GM Questionnaire

So, I decided to fill out Zak's Questionnaire, here are my answers.

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?

I am apparently a one trick pony, I can come up with good campaign settings. I can fill them with interesting NPCs and get some action started via plot hooks, after that it's all on the players. I don't really invent stuff like tricks, traps, spells or monsters.

2. When was the last time you GMed?

December 18, 2011, but that session and the one before it weren't all that great.

3. When was the last time you played?

Sometime in 2009? Right after Hackmaster Basic came out, my Daughter Ashli decided to debut as a gamemaster using that system, it went well for the first couple of sessions while she had pre-prepared material to work with, but once she had to start working with her own material and we started to do things that weren't covered in the book, things started to go bad; it ended shortly after that while we waited for the release of Frandor's Keep. I bought that for her when it came out, but we never went back to Hackmaster Basic, I think that the ultra-busyness of her senior year of high school and the bad memory of how it had ended before turned her off to the system. No, I forgot, it was last Spring when Lee's 1/2 Orc died, she DMed my campaign for a few sessions while I recharged my DM mojo.

4. Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven't run but would like to.

B/X Pendragon, more of a campaign really though.

5. What do you do while you wait for players to do things?

Eat, drink, chat with the other players; eventually roll a random encounter.

6. What, if anything, do you eat while you play?

Usually Beef Summer Sausage, a variety of Cheeses, Ritz Crackers and Ranch Dressing or A couple of Different Types of Mustard make the standard "During the Game" snack tray, also Coffee (always), Hot Tea (Black, Green, or some types of Herbal- upon request), Hot Cocoa (upon request), usually some type of soda, always with a couple of diet options for soda. Sometimes the snack tray will include vegetables or other cold meats, this week's game will have Smoked Herring, for example. Since my game is every other week, I have the opportunity to stock up on snack foods when I find them on sale for a good price, so various Potato Chips and flavors of Doritos make their way here pretty frequently too. Since we always break for dinner, we almost always have some kind of food that is either easy and quick to make, or that we can throw in the oven or on the stove and not have to watch too closely, at recent game sessions we have had Beef Stew and Chili Con Carne; or alternately we order Pizza & Wings or Subs. Players are free to bring whatever other snacks they want to as well, as long as they bring enough to share, so this usually adds some Chips, Cookies and Soda to the mix too.

7. Do you find GMing physically exhausting?

No, but I'm not 16 anymore either. I can't play D&D for 16 hours straight and then take a 5 hour nap before another 16 hour session.

8. What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?

Planning a tactical assault on a well guarded and somewhat fortified urban mansion with a party of low level PCs? I played a 1st level Magic- User. Seriously, I don't get to play much.

9. Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither?

Sometimes they do, sometimes I do. It's a game. Sure I may get a little ticked off when one of the players decides to not take the game as deadly serious as I am, at the moment, but aren't we all doing this to have fun and blow off a little of our real life stress and hang out with our friends, and, in my case, my family too? Sometimes this game just takes a turn for the absurd, and there is nothing you can do to turn it around. When it's one player, it CAN get contagious, when it's the DM it WILL get contagious. The less said about the gay Orc discotheque, the better or the naked no-thumbed Orcs. Why do these things keep happening to Orcs?

10. What do you do with goblins?

After what happened to the Orcs, do you really want to know? Seriously, they're mostly evil cannon fodder.

11. What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?

The floor plan of a Korean bath house.

12. What's the funniest table moment you can remember right now?

Funny things happen all the time at my game. We have a pretty fun loving group of players, but nothing springs to mind specifically.

13. What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?

Moldvay Basic Book, reading it cover to cover for a blog post.

14. Who's your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?

Tough choice here, but I am going to go with Dave Trampier.

15. Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?

I would have to say no. Occasionally a little creeped out, but really scared, no; again, it's just a game.

16. What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn't write? (If ever)

Tough to say, I almost always heavily rewrite adventure modules anyway, because if I don't I am afraid I'll forget something important because I didn't write it, and the potential problem of players having read the adventure before hand. The only adventure I can run with a minimum of preparation AND be sure I am not forgetting anything is B2.

17. What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?

That would depend on the game now wouldn't it? An ideal set up for a WW II board game is going to be different than the ideal set up for a Star Trek RPG, but for the sake of argument I'll assume you meant ideal for D&D. Ideal for D&D would need to have some medieval ambiance in the room, a table large enough to seat 9 people at least, with room for books, snacks, an optional battle mat and minis. Good lighting. Access to a nearby rest room and kitchen facility, should probably be the DM's residence. Side table for the DM. Bookshelves are a plus, so reference books are in the same room. A good sound system would be nice too. Since we're going for ideal, I'd have a computer at the DM station too. The DM's chair would be more like a throne, so he sat higher up and in a nicer chair, projecting his more powerful status to the players. Actually with some redecoration, my old DM Marty's dining room where we used to play in his 2nd edition campaign comes pretty close, the only issues are that I am the usual DM now, his reference books were in an upstairs library room and it was a little on the small side.

