As Requested, My Curriculum Vitae-

Pictured - Mona and I at our big SCA wedding with the kids, Ash was had turned 12 then and Em had just turned 7 earlier in the month, John was still 9.

My name is William Dowie. I am a 43 year old white man from the rural northern edge of central New York state, on Lake Ontario. I am a giant history nerd, in college I majored in history with a focus on Classical Antiquity and the European Middle Ages, I minored in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I also took a bunch of Anthropology courses, but not enough to count as a second major. I am 6'6" tall and I have worked as a substitute teacher, short order cook, bouncer, machinist and convenience store clerk, just to name a few. I speak French passably well, Spanish slightly less so, and can usually guess my way through written Italian or Latin. I have tried to teach myself Scots Gaelic, much less successfully, but can pick out a number of written words on sight and sometimes recognize words when I hear them. Oddly enough I can pick out Welsh words now just as easily when they are cognates to the Scots Gaelic words I know, I see patterns in language easily.

I am married to a wonderful woman named Mona and we have three children; Ashli (19), John (17) and Ember (14), who were literally left on our doorstep when they were 11, 9 and 6 respectively. We live on a small, mostly forested plot of land in New Haven, New York - which is north of Syracuse and east of Rochester, nearest to the smaller city of Oswego, NY - where I continue to scheme ways to homestead and get off the grid, mostly because I hate the high cost of electricity in a county with three nuclear power plants, and I want healthier food than I can buy from the store, with the bonus that it'll be cheaper too. I have been frustrated in my attempts to clear my land because it's a lot harder to do than you would think, I have a lot more respect for pioneers now, especially since they did it with no power tools at all. I also have some valuable lumber that I can't seem to get anyone to harvest because my lot is too small and the presence of my house and the power lines along the edge of the road make it too difficult to be worth it, so apparently I need the price of Cherry to rise back to the level it was before our economic collapse to attract loggers.

I have been playing board wargames and D&D since 1980, when my friend Chris introduced me to both the week that we went to see Excalibur together with my dad. We played SPI's Sorcerer that weekend, because he had brought it over to my house and played D&D with him DMing before the week was out using the Holmes Basic rules. I went out and bought a set as soon as I could save up the money, maybe a month later. For a long time after that pretty much all of my money went into my D&D habit in some way or another, books, modules, Dragon Magazine, "official" Grenadier miniatures.

I found the SCA while the local group was doing a demo at the Sterling Renaissance Festival in Sterling, NY back in 1983 when I was 14, I have drifted in and out of the SCA ever since. I am currently missing Pennsic for my 41st time in a row. Something always comes up. Not that it matters anymore, I have passed my fighting prime and I don't think it's coming back no matter how hard I try. I keep resolving to make it to fighter practice more often and get back into my "Crown Tourney" rhythm, but that just isn't going to happen at my age anymore. I don't heal quick enough to fight six days a week anymore. That and I can't afford the gas money for the hundreds of extra miles per week I'd be putting on my minivan to go to all of the extra fighter practices and events. Still, I have made a lot of good friends in the SCA over the years and some great memories, I am happy to have been there for what I did and I wish I could do more still.

1985 was the year of the release of the 1st edition AD&D Oriental Adventures book, it's one of those books that you either love despite it's warts or you hate because of them. I love that book and it's probably because it's the only AD&D book I ever pre-ordered at Twilight Book & Game Emporium in Syracuse, NY - a sadly long gone FLGS. Despite the fact that the glue cracked on the binding causing several pages to become loose literally the first time I opened it, I was determined to get my money's worth out of it. Before my friend Tim left for Basic training in the US army the next year I took over DMing duties from him, which I had only rarely done before, and we played an epic OA campaign. I have played in one pretty epic OA campaign, as a Steppe Barbarian named Chanar Ilkhan, and DMed a few more since. One of my current projects is rewriting the OA book as I think it should have been.

As a side note, I was really anti-Rokugan because they changed the default setting in the 3e version of the Oriental Adventures book to Rokugan from Kara-Tur, and that made me, by default, anti-Legend of the Five Rings. I had been strongly attracted to the setting through AEG's Clan War miniature battle game prior to that, but hadn't bought into it at the time because I could not find at least one other person that was willing to also jump on board with me and had been burned by miniature games that way in the past. Now I am happy to say I have come full circle because I started buying old Clan War miniatures on EBay for my OA campaign and ended up getting the rules, which made me interested in the setting, which made me interested in the RPG, which got me to buy the new board game, which led me to buy some CCG cards too. I have even read through some of the published fiction, and, until it was shut down recently, was playing in a Facebook app version of the RPG called Emerald Empire. I really hated the 3e version of Oriental Adventures.

