Tegel Manor and my Return to “Gonzo” D&D

As a kid and most of my teens my D&D was all kinds of Gonzo. I used City State of The Invincible Overlord, Tegel Manor, and a variety of early Judges Guild products as my D&D wheelhouse. In those early days I did not give a damn about verisimilitude, and didn’t even know what the hell it was. Right out of the gate I think we were doing weird fantasy in our games by default, long before James Raggi used the term for his games.


But that was not to last. Just growing up made the gaming group increase the realism a bit, and once again as usual I put the blame for my own game world becoming more “real” on girls entering our gaming circles. Pretty, pretty girlies. Endless dungeon gauntlets and constant killing, combined with apeshit occurrences in-game that made little sense seemed to turn girls off. Role-play became a bigger factor then. The gals wanted to develop relationships in the game world. They seemed to respond better to things that made some sense, not just the weirdo whims of adolescent fantasy-minded boys. So in my game world shopkeeps and bartenders stopped being 10 level wizards or retired 9th level paladins. Magic shops began to become scarce. Dungeons existing for no other reason than to massacre adventurers became rarer. I stopped using Thor, Zeus, and other gods of myth and injected my own that made sense for my setting. Verisimilitude reared its ugly head. Thus has it remained over the decades. I kept an eye on things making some kind of sense in my world.


Well, I’m sort of getting turned around on that. I've had a couple of years off from running a regular D&D campaign, focusing on Sci Fi and other types of fantasy. After all those years of making my game world sort of low on gonzo, I’m getting a desire to go silly once more when I get back on the campaign track. Not that everything in the game world is going to go apeshit all of a sudden. But I want to have my main city stop being so much like Gondor, and go back to being more like Lankhmar. Weirdo shit around every corner. And my first step is to utilize the full gonzo nature of Tegel Manor. That setting will be the focus of my next campaign I think. Gonna make it MY Ravenloft! On a trip out of town the other weekend I actually got to test the waters with it outside my regular group a bit. That taste has me ready to go full bore with the wacky, brutal mansion on the gang in the not too distant future. Oh, of course I will try to throw a little gravitas with it in the form of better explanations of why certain things are the way they are, but Tegel seems the perfect way to hit the group over the head with my new gonzo outlook.

Really, life is getting too short for obsessing on verisimilitude in a game of pretend.

Earthlings in your Fantasy Soup

I started thinking on this after reading a recent Grognardia post.

People from Earth ending up in fantasy worlds has an ancient legacy. “The Blazing World” of the late Renaissance, regarded as the first true fantasy world/science fantasy story, featured an Earthling stumbling into a strange world of humanoid animals. And Earthlings, even lepers and dumbass English kids who get locked in wardrobe cabinets, have been going to fantasy land ever since.

So how do I feel about a connection between my fantasy world and Earth? Well, over the decades I have been of differing minds on the matter. I still use the same game world I came up with as a kid, “Acheron.” But in those early days I was up for almost anything. Things like the multi-universal Arduin and The City State of The Invincible Overlord inspired me to do all sorts of wacky things with my world.

In those few short formative years I had gods from Earth myth as the gods of clerics; Thor, Odin, Zeus, etc, just like The City State did. It wasn’t until my mid teens when I started coming up with gods for my world from whole cloth, or expanding upon gods my players created, that I started rethinking that. Eventually I would eliminate those Earth gods from my world and stick with the original ones, so in thinking upon those early days I cut my young self some slack. But into the adult years of gaming I only very rarely had any sort of Earth connection with Acheron. When I did, it was not to use any normal sort of Earth human or Earth setting. It was my futuristic Hero Systems/Champions setting that I used.

In the 80’s I had a brother of my major ranger NPC (my first true D&D character, actually, that I ended up using for my own world) get trapped in my Champions setting, and become a sort of rustic superhero in that. So clearly I had established a link between worlds. And once or twice I had dimension hopping characters from my Champions games spend brief times in Acheron when I felt it was appropriate and I wanted some fantasy elements (in one case, heroes chased down some dimension-bending super-hunters who were going to Acheron to kill unicorns and other cutesy creatures).

