I had my hopes up for this one. After all, “With Folded Hands” is a bona fide super-classic short story. Yeah, sure. Isaac Asimov was onto something when he took the “Robot as Monster” trend of the pulp era and then turned it on its head with his three laws of robotics. But Jack Williamson was even more onto something significant when he managed to turn Asimov’s sterile and naive picture of robots on its head.
Who was ultimately more influential? You know, seriously– the guy that coined the term “Prime Directive” might have been a bigger deal. Personally, though, I just really hate robots. I hate them even more now that so called artificial intelligence has ruined pretty much everything. I really want a mega-classic science fiction novel where the robots finally get their comeuppance, but I hate to break it to you… The Humanoids is not it!
It sure sets you up to think that that is how it is going to play out. The action of the tale follows up that of “With Folded Hands” except it is set on a world that is on the verge of being subjected by these meddlesome busybody robots that won’t let anyone do anything remotely dangerous. They are even scarier this time around as not only do they eliminate entire professions wholesale as if they were suddenly inundated with mass quantities of H1B visa holders, but they also reflexively dope up anyone that looks as if they are even remotely “unhappy”. Shades of Prozac and ADHD meds!
Taking a page from another landmark Asimovian work, humanity’s last hope against these awful do-gooders that won’t even let people smoke or drink is a group of psionically powered misfits: a teleporter, a telekinetic, and a clairvoyant. Everything is set to play out like a typical action flick where the plucky good guys save the universe at the last moment. The suspense is terrific. It appears that the good guys only have the narrowest of chances!
But now… I actually have to spoil the whole book in order comment on just what needs to be said about this work. Forgive me. I know this is not how this should normally be done, but in this case… I absolutely have to make an exception.
First off… the protagonist is an uninspiring “delta”. He is an ordinary weakling with a slide rule that has found his place in life by being a workaholic. Unlike, say, Ursula Le Guin’s lead characters, this guy can associate with a child for several chapters and not come off like some kind of creepazoid. This is a credit to Williamson, who does not act like he is at all privy to any of the darker shenanigans which have plagued science fiction and its fandom at least since the late thirties. But there is more than one way to fall short. In this case– and it pains me to have to say this– but really… Williamson appears to have fallen prey to the sort of modernism that C. S. Lewis describes in The Abolition of Man. Judging from this novel, it appears to me that Williamson is a member of the group that Lewis termed “men without chests”.
Here’s why I say that. The protagonist stumbles into godlike superpowers. But he complete fails in his mission. All of his friends are captured and brainwashed by the evil robots. Worse, a guy that serves as a collaborator with the space equivalent of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere not only defeats the hero, but he also even takes his wife from him. The protagonist ends this climatic encounter throwing ineffectual punches while his wife tells him to just let her be happy with this traitor to humanity.
This absolutely crushing down beat is delivered just when the reader is primed for something a little closer to a genuine eucatastrophe. I am not even sure what Williamson was attempting to do here as he absolutely had the chance to lay down a mega-classic science fiction novel that could stand the test of time. As it is, I have to admit that The End of Eternity is a better novel– and that’s in spite of the fact that it is marred by the typical Asimovian gamma male protagonist. It’s just a better plotted story with a more satisfying conclusion that makes sense of everything that had puzzled you along the way.
Meanwhile, Williamson? He positively humiliates his protagonist in the worst way possible… and then he allows him to wake up a couple years later and just “understand” that the bad guys he was supposed to defeat actually had mankind’s best interests at heart all along. This is insulting, really. Particularly so for somebody that has had to witness first hand tacky AI’s ruining what used to be a moderately useful internet.
Jack Williamson is a nice guy who has a career that spans a great many decades. His entire body of work was called out on the justifiably infamous Appendix N list from the 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide. Why exactly would he have fired the imagination of either Gary Gygax or one of his close collaborators? I can’t say! But I can tell you that it could not have been because of The Humanoids. It really should have been a first rate novel. In reality, Williamson ought not ever have revisited his brilliant short story “With Folded Hands” at all.
Disappointing!
I knew that this was one of Jack Williamson’s most famous stories. I knew that it had been adapted into a novel-length treatment and that Williamson’s peers had lavished it with undiluted praise. I knew that this was something I really ought to get around to reading sooner or later. What I didn’t know was just how much enjoyment I would get out of it.
It is indeed a classic-tier story that ought on to be on everyone’s shortlist. And no, I can’t offer any explanation for why this author and this work just vanished from all discussion in the years following his death. It’s stupid. And it ought not be so.
That it was written in 1947 ensures its baseline ethos to hail from the picture perfect 1950’s era suburban home and its happy nuclear family. That every bit of it is annihilated due to the import of initially harmless-seeming black humanoids is weirdly unsettling. First the entirely all too relatable protagonist loses his livelihood due to the arrival of these newcomers. Then he loses the ability to enjoy any of his or his family’s hobbies. Finally he loses the ability to criticize or comment on anything about the changes to his life which all are ostensibly to keep him happy.
It’s just too real.
It is fun to tick through the number of science fiction tropes which Williamson anticipates. He has here a very well executed rendering of Star Trek’s Borg and also the Dumarest series’ Cyclan. In a move which predicts both the internet and countless “Smart” devices, Williamson’s robots embody a shared consciousness which derives from an entire planet’s worth of computing power. On page after page, you will find yourself nodding as Williamson predicts some aspect of contemporary life which has long since become wearying for us. Heck, he was even decades ahead on the ruining of childhood by adults which are obsessed with bogus safety standards.
I am not sure what comfort there is in knowing that someone grasped that the future was going to be humiliating even eighty years ago. But hey, maybe you will find yourself surrounded by the sort of people that reflexively believe things that the AI tell them and that gloat about the coming of ridiculous AI girlfriends which will finally be able to give these guys the experience of being able to pretend that someone actually cares about them.
In that day which surely cannot be too terribly far off, I would like to imagine you remembering this post. I envision you shutting off your phone and your laptop and settling into an incredibly pleasant Sunday afternoon as you lose yourself in a classic science fiction work such as Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids. Ultimately, I foresee you recovering some dimly remembered piece of your own humanity– and perhaps even the resolve necessary to find a way to destroy these ugly and tacky machines which have ruined so much that was good.
That day can’t come soon enough.
This just about sums everything up:
I means seriously, look at how much is packed in there!
This is not just about Mike Mearls. This is about the fact that an entire generation of creators and games people were unable to convey to him the kind of imagination required to make this weird game actually work.
Hot on the heels of this sad testimonial comes a guy who was ACTUALLY THERE back at the dawn of the hobby:
Now, I am sympathetic to this one. After all, I am always ready to hear from video game creators that tabletop rpgs provide a superior experience. But… “interactive story tellers”? Really?
