Some Productivity Today

My wife and I, OK, mostly her, have been more or less renovating our kitchen, that weeks long activity is nearing completion. Out of that I got a new set of shelves in my office area, which is pretty cool because I always need more shelf space. My wife may have other plans for these shelves, but I am claiming them in the name of the empire!

I also hashed out, with my chief co-conspirator Darryl, a bunch of little things that have been bugging me about my Garnia campaign world this morning; so there's a sense of achievement for you right there! The whole thing ends up changing from a more generically Celtic flavored medieval fantasy world to a really Iron Age/ Dark Ages Celts with Magic added kind of a thing; meaning that a lot of the work that I thought was finished has to be rewritten, but I think it makes for a more flavorful world.

Oh, and it's not just Celts, there are other Human cultures represented there too. Spread across one mega-continent, one small continent/very large island, and several island chains we have various ethnic groups that have been brought here to the Realm of the Sidhe for whatever reasons whichever court of Sidhe saw fit to bring their particular group over. I talk about it more on my other blog, and there's another multi-planar war aspect to the whole back story, but you get the gist of it from this.

I also got these miniatures in the mail today. I was surprised because the seller said he was going to be out of town and not shipping anything until the 7th. I must have made it in just under the wire before he left.

I had bid on these before I got the first Celtos miniature that I won. I might consider more monster types like the Fomorian, but the Humans are a wee bit too fantasy for my tastes. Which I guess begs the question, where do you go for Wizard and Priest types when you are using mostly historical ranges of miniatures? Monsters I can grab from anywhere, although I have my preferred companies. But if I have a player that wants to be a Female Cleric in the setting, pretty much any part of the setting? Finding any females in armor is difficult, but not impossible. Finding one with the limited Cleric weapon set, much tougher*. Female Wizards? They're pretty tough to find too, assuming I want the females in the party to match the males in how "fantasy" they look.

*Although I tend not to be a stickler for enforcement, I'd rather do damage by class than by weapon type. For the sake of argument, assume I am strictly enforcing D&D weapon bans.

Today's Mail Post Equinox Edition

I love me some Ebay! Once again all photos are from Ebay, because the camera on my wife's cell phone sucks.

This guy I used to have and somehow lost, he was my Jagatai mini I kept next to my monitor for inspiration.

I never had this Basic book, despite it being the one that "worked" with the Expert book.

The expert book could have been in better shape, and I'll probably keep looking for a better one, but the price was good. My original copy was a casualty of me going to college and my mom deciding to "clean my room"*.



This is one of the Gazetteer series I didn't have back in the day, surprising since I dig Mongols so much. Plus I thought it might give me inspiration for some Steppe Warrior adventures!

Happy spring time everyone!

*As near as I can tell, that's a euphemism for throw away everything you think you can possibly get away with without it being missed.

And in today's mail...

....4 old school minis of indeterminate manufacture from 2 different sellers on Ebay

Plus some Hellhounds of unknown manufacture, they appear to be 25mm scale but are but made of plastic.

And a copy of Bruce Galloway's Fantasy Wargaming, also from Ebay.

Interesting to me...

I find it interesting that, despite having no interruptions today and nothing else to do, I still have had a hard time sitting down and typing out today's thoughts. I have been musing on the whole "We explore dungeons not characters" thing for a while now, mulling it over along with a couple of related topics; namely player character social class/background and character generation. I tie all of these together because it reflects the depth we give our characters at start. I have also been thinking about the whole "Commercialization of the OSR" and "OSR is dead" stuff, but not as much. Additionally, I have had a few further thoughts on D&D campaign ideas and the "default" D&D setting. My thoughts are a bit scattered today as I keep bouncing around from topic to topic like I am trying to work on a unified OSR theory, which I am not, but I finally convinced myself to sit down and start typing so maybe that'll help crystallize what I am thinking into something useful.

