Interview: Rudy Kraft (Part I)

A long-standing and popular feature of this blog has been its interviews with designers, artists, and other luminaries of the hobby. From the beginning, I’ve believed it’s important to preserve and share their memories, insights, and experiences. They deserve to be heard not only by those of us who remember those now-ancient days firsthand, but also by later generations of roleplayers who might otherwise never encounter the stories behind the games they love.

That’s why I’m always especially pleased to speak with someone whose contributions were largely unknown to me in my own youth. Such conversations are reminders of just how many hands shaped this hobby in its formative years.

Rudy Kraft, who was involved in the early days of Chaosium – or The Chaosium, as it was then styled – very kindly agreed to answer a series of questions I put to him. As you’ll soon discover, he did so with remarkable generosity and detail. What follows is the first part of our conversation; the second will appear tomorrow.

1. How did you first become involved in the hobby of role playing?

I first got involved in gaming as a hobby because of my father. I was the oldest of five children—although we started gaming before the fifth child was born. We had family games of Clue and Monopoly—mostly Clue. At some point, my father bought me a Christmas present of the old Avalon Hill game Afrika Korps. He and I played that a lot often leaving it set up on the desk in my parents' bedroom. Because I liked this game, he bought additional Avalon Hill Games at least once a year until I went away to college in 1974.

Starting in elementary school, I became an enthusiastic reader of both science fiction and fantasy.  During this time, I read and reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and Asimov’s Foundation series on multiple occasions.  

During high school, some friends and I created a space exploration war game where one person acted as the moderator and the other people explored a star map from different locations until they ran into each other and presumably fought a war.  

When I was at Cornell University, I read a lot of science fiction and touched the periphery of SF fandom. In one fanzine I read about this new game, Dungeons & Dragons. This almost certainly occurred in August 1975. The game sounded interesting to me, so I ordered a copy of it which I received in September. Once I looked at it, it became obvious to me that I did not know how to get started in the game and I set it aside.

In October, I overheard two people talking about playing Dungeons & Dragons. It turned out that there was a small group of people playing the game regularly in the same dormitory where I ate my meals.  They played every Saturday, so I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons on the second Saturday in October 1975. In fact, I had a 50th anniversary celebratory session in October this year where, for the first time in years, I played rather than DMed a game of Dungeon & Dragons.

Following that first session, I became very addicted to playing Dungeon & Dragons to the point where it significantly adversely affected my grades. During those years, I bought Empire of the Petal Throne and Metamorphosis Alpha, but I never persuaded anyone to play them instead of D&D. 

Retrospective: Bermuda Triangle

Recently, I came across a couple of “news” stories about the Bermuda Triangle, a topic I hadn’t thought about in years. Growing up in the 1970s, however, the Bermuda Triangle seemed to be everywhere. I vividly remember Charles Berlitz’s 1974 book on the subject – yes, that Charles Berlitz – as well as the steady stream of television documentaries solemnly recounting the mysterious disappearances of ships and airplanes. The 1970s really were a wild time, a period when the Unexplained was treated less as fringe nonsense than as a challenge to modern rationality. UFOs, ESP, ancient astronauts, haunted houses, and Atlantis all enjoyed a curious semi-respectability. The world, it seemed, was stranger than we had been led to believe and I, of course, ate it up.

Thinking about this cultural moment reminded me of a boardgame from the same period that I adored as a child, Bermuda Triangle. Published by Milton Bradley in 1975, it is not a particularly well-known game today, but I suspect that those of us who remember it at all do so largely because of a single plastic component central to its play, the Mystery Cloud. Ships caught beneath it might be removed from the board entirely, creating a physical absence that felt far more consequential to my friends and me than simply flipping a cardboard counter or sliding a token backward. Watching one’s ship laden with cargo and hard-won progress vanish into the Cloud’s plastic depths was a small but unforgettable drama.

Mechanically, Bermuda Triangle is a straightforward enough game. Two to four players each control a fleet of four merchant ships, attempting to move them from port to port to collect goods and return them safely to their home port. The first player to amass $350,000 in goods wins. Achieving this requires a mix of luck, timing, and a modest amount of tactical awareness. Ship movement is governed by dice rolls, with vessels advancing along established sea lanes. Crowding matters, because landing on an occupied space displaces the other ship, pushing it backward, and ports themselves can hold only four ships at a time. This creates opportunities for deliberate obstruction, allowing players to slow one another’s progress through careful positioning.

Beyond the roll of the dice, though, looms the game’s defining feature, the aforementioned Mystery Cloud. At the end of each turn, after each player has moved, a spinner determines the Cloud’s direction of movement across the board. Over time, it will inevitably drift into the sea lanes, crossing paths with the merchant vessels. Each ship token contains a small magnet, as does the Cloud itself. Depending on the Cloud’s orientation and direction of travel, it may “suck up” a ship it passes over, removing it from play entirely.

It is a simple mechanic, but a remarkably effective one. There is no certainty that a ship will be lost even when the Cloud passes directly overhead – the magnets were quite finicky, as I recall – and that unpredictability only heightened the tension. Would the ship survive or would it "vanish?" That moment of suspense, repeated again and again, gave the game a sense of menace wholly out of proportion to its rules complexity. I am convinced that this single feature carried the game for us, encouraging repeated play of what might otherwise have been dismissed as a fairly ordinary, even dull, roll-and-move affair.

Seen in retrospect, Bermuda Triangle feels like a perfect expression of its era. Its mechanics are serviceable, its strategy modest, but its theme and, crucially, its physical embodiment of that theme tapped directly into a cultural fascination with mystery and unseen forces. The game didn’t explain the Bermuda Triangle, but simply assumed its reality and invited us to suffer its consequences. In doing so, it captured something about those days as I remember them, namely, that the world was unstable, unpredictable, and perhaps unknowable. 

The game left a lasting impression on me in a way that Monopoly or Sorry! never did, since, on many levels, it's no better of a game design than either of those staples of childhood. The combination of the Mystery Cloud and its ostensible subject matter, though, was enough to elevate Bermuda Triangle in my imagination. Until I started thinking about this again, I hadn't realized how much I liked this game – or how much of a role it may have played in feeding the earliest embers of my lifelong fascination with the Unexplained. Not bad for an old boardgame!

Retrospective: Conquest of the Empire

Stop me if you've heard this before: I was never a wargamer, but I liked the idea of wargames, specifically simulating a military or other conflict through the use of a board, tokens, and dice. There's just something inherently appealing to me about this, which probably explains why I've spent more than four decades trying but rarely succeeding at finding a wargame that really clicked with me. I owned and played a number of Avalon Hill and SPI games in my youth, but, with the exception of Diplomacy, I was never very good at them (and even there I was hampered by my inexplicable tendency to play Austria-Hungary).

However, in 1984, Milton Bradley released a line of games under the banner of the "Gamemaster Series" that caught my attention. The series was an experiment in bringing wargames to the mass market. Each entry in the series came in a massive, shelf-dominating box filled with lavish components and a rulebook that looked intimidating compared to more traditional boardgames like Monopoly or Risk. The series began with Axis & Allies, designed by Larry Harris, and followed swiftly with another of his creations, Conquest of the Empire.