You have to wonder if anyone back then even tried to play the game that is actually described by those rules booklets. So this post I would characterize more as, “we never actually played real D&D and are not even dimly aware of this fact.”
A subtle but crucial difference to be sure!
Fortunately, there is an alternative to fake and limited gaming culture of these chuckleheads. Get on board with the winning secrets of great D&D today!
I know you thought no one was going to get you the Christmas Gaming Gift of your dreams, but here I am bringing you a totally playable first level Ley Line Walker for your post apocalyptic campaigning. And given how long it takes to figure out how to do anything with Rifts and dig through half a dozen books just to get the hang of the basics, I am sure you will be glad I did. After all, this game is not going to play itself!
Check it out:
Alignment: Principled
Attributes: IQ 13, ME 17*, MA 8, PS 13, PP 10, PE 12, PB 14, Spd 18
Hit Points: 15
S.D.C.: 35
P.P.E.: 122
Experience Level: First level Ley Line Walker
Bonuses: +1 to save vs. psionic attack*, +1 to save vs. insanity*, +4 to save vs. Horror Factor, +2 to save versus possession & mind control, +3 to save vs. curses, 4 attacks/actions per melee round**, +2 to pull punch**, +2 to roll with punch/fall**, +3 to roll with impact ** ***, +1 to parry/Dodge***
O.C.C. Skills: English 98%, Latin 75%, [Some weird esoteric/demonic language] 75%, Climbing 50%/40%, Math: Basic 60%, Land Navigation 44%, Wilderness Survival 45%, Pilot 69%, Lore: Demon & Monster 45%, Lore: Faerie 40%, Lore: Magic 40%, Lore: Psychic & Psionics 40%, Lore: Religion 45% 4 Lore, Hand to Hand: Basic**
O.C.C. Related Skills: Astronomy & Navigation 55%, Excavation 40%, Intelligence 41%, Mathematics (Advanced) 60%, Prowl 30%, Spelunking 45%, Streetwise 24%
Secondary Skills: Athletics (general)***, Body Building & Weightlifting, W.P. Knife, W.P. Axe, W.P. Hand guns, W.P. Energy Pistol
Weapons: Survival knife, hand axe, automatic pistol, energy pistol
Equipment: Cape, travel clothes, knapsack, backpack, 1 small sack, 1 large sack, six wooden stakes, mallet, canteen, binoculars, tinted goggles, air filter and gas mask, flashlight, 100 feet of cord and grappling hook, pencils and notepad.
Gear/Money: Off Road Motor Cycle, Light Concealed Ley Line Walker Armor (31 M.D.C.) (Rifts Ultimate p. 113), Portable Short-Range Radar System (GM Guide p. 187), and 4,000 credits.
First Level Invocations: Cloud of Smoke (2), See the Invisible (4), Thunderclap (4)
Second Level Invocations: Befuddle (6), Fear (Horror Factor: 16) (5), Levitation (5)
Third Level Invocations: Armor of Ithan (10), Invisibility: Simple (6), Impervious to Fire (5)
Fourth Level Invocations: Astral Projection (10), Carpet of Adhesion (10), Fire Bolt (7)
The important thing to know here is Armor of Ithan grants 10 M.D.C. of protection per character level and takes half damage from magic fire, lightning, and cold. The Fire Bolt is +4 to strike and does 4d6 M.D.C. damage.
As far as new spells go, he will automatically pick up one moderate level Ley Line spell each time he levels– this will cost half the normal P.P.E. amount. This is the stuff that makes this class what it is, so don’t forget to look these up in your copy of the Rifts Book of Magic when you level up for the first time!
The Ley Line Walker’s signature ability is that he can learn any spell of and level at any time he wants. The prices for these are so steep, it is more likely that the character will perform a quest in exchange for a midlevel spell before he could acquire the credits to pay for it. (A level five spell costs 50,000 credits… if you can find a seller!) On the other hand, the prices on the equipment listings are even higher for typical soldier gear, so maybe the players can actually come into this kind of money somehow.
The O.C.C. abilities of the Ley Line Walker are impressive. He can sense ley lines, rifts, magic use, and magical energy. He can use ley lines for communication, travel, rejuvenation, reconnaissance, and defense. There are all essentially super powers that go far beyond what typical spells can do. But they only work when you are at a ley line.
A note about the attribute requirements for a Ley Line Walker: they are actually hard to qualify for! They only need an IQ of 10 and a PE of 12, but it took me nine tries to get that. Five qualified for Cyber-knight. Six qualified for Glitter Boy. One qualified for Headhunter and Robot Pilot. Seven qualified for Body Fixer. Two qualified for Cyber-Doc. Seven qualified for Operator. Four qualified for Rogue Scholar. Three qualified for Rogue Scientist. One qualified for Wilderness Scout. Four of those qualified for Mystics. Three qualified for Shifters and/or Techno-Wizards. (Combat Cyborg, Crazies, Juicers, Merc Soldier, City Rat, Vagabond, Elemental Fusionist, Burster, Dog Boy, Mind Melter, Psi-Stalker, and Dragon Hatchling have no attribute requirements.) The Robot Pilot being the hardest to get into is a real surprise here!
Rifts does not have endless amounts of dungeon adventure scenarios for players to wear themselves out on. Its source material details a vast overworld full of insane power players where nearly everyone is overpowered compared to the typical D&D character. You can see from the above that a measly first level wizard type guy in Rifts is pretty much a mid-level magic-user… with outright super powers in addition to a laser pistol. This is what the ground floor looks like in this game.
Rifts doesn’t have any sort of wilderness travel rules or random encounter system, so the referee is pretty well left to make everything up whole cloth. From what I gather, this guy should be performing missions for some kind of patron outfit, heading out to a leyline on his motorbike, zapping himself along the lines some how, and then maybe spelunking down into some cave complex in Kentucky, fighting some demon creatures, retrieving an artifact, and then hightailing it back to Ohio.
Can you do that without having any sort of random tables or monster manual to do the heavy lifting for you? I’m sure you could! Long story short, though, when this guy gets back to base he is going to want a new spell that is suitable for the amount of risks and adventure he managed to win through. And you as the Game Master are going to give it to him, too– even if it is a fairly powerful mid to high-level spell!
Some people might debate that, sure. But around here… this is the true meaning of Riftsmas.
It’s Christmas and that means seasonal depression.
All of those long vacations through your high school and college years where your best friends gathered together for epic game sessions that would rage on until three in the morning? They’re all gone. It’s normal. But it doesn’t seem right. Something is missing.
