Ares Magazine: Issue #4

Issue #4 of Ares appeared in September 1980. What immediately strikes me about it is its cover by Joe Jusko. Jusko, for those unfamiliar with his name, is a comics artist whose work graced the pages of Heavy Metal and, even more famously, Marvel's Savage Sword of Conan in the '70s. Jusko's presence here is very much in line with what we've seen previously in Ares, whose first issue featured a cover by Howard Chaykin (Jusko's mentor). SPI seemed interested in tapping into existing fantasy and science fiction esthetics rather than cultivating their own distinctive ones. This is in contrast with what TSR seemed to be doing at the same time. Longtime readers of this blog undoubtedly know the approach I prefer.

Related to this topic, editor Redmond Simonsen begins issue #4 with a piece, where he explains original vision of Ares and how that vision is being modified in response to feedback they've received from subscribers. He says:

We designed Ares as a cross between a literary magazine and a gaming magazine -- an attempt to create something unique, aimed at helping the two story-telling forms (writing and gaming) to lend their strengths to each other. Because of the base from which SPI operates, however, our natural audience for Ares is more game-oriented than fiction oriented. This doesn't mean the typical Ares reader doesn't want to see good fiction in his magazine; it's just that he wants the game related material to dominate.

I find this paragraph fascinating, as I think it confirms my sense that, as the hobby grew outside its initial audience, it became a lot less focused on the fantasy and science fiction literature that initially inspired it.  In this issue, there's only a single piece of fiction (see below), "Hillsong" by Jayge Carr, and it's considerably shorter than those in the first three issues. The shift toward more gaming-oriented material is also in evidence in John Boardman's "Science for Science Fiction" installment. This time, rather than talk about how some hallowed element of sci-fi was impossible according to "real science," he instead offers up about a dozen brief science articles about topics that could inspire sci-fi scenarios. This is definitely a better approach, but it still falls somewhat flat in the inspiration department. More interesting is Susan Schwartz's "Facts for Fantasy," which does the same thing as Boardman's piece but with more verve. She draws on myth, legend, and history to present new locales, monsters, and artifacts that can inspire fantasy gaming. It's still a little dry but it's a step in the right direction.

"Eye of the Goblin" by David Ritchie is a short piece of "fiction" that's supposed to illustrate a DragonQuest combat. I say "fiction," because it's more of an extended vignette than a true short story and it's not an especially good one, being a typical example of the "gaming fiction" that would come to prominence later in the decade. "Arena of Death" by Simonsen and Ritchie is a standalone gladiatorial combat game derived from DragonQuest. It can easily be integrated into DQ adventures and campaigns or treated as a wargame in its own right. Reading it I was reminded of just why I could never get a DragonQuest campaign off the ground in my youth: its combat rules are just too complex for my feeble mind. Accompanying "Arena of Death" is an article by John Greer on "The Weapons of Arena of Death," which presents stats and historical information about various medieval and ancient weapons.

The issue includes book, movie, and television reviews, many of which are quite lengthy. The one that immediately caught my eye was the review of the PBS series, Cosmos, which I adored a younger man. It's stuff like this that really helps to put Ares into a wider context for me in a way that Dragon rarely did. Ares seems much more engaged in the wider world beyond the hobby, while Dragon was very cramped in its approach, concentrating largely on the hobby and, even more specifically, on TSR's own offerings. Snarky reviews of fantasy RPGs also continue in issue #4, starting with Chivalry & Sorcery, which is, surprisingly, treated with respect for its "original concepts." Nevertheless, the reviewer recommends using it primarily as a resource for other games rather than as one to be played in itself. Dave Arneson's Adventures in Fantasy make out even worse: "The price is high, the graphics are terrible, the rules are worse." Yet, the reviewer still finds the game "fun" in actual play. Closing out the issue is an article describing "DragonQuest Tournament Combat," which is intended to streamline play when time is of the essence.

It's been very interesting reading these issues in order, both because I'd never read many of them before and because I can see the magazine evolving in response to its readers. SPI was always very good at paying attention to what its fans said, so this should be no surprise to anyone who knows the company's history. Ares is also a window on a part of the hobby I didn't know and rarely interacted with during my formative years. Reading the magazine has thus been an education for me.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was one of the first stories by H.P. Lovecraft I ever read and it baffled me. It baffled me not because its content was difficult to understand -- though it does ramble quite a bit -- but because it was not at all what expected from Lovecraft. Prior to entering the hobby, I don't believe I'd ever heard his name. Once I had, many of the older fellows with whom I'd become acquainted sang his praises as an unsurpassed "horror" writer and a huge influence on many of gaming's early designers.

