Dousing the Fireball

With the possible exception of magic missile – which, ironically, didn't appear until a year after the original game's release – I can think of no more iconic spell in Dungeons & Dragons than fireball. As most of you will no doubt already know, fireball (or fire ball, as it's rendered in OD&D and the 1981 and '83 D&D Expert Sets) first appeared in Chainmail, where it's one of two types of missiles a wizard can throw, the other being lightning bolt. In Chainmail, a wizard can seemingly throw a fireball at will and its function is as a form of battlefield artillery that immediately destroys any target within its area of effect weaker than a Hero. Even if you've never played Chainmail, I hope my brief summary makes clear just how potent a fireball is – and that's the problem. 

When the abilities and spells of Chainmail's wizards were translated into the terms of OD&D, there were inevitably going to changes and alterations, big and small. In the case of fireball, these changes included a slightly larger burst radius and damage that increases with the level of its caster or, as Men & Magic explains it, "A 6th level Magic-User throws a 6-die missile, a 7th a 7-die missile, and so on." These changes explain, I suspect, why fireball became the iconic D&D spell and the one that nearly every magic-user hoped to learn as soon as they were of sufficient level to do so. Taken together, the fireball of OD&D and all subsequent TSR versions of the game is one of only a handful of spells whose damage-dealing potential has no upper limit. Coupled with its large area of effect and easy reach for most characters – a magic-user only needs to be 5th-level (20,000 XP) to potentially acquire it – fireball is a must-have spell when it comes to damage-dealing.

Spend enough time in online D&D circles and the subject of the relative power of fighters versus magic-users will inevitably come up. This is one of those perennial topics that simply will not die, because, unlike many such topics, I think there's some substance to it. Fighters, even when equipped with potent magic weaponry, can never dish out as much damage as can even a fairly low-level magic-user. Over the years, various solutions have been proposed, such as weapon specialization in AD&D, but none of them has met with universal acceptance – quite the opposite, in fact. 

That's why I've lately been thinking about either eliminating or modifying spells whose damage-dealing effects increase with the level of their caster. If you look at the original spell list from Volume 1 of OD&D, both fireball and lightning bolt are odd men out, mechanically speaking. Most of the game's "offensive" spells, like sleep, cloudkill, or disintegrate do not become more effective as the caster rises in level. Any variability they have in terms of damage or overall effectiveness is usually independent of level (there are exceptions). That feels right to me somehow and offers a better model to emulate in rethinking spells in OD&D and similar games.

On the other hand, simply removing fireball, lightning bolt, and comparable spells might be simpler. This is what Lamentations of the Flame Princess did long ago. Many of that retroclone's deviations from OD&D were introduced specifically to strengthen the fighter's role as the most potent combatant and damage-dealer, which is a worthy goal. Furthermore, by eliminating and/or weakening the number and scope of magical damage dealing, this approach carves out a different role for the magic-user, that of a seeker after knowledge and controller of the environment. It's a far cry from the role people now tend to associate with D&D magic-users, but is that necessarily a bad thing? It's closer to the pulp fantasy conception of sorcerers and wizards than to the cartoonish, video game-y vision of them flinging fireballs and hurling lightning bolts.

I don't know. I'm still thinking about this, especially in light of my evolving thinking about magic in Secrets of sha-Arthan. I'd love to hear readers' thoughts on the subject, especially from those of you have regularly play fighters and/or magic-users. How do you perceive their relative strengths when it comes to damage-dealing or do you make changes to rebalance things?

The One-Minute Combat Round

Over at Donjon Lands, Stephen Wendell has written a lengthy blog post about the Chainmail-derived one-minute combat round of OD&D that I found quite compelling. Stephen argues, based on his reading of Chainmail, that man-to-man combat takes place at a different scale from mass combat. Consequently, the common assumption – and assumption it is, since OD&D never explicitly states this – that OD&D melee rounds are one minute in length is mistaken. 

Not being well versed in the mechanics of Chainmail, it's difficult for me to say whether Stephen is correct in his interpretation, but, by my lights, I think the points he raises are persuasive and worthy of further consideration. That said, I can think of one possible objection, namely that AD&D, unlike OD&D, is quite explicit about the length of its melee rounds, which are one minute in length. For all its deviations from the 1974 original, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons isn't that different. More to the point, Gary Gygax was involved in the creation of both (as well as Chainmail). Why include a one-minute melee round in AD&D if he hadn't intended OD&D to have the same? 

Now, I think it possible, if unlikely, that Gygax simply forgot how Chainmail's combat sequence was intended to work and thus perpetuated a misunderstanding through derivative rules. Whether that's actually the case, I couldn't say, which is why I'm curious what others with more knowledge of Chaimail might have to say on the matter. Regardless, I think Stephen raises some interesting questions. I'm frequently amazed by how often I discover that some "rule" is, in fact, no rule at all but merely a widely held interpretation. Could this be another example of that? 

Correction: Stephen does talk about AD&D in footnote 9 of his post.

Update: Stephen has a follow up to this here. Thanks to Zenopus Archives for the help in sorting out where the misunderstanding lay. 

Random Roll: DMG, p. 59

The ability of several demihuman races to see in the dark is firmly established in Dungeons & Dragons. My first encounter with the game was through the Holmes-edited Basic Set and its rulebook calls this ability "infravision" without any explanation. The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, though, goes to some length explaining the nature of infravision.

As explained in PLAYERS HANDBOOK, infravision is the ability to see light waves in the infrared spectrum.

To say that I have disliked this definition for decades is an understatement. While I am on record as not being opposed in principle to the mixing of science fiction and fantasy, Gygax's explanation of infravision leans a little too heavily, in my opinion, on real world science, with infelicitous consequences, as we shall see.

Gygax elaborates with the following:

Characters and various creatures with infravisual capability out to 60' (standard) are basically picking up radiation from their surroundings. Therefore, they note differences in thermal radiation, hot or cold. They do not "see" things which are the same temperature as their surroundings. Thus, a room in a dungeon might look completely blank, as walls, floor, ceiling, and possibly even some wooden furniture are all of the same temperature. Openings in the walls should show up rather plainly, as space anywhere else will, and if you are generous, you can allow different substances to radiate differently even if at the same temperature, i.e. the wood in the example above would be discernible if care was used in scanning the room infravisually.

Leaving aside the not insignificant matter of what this does to the "magic" of D&D, the conception of infravision Gygax advances here seems intended to limit its utility. If an elf's ability to see in the dark is akin to 1970s era IR goggles, it's a rather narrow ability, almost to the point of uselessness. I imagine that's the point, though. He continues:

Except where very warm or very cold objects are concerned, vision of this sort is roughly equivalent to human norm on a dark or cloudy night at best. Note also that monsters of a very cold or very warm sort (such as a human) can be tracked infravisually by their footprints. Such tracking must occur within two rounds of their passing, or the temperature difference where they had trodden will dissipate. 

The ability to track via infravision is certainly handy, though, as one might expect, Gygax places limitations on it, which given his explanation of how the ability works, is not unrealistic. Of course, what he gives with one hand, he takes with the other.

Light sources which give off heat also absolutely prevent infravision from functioning within their sphere of illumination. (Explain this as the effect of trying to see into the dark when the observer is in a brightly lot area.) It requires not less than two segments to accustom the eyes to infravision after use of normal vision. 

Again, this makes sense, given his conception of infravision, but it's a potentially serious drawback when one notes that it takes two segments to shift between normal and infravision. A lot can happen during those 12 seconds of temporary blindness.

The section ends by noting that creatures with infravision with a range of 90' or more – the sort possessed by "most monsters inhabiting underground areas" – see much more clearly than those with standard infravision. 

Such creatures can easily distinguish floor, ceiling, wall, and other areas, as well as furnishings within the area.

Talk about stacking the deck in the monsters favor!

This whole section makes me unhappy, or at least disappointed. I much prefer granting certain creatures, like dwarves, elves, and many monsters, the magical ability to see in the dark without restriction. This is more or less what's implied in OD&D and the way I've always handled infravision (a term I now reject, owing to the scientific associations Gygax foists on it here). Chainmail, I believe, grants magic-users the power to see in the dark too and it's something I've long considered giving player characters of that class as a basic ability. 

My point, ultimately, is that I think this whole section reeks of an attempt by Gygax to rein in an ability he thought too useful. Since I neither share his likely concern nor like his reframing of infravision as thermal vision, there's not much here I would use. 

"It Just Grew"

In his book, Fantasy Role Playing Games, J. Eric Holmes devotes an entire chapter to the history of RPGs, with particular attention devoted – obviously – to the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. Holmes's perspective is interesting, both because of the relatively early publication date of his book (1981) and because of his direct involvement in that history, through the editing of the 1977 D&D Basic Set (about which I'll say more in a future post).

