Up from the OSR - Venger Satanis and the C'orny C'ult of C'thulhu

 (as always mostly going on a decade or so old parcel of memories, so please feel free to correct or expand on anything)

Like a lot of OSR personages I found out about in the latter half of the OSR, well after I first stopped blogging for a long while, I heard about Vengir Satanis on a blog I am ashamed to admit I looked at from time to time: "Yourdungeonissuck," a trollsite that targeted many in the OSR (including my humble self). 

The very first thing that stuck right out to me was the name. Satanis? Cool. Could be the name of the wizard character of a metalhead from back in jr. high. Good enough. But Venger? As far as I can tell, he took this name from a cartoon character. 

A demon that threatens school children. 
So, cool, I guess. 

What little I saw at the time was that he was a Wisconsin native (what is with that place? It's all satanists and serial killers). He was involved in, or even founded, a Cthulhu cult of some kind. Heavy on the Anton Levay as well. 

Anton in the 80's working on his
5th level fighter. Or maybe doing
a dark incantation of some sort. 

And Venger from a few years
ago. Shave yer head and grow
a bitchin goatee and you got
yerself some Anton in the mirror

LeVay was sort of a bargain basement Allister Crowley. A San Francisco suburb resident who in the 70's started his own little Church of Satan by hanging black drapes and Baphomet symbols in his garage, and inviting heavy metal dudes and C list celebs to pray before an alter with a naked chick on it. But Anton seemed more Forrest J. Ackerman than Crowley.

"Ooga booga!"

Anton's most famous tidbit was he was in love with Church member Jayne Mansfield back in the day, and when rejected told her he will curse her to die in a car wreck, which she did. 

"Ooga Booga!"

Anton capering around in satan cosplay reminds me
of this MST3K classic..

I actually first encounter LeVay in my first teenage job at Waldenbooks. There on the shelf either in the occult or the comedy section was The Satanic Bible. 

reading it at the mall foodcourt
will get you some looks. Maybe
a loogie in your Chick Fil A
chicken sammich

Yeah, I read it. I fuckin' stole it like a lot of books I owned at the time. Fuck you Walden! As a DnD kid of the 80's I had to have a look. I was also s slowly falling Catholic so it was perfect. It was chock full of "fuck you, Jesus" sort of stuff.

Yer mother sucks in hell, Karras...

Though a bargain basement Allister Crowley, it was more approachable Satanism. No esoteric number crunching or Prater Parado crap. But it was full of some corny shit. One bit of life advice I remember was not washing so you don't remove your smelly body oils and smells, which he somehow thought chicks were into. As a matter of fact, he talked about a guy who wanted to get busy with a fishermans daughter that he was in love with, so he wiped himself down with fish to get a nice crusty seaman odor to attract the lass. I put the book down and never looked back. Outside of the Mansfield thing, and naked chicks on basement altars, it was fairly cheese. 

I don't know about casting spells on C level celebs or what not, but early on Venger was high priesting it up in The Cult of Cthulhu. VS discovered DnD around 10 years old an Cthulhu stuff a few years later, which is in line with my experience. Though I never considered it as a religious path (HP Lovecraft was plainly fiction, you see). Venger did, whether serious or not. Here is a snippet from an old interview (undated).

 Since foundation, the Cult has been both wildly successful and devoid of meaningful manifestations, depending on the day.  It’s a struggle to keep busy in the right direction when there are so many false paths open to us.  I’ve written two official books, CoC bibles, if you will; and enough essays and articles to fill a third.

  The organization was meant to live and spread the Fourth Way teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky within a Left Hand Path context.  Self-deification is our chief aim, always has been, always will be.  Of course, the slimy green tentacles of cosmic horror only add to the eldritch mélange.  The Mythos gives us visual aid, a different kind of structure.  The Left Hand Path is like a code of conduct, whereas Lovecraft’s shambling alienage is more a code of aesthetics.

His cult name? "Venger As' Nas Satanis." It was an early indication of his love for apostrophe. 

I cannot find current citation, but I do remember all those years ago when I first heard of him, he had talked somewhere about hostile shakeups or something among the cult membership. He left the group, maybe? I dunno. 

Maybe it did not meet expectations?

Maybe it got harder and harder to take seriously. I mean, not long into the 2000's you started seeing Cthulhu plushes and the great old one's precense showing up in popular media, more often in a comedic context. 

I think the DnD setting Veng created, Cha'alt, kind of took the place of the Lovecraft focus. 

He describes the setting thus:

Cha'alt is an eldritch, gonzo, science-fantasy, post-apocalyptic campaign setting + megadungeon for old school and 5e D&D. It's 216 pages of places, people, races, monsters, spells, magic items, and weirdness for your roleplaying game of choice (including my own Crimson Dragon Slayer D20, which is included in the appendix). Suitable for levels 0-10. Amazing, full-color layout and artwork the likes of which you have never seen, nor will you ever see again!

Gonzo it seemed. With influences that seemed to run the gamut, from cheesy 70's Sci Fi, 80's tits and ass low budget sorcery, some Lovecraft shit still, and Saturday morning fantasy cartoons on acid. 

 

Manos Hand of Fate? I
get that reference!

???

