Chateau Lloyd

As part of my retro-gaming, I picked up a reprint of the D&D Gazetteer for the Grand Duchy of Karameikos.  It's a handy book, with a good amount of information and proposed adventures.

Because it was designed to mate with other published modules, it even includes a handy guide to integrating them into the campaign.

The Gazetteer series was a setting in a box, if you will, and TSR cranked them out.  Maybe it cranked too many out, because to a certain extent, the company was competing with itself.

At any rate the Gazetteers offered a unified world that was already put into D&D gaming stats.  No assembly required.

The various kingdoms were obviously derived from medieval or other fantasy properties, but that only adds to their utility.  Thus, the Grand Duchy is something of a stand-in for a Slavic nation colonized by Greco-Roman elites.  The setting purposefully has an unfinished feel so that characters have plenty of room to established their own strongholds and engage in royal politics.

All of that is swell.  There is even a discussion of coinage and how D&D oversells the use of gold, which tell me that author Aaron Alston knows a bit about history.

Alas, Alston also bought into the conventional 1980s scholarship that all accounts are unreliable and the truth is always different from what was written down.  The book contains players' sections and referee sections, and there is always a difference.

What was most disappointing is that the "real" version of history is always more mundane.  The players will hear of three god-like tribal founders, but then the Dungeon Master learns that it was all made up by the tribes as part of their mythical history.

This garbage has always pissed me off.  How can anyone prove that?  These are just secular historians with weird theories, not actual science.  What makes it even worse is that this is a fantasy game!  The whole point is to encounter legendary heroes, not use socio-economic data to explain the rise and fall of communities.  

There are actual spells that allow high-ranking spell-users to contact the gods or other immortal creatures, so these "fake legends" would have been destroyed instantly.  The rules for gods are similar - you can't pray to a myth and get your spells replenished.  Someone has to have the power to answer the prayer.

This is what happens when secular wannabe scholars try to rationalize a world with goblins, giant spiders, dragons and rust monsters.

Is it useful?  Very much so.  I will probably buy more, but I will also make a point of always choosing the legend over some dim, gray "reality."

Not quite a year ago I started a Dungeons and Dragons campaign based on older books and using maps only for reference rather than tactical movement.

The game sputtered out, but we're starting it again, and this time I'm fully embracing retro-gaming by buying some of the "Gazetteers" to help me build out a setting.

This is not my first encounter with Basic D&D's campaign environment.  Module X1 Isle of Dread was part of the boxed set, and I subsequently bought Drums on Fire Mountain, which was designed by Games Workshop staff when they were serving as TSR's UK licensee.

Unfortunately, by the time the gazetteers came out, I was fully committed to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which had its own settings and modules.  This was one of the oddities of TSR - the urge to compete with itself.  Indeed, the company grew wild and a failure to do any kind of rational bookkeeping or properly manage the product lines eventually resulted in its failure and takeover.

In practical terms, I didn't have enough money to buy both AD&D and D&D books, and since AD&D was pushing the edge on complexity, that's where I went.  Now seems like a good time to see what I missed.  Just like watching old TV shows, sometimes going back to an old game opens up new takes on it, and a better understanding of how it works.

Certainly I'm much less interested in detail or complexity than I was.  My game design choices now lean towards minimalism, and so using older, less complicated books dovetails quite nicely with my simplified, narrative-based combat resolution.

Posting has been light this week because my grandkids have discovered the Candyland game I got them for Christmas.

On the blessed morning, it got lost in the shuffle of new toys, but the weather precluding outdoor activity, games are a welcome distraction.

Already, we're experiencing some developmental growth, as the kids learn the winning is great, losing is said, and it's not nice to accuse someone of cheating.

Much of society's problems stem from people who are both poor winners and sore losers.  Participation trophies have much to answer for.

Candyland is interesting because it is so arbitrary.  It is won and lost on a random card loss, so there's not much one can do to facilitate victory.  That being said there is an optional rule allowing the players to draw two cards, and choose which one they want to use, significantly increasing their control over the outcome.  I've not yet used this, but fully intend to.  I'm assuming this was a Gen X innovation because we are truly the Gamer Generation.

The most rapidly growing religious group in the US is the "nones," that is, people who have no formal religious affiliation.  Many identify themselves as "spiritual, but not religious" and I was once one of them.

Crisis Magazine has something of a deep dive on what Nones believe and what they practice.

In many ways, they are the heirs of America's fragmented Protestant heritage, which hold that each person can have their own interpretation of the Bible, and refuses to acknowledge any other religious authority.  It is a very American approach to faith.

