The New Encounter is Out

Issue four of the Classic D&D fanzine Encounter is out and I feel totally unabashed in pimping it to readers. (This time around I didn't contribute anything, so I am free and clear of “enlightened self-interest”.)

Why do I like it so?

Well, for one it's free (the right price) without being cheap. The downloadable PDF is first-rate with a nice crisp, three-column layout. Cover and interior art is evocative and well-placed. Editing is tight and the magazine overall feels like it breaks free of the kitchen-sink info-glut common with our side of the hobby.

More importantly, the content quality is quite good too and getting better with each issue. This issue has a number of highlights: a Dark Crystal campaign setting write-up (yes, the weirdo muppet fantasy movie, Dark Crystal) by Encounter editor Jesse Walker; an excellent streamlined set of rules for running D&D for young kids by local Texas boy Jimm Johnson; and a nicely-done article on using Norse-myth-inspired dragons.

Download it here.

Ditching the End Game

Let me tell you how I really feel: the End Game sucks. Not the gameplay of course—that would mean that my current obsessive project would be an exercise in extreme masochism—but the phrase itself.

I am not exactly sure when the phrase passed into the common parlance of the old school blogosphere. Perhaps it was this post on Grognardia two years ago that brought it into being. The original post was inspiring to me, for back in the day I loved the notion of kingdom-carving as part of the arc of character development.

And in many ways my own first experience with this kind of play was the classic AD&D End Game. When my first PC, Evaro IV, reached “name level” we promptly cracked open the holy of holy books, the DMG, and read aloud to the group, “When player characters reach upper levels and decide to establish a stronghold and rule a territory...” The operative word was “when” for us, not “if”. This was clearly what you were supposed to do with a high-level character.

Dutifully, I rolled on the requisite follower chart; packed up the utility belt of magic items and other belongings; and slogged out with my band of brothers to a lonely wooded hex in Greyhawk's Wild Coast (told you it was classic vanilla). Monster lairs were cleared and the foundations of a great keep laid. Wilderness clearing, patrolling, and attracting new colonists were the business of the random encounter charts in the appendices of the DMG—in general it was about the most by-the-book experience as we could muster back then.

I not only had a blast, but it whetted my appetite for an endless string of increasingly complex and immersive computer strategy games to come (please god, stop Paradox games before it designs another Europa Universalis-type game again).

So what the hell is my beef with the End Game?

It's with the proscriptive nature of the term. Months ago in the discussion and debates around domain-level play that led me down the road of perdition to the current Domain Game, Rob Kuntz took me to task for using the very phrase I am bagging on today. At that time he said:

“1974 OD&D never posed an "end-game" that was "retirement" and "winding down". The "end-game" connotation is strictly a "New" (and revised/tacked on) phrase which is interpreted in some strange way as being both an end and a retirement. It's just the campaign portion extending itself dynamically...”

The more I see the phrase used the more I agree with him. For what it implies is a very linear, dull even, way to approach this portion of gameplay that limits its open edges.

By coupling it with a certain point in the power arc—and one in the glacial pace of our adult campaigns we are unlikely to ever see—we put play of this kind in a tight-lidded box conceptually. It's akin to buying so much into the B/X and BECMI D&D marketing decisions to put wilderness travel and adventure into the second booklets, that we all decided to call it the “middle game” and limit participation it to being something only for characters levels 4-14.

Absurd, right?

You play a character for years adventuring the hell out of deep dark dungeons, far-flung wildernesses, other planes of existence even and then your great hero is stuck becoming a graying bean counter in some dreary stronghold as his life fades to black—or worse morphs into an NPC tool for the DM.

Borrrrrring. No wonder you hear any number of voices explicitly saying it's not for them.

D&D was originally (and brilliantly) conceived as a game with few edges and had little in the way of proscription about what a character should or shouldn't be doing in his career.