Venger was producing all kinds of product related to his game. Time was marching on. You see him pop up in forums like Dragonfoot, and even Your Dungeon is Suck. He liked to call people "Hoss." Along with him liking to throw up a devil sign and exclaim "What's up, Motherfuckers!" as his call sign. Nothing wrong with that I guess. Kind of cringy, but fuck, we are gamers so we are kind of cringy. "Hoss."

In his earlier images, Venger is a fit and buff dude who spent a lot of time in the gym. He showed up in pictures in a tank top more than he did in black robes.

Bu the years passed. There was a transformation, like with most of us I guess. The guy has a wife and two kids, and though I don't, my older brothers did. And when you have kids it's hard not to eat like a kid. The good priest of evil softened up a bit. Some grey getting into the bitchin' Anton LaVey goatee. 

Not sure the gawds of Cha'alt would approve
of the hippy dippy Tie Dye tee..

Apparently, his stuff had some popularity and a following.  A nice addition I guess to his real estate professional earnings. He became a regular on a vlog along with The RPG Pundit, that very often degraded into political talking points (the left these days seems to embrace satanism, but he is a staunch conservative). 

I think they ended the stream last August. 

I also remember some time ago he posted about offering a year of DM experience and running weekly games for the tidy sum of 50 grand. I think I spit out my beer when I read that. I am not sure it happened. Who would pay for that? That much? But then, maybe he is more popular than I imagined. Or maybe it was a psi op. 

In recent years Venger started his own little convention in Wisconsin. Capped at 50 people, I think it started at maybe a little more than a dozen people attending, and in the sequel cons it get up to a whopping couple dozen. 

OK, look. I can fucking joke. Plenty of corny shit about me to be joked about. So I spread the love. But you know what? I can joke, but I can't hate. The guy does what he loves. He gets a little over a dozen dudes to attend his con? Instead of worrying, he is jazzed about it. He gets a handful more at the next one, and he is over the moon. I mean, its an OSR thing. I would sit there worried that nobody will show up. He does the thing, he games in person including with fans of his setting. And he doesn't have to have them in his house where he has to worry about what they are doing in his bathroom. 

I think it was early last year that he announced he would no longer be publishing. He had gone from a few hundred in sales a month to less than a hundred. I remember feeling kind of bad for the guy. But I actually thought I read somewhere that no, he still will publish some stuff. I dunno, maybe it will be a flexible thing? 

But you can't get too heartbroken. He is in the zeitgeist of the OSR. He has gotten talked about for years in forums. He had been targeted by Your Dungeon is Suck plenty, and I was told long ago that is high praise.

Whatever it is, keep plugging away with the corn and cheese, good priest of d'ar'k'ness. There can never be too much cheese in the world. 

Find his blog at https://vengersatanis.blogspot.com/

Cheers

"Up from The OSR" - Grognardia

 

(Please note: much of what I will be writing about here comes from memories dating back at 10 years or more. Please feel free to correct me if anything is false or at least misunderstood)

In March of 2008, James Maliszewski, long time rpg enthusiast and sometimes writer in the genre, started his gaming blog Grognardia. His first ever post is here. 

This was around the time I had gotten back into regular running of games after a few years mostly off, and started a group in Santa Monica that went on for almost 10 years. One of the first things I discovered while poking around game stuff online was the Grognardia blog, where James was talking about old gaming stuff. Products, modules, mags, systems. I remember thinking "I am an aging gamer who has played since childhood. I can write stuff!" And I did. I started this blog, for good or ill, a few months after the Grognardia premier. 

If I recall JM is a Canadian who was living in Baltimore during the heyday of his blog. Wife and kids. A job maybe. He did some amount of writing for potentially some kind of money. I think in the late 90's he was freelancing for Wizard Magazine. I was an avid reader of Wizard back then. I had not regularly collected comics for years by then, but I followed a lot of what was going on in comics. And Wizard evolved to cover card games and even rpg's to a degree. Just a little tangent here; Wizard had tremendous art within, sometimes full-page posters, but the covers were the big draw. Impulse buy bait to be sure.

I was still going into Hi Di Ho comics in Santa Monica and reading comics for an hour every couple weeks though I wasn't really collecting anymore. I would justify my browsing by buying a copy of Wizard or Toyfare. Another great mag to look at. Mostly due to all the lovely images of the amazing action figure market of the day. I was also a bit of a speculator back then. When Ebay started up I made a small fortune over a couple years selling comics and figures until that bubble burst.

To continue this aside, Toyfare had features where they would pose figures with word balloons and panels and do little skits with them. I am certain Seth Green read these and years later came up with Robot Chicken.

Anyway, I don't know what other pro of semi-pro writing  James did, White Wolf I think, but his blog was bursting at the seams. Sometimes three posts in a day. And the old school goodness really took me back. 

In the early to mid 2010's, James was plugging away creating things to sell on his blog. One item eventually was a Traveller inspired spacegame he called "Thousand Suns." Not to be confused (I think) with a previous Traveller homage from years back called "Fading Suns." JM will tell you all about it in a recent substack post Even seems he is doing a new edition and even adventures for it? OK. The market is fairly flooded with lots of product, but god speed with that, sir. 

But the most well know attempt at product sales was his personal dungeon, Dwimmermount. 

early...ahem..inspiring art from
it. Hee made a whole post about.
I do not think there was any info
about fighters delving into dungeons
with Grandma in tow.  

