... dammit, I hate writing these sorts of things.

Chuck Cuthbert passed away a couple of days ago. I met Chuck through Bret Boyd's gaming group, with whom I've had the pleasure of rolling dice a couple of times over the past few years. Those games all took place at Chuck's home - specifically, "the barn", which simply put was a gamer's delight. And Chuck was always the gracious host.

I was going to write some stuff about Chuck as a player (he was clever, smart, and just a ton of fun to have at a table) and a DM (one of the best I’ve known), but screw that stuff for a moment ... Chuck was just a really funny, really nice guy.

I guess one of the things that strikes me the most was gaming with him right around Christmas a few years ago. It was only my second time playing with the group, so while I liked everyone in the group a lot, I still felt a bit like the "new guy". When I arrived for the game, I found that Chuck had a present for me. It was nothing major - just a little orange twenty-sided die - but it went a long way towards making be feel like I was indeed part of the group. Little things like that are what made Chuck a truly special, caring person.

And now he’s gone.

Rest in peace, Chuck. We’ll miss you.

Continuing on the “Lost City” theme …

One of the best parts of “B4: The Lost City” was Tom Moldvay’s ingenious inclusion of factions. In the module, the city of Cynidicea fell into ruin long ago, cursed by the appearance of the strange beast Zargon. Over centuries, the descendents of the original inhabitants fell into madness, and separated into different tribes and factions, dedicated to worshipping the old gods of Cynidicea before the fall. The Brotherhood of Gorm, the Magi of Usamigaras, and the Warrior Maidens of Madarua were the three main factions (and the ones the player characters could mostly interact with, if so desired), and the Priests of Zargon were another (though they were mostly intended to be straight-up villains).

(A lot of this was probably inspired by the Conan classic “Red Nails”, but that’s fine. If you’re going to ‘borrow’, then ‘borrow’ from the best.)

Again, in very elegant and economic fashion, Tom Moldvay laid out the basic goals and characteristics of the various factions in half a page. He also laid out some quick guidelines as to what sorts of player characters might choose to ally themselves with each faction, and why. And that’s all the coverage he really gave the factions in terms of how they would interact with the player characters, apart from combat.

It’s an adventure design technique that I call layering. It’s something I learned from modules like “The Lost City” and “Castle Amber” (another Moldvay classic). If the DM wishes to ignore the faction material, and wants to treat all the Cynidiceans as bad guys that are meant to be killed by the player characters … that’s fine! The module works, and it works very well. It becomes more of a generic dungeon crawl, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

With layering, though, options get tossed on top of that base model. The factions in “The Lost City” are a great example of that. If the DM so chooses – and if the players choose to pursue the option, if presented – the factions become much more than “monsters to kill”. The players can ally themselves with one faction, and perhaps become the enemies of another. Or they can double-cross a faction to gain something better from a third. It adds a lot of roleplaying opportunities into a module that – on the surface – is a nice, neat little dungeon crawl. By roleplaying with the various factions, a short 28-page module becomes a campaign that can last a long, long time.

The nice thing about layers is that nothing happens if the layers get ignored. The DM can always work with the basic adventure structure, and just add the layers onto it like ornaments on a Christmas tree. With modules that are very complex and don’t use this technique … well, they’re structured in such a way that if you want to ignore something, the module usually suffers. If “The Lost City” required that the players needed to ally themselves with a particular faction in order to succeed at something, it potentially becomes more work for the DM if he or she wants to ignore that aspect of the module. I’ve found that it’s usually better if a module is set up in a simple way, with more optional complex features that can be added on to it, rather than in a complex way that needs to be stripped down to be more simple.

The same applies for games in general, not just adventure modules. One of the major reasons I’ve never run Exalted – though some of the players at my gaming table would love it if I did – is because aspects of the campaign metaplot are embedded in the rules themselves, and I’m not a big fan of the game’s metaplot. I have ideas for radically different I’d like to run using the Exalted rules, but that means manually stripping out those pieces of the metaplot from the rules, which is a pain. If there were a basic framework for the Exalted rules, with the metaplot stuff layered on top of that as an option, this wouldn’t be an issue.

I tried the layering effect to a certain extent when writing the Dungeon Crawl Classics module “Dreaming Caverns of the Duergar”. In that module, the player characters stumble across a small band of duergar searching for an underground tomb. The duergar are led by Itharnos Cyvorak, a half-duergar/half-dragon mercenary who has his own agenda. The rest of the duergar don’t trust Itharnos, but they need him to locate the tomb. Additionally, there’s some other duergar priests and warriors that have their own agenda in that little band.