To start with the "Dungeons not characters" thing, I guess I should first confess that I have fallen in line with pretty much every major trend in gaming since I started. Randomness and simplicity were the order of the day in the beginning and I was all about it. The first thing I ever DMed was B2 Keep on the Borderlands. I DMed it for my dad and a party of NPCs I created to accompany him. His character was a Halfling fighter named Mee the magnificent (who eventually had a son named Mee II). We didn't care that the caves were a few hundred yards from the keep and just off the road*. It also never occurred to any party I have ever sent through that module that perhaps they should tell the authorities at the keep, who have an ARMY at their disposal, where the hidden enemy fortress known as the Caves of Chaos were. Maybe they just wanted all the riches and glory for themselves.

Eventually, as DMs, we were told we needed to make our worlds (and adventures) more believable, more realistic. I was reading this stuff in the Dragon pretty early on in my gaming experience and it sunk in hard. That is what really killed the megadungeon for me. I wound up with lots of small ruins scattered across my campaign world's landscape. Eventually, the "Underdark" concept arrived and I started throwing in vast subterranean adventure areas again, but they were never the same as the old megadungeon.

I don't think the style of play had changed drastically over the years until after 2nd edition hit the streets. My style of DMing did pretty drastically change after 2nd edition arrived as a result of my one and only pilgrimage to Mecca (Gen Con '90). I played in the AD&D Open and the charity events there that year and it completely changed the style of my DMing for years afterwords. I know everyone hates the 2nd edition style of railroad module, and I do too. The abuses of module design, particularly by the end of the 2nd edition era, were substantial and irredeemable. That said, the "encounter flow chart" plus keyed locations style of play catapulted me from "He runs a pretty good game" to "He is an AWESOME DM!" status locally, so I may be a little biased towards having a little railroad-eyness in my games when I have a plan. When I don't have a plan, which is about 99% of the time, I still roll some dice and fly by the seat of my pants; but I have written some pretty damned good adventures that used the encounter flow chart style.

I think it's a matter of contingency planning that makes most people hate the "railroad". A well written "railroad" adventure CAN go off the rails with a decent DM that can wing it. I think the 2nd edition modules that everyone hates so much were just written so that a crappy DM could still get you to the end of the story and the story was like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book with only two possible endings. Success- Most of the time, whether you did it by yourself or needed Elminster/Drizzt/Raistlin/Bigby to save you OR Failure- Where regardless of how much heavy artillery the DM had to throw in to help you and whatever number of shock troops came to the party's rescue they still managed to screw it up bad enough that no rock star NPC could pull their fat out of the fryer.

I also fell in with other schools of game mastering thought, either through actual play or through reading about them or talking with people who had played. I got "in media res" from West End's D6 Star Wars. I got "Story Telling" from White Wolf's Vampire the Masquerade**. I got practically religious encounter balancing mechanics from D&D 3e***.

Now, how does all of this related to the dungeons not characters question? I guess it's that at each point along the way we have been told to invest more into our starting characters, to give ourselves more role playing potential right out of the gate. When I started playing D&D you rolled 3d6 in order and played what you got, with few exceptions. You picked a class and a name then bought some equipment off a pretty short list of stuff. Maybe you had a character concept, but probably not. You weren't real attached to your character at this point and would not start developing any real attachment until you had played him a few times. Even then it would be more like the attachment you had for the 82nd airborne counter in your D-Day board game after they took out the 2nd SS panzer counter against all odds**** than it was like it is today.

By the time of late AD&D 1st edition things had started to change. Unearthed Arcana had social class and family tables and Oriental Adventures had them on steroids. Now you were much more fully invested into your character than previously. Your randomly determined background turned into a character history in your head, sometimes even on paper. At some point in here it became suggested that we give players extra rewards for fleshing out their starting characters, either as extra starting money or an experience point boost or even a starting magic item. By the time we were playing 2nd edition around here it had become so standard that Lance was mocking the process, it seemed like everyone was an aspiring actor and needed character motivations for every action they made. Simply adventuring for riches and glory had fallen by the wayside as everyone (except Lance) had angst filled reasons for needing to become an adventurer. I blame the influence of White Wolf pretty much completely for that.

