Posts from December 2009

Well, it's the end of 2009.

The year went a little differently than I thought it would, but then again, that always seems to be the case. On a personal level, all things considered, it was marvelous. After all, gaming has allowed me to become both acquainted with a marvelous bunch of new friends and re-acquainted again with many older friends, equally marvelous. Pretty damn good times with all of these people, both new and old, and I hope they continue in the months and years to come.

On the professional side of things ... while the real job is just fine, freelancing this year had a lot of challenges. Some projects went well; most didn't. I think the expectations I had for myself over the past few years are simply just never going to become a reality, and I've reached a point where hard work and persistence just isn't enough on its own to get to where I'd hoped to go. I just don't have the energy - or, sadly, the interest - to keep tilting at windmills anymore.

So it's simply time to be thankful for all the wonderful things I've worked on over the years, all the fantastic people I've met and all the great experiences I've had ... and start moving in a different direction. And, to be honest, moving in a new direction is pretty damn exciting, so I'm happy to be trying something new at this point, whether it's successful or not.

To all of you gaming freelancers out there, the very best of luck to you in 2010. I'm still rolling dice, and I can't wait to see what worlds and adventures you guys dream up.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Work, holidays, rewriting a project from a corrupted file … it’s been a hell of a busy month. Hoping to complete NaClaMoMo before year’s end, but we’ll see.

In the meantime … a quick rumination on writing in general.

I’ve been writing for a long time. I was writing short stories by the time I was ten, was writing my own adventures for games shortly thereafter … but I never really thought about being a writer, if that makes any sense. Writing was something that I did, but it didn’t define who I was. I enjoyed writing, but it wasn’t a part of my very being. Yet.

End of eighth grade. I’m fourteen, and I’m playing in a baseball game. Stretch out to make a play at third base, with one foot on the bag, and the baserunner tramples my ankles. Just doesn’t break it, he shatters it. So I get to spend the summer between middle school and high school like Paul Sheldon in Misery, laid up and hobbled. Fun, fun, fun.

During that summer, the family goes to visit my aunt in Michigan, and I go with them. There’s not a hell of a lot I can do. So I read. A lot. It doesn’t take me long to go through all the books I brought with me, so eventually I start reading whatever I can find on the shelves in my aunt’s house. Most of it’s not to my tastes. But I find one that definitely is.

I’ve never read Stephen King before. But his stories and his writing style just resonates with me. It’s not just his gruesome horror and his black humor, either. He develops characters so wonderfully well, especially the supporting characters. He captures the way characters speak in a believable way. He has a real sense of pacing, of timing – he’s a natural storyteller, with a very matter-of-fact, almost folksy way of telling a tale. He writes in a way that makes me want to write my own stories. By the time I finish the 1,100 pages of IT, the thought occurs to me: I want to be a writer.

(And if you want to know where I get my fondness and overuse of ellipses from … you can probably thank Mr. King.)

I heal up, and go to high school. Inexplicably, I wind up with a free period in the middle of the day that is shared by none of the few friends I have. So I do what any painfully shy, antisocial dork would do from about 10:00 to 10:40 in the morning. I go to the library. And I discover their collection of Stephen King books. During my freshman year, I proceed to devour the likes of The Stand, Salem’s Lot, Christine, Firestarter, and a good number of other early works by King.

And then I start to write, because I know I'm a writer.

The early stuff, naturally, is nothing but short stories, nothing but horror, and is just a pale imitation of Stephen King. It’s crap, for the most part. But I don’t have my own voice as a writer just yet, and I don’t know quite what to write. So I’m just writing someone else’s stuff instead, trying to find my own original voice by using someone else’s first.

Meanwhile, I continue to read. I continue to devour King. Somewhere in there, I discover The Talisman, which was written by King and Peter Straub. I check out Straub, and books like Floating Dragon and The Throat (still one of my favorites of all time). I see how to write horror in a different way, in a more refined and elegant way. My stories and writings start borrowing elements of Straub as well as King.

And that’s how it goes for a while.

I discover the awesome works of Elmore Leonard, the crime novelist, who has the most amazing knack for writing believable, natural dialogue I’ve ever read.

I discover Neal Stephenson, who has an astonishing ability to seamlessly weave a host of strange and seemingly unrelated topics into a carefully crafted story.

I discover George R.R. Martin, the wonderful fantasy writer who puts unflinching grit into fantasy, and who effortlessly juggles dozens upon dozens of characters in his novels without difficulty.

And I discover dozens of others. I read. A lot.

Every time I discover one of these amazing authors, a little piece of what I admire in them gets added into my own style of writing.