18. If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?

Star Fleet Battles and Munchkin, they have got to be sitting at opposite ends of the spectrum.

19. If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?

Higher education, my 1st edition AD&D DMG, Conan the Barbarian, King Arthur.

20. As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?

People who follow the Wheaton Rule. Other than that be clean, no stereotypical gamers here; be on time and attentive to the game, it's respectful to the rest of the gamers here. It helps if we're already friends and would hang out with each other even if there wasn't a D&D game going on, because sometimes shit happens and we don't get to play D&D when we're supposed to and that can get awkward when there is a stranger that I only really know from D&D in my house.

21. What's a real life experience you've translated into game terms?

Armored Combat with Sword & Shield (and other weapons) both in singles tournaments and in mêlée.

22. Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn't?

AD&D 2nd edition Oriental Adventures. I think it would have cleaned up a lot of the problems of the 1st edition version and probably would not have abandoned the Kara-Tur setting like 3e did.

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?

I have in the past talked with people about RPGs that didn't play, but not with any regularity. Usually they either decide to give RPGs a shot themselves or we don't really talk about them after a while.

Garnia Reboot.

Rebooting movie franchises and beloved television franchises seems to be all the rage these days, from J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" to Ron Moore's "Battlestar Galactica", that caused waves of nerd rage and/or nerdgasms, to a bunch of stuff like the "Dukes of Hazzard" or "Miami Vice" that most of us nerds could not care less about. Hollywood has been doing it for decades now and I figure maybe it's time I give my old workhorse world of Garnia a reboot to see how a fresh perspective and some new ideas in design might make my Celtic fantasy world work a little better now that I am older and less of a slave to the AD&D rule books.

Back when I was a kid; I mean literally a child, Garnia started as a project when I was in 7th grade, so I would have been twelve years old; I felt like I needed to jam into it everything "officially" available to me. Thankfully, at the time, the only published AD&D books were the MM, PH & DMG, although I did go on to make extensive use of other AD&D books as they were published, I felt less pressure to always find room for,say, the Nilbog or the Flumph. I will now apologize to my British readers for slighting their countrymen's contributions to the AD&D monster canon.

What got me thinking about this, aside from my work on putting together the campaign pages for my OA game "Against the Black Temple" on Obsidian Portal and seeing my still unfinished "Garnia" campaign pages, was the fact that I have been talking to Darryl again lately, and sure as winter is coming, we will eventually talk about Garnia. Why? Because, while Garnia may have been my brain child, he and I have been collaborating on it for so long now that it is at least partially his. He drew the original maps. He spent countless hours of his youth writing histories for the world. None of it is in use anymore, but he still was always right there in the planning stages. I know for a fact he's run entire campaigns there without any of my input at all when we lived thousands of miles apart.

We even have our favorite nations in the world, I favor Garnia, it was originally named after an old D&D character of mine "Garn the Great", I later retconned that to be an altered form of Gwarynica Riga- in the pseudo-Celtic language I kind of created using bits of Gaulish and Welsh and Gaelic and Breton it means pretty much "Kingdom of the people of Gwaryn", which was later shortened to simply "Garnia"; allowing me to keep the same name I'd always used for the campaign and the kingdom, but giving it a more historico-linguistic rationalization. Historically, in the campaign world, they are founded when the Humans sweep in off the northern steppes and destroy the (already besieged) ancient Elven empire in a decades long war of extermination. I picture their material culture starting off like the ancient Celts and building pretty much like western Europe over time, only with the Celtic artistic flavor throughout. Their kingdom has been conquered several times by their steppe dwelling cousins over the centuries, which generally results in nothing more than a change of dynasty as the new lords settle in to the comforts of civilization. I modeled their history on that of China.

Darryl favors Frodia. Frodia was a nation of sorcerers that I always likened to Howard's Stygia with it's Sorcerous Priests and I wanted to have a nation that would be a clear foil to the noble warriors of Garnia when I set up the world initially, as a kid. Plus, Magocracy was a government type in the DMG and it sounded cool. According to the earliest histories that I wrote (and still have!), Frodia is a child kingdom of Garnia dating to the earliest times after the Humans conquered the old Elven kingdom. A cult sprung up worshiping Frodal*, a name that is going to have to go in any reboot, who was a god of magic; and they were outlawed and driven from the kingdom of Garnia into the wilderness; or, alternately, these priest-kings discovered secrets of ancient elven magic and rebelled against the weak central authority of the Garnian high-king, taking the south-western third of the kingdom with them, which is actually more likely. Frodia also is more urban, the major elven cities having been less destroyed by the decades long conquest by the time it reached there. They have a major river as a natural defensive border between them, think of it like the Rhine.