Before getting to the history of roleplaying games proper, Holmes takes note of several "prehistoric" phenomena that, in his view, laid the groundwork for the invention of the hobby. The first is the growth and development of miniatures wargames, as one might expect, while another, in his opinion, is the paperback publication of The Lord of the Rings. Of the novel, he says

This epic fairy tale, without a doubt the greatest work of fiction produced in this century, inflamed the imaginations of an entire generation. The story, as most of my players know, involves the clash of great armies of men, elves, dwarves, goblins and magical creatures. 

From there, Holmes discusses the publication of Chainmail and its incorporation of "a large amount of fantasy material, magic spells, giants, trolls, dragons and what have you." He also notes that Chainmail was "reasonably popular." It's at this point that Holmes makes a brief but meaningful aside, saying:

What happened next is conjecture on my part. Unfortunately, as so often happens in an enterprise that becomes financially successful, the principals are now engaged in litigation over the priority of the discovery.

With that caveat out of the way, Holmes turns to Arneson and the Blackmoor campaign, "run using the Chainmail rules, which the gamers [i.e. those in Minneapolis] were already used to." It is to Arneson that he attributes that concept of dungeons, which I think is indisputable. Arneson and Gygax then put their heads together, "making up new spells, new monsters and new magic artifacts at a tremendous rate," at which point "they decided to risk the investment and have Gygax's little company, called TSR (Tactical Studies Rules), publish the books." Remember: this is Holmes's perspective, as he saw it in 1981, nothing more.

After Dungeons & Dragons was published, its popularity grew, with "myriads of new players springing up in every high school and college in the country," but, he adds, the rules "were often confusing." 

Few, if any, of the new players guessed that spells could be used only once in each expedition, and beleaguered Dungeon Masters made up their own systems for handling these ambiguities. 

At Caltech in Pasadena, students Cowan, Clark, Shih, Smith, Dahl, and Peterson put together a set of rules with what they felt to be an improved combat and magic system: Warlock.  I used their combat table when I first started playing D&D, because I could not understand the one in the original books. In Arizona, Ken St. Andre created a role playing game called Tunnels and Trolls, again with different rules for magic and combat. These games were published; other rule sets appeared in the amateur magazines. In fact, within a few years of its appearance, D&D had generated many more pages of commentary and revision than were contained in the original three little rule books.

This section, I think, hits on a deep truth about the early history of both D&D and roleplaying games more generally: no one had any idea what they were doing. There was no "plan" or "vision" beyond trying – not very well by most accounts from the time – to document the ideas, processes, and rules that allowed Arneson, Gygax, and others to create these "wildly imaginative fantasy" campaigns that, in turn, inspired others to create their own versions. Holmes quotes Gygax on the development of D&D and what he says is probably truer than most people realize: "Like Topsy … it just grew."

I think, in our quest to understand the past, we often attribute intentionality and purpose to people's actions that, at the time, were at the very least unknown to them, if not wholly absent. I don't think anyone involved in the prehistory or early history of D&D had any real sense of what they'd created. D&D was, in many ways, an accident, like the discovery of penicillin and, like the discovery of that first antibiotic, it changed the world forever.

Interview: Rick Priestley (Part I)

For gamers of a certain age, especially in the UK, Rick Priestley needs no introduction. Designer of 1983's Warhammer Fantasy Battle (with Bryan Ansell and Richard Halliwell), he also had a hand in many of the many games that derived from it, such as Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Warhammer 40,000. Mr Priestley worked at Games Workshop until 2009, when he left to join Warlord Games, which has published several of his designs, perhaps most notably Bolt Action. He very kindly agreed to an interview, the first part of which I am pleased to present below. 

As you will see, Mr Priestley's answers are quite thorough and touch upon many aspects of not only his own experiences but the early days of UK gaming. Since the process of answering my questions in such a fashion takes time, there will be gaps of several weeks between installments of this interview. Nevertheless, I have no doubt readers will agree that what he has to say is worth the wait. I learned a great deal from his answers and am grateful he took the time to provide them.

1. How did you first become involved in the hobby of miniatures wargaming?

It’s the usual story for players of my generation and nothing out of the ordinary. Like every other boy in the 60’s, I was brought up with Airfix models and Britains/Timpo toy soldiers, all sold through Woolworths and commonly available across the nation. Boys’ comics were full of war stories and war themes made for popular TV and films. For many of us, our relatives had served in either the second or first world wars and our parents certainly lived through the second war. Our fathers had probably done national service after the war. Even as infants we routinely played 'war’ in the playgrounds using stick guns and imaginary hand grenades. Children’s magazines like Look and Learn and World of Wonder often had military themes and history was still respectably a tale of battles and kings, with proper dates and all.

At the same time, games were pretty much universal parts of growing up, especially board games, which we all treasured as Christmas and birthday presents. Even as kids we would congregate in each others' houses to play whatever new and exciting games were about. That continued as we turned into teenagers, and we would start to buy and play SPI and Avalon Hill games – the latter were very expensive through – quite an investment at the time! At the same time we’d be putting together more advanced plastic kits, so it wasn’t just wargaming: it was always a mix of military modelling, board gaming and miniatures-based wargames. Many of us would lean one way or the other – perhaps dabbling in miniatures wargaming whilst being primarily a modeller or board gamer, for example. 

I don’t think there was much of a leap from assembling and painting Airfix kits and collecting toy soldiers to devising games with them. I guess the moment when ‘playing’ turned to ‘gaming’ for me was with the discovery of ‘proper wargames’ in the form of the books written by Charles Grant, Donald Featherstone, and Brigadier Peter Young. There was also a series of little booklets in the ‘Discovering’ series (part of Shire publications – pocket-money books on a variety of subjects). Anyway, I came across a copy of Charles Grant’s Battle! Practical Wargaming in a local book store, and that was the loose end of a ball of string as far as I was concerned. That was the first time I encountered proper rules. Afterwards I made friends with other lads at my school who had started wargaming in a similar fashion. Military Modelling began publishing in January 1971 and quickly became the ‘go to’ resource for young wargamers, with adverts from all the leading manufacturers and publishers of the day. I suppose I would have been 12 years old when I came across that first book, towards the end of my first year at secondary school I think.

2. What about RPGs? When and under what circumstances did you first encounter roleplaying games?

Role-playing games didn’t really exist as a genre until quite late in my wargaming day. Before D&D came along in – I guess it must have been 1975 – there was a style of wargaming with miniatures that you might characterise as ‘skirmish’ wargaming. In skirmish wargames a figure was one man rather than representing a portion of a larger formation. Often our men would have names and they would take part in a series of adventures with a continuous narrative, and individuals would survive wounds, gain experiential bonuses and buy, steal or make new weapons and so on. These were ‘role-playing’ games after a fashion, even if we didn’t use that name, and often they would be based upon adventures in the American West or the high days of Empire in Africa. At that time it was reasonably common to have an ‘umpire’ running even ordinary tabletop wargames, so it was usual for someone to work out a game and others to play it out. In essential details this kind of wargaming was the ancestor of all role-playing games.

If you read about the history of D&D, you’ll see that it was a very similar route that led the TSR team from publishing wargames rules to role-playing games via their Chainmail system. Some of my friends and I were already playing similar fantasy games – skirmish fantasy wargames with named characters and a story arc worked out by an umpire. When the first copies of D&D appeared in the UK we did feel a bit as it we’d been beaten to the post! I did go on to play D&D though and created dungeons: this was with the imported rules – I think it was the second edition – three books in a brownish box. A friend of mine had the rule book and some of the early supplements, which was just as well because it was a damned expensive affair! That early version of D&D was extremely free-form, which was very appealing, and beyond that I would just make up stuff – great fun. I never got any further than that with D&D or any commercial RPGs that came afterwards. They all seemed over-regulated and rule-driven to me. Some of the background was nicely done though – RuneQuest especially – and the RuneQuest percentage driven mechanic was considered pace-setting at the time. Some skirmish wargames rules had also used a similar mechanic, as did the first published set of rules that I was involved with – Reaper. I think by the time D&D developed into a phenomenon my gaming had taken a back-seat to college life. Afterwards it was more a question of earning a living so my interest became more professional than hobby.

3. Would you mind talking more about Reaper? You designed this set of rules with Richard Halliwell. What was the origin of the game? Were you happy with the published version?

Reaper was born from two things: a fantasy campaign that Hal ran, and our mutual ambition to publish a set of wargames rules. I think that ambition  to write and publish our own rules – was something that we nurtured all through our teenage years. Hal had a set of science fiction space combat rules printed in a fan magazine called Dragon’s Lair – an irregular newsletter for fantasy wargamers, the first of its kind in the UK as far as I know. We worked on rules together and would invent games using the models we had. I remember coming up with a science-fiction boarding action game that used gridded floor plans to represent different parts of a space ship – something like what would become Space Hulk. Obviously, as teenagers, we were convinced we could do a better job than any of the published rules writers out there. Such is the arrogance of youth.