Now, I think the whole character background thing is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does take us away from our roots where we use the player character as a "piece" in the game. At the very least it makes any PC a very important piece in the game. The background, whether it's completely randomized or wholly from the mind of the player, gives us a much bigger investment in whether or not our character survives the adventure. Our character took a lot longer to create once we added in a whole back story. Equipment lists also got longer here, so they even take longer to equip. Much, much longer.

This leads us to a desire to change character generation too. Now nobody wants to play a fighter with a 6 CON, so we invent a new method of rolling our characters to avoid just such a possibility. My standard was to roll 4d6 keeping the best 3, 7 times keeping the best 6*****, arranged as desired. So now you came to the table with a character in mind, you didn't just make due with the random guy you rolled. Sure it was still random, and it made AD&D stat-worthy characters most times, but I often hear people talking over what role they will take on in the party before anyone touches the dice. Mona will be the Cleric, Ash will be the Thief, Lee will be the Fighter, etc. Rarely does anyone play a different type of character based on their stats. Now they might if they want to experiment some. Point buy systems only make this phenomenon stronger.

So now you have lovingly crafted a character and most likely given him some kind of background even if it's not required by the game system. You have spent some time making sure he fits the needs of the party and you have equipped him along with the rest of the party to avoid redundancies. You have probably spent at least an hour on this guy and you have breathed life into him via his personal history. You are invested in whether or not he survives, and the longer he survives the more invested you are. Now you are at a point where you'll get pissed if the DM kills your character, let alone the whole party******.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think there is anything wrong with investing in your character, to a point. The problem comes from not investing in more randomly created, old school style characters; and in changing your character creation rules so that you can come to the table with a concept and see it made completely as you envisioned. I figure that if you came to the table with a Conan style fighter in mind and you rolled a 5 for your Strength score you need to figure out how to roll with that, it is not up to the DM and not up to the game system. Maybe you play as a Thief that is a Conan wannabe, or maybe you just put that character concept back on the shelf for next time, eh? What's wrong with coming to the table with a blank slate and creating a character when you get there?

Now, on to the commercialization of the OSR and whether or not it is dead, as they are related to each other. I think the rumors of it's demise may be a bit premature. For profit goods produced by the OSR can't help but be a good thing I suppose. If they are good, they will sell. If not, then they won't. I don't see why anyone is annoyed about people profiting from their hobby. Gary Gygax profited from his. The production values of some of the OSR stuff are quite good, or so I hear. I haven't bought much from the OSR, just Ruins and Ronin. I keep meaning to buy some other things too, but money is tight here and I have a wife, 3 kids, 2 dogs and 3 cats to feed first. All told, I don't understand what the problem is, despite having read numerous blog posts about it, because it's not like fanzines and free stuff killed D&D the first time around; if the for profit producers of old school stuff screw it up we'll just start another OSR in the future.

Lastly, I have been ruminating on the "default" setting for D&D. The default is a multi-racial setting in an apparently post-apocalyptic world. This kind of makes me wonder why we haven't been playing Gamma World for all these years instead of D&D. Tolkien gave us the concept of our standard good guy races and bad guy races, D&D ran with that. We aren't playing in a heroic age type setting, if I had to place a historical analogue to the default D&D setting I would say that it is like early medieval Europe. A mighty civilization has fallen and we come from petty kingdoms seeking to rebuild it's glory while at the same time looting it's ruins. In some ways their technology was much more advanced (or their magic in a fantasy world), in some ways ours is; particularly with regard to weapons.

My campaign ideas, generally, are based on exploring historical cultures and settings; sometimes I throw in a neighboring culture that didn't really live next to them. Usually I add a liberal dose of fantasy elements, more or less, depending on where I want to go with it. Sometimes that'll be the full on AD&D special with all the races and all the magic, that's where I went with my Garnia setting where several tribes of iron age Celts migrated to a pretty standard fantasy world. Sometimes it'll just be adding a bit of fantasy to the real world's history like I did with my Viking campaign where I added just the fantastic elements that the Vikings themselves believed in. Sometimes I just pick a culture I like and draw them a new map to be on. Sometimes I take a bunch of these different elements and mix and match. I have found though that most players don't have much interest in actually playing in non-standard fantasy worlds; so, sadly, the closer you cleave to their expectations of what D&D "should" be the more likely the successful run of your new campaign.