While Axis & Allies presented World War II in game form, Conquest of the Empire did the same thing for the Roman Empire's Crisis of the Third Century. The game was a grand-scale battle for supremacy across the Mediterranean world after the death of Marcus Aurelius. It was, in every sense, a spectacle, a game whose physical components alone promised an epic experience before a single die was rolled. As a young history buff with a particular affection for Greco-Roman history, this was the game I'd been waiting for.

To appreciate Conquest of the Empire, it helps to recall what the gaming landscape looked like in the mid-1980s. The boundary between “mainstream” and “hobby” games was much starker than it is today. Wargames were, as I noted above, largely the province of companies like Avalon Hill or SPI. They were sold in specialty stores to an audience comfortable with long rulebooks and hex maps. By contrast, the Gamemaster Series was an attempt to bridge that gap by combining high production values, streamlined rules, and compelling subjects to attract both traditional hobbyists and curious outsiders like myself. 

Axis & Allies was, I gather, very successful. Certainly my friends and I enjoyed playing it and we did so often. Of course, even in the 1980s, World War II was a staple of wargames. Conquest of the Empire thus deviated just enough to be considered daring. Furthermore, its subject, the period of the Military Anarchy, was less familiar and its map of the Mediterranean world, divided into provinces and trade routes, hinted at something more intricate than the average family game. Of course, that's precisely why I loved it.

Opening Conquest of the Empire for the first time is something I cannot forget. To start, the box was enormous. Inside lay nearly four hundred molded plastic miniatures, such as legionnaires with raised shields, catapults, coins, and galleys to patrol the Mare Nostrum. There were also cities to build, roads to lay down, and an oversized, vividly illustrated board depicting the known world from Britannia in the northwest to Aegyptus in the southeast. Following the death of Marcus Aurelius, the empire teeters on the brink of chaos. Each player takes the role of a would-be emperor, commanding armies, building cities, taxing provinces, and waging war until one emerges victorious. It's a straightforward and appealing premise – especially to my teenage self.

Like Axis & Allies, the game was structured around economic management and military conquest. Provinces provided income, which could be spent to raise legions, fleets, and fortifications. Armies moved along roads or across the sea, engaging in battles resolved by simple dice rolls. Catapults were useful in sieges and galleys could ferry troops to distant shores. Victory went to the player who amassed the most wealth and territory, though, in practice, the game often ended in exhaustion or mutual ruin long before an emperor was crowned.

That said, the game was not without its flaws. Its economy could snowball rapidly, favoring whoever secured a few prosperous provinces early on. Combat could be pretty random, with legions sometimes crushed or exalted on a handful of dice. The rules for roads and taxation added an appealing Roman flavor but little in the way of meaningful choice. Players spent much of the game counting coins, rebuilding destroyed forces, and waiting for their next chance to strike. One might argue that some of this is, in fact, realistic or at least true to history, but it didn't always make for a satisfying game.

Even so, Conquest of the Empire often felt epic. Setting up the board, arranging your legions, and surveying the Mediterranean was a ritual of grandeur. It was easy to imagine oneself as a latter-day Caesar, eyeing the spoils of empire. The game rewarded patience more than finesse and spectacle more than subtlety, but it delivered a sense of scale that my friends and I found incredibly alluring. It's little wonder that I still think about this game decades later.

From what I have read, it seems that Milton Bradley’s Gamemaster Series never achieved the mainstream success the company had hoped. Axis & Allies became a perennial favorite and spawned multiple editions and spin-offs, but Conquest of the Empire eventually vanished from store shelves, remembered fondly by those of us who had the chance to play it back in the day. I suspect part of the reason was that its theme was less immediately engaging to American audiences and its rules required a level of commitment somewhat closer to Avalon Hill than to Parker Brothers.

I don't mean that as a criticism at all. I absolutely adored this game and deeply regret that my original copy was lost sometime in the '90s. Conquest of the Empire might not have achieved what Milton Bradley had hoped for it, but, for me, it was a near-perfect "middle road" between simple boardgames and the esoteric complexities of "true" wargames. If there were more games like this, I might actually play them.

Retrospective: Crossbows and Catapults

My childhood circle of neighborhood friends was quite large and included boys of all ages, some of them much younger than myself. For example, when I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons during the Christmas holidays of 1979, I was in the fifth grade, but my closest friends outside of school were a year or so younger than me. I also had friends who were younger still, often the little brothers of my other buddies. Being preteen boys, age didn't really matter all that much to us, because we all, more or less, enjoyed the same pastimes and it was always better to have more playmates. This was especially so after we started playing D&D and other RPGs.

Even so, my discovery of D&D coincided with – and probably facilitated – my abandonment of toys or anything that to my youthful self smacked of being "kid stuff." Children in those in-between years of 10 to 12 are, in my experience, quite concerned with appearing to be more "grown up" than they were just a few short years before. This concern can manifest in the ostentatious rejection of overt symbols of their childhood, like toys, games, and other entertainment that don't match up with their nebulous conception being older. That's certainly how it was for me.

Of course, having a friend group that included lots of younger boys provided a convenient excuse to transgress these arbitrary new boundaries between "kid" and "grown up" from time to time. My youngest friend was another's brother and he was about four years younger than me. Though he played D&D with us (and did so very well) he still unapologetically kept one foot in childhood, playing with those little G.I. Joe action figures – everyone knows the "real" G.I. Joe is 12 inches tall! – and other early '80s toys that the rest of us publicly eschewed. Our looking at and admiring his toys was no sin against our newfound maturity, since we weren't playing with them, you see. Such fine distinctions were very important to us and we did our Pharisaical best to maintain them.

Even so, there were egregious exceptions and Crossbows and Catapults was one of the bigger ones I can remember. Released in 1983, when I had just started high school, Crossbows and Catapults was simultaneously the kind of "family game" that I'd never have bought for myself, but was secretly happy had been given as a Christmas gift to my friend's kid brother. As we often did, my friends and I spent the Christmas break visiting one another's homes and passing judgment on our holiday hauls. We'd also use it as an opportunity to try out anything we deemed worthy of our time.

Crossbows and Catapults had rules, but I honestly cannot recall them. Even if I could, I'm fairly certain we never made much use of them, preferring to do our own thing with it. The game is supposed to be played by two players, but it was very easy to change this to two sides, which is what we did. Each side – Vikings or Barbarians – is given a number of little figurines, plastic blocks and structures, and a rubber band-powered ballista ("crossbow") and catapult that fired chunky discs that reminded me of checkers. To be played at all, you need a large, open area with a fairly flat surface, preferably an uncarpeted floor. We used to play on my friends' basement floor or on the ping-pong table we also used for Car Wars.  

As I said, Crossbows and Catapults had rules, but we preferred simply to build up walls and castles from the plastic bricks, place the figures, and then take turns shooting at them with our ballistas and catapults. We'd done this before with army men when we were younger and had great fun with it. Now, thanks to the cool little plastic siege engines included with the game, we could unleash a more potent – and accurate – kind of destruction upon the world. It was childish, of course, but that's probably why we had such fun with it. At that particular stage in our lives, on the cusp of or just entering our teen years, we thought were ready to leave our childhoods behind, even though, on some level, we clearly were not. Crossbows and Catapults afforded us the chance to be kids again without feeling self-conscious about it, which is why, to this day, I still have fond memories of this stupid game.