Not that there was much for fantasy wargames at that time. There was a set of fantasy amendments for the Wargames Research Group ancient rules, which we adapted and used for most of our early fantasy games. These would be games in Tolkien’s Middle-earth using the Minifigs ME (Mythical Earth) range of models. Later on we would prefer to write our own rules to go with whatever fantasy projects presented themselves. Both Minfigs and Garrison produced a range based on Robert E Howard’s Conan stories that included some nice monsters and unusual ‘fantasy’ types.

I don’t remember exactly when the first percentile dice arrived in the UK, although I recall they were sold by Skytrex and were quite expensive. These were actually 20-sided dice numbered 0-9 twice – one red and one black making a pair. There were a few games that featured these dice. I remember in particular a set of WW2 naval rules that used a series of complicated charts and graphs in conjunction with a percentage mechanic to determine the effect of gunfire. These dice suggested rules mechanisms different from those associated with usual six-sided dice. Percentage dice – D100s if you like – imply a mathematical profundity and precision that I believe we found appealing at the time. They give a feel of a serious and proper game – something more realistic than could be achieved with a D6. I still maintain that D100s give that feel to a game, though I would also suggest that it is a ‘feel’ only and in fact such mechanics are neither more realistic nor more accurate in terms of simulation. D100s can be remarkably unhelpful because of the even spread of probability, making fluky scores rather more common that you might wish. I would go on to use a D100 system for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but we had to ameliorate the fluke element with ‘fate points’ to protect players from erratic dice swings.

Anyway, we started to use a percentage system as the basis for our own fantasy wargames. I think the game that inspired us to do so more than any other was The Old West Gunfight rules by Mike Blake, Steve Curtis and Ian Colwill. This was an inspiring set of rules with snippets of history and lovely sketches to accompany the text. For the time this was rather unusual. We are in the age of rulebooks that were solid text and roneo’d sheets stapled together rather than printed and bound. As for photographs and even diagrams… dream on! Our games evolved as a mixture of rules that we’d transposed from other games together with our own percentage driven combat system. In essence they were skirmish wargames with heroes and followers, and usually fixed upon a scenario where our gallant warriors had to travel across a blighted wilderness enduring the onslaught of mutant monsters, rescuing allies from the clutches of ne’er-do-wells, capturing ancient or mystical towers to uncover mysterious artefacts, and so on. Although ostensibly a ‘fantasy’ campaign, events were to reveal a world that was in reality a post-apocalyptic earth where magic had developed in the clutches of psychic mutants following some catastrophic nuclear war. The action eventually took us to a semi-terraformed Mars via a matter transporter. So, I say fantasy… but there was a lot of science-fiction. To some extent this setting was inspired by Michael Moorcock’s stories, notably the Count Brass books which are part of the History of the Runestaff series.

I can’t remember exactly at which point our collection of rules and notes became Reaper but the name was taken from the Blue Oyster Cult song "Don’t Fear the Reaper," a jukebox favourite following its release in 1976. Asgard Miniatures was also founded in 1976, and we’d started to incorporate some of the first Asgard releases into our games. Asgard were based in Nottingham – which is not all that far from Lincoln where Hal and I lived – and I think we had this notion that maybe Asgard would publish our rules. Of course, we had little idea of what publishing amounted to at that time, let alone how to sell something you’d published, but – as I said before – we were ambitious! Hal phoned the number on the Asgard advert and spoke to Bryan Ansell, who every generously invited us over to Nottingham to demonstrate our game. Bryan showed us round the Asgard workshop, which was a small unit round the corner from where he lived, little more than a double garage really. That was the first time we’d seen casting machines and mould presses and all the paraphernalia of manufacturing wargamers figures. I seemed to remember I bought some figures ‘hot’ out of the mould! Bryan was very encouraging, not just with the rules but also with painting and modelling. I’d painted a lot of the models we took over for our demo and I’d also made conversions of some of them. I think in those days Bryan was keen to see if anyone half-promising could design figures. I did subsequently paint a few models up for the Asgard display and even made a few bits and pieces that found their way into the range. It was Bryan who hooked us up with the owners of the Nottingham Model Soldier Shop – who eventually published Reaper.

I got the job of putting the book together having been introduced to the concept of ‘camera ready copy’ by Bryan. Basically, I typed the rules up onto A3 sheets which would then be reduced down to A4. We had a typewriter at home and it happened to have a ‘legal’ carriage, i.e. an extra wide carriage that could take bigger sheets of paper. I left spaces for illustrations which would be added by Hal and Bryan using stock artwork from the Asgard adverts. I think by this time – probably late '77 and early '78 – Hal was at Nottingham University, so he was travelling a lot between Nottingham and Lincoln, acting as go between. I was out of school but wouldn’t go off to college until late '78, so I guess I had some time on my hands. Anyway, I did the basic production work, finalising the text and drawing up the few diagrams, adding the headers using rub-down Letraset transfers. Hal sorted out the cover and a friend drew the cover illustration. Bryan added a nice sketch of Hal onto the credit page – not a bad likeness either!

Hal handled the final stage over in Nottingham. It was printed by the Nottingham Model Soldier Shop – although often described as ‘Asgard’ at the time – and was supposedly the longest set of British wargames rules published to date! Much of that was down to a rather lengthy set of magic rules, which I’d developed as a kind of ‘build your own spell’ system. The rules were quite expensive and I don’t think they exactly set the world on fire, but it’s amazing how many people say they played and enjoyed them back in the day. Later on a second edition was published by Tabletop Games – essentially a tidied up version of the game – and these are fairly easy to find. The second edition is easy to spot because it’s only A5 size compared to the original A4, and it’s saddle-stitched rather than slide bound as was the original.

Mechanically, Reaper suffered from being a little too predictable in terms of combat resolution, basically because of the accumulated percentages. For example, ten men fighting with a 17% of scoring a hit would calculate out at 170% or 1 hit and a 70% chance of a second. In essence, you would inflict 1 or 2 hits every time and that was that. Hits were moderated by a ‘toughness’ role – a sort of saving throw – but even so things were a bit too predictable really. Later on I tried splitting the results out into 50% chances and taking rolls for each, but with D100’s that’s a bit cumbersome so I reduced the percentages to a D10 system with some loss of detail. At the end of the day you lose a lot of the advantages of a D100 system doing that and if you’re going to go for 50% rolls you might as well be throwing a D6.

The Reaper rules were actually more of a battle game than the games we were actually playing, mostly because our role-playing elements were pretty much done free-form by the umpire without any rules as such. There was a lot of ‘it’s up to you’ in the game system and that’s something I think both of us felt was key to the game. I think we were rebelling against the ‘rules are rules and must be obeyed as holy writ’ style of game that was more usual at the time (and since!).

Reaper was the gateway that introduced Hal and myself to the world of miniature manufacture and rules publishing, and most importantly to Bryan Ansell who would later go on to recruit both of us into Citadel and hence Games Workshop. Two other players who took part in our Reaper games (members of what we called LOON – the Lincoln Order of Necromancers) also joined Citadel – before me – Paul Elsey, who became a mould maker, and Anthony Epworth, who became the shop floor manager and subsequently a mould maker. So really, we have a lot to thank Bryan Ansell for, and none of it would have happened without Reaper.

Interview: Douglas Niles (Part II)

Part I of this interview can be found here.

5. You're also associated with the Dragonlance series, having written several adventure modules for it. What role did you play in creating and developing the setting and course of the series? 

Dragonlance! I can say that I was there at the beginning! I wish I could claim I was a believer from the get go, but that would be exaggerating; I had my doubts initially. And I can honestly say that without Tracy Hickman's vision, and as very quickly became apparent, Margaret Weis's creativity and professionalism, DL never would have gotten off the ground to become the groundbreaking fantasy experience that it was and is.

By mid 1983, I think it was, TSR had a staff of 12 full time game designers. We had also hired a lot of professional editors both for the game and the start-up book departments, which mainly published Endless Quest books in a "Choose your own Adventure" format. Finally, the company gathered an astonishingly talented collection of excellent artists, including Larry Elmore, Jeff Easely, Clyde Caldwell, Tim Truman, Keith Parkinson, and others. Tracy Hickman, came up with the idea of writing 12 connected AD&D modules, one for each of the colors of the game's dragons. (He astutely pointed out that, for a game called Dungeons & Dragons, we had never really included a dragon in one of our adventures.) But Tracy was (and remains!) a Big Thinker; he wasn't going to stop at a module series. He talked to many of our staff artists who quickly shared his enthusiasm, and took his idea of an epic story to the book department, suggesting potential for a novel or two that could accompany the game. As I recall, some of the iconic art that later covered game modules and books was created even before DL was approved by TSR management – no doubt those paintings helped to convince the company brass that this idea had promise.