JM had been posting about his home game Dwimmermount from early on. A very basic dungeon setting with some homebrew elements (dwarves don't procreate through sex, there are aliens or some such, etc). He ran for friends and family. My takeaway over many posts was there was not a lot of investment in the game play by the folks. He openly admitted that there were distractions (I think the TV was on sometimes) and derailing conversations.  This was not the first time I recall James admitted a probably annoying issue with folk in his live games, but putting a brave and understanding face on it. At something called OSRcon James ran a game, and Ken St. Andre of Tunnels and Trolls fame played and proceeded to destroy the session with antics that included cutting orcs face off and wearing it and going "ooga booga" at everybody. In his post about it James was clearly annoyed but took an "aw well" attitude about it. The right thing to do I guess. But I can tell you James does not like being annoyed. More on that later. 

Ken at some convention or another trying to 
impress the chicks. Or something. 

James posted around 2009 that he wanted a few players to join him in some play by posts on the OD&D Discussion Boards. I guess this was the beginning of his playtesting to market the dungeon. I was back then still a commentor in good standing on Grognardia, and I threw my hat in the ring. It was a low commitment thing so why not (also low commitment by JM, but into that in a moment). 

We rolled 3d6 in order. Got a 15 to put in INT Enough to be a low caliber MU for me, so I created Thurston "Thirsty" Brewer, a pub owners' son. He had like a 6 CON so I made him a skinny alcoholic and decided he looked like bedraggled actor Steve Buscemi. 

Amazingly, there are plenty of images of
Steve wearing robes if you google it.

I found an old post by me talking about it, among other things. 

Over a couple of weeks our characters entered the dungeon and explored a handful of rooms and passages. I really do not recall there being any combat. I mostly remember something about a magical pool and some baby giant spiders running along the ceiling towards some destination. More or less nothing of note. Anyway, James just stopped posting. After a couple of days we were like "Um, James? After over a week we just assumed he "went out for a pack of smokes and never came back."

It was weird. I mean, we committed to him and this little campaign. What was weirder, he was still posting on Grognardia daily. Sometimes twice a day. But he fucking left us hanging. Not a big deal, but disrespectful was certainly a fair way to feel about it. Just a quick post "sorry guys, I just got real busy and cannot finish up right now. I will keep in touch about this if we can get back to it." But nope. It remains a mystery to this day. I may have been miffed a bit about the lack of a single word to that little pbp crew. In the link a couple paragraphs up you can check a bit how I felt about my impressions of Dwimmermount from my experiences, and James own play reports over the previous couple years. This was around 2012 when the kickstarter was kicking ass to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. 

Below are a couple paragraphs I wrote on it then. Certainly, one can tell I had grown my own little attitude about my experiences in the OSR, which whether by my own sometimes behavior or the behavior of others, I was getting fairly negative sometimes. 

As anybody reading this probably knows, Grognardia James’ Dwimmermount dungeon, a recent surprise hit on Kickstarter (close to 50 grand in profit), has been getting some gameplay and a few early reviews (the entire dungeon has yet to be finished). A lot of reviews from fairly moderate sources have not been good. A lot of the dislike seems to be in the presentation of those classic old dungeon tropes that James has been so enamored of and blogging about for years. Empty, dusty rooms with no real function having to be explored and searched. Minimalist room occupant description such as the orcs n’ gold combo mentioned above. Dungeon dressing with no interaction or function. Not exactly inspiring.

See, none of that gives me those kiddy thrills anymore, and apparently others who actually paid for that dungeon agree. I read Grognardia for a couple of years faithfully, and the recounting of Dwimmermount game sessions was probably part of why I was no longer reading every day. No knock at James; I only started this blog, my first and only, when I heard him on some podcast I listened to through dumb luck, and checked out his blog and saw old modules I loved being talked about. But man, the later old school gameplay presented in session reports did not exactly draw me in like I guess it has some others. The Gygaxian mandates and strict adherence to them became a turn off. I actually had a chance to briefly explore the early Dwimmermount in the ill fated thread sessions James started on OD&D Discussion, but that didn’t get far. James dropped that like a hot potato around week two, with no explanation or apology. But hey, those forum play by post sessions tend to be kind of a clusterfuck anyway. Maybe that’s why James jumped out the bathroom window and never looked back.

So am I the only one who has tired (again) of this classic D&D dungeon play? Is the whole mythic maze-underworld something that has popped up as some sort of delayed nostalgia? On forums such as Dragonsfoot, the humanoids are still constantly bleeping and durping about this or that aspect of classic dungeons with childlike glee. Minimalist description dungeon locations the size of Disneyland still seems to be the wheelhouse of the so called “OSR.”

He ran another play by post around 2012 for backers of the thing. I have no idea how that went. It was on G+ I think, which I had zero experience with.

