Review 3000: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that  Dungeons & Dragons  was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game,  Wizards of the Coast, released the new version,  Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

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In 1984 and 1985, the breakout comic was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, written and drawn by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and published by their Mirage Studios. It was an independent black and white comic that told the adventures of the eponymous quartet of four genetically-mutated turtles trained under a pet rat, Master Splinter, to fight rival ninja, including the Foot Clan, and other threats, including aliens. Combining humour and stories with a darker edge that Marvel Comics such as Daredevil and The New Mutants, the comic book was a hit and not only continued to be published by Mirage Studios for the next thirty years, but was heavily licensed, pushing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles into the mainstream. Since 1987, there have been five television series based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and eight films. However, in the forty years since the first issue of the comic, there has only been one roleplaying game—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness was published in 1985 by Palladium Games, a company best known at that point for 1983’s Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game and 1984’s Heroes Unlimited. It was designed—or rather redesigned in a matter of weeks after Palladium Games was unhappy with the original submitted version—by Erick Wujcik, who most notably would go on to create Amber Diceless Role-Playing. The result was a fast-paced, engaging, if imperfect roleplaying game packed with art from Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman, that looked like it was a lot of fun. And if you were a teenager when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness was released, it was, because Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was and were cool. Perhaps because of the speed in which it was rewritten, perhaps because it is a Palladium Games book, there is ‘cookie cutter’ feel to some parts of the roleplaying game—the alignment system, the equipment list, and the weapons—which all very feel imported from Palladium Games’ other roleplaying games that used the  Megaversal system, like the earlier Ninjas & Superspies. There are certainly some parallels between the two, not least of which are the fact that they were both written by Erick Wujcik, but they do not feel like a natural fit to the comic book universe of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That aside,  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  proved to a be a big hit for Palladium Games, selling very well until the release of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles television series and the first film, when the toning down of the edginess and darkness of the original material meant that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was no longer cool.

Nevertheless,  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  was cool in 1985. At just one-hundred-and-twelve pages, it does not have a lot of space to waste. It starts by pointing out the animal characters are common to comics, if not roleplaying games, so the roleplaying game is giving players that option.  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  is designed as a supplement to Heroes Unlimited, the superhero roleplaying game published by Palladium Games, but can be played as a standalone game as it is complete. It also rationalises why it uses a random character generation system rather than a point buy system, which was then becoming popular, such as with Mayfair Games’ DC Heroes Roleplaying Game, Victory Games’ James Bond 007: Role-Playing In Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and Steve Jackson’s Man to Man: Fantasy Combat from GURPS, the precursor to the full release of the system the next year. What this boils down to is that “Excellent players can role-play ANYTHING…”, the Game Master can create interesting villains as much the players interesting characters, and randomness reflects real life. This is followed by quite description of what a roleplaying game is before leaping straight into character creation.

A character in  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  is defined by eight attributes—Intelligence Quotient (I.Q.), Mental Endurance (M.E.), Mental Affinity (M.A.), Physical Strength (P.S.), Physical Prowess (P.P.), Physical Endurance (P.E.), Physical Beauty (P.B.), and Speed (Spd.). The base attributes range from three to eighteen, with results of sixteen or more granting bonuses, though low rolls do not impose any penalties. A character will also have Hit Points and Structural Damage Capacity or S.D.C., essentially stun points. He has an Animal Type, which be anything from dog, cat, mouse, frog, monkey, cow, pig, chicken, goat, sheep, turkey, wolf, coyote, fox to elk, moose, boar, sparrow, robin, blue jay, eagle, owl, escaped pet bird, lion, tiger, leopard, baboo, camel, and buffalo. All animals found in North America, including those in zoos and safari parks. The list, of course, includes the turtle. He will have a Cause of Mutation, the reason why he is anthropomorphic and intelligent. This can be due to a random mutation or an accident, but will primarily because he was a research project of some kind, either growing up in a researcher’s home or even being deliberately trained as an assassin! This background will determine how many skills he will have and often, how good a combatant he is, and his basic attitude towards humans, the default attitude being one of distrust.

Creating a Player Character in  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  involves fives steps. These are rolling for attributes, animal type, and cause of mutation (this will also determine the organisation that will have created the mutated animal and his degree of education), and then spending ‘Bio-E’ or ‘Biological Energy Points’ to mutate the animal. Each animal type has a pool of ‘Bio-E’ points that a player can spend to make it more anthropomorphic and give it hands that grip like a human, speech like a human, and stance like a human, as well as its own intrinsic animal abilities. For example, the aardvark has tunnelling and digging, and the elephant has a prehensile trunk, advanced hearing, and thick skin. ‘Bio-E’ points also account for size. So, if an animal is small, the player has to spend ‘Bio-E’ points to make it bigger, but is given ‘Bio-E’ points to spend if a bigger animal needs to be smaller. The aim here is to make the Player Characters roughly about the same size and of roughly the same capability. It was a way of balancing wildly different character types, but still left something to be desired. In addition, ‘Bio-E’ points can be spent on psionic powers.

After this the player chooses his character’s skills. These will include a variety of skill programmes, scholastic and physical skills, and secondary skills. From amongst these, a Player Character should definitely select a martial arts package, whether that is Hand-to-Hand Basic, Hand-to-Hand Expert, Hand-to-Hand Expert, Hand-to-Hand Assassin, Hand-to-Hand Martial Arts, or Hand-to-Hand Ninjitsu, since part of the roleplaying game’s title includes the word ‘Ninja’ and it does have an emphasis upon combat. Plus, there is a variety of Weapon Proficiencies for various weapons, many of the melee weapons drawn from Japanese culture and history. There are Modern Weapon Proficiencies too, but these tend to be the province of NPCs rather than Player Characters, in keeping with the source material, though there is nothing to stop a Player Character learning one. Lastly, the player selects an Alignment and purchases equipment. The process is not difficult, but slightly cumbersome. It does allow for players to create a group of similar characters a la the turtles of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Name: Aaron
Level: 1
Alignment: Principled (Good)
Animal Type: Aardvark
Mutation Cause: Rescued and adopted from a private company by a friendly researcher whilst it hunted him. 
Human Features: Full Hands, Full Speech, Full Stance
Natural Weapons: Claws (1d6)
Animal Powers: Digging, Tunnelling
Psionic Powers: Sixth Sense

Intelligence Quotient 12 Mental Affinity 12 Physical Strength 19
Mental Endurance 12 Physical Prowess 16 Physical Endurance 18
Physical Beauty 07 Speed 29
Hit Points: 22
S.D.C.: 32

SCHOLASTIC SKILLS
Mathematics: Basic 82%, Read/Write English 60%, Speaks English 60%

MILITARY/ESPIONAGE SKILLS
Pick Locks 35%, Tracking 35%, Wilderness Survival 45%

PHYSICAL SKILLS
Acrobatics (Sense of Balance 65%, Walk Tightrope 65%, Climb Rope 82%, Climbing 44%, Back Flip 65%), Athletics, Boxing, Prowling 64%, Running

SECONDARY SKILLS
Automotive Mechanics 53%, Cook 65%, Computer Operation 65%, Dance 45%, First Aid 55%, Hand-to-Hand: Martial Arts, Land Navigation 44%, Pilot: Basic – Automobile 80%

COMBAT BONUSES
Two attacks/round, +4 Damage, +1 to Strike, +5 Roll with Punch/Fall, +7 Parry, +11 Dodge, +2 Strike with Body Block/Tackle (1d4), +2 to Save versus Coma, Death, and Toxins

NOTES
Fearless of Heights

Mechanically,  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  uses Palladium Games’ Megaversal system and is in general, quite straightforward. Skills are percentiles and cannot rise above 98%, with bonuses gained high attributes, training in physical skills, and gaining Levels. Otherwise, the emphasis in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  is on combat. Once initiative is determined, usually by a roll of a twenty-sided die, combatants roll to attack and defendants roll parry, dodge, or entangle, and so on. A roll of five or more on a twenty-sided die always hits. If the attack roll is less then defendant’s Armour Rating (either natural body or worn armour), damage is deducted from his S.D.C. only. If the roll is over the defendant’s Armour Rating, damage is deducted from his S.D.C. first and then actual Hit Points. A roll of natural twenty is a critical hit and inflicts double damage. If a defendant is hit, his player or the Game Master if an NPC, can choose to parry, dodge, or entangle the attack. This requires a roll greater than the attack roll. This can be done automatically if parrying, but dodging uses up one of a combatant’s attacks. Bullets and energy blasts can be dodged, but not parried. If the attack is with a blunt weapon or with fists, the player or Game Master can for roll for character or NPC to roll with the punch and if successful half the damage. Hand-to-hand combat allows for a variety of different attacks, including punches, kicks, jump kicks, leaps, throws, and so on, as well as the use of various martial arts weapons. The rules for firearms allow for multiple shots per round, since a round actually lasts fifteen seconds, and also automatic fire. They add some complexity to combat and are likely to slow things down whilst melee and hand-to-hand combat is going to flow back and forth a lot more easily.