My initial reservations were based on the fact that I didn't think players would want to have their characters tied into playing out a story that someone else had written. Um, I was wrong. I did join the original design team, assigned to write DL2 Dragons of Flame; I think the company wanted a plan so they could kill the module line after four adventures if it fizzled out. (It did not fizzle.) I eventually did 4-5 DL modules over the next few years, and I came to recognize and cherish Dragonlance for the phenomenon it became. At first the company contracted a freelance novelist to write the books, but when the initial drafts were not up to the standard the book department wanted, our managers decided to give Tracy and Margaret a shot at writing the novels. That worked out pretty well.

In addition to game modules, I went on to design a military boardgame for DL, and a sourcebook for the dwarven realms. I also wrote many DL novels – I think about 18 or 20 of them, as well as numerous short stories. It is fair to say that Dragonlance became the main pillar of my freelance writing career from 1990 to 2008. During that time, Wizards of the Coast bought TSR and then Hasbro bought WotC. In about 2008, Hasbro decided to stop publishing Dragonlance novels, even though the books were selling something like 40,000 copies for each title. No one has ever explained to me (or to anyone that I've talked to) why the company made that decision.

6. You were the designer of Battlesystem, which appeared in 1985. What was the origin of this product? Was TSR consciously trying to return to the roots of D&D or was there some other impetus behind it? For that matter, what was your own history with miniatures gaming?

I think that the idea of Battlesystem, the rules for conducting large scale combat with AD&D characters and NPCs was driven by two factors: one was certainly a desire to get back to the roots of D&D, which of course was the Chainmail game system created by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren for medieval era miniatures combat; and two, with the growing prevalence of large AD&D campaigns, and player characters of high level becoming increasingly common, these characters were able to command companies or even larger units of subordinate troops. When a lord with 30 knights encountered a raiding party of 100 orcs, obviously the individual combat rules of the AD&D game became unworkably cumbersome.

At the time I started work on Battlesystem, I did not have much personal history with miniatures gaming, but I had been working with the AD&D rules almost full time for several years. I was honored to be assigned to the project. The biggest requirement (and challenge!) was to translate the basic character attributes of AD&D, such as armor class, hit points, and hit probability (THAC0 – "to hit armor class 0"– in many players' shorthand) into ratings that could apply to military units and allow results to be calculated that would affect multiple NPCs. Certain AD&D rules that rarely came up in dungeoncrawl-type adventures assumed significantly more importance on a battlefield, such as the benefits of charging, or the defensive usefulness of setting the butt of a pike on the ground to meet a charge.

Even more than most design projects, Battlesystem was a collaboration; and I welcomed the assistance, advice, and playtesting of many staff designers, developers, and editors. The editor assigned to the project was Michael Dobson, and the game system was the beginning of a partnership in which the two of us designed a series of game adventures (the Bloodstone Pass series) and eventually led us to become a novel-writing team for several alternate military history novels. 

In fact, Bloodstone Pass was a set of four modules, all adventures for the highest level player characters that, I think, TSR ever published. We began with a premise we shameless adapted ("stole" is such an ugly word) from Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, one that had already been copied by the American film, The Magnificent Seven. It is the story of seven legendary heroes who are sought out by a group of peasant villagers who are under assault from a brutal enemy host. (It's like the story was tailor-made for D&D!) We presented a mix of battlefield encounters and roleplaying encounters that eventually led the characters into the heart of the Underworld, climaxing in the 4th module with a showdown against mighty Orcus himself. I understand that it is still quite a popular adventure series.

7. I have a great fondness for the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, which is a landmark book in the AD&D line for a number of reasons. For example, I believe it's the first book to use the term "Underdark" to describe the subterranean spaces beneath the world. Was this a book you whose topics were of particular interest to you? 

The Dungeoneer's Survival Guide was a really special project that I was delighted to have the opportunity to write. It may surprise some  (or it may not!) to learn that the official AD&D rules system grew rather chaotically with the input and creativity of a number of individuals, rather than through any kind of rigid "master plan." Gary Gygax was the leader of this development, and his old friend Frank Mentzer had a lot to do with the process as well. But the staff designers in the TSR offices also made suggestions, and some of these led to really successful projects. One of the veteran staff designers, Zeb Cook, had always been an aficionado of many Asian-oriented adventure genres. (He had, in fact, the most impressive collection of giant robot models in his office that I have ever seen.) And he effectively advocated for an AD&D expansion that embraced these elements of Eastern culture. His Oriental Adventures rules, a hard cover book that considerably expanded the scope of the game, was hugely successful both for its enjoyable game content and its commercial value to TSR. This led to the company wanting to offer more location-specific rules expansions.

Dungeoneer's Survival Guide was the next new official rulebook, intended to specifically lay out procedures for adventures, environments, and even cultures and civilizations that were based beyond the reach of sunlight. The rules included details about spelunking, existing and surviving in darkness, and the kinds of environments, allies, and adversaries player characters might encounter under the ground. Building off of Zeb's work, DSG also introduced more rules for specific proficiencies than existed in the original game and led to the commonly used game mechanic of a character's "ability check". As I recall there were several other of these hardbound books written subsequently, and they were popular products.  By the late '80s, though, the trajectory of the AD&D rules system had begun to evolve into what would become AD&D Second Edition, which was ably designed by Zeb Cook, of course with input from Gary Gygax.

8. Top Secret/S.I. was a major revamp of TSR's venerable espionage RPG. Had you been a fan of the original before you started work on this version of the game? What were your goals when creating it?

I was not familiar with Merle Rasmussen's excellent and popular Top Secret game until I was hired by TSR as a game designer, and one of my first official assignments on staff was to read the game and learn the rules. I was very impressed by the level of detail in the game systems, the precision of the equipment descriptions, and the variability allowed by the highly detailed systems for all things espionage – most notably, combat. It was a very lethal combat system, reflecting its "true to real life" approach. The game books made for a fascinating read, and I enjoyed some playing sessions with co-workers and some of my friends from outside the company.

In a sense I got kind of a crash course in the state of the RPG industry circa 1982 in my first months on the job. My focus was on TSR products of course, including the Boot Hill, Star Frontiers, and newly released Gangbusters games. I was also exposed to Marc Miller's legendary Traveller science fiction game from GDW, Chaosium's RuneQuest, and many other products in what was still a fledgling industry.

With my primary focus remaining on D&D and AD&D, I never had the chance to work on any products for Merle's Top Secret game, which was admittedly rather under-served in the accessory department by TSR. I was surprised when the idea for Top Secret/S.I. was presented, but delighted when I was assigned to create a new espionage RPG system. (A key aspect of the project assignment was that the company desired a completely new game, not a "second edition" type modification of Merle's game.) During this project I worked very closely with our recently hired, but very experienced editor, Warren Spector, who had been the editor-in-chief at Steve Jackson Games in Texas. Warren's contribution to the writing and, especially, playability of the TS/S.I rules cannot be understated.

 In fact, playability was one of the key requirements of the game. Inevitably that meant sacrificing quite a bit of the original game's meticulous realism. It was as if Merle's rules emphasized the careful realism of the style of a John le Carré novel, while the new version was to be much more representative of the James Bond style that the films presented during the Roger Moore years. And I believe we did come up with an exciting, fast playing game. The game mechanic I was most proud of, I recall, was that a player rolled two 10-sided dice to make an attack. The result would first be read as a percentage, which would determine whether or not the attack was successful; and if the shot hit, the two dice would be consulted individually to determine how many points of damage was inflicted (by the die in the "1" column) and (by the die in the "10" column) what part of the target's body was injured. 

9. Do you still get the chance to play RPGs? If so, what are you currently playing?

I rarely get the chance to play an RPG these days, but enjoy them when I can. In recent years I have had fun playing AD&D at a couple of southern Wisconsin conventions, playing with strangers and old friends. (Hopefully we will be able to have game conventions again one of these days!) Gamehole Con is a fixture in Madison, where I live. In normal years, it occurs over a four-day weekend in early November (always a date when no Badger home football game is scheduled, so that hotel space is available!). It draws a lot of local and regional gamers of all ages, and attracts a number of the old timers from around the area. I always get a chance to see my old boss, Jim Ward, from the TSR design department; he was a great man to work for, and remains a steady and wise presence in the gaming industry. I also try and make it down to Lake Geneva in March for GaryCon, a wonderful gathering of friends, old colleagues, and fans. That con is organized by Gary Gygax's kids. Among many other people, I always enjoy the chance to catch up with Margaret Weis at GaryCon. I also had the great pleasure to run into Heidi Gygax there, who (as I related in my answer to question 1) is the person who first introduced me to D&D!

