Let the players play! MWFs in old time modules

I have a longstanding beef with modules that have some rule written into them that forbids the players from learning important information or performing certain actions that they might otherwise reasonably have a chance of learning/doing. I call that a Module Writers Fiat (MWF). Did Sir Gary Gygaxalot ever include one in his modules? Not that I'm aware of, but here are some old timey modges that did incorporate MWFs:

A1--Slave Pits of the Undercity 

There is an MWF proclaiming that the PCs are not allowed to figure out how to operate the firewagon in the courtyard of the slaver temple. Killjoy.

A3--Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords

The informants in Suderheim that dole out cryptic clues for finding the entrance to the slaver lair will not provide any further assistance beyond repeating their single line of dialog, even though it would certainly help the cause if they would just say "Go to the White Knight Tavern on the Bowery at 4th Street and ask for Phebe."

L1--Secret of Bone Hill

Tales from the rumor table are
only known by NPCs of Level, so the regular townsfolk will have no information to provide even though many of the rumors on the list are pretty prosaic and seem like exactly the kind of gossip you might catch from chatting with the locals at the tavern. 

N1--Against the Cult of the Reptile God

The elves hired by the mayor are not allowed to help the PCs, instead insisting on working alone to stop the Cult. There's no way that two low-level elves are going to do jack squat against the cult on their own. It's not like two freakin' elves are going to tip the balance of power too far in the party's favor if that's the MW's concern--which it obviously wasn't since there is a 7th level MU in town who the PCs are expected to befriend if they want any chance of succeeding at this modge. 

X3--Curse of Xanathon  

This turkey has at least two MWFs. 1) Similar to A3 above, once they've dropped their cryptic clues, neither the dwarf nor the High Priest/Beggar will elaborate on their knowledge regarding the goings on at the Ducal Barracks, even though getting the PCs to investigate the barracks is absolutely essential to the continued play of the module. 2) PCs are not allowed to find the secret door to Xanathon's lab until after they return from the mountains with his soul in a jar. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there were three or four more MWFs to be found in this one.

U1--Super Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh

PCs are not allowed to find out why the Persons of Lizardliness are on the smugglers ship at the end of the module, and for good reason: that knowledge would decrease sales of the sequel module!

Interestingly, the sequel in question--U2 Diabolical Danger at Dunwater--does not have an MWF preventing PCs from entering the Lizard Lair through the front door even though this could immediately upend the adventure. Presumably this is because you've already bought the modge; whether you actually play it or not is irrelevant. 

What U2 has instead is a practical design feature making the front entrance unlikely to be used: you have to swim to use it. No second level party is going to want to swim their way into a cave full of lizardmen. Or women. Practical Design Features (PDFs?) are always a better choice than MWFs. 

Greatest Hommlet Blog Post of All Time and Space

While this blog isn't exclusively a Hommlet hagiography, I have certainly written more words about it than any other single topic. And while I am far too humble (and attractive) to claim that any of my posts are the best blog post on the topic, I have identified the single greatest blog post about Hommlet--and it was not even written by a blogger. Rather, it wasn't written on that writer's blog, it was posted in the comments section of the old UnderDark Gazette.

Remember the UnderDark Gazette? Precursor to Dreams of Mythic Fantasy by the late (yes, sadly) James Smith? Remember when ScottsZ usurped James's Hommlet post with a lengthy dissection of  The Temple of Elemental Evil?

James's initial piece went up on June 28, 2011 and was mostly a splat post of different maps of Hommlet and its vicinity. But then, in the comments section, ScottsZ--a dude who had a pretty awesome blog of his own back in the day (Cold Text Files, though no evidence of it remains [EDIT: evidence found! See comments below])--proceeded to provide an in depth analysis of T1-4, posting hundreds of words on a near-daily basis before tailing off in August. He came back for one final post on September 24th but then he disappeared from the internet entirely, never to be heard from again.

Read the whole affair here: 

http://underdarkgazette.blogspot.com/2011/06/village-of-hommlet.html?showComment=1309342335705#c5108633311901958138

Other noted OSR blowhards such as Malishefski, G'hawk G'nard, and even yours truly make appearances in that comment section--just hoping to ride ScottsZ's coattails to glory. His sagacious words outclassed us all. I miss the guy, he had some great thoughts on adding richness to your game setting using deep knowledge of real world history and mythology. He even posted comments on my stoopid blog back in the day, though that should not be counted against him.

On Unearthed Arcana and other 80s Atrocities

One fateful night in the summer of 1985 I made a momentous trip to the mall with a pocketful of cash from my first paycheck. Sure, I'd mowed lawns, washed cars, and even had a paper route in the past, but this was my first gig where I was paid with a check and had FICA deducted from my earnings and a W2 and all that awesome stuff. With this newfound bounty, I descended on the D&D section of my local B. Dalton with the avarice of a viking berserker sacking an 8th century British monastery.

Little did I know, amidst the booty I would collect that night was one piece that would poison my soul against TSR for the rest of eternity.