Does all this intrigue amongst the duergar matter? It depends. It’s possible to play the entire module and never find out anything about these various agendas, or ever know that most of the duergar hate each other. “Dreaming Caverns” can be played as a simple dungeon crawl, with “duergar = bad guys”, just meant to be fought, killed, and looted. However, depending on how the DM runs the adventure, and how the players choose to react to the duergar, the characters may find themselves allying themselves with one duergar, plotting against another, making arrangements to betray a third … it’s a lot of roleplaying opportunity, should the folks playing the adventure want to use it, but if they don’t, it doesn’t affect the adventure.

And the inspiration for this, of course, came from “The Lost City”.

In a certain amount of irony, I’m currently working on a “Lost City”-styled adventure at the moment with a very gifted co-author. I’ve been consolidating a lot of rough notes and background material for the adventure over the last week or so, and one of the bullet points included in these notes is “Factions”. I don’t know if it can be done as cleanly as Tom Moldvay did it for “The Lost City”, but ideally, I’d like to include a similar sort of network inside the upcoming adventure. I'd love to feature various factions and groups in the city, each with their own plans and agendas … and then have all of it be optional. Just another layer of the adventure, to be added or thrown away as the DM wishes.

I’ll let you know how it progresses.

And someday, hopefully you’ll be able to tell me if it measures up to the original “Lost City”.

Which is a high, high standard indeed.

The following was inspired by a post on James Maliszewski’s wonderful blog over at Grognardia. Thanks, James!

I first started playing D&D in 1983. I never DMed the game, though, until three years later.

The first adventure that I ran was B4: The Lost City.

One of the two best adventures ever written, in my opinion.

And a perfect adventure for a newbie DM.

I was in middle school. At the time, I was a painfully shy, scrawny, socially awkward, nerdy kid, just about one rung up the evolutionary ladder from Waldo in the Van Halen “Hot For Teacher” video … but not by much.

You couldn’t get me to speak in public if you put a gun to my head. I did my best to be little more than a shadow in the corner in every class, saying nothing and trying not to be noticed. The very idea of performing in front of others – which is exactly what a DM must do – was a frightening thought indeed. I was still a few years away from the point in high school where I basically snapped one day, decided that I didn’t give a fuck what anyone else thought of me, and went from being a shy, skinny little nerd to … well, a skinny little in-your-face punk who, deep down, was still kind of a nerd.

But I really liked D&D.

And I wanted to try running the game as a DM.

Somehow, I overcame my inhibitions and convinced a few kids I knew to try playing D&D with me. We all assembled after school in our English teacher’s classroom – she usually stayed late after school, and agreed that we could use the classroom for gaming for an hour or so after school let out. So all that year, once a week, I led my new group of gamers through the wonders of “The Lost City”.

And in the process, I learned a lot about gaming.

“The Lost City”, written by the wonderful Tom Moldvay, kicks off as a standard dungeon crawl. The characters, traveling through a desert, seek refuge in some ruins while caught in a sandstorm, and find themselves descending into the remains of a pyramid, down into the darkness of a vast, ancient, depraved civilization called Cynidicea. Most of the various factions of this civilization are ruled and controlled by a beast of great power simply known as Zargon.

On the one hand, the adventure is very straightforward. In the early stages of the module, adventurers go from room to room in the pyramid, kill monsters, take treasure, and explore a lot of rooms. And that’s exactly what I did as a newbie DM. “Roll Initiative!” was a phrase uttered often, and hack-and-slash ruled the day. However …

Anyone familiar with Tom Moldvay’s modules knows that the man could pack more solid ideas for campaign background and additional adventures in four pages of a module than most 256-page campaign sourcebooks do today. He very elegantly laid out how the various tribes and factions found in the Lost City beneath the pyramid interacted. He managed to fill the module with a dark, moody atmosphere, chock full of pulp fantasy. A lot of “The Lost City” is quite reminiscent of the best works of Robert E. Howard.

While it wasn’t necessary to use any of this information – the player characters could simply fight everyone, take their treasure, and move on – it added a new dimension to the game that I’d never used before – roleplaying. As in, social interaction between player characters and NPCs.

Go figure.

