On Player Agency, Old School vs. New School and Published Adventures

"Er, thanks, but I think I'd just rather rescue Hekaton."*

*Dungeon map by Tim Hartin at Paratime Design.

The blogger, Raging Owlbear (Marty Walser), wrote two critical comments on a post I wrote a few days ago, Why Do Players Enjoy Being Puppets? I told him I would respond to them in another post. Owlbear has a great blog that I have read with interest and enjoyment. It seems like we might disagree on a few things, which is, of course, fine. This post is simply a response to his comments and questions. It's not about having the last word, or anything like that.

The reason I will largely frame this current post around some of Owlbear's actual comments is not to be snarky or last-wordish, but because I'm too lazy to compose a structure for this post from scratch.

Keep in mind that Owlbear typed his comments (the ones I will be excerpting in this post) quickly on an iPhone, whereas I'm at a computer, sitting back with a cigar and a drink and a thesaurus and all the rest. By the way, I'm basically incapable of writing more than three sentences on an iPhone.

Owlbear ended his second comment with this question:

As I noted, this railroad adventure style has nothing to do with whether you are playing "old school" or "new school". It is an issue specific to adventure design when writing a campaign-length module, regardless of which version of D&D you are playing.

So, stated simply, do you agree or disagree with that assertion?

Let me try to answer that, as well as responding to some of the other comments.

The what-is-old-school vs. what-is-new-school debate is interesting and important to a point. Obviously, once it threatens to come down to mere arbitrary semantics, it gets silly and tedious. But I think it's obscurantist to suggest that it must always do that (I'm not alleging that Owlbear says this.)  

On old school vs. new school, one thing that OSR people often do is to draw a chronological line somewhere, say at edition 3.5 or whatever, to separate the two. But virtually everyone agrees that if the categories are meaningful, then there are "new school" elements before that line, and "old school" elements after.

Indeed, old school people such as I, often argue that the seeds, so to speak, of various new school developments were present from almost the very beginning of D&D (long before any quasi-arbitrary line) and developed gradually from there. So, for example, I would point to Greyhawk (1975) - published barely a year after the three little brown books (1974) - as the origin of such new schooly things as skills and hit point inflation. (Indeed, the thief and thief skills predate Greyhawk.) That probably makes me and those like me sound like reactionaries saying that 2017 problems really stem from the French Revolution or the Enlightenment or whatever. But there it is.

New things don't just suddenly spring up. And it's not silly or contradictory to argue that a new thing might have been present, in embryonic stage, right beside an old thing. It happens.

But note, I (and, I assume most other OSR types) are not condemning Greyhawk or, say, 1e AD&D or 2e AD&D as horrible games or horrible heresies or whatever when compared to the "pure" original edition of D&D (first printing, of course). We're just, among other things, making the, I assume, non-controversial point that historical developments in game design happen gradually and often in an unintended and unforeseen way, unnoticed at the time.

But chronology does matter to some extent, otherwise the words "old" and "new" would have no meaning.

The focus of Raging Owlbear's comments was the question of whether old school or new school adventures were railroady vs. sandboxy, etc. One of the problems with discussing this is that many of the terms seem loaded - Who wants to be railroaded or manipulated as a puppet? Let's all play in a sandbox together, yay! - so let me try to choose terms that are as neutral as possible. How about unplanned vs planned?

Here is an unplanned adventure, Palace of the Vampire Queen (1976), the first published (and not by TSR) adventure in D&D history. It consisted of five dungeon levels with a room key detailing monsters and treasure. That was pretty much it. True, there was a very short introduction and back story, but I'm not sure it was that important. The idea was: here is a dungeon, go and explore it. There was no preplanned plot or path, desired or anticipated.

Here is a planned adventure, Storm King's Thunder (2016), and here is an excerpt from A Guide to Storm King's Thunder:

8. Iymrith: The group gets the artifacts and returns to the oracle. They learn that they need a conch. On the way out, Iymrith attacks and Harshnag makes a heroic sacrifice.

9. Find the Conch: In the book, every giant lord has a conch. The heroes will need to go steal a conch from a giant lord. I liked a lot of these areas, so in my version I changed things a little so I can use Svardborg, Ironslag and the Cloud Giant castle in my campaign.

10. Use the Conch: It takes the group to Maelstrom (page 201). There, the heroes hopefully expose Iymrith and get a clue to Hekaton's whereabouts.