There is this persistent idea that there should be something under the tree that makes for the “wow” moment for the Polaroid picture. Does that even happen anymore? I can’t remember a slam dunk Christmas present like the ones of old. Maybe the internet put an end to that, I don’t know. Either way, there’s not really much to get excited about when your friends are gone.
When you love games it’s worse. You can’t get the seminal table top games experience from a video game. You can’t even get it going to a convention. There is something intensely personal about the medium. And it is simply not to be had. For decades now, every table seems to have the equivalent of the tacky Amazon project manager chick that plays Bejeweled when it isn’t her turn. It’s just not what I signed up for. I mean why bother?
One of those longtime friends of mine that I will never see again used to say, “there is only one thing that will keep you from being happy. Not knowing what you want. And not knowing how to get it.” There’s something to that. And I think I finally figured it out.
I’d actually put the word out that the only thing I wanted for Christmas was to be able to play Space Empires again. This very easily could have fallen apart– something about the holidays makes people crazy I think– but everything came together. I even managed to get my opponent to knock the rust off at Thanksgiving. I took the time to play many hours of solitaire battles so as not to waste the opportunity. We met at a Starbucks. They had the perfect table in this back section where nobody went except for the laptop zombies. We set up Space Empires and got directly into what can only be described as Christmas miracle.
I opened with Raiders. I skipped Terraforming and Merchant Pipelines in order to get fleets in play instantly. I researched Exploration tech and fitted it to my Flagship and we were on our way. Pretty soon I had several counters in the middle of the neutral zone. My opponent panicked, declaring that he desperately needed fleets on the board. What followed was four straight hours of nail-biting action where the entire game seemed to hang in the balance on every turn.
My opponent had guessed that I had Raiders, so he never had a fight without Scanners involved. If he hadn’t anticipated this, the game would have likely ended right out of the gate. I started researching Movement tech. My faster fleets converged on his empire just as my slow ones were arriving. I wiped out entire fleets of starships and destroyed two Colonies with their Industrial Centers. More of my fleets arrived. My opponent became demoralized. We agreed that if I could take one more Colony out that the game would likely belong to me. But this turned out to be harder to achieve than I anticipated.
I had bet on Cloak-2 Move-4 Attack-1 Raiders. My opponent was still at Move-1. I thought I could dance around him and blow up some more colonies– and I think I would have done it if I had forced him to split his forces a second time. Doubling down on Raiders was a mistake. I was never going to eliminate his Destroyers entirely. I should have switched to Cruisers so that I could trump him in the firing order sequence. I could have withdrawn on one front in order to set up another two pronged attack. I could have used my initial garbage fleet of two Scouts and a Flagship to put additional pressure on a third location, forcing my opponent to dilute his defense. I could have spared some CP to set up a forward base at that one Alien planet in the neutral zone.
Alas! It all came down to my Move-4 fleet forking three different colonies at the end of a turn set. The entire game hinged on who could win the bid for turn order. My opponent had a higher income after fleet maintenance was taken out. He shut down my invasion. What’s more, he was completely energized. After his fate had hung by a thread for four straight hours of constant battle and maneuver, he was now positive he could win the game. Reluctantly, he agreed to call it a draw. But then he said, “I wish we could order a pizza and then play this for another five hours.”
That was it. That was the moment. We hadn’t just played the best game session of all time. We had saved Christmas. There was no tree. There was no Polaroid. But after so long, that fabled “wow” moment had finally descended yet again. Most importantly we knew that we were going to be doing this again.
But the next time, there is going to be pizza arriving at the five hour mark.
—
These fleets hitting the center of the board so early were just so intimidating. There is a colony planet to the right of the ships in the Asteroid field. If I had known I could only just barely keep my opponent pinned down and putting out fires for several turns, I would have bought Terraforming and sent a colony ship to it.
I really needed to make a strategic withdrawal here while my other units attacked on the opposite side. He could not have been two places at once. Forward bases which could be used to refit my ships would have also been a winner.
My slow fleet could have explored a way through to that isolated Colony on the far right. What a wasted opportunity!
Here it is. The moment that was decided by Yellow putting EVERYTHING on a turn order bid. Incredible!
The terrain on this map could not have been more confounding. Double Black Holes. Double Space Folds. Asteroids and Nebula positioned in the absolute WORST possible location for an invader. The terrain itself literally turned the tide.
I tried this one again with the following settings:
Now, from my first pass at this I learned that you could not throw away your initial Scout units because the Aliens are sending tiny fleets at you early on and constantly. This turned out to be a key element of the appeal of this particular scenario. Behold:
My initial Scout elements stayed in the game from start to finish, they never had a spare moment to get any refits, and they rapidly worked their way up to Legendary status. I’m sorry, but this is just freaking fun. I loved playing with those guys and I don’t think I ever got to see the experience rules come into play quite as much as in this scenario.
I went with only four Research Centers starting on turn 5 due to the fact that I could count on the Alien Players to constantly harass me. Tech upgrades were kind of boring. You need quantity, not quality in this game. With human players, you have more time for a wind up and the curve balls can be incredibly effective. It just never seemed right to go in for something like Fighters, Raiders, or Boarding Ships in this game.
I finally got to try out the ground combat rules, though. Here is the lineup from the final showdown:
Grav Armor was kind of underwhelming. Heavy Infantry was absolutely brutal when they defended the Alien home world. Whoever programed the flow charts that determine Alien Defense purchases knew what they were doing! Marines were passable– if they land in drop ships, are supported by Grav Armor, and maybe have some kind of bonus from the card decks. Vanilla infantry, though? TERRIBLE. I bought a bunch when I was fearful of the Aliens getting past my pitifully weak star fleet. THEY ARE COMPLETE GARBAGE. Pay the 10 RP to get Ground Combat 2 as soon as possible. Heavy Infantry and Marines are many orders of magnitude better.
The whole point of playing this game was to finally get to experience Close Encounters ground combat and I’ve finally done it. The most important part of the rules is that (a) Transports can drop off troops after the second round of the space battle is over, (b) fleet size matters so that the Transports can be properly screened, and (c) without the Drop Ships of Ground Combat 3, attacking forces cannot fight on the first round of combat after landing. Taking altogether, this adds an entire new dimension to planning system defenses and assaults and I am persuaded that it is well worth the effort to add these units into a game.
The one thing I would change about this scenario would be to play the Alien fleets a little more intelligently. They should be able to zig zag around defending fleets and successfully drop infantry units on colony planets. I’m telling you, every battle and every move becomes fairly intense when the Aliens launch fleets several turns in a row– each one with a free fully loaded Transport. I think the intensity would be even greater if there was a chance that one of them might hold off for a moment when a second fleet comes on the board on the heels of another. I think it should be a bit more possible for the Alien Player to punish a defender that has overextended his defense fleets!
Well, that was a nightmare. You can read the whole story just from the production sheet.