Barbarian Prince – Ultimate Edition

Many readers of this blog will no doubt already be familiar with the classic "solitaire game of heroic adventure in a forgotten age of barbarism and sorcery," Barbarian Prince. Originally published in 1981 by Dwarfstar Games, a division of Heritage Models, it was designed by none other than Arnold Hendrick, whose early review of OD&D is the stuff of legends. At its initial release, Barbarian Prince was very well received and continues to be highly regarded to this day. Those unfamiliar with the game – or no longer possessing a copy – are directed here for complete (and completely legal) electronic files of its components, along with those of other Dwarfstar games.

According to this thread – thanks to Jacob Houck for pointing it out to me – Simon Cogan, a fan of the original game since his teenage years, is in the process of putting together an "ultimate edition" with expanded events and optional rules, as well as fixing a few errors and omissions from the original. Back in 2021, Cogan was responsible for producing a 40th anniversary edition of Barbarian Prince, so this is not new territory for him. This "director's cut" of the game will be released on August 26 in a fashion similar to his previous 40th anniversary version. 

Though not official or endorsed by Dwarfstar Games, I'm nevertheless quite curious about what Cogan has in store. He's been posting weekly updates of his work on the thread linked above. Check it out if you're interested.

Trivial Pursuits

The other day a friend of mine whom I have not seen in many years paid a visit and, along with two other friends, we had lunch together. One of those other friends brought with him a copy of the Dungeons & Dragons edition of the game Trivial Pursuit. I think I may have been dimly aware of its existence, but I'd certainly never played it before. I seem to recall that, a couple of years ago(?), Hasbro produced a whole slew of oddly D&D-branded editions of classic boardgames, like Clue and Monopoly, so I'm not at all surprised that there'd be a D&D Trivial Pursuit as well – and, unlike the others, it makes some degree of sense, since D&D certainly has a fair share of trivia associated with it.

That said, I was initially reluctant to participate in the game. As long-time readers know, I have a strong aversion to the lifestyle brandification of everything these days, especially hallowed nerd pastimes. On the other hand, it was all in good fun. Curmudgeon I may be, but even I couldn't permit myself to sneer in the corner while everyone else was enjoying themselves. Furthermore, I was pretty sure I could win, since my brain is jampacked with useless information about Dungeons & Dragons. If I couldn't put that information to good use winning a friendly game in a bar on a Tuesday afternoon, what good was it anyway?

I hadn't played Trivial Pursuit in likely decades. I had forgotten just how tedious it is, with its requirement that a piece has to land on one of the special designated spaces before a player can acquire a "wedge" for the category associated with it. This results in nigh endless wandering around the board until you roll the right number. The D&D version mixes this up a little by introducing the use of more dice – d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12 – which allows the player to tailor the range of results and thus (theoretically) make it easier to reach one's desired space on the board. Nevertheless, my friends quickly ruled that a player could get a wedge from any space of the appropriate color. Otherwise, we'd probably have been playing for even longer.

The categories of the trivia were, I think, six in number: history, magic and miscellany, monsters, characters, dungeons and adventures, and cosmology. Like all editions of Trivial Pursuit, they ranged from the truly obscure ("What was the name of the needlepoint company TSR acquired in 1982?") to the blindingly obvious ("What spellcasting class can use create food and drink?"). I naturally did well in the history category, which included lots of questions about the early history of the hobby ("What was the name of Brian Blume's brother?" and "What was the name of the King of the Orcs in the Blackmoor campaign?"). The other categories proved hit or miss for me, since they included an inordinate amount of questions pertaining to 5th Edition – not a shock, I guess, but I know next to nothing about it.

In the end, I did in fact win the game, though it was actually close. I had much more fun than I expected I would and would definitely play it again. In the course of play, I discovered that I know a disturbingly large amount about both the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance settings. Conversely, I don't know nearly as much about the specifics of magic items and magic spells. I also learned that I should have invested more time in my youth reading D&D novels, because many of the questions in the "characters" category seemed to involve characters who appeared in them. 

As I get older and my memory becomes less acute, I am regularly amazed – disappointed? – by how much I can still remember about trivial things like D&D. For example, I am still capable of recognizing an episode of the original Star Trek series after seeing only its first minute or so, but I sometimes struggle to recall why I've entered a room. It's maddening the way memory works and I imagine it will only get more maddening as my senescence creeps ever closer. Fortunately for me, games like the D&D edition of Trivial Pursuit exist, so I can feel, if only for a little while, that I hadn't wasted my youth by learning all this stuff.

White Dwarf: Issue #76

Issue #76 of White Dwarf (April 1986) features a cover by Peter Andrew Jones, whose art has appeared on the cover of the magazine several times in the past, the most recent being a year before, with issue #64. Like his previous work, this cover is quite striking, depicting a hippogriff – a mythological creature not often shown in fantasy gaming illustrations, so it definitely wins points in my book for its uniqueness (though its inclusion here is in reference to the issue's AD&D adventure).

Ian Marsh's editorial notes that the "unannounced demise" of many long-running columns in WD, such as "Starbase" for Traveller, "Heroes & Villains" for superhero gaming, "Crawling Chaos" for Call of Cthulhu, "Rune Rites" for RuneQuest, and, most significantly, "Fiend Factory," a staple of the magazine practically since its inception. Marsh claims that, "with the greater variety of popular games on the market, having a department for each is impractical, and indeed restricts the content of the magazine." Future issues would include articles according to different metrics, such as themes. Issue #76 is the first example of this, focusing as it does on thieves. 

The issue begins with a longer than usual "Open Box" that devotes three pages to its many reviews. The first is ICE's Riddle of the Ring boardgame, which received only 6 out of 10. Better reviewed is another ICE product, Ereech and The Paths of the Dead for MERP (9 out of 10). Chaosium's solo Call of Cthulhu adventure, Alone Against the Wendigo, receives 8 out of 10, while the Paranoia scenario, Send in the Clones, is judged slightly more harshly (7 out of 10). TSR's Lankhmar – City of Advenure, meanwhile, gets a rare perfect score (10 out of 10), which is slightly generous in my opinion, but I can't deny that the product is a good one nonetheless. Two adventures for FASA's Dr. Who RPG, The Iytean Menace and Lords of Destiny, are reviewed positively and, oddly, receive a joint rating of 8 out of 10. Finally, there's Hero Games's Fantasy Hero (8 out of 10). That's quite a large number of products for a single issue – and not a single GW product among them!

Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" does its usual thing and I do my usual thing of mostly not caring. More interesting to me is the first of this issue's thief-themed articles, "How to Make Crime Pay," by John Smithers. It's written as if it were a lecture given by a guildmaster to apprentice thieves and it's all the better for it. Smithers presents lots of practical advice on how to handle a wide variety of larcenous activities within a fantasy RPG. What makes the article stand out is that its framing device makes it such that the article is useful to both players and referees without having to shift perspectives or divided itself into different sections. Articles of this sort are hard to pull off, so I'm all the more impressed that Smithers succeeded.

"You're Booked" by Marcus L. Rowland is an expansion of Games Workshop's Judge Dredd RPG, introducing the "misunderstood" Accounts Division of Mega-City One's Justice Department. The article lays out the purpose of Acc-Div, as it is known, and how it could be used within a campaign, with several scenario outlines presented as examples. The division is not suitable for Player Judges, but its inclusion in an adventure or campaign could help to flesh out the Justice Department and add a note of levity, as Judges deal with paperwork and expense accounts. 