Oddly, I don't think this is true of published settings. Dragonlance did fine with it's changes and that only seemed to encourage TSR to come up with even more non-standard settings like Spelljammer and Planescape. They pillaged history for the various Forgotten Realms setting additions from Al-Qadim to Maztica. Some of these were fairly well done and rather successful, some not so much. Even post TSR D&D has had some success with non-standard settings it would seem, Eberron springs to mind although I am not particularly familiar with it other than it's use of arcane machines that cropped up in some of the boxes of WotC miniatures I bought.

Some of the coolest D&D settings I have ever seen sprang forth from my wife Mona's mind. I mention this because she had a pretty cool pirates-in-the-age-of-sail-meets-D&D-fantasy-world where there was a city called Ampersand (which makes me kind of smile every time I read that people want to call our game Ampersand) and because she doesn't really DM much, like twice since I have known her is all. Her stuff is always uniquely outside the standard D&D box and I have always loved the idea of playing in her worlds. I just find it to be too bad that the expectations of certain players for a certain flavor of D&D have discouraged her from DMing more. Shooting down my Zulus-invade-China-with-unicorn-riding-laser-sword-armed-elves setting is no big deal to me, I have run more D&D games than pretty much anyone else I have ever met and I have had a thousand campaign ideas that I never got around to trying. It's criminal to shoot down something as cool and unique as hers though.

That's all for now.


*Depending on which scale you believe, I believe in using the map of the caves scale, but the overland map lists the distance in hundred yard increments; it matches the caves map scale if you alter it to 100'/square rather than 100 yards/square.

**Which I never played, but knew several people that had played and kept begging me to run for them, only years after the WW craze did I actually take the plunge and play a WW game, Mage: the Ascension, it was fun but nothing I'd really want to do all the time and that GM never really wanted to run it again anyway since he was more of a Werewolf: the Apocalypse fan.

***I know 3e was not the first place that encounter balancing was mentioned, every version of D&D dating back to the original explores the concept at least a little, notably in the random encounter tables for dungeons, but 3e really made a science of it and preached balance as a virtue. I have since backed off of this in a big way because, hey, sometimes an encounter should be too tough for the party to handle.

****Wargamers know what I am talking about, the irrational feeling of affection for a cardboard counter after it has been lucky for you is real. My wife still mocks me for the sadness I felt when I lost my Grossdeutschland unit when playing Panzer General back in like 1995. I foolishly named my units when they achieved 5 stars of experience so I could more easily tell them apart and remember their individual battle records.

*****8 times if Comeliness was used in the game, only really an issue with Oriental Adventures here, we never really adopted Comeliness as a stat in our "regular" D&D games even after it was introduced.

******Which just goes to show how cool my players are, they spent the entire month of December with weekly TPKs after making complex Oriental Adventures characters every week. Sure, they eventually revolted at the idea of taking hours of character creation every week, but they just wanted to play standard occidental AD&D instead rather than quit playing in my games all together.

A Short Note

I am still somewhat busy here. I have both armor and garb projects going this week so that I can debut Ashli at tournament this weekend and I have got to try to work through the mountain of books I have gotten over the last month or so. Gaming books and fiction and history and other non-fiction. My lady wife Mona is also working on the garb project and painting minis.

Clan Wars

I got a bunch of new minis in the mail today. Most of them were WotC D&D minis I got real cheap on Ebay. I also got a pretty large lot of Clan War minis for a song. I bought them for a couple of reasons.

First, I wanted to use them for my R&R/OA campaign that I will eventually play again. Clan War minis seem like about the only available option for finding specifically Asian/Japanese inspired monsters and supernatural creatures, so I kind of keep my eyes open for deals on them. Are there any other companies that maybe have current lines suitable for my OA campaign? I know TSR never really supported OA with official minis and WotC's support has been anemic at best since they released OA for 3.0.

Second, my wife is a really good miniature painter and I thought I might be able to sell them at a profit on Ebay at some point. I actually already have a large number of Katana wielders prepped for her to paint for just that reason, although I may snag a few for my own collection. I am curious though whether or not anyone still plays Clan Wars or if they'll just be useful as 28mm Samurai units for a historical miniature battle game?