I played (A)D&D, tried out some other RPGs and wargamed a lot through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Wargaming kind of died in the 1990s (except on the PC, it boomed there), and I concentrated on just RPGs, then just D&D. Sometime after 3rd edition D&D came out, after the novelty wore off for me, I realized I disliked DMing it rather intensely. I was a little late coming to the 3rd edition party, because my D&D group was happy with 2nd edition and we didn't switch over until that campaign died. At the time, I had grown bored with 2nd edition AD&D and welcomed the change, although several things bothered me from the beginning; the faster rate of rising in level was a big one and I missed real multi-classing. I took me a while though, and DMing for several different groups, to realize the worst part was that it neutered the DM. My original AD&D groups, who were familiar with my fast and loose, shoot from the hip DMing style were OK with me making rules calls on the fly when none of us had any idea how something was supposed to work in the new system; we'd keep the game moving and I could look it up later. We might even like my way better. The other groups had people who STUDIED the rules though; at first, every time I made a ruling I'd see disapproving looks, eventually they got brave enough to start offering suggestions as to the right way to handle the situation.

So I quit DMing and let one of them DM in each group. Neither group lasted much longer. One started a new campaign and it was just too railroad-ey, I actually started stress testing that campaign to see what would happen if my character deliberately did things that were contrary to the predestined storyline. My character got punished, he made minor alterations to his storyline, but nothing seriously bad could ever happen to us, so, eventually, as a group we got bored and quit. The other guy just took over my game where I left off and had me make a character that would take his place. He had been unlucky in my game and died several times, but I assume that was because he kept making wuss characters, Rogues and Bards. I made a Barbarian, it was fun while it lasted, we went from 8th to 11th level with him at the helm, then he TPKed the party.

I took a break for a while, despaired over playing D&D again, then picked up Hackmaster. I ran a pretty fun Hackmaster game for a while and that was what led me to realize that I should just go back to playing 1st edition AD&D. That was the year we got the kids though, so I wasn't done with 3rd edition - when they decided they were interested in learning to play D&D, they wanted to play the newest version, 3.5 at the time. I gritted my teeth and went with it, anything to get kids into gaming. I have been walking them back in home games for years now, and have only recently discovered the Moldvay Basic half of B/X myself. Back in the day I bought the Expert Boxed Set when it came out, but I never got the Moldvay Basic Set that matched it because I already had a Basic Set, the Holmes Basic Set. So we've been playing that a bit lately, but my home games are pretty much at a stand-still right now, almost everyone that doesn't live here is too busy to come over and play, and everyone that does live here doesn't want to play with just their mom and dad, brother and/or sister. John is still gaming this summer, he's in a regular 4th edition D&D game with some guys he goes to school with and I am playing Dawn Patrol semi-regularly with Darryl & his dad, John and Dalton. We also recently tried out the Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition RPG here at the house. I am trying to start a game of 43 AD and it's supplement Warband, but the start has been plagued by bad luck and poor coordination of schedules.

I have always run my D&D games in my own "World of Garnia" fantasy setting as a default. It's my Greyhawk, my buddy Darryl and I have been working on this on and off for decades, we're doing a serious reboot of the entire setting and discussing it on my other blog. The primary idea for the campaign is that a group of Celts fled the Roman onslaught to this new world, the world of the Sidhe (Elves) where magic works. The main campaign area is one where their culture has flourished. I designed it originally using the core 1st edition AD&D rules, so there are a lot of 1st edition AD&D assumptions in the setting, but I am trying to make the setting system neutral so that it can be played with any FRPG system. When we have finished the maps and gazetteers they'll be released for use. Currently we're working on the whole world, then we plan to "drill down" and do specific regions. I will also most likely release the adventures that I have written for the setting over the years, it's just finding and transcribing all of the stuff, then updating it to match the current standard is going to be a chore.

By now you are probably wondering where all this "Great Khan" stuff comes from, right? Well back in 1996 my buddy Darryl and I were living most of a continent apart and wanted to play some D&D together. He had played a lot of the SSI Gold Box D&D games starting with "Pool of Radiance" when it came out and we were both new to the internet and on AOL at the time where they had a game called "Neverwinter Nights" that ran using the same engine, but was multi-player, up to 300 I think it was. I guess that makes it the first MMORPG, it was great fun anyway. Darryl was more savvy than me and figured out the best way to advance in the game was through guild membership, so we duly joined a guild together. ERS, the Explorers of the Rising Sun, who made us create new Screen Names, because that was your character's name in the game, and everyone in the guild was named ERS something. I was ERS Garn, Darryl was ERS Frodal, we were named after deities I had created for my Garnia campaign world.

