Chapter Five
DUNGEON LOGIC
The evening for our game was agreed upon and my players arrived in good time. I’d prepared the front room with candles and various dungeony looking knick knacks. One end of the table lay my massive library of notes, maps and information cards … all hidden behind a makeshift cardboard screen. In the centre of the table spread out the village of Ching. Painstakingly mapped and painted as only an art student with an obsessive attention to fiddly detail and a set of Rotring technical drawing pens can manage. Two metal miniatures sat beside the entrance to the town. They were dull grey and unpainted because I’d run out of time .. Having only bought them that morning. Each place setting had a blank note pad, pen. Pencil, eraser, a character sheet and a full set of polyhedron dice. There were bowls of snacks for nibbling.. On the side I’d several bottles of coke and lemonade. The outlay for the entire evening had set me back more than the original boxset of D&D had. I had figured why do things by halves. Robbie appeared impressed by the laid out and was enthusiastic about the atmosphere I’d created. He sank down into a chair and asked if he could play an elf. Happy to oblige I handed the players manual over to him and he commenced rolling up his character. Steve (my considerably less than happy to be there friend) had said nothing about preparations. He took a seat opposite Robbie and looked bored. I asked him what sort of character he wanted to play.
“Dunno,” he answered. I pointed to a photocopied sheet in front of him. On it I’d listed all the options from the Players Manual and had illustrated each one with a humorous little illustration. Fighter, Cleric, Magic User, Thief, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling. There was a brief description of the various abilities. Steve stared at it for a few minutes and grunted again “ok, I’ll be a fighter.” I pointed to his dice and asked him to roll 3D6 for his different statistics.
“What?” he glared at me puzzled. I realised I’d descended too far and too fast into D&D speak and he was lost already.
“Take the 6 sided die, the standard dice (I poked one) … roll it 3 times. You add the three scores together. Each set of three gives you a score for your Strength score, Dexterity score, Intelligence score. Each one effects how much your character can do in the adventure.”
“Yeah, I knew that” he said picking up the 6 sided die and giving it a half hearted roll across the table. He was determined to make me feel like I was pulling teeth. I cursed the lack of an option in the player’s manual that says “For moody first time players, create their characters in advance and just hand them out.” The Manual did contain “Sample Characters” but hadn’t hinted that they were life savers in moments like this. The evening was speeding past and Steve seemed determined to waste most of it rolling his character up in slow motion.
“Ready!” Robbie said. He handed me his character sheet to check. I had no idea what to check, but I gave it a quick look and gave him a thumbs up. We both helped Steve sort out the final bits on his fighter character.
“What is your character’s name, Rob?” I asked.
“I’m Gullanthus of Silverwood.” He declared.
(side note Confession: I can’t exactly remember the name Robbie picked, but it sounded very elfy and there was a woodland involved. I’m filling in details as close as I can as my memory fails.)
“What about you, Steve, what is your fighter called?”
“eerrrrrr, Conan” said Steve.
Everything inside me wanted to beg Steve to please exercise a teeny tiny amount of imagination/creativity, but I knew I was on a thin edge here.
Anything like rolling my eyes at his choice would probably mean he stomp off home early and I’d be running the adventure for just Robbie. While this would probably be for the best, I really did want to have a gaming group, not a gaming individual.
“How was the group last night?” guys at the Game store might ask.
“Oh, he enjoyed himself greatly!” I’d have to answer. It just sounded creepy and weird to my ears. Thus, I bit the bullet and Conan and Gullanthus stood before the entrance of The Village of Ching.
“The Village hangs before you in the gathering dusk. Already lights are being lit in windows and the sounds of revelry from the local tavern tell you that the day’s work is over. The Weapon Smith is taking down his display and packing it in oiled cloth for another day, but you might catch him if you wish to purchase a blade.” I began painting my scene, but neither Robbie or Steve say anything as I pause. So I take another breath and carry on.
“All around in the gathering gloom tiny fireflies flit and dance. You can see the dusty north road stretching toward the range of hills you’ve just crossed. In the woodland surrounding town you can see the shapes of cottages and farmsteads.. Villagers, weary from a day’s toil, are walking past you toward the welcome glow of the Kobold’s Rest Tavern.”
“Where’s the Dungeon?” Steve asks, plainly bored by the Peter Bruegul painting I’m attempting to verbally create. “Ahhh,” he points at the cave entrance I’ve stupidly marked on the map only inches from his character sheet.
“Think we should check out the town?” Robbie asks as I make another villager walk past them.
“Narrrrr, what’s the point.” Steve says. “Let’s just go kill things!” Behind the Dungeon Master’s screen I fold up my booklet containing 60 pages of adventure threads/plot devices and colourful characters. I drop it down the side of the chair into the waiting boxfile. No point worrying about the wasted time spent on that. My adventurers are stalking off down the track to the waiting cave entrances. I pull out Encounters on the road file and discover a band of plague riddled goblins have camped for the night just outside the caves. I crafted a subtle dilemma here, do the adventurers fight the goblins and risk catching the plague or do they sneak past them. As my players draw close to the goblin camp I emphasise their plague pox and general sick condition. There is no way Robbie or Steve can mistake the illness. I even mention that they have heard tales of plague among the goblins that has spread to humans in recent months. Robbie looks at Steve and asks what they should do?
“Kill ‘um” Steve says. “They will have treasure and stuff.” Robbie shrugs his shoulders.
“I’m going to keep clear of them and use my bow,” Robbie’s character takes a covered position beside a tree. Steve has his character pull out his blunt battleaxe and wades forward. I run my first group encounter. I’ve done sample combat before between a variety of characters and a selection of monsters/creatures from the rulebook, but this is the first time I’ve run combat with actual players. I surprise myself at how smoothly it works, but the Dungeons & Dragons was designed to be playable and not particularly realistic. Robbie delights in his bow and a series of successful hits. It turns out one of his favourite movies is HAWK THE SLAYER and his ambition to be the Elf bowman character in that film comes to life as he fells goblin after goblin. Steve wades his axe swinging Conan character into the midst of the goblins. He isn’t as lucky as Robbie in his attack rolling. His dice roll several failures to hit and he begins to complain about his lack of complete success. The dice are completely random I tell him, you’ve as much chance of hitting as Robbie’s elf.
“No, I’ve got more chance of hitting, stands to reason. I’m in the middle of a horde of goblins. I shouldn’t be able to swing my axe and miss. Robbie is firing arrows from way over there, and it is getting dark. No way would every arrow hit.” The combat pauses as I explain Elven Infravision, the ability certain races (like Goblins, and Elves) have of seeing in the dark. The only person who is struggling with the gathering gloom is Steve. A fact I haven’t actually compensated for. I should really have been making Steve roll dice and deducting points for darkness he was fighting in, but I hadn’t bothered with this because I feared he would feel picked on. Seems he is already feeling picked on by the dice. Go figure! Combat limps on.
Goblins finally dead, Robbie suggests they burn the bodies as a service to the local village. Steve wants to loot the corpses for treasure. Robbie points out the increased risk of grubbing through plague goblin’s corpses added to the plague contaminated blood all over Steve already.
“I don’t care,” points out Steve, “It isn’t like I am going to play this character again after tonight!”
“What is the point of collecting the treasure then?” Robbie asks. Bless him, I wanted to say that, but feared upsetting the awkward guy even more.
“How do we know who wins if we haven’t got treasure to add up at the end of the night?” Steve says. Robbie turns and gives me a look and a grin. I’ve no idea what it means, but I quickly try to move the game on. By describing the vast entrance to the cavern system.
“I haven’t got my treasure yet!” Steve complains. I make a show of consulting some books and tables and announce he has found a few bags of copper coins, some rusty armour and chipped swords. He insists on bagging everything up and carrying it with him. Robbie suggests he stash the “treasure” in the woods so he won’t be clanking around the dungeon, but Steve doesn’t trust that idea. Robbie shrugs his shoulders again and they move on.
“The passageway stretches away from you, one branch to the left, another to the right.” I say.
“Those are the only choices?” Steve asks, irritation in his voice. Too late it sinks in that there is nothing I can do this evening that will please him. He is determined not to enjoy himself at all costs. Even if I give his character a full set of golden enchanted armor, a blade of magic so powerful it makes goblins explode if they look at it and a chest full of jewels … he is still going to moan. I now understand the significance of Robbie’s looks to me. He figured this out much earlier than I did and is now taking a sort of perverse delight in it.
