White Dwarf: Issue #10

Issue #10 of White Dwarf (December 1978/January 1979) features a striking cover by Eddie Jones. It's the kind of funky blend of science fiction and fantasy I so strongly associate with the 1970s and that remains a fascination of mine. Ian Livingstone's editorial focuses only fairly mundane matters, such as the attendance figures of the Games Day IV convention and the release of the AD&D Players Handbook. The magazine will return to both these topics later.

The first article is "Talismans of Tekumel" by Jack McArdle. You'll notice that the cover calls the article "Talismen of Tekumel" and I won't comment further on that. Despite its title, it's more a collection eight new magic items for use with Empire of the Petal Throne than a discussion of talismans as such. Articles like this interest me greatly, since I'm curious about how EPT was received and interpreted in the wider world outside of M.A.R. Barker's circle. If this article is any indication, such people saw it as an exotic form of Dungeons & Dragons. None of the magic items described strike me as being particularly Tekumeláni; most aren't even that great as vanilla D&D magic items. A shame!

The "Fiend Factory" offers up nine new monsters for D&D, only a couple of which I recognize from the Fiend Folio. Meanwhile, "Treasure Chest" presents eight submissions to the magazine's tricks and traps competition. These entries range in length from a couple of sentences to several paragraphs accompanied by Grimtooth's Traps-style illustrations. The letters page is filled with discussion of "realism" in RPGs in response to various discussions of it in previous issues. Reading these letters, I am reminded of the perennial nature of the topic, which still bedevils the hobby to this day. "Games Day" is a report by Ian Livingstone on the UK convention of the same name. Most interesting is the fact that its attendance topped 2500, making it the second largest games convention at the time. That's a remarkable fact on multiple levels, not least of which being that 2500 attendees was considered a significant number. Those were the days!

"Light Sword" by Wilf Backhaus is a strange little "simulation" game of combat with laser swords. It's short and simple and is not directly associated with any RPG. "Open Box" reviews four projects, two of which it receive high marks and two of which do not. The highly rated ones were Gamma World (rated 9) and the AD&D Players Handbook (rated 10). The two low-rated ones are The Realm of Yolmi (rated 2), of which I've never heard, and The Manual of Aurania (rated 4), with which I am somewhat familiar. All the reviews were written by Don Turnbull, who'd eventually go on to be head of TSR UK. Mike Ferguson's "The Experienced Traveller" continues in this issue. Here, he presents the possibility of a Traveller character attending university to learn new skills. The system presented is workable enough, though not one I'd personally use. On the other hand, I did find it amusing, since it includes a random table for determining a character's attitude toward his studies. "Only here for the social life" and "Only here for the beer" are two (bad) results. The issue ends with part three of Rowland Flynn's "Valley of the Four Winds."

Retrospective: Chivalry & Sorcery (1977)

Normally, when I speak of Chivalry & Sorcery, I'm talking about boxed second edition of the game, which was released in 1983. That's the version of the game I vividly recall from having seen its many advertisements in the pages of Dragon. That's also the version that secretly intrigued me, since it's the one I actually saw on hobby stores shelves. I say "secretly," because many of the older guys I knew, the ones who initiated me into this weird hobby, were really down on C&S, seeing it as unnecessarily complex and too concerned over "realism." So, it was generally best not to admit to having an interest in such a game in their presence -- and I didn't.

The thing is, even though no one admitted to playing C&S, at least no one with whom I had any regular contact, it still got talked about a great deal, much like the Arduin Grimoires. Despised or not (in my neck of the woods), it nevertheless had a big intellectual "footprint." What I didn't understand at the time was that the Chivalry & Sorcery the older guys were talking about wasn't the edition I instinctively associated with the name, but the original one, published in 1977 -- the so-called "Red Book" pictured above. Since I didn't play it and was discouraged from doing so, I never looked into the matter until recently and simply assumed that the version of the game advertised in Dragon was the only one.

The Red Book is a 128-page softcover book whose contents are presented in very small typeface in two columns. As FGU editor Scott Bizar says in his introduction:

The sheer mass of these new rules has made it necessary to print in small type rather than in our usual format, but this saving in pages will cause substantial savings in the purchase price of the book.

Bizar also goes on to call C&S "the most complete rule booklet ever published" and "the length of a novel" in terms of word count. He's certainly not kidding and I think Bizar reveals something very important about the game with his words. You see, lots of people criticize Chivalry & Sorcery for making a fetish of "realism," but I think, if one were to look at it with an unbiased eye, the game's real focus is on "completeness." C&S tries very hard to provide everything a referee might need in running

an all-encompassing campaign game in which dungeon and wilderness adventures were just a small part of the action.

