Kingdoms of Kalamar

Since not enough people seemingly know about this, I'm bringing it up here and doing my little bit to schill for the Kenzer guys. The Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting is something that I think should be more popular than it is today. In my view, this is a setting that learned all of the best lessons of Greyhawk and The Forgotten Realms and produced one of the best campaign settings for sale today. And yes, I'm a great fan of it, why do you ask?

Since Dave can say it better than I can, I present you with his own words on the matter.

From my perspective, what draws me the most about it, is simply the campaign setting book. It's a mark of its quality, I think, that I can open the book to just about any page at random and pick out at least a dozen adventure ideas and long term campaign plans. Liberating the dwarf stronghold Karasta, recently conquered by the resurgent Kalamaran Empire of the Vast. Fighting the slavers and priests of the Overlord of Pel Brolenon, a city where more than 75% of the population is in bondage. Exploring the remains of Kolokar's Barrier, a great wall built to hold back the invading barbarians. There's just so much in every page that, frankly, I actually get giddy with ideas for running a game in this world, and that's what it is, a world. It's not just a campaign setting, it's a fully realized world in so many ways.

The greatest aspect is, in my view, that just about any adventure type is supported. Political and cultural adventure types are the setting's forte for sure, but at the same time, it's easy to shove that into the background and just hurl oneself into dungeon crawling and monster slaying. God killing? Yeah, you can do that.

I recommend it to all the Old Schoolers, Middle Schoolers, and New Schoolers out there that the CS is worth a look, even if you only pick up the PDF copy of the campaign setting and Atlas (currently with 4e mechanics in it, but so few you could count the instances on one hand and still have fingers left over), or grab a used copy of the book from Amazon or NobleKnight. It's definately worth your time.

And now, I'll refrain from further shameless displays of fanboyism.

Bernard Gui Was Lawful Good

James Raggi over at LotFP has put up a series of articles over the last week about alignment. Here's the latest in the series. What's interesting is that the articles are not the standard dithering over defining what Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil really mean as if the definitions in the books weren't already clear, but about larger, farther reaching ramifications, such as what a being of evil incarnate might be like when the evils perpetrated by ordinary humans (even in the name of good) are so heinous as to turn your stomach. A demon or devil, even a relatively low level example, would be evil on a level unknown to lowly humans.

I wanted to get into some of the smaller, closer to home aspects of alignment. How a normal mortal might operate within the framework of the nine-point dual axis (i.e., AD&D alignment system) alignment codification and still break from a 1970's conception of right and wrong and morality: which is not to say anything disparaging against such conceptions, merely that good and evil within the framework of D&D seem to be largely judged from the paradigm of a 1970's educated man, which makes perfect sense since it was written and largely written for 1970's educated men.

My first object lesson is Bernardo Gui, born 1261, died 1331, and arguably the most famous member of the Medieval Inquisition (as VERY distinct from the infamous Spanish Inquisition which he had absolutely nothing to do with). It's remarkable how few people know Bernardo outside of the near caricature by F. Murray Abraham and Umberto Ecco in The Name of the Rose: you see, Umberto disliked the Church in general and the Inquisition in particular and it bled into his writing (which I'm sure he'll be the first to tell you is open to the audience's interpretation) and when the movie was created, it was decided that there was a need for a stronger antagonist than an old monk who hated laughter during the climax, thus was born the enhanced antagonism of Abraham's Gui.

In reality, the man quite literally wrote the book on how the Papal Inquisition was supposed to conduct and comport itself as well as its overall purpose: Practica Inquisitionis Heretice Pravitatis or "Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Wickedness." The work discusses the purpose of the Inquisition, describes its "targets" (including a very good description of the Cathars and why they are designated heretical by the Church of the time), and the methodology of accusations, interrogation, indictment, and punishment by members of the Inquisition. Gui did, indeed, advise the use of torture as a method to extract information from accused persons, an act that almost anybody in the Western World would consider irredeemably evil. During his tenure in this position, Gui obtained about 900 convictions, but only turned over a mere 42 to the state for execution. He was very reticent to see the people brought before him executed arguing convincingly that such would be considered a failure of one of the most important purposes of the Inquisition: the detection and rehabilitation of those persons who had strayed from the "correct" teachings of the Church. More common and preferred forms of punishment and rehabilitative therapy included pennance, joining an aesthetic monastic order for a time, a long pilgrimage, flogging, or simply time in the stocks. Killing somebody in this situation would be effectively damning them to hell, something that was to be strenuously avoided as the Church truly believed itself to be in the business of helping to save souls, not condemning them. Thus, execution was reserved for only the most vile and unrepentant heretics.