So as the game progressed, the player characters wound up making alliances with one of the Cynidicean factions, which thereby automatically made them sworn enemies of another. The heroes couldn’t just walk into a room and wantonly slaughter everything in sight anymore – they needed to be savvier than that, and do a little sleuthing. Battle preparations become more carefully planned affairs, rather than “draw swords, throw magic missiles, and hope for the best”. The game wasn’t the most sophisticated thing in the world, but it slowly evolved to something far beyond a mere hackfest and into something more well-rounded, featuring combat alongside diplomacy, explorations, and investigation, which proved to be much more interesting to the players.

Additionally, Moldvay put in a lot of areas in the module that weren’t detailed on the maps. Rather, there would be a corridor leading off the map, and the module would state “this corridor leads to the Temple of Despair”, or something like that, and a sentence or two about what might be found there. Towards the end of my “Lost City” adventure/campaign, I began writing up the details for things like the “Temple of Despair” on my own. This sandbox approach by Tom Moldvay allowed enough tools and guidance for newbie DMs to start creating their own adventures, and he managed to do so with a remarkable economy of words.

“The Lost City” was my first attempt at running a campaign, and after all these years, I still think it’s one of my best.

I’ve had the opportunity to write several modules of my own over the past few years. In all of them, I’ve done my best to try and emulate that sandbox approach of “The Lost City”. While I’m not nearly as succinct as Tom Moldvay, my goal has always been to provide additional, optional campaign ideas in an adventure in case the DM feels like expanding things, and potential opportunities for a lot of roleplaying, even in the middle of an adventure that is meant more as a dungeon crawl. If a gaming group reads one of my modules and doesn’t care about any of that extra stuff, they should be able to skip past it and go straight for the meat of the hack-and-slash dungeoneering. But hopefully, in case a DM is looking for more, there’s at least some ideas to grab, and to develop, and to make his or her own.

“The Lost City” has had a tremendous an influence on me as a game writer and designer. Sadly, Wizards of the Coast lost their damn minds (again) and have stopped all PDF sales of their out-of-print products, so it’s no longer easy to get of copy of this module. But if you’re a game writer, and you can find a copy on eBay or elsewhere, by all means do so. It’s worth your time.

I’d really like to run “The Lost City” again someday. It remains a true classic to me.

When I was younger, most of the guys (and girls) in my gaming group were slightly older than myself. This never was really a problem until my senior year in high school, when they were either attending local community colleges, or working all sorts of jobs with weird hours. As a result, a lot of games got played in the middle of the week, during the middle of the day, when I was supposed to be in school.

I say “supposed to be” because given a choice between school and gaming, I ditched school. My priorities were a little warped back then.

I thought of this early this week, when I blew out of work early so I could go play in a game during the middle of the day. Chris Doyle, one of the esteemed authors of Castle Whiterock, was running a Pathfinder-ized version of Whiterock, and there was no way I was missing that. (Especially since the other esteemed author of Whiterock – Mr. Adrian Pommier – was participating in the game as well.)

Apparently, my priorities haven’t changed much in the past 20 years.

The game turned out to be my first real in-depth exposure to the upcoming Pathfinder game, which is derived from the rules for D&D 3.5. I’ve been freelancing for Paizo on a few small Pathfinder projects over the past few months, and I’ve read many times through the Pathfinder Beta rules that I acquired last summer … but this was the first real chance I had to see if my preconceived notions of Pathfinder matched up with reality once the dice hit the table.

One of the more prominent differences I noticed came during character generation. The power level of Pathfinder is more substantial than that of D&D 3.5. Low-level characters in Pathfinder have access to more feats, and are a bit stronger and tougher than their 3.5 counterparts. In rolling up Ravnir, my 3rd-level half-elf rogue, I found myself with a lot of feats and additional abilities I wouldn’t be getting with an analogous character in 3.5. I also found the options for “builds” much more accessible at lower levels – I was able to make Ravnir much more of a find-and-disable traps burglar even at 3rd level than I normally would be able to do in 3.5

Pathfinder also streamlined some of the more clunky elements of 3.5 (grapple, I’m looking at you!). A new mechanic – the Combat Manuever Bonus, or CMB – captures how characters accomplish a variety of different actions in combat, such as bull rushing, or tripping, or the aforementioned grapple. It makes figuring out these maneuvers much easier. Additionally, various skills like Spot and Search got consolidated into simpler skills, like Perception. It makes the game run a little smoother.

(To be fair, D&D 4E did a lot of this sort of consolidation as well, and also for the better.)

Most importantly, I found the game play in Pathfinder to be very close to D&D 3.5. The style and feel of the Pathfinder game was virtually identical to the various 3.5 games I’ve played. Granted, there were some minor changes, but I didn’t find myself going “whoa, that’s different”, or feeling like I was playing something very, very new. If you like D&D 3.5, then I think you would like Pathfinder. For all of the differences that can be found between the games, they’re relatively minor once the games are being played.

