1980's D&D Cartoon characters in Honor Among Thieves!

 (Spoilers, other than the one in the post title, follow)

I don't really feel like reviewing the new D&D movie. Suffice it to say it exceeded expectations. 

I will say I like the nods to classic monsters (though they seem to be in most cases somewhat altered, though maybe not as much as the character classes), and tropes like leveling up (maybe multiple levels). And it was pretty funny, and sailed along in large part on Chris Pine's "silver fox" charisma. 

The only real signs of woke was that the two straight, white leads were buffoonish dipshits, but I was able to swallow it. And that is pretty much the way of Hollywood now, even in non-woke things. Yeah, whatever. The kind of folk who designed and built most of the world are the enemy, so dipshit-them up. 

The one jaw-dropping thing was the inclusion of the kids from the 80's cartoon. 

I know they are teenagers, but
acrobat is pretty damn hot. 

I'm lucky I noticed, because you could miss it. They are seen a couple of times in the final acts maze (dungeon I guess)  scenes; one of several groups who are trying to make it out of the hellish automated labyrinth. 

Clearly they are older. Did they make it out of D&D world in the cartoon? I did watch it, but don't remember. And how older? They all have that "25 year old playing a teenager" thing going on. Fine, but the youngest one now looks the oldest. 

The glimpses of them are literally seconds, but even then I thought that cosplay I've seen in the past captured them better.

The Cavalier dude for sure has that bitchy 
look that suits him from the cartoon. 

Based not on the movie version, but the cosplay photo above, I'd kind of like to see a live action version of the cartoon. Maybe its a couple years later and they having been a world devastated by Venger. 

I'm kind of glad to have not seen the little whiney baby unicorn from the cartoon. I hated that little thing. YMMV.

Cheers

Getting that dungeon crawl going

 

Around the time I posted last, I started a new job in healthcare. Previously my later-in-life health care career transition from a couple of decades of entertainment business management back in LA included a major regional hospital during the height of the pandemic, but the most recent gig is for a healthcare insurance plan company, and it includes some new perks. More money than I ever made since leaving my home city, and the biggest change of all was working from my home office most of the week. 

But despite this being a somewhat demanding position, I have managed to do a lot of gaming. OK, most of that gaming is video games on the weekend. I play Elder Scrolls Online a lot less, as it started to feel too unchallenging. I will pop in for an hour or two with my old pal T, who is still enchanted by the game and plays a lot of it. But I need variety in my games. I still have a Mad Max game and GTA 5 I dabble in on XBOX, plus I recently downloaded an old favorite side scroller, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild remains a favorite, and I also like to play a little Cuphead here and there on Nintendo Switch in handheld mode while taking a little break in the workday. Man, what a hard game!

My Roll20? Well, I have mentioned my besties "B&L" (currently on the other side of the country helping L's mom run her bar...I will see them in fall and Winter when they come back to town for a while) and also my Los Angeles homegirl "T" who has played in my games on and off since the early 90's. The three of them make up my current little group, playing every couple of weeks. A classic dungeon crawl campaign. 

This is for sure giving me experience in online dungeon creation. I do have a couple of purchased modular dungeon packs from Roll20 (about 5 bucks a pack). I built the first few levels of a dungeon for me very first little Roll20 campaign that went for about 15 sessions. So pretty much reusing that same dungeon, but will be always tweaking. I built the first 4 levels back then, though the party only got to level 2 back then (just like the current things I had about 7 or 8 session working towards the delve...little adventures on the road).  

As it's not exactly a huge labyrinth, I hope for us to more or less get to level 5 at some point, maybe by late summer? But historically I have always ended up getting fed up with a crawl and found a way for the characters to do other things. So it may not make it that far. 

But this little dungeon has a bit of history in my setting, going back decades. So I think I will talk it up a little more next post. 

Cheers

Megadungeons & The Mythic Underworld

 Below is another article I wrote a few years ago for an online pop culture website. The humor is a bit bitey because the site owners were into that...

Can Gary Come Out To Play?