11. King Hekaton: The group tracks down Hekaton and saves him!

12. Final Battle: The adventurers team up with Hekaton to take down Iymrith.

If Owlbear wants to argue that one could run Storm King's Thunder in a more open or unplanned way, perhaps by changing some things around, I'm not going to try to refute that. I'm just going by how it is usually presented, and how it seems to have been originally designed and written.

Okay, now let's get into the argument. Here's Owlbear:

You are cherry picking your examples to somehow show that "old school" D&D is better, but it's a false premise.

I assume what Owlbear is partly reacting to is this:

But I think contemporary D&D would be more fun, or at least more fun for many people, if it went back to its original, yes, Gygaxian conception, where player agency was emphasized more - less Storm King's Thunder and more Keep on the Boderlands or In Search of the Unknown.

Well, sure I was cherry-picking. I was contrasting planned vs. unplanned adventures. But Keep and Search (unplanned) happen to be the first Dungeons & Dragons - as opposed to the chronologically later Advanced Dungeons & Dragons many of whose first published adventures were designed as tournament modules - adventures ever separately published by TSR, and Thunder (planned) is one of the most recent. I could have emphasized the chronological point even better by going back further and citing the first non-published, non-separately published or non-TSR adventures: Dave Arneson's Blackmoor, Gary Gygax's Greyhawk , Arneson's "Temple of the Frog" in the Blackmoor supplement (1975) and of course the first Judges Guild published adventures (which all predate the TSR efforts) - City State of the Invincible Overlord (1976), Tegel Manor, Wilderlands of High Fantasy and "Night of the Walking Wet" (1977), among others. All of these were unplanned.

One could also look at the sample dungeons in, say, The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures (1974), the "Holmes" version of D&D (1977) or even the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide (1979). All of these were unplanned.

And note, this is not about good vs. bad. Most people, even sympathetic OSR people, seem to think that Temple of the Frog is virtually unplayable. And, for better or worse, I'm sure most current players would regard Palace of the Vampire Queen as a sort of crude and childish joke compared to the long and detailed Storm King's Thunder. 

Any long running adventure module is going to have rails because one can't anticipate the actions of the players completely. This was just as true in AD&D as it is today.

I honestly have no idea what this means. Why must you have rails just because you can't anticipate the actions of players (and if you can anticipate them, who needs rails)? Why not just not have rails? Or, in other words, why not just create places for them to explore and then react to that as needed? Why can't you simply have, say, a dungeon with stuff in it?

Designers must write several pre-plotted scenarios for the players to run through because it is impossible to write an open world pre-published adventure.

Well, actually, Wilderlands and many current OSR efforts, such as Rob Conley's The Majestic Wilderlands (2009), are exactly that - "open world" pre-published campaigns, if by "open world" Owlbear means wilderness settings. But, more to the point, there's no reason why "open" (in the sense of unplanned) has any necessary connection to the outdoors. What about just a big dungeon with no preplanned plot?

Look at "Night Below" written for AD&D. It takes characters from 1st to 14th level culminating in a boss fight with aboleths. Are you claiming it somehow gave more control to players than Storm King's Thunder does?

No (or, I assume, no - I haven't actually read Night Below) But, among other things, Night Below was a 2e AD&D module written in 1995, twenty-one years after year zero. It's hardly evidence for the presence of, say, a planning element in chronologically early old school adventures.

Q: If you claim old school D&D gives more player agency, how are series modules like A1 - A4 (Slaver series) or Night Below, or any other longer campaign path written for AD&D any different from something like Storm King's Thunder or Hoard of the Dragon Queen?

In the Slave Lord series in particular, A3 "forces" the DM to capture the PCs because the A4 module starts out with the PCs as captives of the Slave Lords.

In a previous post that Owlbear commented on (and, thus, presumably read), I myself admitted that some of the earliest published adventures had railroady elements:

And some early TSR adventures or sets of adventures, did have their "railroad" elements. After all, you were sort of expected to go from G1 to G2 to G3 of those Giant Modules (though, I would argue that you still had much more freedom within the modules, and that "railroading" in general was not present to anywhere near the extent that it is now).

