Pendragon Classic Returns

The RPG nostalgia tour continues with Chaosium bringing back another 1980s classic of the RPG genre, Pendragon Classic. 

I'd read through the original version once before, and yes, I'm a product of those old classic movies such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Prince Valiant.* Hell, I am still fond of the 1982 mini-series adaptation of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe on television.

The more I've delved into Pendragon the past few years, the more I've been impressed by Greg Stafford's adaptation of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur into an RPG that's designed to last 50+ years in a campaign setting. That concept alone is something that people who play D&D and its ilk would have trouble wrapping their heads around. 

For those people interested in old editions of RPGs, or for those interested in how the concept of the RPG was stretched far beyond what was originally envisioned by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, this might be something you'd be interested in.

I think I ought to finish up my RPG from the Past on Pendragon soon. Maybe in time once this is released...

*Independent television stations used to broadcast those movies --and many others-- on Saturday afternoon matinees. 

An RPG from the Past: RuneQuest

Back when I was in high school, my Geometry teacher ran a club called the Rail Baron Club. Until I actually had him for Geometry my sophomore year, I had absolutely no idea what the hell Rail Baron actually was, much less why a club existed for it. 

As it turns out, Rail Baron was a game produced by The Avalon Hill Game Company*, and since my Geometry teacher was a railroad fan, he'd fallen in love with the game and shared it with the students. A few of us bought our own copies of Rail Baron, and I joined their ranks sometime late in my sophomore year. 

Imagine Monopoly but using rail lines, although
that's a bit of an oversimplification. I'm nerdy enough
that I laminated the destination chart to protect it long term.
"I swear, Bill, if you buy Seaboard Air
Line AGAIN I'm gonna scream!" --Me

Inside the box for Rail Baron was a postcard you could send in to Avalon Hill, requesting a game catalog, and of course I did just that.

I couldn't find any of these old cards, where
the air of superiority was very strong, so
I had to go to the Internet Archive to find this one.
The cards I found from the late-80s onward were...
much more polite toward prospective players.

When the catalog arrived, I would spend hours perusing the various board game titles, imagining what it'd be like to play them. But in the back, there was an ad for this:

Something I did not know was that
SFF author Kate Elliot and her husband
were the models for this artwork by
Jody Lee. From Bill H from RPGGeek.

RuneQuest? I'd never heard of it before. Given that I was a couple of years into the RPG ban in my household, I just didn't draw any sort of attention to the fact that an RPG was right in a board game catalog. Still, the image that Avalon Hill tried to project --they were a "thinking man's company"-- meant that their Mensa-esque "superior" image rubbed off onto RuneQuest. I kind of knew about the game, but never played it, and I figured it was pretty highbrow as far as it went.

Oh, I had no idea just how bonkers the game could be.

***

Okay, let me back up a bit. 

As I have since learned over the decades, RuneQuest was created in 1978 as an RPG for the world of Glorantha, a setting created by the late Greg Stafford back when he was in college in the 60s. Greg co-founded Chaosium to publish his first game based on Glorantha, a board game titled White Bear and Red Moon, and RuneQuest came along a few years later. D&D was experiencing its first huge burst of growth, and people who liked the Glorantha setting in White Bear and Red Moon wanted an RPG for that setting. 

Hence, RuneQuest.

The initial two editions of RuneQuest, published by Chaosium, were integrated with the Glorantha setting, but by the time the third edition was published, publishing had since been picked up by Avalon Hill.*** The biggest change from the previous editions of RuneQuest was that the third edition became divorced from the Glorantha setting; sure, there were plenty of Glorantha supplements published for RQ 3rd edition, but the "official" setting was Fantasy Europe****, which is just as it sounds.

Avalon Hill published RuneQuest up until the company imploded and was sold to Hasbro*****, and when the rights to RuneQuest became available once more, Greg Stafford grabbed it and got Mongoose Publishing to create a version of RuneQuest. 

In typical Mongoose fashion, they ended up with two versions of the RPG. And let's just say that Mongoose's version of RQ had.... issues. Unlike Mongoose Traveller which continues to be well received, there were a ton of issues with RQ, and in the end a RuneQuest 6th Edition was created by The Design Mechanism. 

Fast forward to 2015 and Chaosium was on the verge of collapse, and the founder, Greg Stafford, was brought in to save the company. (Apple fans, tell me if you've heard this scenario before.) When Greg came back, he helped to get Chaosium on good financial footing, and began work on a new version of RuneQuest. The Design Mechanism's version of RuneQuest was no longer needed per se, so that 6th Edition morphed into a setting-agnostic version of the game called Mythras. (Which still exists to this day.)

Greg passed away in 2018, but his vision for the current version of the RPG was realized with the publication of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, in 2018. 

Got all that?

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned Greg Stafford creating HeroQuest, which also uses the Glorantha setting in a rules-lite fashion.

No, not this HeroQuest:

This is the current version of the
Milton Bradley game, published by
Hasbro. Pic is from all over the net.

But THIS HeroQuest:

Yeah, it's complicated, and I'm not done yet!
From Moon Design Publications.

And back in 2020, the trademark for HeroQuest moved back to Hasbro so they could republish that first HQ game, and THIS HeroQuest is now known as QuestWorlds.

Whew!

In a bizarre sort of way, the history of RPGs based on Glorantha is as complex as the Glorantha setting itself is.

***

Remember when I mentioned that RuneQuest was a bit bonkers? The RuneQuest system itself isn't bonkers per se, because it is a skill based RPG with a lot of crunch to it; if you think Pathfinder has crunch, let me introduce you to my little friend here. 

No, it's the Glorantha setting itself that is bonkers.

When you first hear Glorantha and "Bronze Age Setting", your mind immediately leaps to, well, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Or maybe Ramses II of Egypt, or Hammurabi. Or maybe even the Hittite city of Watusa, the Nubian city of Meroë, the Elamites of Anshan, or the Indus Valley and Harappa.

Somebody should have told the Hollywood

execs that these should have been bronze weapons.

But The Rock's gonna Rock...

But Glorantha is... Well, it's kind of not what you might be used to.