There was no End Game in Arneson's Blackmoor, It started in fact as the great clash of armies and rulers and the players throughout its existence found themselves playing all kinds of roles in the realms of that campaign. Here was a high priest or town merchant, there a vampire.

The classic kingdom-carving phase when players moved off the southern edge of the map to that famous hex map from Outdoor Survival grew dynamically out of the machinations of the players. It wasn't the end, it was just another big leap into something new—and something fun.

As the Domain Game rolls forward I am all for figuring ways to subvert the End Game. Decoupling it from rail-car linear boxes and creating avenues to expand domain-level play to all levels.

After all we have a world to win—even if it only exists in our imaginations and Sunday afternoons.

And Now the News

The Domain Game playtest is moving again, if slowly. The rift in the barrier between the planes that separates Nowhere from Elsewhere apparently fluctuates from time to time. The two weeks to one month turns have become something like five weeks to to one month, maybe it will shrink again as spring gives way to summer.

News from Nowhere:

Sourcebook Writing. Lots on the plate, but progress is being made. This month I will be turning my attention to finishing the sections on hex content generation (this not includes expanding the usual D&D fare, but a more detailed approach to topography and resources), a Pendragon-like system for handling longer-time scale gaming, domain-level ritual magic (thanks, Tim), the fantasy supplement for my mini rules (the first playtest being the battle on the golden barge pictured to below), settlement growth rules, the extended equipment list, and more.

Expect to see more related output on the blog, if all goes well.

Extension of Phase One. Given the delay in finishing the last turn, I extended the choice to the Phase One players to continue this part of the playtest until June or to go with the Phase Two plan of bending the rift to fast-forward a few years. The vote was unanimously in favor of the extension, so for now our brave little expeditions on the edge of the universe soldier on, fewer but stronger.

If you are one of the several players who queued up nice and polite like to play in what was supposed to be Phase Two by now, drop me an email at kutalik at gmail dot com, we may have a role for you yet in one of the existing expeditions (or of course in Phase Two).

New Tin God Revealed. The Gods of Nowhere--with the exception of the mercurial attention whore of a god that lives in the hills--prize shrouding themselves in the cloak of mystery and anonymity, but a new master of the game has revealed himself. Ragnorakk of Tran Eskoor an Doon blog has had some experience running a similar-minded domain-level play-by-post and has graciously agreed to help out as a co-GM. Once he makes his way through the small mountain of documents this game has already generated (hey, we have fertile imaginations we do

Glorious Shen Expeditions Regal Tekumel with Their Annals. Shen-blog make for good reading for curious monkey-allies here.

Prince Khuvu of Thuja watches his shieldwall ready itself for the short, sharp, shock of combat on the foredeck of the mist-shrouded golden barge. 

Free and Painless RPG File Hosting

Now time for a public service announcement. Brad of Skull Crushing for Great Justice has offered us all a great gift: free hosting space for your DIY RPG downloads, images, and other online file needs. Anyone who has been annoyed by Mediafire and the other less-than-stellar options for handing downloads will undoubtedly find this of great use (or at least they should).

Scoot over to his blog here to find out how you can opt in. 

To ameliorate my glaring hypocrisy (see yesterday's post), a real only-somewhat lazy post is coming later today.  

Random Chart for Lazy Blog Posts

Roll d6

1	[Cue the sound of the tundra wind.] You couldn't get your shit together sufficiently to even scrape together even a half-assed post. Get free roll on Real Life Chart B.
2	“Hot Elf Chick”. If I have to explain it, you forfeit a roll on this chart. -2 on next roll if you expend extra energy trying to put a clever or socially-meaningful twist on the post.
3	“Now class, Coach Hand is sick today, so we have this El Cid filmstrip to watch.” Post YouTube video, or Frazzeta picture if hard pressed. Bonus 1d4 lazy points if you remember that you posted it last year.
4	“PieLover over on Dexterity Armor Class Bonus blog...” Instead of writing that comment on someone else's page you just go ahead and post that badboy with a linkback as your own post for the day. +1 on Karmic rolls if it's a lower-traffic blog. -1 on next Lazy Day roll if more than one other blogger has posted likewise.
5	“What did Gary intend when he wrote Missile Fire Cover and Concealment Adjustments in the DMG?” Open preferred edition gamebook to random page. Quote extensively from said selection and top with open-ended questions. Eschew commentary and/or analysis over two sentences or post will polymorph into Not-So Lazy Post on a failed save against Petrification.
6	If you can still move your hand, roll again twice.