"Glen Woe" is a Warhammer miniatures scenario by Richard Halliwell. It's intended to expand upon the material provided in McDeath – a Shakespeare-inspired scenario pack released around this time. Not being a Warhammer player, I can't to much about the quality of the material presented here, only my amusement at knowing there was ever a miniatures scenario based around MacBeth. "Banditry Inc" by Olivier Legrand looks at thieves guilds within the context of AD&D from the referee's point of view. While hardly revolutionary, it nevertheless raises some useful questions about the organization and operation of the guild that any referee should consider if thieves and thieves guilds become important in his campaign.

"Caped Crusaders" by Peter Tamlyn is a three-page article on "running Golden Heroes campaigns," though most of its advice is equally applicable to superhero campaigns using another RPG system. Tamlyn covers a variety of topics and the quality of his advice will depend, I imagine, on how familiar one is with both refereeing and the superhero genre. I judge it pretty positively myself, though I imagine others might find it old hat. "Thrud the Barbarian," "Gobbledigook," and "The Travellers" are all here, among a handful of only a few remaining connections to the eatly days of White Dwarf. Since I was not a reader of the magazine at this time, I can't help but wonder how much longer they will continue to grace its pages.

"Castle in the Wind" by Venetia Lee, with Paul Stamforth, is a lengthy AD&D scenario aimed at characters of 5th–8th levels. As its title suggests, the adventure concerns the sudden appearance of a "sky castle" above a desert in the campaign area. There are several things that make "Castle in the Wind" stand out aside from its length. First, there's its vaguely Persian setting, a culture that doesn't get much play in fantasy games in my experience. Second, there's the clever design of the sky castle itself (including its hippogriff nests). Finally, there's the open-ended nature of the adventure itself, which spends most of its text presenting a locale rather fleshing out a traditional "plot" for the player characters to follow. 

"How Do You Spell That?" presents a collection of six new AD&D spells culled from reader submissions. The article is listed as being part of the "Treasure Chest" column, which surprised me, since so many other standbys of White Dwarf were axed this issue. Part two of Joe Dever's look at oil painting closes out the issue. In addition to the usual color photographs that always accompany it, the article also includes a mixing guide for how best to achieve certain results when using oil paints.

I must admit, I found this issue a bit of a slog. I don't know that it was objectively any worse than most issues. Indeed, I suspect it was probably better than many I'd read in the past. Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that the magazine has changed and that change has started to sap my enthusiasm for reading it. Of course, I might simply be tired of this series. Slightly more than three-quarters of the way to 100 issues, I hope I can be forgiven a little White Dwarf fatigue. Still, I will attempt to soldier on for a little while longer.

White Dwarf: Issue #74

Issue #74 of White Dwarf (February 1986) sports a cover by American conic book artist, Frank Brunner, who's probably best known for his work on Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella, as well as his covers for Marvel's Savage Sword of Conan and Red Sonja. The issue also marks the point where Ian Livingstone hands over day-to-day editorial duties to Ian Marsh. Livingstone states that he is not "deserting the magazine" and will still "be keeping a benevolent eye on the progress of [his] eight-year-old love-child" in his new capacity as Editor-in-Chief. Despite his reassurances, this nevertheless feels like a turning point in the history of White Dwarf.

Case in point: the issue kicks off with "Superpower" by Bruce Hollands, which is an extensive look at the Games Workshop-published boardgame of the same name. Like the look at Warrior Knights from the previous issue, this article, while informative, nevertheless feels more like an extended advertisement for a GW product than a "real" article. That may be an unfair judgment on my part, but reading it convinced me that the oft-discussed transformation of White Dwarf into a full-on house organ of Games Workshop was not far in the future.

Countering that worry is "Open Box," which only reviewed one GW product this issue, the Call of Cthulhu scenario Night in Norway, which scores 7 out of 10. Also reviewed is Dragon Warriors and two of its supplements (The Way of Wizardry and The Elven Crystals), which collectively earn 9 out of 10. After all these years, I've still never read Dragon Warriors, which people whose opinions I respect tell me is well worth a look. The historical RuneQuest supplement Vikings gets 8 out of 10, while Oriental Adventures for AD&D receives 9 out of 10. The Pendragon Campaign, the predecessor to the well regarded The Boy King, is similarly well regarded, earning 9 out of 10. The column wraps up with a look at two different scenarios for use with FASA's Star Trek, The Outcasts and Termination 1456, both of which are judged perfect (10 out of 10). 

Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" generally vexes me, but this issue's column at least looks at a few books I know and have read, like Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure series. Langford quite correctly recognizes the value of these books and of Vance more generally

The good stuff lies in Tschai's rich scents and colours, and in elaboration of style. No Vance villain would say 'I'll get you for that.' Instead: 'Low-grade assassins will drown you in cattle excrement! Twenty pariahs will drub your corpse! A cur will drag your head along the street by your tongue!'

Langford's byline reappears under "The Power of the Frog," a science fiction short story about a human junior military officer held prisoner by an alien race. Like all of Langford's previous short stories, this one is both brief and amusing. It's clear the man has talent, which is why I sometimes feel bad at the lack of interest his book review column elicits. Truthfully, I wish he had contributed more fiction to White Dwarf. 

"Terror at Trollmarsh" is an AD&D adventure for 4th–5th-level characters by Peter and Janet Vialls. I really enjoyed this one, which takes the form of a murder mystery with fantasy/horror elements. A monster is stalking the halls of Baron Uther Torgrim, killing his servants, and it's up to the players to figure out just what is really going on. While the overall concept is a standard, even clichéd one, the authors handle it well, giving the referee an interesting, well mapped out environment, an array of compelling NPCs, and a culprit with clear, understandable motives. "Terror at Trollmarsh" is nothing revolutionary, but, like all good scenarios, it gives players lots of "moving parts" with which to interact as they grapple with its central mystery.

"A Company of Wolves" by Peter Blanchard looks at lycanthropy in AD&D from both a game and folkloric perspective. The article doesn't offer much in the way of new rules mechanics, which I appreciate, focusing instead on "social" aspects of this magical curse, which is to say, how it might function in a fantasy setting, including its advantages and drawbacks. "The Hide of the Ancestor" by Chris Watson is a short RuneQuest scenario about the recovery of a relic holy to the twenty-six tribes of the Ithillian-Fane, a race of lion-centaurs. I find it oddly refreshing to read a RQ adventure set in Glorantha whose author feels comfortable enough with the setting to his own creations, like the Ithillian-Fane to it. Too often settings like Glorantha – and Tékumel and Hârn and ... – are treated as inviolable to the point that no one is even willing to play in them, lest they "do it wrong." That's nonsense in my opinion, which is why I delight in scenarios like "The Hide of the Ancestor."

"Gentlemen and Players" by Richard Edwards and Chris Elliott is nice little article about creating British characters for use with Call of Cthulhu. As its title suggests, the article focuses on the creation of "gentlemen" (or aristocratic amateurs) and "players" (professional sportsmen). "Hitting the Right Note" by Ian Berridge presents information on musical instruments, their use, and the how to learn to play them for use with AD&D. Articles like this are godsends to those whose campaigns would benefit from such fine details – and absolutely useless to those whose campaigns wouldn't. 