For example, Aaron the Aardvark is out on patrol one night when he spots Bill the Burglar attempting to break into a house. Aaron’s player states that the Aardvark is going to sneak up on Bill the Burglar and attempt to knock him out. The Game Master calls for Prowling roll first, but Aaron’s player fails this by rolling 83% rather the 64% needed. Since Aaron has failed, the Game Master rules that since Bill the Burglar was being quiet too, he heard the sound of Araon’s claws clicking on the slabs of path. She calls for an initiative roll. The Game Master rolls 17, but Aaron’s player rolls only a 12. With the initiative, the suddenly shocked and frightened at the sight of a five foot tall aardvark Bill the Burglar reaches into his jacket and pulls out a 9 mm Smith & Wesson Model 59 and opens fire! Bill the Burglar has done time at the range and has the Weapon Proficiency: Handgun, but in his state, he opts to blast Aaron with a burst of shots. This gives him a +1 bonus instead of the +3 for an aimed short. Aaron is wearing a vest which gives him an Armour Rating of 10 and 50 S.D.C. The Game Master rolls 16 and one of the shots from the burst hits Aaron, meaning that the damage will be deducted directly from his own S.D.C. rather than the vest’s. Instead of taking the damage, Aaron’s player opts for him to Dodge the attack. Aaron’s player rolls the die and adds his Dodge bonus of +11. He rolls 16 to get a result of 27, meaning he leaps out of the way. This uses up one of Aaron’s actions. Realising that whatever this creature is that is in front of him, Bill the Burglar realises that just blasting away at it, is not going to work. This time, he takes an aimed shot, which gives him a +3 bonus to hit. This time he rolls a 3 for a total of six, which means that Aaron’s vest has stopped the round. Aaron’s player chooses not to Dodge, but instead pounces on Bill the Burglar with a body tackle. Aaron’s player rolls 19, adds +2 to get a result of 21, which definitely means he hits. Aaron’s player rolls for damage, a four-sided dice, +4 for his damage bonus, and inflicts eight points damage to Bill the Burglar’s S.D.C. that he is not fast enough to avoid. There is an oof from Bill the Burglar as Aaron slams into him!

One aspect of  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  that is decently handled is Experience Points. Player Characters do improve going up Levels, and so increasing their Hit Points, Skills, hand-to-hand combat skills, and Weapon Proficiencies. Experience Points are awarded not just for killing or subduing menaces, but also ideas clever and useful, performing skills, endangering your life to save others, avoiding violence, and good roleplaying. There is a lot in the list that encourages good gaming.

There is a decent equipment list other modern-set roleplaying games from Palladium Games as well as an extensive list of Japanese and Ninjitsu weapons, plus equipment for the latter. The Game Master or player wanting more is recommended to check out Heroes Unlimited or The Palladium Book of Contemporary Weapons. The list does include energy weapons since they appear in the comics. A lot of the equipment is intended for use by the police or in espionage.

In keeping with the relative shortness of  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, the section for the Game Master is also short. It is supported by helpful examples of combat and character creation, and there are some notes on matching the scenario to the capabilities of the Player Characters, creating villains and villainous organisations, and how to use  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  with Heroes Unlimited. The bulk of the Game Master dedicated to five scenarios. They include ‘Caesar’s Weasels’, in which the Player Characters track down a gang that has been looting meat packing plants; ‘The Terror Bears’ in which a gang of mutated bears have using their psionic powers to terrorise and then hide in a neighbourhood; ‘Doctor Feral: The Genius of Bio-Spawn’, which details a highly respected scientist who kidnaps mutant animals to vivisect them; ‘Terror on Rural Route 5’, in which mutant animals have taken a school hostage; and ‘The Leg of the Ninja’ which details a Ninja organisation that could grow into a major threat for the Player Characters. ‘Terror on Rural Route 5’ is intended as an introductory scenario, but to be honest, none of the five are actually full scenarios, but rather, set-ups. None of them are bad per se, but rather that the Game Master will need to develop each of them further. Of the five, ‘The Terror Bears’ is the most memorable, since it introduced the four anti-Care Bears—Pain Bear, Fear Bear, Doom Bear, and Nightmare Bear—that parodied a popular animated series of the day. One thing that all five scenario seeds did was provide the Game Master with good range of sample threats.

Rounding out  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  are the stats and write-ups for characters from the comic. This includes the four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, their friend April O’Neil and others, Shredder, the leader of the Foot ninja clan, and the T.C.R.I. (or ‘Techno-Cosmic Research Institute’) aliens, as well as the Sparrow-Eagles, the sample team characters outlined earlier in the book.

Physically,  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  feels a little scruffy around the edges, and not quite up to Palladium Games’ usual neat and tidy standards. That may be due to it being rushed or the artwork that sometimes intrudes into the page. It is engagingly written and what really stands out is the artwork. This is either taken from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic or drawn for the roleplaying game and it really is good, including as it does a couple of short strips, one of which depicts the origins of the turtles. The artwork also gives the book a sense of energy and excitement like you really want to take up your katana and battle ninja in the sewers or aliens on the rooftops of New York. Lastly, it is short—at barely more than one hundred pages—and if not quite as well organised as it could be, its short length makes everything easy to find. It also suffers from none of the bloat or utter lack of organisation that have plagued books from the publisher since, most obviously, Rifts.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  is not perfect. One problem is character generation, which though fun is very far from balanced because it is entirely random. Only very high attributes provide bonuses of any kind, and whilst taking some physical skills will improve them, any Player Character with attributes high enough to provide bonuses is at an advantage. The end results can also vary, so that one character might be a relatively mild manner creature with a college level education or a wild creature with barely any, whilst another is a super-soldier assassin killing machine trained by the military. This in addition to some Player Characters who might look humanoid, others not, and maybe not even able to talk, and given a roleplaying game as heavily focused on combat as  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, the super-soldier assassin killing machine trained by the military is what everyone wanted to play. Another problem is that focus on combat, means that other aspects of the game may suffer such as roleplaying. The advice for creating NPCs is underwritten and the Game Master wanting to create ordinary humans will need to work out how to do that. It is not difficult, but advice would have been useful.

Unfortunately,  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness was not free of controversy. In the first printing of the roleplaying game, it included the option for a Player Character to start play with a form of insanity or gain a random later in play as the result of trauma, for example, demonic possession, near-death experience, or torture. Under the list of insanities, it included a list of sexual deviations, which notably featured paedophilia and homosexuality. The idea here was that one of the effects of the trauma was to compel a Player Character to change his sexual orientation. Another bizarrely, was that the Player Character would want to retrain as a psychiatrist! Even so, at the time, this was a tasteless, even offensive, treatment of sexual orientation, especially as homosexuality had been officially declassified as a mental illness for over a decade in 1975. At first, the offending section was covered up by Palladium Books, but then excised from later printings.

Alignment in  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  is also a potential problem. An Alignment represents a Player Character or NPC’s attitudes and moral principles and can be one of seven options divided into three categories. ‘Principled’ and ‘Scrupulous’ are both ‘Good’; ‘Unprincipled’ and ‘Anarchist’ are ‘Selfish’; and ‘Miscreant’, ‘Aberrant’, and ‘Diabolic’ are ‘Evil’. The problem, specifically, is that of torture. Only the ‘Principled’ character or NPC will never resort to torture, whereas even the ‘Scrupulous’ will, but “Never torture for pleasure, but may use muscle to extract information from criminals or evil characters.”; the ‘Unprincipled’ will “Not use torture unless absolutely necessary.”; and ‘Anarchist’ “Will use torture to extract information. But not likely to do so for pleasure.” The ‘Evil’ Alignments are worse, and this treatment of Alignment was common to all roleplaying games from Palladium Games, but that does not excuse in any way the suggestion that a Player Character should or can use torture.

