Results So Far

Excellent!

We've had 58 votes in less than twenty-four hours here, so someone will be getting something! For better or worse I did specify a one-week time-period, so I need to stick to that. There's still plenty of time to get your vote in if you haven't done so. Please put it on the original post.

This may or may not be okay, morally, legally, or from a practical point of view, but I thought I would sum up the results so far (the comments are through Crunk Posby's). Then again, the votes aren't exactly hidden.

Here is my counting methodology: in my mind the original question pertained to a written shortening (although I didn't explicitly say this) so where people separated their spoken choice from their written one, I counted the latter. If people hedged but put any emphasis on one version, I took that one, If people seemed completely equal, I divided the vote into halves, thirds or in one case quarters.

Here are the totals so far:

Zylarthen	14.33
7VoZ	11.25
Seven Voyages	10.50
SVoZ	9.58
7VZ	4.50
7 Voyages/7V	3.50
SVZ	2.33
Seven	1.00
Voyages	1.00

Cheers and thanks again for your comments!

Oakes

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen: What's in a Name? Poll and Contest

The name of the game is 'Seven Voyages of Zylarthen'.

It's a relatively long, unwieldy and frankly, odd name as these things go, and has thus been abbreviated in at least four ways. More on that in a moment. But first a bit of background:

I publicly released the game on Christmas Eve, 2013. The game was more than two years in the making. As I've said before, I'm slow. But the name came to me in a sort of flash only shortly before. Here were some of my earlier ideas:

1. More Things in Heaven and Earth (this was when the game was more 16th/17th century in tone, hence the Shakespeare reference)
2. Coat of Mail
3. Original Swords & Sorcery (this was both boring and risked confusion with Swords & Wizardry, among others)

So why did I instantly like 'Seven Voyages of Zylarthen' and decide to go with it?

1. The other names sucked for my eventual purpose.
2. It was a tribute to the first named character in OD&D--Xylarthen, the character who 'would have progressed faster as a Cleric, but because of a personal preference for magic, opted for that class' Men & Magic, p. 10. At least one other author riffed on this character--Jeff Rients in his neat convention module, Under Xylarthen's Tower (never offered commercially). I was feeling so righteous at that time that I considered naming the game using the actual name with the 'X' and everything. Sue me WOTC! Then I saw reason (and morality and legality) and decided I had to modify it. I'm glad I did.
3. It was different. It hopefully made the game stand out from the pack.
4. It was alternately memorable and hard to remember, if that makes sense.
5. Along with the 'Seven Voyages' it referenced Aladdin and the tone of sort of fairytale wonder that I was going for, and that the illustrations by John Dickson Batten (perhaps the best thing about my humble effort) promoted.

Why am I now even more happy with it?

1. I just like it.
2. It's different.
3. It's memorable or at least gets people talking about how to say it or pronounce it.
4. If you google 'Zylarthen' you get only my game with a few minor exceptions: Jeff's module ('Did you mean Xylarthen?') and some video game discussion concerning a character named 'Zylar' who THEN did something or some such. I think there's also something going on in Hungarian. If you include the quotes around it, you obviously avoid these. This has helped me monetize things immensely to the point where I am now living in high style out of the proceeds from my game.*

But now the question is, how do you abbreviate it?

Swords & Wizardry is S&W. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is LOTFP. Original Dungeons and Dragons is, well, you know...

In private and public correspondence I usually refer to it as 'Zylarthen' (I feel a fellowship with that guy) but I've noticed that most other people do not do this. The alternative versions are:

1. Seven Voyages
2. Voyages
3. 7VoZ

So the question is, what do you guys think? The alternatives are:

1. Zylarthen
2. Seven Voyages
3. Voyages
4. 7VoZ
5. Other (Spalding's Folly, that weird free PDF game, or any other possibility...)
6. 'Withdraw it from circulation. I'm a 5E man' or 'Withdraw it from circulation, clones are so 2009' etc.

So, here's the contest. Comment on my blog as to your preference. I can't say I'll listen if 6. wins, but I will applaud you for your opinion in the spirit of openness and tolerance.

They must be on my blog. Not merely Google+.