For starters, the world of Glorantha is known by its inhabitants be a gigantic disk, with an underworld and a sky above:

I should mention that the artwork and the rules
themselves do have an adult approach toward
sexuality. I mean, I'm an adult so it's no big deal,
but be aware of it in case you don't want kids asking
uncomfortable questions of you.
This is from writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com

There are also a veritable ton of gods out there in Glorantha, and none of them really fit into the standard Greco-Roman --or even Egyptian-- Pantheons. The gods aren't good or evil either in the standard Fantasy sense either, despite what the Chaosium rep tried to explain to me at Gen Con back in 2023. There are gods and goddesses of Nature, the Sky, the Underworld, etc., but whether they are good or evil is purely dependent upon the point of view of your cult.

Oh yes, the cults of Glorantha.

No, not this Cult...

but these types of Cults. Have I mentioned
the adult themes? From Chaosium.

A Cult in Glorantha isn't what it means in our own terminology, but is closer to an extended tribe that embraces a god or goddess. If you roll with that, you're about 90% of the way to understanding cults. Your cult gives you identity and camaraderie, and a ready made community to fall back on for support throughout the game. You betray your cult at your own risk.

The player characters in Glorantha embrace their position as heroes by going on what is in-game referred to as Hero Quests# --if you think of the Hero's Journey as a template, you've got the right idea-- for the glory of your cult and your chosen deity. If you complete your Hero Quest successfully, you may take your place in the upcoming Hero Wars, where the great heroes across Glorantha gather to fight for the future of the world.

The traditional starting location for a RuneQuest game is Dragon Pass, where there's a ton of action and activity, and there's clearly defined "Good Guys" (Kingdom of Sartar) and "Bad Guys" (The Lunar Empire). Like I mentioned above, they're not "good" and "evil" in the traditional sense, but the Lunar Empire is definitely the aggressors as an occupying empire that the Kingdom of Satar has recently ejected from the area; like the Galactic Empire in Star Wars, the Lunar Empire is plotting to return to power in Dragon Pass, so they're not going away any time soon.

***

Okay, one thing I do have to address about Glorantha is that while humans are the current dominant race, there are lesser races that had their time in the sun. Such as the Elder Races. 

Elves are not like what you typically find in RPG fare, but are akin to that found in Guild Wars 2: they are sapient plants.##

There are also spirits that reside within everything, which is very much an ancient way of looking at the world:

From RuneQuest: The Coloring Book,
available for Print and PDF from Chaosium, page 15.
If you buy the POD version, the PDF is free.
Again, yes, adult themes, but the art is really fantastic.

And I suppose I need to mention the Ducks.

Again, Glorantha is a bit bonkers.
From Runeblog's Creating a Duck
Character for RuneQuest Glorantha.

They're formally known as the Durulz, and kinda-sorta fill the spot in a Fantasy RPG normally populated by Halflings or Gnomes. As for their creation, the most common explanation is that they were created by a curse, but I've also seen goofier creation stories. Still, they're a part of what makes Glorantha a bit nutty.

***

Okay, nuttiness aside, why am I so fascinated with Glorantha and RuneQuest?

Because it's a classless, skill based system that acknowledges that combat is dangerous.

Unlike MERP or D&D 3e or other skill based hybrid systems, RuneQuest has abandoned the level concept and gone full tilt into skills. If you want to 'get gud' at something, you have to actually do it. You know, like real life. 

But RuneQuest has also abandoned the class structure as well, basically allowing you to do whatever you want as long as you actually work at it. It's like an Elder Scrolls game without even the pretense of a class structure.

There is magic, performed through the use of Runes that grant you access to spells. Runes are also intrinsic to Glorantha, and their in-game use is that they also allow you to augment your skill checks and your resistance rolls.

Combat is, well, not something you enter into lightly. You can quite easily be maimed or die. It's not quite the "you die on character creation" that Traveller has, but it's not the handwaving of the danger that you find in a lot of other RPGs. There are real consequences to combat, and even the best battle plan and warriors can be laid low if the gods do not favor you. True to the ancient world, you want to attack when the gods favor your success. 

Yes, RuneQuest is crunchy; there's no denying that. But it also provides you with extraordinary freedom within all that crunch. 

And yet...

RuneQuest can be dense. The reason why it never took off the same way D&D did is due to the denseness of the rules and the zaniness of the game world. You kind of need a RuneQuest evangelist to help you embrace the game and overcome it's quirks. For some, that's the video game The King of Dragon Pass that is set in Glorantha. For others, YouTube can come in handy, although I've found the official Chaosium videos on Glorantha to be somewhat lacking. If you've lived through a class at a university given by a boring professor who obviously knew his stuff but couldn't communicate effectively, you'll understand what I mean. 

However, Chaosium has put out a truly high quality starter set for RuneQuest that is worth checking out. The Starter Set has premade characters --and the set doesn't teach you how to create characters, strangely enough-- but they stuffed just so much material into the box that it's frankly amazing how they were able to pull it off.

From Chaosium. You can find it at their
website or at your local game store (which
is where I bought my copy).

I've often wondered how RuneQuest would work in a rules-lite system. I've never played HeroQuest so I couldn't comment there, but adapting RuneQuest and the Glorantha setting to the FATE or, say, Burning Wheel systems would definitely pique my interest.  

Still, if you're up for something definitely different, RuneQuest is a rabbit hole worth going down. I mean, where else can you create a character who is a Bison Rider?

This is Vasana, Farnan's Daughter,
one of the iconic characters of Glorantha.
From Book 3 of the RuneQuest Starter Set.

*3M --yes, that 3M that created sticky notes and various forms of adhesive tape-- was publisher of Rail Baron before Avalon Hill bought all of their board game assets, including Acquire and Facts in Five. The original Facts in Five (which is what we have) is kind of dated these days as far as trivia goes, although there was a reworking of the trivia part back in 2007 or so when University Games put out a version. As is usual, my wife tended to win those games we played in the 90s and 00s.