"Alternative Origins" by Ian Thomson is a collection of random tables for use with Games Workshop's Golden Heroes. The tables are intended to replace those presented in the game for character generation in order to produce more "convincing" heroes whose powers are an incompatible jumble. This makes good sense to me, but then I haven't looked at a copy of Golden Heroes in decades, so it's hard for me to judge how useful this article would be. Elsewhere, Joe Dever offers part three of his look at "Dioramas," accompanied by some lovely – though non-diorama – photographs of painted miniatures.

The issue also includes more "Thrud the Barbarian," a full-page "Gobbledigook," and "The Travellers," which continues its Shadows-inspired plotline. I particularly enjoyed the latter, especially this bit:

Of course, I've always been fond of the way that "The Travellers" blends Traveller-specific humor with more general lampoonery of roleplaying games, so I may be biased. In any case, it's nice to see that one of my favorite comics remains as amusing ever, even if White Dwarf as a whole looks to be on the verge of some monumental – and not entirely pleasing – changes.

White Dwarf: Issue #73

Issue #73 of White Dwarf (January 1986) features a cover by Lee Gibbons, an artist whose work I recall from various Call of Cthulhu products over the years. Inside, Ian Livingstone boasts of the fact that the UK pharmacy chain, Boots, has "decided to stock role-playing games, Citadel miniatures, and Fighting Fantasy books." He sees this as a major victory that will help "dispel the illusion of [the hobby's] being a weirdos' cult." 

Having grown up in the United States, I find this fascinating. For all the overheated rhetoric about Dungeons & Dragons in certain quarters, RPGs and fantasy games had been readily available in major retail chains across the country since the beginning of the 1980s, if not before. However, Livingstone states that Boots is "the first major chain to stock a large range of rolegames in the country." This surprises me. When I was an exchange student in London in 1987, I had no trouble finding RPGs in most of the bookshops I visited and so assumed they had been a fixture in such places for a long time, as they were in the USA.

"Open Box" reviews Queen Victoria & the Holy Grail, a scenario for Games Workshop's  Golden Heroes, which nets a score of 8 out of 10. Also reviewed is another Games Workshop product, Judge Dredd – The Role-Playing Game, which earns a perfect 10 out of 10. I remember wanting a copy of this game for a long time, but never encountered it for sale anywhere on this side of the Atlantic. The Dungeons & Dragons Master Rules receive a (in my opinion) very charitable 8 out of 10, while Unearthed Arcana is given a serious drubbing (4 out of 10). The reviewer, Paul Cockburn, has many reasonable criticisms of the book, a great many of which I share. His biggest complaint seems to be that UA "is about as important to running a good game as Official character sheets or figures." I find it hard to disagree.

"2020 Vision" is a new column "covering fantasy and science-fiction movies" by Colin Greenland. The inaugural column focuses on two movies, Back to the Future, which Greenland enjoyed, and The Goonies, which he most certainly did not. He also reviews The Bride, "a hokey new variation on The Bride of Frankenstein," about which his opinion is more mixed. Dave Langford's "Critical Mass," meanwhile, does what he usually does: looks down his nose at various books, only a couple of which I've ever heard of, let alone read. It's a shame really, because it's clear that Langford is quite a talented writer in his own right, but most of his columns simply leave me flat. Some of that, no doubt, is the alienating effect of time. He is, after all, writing about the literary ephemera of three or more decades ago; it would be a miracle if it were still of vital interest to me today.

"Power & Politics" is an interview with Derek Carver, in which he talks about his boardgame, Warrior Knights. From the interview, it would seem the game is in the same general ballpark as Kingmaker in terms of overall focus and complexity, though it's set in a fictitious medieval European country rather than a real one. The game was (of course) published by Games Workshop, hence the two pages devoted to what is essentially an advertisement for it. 

I usually don't comment on the letters page of most issues of White Dwarf, because they're rarely of lasting import. This issue is a little different in that it's been expanded to two pages (from the usual one) and it's given over to lots of arguments back and forth about the merits of previous articles, not to mention letters attacking and defending said articles. This time, much ink is spilled with regards to Marcus L. Rowland's review of Twilight: 2000 from issue #68. Rowland, you may recall, intensely disliked the game and what he saw as its inherent immorality, calling it "fairly loathsome." Judging by the letters in this issue, not everyone shared Rowland's assessment and felt the need to say so. Of course, others very much agreed with him. Reading the letters for and against, it's a reminder that the past really is a foreign country.

Simon Burley's "The American Dream" is a lengthy scenario for Golden Heroes that focuses on a former American superheroine who has gone rogue in order to take down corruption within the secret government organization that trained her. It's delightfully overwrought and cynical and very much in keeping with the general spirit of the late 1980s. "3-D Space" by Bob McWilliams takes another stab at a classic Traveller "problem," namely, the game's star maps are two-dimensional. As he so often does, McWilliams makes a challenging topic easy to understand. In this case, though, I remain unconvinced that much is gained by adopting a more "realistic" style of stellar mapping.

"Star Spray" by Graham Staplehurst is an adventure set in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, written for use with both AD&D and Middle-earth Role Playing. The adventure takes place in southern Gondor and concerns the fate of Maglor, the second son of Feänor, who disappeared during the First Age. It's clear that Staplehurst knows his Tolkien and "Star Spray" makes good use of that knowledge to present a situation that's more than just a dungeon delve in Middle-earth. Good stuff!

"First This, Then That" by Oliver Johnson is a fairly forgettable bit of advice on adjudicating the rules of RuneQuest. I'm sure the article seemed very relevant at the time, but, in retrospect, it's hard to muster much interest in it – the fate of a lot of gaming material, alas. "Cults of the Dark Gods 2" by A.J. Bradbury looks at the Bavarian Illuminati from the perspective of Call of Cthulhu. "A New Approach to Magic Weapons" by Michael Williamson is an interesting, if frustratingly sketchy, plea to give magic weapons in AD&D more "oomph" by rooting them in a setting's history. I'm very sympathetic to this approach, since I think there should be no "generic" magic weapons in any campaign, but, unfortunately, Williamson provides only the barest hint of a way to implement this mechanically. That's a shame, because I very much think he's on to something.

"Jungle Jumble" gives us four new jungle-themed monsters for use with AD&D, including vampire bats and army wasps. Joe Dever's "Dioramas" is the second part of his look at this intriguing topic, focusing this time on "scenic effects," like sand, snow, water, and foliage. I continue to find this column enjoyable, despite my own lack of experience with miniatures painting. The issue also includes new episodes of its long-running comics, "Thrud the Barbarian," "Gobbledigook," and "The Travellers," all of which are diverting, if not always memorably so. 

The transformation of White Dwarf into a full-on Games Workshop house organ continues apace. While there are still quite a few articles devoted to non-GW games and topics, more and more space is devoted to GW's own publications. While probably a good business decision – Games Workshop still exists today and most of its contemporary competitors do not – it does lessen the magazine's appeal in my eyes. I'm going to keep soldiering on with this series for the foreseeable future. How long I'll be able to do so is another question ...