“We go left,“ says Robbie.
“Why?” asks Steve.
“Because if we keep going left we won’t get lost. Basic principles of Dungeon exploration.” I am not sure how sound this idea is, but Robbie appears to have convinced Steve he knows what he is doing. They shoulder their packs, light a torch and walk inside. Robbie’s familiarity with dungeon logic starts to pay off. He tries everything and makes notes on things. He is picking up clues that I’ve scattered through the cave system. Hints that will unlock things later on, seemingly innocent items left around that Steve ignores, but Robbie puts in his pack. It is a little like being on the same wavelength as the person setting a quiz or crossword. If your brain works roughly the same as theirs you can buzz through a quiz and appear uncanny. It isn’t that Steve is unintelligent, though he will often play that game for some reason all of his own devising. He is just not in the dungeon mindset, and he is probably wasting a lot of mental energy on appearing moody and awkward as well.
They battle their way around the doughnut of death for about an hour. By this time they are nearly upon the first of my Boss Monsters. The Polychromatic Dragon Challenge. Their health scores have dipped to quite low and so, to cut them a break, I’ve placed a dusty locked storeroom just before the Dragon’s Lair. The door opens with four symbol coded dials. I’ve left the clues to the correct sequence of symbols scattered around the dungeon (why wouldn’t I?) and Robbie examines the door. Consulting his note pad, now filled with several pages of carefully collected clues he figures out the first two dial positions. Steve, whose notebook contains a doodle and a series of stick figures, suggests he break down the door ‘cause it looks old and flimsy (I never described it as such, he is just reaching here!)
“The sound of you smashing the door down is going to attract a lot of unwelcome attention,” says Robbie, inadvertently irritating Steve again by his unerring dungeon logic. Robbie finds the final two clues and spins the remaining dials. When a satisfying clunk, the door swings open. They shine a torch inside to reveal a tiny treasure house. Fresh armour, which gives them both better armor class scores.
There is a fresh quiver of arrows for Robbie, one of which is a golden arrow with a dragon etched on the barbed arrow head (I had a problem with being too subtle in my early days of dungeon design!)
I’ve also left an Axe the size of a small hobbit for Steve. It is glowing with a soft enchanted light and seems to float off it’s wall mounting as his hand approaches it. It is much better than the weapon I’d originally left there, but at this stage of the game I’m employing a psychological technique on Steve called Operant Conditioning. He plays nice and quits bitchin’ … I give him some imaginary treats as a reward.
I’ve also left two sets of four jars. One set has a smiling golden sun face etched on the outside and is filled with a sweet nectar. The other has a Scowling Moon face etched on it and is filled with a black viscous fluid. Robbie opens a Sun Jar and gives it a drink. His health points (called Hit Points in D&D) are fully restored. Robbie, his dungeon logic sound as usual, places the second Sun Jar is in his pack. I’ve left four jars … two to get both of them back up to full health before the dragon fight, and two to heal them after the dragon fight. Robbie gives Steve his two jars of Sun Fluid. For some bizarre reason (call it sheer “bloody Steve mindedness”) Steve ignores the Health potion and insists on opening the Dark Moon Jar. I describe the black fluid as having a vaguely evil stink. It slops around in the jar with an unpleasant bilious quality. I am sure not even Conan himself would have tried a mouthful of the nasty crap, but sadly Conan is being controlled by someone with a point to prove this evening. Steve makes his character take a good chug of this stuff. It is enough to wipe 2 ten sided dice worth of hit points off Conan, but I quickly half that amount for fear that Steve’s character will die if he rolls badly. As it is he takes 5 points of damage.
“Eh?” Steve says, playing confused by this mysterious and illogical outcome. “Why am I loosing health when Robbie got his back?” Robbie tries to explain that the two different jars and two different fluids, but Steve is playing his “I’m thick” card again. He insists his character takes another drink of the black fluid. I order him to take a second ten sided dice of damage and his face does that “What for?” look of annoyance. I know he knows exactly what he is doing, but I am not sure characters deliberately committing suicide is covered in the D&D Basic Set. Robbie grabs one of the remaining Sun Jars and tells him to drink it. Even Steve can’t find a reason not to. Conan, slumped to the floor and with one hit point remaining drinks the potion. I tell him to restore his full hitpoint total back on his character sheet.
“There is a second jar with a sun on for me?” he asks.
“Yes, Robbie drank one, stashed another in his pack for later. You drank the third and there is a fourth one for you to take.” I explain.
“I’ll drink the fourth one now.” Steve says.
“Why? You are already on full health, it isn’t going to give you anymore health!” I say, breaking the rule of not providing information that players ought not to know.
“It might do!” says Steve, that look in his eye. Despite the fact the Dungeon Master (who thinks he is controlling the game) has said it won’t, Steve breaks the seal on the fourth jar and drinks it. Like I predicted, the fluid doesn’t double Steve’s health. He complains about my dungeon logic, though he doesn’t call it that. Robbie is giving me that “what a plonker!” grin again. I wisely push to move on. They round the corner and encounter the lair of the Polychromatic Dragon. The fight is a tough one and though they dispatch the zombie minions fairly quickly, they take quite a lot of hits doing it. Steve decides to break the flow of the action by arguing that since the healing fluid is still in his stomach, he shouldn’t be suffering damage at all. I point out, with perhaps just a trace of sarcasm in my voice, that isn’t how the magic fluid works. “Well it should!” Steve says. At this point the Dragon locks eyes with Steve and I ask him to make a saving throw against the Dragon’s Hypnotic Gaze. Saving throws are the system of testing your luck in Dungeons and Dragons. A series of numbers each character has to deal with various situations. There is a saving throw vs. poisons which I ought to have made Steve roll against just a few minutes ago, but I had been so stunned he was drinking a jar filled with black rank smelling oil that I’d quite forgotten this rule. Now he has to make a saving throw against Dragon Breath.
“But this isn’t Dragon Breath.” he argues, “It is Dragon Vision!” Of course he would argue. In being a bit creative and designing my own dragon for this adventure I’ve strayed away from the purity (simplicity) of the Basic Set Rules. I pull out the Dungeon Masters Rulebook and look up Dragons to see if anything in the fine print covers this. I have to stop the fight to start reading. I glance at the clock. It is nearly time for Robbie’s bus home. We would have time for either pushing on and finishing the fight or arguing about the rules, not both. I point this out to Steve … who naturally thinks that bitching about the dragon is the best use of our last 20 minutes.
“I think we should finish the fight with the dragon and you get the treasure” I say, trying to appeal to his greed for imaginary loot. But now I’ve handed Steve what he has wanted all evening. A chance to ruin everything. He isn’t going to let a simple thing like gold and gems get in the way of stopping the game until Robbie has to catch his bus.
“You’re changing the rules, making stuff up!” he bitches. “How are we going to win if you keep changing the rules.” I try to argue that it isn’t about winning or losing, it is about having fun. This is something that Steve has tried hard to avoid all evening, so I’m really barking up the wrong tree. I can see Robbie looking at the clock. We’ve less than 10 minutes now before the bus. I suggest we put the game on pause and walk with Robbie to the bus stop. There are no objections to this plan. We reach the bus stop, and Steve announces he is going home as well. He has parked just a short distance away. He says goodnight to Robbie, ignoring me, walks back to his car and drives off into the night. Robbie, diplomatic and with an almost unflappable good nature, says nothing about the horrible end to the evening. He thanks me and tells me he has left the dice I’d given him on the side by the bottle of Pepsi. His bus slides around the corner and I wave him off. My head feels like it is mashed again as I walk back to my house. What had gone wrong this time? I was nominally in control of this night, but the dynamics of it escaped me. It didn’t feel as crappy and nasty as the Runequest evening, but I am still walking home with a heavy heart. I get back in and start to pack away the maps and files. I discover something quite unusual. Robbie’s dice are where he told me they would be, neatly stacked by the drinks station. Steve’s dice are nowhere to be seen. He has taken them with him. I hadn’t said I bought the dice as gifts for everyone, but I’d not said don’t take them at the end of the night. I am just bemused that the guy who appeared to loathe the evening so much he stopped the climatic fight in its tracks has taken a set of dice.