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Marcus L. Rowland reviewed  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  in ‘Open Box’ in White Dwarf Issue 78 (July 1986). He did not come to any clear conclusion, but said, “Fans of the comic will already know what to expect, other readers will need enlightenment. The heroes are exactly what the title implies: large intelligent turtles, trained in Oriental martial arts, and equipped with a variety of Ninja weaponry. Apart from this central joke, the comics pretend to take themselves very seriously. To reflect this, the style of play is completely deadpan, setting intelligent and deadly animals against a background of urban terrorism, gang warfare, juvenile delinquency and random violence.” A more positive comment was made by Robert Neville in ‘Open Box’ in White Dwarf Issue 83 (November 1986) when he reviewed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures!. He opened the review by saying, “TMNT has been one of the surprise hits of the last year, with multitudes of gamers snapping up copies of the rulebook as fast as importers can freight them over to the UK.”

Scott Dollinger reviewed  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  in ‘Game Reviews’ in Different Worlds Issue 44 (November/December 1986). He awarded it three-and-a-half stars out of five, said, “What is unusual is that Eastman and Laird have not taken the easy route to fast money and licensed the characters to a combat [sic] that would produce a hastily-made product to cash in on the current popularity of the characters. Instead they have maintained the high quality of the comic by licensing the characters to a smaller but well respected gaming company that takes their time and produces an excellent product. In this case the game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness was created by Palladium Books and the results are fantastic.” He also added that, “…[T]he $9.95 price tag makes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness one of the best buys on the market.”

Arcane magazine and editor Paul Pettengale had reason to examine  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  not once, but twice. First in Arcane Issue Twelve (November 1996) in which he made it the subject of the magazine’s regular ‘Retro’ department. He said, “Of the random character generation system and its consequently random results he said, “You can imagine how much potential this had for farcical situations.” whilst of the layout, which he said were badly organised, he added that, “The layout of the rulebook could have been clearer (the martial arts section was together with the skills rather than the combat).” Yet despite this, his conclusion was positive: “…[I]t was a quick and easy game to learn, and the rules for character generation are good ... together with Paranoia, TMNT&OS was one of the most fun, and funny games I have played.”

This was followed in Arcane Issue Fourteen (December 1996) by its inclusion in ‘The 50 favourite RPGs of all time’ based on a reader’s poll at position #36. Arcane’s editor Paul Pettengale commented that, “The rules are badly laid out, but the principles are easy to learn and combat is fluid. So, fine on that score. It’s a superbly fun game to play because of its quirkiness, and the fact that the post-apocalyptic setting has most of California under the ocean. Fantastic fun.”

—oOo—

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  was a big hit upon release. It was the roleplaying game that everyone wanted and just like the comics it was based on, it was cool and it was fun. Tonally though, there are elements of the roleplaying game that are at odds with the comic, even though that comic is grim and gritty and full of cartoon violence. But remove them—and at least Palladium Games removed some of them—and there is still potential for a lot of fun in its pages. If you can get them roughly balanced, then the range of character options based on the eighty animals it includes is huge and the rules are straightforward, if only a little rough. Which to be fair, is an amazing achievement for a roleplaying game designed in five weeks! It is not the greatest roleplaying game or even the best roleplaying game of 1985, but  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness  opened up the world of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to roleplaying and let you roleplay strange mutant animals sneaking around in the shadows, fighting crime, stopping alien invasions from other dimensions, and facing off against ninja. Which was very definitely cool in the eighties, and if you want to whisper it to yourself now, it still is forty years later.

1985: Conan Role-Playing Game

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

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In 1984, TSR, Inc. published CB1 Conan Unchained!, the first appearance of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian in roleplaying. It would be followed the same year by CB2 Conan Against Darkness! And then in 1986 by RS1 Red Sonja Unconquered. All were written for use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition—though with some adjustments to accommodate the specific style of Robert E. Howard’s pulp fantasy and all were inspired by, but not based upon the films which had been released in the previous two or three years. Of the back of the strength of CB1 Conan Unchained! and CB2 Conan Against Darkness!, TSR, Inc. would develop the Conan Role-Playing Game. Like CB1 Conan Unchained!, it was written by David ‘Zeb’ Cook, an avowed fan of Conan, and that showed in much of the detail and flavour of the roleplaying game. That said, mechanically, it was a radical departure from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition of CB1 Conan Unchained! and CB2 Conan Against Darkness!, owing more to TSR, Inc.’s other licensed roleplaying games from the previous year—Marvel Super Heroes and The Adventuresof Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game.

Like those other roleplaying games, the Conan Role-Playing Game came as a boxed set, and it is one that nicely appointed. Behind the striking cover, can be found a thirty-two-page ‘Rule Book’, a sixteen-page ‘Reference Guide’, a four-page ‘Master Reference Sheet’, a forty-eight-page ‘The World of Hyboria – A Collection of the Hyborian Studies by Professor Ervin H. Roberts’, a four-page ‘Character Folio’, and a large poster map of Hyboria, plus two ten-sided dice and a crayon to fill the numbers in. The ‘Rule Book’ dives straight into explaining what a roleplaying game is, oddly using ‘cops & robbers’ as an example, when you really wish that Conan was being used instead, and then into Player Character creation.

A Player Character in the Conan Role-Playing Game is defined by Talents, representing his physical abilities, skills, and knowledge. These are divided into six Talent Pools—Prowess, Fighting, Endurance, Knowledge, Perception, and Insight. A tenth of the total value of the Talents in a Talent Pool will define the General Talent value for the Talent Pool, covering every other skill within a Talent Pool that the Player Character does not have. A Player Character can also have one or more Weakness, but will definitely have a Story. This is his background which starts with his Country and his Parents, and the following form that the player has to fill in:

“____________ (Character name), the ____________ (Sex) of ____________ (Father) and ____________ (Mother), was born in the land of ____________ (Homeland). ____________ (Character name) grew ____________ (Appearance). As a youth, ____________ (Character name) learned ____________ (Talents) and ____________.”

The character creation process is simple. A player decides on his character’s name, as well as those of his parents, chooses a Homeland from the given list, and then assigns thirty-five points to his Talents. No more than five points can be assigned to any one Talent, the Player Character must have one Talent from each of the six Talent Pools, and one point must be assigned to his father’s Talent. He can gain another five points to assign for each Weakness he selects.

“Thellius, the Son of Gaenus and Hygira, was born in the land of Iranisatan. Thellius grew up lithe and wiry, but with a broad smile. As a youth, Thellius learned the songs his father taught him and to perform, but fell into what his mother called wicked ways.”

Prowess – 1
Acrobatic – 3, Climbing – 4, Movement – 1
Fighting – 1
Brawling – 3, Sword – 3
Endurance – 1
Damage – 4, Stamina – 3, Will – 3
Knowledge – 1
Lockpicking – 4
Perception – 1
Observation – 3, Minstrel – 4, Pocket Picking – 3,
Insight – 1
Danger Sense – 3, Personal Magnetism – 4

Weaknesses
Gambler, Weakness for women

The Player Character creation process is simple, but underwhelming. There is no example of the creation process, and whilst a sample character is provided, it is in the ‘Character Folio’ and not the ‘Rule Book’, and is of Conan himself and not a starting character. Similarly, the NPCs named and given stats in ‘The World of Hyboria – A Collection of the Hyborian Studies by Professor Ervin H. Roberts’ are extremely experienced NPCs. The primary problem though, is there is no guidance on how to create a character that fits either the setting or any kind of a role. So, no guidance on creating a warrior or a thief or a guide or a healer… In fact, when it comes to the thief, let alone Conan himself, there is no Stealth skill. At this point in the roleplaying game this leaves a fundamental question unanswered and that is, “How do I create Conan in the Conan Role-Playing Game?”

Mechanically, the Conan Role-Playing Game is a percentile system used in combination with a ‘Resolution Table’. A ‘Resolution Table’ that looks more like a graph. The vertical axis of the ‘Resolution Table’ runs from one to one hundred and represents a player’s dice roll. The horizontal axis is the ‘Talent/Differential’ row and runs from thirty to minus thirty. The results are banded from top to bottom, White, Green, Yellow, Orange, and Red, each band representing a complexity. A result in the White band is a failure, Green is easy complexity, Yellow is moderate complexity, Orange is hard complexity, and Red is difficult complexity. To have his character undertake an action a player rolls the dice and compares the result of the roll on the vertical axis of the ‘Resolution Table’ versus the value of the Talent his character is using on the ‘Talent/Differential’ axis. If the rest is in the right band, his character succeeds.

The colour band into which the result of a test falls can also be used to be determine the quality of the outcome. Examples suggested include NPC reactions, degree of a language understood, damage inflicted in combat, advantage gained in combat, damage blocked in combat, falling damage, the effects of poison, and more. Although the ‘Resolution Table’ looks complex and more like a mathematical exercise, in combination with the various modifiers for the different situations and just a single roll for all of them, it is actually surprisingly flexible in its application.