That actually is where he and I had one of our greatest creative differences. He saw Frodia as this Magic-User ruled utopia with magic taking the place of technology, kind of a magi-tech, almost steam punk before that was a thing, thing going on there. He also saw them as clearly the greatest superpower in the world. I was going for a more "pulp-fantasy" Conan the Barbarian, so when magic does happen it will be awesome kind of a vibe, even back then, and I still kind of do that now. I like magic to be either of the rare and wonderful or scary and possibly sanity destroying varieties. Perhaps D&D/AD&D wasn't the best vehicle to convey my vision of a "perfect" RPG world, but it's what I had, and what I have.

Anyway, enough about two countries in a fantasy world most of you don't care about, although, if I ever do actually publish anything through the Hydra collective, my Garnia campaign will probably be it. My wife Mona and my daughter Ashli were sitting in the living room sick the other day, so I had a captive audience, which they hate, and I said to them "I think for my next (D&D) game I am going to get rid of all the half breeds, they really don't make much sense when you think about it. No Half-Orcs, Half-Elves, Half-Ogres, or Halflings!", I threw that last one in there just to see if they were paying attention, and if they weren't before, that sure got it. You'd think I'd kicked a hornet's nest from the reaction it got, are Halflings really such sacred cows in the D&D/RPG universe? My adult take on them is that EGG either added them to OD&D because he snagged everything he could for content from every source he could find, fantasy, science fiction, mythology, even the Bible(!); or, more cynically, he deliberately contrived to add Hobbits to OD&D to broaden it's appeal because Tolkien's work was so popular in the US at the time; either way, I don't think the loss of one PC race is going to ruin the game world and I have always had trouble rationalizing a reason for their existence in my Garnia campaign world. Plus, I didn't see anyone coming to the defense of the poor bloody Gnomes when they got the axe back in the 90's. I know they are technically not half breeds, like the other races I am considering taking out, but is it really so bad to be limited to playing Humans, Elves & Dwarves?

Elves and Dwarves are getting a racial make-over too, partially due to an offhand comment by my wife, who said "Why let people play Elves at all?", in regard to the setting being the ruins of an ancient Elven empire; that gave me a kick-ass idea, all player character Elves are what I am calling "Fallen Elves" the degenerate survivors of their long ago fallen race, no longer immortal, merely long-lived; they have lost the culture, technological secrets and magic of their forebears. They are the ones that fled to the wilderness, turned coat or submitted to slavery, the descendants of the few survivors of a near total genocide of their species. This allows for the seriously strong mystical, hidden Elven island kingdom to still exist and have really powerful Elves that aren't like the PCs, that shun the PC Elves as a lesser version of themselves.

Dwarven PCs get a similar treatment, but to a much lesser extent, all Dwarven PCs start as "Broken Dwarves", Dwarves from clans or kingdoms that have lost their territory to humanoid encroachment and moved into Human lands as refugees. The Garnian high-kings have always had a history of keeping a Dwarven warband, as do some other ranking nobles. Dwarves are essentially mountain dwelling craftsmen, traders and warriors; to my mind that makes them pretty much like short Vikings culturally, and in AD&D they can't be anything but Fighters and Thieves (or Assassins, but that's another story). So, my point here is, essentially, that if you play a Dwarf in my Garnia campaign, then your character is pretty much a refugee. Maybe a refugee of generations long status, but a refugee all the same.

Humans are supposed to be the backbone of any party in AD&D, and the culture of my campaign is set up for it to be a very humanocentric world, the reboot is going to make it even moreso, only more like ancient/medieval Europe too, where the territory between settled areas is dangerous howling wilderness and ancient evils lurk waiting to trap and devour the unwary. The cool thing about a reboot is I don't have to toss out thirty years of development entirely and start again from scratch, that's probably why Hollywood likes them, I can take the good bits and tweak them better, I can keep the best bits the same and I can toss the crap bits entirely.

The hard part is deciding what constitutes crap. Over the last 30 years Garnia has accreted to it pretty much every smaller, lesser campaign idea I have ever had and some of them I still love. Old fantasy Roman empire campaign where the Romans conquered an Egypt that was run by Goblins? It's on the other side of the huge and largely impassable mountain chain where the Dwarven kingdoms are, on the old Roman campaign map, they were called "Regni Homoi Cortii" or something like that, I don't actually speak Latin, so I had to look it up at the time, I really just read Latin, and then only some. Damned American educational system. But it was like I'd planned for those two maps to fit together all along.