I think it is also an outgrowth of the mainstreaming of role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, which pushed the notion that people would be judged not by the good or evil of their actions, but whether they followed the faith of their choice.  Thus, worshippers of Zeus would be judged on their terms, Muslims on theirs, and Christians theirs.

This neatly side-stepped the issue of whether there was one true God and also the consequences of ignoring Him.  If you identify as a neo-pagan or Wiccan, well then that is how your fate after death will be determined.

Alas, the world doesn't quite work that way, and while you may not be interested in the devil, the devil is very much interested and you.  There are many accounts in the exorcism community of how New Age or neopagans ended up opening doors that were better left closed.

There is also the fact that such beliefs rarely provide a sturdy foundation for success in this world, let alone the next.   While there are indeed plenty of observant Christians who are also screw-ups, the fact is that there are vanishingly few Nones that seem to be happy and/or stable.  I know several that have found material prosperity, but they remain mired in a worldview that keeps them perpetually aggrieved and/or distracted.  

They also tend to divorce a lot.

I think a big part of this is the hubris of someone deciding that all of the other traditions are flawed or incorrect, and that they can achieve something just as good or better based on their own wits and insight.  What actually happens is that they entrench their sins as virtues.

This also leads to Yard Sign Calvinism, performative virtue-signaling where intentions matter more than results.

The only positive element of this is that by acknowledging the possibility of a spirit world, the Nones have a decent chance of finding their way back to the true faith.  

I think it is essential that Catholics especially use a soft touch with these folks, inviting them rather than hectoring them, as Protestants often do.  Above all things, though, there must also be a willingness to speak clearly.  "Nice" Christianity is a dead end.

For the past couple of years, I've hinted about various writing and gaming ideas, but none has really gotten anywhere.  The biggest obstacle was a lack of free time, both to contemplate and execute.

This obstacle has largely been removed, and I've felt my creative impulses stirring for the first time since Walls of Men.  It's a wonderful feeling.

(A renewed push to get in shape may also have contributed to this new energy.)

My inspiration is Avalon Hill's old game of the Wars of the Roses, Kingmaker.  I have played this game many times over the years, most recently with the family.  It's not too heavy on the wargame side, and the cards offer a nice period feel, but it does have some severe limitations.

The first is the time needed to set it up and take it down.  It has lots of small counters that require precise placement at pre-ordained positions and while there are markings on the board, the heraldry is so close that it's easy to mix them up.  The board has a neat archaic look, but it's a bit drab and heard to read.  Basically, you'll need at least 15 minutes to set it up and to put it away, and that's a lot of up-front time to commit to something.

The game itself can move very slowly, in part because it uses traditional wargame-style movement, and in part because the cards constantly stir things up, which is kind of cool from a chaos of war perspective, but often the reversals of fortune seem random rather than historical.

Put simply, the game tries to do too much, and it has too much randomness thrown into it, which makes a "quick game" essentially impossible.  It also tends towards stalemate as random event cards drag armies who were about to make decisive contact to the far corners of the realm.  It is a rare game that ends quickly and decisively.

The core concepts for my game are therefore quick setup and cleanup, fast play and the possibility for a follow-up game in the same session, perhaps with the players changing factions.

Yes, that's another issue with Kingmaker.  The conceit is that the actual claimants are mere pawns in the hands of the Great Houses, and while and interesting take, it's not very realistic.  Everyone is essentially chasing after the same tokens, and this creates bottlenecks and stand-offs where no one can achieve decisive superiority.

For my system, there will be five defined factions, each with special rules and their own objectives.  What is more, there will be complimentary objectives, allowing for joint wins.

All of this is based on military wargames I developed more than a decade ago, and the benefits of that experience mean that I'm actually starting with a tested, robust core system that only needs slight modification (mostly a new map) to run properly.

Quick games also make for better playtesting.  The chief obstacle on this is actual production: getting the custom cards and map produced and packaged for sale.

I also need a title, and right now I'm tempted to use the "Conqueror" brand because I anticipate producing more games using this system.

For the first time in a long time, I'm involved in a tabletop game of Dungeons and Dragons.  We're using the 5th edition rules, but I'm running an old "Basic" era dungeon.  It works surprisingly well, and I'm sure the similarities are not accidental.

This is not the first time I've done retro-D&D gaming.  I did the same in the 1990s, and it was a hoot.

So when it was time to start a new campaign, our group talked about what worked and what didn't.  One thing I wanted to try out was playing without a map or figures.