Labyrinth Repair Shop

Long ago – more than a decade now, if you can believe it – I wrote a Retrospective post in which I talked about the Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game released by Mattel Electronics in 1980. Though I never owned the game myself, a close friend of mine did and I took advantage of this fact to play it as often as I could. Though I'm not certain that I could unambiguously call it a "good" game, I nevertheless retain a weird affection for it, as I do for many other examples of transitional technology from my long-ago youth.

Rob Conley alerted me to the existence of a blog post over at Old Vintage Computer Research, in which the author pulls out his copy of the game (which he barely played at the time he first received it), examines it in detail, and then sets about repairing it so that he can finally get around to playing it after all these years. It's a terrific post, filled with lots of information on the inner working of the game. I suspect it'll be of great interest to anyone who, like myself, has a fondness for the electronic "boardgames" of the late '70s and early '80s.

(As an aside, it's worth noting that this game, as well as the slightly later Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Game, are D&D-branded rather than AD&D-branded, like the Intellivision game cartridges that appeared in 1982. I assume this is the result of various legal and financial wranglings at TSR vis à vis Dave Arneson, but have no proof of this one way or the other. Regardless, it's yet another fascinating wrinkle in the long history of attempts to turn Dungeons & Dragons into a mass market consumer brand.)

White Dwarf: Issue #46

Issue #46 of White Dwarf (October 1983), with its striking cover by Gary Mayes, is one I owned but about which I have few strong memories. I'm not entirely sure why that is, because it's not a bad issue by any means. Were I to guess, I imagine it has more to do with the fact that many of its preceding issues are simply so good that, by comparison, it seems less remarkable. That's actually a fairly common problem during the early '80s when it comes to RPG products more generally: there was a surfeit of good material being published at the time, so much so that it's easy to overlook some of it in retrospect.

Phil Palmer's "Strangers in the Night" kicks off the issue. It's an article devoted to the subject of wandering monsters in AD&D. Palmer's musing on the matter are quite good in my opinion, emphasizing the need to tailor wandering monster tables to the locale to which they're connected, as well as the utility of including random events among their entries. This isn't groundbreaking advice by any means, but it's the kind of thing that gets overlooked, even by experienced referees, so I appreciate his discussion of it.

"Open Box" offers up lengthy reviews of three products, starting with the RuneQuest Companion, which earns an 8 out of 10. Also reviewed is the second edition of FGU's Chivalry & Sorcery. This, too, receives a rating of 8 out of 10, which surprised me somewhat. C&S has a deserved reputation for being quite complex and I assumed that would be held against the game. However, C&S also has a lot of genuinely clever ideas within its pages (e.g. its magic system) and the reviewer felt that those ideas more than outweighed its mechanical unwieldiness. Finally, there's the Mayfair boardgame Sanctuary, based on the Thieves' World series, which received a 7 out of 10. 

Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" column is very hit or miss with me, in part because the books he reviews vary considerably in content. That's completely understandable, of course. However, it does mean, especially when I re-read these columns, that my interest is often commensurate with whether I've read the books in question. Since this issue's column doesn't include a single book I can recall having read, I'll confess to my eyes glazing over a bit. Apologies to all the Langford fans out there! 

Charles Vasey looks at two fantasy boardgames at some length, Dragonhunt and Titan, both from Avalon Hill. Vasey likes both games, though he gives Titan a slight edge in terms of its design. On the other hand, Dragonhunt seems to him to be more truly fantastical in terms of its presentation and overall subject matter. I own a copy of Dragonhunt, but have never played it, so I can't speak to his claims. I've sadly never set eyes upon Titan, a game that interests me, since it was designed by the late, great TSR artist, Dave Trampier. 

Part 3 of Dave Morris's "Dealing with Demons" is the finale of this series describing demons for use with RuneQuest. It's a very good entry for the same reason that Part 2 was: the demons detailed here are wholly original creations without any basis in existing folklore or mythology. I appreciate the creativity that went into imagining these dark beings, not to mention his enumeration of the books and authors that inspired him. "Worldly Power" by Phil Masters presents a handful of new government types for use with the Traveller world generation system, along with a few adventure seeds that make use of them. This is a perfectly fine article. However, as a Traveller snob, I find most of the material unnecessary, since the existing Traveller government codes can handle nearly all of those Masters proposes without the need for creating new codes.

"The Wizard's Library" by Lewis Pulsipher is a genuinely interesting article. In it, he proposes to look for inspiration for RPGs in non-RPG books. Hardly revolution, you might say and you'd be correct if the books he proposes to use were fiction. Instead, he suggests looking to non-fiction books, such as history, archeology, and architecture books, among others. Like so many things Pulsipher writes, none of this is revolutionary but it's clever nonetheless and might serve as a source of unlikely inspiration for harried referees looking to spice up their campaigns.

Part 5 of Daniel Collerton's "Irilian" presents yet another section of the city, complete with a map, along with an adventure set in this area. The focus this time is on guilds, companies, and societies within the city. There's also a full map of a wizard tower that plays an important role in the accompanying scenario. As with previous entries, this is all very well done and its true value lies not so much in any individual installment as in the piling up of details that lead to a fuller picture of Irilian and its inhabitants. As I believe I mentioned before, in my youth, I found Irilian so well done that I dropped it right into my old campaign setting, albeit under a different name. This is an excellent series and proof of why White Dwarf was such a terrific magazine once upon a time.

"Play-by-Mail Games" by A.D. Young is an overview of computer-moderated PBM games, which, apparently, was a new and interesting thing at the time. Though I never participated in any PBM games, despite my interest, I (again) must confess that this article never got my full attention. That's not a comment on its quality, so much as its age. Neither of the games discussed – Empyrean and Heroic Fantasy – ever crossed my radar back in the day and neither sounds sufficiently interesting even as historical curiosities, alas.

We get more Thrud, The Travellers, and Gobbledigook, which makes me happy, especially the first two comics. "Death in Green" is a D&D/AD&D mini-scenario dealing with yet another secluded rural village that has come under attack by unknown forces. In this case, the forces are a variety of plant monsters – six kinds in fact – that are this month's "Fiend Factory" entries. "Swashbuckler!," meanwhile, is a collection of rules suggestions for spicing up combat in RuneQuest with moves worthy of Errol Flynn. Finally, there's "The Hellwalk Spell" by Lewis Pulsipher. Inspired by Roger Zelazny's Amber series, the spell transports its target to a pocket dimension, where they must engage in combat against random foes. As a one-off challenge, this could be fun, I suppose. However, I think it would get tedious if it were used too often in a game.

As you can see, this is a perfectly fine issue, filled with a variety of different articles for many different games. Unfortunately, with the exception of the latest Irilian entry, none of them really grabbed my attention in the way previous issues' articles did.  Though I stand by the theory I advanced at the beginning of this post, another possibility occurs to me. During this period, White Dwarf was rapidly expanding, adding more content with each issue, including several new columns devoted to other aspects of gaming beyond roleplaying. It could be that the addition of these new pages diluted the perceived goodness of the other articles to such an extent that I no longer saw some issues as being as good as they actually were. I'll keep this in mind as I look at future issues.