The last clause covers an important point. I would also say there's a difference between railroading the party into an adventure - going from  Scourge of the Slave Lords A3 to A4, where you must contrive to have the player-characters captured so that they can be thrown into a cave complex - and railroading them once they're there. But there's no question that the adventure path thing, or whatever you want to call it, started early. And, no, I'm not claiming that that, in and of itself is wrong or evil. I greatly enjoyed the Slavelords series.

It's more about a comparison between *any* pre-published scenario versus one that is home brewed... or an adventure module that is short in scope/length versus one that covers a broad swath of class levels (B2 versus Night Below, for example).

No. It's not about published versus home brew. That has nothing to do with it. Published adventures can be, and often are, unplanned. Consider the first D&D adventures previously mentioned, or the contemporary Stonehell Dungeon (2009) by Michael Curtis, Barrowmaze by Greg Gillespie (2012) or Dwimmermount (2014) by James Maliszewki, Alexander Macris, and Tavis Allison. And home brew adventures can be planned (though, they are perhaps less likely to be so because many people don't like dreaming up and writing up all that complicated plot stuff). In terms of adventures that are short/long in scope, the unplanned Stonehell can potentially "take you through" 10th level (the "you" refers to you, the player, as it's likely that many player characters will die). The unplanned vs. planned thing is not about length or scope.

Even aside from all that... Some DMs don't have time to build a large over-arching campaign arc because we have jobs, kids, and precious less free time than we did in high school or college...

Well, I would argue that if a DM has time to wade through 900 pages of 5th edition core book rules (!!!), he probably has time to draw a map and put some monsters and treasure in it. But more importantly and to the point, I'm not against buying pre-made adventures. Indeed, personally, I'm in favor it. I bought Stonehell for the equivalent of a few hours of work at minimum wage, and now I can play it for, literally, years. I think that's a great deal.

So a wide ranging adventure with some sandbox elements to customize like SKT [Storm King's Thunder] is a relatively treat. To criticize these kinds of modules as treating the players like puppets is entirely misdirected.

Fair enough, but I think my analysis was more nuanced than that. I said that a) I sometimes like such adventures, b) they have their place, and c) they still allow a fair amount of room for player agency. I used "puppets" to bluntly frame the general issue. See my original post, especially the discussion of "points" 3 & 4. And I suppose it is true that detailed planned adventures can be a "treat" in that I can't imagine anyone coming up with that sort of thing, in such detail, on their own. That's not a criticism.

No published adventure can give a player 100% agency, no matter how short. Even B2 goes with the assumption that the players will get to the "boss fight" with the cultists.

See above. But also, having a "big boss" at, say, the bottom or end of the dungeon and, thus, anticipating that the players will probably eventually fight him, is completely different from choreographing how they are going to get there. See the excerpt from the Guidebook above.

Your premise is entirely flawed because you seem to connect this to mechanics (specifically when you call out 4th edition) when it has absolutely nothing to do with mechanics or edition and everything to do with the limits of adventure design when trying to provide a long running campaign to DMs in published form.

This brings up a more complex issue that I don't want to spend a lot of time on here. But briefly, when I speak of an edition, I mean at least three things - a) the mechanics, b) the explanations, guidance or philosophy expressed in the text of the rule books and c) the associated products, such as adventures, marketed with it. Among other things, looking at b), 5th edition, which is supposedly a partial return to D&D's roots, the current Dungeon Master's Guide contains many pages of advice on how to create drama and suspense through careful plotting of your adventure etc., etc. (so here's the core book telling you how to home brew a planned scenario). There is nothing like this in the three little brown books, Holmes. Moldvay/Cook (I don't think) or AD&D.

The whole argument just falls flat when you turn it into some kind of OSR vs new school rant, when it has absolutely nothing to do with that.

Well, to summarize, at some point this arguably just becomes silly semantics. But if the terms have any meaning (which I assume Owlbear believes or else he wouldn't be using them), I think it's a commonplace in the OSR blogosphere that one of the things that "old school" means is putting a emphasis on unplanned sandbox or dungeon/megadungeon settings, as opposed to preplanned plots or stories. I just don't think one can deny that - that most OSR blogger people believe it, and partly understand the term in that manner, regardless of whether they "should." And I think if most people use a label, even if arbitrary (which most labels in a sense are), it sort of ceases to be arbitrary, if that makes sense.