I did design a D&D module for expert level players a couple of years ago. I was a guest of a fabulous game convention, in Italy, called the Lucca Comics and Game Convention. As part of my participation, I created an Expert-level module (for characters levels 5-8) and had a great deal of fun playtesting that here at home, and then playing it several times in Lucca. I was amazed to see how popular that level of D&D is in Italy, and in particular how many players enjoyed the modules that we were creating during the 1980s. At that con I also had the chance to run, for the first time, Gary Gygax's Tomb of Horrors.

For my hobby gaming, I generally favor board and counter wargaming, either strategy or tactics on a fairly grand scale. I still love SPI's Wellington's Victory, a four-map monster game about the battle of Waterloo. Decision Games has released a new version of that game, with a new rules system, and I spent a lot of time with another old friend and colleague, Mark Acres, trying (with limited success) to master the update. If I may be forgiven a small boast, I confess that my absolute favorite game to play is my own design, released by TSR /SPI in the late '80s: World War Two: European Theater of Operations. I was fortunate enough to be given the time and resources to polish the original game into a second edition. That product benefited tremendously from the talents of Steve Winter, the best editor –and one of the nicest people – I ever had the chance to work with. I understand from the blogosphere that WW2:ETO is still played regularly around the US and the world. I have always maintained that if I could only have a single book or game of mine displayed on my tombstone, that would be the one.

Chainmail Alignment Chart

Since the topic has come up in the comments to my previous post, here's the version of the alignment chart that appears in my copy of Chainmail:

Looking at it, there's no question that the OD&D chart is modeled on the one from Chainmail but there are also a lot of differences between them, particularly when you look at the Neutral column.

Gary Gygax on Fantasy Battles

Once again, Chris Kutalik has pointed me toward a post over at the excellent Vintage Wargaming blog where there's a scan of an old article by Gary Gygax from The Wargamer's Newsletter. In this case, it's from issue #127 (October 1972) and he discusses how best to represent various monsters and fantasy characters using model extant at the time. The article's also interesting because Gygax notes, as he later would elsewhere, that he does not consider Tolkien to be "authoritative" when it comes to fantasy -- an opinion that's all the more interesting because it predates the publication of D&D and thus cannot be dismissed as a disingenuous dodge.

Before There Was Greyhawk

Chris Kutalik of Hill Cantons fame pointed me toward a blog post over at Vintage Wargaming that includes scans of pages from issue #116 of Don Featherstone's Wargamer's Newsletter. In that issue (November 1971), Gary Gygax reports on a Chainmail miniatures battle called "The Battle of Brown Hills." The battle is between the forces of Chaos, led by the warlock Huldor ap Skree, and those of Law, led by Count Aerll. Of particular interest are the various Greyhawkian and proto-Greyhawkian names scattered throughout the report. It's a fascinating read for anyone interested in the prehistory of our hobby.

Chainmail Dragons

If anyone out there has access to first edition (1971) of Chainmail, published by Guidon Games, I have a question for you: is the information on the various colors of dragons and their powers included in the Fantasy Supplement? The third edition copy I have (1975) includes those details, but, since it postdates the release of OD&D, it's clearly not reliable evidence that Chainmail is in fact the source for D&D's dragon types.

Spell Complexity

As most of you almost certainly know already, spells in Chainmail are rated according to their complexity. There are six levels of complexity, which not at all coincidentally maps on to the six levels of magic-user spells in LBB-only OD&D. An optional rule pertaining to complexity compares the complexity rating to to power of the magic-user casting it (there are, in descending order of power, wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, magicians, and seers). The more powerful the magic-user, the more likely his spells will take immediate effect, while less potent casters have a greater chance for their spells to be delayed until the next turn or to be negated entirely.

This is a rule I find intriguing and one I've often contemplated adding into my OD&D game, but I've never done so, both because I'm not sure how I'd implement it and I'm uncertain the effect it'd have on gameplay. I'm familiar with the original Chainmail rules, as well as adaptations of the spell complexity system in Spellcraft & Swordplay and Brendan Falconer's article from issue 2 of Knockspell, so I do have resources to draw upon should I ever go ahead with the idea. However, I do worry about the impact it'd have on spellcasting in an OD&D campaign. Clearly, it'd make things more unpredictable, which I like, but it might also make magic-users more ineffective as well, unless one adopts the interpretation that only negated spells vanish from the magic-user's memory. In that case, it might be a fair trade-off, I don't know.

Does anyone have experience with using spell complexity on a long-term basis?

A Chainmail Oddity

I've been re-reading Chainmail lately, though mostly for flavor purposes, because I'm largely of the opinion that Dungeons & Dragons without the "alternative combat system" is a very different game than the one I'm interested in playing. Still, there are many interesting ideas to be gleaned from Chainmail, some of which I might add into my OD&D campaign.

One that I am not sure I will add but is worthy of comment nonetheless concerns magic weapons. When I was looking at a section entitled "General Line-Up," which divides creatures into the categories of "Law," "Neutral," and "Chaos," I noticed something peculiar. Under the heading for "Law," after such obvious entries as hobbits, dwarves, gnomes, heroes, super heroes, wizards, and ents, there's an entry for "magic weapons."

At first I thought this might be an allusion to the fact that some magic weapons, particularly swords, could be intelligent, an impression supported to a limited degree by a statement earlier in the rulebook about magic swords: "Because these weapons are almost entities in themselves, they accrue real advantage to the figure so armed." There's a mention of Elric in the rules and Stormbringer, though not named, is referenced as an example of a magic sword.

Interestingly, "magic weapons" are not listed under "Chaos" in the General Line-Up. I'm not really sure what to make of this, particularly since, as already noted, Stormbringer is alluded to in the rulebook. I suppose it's possible that it was a mere oversight, but I'm not wholly convinced by that, since Gygax establishes several examples of entries found in multiple columns in the General Line-Up. On the other hand, it was deliberate, how are we to interpret this, especially in light of a weapon like Stormbringer?

There are lots of little wrinkles like this in Chainmail. I'm sure individuals more knowledgeable than I can step forward and offer explanations of why magic weapons are presented in such a fashion and, if you do know, I'd be glad to hear your thoughts. But, on some level, I don't really care. I see this as an opportunity to try and puzzle out a solution of my own, no matter how untenable it might be from a purist perspective. That's why I like the LBBs as well: you can build entire worlds out of lacunae.

The Purple Wyrm?

As others have already noted, D&D's purple worm began its existence as a rare species of dragon in Chainmail.

Finally, the Purple, or Mottled, Dragon is a rare, flightless worm with a venomous sting in its tail.

No other details are given for this Purple Dragon. Of course, Volume 2 of OD&D, which contains the illustration accompanying this post, provides the first write-up of this creature, under the name by which it became staple of the game.

These huge and hungry monsters lurk nearly everywhere just beneath the surface of the land. Some reach a length of 50 feet and a girth of nearly 10 feet diameter. There is a poisonous sting at its tail, but its mouth is its most fearsome weapon, for it is so large as to be able to swallow up to ogre-sized opponents in one gulp.

Other than its color, the main element that carried over from Chainmail is the worm's poisonous sting. Interestingly, the AD&D Monster Manual includes an aquatic variant of this creature, called the mottled worm, which recalls its first appearance in Chainmail.

I'm a big fan of re-imagining classic monsters in ways that aren't arbitrary but rather reflective of their complex histories/origins. The purple worm, which I've yet to have any reason to use in my Dwimmermount campaign so far, strikes me as a good candidate for such a re-imagining. While I've avoided detailing any more of the campaign setting than I need for my immediate purposes, I have to admit that I have been giving some thought to the role of dragons, if only because it seems a shame, in a game called Dungeons & Dragons, not to use these creatures at some point. So, the thought has crossed my mind that purple worms (purple wyrms?) are in fact related to dragons, if not actually a subspecies of them. That'd necessitate making them less worm-like and more reptilian in appearance, but that's still in line with OD&D's general description of them, while also being an homage to Chainmail.

I like that.

Chainmail Combat in OD&D

I've always used the "alternative combat system" when playing OD&D, as it's the one my players and I are most familiar with, but I've often thought about giving the original Chainmail combat system a whirl in order to get a sense of what things might have been like in the earliest days of the hobby. Unfortunately, though I own a copy of the game -- sadly only an electronic one -- and have read it several times, I'll admit that I don't quite get it in places and never felt entirely comfortable making a go of it. (Yes, I realize this reveals an awful truth.)

Thankfully, D.H. Boggs, author of the speculative clone, Dragons at Dawn, has put together a nice little booklet to help mental deficients such as myself. Entitled Using Chainmail to Resolve OD&D Combats, it's available as a free PDF here. And while you're there, consider picking up a copy of Dragons at Dawn. I haven't gotten round to it myself, I confess, but I plan on doing so soon, if only to show my thanks for this excellent OD&D resource.

