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.
No comments:
Post a Comment