But I have also tried to show that this is not simply arbitrary or a misunderstanding or whatever, but well grounded in the actual early history of D&D. Now, obviously, one can be a new school person who likes some old school elements, or an old school person who likes some new school elements, or a mix of both, or just one or the other, or whatever. And/or, if one simply doesn't like any of the labels - perhaps because of annoying associations, etc. - one can just dump them entirely. There's no law against that. But I don't think one can as easily ignore the history. Or rather, one can ignore it, but what's the point of that?.

Femen Demonstration

Six members of the activist group Femen pose in front of WOTC
headquarters before rolling up characters and buying equipment.

There was no OSR Art Friday post yesterday, due to this author's desire to express a day of blog silence in solidarity with three Femen members still detained by Washington authorities.

RENTON, WA, December 5 (AP) – Members of the topless feminist group Femen staged a demonstration today against the “anti-sexual prudery” of the new 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons and against “New School” gaming mechanics in general, stripping down to what one activist called “our sacred chainmail bikinis” in front of the gates of Wizards of the Coast headquarters in suburban Seattle. Three members were arrested.

More than twenty demonstrators stood silently for ten minutes with slogans etched in black marker across their chests, such as “Take your Clothes Off My Body!” "Imagine the Hell Out of It!" and “Fight On!” They then unfolded a card table and proceeded to “role play” a game of what one demonstrator called “Holmes Basic”, led by an activist wearing nothing above her waist except a three-paneled cardboard screen emblazoned with the words “Dungeon Mistress”.

A spokesperson for Wizards of the Coast commented, “I have no idea why they are mad at us. For the text of 5e we consulted all the experts on game design and gender equality. We believe our product reflects the latest consensus of people whose opinion we care about. Where did we go wrong?” When informed of this statement, one of the demonstrators held up what she called a “twenty sider” and shouted, “Save or die, Fascist!”

“What’s all the fuss about,” said Sally Layton, a software engineer from Microsoft, who happened to be on her way to work. “5e is the new thing by the dominant company in the industry. That means it must be good. So, why are these women, like, getting naked or whatever?”

“I find it appalling and highly offensive,” said Matt Vickers, another software designer, who was recording the event with a high-resolution video camera.

Irina Gygaxocova, a representative of Femen from the Ukraine, said the demonstration was intended to highlight how the corporate patriarchy intended to keep women out of tabletop gaming by making the new editions as stupid and boring as possible. “1974 was a liberation for us. Soon there was so much to choose, including Warriors of Mars, original Boot Hill and Gamma World. It was a love orgy of freedom that lasted for more than a decade. But beginning with 3e, and even more with 4e and now 5e, they tried to re-enslave us with their rules for everything, $50 core books and sexually repressive art. (Bleep) them! We can now get whatever OSR games and modules we want from Lulu and RPGNow for less than 1% of the cost of a leather skirt.”

Femen calls its form of protest “Hextremism”.

Natalia Arnesoneskva, a Femen member currently serving five years of hard labor in Moldova for possession of a paperbound copy of Labyrinth Lord was more circumspect. Reached for a comment during her weekly five-minutes exercise period, she said, “I support my sisters, but I now feel that edition wars are counter-productive. As long as the game group is having fun, that’s all that matters. I intend to make that point during my next parole hearing.”

Police detained three demonstrators after they refused to remove a banner they had pinned to the company gates. The banner contained the letters “OSR”--thought to be the abbreviation of a political slogan used by Danish feminists. In a press release on their website, Femen stated that lawyers were working to get the three released as soon as possible. “No laws were broken. They’ll be out quicker than the time it takes to fight a melee engagement in 4e.”

Uncharacteristically, the RPG Pundit had no comment.

What is the OSR?

I don't care.

Don't misunderstand. I'm not one of those 'why can't they all shut up and just play?' people. Bloggers can't shut up. Nor should they. But as will be clear in a moment, I'm more interested in describing a type of game or a style of play that we shall call Old School, for lack of a better term. On the other hand, defining the OSR movement--when it started, why it started, who started it, and then of course the inevitable (for some) what went wrong, who led it astray, etc. etc, and so on and so forth--is not my bag. Among other things, I wasn't there. If you were there, that's great, and my sincere thanks if you contributed to resurrecting or bettering Old School gaming in even the smallest way. But in a certain sense (and don't take this in the wrong way) I don't really care about that either. Or rather, I'm not going to swoon because, say, in your opinion Encounter Critical was more important or characteristic of the movement than Swords & Wizardry or whatever. Indeed, if you make that sort of claim coupled with the logical fallacy of claiming that it's true because, well, you were there, that's just going to annoy me. Partly because I'm jealous of you. I'm lazy and usually late to parties anyway.