For example, Thellius is performing in a tavern and wants to impress the daughter of a merchant. This will use his Personal Magnetism Talent. His player has already made a Talent Test using Thellius’ Minstrel Talent. The result was Orange, so the Referee grants a +2 bonus to his Personal Magnetism Talent. This will shift it along on the ‘Talent/Differential’ axis of the ‘Resolution Table’ from four to six. The Referee has already decided that the situation is ‘Friendly’ on the ‘NPC Reaction Result Table’ as it is in a tavern. Thellius’ player rolls the dice and gets a result of eight which is in the Red band! This is a very good result. This is a Red result and on the ‘NPC Reaction Result Table’ indicates a ‘Generous’ rection. The merchant’s daughter definitely catches his eye and raises a glass to him.

Combat also uses the ‘Resolution Table’. Before it begins, the participants roll to determine if anyone is caught off-guard using either their Animal Reflexes Talents or General Prowess rating. The better the roll, the more Advantages a player generates, either one, two, three, or four. These are compared against their opponents and the combatant who has the most left over afterwards gets a free combat action for each one. Combat takes place in five-second combat rounds and initiative is determined by rolling a single ten-sided die and adding the highest of either the Animal Reflexes or Movement Talents or the General Prowess value. It is possible for a Player Character to take multiple actions in a round, but this requires a test against his Animal Reflexes Talent or General Prowess value and a Red result. Otherwise, he cannot take multiple actions and is at a penalty to his actions for this round and the next! So, in general, a combatant will either attack, defend, move, cast a spell, or wait, at least until either Animal Reflexes Talent or General Prowess value increases. When his character makes a mêlée attack, the player declares an Aiming Point on the body of his character’s opponent. Combat modifiers shift the ‘Talent/Differential’ up and down, and then the Fighting Talent of the defender is deducted from that of the attacker. The subsequent roll will determine not only if the attacker successfully strikes, but if he does, how much base damage is inflicted. This can be modified by the weapon used, for example, a javelin or tiger claw has a ‘-1’ penalty, whilst a flail has a ‘+1’ bonus. In most cases, weapons that inflict more damage have a penalty to Initiative.

Damage inflicted then, is roughly on a scale of between one and seven points, is deducted directly from a Player Character’s Damage Talent. If the Damage Talent is reduced to zero or less, each time the character takes damage after this, his player must test his character’s Damage Talent using its current value. If the result is Red, the Player Character remains conscious, but falls unconscious if the result is Orange, Yellow, or Green. If the result is White, a failure, then the Player Character dies. However, armour does stop damage, the amount depending upon what is being worn on each location and whether a shield is being carried. In addition to inflicting a base four points of damage, a Red result on the attack also inflicts a specific wound to the location targeted, typically a stun effect against which the player will need to make a General Prowess Test.

The Conan Role-Playing Game does allow Player Characters to use magic, whether that is as a sorcerer, witch, wizard, or shaman. However, it is not recommended as it takes a great deal of time and effort to learn and it can have deleterious effects upon the practitioner. Simply have a magic-related Talent, whether that is Alchemy, Information (actually being a seer of some sort), Mind Control, Natural Magic, Physical laws, Summoning, or Transformation, only indicates an aptitude. The would-be practitioner has to spend months of game time in study. Then, there is a cost to pay, but the cost is not necessarily financial, it can be personal. Every time a Player Character magician gains a magical Talent or a Spell, he gains one or two continuing effects. One is a magical Weakness, including Animal Aversion, Disfigurement, Endurance Loss, Madness, and Nocturnal. The other is Obsession, a Weakness that is treated like a Talent which when the practitioner is tempted by even greater magic, is forced to test and if the result is Red, he must do everything in his power to obtain the new magic. The Conan Role-Playing Game does not include any spells by design, intending the Referee and her players to create them and define their effects and where they can be learned. For experienced roleplayers, this is unlikely to be an issue, but new players will find this unhelpful. On the whole, much like the source material, magic is intended to be used by the antagonists rather than the protagonists.

In addition to the rules for magic, the ‘Rulebook’ also covers movement, hazards such as falling, fire, and drowning, gives details of what life is like in Hyboria, interaction with NPCs, and rewards for the Player Characters. The latter includes Fame Points, which can be earned for heroic and savage deeds, annoying a major NPC, improving a Talent above twenty, and so on, but can be lost through acts of cowardice, stupidity, betrayal, and so on. Successful Talent use during an adventure will earn a Player Character up to ten Talent points to assign, and for originality and good roleplaying, the Referee can award Luck Points. These can be used to reroll a dice roll, to reduce the damage taken from an attack, and as means to perform incredible feats of luck. This works by the player expending as many of his character’s Luck Points as he wants, the number determining the column on the ‘Talent/Differential’ axis of the ‘Resolution Table’, and then rolling. If the result is Red, he succeeds. There is no mention of Luck Points before this.

The advice for the Referee on creating and running adventures in Hyboria is decent and there is also an adventure included at the back of the ‘Rulebook’. This is ‘The Tower of the Elephant’, based on the short story by Robert E. Howard. As in the story, it starts in a tavern where there is chance for some revelry and a fight before sneaking into the nearby tower to steal the ‘Heart of the Elephant’, a fabulous jewel in the possession of the evil sorcerer, Yara. It is a short affair, offering only a single session’s worth of play and its set-up is completely wrong for the Conan Role-Playing Game. The first problem with it is that it follows the plot of the short story fairly tightly and does not give a lot of options in terms of what the Player Character can do. The second problem is  that it is not designed to be played using any Player Character created using the rules in the game and it is not designed to be played by a group. Instead, it is designed to be played using the stats for Conan himself given on one of the character folios, who is a more experienced character. As a one-on-one, short scenario, it is adequate, but given that there is no scenario included for a group of new created Player Characters, it is anything other than fine.

Of the other items in the box for the Conan Role-Playing Game, the ‘The World of Hyboria – A Collection of the Hyborian Studies by Professor Ervin H. Roberts’ is a good gazetteer, introducing Robert E. Howard and Hyboria, the latter as if it was written down in an academic’s notebook, complete with annotations. It includes quite detailed descriptions of the various lands, their peoples, towns, and cities, and there is a decent bestiary too. Several NPCs are also detailed as are various gods, cults, magical items, and ruins and their lore. This is all solid background material that the Referee can develop for her game. The map is good too.

The ‘Reference Guide’ gives explanations for all of the roleplaying game’s Talents and Weaknesses before providing some of its charts and tables, including the ‘Randon Hit Location Table’, the ‘Combat Modifiers Chart’, the ‘Resolution Table’ a second time—the primary one is on the back of ‘Rulebook’ where it is in colour, an ‘Equipment List’, a ‘Specific Wound Chart’, a ‘Jewel Table’, a list of the ‘Principal Hyborian Languages’, and a ‘Talent List’. The tables are all useful, but they seem placed in a random order which makes their use not as easy as they should be. There are more tables on the ‘Master Reference Sheet’, which covers everything else, including NPC Reactions, a synopsis of the possible results, the combat sequence, and more, including a quick guide to being a Referee.

There is a neat, even decent set of mechanics at the heart of the Conan Role-Playing Game, good enough that they were later redeveloped as the ZeFRSRules—short for ‘Zeb's Fantasy Roleplaying System’, as the author is known as David ‘Zeb’ Cook. Yet the Conan Role-Playing Game almost goes out of its way to make the learning and using of the rules as awkward as possible. This begins almost immediately in the ‘Rulebook’ where there is no explanation of the core rules and how they work, the ‘Rulebook’ going from character creation to combat, leaving the reader none the wiser. Instead, there is an explanation of rules, roughly two paragraphs long under ‘Action Succes’ on the third page of the four-page ‘Master Reference Sheet’. What this means is that the Conan Role-Playing Game, which is designed for ages ten and over, an introductory roleplaying game that is effectively hiding its rules. Add to this, the lack of an example of play, no example of character generation, no example beginning characters, and no beginning scenario for beginning characters or even multiple characters, and it is clear that the Conan Role-Playing Game is not giving proper support to either the Referee or the player.

Yet on the plus side, in addition to the very serviceable rules, the means of creating a Player Character using the form on the character sheet is a neat touch as it asks each player to think about his character in terms of his story and tying him into the world of Hyboria. The background description of the world is not bad either and to be fair, the adventure, ‘The Tower of the Elephant’, is actually reasonable enough for a one-one-one, single session’s worth of play. The problem with it is that is either not suitable for the roleplaying game on its own or it is simply not enough.