**Now most well known for the Call of Cthulhu RPG.

***Hence its presence in the 1985 Avalon Hill catalog.

****Not to be confused with the Mythic Europe setting for Ars Magica.

*****Now THAT is quite a tale by itself.

#Hence the name of the rules-lite RPG HeroQuest.

##From the Glorantha Tumblr on the subject of Elves.

An RPG From the Past: Traveller

This is Free Trader Beowulf,
calling anyone . . .
Mayday, Mayday . . .  we are under
attack . . .  main drive is gone . . .
turret number one not responding . . .
Mayday . . .  losing cabin pressure
fast . . .  calling anyone . . .  please help . . .
This is Free Trader Beowulf . . .
                                        Mayday . . .

--The iconic distress call gracing the cover of various editions of Traveller

Back in the late 90s when I worked as a Software QA Engineer, one of my friends there* and I would spend about a half hour after 5 PM chatting about whatever was on our minds. He wasn't interested in "traditional" sports, but he was an absolute racing nut. He preferred the CART series** back then, so we frequently talked open wheel racing. One day, however, we geeked out over RPGs, mainly because of the upcoming D&D 3rd Edition.

"I never really played D&D," he confessed. "I played Traveller."

"What's that?" I thought I knew of most of the RPGs at the time, but this one was new to me.

"It's a Sci-Fi RPG."

"Like Gamma World?" Gamma World was put out by TSR, the publisher of D&D, and was essentially D&D in a post apocalyptic setting.

Be warned, the prices for the
Gamma World 1e rulebook can
spike. A LOT. From eBay.

"No, although it was closer to Star Frontiers." Another TSR game, this time set in space.

Yikes. This is the $90 copy on eBay.

"I'd never heard of it before."

"Oh yeah, it was really cool. It came out right around the time Star Wars was released in theaters, so it got kind of a boost from that."

A few days later when I stopped by his cubicle, he handed me a small booklet. 

"The Travellers' Digest?"

"Yeah! It was a periodical that was put out to support Traveller. It had premade adventures, like early Dragon magazines, but in a scientific journal format."

I flipped through it. "Looks pretty cool."

"Hey, you can have it. I don't play any more, and I happened to stumble on it the other day while I was moving boxes."

"Thanks!"

It's digest sized too, much like the
original Traveller rulebooks were.

That was the extent of my knowledge of Traveller until several years later, when I was perusing the RPG section at a (now deceased) local game store and came across a few Traveller books under the GURPS license.*** As it turned out, the employee at the store was in a long running campaign of GURPS Traveller, and over the course of a half hour he filled me in on the history of the game.

I found this pic from
talestoastound.wordpress.com.
No, I've never acquired a copy of
the original version.

Traveller was published by Games Designers' Workshop, a wargaming company, in 1977. Marc Miller was the primary designer, with Loren K. Wiseman, Frank Chadwick, and John Harshman assisting. The original intent for Traveller was to be a generic space RPG system, but what ended up happening was that the Charted Space setting, released by GDW over the years, became so associated with Traveller more people think of Charted Space when they think of Traveller. (Kind of like how D&D and Forgotten Realms are so intimately intertwined.) GDW also kept up with an "official" timeline of what is going on in the Third Imperium****, in much the same way that White Wolf did with Vampire: the Masquerade, so that further integrated Charted Space into the Traveller RPG.

Traveller has seen many iterations over the years. There was the original Traveller, then Megatraveller in the late 80s, then Traveller: The New Era, and Marc Miller's Traveller (4th Edition). There is also a 5th Edition of Traveller put out by Marc Miller, but that version has returned to its roots as a "generic" space RPG system and is mostly comprised of tables upon tables of stuff. Hey, if you like tables to generate things for a space RPG game, there you go.

But for me, Traveller took on new life when it escaped the confines of GDW after GDW closed up shop in 1996.

Among the first of the "non-GDW" Traveller games was GURPS Traveller, supposedly a deal made with a handshake between Loren K. Wiseman and Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games, the publisher of GURPS. GURPS Traveller followed an alternate timeline than the "official GDW timeline", and Steve Jackson Games put out quite a few high quality settings books for Traveller.*****

The starship on the cover of Behind the Claw
is the Beowulf Class Free Trader.
The Spinward Marches is a contested sector
in Charted Space that is the starting
point for many Traveller campaigns.

There was also a d20 version of Traveller, called Traveller20, Traveller Hero (using the HERO System), and what is commonly known as "Mongoose Traveller" (a version of Traveller put out by Mongoose Publishing). Of all of those various versions of Traveller out there, the most popular one that's currently being supported and published is Mongoose Traveller, which is presently on its Second Edition.

Over the years I acquired several GURPS Traveller splatbooks, but I could never get into the GURPS system enough to warrant running the gauntlet of configuring GURPS for a campaign of my own. But Mongoose Traveller...

Now, that's a system I can get behind.

The late Andrew Boulton created several short videos
based on Traveller and the Charted Space setting
about 15 or so years ago. This is the best of the bunch,

using "He's a Pirate" from Pirates of the Caribbean:
Curse of the Black Pearl for the music.

***

Mongoose Traveller is a bit of a throwback to the original Traveller system in as much the same way as D&D 5th Edition borrowed from Old School D&D. If you want to play a game of Traveller today, most people will be expecting a game of Mongoose Traveller, so if you say "Let's play Traveller!" this is what people expect you to pull out:

It is functionally the same as the
Traveller Second Edition Core
Rulebook, just tweaked for clarity.

Traveller is one of those games whose character creation was a mini-game of its own. You start out as a fresh faced 18 year old, then you go through some (or many) iterations of "professions". You could be a student. Or join the military. Or be an assistant on a trading crew. Or... you get the idea. After that iteration is over, you make a few rolls to see how that period of your life came out, you gain skills, potentially gain "defects", and either join the campaign or spend more time in another iteration.

If somewhere in the back of your mind you're thinking, "That's nice and all, but it's not like your character is ever in any real danger during this character creation process, right?" Well, it's a good thing you're not playing the original version of Traveller.

Why? Because in the original release of Traveller back in 1977, your character could actually DIE during the character creation process.

You read that right.