A couple of college-age men knocked on the front door of a modest two-story home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. They were nervous and a bit apprehensive, but they were also filled with a hopeful anticipation. A pretty blond woman opened the door and eyed the young men with suspicion, though she already knew why they were there.

Rolling her eyes, she called out behind her “Gary! Players!”

In his study, Gary Gygax shuffled his work papers into a pile, took a couple drags off a joint and went out to greet the men.

Smiling, he ushered them down into a large basement.

It was full of tables, one of them piled with small dunes of sand. In one corner stood a five foot, open-sectioned miniature castle, its exposed rooms and halls populated with lead minis of elves and orcs.

The young men eagerly smiled and looked at each other.

Gary handed them each several sheets of paper with pre-generated characters on them and pointed to a couple of chairs at a table laden with books and binders. “I have a couple of hours. guys, let’s start you at a town tavern down the road from Castle Greyhawk.”

The Basement King Of Lake Geneva

It was the late 70’s, and Dungeons And Dragons was swiftly becoming a certified phenomenon. Gary Gygax was making enough money off the game to fully indulge in his profitable hobby. He was running games for 10-20 regulars almost every night.

In addition, mostly on weekends but often any day of the week, strangers would show up at the Gygax abode, having heard he was up for DMing for anybody at a moments notice. As long as he wasn’t busy with his huge group of regulars in his closed evening campaigns.

This would not last, as eventually the growing popularity of the game, and larger and larger related projects taking up his time, would make gaming with Gary outside his regular group possible only at conventions.

See, when you get more and more famous and successful, you have less time to kick it with small groups of fans. The only thing I can personally compare it to was when I was a little kid in the late 70’s at San Diego Comic Convention International (one day to become Comic-Con), where I remember cornering Stan Lee in a hallway with several other young comic geeks, where “The Man” happily hung out for a half hour answering questions on everything from Spider-Man to Howard The Duck. From the 80’s on something like that would just not be possible.

But back to Gary.

Birth of The Megadungeon

So early on GG was running impromptu sessions for fans, and nightly for his group. How did he do it? Nowadays most modern story-crafting DMs would balk at the lack of prep time. Also, Gary would often be missing players at any particular session. How do you attend to a running narrative when the player pool shuffled so much, with little to no notice?

The answer is you didn’t. You just centered your gameplay around a megadungeon.

One of the hardest parts of running for a regular group is to consistently get everybody to show up regularly and constantly explaining away character absences. Getting players together for a game is like corralling cats. Jobs, family, and vacations get in the way of regular attendance.

But what about the fragile DM’s precious story? Mr. 5th Edition Dungeon Master needs to script out and craft his little stories, anticipating the players’ future actions.

Well, that was not always the case, Brosif.

Fuck Story

With a megadungeon, there is no story (or if you must, it IS the story). All you need is the adventure location and a separate home base such as a town. The dungeon is itself the tent pole of the campaign.

It’s where you do the dirty murder hobo business of kicking in doors and killing beasties. And the tavern, inn, or whatever is where you retreated to heal, recover, and spend your blood-soaked loot.

Each session ends with the trip back to town. The next with a trip back to the dungeon. Sounds monotonous? Not in Gary’s Castle Greyhawk. Here’s a pic of his first level:

That’s a lot of rooms, right? Not only that, but most levels had sub-levels. Gary’s 12+ level Greyhawk dungeon typically had 100 rooms or more per level.

But believe it or not, Gary was a minimalist. He only wrote a sentence or two in his notes for each room, winging and randomizing elements he had not notated. When a room was explored, he would draw a line through it, and later would restock it or redesign it all together.

He could mix things up and make things as unique as he wanted.

Some rooms would be monster lairs; others might be large halls with pools filled with various magic liquids. One room might contain a dwarven forge; while the next might be an oracles chamber. Some rooms even lead to other worlds, such as Conan’s Hyperborea or John Carter’s Barsoom.

No two rooms out of hundreds would offer the same experience.