Now, I had wanted to open with Boarding Ships and Military Academies, but I was terrified that the Alien Player in the Close Encounters solitaire game would be sending in Raider fleets. On turn three, I opened with a pair of Destroyers with Scanner tech thinking this would be the key to my survival. Two turns later I would be kicking myself for not purchasing Attack-1 instead.
On my right flank, Green has sent a fleet of three Scouts to harass me. I can’t move anything into position to defend in time. My two destroyers may as well not even exist. Suddenly I feel very foolish for casually obliterating two of my own Scouts exploring deep space hexes as I would normally do. All I had to face him were one Scout paired with a single Shipyard. My dice were hot, however, and I narrowly survived the incursion with only the Shipyard as a loss. In reviewing the rules at this stage I discover that the Alien Players get a fully loaded Transport with every fleet. What are the implications of this, I wonder…?
Well, I found out. On turn five I blithely ignore the yellow fleet that is bearing down upon my left flank. I mistakenly presume that four Destroyers and a Flagship would easily beat them back, but I was wrong. I opted to expand my economy by purchasing Terraforming-2 and stocking up on seven Merchant Ship Pipelines. The Aliens did not launch any new fleets that turn, but my heart sank when I realized that they would have a six Scouts in their fleet. The horror!
Everything fell apart. The Victory was vaporized and those stupid Destroyers proved ineffective. What about the ground combat? I had never even punched the counters for this before, much less played it. I decided that the Aliens would bombard the planet for all three turns, knocking my world down from Colony-5 to Colony-1. After that their six Infantry units easily mopped up my lone Militia and Infantry counters. The Alien opponent then immediately took Ship Size and Scanner technology from me. Painful!
Funny thing was, I spent the entire game thinking that the Aliens didn’t stand a chance! I think I can call this here as this is probably too big of an unforced error to come back from. Besides, I botched the home world rule right out of the gate here. The whole thing doesn’t count!
So much I would do differently next time:
So, yeah. I need Attack-1 Destroyers, Merchant Ship Pipelines, and Exploration tech– all early and all at once. NEXT TIME!
I hate to say it, but the holidays means just one thing to me. Spending time with someone that will invest however long it takes to get your favorite games played again and again. I can’t help it. All of those college breaks that turned into reunions with my best friends from high school just made me that way forever and I will never get over it.
Today we did Space Empires 4X with both the Close Encounters and Replicators expansions. Yeah, it would be nice to have two more players. But this game works well enough with two. There is just enough fog of war to make it worth the effort.
So many things to remark on!
Okay, we should be set now to have a decent game of this coming up for Christmas. No matter what gifts are under the tree, I am just not going to be happy unless I get some first rate gaming in. That’s just how it is!
It is a property of the DMG that it always seems to contain some offbeat rules element which alters your conception of the game when you finally take a moment to seriously contemplate it. Now, most people don’t want to alter their conception of the game. And I guess that’s fine. But some people want to actually try playing AD&D before they die. This post is for that sort of person.
First off, check out these notes on the denizens of an inhabited area:
I don’t get why this in the book. I mean, everyone always told me that the implied setting of AD&D was post-apocalyptic. If AD&D is some kind of “points of light” style campaign setting by default, then how is it that there is room in the game for this low key renaissance fair stuff? Well, the answer to that is patrols. A good chunk of encounters in inhabited areas are going to be with patrols. What are those?
These patrols are no joke. They are combined arms units. If enemies set for charge, they can hang back and let the men-at-arms fire volleys of arrows. If the patrol elects to charge, the lance attacks will likely go first at a bonus and the horses will get an overbear attack on the opening round and then melee attacks thereafter. The potential for midlevel clerics and magic-users to be along for the ride makes these units even more formidable.
Patrols are not something that is dealt with in most D&D supplements. Most people build their game off of the B/X derivatives of the game which omits things of that sort. Chances are you never gave such things much thought. But Gary wasn’t like that. His 1983 Greyhawk box set dedicates quite a bit of effort to the concept. Check it out:
These entries are further detailed in the supplement, but one thing is immediately noticeable just from this. The patrols got much more formidable in the Greyhawk setting. I wonder why that is?
Well, that has something to do with the wilderness clearing rules.
Look at that. This works out rather neatly. I had always preferred to use 30-mile campaign hexes per Gygax’s instructions and I was loathe to drop down to the one-mile hex scale in order to map out a bunch of measly hamlets and thorps per Appendix B. But the wilderness clearing rules suggest that the 30 mile hex is sufficient to denote that there is a domain with settlements in a given location.* And these guys when they have settled in and gotten the clearing job sorted out only have to deal with maybe one bad monster encounter a month. But then again, this stronghold hex won’t even have to bother with patrols at all if each of the surrounding 30-mile hexes are inhabited and patrolled. Which suggests that the inner hexes of a multi-hex polity could send a portion of their troops to serve on the frontier, beefing up the already formidable patrols which are there.
This is not post-apocalyptic at all. This is nowhere near anything like the “points of light” campaigns which I used to hear so much about. But this brings us back to the absolutely maddening inhabitants table which is back in Appendix B which I have never really bothered with at all. Why on earth would I ever care about the location of all these stupid hamlets and thorps and so forth at the one-mile hex level of resolution? The fact that they exist at all on the map is an indication that we are nowhere near anything that the typical AD&D adventure session tends to deal with.
Seriously, look at that stupid stuff. Why would I ever care about the exact location of 700 renaissance fair peasants? But then I remember… there was something about this in the Players Handbook. You know, I really think there was. Behold:
I think all of this is starting to fit together now. Because as the wilderness clearing rules state, hamlets, thorps, and various other settlement farms will eventually be established here and there in [your cleared stonghold hex], starting near the castle and working towards the fringe of the territory. These points of interest aren’t necessarily adventure locations. They’re the economy of your ongoing strategic element which you and the referee keep up with monthly turn orders and status reports– because obviously weekly and day to day activity would of course burn out any referee and cause them to delegate all domain activity to solitaire play. Boy, that would be stupid, wouldn’t it!?
And so we have arrived at the end of a great mystery which practically no one has argued about for forty years since the release of Gygax’s famed Dungeon Masters Guide. What is the real point of the inhabitation table in Appendix B? Is it so you can have abandoned fortresses just sitting around randomly for players to just wander up to and seize for their own purposes even in the midst of patrols which include powerful knights and magic-wielding NPC’s? You know, I am skeptical of that. Is it so that players can go deal with brigands which have taken over a castle hex which the local patrols have allowed to happen? Hey, I don’t buy that either.