James was raking in around 50 grand so far before he noped out again. But in a much larger, far more important situation. Much like that play by post, he just was not communicating. With backers, his partners, nobody. James had the money, the delivery date passed, and artists who worked on it were not paid. For at least several months, nothing. Then I guess, as best as I remember, he made a statement. His father was sick or some such. I remember some blurb somewhere about how he had been estranged for years from his dad, but I can't of course be sure. It was his dad and that is enough. My own dad passed away a couple of years earlier, almost blissfully because he had real bad dementia for a couple of years and I had helped take care of him despite having a demanding high end professional job. When he passed away it hit hard, but I was back at work in 3 days. I just wanted to be busy. James just dropped all responsibilities. I don't want to judge, but a word about his trouble a few months earlier would have gone a long way to get folk to understand. Folk in the OSR were aging, and many of us had lost our dads, moms, or whoever. People put hard earned money on the barrelhead to support his art. And he did not seem to give a fuck. Perhaps the most baffling and complained about thing was, during his ghosting of his project over those months he was still making multiple posts a day on his blog as if nothing had happened.  

This was around the time I stopped posting on my blog. I was super busy with career, an active dating life (getting in the gym every day after years of recovering from an auto wreck and making great money and dropping tens of lbs can do wonders), still doing Ren Faire to a large degree, and running multiple campaigns was taking up so much of my time. Also there seemed to be a lot of toxicity in the OSR at the time. I remember one gamers statement on some forum saying, "the old schoolers keep bayonetting their own wounded."  And sometimes my own behavior was less than laudable. I was coming off years of Howard Stern fandom, and I naturally have a bit of a dry and sarcastic wit and I often peppered my humor with that level of boyishness (still kind of do but I think to a much lesser extent these days). I said a few things I regret back then. 

Even in the Grognardia comments sections. I had long disagreed with some of the things James posted on. He hated the 80's Ah-Nuld Conan. And man, I loved it. Saw it with friends like 5 times in theaters as a kid. I scoffed at his "Conan should have blue eyes and not be that big!" sort of statements.  Or that Dejah Thoris in the John Carter movie was not hot enough (I retrospect I agree with that one now). Disagree on some things enough and its "why don't you go your own way and leave us to our delusions?" So I did eventually. 

This is my last post of that time period. 

So I only watched from afar from time to time. James eventually handed over the reins to others to finish Dwimmermount. It eventually fulfilled. Reactions were mixed. Ten Foot Pole reviewed a draft copy, and it is more or less similar to other mixed reaction reviews. Including my own opinions. Here is an excerpt. 

Adventure Time! This is a Maliszewski dungeon. If you’re familiar with his other work them you’ll be mostly familiar with this. It doesn’t deviate much from his usual style. The best parts are when it does. He’s got a kind of bog-standard D&D vibe going on that I don’t really get in to. Knights, brave paladins, holy clerics, etc. Not quite the nonsense I equate with 2E, but more of a non-weird 1E style. IE: Boring. This feel is exacerbated by the O M G LAME room descriptions. He’s got this style where he describes meaningless detail. Something like “This room was once a vestibule” followed by several sentences of what it was once used for and what it once contained. That’s then followed by something like “but it’s now filled with just some wooden scraps and debris.” WTF dude? What’s the point of the description provided? It did nothing to help me run the room or inspire me, the DM, to greatness. There is A LOT of space wasted on this kind of thing. Here’s an example from the text: “6. Trophy Room This large room once contained trophies commemorating Thulian military victories. There were plaques, statues, and other similar ornaments all long since looted and removed to other parts of the fortress. There are indentations in the walls, shelves, and brackets that all give evidence to their former presence. Also in the room are the bodies of two dwarves, both quite fresh though cold to the touch. They wear chain mail and carry axes, but the rest of their belongings (if any) are no longer present.” That’s once of the most useless room descriptions I’ve ever seen. It’s long, boring, and does nothing to help the DM with the room. The vast majority of the rooms have this problem. It’s almost like …. idk, the fluff text that appears in those fluff supplements. I loved the “Eye, Tyrant” book, but its not a dungeon supplement. In a dungeon description I need to be able to find information quickly and I need the information convey general ideas about the room. Things to spark my own creativity. That trophy room description does none of that. It’s just text that has to be slogged through, for fear of missing something, in order to run a boring room. That room did not make my job as a DM easier. It did the opposite. Most of the rooms have this problem. I don’t usually comment on layout/etc, all I generally care about is content. I’m going to make an exception here because the style chosen makes the problem worse. I’m not sure if James or Autarch are doing the layout, but it stinks. It takes these long, boring, meaningless text blocks and turns them in to giant text blocks. I believe the style is called Full Justification. ANY soul in the rooms descriptions are completely killed off by this style. You can’t quickly pick out anything important. It’s just a mass of fully justified text. If you’re lucky there’s a second paragraph. HATE.

Ultimately James partners took over and finished up the Kickstarter product, and it seems JM's hands were washed of it. Searching for Dwimmermount on Grognardia it looks like the last time he made a post that referenced it was in 2011.

This is completely accidental on my part, but James restarted his blog in 2020 about the same time I did with mine (I had moved to the Pacific North, and was now involved in 5th edition and online DMing so it seemed a good time) . I was not aware at first but saw his video interview on Wandering DMs. Gaming pods are not my jam, but I listened to the whole thing. Most of what I remember was them amazed at his number of posts on a weekly or even daily basis. I also recall that as best I can remember, James smiled exactly once for about 20 seconds. They used that as an image of him in their ad for the episode.