So what is Old School? Just to be scrupulously fair, balanced and non-confrontational, let's discuss that question partly in reference to an entity we'll call The Man. Also for the fun of it, and very uncharacteristically for this blogger, the following 25 propositions will be asserted briefly, with little extra detail or explanation.

1. The Old School is not The Man.
2. The Old School wants you to do the imagining. The Man wants to imagine things for you.
3. The Old School treats you like an adult (even if you're a child). The Man condescends to you (even if you're an adult).
4. The Old School wants you to roll up a character. The Man wants you to build one
5. The Old School gives you 100 pages of rules (or 25 pages of rules with multiple columns and really tiny print). The Man gives you 400 pages of rules and 500 pages of description (see 2. above).
6. The Old School's text is difficult to read because the text is small. The Man's text is difficult to read because there's an image overlaying it.
7. The Old School wants to kill you (often or at least sometimes). The Man wants to hold your hand through 29th level.
8. The Old School wants the wandering monster to be randomly determined. The Man wants your solving a puzzle to be randomly determined.
9. The Old School isn't 5e. The Man wants you to think that it is. (If you disagree, that doesn't make you a bad person. I hope we can laugh together over a beer sometime...at how wrong you were on this issue.)
10. The Old School doesn't want your money, or at least doesn't want very much of it. Or when it does, it gives you a really nice collectors edition that you will always treasure (even if you get it two years late). The Man wants to sell you multiple 'Core' books at $50 apiece, and then wants to sell you additional 'Core' books with numbers added to them--'Core Book 2', 'Core Book 3', and so on--for $50 apiece. It will also cost you an additional $50 to have your hand held through 9th level (not including the battle mats).
11. The Old School wants you to become a hero. The Man lies to you that you already are one.
12. The Old School speaks Chaotic. The Man speaks Abyssal.
13. The Old School defines you by your actions. The Man defines you by your character sheet.
14. The Old School wants you to explore dungeons. The Man wants you to explore your character's sexual preferences.
15. The Old School is sexy. The Man is a sex theorist.
16. The Old School offends you (sometimes). The Man is offended by you.
17. The Old School wants to see what happens. The Man wants to plan things.
18. The Old School loves your unpredictability. The Man hates it.
19. The Old School gives you good art, sometimes even great art. Or at least it wants to when it can afford it. The Man wants to pawn off tacky looking videogame-like images on you as art, thinking you won't notice.
20. The Old School gives you art that stimulates your imagination. The Man gives you art that stimulates your torpidity.
21. The Old School is C.L Moore. The Man is Katherine Kurtz.
22. The Old School is a brilliant amateur historian repairing shoes in his basement to provide for his family. The Man is a $400,000 Kickstarter.
23. The Old School embodies diversity. The Man preaches it.
24. The Old School wants you to make choices. The Man wants you to be part of his story.
25. The Old School is you and me. The Man is too. Or it's who we're tempted to conform with or suck up to. We don't have to.

Fight On!

The Good, the Bad and the Clothed

I am of course referring to the art of different versions of Dungeons & Dragons--0e/1e, 4e and 5e.

Yesterday I argued that the cover of the 0e supplement Eldritch Wizardry, which features a fully nude figure, presents an interesting contrast with the art of the recently released 5e Player's Handbook, which features 100+ human and humanoid figures, virtually all of whom are almost fully covered, head to toe, in a manner that suggests rational outdoor attire in cold weather conditions or an irrational fear of sun poisoning.

Now, if you were to draw 100+ figures in different and varied contexts and situations, and they were all nude or close to nude, that would suggest a preoccupation with, well, nudity. 

But  if you were to draw 100+ figures in different and varied contexts and situations, and they were virtually all fully wrapped and draped in clothing that exposed very little skin whatsoever, that would also suggest a preoccupation with nudity, though a preoccupation of a different kind.

Back in the day, some would have called the first sort of preoccupation perverted. Then and even now, many would call the second prudish.