And it was perfect for groups of varying level. The megadungeon levels had many stairways and chutes to other levels, and parties could delve in relation to ability. Noob poltroons could stick to the giant rats and goblins of level one, while tougher adventurers could head to deeper levels, where the rewards matched the dangers. After an evening of ass-kicking, they headed back up and back to town till the next game. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Dungeon As An Entity

Who was restocking this dungeon? Who was coming into this deadly maze to construct rooms? The usual explanation was that some mad wizard was in charge. But that didn’t explain how monsters and undead lived literally on top of each other with little in the way of resources, waiting patiently for characters to come challenge them for the contents of locked chests.

Even as early as 1st edition, the charming batshit whimsy of colossal dungeons with no naturalism was slowly giving way to more realism, but in original D&D unrealistic “living dungeons” were heavily implied in the rules. It was baked in.

The rules for the underworld stated that in the dungeon, doors would automatically slam shut behind the characters, and were usually locked or jammed. The same doors would automatically open for monsters. No character could see in the dark, but all dungeon inhabitants, even evil humans, could see fine; that is unless they were taken prisoner or charmed by players, at which point they lost the ability.

Megadungeons were like haunted houses, they seemed to have their own agendas. An old school dungeon such as this hated player characters and loved its monsters.

This seems perhaps too whimsical and fantastic to many, but the idea of a living dungeon fits well in the madcap world of old D&D.

Online amateur D&D historian Jason Cone, also known as Philotomy, describes the verisimilitude of what he calls the “Mythic Underworld” quite eloquently:

“There is a school of thought on dungeons that says they should have been built with a distinct purpose, should ‘make sense’ as far as the inhabitants and their ecology, and shouldn’t necessarily be the centerpiece of the game (after all, the Mines of Moria were just a place to get through).

None of that need be true for a megadungeon underworld.

There might be a reason the dungeon exists, but there might not; it might simply be. It certainly can, and perhaps should be the centerpiece of the game.

As for ecology, a megadungeon should have a certain amount of verisimilitude and internal consistency, but it is an underworld: a place where the normal laws of reality may not apply and may be bent, warped, or broken.

Not merely an underground site or a lair, not sane, the underworld gnaws on the physical world like some chaotic cancer. It is inimical to men; the dungeon, itself, opposes and obstructs the adventurers brave enough to explore it.”

Megadungeons Become A Dirty Little Secret

But as time rolled by players found such concepts as running gauntlets in super-magical labyrinths to be passe to a degree. But this was not the main reason megadungeons such as Castle Greyhawk did not become the norm in published adventures.

With minimal descriptions and a constantly shifting layout, Gygax didn’t think megadungeons would be all that usable for DM’s who did not create them. And in all honesty, I think he believed most dungeon masters, especially unseasoned ones, would be incapable of the on-the-fly decision making required for a dynamic and ever-changing location. Rather ironic now that we old schoolers see original D&D as having been more about “rulings NOT rules.”

Anybody who ran OD&D by necessity had to be adept at winging things. This is in stark contrast to the more modern editions where “player agency” seems to run the game.

But when it came time to publish adventures for the game, Gary passed on using his precious Castle Greyhawk dungeons and instead focused on ones he used for convention tournaments, such as his classic Against the Giants series. Basically, these were “railroad” adventures, more about getting from point A to point B than sandboxing. When a dungeon was involved, it was just a series of halls or caves meant to be cleared out, not a magical theme park you could delve into again and again.

The linear adventure became the norm, and was of the type DMs would imitate for years to come. By the early 80’s, dungeons of The Mythic Underworld were becoming a lost art.

The Megadungeon Lives Again

About 10 years ago or so a renewed interest in original D&D brought the megadungeon concept back into fashion among gamers old school and new.

For a somewhat outside-the-box list of megadungeons (including the Death Star) check out this article.

Once upon a time in Los Angeles

The “street” I was born on in Venice.

