Part Three: Rise of the Big Three. Issues 21-30
Part Three: Rise of the Big Three. Issues 21-30
Overview
Over the period of October 1980 to May 1981 there is a definite sense of the hobby maturing, with a further move away from whimsy and gamism (where dungeons are places deliberately set up as a challenge with a solution) towards a style of play where the character, its personality and a believable setting are more important than artificial tricks and traps. Perhaps this is in part due to the rise of games such as Traveller and RuneQuest with their different emphases on what a player character does, or perhaps it is the shift in writers contributing to the magazine away from the likes of Don Turnbull (a strong advocate of the big-dungeon-full-of-traps style of play) towards the likes of Andy Slack, Marcus L Rowland and Oliver Dickinson who emphasise settings and ideas. Quality-wise the magazine remains strong with plenty of useful articles per issue and a colour cover, bimonthly for 75p.
Games
As suggested in the title, this is the period where
Traveller and
RuneQuest rise massively in terms of output and popularity, and such gems as
Twilight's Peak,
Deluxe Traveller,
Griffin Mountain and
Cults of Prax are released. Although RQ, according to reader polls during this period, remains a niche system (played by 9% of respondents of the first reader’s poll, I think), it still stands well above other systems out at the time, and one only needs to look at the adverts for games shops, and the coverage given to the games that they advertise, to see this. The nearest challenger is
Tunnels and Trolls which has a steady output of material, but the Dwarf tends to lack coverage. Perhaps as a simpler game there are fewer rules ideas that can be introduced, perhaps there just aren’t the contributions for it. However, Ken St. Andre, creator of T&T, gets a brief column putting him on a par with Gary Gygax, Marc Miller and Greg Stafford and shows that there isn’t an inherent anti-T&T bias to the Dwarf. Other games that are released during this period include
Aftermath, a post-apocalypse RPG by FGU,
Man, Myth and Magic by Yaquinto (which is more of a campaign with a game system attached) and
Champions, which adds superhero gaming to the list of available genres (although the reviewer, Dave Morris, thinks it’s of limited appeal, c.f. Don Turnbull and Traveller). Chaosium take their RuneQuest engine, Basic Roleplaying, and use it to give us
Stormbringer (the RPG of Moorcock’s Elric) and, in production, some game based on the works of an obscure pulp horror writer, called
Call of Cthulhu. It’ll never catch on.
Scenarios
The scenarios illustrate the trend in gaming from trap-filled dungeons to more serious scenarios quite well, with the first two issues (21 and 22) featuring The
Tomb of the Maharaja (by S. Hartley) and
The Search for the Temple of the Golden Spire (by Barney Sloane) and the last two issues (29 and 30) featuring
Weed War (by S. McIntyre) and
The Curse of the Wildland (by Phil Masters).
The first of these,
Maharaja, is a pretty uninspiring zoo/trap dungeon, the second,
Spire, is one of those adventures where the PCs have to solve a riddle to solve the scenario (although it’s not clear what they get at the end. General treasure, it would seem. No specific treasure, no saving the world or any discernable end-point). To be fair it
is a competition scenario where such things seem to be more acceptable. It’s good in parts, but it does feel like a very artificial set-up, a game rather than a world.
By way of contrast,
Weed War is a Traveller adventure set on a water world where pirates are stealing the harvest of a sea plant vital for drug manufacture. As with most published Traveller adventures, the referee is given the bare bones and left to get on with it. There is nothing in it specifically designed as a puzzle; all the obstacles come from the scenario itself and whatever results the actions of the players create. Good stuff, however the map of level 2 of the underwater base bears an uncanny resemblance to Hitler.
Maps That Look Like Hitler
The Curse of the Wildland is a simple wilderness adventure (with 6 encounter areas) and although it too has a riddle, this doesn’t form the crux of the adventure but is instead the words of an oracle that may or may not help the PCs. It’s not too difficult to complete, but again it presents a world and a scenario that feels real rather than artificial.