I owe use of the second very apt term to the astute comments of Paul Go. (See his comments on Google+). Note that 'prudish' is very often not defined as having a marked aversion to sexuality per se, but as a tendency to just be offended in general, or to be offended by nudity (defined in a neutral and not necessarily sexual way). A prude would for example be affronted by a prominently displayed loin cloth-attired Christ hanging from a crucifix. He would want to cover Him up.

Last night I said the 5e clothed thing was 'weird'. But tonight I'll accept that its prudish.

There are many who like 5e for a variety of reasons. Even many 'OSR people' seem to like it. It's understandable that if you like it, you're probably not going to like some upstart blogger calling it prudish, especially since these days, 'prudish' is thought of as about as bad a thing as, well, 'perverted' used to be.

That doesn't mean it's not true.

Now, two sorts of counter-arguments were given. The first was what we might call the moral argument:

1. Whatever else might be said, the art of 5e is morally preferable to, say, the John Norman, Frank Frazetta, chainmail bikini, women-exist-only-to-be-put-in-positions-of-peril (preferably while naked)-in-order-to-be-rescued-or-eaten style of fantasy art. That's sexist. it also doesn't give our daughters good role models.

The second is what we might call the practical argument:

2. The art of 5e more accurately or realistically represents what player characters actually look like, given the rule mechanics coupled with the equipment lists--in terms of armor, clothing and accessories--of the game. Whatever else one might say about the women (and men) in Frazetta paintings, they're not attired in the way any rational player would dress his or her character.

In what remains of this post I want to dispose of these arguments. Do not misunderstand. I'm not unsympathetic to the underlying views or motivations expressed in each. Indeed, I think they're reasonable.

But that doesn't mean they succeed in saving 5e.

1. Disposing of the first is easy. It's not an either/or choice. Just because you think that it's weird that very little skin of any kind is shown in the 5e Player's Manual, doesn't mean you want everyone to be nude, or all the women to wear chain mail (or non-chainmail) bikinis, or role-playing games partly intended for kids to sexualize our kids or provide bad role models for our daughters (or sons) or whatever. Selecting the cover of Eldritch Wizardry as the starting point of the discussion doesn't mean I want restrained nude women on sacrificial slabs to be the model for all of the art of the market leader in role-playing games. I can't even believe I have to say that.

2. The second argument or claim has two problems. First, the initial premise is just nonsense. 5e art is not more 'realistic'--in any of the meanings that term might have. The mechanics of these systems do not require that 5e (or any of the e's) mandate full body coverings for virtually all characters. They just don't. Should fighters often wear full plate armor? Of course. (And, incidentally, the 1e Player's Handbook has more depictions of full plate than 5e.) But do fighters ever take their plate armor off? Do they ever relax, at taverns and the like? And of course, aren't there other classes where armor is either not worn or not that important? Yes, yes and yes.

Exhibit A is the 5e Barbarian, above. For most of the various editions of D&D, barbarians were often the half-naked guys. They are, after all, barbarians--uncivilized and uncaring regarding the usual norms. They don't have access to effective armor or they prefer not to use much of it.

This is not only a fantasy trope, but also has reasonable historical grounding. Here's an excerpt of the text from the great Avalon Hill wargame, Caesar at Alesia:

The Gauls were an altogether fearsome lot. Many wore long red and blond hair and mustachios in tight braids. Their horrendous battle-cries were literally stunning. The warrior males of a family often linked themselves together with rope so that whether they prevailed or perished it would be together. Some GauIs, attacked without garments of any sort but with their hair and beards worked into fantastic shapes with a mixture of grease and pitch.

As I understand it, they also sometimes painted their naked bodies blue. How’s that for a cool 5e character?

But not that guy above. Except for the axe, I see his type at Starbucks every morning.

What about 5e game mechanics? Well, barbarians have a skill or feat (or whatever it's named) called 'unarmored defense'. Sure enough, the barbarian above does not seem to be wearing much armor save perhaps light leather. His arms aren't covered by armor. They're covered by...

...a long sleeved shirt.

That's just one example, but it could be multiplied 50 times.

The second problem is this: Let's assume that obsessive body covering is more 'realistic' (it isn't but let's assume it is). Does that mean that the pictorial representations must track that precisely? Well, the history of, say, science fiction and fantasy paperback book covers say No. Those of us who read such stuff have all had the experience of reading a novel or story where the cover doesn't quite match up with what's described. (Ironically, the Conan stories are a great example of that--as was noted in the Google+ comments by Jeffro Johnson's sharing of yesterday's post.) Is that phenomenon sometimes silly? Of course.  But does it also often make things more interesting, romantic and, well, fun? You bet.

