Gobocalypse Now: Playing D&D after 35 years

 SE corner of the Sunken Lands   

For the first time in over three decades I played a session of D&D. Not only did I play with my eleven year old nephew and his friend and my wife, I also played with Densel E., the man who introduced me to the game, as well as another friend from my old gaming days.

I stopped playing D&D around 1983 in favor of other games; first DragonQuest, then Rolemaster, and finally the Hero System. First, a group of us had decided we wanted a system where armor made you harder to hurt but easier to hit. Secondly, we wanted one that awarded experience for cleverness and roleplaying and not just killing things.

As it probably did for lots of viewers, Stranger Things introduced one of my nephews, Jac, to the idea of roleplaying. At the same time he was watching the show I was learning about Dungeon Crawl Classics from Goodman Games. Reading about the game and listening to the hosts of the Appendix N Book Club and Sanctum Secorum podcasts talk about it really made me want to roleplay again. At some point it became clear I was going to have to run a game for Jac. Since he and a friend were coming to stay for a week at my house this summer a date was picked and I started relearning how to run a game.

Somewhere between the decision to play and last week, the guy who taught me D&D and I had renewed our friendship after many years. When I told him about reffing a game, he suggested D&D 3.5. I read the rules and it seemed good enough.

We spent a night making up characters and explaining the basic of roleplaying to the two kids. My nephew made up an elf cleric and his friend an elf paladin. Hallie decided to play a half-orc barbarian and the two old timers a human wizard and a human rogue. The following day we played.

The adventure I created in the preceding weeks was this: With more than a tip of the hat to Apocalypse Now, I planned to send the players off down a river into unexplored hostile country. Unbeknownst to anyone but me, goblins to the south of a frontier settlement had been riled up. A human soldier exposed to strange, chaotic magic had become their leader/shaman. He had infected them with some of the same magic and they had taken to raiding the village and its outlying farms. In turn the village put out a call for soldiers to come protect the town. In other words, standard frpg stuff.

The adventure wasn't planned as anything spectacular, just a nice basic intro to get new players a feel for roleplaying. I expected the players to hunt for some clues, journey down the river in search of the goblin base, and get into some fights. All that happened, just none of it in the way I had planned.

3.5 goblin - not bad...

Immediately upon arriving in the town, the group started throwing a monkey wrench in my plans. No in a bad or annoying way, but in a way that meant I had to switch things up on the fly. I haven't had to do that in ages so I was a little rusty. The longer we played, though, the more it came back.

My plan was that the players would stick around town and the first night goblins would attack. Instead of just waiting, the players decided to find tracking dogs to follow the goblins. It hadn't even occurred to me that idea would even arise, but I sure didn't want them getting dogs. So, I decided a farmer had some good tracking dogs but that when they to get them a frenzied goblin attack would be in full swing.

..but DAT's will always be
THE goblin for me

Later on I got to mess with them when they had to go overland in search of the goblin lair instead of taking boats. If they'd fought the goblins at night they would have been able to take their canoes. This meant instead of meeting more goblins on the river, they instead faced off against several waves of very low level myconids (something I'd never used ever before in D&D). While the goblin fight had proved tough for a first-level party, the myconids had left two players almost dead. After that I got to pull off the big reveal of the goblin lair. I'll save that for the next time I get to ref this campaign.

The best thing that happened was the banter back and forth during the session. I haven't been part of that in 25 years. For the two old-timers and myself who've been friends for forty years it was natural, but it took a little longer for my wife and the boys to get into it. Densel kept prompting people to talk as their characters, not themselves. Soon enough, everyone was speaking in accents, haggling with tradesmen, and roaring in battle. It was everything I hoped it would be. A lot of fun was had and my nephew and his friend are clamoring for another go as soon as possible.

As to 3.5, eh, it's alright. I think it makes things a little too complicated for rand new players, requiring them to think on skills and feats before they have an understanding of how the game's systems work. As an experienced player who prefers skill-based games I deem it ok. The feats are a nice idea and really let you tailor your character, but I think they get too specific and add another bunch of things to be remembered.