Chapter Four
THE DOUGHNUT OF DEATH

Now, armed with a fairly good idea of how not to run Fantasy RolePlaying Games, I decided to try and get my friends involved one last time. I asked my friend Robbie in college, who had originally gamed with his brother’s group. I hinted he would really be welcome to join us for a session. He laughed a lot at the idea, but agreed to give it a go. I also pressed my very reluctant buddy Steve into it. Steve seemed determined to make me feel that he was doing me a HUGE favour by agreeing to come to the session. His actual words were along the lines of “At least I can tell people I’ve played a game of D&D!”  I couldn’t understand this motivation for doing it. Surely you do things to enjoy them not to add them to a sort of life C.V. to tell other people about. I mentally scratched my head, but figured whatever got him around the dining room table was okay by me.
With two players confirmed I set about planning my first dungeon hack. I designed a tiny village called Ching on the river Ford. A short distance away from there I created an ancient warren of caves and passageways. I spent an equal amount of time on both the dungeon system and the village. The village was fully realised with a population of around 40 people the players could meet and talk to. I intended the village to look a look real, and wanted the players to be able to stop and questioned anyone, initially it would be one of the 40 NPC (Non-Player Characters, ie anyone not belonging to the group of players), but I planned on expanding the population.
Each of my villagers had some clues to the dangers of the caverns and hints that would help the players in the depths of the maze system. They also all had future plot directions and suggestions. After about 20 ideas that would launch a mini-adventure in themselves I began to struggle for ideas. It wasn’t that I’d run out of plot possibilities, I had hundreds begging for their moment in the spotlight. It was just my initial 20 plots were modest village sized ones. Thefts of prize cattle by local bandits, missing semi-magical rings, spurned lovers that had run off into the local hills and not returned. After I hit 20 my ideas got grander and more epic. I didn’t think a hill farmer would be the proper person to launch the players on a quest to return a jewel that unfroze a legendary king in the Volcanic Mountains of the Northlands. I finished my final 20 plot possibilities with a struggle to keep them homespun and rural … but also exciting and challenging.
My attention then turned to my dungeon design. I built the initial structure in a huge ring shape. The Doughnut of Death was my private name for this torus of doom. The players would be faced with an east or west bound passageways that would eventually meet up on the far side of the mountains. It was a long loop, infested with side tunnels and blocked staircases leading up and down (I slowly unblocked these as I added upper and lower chambers.) But the main action was in the central doughnut. There were three main boss creatures,
1) A Polychromatic dragon (of my own creation, it was the size of a Shetland pony) with a hypnotic gaze and a small group of zombie minions. I didn’t feel it proper to put a full sized dragon in on the group’s first outing. The ones in the rulebook could eat a party of 10 players. My two friends would be mince meat. They would be disappointed though if I didn’t include one dragon in the game .. Thus my crafty compromise.
2) An Ancient Statue with jewelled eyes that granted dreams, but in each dream the players would have to fight each other in various historical settings to unlock keys. The keys would open the portal for the creature who created the statue to travel through to our realm. The players would have to discover a route out of the dream worlds and back to their bodies. This was my favourite idea and I’d planned each of the historical settings out in fantastic detail.
3) An Orc guardroom. The doughnut of death connected via a huge locked stone door to a larger dungeon complex controlled by the Orc King Thargus. This could take the players through the mountains to the sunbaked lands on the other side. A small prison of captured adventurers was attached to the guardroom, and if freed they could combine their strength and vanquish the Orcs squad and the Captain of the Guard, Demos the Fetid.
Alongside all of these large challenges I’d filled the dungeon with a variety of smaller and easier to solve traps, creatures and prizes. I didn’t know it, but the amount of work I’d lavished on this one night dungeon could have sustained an average group of adventurers for months. It hadn’t put me off that both players had only said they would do one night. I’d put serious man-hours into my first creation as a true labour of love.

Chapter 3
THE PERILS OF THE UNKNOWN DOOM

I wish I could say I went home and hit the phone. I don’t wish to give you any further evidence of my lack of social confidence and shyness, but it is unavoidable if I am to be honest in this tale.
It took me an age to pluck up the courage to cold call the first number. It was one of the Runequest groups. The guy on the other end of the phone seemed very nice and understanding though. I explained I’d not played Runequest before, strategically not mentioning I hadn’t played ANY roleplaying games before. He asked if I’d played Call of Cthulhu and I had to confess I hadn’t (it wasn’t until later that I discovered the two games shared the same rules and game mechanics .. Though, obviously, very different settings!)
Not a problem he said. He told me the address they played at, but then mentioned that the following week was their once a month gaming night at a pub in Liverpool. If I showed up early he would go through the character creation process with me and I’d have my character introduced during the session.
I thanked him, scribbled down all the details and rung off. It was the only call I ever made.
Now I had a target, something to set my gaming sights on. I set about planning another trip to GAME in Liverpool. This time I was going to buy RUNEQUEST. I hit DICING WITH DRAGONS again to reread what Ian Livingstone though of it. I figured it was a great idea to be familiar with the rule system this other group used before I sat down with them. Maybe even to have rolled up my own character in advance. I didn’t relish the idea of playing a game with a whole room of strangers and not knowing what dice to roll for the most basic of operations. Of all the games I’d previously reviewed and considered as my second purchase, Runequest had come out on top. Lots of people appeared to play it and it seemed free of the stigma that D&D had acquired due to being the leader of the field. I was a bit sad I wasn’t going to play D&D, but it was out of my hands.
Around this time I had also discovered the British gaming magazine WHITE DWARF. This had a regular column devoted to Runequest and I looked eagerly through it for hints or tips. While this Runequest obsession wasn’t as acute as my previous Dungeons and Dragons one, I had still built up quite a Christmas Morning anticipation fever when the day dawned to ride the train over and enter the cellar of dreams for the third time.
  I was surprised and a little relieved to see a different wizard sat behind the counter this time. He was an older guy than the one who had sold me the Red Box. He was also deeply engaged in  conversation with a customer when I descended, but I didn’t panic. I knew what I was after and trolled over to the main display to find the RUNEQUEST box among the other games.
It wasn’t there!!!!!!!! I worked my way through a second time and still couldn’t see it. They had a number of boxed sets that listed themselves as support items for Runequest, but the main box with it’s armoured Battlemaiden wasn’t among them. I couldn’t believe this. I had less than 2 days before the Games Meet in Liverpool and the game isn’t in what must be the best stocked games shop in the universe. I glanced up at the counter. The Elder Wizard appeared to be explaining the finer points of a box of paper chits to a customer. I swallowed my mounting gaming panic and wandered over. It all appeared to have unfolded from a tiny Tardis-like plastic box no bigger than paperback book. Tiny chits of paper portraying cars and bits of roadway had spread across the counter. The rule book looked like a pamplet. Was this a roleplaying game??
“What is this?” I asked, suitably intrigued and forgetting my crisis for a moment.
“CAR WARS, nothing is more fun in a tiny box! Comes from Austin, Texas, the home of Steve Jackson Games.” I ooooo’ed in appreciation. He pushed a tiny chit toward me.
“Want a go?” Within minutes I was screaming around the counter top attempting to ram the other customer’s paper chit car. He already had 20 minutes experience of table top crazy driving on me so it wasn’t long before my car was a twisted mass of imaginary metal. I plugged a couple of good rounds into the side of his vehicle as I limped away from the paper road sections.
“Runequest?” I breathlessly said, dragging my brain back to the present and wiping burning hot brake fluid from my mental jacket sleeve.
“Just sold the last one,” he said “Could be a week before we get some new stock in.” At glanced sharply at the victorious Auto duelist stood beside me.
“Not me!” he said a little defensively.
“I am supposed to joining a gaming group in a couple of days, they play RUNEQUEST …I wanted to try and learn the system before I played.
“Complex system, RuneQuest. Not one I’d recommend to a new player!”
Oh great, I thought .. Not only do they not have the blinking game, but he has sussed how inexperienced I am as well.
“What about Call of Cthulhu?” I suddenly remembered the chap on the phone asking if I played that.
“Yeah, both Chaosium games. Use practically the same game mechanics.”
I was pleased that aside from the word Chaosium (which was the publisher of both games it turned out) I had understood practically every word he’d said. He reached past me and pulled out the dark green box of CALL OF CTHULHU.
“This isn’t going to help you with your Rune Magic” he mentioned, sliding the box across to me. “But if you hadn’t played a percentile based system before, I’d pick Call of Cthulhu as an excellent starter.”
Damn, just when I was getting cocky and thought I was getting game terms. I gave him my best “Of course I understand you” smile and handed over the cash for the game. I made a mental note to look up “Percentile Based System” in Dicing With Dragons. Ian would know!

Upon leaving the shop I felt a weird lurch in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t planned on Cthulhu being the second game in my RPG Library. I’d not had a chance to get all excited about it and plan on buying it. No Christmas Morning feelings … I felt cheated out of an important part of the experience.
I also still felt nervous that I was going to be woefully unprepared for the RuneQuest night, but looking at the painting on the cover of the Cthulhu boxlid, I couldn’t help but be excited. A weird old house lurks in a thunderstorm. Three figures stood in a graveyard, lit only by a lamp held in the hand of a man whose face you can not see. One window in the house is illuminated with sinister purpose.
It had been a few years since I’d read my Lovecraft books, but I remembered them well enough. This wasn’t standard fair ghost stories or boring slasher horror. This was cosmic oddness, creatures from wildly different dimensions wanting in on our cozy little world. They didn’t care that just being here was poison to us, they hungered for our world. This could be a great game afterall, even though I suspected I would probably never play it with people.

On this occasion the box stayed sealed until I was safely on the train. When I finally popped it open I was surprised by the extras included. A huge world map (with suitably Lovecraftean tentacles writhing away in the corners!) a sheet of character figures in sinister silhouette, a sourcebook of the 1920s (until this moment, I had forgotten the era the stories had been set in!) and a big chunky rule/source book with a bilious green monochrome cover depicting some shambling monster. There was also a set of garishly colourful dice that seemed to clash madly with the tone set by the rest of the game.
I was quite surprised by adult way the rulebook read. After the D&D books, which had an unmistakably gosh/wow and childish tone to them, this book read as though the author was talking adult to adult. This really shouldn’t have surprised me, after all I’d read enough Lovecraft to appreciate that the themes in this game would be madness, darkness and soul shredding horror. Cheerful Dwarves with battle axes and hot Elven Battlemaidens need not apply! (I was already missing the imaginary Elven Battlemaidens though!)

