Paul Jaquays - Wow!

This news will probably be all over the OSR in the next day or two, but just thought I'd do a quick post on it. Paul Jaquays, one of my favorite JG designers from back in the day, has had gender reassignment this weekend. Apparently he has been unhappy for a long time, and this is bringing him happiness, according to his Facebook page.

Last year he answered a couple of my silly questions in the comments section of his Grognardia interview (I think regarding Fred the Amulet and his old Star Trek parody in The Dungeoneer). He came off as a pretty cool guy, who is now I guess a pretty cool gal.

Anyway, as a nod to PJ here's a post of mine from a year or so ago talking about wanting to get back into some of his old material I loved in my gaming olden days. Good luck with your new life, my friend.






Night of the Walking Wet

Even though it is maybe months away, I keep thinking about what I would like to do for the early part of my next campaign, so I have been going through my older game stuff for ideas. Over the weekend I took another look at my old and beaten copy of The Dungeoneer Compendium.

The first 6 issues of The Dungeoneer from back in the day each had a featured dungeon. Each of these were great examples of Judges Guild’s wild and wooly take on Dungeons and Dragons. For one thing, the entries for rooms and areas were just like I did mine in my game notebooks, specifically, poor spelling, grammer, and amusing misuse of words. A lot of the time, you could barely grasp what the author (usually the great Paul Jaquays) was getting at in some of the entries, just like one of my players might find my notebook jots to be if they snuck a glimpse. This stuff was so very amateurish, and for sure that was a good thing. It was one of the charms of the stuff; it was written the way I wrote for my games, and how could that not appeal to me? It was homey and warm, and you automatically felt like the author was your buddy, a regular guy in a way Sir Gary never could came off in his flowery prose.

At one time or another, I ran each of the dungeons featured. Borshak’s Lair, The Pharoah’s Tomb, Merlin’s Garden, etc. Actually, I ran most after the Dungeoneer Compendium came out and collected the dungeons of the first six issues. That great book not only contained all those dungeons, but also placed them all on the land map of Jaquays’ great Night of the Walking Wet setting. All those places, and more, were right there in the Castle Krake area, and I used that to my advantage.

I made a decent mid-level campaign out of it. My teenage sweethearts’ Elf character Noradama “Nord” Calingref won Castle Krake in a card game, and took her adventurer pals along with her to clear out the Slime God, and the Type 4 Demon and ghoul army of Krakesbourough. That Walking Wet scenario is hella cool, and is pure Judges Guild.
I have great memories of all those dungeons set near Krake. In The Pharoah’s Tomb, one player had a desert ranger, and he was able to scramble over all those sand-trap rooms while other characters struggled and got trapped. He loved using an ability I gave his character that he thought he would never use. He was so jazzed, his character skittering over the sand floods and ululating “ayiayiayaiyaiyai!”

Within Borshak’s Lair, a magic tomb invaded by orcs, one character found the hilarious “Fred the Magic Amulet.” The sentient, +1 protection amulet had awesome illusion powers, and I would have it transform into a giant, inanimate shark that still spoke in Fred’s high pitched Mickey Mouse voice. Dark Tower was great, but this shit was Paul Jaquays best work as far as I was concerned. Was he as stoned as I sometimes get when he was writing these scenarios?

All these dungeons featured old school D&D staples, i.e. plenty of magic affect statuary, and traps that were usually more weird and scary than deadly. I had so much fun with this stuff as a teen. Sadly, I eventually got more serious with my adventures, heading more into “High Fantasy” despite sticking with 1st edition.

But I think it is time to revisit some of this classic cheese of time past, so I may just be making the dungeon-heavy Castle Krake area and it’s interesting sandbox surroundings the setting for the next campaign.

Night of the Walking Wet

Even though it is maybe months away, I keep thinking about what I would like to do for the early part of my next campaign, so I have been going through my older game stuff for ideas. Over the weekend I took another look at my old and beaten copy of The Dungeoneer Compendium.

The first 6 issues of The Dungeoneer from back in the day each had a featured dungeon. Each of these were great examples of Judges Guild’s wild and wooly take on Dungeons and Dragons. For one thing, the entries for rooms and areas were just like I did mine in my game notebooks, specifically, poor spelling, grammer, and amusing misuse of words. A lot of the time, you could barely grasp what the author (usually the great Paul Jaquays) was getting at in some of the entries, just like one of my players might find my notebook jots to be if they snuck a glimpse. This stuff was so very amateurish, and for sure that was a good thing. It was one of the charms of the stuff; it was written the way I wrote for my games, and how could that not appeal to me? It was homey and warm, and you automatically felt like the author was your buddy, a regular guy in a way Sir Gary never could came off in his flowery prose.

At one time or another, I ran each of the dungeons featured. Borshak’s Lair, The Pharoah’s Tomb, Merlin’s Garden, etc. Actually, I ran most after the Dungeoneer Compendium came out and collected the dungeons of the first six issues. That great book not only contained all those dungeons, but also placed them all on the land map of Jaquays’ great Night of the Walking Wet setting. All those places, and more, were right there in the Castle Krake area, and I used that to my advantage.

I made a decent mid-level campaign out of it. My teenage sweethearts’ Elf character Noradama “Nord” Calingref won Castle Krake in a card game, and took her adventurer pals along with her to clear out the Slime God, and the Type 4 Demon and ghoul army of Krakesbourough. That Walking Wet scenario is hella cool, and is pure Judges Guild.
I have great memories of all those dungeons set near Krake. In The Pharoah’s Tomb, one player had a desert ranger, and he was able to scramble over all those sand-trap rooms while other characters struggled and got trapped. He loved using an ability I gave his character that he thought he would never use. He was so jazzed, his character skittering over the sand floods and ululating “ayiayiayaiyaiyai!”