But then we realized, being ambitious adventurers, that ERS was there to help newbies find their bearings and, in general, be nice; and we wanted to move up the food chain in NWN. So we decided to create our own guild, which would, even though it was a gamble, make us guild leaders and let us take charge of our destinies and how we wanted to play the game. We needed a hook though, and that's where our collective history nerdity took over, we decided to play as Mongols, because we wanted to send out a strong challenge to the status quo in all of the guilds and it was unique in NWN to play a culturally oriented guild, unless that culture was a fantasy one. Mostly I think we chose the Mongols though because I was playing them at the time in Civilization. Partly I think we picked them because we both loved the NES game Genghis Khan*, Darryl and I used to spend weekends playing that game together. We also both liked the Mongol reputation for ass-kickery and conquest. Then we studied and studied some more, at this point I think that our kids could hold their own at a conference of Mongol Medieval History scholars.

Anyway, the Steppe Warriors were born. Technically, since NWN is in the Forgotten Realms, we were members of the, at the time, recently defeated Tuigan Horde that decided to march west rather than return east. Darryl was our first Khakhan with his character SW Ogotai, named after one of the sons of Genghis Khan, the reasoning was that he could afford to be online more often (remember this was when you paid/minute of use) because I was in school at the time, and he was a better recruiter. My character was named SW Jagatai, also after a son of Genghis Khan. Ultimately Darryl resigned the position of Khakhan and I was elected to fill it. We've had our highs and lows as a group, and we're pretty dormant now, but I have been Jagatai, Khakhan of the Steppe Warriors since 1997 on the internet, so when I named the blog and when I created my initial Blogger account, I just naturally went with the same motif. My Yahoo email address is still SWJagatai at yahoo dot com, created in the same era. Back when I was sure we were going to leap from AOL's NWN into the expanding universe of MMOs I registered three domain names, steppewarriors.com, steppewarriors.org and steppewarriors.net; I used to joke that they would soon be followed by steppewarriors.edu and steppewarriors.gov. Clearly things didn't turn out as well for the Steppe Warriors as I had anticipated in the late 1990s.

Ultimately, I am pretty pleased with my alternate persona. In doing the research to properly play a Mongol character I have learned a great many things about the Mongols and other steppe peoples. I have eaten a bunch of Mongol food, drank Kumiss, shot arrows from a composite bow (not while mounted though), been in a yurt and made friends with a bunch of people that I otherwise probably never would have met. When I think about how it could have gone another way, if I'd been playing a different Civilization that day when Darryl and I were talking on the phone, or if he and I hadn't played so much of Koei's Genghis Khan together and he hadn't been as receptive to the idea, or maybe it was the fact that he had played in one of my epic Oriental Adventures campaigns that made him cool with the idea. If Darryl hadn't signed on for Mongols, we might have been a Samurai guild or a Viking guild or a Celt guild, they were all infinitely more familiar to both of us at the time; or maybe we'd have gone with something lame like a Dark Elf Ranger guild, who knows?

At any given time I usually have more irons in the fire than is wise, so many of my projects get back-burnered until I get back around to them. Currently I have on hold an Oriental Adventures campaign that just kind of fizzled when it was starting to get good, I had converted the Temple of Elemental Evil for OA and made it the Black Temple from OA1. I have a B/X Viking campaign that stopped when two of my regular adult players got new jobs. I have a B/X conversion for WW II that I spent a lot of time working on last summer, but my regular group, which is mostly my wife and kids and family friends, was lukewarm about play-testing it. I'd say it's an early alpha level right now. I am working on a total rewrite of the 1st edition OA book, kind of recasting it in a form I find more desirable. I just started learning the L5R RPG, I am GMing and the party is about 1/2 way through the adventure in the back of the book, I still haven't found the fumble rule. I have announced several times, prematurely, the start of my 43 AD campaign, so while that should be starting soon, I am going to not say when just in case something happens again. Mostly though, right now, getting a lot of my time behind the scenes, is the reworking of my old Garnia campaign world. We've made some interesting progress on it. I also have a bunch of OSR stuff piling up on my to read list, making me wish I had bought hard copies rather than pdfs because I mostly hate reading off my monitor, but that's where my copies of "Lamentations of the Flame Princess", "Carcosa", "Vornheim", "Adventurer, Conqueror, King", and several other major releases are sitting waiting to be read.