I think something else is going on here and I think Gygax just comes right out and tells you what it is:
I think the exact location of those thorps and hamlets most matter in the moment when inimical forces are set to roll right over your civilization. They are strategic targets for troops and monsters that want to destroy your ability to pay for mercenary troops. They are a measure for how far along you are in taming a wilderness hex. They are a marker demarcating just how much of your holdings you are able to maintain. Once the inhabitation table has been used to nail down just what is where in the area of your stronghold, you suddenly have a very clear measure of the economic power of your domain. And you also have a clear idea of just what it is you need to protect.
After all, the inhabitants of your settled region are just somebody else’s orc babies.
—
* Note that the range of these cleared areas spills over beyond a the standard 30-mile hex. They can end up with a 30-mile radius of cleared terrain. You can still map out polities on the 30-mile hex campaign map, though– just mark strongholds in every other hex!
The overworld of AD&D is concerned with the contrast between wilderness and inhabited regions. If you do not get this right, you are botching something that is integral to how everything in the game is set up. So pay attention!
Inhabited areas have patrols. Uninhabited areas have fortresses. THIS IS THE DIFFERENCE.
Does that mean that inhabited areas don’t have castles per the inhabitation table from Appendix B? Not at all! A fortress in the wilderness is an isolated outpost. A castle in an inhabited region is not only manned, it is actively sending out patrols to sweep the area of monsters on a weekly basis– just like the player that is establishing a stronghold does when he has cleared a wilderness hex and wants to keep it cleared.
Check out what the text says in the section on fortresses:
Look at that! From the context of this passage, it is as if these castle tables are tailored specifically to flesh out something that only occurs in a wilderness area. So now we know a few more things about the game.
If you don’t get the difference between wilderness and inhabited regions correct, then the very elaborate stronghold building aspect of the game loses its luster. So get it right! And try to think about more than one aspect of the game at a time when you read through individual rule sections. They’re not going to make sense any other way!
“But what about the note in Appendix B that says to use the Castle tables? And what about the fact that the fortress section you quote above says that there will be settlements there? It sounds like the inhabited regions will have bandits occupying abandoned keeps and that wilderness hexes will have all of the things which are mentioned in that inhabitation table.”
Yeah, buddy. I know you think that makes sense. But it doesn’t add up with the rest of the text.
Hamlet, thorps and various other settlement forms only show up in patrolled areas. The inhabitation table in Appendix B is not used in wilderness areas.
If you muddy the waters in how you define how inhabited and wilderness areas work, then there is no point to name-level player characters going out and clearing hexes and establishing strongholds. None. DON’T DO THAT!
There is one more thing that will happen if the wilderness clearing model of the player characters is actually honored. INHABITED AREAS THAT ARE THE RESULT OF ONE NAME-LEVEL CHARACTER CLEARING A 30-MILE HEX WILL NOT HAVE RANDOM LAIRS AND SETTLEMENTS AND CASTLES OF PEOPLE WITH OPPOSED ALIGNMENTS. The inhabitants of the hex will be people more or less of the same alignment. Thus, inhabited areas are not going to be as weirdly heterogenous as you might assume based off of a naive application of the random tables in the back of the DMG.
That is one more reason not to stock a hex in a completely random manner.
If you were wondering why it is that it took forty years before someone could explain this stuff to you, look no further than the Cook/Marsh Expert ruleset and all the people that are mindlessly singing the praises of the B/X incarnation of the D&D ruleset. Seriously, read this:
Wait, are you telling me that in B/X that castles in the wilderness belong to high level NPCs who have cleared the land and hired mercenaries? Bruh. If they have cleared the land, then that area isn’t wilderness anymore.
The B/X ruleset is not just incomplete. It is disastrously wrong. If you’re still using it or one of its derivates as the basis for an ongoing campaign, stop it an start using Real D&D instead.
First off, you only use the INHABITATION table in… inhabited regions. Some of you will balk at this, but you really need to pull yourself together and think this through. Seriously, look at it:
And now look at the instructions on rolling outdoor encounters:
Inhabited areas have special encounter rules for patrols. Uninhabited areas have a chance for their encounters to be of the castle variety. If you are using the inhabitation table to stock an area and then using some kind of procedure for determining castle encounters in order to flesh out the location further… then you are not using these tables as intended. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!
Furthermore, you do not check to see if the inhabitants of castles are something other than Character-types when you are stocking maps for an inhabited region. Those inhabitants results are clearly tailored to the uninhabited areas of your campaign map.
Now, you may be inclined to sperg out and go do an analysis of how the outdoor encounter differs between the inhabited and uninhabited areas. I probably wouldn’t bother. These are great tables. You can play them for years. However, the expectation here is that they are in fact merely a stopgap. You will only resort to the use of the tables in the appendix when you do not have an encounter table specially devised for the area you are playing in.
Yeah. The Isle of Dread has its own encounter tables. Man, it even has different encounter tables for different sections of the island. Pretty cool! You can make your own campaign be like that, too. No, really! I am not making that up! In fact… you should be making up your own encounter tables.
If you need some directive from Gygax indicating that it is not the intent of the game that players simply mine the wilderness encounter tables ad infinitum, there it is. They don’t keep springing up forever. In inhabited areas, many of the encounters are going to be patrols from powerful figures based in cities and castles. Meanwhile, the monsters are not necessarily just waiting around to be taken out piecemeal by enterprising player characters. They could be instead inimical forces that are rolling back the frontiers and sowing chaos in the inhabited regions by causing some of those castles to become deserted in real time!
But there is still more to this:
We have all pat ourselves on the back for being able to handle the full-on wilderness encounter tables which are completely and totally unconcerned with the general strength of the player characters’ party. But that is not the actual intent of AD&D’s design! It’s true we have a one-size-fits all encounter system for the wilderness. But the difficulty of the monsters should increase with the distance you get away from civilization.
So, there it is. AD&D’s implied setting is maybe not entirely like it’s been characterized to you. It is very much concerned with the contrast between wilderness and civilization. If your concept of the world is just a bunch of stuff which is rolled on those wilderness encounter tables and it’s all somehow just going to spontaneously make you rich, then I’ve got bad news for you.
You’ve been using Appendix B wrong.
Okay, I took a look at the Appendix B: Random Wilderness Terrain and I have to say… this is pretty stupid.
Now, I love this thing for what it is: a method for creating random terrain in the event that players go off the edge of the prepared maps. It’s brilliant for that. For everything else, common sense must prevail. And in this case, this means using these procedures only as a very loose sort of inspiration for adding something to the campaign.
Let’s talk about all of the stuff that is dumb about this system. This thing is supposed to work “with relative ease for a 1 space = 1 mile, or larger scale”. Poppycock! The wilderness travel and encounter rules presume that you are spending a day travelling through basically one type of terrain. How do you figure your movement rate across ten miles of travel on this map? If you have encounters on this map, what table do you use? DON’T KNOW. Good thing I have lots of common sense! I declare this entire map to be rough terrain. All of that time I spent filling in these hexes was wasted effort.