That being said, there are differences. Despite streamlining a lot of the bloat of 3.5, Pathfinder also added some bloat back in with some new rules and options. Some work very well, in my opinion (sorcerer bloodlines = win), and others not so much (barbarian rage points = meh). Between the new rules, options, and scaling up in power level, I’d probably be hesitant to drop Pathfinder characters into a stock D&D 3.5 module without some serious tweaks of the adventure. And considering one of the original design parameters of Pathfinder was supposed to be “backwards compatibility” between Pathfinder and 3.5 … I’m not exactly seeing it right now. The Pathfinder game plays the same as D&D 3.5, for the most part, but it’s a stronger game.

This is based on game play using the Pathfinder Beta rules, though. I know Paizo’s plan was to throw some more experimental ideas in the Beta rules, and refine accordingly for the final rules, which are scheduled to be released this summer. Though I have a few reservations about things I’ve seen in the Beta rules, they’re minor issues at best, and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the “official” rules in a few months.

Oh. Right. As for the game …

… lots of fun. The highlight of Ravnir’s brief adventuring career was an encounter with orc slavers, and a particularly nasty orc leader. Attempting to take advantage of a spell that dazed the leader, Ravnir stepped in with his short sword and dealt out a ridiculous amount of sneak attack damage. He then dealt out some more damage the following round, just as the leader regained his senses … but it wasn’t enough to take down his foe. So the orc leader got a critical hit, dealt out a ton of damage, and Ravnir got relegated to the realms of the permanently dead with -12 hit points.

If Ravnir had just inflicted 1 more point of damage on the orc leader, he would’ve dropped the orc instead.

Still, a great time. My thanks to Mr. Doyle for running a fine game, and to everyone else at the table as well. I had a blast.

Definitely worth playing a little hooky.

Been very, very busy the past few days. I've been writing stuff involving giants, lost cities, strange puzzles, and river kingdoms ... and sneaking in some honest-to-goodness gaming as well. The next post will probably cover my long-overdue return to the gaming table as a player, but suffice it to say it involves Pathfinder and Castle Whiterock.

And a few thoughts on playing hooky as well.

In the meantime, something short and sweet - I've managed to acquire a curious little edition to my gaming collection.

Yep. Chainmail, which is the predecessor to all things Dungeons & Dragons.

It's a short and interesting game. At heart, it's a tabletop combat game - you move troops around a field of battle, with terrain affecting your ability to move and attack. Everything's determined by rolling six-sided dice. Roll high (5 or 6) and you destroy your foe. Depending on what sort of troops you have, you get more dice to roll during an attack.

You also get heroes. Some of them have familiar roles - heroes, wizards, dragons, and so on. Though they don't really have a lot of detail to them (a dragon, mechanically-speaking, is a catapult that can fly and move over impassible terrain), you can see basic elements that would show up prominently in the White Box D&D rules, the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, and even Boot Hill. And there's some elements that even carry to the modern version of the game - heroes fighting troops in Chainmail is very, very similar to a fighter taking on minions in 4E.

I'm definitely going to have to try playing this at some point, just to see what else I discover. Reading a game is always good, but I always find that playing it gives you a far better idea of how things work.

(And I may have to gank the jousting rules from Chainmail for other games that I run - they're very simple, very clean, and works brilliantly.)

Just need to find some time to step away from the computer and roll some dice again.

My friend John has been trying to get me to run an Exalted campaign for years.

So far, he hasn't been successful. Although over time, he's slowly managed to push me closer and closer to doing so.

Behold the cover of an upcoming Exalted book called "Scroll of Exalts".

This may finally push me over the edge.

My Warhammer game is … quirky.

In a good way, though.

The players in my Warhammer game are folks with whom I’ve been gaming for a very, very long time - in cases, twenty years or more. We know each other’s gaming tendencies very, very well. The current game is investigation-heavy and combat-light because that’s the style they – and I – happen to like. Though I still seem to get caught off-guard at least once a game by the actions they take during a given adventure, I can generally guess what they’ll like in an adventure, what they won’t like, and what general direction each adventure will go.

But sometimes, it’s just fun to throw things out there to see what happens.