Getting off the train in Birkenhead I didn’t make the same photocopy mistake twice. Instead of grabbing my bus outside the station, I walked down to Argyle Street and visited a photocopy shop there. I got ten copies of the Call of Cthulhu character sheet before stalking out into the gathering gloom to find the bus stop across from the Old Classic Cinema. I had also had the foresight to have packed a notepad and pencil with me. This was to have allowed me to dice up my first RuneQuest character on the bus. Now instead of some hairy Nomad Adventurer from the foothills of Glorantha I was creating Professor Stephen Salem. A brooding Antiquarian bookseller with a mysterious past and late of New York. He would wander in and out of a dozen adventures in the following years, but for now he was just an exercise in filling my first character sheet. The Call of Cthulhu box was a lot deeper than the D&D box. It allowed me to fling my dice around a bit. It also allowed the movement of the bus to fudge a few rolls so my Professor had a scary high score for his Intelligence and Power. Feeling a little guilty about my first actual cheating while gaming, I kept the pathetic dexterity and strength rolls. While Stephen Salem was going to be uncanny in his sensitivity to magic and bookish in the extreme, he was never going to be able to run away from a shambling horror. I predicted he would probably have his face gnawed off pretty sharpish if I ever actually played him.
Confession: Okay, okay …Who am I trying to kid with the “hairy Nomad Adventurer from the foothills of Glorantha” stuff. Had I got RuneQuest that day, the first character I’d have brought into existence would have been the girl in the battle bikini with the glowing sword from the cover of the box. Damn, it is hard staying honest when you’re putting your memories down for posterity.

The bus ride seemed to be over in an instant, thus were the time compression effects of CoC Character Creation. It made 25 minutes feel like barely 5 had passed … and was probably the first occasion when I actually noticed how time seemed to vanish when roleplaying gaming touched my life. I reached home and briefly slid my second cardboard box in alongside Dungeons & Dragons on my new gaming shelf to see how they looked together. The shelf also contained a copy of White Dwarf and a copy of IMAGINE, a British gaming magazine from TSR (The Cambridge branch of the Dungeons & Dragons company), I’d also got a boxfile with a huge amount of scribbled notes, drawings and maps. This contained the seeds of my own Insane Fantasy Game REALITY RIDERS. A berserk experiment in gaming madness that would take shape as soon as I had assembled some willing victims, but let us not jump ahead in this tale too swiftly now. I had Call of Cthulhu and though this wasn’t RuneQuest, I had a small window into how the system worked. I set about digging through the rules.

Chapter Three

The Legend of Saltahar
Two days passed slipped past in an eye blink. I was back in Liverpool looking for a grubby City Centre pub whose name quite escapes my memory. My nerves were back again and I half expected to bottle out of going. By some stroke of luck I found the place and then discovered that thanks to my paranoia about being late, I was actually hugely early. A cardboard sign proudly proclaiming the Mersey Fantasy Gaming Society was propped up on a chipped and yellowing radiator. An arrow on the sign pointed to an unappetising doorway and a narrow gloomy staircase. Without getting a drink from the bar (I’d a couple of cans of Pepsi in my bag for when I got thirsty … it hadn’t occurred to me that using a pub for a game night was anything but a handy gaming space!) I wandered upstairs. I reached the function room, which was really just a large open plan area beside some toilets. A small gathering of very hairy guys and one bored looking girl where already around one end of a table. A couple of them looked up at me as I entered, but nobody asked who I was or offered to introduce themself. I walked across and taking note of the character sheets, dice and boxes with bad fantasy art spilled over the tabletop, redundantly asked “Mersey Fantasy Gaming Group?”
“Yeah, sit down anywhere.” the most hairy guy said. He looked a lot like Lemmy From Motorhead. A fact I’d have found strangely comforting in any other social situation. Without pausing for breath, Lemmy went straight back to recounting a gaming anecdote. I sank onto an uncomfortable leather stool and listened to his tale. It was a fairly dull story than contained too many references to players I didn’t know so I didn’t appreciate either the humour. I did enjoy the sense of excitement that the storyteller obviously had. Everyone around the table seemed keen to share some story or other. It was my first experience of the gaming phenomenon of Glory Tales.
Glory Tales: The compulsive need that Players have for telling stories from their experience at the gaming table. These are usually recounted with the sort of passion reserved for things that happened in reality. I’ve come to relish this sport over the years and have my own Glory Tales that I will roll out and repeat given half a chance. I’ve even allowed the habit to inform the name for this ebook. One of the things I will say in defence of this pastime, though the sources of most of these tales are completely imaginary adventures created as a shared fantasy between gamers, they probably have as valid a reality as most of the tales told in any pub or by groups of people gathered anywhere. Probably a similar social mechanic is at work with most tales of sexual conquest, fishing skill or footballing prowess you overhear in pubs or where ever people gather in significant numbers. Gamers however are probably more honest in confessing they wished it happened, rather than pretend it actually did.