So, naturally, I made my way to library to grab any book by Lovecraft that I could. Among those volumes was the book pictured here, a 1943 Arkham House-published collection of some of Lovecraft's tales, including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Though completed in 1927, Lovecraft never submitted it for publication in his lifetime and, indeed, felt "it isn't much good," as he admitted in a letter to Wilfred Talman. Consequently, the version that appeared in 1943 was based on a largely-unedited rough draft, which may explain some of its disjointedness.


The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is an odd tale -- "a picaresque chronicle of impossible adventures in a dreamland," as HPL himself described it in the same letter quote above. At over 40,000 words, it rivals At the Mountains of Madness in terms of length. I'd also argue that it rivals At the Mountains of Madness in terms of being one of Lovecraft's greatest -- or at least, most ambitious -- works. That's not an opinion everyone shares. Many critics consider The Dream-Quest to be without much merit, seeing it as yet another ape of Dunsanian fantasy without many redeeming features. I won't deny that it owes much to Lord Dunsany, as all Lovecraft's dreamlands tales do, but I think it's a mistake to see it only as yet another knock-off of the Irish writer. That's because I consider the novella to be a valedictory tale, where Lovecraft not only bids farewell to Dunsany but lays the groundwork for the next phase of his writing career.

For this tale, Lovecraft brings back his dreaming hero and alter ego, Randolph Carter, who'd appeared in three previous stories.

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.

What follows is a record of Carter's attempts to find the "majestic sunset city" of his dreams. This quest includes visits to the Enchanted Wood, to Oriab Isle aboard a black galley, to Celephaïs, and, at last, to the Cold Waste, where Kadath lies. Along the way, he meets the rodent-like zoogs, the cats of Ulthar, ghouls, fellow dreamer King Kuranes, moon beasts, and many, many wondrous and terrifying creatures. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a veritable catalog of the beautiful and the weird, often coming so quickly, one after the other, that it's difficult to really appreciate any of them, or the care with which Lovecraft describes them. That's probably the biggest fault of the novella: it contains so much that it demands a more coherent narrative structure from which to make sense of it all. Without, the reader is left reeling.

Yet, I can forgive that, partly because I like catalogs of the beautiful and the weird, especially when drawn so artfully as Lovecraft does here. However, the ultimate reason for my forgiveness is the conclusion of the tale, when the messenger of the gods, Nyarlathotep himself, explains to Carter the true identity of the city he has seen in his dreams:

"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset, of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love. And there is antique Salem with its brooding years, and spectral Marblehead scaling its rocky precipices into past centuries! And the glory of Salem's towers and spires seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour against the setting sun.

"There is Providence quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbour, with terraces of green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and Newport climbing wraithlike from its dreaming breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it; and antediluvian Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables, and the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.

"Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lands in Portsmouth, twilight bends of rustic New Hampshire roads where giant elms half hide white farmhouse walls and creaking well-sweeps. Gloucester's salt wharves and Truro's windy willows. Vistas of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along the North Shore, hushed stony slopes and low ivied cottages in the lee of huge boulders in Rhode Island's back country. Scent of the sea and fragrance of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens at dawn. These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last these endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.

 The world of Randolph Carter's dreams is not in some faraway place, but right before him, in the familiar places he loves and has loved since his childhood. Perhaps it's because I know so much more about Lovecraft's life that I find this passage so powerfully moving, erhaps it's because I, too, feel the pull of my past and an attachment to the places of my youth or perhaps it's because I'm middle-aged and feel more keenly than ever the weight of the past, I don't know, but I consider it one of the truest things Lovecraft ever wrote and enough to earn The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath a place among the pantheon of my favorite stories.

Open Friday: "Niche" Games

Last night I had the chance to play my first session of Dungeon Crawl Classics (I'll talk about it at greater length tomorrow) and I had a blast. As I said then, DCC RPG is a game that really won me over, despite my initial skepticism, because it was clearly not written to be a mass market crowd pleaser. That is, it's not a "generic" fantasy game, but instead comes with all sorts of mechanical, esthetic, and gaming cultural (e.g. the coolness of Zocchi dice) assumptions that not every gamer is going to share -- and indeed many will actively dislike.