The world seemed like a very different place when I started a humble little underachieving gaming blog around 10 years ago. At least my world. I was working in entertainment industry finance and management (occasionally going to parties and events of household-name celebrity clients), involved in world music and Renaissance Faires, and GMing games for the longest running group I had ever had. I was doing so many things writing a blog was not a priority by any means. But I loved to talk and write about things I loved, and there was this OSR thing going on, and I had a group to run for after years off from the hobby, bringing back great memories for me of early days gaming. Decades of great groups running my favorite games. D&D, Cthulhu, Champions, even some Runequest. It was unfortunate that often times the memories of games of yore were much better than that games of now, but I'm sure that's a common condition of long timers in the hobby. When in doubt, recapture. Bask in nostalgia. 

My attempts back then at getting out of my private groups comfort zone and into the gaming community certainly had its ups and downs, with some especially bad downs. For my own blog writing I decided to go with a sort of Howard Stern "tell it like it is" mentality which didn't serve it all that well (even Stern has stopped being Stern and looks critically now at his own public persona behavior in the past). It was a reactionary style to be sure. But it seemed a way to go since I saw so much negativity in the old school online scene already. I mean, one of the first statements I read about the so called OSR when I looked at it online was "old schoolers are too busy bayoneting their own wounded..." 

That was certainly true.

RPG scene in-infighting. "Shit Wars." It didn't take long for it to make sense (or maybe it never really did). 

 It soon started to feel like I was doing more of some kind of Andy Kaufman-based gaming performance art than just talking about things game related, and I was getting negative attention when in reality I didn't really want much in the way of any kind of attention. Fuck. Just wanted to talk games with other old schoolers. But it was way beyond the simple pleasures more often than not. It often seemed like war. 

 I eventually quit the blog and the seeking of games outside my group, and for RPG's I just settled into running for my occasionally evolving group at our hosts house in the beach community of Santa Monica. You know, the play is the thing. Blogging in the OSR may start out nobly just an urge to share ideas and tell tales, but it easily just turns into a vanity project. And I was just a long time gamer. I had nothing else to be vane about. No big following, no products to shill for beer money.

 Just play the damn games.

Life went on, but I slowly realized I no longer wanted to live in the city I was born in and once loved. It dawned on me that I needed change in my life. Frank Herbert said "the sleeper must awaken."

 I had grown complacent despite being dissatisfied where I lived (a city seemingly on the verge of apocalypse; already in a state of dystopia).   I was a weekend hedonist; a lover of parties, world music, top shelf potables, and intoxicants of a mild variety. A confirmed bachelor and off and on wanna be playboy. A big city lights and beach life party boy, a Ren Faire/Burning Man world citizen semi-hippy.  But I started to crave a slightly less candle-at-both-ends life. A change.

The city I lived in, the neighborhood I was born in and lived in (now a jungle of tent cities on every street corner), the job I had for years, the people I was gaming with. A slowly growing dissatisfaction. So since I was a bachelor with no kids, and had great savings and some property investments, I had the ability to leave that job and spend time casually trying to improve myself and decide what I wanted to do next. 

My old neighborhood where I grew up currently. In the 90's most of the show Baywatch was filmed in a 6 block radius right here. Go watch the old David Lee Roth video California Girls (also filmed here) for what people have in their mind when they are on their way here. 

What I did was move out of Southern California. I decided to change everything. I moved away from the beaches and into a mountain/river community in the Northwest. Now I live in a small city. I now live across the street from a rustic park and a part of the river that is a protected bio-sphere. During fall and winter flocks of geese and ducks come to the area for months and are hanging out everywhere. Sitting in my garden looking at me like "what you gonna do about it?" I love the little bastards. I love living where you get a bit of snow. I love being away from a big crowded city  where it never rains to wash away the hubris and pee smell. 

N

The area is great for biking and hiking, and thanks in large part to that, and finally living somewhere fairly quiet and peaceful where I could get restful sleep (when I left LA I was living on the busiest street in the city), I'd lost around 40 lbs. (weight gained years before after an auto related back injury) over a year without taking any extreme measures . My time in a local gym continued the process of getting much more healthy. Discovering new things like wall climbing and battle ropes has been life changing.  A few months into my gym habit the owners named me member of the month and gave me a plaque, putting me on the wall of fame.  I feel 10 years young. 