It was one of the quirks that Traveller was (in)famous for.

Thank you, John Kovalic.
Dork Tower April 4, 2019.

The modern game, starting with GURPS Traveller and Mongoose Traveller, does not allow for character death during the creation process; it's merely "optional" in Mongoose Traveller. I suppose you could use that rule if you really wanted an "old school" feel to your game, but why bother? The point is to create a character that you can play, not realism to the point of having a useless or dead character.#

Another quirk that is not so unusual these days is that character creation in Traveller is a shared experience. Instead of creating a character --in consultation with the GM-- and then showing up with the completed character on the first group session, Traveller expects that character creation for the entire group is what happens in your first session. Along with other RPGs, such as FATE and Burning Wheel, characters in Traveller are created with character hooks, so that each character has a connection with the others. (Or some of the others.)

This is one of the big editing changes
in the 2022 Update version of the rules.
If only other RPGs did this!
(I'm looking at you, Ars Magica...)

***

One thing that distinguishes Traveller from, say, Paizo's Starfinder or the various iterations of the Star Wars RPGs is that Traveller skews much more toward hard SF. Elements of Fantasy --Magic, Force wielders, etc.-- are not found in Traveller. There's SF handwaving in terms of how faster than light (FTL) travel is achieved via the Jump Drive, and there's Psionics among some species --such as the Zhodani, a sub-species of Humans-- but aside from that, Traveller is very much a hard SF setting. Even The Ancients, a mystery species (well, not to the GM) who planted human ancestors across Charted Space and tinkered with and/or uplifted others, are less Fantasy and more SF. I mean, CRISPR-Cas9 exists already.

Unlike Star Trek, where players typically are members of the crew of a Starfleet or Klingon starship, the Traveller crews can fill any number of potential roles:

• Independent Trader
• Naval
• Mercenary
• Pirate
• Espionage
• Smuggling
• Warzone/Rebellion
• Exploration
• Diplomacy
• Etc.

All that's limited is your imagination.

Yeah, Smeghead.
From zhodani.space.

• Want to play a campaign inspired by Firefly? Traveller can do that. 
• Want to play a rebellion campaign without Fantasy elements, such as Star Wars Andor or Blake's Seven? Traveller can do that.
• Want to play a bounty hunter space campaign inspired by Cowboy Bebop? Traveller can do that too.
• Want to play James Bond in Space? Or an Ocean's Eleven in space? Traveller again.
• Want to play a space exploration/horror campaign where your crew encounter aliens based off of Alien or The Thing? Or even Men in Black? Yeah, Traveller has you covered.
• Want to play a military oriented campaign in the same vein as John Scalzi's Old Man's War? Hey, if you want to homebrew the setting a bit, Traveller can do it. After all, there's a Traveller setting called 2300 A.D.
• Want to play a space opera where Duchies encompassing different star systems vie for power and prestige in a galactic empire? Let me introduce you to Traveller's Third Imperium, set in the Charted Space universe.
• Want to play a game with a lot of starship oriented combat and maneuvers? Traveller was built with starships in mind at the beginning, not bolted on at the end (Starfinder) or added in an expansion (Star Frontiers).

In fact, Traveller's Charted Space setting can handle all of these campaign ideas and more, while providing a familiar framework to fall back upon. Even Charted Space itself may feel familiar to SWTOR fans in an unexpected manner, as the Third Imperium's modus operandi is that the Imperial Space doesn't mean that the Imperium centrally controls worlds or systems, but the space between the systems.

***

Mongoose Traveller uses the six-sided die as its main mechanic --typically 2 six-sided dice rolled, with the nomenclature of 2D instead of 2d6-- but aside from that the basics of RPGs are still intact. There are skill checks, combat checks, etc., all things you'd expect in an RPG. While Traveller is definitely a hard SF game, don't mistake the game as being entirely centered around combat. 

It's not.

Traveller was designed from the beginning to handle a lot of campaigns, and while the "free form trader" type of campaign is the most ubiquitous type of Traveller campaign, that doesn't mean that you spend all of your time examining spreadsheets and figuring out optimal profit margins as if you were playing a pencil-and-paper version of EVE Online.## 

Heh. If you really want to, I guess both.
From imgflip.com.

But campaigns aside, let's talk about another elephant in the room: advancement.

Traveller may not be so unusual today, but the concept of a game where there is little if any skill advancement once character creation is complete very much went against the grain back in the 1970s. Think about it this way: what would WoW be like if there were no levels or power ups or skill progression such as is currently found in the game? If the point of the game wasn't to become powerful but the telling of the story and your character's progression through the story? While you may potentially learn more skills (and/or spells, attack moves, etc.) and you might find better arms/armor/weapons, the concept of raid bosses with explicit and/or implicit affiliated gear checks would take on a different meaning. 

If you were a crewmember on the Firefly (or the Bebop), your focus isn't on progression, it's where your next meal is coming from. If you were Fezzik, Inigo, or Westley, your "character progression" in The Princess Bride happened before the real story began, when Princess Buttercup was captured. The entire adventure didn't end with someone "leveling up", but rather their escape from Prince Humperdinck's clutches. Their adventures certainly didn't end there, but they weren't running around looking for loot and better magic items to use. 

My point is that the mindset we have with a lot of our RPGs is very much advancement/loot oriented or maybe min/max oriented, and Traveller is not built for that. Sure, you might end up with a better ship than the Beowulf Class Free Trader --hey, that Empress Marava Far Trader would work-- but how you got that ship in place of your old one is worth an extended campaign all by itself.### In fact, there's a starter adventure hook out there that is exactly this: your crew purchased the rights to a starship that's sitting out in the wilderness, having landed there a while back and the owner wasn't able to get back and take off. It's all yours, but it's out there, somewhere. Surely that's not a big deal, is it? Is it?

***

In the end, Traveller is one of those RPGs whose Charted Space setting is so amazingly deep that if the game mechanics don't suit you, I could easily see Traveller's Charted Space being used as the setting for another RPG, such as FATE or Savage Worlds. Still, Traveller itself has its share of devotees even today.  Not too long ago, my oldest was hanging with a couple of friends from her high school days. The boyfriend of an acquaintance was there, and talk eventually turned to RPGs. "Oh, I play this Sci-Fi RPG that hardly anybody has ever heard of," the boyfriend piped up. "But we like it."