And as I continue to write, the collection of pieces gets a little bigger … and the edges between them start to fade away. It’s not so much a collection anymore as a bunch of influences. For in the middle of them all stands my own unique voice, definitely shaped by these pieces, but ultimately something that’s completely my own.

I haven’t written a novel, or even short stories, in a long, long time. I stopped a couple of years ago to focus on writing for gaming companies. That was fun, and for the most part I enjoyed that experience immensely … but over the past year, I realized that it was time to leave the world of gaming for awhile, and get back into writing fiction. And that’s what I’ve slowly been doing for the past few months, as I wrap up my final gaming projects and obligations once and for all.

I recently started on a horror novel. It’s something I had kicking around for well over a decade, but never quite knew how to write it. Ten years ago, the story was beyond me. Now? I can see it. More importantly, I can see how to create it.

I jumped into the manuscript, which started falling together nicely. Almost too nicely. So I stopped, and took a critical look at it. I realized that in a roundabout way, the story does owe a few things to some of the works of one Mr. Stephen King – IT, for starters. And The Tommyknockers. And The Shining. I got a little uncomfortable.

Whose voice is this?

And that’s when I realized the voice was mine.

My story may be a bit like those novels or the surface, in a superficial way … but it’s definitely my story. Told my way, in my own style, and using my own ideas.

I felt good about that realization. In fact, I felt great.

So since then, I’ve continued to work on the story in earnest. Haven't slept much, but that's okay. I'm back in a creative groove.

I’ll let you know when it starts looking like something like a finished novel.

"Palace of the Silver Princess" is one of those modules better known for its checkered history than for its actual content … which is probably a good thing, since its content isn’t all that memorable. For those unfamiliar with the adventure, “Palace” was originally written by Jean Wells, and featured a now-infamous orange cover. Rumor has it that some of the “objectionable” interior art led to quite a stir in the TSR offices after it was printed … but what isn’t rumor is that virtually all copies of the module were destroyed before ever shipping out to stores. Only a handful of these original orange-covered modules survived, making them an incredibly rare collector’s item. Later on, a green-covered version of the module – now rewritten and co-authored with Tom Moldvay – actually made it to the shelves of gaming stores around the world, with all of the “objectionable” art removed and replaced.

For what it’s worth, I never understood the big deal about the art. The big rumor was that the “objectionable” pieces were very risqué, but they actually aren’t, or at least they aren’t any more so than artwork featured in stuff like Deities & Demigods or even Vault of the Drow. Wizards of the Coast actually posted the “objectionable” artwork on their website a few years ago, along with a downloadable file of the original "Palace of the Silver Princess". There’s one piece that’s arguably risqué … but I would venture to guess that a particular piece drawn by Erol Otus that happens to not be very flattering to one Mr. Gary Gygax caused more of a stir than anything else. If there’s a smoking gun as to why the original really got pulped, that would be the one I would point at.

Well, that, and it’s just not a particularly good module.

Both versions of "Palace of the Silver Princess" work with the same basic premise. Unwittingly uncovered by dwarves, a magical ruby known as the Eye of Arik has sent the valley of Haven into utter chaos. In order to save Haven, the player characters must travel to a ruined palace to destroy the Eye of Arik, prevent its evil, god-like owner – Arik of the Hundred Eyes – from escaping a dimensional prison, and save the Princess Argenta.

Apart from the clichéd “save the princess” motif, "Palace of the Silver Princess" departs from many of the other modules of the era in that it pre-supposes the player characters are indeed heroic. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes the DM’s life more difficult if they aren’t. (“Eye of Arik? Evil palace? Not my problem, let’s move on to the next town.”) From the get-go, "Palace of the Silver Princess" – both versions – make certain assumptions about what the players will do, and that’s not a good thing.

As for the rest … well, let’s look individually at each version of “Palace”.

THE ORANGE VERSION.

God, what a mess. The initial levels of “Palace” are structured much like “B1: In Search of the Unknown”, in that it’s assumed the DM wants to take a hand in the creation of the adventure. It’s a true sandbox … rooms are essentially empty, with the DM being told “put a monster in this room” or “put a trap in that room”, with little guidance otherwise. Different, but not necessarily a bad idea, particularly if the adventure’s being run by an experienced DM. However, since the module bills itself as “A Special Instructional Module” intended for new DMs and new players … not a good idea. Basic/Expert D&D came long before the concepts of Challenge Ratings and Monster Levels, so it’s easy for a neophyte to not really get the difference between sticking a single zombie in a room or sticking three ghouls in it, and inadvertently turning the adventure into something next to impossible.