*Out of all of Koei's strategy games for the NES, Genghis Khan had the best multi-player play, Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms were too slow, and Nobunaga's Ambition II had the annoying "siege mode" in battle.

3e and I: Why We Broke Up

As promised yesterday, the semi-bitter story of my experience with 3rd edition D&D.

At the end of the day, I guess you just can't teach an old dog new tricks. I was the "go-to" DM for a bunch of different small groups here in Oswego county by the time 3e came out. I had been involved in the 2nd edition era with a bunch of my own campaigns and I played in a couple of fairly long running campaigns too*. Mostly my players were older players that I grew up with, or younger players that me or my friends taught how to play, so the weird proficiency checks for everything style of play that became common in the 2nd edition era** was largely absent from gaming in my neck of the woods. When players, usually newer players or rules lawyers, tried to use proficiency checks instead of playing things out I metaphorically slapped them down for it some; at best I'd give you a bonus of some sort. I wouldn't smack you for things that can easily be handled by a die roll, like say, identifying a plant or heraldry, but stuff that SHOULD be role played, like bluffing or pretty much anything that involves talking to NPCs and coming up with a story or an excuse or whatever; just making a proficiency check for that kind of annoyed me.

3e players, even my older players eventually, hated my DMing style in 3e. I couldn't just wing it and come up with a "roll a die and I'll let you know if it works" ruling on the fly, there was already a rule for whatever the PC was trying to do, and if there wasn't one you could assume that he couldn't do it. The skill checks though are what did me in. They drained the life out of the game and made every damned thing a rules mechanics issue. The players started to play the rules system instead of the game. Suddenly I had players planning their character builds out for levels in advance to maximize their potential.

Character creation was a bloody nightmare in and of itself, when the Player's Handbook comes with software for generating characters you know there's going to be a problem. Not that I noticed at first, at first I just noticed that it was pretty cool to have a unified XP chart and that feats were pretty cool for customizing your character and all the stuff that makes players happy with 3e. I kind of liked the simplification of saving throws. Then I started DMing and got the complex stuff. I hated having to remember all of the different effects for various feats that applied here, but not there, et cetera and monster stat blocks and combat rules that made everyone move around the battle board in odd ways to avoid attacks of opportunity and combats that lasted quite a bit longer than before. Oh, and the odd changes just for the sake of change, like Orcs going from Lawful to Chaotic Evil, and I hated the art; not that I was in love with the art of 2nd edition either, I just thought 3e's art really sucked. I also hated the super fast leveling, and I missed real multi-classing.

A quick observation here; when I finally made the switch to 3e D&D I was DMing for two different groups of players. Why two groups? Because each group contained some of my friends, but all of my friends don't play well with each other; there were also some scheduling issues since people my age were 30-ish when 3e came out. Mainly it was the A-Team and the B-Team though, that's how I thought of them at the time anyway. By the way, you should never let that slip either. The A-Team consisted of two guys that I had regularly played 2nd edition AD&D with for most of it's run, we also played wargames regularly for the same period (everything from Titan to ASL); one guy that was the cousin of one of those guys and also a pretty hardcore AD&D player and wargamer; and a married couple the husband had been an old AD&D player in the 1st edition era, a member of my old group actually, and a wargamer from way back then too, but the wife had never played any RPGs. The B-Team consisted of three guys that were in college, but had been playing 2nd edition for a few years; the younger brother of one of those guys that was still in high school, and had played mostly CRPGs; my wife, who has played a lot of D&D over the years, but isn't a "rules" person; and one old buddy of mine that I had been playing D&D and other RPGs and wargames (including the really complex ones like Star Fleet Battles, he was a Romulan lover) with since I was in 7th grade.

Actually, because of all the set up necessary, this observation really wasn't all that quick. My observation was that the wargamer heavy group took to the new rules a lot easier than the more casual group of gamers. All of them really liked the idea of customizing their characters, except maybe my wife, who really customizes her characters through roleplaying them; but it took longer for even the combat monster in the B-Team to start figuring out how to exploit the rules and rape them best to his advantage; that was a sad day for me. He once played a Fighter in 2nd edition game that had aspirations towards being a Bard. In that same campaign my wife played a Cleric that had always wanted to be a Fighter, but was forced by her family and her natural ability into the church. He used to write songs and poems about her character between game sessions or even during them he'd whip off little snippets of poetry. That would never happen in a 3e game. Those games were all business, working out tactical advantages and using every skill and feat to their synergistic best.