"Oh," my oldest replied. "You play Traveller?"

"Holy crap! You've heard of it?"

"Yeah, my dad has a lot of splatbooks for it."

Score one for the Sci-Fi devotees!

Free Trader Beowulf . . .

Come in, Free Trader Beowulf . . .

Can you hear me?

Come in, Free Trader Beowulf . . .

Hang in there, Beowulf. . .

                . . . help is on the way!

--From Steve Jackson Games' GURPS Traveller website

*Before anybody asks, yes he was one of the people from this story. I still keep in touch with him, even after he left our company and moved to Houston to take a job with NASA. Yes, he works at NASA as a third party programmer, and presently is coding various systems for Artemis. The lucky dog.

**It's morphed into the IndyCar Series of today. It's a very long story as to how CART led to a rival league, the IndyCar Racing League (IRL), and how after several years one league folded and the resultant fallout created the IndyCar Series.

***GURPS is one of many generic role playing systems out there, but also one of the more complicated ones to set up. It is so detailed that it is difficult to configure the way you like it, but once you've decided on a system and customized a set of abilities it is easy to implement. That being said, I frequently like to quip that GURPS is a game where the system tends to get in the way of a good time.

****The Third Imperium is the largest star empire in Charted Space, and so you frequently see Charted Space and Third Imperium used interchangeably. If you're like me and see a space game with a name like "Imperium" in it and immediately think of "Evil Galactic Empire", don't worry. The Third Imperium is definitely NOT that. The closest way I can describe the Imperium --and Charted Space in general-- is that it is the Age of Sail in space. Distances still have to be crossed for communication, and while the Jump Drive does connect star systems, it does take time for a starship to cross the vastness of space. Subspace communications --ala Star Trek and Star Wars-- simply don't exist. 

*****If you ignore the GURPS stat blocks and/or tweak them to your own version of Traveller you're using, the writeups for these GURPS splatbooks are fantastic to mine for ideas and setting materials. I think the only drawback now is that they might be hard to find in print. Not as hard to find as MERP, for example, but definitely not something that'll just show up in the cheap bin in a random game store. However, Steve Jackson Games has PDFs of the splatbooks for sale at their Warehouse 23 website.

#This is a pale echo of the same argument about "realism" by modifying a PC's character stats in AD&D 1e due to aging or gender. I understand the desire to make a PC "realistic" by modifying character stats if you want to play an aged Cleric, for instance, but you don't need to modify stats for that. Any DM worth their salt would accommodate this without resorting to changing a character's stats at all. Same with playing a male vs. female Human PC: just because the average male Human is stronger than the average female Human doesn't mean that female PCs should have a lower ceiling on their Strength stat: after all, you're playing an outlier to the "average" Human, so artificial limitations to the stats for the sake of realism make no sense.

##I know NOW that EVE Online isn't like that, it just seems like it at times. So that little quip here was to just tweak the EVE fans out there.

###After all, we can't all be so lucky as to win a freighter in a game of Sabacc. And if you did, can you imagine that the crew of said ship would be happy about that?

Addendum to An RPG From the Past: Dungeons and Dragons (Moldvay Edition)

For the record, I never saw this commercial back in the 1980s...

After I'd posted the previous article about the Moldvay Edition of D&D, I realized that there's a simpler way to gaining access to copies of this edition: DriveThruRPG.

Well, duh. I should have thought of that.

So, here's a few links that would help someone pick up a PDF version of this classic RPG, that you can then print as you wish:

DriveThruRPG: D&D Basic Set Rulebook (B/X Edition)

DriveThruRPG: D&D Expert Set Rulebook (B/X Edition)

DriveThruRPG: B2 The Keep on the Borderlands (Basic)

DriveThruRPG: X1 The Isle of Dread (Basic)

Now, if you're interested in more detail about those two modules, as well as a conversion/update to D&D 5e as part of the deal, Goodman Games (of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG) created several huge books covering various classic modules. These are likely available at your Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS), and they're absolutely worth the trouble.

There are six total (as of 09/2022).
Beware that The Temple of Elemental Evil
is two books! I've not sprung for that
one (yet). Maybe with some Christmas funds...

Goodman Games Original Adventures Reincarnated #1: Into The Borderlands

Goodman Games Original Adventures Reincarnated #2: The Isle of Dread

An RPG From The Past: Dungeons and Dragons (Moldvay Edition)

Back in the ancient days of this blog, I described my first time playing D&D with a friend named Rob who lived in the neighborhood behind our own. We went to school together, played on the same baseball team together, and played Atari video games together. Typical 70s/early 80s stuff. 

I mean, if you've seen Stranger Things, that was kind of my life. Well, except for the monsters from the Upside Down and characters such as Eleven with "powers". 

I swear I had a shirt just like the one
on the left. From cafemom.com.

That fateful day I'd never heard of Dungeons and Dragons before, but even though I got stomped like nobody's business when our first encounter was five Red Dragons, I was fascinated by the possibilities the game provided. 

Compared to how they're presented
in D&D 5e, dragons back then are far from
being a force of nature. They're still
frighteningly powerful compared to
a first level player, however.
From the Blue cover Holmes Edition
of D&D (circa 1979).

So, when Christmas rolled around, I asked for a D&D set. And this was what I got: 

The original copy is long since
gone. Because, well... Satanic Panic
and all that.

This version didn't look like Rob's, but the guts of the thing were still there. The same six stats --Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma-- the same funky dice, the same classes*, and the same monsters. Compared to some wargames such as Risk, the game seemed very complicated, but compared to modern RPGs, well...

An RPG From the Past: Middle-earth Role Playing

During the height of the Satanic Panic in the 80s, my parents decided --with the help of some "encouragement" from watching The 700 Club* and from hearing some of my mom's hardcore evangelical in-laws-- to get rid of all of my brother's and my D&D material. 