Foremost in my treasure haul was the brand-spanking-new Unearthed Arcana tome! I won't pretend that I loved UA but I certainly didn't hate it. Thanks to The Dragon magazine we'd already had cavaliers and their weapon specializations ruining our campaigns for a couple of years by that point, so I've never associated those busted rules with Exposed Knowledge of the Arcane Variety. Indeed, the expanded spell list was appreciated, I kind of liked the thief acrobat, and the barbarian... I never loved the barbarian and still don't, but it certainly wasn't a deal breaker. So even though I never felt compelled to buy UA back when I was replenishing my AD&D rulebook collection in the 00s, I don't feel ill will toward it. 

If I had only bought that one book that night, things might have turned out different. But alas, there were three other TSR-published works purchased; one of which did write the epitaph on the gravestone of my TSR fandom. What were the other three?

As we played a fair amount of Star Frontiers back then, the SF:Knight Hawks space combat rules were also on my hit list.

Whose fault is this?

KnightHawks: Penned by Douglas Niles--AKA Whipping Boy #1 in the corral of 80s module writers--this was really a board game. Movement was given in "spaces" counted out on a hexmap, not actual units of measurement. Not that I know what an appropriate unit of measure would be for space combat, but still, I was hoping for a much more granular space combat system. Ship construction likewise was oversimplified, offering very limited options for customization, character skills like astrogation were not very interesting, but wurst of all, there was no artificial gravity in the KnightHawks universe. The only way you could keep your feet on the ground in space was by accelerating or decelerating and pointing the "floor" of your ship opposite from the direction of travel. Niles himself would see the error of his ways when, in his module Dramune Run, the skipper of the spaceship has modified his bridge with a porthole over head because "he likes to see where he's going." 

Message to D. Niles: Everybody wants to see where they're going!

Of course, the skipper would also need a viewport on the floor in order to see where he's going when decelerating but Niles, to his credit, never slows down. 

Anyway, for not letting us sit in our captain's chairs on the bridge of our spaceships looking out over the panorama of outer space, Niles you are a killer of joy. And, overall, I found the game rules to be lackluster and I never bothered using them. 

So what else is left? Finally succumbing to the DragonLance marketing efforts, I purchased the first book of the Chronicles: Dragons of Autumn Twilight. While I didn't loathe DoAT, I did realize that, at the wizened age of 16, I was already way too old for this shit. I found the drama to be naïve, the plot twists were predictable and uninteresting, and Raistlin's moody narcissism was tiresome in the extreme. Even so, the plot was just compelling enough that I muddled through all three of the original tomes, though not compelling enough to ever bother reading another TSR trilogy.

So far we've got a not-terrible new rule book, an underwhelming space combat game, and a novel that was written for younger young-adults than I was at the time. None of these is a dealbreaker, so what's left?

DL 1 Dragoons of Disrepair: Set in the world of Krynn where clerics no longer exist (Yay!) and the world is plagued a by a diminutive race of kleptos armed with lacrosse sticks (Boo!)--gold is valueless but steel is super rare. Instead of using this precious, rare commodity to make frying pans and non-allergenic body piercings, they mint it into coins. Welcome to Dragonlance, folks.

But the real sin was the very idea that you were expected to play characters from a novel, and that they had to survive the adventure in order to continue the story. This was anathema to the concept of D&D to this point: freewill was gone, you were just actors doing fantasy theater; your dice rolls only meaningful as long as they didn't disrupt the "story." Up yours TSR, ya' buncha' wankers. 

From that point on, I no longer paid any attention to whatever was happening in Lake Geneva. I found out only decades later that Gygax got his ass canned from TSR and that a 2nd edition of AD&D was published with something called THAC0 at its core. That TSR, not satisfied that they'd created a world without freewill, decided to wreck the World of Greyhawk as well by painting over it with a bunch of geopolitical drama that negated whatever stuff your PCs had been up to for the previous decade. And that TSR had been bought by a trading card company whose offices were only a few blocks away from my job at the time!

And that, my friends, is how I came to achieve a multiple of six posts for the year 2024. Happy New Year everyone!

How to Read the AD&D Rules: Keen-eared individuals

Readers:     After sleepwalking through the year, here comes Dice Chuckles with some year-end filler to meet his stoopid multiple-of-six-posts-for-the-year mandate, hoo-freakin'-ray.

Me:             Stick it, ya hose bags. This one is actually super important.  

Readers:     Really?

Me:            Of course not, I'm writing about a 45 year old book that folks stopped taking seriously 35 years ago. Of course none of this matters. But please read on anyway or the plutocrats on the Dicechucker Enterprises Board of Trustees will replace me with a Neo-Otyugh with psionic capabilities.

Readers:    Fine, carry on. But only because we don't want to experience a Psychic Crush while tending to the compost.

Me:             Thank you. You won't regret it. Probably.

