Land of the Lost (lostlostlostlost…)

This weekend I happened to spend a lot of time at home with the BBQ going on the back patio, and a Sam Adams in my hand. Enjoying some rays, drinking a few ales, and burning some meat and veg on the grill is the perfect Memorial Day for me.

But a certain marathon on the Sci Fi channel kept me running into the back workshop to tune in the TV. What had me so interested? A little show I grew up with called Land of the Lost. In honor of the movie the network had a non-stop marathon of the old show on, and it brought back some great memories.

I grew up with this show. In fact, outside of comic books this was the first piece of “speculative fiction” that I geeked out on. I was only about 10 years old, and I read comics for the wild super-combat, not for any philosophy or rationalizing about time travel and alternate universes. Those concepts would come to obsess the comic book geek teen I would later become. But LOTL instilled in me the first love of weird places, creatures, and worlds. It was for sure my very first pocket universe.

Watching with adult eyes, I was struck at the adult nature things in the show. I didn’t know this as a child, but a variety of great science fiction writers, including Star Trek’s David Gerrold, and Sci Fi icon Larry Niven, brought along some real weight and meaning to the magical goings-on of the chaotic land filled with dinosaurs, aliens, and powerful cosmic, inter-dimensional energies.

This show was no doubt a great influence on the gaming I would get into in the couple of years to come. It really prepared me for my early “anything goes” nature of my game environs (only Dave Hargrave would be a bigger influence of the weird and out of place). I do remember using pylons as gateways and time travel devices in some of my earliest scenarios (I placed a couple on the Isle of Dread). I haven’t used them in decades, but after getting inspired by the show…

I was also struck by the intense drama of the show. Sid and Mary Kroft’s earlier shows, HR Puffenstuff and Lidsville would feature young kids lost in a mad pocket world, but LOTL really pumped it up a notch with constant danger. I mean, every time the kids went out to get water or firewood they had to contend with a pissed-off T. Rex lovingly nicknamed “Grumpy.” And I still kind of get chills when I see the boulder near the Lost City with “Beware of Sleestak” painted on it. Those friggin’ lizards won’t just eat you, but will even go so far as to lure kids into traps with visions of their dead mothers. Bastards.

And I’ll admit it, Holly was my first TV crush. She was just a little older than me, and carried a knife. She lived in a world filled with dinosaurs and various monsters, and got out of every situation alive and well. You know that if she never got out, that girl grew up into an Amazonian badass with dino-armor and a huge sword.

For the third and fourth season they had dad make it home and his brother show up to help the kids. Pretty convoluted. Plus I remember being sad thinking about the dad at home worrying about his kids still being in that closed-off nightmare realm. You know he must have turned to drink, staggering around the grand canyon looking for an entrance to that world so he could find his kids.

So they made a big budget movie out of it. Sounds like a no-brainer. A capable, ranger-like dad, and a brother and sister who constantly bicker, but are always at each other’s side with the save when danger looms. But no, sadly, they have raped the material (sometimes I hate you, Hollywood) for the sake of Will Farrell’s cheap humor. Holly has been made into an older, non-related research assistant for the sake of sexual humor (har har), and Will has been turned into a fat, crude trail guide ( ha ha). And Rick Marshall, as played by Farrell, is an incompetent Paleontologist (har dee har har). It’s hard not to think of what a great movie it could have been if done with some seriousness, but I guess I should not dwell on what might have been in Hollywood. That could drive ya crazy.

A little boardgame called Rivets

As a teen I played most of the microgames put out by Metagaming in the late 70’s. Chitin, Ogre, and of course Melee and Wizard.

These games were touted as being playable during a school lunch break and damned if they weren’t right. I was by no means a great rules interpreter (those skills would not be hard-forged until I started running Champions in the 80’s), but these microgames were so easy. The rules were aimed towards fast and furious action. You moved your little chits on the hex map, and you attacked, either with a weapon or missile of some kind. There you had it.