Physically, the Conan Role-Playing Game is well presented. Everything is of good quality, the layout is tidy, and the internal illustrations, all by Jeff Easley, are excellent.

—oOo—

The Conan Role-Playing Game was reviewed by Mike Dean in ‘Game Reviews’ in Imagine Adventure Games Magazine No. 29 (August, 1985). He began by saying that, “With the recent influx of RPGs based on specific books, films and TV series, it is not all that surprising that we should eventually be presented with the CONAN® RPG. Along with the trend for this type of RPG has also come the unfortunate tendency for such games to be written in very simple English. CONAN RPG is no exception, and although it can be argued that the style encourages younger players and enables them to grasp the concept of the game more easily, one cannot help but feel that one is being talked down to by the authors.” He was also critical of the magic system in the Conan Role-Playing Game and the effort required both in game and out, adding, “…[I]t is almost as if by making magic difficult to pursue the authors are hoping that no-one will want to.” He concluded, “In conclusion, this game has some interesting concepts but is lacking in certain respects, notably the magic system and the slant towards the younger gamer.

Pete Tamelyn reviewed the Conan Role-Playing Game in ‘Open Box’ in White Dwarf Issue 69 (September, 1985). He was critical of the layout and organisation, saying that, “I get the impression that there were quite a few bugs in the systems as well because there is a 4 page ‘Reference Sheet’ included which makes several significant changes to the rules. ‘Last minute errata sheet’ might have been more appropriate.” Despite this, he awarded it an overall score out of seven out of ten and finishing with, “It's a great shame. With a bit of care it could have been a very good product. Most of the errors are essentially cosmetic and even with them I still prefer it to AD&D. Hopefully TSR will produce a second edition – after they’ve tightened up on their quality control.”

It was reviewed in ‘Game Reviews’ in Different Worlds Issue 45 (March/April, 1987) by Edwin King, whose initial description was that, “The Conan RolePlaying Game is a great piece of hack & slash fun that can reawaken the enthusiasm of the most jaded role-player.” Although critical of the limitations of the scenario, he was positive in his conclusion. “Essentially, it is worth the effort to overlook the organizational problems and occasional lapses in clarity in the rules. If you can enjoy the freedom of using an easily-learned rules set that leaves plenty of options, Conan is great. It makes a pleasant break from more detailed fantasy campaigning and it is certain to have its players rereading the Conan stories in search of inspiration.” He awarded it three stars out of five.

—oOo—

The Conan Role-Playing Game has an experimental quality to it in combining a very simple system that gives the players a lot of freedom in terms of what they can create and play with a resolution mechanic that is surprisingly elegant and flexible and can cover most situations. It is unlike any other roleplaying game from TSR, Inc. of its era and as a development of the earlier Marvel Super Heroes and The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game, it could have been the basis of a system suitable for a variety of genres. Yet despite its production values, the Conan Role-Playing Game hides this mechanical simplicity behind a ragged organisation, poor explanations of the rules, and a lack of support for the player in terms of examples and advice. There are moments where the author’s love of Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian does shine through even its poor organisation, primarily in the sourcebook and the rules for magic, but even this cannot stop the Conan Role-Playing Game from failing to live up to its potential.

Magazine Madness 40: Autoduel Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 1

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickststarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

—oOo—

Autoduel Quarterly was Steve Jackson Games’ quarterly magazine dedicated to Car Wars, the publisher’s game of vehicular combat in a future America. Specifically, fifty years into the future after fossil fuels had been severely depleted forcing a switch to electric engines and a worldwide grain blight triggered a limited nuclear exchange that the world survived, but in the USA forced a partial collapse and fortification of towns and cities due to raiders and bandits. The USA’s armed society went from personal arms to vehicular arms as protection on the road and autoduelling is not only legalised, but organised into a sport of its own. Car Wars was a skirmish wargame in which each player could control one or more cars, pickups, vans, and motorcycles, and battle each other in arenas or on the road. Every vehicle was detailed with a chassis, suspension, wheels, engine, armour, armament, and other devices. Common weapons include machine guns, flamethrowers, and minedroppers. The appeal was not only the fact that every player was effectively driving a car armed with a machine gun, but that they could design the vehicles themselves and test them out as well as use the standard designs in the game. Inspired by Alan Dean Foster’s short story, ‘Why Johnny Can't Speed’, and Harlan Ellison’s short story, ‘Along the Scenic Route’, as well as the films Death Race 2000 and later Mad Max 2, Car Wars proved to be popular and award-winning, receiving the Charles S. Roberts Award (Origins Award) for Best Science Fiction Boardgame of 1981 and being included in the Games Magazine Games 100 list in 1985. Initial support for Car Wars appeared in the pages of The Space Gamer, also published by Steve Jackson Games, adding further vehicle designs, new rules, scenarios, and expanded background.

Autoduel Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 1 was published in March, 1983. The conceit was that it was also ‘The Journal of the American Autoduel Association’ and was actually the Spring, 2033 issue. What this meant was there was a duality to the magazine, one that continued throughout its forty issues, in that the authors were writing about a game being published in the eighties, but writing for a game set in the thirties of the next century. This was particularly obvious in the adverts, most notably for ‘Uncle Albert’s Auto Stop & Gunnery Shop’ which combined advertising pitches for the latest arms, armour, ammunition, and equipment which would sell the product to the reader with Car Wars stats underneath. ‘Uncle Albert’s Auto Stop & Gunnery Shop’ was a regular feature of the magazine and its content would be collected in six ‘Uncle Albert’s Auto Stop & Gunnery Shop’ yearly catalogues. The same was done with new vehicle designs, providing in-game advertising from the manufacturer and then the game stats. For Autoduel Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 1, these vehicles are The Morningstar from Rothschild Auto Works, a luxury automobile with turreted laser and rear minedropper as well as patented Velvet Glove trimmings, and the Conquistador Flamenco, a Mexican compact with a forward-firing machine gun and a rear Artful Dodger flaming oil jet. (Even miniatures manufacturer, Grenadier Models, Incorporated gets in on the act, if just a little, with an advert for its line of licensed Car Wars miniatures as coming from Grenadier Motors.)

The issue opens with an introduction from publisher Steve Jackson, promising that the Autoduel Quarterly would be as much a quarterly supplement for Car Wars as it would be a magazine, but that elements of the latter, such as editorials, (real-world) adverts, columns, and so on, would be kept to minimum versus the actual support for the game. This the issue manages, and it would be something that Autoduel Quarterly continued to manage fairly effectively throughout its run. ‘The Driver’s Seat’, David Ladyman’s editorial has a tentative quality, highlighting some of the content for the issue, but as much looking back to some of the support for Car Wars in the pages of The Space Gamer and forward in a request for submissions and ideas that would develop the setting of Car Wars in the twenty-thirties.

‘Newswatch’ provides a snapshot of some of the history of the future that is Car Wars, in the first issue quite broad, but in later issues it would focus on particular aspects of the setting. ‘50 Years Today’ presented snippets of news stories from 1983 as if they were being viewed from 2033 and include reports from Army magazine that the U.S. Army is purchasing fast attack vehicles from the Emerson Electric Company and a report from the Austin American-Statesman that fights, assaults, and shootings on Houston’s freeways were up 400% in under a year!

‘Excerpts from NORTH AMERICAN ROAD ATLAS AND SURVIVAL GUIDE, 3rd Edition’ describes various locations around the USA in the 2030s, giving their history and current state, describing various facilities, organisations, and hazards. In this first issue, written by Aaron Allston, the location is Midville, Ohio. This small town is the default setting for Car Wars, highlighted in the first expansion for the game, Sunday Drivers, which pitched the pedestrians, law enforcement, and autoduellists of Midville against attacking motorcycle gangs. This neatly summarises the town and the immediate region, giving an area in which to set Car Wars sessions, especially in conjunction with Sunday Drivers, and add background details that can set up storylines and reasons to duel.

The big feature in Autoduel Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 1, taking up almost half of its content at over fifteen pages long, is ‘Convoy’ by Steve Jackson and David Ladyman. This is a scenario, subsequently published on its own as Convoy which sees a team of duellists hired to guard a tanker carrying disease-resistant algae from Lexington, Kentucky to Memphis, Tennessee whose algae farms have been infected by a mutant bacterium, leaving the city on the verge of starvation. ConTexCo is providing the truck and paying well, but the duellists only have thirteen hours to get their charge to Memphis, and they will lose part of their fee if they are late, or the truck is damaged. ConTexCo also want the situation kept secret as it does not want it widely known that Memphis has come this close to starvation. ‘Convoy’ can be played by between one and eight players, plus a Referee, though between three and six players are recommended and each is given a budget in which to buy or build a vehicle. (It could even be played solo without a Referee, an option given in the published book.) In addition to Car Wars, a group will need a copy of Car Wars and ideally, a copy of the then newly published Truck Stop, which added trucks to the game and was only the game’s second supplement. That said, Truck Stop is not required to play and a counter for the ConTexCo truck is given on the back cover of the magazine for the Game Master to copy. However, using Truck Stop adds a lot of detail and mechanical options to the play of the scenario.