What's wrong with fun?

OSR Art Friday: Cover of Eldritch Wizardry

Okay, a controversial choice.

First, let's get this part out of the way. Is the above painting immoral, misogynistic, pornographic, inappropriate for teenagers (or anyone) or any other bad thing? For the purposes of this post and the following one or two posts I don't know and I don't care. Tonight and for the next few days I'm not interested in the probity of this piece. I'm just not. If that attitude itself annoys--if you think that that in and of itself places me on a particular 'side' or whatever, then go away. Go away right now.

If you're still with me, then let's proceed. The painting appeared on the cover of Eldritch Wizardry, published in 1976--the third and last of the 'regular' supplements to the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

It was drawn by Deborah Larson. Who was she? No one seems to know. As far as anyone is aware she didn't do anything else for TSR before or since. None of the contemporary sources that I'm familiar with knows anything else about her, including whether she is currently alive or dead.

If anyone out there has any additional information on the artist, it would of course be welcome.

So, in this Friday post I want to make one basic observation about the piece and how it relates to 'OSR' art, as well as comparing it to contemporary 'establishment' (read: Hasbro) Dungeons & Dragons art. I may make a few other points in the following days.

Look closely at the painting. What is one of the things (perhaps the one thing) that most stands out about it? Think hard.

The central figure is wearing no clothes.

(See, this is why you read this blog--for the incredibly incisive, deep, spot-on and smart analysis that you can get nowhere else.)

But here's a serious point. Pre-3e Dungeons & Dragons art was crammed with art that featured completely unclothed people, as well as three-quarter unclothed people and half-unclothed people. There was a lot of nudity, virtual nudity or partial nudity.

There was.

Here are some examples:

1978 1e Players Handbook: Shirtless Thief

The cover of the 1979 1e Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide:
An almost naked Balrog clutches an almost naked woman.

1989 2e Dungeon Masters Guide, p. 40: AC 9 Magic-User

These instances can easily be multiplied.

This phenomenon was partly due to the pulp roots of the game. But that's not all there is to it, as I'll explain in a moment.

Let's jump ahead to 2014. In the recently released 5th edition Players Handbook I counted 142 illustrations of player character types. Of those 142, here's the tally of, so to speak, visible body parts or sums of body parts, as it were:

Naked people: 0
Mostly naked people: 0
Half naked people: 1 (This was an extremely small representation of a shirtless Conan type attacking a Fire Giant or some such. The figure was so small I almost missed him. We only see him from the back.)
Bare chests: 0
Bare lower legs: 0 (I think)
Bare upper legs: 0
Bare shoulders: 2
Bare biceps: 1.5
Belly buttons: 1
Bare midriffs (without belly buttons): 1
Bare feet: 0
Knees: 1 (I think)
Bare elbows: Oh, I don't know, 3 or 4, if that.

Here's a typical example:

A Well-Covered 5e Character 

In truth, the positive numbers are 90% based on 3 and only 3 (out of 142) figures--that mini-barebacked Conan guy, a half-Orc fellow wearing shorts and a sort of t-shirt, and a female druid clothed with strips of fur. Virtually everyone else is almost completely covered with clothing or armor, with only hands (sometimes, when not wearing gloves) or faces (beneath caps or helmets) sticking out.

That's really weird.

Is that a rejection of the pulp roots of fantasy? Of course. But it's also a rejection of 2,000+ years of Western art. Art is often about people. People usually inhabit, well, bodies. Therefore, bodies are often the subject of art. I'm not talking about sex per se here. I'm just taking about life. Bodies (sometimes partially, or more than partially unclothed) are, from the point of view of artists, just...interesting.

Though not for the artists (or their superiors) of 5e.

For perspective, I attend a Traditionalist Catholic Church--the sort of place that is often caricatured as being 'anti-sex' or 'anti-sexiness' or whatever. My wife was once yelled at by a fellow parishioner for being dressed in 'tempting and inappropriate' clothing (she was wearing a mid-length skirt or something). But you know what? There are a lot of naked or partially naked people in there. Jesus on the Cross is almost naked. Mary cradles her almost naked son. The cherubs are completely naked. Most of the saints have flimsy cloaks. And so on.