And another thing. How do you know what path to take on the map as you fill it in? If I were to spiral out from the center the results would be entirely different than if I zigzagged through all the hexes. When I circle back into some hexes that have been determined, does only the hex I just left matter or should the other hexes I have just run into also influence the result? DON’T KNOW. Good thing I have a lot of common sense! I declare this entire system to be useless for procedurally generating campaign material.
And I am glad this sucks. I don’t want to deal with people adding a crap ton of procedurally generated crap to my game and then insisting, “well, it is totally RAW.” Bro, there are so many places where you interpolated rules into this that don’t actually exist, you simply can’t say that at all.
THERE IS NO SYSTEM IN AD&D FOR DETERMINING WHAT IS IN A WILDERNESS HEX.
In the wilderness clearing section, Gygax does indeed say to have the player map out his 30-mile hex and then resolve wilderness encounters there normally. And he does say that when these monsters are driven out they don’t just automatically respawn. But we do not have a system for determining the terrain in the hex which means we don’t even know which encounter tables we will be drawing from. And if the map is stocked by conducting random encounters normally, well hello… if you do this on foot you will have many more monsters in your hex than if you did it on horseback.
AD&D IS OPTIMIZED FOR RUNNING SESSIONS BY THE SEAT OF YOUR PANTS. IT IS NOT ENGINEERED FOR TOP DOWN WORLD BUILDING AT ALL.
And I like it like that. Honestly, I think all those solitaire play videos have rotted away most of y’all’s brains. Half you act like you couldn’t just make something up for the fun of it anymore. Seriously, bro. What happened to you? I remember when people that played this game would pat themselves on the back for how imaginative they were. You guys? You act like you can delegate this stuff to procedures and not just get complete garbage back.
But hey, let’s keep going with this.
0201 City (40,000)
0303 Ruins (Tomb)
0304 Single Dwelling (5)
0309 Castle — Med. (Large Shell Keep) 14th Level Assassin
0501 Single Dwelling (2)
0502 Castle — Large (Large walled castle with keep) Totally Deserted
0509 Single Dwelling (6)
0510 Ruins (Tomb)
0601 Single Dwelling (6)
0609 Single Dwelling (2)
0710 Single Dwelling (6)
0804 Ruins (Village)
Now the next thing I am supposed to do is have an imaginary party walk through this map and I am supposed to roll encounters normally and then if the monsters maker their “% in lair” roll, they go on the map, and then maybe the ones that don’t go on a random encounter table or something. Who knows. You’re just making it up at that point anyway and you might as well lean into that. For the record, here are the incredibly boring results I got by rolling a bunch of stupid dice:
0186 (marsh) Shambling Mound
0509 (marsh) Lizard, giant
0307 (rough) Bear, brown
Wow, that sure is a yawn fest. Did Gygax make a note somewhere saying that I could ignore a crap ton of die rolls if the results are boring and stupid and I don’t care about them? I sure hope so!
At this point I can’t even remember what I was trying to do with all this. I think maybe I was going to be make some point about AD&D esoterica or something. Honestly, I don’t really care about that any more. All I can think about is how much I hate all of the random crap that other referees dumped onto my beautiful Appendix N fueled original milieu. All I can think about is how much of my stuff they wiped off the map. All I can think about is the stupid amount of magic items that were introduced into the game by people farming the random encounter tables in solitaire play.
And I think about that and I think… I know these people. A 14th level Assassin in a shell keep is not enough to challenge them. It’s not enough to inspire them. The guys in Trollopulous would not even blink at that. Besides. It’s been done. His name was John Wick. This new Assassin guy will not even register as a character unless he has a really choice set of magic items in his possession. As well he should.
So then I look at that city. I look over at that city and somewhere, Jack Nicholson begins nodding his head at me. Yes! Jack Nicholson is nodding!
Because there are 40,000 people there. And they have bird heads. And antlers! Their skin is wrinkled and seamed as if they have been sewn together. They have these crazy large ears like an elephant. And hypnotic orange-red eyes. But they are huge and flat! Huge, flat orange-red eyes. Their beaks hook down and are twisted and sharp. Fangs jut out at odd angles. The rest of their bodies are crab-like… and they have poisoned tails like a scorpion. Their chiton is of a purplish color. Their backs, brilliant green like a Japanese beetle. Their arms? Writing tentacles of horror! And their hands are like giant lobster claws.
There’s your 40,000 “people”.
What to do with those Single Dwellings, though? Oh, probably make them something cool. Witches. Medusa. Giants. Heck, they are probably bona fide lairs, though. The Ruined Tombs are clearly one page dungeons. We’ll stock something in them and then stock a book of lore somewhere else that highlights what secret room is liable to still contain something awesome.
I’ll tell you one thing, though. This area is not uninhabited. We started off trying to map out a wilderness area as if we were going to clear it and… this place is just not uninhabited! (Note for D&D esoterica people: the instructions on page 182 of the DMG seem to indicate that you do NOT use the Inhabitation table in an uninhabited region. Uninhabited regions ONLY have the one-in-twenty chance for castle encounters… where the game does not actually define how many encounter checks to perform for a given area.)
If you come within five miles of either the City or the Shell Keep, though, 5-in-20 of your encounters are with patrols. By the same token, if you come within a mile or two of these Single Dwellings aka “Lairs”, I bet you have a chance to encounter somebody from there as well… or at least be sighted.
Anyway, I have some more work here but it doesn’t involve rolling up a bunch of crap on a table.
One thing I will say here, though.
I have rolled up totally random Traveller worlds and then felt like, “gosh… we just have to play this.” At this stage, I am not feeling that with this pile of stuff.
Something’s missing.
At some point you just make a town and dungeon and then go. Gygax gives so much top-down type advice on how to set up the campaign, it’s true. But there is so much involved in getting a game off the ground and even more involved in keeping it going, it is very easy to charge on ahead without ever really assimilating a great many things that Gygax thought needful.
Gygax did brilliant work on laying out how to determine which monsters are on a given dungeon level. The mix of larger numbers of low hit dice creatures with occasional encounters with smaller numbers of more formidable monsters… this is just chef’s kiss level of work. Yet by his own admission, his magic item tables leave something to be desired. Magic should be placed very carefully to maintain a very specific risk/reward ratio. It was never Gygax’s intent that an artifact should be found in a random wilderness lair or else on the second level of a dungeon, though Tolkien’s rich lore is predicated upon just such an occurrence.