Change of Weekend Plans

No Sunday game this week. This means no Monday after-action-report.

Ashli has the Army Reserve this weekend and Lee Ann has to take her nursing boards. Ashli and Victor broke up this week too, so I don't imagine he'll be coming back at all.

I am thinking about playing a board game with the rest of the clan this weekend or maybe introducing them to painting minis. Maybe a little of both. I was thinking Axis & Allies for a board game, it's a step up from the "family" style games in complexity and, in my opinion, fun. Definitely easier than trying to teach them Star Fleet Battles. Besides Ashli is the only one that has shown any interest there.

Both of the other kids have shown interest in painting minis though, and I have all of those new ones that they picked out from MegaMinis. John was a little disappointed with them because he thought they were too small. Scale creep ruined his expectations for what a miniature figure for D&D should be. He said he was worried that it would be too difficult to decently paint something so small.

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.

MegaMinis Grenadier Classics Review

I just got my order from MegaMinis in the mail today. I can say I am pleasantly surprised. I wasn't really expecting much from them because they were so inexpensive and I had gotten a bad review of them in a blog comment, so the bar was set pretty low. I mostly was picking them up because the kids wanted to learn to paint minis. I ordered exclusively from their Grenadier Classics line (except for the Pack-Mule), since I already had some of them from Grenadier that meant I'd have some basis for comparison. I have to say that they are probably better in quality than the original Grenadiers simply because the metal is less prone to bending, which leads through metal fatigue to breaking. Breakage is the bane of my old miniature collection. Under the best of circumstances any mini that sees use at all will occasionally suffer a mishap. Being knocked over or dropped, even from and inch or two, can cause significant damage to a lead miniature or at least it's paint job. The tougher lighter metal they are made from now seems more likely to cause less damage due to accidental mishandling. I can heartily recommend anything from their Grenadier Classics line and also their Pack-Mule. I will probably order some more minis from their other lines, given the quality of these ones I just ordered.

Miniatures (again) and a bit more

First off, it is Clark Ashton Smith's birthday. I never read any of his work, but given his influence, it's on my to do list; along with H.P. Lovecraft. I am a big Robert E. Howard fan, so I don't know how I missed his two most thematically similar contemporaries.

Secondly, WotC has announced the end of D&D minis. I was just expounding on my love/hate for them last week. Now the blogosphere is abuzz with speculation and such. I guess it just settles my issue with them all together. They were the only WotC product I was still purchasing; and then only used off of EBay so I didn't have to deal with randomization. I guess this means Reaper gets to pick up their slack. Now I am completely free of WotC. I already own every D&D book I will ever want and if I want another copy they're out of print anyway, so it's retro-clones or EBay.

Now, does anyone know where I can find reasonably priced storage/transport containers for my lead minis? Currently they are stored in egg cartons, which aren't very protective and take up a lot of space for the number of minis inside; sterilite totes wrapped in bubble wrap, which is only marginally pretective; or in their original boxes which aren't very sturdy over time but provide excellent protection to the miniature and it's paint job. Chessex makes those hard plastic cases, but at twenty-five bucks a pop are they really worth it?

Miniatures and D&D: My Thoughts

Ah, Grenadier's AD&D line, my first love. Like a lot of people my age, my first introduction to the use of minis with my D&D game came with Grenadier's official AD&D gold box line of miniature figures. My first box was the Dwarves set. I foolishly traded them away for some inferior unofficial minis so I could have a greater number of figures for my game. I immediately regretted that decision setting a pattern for my ownership of miniatures that continues to this day. I did manage to purchase a bunch of the other sets over the course of time though, coordinated with the other guys in my neighborhood D&D group so we could avoid too much overlap.

I had, ultimately, one large boxed set (5002 Monsters), and four small boxed sets (2001 Wizards, 2002 Halflings, 2004 Hirelings and 2007 Females). Tim M. (the regular DM) had one large boxed set (5009 Dragon's Lair) and six small boxed sets (2003 Dwarves [the reason I never replaced mine], 2005 Fighting Men, 2008 Thieves, 2010 Denizens of the Swamp, 2011 Orc's Lair and 2012 Dwellers Below), which I just fact checked at http://www.dndlead.com/Grenadier/Grenadier.htm .