Within Borshak’s Lair, a magic tomb invaded by orcs, one character found the hilarious “Fred the Magic Amulet.” The sentient, +1 protection amulet had awesome illusion powers, and I would have it transform into a giant, inanimate shark that still spoke in Fred’s high pitched Mickey Mouse voice. Dark Tower was great, but this shit was Paul Jaquays best work as far as I was concerned. Was he as stoned as I sometimes get when he was writing these scenarios?

All these dungeons featured old school D&D staples, i.e. plenty of magic affect statuary, and traps that were usually more weird and scary than deadly. I had so much fun with this stuff as a teen. Sadly, I eventually got more serious with my adventures, heading more into “High Fantasy” despite sticking with 1st edition.

But I think it is time to revisit some of this classic cheese of time past, so I may just be making the dungeon-heavy Castle Krake area and it’s interesting sandbox surroundings the setting for the next campaign.

“The Hellpits of Nightfang” – it changed my world.

A recent posting about Paul Jaquays got me thinking about my fondness for his work (especially when I was a kid) for D&D and Runequest. I suddenly remembered Jaquays’ Hellpits adventure, and it reminded of how much it entered into my particular game world in the 80’s.

The Hellpits of NIghtfang was a 32-page scenario booklet that came out in 1979. Like a lot of the times I was a kid hanging out at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica as a kid, it was a modest product that really captured my imagination. If you are not familiar with it, let me describe it briefly before telling you how I used this Runequest adventure in a big way in my game world, “Ardor.”

Basically, it is a cleverly designed series of muddy sink holes in a grassy field. It seemed like a simple enough setting, but there was plenty of action and Dex rolls to be had just in trying to navigate the slippery sides of the smallest hole. Down below in the small inner complex, Runequest mainstays like Flail Snails, Stake Snakes, and power-draining spirits abounded. But the main inhabitants of the earthy place were the elderly (but muscular) vampire Rune Lord Nightfang, and his rather homely wife. Fight Nightfang, bargain with him, or whatever. There you go.

OK, so at some point around 1980 I used The Village of Hommlet module to run a couple of games for my group. The major change (and I always make major changes to modules) I made there was to take the handsome, but scarred evil cleric Lareth, and make him as supremely handsome and charismatic anti-paladin. He was not slain at the end of that adventure, and ended up as the lover of a (not evil) Elvish magic-user/thief of one of the female players character named “Noradama” (or “Nord” for short). Although not exactly changing his ways, Lareth behaved long enough to have a short relationship with Nord in later games, and to become a fairly regular NPC. I know I know, lot of questions there. But it was 30 years ago and my memory dims like the Feral Kid in Road Warrior. It lives now, only in my dreams…

So around a year or less later, I had the Hellpits adventure, and decided to use it. But I wanted more from Nightfang and his wife than the sparse background Paul J. put into the scenario. Mind you, this was a Runequest adventure that I was converting into a AD&D adventure. As written, NF was a Rune Lord. So I decided in D&D he would have been some great wizard in ancient past. I needed more background for Lareth, who by now was involved with the same female players other character (a female drow, much more suited to Lareth as a lover than a wood elf tart), and was a regular feature in scenarios.

So I decided that NIghtfang was once known as Earlwuth Tan, a great general from the eastern empire who came to the west and founded my main city of Tanmoor, then just a frontier wilderness, several hundred years ago. In self exile at that time, after being cursed with vampirism, he eventually came across and married his current wife in recent decades, who happened to be a werewolf. Look, I was a teenager, OK? I then (and now) came up with some pretty wacky backgrounds for things .

Lareth was along with the group for that adventure, looking for his long lost father and mother who he barely remembered after he was born 20 years ago. And yeah, it gets wackier. Although I hadn’t originally intended for it when I did the previous Hommlet adventure (but the players did not know that), Lareth was a child of a powerful vampire and a werewolf. He was both, and had been hiding it from the characters. After some battling of monsters and Nightfang, Lareth revealed himself as Nightfang/Earlwuth Tan’s son, and after some thrashing about there was a family reunion that ended will, under the circumstances.

Now it gets bigger than shit. It was time then for a new campaign, and this started with Earlwuth’s (I would no longer refer to him as NIghtfang from then on in) declaration that he would take Tanmoor, the city he founded long ago, from it’s rulers from the Eastern Empire, and return it to the glory he meant for it when he founded it. He was evil, and a vampire, but he wanted the city to be returned to a time of kings and chivalry. The Empire from the East was mostly thought of as evil by the players, so it was not hard to get characters into this concept. For many games, the party helped Earlwuth, Lareth, and family overthrow the imperial forces in the city. Earlwuth/Nightfang then took a backseat, in the shadows, while his son Lareth Tan, took his birthright as king of Tanmoor.

Lareth married his drow character lover, and the Tan family remained for years in-game. Tanmoor had always been a wizardly city, but with a Vampire/Werewolf/Anti-Paladin as king, and his personal Addams Family in court, it became more of a place of elegant weirdness. Though the royal family had an evil background, the normal people of the city were actually safer, more prosperous, and happier than they had been under hundreds of years of rule by a distant empire. Some time in the later 80’s, I had a plot line that included the destruction of the royal Tan family. Hey, things change.

This may be the most extreme example of a modest adventure module being tweaked to fit into my personal game world. I still use this game world today, and when any of my player’s characters are from the Kindom of Tanmoor, I always have to explain the interesting Tan Family part of the city history (that happened around 50 years ago now in-game timeline). Sometimes they go “Oh man, I wish I had rolled up an anti-paladin vampire/werewolf with an 18 charisma instead of this fighter.” But the time of the Tans, the family of Nightfang, has long passed. Tanmoor remains kind of weird, though.