But what irked me the most was the damned skill checks. Suddenly the power behind the game was taken from a godlike DM and given to a set of books, and with those books came rules lawyers who would milk every drop of advantage they could out of every possible skill point and feat. Dragon magazine even ran a column for a while in the 3e era teaching you how to build super bad-ass characters by exploiting the rules; that's just not right. Pretty much overnight, after we converted to 3e, without any fanfare and really without anyone noticing, we all just stopped roleplaying all together. I blame the skill checks for that too.

What's worse is that I know it wasn't the players and it wasn't me, it was the game, 3e killed all the roleplaying and turned D&D into pretty much just a fantasy tactical miniatures skirmish game, and a fairly complex one at that; I know because I dumped D&D shortly after the 3.5 conversion, I only ever bought the 3.5 PH and DMed briefly in the 3.5 era before I realized I wasn't having any fun any more; I dumped D&D and bought into HackMaster and we played it and everyone had fun. People roleplayed their characters. We played through combat encounters without the use of miniatures. People once again laughed and had a good time at my table. HackMaster 4th edition was AD&D cranked up to 11.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't 3e, it was me. Pathfinder sales and Paizo's nearly fanatical fan base are clear evidence that 3e was, and still is, a fun game; and I had a lot of fun playing it from time to time. I didn't like the extra workload it placed on me as a DM. I didn't like the power it stole from me as a DM. We just weren't a good fit, irreconcilable differences.


*Although one of them was run by Luddite DM/Old School Prophet Steve S. who ran a 1st edition AD&D game during the 2nd edition era. We all thought it was quaintly eccentric at the time. He said "I already bought this game, these books still work."; whatever, I just liked the break from DMing all the time and he was an engaging and quirky DM. Sadly prone to sudden burn out though, three times his campaigns just ended abruptly.

**Yes, I am well aware, especially since I am running a 1st edition AD&D OA game right now, that non-weapon proficiencies were introduced in 1st edition AD&D, they were kind of a mess there and didn't see much use outside of OA from what I saw. 2nd edition made them pretty much standard issue and made the system work better, separating them out from the weapon proficiencies (if only someone had thought to call them skills, eh? Much less cumbersome than non-weapon proficiencies). Splatbooks proliferated them and made super non-weapon proficiencies and redundancies and I always thought that Player Characters got kind of hosed on the number of NWPs they got based on my own number of skills at the time, I grew up in farm country, next to the woods near a river and Lake Ontario, by the time I was a teen-ager I could swim, sail, fish, hunt, farm, cook and a bunch of other stuff in the PH, not counting the stuff I learned in school, like a foreign language and math and literacy. Now I figure it must have been a game balance issue, but I still give out background skill packages in systems that use skills.

D&D CRPGs

Computer RPGs and I have a long history, since I was a computer nerd from way back. I played Telengard and Zork and a bunch that no one has ever heard of. Today I am going to talk about D&D CRPGs.

The first one I played was "Pool of Radiance", which I have to admit I watched my friend Darryl play a lot more than I played myself. The entire "Gold Box" line from SSI was pretty much the same. They were essentially fairly long D&D modules, set in either the Forgotten Realms or Krynn. They were menu driven and the later ones had some mouse control options. I forget how many there were ultimately. I think the best ones were the first two, "Pool of Radiance" and "Curse of the Azure Bonds". I never finished any of them. They had a hard time holding my interest after a while because of the limitations of the format and the fact that I had plenty of opportunities to play actual live D&D with people.

The things I liked about them were the lessons I learned about D&D tactical combat and the house rules I picked up from them for my real D&D games, like holding your action. That was a big one. Holding your action may seem like an obvious rule now, but no one I ever played with had ever considered the benefit of going later than their initiative previous to then. Mind you we were teen-agers, but still. Even wargaming hadn't made us think of it because they pretty much all work on an I-go-you-go system too, with occasional breaks for opportunity fire. I may lament the fact that D&D has become a tactical miniatures combat game now, but tactics are real and were always important.

The other thing I liked was that the "Gold Box" format made my transition to online gaming easier via "Neverwinter Nights", the first one, that only was available on AOL, not the later one that everyone has heard of or played. "Neverwinter Nights" was a "Gold Box" game and the only one using that engine that was designed for multiplayer use. We used to get a couple of hundred people playing at a time. We had guilds and quests and special events more than a decade before WoW arrived on the scene. I founded a guild- The Steppe Warriors- with Darryl, who at the time was living in Utah. We figured it was the only way we could play together. I could go on at great length about the community and what an awesome time was had by all or the Steppe Warriors (I miss you guys) but I'll save that for another time.