If I get 50 comments or votes, I'll send a free set of Seven Voyages of Zylarthen hardcopy booklets out to a randomly selected entrant. If you already have it, I'll send you the the hardcopy Lulu version of Stonehell, Swords & Wizardry Whitebox or Anomalous Subsurface Environment.

If you have all of those, then you're golden, and I'll be asking you to sponsor me and my family with a monthly donation...

Full disclosure: I've never received 50+ comments on my blog. I've gotten 20+ a number of times in reference to the mathematics of Orc evolution or monotheism, etc. But never 50+.

So, it's perhaps a tall order, but I'm serious about it. 50+ votes or bust. Hey, I'm risking major embarrassment here if I only get 2 comments. Let's give it, say a week. 

May the best abbreviation win!

Cheers and thank you in advance.

*Spalding is lying.

Your Campaign Setting: Middle-Earth or Narnia?

So which is it?

Yes. It's got to be one or the other.

What do I mean by that?

Middle-Earth is a stand in for a more naturalistic setting. Yes, it's a fantasy world. But given certain assumptions, it makes sense. There's an explanation and a reason for everything. It's consistent.

Narnia indicates more of a fairytale setting. It might have rules, but they are the twisted rules of faery. Or at the extreme, anything goes.

Now, I think in previous posts I've made a few small snarks at what I have called 'naturalism' as understood in the above context. But my purpose here is not to say that one approach is better than the other. If I seem to argue for Narnia it's only because I think it's been unfairly neglected as a viable alternative.

Let's first look at Middle-Earth. In his seminal study Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey convincingly shows that one reason why Lord of the Rings works and works so well is that J.R.R. Tolkien built it up from firm mythological and linguistic foundations. We all know that Tolkien started with the language, then created the history, then, almost as an afterthought, wrote the story. Of course it wouldn't have worked if he had not been an outstanding tale teller. Thank God he turned out to be. But every creature, every place, every name has some basis in Old Norse or Old English, or well, some language or another as long as it was old (and Northern European). Shippey convincingly shows that only a handful of scholars at the time (and sadly, perhaps none in the present) knew as much about these languages as Tolkien did, such that they could have fully appreciated the depth and accuracy of what he accomplished. Yet one of the reasons that his writing resonates with us--even though we almost certainly are not fluent in, say, Medieval Icelandic--is that at some level (perhaps even an unconscious one) we understand that it's all consistent and all true--in the sense of being based on actual, partially internalized myth or dim linguistic memory. Okay, perhaps I'm not putting it quite right. But you get the idea.

Now, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were friends. But it's no secret that Tolkien found Narnia less than satisfying. There was no deep tonal underpinning to it. It was just a story for children with nothing less and nothing more than the sorts of things that children might like--witches, dragons, talking beavers, even Santa Claus. He found this annoying.

I don't. I like both approaches in the context of fiction, although I agree that from the point of view of sheer artistic value and weight. Tolkien's Middle Earth would have to win out. I agree with Shippey that, given certain assumptions, Tolkien is not merely the fantasy author of the century, but the author of the century. That's a big deal.

But what works from the point of view of an OD&D campaign? I think it's fair to say that many of us have had grandiose visions of being, well, Tolkien. Give me a few uninterrupted months (away from my studies, my job, my usual family responsibilities or whatever), and I will create a consistent world that my players will appreciate and love. I'll put together the natural history, the political history, the languages, the religious anthropology and all the rest, and it will be rich, cool, consistent and, in its way...true (just like Tolkien's).

Now, I think this is laudable. But let me suggest two potential problems with it: 1. None of us has the time or (sorry) the knowledge to really do it justice. We just don't. None of us is Tolkien. But perhaps more importantly, 2. what works for successful fiction does not necessarily work for successful campaign design from the point of view of gaming, or more accurately, fun gaming. Plenty of referees and players have discovered (partly through purchasing Middle-Earth settings such as the 1980's I.C.E effort) that Middle Earth is neat to have as a setting for a story but in the end is often pretty boring to play a fantasy adventure game in.

