Monthly Archives: June 2020

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

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Two months ago, I kicked off my #CuratedQuarantine series with the original white boxed set for Dungeons & Dragons. That was indeed my first RPG and my first hobby game as well. It was 1979 and I was 10 years old. I was excited by the idea of D&D and I could tell there was something cool in those three small books, but the white boxed set was in no way designed to introduce 10 years to gaming. It came out of the 60s wargaming scene and it was written for that audience. So my brother and I quickly got the Holmes Basic Set, which was a much better introduction (though we got the version that came with chits instead of dice!) and then jumped right into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. That’s what I want to talk about today.

The classic three core rulebooks for AD&D were published between 1977 and 1979, so perfect timing for me. Surprisingly, it was the Monster Manual (1977) that came first, then the Player’s Handbook (1978), and finally the Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979). When I say that D&D changed my life, it’s really AD&D that I’m talking about. This was my favorite game and by far my most played RPG from 1979 to 1985 or so (by which point I was branching out much more). Many people slightly younger than me have this same nostalgia for the red box Basic Rules (1983) but I never picked them up back then because I (at the wise age of 14) considered them “kiddie stuff.” I was a veteran of Advanced D&D, what did I need dumbed down rules for? As an adult, I would gain a healthy respect for the BECMI rules and today I would take the Rules Cyclopedia as a desert island game, but I digress.

The reason AD&D was so important to me is that, in addition to the fun of playing, it was a gateway to so many other things. I was already a Tolkien fan, but AD&D led me to Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, Poul Anderson, and many other authors. It also got me reading things like Beowulf and the Song of Roland at a young age. And it only amplified my desire to read more ancient and medieval history. Naturally, I also became a Dragon Magazine subscriber (had to get the official word from Gary Gygax!), and that introduced me to the wider world of hobby games. Many of the games I have covered in my Curated Quarantine series I first learned about in the pages of Dragon. That’s how I was introduced to wargames like Squad Leader and Dawn Patrol.

AD&D also got me into my other lifelong obsession: miniatures. It started with minis to use with AD&D from Grenadier, Ral Partha, and Heritage. Then I got the AD&D Battleystem when it came out in 1985. I was going to say it was my first minis game but I that’s not quite true. I had Chainmail, the minis game that was D&D’s precursor, but never played it. We did use its jousting tables in our AD&D games though. Battlesystem is the first minis game I actually played, and that hobby has been its own long and rewarding journey.

When I was 12, I fantasized about one day writing an article for Dragon Magazine. Why, I might make a $100! This is the first time I remember thinking about game writing as a thing I might do. Many years later I would indeed write articles for Dragon. When I was hired into the TSR Product Group of Wizards of the Coast in 1998, I’d also get to write for AD&D itself. 10-year-old me surely couldn’t have imagined I’d one day get to contribute to the game I so loved. When my first book (the AD&D Guide to Hell) was published in 1999, it was pretty damn cool to see my name under the AD&D masthead. Getting to write (with Sean Reynolds) Slavers, a sequel to the Slavelords modules I had enjoyed so much as a youngster was also a highlight.

People have spilled an endless amount of ink on the warts and flaws of AD&D, the various misguided TSR policies, the way Dave Arneson was sidelined, and a host of other related topics. And I get it. I do. But AD&D is a portal I’ll always be glad I walked though.

UK 50th Birthday Trip

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UK Games Expo, the first major stop on my trip.

A year ago I was recently arrived in the UK for a month long trip to celebrate my 50th birthday. Turning 50 felt a lot different than turning 40. For my 40th, Nicole threw me a great party with lots of friends. For my 50th I wanted to go somewhere remote and be alone. Times change, eh?

The being alone would come later in the trip though. After an overnight stay in London and a great dinner at Dishoom with our friend Namrata, Nicole and I took the train to Birmingham for the UK Games Expo. This is a convention we’d heard a lot about and wanted to check out, and working a con meant the flights would be a business expense. You need to work it when you’re a small business owner.