Gygax on Tolkien (Again)

Victor Raymond contacted me yesterday about a discovery he recently made that he thought would be of interest to me. It's an article from a fanzine called La Vivandière. As its name suggests -- vivandières were women, often wives, who accompanied French soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars and acted as provisioners -- the fanzine's focus was on miniatures wargaming and Victor surmises that it was probably associated with a Minneapolis wargames shop known as La Belle Alliance, which later became the the Little Tin Soldier Shop. What's interesting is that the article Victor sent to me is by Gary Gygax and entitled "Fantasy Wargaming and the Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien" -- and it was published in 1974.

The date is of particular importance, because nearly every discussion of the role of Tolkien's work in influencing Gary Gygax is based on evidence from a much later date, after the threatened lawsuit against TSR by the Tolkien estate. Indeed, many commentators presume, based on this fact, that Gary had to have been, at the very least, disingenuous when he downplayed the influence of Tolkien and that his doing so was based primarily on his desire to distance TSR from its having infringed Tolkien's copyrights. I've never bought this theory, feeling that the bare text of D&D, even in its original form, with all those references to hobbits and ents and orcs, pretty clearly showed that Tolkien was, at best, a superficial influence on the game as Gygax conceived it.

The article probably won't settle the matter definitively -- we gamers like to argue, after all -- but I do think it'll go a long way toward putting to rest the notion that Gygax was lying when he later claimed that Tolkien's work mostly provided a handful of creatures that he gleefully looted in an effort to ride the coattails of their popularity during the 1970s. Here's what Gygax says -- in 1974, remember -- about the role of Tolkien as compared to other authors:

What other sources of fantasy can compare to J.R.R. Tolkien? Obviously, Professor Tolkien did not create the whole of his fantasies from within. They draw upon mythology and folklore rather heavily, with a few highly interesting creations which belong solely to the author such as the Nazgul, the Balrog, and Tom Bombadil. All of the other creatures are found in fairy tales by the score and dozens of other excellent writers who create fantasy works themselves: besides Howard whom I already mentioned, there are the likes of Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, and Roger Zelazny -- there are many more, and the ommission [sic] of their names here is more of an oversight than a slight. In the creation of Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons the concepts of not a few of such authors were drawn upon. This is principally due to the different aims of a fantasy novel (or series of novels) and a rule book for fantasy games. The former creation is to amuse and entertain the reader through the means of the story and its characters, while the latter creates characters and possibly a story which the readers then employ to amuse themselves. In general the "Ring Trilogy" is not fast paced, and outside the framework of the tale many of Tolkien's creatures are not very exciting or different.

Perhaps I am irredeemably biased but that passage sounds an awful lot like something Gygax could have written in 1984. Indeed, it's remarkably like his standard line about the influence of Tolkien on D&D and his critique of The Lord of the Rings as "boring." He goes on:

Tolkien includes a number of heroic figures, but they are not of the "Conan" stamp. They are not larger-than-life swashbucklers who fear neither monster nor magic. His wizards are either ineffectual or else they lurk in their strongholds working magic spells which seem to have little if any effect while their gross and stupid minions bungle their plans for supremacy. Religion with its attendant gods and priests he includes not at all. These considerations, as well as a comparison of the creatures of Tolkien's writings with the models they were drawn from (or with a hypothetical counterpart desirable from a wargame standpoint) were in mind when Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons were created.

Take several of Tolkien's heroic figures for example. Would a participant in a fantasy game more readily identify with Bard of Dale? Aragorn? Frodo Baggins? or would he rather relate to Conan, Fafhrd, the Grey Mouser, or Elric of Melnibone? The answer seems all too obvious.

Gygax then goes on to cite numerous examples of where Tolkien's creations were and were not a model for those in Chainmail and D&D, in addition to pointing where he borrowed just as heavily from other sources, notably Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. Throughout, his repeated point is that, while both games "owe a great deal to him," "fantasy wargaming goes beyond Tolkien" because, in fantasy, "there are no absolutes or final boundaries simply because it does draw upon all of these sources with the bonus of individual imagination added by those who play it."

As I said, the article settles nothing. If anything, it muddies the waters a little further insofar as Gygax readily acknowledges the debt both his games owed to Tolkien for some of their integral ideas. At the same time, I also think it clarifies beyond any doubt that Gary's repeated dislike for Tolkien and his denial that it was a good model for fantasy roleplaying was not merely a consequence of the threatened lawsuit by Tolkien's estate. Rather, it reflected a longstanding and heartfelt belief on his part, a belief that certainly ossified as the years went on and he grew ever more irritated by the extent to which Tolkien (and his epic fantasy imitators) were deemed the ne plus ultra of fantasy, an opinion Gygax never shared -- even in 1974, before he had any reason to claim otherwise.

Spell Complexity

Has anyone successfully used the spell complexity rules (or a variation thereof) from Chainmail in their OD&D campaigns? It's something I've long pondered and am considering testing in the next session of my Dwimmermount game this weekend. The gist of it is that, when a spell is cast, a roll is made to determine if the spell is cast immediately, is delayed, or fails entirely. In addition, there's a chance the spell may or may not fade from the character's memory upon being cast, introducing the possibility that a spellcaster could cast, say, charm person successfully and then still have access to that same spell for another go rather than having to re-memorize it.

That may sound like a serious buff to the effectiveness of spellcasters, especially magic-users, but there's no guarantee of this. Moreover, the possibility of a spell's not fading from memory is counterbalanced by the chance that a spell could be delayed in casting or fail entirely, outcomes not possible under straight OD&D rules. I am intrigued by spell complexity because I think it'd go a small way toward making magic more unpredictable and less exacting. That's a good thing to my mind. I've never been particularly fond of D&D's "scientific" approach to magic, even if it does make the game run more smoothly than other options. The notion that even a veteran spellcaster can't be certain that a spell will function as planned -- or at all -- is something I think adds great flavor to the game, but does that flavor come at the cost of useless complexity? That's what I'd like to know.

If anyone's used Chainmail's magic rules in their OD&D games, I'd love to hear about your experiences.

1972 Gygax Article

Reader Jervis Johnson kindly sent along the following short article by Gary Gygax, published in the October 1972 (No. 127) issue of Wargamer's Newsletter. There's no copyright statement on the issue from which this is taken, but it's assumed to be copyrighted to Donald Featherstone, who began this venerable periodical in 1962.

Here's the text of the article, typos and misspellings included:

FANTASY BATTLES

By

GARY GYGAX

I offer the following details of our fantasy battles:

The rules used are those designed by Jeff Perran and I – CHAINMAIL, Guidon Games, P.O. Box 1123, Evansville, IN 47713, U.S.A., at $2 plus postage. The revised and expanded version should be available by the time this is read. The booklet contains brief information about the scales used for different figure-types, and the expanded edition has things like how fast goblins, orcs and dwarves can tunnel under the walls of a besieged stronghold.

Tolkien purists will not find these rules entirely satisfactory, I believe, for many of the fantastic creatures do not follow his “specifications”, mainly because I believe that other writers were as “authoritative” as he.

Because I have a large force of 40mm Elastolin figures, we use a base 40mm as man-size, but 30mm will do as well. Regular troops have only a few added touches of paint, but hero-types have such things as gilded or enamelled armour, jewels, and carefully painted devices on their shields.

Orcs and elves are 30mm – that is what it says in our book. However, because we have not got around to preparing them, Orcs are 40mm Turks and Elves are bowmen of the same scale.

Trolls and ogres are 54mm. I located some inexpensive plastic Indians in this scale, and a bit of conversion has produced sufficient numbers of black, grey, green and purple creatures of this ilk.

Metal mediaeval figures in 25mm scale can easily be painted up to make goblins and dwarves, while converted Airfix “Robin Hood” men serve as Hobbits.

Giants are made from the 70mm Elastolin figures. At the moment we have only a pale blue fellow with a head of bushy hair (snipped from one of my daughter’s dolls when they weren’t looking), who is brandishing a huge club. He was originally a Viking with a sword and shield, but the shield was stripped off, the sword removed and a puttied matchstick became the bludgeon.
The Balrog has caused considerable problems, and right now we are using a giant sloth from an assortment of plastic prehistoric animals, which (converted) makes a fearsome looking beast, albeit not quite as Tolkien described it.

Nazgul, like the Balrog, are also difficult. Presently we are employing unconverted 40mm Huns on black horses, but we would like to put wings on the steeds and cloak the figures riding them.