Looking back on it now, I still get angry about the whole affair, especially knowing what an original Deities and Demigods (complete with the Michael Moorcock section) is worth nowadays, but in a bizarre way it pushed me into other RPGs that I would have ordinarily never tried. So... I guess I have to thank my parents for expanding my RPG horizons a lot.

Such as Middle-earth Role Playing by Iron Crown Enterprises.

ICE put out Middle-earth Role Playing --MERP for short-- in 1984, basing the game on a streamlined version of their Rolemaster system. ICE put out a Second Edition of the game in 1986 --functionally the same, but cleaned up in presentation-- and continued to release supplements and support MERP up until they lost the license granted by Tolkien Enterprises in 1999.

This is probably about half of ICE's output.
And no, I'm not selling any of them. I've had
most of these for 25-30 years.

I realize some people prefer The One Ring or the D&D version of a Middle-earth RPG as their go-to for adventuring in Middle-earth, but for me MERP was it. From practically the moment I spied the MERP RPG materials at our local Waldenbooks and opened up a few of the splatbooks, I fell in love with the game.

***

Okay, you have to be wondering how on earth I managed to hide a boxed RPG set --never mind the REST of the splatbooks-- when my parents were incredibly anal retentive about controlling major aspects of my life.** Therefore, I ought to take a step back and describe exactly what went into my thought process when I finally decided to pull the trigger.

Having attempted to toe the line for a couple of years, I began to look into RPGs again. I mean, I thought the entire "Roleplaying is Satanic" thing was bullshit***, but since I wanted to keep my continuing interest in Science Fiction and Fantasy novels/short story collections alive, I figured I had to toe the company line for a while. And believe me, when I bought the Dragonlance novels that was truly put to the test, as my brother conspired to use the fact that they were printed by TSR --the same company that put out D&D-- against me in an argument with my parents. Luckily, my parents didn't take my books away, but I knew I was walking on eggshells.****

Still, I wasn't going to give up on this. I knew I had to wait until I got to college to be more open about playing RPGs, which is rather ironic given the extremely low social status RPG players had on the teenager social scale, but I'd seen through the bullshit and I figured there had to be a way to pull off playing RPGs.

Normally, you'd just find someone playing D&D and sit in on their game, but the people I knew who played D&D had discovered girls and cars, and that was that. So if I wanted to play, I'd have to get a game group together myself.

So all of this was on my mind when I stumbled across the MERP materials at the bookstore, and I thought that this could be exactly what I needed. The books were all soft cover, the boxed set was the size of the old D&D Basic set with the Errol Otus cover art, and because of the (relatively) cheap production values the books were much cheaper than comparable D&D books. That they were softcover meant I could hide them inside my copy of this game without anybody noticing:

There was a LOT of extra space inside
once you put the ships together.
From Mandi's Attic Toys.

Between that and my copy of Risk, I could hide the boxed set and a couple of expansion settings. 

I then targeted my friends who loved reading SF&F, and I got a couple of people together for regular game sessions. They all knew my parents' opinions on role playing, so they were more than happy to be the hosts for the games. 

There were more than my share of close calls with my parents, but once I got away to college --and bought myself a footlocker to carry my books and whatnot back and forth from college over the summers-- I was set. Once my girlfriend got an apartment nearby for grad school, I just moved my MERP collection over to her place and I was set. Looking back on it, I'm shocked I wasn't caught with my hand in the cookie jar, because my 50+ year old self looks back at the risks I took and think that I had to have been out of my mind to think I was going to get away with it.

I mean, I did all the following:

• Created a false bottom in the drawer in my old wooden desk
• Built a false bottom underneath one of the shelves of my bookshelf  (I got cold feet putting the books there, so I put some of my old classwork from high school there instead. If it was found, the fact that I didn't want my old classwork thrown out would have worked in my favor.)
• Hid some of the books under my dresser
• Put some of the books between the box spring and the frame of my mattress

All of which sound on the face of it that I was hiding marijuana or condoms or Playboys.

***

The TL;DR of that whole thing is that compared to D&D, MERP was modular, cheaper, and had much better splatbooks than D&D had. The ICE team worked their collective asses off on MERP (and Rolemaster), and it showed.

And, in my opinion, until D&D 3e came along, MERP was the superior game.

If you looked at a MERP character sheet, it looked a lot like a D&D 3e character sheet. 

This is a scan of a character I created
when I was learning the game. The
photocopy came straight from the
core rulebook itself.

I absolutely love this version
created by Tensen01 on DeviantArt.

You see skill ranks, character stats, languages, and a few other odds and ends. Instead of the modern MMO nomenclature of "Mana", you have "Power Points" for casting spells. The Stats and rolls are all based on the d100 system, so no other dice are needed other than a pair of d10s. Oh, and those Languages? Yes, they have skill ranks as well, from 1 (can say a couple of words) to 5 (speak like a native). Each level you go up, you get a certain number of skill points to distribute, no fuss no muss.

All of these skill ranks and the d100 system made so much sense that I wondered why D&D bothered with all the assorted dice. And until 3e came along and basically took a lot of the MERP/Rolemaster system along for the ride, D&D felt weak by comparison. 

MERP did suffer from one major drawback, which was that the game went up until 10th Level. If you wanted to utilize higher levels, you had to use Rolemaster for that. But given that Rolemaster, or RM for short, was also straightforward I didn't have any issues with using RM on an as-needed basis.

But the sheer joy in MERP lay in the splatbooks and modules. And oh, were there a ton.

I found a couple of copies
of this in the box set.

I even kept track of what I was missing.

I'm biased, but I really liked Lorien a lot.

***

The default setting for MERP was in the mid-Third Age, while there still was a Kingdom in the North (Arthedain), the Balrog hadn't been unearthed yet in Moria, Rohan hadn't been founded yet (but the Horse Lords roamed south of Mirkwood), Minas Ithil was still intact, and there was a King in Gondor. There's plenty of opportunities for campaigns in this era, and if you wanted to run a campaign in another era, the books were easily adapted to those. Well, within reason: Minas Ithil was not going to be the same once the Witch King got a hold of it. The Balrog the same with Moria, but the largest difference between the two is that we know --courtesy of The Fellowship of the Ring-- that the rooms in Moria were largely intact, if unused or had signs of fighting in them.