That block quote above is from the first page of the game itself, under a heading titled "Chivalry & Sorcery: The Grand Campaign." There, the authors lay out the origins of C&S as well as their vision for it. My feeling is that it's here that one can really come to understand what this RPG was all about. That section also explains that

Chivalry & Sorcery began innocently enough with a discussion about the vacuum that our characters seemed to be living in between dungeon and wilderness campaigns. In the Fantasy Wargames Society of the University of Alberta a degree of dissatisfaction emerged over the limited goals that were available to our characters.

Thus, authors Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus created a game that answered their own needs for an "all-encompassing campaign." C&S includes all the usual things you'd expect from a roleplaying game -- character generation, combat, etc. -- but it also has rules and discussions of social status and influence, costs of living, enfeoffment, castles, warfare, training, sieges, tournaments, and more. Whether it really qualifies as "the most complete rule booklet ever published" I leave to others to decide, but there's little question in my mind that Simbalist and Backhaus did create an extraordinarily broad and complete RPG, especially for the time period.

All that said, Chivalry & Sorcery is deserving of its reputation for complexity. Many of its rules, especially for combat, are quite complicated, moreso even, in my opinion, than Rolemaster, which is more "chart heavy" than complex. But I also think it's fair to say that the complexity of C&S reflects not only the mindset of its creators but the game's origins as well. Within a few years of the publication of OD&D, there were gamers who wanted more -- more realism, more complexity, more depth. And from those wants were born a wide variety of alternate approaches to fantasy roleplaying, some of which, I can't deny, I find very intriguing.  

C&S is one of those games.  God help me if the old guys I used to know ever find out.

Comments on this post can be made here.

C&S-ian Naturalism?

Reading through The Chivalry & Sorcery Sourcebook, I came across a sub-section of "Designing C&S Monsters" entitled "Natural Law." Given my interest in Gygaxian naturalism, I was of course intrigued. The sub-section discusses the role natural laws should play in designing monsters and, by extension, campaign settings. Here are a couple of relevant paragraphs:

No matter how "fantastic" the setting, the basic laws of the universe should apply.

This fact about the nature of the universe -- any universe -- has been all too often lost on many game designers and players alike at one time or another. Part of the problem is that many players themselves are still acquiring a working knowledge of basic physics, chemistry, and biology -- as well as any other relevant science. There will be someone out there ready and eager to interject at this point that "it's only a game". I agree, but I will remind him that role games necessarily and inevitably simulate environments. Players have been too thoroughly conditioned by their own life experiences and have acquired enough knowledge about what happens in their own world to make setting it aside far too difficult. It is too much to expect of players to demand that they accept an arbitrary universe conceived by the Game Master which has natural laws too far removed from those of our real world. Water flows downhill, not up. Rocks do not suspend in midair (unless comprised of ferrous material and buoyed up by an electro-magnetic field). Living creatures can be damaged and killed by physical agencies. These are the facts of science. Why should it suddenly be different in a "fantasy" world?

A Game Master bent on violating natural laws should be required to present detailed explanations of the "laws" of his universe which conflict with those we know prior to playing in his world. Any surprises in this area are simply inexcusable.

Here, I think we very strongly see a difference between Gygaxian and C&S-ian naturalism. The Gygaxian variety is more concerned with verisimilitude than with simulation. C&S, on the other hand, is very much about simulation, as even the short passage above demonstrates. Throw in some high-handed rhetoric about players -- and other designers -- who don't know enough physics, chemistry, and biology and it's very easy to see why I had the impression of the game I did back in the day.

In this passage at least, Chivalry & Sorcery definitely comes across as the game of guys who take it a little too seriously and look down their nose at those who don't share their degree of obsessiveness. Of course, as with many things, that's not the whole story, as is evident even within the "Designing C&S Monsters" section from which I've quoted. Still, there's no question that C&S was one of those games that appealed primarily to those who'd already played D&D and found it unsatisfying, not because it was confusing or poorly written, but because it wasn't a good enough simulation. It's a game that was, in some sense, somewhat parasitic upon D&D, because it depended on dissatisfaction with D&D as an engine for generating its players.

That's nothing new by any means. Just as Benjamin Jowett was reputed to have said that all of Western philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, so too one might argue that all of RPG design consists of a series of footnotes to Gygax and Arneson. C&S definitely feels that way to me, at least right now, but I reserve the right to change my opinion as I absorb more of these fascinating rulebooks.