So far, the game has prominently featured the mysterious goings-on at an opera house, and the nefarious activities of the rat-like skaven in the sewers beneath the city. I’ve plotted out both of these aspects of the campaign in fairly rigid detail. Not quite as rigid as an adventure written for publication, but I have the details of these particular storylines mapped out, along with timelines as to how and when certain things will happen, depending on the actions (or inactions) of the characters.

It’s worked well so far, but I’ve noticed that too much familiarity hurts the game sometime. The players know my tendencies. They know that I know theirs. And after a lot of years of gaming together, it can get a little too easy sometimes to predict what someone will or won’t do. So while the specifics of the game can still be surprising to the players, the general tendencies of it … well, sometimes, they aren’t.

So to combat this, I just tossed in two random elements into the game.

I don’t have any preconceived notions for these two elements. I don’t know what the players will do with these elements. For that matter, I don’t know what I’ll do with them. But rather than taking the lead with them, I’ve just thrown them into the game and watched how the players reacted to them. Their reactions have dictated how they’ll fit into the game. This means I don’t have to adjust anything to fit what the characters plan to do; I just see what they choose to do and react accordingly.

One of these elements involved dwarves involved in purchasing large amounts of guns from a shoddy gunsmith in the merchant’s district of Kislev. For those unfamiliar with the Warhammer campaign setting, dwarves are the premier weaponsmiths – and gunsmiths – of the world. The thought of them ever buying weapons from humans is pretty odd on its own, but from a human gunsmith who isn’t even very good … very, very weird.

The actual reason why the dwarves are buying lousy guns from a human gunsmith? Beats me. I don’t know. I just tossed that tidbit out there to see how the players would react to it.

And the theories they’ve come up with while sitting around the table are far better than anything I ever would’ve dreamed up on my own.

The other … well, I’ll keep quiet about that one for a little while longer, in case any of them happen to drop in and read this post.

I wouldn’t recommend running every aspect of every adventure with random, unplanned elements like this, but if you want your game to head in some interesting directions … well, odds are that you’ve got some pretty creative and talented folks sitting at your gaming table. I’d gotten very used to writing rigid adventures as a result of my freelancing. Sometimes it’s good to remember that home games can take advantage of being more fluid and flexible.

Let the players take the lead every once in a while.

I’ve spent some time in recent weeks reading over the various Player’s Handbooks for four editions of AD&D and D&D. There hasn’t been any grand purpose for doing so. I’ve just come to realize that I like certain things about certain editions of the game, and often I can't quite put my finger on the reasons why. I’m also someone who likes knowing the history of things, and how things evolve. I think you get a much better understanding for how and why the way things are by knowing how they used to be.

So I present to you my random musings on the various editions. Have I really reached any conclusions? Not really. Or – at least – not yet. Suffice it to say there’s things I like and dislike about each version of the game, and I’m actually happy to run or play any of the four editions. If I ran another AD&D/D&D campaign on a regular basis, the version I would run would be …

… well, let’s take a look through them all first.

First Edition:

The 1E Players’ Handbook represents all the original ideas for a game called Dungeons & Dragons, as laid out by Gygax, Arneson, and a host of others. These ideas started with Chainmail, made their way into the White Box set of D&D … and then finally crept into the Player’s Handbook.

The main thing that’s evident with 1E is its reliance on subsystems. It’s clear that the game as a whole was not designed all at once. Rather, it started with core elements from the aforementioned Chainmail and White Box D&D, and whenever someone got a new idea, it was tacked onto the game. And that new idea often had nothing to do with the ideas that came before it.

During this early stage of the game’s existence, I’m pretty sure that there was no thought of a unifying mechanic for the rules. Just because something worked a certain way didn’t mean that something else similar should work the same way. So, the game wound up with rules where things were resolved at times by rolling percentile dice, or by rolling a six-sided dice, or by rolling a twenty-sided die and wanting a low result, or a high result … you get the idea. Also, many times, the needed result by rolling any die needed to be compared to a chart or result matrix, and the game had dozens of those. (And sometimes, the “mechanic” was easy – “Touch this and die”.)

There were some arbitrary decisions made for the game as well. For example, clerics wound up with the curious trait of not being able to use edged weapons because Gary Gygax had read stories of the Archbishop Turpin. The good Archbishop wielded a mace in combat because he didn't want to shed blood, as he believed firmly in the motto "who lives by the sword dies by the sword". The same went for the magic system, which was based mostly on the works of Jack Vance, which Gary Gygax happened to like. The rules were chosen more because the designers found such things interesting or fun, not due to balance.

It all led to a slew of fractured systems and subsystems. On their own, most of them worked; it just left a lot to be desired in terms of consistency.