Chart additions and modifiers, dear readers?

[Editor's Note, this post on Zalchis is awesome.]

History Is Un-Bunk

Henry Ford, inventor of a mode of production that ruled the world for a century (and arch anti-Semite), is remembered to have said “history is bunk.” Like most too-juicy quotes, of course, he actually said something else close, but not the same: “History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today.”

Good discussions always bring me a good kind of problem here at the HC. Invariably I want to run in three different directions at once with my mind flipping back over this one and that. So indulge me as I start with the last and most tangled thought-post and work backwards.

Several people in yesterday's comments (and Trollsmyth's spin-off discussion) noted that vanilla D&D is as much or more about what Robert Fisher called the “here and now” as it is about a specific historical era.

Several also opined that it's not at all about rigorous historical play, but about playing out a game that is an a-historical crazy stew of mostly literary or pop cultural influences. It's about making a game filtered by elements from the novels, comic books, and movies of the present or recent past.  

There are patently obvious truths in all these comments and I certainly subscribe to at least some of the spirit—or at least bow to the at-the-game-table experience. It's a rare D&D campaign where the players come down with dysentery from eating spoiled food bought from a crowded, unsanitary open-air market or throw out their backs hauling in the local lord's rye harvest.

Often it's much more Ren Faire, then Renaissance (although for the record I think that the implied setting of D&D is something much closer to early Renaissance Europe than anything) and the exuberant train wreck mash-up spirit is found in that whole Jeff Rient's awesome quote thing: “You play Conan, I play Gandalf.  We team up to fight Dracula.”

But the real genius of the game's original vision is, I think, close to what James pointed out, “the beauty of D&D, though, is that it's chassis can accommodate both the irreverent anachronist as well as the stickler for accuracy.” It's always been a “yes and...” game rather than an “either/or” game. It's not just that I can play Conan and you play something else, but that I can also say “this game no one plays Legolas and we're all playing Saladin” and still be playing D&D (though I'd still want to throw in a Deodand, Broo, Ruby Red Eye or two). 

History can be both bunk and not; your call and you can fold, spin, or mutilate the rules to suit.

Not only can history in D&D be un-bunk (fresh outta word choice here), but it can strive to be more than Richard's flavorless un-gumbo—the new societies of the mind can be internally rigorous and logical too—while retaining the “yes and...”.

We can have the Hive Mind's world where nonhumans are more than human ethnic groups with crap on their forehead, but have longstanding societal dynamics of their own (like Tekumel, which at one point was D&D too).

We can have a campaign where the central arena is a bog-standard sandbox with the usual crew of footless misfits—and behind it great historically-derived whirly-bits off stage in the wings: a Reformation-sized rift in that vanilla Catholic Church; the massive cross-cultural shock of a Western stand-in nation meeting a continent it never knew existed; or the sudden collapse of a Great Empire to a dynamic barbarian conqueror. And injecting the weirder and more fantastical twists and prisms can only add to that fun.

I can see why Richard comes to his conclusion, much of the game as written in its many iterations rarely seemed able to rise to projecting the great, sweeping possibilities of weaving in these dynamics. To often it just copped out and invoked the barest of pseudo-medieval handwaves (explicitly or implicitly)--perhaps with that Gygaxian exception in the DMG I pointed out yesterday.

It's a big exception though...and that whistle you hear is a train of thought switching to a different track. More later, but for now, watch your step.