Quick quiz, which setting--Middle-Earth or Narnia--features more OD&D creatures? The answer is Narnia by about a mile. Here's a partial listing of Narnia creatures that were on the original OD&D lists, most of which did not appear in Middle-Earth: Apes, Giant Bats, Bears, Giant Beavers, Boars, Hobgoblins (though called 'boggles' in Narnia), Centaurs, Dryads, Efreet, Ghouls, Giants, Gnomes, Griffons (spelled 'Gryphon'), Incubi, Djinn, Minotaurs, Mermen, Ogres, Pegasi, Salamanders, Sea Serpents, Spectres, Sprites, Giant Squid, Trolls, Unicorns, Werewolves, Evil Wolves and Wraiths.

OD&D isn't Chainmail set in Middle-Earth, it's Narnia plus dinosaurs and robots.

AD&D and then the successive editions of AD&D and 3.0+ D&D gradually diverged from this. In part this was because the basic D&D setting with its canonical monsters from original diverse mythologies more and more became a naturalistic setting. We forgot that these creatures came from wildly different traditions. The set of them became a myth of its own. Language groups and families were postulated, natural histories of the different races and creatures were invented and so on.

It was a series of brilliant posts by Wayne Rossi's in his blog Semper Initiavus Unum On the OD&D Setting that first jolted me out of seeing things in the naturalistic terms that my teenage exposure to AD&D predisposed me to. I'm not saying this view is necessarily better. But I am saying it's a bit truer to OD&D and certainly worth considering.

For the sense of wonder, magic, romance and, yes, fun.

I tried to do it for my own game.

I'm not claiming you have to include Santa Claus. Then again...

OSR Art Friday: Omar?

The illustration above appeared on the cover of the first printing of Swords & Wizardry Complete (2010) and was created by Richard Sardinha in the same year. The title, 'Omar?', was, as far as I know, referred to in only one place--the artist's posting of it in his gallery on DeviantArt. (The S&W link takes you to a free version of the second edition with a different cover.)

An interesting and perhaps odd choice for OSR Friday, for at least three reasons:

1. Sardinha is well-known for his work on various 'New School' games and related products including 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer, Magic: The Gathering and others.
2. Some Old Schoolers were a bit negative on the piece (see the blog post and especially the comments here), as it replaced a painting by an OSR stalwart, Pete Mullen, on the previous 'Core' edition of the game and was in turn replaced by a painting by the beloved Errol Otis for the second edition of the 'Complete' rules set.
3. Sardinha admits that the illustration was not painted but photoshopped (presumably not a very Old School method) from an original sketch.

So, why did I choose it?

Because it is associated with an OSR game. And I like it.

This is as good a place as any to spend a moment discussing what I'm up to with this series. The point is not to divide everything into immutable categories of Old School versus everything else, and thus to separate artistic works or artists into the good or approved versus the bad or ideologically-suspect. It's true that I have my aesthetic preferences, or rather--since I've given my opinion on the non-starter of relativism in previous posts--my opinions on aesthetic value. I do think role-playing games have devolved from what they once were (though with a bump in the positive direction from the contemporary OSR movement) and the artistic choices have certainly been a part of that. But it's not all--if you'll pardon the metaphor in a discussion of illustration--black and white. I'll leave that attitude to the other guys--you know, the ones who insist on always looking at things in terms of bad people versus good people. The misogynists, homophobes, Eurocentrists, Frazetta-ites, philatelists, or whomever else they want to focus their Two Minutes Hate against on any particular day of the week versus, well, themselves.

Also, I think it's interesting to consider as great a diversity of good art as possible--both in terms of era and style--especially if it will provoke useful thought or discussion.

Which doesn't of course mean that we can't occasionally have a bit of fun snarking at some of the bad art or the small and petty little orthodoxies that often tend to encourage or support it.

But let's look at the painting:

Who's Omar? He's the guy who was just picked off by the underwater snake, or whatever it is. His body (living? dead?) is entwined in that tentacle. I missed that at first. Just as the party missed it and perhaps will never discover it. Omar went home. You know how he was. He just wanted to return to the surface and bank his copper pieces. Coward.

Speaking of the surface, I thought originally that the illustration depicted an Asian sort of scene--a valley with those beautiful Chinese-like vertical hills. But of course it's a huge underground cavern with perhaps a shaft of light at the top. The artist describes the central city as a 'subterranean goblin ghost town'. I guess the remaining adventurers are about to find out what that means.