‘Convoy’ is a programmed scenario, the players’ duellists driving from Lexington down the Bluegrass Parkway and onto I65 and I40 to get to Memphis. Along the way, they will need to stop at truck stops—points of safety and respite along the way—to recharge their engines, and whilst this happening they have the opportunity to interact with the locals and other travellers and perhaps pick up some rumours about the route ahead. The main play will be with the ten encounters along the route, one after the other, some benign, others aggressive, which the players can get through with a mixture of good roleplaying and combat. In fact, the players are advised that fighting at every turn will slow them down and thus reduce their fee. The encounters do escalate in hostility, including a nasty driving challenge against a clever paint spray trap.

‘Convoy’ is a detailed, but very enjoyable scenario. It challenges the players’ judgement—as is in what is and is not a threat—and skill and luck in combat, but there is potential for roleplaying too. Of course, it also serves as an advert and showcase for Truck Stop, but it is nice touch that the scenario can be run without the supplement.

‘Creating a New Character’, also by David Ladyman and Steve Jackson expands on the roleplaying aspects of Car Wars, which are very light. It looks at the five skills of the game for characters—Driver, Cyclist, Gunner, Trucker, and Mechanic—and explains their levels and what they mean. In particular, it expands on the Mechanic skill can do and the difficulty of repair jobs. Overall, a generally useful article.

Rounding out Autoduel Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 1 are two regular columns. One is ‘ADQ&A’, a questions and answers forum for players to ask and receive rules clarifications, whilst the other is ‘Backfire’, the letters column. The former would have been useful at the time and the latter is interesting enough.

Physically, Autoduel Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 1 is well presented. The artwork is good and the writing clear. The cartography is simple, but the vehicle layouts are slightly rough.

In 1983, Autoduel Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 1 would have provided welcome support for Car Wars, at a time when the game only had two supplements—Sunday Drivers and Truck Stop. The issue really is packed with useful content. The background to Midville, new equipment and vehicles, questions answered, so on. There is no fiction in this first issue, something that Autoduel Quarterly would become known for later (and has been since collected into a single volume, Autoduel Tales: The Fiction of Car Wars), but instead has the terrific scenario, ‘Convoy’. This is certainly a scenario that many, many Car Wars fans will have played over the years, and it appeared here first in the pages of Autoduel Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 1. Were it not for the fact that Convoy is available separately, Autoduel Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 1 would be worth revisiting for that alone, but this is a still good issue with a good mix of content that set a blueprint for the issues to come that it would stick to.

[Fanzine Focus XL] The Beholder Issue 5

On the tail of the Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed how another Dungeon Master and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will be compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry. As new fanzines have appeared, there has been an interest in the fanzines of the past, and as that interest has grown, they have become highly collectible, and consequently more difficult to obtain and write about. However, in writing about them, the reader should be aware that these fanzines were written and published between thirty and forty years ago, typically by roleplayers in their teens and twenties. What this means is that sometimes the language and terminology used reflects this and though the language and terminology is not socially acceptable today, that use should not be held against the authors and publishers unduly.

The Beholder was a British fanzine first published in April, 1979. Dedicated to Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, it ran to twenty-seven issues, the last being published in July, 1981. It was popular and would be awarded ‘Best Games Fanzine’ at the Games Day convention in 1980. After the final issue of The Beholder, the editors would go on to release a number of anthologies which collected content from the complete run of the fanzine such as Beholder Supplement Glossary of Magic, which collected many of the magical items which appeared in the fanzine and collated them into a series of tables for easy use by the Dungeon Master, and Fantasie Scenarios – The Fanzine Supplement No. 2, the first of several scenario anthologies.

The Beholder Issue No. 5 was probably published in August 1979, given that the fanzine was published monthly and on a regular basis throughout its run. The issue’s concerns are typical of the period for a fanzine devoted to Dungeons & Dragons—problems with different aspects of the roleplaying game and possible solutions, new monsters, new spells, an adventure, and so on. The editors—Michael Stoner and Guy Duke—implore readers to submit ides for the forthcoming monster issue, likely to be Issue 8 to coincide with Games Day V and note that, “In a few weeks the long-awaited DM’s Handbook will be on sale. Watch out for a review of it in issue 7. There is no doubt that it will have a large impact on the way many people play D&D , and will most probably alter several basic parts of the game. We hope to be able to “move with the times” and cater for the many new players who will be coming into D&D because of this (just as many started when the “Basic Rulebook” first appeared). However, if you still play “old style” D&D, don’t panic! We will try to ensure that articles are of use to everyone, from rank amateur to top-class pro.” Thus, the issue comes at a point when there is a definite shift in the hobby from Dungeons & Dragons and Basic Dungeons & Dragons to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a split that would mark the first of the edition wars that followed over the years. This split then will not be as sharp since mechanically the similarities between the two really are very strong.

The issue’s content opens with ‘View Point: Specialised Clerics Are More Interesting’ [sic] by John Norris. His viewpoint is that the Cleric Class as presented is unsatisfying and vague, calling Gygax’s design simplistic and the only thing that distinguishes one Cleric from another is the plain and boring Alignment system. He suggests that real clerics have “…[A]ll sorts of interesting foibles, some of which stem from the particular tenets of their various faiths and others which seem to be a kind of professional “occupational hazard” of clergy in the society to which they belong.” The article highlights one of the longstanding and oft-addressed complaints about the roleplaying game, in that Clerics are depicted as a holy warrior a la the Crusades, when in the fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons, Christianity was not the faith of choice and there were plenty of other options. The solution is typically to design pantheons with gods that grant different spells and demand different tenets and the article more or less suggests that with a detailed example of a ‘Subclass’. This is ‘The Way of Anubis’, which believes that it is the proper doom of all living things to die and that it is wrong to interfere with the dead, especially via resurrection. There is some divide in the faith too, between those that believe that the process should not be interfered with and those that believe its process should be hurried. In game terms, Clerics of the Way of Anubis better turn and dispel the undead and they cast Lay Undead better and more effectively than the standard Animate Dead spell. Counter to this, Clerics of the Way of Anubis do not use healing magic and are opposed to its use, even seeking to reverse the effects of such magic if used! Clerics of the Way of Anubis also seek to kill anyone who has been resurrected.

‘The Way of Anubis’ is a fascinating creation. One that follows through on the author’s initial complaint about the Cleric Class, but to an extreme. ‘The Way of Anubis’ is a Cleric Subclass is unplayable as a Player Character type since it is antithetical to what a standard Cleric is supposed to do in play and that is heal. One way which the author suggests getting around this is to keep the ‘The Way of Anubis’ Cleric’s faith hidden until the full meaning of his tenets are realised in play. This is odd in itself since a reason would have to be given why this was kept hidden and keeping it hidden feels like a dirty trick to play upon the players by the Dungeon Master. In a way, the article shows the reader how not to do it when it could have been exploring more options.

‘Monster Summoning’ gives eight new monsters. They include the Wood Golem for the Druid to create; the Thin Giant, essentially a giant with invisibility due to permanent Duo-dimension spell having been cast on them; the Bactos, a living cactus that uses its offshoots to pin victims against it and drain all moisture from their bodies, making resurrection impossible; and the Death Grub, an flying insect related to the Rot Grub, which does not attack, but instead infests dead bodies and again, resurrection impossible. The daftest monster is the Time Rat, a rat from the future with time travel powers that likes to come to the past and explore dungeons and is curious about adventuring parties. If attacked, it can cast Time Stop, after which it will steal any item its can, especially magical items, and then phase out back to the future. It is essentially a means to deprive Player Characters of their hard won magical items and it could have been a whole lot more interesting. Lastly, the Thin Giant is simply boring.

‘Monster Reaction Roll Tables’ provides a more detailed means of handing interactions between the adventurers and the dungeon denizens if the former are looking to do more than fight, whilst Andreas J. Sarker’s ‘More Gem Tables’ provides a means for the Dungeon Master to detail the gems that might be found as treasure. The included ‘Computer Program’ is a simple BASIC computer program, running to just fifteen lines of code and designed to generate attribute values for Dungeons & Dragons characters. This dates to a time when home computers could easily be programmed at home to run programs typed in.