So I sat and listened. I was waiting for the proper moment to bring up the awkward fact that I didn’t have a character ready to play. However, nobody seemed inclined to ask me even such mundane details as I my name. I decided to do the thing I’ve always done when social situations begin to overwhelm me …I pulled out a sketchpad and commenced drawing. I got working on a shaven headed warrior priest doing something unpleasant to a dragon the size of a horse. It is probably a good time to mention how quickly I draw. While lots of artists spend days getting pictures to blossom gently into life on their paper, I am of the school of hack it in swiftly. The speed I draw scares other artists sometimes. I once took a still life class. After three weeks the teacher had to explain that I was a commercial art student and as such worked very quickly. Apparently some of the students had approached him in a slightly panicked way, seeing me drawing five or six studies while they had just completed one drawing.
In a few short minutes I’d drawn the bald warrior priest (I figured there was enough hair around the table already!) and had started on the dragon. My artistic endeavours seemed to be as ignorable as I was to the guys around the table, but the loan female gamer took an interest. Now the less kind of you might suspect this was my subtle female gamer seduction technique, but honestly it wasn’t. I really do draw when I’m nervous, helps me focus my mind away from whatever awkward social situation I‘m in. The fact it attracted Beth, as she introduced herself straight away, was a rather pleasant side effect. She asked if she could look through the rest of the drawing book, then “coo’ed” and “arrr’ed” in a delightful way through my other drawings.
“You’re really good at this!” she said “do you do it for a living?” I confessed I didn’t, but intended to once I’d finished art college. Once the social niceties were out of the way and she’d looked through my drawings, she asked if I would do a drawing of her character. She dragged a character sheet in front of me. I recognised the style of the sheet from Call of Cthulhu, roughly the same layout and similar wording. Beth’s hand writing was microscopic and very untidy. I could hardly read the notes she had filled the sheet with.
“Probably best if you tell me what she looks like.” I prompted, suspecting that this girl expected me to able to draw an illustration based on just her character sheet information. However vividly something lives in your imagination, it is quite a struggle to expect others to see it from a tatty A4 sheet of paper and copious spider like notes. [Note: She was the first to do this, but she wasn’t the last. I’ve drawn character portraits for the 30 years for a massive range of players. Some really do think I can work from just a list of stats and an equipment itinary.]
Beth commenced telling me about Sala’thar. After 20 minutes I’d got quite a good drawing taking shape in front of me. It looked something like Siouxsie Sioux from Siouxsie And the Banshees, but with a battle axe and minimal armour. All my RuneQuest dreams were coming true, here was my battle maiden … already impressed with my art skills and, dare I hope it, an actual fantasy gamer, not just someone’s girlfriend.
Yes, I really hoped she wasn’t someone’s girlfriend, I might even have offered up a quick prayer to Mithras that she was looking for a sweet natured art student gamer! Life is just that good sometimes, isn’t it?
I pulled out a set of colouring pencils and began to bring Sala’thar to life on the page. It was easily better than anything else in the drawing book I’d done before.  Never underestimate the creative power of a lovely muse and hormones! I carefully tore it out of the drawing pad and gave it to her.
“Sign it, you might be famous one day!” she insisted. I scribbled my name and a bolder soul might have included their phone number. The only numbers I had the courage to scratch alongside my name were the day’s date. My impromptu art performance had finally attracted the attention of the others around the table and while I’d been drawing more people had slunk in and sat down. One slightly less beardy and wizardy looking guy was sat on the other side of Beth. He introduced himself, but his name went into and out of my brain almost immediately. He did however have a blank character sheet and some dice. With the skill born from a person who has swallowed the Runequest rulebook completely, he drove me through the character creation process at a 100 miles per hour. I realised, with belated horror, this was our Dungeon Master and wished that I had made a mental note of his name!
By 9.00 the table was heaving with gamers, beer glasses and someone unrolled a map of a fantasy town that was staggering in it’s detail. Laid out on a huge sheet of A2 paper and appeared to contain information down to the type of rubbish found in the back yards of slums, it was amazing! The whole thing would have taken weeks to prepare. I was impressed at the dedication of the nerdy mind that had breathed life into this place.
A collection of badly painted metal miniatures were heaped together on an outline marking of an Inn. The Hydra’s Scrotum was my first imaginary pub. It was probably as comfortable as the tavern I was currently in, thirsty, but now cut off from the downstairs bar by the press of gamers between me and it. I felt sheepish about opening one of my cans of Cola since nobody else seemed to have brought their own drinks from home. I just thanked providence that I wasn’t desperate for the toilet, since the route to those also seemed blocked by gamers from the Biker Zone.
“You’re gathered en masse at the Hydra’s Scrotum!” our Dungeon Master proclaimed. “Your action in stealing the Sword of Night from the catacombs has angered the Thieves Guild. Already two of your number have been assassinated because of this.” , this prompted  grumbles from two unhappy looking players at the far end of the table.
“More reprisals have been promised unless the Sword is returned.” Rapidly it became apparent we were bottled in. The Guild of Thieves had slowly forced the party of adventurers back into the grubby corner that was The Hydra’s Scrotum. Anyone who had tried to sneak out had been ruthlessly killed and their private parts delivered back to the Inn by special messenger. I tried to be clever and suggested that since I was a new face to the party, the Thieves Guild wouldn’t know me. I could walk out like a regular customer and go for help. I thought this was a good idea, but was put in my place and informed, for the purpose of the game, I was one of those who have taken part in the original theft. I felt a bit put out by this. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I was a marked man because the Games Master said so! Well, he is the boss. Nut up or shut up as Woody Harrelson says in Zombieland.
“We’ve two options,” an overweight guy in a faded black tee shirt says. “We negotiate with them to borrow/rent the sword from them legitimately or we fight our way out. Once we’ve reached the edge of Noir Wood, we can vanish into the trees and rendezvous on the far side of IceSpike mountains.” He pointed a meaty hand to a densely drawn forest due north of the Inn. Beyond the forest was an impressive range of snow capped bumps. I liked the idea of fighting better than just renting the sword from the Guild. I’d not been here the week they had stolen the sword, so I had no vested interest in the thing or sense of accomplishment in having it in our possession, but it seemed wrong not to fight for it.
“If we fight, we fight!!!” one guy said in a voice that sounded impressive until you actually listened to what he said and realised it didn‘t really mean anything. My soul contribution to this evening had been to suggest I sneak out. This, it suddenly occurred to me, wasn’t the most impressive thing I might do in front of Beth. She was still sat beside me and in the imaginary candle light of the Inn, her hair glowed like dark brown honey. She was like a medieval Kate Bush, with slightly too much eye makeup and a battleaxe. She wouldn’t be caught dead sneaking out to fetch help. When the fight happened she would be dealing death with a grim smile on her defined elven features. I pulled out my imaginary blade and joined in with the calls for a battle to the death with the Guild.
“We need to explore all the options, no use walking into a gauntlet of Destruction. This sword is the only item that will cure King Madelinous’ son from his madness, but it is little use if we are all dead. Let us see if we can’t negotiate for a price. These thieves care for little but profit. Perhaps we can meet their demands and promise a boon from the King himself.” The overweight guy seemed to be the alpha male around the table. He called the shots and most heads nodded at his wisdom. I now felt a proper burk with my bare bodkin out, but didn’t announce I was putting it back in it’s battered leather scabbard. The evening of negotiation had begun. We sent a message out to the Thieves for their price. It returned that they would let us go for
1) the return of Sword,
2) three eyeballs from our party
3) the youngest of us to be tortured in the town square.
Since I was the new member I assumed I was “the youngest” and didn’t fancy this part of the deal, despite the fact the eyeballs couldn’t come from the one who was going to be tortured. We sent out a counter offer that included less eyeballs and a guarantee that the tortured member of the party wouldn’t actually be tortured to death. We tried to hang onto the sword as well, but increased the amount of gold we promised them in compensation.
Their demand now increased to
1) four eyeballs,
2) the sword and
3) the death of the youngest member of our party.
These thieves played hardball and it appeared they had us well and truly trapped. Overweight guy was examining the possibility there might be a tunnel system under the town that would allow us to slither through sewage and escape. I didn’t mind the idea of raw sewage, since it was fully imaginary. My only objection was, and I naturally kept it to myself, that I wouldn’t be that attractive to Battlemaidens caked in fresh effluent. The sewer plan is quickly ditched as non-starter. The diameter of the drains was tiny, meaning we would need 9 potions of polymorph self to transform us into rats. We are playing the wrong game for that magic potion to be available … and anyway, we couldn’t carry the sword in rat form either, not even if we all cooperated like a little rat army.

The tension builds, or it should have. With so many people around the table and so many rather naff plans being put forward, it is getting hard to concentrate on anything. Maybe it is just me, but I figured that games would be best elements of fantasy literature emphasised, not the dull standing around stuff. If I had been the Games Master of this dull debate-a-thon, after 30 minutes of failing to do anything, I’d have sent an burning Orc dipped in pitch into the Tavern just to stir things up a bit.
I begin to long for a burning Orc, but it doesn’t come. Instead the various strategies are re-debated and chewed over yet again. I craftily sneak out my sketchpad and begin to draw another picture. Doodling a burning Orc it is preferable to stacking my dice into a tower with the D4 as a pointy roof. Perhaps the Thieves Guild are intending to bore us to death. Various real world conversations are breaking out around the table as the roleplayers give up remaining in character as their medieval selves and begin to debate Everton’s chances at the weekend. The Dungeon Master is giving them icy looks, but who can blame them. The Alpha Male of the group, a couple of his vocal second in command types and the Dungeon Master are the only ones appearing to have any fun this evening. I suggest dipping a few of the Tavern customers in pitch, setting them on fire and sending them out into the streets as a distraction. I am asked if I have really said this “in character” … meaning, did my character really loudly announce that to the packed tavern. I respond that I whispered it as a suggestion to our party leader and I get one of those looks that says “who invited you?” from the tubby Alpha Male.
Another 30 minutes of this passes and I’m wondering about dipping myself in burning pitch (though not out loud, naturally!). Finally a plan is settled on. We will storm out into the streets, splitting up to the four compass points and all making for the nearby dark woods. The Hydra’s Scrotum bizarrely has 4 exits. The party leader and his pals (including Beth) get the north exit closest to the cover of the trees. I get the south exit with a player who has done even less than me this evening. He gives me a look of weary resignation and we move our character figures to the bottom of the tavern floor plan. The others take the East and West doorways. On the command of overweight Alpha guy we pile into the dimly lit streets and commence running. I’m hoping for the odd thief or two to hack at with my sword, but the thieves guild is not there to oblige me with some entertainment this evening. Instead a rain of arrows begins to hammer down around us. The Games Master informs us we’ve been hit and rolls for our hit location. I’m not surprised to discover an arrow has hit me right in the throat and I’m lying in pool of blood. The small party of adventurers heading north has already made it to the tree line. They get to skirmish with an improbably small band of thieves (or so it seems to the dying brain of my character) and escape into the woods. I am struggling to remember if any of the guys who ran East or West made it out of the tavern alive. It is academic, we are packing up bags, hunting down dice that may have rolled under the table and generally saying our goodnights. Beth thanks me again for the picture and leaves arm in arm with the Games Master. I suddenly understand the arrow sticking out of my character’s throat a lot clearer.
I wonder if anyone is going to ask me if I am retuning for another session, but nobody does. I get out into the street and begin wandering down toward Central Station. I walk some of the distance with a couple of the other players who are now bitching loudly about the Games Master, and favouritism. I’ve now decided this whole evening was a learning experience, mostly in how not to run a game. My dreams of exciting adventures and heroic daring are cooling in the blood leaking out of my gaping neck wound. If I had been the Games Master I’d have given all the players a chance to have their moment of glory. I had a needless and nasty death in a grubby back alley because the guy in charge had a useless plan. Well, it might have been that or it might have been I was being punished most brutally for my “dip a few tavern customers in burning pitch and send them out as distractions” comment. Or it might have been because I’d been artistically wooing the Games Master’s girlfriend. For some reason known only to the Games Master the most obvious escape route was practically unguarded. If the Thieves Guild were as red hot as we’d been led to believe, surely they would have made the area between the North Exit and the wood a brutal killing ground. Hiding archers in the woods to riddle the escaping party members with poison tipped barbs as they fought through a press of dagger wielding thieves.
I crack open a warm can of Cola and walk into the harsh neon lit train station. For a moment or two my enthusiasm for gaming has been dulled by a room filled with basically unfriendly and quite vindictive people. Who wouldn’t cut a new player a single break on his first evening with a group? Not that Games Master, obviously. If they treated all their new players with such a welcome (burning pitch comments or not!) I doubted if they hung onto anyone for long! Still, they had a group of nearly 10 players who turned up for that abuse each session. I couldn’t muster even two of my friends. If I was going to get a group going, I was going to have to much craftier than the Thieves’ Guild.