I played Rivets, Ogre, and Chitin religiously, but Rivets got the most play of all.

Rather than turn me off, the slightly cartoony robots of the Rivets were strangely appealing to me. In some weird way I thought of little robot tanks with big eyes as being kind of scary.

Armed with various guns and the occasional melee weapon (I think it was the Bopper class tank that featured a huge can-opener as a weapon, along with its freaky robotic war cry of “Pop-A-Top!”) the little mini-tanks scooted around the post apocalyptic landscape, fighting and scavenging for their respective factory CPU.

Besides some fun little game sessions, Rivets also made it’s way into a couple of my campaigns of the 80’s. In my first homebrew game, based on The Road Warrior, I had players dealing with the robots from Rivets as fellow scavengers on the field. As long as you didn’t attack them, or pick up choice pieces of salvage, they would leave you alone. I also used them in a much more violent encounter in an early Gamma World game, which eventually saw the characters having to assault the Robot Factory CPU.

I may actually have my old copy of Rivets somewhere deep in one of my game boxes, but I really only thought of the game again this last weekend as I was coming up with encounters for my Mutant Future campaign I have planned. I thought that it would be a hell of a shame not to feature the little metal scavengers as warriors in one of those upcoming games.

And I may just have to throw that monster tank for Ogre at theme at some point as well…

MY “APPENDEX N” (hold the applause)

MY “APPENDEX N”

OK, the rage this last week was listing books that inspired your D&D ( or other gaming), so here is mine in a nutshell.

Comic Books – probably the most influential media in terms of my love of gaming, and not just my long-running Champions games from the 90’s. I have always tried to inject the drama and descriptiveness of comics into my games, D&D or otherwise. I think it is one of my greatest points as a GM. Without going too much overboard, my humanoid villains often came off a lot like Marvel Comics villains. I do try to go light on the corny dialogue, however. Offbeat, genre-slapping comics like Watchmen, Dark Knight returns, and Marshal Law also taught me to turn clichés and expectations on their ear a bit in game terms.

The Hobbit/LOTR – Natch. Nuff Said. Oh man, my mind is still on comics. Tolkien was my greatest gaming influence in the earliest days, just as it was for D&D in general.

Conan – I was in my early teens when I started devouring the first several Conan paperbacks. REH’s mood, passion, and swift and blinding violence transported me to that dark prehistoric place where Conan tread in his sandaled feet. Marvel’s Conan comics, especially Red Sonja, helped color my world as well.

Tarzan/John Carter of Mars – My dad read me the first Tarzan book when I was a kid. Years later I would jump on the rest and be transported to those awesome jungle places. And the sweeping adventure of JC of Mars really set my gaming blood on fire. I so wanted to have dashing sword fights like those in my games. Edgar Rice B. has such a terrific sense of adventure, and such a great sense of love and honor.

H.P. Lovecraft – Ok, I didn’t read HP before I got into D&D, but when I started in the early 80’s, it lead me to one of my favorite D&D alternatives: Call of Cthulhu. It was hard to talk my D&D players into trying it when I went for a full campaign in the early 90’s, but they soon fell in love with it, even the girls. It was always a great break from D&D.

Lankhmar – of course of course of course. The big guy and the little guy and their crazy city came in second only to Tolkien for my game inspirations. I could not get the most out of Judges Guild products like City State of the Invincible Overlord or Hargraves’ Arduin until I got into Leiber's great (and ahead of their time) books. This was one of those rare series that let you know how limitless the possibilities were in a fantasy world, as opposed to how limited. Somehow, the world of Fritz seems an amalgam of all the reading material I have listed above.

Too Many Curses

I’d love to review this funny little fantasy novel, but truth be told I did not finish it. I actually got into it for less than fifty pages. It was a little too whimsical to me, and constant silliness is ok for awhile, but not for 300 pages.