In the end, and within the context of his historical setting, I would argue that Bernardo Gui would fit in well within the Lawful Good alignment, despite what we would view as reprehensibly evil methods, much of which could be attributed to a Medieval sense of jurisprudence really. Which brings me to my point, at last; while it's certainly great to play D&D within the moral framework of modern folk, there's a lot to be said about opening up to a different moral paradigm. To continue within our example of the Inquisition, how would the players themselves interact with such a person? Upon realizing that torture was being used as a method to seek out and identify heretics (or, perhaps, slightly easier on our modern sensibilities, hidden evil moles), what would the party's attendant Paladin do? The party may be asked to perform tasks for such an inquisition and to abide by its regulations.

Travelling this way is difficult to do without getting hokey and over simplified, but done right, it challenges more than just the technical and role playing skills of the players, it challenges the players themselves. A little narativist in a way? Sure, but even the oldest and grognardiest of games can benefit from some of the better lessons of the White Wolf and Hickman/Weiss revolutions. Dealing with good and evil on a more than just lip service level, forcing players to confront some of their own personal demons within the game, is, in my opinion of course, one of those good lessons. It's another layer of challenge beyond disarming traps, killing monsters with clever tactics, and hauling treasure out from under the nose of a sleeping dragon. How, as a player of a Lawful Good character, do you work within a game world where not only is slavery and martial interrogation (torture) are not only accepted and acceptable functions of society, but are so widespread as to be near universal?

Dave Arneson

Well, the news is official this time, and it's certainly sad. There are already a number of tributes to the man and his work sprouting up across the blogs and other spots in the web. I won't bother linking to them since you'll be able to find them easily enough and they'll all have done a better job at commemorating the man than I ever could.

I'm only taking a brief moment here to give a nod to one of the co-creators of the game that we all enjoy, whose creative style and sensibilities meshed well enough with Mr. Gygax's to create something that - little were they aware, I am sure - would become a cultural phenomenon spanning the globe and spawning several multi-million dollar industries and created a household name that even the uninitiated recognized and understood.

I will note that, likely due to my age, I never used Blackmoor or the First Fantasy Campaign or really anything that was distinctly Arneson's, and I don't think I'm alone in this. There is currently an entire generation of gamers who recognize Arneson only as a name written briefly in the front of their PHB's and to whom they have no more solid or tangible connection than they do to the other roots of the game they play. Dave Arneson is "just another name" really, and that's a very sad thing.

In any case, I offer my salute today to one of the two men who helped give us a new way to play cowboys and indians, and who talked to us like we were adults no matter what.

Media Influences: 8 Months Late

About eight months ago, Lamentations of the Flame Princess issued a challenge to list the primary, secondary, or just any influences on one's home game and gaming style. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Old School Community's response, though varied to be sure, generally seemed to draw from the same genres at least, or from the same general area. James over at Grognardia seemed to be rather emblematic of the general mood and response.

Before people pull out their ropes, torches and pitchforks, let me state unequivocally that I'm not in any way denigrating this, merely commenting on it as a curiosity since, from my perspective, most of the authors that are cited are simply not influential to me at all. Whether this is because of age (I'm definately too young to have caught the first wave of D&D and, despite their presence in the DMG Appendix N, have only just now started to investigate those strange books that Mr. Gygax put down as suggested reading) or simply the focus on a different vein of Fantasy, I just never caught the Pulp Fiction Fever. To me, Conan always was, and mostly likely always will be, an Austrian bodybuilder with a thick accent.

Going through it all, it's pretty clear that, though closer to the Old School than the New, my generation of gamers really doesn't fit there either. We're still the new kids who, if we promise to behave, get to sit at the table and play the cleric NPC and cast healing spells when told to.* We grew up with Tolkien as the core of the fantasy genre rather than Leiber or Howard, though they were still interesting enough to grab from the dime store if we saw them (I, for some odd reason, never did). We didn't have Hammer Films. As a matter of fact, most people I knew at the time considered such films hokey and silly. Instead, we got loaded with films like "Lady Hawk" and "DragonSlayer": both of which I watched so often I about wore the VHS tapes out. Not only that, I grew up a second generation Trekkie, who thought that the original series was plainly inferior than Jean Luc Picard's sofistication and obvious competence right up until I was 16 and learned exactly what made Kirk so damnably cool. I never even heard of HP Lovecraft until I was 20.

All together, it seemed strange to me that people repeated again and again that D&D had little to do with Tolkien and would I please put away such childish notions. Clearly they were out of their minds. It had halflings and ents and dwarves and elves and practically shouted out Middle Earth in a hundred different ways! I'm sure there are any number of gamers today who can say the same thing.