How about those independent "Mistlander" Clans? Essentially Scottish Highlanders living in a mountainous area north east of the kingdom of Garnia, the area is always foggy and the sulfurous fog eats ferrous metals over the course of days. Between the mists and the hostile terrain, no one has ever been able to conquer them. Do we like the idea of a Chinese empire on the same map as a Celtic one? How about the Japanese islands (Tenchuko, I forget what it means) just off map? Most of the lands are Celtic, the first non-Celts were the Wotanic Knights, who were actually one of the few (relatively) unchanged names from the original Garnia map, back in the day when all of the names were vaguely Germanic, rather than Celtic. Now the county's called Wodanslund, and the people bear a striking resemblance to the Rohirrim that I never noticed until I actually set a campaign there a couple of years ago. I have an origin myth for them even. What about the Viking island kingdoms? The Byzantines? The Aztecs? The Mongols (actually a mixed Turko-Mongolian horde) that I placed in an unused spot on the map and used as a tribute to the Steppe Warriors? The Necromancer's lands are Arabic in name and culture, just south of the civil war torn Celtic kingdom of Tir nan Kaur, and the Necromancer once, almost, conquered the entire world. I have an Orc kingdom on land torn from Garnia itself, should I keep it or kill it? Do I have too many races and cultures?

The key thing to remember is that the world where Garnia is was the Elven home world and is at the heart of a multi-planar war between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Humankind was the wild card introduced by the forces of evil to unbalance things, Humans are inherently neither good nor evil, other races are. Since this is a good plane, the goodness emanating influences the naturally unaligned Humans towards good, but it isn't a given. Anyway, Humans are an import, brought through planar gates, Stargate style, although long before that movie/TV series, and I picked the Ancient Celts as the people to go, the had a lot going for them. War chariots, head-hunting, woad, iron weapons, warlike disposition and a tendency to migrate entire tribes all at once seemingly on a whim. Oh, and Druids and Bards. Plus a largely mutually antagonistic relationship with the Roman empire over time. Those things combined to make them ideal choices for my peoples of choice for the journey to another world, plus my own feeling that they peaked too soon here on Earth, so maybe I could give them another chance elsewhere, and almost all of my own ancestors are western Europeans, some of them are Scottish Highlanders, so there is a little narcissism there too.

There's a little more to the whole story than just that, and originally I had it being the Germanic hordes that took down the Roman empire instead of the Celtic hordes that were taken down by the Romans, but I wanted to move it back into the mists of time some and give me a little wiggle room, plus it seemed like everyone and their brother was doing everything in a Germanic barbarian or Viking theme back then, so I wanted to be different, even if it meant I couldn't pronounce half of the names I was using properly. Incidentally, also a problem for people using Viking or Germanic barbarian stuff, just saying; it remains so to this day for the vast majority.

*Frodal- God of Magic is one of the pantheon of deities I designed using EGG's Greyhawk and the DDG as a guide, they are horrible. Garn was another, but he was just a deified player character of mine, that I created the entire world as a vanity project for, one of the other gods was "Ignas the Bright" Who, I believe was a God of Law. His people got the far away "Bright Empire", a Lawful Neutral aligned empire, that was sometimes at war on the sea and over some rough terrain and at long distance, on land, with Garnia, they are now known as "The Empire of Ming Liang**". The rest of my original pantheon? I have them in a binder here somewhere, but they are painful to see. They were replaced, largely, by the Celtic pantheon by the 1990's, although some parts of the world have other gods and the Demi-Humans and Humanoids have always had their own too. I have never been able to come up with a good rational Celticization of Frodia, I have been able to do that for other countries on the map, the old Torakor, invented when I was 12, got to be renamed "Tir nan Kaur", I forget what it means, and it's probably in a mixture of languages, "Tir Nan" means "Land of" in Gaelic I know.

**Yes, it's poor form to footnote a footnote, but I felt it best to mention that I redesigned that area of the world specifically so I could play some Oriental Adventures without ever having to leave my Garnia campaign world, and then never did. Every single time I play OA, I end up playing in Kara-Tur.

Sunday Extras-

Since I didn't have a game on Saturday due to Ashli's Army Reserve drill, here's some of the stuff that I either forgot about, didn't have time for, or just plain got skipped on their proper day.

K should have had Klingons. Star Trek's best bad boy race from the Original Series that became their most honorable warrior ally during the Next Generation era. Borrowing elements from earth cultures that I have a distinct interest in to start with, namely the Vikings, Mongols and Samurai; it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that they were going to be among my favorites once they got fleshed out in the Next Generation era. What may come as a surprise to my blog readers though is just how big a Klingon fan I actually am. I am a not just a member of the Klingon Assault Group, the worlds largest costumed Klingon fan organization, but I am also a reasonably high ranking member. I command the vessel IKV Fist of Kahless (The Oswego, NY chapter of the club) and I am the Dark Vengeance Quadrant Commander*; as I write this it occurs to me that there are only two people in the club in the chain of command above me, my Fleet Admiral and the Thought Admiral (Supreme Commander of KAG). We dress like Klingons fairly regularly, love Star Trek and do charitable works.