Despite, I think DCC RPG is a great game. Indeed, I think much of its greatness comes from the very fact that it was designed with a niche audience in mind rather than a broad one. So, my question for today is this: what is your favorite "niche RPG?" By this, I mean a game designed for a small, specific audience that understands and appreciates its quirkiness in a way that a mass audience never could.

My Arduin Education

As I admitted years ago, I long held an unthinking prejudice against Dave Hargrave's Arduin books, a prejudice I still haven't wholly overcome, even if I've made great strides in that regard. Even if, ultimately, Arduin "isn't for me," I have started to appreciate it in its own right and have found that, despite the stolidity of my imagination, little bits of Hargravian has seeped in over the last couple of years.

I own the first three volumes of the Arduin Grimoire series and nothing more. What I'd like to hear -- from fans of Arduin, not its detractors -- is whether there are any subsequent volumes or related products that you think might be helpful to me as I continue my education. Are volumes IV-IX worth owning? What about Hargrave's dungeons? The modern Arduin books by later authors? Let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Feelings Occasioned by Dice

I got the last of the Zocchi dice I ordered so that I'd be set to play in my first game of Dungeon Crawl Classics tomorrow night (you can be sure I'll post about the experience later). I couldn't find a complete set that included everything I needed, so I had to get a few of them separately. Likewise, I'd been told that the "standard" D7 doesn't roll very well, so I got a D14 numbered 1-7 twice instead. And, to be honest, I didn't like the looks of the D7s I saw anyway, though the modified D14 I got is no prize, being large than I expected.

I know, for a lot of people, the use of all these additional dice types is a big turn-off. When I first heard about it, I thought it was a bit gimmicky too. Plus, the cost of assembling these dice was not insignificant, especially when compared to how cheaply one can acquire a full set of "ordinary" polyhedrals these days.

Having said that, I want to be honest: it was a lot of fun assembling this new collection of dice. In fact, hunting down all these weird dice reminded me a lot of what it was like in early 1980 finding my first set of polyhedrals. As you may recall, I started with the Holmes set. My copy included chits, not dice. I knew what the dice were supposed to look like, since I'd seen pictures of them and my friend's older brother had some, but I wanted my own. Finding them in suburban Baltimore at that time was no easy task, at least not for a kid who was as yet unaware of the existence of hobby stores that stocked RPGs.

The process of finding that first set of dice is something I'll never forget. It's not only one of my early RPG-related memories, but it reminds me of an aspect of the hobby that's very important to me -- initiation. Finding those dice was like a quest for the Holy Grail. Bringing them back to my friends and showing them off was proof that I'd ascended Mt. Olympus and returned. It was a rite of passage that showed I was now a full member of the fraternity of gamers. I suspect that this was a big part of the initial attraction of the hobby to me -- I felt like I was joining something "mysterious" and "elite."

I'm sure that sounds silly to a lot of people reading this, especially those who either didn't have a mentor who brought them into the hobby or who entered it by way of miniatures wargaming long before annoying kids like me appeared on the scene. For me, though, it's a fond memory and one that Goodman Games has not only conjured up but helped me to relive, if only a little. To my mind, that's what more contemporary RPG publishers ought to be trying to do.

A Crazy Idea

Let me preface this by saying that I'm not necessarily advocating the rule modification I'm presenting below. It's intended more as an illustration of a broad concept I've long wanted to make work, but that I've never quite managed to do so. Basically, the concept is this: high ability scores should be a double-edged sword. That is, they should come with benefits and drawbacks.

This is hard to do in D&D, since ability scores, as they have evolved over the years, have become ever more important to a character's effectiveness in play. Originally, though, the three "prime requisites" -- Strength, Intelligence, and Wisdom -- had (almost) no mechanical role in the game except providing an adjustment to earned experience. Thus, the only difference between having a fighting man's having a Strength 15 and a Strength 10 is that the former score grants a small XP bonus, presumably on the notion that a fighter with higher Strength has an easier go of his chosen profession and thus advances more quickly.