(And for those who complain about the “lack of balance” in 1E … sometimes it helps to remember that the designers were going where no one had gone before. Yes, parts of it are certainly unbalanced … but it helps to keep perspective sometimes. We get to talk about stuff like balance because of their early forays into design.)

Second Edition:

This is the last version of the game that I consider a true revision. When 2E came out, AD&D was enjoying great popularity, and most gamers really liked the game. So 2E didn’t change things a hell of a lot. The game got streamlined quite a bit – we got THAC0, for example, rather than half a dozen “to-hit” charts for the various character classes – but not much got hideously altered from 1E. Gamers were still left with a lot of systems and subsystems. The biggest change I can think of for 2E didn’t really come in the Player’s Handbook, but in the various “Complete” books, which introduced the idea of non-weapon proficiencies – which were the early versions of skill systems, for all practical purposes. TSR’s goal with 2E seemed to be “let’s clean up the game”, not “let’s change the game”. A lot of people liked 1E, so I’m guessing they had no desire to mess around too much with the core mechanics.

The up side? The clean-up. The bad side? Stuff like the "Complete" books added in a ridiculous amount of unbalanced bloat. If you stuck to just the rules in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide, your game was probably fine. If you went beyond that, though, the game moved badly out of whack.

(And let's not talk of the Monstrous Compendium and its crappy binder system.)

Third Edition:

3.0 and 3.5 blew up a lot of what First Edition and Second Edition had done, and started over from scratch. Classes and most of the core concepts of the game remained the same, but the big goal was the introduction of a unifying mechanic to the rules – the d20. Roll a d20, beat a target number. That’s essentially how every rule in the game works, whether trying to smack a dragon with a sword, or looking for a secret door. Everything else is a modifier to those rolls. Skills and feats let you either do something, or improve your odds of doing something.

The other goal presented by 3.0 and 3.5 was explaining how everything worked … and I mean everything. A lot of 1E and 2E was dictated by the handwave, or DM fiat. How do you create a sword like Excalibur? In 1E or 2E, the answer is either “you don’t”, or “you need to forge a blade like this in the fires of lava beneath Mount Wyvern, during a full moon when the stars are aligned right” … in other words, whatever the DM decreed. Houseruling was pretty much expected in 1E and 2E.

In 3.0 or 3.5, the answer is “if you have a wizard of this level, with these spells, this amount of gold, and these feats, roll a d20. If you beat the target number, you succeed.” The design philosophy went more along the lines of the DM shouldn’t have to houserule anything. The rules should be your reference for anything and everything imaginable.

Explaining everything, I found, was always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s good to know everything. Want to create a monster? Easy. Follow the rules. Want to leap off a balcony, swing from a chandelier, and do a backflip onto a raving lizard creature? Follow the rules. The rules cover anything you want to do, or can be adapted to do so.

On the other hand, too many rules bog things down. In 1E and 2E, it was always easy to create an orc chieftain. Bump his hit points, give him a slightly better “to-hit” roll, hand him a +1 longsword, and away you go. In 3.5? Making a properly-statted 5th-level orc fighter was a nuisance, especially figuring out his skills and feats (and half of which wouldn't even come into play before the characters killed him!). I also found that things would get bogged down in 3.5 because you knew there was a rule for what you wanted to do somewhere in the Player's Handbook … so you spent a half-hour poring through books looking for that obscure rule, rather than just houseruling and moving on.

The complexity of the rules could also detract from trying to do cool stuff at times. If you wanted to do the aforementioned leap from a balcony, you knew you needed a lot of ranks in skills like Jump, Tumble, and the like to try such a thing. So while it was nice to know exactly how such things could be accomplished, the rules also defined limitations much more clearly.

But despite its differences from its predecessors, I think 3.0 and 3.5 had its strong points. I don’t consider it a better version of the game, though … just different. I personally like the more unified rules (even though it got rid of little grognard things like “negative AC = awesome”, which I always loved), but the fiddly explanations for how everything worked had its bad points as well.

Fourth Edition:

I don’t look at 4E as an evolution of 3.5. Rather, I think the designers went back to 1E and 2E … and then designed a new version of the game, as if 3.0 and 3.5 never existed.

A lot of the 4E game is great. I think the 4E design team found a happy medium between the need for houseruling in 1E/2E and the massive complexity of 3.0/3.5. The rules are unified. They explain pretty much everything that you need to run a game smoothly, and they do so quite easily. It’s something that's *very* noticeable from the DM side of the screen. In terms of running a game as a DM, 4E is by far my favorite version of D&D.