Did any of you know that in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons of the First Order, there is a chance that your character might be granted a 5% or 10% bonus to hear noise? No? I never knew this either, but it's right there on page 60 of the Guide for Mastering Dungeons. How do you determine if your character is a "Keen-Eared Individual"(KEI)? The procedure is quite simple:

"Use chance of hearing noise to determine if a character is keen-eared the first time he or she listens at a door, and if it is indicated, tell the player to note the fact for his or her character." EGG, DMG

Got it. The first time your PC rolls to hear noise, determine if keen-earedness is indicated, what could be simpler? And while you're at it, determine whether they are 5% keener of ear than your regular schmoe or if they are 10% keener. How is that determined? C'mon folks, Gary just wrote six paragraphs about listening at doors; we know how many people can listen at a single door, how long it takes to listen at a door, how many attempts can be made at listening to a door, how much time it takes to recover from the strain of door-listening; can't you figure anything out for yourselves?

Rogues Gallery: Grimslade and Valerius, Saren and Indel

Back in late '81/early '82, TSR ran a series of full page ads in the back of comic books--remember when comic books had ads? These ads were in the form of a comic-strip about a group of adventurers exploring the dungeons under "Zenopus Castle"--a reference, of course, to the greatest sample dungeon of all time. Back in the day, I did not make the connection between the castle in the comic strip and the Holmes sample dungeon because no one had spent years obsessing over that tasty little adventure yet. 

Likewise, Ididn't make the connection between Valerius the Fighter and Grimslade the wizard; both of these characters appeared in the TSR product for which this whole series of posts is named (sort of): Rogues Gallery. For any of you hose-bags who are unfortunate enough not to have gotten it for Christmas in 1981, Rogues Gallery (RG) was a book containing pages and pages of pre-rolled characters; each of the ten standard AD&D classes (10 pts to Gryffindor if you can list them all in the next 8 seconds) got a 2-page spread listing the vital statistics of 100 such characters. Unfortunately, things like names, gear, interests, quirks--anything that would be of use to a DM having to conjure up an NPC on the fly, were not provided, so no one has ever bothered to replicate this aspect of the RG in the years since. Actually, I tried to replicate this very thing a few years back, so, as usual, I am full of s**t.

While the bulk of the characters were just a collection of stats on a spreadsheet, in the back of the book there were a bunch of more fully developed characters fleshed out with personality traits, magic/special items, etc. Some of these characters will be familiar to even modern day D&D fans: Bigby, Mordenkainen,Tenser; while others who did not have spells named after them were identified as the PCs of various employees of late 70s TSR such as Lawrence Schick, Jean Wells, Rob Kuntz, et al.

Valerius the fop

Relevant to this post, two characters from the D&D comic strip share names and classes with characters from the back of Le Gallerie des Rogues: Grimslade was the character of a one Harold Johnson--cousin to Howard and author of many D&D/TSR modules including one of my all-time my favorites: Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan; and Valerius, PC of young Erol Otus himself. But name and class seem to be the only traits the characters from the RG share with their comic strip brethren. Notably, the Grimslade of the Rogues Gallery publication was not an old bald dude and was accompanied by his sidekick, an umberdwarf-possum. And RG Valerius (see photo above) was much more of a dandy than the strapping bloke of comic fame.

This is the part of the post where I am supposed to provide you with some fictionalized backstory on the subject(s), or give an update on what happened after we last saw them. But, famously--I say famously, because this is not my idea, I read about it on the internet but can't remember where--Grimslade, Valerious and the rest of the party are stuck in an eternal time loop. 

Tawny Valerius and under-dressed Saren

Zenopus Castle?

Let me explain. In the eighth and final episode of the comic strip, we see Valerius--now depicted as a person of color--is carrying non-responsive Saren, who, Grimslade informs us, has been "hurt". She probably isn't so much hurt as suffering from hypothermia, having ditched her sleeveless tunic/hauberk outfit--cut high to expose her gams--for an even more revealing getup consisting of miniskirt and sports bra--even though the party is traveling through a freakin' snowstorm! In hopes of saving Saren's life, Grimslade casts Dimension Door and teleports the party into the dungeons under "an ancient castle!" Here, in the immortal words of The Sundays, is where the story ends.

Or is this just the beginning? 

If we go back to the first episode and give it another read, we are told that the party is adventuring deep under Castle Zenopus--could this be the ancient castle to which they teleported at the end of the last issue? Interestingly, Saren is not with the group at first--she arrives on the scene in the 2nd epi., insisting that no questions be asked. Given that the boys must have left her for dead in some side room, the rest of the party is glad not to have to answer any questions themselves, so an awkward peace is quickly brokered and Saren is reinstated in the party.

The arrival/return of Saren

Unknown to the fellas, Saren had made her Death save--absolutely not a thing in D&D back then (Actually, saves vs Death were a thing but they didn't have the same meaning)--and revived from her cadaverous stupor. She healed herself, changed her outfit, and set out to find her erstwhile compadres, arriving just in time to save Keebler/Indel from the green slime.  

One hole in this hypothesis is that when the gang clears out of Castle Zenopus in Ep. 5 they head for the tavern; this fits with the Tower of Zenopus of Holmes Blue Book fame as it is famously located within city limits of Portown. But is the "ancient castle" that our party ends up in located close enough to a tavern that they could just pop in after a day of adventuring? Possibly, but if so, why wouldn't Grimslade have teleported the infirm Saren to a nearby inn or temple instead into the dungeons of this castle? Sadly, we'll never know.