James has been posting pretty much daily like the old days, and in seems that over these five years he has a lot of irons in the fire. He has been running Empire of the Petal Throne for over 10 years for the same group online. Looking just recently he has Patreon's and Substack's and all. He seems to be doing a new version of Thousand Suns. He also is doing his own version of Empire of the Petal Throne (some years ago it came out that the original creator was a nazi or something). Other projects likely looming. 

I do want to sadly say that when I saw James was doing his blog again I made comments for awhile, and we interacted cordially. He read and commented on some of my posts. Suddenly, my comments on Grognardia were not being posted. Though a lot of the posts I made back in the day that contained any kind of toxicity or anger were deleted by me just to get a fresher start. Not that I was planning to beef with anybody like in those days that seem so long ago, though my wit would stay dry (these days I would say my sense of humor would be more in line with the Red Letter Media guys than Howard Stern).

That's 2012 me on the far left.

I checked out the comments of my final posts in 2012, and I found a couple with me and some other chucklehead goofing on something or other about James and or Dwimmermount. I cannot recall if or how mean the comments were, but I do not think they were deeply hurtful. To most folk anyway. But I deleted them, and it was over 3 or 4 years ago or so and really don't remember the specifics.

Since getting into 5th edition to run on Roll20 almost 6 years ago, I have had little desire to be a part of discussions online. I am on Tenkar's Discord and have made a comment here and there. A couple of private messages with the good constable a couple of times. Other than that little else. But something about the return of Grognardia around the same time I decided to get back on it sort of drew me back in. On the Wandering DM's podcast JM appeared on, one of the guys mentioned something about blogging for yourself as sort of a journal or diary, and that was exactly my newer attitude about it. I just like writing (if you can call it that - I hardly ever use the word "indeed" in my posts) about my gaming experiences and thoughts. I do not try to get the word out about the blog or comment in a ton of places. Most of my posts barely get a couple hundred views (though some occasionally get way more. A recent post about James Raggi has way over 1500 and my one about my alcoholic monk got over 2000). But there was something nostalgia about doing it again, especially since leaving old editions behind. 

And it was double nostalgia commenting on Grognardia again after over a decade. But it is what it is. A case of sins of the past coming back to bite you. And I'm not trying to stick it to him. Lately I just feel like talking about some of the personages of the OSR, and maybe some scandals from back then.  I don't know that the Dwimmermount thing is as big as scandal as Satine Phoenix's Battle of the Bards thing (that seemed a literal take the money and run...to Bali). But it is an interesting part of the OSR history. 

I hope the Dwimmermount thing is something James can laugh about now. I am sure he meant no harm. There were probably a ton of reasons that lead to the eventual outcome. All of us from the OSR heyday have plenty about us to goof on.  On me for certain. And I hope his variety of endeavors pay off for him, and that he keeps posting about stuff my players these days have not even heard of (average age 25-35). Plenty of people are like me and are old enough and old school enough to know about it all. James just ended a 10-year campaign. I just ended a year and a half one and boy, am I a bit burnt out.  

So he is doing what he loves, gaming and writing about old game gew gaws. And if he can make a few bucks off it then good on him.

You should have no trouble finding the Grognardia blog if you have never been there.  His Patreon is here.  And he has a Substack here.

Cheers

The Last Isle of Dread Campaign and too much DnD

Last week I finished up my latest Isle of Dread campaign. It has pretty much been a year and a half of mostly weekly sessions. 

I have used Isle of Dread a bunch of times since I was a kid. I remember at around 17 years old at Loscon, a Southern California Sci Fi convention, with my girlfriend, my best friend and his GF, and a couple of other dude friends (we all usually played DnD together) spending around 8 or 9 hours over two late nights in one of our rooms sitting around the little hotel room table making a quick trip to The Isle of Dread. I managed to cram in a sea voyage with a surprise stowaway assassin attack and a fire, landing at the island native villages, and trekking to the plateau and partying with alchohol and sex loving Rakasta up in the clouds. I don't recall for sure, but I think we did do the plateau dungeon in the days after the convention. But the point is I had early memories of this module and have used it every several years in a major way. In later in life campaigns, I had a campaign "The Pagos Trading Company" where characters helped a start up trade company travel to the Island and start up a trading post. Though the Pagos company is defunct, one of its old merchants still works out of the trading post and even has a tiki bar! 

I know that sounds like its a busy place now, but it is still hard to get to. You know, that mysterious fog and monsters and pirates and etc. And the main island is as wild as ever. 

I really vetted hard to get a good group of players. The online forums and Discords with the best odds to reach potential players have become, at times, wastelands of lame and weird usernames and particular expectations. But I have gotten good at picking my shots. And I did not rush those early games. You might call them several sessions 1's. I started with a solid player, Christine, who had advertised on Roll20 looking for a campaign, and I sort of team up with her to get a few others together. Some good ones that remained. A couple that ended up not working, but by around sessions 4 I had a solid group of people.  And pretty much all those of us played together for that long year and a half. 

I did not rush them to the Isle of Dread. I hooked them up with Merlot Von Tanmoor, a very connected (knows the queen and proves it) wizard and academic from old Tanmoor money. I used him in the last couple of campaigns as an easy patron type. The characters included a couple of freshly arrived drow from the deep. A gnome artificer who also considered herself an archeologist, and who quickly became a mentee of history professor Merlot. Also Kork the dragonborn cleric. That was fun because Dragonborn are newly showing up in my originally 1st ed. setting. 