This was how we did it "back in the day."  The miniatures industry was not as fully developed, pre-painted figures were unknown, most terrain was modified from model railroading, so it was a something of a challenge.  The rule books mentioned it, but my group just mapped the dungeon as we went along (mostly to avoid getting lost) and when it came to a battle, the DM described it and we went around the room giving our actions.

There were to advantages to this approach.  The first was that rules disputes about terrain, movement, line-of-sight and so forth were almost non-existent.  If a player could give a good account of what he wanted to do, the DM would allow it, or ask for a roll and players accepted it.   I should note that we rotated DMs, so the party-killing ego-maniac DM was something I had to wait until I was an adult to deal with.

The second advantage is speed.  Combats go very quickly when you cut own the measuring, calculating and min-maxing of movement and facings.  The game is less tactical, but much more immersive as people have to explain what they are doing rather than moving a figure so everyone can see where they are.  It's basically competitive storytelling.

Some might wonder how the rules work in such an environment, and the answer is that some do, some don't and we just work things out as they come up.  

Another simplification is initiative, when always seems to bog down a game.  Even with a small group of players, everyone has to roll, the results have to be compiled, and then people work out their moves, often waiting to see what someone else does or arguing about who should do what.

We've reverted to the old system where there are only two rolls: the party and the monsters.  Whoever has the initiative just moves all at once and as before, the discussion is interactive.  So yes, people can hold their actions, declare if/then situations and coordinate their actions, but it feels less like a wargame.

I obviously like wargaming quite a bit, but there's a limit to what it can do in a role-playing environment.  There's also the tendency for rule-mongering and exploits, and for the encounters to take on a competitive rather than collaborative experience.

A practical advantage is that setup and cleanup is much, much faster.  If you have a dedicated space and leave things set up, it's not much of an issue, but for us, keeping the clutter to a minimum is nice.

I may go back to maps and minis and some point, but right now, I'm not missing them.

Amazon Prime's desecration of J.R.R. Tolkien's work continues with the release of the second season of The Rings of Power.

A stunning (but at the same time predictable) development is the decision to "humanize" the orcs.  Tolkien's villains were cruel, cowardly, cannibalistic monsters who lived a debased existence.  They were a twisted mockery of elves created by Morgoth to serve as the foot soldiers for his war against the Valar.

These creatures immediately struck a nerve in the popular culture and were part of the original elements of Dungeons and Dragons and are now a staple of fantasy environments.

Alas, in our decadence, people have decided that what was once obviously evil must now be seen as good, so just as sodomy is the highest form of sex, so orcs are just misunderstood and must be rehabilitated into yet another People of Color oppressed by white bigoted imperialists.

I've dealt with the whole question of whether they are supposed to be an allegory for actual people, and the short version is "yes and no."  Yes, they represent human vices and were written with bloodthirsty and battle-crazed soldiers of World War I in mind.  No, they are not a racial caricature of anyone.

As the old saying goes: if you hear a "dog whistle," you're the dog.  Anyone who looks at misshapen, homicidal, cannibals who delight in cruelty and says:  "You know who this reminds me of..." is the bigot, not the guy who made them up.

It is yet another milestone on our civilization's downward path, and their utter rejection gives me comfort and hope for the future.

Last week the trailer for a new installment of the Assassins Creed franchise came out.  I'm familiar with the game, though I've never played it.  Anyhow, my understanding is that it uses the Knight Templars as some sort of ancient conspiracy against their arch-enemies and assassins are good, Templars bad, or whatever.   I'm quite the fan of Umberto Eco's Templar conspiracy tour-de-force, Focault's Pendulum, which I'm sure was at least some of the inspiration for the franchise.

Anyway, the new release is set in Japan, a first for the series, and people were naturally looking forward to actual samurai and ninjas duking it out.  Instead, the titular character is an African samurai, which has a lot of people scratching their heads.

Apparently, there is a mention of an African man reaching Japan during the tumultuous 16th Century.  The actual person was the servant of a Jesuit missionary and a Japanese warlord took an interest in him, taking him into his service as a page or manservant.

To put it another way, he wasn't an actual samurai.  

But facts mean nothing to modern social justice motivated scholars, and so the game publishers are digging in on the "authenticity" of their game.  Some are citing African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan as the authoritative source.  The book has hugely positive ratings, but that's meaningless in terms of whether or not it is actual history.

Long-time friends of this blog will know that when I dug into the Spanish Civil War, I found plenty of "respected" sources that spouted provable lies.  Antony Beevor is - for some strange reason - considered a respectable historian despite his blatant bigotry and complete disregard of the facts.

That tissue of lies has a very positive rating despite being filled with hot garbage, and I noticed that critical reviews of that Yasuke book echo my own audit of Beevor.