The color scheme and overall tone reminds me of some of the drawings for Call of Cthulhu. The guy in the forefront holding a torch almost looks like he's wearing an early 20th century pith helmet. Indeed, we learn that Sardinha has done a number of pieces with that sort of motif. Fittingly, he lives in Providence. Here's his interpretation of a rather thoughtful Great Old One:

Sardinha has diverse talents. He's also a sculptor and puppet maker, as well as having an interest in drawing dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. His website is fascinating--and intimidating, especially for a non-talented artist groupie like me.

I think the original illustration wonderfully captures the spirit of Swords & Wizardry, which is about as Old School, OSR or just plain cool as you can get.

We'll have more to show and say about Mullin and Otis in later posts... 

Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Does Tone Matter?

Author's Note: The following grew out of a pending review I was writing. But I thought it deserved it's own space. It may sound critical of the primary game discussed in the post--Lamentations of the Flame Princess--but that was not its purpose. With the caveats expressed below, I think the game is excellent--the most perfect example of a completely realized OSR game product that I own. Indeed, I spent more money on the thing--31 Euros or whatever (which is $519,000 or thereabouts in U.S. currency)--than I have on any other contemporary game or accessory.

And I like the painting.

Perhaps the defining element of Lamentations of the Flame Princess is its tone, which we might variously describe as dark, macabre or expressive of what author James Raggi calls 'The Weird'. We might contrast the tone with the rules and setting of the game. The rules are  Classic 'B/X' D&D with some new twists, extrapolations and additions. The setting--perhaps early Baroque if anything--is actually surprisingly thinner than many games, owing to the fact that LOTFP does not include its own catalog of monsters or magic items.

So I think the tone is the thing, partly set by Raggi's sharp and evocative prose as well as the often graphically violent illustrations. We are introduced to it quite forcefully in the descriptions of the character classes in the Grindhouse edition. Let's skip the Thief and look at the three original human classes in the order first presented in OD&D. First the Fighter (to save space multiple paragraphs are concatenated):

Slaughter defines man’s history. Every new era is defined by the cruelty man inflicts upon man...In battle, there is no law. Man maims man. Horribly wounded men scream for mercy as their life’s blood pours out from cruelly hacked wounds. Their cries are ignored and their lives extinguished by those too cruel or frightened to listen...in battle there is no justice...To be willing to slaughter at another’s command in the name of peace and nobility, to be hardened to the deaths of loved companions, to be immersed in this worthlessness of life, that is the life of a soldier. Fighters are these soldiers that have seen the cruelty of battle, have committed atrocities that in any just universe will damn them to Hell, and have survived.

Some have called the tone of LOTFP cynical or nihilistic. But given the above, one could also brand it almost Nietzschean. Note that I'm not saying that Raggi himself is a Nietzschean or even that he is cynical or nihilistic in real life. I would strongly bet that he's not. But I think the author believes that infusing the text with that sort of tone helps to create the Weird effect he's going for. It makes it cool in the way that, say, certain kinds of dark horror films are cool or a Lovecraft story is cool. 

Now one reaction to the description above is to embrace it. Indeed, embracing it might almost be the expected reaction of a normal human being that has had nothing but a steady diet of the pap that passes for prose in the current and recent editions of the world's most popular fantasy role-playing game.*

Another reaction is to be put off by it. Wait, I don't want to play that guy.

Let's follow along with that reaction as we look at the other two classes. Here's the Magic-User:

Magic-Users choose a different path. Instead of cowering away from the darkness, they revel in it. They see the forces of magic as a new frontier to explore, a new tool for the attainment of power and knowledge. If it blackens the soul to equal that of any devil, it is but a small price to pay.

But what if I don't want to have my soul, you know, blackened?

Well, hope still lies with the Cleric. Here's the text:

Some religions teach the people how to receive the grace of their loving deity. Some religions teach the people how to survive the wrath of a cruel and vicious deity. Some religions simply strive to teach the truth about creation. All religions serving true powers have one thing in common: orders of those selected few who are not mere priests, but spiritual warriors endowed by their deity with mystic powers. These few are known as Clerics.

Okay, finally at least a neutral description. I'll be one of those guys, please!