 I have to be honest, it took me months to get used to sleeping without traffic and emergency vehicle sirens surrounding my senses. The loudest thing at night is the passenger train on the other side of the river, coming down from the mountain pass, and that is more lulling than loud. In winter as you doze off you can imagine it coming down from the mountains covered in snow. I love it. I don't know that I'll live here the rest of my life, but for now its great. 

a favored fishing or just sitting spot right across the street from my house. Yeah, about a 200 yard stroll away. 
#brandywineriveriscallingme

I got a great job, again, different. Instead of working for private firms enriching a select few Individuals, I was now working for a large not for profit health organization. Another needed change. Doing some good. 

I made some friends in town who helped me get a D&D group together. Yep, 5th edition, another change. Easier to get players for. I'll write soon about my transition to that, though I will always hold on to an old school perspective.

My local besties who helped me get a group going for D&D, and also got me boardgaming like crazy. Talisman, Dead of Winter, etc.  Every D&D game I ran they would bring a sixer of expensive beer for me even when I told them they are way too generous. Man, all players should be more like these fine folks. Players who act like I'm something valuable rather than working for them and catering to their needs as a DM. Talk about change!

Well, then all this virus/helter skelter stuff. Again, big changes. But this seemingly negative change begat new things. I've started playing friends for the first time online with my XBOX Live. But even bigger than that I finally got into Roll D20 and have a great online group to do D&D with during these end of times. A whole new world. Loving it.

In hobbit cottages awaiting a spider attack

But talk about changes In the old school gaming scene. As mentioned my style of blogging lead to some negativity, but there was a ton of negativity online in relation to gaming at the time. But really nothing compared to that of the OSR the last few years. Negativity and argy bargy online? You can have your "OSR shitwars." 

With being settled into a happier and more satisfying life-space I've decided to come back to my old blog to talk about some of these gaming changes in my life. Not that I or anyone else needs it so much, but I was recently inspired to start blogging about my old comic collection just for shits and giggles and I thought what the heck, why not drop in here from time to time to document my changes and ideas in gaming. And if you (or anybody) actually reads this, maybe you'll have some comments about your changes or whatever. I have no desire to sell anything. I have a career and investments to make money in. Though it is nice to share some gaming ideas, my scenarios are for my players and that is all the attention I need from my game prep. But it can be fun to put your gaming ideas out there, if only for yourself. A blog can be a way to get in touch with your own personal gaming id. Moments of reflection.  Do it for yourself. That's my main motivation. So here I am again for however long it is fun to do.

And gaming goes on. 

Cheers,

Mac

The Cliched End Game

There are a lot of things that quickly evolved out of my 1st edtion AD&D. Old school concepts such as henchmen and hirelings, endless dungeon crawls, and strictness about character creation are things that got old long before the 80’s where over. I didn’t really mean for my style to take the high fantasy road, but that was where I went. That later editions of D&D did much the same was a coincidence (my non-attendance of cons or other game groups kept me out of the loop more or less of what was going on in later edition core books).

It’s weird I guess, but the end game of classic D&D, that of clearing a hex in the forest, killing it’s monsters, and building a keep (per the DM guide fretting over the cost of every brick and every mook with a shovel) so a village would build around it and you could collect taxes didn’t seem to appeal to my players by around the mid-80’s. Sure, MU’s need to have somewhere to research at later levels, and clerics (maybe) need to set-up a place of worship, but for the most part, it did not tend to go the classic way of becoming some kind of lord over barony.

Maybe it stems from my DMing style and game setting, or perhaps I’ve just had exceptional players, but characters in my games just seemed too cool and colorful for basic stronghold building when they got to higher levels (or “name” level). Things they often chose to do instead were to use their hard-fought wealth to perhaps buy/build a tavern. Some might buy horses and land and start a ranch to raise ponies. Maybe a garden house in the nice part of town with a view from a hill. MU’s in the big city didn’t need to go live in some cobwebby tower to research. There was the Wizard’s Guild where all the proper areas and equipment were available to members. And for clerics, well, the big city already had huge temples to the major god, with high level clerics already in charge. So if a cleric character didn’t want to go to some bumblefuck bumpkin part of the kingdom to start a new temple, they would usually settle in as a respected cleric/troubleshooter for the main temple of their god in the city.