We didn't have anyone else buying minis in our group (yet), and we preferred boxed sets to blisters since you got more bang for your buck, with a couple of caveats. I, for example, had terrible luck with the boxed sets between broken unfixable minis that clearly came from the mold messed up (Werewolf from the Monsters, Druid with dart from the Wizards), missing parts (again with the monsters, my poor wingless gargoyle, ) or just the wrong mini (Halflings box gave me the halfling thief from the thieves set instead of the slinger). It's like they had a 10% quota for messing with me. Only the Dwarves that I traded and the Hirelings came as they should have, I don't count the Females, they were a birthday gift.

Then there were the useless ones, the ones that were only good if you were planning to build a diorama. The Halflings gave us the lookouts, one standing on the other's head, the camp guard, lounging against a small tree and the lancer mounted on a pack-mule is of, at best, limited utility. The Thieves gave us the climbing thief, the thief opening the chest and the nearly useless thief with grappling hook. Just annoying. I loved them anyway though. I have a deep nostalgia for them. I would love to have them again, despite the fact that they are not up to modern standards as sculpts and they are small compared to today's pseudo-25mm scale minis (which are actually 28-32mm scale)

I sold all of mine off before the end of the 1980's because I wanted to get new minis that I could put better paint jobs on. I figured that I had like a decade of painting experience at that point and I could avoid all the old mistakes. When I first got them I had worked under the theory that I should just slap some paint on them and get them to the table. I mostly painted them with Testors model paints because that's what I had. After a few years of use they weren't looking good, so I sold them to my friends and used the proceeds to buy more minis (in theory anyway, I mostly used the money to buy beer, cigarettes and gas). My mini collection would recover eventually, but not with my beloved Grenadiers.

I have seen most of these miniatures recently, so I can attest to their primitive appearance when compared to newer minis. This leads us in to the story of Lance the lucky. Lance W., who was a member of my old neighborhood D&D group (actually 2 of them, after most of the old crew had graduated from high school and moved on he went out an recruited a new bunch to take their places, I was primary DM for the Dempster D&D group phase 2) went to Gencon about 10 years ago and spent most of his time at the auction (every time he has gone since he volunteers at the auction, he has gotten free admission more than once because of this), while he was there the auctioneers got a sealed suitcase for auction. It was late, they didn't open it up. The description of the contents was extremely vague. No one wanted to bid on it. Lance eventually bid five bucks for the suitcase. He won. The suitcase contained, among other things, a nearly complete set of Grenadiers AD&D miniature line still shrink-wrapped. Now you know why Lance loves the auction and why I call him, in this context anyway, Lance the lucky.

The funny thing is Lance had been buying old Grenadier lead all along. He had picked up the bulk of Tim's collection (although in real roundabout way, Darryl C. had bought them when Tim went through the same newer, better phase I did, Lance just managed to catch Darryl years later when he was in the mood to sell). I think he bought some of mine, and he had been hunting it at garage sales and flea markets since he got his first job. Lance even stayed with Grenadier into the 1990's as a loyal customer. Sadly Grenadier is no more. I wonder what happened to their old molds?

Scale Creep is the scourge of our time. It makes our old minis useless next to these huge minis produced today. Scale creep means that we have to either rely solely on old, no longer manufactured, increasingly expensive and difficult to find sculpts or replace our entire collections and start over. I blame Games Workshop and their Warhammer minis. I guess it's in their interest to try and get people to buy more, newer stuff all the time; and their bigger is better philosophy certainly seems to be popular, but I can't help but wonder- who gave control of the entire fantasy miniatures manufacturing industry to them? Historical miniature wargamers would never tolerate scale creep in their hobby. That's half of what the problem was with WotC's Axis and Allies miniatures line, the vehicle scales were inconsistent and not scaled to the soldiers. WotC had to re-issue all of the vehicle models redone to the proper scale to try and fix the problem and get the line taken seriously by what should have been the core audience they were marketed to.