To put it another way, there is zero proof that this Yasuke was a samurai, but bigoted Western authors have decided that he was one, and that's that.

At the start of this dispute, both Encyclopedia Britannic and Wikipedia were skeptical of the samurai claims, but once the signal was given both sources rewrote their entries to conform to the new narrative.  They both went full George Orwell.  Never go full George Orwell.

The core problem with this transparent re-writing of history is that it convinces no one.  Skeptics will become more skeptical while fence-sitters will be turned off by the sudden about-face.  The true believers will parrot whatever is given them, which further strengthens the skeptical arguments.

Put simply, it is self-defeating, destroying the authority of once-respected institutions in return for ephemeral short-term gains.  This seems to be the hallmark of our age.

What makes this all so pathetic is that all this revisionism is being done in the service of a video game, one that has already generated overwhelmingly negative responses.  The various authorities that whored themselves out for this endeavor will see zero return on their investment.  Their best-case scenario is for some tech mogul to get a little bit more wealthy for a little while.

Meanwhile, the prestige of Western scholarship will suffer irreparable damage.  

At this point, I'm good with that.  Modern academics are nothing more than credentialed imbeciles.  Indeed, when challenged, they always resort to asserting their authority rather than providing actual evidence.  The faster this corruption is exposed and destroyed, the better for everyone.

I recently purchase a copy of the Bolt Action World War II miniatures rules.  This is published by Warlord Games, which is affiliated with Osprey, one of my favorite publishing houses.

The story behind Bolt Action is kind of interesting.  The game designers started their careers working for Games Workshop, and were involved in the design of Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Fantasy Battles and other stuff.  For many years they were quite happy with their gig, in part because they had a good amount of creative freedom and the company was growing by leaps and bounds.  From the 80s to through the 90s, there was continuous improvement in both the quality of design and physical appearance of their products.  I am not alone in considering it the Golden Age at GW.

However, by the late 1990s, the management had become more profit-oriented, and this resulted in friction between the designers, who wanted the best possible game design, and the management, that was more concerned with sales than the quality of the rules.

Since the bulk of GW's money came from miniatures sales, it was no longer enough to simply build a good wargaming system and  marketing it, the system itself became a vehicle to boost miniatures sales.  In practical terms, this meant that the rules of their games were altered to make players need to buy more figures either by increasing the scope of the game (requiring more models to play) or changing the rules for various units, requiring new models to remain "current."

As one might expect among creative types, they eventually got tired of this and left, staring various alternative companies.

Warlord Games is one of those successor companies, and the design of Bolt Action is essentially the final form of the earlier 40k system.  It therefore is familiar to me, intuitive, but much simplified and streamlined since it got more playtesting and the designers were freed from the constraints of managers pushing new editions every 3-5 years.

This places me in the unique position of having never played a game, but having a good idea how the game will play because it is so similar. 

The timing for this seems to be just right, as I am taking some time off over Christmas. 

There's something fun and exciting about starting a new game system, and that's definitely in play, even though I've seen much of it before.  I actually have a fair amount of figures already painted up due to my decision many years ago to use historical models for my 40k armies whenever possible.

At the same time, there is also scope for additional collecting (I'm looking at building a Soviet force to fight my existing Germans), which is always enjoyable.

Apparently Warhammer 40,000 is celebrating its tenth edition this year.  I quite during the third edition, which makes me seven editions out of date.

In practical terms, this has saved me hundreds of dollars in what would now be useless rule books.

The game had its debut as Rogue Trader back in 1989, and the first major revision was in 1993.  This is the 2nd edition, which I still play.  The 3rd edition was release in the fall of 1998, and made significant changes.  I stuck with it for a while, but eventually quit, and later picked up 2nd where I left off.

I bring this up because as a game designer, I strive to create a definitive and clear rules set.  The more a system is played, the more problems are identified and subsequently corrected.  What Games Workshop has done is create a situation where the game sees significant revisions every three years.  These are not about correcting mistakes; they sometimes appear to be random design decisions to highlight new tactics or draw attention to new models or factions.

GW can do this because of a near-monopoly position in tabletop gaming, particularly in Europe.  I don't sense anyone else could ever be in that position, and as yet, GW has managed to stay afloat despite these changes.  Apparently, it works for them, though I can't help but wonder how long this will continue.

Gaming companies are uniquely susceptible to sudden failure.  SPI, Avalon Hill, TSR - all of these were industry leaders and are now defunct.  Some years back, I thought GW was close behind them, but so far, I've been wrong.  So maybe they've found the secret sauce.