I also like the synergies between the character classes. The player character roles, which I thought would suck, are great. In earlier versions of D&D, there wasn’t an intentional effort to have characters work as a team in combat. There certainly were things characters could do together that would improve their chances of success (such as spell buffs), but I don’t think this was part of the initial design process prior to 4E. The ability to mark enemies in combat, manipulate terrain for tactical advantage, and the like shine much more in 4E than any other version of the game.

On the down side …

The game is very combat-intensive, even in comparison to other earlier editions of the game. Enough so that I consider 4E to be a miniatures game that features some roleplaying elements, rather than a roleplaying game that strongly uses miniatures (3.0/3.5), or just uses miniatures if that’s what you want (1E/2E). Utility skills and spells are present in 4E, but they’ve been very much pushed to the backburner.

I happen to like games that are roleplaying-intensive and feature lots of investigation, in addition to the combat. Without those utility skills and spells … well, I can run a 4E game that’s an investigative game, but the rules aren’t suited well – in my opinion – to run a game like that. It’s kind of like running a dungeon crawl for a White Wolf game like Vampire; you can do it, but there’s probably a whole bunch of other game systems better suited to do what you want.

Also, in many ways, the game is the least flexible of all the versions of AD&D/D&D. Everything has a clearly defined role, or a niche, or a slot. If you want to have the player characters fight sahuagin, you can’t just chuck sahuagin at them. To optimize the combat, you ideally need some of sort sahuagin controller, some skirmishers, perhaps a brute or a lurker as well … granted, it’s not too hard to do, but there’s something a bit off to me about making sure everything fits a formula. 3.0/3.5 did this to a certain extent, but I thought those versions of the game had a little more leeway. 4E, while streamlined, often limits options a bit much for my tastes. It makes me miss the days of 1E/2E where as a DM, I could send a group of sahuagin at the players characters, and I could determine the sahuagin's tactics and roles … rather than having the game dictate those tactics and roles to be in the rules by how the monsters were constructed.

The bottom line?

I like all four versions of the game.

I think they’re all flawed, but in all versions, the good they offer far outweighs the bad.

I probably like 1E and 2E best of all, but that’s probably just my inner nostalgic grognard speaking.

And if I were to run another AD&D/D&D campaign on a regular basis, the version I would run would be whatever the hell best suited the tastes of the gamers at my table.

Several years ago, I got the opportunity to write a book called "The Complete Guide to Liches" for Goodman Games. It was the first complete book that I ever wrote that got published. I have fond memories of writing it, despite the difficulties I found working on it.

Writing a full-length game book is a weird animal. It has to make sense, rules-wise, as well as be mechanically useful to a game. But write too much crunch, and it's boring.

Fiction needs to play a strong hand in these books as well. But the fiction can't be self-absorbed. It needs to have many, many ideas that are both interesting to read but easily ported into anyone's game. Make the ideas a little too esoteric, and you've killed a huge number of potential readers. Make it too generic, though, and it's boring. And make the book too much fiction ... well, it's interesting to read, but it can't be used in a game without some crunch to back it up.

"Liches" turned out okay - not great, just okay, but it's one of those books I'd love to take another crack at someday. I wasn't all that familiar with the d20 rules at that point, and I think it shows. It also shows the inexperience of a new writer putting words to paper. At some point - in some form - I'll try my hand at another monster book, only I'll do it better.

In the meantime ... I have this gem as my new standard.

Monstercology: Orcs is a great new 4E sourcebook by Rick Maffei. If you don't know Rick's work, you should ... and you will. Rick's one of the great unsung gaming writers I know. His adventure "The Scaly God" is one of the best DCCs ever published; he's written some of the best and most fiendish encounters for the various Dungeon Crawl Classic tournament adventures; and his most recent DCC, "Thrones of Punjar", is a must-have if you're playing a 4E game.

Monstercology: Orcs balances fluff with crunch effortlessly. Better still, it gets ideas for games flowing as you read it, and flowing easily. I picked it up this morning - and although I'm only about halfway through its pages, I've already gotten ideas for a great 4E campaign just by reading this book. I can't really say the same for many other 4E sourcebooks ... so kudos to you, Rick, for a job very, very well-done.

Although it's perfect for 4E, I think it's a good sourcebook for any sort of fantasy game. I know I'll be importing some of its concepts into my Warhammer game.