I don’t think Gygax intended that it should be possible for players to simply mine riches from the wilderness encounter tables. But there is some implied setting baked into them. I think it is reasonable to set up your overworld in such a way that it is consistent with what those tables can produce in the event that you start using them to fill in the blank spots on the map.
In the wilderness clearing rules, Gygax suggests using 200 yard hexes such that a span of nine hexes equals a mile. The hex does not become developed until 30-miles of terrain is subdued in every direction from the new stronghold. This is a massive amount of terrain! What is in this vast region? Oddly enough… it depends on how you explore it. If you map it out on foot you will run into many more random encounters than you would on foot. Similarly, there will be more encounters in the marsh and forest hexes than in other terrain types. The AD&D random tables are in fact predicated on referees using them on the fly… they don’t actually support setting up the campaign in advance in the manner of a Traveller referee building out a subsector map!
But hey, no one wants to randomly generate seven 30-mile hexes broken down into 200-yard hexes. I know I sure don’t. I mean it’s nice to be able to fill things in in a pinch, but I think I would rather use a little imagination and set things up in such a way that problems I have faced previously are headed off at the beginning.
Base chance of encounter in the wilderness is 1-in-10. There are three checks per day for travel in Plain or Hills terrain. A party on foot will travel ten miles per day on rugged terrain. The one mile hex will have I think 61 200-yard hexes in it. Such a party could easily meander through the entirety of such a hex in a day… with some room to account for getting lost on occasion. Yes, sorting all this out is a nightmare!
As a rough rule of thumb, then… a referee could check for encounters at the one-mile hex level of resolution… making a number of checks per the terrain type. This is not entirely precise. Remember, though, the point of this is to have an initial campaign state that is consistent enough with the random tables that the random terrain generation system COULD be used to extend the mapped area as needed. This is like being able to roll up a new subsector in Traveller when the players go off the map edge. The worlds that we invent on a subsector map should be compatible with potentially random worlds that are added to the game on the spur of the moment.
Now, one effect of this system is that monster lairs will be more dense in forest and marsh and less likely to appear in plain and hills and desert. This is nice. Weirdly, though… 1-in-20 of the encounters will be a stronghold. This means that the strongholds on the map are more likely to turn up in the more gnarly types of terrain. This maybe does not make sense from a sort of Poindexter type top-down worldbuilding approach. But from a fairy tale standpoint, this makes perfect sense.
Now… using these results you are going to get three types of encounters. Strongholds, lairs, and a big pile of monsters that are simply moving around. Now… here’s the question: just what is going on here?
The first thing you need to realize is that you have half of the strongholds are deserted. The next thing you need to realize is that the NPC strongholds are not undertaking an effort to clear the hex. Further, the monsters which do not have lairs… are they passing through from a neighboring wilderness hex or are they making forays from some kind of dungeon location. Don’t know! But the last thing you need to realize is that nobody is going to just walk into the middle of this and start farming the lairs at will. You have a 9-point alignment system. These strongholds and lairs are going to have alliances.
I would not simply accept a completely random placement for all of this stuff. I might start with something like that… but I would swap things around so that the various alliances form slightly more sensible geographic regions.
Even so, this is weirder than what we tend to play. Granted, some of my friends have looked into this sort of setup to varying degrees. Some have called this sort of set up post-apocalyptic. Others have contrasted the supposedly more normal overworld with the more weird and chaotic mythic underworld. If something like this is the backdrop for a game setting, I am not entirely sure of just what all is going on here. Can you even conceivably travel across 30-mile hexes which are stocked in this manner? How exactly does this sort of setup fit with what Gygax advises for general campaign setup up? And do I even want to play this?!
I couldn’t say. I will have to ponder this some more. And maybe roll a bunch of dice.
All my life I have wanted to write a designer’s notes article the way that Steve Jackson did in Space Gamer and Scott Haring did in ADQ. Well the day finally arrived when Joel Peterson sent some interview questions my way for an article he was writing. What a moment! This has been a long time coming. Find below my interview excerpt, but definitely read the whole thing over on Joel’s substack here.
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How long was BROZER mulling around the think tank before you fellas decided to publish it, and was it a reaction to the vague legal threats of calling your games “a Braunstein”, or was it coincidence that it came out around the same time that dirt was being kicked up?
Brozer happened very quickly because the time was right. We had been experimenting with these ideas for five years. We had a dozen people run session braunsteins in their own campaigns this spring which replicated our results in a wide range of play groups. Interest in this new direction compounded dramatically during the “summer of Stein” with more Braunstein events going than anyone could keep up with anymore. Most importantly, I explored Bdubs’s controversial idea of the ineffable Total Nonstop Braunstein in a series of Traveller sessions. Basically, I ran a different type of Braunstein game every week or two an then placed them all in the same continuity. A lot of people had said that that couldn’t be done. Well, after I’d done it I was sure I finally understood how Braunsteins really worked.
Now, I am not sure of the exact chain of events. Griff had been calling us names and saying we were all doing this wrong for many months. This was really annoying. But I didn’t really get the idea to do something like Brozer until Rob Kuntz had challenged me to a module writing contest. When he chickened out from actually following through on that, I was really disappointed. It might never happened at all had not Griff suggested that he would like to make a play to somehow control the concept of Braunstein as if it were a trademark or some kind of intellectual property. Of course, he was so rude and so insulting to so many people, this galvanized everyone within the scene to come together for a prank. We figured he was making a big deal over the Braunstein thing because we had already demonstrated conclusively that it was fundamental to roleplaying games in addition to being a great deal of fun. We didn’t think he understood this stuff at all and that we could easily beat him in a race to get the definitive Braunstein product out the door. So everyone in the BrOSR came together like some sort of fantasy Amish-style barnraising and just got it done.
It was amazing! We were ready to go in something like five or six weeks. In retrospect, making it a group project was the objectively correct move. Not only could we put together a sort of greatest hits collection of the BrOSR’s best factions, but we could also give referees a truly authentic gaming experience. When you run intense, longrunning campaigns with heavy Braunstein elements, you end up having to make games out of whatever it is that the players have come up with and gotten excited about. It’s not going to be a perfectly consistent fantasy milieu! It’s just always going to be a weird mishmash that grows on you the more you play with it. With Brozer, though, you not only get to turn players loose with just that sort of weird mishmash– but you also get to hand them the best Braunstein factions created by the the very best players in the BrOSR have come up with. It’s a gold mine of gaming greatness!
Do you consider BROZER a complete and encompassing manual explaining the Braunstein and how to run one, or is it a companion piece to the Blackmoor film/your own writing where it is expected people will have some familiarity with Braunstein before picking BROZER up?