There are two dragons in our force of fantasy figures. One I made stegosaurus: First, the head was enlarged with auto body putty, a wire was inserted into the tail and puttied to make it longer – and barbed, the spikes of the tail were clipped off and added as horns to the head end, cardboard bat wings were puttied into place, and finally the entire affair was given many coats of paint, gilding and glitter (as sparkling gems on its belly). The other was made by Don Kaye using a brontosaurus, with two smaller heads added to the long neck, spikes along the back, wings, and so on.

A large stock of plastic wolves, bears, vultures, and the like are used for lycanthropes or whatever other fairly normal looking creatures are called for. Soft plastic “horrors” and insects from the dime store serve as elementals and giant insects.

Perhaps the best part of fantasy wargaming is being able to allow your imagination full rein. Whatever the players desire can be used or done in games. For example, for one match I built a chest of jewels as the object to be obtained to win. However, I did not mention to either team that I had added a pair of “basilisk eyes” (large pin heads dotted appropriately) which immediately turned the first ogre who opened it to stone. The possibilities are boundless.

The way the rules are selling here, it seems a good bat for some model figures firm to start producing a line of properly scaled fantasy figures!

Mr Botham’s observations about the possibilities of Airfix “Astronauts” as Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” (or other future warriors) has also crossed my mind as a fair possibility. In fact, if Mr Botham eventually puts his ideas into a set of rules I can state, as Rules Editor at Guidon Games, that I would like to see them with eventual publication in mind.

It's an intriguing article for a number of reasons, not least because of his comment about other authors being as "authoritative" as Tolkien when it comes to describing fantastical creatures. That ought to add more fuel for the fire of future discussions on that topic.

Thanks for sending this along, Jervis!

Retrospective: Battle System

Having thought a lot about the miniatures wargaming heritage of Dungeons & Dragons lately, it was probably inevitable that I'd start to reminisce about 1985's Battle System supplement to AD&D. Designed by Douglas Niles, Battle System was an attempt to "go back to ... [the] roots" of D&D, according to the supplement's introduction. I vividly recall the appearance of this product, which I hoped would finally give me something I'd always wanted: a playable mass combat adjunct to D&D. In my opinion, this is something D&D hasn't had since the days of Chainmail and the continued lack of such a thing has played a big part in the loss of D&D's endgame by making it unnecessarily difficult for many referees to handle the large combats that are likely to occur once the PCs become rulers of their own domains.

I'm not sure that Battle System was written with these concerns in mind. Indeed, I'm not entirely sure why the product was released at all. My guess is that Douglas Niles, who was himself an avid wargamer, wanted to write it. Likewise, in 1985, D&D was in the midst of an identity crisis as it entered its Silver Age and was being buffeted by internal squabbles during Gygax's Cent-Jours (he was removed from TSR's board of directors in the fall of that year). Battle System thus comes across as a kind of schizophrenic love letter to the early days of the hobby, even as it embraces a lot of the esthetic shifts that would mark the post-Gygax era. Just take a look at that Jeff Easley cover art.

What I liked about Battle System was its seeming open-endedness. The rules were designed, according to editor Michael Dobson, to be "up to date with the full, current AD&D system ... [and] include all new magic spells, new character classes, and every monster in the entire system!" Likewise, the rules more or less required the use of a referee, since the sheer breadth of situations possible by integrating the entire AD&D system demanded that there be some living arbiter to handle unusual situations, particularly when magic was involved. This appealed to me greatly and reminded me of those guys I saw playing Napoleonics miniatures battles back in the 70s. Battle System made me feel as if I was "one of them" as I played it.

And play it I did. I've spoken before about my general lack of experience in miniatures wargaming. As intrigued by it as I've always been, I've never really had the fortitude to play any such games to any great extent. Battle System was the sole exception and I suspect it's because the rules were short (32 pages) yet comprehensive and because the boxed supplement gave me everything I need to play. There were close to 1000 cardboard counters included and this obviated the need for having huge numbers of metal minis. Granted, metal miniatures look so much better than counters, but I had neither the time nor the resources to assemble huge armies in lead, whereas it was a snap with all these counters. This enabled me to have the fantastic massed battles I expected of any battle system associated with D&D.

Over time, my enthusiasm for Battle System waned. I found the rules both too sketchy and too restrictive at times and, even as loose as they were, large battles still took many hours to play out and my friends and I simply had better ways to spend our time. I'm not at all certain that this is a flaw of Battle System itself so much as it is a statement about why miniatures gaming generally and why its connection to roleplaying have diminished over the years: time. Even in the late 80s when I was in high school, I simply wasn't willing to lavish the same attention to gaming as I once did. I wanted things to take less time and demand less of my attention than they had in the past and I suspect I wasn't the only one who felt this way.

I no longer own a copy of Battle System. I got rid of mine years ago and wish I hadn't. While I doubt I'd play it again, it'd be nice to reread it and see what memories it sparks in me. I think Douglas Niles is an underrated game designer in old school circles. His work on the Star Frontiers Knight Hawks starship combat rules was very innovative in many ways and his Against the Cult of the Reptile God is a cleverly done adventure module. Unlike a lot of more celebrated people in this hobby, Niles's work often gave me a lot of pleasure and that, in the end, is all that really matters.

The Changing Meaning of "Alignment" in OD&D

The term "alignment" doesn't appear once in Chainmail or its fantasy supplement, but those rules do divide figures into the categories of "Law," "Neutral," and "Chaos" as "a general guide for the wargamer designing orders of battle involving fantastic creatures." These categories serve a primarily practical purpose in helping players of Chainmail to select units that could plausibly fight side by side. There's no explicit explanation of what the category names mean beyond the obvious fact that Law and Chaos are opposed, while Neutral beings might join other side, depending on circumstances. One could reasonably equate "Law" with goodness and "Chaos" with evil from context, but neither is stated outright in the text. They are just two "sides," no different perhaps than "Romans" and "Gauls" in an ancient world wargame.

OD&D is where alignment first enters the picture and it uses the same categories as Chainmail, again without any explanation of their meaning. The text states that "Before the game begins, it is not only necessary to select a role [i.e. a character class -JDM], but it is also necessary to determine what stance the character will take [italics mine] -- Law, Neutrality, or Chaos." The term "stance" is vague but, once again, seems to imply an allegiance rather than an ethical outlook or moral code. At the same time, among the prominent members of Chaos listed are "Evil High Priests," suggesting a connection between Chaos and evil. Also of note is that there are no spells in the three little brown books (or their supplements) that allow the detection or knowledge of alignment. (And, in a shift from Chainmail, elves go from being Neutral with tendencies toward Law to full-fledged members of Law)

The Holmes-edited Dungeons & Dragons speaks at greater length about alignment. The text reads:

Characters may be lawful (good or evil), neutral or chaotic (good or evil). Lawful characters always act according to a highly regulated code of behavior, whether for good or evil. Chaotic characters ore quite unpredictable and con not be depended upon to do anything except the unexpected - they are often, but not always, evil. Neutral characters. such as all thieves, are motivated by self interest and may steal from their companions or betray them if it is in their own best interest. Players may choose any alignment they wont and need not reveal it to others. Note that the code of lawful good characters insures that they would tell everyone that they are lawful. There are some magical items that can be used only by one alignment of characters. If the Dungeon Master feels that a character has begun to behave in a manner inconsistent with his declared alignment he may rule that he or she has changed alignment and penalize the character with a loss of experience points. An example of such behavior would be a "good" character who kills or tortures a prisoner.

Here we see not only greater definition of alignment, with practical and mechanical examples, but also a shift away from the "us vs. them" approach of Chainmail and OD&D and into something that prescribes and proscribes behavior. Holmes also introduces the know alignment spell.

Of course, predating Holmes was an article in the February 1976 issue of The Strategic Review by Gary Gygax. Entitled "The Meaning of Law and Chaos in Dungeons & Dragons and Their Relationships to Good and Evil," it's a very odd piece. I posted the chart that accompanies it in an earlier entry. The article basically argues that alignment is much misunderstood in OD&D and that it needs to be clarified by adding the categories of "Good" and "Evil" so that there are now five alignments rather than just three. Gygax goes on to note that "While they [i.e. Law and Chaos -- JDM] are nothing if not opposites, they are neither good nor evil in their definitions." He also notes that, in settings that emphasize the showdown between Law and Chaos, Chaotic Good and Chaotic Evil creatures ultimately both serve the same end, namely anarchy and lawlessness and would, to some degree, cooperate to prevent the ascendancy of Law. Of course, he goes on to say that, "Barring such a showdown, however, it is far more plausible that those creatures predisposed to good actions will tend to ally themselves against any threat of evil, while creatures of evil will likewise make (uneasy) alliance in order to gain some mutually beneficial end."