M should have included Mandark the Barbarian. Mandark is probably the longest running player character I ever had. I created him the first day I played in Tim McD's campaign and he was my PC there until Tim went away into the army. That was from teh time I was in 5th grade until I was a junior in high school. He had a pretty full life, starting out as a rootless barbarian from the Soderfjord Jarldoms on a quest for riches and glory, he eventually laid roots in his adopted home town of Specularum, buying a controlling interest in a ship yard and marrying a woman who was as big a pirate as himself. He had friends there, mostly shady adventurer types, but also a Paladin. I like to think that he eventually just settled into a comfortable retirement, living off of his adventuring booty and the proceeds from his interest in the shipyard; and told stories about his adventures to his grand kids.

K should have had Keep on the Borderlands. Module B2: Keep on the Borderlands is my go to adventure for teaching newbies how to play. I cut my teeth DMing there myself. My first copy came with my Holmes edition boxed set, and I still have it; it's the only survivor of that boxed set. I have run this adventure for so many different groups of players that I am getting to the point where I don't actually need to have the module text, just the map. Almost every party takes the evil Cleric on their expedition and is SHOCKED when he betrays them. Almost every party finds the lizard men's lair before they find Caves of Chaos. Rarely does any party encounter the hermit. In my experience when the party does find the caves they either go directly to the Goblin cave on the left or the first Orc cave up the hill on the right. Players that started playing D&D with later editions of the game tend to do two things; first they try and clear out the entirety of the Caves of Chaos in one go, which of course leads to their untimely deaths even when the module has been converted to whatever later edition they want to play; and second, and this applies mostly to the 3e crowd, they get kind of pissed when they encounter the really tough stuff, as though avoiding an encounter or negotiating or fleeing are not options.

K also should have had Kara-Tur and, particularly, it's nation of Kozakura where the vast majority of my Oriental Adventures games have taken place over the years. I have run two pretty epic hex-crawls using just the maps from OA1: Swords of the Daimyo over the years, even before I had ever heard of the term hex-crawl. I love Oriental Adventures, I am pretty sure that regular readers have picked up on that by now, this love for OA was pretty much due to the excellent quality of the Oriental Adventures book and the first module OA1. I guess it didn't hurt that Kara-Tur was originally designed to be part of the world of Greyhawk, to which I have a strong sentimental attachment due to my near deification of EGG; but the early Gray Box Forgotten Realms didn't suck either, so when Kara-Tur got officially made the "Eastern Realms" I wasn't too terribly disappointed either. The Kara-Tur boxed set is also the sole surviving originally purchased boxed set I still have, so that makes it kind of special too. My wife has had to repair the box like a dozen times though.

Kiku the Cat Girl got missed on K day because I really couldn't figure out how to do her justice. She was a cat Hengeyokai Shukenja played by my wife Mona. She was kind of crazy, in that I guess she was just really cat-like, and spoke in a kind of dreamy prophetic way that really creeped out Mark K. who was playing the party Samurai Akihito**. She was also renowned for her hatred of Kappas.


Pictured- A sketch Mona did of Kiku immediately following a battle against a Kappa. The writing at the bottom I would guess is xp maybe?

While we're on Oriental Adventures and K we should mention the Katana. I am not a Katana fanboy that believes that it is a magical work of sword-making art that far surpasses anything ever made by anyone else in the history of ever, but it is a damned good sword. The Katana is elegantly designed to it's function and it's environment, when considered under that light it is practically unsurpassed. I own one and I am studying it's use. It is the most expensive sword I own by quite a bit and I have a small collection of pricey swords and a slightly bigger collection of decorative wall-hangers.


Pictured- A Samurai girl with a Katana drawn by my daughter Ember when she was maybe ten years old? I found both this and the Kiku sketch tucked into the equipment section of my 1st edition OA book the other day.


I guess to finish off the skipped on their letter's day Oriental Adventures theme I should mention the Daikyu. The Daikyu or Great-Bow is a Japanese composite longbow designed to be fired from horseback. I mention this because the samurai class is associated strongly with their sword, but their function on the battlefield, originally, was as horse archers; and that role was never completely lost to them until the suppression of the samurai during the Meiji restoration in the 19th century, which overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate.

M maybe should have had Magic: the Gathering. I cannot express in words my loathing for this game when I became aware of it, which was not immediately as it hit the scene, but only after it had saturated the gaming world. I first hated it because, despite what everyone kept telling me, it was drawing players away from D&D. I had players, particularly the younger ones bringing decks to my D&D games. It was like D&D for the ADHD generation. Only after I tried a different collectible card game did I realize the full horror of what had been wrought; players that invested the most money won the game. After that I hated everything labeled as collectible, including the WotC minis- they were just so cheap to buy that I couldn't resist, it was the Star Wars ones that drew me in, but I got into the D&D ones too, pretty big right before the end.