D&D as a tactical miniatures skirmish game really irks me. Since 3e hit the market you haven't been able to play modern D&D with out minis. I really didn't care initially (when I started playing 3e, which was literally years after it's release) because I have played and enjoyed tactical miniature battles before. After a while it started to wear on me though, because all of the 3e rules are fiddly. I hate all of the conditional nonsense that I am likely to forget as DM. Attacks of opportunity were a good idea in theory, but in practice just make everyone move in a really super paranoid and weird fashion across the battlefield.

I didn't realize how much I had come to hate it until I eventually dumped D&D in favor of Hackmaster (4th edition, the D&D based one). The group I was DMing for played through a small, quick combat and it didn't occur to me to use minis for it or "battle-board" it up. It was like as a group we had some sort of catharsis. After that battle no one in the group wanted to use minis at all. We didn't and it was awesome. Don't get me wrong, we all had a long history of using minis with our D&D games, but I think they had become a symbol of the shackles of 3e and when we didn't need to use them we chose not to as a hallmark of our liberation from them. Kind of like how America drinks coffee instead of tea since the revolution.

Now minis have snuck back into my game, both because I loved them once so very much and because my kids were taught D&D using 3e (they insisted, they wanted the newest, best edition). I have bought a lot of WotC minis, both their D&D minis and their Star Wars minis. The D&D minis I bought for use with my FRPGs, the Star Wars minis partly because I love Star Wars and partly because I was hoping to entice John into my love of wargaming through a Star Wars gateway (unsuccessfully, I tried a similar tactic with Heroscape equally unsuccessfully).

I have previously mentioned D&D miniatures and their collectibility being a problem for me. It annoys me on the one hand to not know what I am getting, since I am old enough to remember buying minis that told you what was in a box, and I know that it is just a scheme by WotC to milk their customers of more of their hard earned money than a decent product should. What I have not mentioned before regarding WotC D&D minis is that they are moving farther and farther from being useful to an early edition player. New PC races are essentially useless to us, I mean we can use the dragon dudes for lizard men or draconians or something, but not what they are intended to be; the other elf looking people could be used for elves I guess, but they are not really producing suitable PC minis for some old school races (gnomes, cough, cough), not that 3e gnomes (or halfling for that matter) really looked right for old school games. They are also changing the appearance of a lot of older monsters. The Shambling mound comes to mind. It used to look like the swamp thing, now it looks like a poorly trimmed hedge.

Now, I am sure someone will point out that Otherworld miniatures has come to our rescue with awesome old school minis in a modern scale, and that's true. However they come at a premium price and they are made in England so the shipping adds to that. Now, I live in upstate NY, which is in the US, whose economy collapsed a couple of years ago. I also have 3 kids at home. I am a grown man and I can't really afford them, how are kids supposed to get them? Since I was a kid myself everyone I have ever played D&D with always wanted to have at least a miniature to represent their character. Many of those people were kids. Minis are too expensive for kids and they lack the instant gratification effect when you have to wait for them to be shipped. Plus they lack the appeal of pre-painted minis in that they are not ready to game with as soon as they arrive. Reaper is solving this problem a little bit with their new line of non-collectible pre-painted plastics, but they are typical reaper sculpts, not necessarily representing an early edition aesthetic.

Samurai fever... Broke?

I don't really know what happened to blogger here, but my fairly long post about my Samurai campaign was eaten when I tried to post it. I was under the impression that blogger saving my posts once per minute would prevent this sort of accident, but apparently not. It had a commentary about how my game was getting just one more chance before I pull the plug and go back to "standard" AD&D1. It also had a long tangental discussion about minis, the new ones I bought for OA, my love/hate of the WoTC D&D line, my irrational hatred of Games Workshop for causing both scale creep and ridiculously sized weapons, and my nostalgic love of Grenadier's AD&D line (and consequently the story of Lance-the-lucky). I also briefly discussed old D&D computer games. I worked on it for quite a while and now I have no desire to run across that ground again. Sorry, blame Blogger.