The sad thing is that ICE lost the Tolkien license right before the Peter Jackson LOTR movies came out, because it would have been a huge shot in the arm to the system. Then again, people would have wanted to play in the era of Lord of the Rings in the same way as people do in LOTRO, so the concept of a mid-Third Age setting wouldn't necessarily have worked as well as I might have thought. But still, that the game is a love letter to Tolkien's works is something that can't be overlooked. The world of Middle-earth is so diverse that you could spend an entire campaign in the area around Bree, or maybe have an urban campaign down in Gondor, or even a wilderness campaign out in Mirkwood. 

Faerun ain't got nothing on Middle-earth.

***

It's a shame that the used prices for these splatbooks can be pretty high, because they're very much worth a perusal if you're a Tolkien fan. I'd checked out some of the splatbooks I was missing in my collection, but when I saw they were over $100 for a "meh" quality version, I took a hard pass. Finding PDF files of these rulebooks and systems are very much worth pursuing, however, because that's one way of keeping costs down.

If you happen to come across some of these books at a yard sale and you're interested in an RPG based on Lord of the Rings, I'd recommend picking them up. 

*Commence groans. Oh yes, I had to defend my listening to Rush of all things because they showed up on one of Pat Robertson's lists of "Satanic Heavy Metal". (At least Triumph avoided that listing.) If anybody knows anything about Heavy Metal, maybe --maybe-- you could count Rush's self titled first album, but that's it. 

**This absolute need to control my life fueled my desire to go to college away from home. Admittedly the University of Dayton was only 54 miles away, but it was just far enough away in the days of a 55 MPH speed limit that my parents weren't going to drop in on me unannounced. However, I found out a couple of decades later that during my Freshman year my father did just that, dropping in on the Physics Department and asking the Department Chair how I was doing. "We don't discuss such things with parents," he stonily told my Dad and showed him the door.

***I once had a huge argument with my mom over this, saying it was the same as acting, as playing a role is what actors do, but I swear the mental gymnastics on this she used to try to split hairs was absolutely ridiculous. "Playing a role" was fine, she said, but "role playing" was Satanic.

****My brother also tried to tie my interests in music to Satanism, but given that I didn't have bands like Ozzy or Black Sabbath in my music collection at the time, that failed as well.

EtA: Cleaned up some grammar.

An RPG from the Past: Ars Magica

Note: This is likely the first of an occasional series about RPGs and/or other games that I've either played or wanted to play in the past. Look, I get that people aren't likely to find these interesting, so I'm doing this more for my own trip down memory lane. Up first is a game that's been a lot on my mind lately, Ars Magica.

 

A long time ago, around the time my wife and I were married, she worked at the Cincinnati Museum Center* and we got to know several fellow recent college graduates on staff. This was during the first huge surge of popularity for Magic: The Gathering, and a couple of her friends on staff offered to show us how to play the game. We'd played Talisman and other board games such as Advanced Civilization**, so I figured we were ready for a new challenge. We met up at a coffee shop attached to a local bookstore, set up the cards, and started playing. 

The game was okay, I suppose, but what I remembered the most about that evening was one of my wife's friends casually mentioning role playing games. 

"Sure," I said in reply. "I played D&D back in the day, lived through the Satanic Panic, and I played MERP as well."

"MERP?"

"Middle-earth Role Playing."

Oh, Iron Crown Enterprises.
My old friend. I have waaaay too
many splatbooks from them.
(Pic from worthmore.com.)

"Ah! Have you tried Ars Magica?"

"No, I haven't," I replied after a short pause. I'd tried a couple of less well known RPGs, such as Gamma World, Top Secret, and some indie games people were developing, but Ars Magica didn't ring a bell.

"Oh! You have to try it!" he replied. "It's a game where the main characters are all Magi and it's set in Mythic Europe, where all of the myths are real."

"So like the setting for Darklands, then," I added, making the connection between the Microprose video game and his RPG.

"Yeah, but the system is really different. Magi are really the main characters in the game and are much more powerful than any other character."

"Oh." I preferred playing Clerics and healer types, so that kind of put a damper on my enthusiasm. Still, I didn't want to turn down the potential offer of playing another RPG, so I kept him talking about the setting and how it all worked out.

The next Friday that we got together to play some M:tG, he handed me the core rulebook:

From all over the internet, but
this one was from Atlas Games.

I was used to an RPG having multiple rulebooks, such as D&D or Rolemaster, so a singular rulebook of around 160 pages or so kind of threw me. I was expecting something, well, more massive than it seemed. 

But still, when I read the first words of a narrative story provided to the reader...

The wisps of mist swirled around Lucienne as she trudged the last few yards up the hill with the others. Nearing the summit, she stopped and looked up to see the goal of her journey, the tower of Mistridge Covenant thrusting heavenward through the gray fog. Perched on the parapet at the top of the tower was the ragged silhouette of a woman clawing at the air. A screech echoed over the hill as she suddenly plunged earthward. In a mad flurry of feathers, she turned into a large raven, then flew off across the valley.

Watching the bird disappear into the distance, Lucienne looked behind her. There lay the rolling countryside, lush, green, and fertile, home of the common folk, home of the life she was now leaving forever. Somewhere just beyond the horizon lay Foix, the city that had burned her father for heresy and left her mother dead in the gutter. In that city she had no future, but what lay before her now?

She glanced uneasily at the tall, gray-robed wizard beside her. Grimgroth, her future mentor: she would call him master. He had stopped beside her and was searching her face with a somber, inscrutable gaze.

Avoiding his eyes, terrified of what she might see, Lucienne peered forward to see the gate of the covenant through the mist. Once she passed through that portal, there would be no turning back. Inside awaited a whole new world.