Recently, though, I started to wonder if perhaps its made more sense to give an XP bonus to characters with low prime requisite scores. The idea behind this is that a low Strength fighting man who survives, despite his inherent weakness, learns more than would his high Strength counterpart. Granted, this makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of experience points, not to mention the role that having a high ability score plays in gaining XP, but it seemed like a very elegant way to achieve what I wanted -- a negative consequence to having a high ability score. I just flipped OD&D's experience adjustment chart and got this:

Prime Requisite Score	Experience Adjustment
3-6	+10%
7-8	+5%
9-12	0
13-14	-10%
15+	-20%

I should add that, if I were to use this chart, it'd be in conjunction with Supplement I's expanded ability score charts. The whole reason I want there to be some negative effects associated with high scores in the first place is because Greyhawk makes certain scores so useful at high levels that it almost necessitates that every character of certain classes will now have high scores. I'm fine with that, but I want a trade-off of some kind, even if I'm far from convinced that this crazy notion I've presented here is the trade-off I'm looking for.

Ares Magazine: Issue #3

Issue #3 of Ares appeared in July 1980. It begins with an editorial by Redmond Simonsen, in which he praises the recently-released film, The Empire Strikes Back, about which more will said later in the issue. Personally, I find this interesting because it puts this issue in immediate historical context. I would have been preparing to enter the sixth grade at the time and had been playing RPGs -- D&D primarily -- for less than a year. I hadn't even started reading Dragon yet.

As in the previous two issues, this one includes not one but two pieces of fiction. The first, "The Whispering Mirror," is a fantasy tale by Richard Lyon and Andrew Offutt. The second, "Final Notes," is, for lack of a better word, a "weird tale" by Michael Edwards. Neither is particularly noteworthy in itself, but, as I've remarked before, it's fascinating that Ares devoted so much of its brief (40) page count to fiction. "Space Wars" by John Prados is another "real science" science fiction article, this time devoted to space-based weaponry. Though the article retains some of the fun-deflating concern with realism of its predecessors, it does so more matter of factly, without the glee that seemed to animate the others. Also, the article evinces concern in multiple places about the real world dangers to peace and humanity's very survival if space becomes militarized. In historical context, it makes more sense, but I can't deny that it strikes an odd tone in a magazine published a wargaming company.

 Issue #3's integral wargame is called "Barbarian Kings" and was designed by Greg Costikyan and Redmond Simonsen. The game, for two to five players, is "a simulation of the Red Age of political and military turmoil on the island continent of Castafon situated in the northern quadrant of the Fira Ocean on the planet Hypastia." That description, right there, nicely encapsulates so much of what I feel about SPI's fantasy efforts -- bold yet tone deaf. Each player assumes the role of a "provincial king" hoping to use his power and influence to bring enough provinces under his control to achieve victory. The game includes human troops, as well as orcs, elves, and dwarves (as well as "whale folk" and "war frogs"). Magic exists and works mostly on a "high" level, which is to say it's mostly strategic, aiding or impeding actions on the map of the world. Combat, movement, and resource management are all fairly simple and straightforward, even to a guy like me who's far from a wargamer.

Eric Goldberg presents reviews of numerous games in his signature snarky style. His first review is dedicated to Steve Jackson's In the Labyrinth, which he calls "as good as any FRP system currently available commercially." Of the second edition of RuneQuest, he is more critical, seeing it as simultaneously a step forward from D&D (and its "odious" level-based system) but also unnecessarily complex in other places and with systems that "don't mesh together as nicely as one would hope." He also criticizes its price and its cover artwork, which he says depicts "a somnolent girl dressed for a Marquis de Sade Costume Ball proffering an oversized tortilla to a ravenous, deformed gila monster." His brief review of Tunnels & Trolls largely dismisses it as a "puff-piece." He concludes by reviewing all three volumes of AD&D, the Dungeon Masters Guide having been out less than a year by this point. Goldberg is mostly negative about AD&D, saying that, rather than correcting the "previous rules maladies" of OD&D, AD&D made the situation much worse. He instead recommends that, "if the reader is interested in investing in D&D as the most prevalent FRP game, bu the collector's edition and Greyhawk, and ignore the rest."