Merlot took them to the opera in a carriage one night, and the characters role played for an hour in it though the ride was probably only 20 minutes. He took them to a major party he threw for connected people and fought assassins there and later in the street. Got arrested for the street fight and I played rap music for that scene inside the precinct with them in chains and we all laughed.

They spent nights drinking at Merlots haunted estate house, and enjoyed the city through second level, then went to the island. All this time there was great role-play, engagement with my stuff, and I was really loving it all. 

An eventful couple of week sea journey, meeting the Tanaroa natives and drinking at the old Pagos tiki bar on the beach. Kork, and orphan who grew up back in the Tanmoor healing gods cathedral, found the secret society of silver dragonborn expats from the mainland that his parents were from. Fought a recurring group of Allosaurus the islanders called "The Seven Brothers," saved villagers from the big pirate camp. All the good stuff. Everything but the plateau (where now instead of the old dungeon I have the spaceship from Barrier Peaks). 

Never went there tho..

The campaign rolled along on the reg. In those early months I had some rough times. I had a family member pass, and I had a long struggle with a persistent sinus infection that could have killed me (takes forever to see a specialist in this town) and a surgery for it that could have blinded me. But the games were so much fun. So much great character interaction. In a good way (mostly) I could barely get a word in sometimes. I like to say, "Sometimes you run the game. Sometimes the game runs you." But I loved it. 

But it let me kick back a lot. The scenarios and campaign had a slow progression, combined with all of them pretty much were Eastern time zone, and since I like to start games at night we usually only played three hours. But for online gaming I have really specialized in getting a lot done in a short amount of time, even with all that role playing. And as a veteran DM, especially with people you are meeting online, I have come to understand most campaigns will not get to their conclusion. Live for the now.  

Early this year, maybe four or so months after my campaign was in swing and my rough times of late 2024, a couple of my regulars started their own games on other nights. Kate, a 24 year old from Tennessee who had an odd Slenderman fixation (who knew there was a "Slenderverse"?) and had a great energy also had a Legend of Zelda fandom, and was starting a campaign based in Hyrule (look it up if you don't know). She invited me and the players to play in it. I was the only one who bit. I mean, Breath of the Wild is a modern favorite of mine, and outside of the original game it was my entryway into the world. K was having trouble getting players at first, so I decided to play to be supportive (always the road to hell is paved with kind intentions). A week later she had found several people WAY into the "Zeldaverse" and pretty much all also aficionados of Pokemon, Digimon, whateverthefuckmon, and furry stuff etc etc. I mean, it was LBGTplus plus plus plus. But hey, I have had such in my games of recent years, but this was next level snowflaky floof 🌈.

I have to admit, K is creative, but I was just not into the Zelda stuff, the creatures and lore and all that. Though I had been playing BOTW for a long time, I could never get the names of the creatures correct. That shit did not matter to me in a video game. It was basically 5th ed DnD, but everything skewed to harken to stuff from a dozen different versions of this setting across games that are only slightly connected to each other. I invested myself into this character, a ruthless young hunter and wild child who was deadly with a bow. But the action was few and far between. There was once three sessions where zero action happened. And since at least one of the twinks (they openly referred to this term) and one of the PokePillow hugging cat ladies was uncomfortable with my character hunting and butchering wildlife. So I made her mostly a forager. Jeez. At least I had all those hours to work on my own campaign while long, out of game conversations broke out about "which Pokemon do you most feel a bond with." Ugh. 

And then another one of my players started a Sunday campaign, their first attempt. So I had to of course try to support that. Especially since all his players were pretty much recruited from my thing. It's a free world, but you know, I worked hard to gather this group and it would be good for to talk to me about it first, plus Sunday was meant to be my alternate day was kaput. Ah well. 

He was pretty good at it being a new DM.  This started I think while I was on an out-of-town trip, and I joined a couple weeks later (I talk about my monk character Zen in some recent posts).  But I dunno. I was never truly happy in these other games. I think it showed sometimes. Like I said I used a lot of the time to just be a quiet player and work on my own stuff (something you could never really do in face-to-face gaming). 

I have to say about this, in my life I rarely have been a player compared to my gamemastering hours logged. Since I was a kid. I don't know why, but the player experience never appealed to me. Outside of "story" or "agency" for any of this stuff, I just want to set a scene with a map and some description, sprinkle in some NPC's and maybe some interesting thing happening and let the characters romp around. I don't really want to do the romping. So when I realized I was not really happy with all this other gaming I started feeling burnt out. And though I always had fun within my sessions, which I think were some of the best of my online gaming life the last 5 years, I was starting to yearn for some new voices in my games. 

With the holidays swiftly approaching, this seemed like a good time to wrap up all my gaming for the year a bit early and to start working on a new one for next year. I have to admit, I have been building life rafts for months because I foresaw I was getting more and more dissatisfied.  There was a line in the show Mad Men where his soon to be ex-wife said to him "You only like the beginnings of things." And that's me in life in a nutshell. Relationships, jobs, or campaigns and game groups. The earlier parts are deliriously happy. But I get discontented with some situations that started out amazing. I actually like a lot of quotes from Mad Men because I feel kinship with lots of them.