Thoughts and memories of her former life rushed through her mind. Of her years as a forlorn waif running through the crowded streets with a gang of urchins. Of stealing bread from the market stalls beneath the disapproving gaze of the looming cathedral. She remembered her only friend, Friar Ambrose, who would sometimes gather her into his robes at night, offering her the only peaceful sleep she ever enjoyed. After the death of her parents, there had been only the cold, the hunger, and the loneliness.

Then one day he came, a tall, gray shadow, whose stare tugged at feelings of awe within Lucienne. He had followed her around the city for days, watching everything she did, scrutinizing her very soul. She had been terrified, but there was no one she could turn to. In the end he had asked her to go with him. And she had gone, compelled by a nagging curiosity, tinged with a hint of fatalism. Anything would be better than the streets.

She had heard stories of the wizards and their damnable deeds. The tales were mainly the babblings of old women and over-zealous priests, but what if there was some truth in them? As she began to realize what might lie before her, a feeling of panic clutched her heart.

"What am I doing here?" she said in a whisper barely audible above the wind that raced over the hill.

Grimgoth, who had waited patiently for her, said gently, "You, Lucienne, are becoming a magus, to learn the art of magic, and to learn of yourself. You have the Gift within you, and I will draw it forth. Come."

Her worries somehow laid aside, and her heart filled with new courage, Lucienne walked with Grimgoth the last steps through the mist to the tower, entered through the gateway, and heard the thick, oaken doors shut behind her. A new life had begun.***

There was more to the story, of course, scattered throughout the rulebook, but past that first page I was drawn into what the designers wanted. 

The game was a "troupe" style narrative system, where the players would create several characters --one mage and several others-- and who they played depended on the scenario and the GM. The GM position rotated among the players as well, so that gave everybody a chance to direct the story as well as play different characters. Since you had a stable of characters, the imbalance inherent in Ars Magica with vastly powerful Magi coupled with Grogs and Companions (both "normal people") meant that nobody felt left out in the game. 

A lot of the illustrations from the 2nd Edition
would have been at home in old style D&D books.
From Ars Magica 2nd Edition, page 102.

Magi in Ars Magica are vastly more powerful than the other characters in game, but they are limited in social interactions and by the code of the Order of Hermes, which all magi belong. The long and short of it is that The Gift makes people uneasy around magi --magi included-- and magi in general lack in social skills. On top of that, the code which all magi swear to is to avoid being pawns or meddling in mundane affairs (those without the Gift) or that of the Church or Infernal beings. If a magi breaks the code, the inquisitors of the Order investigate and can order the destruction of any mage found guilty of breaking the code. Given that the Divine can wipe the Order of Hermes off the map if it chose to do so, staying out of mundane affairs is a prudent path forward.

Of course, that doesn't mean that magi don't make problems into their own, such as Faeries attacking a nearby village becoming the magi's problem when people blame the magi for the attacks. To clear their name and possibly obtain rare resources in the process, the magi investigate to determine the truth of the matter, beginning a campaign in Ars Magica.

One last bit of the basics of Ars Magica is the Covenant, the "home base" for magi. A group of magi come together to form a Covenant that operates much like a self contained keep or manor house, complete with people who run the place (non-Gifted humans known as Grogs and their more specialized Companions). Covenants themselves have vigor and importance based on the "seasons" of their life: Covenants in their Spring are brand new, full of vigor, but hardly any influence; Summer Covenants have grown in arcane power but political power lags; Fall Covenants are at their height with political and magical power in abundance but the seeds of their decline are already planted; but Winter Covenants are those that have lost their political and magical power, and are but a shell of their former selves.

The game could be combat heavy, politically heavy, or research and development heavy. Sometimes all at once, sometimes something different entirely. It was entirely up to the players in the same way that a modern FATE or Burning Wheel game is today. And that free form magic system that was in place... That was something totally unique to the time. I can't really describe it as anything other than placing latin words to magical effects, and the mixing/matching that goes on courtesy of the naming is something else.

***

I never got the chance to actually play Ars Magica, because the person who let me borrow the rulebook for a while ended up dating someone who consumed almost all of his time, and that was that. Some years later I stumbled across a 3rd edition of Ars Magica and picked it up, but it was a slightly edgier version of the same rules than I'd experienced before.

I found out later that Mark Rein-Hagen had taken some of the basic rule design of Ars Magica, in particular the "troupe" style of play, and created Vampire: the Masquerade, which happened to become a bit of an RPG hit in the 90s. I suspect the edginess from 3rd edition came from that association with V:tM as well as another descendant of Ars Magica, Mage: the Ascension. 

The game whose popularity in the
90s eclipsed that of D&D.

For some reason, Ars Magica's edginess and association with V:tM bothered me. I wasn't a prude by any means, but I think that my dealings with the Satanic Panic back in the day made me sensitive to how games could be perceived by the religious parts of society, and the Mythic Europe of Ars Magica skirted that border so much that it made me uncomfortable. You'd think that someone well versed in Fantasy and Science Fiction wouldn't have such issues, but I did. I guess I wasn't as secular as I thought I was, because it took much longer for me to make some peace with my ghosts and move forward.

Not too long ago, I stumbled across a 5th Edition of Ars Magica --the current version-- and on impulse I bought the game. 

A better quality photo than I'm
capable of.

 

It still has its players but is nowhere near as popular as D&D, Pathfinder, or even its own descendants, the World of Darkness games. That's a real shame, because the game has an extremely well thought out design and a game world that is both immediately recognizable and familiar to players. I have made my peace with the troupe style of play, due in no small part to playing Mages in World of Warcraft and other video games, and if I had the chance I'd jump at trying my hand at an Ars Magica campaign.

*Back then she worked in the Natural History Museum as floor staff. Eventually, she transitioned off that job and into working evening events, which worked out well for her once we started having kids. I could take care of the kids in the evening, and she could go out and work an event or four per month.

**The Avalon Hill boardgame, not the one based on Sid Meier's Civilization.

***Tweet, Jonathan and Rein-Hagen, Mark; Ars Magica, 2nd Edition, 1989, pg 4. What I find most interesting is who also contributed to the book: Lisa Stevens, now the head of Paizo; Doug Shuler, artist for M:tG and plenty of RPGs; and John Nephew who went on to form Atlas Games.