Hey, we might say again, it's life.

The artists of the 5e Players Handbook want their subjects to wear layers.

Current 'official' Dungeons & Dragons art seems to have this odd sort of problem with, well, 2000+ years of art history. Or we could say that it's uptight about the human body.

Original Dungeons & Dragons art and current OSR art did not and does not seem to have any such problem.

Is there more to it than just the matter of clothing? Of course. There is the matter of that completely boring and uninteresting, and totally minor side-issue...sex. I'll try to address that in the next few days. Stay tuned.

OSR Art Friday: The Adventuring Party

This piece was one of the first published by the artist and game designer Tom Wham, who joined TSR is 1977. It first appeared in the 6th printing of the original 'White Box' edition of Dungeons & Dragons, replacing the section of text that in previous printings had described the Balrog--excised due to legal pressure from the Tolkien estate. It also appeared on the front page of the 1979 bluish 'wizard logo' Character Record Sheets.

Here they all are--the Fighter with his sentient magic sword, the conical-capped Magic-User hiding behind him, the Thief in the process of picking the Magic-User's pocket and the beneficent Cleric (is he trying to gently dissuade the Thief or naively oblivious to his action?). To me, they are united in having an almost maniacal look about them, as if to say, this is what the lure of treasure does to everyone.

Wham would do many other drawings for TSR and later other companies including his own, often combined with game design such as in his brilliant Awful Green Things from Outer Space. Most of his drawings were comical or light-hearted in style but not all of them. He also composed the Monster Manual's Beholder. (Though, now that I look at it again, even that awful creature appears ever so slightly comic.)

In a blog post contrasting his work with that of David Trampier, Matt Finch references the above drawing while aptly describing Wham's contribution:

...Tom Wham's picture is an adventuring party seen from the outside, from the perspective of the gamer looking in. Because let's face it, most of our gaming sessions have plenty of Tom-Wham-adventurer moments in them. Quoting Monty Python? That's the Tom Wham guys. Dancing around the table when your roll for dexterity comes up triple 6's? That's the Tom Wham guys.

Quick quiz: In what fundamental ways does 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons differ from 1st edition? THACO and skills would be possible correct answers, of course. But here's another one:

There are no cartoons in 2nd edition AD&D.

Or at least there aren't in the 2nd edition Dungeon Master's Guide. Contrast this with the multiple cartoons (with captions!) liberally sprinkled throughout the original DMG:

P. 34:

P. 35:

P. 44:

So here's another difference between the old school and newer editions (for those of you still keeping count). The old school had a sense of humor. Newer editions often give off a ponderous air of humorless self-importance, as if to say, 'don't laugh, it will break the spell'.*

Also, prestige classes aren't funny.**

Recently Jon Peterson unearthed and published a sort of variant or possibly even proto-version of Dungeons & Dragons, played in Minneapolis in 1974. Among other things it featured giant carnivorous meatballs. I think many of us would agree that 'official' OD&D was wise not to go that far, though if you wanted more of that sort of thing, there was always Tunnels & Trolls.

However, in the Golden Age of the game, there was a sense (at least at some level) that things shouldn't be taken that seriously, partly because we all were well familiar with how the game was actually played. Despite some of the fantastical depictions in the media--like Tom Hanks and friends sitting around a spooky table that featured candles and crystals--we all knew that in the end we are all just a bunch of pimply kids getting potato chip grease on our graph paper and riffing about Monty Python or Doctor Who in between rolls.

The game was cool. No question about it. But what was wrong with laughing with it and at it from time to time, as well as (on occasion at least) laughing at ourselves?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*2e was still old school in many ways, and to be fair, I liked much of the art in 2e, but on some things the vibe had already changed.

**Unless you say some of the names aloud to your wife. For the list of over 800 prestige classes I published a few weeks back (stolen from Wikipedia), I stuck a few phony names into it--such as inserting 'Swiss Burger with Bacon' in between 'Swift Wing' and 'Sword Dancer'--to see whether anyone was paying attention. My wife, at least, thinks I'm a funny man.
'Wearer of Purple.'
'That's hilarious. You're a funny man.'
'I didn't make that up. It's one of the real ones.'
'You're lying. You made that one up.'
'I didn't.'
etc.