But there is a fantastic dungeon idea to be gleaned from within the pages of this book. Basically, it takes place in an evil wizard’s castle. In his career the wizard has had many enemies, and he had vanquished them all. But rather than kill his foes, he preferred to trap them in different forms and lock them up in his dungeons. So this multitude of rival wizards, knights, and adventurers off all kinds exist as monsters, phantoms, and even inanimate objects such as walls, paintings, and suits of armor. One unlucky victim even exists as a mechanical pulley unit that drags meat for the monsters from larders deeper in the dungeon.

The wizards’ slave, who actually is a young female kobold, runs around cleaning and feeding and generally doing upkeep on the castle and environs.

The D&D roots of the story are clear, and so it would be natural to take ideas from it for games. This sort of mega-dungeon, populated entirely by purpose rather than some sort of Gygaxian Naturalism would practically write itself once you got working on it. First, have some small parts of the dungeon complex be polymorphed victims, such as corridors, walls, and bridges. Even entire rooms could have once been a living being. Maybe the castle itself. Let them talk a bit, and either hamper or help adventurers with info. Have some victims be magical statues or mirrors that do helpful or harmful affects on those that dare to deal with them. And of course stock the dungeon with typical monster fare, but each and every one of these monsters was once a person, and they still have their original intelligence and can often still talk. Maybe some want to hurt the party to please the wizard and maybe get a reprieve from their curse; or maybe they will help if the party promises to kill the wizard, therefore relieving them of their predicament (of course, even if the wizard dies they still might be there).

Even some treasure items could be former foes of the wizard, such as talking jewelry, or intelligent swords and armor. And of course, don’t forget to have a helper/apprentice who runs around taking care of the place.

And perhaps the wizard has a massive spell cast on the castle itself, so that if anyone dies within it’s walls while opposing him, they automatically reincarnate in a different form rather than perish. Just another victim in the castle, rooting for the party to stop the foul sorcerer.

Awesome stuff, and probably the first time I got really good ideas from a book I could not finish.

What Color is your Orc?

Who would have thought the humble orc would have gone through so many changes since first used in D&D?

Created by Tolkien for his Middle Earth cannon fodder, their use in Dungeons and Dragons made them a household name. First mentioned in the “White Box,” they were described as savage tribal creatures that live in caves or villages.

In pre-AD&D days, my orcs pretty much looked like the figures I found. Those early figs, Ral Partha I think, pretty much were the pig-faced orcs as depicted in Hildebrandt Bros. LOTR calendars, where more often than not they also seemed to wear roman centurion armor. Tolkien did not describe them as pigs, but having mentioned broad noses may have lead to the pig thing. I never really liked the pig look. James at Grognardia seems to have gone “full hog” with this “orc as pig” philosophy, making the orcs in his Dwimmermount campaign actually be boars given humanoid form. Hmm. That’s all good, but for some reason to me it seems less orc, and more like something from the old 80’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. When I picture a “boar man” it’s hard not to see it in a badly animated cartoon image in my mind. Not to say James is wrong , but that image is my least favorite as far as “What color is your orc.” Never mind that people are going to start confusing orcs with wereboars during the full moon.

Some pretty shitty orc miniatures came out in conjunction with the Ralph Bakshi animated LOTR 70’s film. In that movie the orcs were just dudes with fake tusks and caveman fur singlets, made to look pitch black and poorly rotoscoped. Bakshi even just shaded old footage of Zulu warriors from old movies for some of the orc scenes. There was some creep factor to that look, but it really made for some craptacular miniatures based on the film.

During the 80’s, orc figures evolved into a more ape-like look, and by around 1990 Warhammer 40000 continued with the green caveman meets ape look. Orcs now were becoming more thuggish than pure snarling evil as Tolkien portrayed them.