 So yeah, I was doing too much of it for too long (a year and a half is longer than most of my romantic relationships). So I needed to cold turkey for a couple weeks before working on the new things. A new campaign. I might even consider playing in campaign of somebody as well. But three nights a week? It was too much. As with any drug you do too much, I am jonesing a bit now. And I did like most of these people. But life is getting short and like Duke Leto said to Paul "a man needs new experiences."

I am in a semi-weekly Marvel Multiverse thing the last few weeks to learn the system (so in my final weeks of my group I was actually in FOUR campaigns, though this one had none of my regulars in it). 

But now that I treated you like my bartender and told you about my gaming trials and tribulations sinking in a gentle pool of wine, I can mention the topic title of this post. "The Last Isle of Dread" campaign I will ever run. 

OK, maybe saying that is hyperbole. But look, I'm a GenX'er and I ain't getting any younger. Sure, been eating fairly healthy in recent years. Going to the gym every other day. Riding my mountain bike on the weekend in the Sierras. No grey hair yet. But why age myself? Well, this campaign was weekly but was still a year and a half. In large part due to fairly short sessions and all that role-playing by the kooks, but still. I wanted to touch on Isle of Dread in a campaign again for years. And here it was. I did it. A great campaign everybody liked, much initially being in the city which are games I love doing. Then the Island. There it is. I did it. Do I want to do another campaign with it soon? More sea voyages and time in the villages and going off to fight dinos and encounter interesting shit. I certainly did not get to do all I wanted. 

The campaign had to switch directions a few sessions in when player Christine, who was in my game and the Sunday one, suddenly had to miss my Saturdays because of some medical thing she did on Fridays that made her ill for a day or two. She made Sundays a couple more times then vanished fully without letting us know what is up. Now, I work in healthcare and I can only imagine she was in chemotherapy. Hopefully she is better, but who knows. The point here I guess is I was prepping sessions a game or two ahead of time, and the plan was to explore rumors ancient civilization ruins around the island. Hidden cities and maybe going to the plateau to explore the old ruins there (and finding out a big spaceship is up there). But when she dropped out I had to start improving. I liked Chris, and felt bad about whatever she was going through, and that took some wind out of my sails months ago to a degree. Leading to some of my disappointments with how things were going. But I changed course and kept going because when actually in my zone with my wheels greased during a session, I was loving it. 

But maybe that is a reason to have another party go back in some later campaign. I have all this prep work for ancient cities to explore. But I dunno. One of my players was a big Curse of Strahd campaign and fan and she turned me on to it, and I have been studying that a good deal. I have the Roll20 purchase for that material with all the tokens and locations with dynamic lighting already added and all this shit. But I am keeping open about what it will be to wait and see the make up of the next group. Maybe something more basic like a Keep on the Borderlands campaign. Or one of a couple other campaigns I created in recent years. Just use them again for a new group. 

Whatever happens, that big Goodman Games copy the Isle of Dread update will stay closed for some years I think. But who knows. If I am still gaming several years ago from now maybe it will get touched upon, if not a whole other campaign with it. But for now, I want to explore new situations with some new people. Duke Leto would approve. 

Cheers

Endless Retcons in your game world

 

In the long history of my game world (that I started as a kid) I always tried to maintain some consistency in setting, personages, and timelines. Very early on I started a journal that is now decades old and well worn with the hard cover missing. But it is still handy to go back to and look at. Sometimes I have to dig around for it, because in recent years I refer to it mostly a couple times a year at most. Sometimes just taking a quick look when I come across it when cleaning or something.  The important history and events in my setting will always be in my head, so I don't really need to always be looking back at old text.

What I did was every campaign or so since I was a teen I would scribble a paragraph about what was happening. The main beats and arcs, what characters were involved, events, locations etc. Most of my longer campaigns could span a year or more, and I would indicate the year, and there would be a couple or three entries of what was happening during a certain season within that year. I mean, I have been using this world forever, with groups of friends playing for years with me until different stages of life occurred. It can be big fun to look back and see things I forgot, see the names of characters of transitory occasional players I totally forgot about (a lot of time I cannot put a face to some of the character names from the 80's and 90's).

At the start of a new campaign these days I take a look just to brush up on the time line of big things from the past so new players can work up background stuff that may relate to changes in the setting that happened in those old campaigns. I mean, there is now around 120 years of play continuity since I created that first dungeon and a town. But the most meaningful events to modern times occurred in the last 50 years or so of the setting, so I can often just say "a few decades ago this and that happened." 

 In campaigns of yore I had a certain obsession with my game world's timeframe marching on.  After a campaign I would often have an in-setting year or two go by till the next campaign. If I had a major change in a group and took significant time off from gaming, a couple of times I had like 5 years go by. I feel like it lends and epic feeling to a world for actual play years to pass. But there could be funny side effects. I had a long-time female friend who played a lot in the 90's declare "stop trying to make my character old!"

Since I started running online with Roll20 around Covid, I had moved things forward a little slower. A LOT slower. I think the 4 major campaigns I have done in that time have all occurred pretty much within the same year. It makes sense. Online groups just don't seem to last that long. On average my sessions would go around 20 games before a couple people have life issues. I heavily vet people I cannot meet in person before inviting them into a new campaign, so I usually start with four or five players. When you only have maybe four regulars you are on a razors edge. Losing a player or two is the end of it. Certainly, my current group is an exception. We have played for around 14 months now, almost weekly, and its well over 40 sessions so far. But anyway the quicker turnaround of groups in my online game life has caused me to slow my roll on the time moving forward thing. 