H really should have included Highlander and I don't know how I failed to mention it. Highlander was one of the big three go to fantasy movies for me and my friends, along with Conan the Barbarian and Excalibur. Highlander is the first movie I owned on DVD.

While we're on movies I guess honorable mentions in fantasy film should go to Beastmaster, Hawk the Slayer and Krull; they also got skipped but weren't as important in my personal RPG development. There was also a TV version of Ivanhoe in the 1980's that I thought was pretty cool at the time and have never seen since, but it's not really fantasy, more of a romanticized historical fiction.

For N I wanted to mention Nobles and Nobility. I spent a good potion of my young adult life studying the history of the European middle ages and then, just for a contrasting view of feudalism, feudal Japan. Every civilization on earth after they reach a certain level of development it seems, decides that some members of their society are just born better; aristocracy forms. I find it kind of interesting that we modern humans, who, according to my blogger statistics, if you are reading this probably live in a democratic society (and most likely the United States of America), almost entirely play our RPGs based on a feudal society with a system of nobility that we have outgrown and flatly rejected in reality. Perhaps this is some kind of buyers remorse and we all really would deep down rather have someone born to rule over us? Or maybe it's because our society is still struggling to come to grips with the rejection of a stratified hierarchy based on birth that is deeply rooted in our culture. The caste system is NOT unique to India, pretty much all European cultures have similar stratigraphy in their societies, from the ancient versions up through the 20th century in some cases. Look how much we seem to care about the impending royal wedding in Britain. British royals who the hell are they? The world's most successful scam-artist welfare family is what they are. They didn't even pay taxes until Queen Elizabeth II decided to voluntarily. There are all kinds of protocols and security and stuff when you have them around and all they are are members of the lucky sperm club. I categorically reject the notion that anyone on earth is better than me based on their blood line, but maybe that's just because I am an American. Or maybe it's because I have better ancestors than they do ;)

*Quadrants are how KAG breaks down their fleets into geographic areas, the Dark Vengeance Quadrant is part of the Dark Moon Fleet. The Dark Moon Fleet covers the eastern seaboard of the US. The DVQ is NY, NJ, PA, WV and DE.

**There were actually two Akihitos. The first one was a commoner Bushi masquerading as a Samurai. Random events in the campaign kept foreshadowing his death, and unsurprisingly, those prophecies came true. The second Akihito was a true noble-born Samurai, he actually had an imperial bloodline. Akihito II's major claim to fame was in actually talking an Oni into fighting an Iaijutsu duel with him. He then one-shotted the Oni with a critical hit combined with his Iaijutsu bonus.

On Human Culture and a bit more

My D&D campaigns and the real world cultures that exist within them are perhaps an unconscious homage to D&D's “The Known World” campaign setting that was introduced in the Expert set I got pretty much as soon as it came out. The Known World (later AD&D-ized as Mystara) was the first world for D&D I ever saw and even as a kid I could tell that Ostland, Vestland and the Soderfjord Jarldoms were Norse lands, that Ylaruam was Arab and Ethengar was Mongol. Sure the Five Shires were a Tolkien rip-off and the other racial homelands were just kind of tacked into place. I also didn't get the other historical human cultures at the time, somehow even missing the fact that Thyatis was just Rome reskinned for this world.

I am not really sure how it happened that my Kingdom of Garnia campaign world turned out so much like the Known World. When I started writing stuff up for it I was consciously aping the World of Greyhawk in format, because it was AD&D and I had moved on from B/X. I guess it started when I gave my world an origin mythology. I wanted to have a world where the people made sense, logic and reason were constantly being thrown at me from all the campaign design articles I was absorbing from the Dragon. So I got a real world culture, the Gaels who are near and dear to me only because my family is of Scottish Highlander origin, and I made them the centerpiece culture for the setting. The were the “People of Ailill”, the semi-legendary leader that brought them to this world to escape the destruction of their culture on ours. Their Druids could open extra-dimensional portals through the use of planar gates constructed in ages past by the Elves. These portals took numerous forms, but were mostly rings of standing stones. Like Stonehenge.

As I learned more about history, particularly the history of the Gaels, I retconned the setting to make it have more and earlier Celts. Celts fleeing Roman aggression, Celts fleeing encroaching Christianization, Celts fleeing inter-tribal warfare, Celts escaping from German aggression, Celts escaping from cultural assimilation from Asia Minor to the British Isles. This may have been partially resulting from a piece of D&D campaign advice I read, probably in the Dragon, where the author said to use language to give your world verisimilitude; something like “if you have a string of border forts all named Dun Something, your players will eventually figure out that Dun means Fort”. That struck a chord with me, because I knew that Dun was Gaelic for fort, and I really was into the whole Scottish Highlander thing back then. It was maybe the better part of a decade after “Roots” had aired, but Americans were still pretty interested in learning theirs and my Grandfather had taken a real interest in making us aware of our Highland heritage. We were going to the Scottish games every summer, listening to bagpipe music and Scottish folk songs. I even got a kilt, which I wore to school on numerous occasions; for the record chicks dig guys in kilts, guys call it a skirt and try to mock you. I liked the attention from the ladies and the challenge from the guys, fornication and brawling are both lifelong hobbies of mine!