While I'll keep on with the 3.5 with my nephew, but what I'm really hoping to do is run a DCC game with some of the old timers. It's got a nicely lunatic pulp feel and looks like it affords the ref and players a looser style of play. I'm also a bigger fan of S&S and pulp in my gaming than high fantasy. I'm thinking it could be a real blast.

To Tie-In or Not Tie-In

I've been ambivalent about tie-in novels for a very long time.  I say this as someone who grew up reading movie novelizations (particularly Alan Dean Foster's) and has really liked the pair of Warhammer 40K books I read. Andre Norton's Quag's Keep was good fun. I also admit my main reason lies with my terrible experience with the first of TSR's Dragonlance books: Dragons of Autumn Twilight and Dragons of Winter Night. It's hard to remember what I disliked specifically about them, but I know by the time I made it to the middle of the second book, I wasn't going to even open the third, Dragons of Spring Dawning, even though I'd already bought it. 

What worked for me as a gamer - classes, alignment, definite rules of magic, etc. - became wooden on the page. Characters had defined roles to play that weren't interesting or intriguing. I would like to think I saw the coming flattening of fantasy fiction into generic mush, but I think I just found the books boring. Their "epic" stylings were old hat to me, having read hundred of fantasy books by that time, from Tolkien to Karl Edward Wagner to Ursula K. LeGuin. It didn't help that I also detested Larry Elmore's cover art, with its dull-eyed, moody characters and silly-looking faux-barbarians.

From that point in 1984, I watched the shelves of the Waldenbooks in the Staten Island mall fill up with more and more TSR novels and fewer and fewer ones non-TSR novels. When the Forgotten Realms books came along it got even worse. 

I looked at the FR books, but there was nothing there that looked appealing or caught my eye. I know there are loads of people who grew up on R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt books, but I'd already read the adventures of a moody, racial turncoat in the Elric books a decade earlier. 

And then the FR books just kept coming and coming. ISFDB lists nearly 250 books written in the setting. There's a point of overproduction and diminishing returns. Again, I didn't read those books, so my inclination to avoid them was based on prejudice, but acknowledging that doesn't mean I'm going to change my mind. There's way too much original fantasy with weird or cool ideas to choose from to make me. Watching what DL and FR did to D&D and gaming in general, rejecting its wide open nature for a highly delineated setting, didn't endear them to me either.

So why did I read and review Matthew Hughes' Pathfinders Tales book, Song of the Serpent, and why did I buy Howard Andrew Jones' Plague of Shadows and Stalking the Beast? Simply, I already know really like the authors' work. Hughes' Vancian Raffalon stories are a hoot and Jones Dabir and Asim are classic historical S&S.

I also like what I've seen of Pathfinder's Golarion setting. It's got the feel of an up-to-date version of TSR's old World of Grayhawk with room for any sort of campaign or adventure and is generic enough for the ref to mold it to his own vision. Its roots look more in keeping with D&D's pulpier roots than the mass-market epic ones of Dragonlance. Which strikes me as the perfect game setting to write stories for. I know I just complained about the generic qualities of DL, but by offering writers a generic one to play in it can be like the sandbox settings of early gaming, and therefore anything and everything goes. Which is a good thing.

My review of the Hughes book, Song of the Serpent is up over at Black Gate. It's a mixed review. The book's first half is just what I wanted in a Vance-pastiche, the second half, not so much. It mutates into a "big quest" story too different in tone and style from what came before. Hughes is a very good writer, so he's able to make the quest appealing and knows the material so he knows how to draw you in, but it wasn't what I wanted at that point. 

It didn't turn me against Golarion, though. The world, as interpreted by Hughes is a good one, with room for oddball Vance-style societies alongside a classic dwarf citadel and a sorta Old West boom town. Scanning the rest of the Pathfinder titles, they don't look like they're dominated by any single storyline or character (see Elminster or Drizzt). They're also fairly short, looking more in keeping with seventies era fantasy than the bloated tomes and endless series of the last thirty years. It's not that I don't have time to waste on those sorts of book, I just mostly don't want to. Then I found this quote by Pathfinder author Tim Pratt made me smile.

