lot through asking questions, and on our shopping trips to outfit ourselves. Later we ended up exploring most of the planet through use of the tube car system.

Those were some of the best adventures I have ever played in, in any campaign. They are still etched vividly in my memory.”

Barker goes on to say in that convention piece that “the original Empire of the Petal Throne was about as realistic a simulation as Monopoly is of Atlantic City of the 1930’s.”Personally though, I would love to see nothing better for Tekumel to return to its “gamist” roots, to a time when those barbarian outsiders explored vast, history-soaked underworlds by torch-light with nasty barbed chlen-hide swords in hand.

Instead of yet another clunky (or narrativist-rooted) edition of rules, why not a return full circle? Why not a whole new, old edition of OEPT that explicit posits itself as a tricked-out, rules-lite version of OD&D with a outwardly, less canonically-obsessed tone? Based on the sales of new, old rules sets presenting heavy designer-flavoring such as LotFP--which has effectively sold out on its entire first print run--my hunch is that the professor would have a hit product on his hands.

Something We Forget About Gary Gygax...

...namely that he had his moments of really being crankily down on those tinkering with house rules and variants in D&D. A fact that we, the so-called old school, tend to readily gloss over in our rush to embrace a DIY ethic. Re-reading an ancient issue of Dragon magazine (#16, July 1978) yesterday I was surprised how early indeed he was travelling down this warpath.

A few eyebrow raisers:

ON CRITICAL HITS (one of the most common of house rules)

"The “critical hit” or “double damage” on a “to hit” die roll of 20 is particularly offensive to the precepts of D&D...the point must be made that whole game system is perverted, and the game possibly ruined, by the inclusion of “instant death” rules, be they aimed at monsters or characters. In the former case they imbalance the play and move the challenge which has been carefully placed into D&D. In the latter, “instant death” no longer allows participants to use judgement when playing. Certainly some monsters are capable of delivering death at a single stroke, but players know these monsters and can take precautions. If everything that is faced has an excellent chance to kill characters, they will surely die before long. Then the game loses its continuity and appeal, for lasting character identification cannot be developed."

ON WEAPON EXPERTISE (guess a view he ditched when Unearthed Arcana reared its head)

"There are a number of foolish misconceptions which tend to periodically crop up also. Weapons expertise is one. Given the basic assumption that those normally employing weapons are typical of the medieval period, and D&D is plainly stated as a medieval fantasy game, it should follow in the minds of knowledgeable players that any fighting man worth the name made it a point to practice daily with all forms of arms. There was a prejudice against the use of the bow by knights, granted...The truth of the matter with respect to weapon expertise is, I believe, another attempt to move players closer to the “instant death” ability. For those who insist on giving weapons expertise bonuses due to the supposed extra training and ability of the character, I reply: What character could be more familiar and expert with a chosen weapon type than are monsters born and bred to their fangs, claws, hooves, horns, and other body weaponry? Therefore, the monsters must likewise receive weapons expertise bonuses. While this does put part of the system into balance again, it moves player characters closer to situations where they can be killed before they can opt to follow a course of action aimed at extricating themselves. Again, this feature is undesirable and must be discarded."

ON VANCIAN MAGIC--AND THE AMATEUR RPG PRESS IN GENERAL

"Spell point systems are also currently in vogue amongst the fringe group which haunt the pages of “Amateur Press Association” publications. Now APAs are generally beneath contempt, for they typify the lowest form of vanity press. There one finds pages and pages of banal chatter and inept writing from persons incapable of creating anything which is publishable elsewhere...From this morass rose the notion that a spell point system should be inserted into D&D...[The D&D magic system is] inspired by the superb writing of Jack Vance. This “Vancian” magic system works splendidly in the game. If it has any fault, it is towards making characters who are magic-users too powerful. This sort of fault is better corrected within the existing framework of the game — by requiring more time to cast spells, by making magic-users progress more slowly in experience levels. Spell points add nothing to D&D except more complication, more record keeping, more wasted time, and a precept which is totally foreign to the rest of the game."

Beyond enjoying the sheer snarky beauty of this particular rant, I draw two somewhat contradictory lessons from reading this:

1. that those of us monkeying around with the rules shouldn't bow to any infallible authority--even to that of figures we tend to respect. It is your game after all and all the putzing around under the game hood out there is a good and healthy thing. Can I get an amen?

2. That said, one should always keep a sharp eye for the balances that were built into the game at the get go. Thus the seeming weakness and illogical nature of one class (magic users not being able to wield swords is a classic example) may be hardwired into the game for good reasons. Keep an eye out especially for changes that muck up actual play at the table and be clear-minded enough to discard your own "brilliant" ideas when they just simply don't work.

More later next week on how and why we ditched any number of "brilliant" house rules in our campaign.