Anyway, my campaigns have included both kilt wearing claymore wielders and plaid-trousered head-hunters; immigrants to Garnia from over a millenia of Celtic movements. Officially, by the way, Garnia is Gwarynica Riga in their language. The dominant language of the campaign area is a hodge-podge of Gaulish, Welsh, Gaelic (Irish, Manx and Scottish) and Breton, roughly in that order. I discovered Katherine Kerr's Deverry novels in the mid-1990's, introduced by my then girlfriend- now wife Mona, and I have used some of her Deverrian language to fill in the blanks in a few spots since her and I were working from the same starting point. I have worked hard to not cross pollinate my world with hers, but some was probably inevitable after I discovered her writing.

The earliest non-Celts to make the journey to Garnia were the heathen Anglo-Saxons. They wound up with their own kingdom at the edge of the mapped world almost by mistake. When I started adding realism to my world in the form of real human cultures I started by making them Germanic. I Germanized the entire world, but I didn't like the result. So I de-Germanized the world and Gaelicized it instead. This happened at a key time. I suck at making maps, and I don't particularly like it. I was in 7th grade and my BFF Darryl wanted to help with the project, since it was pretty much all we talked about at lunch. I tend to get a little single-minded when I am working on something and my enthusiasm for a project can be infectious. I gave Darryl some of my material so he could make some maps for me. The bulk of the map I gave him had been altered, but the Wotanic Knights (think heathen Teutonic Knights) were still there at the bottom of the map. I liked the results of his mapping, so they got to stay. I eventually gave them their own origin even.

The Basques made it into the world next. I liked their shadowy pre-indoeuropean origin, so I had the Elves rescue a bunch from Celtic encroachment and give them a place to stay while they looked for a new world for them. The same treatment they gave the Neanderthals in the canon history of the campaign.

Arabs and Turks made it in later, in the late 80's or early 90's for the sole reason that we had some Arab and Turk looking minis. Previous to that I had exactly one Arabic sounding character in the world and he was a powerful mage (necromancer actually), so he could have gotten there on his own. Al-Khalid was just a name I picked out of a hat, basically. But in my long running Dempster: Phase 2 D&D campaign, Arabs and Turks started making regular appearances because of those minis. Hakim the thief was a party henchman and became a huge catalyst for adventure in his own right when he betrayed the party and made off with a flawless fist-sized magic diamond. Ivar , the party's PC thief and Hakim's former boss, tracked him back to his own homeland and attempted to get his revenge. That was easier said than done and gave us an entire campaign arc set in my pseudo-Arabia and eventually led to Ivar taking on Abdul the fighter as a regular Henchman. Turkish mercenaries were a small but significant part of my last AD&D2 campaign in Garnia circa 1999-2001. That campaign had a lot of stops and starts and player changes and ran concurrently with my Mighty Celts campaign that ended with the first colonization by Celts into Garnia.

In the mid-1990's I ran an AD&D2 campaign set in a fantasy Roman empire, so that eventually became a part of the world too. I placed it on the west end of the large continental mass that included Garnia, Frodia and the rest, far from the old campaign areas in what is an approximation of the Mediterranean world. That area also included an old fallen Egyptian empire, where the ancient Egyptians had been completely overrun by Goblins over the course of centuries. The Goblins there had almost completely adopted Egyptian culture and religion and language, giving us a super-civilized Goblin empire, complete with a Goblin Pharoah. Of course the Romans conquered the Goblin Egypt, and non-human slaves were pretty common in that setting. That game didn't run long, but it was interesting.

It was in this era that I started making my own maps. I used the map-maker for Civilization 2 and added the new stuff right on to the western edge of the old maps. I placed the Civilizations on the map and watched how these areas actually interacted with each other in game. It was an experiment that I found quite helpful for rewriting great chunks of the canon timeline. It also influenced me to add a few more cultures into the mix.

The early part of the 2000's, right after the release of 3e was an interesting time for my campaign world. I ran an entirely new viking setting when we started playing 3rd edition, that setting soon became part of Garnia too, off in the southern sea. Now the Vikings were here too. Around 2005 I decided that it would be cool to add in some of the civilizations from my Civilization 2 map, this coincided with me finding out that one of my country's names translated into Chinese was Ming Liang, right where I had placed China on my Civilization 2 world map. Obviously that was a sign. So I added the Zulus too, after realizing that I didn't actually have any black people in my world. The Chinese made me think of an old Oriental Adventures campaign I'd run in 1996-97, so my Japan cognate Tenchuko got plunked down off the main map, but near enough to Ming Liang to make all the stuff that happened there canon for my world too.