“It’s a strange and sprawling world where you can tell any kind of fantasy  story you want,” said Tim Pratt. “From weird Westerns with gunslingers,  to Gothic horror, to supernatural heist novels, to barbarian tales, to lost-world adventures, to archaeological expeditions with mystical monsters, and more. I’ve written Pathfinder books featuring killer robots from beyond the stars. It’s an amazingly wide-open world.”

How can you not be snagged by that quote? Still, I probably won't be rushing out to buy lots of of Pathfinder books, unless by an author I already like or recommended by someone whose tastes I respect. What I will say is, I'm not going to reject these sorts of books simply out of hand ever again.

So what do people think? Do you read these sorts of books? If so why, and if not, why not? 

Tempus Fugit

So attending my friend George K.'s 50th birthday and the luminous Mrs. V's appointment to a local grand jury disrupted the finely tuned operation that is my weekly book reviewing for Black Gate. So it goes. If you haven't yet, you can read my review of Dark of the Moon here. It's should be pretty clear I really (REALLY) like P. C. Hodgell's books.

I'm back on track with this week's review. The very fun Changa's Safari books by Milton Davis are worth any S&S fan's time.

Going to friend's birthday served as the first reunion of my core group of friends in over five years. While we had all known each other from the neighborhood or school, but what really drew us together was a love of science fiction and fantasy and roleplaying in particular.

We started with D&D then moved on to DragonQuest, then Rolemaster, and finally settling on the Hero System. Each new game was an effort to get towards something we considered more realistic. We wanted games that awarded experience based on adventuring not just killing beasties and stealing their gold. All three of three of those post-D&D games did just that to varying degrees of success.

Even as we got older and did other things, gaming still occupied an important place in our friendship. Sometimes we didn't really play and just hung around making up characters and eating Chinese food. And we didn't care. Just hanging out was enough.

But most of the time we played. A few of us started playing seriously in 1978. By 1980 we gamed with between ten and twenty people each Saturday. Eventually, the chaos became overwhelming and we retreated to a small core of under ten people. Certain players, in fact, who had become terrible rule-players, weren't even told about our sessions anymore. We came to take our playing very seriously. If we weren't having fun it wasn't worth doing.

If I take the time, I can still smell my basement and of the weathered game books and hear my late friend Jimmy C.'s voice. When I come across an old character sheet or meticulously drawn map on hex-paper I'm zapped back in time thirty years. I feel young and old simultaneously.

As people got 'real' jobs, engaged and eventually married, or moved away the gaming stopped. No time and nobody. But when we got together last week it was one of the big topics of conversation. Memories of games played twenty years ago and more still figured large in all our minds. Remembering the castles pillaged and monsters slain was a real blast.

Now, if I want a bit of the old gaming feel I'm stuck playing Icewind Dale or something similar. A bit of hack and slash is alright, but I miss the extravagant roleplaying from my youth. Oh, well. Tempus fugit.

"Ki Khanga" by Davis and Ojetade

   The latest blast of swords & soul to end up on my kindles is "Ki Khanga: The Anthology" by Milton Davis and Balogun Ojetade.  Last year, Davis announced that he and Ojedate were working on an African-derived RPG.  At some point, he wrote, an anthology exploring each of the regions of the world of Ki Khanga would be released early this year.  It would serve as an introduction to the game as well as a source of financing.  When Ojedate announced on January 19th it was available, I downloaded it immediately.
   Ojedate has written at length about role-playing, including the racism he encountered back when he first played D&D.  Later, as a ref, he took on the boredom caused by endless pseudo-European campaigns by introducing pseudo-African characters and settings and, lo and behold, it helped eliminate the torpor that had settled over his gaming.  Players were excited at the prospect of something new and different.
   Both these men are entrepreneurs and swords & soul promoters as well as writers. Now they're hoping to build on what they and other writers have done and continue expanding the audience for the genre and the horizons of those reading it.  The world of Ki Khanga will be one more step forward.

   So how's the book?  Well, it's excellent at times, but it's a bit of a mixed bag.  I suspect that's due to it's serving as an RPG supplement as well as a collection.  It opens (following a nice forward by Charles Saunders)  with a history of Ki Khanga.  Of special importance, we learn of the Cleave, a great inlet in the continent of Ki Khanga, supposedly caused by the Creator's axe at his dismay of the nature of the world's inhabitants.  Now, unpleasant, seemingly evil things emerge from the Cleave to pursue unknown goals.