Chapter Two

THE CRYPT OF THE SORCEROR!

         Armed with my money and where to find GAME in Liverpool, I took the bus down to Hamilton Square train station and jumped aboard the first train heading under the River Mersey.
It is funny how vividly I remember taking that journey and how excited I was. The anticipation was almost the same pitch as waking up on Christmas morning like a child and discovering Santa had left you a pile of gifts. I relished the amount of involvement this game was going to need. I wouldn’t just be setting out a board, organising tokens or piling up a few cards or plastic hotels… I’d grown bored of board games years before, I’d be making a fully realised world … with people, objects, secrets and creatures. All I needed was the springboard this box would give me to add the mechanics of a game to my vision. The game world hanging in my head was already quite well realised. I could see vision different quasi-human races dwelling in cities that nestled in mist soaked mountain valleys. Ancient ruins from a time of prehistory where sub-humans guarded dangerous and bizarre technologies from crafty tomb robbers. Floating continents that drifted above the cloud line, beasts that shifted shape according to the different hues of the sun. Forbidden magics that punched doorways in space/time and immortal lords and ladies who granted access to them. It was all there and I was going to get the tools to get it out of my brain and share it with others.

I reached the Games Shop, paused reverentially for a moment, then walked inside. I’d never been in a shop 100% dedicated to games before. Racked on every wall was a staggering range of playable goodies. Traditional Chess Sets jostled for space against exotic board games. Japanese Shogi and Chinese Checkers. Go Boards with pots of white and black stones. Lots of funky American games I had never dreamed existed. Just by the door was a wall of Avalon Hill “Bookcase” games. These were simulation board games that covered a bewildering and bizarre range of ideas. Sports sims (gaming jargon for games that “simulate” an activity/event) like Golf, Tennis and American Football rubbed shoulders with restaurant management, cooking, running a South American country. I quite liked the look of a Attack of the Mutants one, but I reminded myself I was here for Dungeons and Dragons and nothing less would do. Perplexingly though I went through the racks and didn’t see a single box of D&D (as I was now learning to call it). Eventually I wandered over to the counter to ask. I mentioned that I’d been told they stocked Dungeons & Dragons, but it didn‘t look as though they “actually” did.
The clerk pointed to a gap between two displays.
“You want the cellar … be careful, the stairs are quite steep!”
For the first time I noticed this weird little entrance. It was immediately totally fitting. If you wanted to buy magical boxes filled with gateways to other realms, you ought really to descend into musty cellars and catacombs to do so. Thanking the assistant I stepped into cellar staircase. Facing me on a display shelf that hung above the stairs was a selection of Dungeons and Dragons Box sets. Not just the one I’d seen in Birkenhead, but another more colourful box. I was deeply intrigued, but saw no way to reach the display. With heart in mouth due to anticipation I descended the stairs. It was a steep and awkward climb down and twisted around sharply to the left at the bottom. This hadn’t ever been designed for customers to use … it was obviously an old store room that had been pressed into service. I didn’t care, I was here …

THE CRYPT.

Dim lights strategically placed under shelves and in corners illuminated the depths of the crypt. If upstairs had seemed overstocked and busy, downstairs trumped it by a factor I wouldn‘t even want to calculate! It truly seemed every available micro-millimetre of wall was devoted to shelving and racks. Upon these groaning shelves was a massive horde of Fantasy Games. My brain stalled, froze, rebooted itself .. then let out a internal scream of pleasure!
Completely boggled by the huge choice, I wandered in awe through the three interlocking rooms with a dry mouth and a woefully inadequate amount of money in my wallet.
Several other gamers shared this subterranean treasure house with me. They drifted past clutching at their already claimed booty. Scenarios, packs of miniatures, tiny plastic boxes of weird games from Austin Texas. Two guys were stood by the counter chatting about a Starfleet Battles game they had played the previous evening. I hovered beside them as they waxed lyrical for nearly 20 minutes about their skirmish between A Constellation Class and a couple of Klingon Cruisers. It sounded as though both of them could re-wire the Starship Enterprise if the need arose. I mentally added “Starfleet Battles” to the list of games I needed in my library.

Yes, The Mothership had landed, and I had been given the key to the Engine Room. Trouble was, I was nearly completely green. From Ian Livingstone (who I hadn’t brought with me) I had an idea what I needed to buy to begin playing, but was it going to be enough? Was the Basic Set going to cut the mustard? The Dungeons & Dragons section was huge. Four huge books of ADVANCED DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS scowled down at me. The Players Handbook, The Dungeon Masters Guide, The Monster Manual and The Fiend Folio. The entire set would cost me over £40 (massively over my tiny budget!) The walls groaned under rack after rack of adventure supplements. I felt confident that I’d be able to avoid buying those. I already had adventure ideas spilling sideways out of my brain. There were several big box collections as well, The World of Greyhawk caught my eye, but I couldn’t see the boxset that the other shop had stocked. I was getting a growing feeling of paranoia, had someone beaten me here. Was I going to be gutted, travelling all this way, been tempted by all these wonders, and then finally, as I was so close to joining this amazing hobby, be crushed cruelly by them not having the entry level boxset? What was I going to do? Ask the guy behind the counter … it would reveal that I didn’t really belong here, that I was just a noob with no more knowledge of Armour Class and Hit Points than the average joe in the street! On the other hand, if I didn’t ask I’d risk walking out of here with nothing!!!!!
Quick Reality check: Actually, lets be honest, there was no risk of walking out with nothing. I was going to buy everything in the cellar eventually. I fully intended to empty my wallet on the counter here and leave with an armload gaming materials. The question was, would it be something that would get me gaming or something that would sit on my bookcase at home taunting me with it’s inexplicable complexity. Some box of advanced rules forever unplayable because I lacked the Fantasy Gaming Rosetta Stone of the Basic Dungeons and Dragons set?
Digging deep into my rather shabby self confidence I plucked up the courage to approach the young wizard lounging behind the counter.
“Dungeons & Dragons?” I said in a low whisper, “I’d like to buy basic set.” [Yes, it sounds pathetic to my ears now as well.]
“Cool,” he said, “They just upgraded it” He reached down behind the counter and heaved a bright red box up. “New Players manual, Dungeon Masters Guide, totally rewritten, a useless wax crayon and a set of ugly blue dice” He opened the box up to show me the wondrous contents. The Blue Dice looked anything but ugly, but I felt the need to sneer along in a sense of camaraderie. It took all my self control not to fall to my knees in worship at the splendour of the red box. Years later, watching PULP FICTION, when John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson open the suitcase belonging to Crime Boss Marsellus Wallace, I knew what was creating that mysterious golden glow! It was the Players Manual, Dungeon Masters Guide, wax crayon and set of Ugly Blue Polyhedron Dice.
“This will get me going?” I whispered.
“Yeah, but you’ll be back here in a week to buy the big three though.” He gestured at the wall display with the Advanced D & D books. I nodded in agreement, though I couldn’t see me finding £30 in a week’s time. I was also naively convinced that the Red Box would contain everything I needed. He reached down and pulled up a shrink wrapped box up.
“Want this one then?” he said.
“Yes please!” I chortled, heaving the cash out of my pocket and doing my level best not to drool as he rang in the cost on an ancient cash register.
Now the game was How Long Can I Resist Ripping Open the shrink wrap. I had a 10 minute walk back the train station, but I knew I wouldn’t make it that far. I hadn’t wanted to break down in the shop and begin reading. I had already confessed my newbie status to the guy behind the counter, I didn’t want to advertise it to all the other shopping trolls by gibbering over my Beginners Level booklets.
In the end I made it as far as Williamson Square. I dumped the
shredded shrink wrap in a litter bin. [Confession: My memory is a little hazy here, I might actually have eaten the shrink wrap in my excitement!] I sat down and read. It didn’t take long before the rules were asking me to make notes and roll dice. Did I really want to start playing in the middle of Liverpool City Centre? Not really. Flicking ahead in the book seemed a bit pointless as well, so I reluctantly returned the books and dice to the box. With a grumble I stashed them back in the carrier bag and trudged on towards Central Station. A few minutes later I was standing on the platform waiting for the Wirral train. Nowadays Merseyrail has overhead displays telling you how many minutes away the train is, back then I was clueless, so I couldn’t resist getting the box out again and looking at the books. I reread the Preface and How To Use This Book section before the train hissed into the station. While riding back I split the plastic bag containing the dice and rolled them around in the box a bit.  I also dared skip ahead and look in the Dungeon Master’s Guide …delighting at lists of Map Keys and treasure tables. By the time I was riding the bus home I was in serious danger of missing my stop completely. I’d played through the mini introductory adventure (skipping the dice rolling part) and understood the basics of the game. I got off in Greasby, cursing my village that it didn’t contain a photocopy shop, where I might get multiple copies of the character sheet. I wanted to create a range of characters and didn’t relish having to waste time copying all the various categories off the back of the player’s book.