In the last several years, we have seen two newly portrayed types of orcs. There are the Peter Jackson movie orcs, which I really like. In the film, they come in all kinds, which is how Tolkien described them. Although I have not seen orc miniatures based on those films (I was semi-retired from gaming for most of the new millennium), I’m sure the look would/did translate well to miniature form. Especially those badass Uruk Hai.

Now, with the World of Warcraft generation, orcs have become something much more than the original basic primitive savage good and evil concepts. Later editions of D&D let you play pure orcs as characters, and WOW followed suite, even going so far as to make them cunning, brave, muscular heroic warriors. Wow indeed.

So my preference is for the snarling, hateful orcs of Tolkien. Orc women and children? Characters will never delve deep enough to find them. They will only continue to contend with gangs and troops of the foul beasts in caverns and dungeons of the sub-surface world. And they will continue to put them to sword and axe with a clear conscience. In my game world, orcs were born to die. And I guess in my world, they look like whatever figures I happen to have on hand (including my one remaining “pig-face” orc from the old days).

D&D live action movie gets greenlight

Fake. Yeah, I know, lame. If we did get one at this point, it would be a Roger Cormen-esque budget straight to video mess. Or worse, some monstrosity directed by that Uwe Boll guy who makes all the crappy video game movies.

As you can see in the Cosplay photo, the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon from the 80’s has a small cult following. With the 80’s still being mined for it’s richness of pathos and irony and middle-aged nostalgia chumps like me looking to recapture our youth, just doing a live-action adaptation of the cartoon would please us game geeks. Try to do a new story, and you’ll end up with a Wayans brother as a thief, and Beholders so weak that they have been reduced to minor guardian creatures.

Even the annoying child Barbarian and his whining unicorn could not ruin it if it was done right. To keep the kids at the proper age, you get a bunch of mostly unknowns for them, and then just get a big star for Dungeon Master and Venger. My vote for Venger is Willem Dafoe. Scrunch Gary Oldman up with the miracle of movie Hobbitization, shave the top of this head, and you gots yourself the DM right there.

We can dare to dream. If they can make it any better than the D&D movie from the 90’s, then you’ll get my ass in a seat at the local movie house. I’ll probably stash a few Fat Tire Ales in my backpack though, just in case I need to dull the pain.

What’s your alignment, baby?

Like most young D&D geeks back in the day, me and my buddies often used D&D terminology in our regular lives as kids. Obviously, if you fell off your bike or skateboard and got bashed up a bit, you’d say “I think I lost about 5 hit points there” (in reality, being zero level, we probably only had about 3 or 4 hit points max). I remember as a teen surfing with another gamer, and he asked me how many wandering aquatic monsters did we risk randomly encountering. We saw sharks and jelly fish all the time, so those topped our list. Also in there was killer whales, “kooks” and killer bacteria (this was Santa Monica Bay, after all).

But my favorite “D&Dism” was a pick-up line that I actually used and ultimately got lucky with in my early 20’s.

In our teens, I had joked about how in the far flung future world of my gameworld, people used “what’s your alignment” instead of “what’s your sign” (the big real world pick-up line of the late 70’s, early 80’s).

At a party years later, I was enjoying the kegs and open bar, when a pretty blond girl asked me to pour a beer for her. Happy to oblige and a little toasted, I hit her with it “so…I’m a cool and easy chaotic good. What’s your sign, baby?”

Not even thinking it would work, she was fascinated and wanted to know what the hell I was talking about. At that point in life I never talked about gaming around non-gamers. I was totally in the closet. But for some reason I decided to tell this girl what alignment meant, and about the game it came from. She was sort of a bimbo and didn’t like sci fi or fantasy (not even Star Wars), but the opening I got with my gibbering D&D nonsense got me into her life and dating her for around three months. If I recall, it ended because we had nothing in common but being pretty. And I was broke around that time too. That does not go with “high maintenance” L.A. chicks.

You don’t really hear that “what’s your sign” line outside of Burning Man these days, but I still think knowing somebody’s alignment is a whole lot more informative about them than what month they were born in.