Not so fast. On the opposite page of this text is an illustration of a Cleric, or rather two Clerics. The one has just lynched the other and is admiring his work as the victim's eyes bulge out. Behind is a burning church with bodies strewn about. Why did the one do such a horrible thing to the other and his parishioners? After all, they seem to be wearing similar hats, similar robes and have similar pendants. But look closely. What's that? There is a difference with the pendants. Or rather a slight difference. The star on one of them has five points. The other star has seven. It's sort of a very adult version of the Sneetches.

Now, I'm a Catholic, so by definition I don't think religion or at least all religion must be like this. Nevertheless, I think the illustration is very clever and even I suppose quite funny in a very dark way. In addition it probably expresses a cynical truth about human beings (and even religions) at their worst.

But it doesn't make me want to play that Cleric.

Is that reasonable?

Here are four possible ways to look at it:

1. You like the tone. That is, you like it for purposes of the game, not that you necessarily agree with the morality or metaphysics of it in real life.** That attitude presents no problem of course.
2. You like the tone or at least appreciate its point of view or effectiveness as art or literature. But you don't want to play in a campaign defined or infused by that tone.
3. You hate the tone and therefore don't want to play in such a world or have anything more to do with the game. You're sorry you spent those Euros. You could have instead purchased a croissant and two espressos at a cafe on your next trip to Paris.
4. You hate the tone but like the rest of the game. Therefore you play the game--with its rules and setting--and ignore the tone completely. Why should it matter? Rule Zero, after all.

I subscribe to 2. I think tone does matter. If it didn't matter, why put it in? In the case of LOTFP it elevates the game (in a good way) over much of the competition. But at the same time it colors the game in a way that if the tone doesn't agree with you, it might interfere with your enjoyment of actually using it for a campaign.

Think of this hypothetical: Suppose Lamentations were rewritten by, say, a Fundamentalist Protestant. After each important bit of text there's a corresponding bible passage that supports it. Instead of Clerics lynching each other, you have pictures of Aslan and sandaled biblical heroes. If you didn't like that tone, would you play the game? Why not just ignore that stuff? Rule Zero.

I think that would be a stretch. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Or rather, you can but only if you like it.

Ideally, a successful OSR game is not just a sum of mechanics and lists. It should be evaluated as an aesthetic whole. The original 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons was such a game, as is the contemporary Lamentations of the Flame Princess. And of course there are many other examples. Every successful game is such an example. This may seem like an obvious or even trivial point, but I think it is often a bit lost amidst discussions of house-ruling this or hacking that (not that there's anything wrong with it).

You should aspire to rise above the bland. But you should understand that some people may then have a problem. Tone matters. If they're fair people, they'll still appreciate your effort (even if they don't use it for their next fourteen year campaign). If they're not fair people, then who cares?



*A human in clanging plate armor holds her shield before her as she runs toward the massed goblins. An elf behind her, clad in studded leather armor, peppers the goblins with arrows loosed from his exquisite bow. The half-orc nearby shouts orders, helping the two combatants coordinate their assault to the best advantage.

**That last sentence was a later insertion motivated by a comment made by Stefan Poag in the Google+ OSR Community discussion on this topic.  

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!

Great OD&D Movie: The Vikings

There are many great OD&D movies. But in my experience, the more explicit you make them--such as the two execrable Dungeons & Dragons films--the worse they are. So, among the best are the historical films.

Okay, I admit that I'm biased. I gave Vikings a prominent place in my own game.

This 1958 movie features Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Though I would take issue with the scary and (in my view) somewhat exaggerated Orson Wells introductory narrative (see one of my early blog posts on things Viking here), the movie is wonderful.

See below for a great scene featuring a longboat and fjords:

There's this cliche that 40's and 50's films were black and white in terms of evil vs. good characters. 60's, 70's and more contemporary films are more nuanced, or whatever. That's actually sort of the opposite of the truth.

In the Vikings most of the characters are morally mixed, to say the least, except perhaps for Janet Leigh and her priest, maybe, and of course, the current English king, who's a jerkopotamus to the core. So, the Vikings (represented most forcefully by Kirk Douglas) are literal rapists and murderers, but they also have a certain sense of honor and honesty, unlike, say, the scheming British. And even Douglas does the right thing by the women he loves at the point of death, perhaps sacrificing himself to his sworn enemy.

That's great drama. It's also (I hope) life.