Concluding the issue are brief book reviews, along with reviews of several movies, including The Empire Strikes Back, to which Simonsen referred in his opening editorial. The reviewer praises the film for taking Star Wars in new directions and for its "grimness." Reading through the review, it almost seems as if the writer actually disliked Star Wars for having "the tension ... of an Erroll Flynn film" and being "light" -- precisely the qualities that made the original such a huge hit in the first place. But then it wouldn't be an Ares magazine review if it didn't pour on the macho posturing.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Coming of the Sword

Issue #55 (November 1981) was the last issue in which a story about Gardner Fox's Niall of the Far Travels appeared. There are a number of things that are interesting about this final appearance of the Northumbrian barbarian. First, Kim Mohan, in his editorial, calls the stories of Niall "one of DRAGON's specialties." Then, he apologizes for the fact that it had been nearly a year since a new story had appeared, adding that it was Dragon's fault, not Fox's. Second, the story that appears in this issue, "The Coming of the Sword," is out of sequence from its predecessors. Instead of picking up after the last one, this new -- and, as it turns out, final -- one presents us with the tale of Niall's very first adventure, when he was a young man. Now, presenting the adventures of a sword-and-sorcery hero out of chronological order has a long pedigree, going back to Conan the Cimmerian at least, but I find it odd in this case, because it's different from what Fox had done in all his previous stories.

Of course, we'll never know if this represented a change in direction for the Niall of the Far Travels series, since it was the last one ever published. After "The Coming of the Sword," no more appeared, either in the pages of Dragon or elsewhere. I'd love to know why that was the case, but I suspect it's a mystery without any easy answer (unless, of course, Kim Mohan could be prevailed upon to remember what happened -- assuming he even knows). Even without that knowledge, "The Coming of the Sword" is a strange story. I say "strange" in that it not only shows us a younger, less experienced Niall but it shows him in his homeland, which comes across as a Norse pastiche, right down to invocations of Freya, Thor, and Wodin. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, but previous installments in the series were filled wholly imaginary deities with no connection to our world.

The story tells of Niall's discovery of a beautiful woman frozen in the ice. While he stares in awe at her, he hears a voice in his head say: "Free me! free me, man of the outer world! free me — and know my
gratitude!" Naturally, he decides to follow her wishes and spends hours attempting to chip away at the ice that contains her. He eventually succeeds and the woman awakens, claiming to be Clovia, the queen of Helios, a realm of which Niall has never heard. This causes Clovia to realize that she must have been imprisoned within the ice for untold years and that her captor, "a magician ... out of the East," must likely be dead by now. Still, she hopes that he homeland of Helios still exists and asks Niall to act as her bodyguard as she makes the long journey there. She promises him riches and fame in her service, both of which get Niall's attention. He had already decided to see more of the "warmer world" anyway, so he agrees to accompany Clovia.

The remainder of this lengthy story concerns the travels of Niall and Clovia as they seek out Helios. Along the way, they encounter numerous dangers, which not only help to establish the barbarian's skill at arms but also serves to highlight just how much the world has changed since Clovia's time. As the duo get closer to her homeland, it becomes ever less likely that Helios has still survived the centuries. Yet, Clovia still holds out hope and Niall does not abandon her, instead forging ahead into the unknown, in the process showing him a wider world beyond the northlands from which he came. We begin to see him become the character we saw in earlier entries in the series.

With that, the Niall of the Far Travels series comes to a close. There's one story left that I have not read, but I'll rectify that soon. When I do, I'll make a post about it. All in all, I enjoyed the series. Not every entry was pure gold, but many were fun to read, filled with well-imagined scenes and engaging characters. It's a pity the series ended so abruptly. It's even more of a pity that these stories have never been collected together under a single cover. I think they'd make a great read for fantasy gamers looking for inspiration.

In Less Controversial News ...

... the Awesome Dice Blog has a post up about the History of Dice, from about 3000 BC to the present, complete with an illustrative graphic.

Selling Out

For those looking for further evidence that I've sold out to the Man, here's a link to the second of a series of articles Wizards of the Coast has asked me to write about the history of Dungeons & Dragons and its various elements (literally, in the case of the first article).

Alas, for the conspiracy theorists among my readership, this does not mean I've had any connection whatsoever with "D&D Next" (have I mentioned how much I dislike that name?). In fact, if what I've heard about the "online playtest agreement" one needs to sign to participate in the upcoming playtest is true, I won't even be involved in that.

Despite that, I do want to say that WotC pays well, pays quickly, and has been almost completely hands-off in the process of writing these articles. I haven't been asked to change what I've written or insert plugs for 4e products or anything of the kind -- quite the opposite in fact! That they're willing to pay me to write articles about stuff that doesn't directly translate into sales of any product they're currently selling has earned them my respect, if not my love.