The Strategic Review article also marks a shift in its imputation of an ethical/moral dimension to alignment. Indeed, one of the purposes of the article is to delineate the characteristics of Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil so that a referee might track a character's behavior on a chart to determine how closely he hews to his stated alignment, with repercussions should he stray too far. To this, Gygax adds, "Alignment does not preclude actions which typify a different alignment, but such actions will necessarily affect the position of the character performing them, and the class or the alignment of the character in question can change due to such actions, unless counter-deeds are performed to balance things." I distinctly recall playing in games where players took this to heart in a very literal way, doing equal and opposite things to ensure they "remained Neutral."

Despite this, some questions remain murky. Gygax says that "law and chaos are not subject to interpretation in their ultimate meanings of order and disorder respectively, but good and evil are not absolutes but must be judged from a frame of reference, some ethos. The placement of creatures on the chart of Illustration II. reflects the ethos of this author to some extent." [italics mine -- JDM] That's quite a bombshell, if you ask me, and one that adds several new wrinkles to attempts to grapple with the meaning of alignment in OD&D, the most important of which being that, at least in 1976, Gary felt the game required that it be seen through some lens that the players and referee brought to it on questions of good and evil. I can't help but find that remarkable, assuming I am reading him correctly.

(Also interesting is the idea that "The player-character who continually follows any alignment (save neutrality) to the absolute letter of its definition must eventually move off the chart
(Illustration I) and into another plane of existence as indicated," but that's probably a topic for another post.)

REVIEW: Spellcraft & Swordplay

One of the bits of gaming trivia grognards know is that the D&D combat system with which most people nowadays are familiar -- roll high on 1D20 against a number determined by the Armor Class of one's target -- began its life as OD&D's "Alternative Combat System," so called because the assumed standard combat system was that of the miniatures wargame Chainmail. By all accounts, comparatively few players of OD&D used Chainmail's system, instead opting for the alternative and the rest, as they say, is history. But what if it hadn't happened that way? What if the links between Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons hadn't been severed and the latter game developed in a way that was more closely tied to the wargame from which it sprang?

One set of possible answers to these questions forms the basis for the intriguing game Spellcraft & Swordplay by Jason Vey of Elf Lair Games. I hesitate to use the word "retro-clone" to describe S&S, because it's not a restatement of an earlier game so much as the product of an alternate universe. At the same time, the game uses many of the same tools as retro-clones, most notably the Open Game License, to create a fascinating work of speculative game design. S&S shows some clear affinities with retro-clones like OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, or Swords & Wizardry, but it's definitely a unique animal, not quite a "true" retro-clone but showing strong genetic similarities to OD&D and its descendants.

Spellcraft & Swordplay is a complete game, 110 pages in length and divided into three internal "books" that closely imitate the three volumes of OD&D. Characters in S&S have the familiar six ability scores of D&D, although modifiers associated with them more closely resemble those of the Moldvay Basic Rules than those of OD&D (or AD&D). Percentile Strength is also present here, but its implementation is unique to S&S. Playable races include Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings, with the three demihuman races limited in both their class selection and level advancement more or less as presented in OD&D. The ambiguity of just how Elven "multiclassing" works is preserved in S&S, being left to each referee -- nice to see this term used! -- to decide what he prefers for his own campaign.

There are four basic character classes: Warrior, Wizard, Thief, and Priest. There are also two "elite paths," the Paladin and the Assassin. Rather than being subclasses in the traditional sense, they are instead a collection of additional abilities given to members of the Warrior and Thief classes respectively whose ability scores and other attributes meet the requirements of the paths in question. Some will no doubt balk at this, as neither the Paladin nor Assassin require more experience points to advance in level compared to "normal" members of their class, but the benefits of their extra abilities are weighed against the additional strictures placed on their behavior. It's definitely an old school approach and I applaud it, though I will admit some unease about how it might function in play.

The classes are all roughly as you would expect them to be, given the OD&D influences on S&S. There are a number of interesting wrinkles that derive from Chaimail, however. All classes use D6 Hit Dice and the rate at which they gain them is not uniform, being staggered by pips in addition to whole dice. Likewise, wizard spells require a 2D6 roll in order to function -- all "action" rolls in the game use 2D6, incidentally -- modified by the wizard's Intelligence score modifier. If the number generated is high enough based on the level of the wizard and the level of the spell, the spell is cast immediately. If the number generated is high but not high enough for the spell to be cast immediately, it takes effect the next round after casting. If the number is not high enough for either, the spell fails to function and is erased from the wizard's memory. The implication here is that spells that are cast successfully do not fade from memory but may be used again later, pursuant to the usual rules for casting spells. Addtionally, for every day the wizard goes without re-memorizing his spells, he loses a number of them, starting with his highest level spells. Thus, while memorization is present as per OD&D, it demands slightly less planning than the standard system. I should note that this is close to the magic system presented in Chainmail. The selection of magic spells is very similar to that of OD&D, plus Greyhawk with some additional ideas borrowed from Chainmail (mostly having application in mass combat situations).

Spellcraft & Swordplay includes an ability check system to handle ad hoc actions by the PCs not covered by the rules. I have very mixed feelings about it, particularly because there are specific rules on how to use the ability checks to handle things like perception and social interaction, activities that I generally prefer to leave to player skill rather than dice. Ironically, the game includes optional background skills, which have no system associated with them at all and their implementation is left entirely to the referee's discretion.

Combat is handled much like the man-to-man system in Chainmail, with a character's chance to hit being determined first of all by his choice of weapon and comparing it to the Armor Class of his opponent. As in OD&D, magical armor subtracts from the to hit rolls of attackers rather than being a bonus to their AC, which remains an unchangeable class based on the type of armor rather than a generic target number. For reasons I don't quite understand, S&S uses a different AC system than OD&D, with higher numbers being better. Thus, plate mail and a shield is AC 8 rather than AC 2. Granted, the number is purely arbitrary and retro-clone games often change certain game mechanics to avoid infringing upon the artistic presentation of the games they're restating. Still, it's a bit jarring to see AC 8 as a "high" AC, when one is accustomed to its being a "low" one after three decades of playing D&D.

Like Swords & Wizardry, characters in Spellcraft & Swordplay get only a single saving throw, based on their class and level, but modified when appropriate by ability scores and class-specific situational modifiers. Warriors, for example, get a +2 bonus to any Constitution-based saving throws. As befits a game inspired by Chainmail, there is ample room devoted to movement, the effects of terrain, siege weapons, morale, and other related topics. At the same time, the experience rules are a bit odd, being a mix of old (XP for defeating monsters) and new (XP for good roleplaying), along with the notion that "treasure is its own reward."

The monsters section includes the usual staples of OD&D-descended games, but there are universal rules governing how certain abilities work, meaning that, for example, any creature with the Paralysis ability paralyzes opponents for 1D6 turns unless otherwise specified. Again, I have a very minor quibble about this, as this is a bit too schematized an approach for my tastes. Given the simplicity of the system overall, there's little real need for such mechanical shorthand and, more importantly, I prefer my monsters to be unique, right down to their own unique rules implementations. There are also some rough and ready guidelines for the creation of one's own monsters, but they're very "impressionistic," trusting the referee's judgment and ability to eyeball appropriate abilities. This is another example of the game's schizophrenia, one minute lapsing into 3e-style mechanical universalism and the next minute giving referee fiat free rein. The book concludes with a selection of magic items, most of which should be familiar to D&D players.

Let me be blunt: I really like Spellcraft & Swordplay. As a game, I think it's quite good. As an example of "what if?" logic applied to design, it's even better. There are quite a few ideas in here that I think could -- and should -- be swiped for old school homebrews, in particular the way that magic works. I'm also a fan of one's choice of weapon playing a more important role in determing whether one can do damage to an opponent. Still, there's something off-kilter about the game, as if its author can't quite make up his mind whether he's writing an old school game or a new school game in ur-Gygaxian dress. You can see this in the fact that the book's illustrations alternate between early modern woodcuts and lithographs depicting medieval tales and legends and Larry Elmore clip art of the lowest sort. Jason Vey notes in his introduction that he intended S&S to be a minimalistic rules set that is simultaneously old school and "cinematic." Granted, I don't share Vey's interest in such an approach, but I nevertheless think it's fair to say that the game, as presented, suffers because it's largely an old school one, but it has enough of a foot placed in the new school that it rankles. I have a hard time imagining committed new school gamers finding much to appreciate in S&S, so I'm not sure of the rationale behind this "of two worlds" presentation.

These are quibbles, though. Spellcraft & Swordplay really is an excellent game and I think it has a lot to offer old school gamers, particularly those interested in the prehistory of the hobby. I do hope that, one day, we might see a somewhat more refined version of the game, freed of the new school mechanical incursions and with a more consistent esthetic, but, even as it now is, S&S is well worth the cost. I recommend it very highly.

Final Score: 4½ out of 5 polearms.