Where is this all going, except on some twisted journey through the dark and cobwebby corridors of my brain? Well, World of Thool seemed to pick this up and take it that one extra step and use the same idea of listing influences, but applying them to a speciric campaign. The literary influences of a campaign world, the germinating kernels that would grow up into the deliberately wierd world of Thool. That's an excellent place to start.

So I present unto you, the faintly interested and most likely bored by now, the inspirational kernels of what will grow into the World of Thylia:

1. Goerge Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire: I have an almost indecent appreciation for these books. In so many ways, Martin's Westeros embodies almost everything that I love about fantasy and jettisons from it so much that has become stereotypical that I practically gush over at least the first book Game of Thrones. Intricate, but not absurdly complicated plots. A focus on the gritty and realistic point of view that has little of the "Dark Lord on his Dark Throne in the Land of Shadows wherefrom the Legions of Evil issue forth . . ." that gets repeated over and over again by people trying to imitate Tolkien. Real characters rather than token symbolic characters. I would love it if my NPC's could even approach this level. Most of all, Martin appears to be the undisputed master of what I call "Normal Fantasy." The wierd, strange, and mystifying is there, but it feels normal or it creeps in at the edges of the book's conciousness. By the time that the fantastic begins to show up, it never really feels fantastic, which is to me a great acheivment. Assimov's greatest statement concerned the writing of Science Fiction. He said that a good author only asks his audience to believe one unbelievable thing, and that the rest had better be rooted in the familiar and comfortable bounds of life.

2. Tolkien: Of course The Professor is on this list, and for obvious reasons. The man didn't just write an engaging and fascinating story that, apparantly, has outsold the Bible, he wrote a mythology for his modern age. A trite statement by now, I'm sure, but no less pertinent. One of my clearest memories today, and one that makes me chuckle again and again, is thinking at the tender age of 10 or 12 that "Tolkien got it right!" when I read The Hobbit and came to the passages concerning Smaug. Tolkien got it right because, of course, because his dragon guarded a great horde of stolen riches and, according to the illustrated version I was reading at the time, had red scales. Obviously this man had read D&D!

3. HP Lovecraft and other Wierd Tales: Though I will always push toward a "Normal Fantasy" setting, I will always adore the idea of unknowable and likely malign strangeness gnawing at the edges and roots of the world. Somewhere in the dark, the forests, the mountains, or locked deep within the ice, Things that predate this world and reality lurk still, just waiting for the brave and foolhardy to come looking for them.

4. Pulp Fiction: I will state flat out that I am not a fan of the likes of Moorcock (always felt that he was trying too hard to be "not Tolkien" to me), Leiber, and their crowd. They're just not my thing, I suppose. However, I do love the thought behind some of them, especially the innate curiosity that drives them and the characters in them to go out and explore, loot, and pillage the world around them. The original inception of the restless and adventursome individuals who are never satisfied with living in West Podunk in the Great Kingdom as a blacksmith or carpenter. The one's just looking for the excuse to pack up and move on to the next interesting thing. D&D adventurers exactly.

5. Vance's Dying Earth: This I'm pulling out of number four for special attention. It's not so much the stories themselves. Like the other Pulp Fiction mainstays, I could just never get into them. The concept of the old and dying world, on the other hand, is deeply alluring. History throughout the world so old that it was forgotten by civilizations that were themselves forgotten ten thousand years ago.

6. Dragonslayer: Not so much for the story, but for the sets and filming locations. That, right there, is what Tylia looks like, except warmer. Just drop a glacier in the background and there you go. Dingy, cold, downright unpleasant at times, danger lurking just beyond the walls.

7. DragonLance: No matter how much I hate the fact, the DragonLance novels will always be an influence on me. I grew up with them and, for a time even, they were the yard stick against which even Tolkien was measured. For a long time, it was the embodiment of bog standard D&D in my eyes. Knights in shining armor riding around on dragons. Beautiful (obviously blonde and bouxom) elf women. Irrascible dwarves who most obviously spoke with a Scottish accent. Fighting the evil gods. And so on. As much as I'd love to just sever those books from the gaming hemisphere of my brain, it'll never happen.

8. Beowulf: Really all Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the Icelandic sagas, and for that matter most other epics, but Beowulf will always wear the crown here. The story of a hero, and so much of the untold story as well (such as the details of the Finn Fragments, and the story of the people who build the dragon's barrow) are evocative. Another that get's special mention is The Wyf's Lament, but that's for another post entirely. Norse, British, and Germanic legend as put down in these works will become a strong influence in Thylia.

There are more, of course, but for now, these are the basics.


*Yes, my very first experience in D&D was exactly that. It took me all of 1 hour to locate the spell descriptions for the claric in the PHB and six seconds later I declared defiantly that Bob the Cleric would be memorizing "Sanctuary" instead of "Cure Light Wounds" and if the party thief didn't like it, he could suck it.