But just having some d-bag professor or leper or whatever show up to dick around in Acheron? Naw. It isn’t that interesting to me. Maybe because I found Thomas Covenant and Harold Shea to be total bores. It has to be something very appealing to make me break that line between worlds, and the typical “Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” type stuff seems pretty played out to me now. Just a busted, old concept.

These days, I just like to keep my fantasy world pure. I do, however, like chocolate in my peanut butter. That will never change.

Sandboxy enough for me

Sandbox. It’s a gaming term that many people will have a somewhat different definition for. What is it?

Well, unless you are all about totally “winging it” as a GM, you need to do a lot of prep on a lot of locations when you are thinking sandbox. Have all your ducks in a row, as they say. If you start players in a location, they can hear about and choose from a variety of directions and places to go. Head to the hills up North where rumors of giants with sacks of gold come from, or go to the Western Forest to visit the old abandoned wizard tower the barkeep has told you about. Maybe just head south and explore some wilderness hexes. The GM has something to offer no matter where the players might go.

Is this really sandbox, or are you just creating enough railroad tracks to make it seem like a sandbox (paraphrasing Frank Mentzer, I believe)?

In my teens I took a rare break from my own gameworld to do a few sessions of City State of the Invincible Overlord. The players made up characters, and I had them be non-natives showing up at the city gates. From there, they were free to go where they wanted. Go into that tavern and look for action? Sure. Go into the bath house and talk to the dolphin that just appeared in a pool? Whatever. Go down in the sewers to investigate rumors of a Wraith Overlord? Fine by me. It was a lot of fun, but lets face it – every one of those locations the player visited where set encounters with their own preset plot hooks and rumors and such. Was that true sandbox because the players decided which stores to go to first? I dunno.

I guess it is still something to taste that is very debatable. What do I think of trying to sandbox? Well, as a kid things seemed more freeform. But as adulthood started I was doing more plot driven things. I would not say railroady, because I have always thought the character freewill was important to the games. But If I start a game and say “you guys hear about a newly discovered system of caves under the city rumored to have monsters and treasures” and the players say “Naw, we’d rather go out in the woods and explore unmarked hexes” then I am probably already running a shit campaign that the players have no respect for anyway.

I think my current players want some freedom to do some things in-character that they want to do, but as far as the main adventure I think they want some fairly well defined goals. Go visit that dungeon, go explore this abandoned tower, go find that enemy who left us for dead.

Like right now I'm doing a 1st ed. campaign set in the Night Below. Pretty linear, right? But a couple of games ago a (rolled encounter) Minotaur hunting group appeared out of a side tunnel and eventually got defeated. Appearing to come from a larger group (they weren't bearing lots of supplies or water), the players decided to go down the side tunnels and look into it. The party druid changed into a bat and swooped down many miles of tunnels where I had to randomize everything, including a small minotaur fishing village and a minotaur giant maze city (something I had been thinking about for a while, and got the chance here to display it) that the players found mighty cool and unexpected (sadly, they decided to leave that place for their currents tasks at hand, maybe to return and explore more one day).

But players deciding to "got north instead of south to the dungeon" is great in small quantities, but I would get tired of that sooner or later no matter how creative I am. It's more fun for me if the players can decide on a solid goal and follow through with it, instead of going in the opposite direction from what I've prepared or burning down inns on a whim or whatever.

If I create a dungeon I want the players to go to it, not go in the opposite direction. I can handle it if they do, but they can think a little bit about my fun too. I'm a DM, not a damn civil servant.

Those old City state sessions from my teens were the most open and free games I ever ran, and the experience and challenge made me a decent and capable GM later in life. Generally, I think it is great to have some choices, but also for the DM to light a fire here and there to temp the players into certain actions. The best games are a combo of choice and available plot hooks. Sure, I could just tell players to go wander willy nilly and crack open the Old School Encounter reference and randomize every little thing. Hex by hex wilderness crawl or whatever. But I think most players want a GM to have certain plans for them (and those plans are at their best when they come in the form of the DM being inspired by the characters), while leaving some wiggle room for improv adventure.

The party knows about an old haunted tower outside of town that perks up their interest. But the party thieves want to go do a bit of pick pocketing at the market place while the rest of the party hits up the beer tent to buy some rounds for locals and maybe hear some rumors about the tower. That's cool. Sandboxy enough for me.