My understanding is that “Gygaxian” just means “like Gygax(‘s approach)”, and can refer to anything from writing style to design sensibility. “Gygaxian naturalism” specifically refers to a sort of pseudo-naturalism used to justify the presence of obviously unnatural fantasy elements in an environment. For example, saying that the Caves of Chaos were some kind of social experiment engineered by a mad wizard. The implication being that this was how Gygax did it.
Ah, that makes sense. To me, Gygaxian just means something utterly ridiculous seemingly designed piss off and or punish players for having the temerity to participate in a module.
Gygaxian feels more like a prose style as much as a dungeon design principle.
Since Gygax was, loke, the second or third person to even try writing a published adventure, I'd say pretty much all Dungeons can accurately be called Gygaxian, om the other hand.
Yes, "Gygaxian" is a modifier describing at least a couple of different things.
Gygaxian Prose tends to be purple, highly ornamented, and shows off the writer's vocabulary and knowledge of obscure and archaic terminology. It often uses circumlocutory phrasing.
("Assassins are evil in alignment (perforce, as the killing of humans and other intelligent life forms for the purpose of profit is basically held to be the antithesis of weal)." Some folks have theorized that it reflects Gygax being sensitive about his own lack of higher education, and wanting to assert his intelligence, especially since he was often keeping company with people who had done formal advanced study of the same historical subjects he was interested in. It's also definitely reflective of the prose styles of at least one of his favorite authors- Jack Vance. Possibly also Clark Ashton Smith, though CAS was left out of Appendix N, which has been debated whether its an oversight by OSR nerds for many years.
Gygaxian Naturalism usually refers to the effort to make a fantasy world seem more realistic and have nods to things like ecology. Examples include the trolls in Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth (IIRC) which he tells us subsist on giant cave crickets in a neighboring cavern. Or the chapel Frank Mentzer added to The Keep on the Borderlands after noticing that there was a priest but no chapel, a correction Gygax agreed with as fixing an oversight. Or the monster lairs in The Caves of Chaos having guard posts, sleeping chambers, mates and young. Or the pages in the 1E DMG where Gary writes a detailed description of an ogre treasure horde, full of trade goods and mundane items as well as valuables, to make the horde look plausibly like something the ogres would have gotten from raiding merchant caravans and such. Or the detailed descriptions he gives in the DMG about how different monster lairs will respond proactively, augment defenses, and react with increased organization (or not) to repeated assaults by a group of adventurers who return to town to rest and heal after a first attack. Gary wanted his worlds to feel logical and verisimilitudinous, and his players to be able to make logical deductions and decisions within the context of that world.
That latter leads us to
Gygaxian Skilled Play, a concept of the kind of play Gary found really stimulating and exciting and clever. In which players use their acquired knowledge of the game world and rules to solve puzzles and tackle problems, and adapt to new surprises (like "gotcha" monsters). And their knowledge of things like, e.g. military tactics to anticipate and counter things like those aforementioned monster lair defensive strategies I mentioned above, from the DMG.
I much prefer “nonlinear dungeon” and “looping” a dungeon, simply because going with another non-transparent phrase isn’t going to help with anything.
“Gygaxian” means a lot of different things, obviously; “Gygaxian prose” and “Gygaxian naturalism” are separate concepts.
Yeah, "looping" is one of the closest. There are other kinds of nonlinear dungeons.
Kind of like a starburst pattern. That's one type of level design, for sure; and starburst is as good a name for it as any. The sample-of-play dungeon in the 1e DMG uses this format, I think.
Another type is dendritic, where there's numerous dead-end branches (and sub-branches) off a single "stem" route.
There's another type of design that kinda resembles the freeway map around Indianapolis, where there's a "ring road" with various ways of getting to and through the center of it. The lower level of S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth uses this format, except if you squint there's actually two ring roads, one inside the other.
I don't think a starfish or dendritic layout reflects Jaquays' design principles which the original article exalts. Part of the point of a Jaquays dungeon is that it contains loops and the ability to encounter stuff in different order. Depending on which ways the PCs go, they may have SEVERAL different orders in which they can encounter various rooms and locations. Combine that with multiple entrances, so even the first room/area encountered can vary. And multiple and tastefully-deployed vertical connections between levels, so areas can be circumnavigated vertically as well as horizontally, and approached from different directions that way too.
I may have missed the finer details. Or even the whole thing.
In that case, I'm sorry. I admit to have only very, very superficially looked into this thing.
(It's just weird in general when somewhat better known people write an article about some ancient thing or practice that most everyone's been doing forever, and then the thing or practice starts getting associated with them, as if they alone invented it, while in reality anyone with a bit of practice and experience arrived (or will or would arrive) at mostly the same solution. It may just be me, though. Non-linear dungeons, or more like non-linear adventures and adventure sites, for example? We used them back in the '80s, without ever reading an official module, to which we def had no access back then. Non-linearity was and is just logical, say, if you ever been to a castle or looked at a map or been to a trickier situation in life, right? Sure, I'm happy if someone writes a step-by-step instruction for those who haven't gotten there yet, in fact, I applaud them… but you get my point. I'm sorry if my point is/was not applicable and misconstrued regarding the current situation. I'll go educate myself.)
If you haven't read the
original articles, I recommend them. All the cool ideas that
Charlequin listed a few posts ago, including looping options and paths, verticality, and multiple entrances, which Jaquays starting using in dungeons like Caverns of Thracia back in the 70s were IME a bit more advanced and thoughtful than most attempts even at non-linear dungeons. She had a TON of neat ideas and she had them really early. IMO she deserves the credit.