        The next few days were filled with the joy of discovery. On the one hand I quickly discovered the limitations of the game. It was set in a totally vanilla fantasy universe. The basic set hinted at nothing that hadn’t been filleted straight out of the standard Tolkien format fantasy. I know this may sound like Fantasy Heresy, but I was never the Pipe Smoking Professor’s biggest fan. I read The Lord of the Rings back during my school days. I’d enjoyed it well enough but in all honesty found it overlong, ponderous and lacking in epic feel. I’d been spoiled by discovering the worlds of Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock previously. These authors combined all of Tolkien’s world making wonder with a solid grasp of good storytelling and brevity. Moorcock had a deft touch with characters that made Tolkien’s bland bunch of farmers and hobbits seem the most boring fellowship to ever try and destroy a ring. Robert E Howard seemed to have an instinctive grasp of action and his characters were larger than life superheroes. After breathlessly scrambling through a crumbling citadel with Conan, trudging along after some hobbits moaning about missing lunch makes one wish for a black rune blade to shorten the quest a little. I was disappointed that the D&D game seemed to have taken its inspiration from the rather too flavourless potatoes and boiled vegetables of Tolkein’s world, than the spicy and pungent universes of Fritz Leiber, Moorcock and CL Moore. Still, it wasn’t anything I couldn’t change, expand and improve on. The rules cautioned restraint in adding elements to the game, Ian Livingstone said “go for it” .. guess whose advice I was going to take!
On the positive side, it was ridiculously easy to play. Given the basic set and the principles it laid out, it was a breeze to create almost endless streams of things, creatures and places. I didn’t see why anyone with a shred of creativity would need to buy another product.
Confession: I was in denial at this point. While I could clearly see that given some time and enough blank paper I could create a game that was massively better than this one, I was fighting a losing battle with my willpower not to scurry back to the Game Shop and explore some of those other games.
I was also trapped in a dilemma. Dungeons & Dragons is a social game. It is played with friends around a table … interacting and combining their strengths to overcome epic evils and towering odds. My friends were completely disinterested in undertaking imaginary adventures or fighting evil I’d dreamed up in my bedroom. I’d got one friend vaguely interested and another who had told me in no uncertain terms he would “do me a favour” and join in if he had to. Nobody really shared my slightly wonky passion for this hobby. My friend in art college hadn’t got back to me about joining his brother’s gaming group … I suspected it was a no, but he felt awkward telling me this.
 My only options at this stage were
1) advertise on the notice board in GAME LIVERPOOL for players (and include a confession that their Dungeon Master had never played before!)
OR
2) look around for an established group locally that would accept a totally inexperienced player.
Neither option really filled me with joy. I was a shy sort of person who didn’t make friends that easily. The idea of joining a room full of strangers made me feel vaguely ill at ease. However I wasn’t converting any of my existing friends to the Church of Polyhedron Dice so I bit the bullet. Armed with a pencil and paper I returned to Game in Liverpool to scribble down some phone numbers from their notice board.
It was here that I discovered a curious and previously unknown thing. Despite D&D being the biggest roleplaying game out there and GAME Stocking a truly awesome amount of gaming produce relating to it, very few of the groups advertising on the board listed D&D. In a hobby so very young as this, a sort of gaming snobbery seemed to be operating in fact. Several of the notices had “NO TSR PLAYERS PLEASE” or “D&D is NOT PLAYED” … instead a bewildering array of games I hadn’t bought yet were listed. Runequest, Traveller, Champions, Call of Cthulhu, Tunnels and Trolls. I didn’t really know any of these, aside from what Ian Livingstone had listed in DICING WITH DRAGONS, so I had a quick stalk back to the racks in the shop fill in the blanks.

Runequest appeared to be another just Fantasy Game, though this one had a scantily armoured female warrior on the boxlid. She was keeping at bay a really naff looking creature. It seemed to be chewing through her shield, but she held a glowing sword that suspiciously looked magical. I’d read quite a bit about Runequest in DICING WITH DRAGONS, but hadn’t been that excited by the description. The box artwork was helping to convert that initial reluctance into a more positive warm feeling. I marked down “Runequest” on my pad and added a smiley face.

Traveller: Science Fiction Roleplaying. Truth to tell I’d always been a bigger Science Fiction fan than fantasy geek in my reading choices. However, Traveller just overwhelming struck me as a boring game. The covers of the books were all black with neat little lines. Now boring graphics doesn’t mean boring game, but flicking through the books in the shop it looked as though someone had sat down with a mound of science fiction and distilled out all the dreary bits to create a game. I’d yawned my way through the description in Dicing With Dragons and nothing on the rack in GAME was doing anything to change my initial feeling. Confession: Maybe a semi-naked female astronaut with a blaster facing down a monster would have stirred something in my imagination(libido). As it was, I didn’t relish being trapped around a table with a bunch of nerds worrying about the imaginary engines failing as we circled an imaginary planet. I wasn’t quite ready to buy and wear that tee-shirt, not yet!

Champions: Superhero roleplaying. The Notice Board had quite a few requests for Champions players, but for some reason they listed the Champions books you needed to own and many of them requested “Experienced Gamers Only” … all of which put me off, though the idea of imaging running around in lycra catsuit through some crime riddled city was weirdly attractive. I marked it down as a definite future purchase, but didn’t take any contact details for groups.

Call of Cthulhu. Based on the weird fiction of HP Lovecraft. I’d been a fan of Lovecraft’s strange little tales when I discovered them in the late 70’s. I wasn’t aware of the Cthulhu Mythos as a driving concept though. I’d not figured out that many of the creatures and themes reoccurred in the stories and formed a sort of universe of difficult to pronounce horror. Later on, thanks in large part to the success of the game, the books would be rebranded and released with Cthulhu themes. With my knowledge of the stories I doubted a good game could be created from it, unless the players enjoyed darkness, corpse filled caverns, being torn apart by creatures from beyond time and space and having their brains fitted into metal cylinders. There didn’t seem a lot of “heroic” possibility in the idea. I did make a note of it and marked it down to “Buy” .. if only just to see how on earth they could make a game out of it.

Tunnels and Trolls: Yet another Fantasy game, but this one I recalled from Dicing With Dragons because of the solo game aspect. The game designer had catered for the nerdy player who couldn’t muster a few friends to share adventures by publishing a line of solo quest books. These were like the solo game in the basic D&D Players book, but far more complex, funny and challenging I later discovered. The notice board had quite a few T&T groups listed. They attracted me because the T&T groups had illustrated their adverts with goofy little cartoons or drawings. This was something I’d have done. I scribbled down a few phone numbers and wrote T&T next to them.

Most of the remaining adverts seemed to be for tabletop war gamers. Either that or I didn’t recognise the games listed as Roleplaying ones.

With a wistful glance around the cellar I departed, this was bizarrely the one occasion I didn’t buy something from GAME. It felt wrong and somewhat disloyal not to be adding something to my fledgling library, but money was tight and I had other fantasy fish that needed frying.

Chapter One: The Path to Sala'Thar

GLORY TALES
Or
Zen and the art of Dungeon Mastering.
By Neal Burton
30 Odd Years of Fantasy Roleplaying Games
by the Creator of the REALITY RIDERS Game.

Afore we begin…

The proceeding blog is part memoir, part travelogue, part game, part philosophical blockbuster, part mystery and part celebration.
Like most of the best things in life it probably defies fitting into a neat category. Much in the same fashion that School meals slithered past the classification of food and nutrition back in the 70’s!
(Naturally the proceeding blog will attempt to make a liar out of me ... Especially the part about being a Philosophical Blockbuster.)

The names of the guilty and innocent have been changed on most occasions to protect their identity. In other cases I have left the plain ugly truth in full sight so the people in question can have a good laugh without having to wonder “Was that really me??”

I don’t regret many of the moments I spent on my chosen hobby. Spending time with friends doing things you love is probably the best way to spend the leisure time we often take for granted in the effluent Western World. When I have regretted those moments, I’ve tried to use humour (my first choice as a defence mechanism) to play those moments up and have recorded them here for your amusement.
Whether you are laughing at me, or with me, I can’t know. Please remember, from the outside, and to a disinterested observer, all hobbies seem a touch pointless and bizarre.

Chapter One

THE PATH TO SALA’THAR.

Welcome to my world, it is a world of imaginary dragons, dusty catacombs and meeting nearly every week with friends to play an addictive “lets pretend” game for nearly the last 30 years.
Fantasy games lurched weirdly into my life during the period of the early 1980’s. By my nature and my dodgy inclinations, I was always going to attracted by their lure of Roleplaying Gaming. The delay in time between me not being a Fantasy Gamer and being a fully fledged dice rolling dungeon fiend was really measured in how long it took the hobby to move across the ocean from America to the misty shores of Merseyside.