Retrospective: Talisman

There's a lot that could be said about the creative and commercial ecosystem created by the publication of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. Chief among them is that, while D&D and many of its imitators did indeed sell well, those sales were nevertheless minuscule compared to traditional boardgames or even the burgeoning fields of electronic and video games. That's why many RPG publishers, TSR foremost among them, quite quickly attempted to find ways to make inroads into the wider games market. The various incarnations of the D&D Basic Set were one prong of this strategy, attempting to make roleplaying less arcane and more accessible to those not already immersed in wargaming or fantasy and science fiction. Another prong was the creation of more conventional games that borrowed thematic and esthetic elements of RPG in order to generate greater interest in them. 

Aside from Dungeon! (which was actually created before the publication of D&D but published later), I get the impression that most of these fantasy-themed boardgames weren't all that successful – or at least weren't as successful as their publishers had hoped they were going to be. The only other exceptional that immediately springs to mind is Games Workshop's Talisman (The Magical Quest Game), which first appeared in 1983. I say this because, unlike all the other such games from this time period, Talisman is the only one that's still in print today. There's even a digital version of the game.

Talisman is a competitive game. Two to six players contend with one another in an attempt to reach the center of the game board, where the Crown of Power is located. Each player selects a hero card, which includes game statistics, including special abilities that differentiate one hero from another. Play consists of rolling a die to determine how many spaces a player can move his hero around the board. Depending on the space his hero enters, the player has to draw one or several cards. These cards can depict anything from monsters to fight, objects to find, or even helpful strangers to aid the hero. Interestingly, some cards permanently alter the space for which they're drawn, meaning that other heroes who enter them later must contend with their effects. This is especially true of monsters that aren't defeated: they remain their until someone slays them.

The board is divided into three concentric rings, each one smaller than the previous one – and filled with greater danger. Getting between the three rings is difficult, unless the hero has improved his abilities and acquired beneficial items through battle and the luck of the draw. Talisman thus has a kind of leveling mechanic built into it, which each ring representing a different level of challenge and only heroes whose players have taken the time to build them up will have much chance of success. Notice I wrote "chance of success." That's because Talisman is very random game, with so many of its elements determined either by cards or the roll of dice. That's not to say there's no strategy involved in its play, but the vast majority of its outcomes are determined by random means.

This randomness will no doubt be frustrating to many players, but, for others, that's a big part of the fun. Each game is quite unpredictable and there's no guarantee that even a seasoned player of the game will come out ahead of a total neophyte. Of course, Talisman includes the possibility of direct player versus player action too. Whenever a hero enters the same space as another, they can fight and the winner can steal an item or money from the defeated hero (as well as losing a life – all heroes have four before they are out of the game). This adds another level of uncertainty (and sometimes frustration) to the game and increases its appeal.

Talisman is one of those games that roleplayers frequently keep nearby to play during those times when not everyone can show up for a session. Because of the randomness of its gameplay, which only increases if one makes use of even one, never mind several, of its expansions, this is not a short game to play. In my experience, it was rare to complete a game of Talisman in less than 90 minutes and I recall some games that lasted three hours or more. Still, if you don't mind the outsize role that chance plays in the outcome of most games, Talisman is quite fun. There's a reason the game is still published almost four decades after its initial release. It's one of the classics of the hobby and I have many fond memories of playing it with friends.

King Arthur's Knights

Looks like it's time to add another Arthurian game to the list of those I never owned. In this case, I never even heard of it. In fact, I can't even recall seeing any evidence of its existence in the Chaosium catalogs that came in the company's boxed sets during the early 1980s (or I somehow missed it). 

In any case, it seems that Greg Stafford designed a competitive boardgame based around the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which was published in 1978. Does anyone reading this reading post own or, alternately, has anyone ever played it? I'm curious to know a bit more about it, particularly the extent to which it has any design similarities to Pendragon. 

Retrospective: Snit's Revenge

Last month, I wrote a post in which I briefly sang the praises of Tom Wham, whom I called an underappreciated game designer. When I wrote that, I cited a few examples of his designs that I remember playing in my youth and was surprised to discover that I had never, in the more than 270 retrospective posts I've made over the years, written one about Snit's Revenge. This surprised me multiple reasons, not least of which being that I probably played Snit's Revenge almost as often as I played The Awful Green Things from Outer Space (my favorite Tom Wham game). Still, it was strangely pleasing for a TSR fanboy like myself to discover I still had a few more memories left to mine for blog content.

I first encountered Snit's Revenge in its 1980 boxed set form, which I purchased at Kay-Bee Toys sometime in 1981 or '82. This is actually the third version to appear under the auspices of TSR, the first being in the pages of Dragon magazine (December 1977) and the second a smaller boxed game (1978) similar in size to the original release of Dungeon!  The 1980 version had pretty good production values and generally looked more like the kind of "family boardgame" published by Parker Brothers or Milton-Bradley, which makes sense, given TSR's ambitions to broaden their audience beyond the teenagers and college students who were D&D's primary customers.

Like many Tom Wham games, Snit's Revenge is a two-player game, with one of the players taking the role of the titular Snits and the other their mortal enemies the Bolotomi – or rather the immune system of a single Bolotomus, as it attempts to fend off an infestation (infection?) of Snits. Wham amusingly provides a backstory for this situation in the form of a comic in which he shows how a deity, Embraz the Bulbous, created a world to alleviate his boredom. Eventually, Embraz seeks the aid of his fellow gods to make "something new" for the world he created, leading to the creation of the immense Bolotomi and the tiny Snits. The Bolotomi enjoyed nothing more than smashing Snits, but the Snits were gifted with the ability to reproduce quickly, which enabled them to enter the bodies of Bolotomi and attempt to destroy their "spark of life" from within.

If this all sounds silly and bizarre, it is, but what else would you expect from a Tom Wham game? Basic gameplay is quite simple, with the Snit player attempting to destroy the internal organs of the Bolotomus, one of which holds the aforementioned "spark of life." Destruction of that organ results in the death of the Bolotomus and victory for the Snit player. The Bolotomus player attempts to mount a defense against the Snits with Snorgs, which act like leukocytes in the human body. In the advanced version of the game, the Bolotomus player has additional defenses at his disposal, such as Makums and Runnungitms, while the Snit player Supersnits, which are hardier and generally more dangerous. In both versions of the game, the main advantage of the Snit player is numbers; indeed, he does not need to reveal just how many Snits he has in his invasion force and this uncertainty hampers the decisions of the Bolotomus player.

Snit's Revenge has a bit less replayability than The Awful Green Things in my experience, owing to a smaller board and fewer random elements. Likewise, it's unconventional subject matter is perhaps not quite as appealing as the straightforward B-movie scenario of The Awful Green Things. Even so, my friends and I had fun with it. A complete game could be played in no more than 30 minutes and it wasn't uncommon to do so in even less time. That made it perfect for playing while we waited for our RPG group to assemble in someone's basement. 

Lost in a Forbidding Land

Here's a 1982 advertisement for Milton Bradley's electronic fantasy boardgame Dark Tower. 

Retrospective: Outdoor Survival

I don't think I'd ever heard of Outdoor Survival prior to 2007. That's the year when I first started looking seriously into the history of Dungeons & Dragons, with a special focus on the original 1974 version of the game. What I soon discovered is that this rather odd 1972 Avalon Hill game played a role, albeit a minor one, in the development of D&D. Nowadays, I think this fact is pretty well known, even among those who don't play old school RPGs, but, at the time, it was news to me. This is in spite of the fact that Volume 1 of the Little Brown Books includes Outdoor Survival on page 5, as the second entry in its list of "recommended equipment," right after D&D itself.