‘The Dragon Race’ presents the Dragon as a playable Race. As a playable Race, the Dragon has high minimum attributes, can only be a Magic-User or a Fighter—and cannot cast magic if the latter, and has a breath weapon that inflicts damage equal to its Hit Points and can be used a limited number of times a day. They have a natural claw and bite attack, but the bite attack gets better for the Fighter Dragon. All Dragons can attack creatures and enemies that require magical weapons or attacks to hit, but need to be higher Level to attack creatures and enemies with higher magical protection. However, there are two downsides to the Dragon as a playable Race. One is that all Dragons are suspicious of everyone and everything and they are only accepted in society because they are feared, and mechanically, they suffer a high penalty to Experience Point gain. This is -20% for the Fighter Dragon and a massive -40% for the Magic-User Dragon! Honestly, this is not a bad version of the Dragon as a playable Race as the penalties do offset any advantages that the Dragon has and a player of a Dragon will see the characters of his fellow players racing ahead in terms of power and ability.

‘New Spells’ are taken from the ‘Barad-Dur Spellbook’. The eight spells include Mirage for the Illusionist, which makes something appear very attractive, like a fine meal or a pile of gold, and can be used as a distraction for all but the most intelligent and similarly, for the Illusionist, Premonition, with which the caster runs his finger across his neck as if to cut and then points at the victim of the spell, who gets a bad feeling that his about to die, and if he fails a Saving Throw, runs away! Effectively, a Fear spell then. The Clerical spell Cure Paralysis is good for after encounters with Ghouls and Ghasts and the like; Death Bomb turns a Magic-User into a living bomb if he is killed, potentially destroying every item on his body, if not his actual body, so good for the Dungeon Master to use on a villainous wizard; and Probability Travel gives the spell’s recipient the ability to see a few seconds into the future, see what he is going to do, and give him the opportunity to improve on it. In game terms, Probability Travel lets a player roll twice for his character’s next action and take the best result. So, Advantage in 1979, then?

Lastly, ‘Thoughts on NPC’s’ (sic), suggests ways of getting away from anonymous NPCs who are just there to provide services such as Cure Disease and Resurrection. Ultimately, the point of half the article is not about NPCs as such, as more finding ways of making the Player Characters work to access spells such as Cure Disease and Resurrection, whether that is through simple, but big payments or more interestingly, require a quest to get the right ingredients or components, or fulfil a task required by the caster. The other half is a call to make normal NPCs more interesting, especially those that adventure with the Player Characters, such as having an Assassin pose as a Paladin in a party of Good-aligned Player Characters. Arguably, this is a call to make NPCs more of a threat—in this case, an internal threat—than necessarily interesting.

The highlight of any issue of The Beholder is its scenario. ‘Legend of Leshy’ is what it calls a ‘stage-by-stage’ mini-scenario. What this means is that its plot and story will be revealed in discrete sections or scenes. Roughly designed for a group of five Player Characters of First and Second Level, one of whom should be a Druid, the scenario is based on Slavonic mythology and calls upon them to capture the ‘Leshachikha Bond’. The Leshachikha is the mortal wife of Leshy and bearer of the Leshonki, the children of Leshy. By capturing the ‘Leshachikha Bond’, it will free her from her subservience to Leshy. He is the spirit of the forest and tends to be good natured, though he does lead travellers astray. The scenario begins at the Ivanovich family farm where the Player Characters are staying, put up in a barn overnight. This barn is locked and the Player Characters are warned about the Keeper of the Barn and told not to enter the yard after 11 pm as there will be strange spirits about.

The farm and its inhabitants are nicely detailed and will be a challenge to get past as the Player Characters will need to break out of the barn and into the house in order to really get the scenario going. This is to begin the quest that spirit of the barn sets, which includes actually setting fire to the barn(!), and puts them on the path to capturing the ‘Leshachikha Bond’. Much of the scenario is an exploration of the surrounding wilderness, almost jump-cutting from one scene to the next, one encounter with a mystical inhabitant of the forest to the next, as the Player Characters go in search of the ‘Leshachikha Bond’. In places, the scenario can be quite tough physically, such as attempting to get across a battered rope bridge, but bar the occasional random encounter, is low in terms of combat. Most of the encounters will give clues as to where to search next and ultimately, if the Player Characters complete the quest, they will be well rewarded.

In 1979, ‘Legend of Leshy’ would have been a fine scenario. It is rough around the edges and the background to the scenario, based on Slavonic folklore, would not have been familiar to many players or Dungeon Masters, so adding it to a campaign would have been a challenge. (Today, there is at least a Wikipedia page.) More background would have helped and it would have been good if the possibility of the Player Characters returning to the Ivanovich family farm after the quest ends had been addressed. The main problem is the lack of detail on the otherwise large, two-page spread map of the region. The Dungeon Master really needs to work through the scenario hard in order to extract clues as to where various locations are on the map. That aside, ‘Legend of Leshy’ is a fine fantasy folkloric adventure, possessing an at time eerie and unsettling atmosphere that would have been enhanced by the lack of familiarity with the folklore.

Rounding out The Beholder Issue No. 5 is the ‘Contacts & Info’ section. Not only does this gives details of the then forthcoming Games Day which would take place on October 20th later that year, but lists a couple of players looking for players. This was how it was done back in the dawn of the hobby and people were then quite happy to hand out their address as contact details! One of the two is Simon Washbourne, later designer of roleplaying games such as Lashings of Ginger Beer.

Physically, The Beholder Issue No. 5 is slightly untidy in places, but readable. The layout is tight and that does make it difficult to read in places. The illustrations are reasonable, but the cartography simply lacks the detail its scenario requires. Of course, every issue of the fanzine was published when personal publishing was still analogue and the possibilities of the personal computer and personal desktop publishing were yet to come. In the case of The Beholder that would never be taken advantage of.

The Beholder has a high reputation for content that is of good quality and playable. The Beholder Issue No. 5 does not yet match that reputation, but as with previous issues, the signs are there and there is content aplenty that the Dungeon Master could have used in her game at the time and in some cases, still use to today. The standout piece is the scenario, ‘Legend of Leshy’, which is a rough, but interesting attempt to write a folklore-based scenario that just about works. It is certainly the best scenario in the fanzine to date. Elsewhere, the other articles are not quite as interesting or as thoughtful as in previous issues, though still very much concerned with what would have been traditional topics for Dungeons & Dragons at the time. The Beholder Issue No. 5 would have been a solid issue of the fanzine in 1979 and even today in 2025 is an enjoyable read.

1975: En Garde!

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

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En Garde! is one of the first five roleplaying games to be published and it was the first to be published by Game Designer’s Workshop. It was not the first historical roleplaying game—that likely would have been Boot Hill from TSR, Inc., published like En Garde! in 1975—but subtitled, “Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions”, it was definitely the first swashbuckling roleplaying game and the first to emphasis what a Player Character was doing socially and what a Player Character’s social status and standing was. Although it began life as a set of rules for handling duels, the expanded rules provided the scope for roleplaying as gentlemen attended their clubs and caroused and quaffed and gambled, spied pretty ladies and courted them as potential mistresses, joined a regiment and went off on campaign to fight either the Habsburgs, the Spanish, or the Protestants, aiming to win prestige, promotion, and position, all the whilst attempting to maintain sufficient monies to support themselves and their mistresses in the lifestyles they have become accustomed and want to become accustomed to! There is always the danger of death and penury, and insults flung, leading to a duel and its consequences.

Yet, En Garde! has always been overlooked as a roleplaying game and may not even be a roleplaying game in the traditional sense of even the Dungeons & Dragons of 1974. There are good reasons for this. The game play is rarely one of being sat round the table in the traditional sense because a player programs the actions of his character a month in advance. There is none of the immediacy of a traditional roleplaying game, no back and forth between the players and their characters, or indeed between the players, their characters, and the Game Master’s NPCs. Nor is there a real strong sense of place, since the Player Characters move between locations automatically, whether between their club and their barracks, between their mistress’ apartments and the duelling ground, and between Paris and wherever the French army is in campaign. Consequently, En Garde! abstracts France rather giving it any sense of place or geography.

Consequently, the baton of the swashbuckling genre and the period of Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers would be taken up other roleplaying games, most notably Flashing Blades from Fantasy Games Unlimited. Yet En Garde! has had a long life of its own parallel to the roleplaying hobby. This is because its pre-programmed style of play lent itself very easily to what was then Play by Mail, turns and results being sent and received through the mail, and more recently Play by E-Mail. It thus found a home in fanzines devoted to postal games such as Chess and Diplomacy. The current owner of En Garde! began running postal games of En Garde!, and convention games of it, before becoming the publisher.