At the start of my story I am a fuzzy haired Art Student gaining an almost useless diploma in “Visual Communication” at an old gothic art school in the North of England. I was a dedicated and enthusiastic student of Art and Design, but my expectations for art school had been cruelly crushed on the first day when I discovered that far from being the last bastion of bohemian eccentrics and arty beat poets, the place was almost universally filled with clean cut and quite trendy looking young adults.
Before I started Art School I had this impression that I’d be painting swirling psychedelic landscapes through lavender shaded glasses while The Grateful Dead wafted out of battered tape machine in the corner of a large room covered in posters by Rick Griffin. This vision was not to be realised. Instead I discovered I’d been swallowed whole by a business known by the grand name of The Wirral Metropolitan College.
This was a very organized, if a bit clueless, system for turning artistically inclined individuals into “skills enabled” graphic design /illustration communicators. Even in those early days of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain the petty bureaucrats had taken over and were putting their unhelpful stamp on things they didn’t understand. We had a new vocabulary to learn and new games to play … and the actual work of learning how to be an illustrator/designer/artist had to be filtered through approved and validated systems.
It was my first experience of the now pervasive habit of dressing up things with impressive sounding wordage.

If I had known this vile habit with words was going to take over the world, I’d like to think I’d probably have flung myself into the oily dark waters of the River Mersey back then. (Side Note: You may detect a trace of the overdramatic in me. This honestly hasn’t hurt my roleplaying at all over the years!)

If I am painting anything at the moment, it is the impression that I imagined myself the slightly lefty bohemian arty sort. I fitted into that certain stereotype you might have found in many art school’s of the 70’s … shoulder length mop of hair, John Lennon glasses, duffle coat with CND patch and various badges on it (the more obscure the band, the better … for reasons any alienated social misfit will instantly understand!) a collection of various tee-shirts and sweatshirts intentionally chosen to be as far away from trendy as I could get. My record collection was a mish mash of folksy psychedelic rock, I played the bass guitar and “sang” in a band called THE RIDERS OF DISCORD. My room (I couldn’t afford to move out of my parent’s house at the time) was filled with more Science Fiction and Fantasy books than could be comfortably accommodated.
(Side Note 2: Over the years some of these details have changed. Distressingly few of them if you ask my friends and family!)

Picture this, bookcases fill almost all the walls. Boxes of books also fill under the bed space, stacked up on the floor in teetering piles, and stuffed into the remaining loft space. I’d been reading and collecting books voraciously since my early teens. I knew every secondhand bookshop, market stall and charity shop on the Wirral. I also haunted the “Withdrawn from Stock” section at the local libraries. Back in those days a book had to be seriously damaged to be withdrawn … but I remember carefully scraping an amount of scrambled egg from the inside pages of a Frank Herbert hardback before buying it for 20p to add it to my collection.

Lurking amongst my vast personal library were a few books in the Endless Quests Series from the American company TSR. These were the guys from the distant and exotically sounding “LAKE GENEVA, Wisconsin” who produced the Dungeons & Dragons game. The Endless Quests books were a hybrid of regular story, but you also had the option to guide the character in the story via a set of programmed choices you could select following most paragraphs. This probably makes it sound more impressive than it was in reality. The books were slim and quite limited in their scope; certainly the phrase “ENDLESS QUEST” seems to have been a bit misplaced. With a combination of good guessing and keeping your finger tucked into the previous page, you could hammer through one in a matter of a couple of hours. However they gave me a passion for getting my fingers dipped into true fantasy gaming.

I’d seen Dungeons & Dragons the game in a shop not far from the art college and had been intrigued by it. Trouble was, it was shrink wrapped in plastic and I wasn‘t able to trawl through the contents.
The back of the box promised…
“wandering through dark dungeons, meet strange wizards, and battle ferocious dragons. Playing a D&D game is like writing a novel with each player contributing a part.”
The text was accompanied by a photograph that appeared to show three booklets, some funny shaped dice and a pen. I wasn’t sure how this collection of books (there were only two … to make it appear better value a reproduction the box lid was included in the photograph!) dice and a pen would be able to achieve this bold promise. The price was the off putting part, it was nearly ten pounds, if my memory isn’t playing tricks on me! (It is playing tricks. Just found a magazine from that year and an advert listing the shop price of £8.95)

I fell into a curious habit of calling into the shop, picking the box up, reading the blurb on the rear …then I’d give it a shake and put it wistfully back on the shelf. It seemed like something I would really enjoy. Certainly wider in scope that the Endless Quests Books, which quickly became frustrating to play as the choices presented to you often were limited and quite unimaginative.

After a few months, when I’d done the ritual of the Game Shop and shaking the box several times too many, I happened to mention Dungeons & Dragons over a lunch break in college. A couple of the guys on my course had heard of it and one of them confessed that he had been playing D & D with his brother. I immediately pressed him for details of what it was like! He described roughly how the game worked and told me intriguing tales of adventure inside his brother’s home designed Dungeon. I found the ideas a bit more bizarre than I’d imagined they would be. The dungeons appeared filled with room sized microwave ovens, huge red fish and riddling dwarves. His antics and his brother‘s creativity had me laughing, and I begged to be invited to one of his sessions. He promised to check with his brother (The Dungeon Master) if this was okay.
In the meantime I vowed to put enough of my tiny grant money aside to buy the box set. Strange to think this was actually quite an undertaking. I got such a tiny piddly amount of money to fund my college attendance and nearly all of this was eaten up with art materials and the cost of commuting to College each day. As was previously mentioned, my reading habit was budgeted in at ex-library books filled with dried on breakfast items inside them! However such was my growing obsession with finding out what was in that box and what possible words could spawn these imaginary worlds, I found myself scraping together money, trading in records and hitting my dwindling savings account for the money. With cash in hand I boldly quested to the shop to buy claim the box I had rattled so many times. However when I reached Birkenhead and the Department store with the Games Section (Beaties, now sadly defunct), the game in question had been sold. I felt massively betrayed. I had already considered that game was mine through sheer amount of attention I’d lavished on it.
Though the shop did stock some other fantasy games, at that moment I was so focused on getting Dungeons & Dragons, that it did not even occur to me that other games was an option. Luckily a helpful assistant behind the counter came to my rescue. He told me about a shop across the water in Liverpool called … da darrrrr … “GAMES Of Liverpool”
It was easy to find, being located by the tunnel entrance. I was assured that their stock was far superior and I would have no trouble getting a starter box set there. He also recommending getting a book called “Dicing With Dragons” by Ian Livingstone. The local WH SMITH (only chain bookstore in our 1980’s high street) stocked it. This bookstore (combination travel agent, record shop, newsagent)was on my route back to college. This book had a game inside it that was playable with regular dice, a full overview of the field and lots of helpful advice that wasn’t in the core D&D books. This tome of wonders was also only four quid, he said, and I’d be much better off reading it before I decided on the game I wanted to invest in.
It has to be acknowledged that this was the best piece of gaming advice I received in my whole career as a gamer. I thanked the man, then took off speedily toward the bookshop. My goal was an oversized paperback in a heavy cardstock cover. The photograph on the cover was a tabletop layout with metal miniatures and cardboard dungeon map tiles. It looked amazing … and a quick glance inside confirmed the presence of the solo game I’d been promised. Unlike the Endless Quest game books, this required you to create a character, roll dice and match more than just blind chance to win out. I trolled back toward college with this book tucked in one hand and a song in my heart (probably Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from the last movement of the 9th Symphony)
I wanted to sit down and read it there and then, but my lunch “hour” was rapidly fading away and I had lectures all afternoon.
College was a pain, an unwelcome distraction from devouring Dicing With Dragons. It sat on top of my book bag, luring my eyes to it whenever the tutor appeared to be droning off topic and getting as distracted as I was. Eventually I grew bold enough to casually reach down and flip a few pages. I was possibly the worst student in the world that afternoon. I believed I’d been handed the key to a fantastic new universe, but was obligated to absorb a slab of information on advertising design theory instead.
After an eternity of waffling the lecture finally reached coffee break and I grabbed the book up onto the table. For 20 minutes I poured through descriptions of games, ways to play them, and intriguing lists of extras to enhance the game experience. I cursed myself for not having the foresight to have bought some 6 sided dice from the games shop. Right now I could have been playing the Dragon’s Eye solo game.
I began making an exhaustive list of things I would need to start gaming, then the lecturer wandered back in from his coffee and we were hauled screaming back into design theory again.

Over the next few days I devoured the book cover to cover. Played the solo game so many times I had it nearly memorized. I carefully read through the descriptions of the games and “modules” available. Absorbed the guru like advice of Ian Livingstone on multiple aspects of fantasy game theory. I also laid the groundwork of getting my friends involved in a new gaming group. To my surprise they appeared less than impressed with the notion. Looking back I suspect I might have come across as slightly wild eyed and manic about this new love in my life, like a cult convert trying to peddle his weird new religion.
I also started designing my own game system, despite the gulf in my knowledge and never having read or played any of the available games on the market. Designing a game from scratch didn’t strike me as overly ambitious at all, Ian Livingstone’s book was empowering stuff. He made you feel it was all possible (and it was!).
Eventually I had read that list of Available games just too many times and it was time to change fantasy into reality. I decided it was about time to actually own one. Dungeons and Dragons was still my first choice and I knew where to go.