On 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.
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| 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!
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