All the manpower that comes at high level, to fighters and clerics and whatever as in the books at name level, were often turned down by the players. Hey, they would only have to house and feed them. If they don't advance as characters with a passle of henchmen and hirelings along for the ride, they don't get into that "gang mentality" where more is merrier. Most of my players don’t seem to find that appealing. Micromanagement. It ain’t always fun. And if you’ve ever read King Conan, you know that heavy is the head that wears the crown, especially if that head lead a life of action, derring-do, and a new wench every night. There was a great Twilight Zone where the guy thought he died and went to heaven because he was getting everything that he ever wanted handed to him on a silver platter. Turns out that was actually hell, bub.

So I don’t really look to the end game by the book, and my players tend not to as well. To them, settling down with a keep and managing a garrison maybe sounds too final to them. I think they would rather tend bar at their tavern telling tall tales of their adventures, or sit on the porch of their hilltop garden house with the ocean view, sipping wine and waiting for that next big adventure to come along. To most characters in my games, it seems like the end of the adventure life might as well be the end of their fun.

Birthday Game/Birthday Wishes

I have never made much of a deal out of my own birthday. I for sure usually don’t skip work, and don’t talk it up there like a lot of people do (there are people here with balloons in their cubicle from 8 months ago). I don’t like parties in my honor, and I don’t like discussing my age (after I hit 40 I stopped telling people, at least at work, how old I am) even though most people who know my true age tell me I look at least 10 years younger than I am. Must be all that clean living *cough*.

As it just so happens, it’s a game night tonight, so for the second time in three years I’ll be spending my birthday night with the gaming group. Thank God most of them are drinkers. Anyway, I enjoy DM’ing on my birthday, and tonight I’m going to continue our occasional White Box old school dungeon delve. Some nice relaxing fun compared to the uphill struggle that is my AD&D campaign (a torture of my own design). I just gotta find a way over to Andy’s and home without risking a birthday DUI.

Anyway, I would like to divide this post into two parts, each where I ask your input/experience. OK, first one: have you ever run a game on your birthday, how was it, and did you eventually wish you had just had a traditional birthday party (y’know, a night at the Super 8 Motel with a couple of hookers, a pizza, and bottle of Gray Goose)? Have you ever DM’d or played on a birthday?

And secondly, have you ever made a “Bucket List” of things to do before you die? I haven’t. To travel the world? Outside of some visits to Scotland back in the day, I don’t leave America (although I often hear Amsterdam calling my name). If you gotta pee in the street and poop in a hole in the ground, I don’t go. Date a supermodel? I think that boat passed me by. Get rich? Man, I’m tryin’. But anyway, below are some of my favorite Bucket List items from Adam Carolla’s new book In “50 years We’ll All be Chicks.” I relate very much to the pop culture nature of some of these, and I choose these things to do before I die. Do you have any?

*Disclocate my shoulder to get out of a straight jacket.

*Pull a fake mustache off someone and shout “Ah Hah!”

*Shout “Release the hounds!”

*Stop a crime by throwing something. A guy steals a purse and starts running. I throw a can of corn football style and knock him out.

*Catch a punch and twist the guys hand until he drops to his knees

*Get shot and blow it off “I ain’t got time to bleed”

*Put my hand over the mouth of a beautiful woman to stop her from screaming and alerting the bad guys.

*Punch out my undercover partner who is about to say something he shouldn’t and blow our cover.

*Get kicked out of a casino for winning.

*Have a cape removed on stage.

*Be killed by the person I told to kill me if I start turning into a zombie.

*Dry-shave with a machete

*Drive my car off a pier onto a garbage scow.

*Box a kangaroo

*Fight somebody on top of a moving train

*Pop the locks on an attaché case full of money and slide it across the table.

*Silently communicate/point to my watch underwater.

*Fend off a Kodiak bear with a torch.

*Track somebody. I get off my horse, squat, then do that thing where I pick up a clump of dirt and let it sift through my fingers.