We were able to do UK Games Expo thanks to the help of friends. Dave Salisbury owns the excellent Fan Boy Three game store in Manchester, and he gave us space in his booth and helped us get product in to sell. Huge thanks to Dave, Heidi, Scott, and their whole crew for hosting us and giving us a way to try out the show without committing to a full booth. The convention was good and quite sizable, easily the biggest one I’ve been to in the UK.

John Kovalic was also over and he whisked us offsite for some terrific Indian food one night. UK Games Expo is at a convention center outside Birmingham and the food options were not great, so this was appreciated. Later in the show the three of us met up with James Wallis and Marc Gascoigne and that was a delightful reunion. We’ve all been friends since the 90s but are rarely in the same place at the same time.

I’m going to try to post more about this trip over the coming month. For one thing, I never did write about it, apart from my social media posts as it was happening. It’s also been on my mind quite a bit as my 51st birthday approaches. Travel has been a huge part of my adult life. It’s one of my favorite things to do, and I’m thankful the game industry has enabled me to go from Finland to Brazil to New Zealand and many places in between. 2019 was a particularly gonzo year for travel: 101 days on the road, traveling over 81,000 miles on 11 trips to 5 countries and 40 cities while attending 9 conventions. So it is now deeply weird to not only be home all the time, but also to have no idea when I might be able to travel again. Every convention we had planned to attend this year has been cancelled. We had hoped to go to Prague with a group of gamers this summer but that too is off. I just couldn’t have imagined when I left for my trip last year how much different the world would be in 2020.

So in between my curated quarantine posts and me screaming about America’s descent into fascism, I’m going to look back on what turned out to be a very memorable trip indeed. There’s still so much I want to see but for now I’ll just have to look back and hope in the future the world won’t be quite so on fire.

Mighty Empires

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Today’s game is Mighty Empires (1990) from Games Workshop. It provides a full campaign system for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, but could also be played as a game on its own. You use hex tiles to build out a board (this is 5 years before Settlers of Catan, mind you). Each player then starts with a region under their control, with cities, armies, and so on. You play through years of time, dealing with everything from revenue and recruitment to diplomacy and espionage. There also fun stuff like equinox magic (big honking ritual spells your wizards can cast twice a year) and dragonrage (accidentally finding a nest of dragons with predictable results). If you are using it with WFB, when army banners come into conflict, you break and then play out a full Warhammer game to determine the winner. When used as a campaign system, it provides a rationale for battles and gives each one a context and importance lacking in one off affairs. 

Mighty Empires came out when I was in college. I always remember my friend Bill saying, “My biggest priority this semester is playing Mighty Empires.” School? Whatever. We did, in fact, get a campaign going. The problem for us was that you need to keep the map set up, and we were apartment dwelling New Yorkers with limited space. What we ended up doing was getting a big metal sheet and a bunch of magnets. We glued to magnets onto the tiles, then built out the playing area on the metal sheet. This allowed us to turn the whole thing sideways and lean it against the wall  when it was not in use. My friend Sandeep and I kept it in our tiny Soho apartment. (Yes, it was (barely) possible to get a Soho apartment in 1991 while working a retail job.) I don’t remember whose copy that was (Bill’s probably) but this whole thing was nothing but a memory until just a few years ago. Then I found this copy for a song at the Enfilade bring and buy. I could hardly pass up adding such a piece of my gaming history to my collection.

Note: This is part of an ongoing series called Curated Quarantine I started a couple of months back. Each day I talk about a different game from my collection. Some games are meaningful to me, others are interesting for historical reasons, and occasionally they are just bad. I’m mostly doing this on Twitter (#CuratedQuarantine will pull them up) and Facebook but this entry was long enough I decided to put it up here. My first entry was a single tweet, but as time has gone on they’ve gotten longer and longer. Frickin’ writers, I tell you what.