After that I got it into my head that, since it was fun to see the cultural interactions of wildly different cultures from across history play out in my campaign world (Civilization series fan here, Hello), I'd add in a few other cultures that have maybe died out or failed to thrive in our world that I would like to see there in Garnia. I sprinkled in the Nubian kingdom, the Mongols (I couldn't leave the inspiration for my beloved Steppe Warriors gaming guild out), the Kung San, Vietnamese Montagnards, the Aztecs and a few others; then I placed them near groups that they were culturally dissimilar to and mixed things up.

The only downside of this cultural/historical experiment is that I then don't get to use these cultures as touchstones for my demihuman and humanoid cultures like so many others can and do. I have worked hard at making my Elves have a unique and somewhat alien culture, but I still need to de-nordic my Dwarves. That would probably be more of a priority if anyone wanted to play a Dwarf. Gnomes fall into the category of their cousins the Dwarves, but less so. Halflings I have a really hard time not seeing as Hobbits. I work at it by looking at the cool illustrations of Halflings from early D&D stuff like module A1 or the old illustration from the Expert Book, tiny bad-asses rather than Tolkien-esque Hobbits.

The Orcs get a slightly different treatment from me. I always picture them as somewhat like Next Generation style Klingons. The Orcs even got their own Garnia adjacent kingom. Hobgoblins get to be somewhat Asian inspired, owing to the illustration in the Monster Manual. Goblins and Bugbears are something like less evolved or devolved Hobgoblins, like the forces of evil only got the mix right with the Hobgoblins. The Bugbears are their less evolved brutish cousins and the Goblins are their degenerate spawn. Trolls are just downright alien, they might as well be the aliens from the Aliens movies for all that we can fathom their culture or their motives. Giants are a tough one for me because I always want to make them like the Fomor and instead wind up with the Jotnar, score one for our Germanic Anglo-Saxon culture over my desire to make a more Celtic world, eh? Dragons are usually pretty alien too, reptilian but owing a lot to Beowulf or Fafnir, I know Germanizing again.

Kobolds get to be little dog-men just like it said in B2, Gnolls are hyena-men; no need to add a lot of culture there. Lizardmen are tribal reptiles, I always just play them as generic primitive tribesmen and have never had a problem. Pretty much every other monster is either rare enough that building them a culture would be a complete waste of my time or hasn't appeared in my campaign (yet). I like the idea of rare or unique monsters, probably as a result of my years of Conan comics, novels and short stories. REH and Marvel comics probably had more to do with how I made my world than Tolkien ever did, despite the Tolkienisms of pretty much every D&D world ever made. Like the great EGG, I have vastly preferred a humanocentric world, which is why my map looks more like Hyboria than Middle-Earth.

Riches and Glory!

You’re no hero.
You’re a reaver, a cutpurse, a heathen-slayer, a tight-lipped warlock guarding long-dead secrets. You seek gold and glory, winning it with sword and spell, caked in the blood and filth of the weak, the dark, the demons, and the vanquished. There are treasures to be won deep underneath, and you shall have them.
Return to the glory days of fantasy with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Adventure as 1974 intended you to, with modern rules grounded in the origins of sword & sorcery. Fast play, cryptic secrets, and a mysterious past await you: turn the page…

This is the opening text of the Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG webpage, and it got me thinking. My buddy Lance used to deride these “new” players (particularly after the advent of Vampire: the Masquerade; not necessarily causal, just saying) with their need for character motivation. He'd say, often, “the only motivation we needed was riches and glory” or “we quest for riches and glory”. Riches and glory were the only motivation we needed, we didn't need an angst filled back story for our character. We were there to play and our ultimate motivation was to be the biggest, richest bad-asses in the campaign world. Even Lance's paladin Bordan had a wealthy bad-ass fixation, which is hard to do given the wealth restrictions on paladins, but he was very legalistic about them and got certain dispensations from the DM (Tim) on occasion (usually in connection with the campaign arc he had surrounding the quest for the 10 holy swords).

I read somewhere recently, probably on an OSR blog, that the art changed between editions and became more heroic, where in early edition stuff the adventurers were depicted more like grubby mercenaries. I guess I can see the change now in retrospect. Newer editions and the vast amount of additional available material for them kind of encouraged a straight-up heroic style of play and I kind of went along for the ride on that because I like heroes myself. But I kind of miss the morally ambivalent Conan the barbarian inspired hero. Conan wanted to be rich and powerful so he did what he could to get there and ended up king of Aquilonia. But he started out as a thief and a mercenary. He had a moral code that would probably put him on the good side of the alignment chart. He had interest that included wasting lots of his (often ill-gotten) riches on wine and women.

That's the character, more or less, that pretty much everyone I played with back in the day used to play.