The actual use of Outdoor Survival in D&D isn't explained until fairly late in OD&D, about halfway through the third and final volume. There, in a section entitled "The Wilderness," it's suggested that the referee use the game's board for "off-hand adventures in the wilderness," which is to say, adventures whose wilderness locales are not determined by the referee beforehand. Because of this, it was once quite fashionable in the OSR to base one's starting campaign map on the one in Outdoor Survival, a fad I myself could not resist. 

None of this says anything about Outdoor Survival itself, though. As I said in my opening paragraph above, it's designed by James F. Dunnigan, a legend in the wargames world. His first design, Jutland, was published by Avalon Hill in 1967, followed by many others, including PanzerBlitz in 1970 (also from AH). Dunnigan was also the founder of SPI and, believe it or not, the designer of the Dallas RPG. It's worth noting here that the game indicates that it was "produced and jointly distributed by the Avalon Hill Game Company … and Stackpole Books." Unlike Avalon Hill, Stackpole Books still exists and is a publisher of nonfiction books about arts and crafts, travel, and the outdoors. (As I understand it, Dunnigan claims, in his The Complete Wargames Handbook, to have designed Outdoor Survival as part of a bet about his ability to design a game on any subject.)

In addition to the game rules and the components needed to play, Outdoor Survival included a 24-page booklet entitled "A Primer about Wilderness Skills for Players of the Game." This is an honest-to-goodness handbook on the basics of surviving in the wild, covering everything from direction finding to killing and tracking game to first aid and more. Flipping through it reminded me of Boy Scout Handbook I had in elementary school. Its back page is an advertisement for larger treatments of all these topics in books sold by, you guessed it, Stackpole Books.  

The game proper is comparatively simple. As its title suggests, it's intended as "a simulation of the essential conditions for staying alive when unprotected man is beset by his environment." The celebrated game board represents a wild area consisting of 13,200 square miles, with a wide variety of terrain types (woods, rough, desert, swamp, etc.). This area is divided into hexagons five kilometers (three miles) across. This makes me wonder if OD&D's use of five-mile hexes is the result of a misreading of the rules to Outdoor Survival or a deliberate choice on the part of Arneson and/or Gygax. I doubt I'm the first person to have noticed this seeming discrepancy.

Play depends on which of five scenarios one chooses. They consist of "Lost," "Survival," "Search," "Rescue," and "Pursue," each with slightly different rules and victory conditions. In general, though, each scenario involves the player or players – solo play is possible – attempting to navigate the board's variable terrain in order to find food, water, and shelter, while avoiding various natural hazards. Each player keeps track of his counter's "life level," which measures food and water consumption. The less of each recently consumed, the slower the counter can move. Play is actually quite simple at its base, though there are a number of optional rules that add further "realism" and complexity, should one desire such a thing.  

Though I own a copy of Outdoor Survival for "research purposes," I've never actually played it. From what I have gathered online, opinion about its virtues is quite divided, with some viewing it as a straightforward, easy-to-learn introduction to simulation games and others seeing it as dull and tedious. Whatever the truth of the matter, it has a place in the early history of Dungeons & Dragons for the role it played in the conception of wilderness travel. That's not insignificant. If nothing else, it's a reminder that inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of places.

Knights of Camelot Art

The more I look into TSR's 1980 boardgame, Knights of Camelot, the more entranced I've become by it. Take a look at some of its counters, with art that looks to me like the work of Dave Sutherland:

Mind you, I have an inordinate fondness for counters, so perhaps not everyone will be as impressed as I am. In that case, here are some interior illustrations for your delectation:

If you're a fan of TSR's artwork from that remarkable period between 1979 and 1982 as I am, this is like catnip. Darlene's map, which serves as the game board, is similarly eye-catching.

What a terrific looking game this must have been! I wish I'd seen a copy back when it was originally released. The legends of Arthur and his knights played a huge role in my early introduction to the hobby, so I imagine I would have enjoyed this game as much as I did Greg Stafford's masterful Pendragon.

Thanks, once again, to Thaddeus Moore for providing me with these images.

A New Challenge from TSR

One of the things that strikes me about some of the game companies of my youth, like TSR, is how many different games they produced – so many, in fact, that, even a TSR fanboy like myself, couldn't keep up with them all. I owned (and played) most of TSR's RPGs and many of its boardgames, but there were still several that escaped my grasp.

I was reminded of one of them, Knights of Camelot, when I saw this advertisement on the back cover of White Dwarf #22. Was this ad unique to the UK market? If it wasn't, I never saw it prior to this point. Mind you, I never actually saw Knights of Camelot itself outside of the pages of TSR's "Gateway to Adventure" catalog. That's odd, because my local area had excellent distribution of gaming products generally and it was rare that at least one of the game or hobby shops I frequented didn't stock a given product. Judging from the exorbitant prices of used copies of the game, I'm guessing its print run might have been small.

This is a pity. In looking into the game, Knights of Camelot seems quite interesting. For one, it's designed by Glenn and Kenneth Rahman, who are probably best known for another TSR design, Divine Right. For another, it's illustrated by Jeff Dee, Dave Sutherland, Dave LaForce, and includes a map by Darlene that looks quite stunning from the images of it I've seen. 

Looks like I have another game to add to my list of white whales …

Bazaar Closed

I've written before about Milton Bradley's 1981 electronic-assisted boardgame, Dark Tower, whose appearance coincided almost perfectly with my initiation into the hobby of roleplaying. Consequently, I played the heck out of this game, particularly with a close friend from elementary school who shared my burgeoning interest in RPGs. Though the game itself is nothing amazing, its artwork is. Milton Bradley tapped Bob Pepper for both Dark Tower and the 1982 card game, Dragonmaster and it's primarily because of their illustrations that I still remember both games. 

Pepper's artwork, which evinces roots in Art Deco and Art Nouveau, graced the covers of numerous album covers in the 1960s and '70s. He also provided covers for entries in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. I don't think it's a coincidence that Milton Bradley turned to Pepper. In my opinion, their employment of him is a recognition of the continuity between fantasy games and fantasy literature that still existed at the time.

Whether one agrees with this thesis or not, there's no question that Pepper's artwork is incredibly evocative. Take, for example, this image, which had a profound effect on me as a young person:

Even though the Monster Manual included an entry for brigands as a Chaotic Evil sub-type of bandit, I had somehow not noticed it. That's why, for years afterward, whenever I heard the word "brigand," I thought of this illustration. I have no idea what these creatures are, but their appearance is both distinctive and subtly unnerving (the repetition of the image probably contributes to that as well).

This is another image that I can easily recall from memory. With his ram's horns headdress, he reminds me a bit of Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, albeit of a more serious demeanor. There's also a hint of psychedelia in the image, with the colored smoke streaming from the wizard's face – something that was very common in fantasy artwork from the period.

The dragon is another memorable image, probably because its appearance in the game was a dire portent. If you're interested in seeing more of Pepper's artwork from the game, take a look at this site, which is dedicated to Dark Tower and its gameplay.