Later on, as we get to the detailed, keyed areas, there’s more problems. The map frequently doesn’t correspond to the adventure as written – for example, there’s no stairs leading to upper areas of the palace where important stuff is located. The encounters are also very disjointed, and read more like a random encounter list than a cohesive dungeon. (In this room, four fire beetles! In the next room, three zombies! In the room after that, a decapus!) I’m all for having monsters in every room, but there at least needs to be a coherent theme connecting them all, and the orange version of “Palace” sadly doesn’t have that. Worse still, the adventure features a slew of new monsters, all of which are incredibly lame. My favorite happens to be the bubble monster that attacks with … yes, you guessed it … bubbles.

The module also commits one of the cardinal sins of adventure design in that in order to achieve one of the big goals of the adventure – destroying the Eye of Arik – it assumes the players will find a number of items to let them commence with the destroying. If they don’t find all the items, though, they’re out of luck. Considering how easy it is to overlook a good number of these items (like a silver harp) – especially since YOU NEED STAIRS to reach some of them – not a good plan. Again, this is something I’ve covered in other NaClaMoMo reviews, but it’s worth mentioning here – having the items should help to destroy the Eye, but it shouldn’t be necessary to actually have them.

THE GREEN VERSION.

Well, now we have stairs, so that’s already an improvement.

Also gone are most of the lame “new” monsters, replaced by more traditional creatures, as well as the open-ended sandbox beginning. It’s clear in comparing the two that Tom Moldvay did a fair bit of overhauling the original module, and trying to make it more true to being “A Special Instructional Module”. Instead, the beginning now reads more like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, with very specific options and directions being provided to both the DM and the players. The DM is given read-aloud text for the players, which contains specific choices for the players; depending on which choices the players take, the DM is then provided very specific instructions as to what to do next. It’s a great idea for newbie DMs … the execution, though, isn’t very good. There’s certain lines of read-aloud text that probably shouldn’t be read-aloud (like “The DM should roll 1D6 to see if the party is surprised”), and if you actually follow the logical progression of “If the players do X, then go to Y … if the players then choose C, then go to D” … well, you can wind up in unending circular loops, or dead ends that could frustrate the players. Anyone actually using this as written probably needs to read through it very carefully before running the adventure.

As we get to later areas of the adventure, Tom Moldvay makes the adventure a bit more coherent – certain areas of the original adventure are removed and replaced with new ones, which improve the overall adventure quite a bit – but it’s still very flawed. A lot of the encounters still read like nothing more than a bunch of random encounters, and have little relation to the overall story contained in the module. There’s too much treasure – considering that the players may start as first-level characters, they could easily wind up with close to 10,000 gp and 2 magical weapons apiece by the end of the adventure. And the ending gets very tough. If the DM is awarding XP throughout the course of the adventure and allowing characters to “level up” as the module progresses, that’s not a problem; but if first-level characters are being used, there’s virtually no way to make it to the end of the module if the DM only intends to let the characters level up once the module is completed.

"Palace of the Silver Princess" is an interesting module with some good concepts, but overall, it’s one of the weaker adventures of an era filled with great ones. I wouldn’t even consider running the original version of the adventure – it’s a collector’s item, nothing more – and the later Moldvay revision of the adventure is something I would only consider with a heavy amount of rewriting.

Interesting history? Yes.

Classic module? Alas, no.

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Some quick housekeeping notes …

One – yes, it’s December. Yes, NaClaMoMo stands for National Classic Module Month … and it started in November. So sue me. Real life, as always, interfered with the best of intentions. I have two modules left that I intended to cover for NaClaMoMo – “The War Rafts of Kron” and “Starspawn of Volturnus” – and I will do that over the next week or so. So stick around for that, if you think that might catch your fancy.

Two – I’m pleased to note that NaClaMoMo has been embraced by some other writers as well. Rick Maffei chose to make his own personal review of “The Village of Hommlet”, which I enjoyed immensely. He covered several aspects of the adventure that I simply didn’t in my own review, and it’s well worth reading. He also reviewed “The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan”, a module that I like but admittedly know little about … thank you kindly, Rick, for the review! (I remembered the Metamorphosis Alpha nod but little else.) Your high praise for this one means I’ll definitely be digging that one out of storage and giving it a closer look – unless, of course, you still plan on running it at some point!

Though NaClaMoMo was essentially a challenge to myself – namely, to try and write a semi-regular series of articles for the website – if you’ve got your own website or a place on the Internet to write, why not write a little piece on a classic adventure you’ve always liked? You don’t even have to be overly verbose like me. Just a paragraph or so on something you’ve enjoyed, something that’s influenced you to roll dice and kill imaginary monsters, and to have fun with your friends while doing so.

I’d love to hear about the adventures that have inspired you.