Rick's one of those writers whose stuff I love to read, and who always makes me want to be a better writer myself. He always makes me shake my head and go "... man, I wish I'd thought of that." And for a writer, I don't have any higher compliment than that.

So pick up Monstercology: Orcs, and get familiar with Rick's work.

I get the feeling that you'll be seeing his name on more and more books in the weeks and months to come.

Which is fantastic indeed.

You’ll notice that I post a lot of old-school gaming artwork on the site.

Part of it’s because the artwork – at times – reflects the sort of projects I’m working on. I might not be able to “officially” talk about the sorts I’ve projects I’m writing at times, but the artwork might provide a hint or two.

Part of it’s because the artwork reflects the subject or the tone of a given post.

But mostly, it’s because I dig the art.

I think I got as much into D&D way back in the day as much because of the cover art as because of the game itself. I still remember my sister Laura coming home with the D&D Basic set many, many moons ago, and looking at that crazy Erol Otus cover.

That made me want to play the game nearly as much as the idea of playing a wizard or an elf. Erol’s art isn’t necessarily the best stuff on the planet, but I love it. It evokes a feel for the game – a sense of something both wondrous and strange – and stamps a personality upon the game that’s unmistakable.

In the pages of the Basic rulebook, I started to become familiar with other artists who would become legends of D&D and AD&D. Jeff Dee. Jim Roslof. David C. Sutherland III. Bill Willingham. David Trampier. Tom Wham. Jim Holloway. And others I’m sure that I’m forgetting.

All gave the game wonderful visuals to the words of Gygax and company, and I think it’s safe to say that the game wouldn’t have nearly have become as popular as it did back in the day without their talented works.

I bought L1: The Secret of Bone Hill strictly because of the cover art. I love this cover. You have no idea what the adventure’s about based on the cover, but dammit, it screams adventure to me. I can’t tell you how many adventure modules I bought strictly based on the cover art, not knowing or caring what the actual module might be about. Turned out that the adventure (and its sequel, "The Assassin's Knot") turned out to be preety damn amazing as well.

I always loved the back cover of White Plume Mountain. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that “Blackrazor” was actually Stormbringer, and that the whitehaired warrior was none other than an uncredited Elric of Melnibone.

Of interest (to me, anyway) are the unfinished parts of this drawing, which recently came to light. Given TSR’s later kibosh of demons and devils in order to become “family friendly”, I’m not surprised that the complete drawing went unfinished.

I got into “Villains and Vigilantes” strictly because of the art. I can remember old advertisements in Dragon Magazine, featuring a hero called Magnetor. Much like the D&D modules, I saw this ad and immediately wanted to play the game. Didn’t know what the rules were, and didn’t care.

I just wanted to play a character as cool as Magnetor.

Dragon Magazine had its share of awe-inspiring artists as well. I remember that Jim Holloway usually did most of the art for the “Ares” section. I got introduced to the art of Larry Elmore and Clyde Caldwell through their great covers as well. Though Elmore and Caldwell usually veered a little too close to cheesecake-chainmail-bikini for my tastes, I still loved their work.

The recent “Master Dungeons” series by Goodman Games has recycled a bit of the cover art from those old magazines. If I ever got a crack at writing something for that series, I’d love to use the Elmore piece above. At least for me, there’s an adventure lurking in that painting that’s just waiting to be told. (Just where does that path lead?)

RIFTS introduced me to the works of Keith Parkinson and Brom.

These two covers, both done by Keith Parkinson, kickstarted a pretty damn good RIFTS campaign that I ran for many years. And Brom’s stuff always had a surreal, sinister edge to it that I always admired. (Brom’s stuff is what stoked my interest in the Dark Sun campaign setting for AD&D as well.)

I’ve always thought that covers are just as important for a game book as the content inside. A good cover won’t necessarily make up for lousy content … but you want people to pick the book off the shelf in the first place. A great cover is a great way to do that. Also, a great cover gets gamers fired up to run something vivid and imaginative. I don’t think I would ever have been nearly as inspired to run my old RIFTS campaign if the book covers had been boring and bland. With Keith Parkinson’s covers, I got a sense of a truly strange, alien menace, and I could take that sense and develop it into something I could call my own.

As a writer, I’ve been lucky enough to have had some great covers on the things I’ve written. My favorite is still the cover for “Curse of the Emerald Cobra”, which Mike Wilson knocked out of the park.

And this guy named Jeff Dee did not one, but two of the covers for my adventures.

I still can’t quite wrap my head around that, but I love it.

Here’s to the artists who inspire us!