To be fair, just because the game is played in a procedural fashion, it does not mean that it is truly lacking roleplaying possibilities. En Garde! does have a definitive aim for every Player Characters and that is to acquire better social standing and status—and keep it. That desire to better oneself and maintain it drives a Player Character’s decisions and how he reacts to the outcomes of those decisions and those of the other Player Characters, and it is this space that En Garde! has scope for roleplaying? If a Player Character discovers another man has been courting his mistress, what should he do? If facing certain death on the field of battle, an act of poltroonery might save him, but should the act be exposed, should the Player Character challenge his accusers to a duel and protect his honour or confess and suffer the consequences? As a King’s Musketeer, what insults should he be taunting members of the Cardina’s guard with? Answering them spurs a roleplaying response in character, even if only written down, and in being written, unlike in most roleplaying games, you have a specific chronicle of the actions, reactions, and responses of all of the Player Characters.

A Player Character in En Garde! is simply defined. He has four stats, Strength, Expertise, Constitution, and Endurance. The first three are rolled on three six-sided dice, whilst Endurance is determined by multiplying Strength by Constitution. Strength is a Player Character’s ability to inflict damage, Expertise his skill with a sword, Constitution his health, and Endurance his ability to withstand punishment. His Social Level is determined by rolling on tables for his Birth, Sibling Rank, Father’s Position, and Father’s Title (if Noble). His Military Ability, used when he is on campaign, is rolled a single six-sided die.

Our sample Player Character, Cyrille Mageau, is of a very lowly origins, with barely a Louis d’or to his name. His lack of status means that his prospects are equally as low, but Cyril is ambitious and not without potential. Given his very high Military Ability, his best option is to enlist and prove himself on campaign. If he is successful there, he may improve his fortunes in Paris.

Cyrille Mageau
Social Level: 1
Class: Commoner
Sibling Rank: Bastard
Father’s Position: Peasant
Strength 09 Expertise 13 Constitution 13 Endurance 117
Military Ability: 6
Initial Funds: 9 Allowance: 0 Inheritance: 0

Mechanically, En Garde! does not really offer much in the way that looks like a roleplaying game. It starts by offering the mechanics out of which the rest of the game grew. These are the duelling rules, with participants programming manoeuvres such as Close, Cut, Slash, Lunge, Throw, and more. This is written out in a sequence of letters as a routine, for example, ‘-X-L-X-’ for a Lunge, ‘-CL-K-X-X-X-’ for Kick, ‘-P-(R)-’ for Parry and possible Riposte, and so on, with the ‘X’ standing for Rest or Guard. These sequences are then compared step-by-step and the results determined, with duellist’s Strength, manoeuvre, and weapon type. The latter includes rapier, dagger, foil, sabre, cutlass, and even two-handed sword! A duellist who has a lower Swordsmanship—later called Expertise—will be slower against a duellist who has a higher Swordsmanship, and this is represented by the player having to be put in more ‘X’s. Duels are played out until one participant either surrenders or is killed. Winners will gain Status Points and Social Levels in general, depending upon the Status Points and Social Levels of the participants.

The actual play structure is based on four weeks per month, three months per season, and four seasons per year. A player will program his character’s activities four weeks at a time. These could be to a club with a friend, practice with a weapon, carouse at a bawdyhouse, and court a mistress. A Player Character can also join clubs, gamble, take out loans, join a regiment, and so on. The aim throughout is for the Player Character to maintain his Social Level at the very least, but really the aim is to increase his Social Level. To do this he needs to acquire Status Points. If at the end of a month, the Player Character has acquired Status Points equal to his current Social Level, he maintains it, but he acquires Status Points three times the next Social Level, he can increase it. Just as a Player Character can rise in Social Level, he can also fall, but he will also be seeking out actions that will gain him Status Points. Being a member of a club, carousing, toadying to someone of higher Social Level, successfully gambling, winning duels—especially members of rival regiments, and belonging to a regiment. Actions such as losing when gambling, losing duels, and not spending enough money to maintain his Social Level will lose a Player Character Status Points and his Social Level. Most of these actions will cost a Player Character money. Most Player Characters have some income, but can gain more from gambling, taking out a loan, making successful investments, receiving an inheritance, being in the military and returning from a campaign with plunder. Conversely, loss of loss money and income will lead to bankruptcy and a Player Character enlisting in a lowly frontier regiment in the hope of restoring his name and fortune.

Once per year, members of a regiment will have to go on campaign for a complete season. There is a chance of a Player Character being killed in battle, but he could try to be heroic and make a name for himself, get mentioned in dispatches, get promoted, and take some battlefield plunder. Being mentioned in dispatches gains a Player Character national recognition and ongoing Status Points. In the long term, a Player Character can apply for various positions in both the military and the government. For example, being appointed regimental adjutant, Army Quartermaster-General, or Inspector-General of the Infantry, or Commissioner of Public Safety, Minster of War, or Minister Without Portfolio. Titles can also be won. Once a Player Character achieves a high position, he gains some Influence that can be used to help others.

Of course, En Garde! is a profoundly masculine game. As the subtitle says, it is, “Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions”. Women are not really characters at all, merely dalliances there to prove a Player Character’s masculinity and bolster his social standing. It is difficult to get around this, since the role of women both at the time when En Garde! is set and in the fiction it draws upon, is not as protagonists, but even as in some cases in both, as antagonists.

En Garde! is not a roleplaying game that looks beyond achieving high rank, position, or social status. So, there is a limit to how much play potential there is beyond this. Certainly, in a typical group of players, this would be the case. In a larger group, there is greater room for maneuvering and jostling for status and rivalry with players being members of rival regiments, competing for the same positions, even for the same mistresses, and so on. This lends itself to play at a club if it has plenty of members or simply playing with a more dispersed group of players by mail—electronic or otherwise.

One way in which En Garde! is not a roleplaying game is in how little scope there is for the players to roleplay and affect the world around the characters through roleplaying. Perhaps through delivering an insult to a member of a rival from another regiment? Further, players will find themselves playing at odds with each other when they join rival regiments or compete for the same mistress or position. In some ways, to get the most out of En Garde! it is best for the players to play characters who are rivals and so it is adversarial to one degree or another.

Physically, En Garde! is surprisingly well presented and written. Illustrated with a mix of period pieces, the only real downside is that it starts talking about duels rather than characters and what they do and who interact with each other beyond duels. This organisation lends itself to the idea that the rest of the rules grew out of wanting more to the game and more reasons to duel.

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It appears that En Garde! was never reviewed in the roleplaying hobby press, though it was covered by magazines and publications devoted to games. The designer and publisher, Charles Vasey reviewed it in Games & Puzzles Issue 55 (December 1976) saying that GDW has, “…[P]icked a really splendid period for the new duelling game.” He was critical though, saying, “Despite its complexity, the system does not play as well as one might think. Often duels end very swiftly.” and “It is complex and convoluted, and it feels like real life. Players will soon find they have natural enemies and rivals who must be crushed directly or by a hired blade. One must seek to be in the best set, but beware bankruptcy or it’s the frontier regiment and disgrace until you pay off your debts.”

Similarly, games designer Greg Costikyan reviewed En Garde! in ‘Games fen will Play’ in Fantastic Science Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 10. (July 1980). He was very positive, calling En Garde! “[T]he the first well-written set of role-playing rules.... En Garde! was the first role-playing game by a major company and by established designers; and, as one might expect, it set new standards for role-playing rules — standards to which few subsequent games have risen.”

Perhaps the oddest vehicle for a review was The Playboy Winner’s Guide to Board Games (Playboy Press, 1979). Author John Jackson said that, “There is a minimum of player interaction; play is geared toward individual deeds rather than group action.”, but that, “Although lacking neither color nor detail, the rules to En Garde! are clear and comprehensible.” He concluded that, “If it lacks the scope of true fantasy role-playing games, it’s not as time-consuming, either, and it appears to be a pleasant diversion.”

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En Garde! is not a roleplaying game per se. There is more of a simulation to it, a means of modelling the life of an officer and gentlemen in the early seventeenth century as he makes his way in life and attempt to better himself. Yet like any simulation, the result of dice rolls on the roleplaying game’s various tables sets up interesting, intriguing, and involving results that draw you in and make you want to explore how to resolve them and how to respond to them. This is where the roleplaying potential lies in En Garde!, even if it is not written to support roleplaying and all but ignores it. Ultimately, it has been shown again and again, in multiple games, all this is best handled and roleplayed away from the table and at distance, whether by mail or email.

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The current version of En Garde! is available here.