If you want to want to know the real story on the history of the game, then yes, you will want to view the David Wesely segment of the Blackmoor film. I didn’t really understand the significance of Braunstein until I myself viewed that back in 2020. If you want a very persuasive argument outlining what Real D&D is and why Braunstein is fundamental to it and why it is intrinsically different from what we call “roleplaying games” today, then yes… you don’t want to miss my own hard hitting pamphlet “How to Win at D&D”. But I have to tell you… nobody cares about any of that stuff. Most people that dig into it come away wanting to run Braunsteins or exciting campaigns like the ones Dave Arneson did… but they have no idea where to begin. And it is not just us. There is even a forum thread from a few years ago where some guy was back from playing Braunstein at a con with David Wesely. He wanted to run games like that himself! But neither he nor anyone else on the forum had any idea of where to begin or how such games worked.
It turns out that this is a very challenging problem if you haven’t spent five years tinkering with this stuff. But Brozer not only gives all of the best advice and direction from countless hours of great gaming, it also explains how to skip right to the good parts without making any of the errors that we made along the way. There really isn’t anything else like it in gaming history!
Was there a consideration for having an “example of play” in BROZER to more clearly outline what game masters should generally expect when they first run one? Do you have any specific recommendations for such an example on video or otherwise for people to reference if they want to see a Braunstein in action?
Okay, no, we never talked about writing up an example of play. One reason is that it would be boring. Another reason is that it would be hard to follow. What are you going to do? Write up five conversations that happen concurrently? Bruh. I don’t even want to think about how to lay this out.
My personal opinion of this is that people that think they want this don’t actually exist. Or else including something like this won’t solve the problem that these people actually have, which is that they need to put their rpg books away, sign up for some dance lessons and then spend a great deal of time outdoors and at the gym.
Listen. The idea of Braunstein is very simple. All of the players are able to do whatever they want independently of everyone else. The referee talks to the players one at a time to find out what they are doing. While the referee is busy, everyone else is talking to each other hatching plots and setting up schemes. When conflict occurs, the referee resolves it just as it is done in any roleplaying game that you would care to mention. In subsequent player conferences, the referee informs players of any gameplay results which they would have knowledge of. Play continues to evolve from there– and more than likely will become volatile, chaotic, and dramatic. So now I have told you everything. All you need to do is just go do it.
But you might object then, “Oh! I have never done this before! I don’t know where to begin and I haven’t the faintest notion of what the best practices are for this new type of game!” Well, okay. The factions we put in Brozer are the ones that were the most fun in our group after five years of gaming across a half dozen tables. Even better, we tuned them up in order to help you sidestep things which were problems in our games. And even better than that we included a great deal of advice and direction from the most thoughtful and cogent guys in our scene to help get you pumped up enough that you can find the courage to dive into this utterly compelling form of gaming. You really can’t miss with this! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!
Jump on the team and come in for the big win. Get your copy of Brozer: Island of War and Winter here.
The feedback from Brozer continues to trickle in– and this report in particular is especially heartening:
I ran my own Braunstein last weekend. Discord, eight players. None of us had ever done anything like this before, except that I’d played in an in-person Braunstein. There was significant trepidation.
And everything you said in your Brozer essays was absolutely RIGHT. It was complete chaos (for me) but everyone loved it. They can’t stop talking about it. They want to run their own. Someone even told their family.
Very exciting! But also… completely predictable. You’re seeing here a replication of the exact same excitement we saw back when Scutifer Mike was confirming that my Battle Braunstein proof of concept really was a sound template for us to move forward on.
Meanwhile, the author of the superb Brozers & Braunsteins article has this to say about some of my older and more tried and true gaming ideas:
Jeffro, since implementing 1:1 time into my game it has grown from 4 to 8 players in just a few weeks. It’s not only a good way to manage game time, but people are really excited and interested by the “always on” nature of it.
That’s right. The stuff I developed back in 2021 still works just as brilliantly as it ever did.
Take these two ideas and put them together and you get real life gaming groups that grow over time rather than consistently fall apart after six sessions. Even better, the type of games that develop from these ideas can not only entertain whoever happens to shows up, but they can also scale up to host as many people as arrive as well. These ideas not only were pioneered in the sort of environment that Bradford Walker terms as “the clubhouse”… but they also in a very real sense cause such social entities to spring into existence.
Now, while we are all celebrating this profound shift that is transpiring within gaming, there is something that I feel ought to be pointed out about it.
I described this precise dynamic in exquisite detail back on my notorious appearance on Harmony Ginger’s debut show. At this point, you’d really have to be retarded not to realize that if I am taking serious flak from within the BrOSR, it is a sure sign that we are on the verge of taking the state of the art a quantum leap forward yet again.
And so we were.
I quipped last year that I was the third most important person in D&D due to the fact that you couldn’t play the game correctly without using ideas that I had recovered and championed. Today we have moved well beyond that. I have now expressed a set of phenomenal ideas in a way that many more people can replicate than ever. This is something that gaming pioneers like David Wesely, Dave Arneson, and Gary Gygax were unable to do within a fifty year timespan. I have solved what was the most difficult open problem in gaming. I am therefore now the most important person in rpg history.
And though it is true that I could not have accomplished this without the BrOSR. It is also very much the case that I had to pull this off in spite of them as well. And it is clear that it is only because of my persistence, my brilliance, my intuition, and my leadership that we are crossing the finish line today with the amount of elan that we are.
You should thank me.
I was right.
You might have thought I was being overdramatic. But the conversation really has shifted.
No one is talking about the finer points of Braunstein theory. If they are talking about rpgs, they are talking about Zero Prep and 1:1 time– things which the BrOSR introduced months or even years ago. If they are talking about the BrOSR, there is only one thing that they are concerned about: explaining why it is that they cannot or even ought not to ever contribute to the common good.
This is an extraordinary turn. Finally, the real and fundamental difference between the BrOSR and the OSR has been made plain. I mean, sure, it’s one thing to say that the hobby is something other than copying and pasting somebody else’s ideas and then figuring out a way to make tens of dollars a year off of it. From where I sit, people approaching rpgs with this weird and grabbling “how can I make money off of this?” type attitude have not only debased the medium, but its creators and fans as well. Sure, I can almost understand people settling or compromising or even just making a strategic decision. But the thing I can’t understand is the way that people pretend to not be able to understand this. I mean, they act as if it is a landed gentry class that owns sprawling estates which can afford to be genteel and magnanimous and embody a sort of noblesse oblige.
This is a disastrous failure of the imagination. One much more telling than simply being unable to imagine fantasy without the intrusive and overwhelming influence of Tolkien. But we can help you with that. It is in fact our calling to do so. We didn’t just make Brozer free because we wanted to make your game better. We didn’t just make Brozer free because wanted to make it harder for people exploit you.
We made Brozer free because we love you.