What does this have to do with retconning? Well, a bit of general history can be helpful. Because things change. And I want to talk about two retconning issues I often adhere to, with the second being maybe the most pertinent to this discussion, as it's what inspired this post. 

Isle of Dread was about my first real module, and the one I probably dipped into the most. Since I was a kid used it probably every several years. This is an example of something I did not retcon, but it just went through organic changes with each group that visited. For that first adventure group or two, it was an untouched area. But later uses demanded a place that was no longer virgin territory as far as the mainland or the natives were concerned. There was now trade with the tribes, and even a dedicated trading company from the mainland that was subsidized by the crown, and in my current campaign there is a trading outpost on the beach near Tanaroa (run by a mainlander and also has a bitchin' Tiki Bar!) that is a go between for trade with the natives. And should the characters go to the great plateau they will not find the dungeons from the module but instead other stuff that has happened there since the first PC visitors (spoiler - I currently have a massive space ship like from Barrier Peaks up there... in keeping with my having the Kopru creatures have originally come from outer space).

But then I have areas I have reused and have started retconning in more recent years for new usage for new players. I have less of a mind for continuity because most of my old players will never play again. So new groups don't know any better. Even before running online I have done this for many the last 15 years or so. I have adventure locations I want to reuse. Things I have used over my lifetime again and again. I just reuse them as is. Examples of this would be favorites like The Lichway from White Dwarf magazine. And also Tegel Manor.

These are things I have run at least a half dozen times as major parts of campaigns. And I just don't change them (mostly). I just recycle and reuse. I love them that much. OK, Tegel has changed up a bit since I was a kid because I found some of the sillier elements easily adjustable without detracting from the fun. But pretty much they get reused as is. 

Now that I think of it, maybe this is not really retconning in the truest sense. But the world around these places change. OK, I have not used Tegal since I adopted 5th edition, and the changes in undead and such may make it a different thing. Dunno. But in my mind right now it is the same old manor. But I have used Lichway twice since going to 5th about 6 years ago, and it had the same feels. Last time the Susurrus was released and an army of undead now stalk the halls. To use it again I would probably just reset it. 

So how I think about these places is that they are affected by a powerful time loop situation. As comedy magician The Amazing Johnathan used to say "fuck you its magic!"

What happens in The Lichway or Tegel will have no affect on the greater world. New batch of players. Just run it again. I may be using Keep on the Borderlands next campaign, and I have used that a couple times before. Oops, all retcons. Its back to formula. the frickin' humanoid tenement caves are back to normal. 

OK, so here is the current retconny notion I have. Perhaps more contentious than that other retcon stuff. 

In the past in discussions during a game, we have talked about how in DnD (and any rpg with levelling) about how characters go from fairly weak to powerful heroes often in the course of a few months in setting. Hell, often a matter of weeks. DragonballZ always comes up (mostly from me). If you know DMZ, then you know what I am talking about. 

1000 times gravity!

Often, especially when a player complains about having to start at 1st level, they will say that they think of their character as starting out fairly powerful in some way, or at least fairly effective. Especially when they want the character to be older. By hundreds of years in the case of elves. 

For years my response has been this: OK, well, think of it this way. At first and maybe even 2nd level, think of it as the character is having a "bad day." or Week or whatever. Imaging that the weak foes like goblins are stronger when you meet them as well. A player might respond "but, it's only been a month and I'm 6th level now!" Cry me a river, player, this is dungeons and dragons. It's how it works. 

Sometimes I think these complaints are misplaced, or even kind of performative. I mean, they complain about this in their tabletop, but in the video games they play they fucking love going from 1st to 50th level in the first couple hours of play. 

But I have to admit that the fast levelling is kind of awkward when you think about it. OK, so don't think about it. Heh, easier said than done. But In a convo with a player in last weeks session, it came up while speaking with "K", who was running her drow wizard, was known to have come from a family full of fairly powerful members. An awesomely powerful house matron mother, and pretty effective siblings. She is 7th level in my game now (Isle of Dread will level you up lickety split), but it came up that she started weak. A first level drow who travelled from the Underdark to my main setting city. What is up with that?

So I suggested that perhaps we can look at things like her journey from 1st level is affected by constant retcon. It happens with any character you would want to look at this way. When you look at those earlier sessions, think of her as having been 3rd of even 4 level then. She just wasn't using those more powerful spells yet. Maybe those goblins did not seem as scary now when you look back at it. No big deal. 

Sure, even looking at it from that light, she certainly has had recent experiences that improved her ability and powers. People can learn and get better at things fast. A total noob at golf or tennis can get relatively much better than they were in just a month. Not a pro or anything, just way better than they were. But again the point is to explain a bit better somebody that went from 1st level to 6 or higher in a month. Retcon that 1st level by saying you actually started at 3rd level or something.

In 1st edition you had that having to pay a trainer to get your level. Spend some time with that. I guess that can be a less awkward explanation. But on the Isle of Dread, for example, where the hell do you find a guy to help you train with your longsword or whatever?

Just say "aw, at the start of the campaign you were better than you thought you were" and move on. YMMV.

Cheers.