   The first stories, "Nubia's Revenge" and "How Adjoa Became King", are little more than character introductions, providing peeks at the greater world and events.  We meet a warrior who learns revenge isn't all she needs to be capable of and a royal daughter who becomes king.  A later story, "The Signal", again is a little thin, but it does introduce the almost majestic terror of another enemy of Ki Khanga, the mysterious joka watu.  If you read them as background material for the RPG they're more successful than as stories.

   With each new story, a little more is revealed about the world of Ki Khanga and the forces at work across the land.  In Davis' "Old Hunter", things get ratcheted up a notch and the enormity of the magical forces in the Cleave is revealed.  "The Hand of Sa-Seti" by Ojedate introduces intelligent, gun-toting elephants and giant beetle monsters from the Cleave.   "Old Hunter" has a potent, mythic feel while there's a nice steampunk bit of business going on in "Sa-Seti". This is great, action packed S&S.
  It's with Davis' "Timneet" that the book hits it stride.  Two men are sent by their Temple by their master, the Teacher, to kill his enemy in the town of Sala.  In the end it reads like the opening to a much longer tale, but that's not a failing.  Most of the story is composed of conversation between and contemplation by the two would-be killers.  Even though the surprises are very surprising, Davis' character had me caught up in their story from the very start.  I need to know what happens next.
   There are several other solid stories.  "A Name Long Forgotten" is about a a witch and her promised revenge.  "Fearless" is about a brave prince unable to see the source of his foretold doom and reads like a fairy-tale.  Both are by Ojedate.
   "Ki Khanga"'s best moments are the last three stories; "The Bene's Daughter" and "Simple Math" by Davis and "The Deal" by Ojedate.  Longer than most of the earlier stories, each provides enough room for the authors' to stretch out and deliver more complex characters and more excitement.  "The Bene's Daughter" is about the hidden and unknowing daughter of a potent magical family from a race dedicated to defending Ki Khanga from the Cleave's inhabitants.  In "The Deal", there's a wizard who travels underground inside a dead, giant worm, a warrior covered with animate and deadly tattoos, and we learn a little more about the division between magic and the divine first glimpsed in "How Adjoa Became King".  While both only introduce us to their heroes, they work as solid, standalone stories much better than "Nubia" and "Adjoa".

   The book's finale, "Simple Math" introduces the best character in the collection, Omari Ket.  Omari's a member of the Mikijen, a force of professional mercenaries.  It's a long, episodic story, but doesn't feel like a series of adventures simply strung together.  Each section leading logically to the next with enjoyable escalating scale of adventure and danger at each step.  There's a naive young mercenary from the back country, an upstart merchant backed by renegade mercenaries and the Ndoko, ape-men warriors.  Just the sorts of bits and pieces that make good S&S.
   Omari is a skilled warrior, loved or lusted after by almost every woman he meets, and almost gleeful cynical.  His attempts to tutor the naive Zewani are great.  Unbeknownst to him, he's been marked by the goddess Odu for a greater purpose than roaming through life whoring and fighting.  Throughout the story he finds himself pushed more and more in ways he doesn't appreciate but finds irresistible.  I'm definitely waiting for what he does and where he goes next.

   "Ki Khanga: The Anthology" is a lot of fun.  I've read Milton Davis' stories before and I'm a fan.  I'd only read Balogun Ojedate's excellent blog prior to this , but I wasn't surprised to like his storytelling.  By the time the book's done you really have a feel for the world of Ki Khanga and some of its heroes and heroines.  If you want more detail about the world, its realms and people, check out Davis' site and the Ki Khanga entries.
   So should you buy it?  Of course you should, the e-book's only $3.99 and you're helping back the RPG.  You should really buy it because the last three stories alone are worth the price.  One of the points of the whole swords & soul movement is to widen the palette for creating swords and sorcery.  Books like "Ki Khanga" are doing just that.  It's not a perfect book (those early stories that leave the reader hanging and more typos than I'm used to are weaknesses), but there's so much great yarn spinning going on you shouldn't give it a pass.