There is one other full Traveller scenario,
Amber to Red (by Neil Cheyne), involving the theft of a starship, which might make a good campaign opener. Notable D&D scenarios include the
Hive of the H’rrl (by Daniel Collerton), a general purpose setting to go with the “Flymen” monsters given in the same issue, and the
Lair of Maldred the Mighty (by Mark Byng), a highly-detailed puzzle dungeon, which is okay for that kind of adventure but the print is tiny in order to fit it all in, and I’m afraid the aesthetics mean that I’ve never warmed to it (how shallow!). Those last three are all winning entries in various competitions.
Articles
There are two sizeable series of “How to...” articles running through these issues.
An Introduction to Dungeons and Dragons by Lew Pulsipher gives an overview of game play and tactics whereas Roger Musson’s
Dungeon Architect series gives sage advice to the DM for designing dungeon adventures. RM’s series contains more meat and is an entertaining read; both are a little dated but still quite useful for that style of play. If you could only read one, read Roger Musson’s series. Given his past entries into the Fiend Factory, such as the notorious stair stalker, it comes as a surprise that Roger is not a keen advocate of the “silly” style of play, although I suppose his “purple mold”, used for preventing access to un-written areas of the dungeon, is in that kind of dungeon-specific monster vein. Paul Vernon’s series on
Designing a Pseudo-Mediaeval Society starts near the end of this batch of issues and gives some very detailed information about creating a more realistic economy for a D&D setting based on the “Ale Standard”. Probably more detail than you’d really need, although it does distill into a useful table of costs for services and contains some food for thought.
The Magic Jar, by Andy Slack, is an article about converting characters stats from one game to another. There are a few mathematical tables that match the probabilities from different types of roll (3d6 vs 2d6, etc.) and some examples mostly for games that never made it. Nevertheless, I’ve found this useful from time to time.
Other D&D articles discuss such matters as a spell point system (by Bill Milne), alignment (in a very intelligent article by OC Macdonald that considers how morality is measured in other games as well as D&D) and Marcus L Rowland prefigures Spelljammer with a series of excellent articles on fantasy space travel, backing it up with an adventure,
Operation Counterstrike. One JP Hasledene of Boston (I suspect of Lincolnshire rather than Massachusets) gets very irate at the idea of D&D in space – “...this spacefaring system doesn’t fit in with the general atmosphere that AD&D creates...Perhaps if the author feels he needs a change from ‘ordinary’ AD&D – insult though it is to call AD&D ordinary – he should play Traveller instead”. Ouch! Operation Counterstrike misses an opportunity and is really just another dungeon crawl but with added alien machines, quite mundane compared to MLR’s other innovative ideas. It’s another one where the hard-to-read font puts me off.
Character Conjuring comes to an end as a regular feature, after a range of offerings. Most of these could be created under d20 rules quite easily, and these days seem almost mundane.
Brownies (by Bob Lock) and
Lizardmen (Roger E Moore and Michael Brown) are added to the list of playable monsters.
The War Smith (by Roger E Moore) is a sort of fire/war cleric.
The Summoner (by Penelope Hill – a girl?!) and
Elementalist (Stephen Bland) are specialist wizards who do what you would expect from their titles.
The Merchant class (also Roger E Moore) could be covered by an Expert with the appropriate skill set but is an attempt to create a character class that focuses on trade and discussion.
The Black Priest is an interesting NPC class from Lew Pulsipher, albeit illustrated in dubious taste, not unlike the “Cultist” class from the Freeport Trilogy, giving mechanics to an archetypal villain. Finally the
Detective by Marcus L Rowland could be created using Urban Ranger and/or Master Inquisitive from Eberron. Most of these classes are a bit underpowered compared to mainstream clerics and magic-users and although I offered them in my games at the time nobody was interested. It’s fun, though, with these old 1e classes where people felt that they had to make titles for each level – one of those great unquestioned oddities about AD&D.
On top of that, Traveller. Lots of Traveller. Not only is there a Starbase column each issue but there is usually another feature article, be it on setting up and running Traveller adventures and campaigns, or new vehicles, variant character creation, the
Android and
Secret Service careers (by Roger E Moore and Robert McMahon respectively), a complex critical hit system (that could be ported elsewhere if you like a lot of realism, by Steve Cook), expanded rules for jump drive problems, vac suits, nobles, even, shock, laser swords! Andy Slack and Bob McWilliams are the prime source of articles, but other contributers add their two credits. Not to be overlooked, there's a good article by Andy Slack called "
A Backdrop of Stars" which, apart from some layout artist taking the title as an instruction and setting it in almost unreadable white on black, is an excellent discussion on setting up a Traveller campaign, drawing inspiration from various SF sources.
Starting Issue 19, Oliver Dickinson introduces some regular RuneQuest material, both in the form of his excellent
Griselda stories and in the new monthly
Runerites column, the first of which features unarmed combat by E Varley. There is a wierd symmetry to this which we shall see in the last of these columns.
Fiend Factory and
Treasure Chest continue to do what they do, for better and worse. The days of magic items specifically designed to mess with adventurers, or monsters with a jokey theme are largely done with (bar some purposefully silly monsters for the April issue). The offerings from Treasure Chest are either things that now exist in 3rd Ed. (or similar), or not very interesting, and so I won’t cover too many specifics.
The Staff of Earthquakes (Phil Masters) is quite neat; not only can the wielder use it to cast an earthquake spell, but can brace against it to be immune to such effects himself. The items in the “
assassin’s toolkit” (by MF Ozanne) are also nifty, particularly the
Scarab of Assassination, a kind of remote control Scarab of Death. Finally, I like the spell “
leafskin” (Roger E Moore again) that allows the caster to photosynthesise; kind of a lesser version of barkskin, perhaps.
Fiend Factory moves towards more interesting monsters, and notably both the monstermark and the annoying illuminated names for the monsters are gone. Quality remains variable, but stand-outs worth keeping are the
dream demon (by Phil Masters. Just the picture is evocative - a butterfly-winged skeleton), the
shadow goblin (by Barney Sloane. I used these to great effect in an adventure), the
argorian wormkin (that splits in two unless you kill it outright – a creation of Kyuss, perhaps? Barney Sloane again), the
stirge demon (a fitting creation for a D&D setting by Ivo [sic] Smith) and the
birch spirit (by CN Cartmell, a kind of undead dryad – the birch spirit, that is, not CN Cartmell, who might be I suppose...). The birch spirit could, pretty much, be made in 3.x by applying a ghost template to a dryad, and some of the other monsters, like the Trevor French’s
coacula (vampire wolf), are also creatures that the inclusion of templates makes so much easier to create, and removes the necessity for a special monster entry.
Dream Demon, artist unknown.
General Thoughts
There’s some good material in these issues. An expanding range of games covered means more variety to the material and more contributors. Attitudes in gaming have already changed from the early days, at least as reflected in the magazine. The player of 1982 wants believable, logical adventure settings with maybe a dash of whimsy, rather than monsters with silly powers in a complex of specially designed traps and tricks (early players may well have wanted that kind of thing too, but the industry standard didn’t reflect it so much). A range of different settings; post-apocalyptic, wild west, spies, super-hero, samurai, rabbits, horror and sci-fi as well as several flavours of fantasy are available for play (pre-GURPS and d20, however, each system tends to be either unique, with varying degrees of playability, or a thinly-disguised D&D clone). Even the idea that D&D can be used in radically different settings, such as fantasy outer-space, is taking root. Finally, the news section of issue 30 mentions the possibility of playing D&D via computers, using the Prestel system. If you ask me, it’ll never catch on, even with the swanky Commodore PETs seen in the photos of Games Day ’81.
