Rogue Games Tabbloid -- December 3, 2009 Edition

3 December 2009

Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR [email protected]

ROGUE FEED

plastic Indians in this scale, and a bit of conversion has produced sufficient numbers of black, grey, green and purple creatures of this ilk.

1972 Gygax Article DEC 02, 2009 04:07P.M.

Metal mediaeval figures in 25mm scale can easily be painted up to make goblins and dwarves, while converted Airfix “Robin Hood” men serve as Hobbits.

Reader Jervis Johnson kindly sent along the following short article by Gary Gygax, published in the October 1972 (No. 127) issue of Wargamer’s Newsletter. There’s no copyright statement on the issue from which this is taken, but it’s assumed to be copyrighted to Donald Featherstone, who began this venerable periodical in 1962.

Giants are made from the 70mm Elastolin figures. At the moment we have only a pale blue fellow with a head of bushy hair (snipped from one of my daughter’s dolls when they weren’t looking), who is brandishing a huge club. He was originally a Viking with a sword and shield, but the shield was stripped off, the sword removed and a puttied matchstick became the bludgeon. The Balrog has caused considerable problems, and right now we are using a giant sloth from an assortment of plastic prehistoric animals, which (converted) makes a fearsome looking beast, albeit not quite as Tolkien described it.

Here’s the text of the article, typos and misspellings included:

FANTASY BATTLES By GARY GYGAX I offer the following details of our fantasy battles:

Nazgul, like the Balrog, are also difficult. Presently we are employing unconverted 40mm Huns on black horses, but we would like to put wings on the steeds and cloak the figures riding them.

The rules used are those designed by Jeff Perran and I – CHAINMAIL, Guidon Games, P.O. Box 1123, Evansville, IN 47713, U.S.A., at $2 plus postage. The revised and expanded version should be available by the time this is read. The booklet contains brief information about the scales used for different figure-types, and the expanded edition has things like how fast goblins, orcs and dwarves can tunnel under the walls of a besieged stronghold. Tolkien purists will not find these rules entirely satisfactory, I believe, for many of the fantastic creatures do not follow his “specifications”, mainly because I believe that other writers were as “authoritative” as he.

There are two dragons in our force of fantasy figures. One I made stegosaurus: First, the head was enlarged with auto body putty, a wire was inserted into the tail and puttied to make it longer – and barbed, the spikes of the tail were clipped off and added as horns to the head end, cardboard bat wings were puttied into place, and finally the entire affair was given many coats of paint, gilding and glitter (as sparkling gems on its belly). The other was made by Don Kaye using a brontosaurus, with two smaller heads added to the long neck, spikes along the back, wings, and so on.

Because I have a large force of 40mm Elastolin figures, we use a base 40mm as man-size, but 30mm will do as well. Regular troops have only a few added touches of paint, but hero-types have such things as gilded or enamelled armour, jewels, and carefully painted devices on their shields.

A large stock of plastic wolves, bears, vultures, and the like are used for lycanthropes or whatever other fairly normal looking creatures are called for. Soft plastic “horrors” and insects from the dime store serve as elementals and giant insects.

Orcs and elves are 30mm – that is what it says in our book. However, because we have not got around to preparing them, Orcs are 40mm Turks and Elves are bowmen of the same scale.

Perhaps the best part of fantasy wargaming is being able to allow your imagination full rein. Whatever the players desire can be used or done in games. For example, for one match I built a chest of jewels as the object to be obtained to win. However, I did not mention to either team that I had added a pair of “basilisk eyes” (large pin heads dotted appropriately)

Trolls and ogres are 54mm. I located some inexpensive

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR [email protected]

3 December 2009

which immediately turned the first ogre who opened it to stone. The possibilities are boundless.

were seen as unfit for play by discerning gamers. Ludicrous though this position is, it’s one against which I nevertheless have to fight even now and, while, I’ve been largely successful in keeping it in check, it still pops up every now and again, despite my best efforts to the contrary.

The way the rules are selling here, it seems a good bat for some model figures firm to start producing a line of properly scaled fantasy figures!

If I were to pick a single mistake I made in my gaming education to call “tragic,” it would be my rejection of Tunnels & Trolls back when I had the chance to become better acquainted with it. A friend of mine purchased the 5th edition of the game sometime in the early 80s. He was quite keen on the game and wanted to free me from my regular refereeing duties by starting a T&T campaign with me as a player. If I recall correctly, I created a human rogue — rogues being not thieves but rather hedge wizards — modeled somewhat on the Gray Mouser and was initially excited about the prospect of playing him.

Mr Botham’s observations about the possibilities of Airfix “Astronauts” as Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” (or other future warriors) has also crossed my mind as a fair possibility. In fact, if Mr Botham eventually puts his ideas into a set of rules I can state, as Rules Editor at Guidon Games, that I would like to see them with eventual publication in mind. It’s an intriguing article for a number of reasons, not least because of his comment about other authors being as “authoritative” as Tolkien when it comes to describing fantastical creatures. That ought to add more fuel for the fire of future discussions on that topic.

That is, until I read T&T‘s spell list. Among the 1st-level spells are Oh There It Is, Take That, You Fiend, and Oh-Go-Away. For some reason, I just couldn’t accept these spells names and every tale I’d been told by the older guys at the hobby shop about how the game was silly came rushing back to my memory. I made a feeble effort to try playing the game, whose mechanics I found intriguing, but it didn’t last too long. I tried a few more times later and got a little more into the game. By that time, though, my opinion had ossified and I wasn’t willing to look beyond the surface of T&T, a situation I didn’t rectify until this year, actually.

Thanks for sending this along, Jervis!

ROGUE FEED I made a point of acquiring both the 5th edition rules I played way back when and the latest edition (v7.5), along with a number of solo adventures. I also started lurking at various T&T oriented forums, including Trollhalla, to get a better sense of the game and what I might have been missing. And I’ve been missing quite a lot. T&T is a very cleverly designed game: complete, simple, and flexible, yet easily expandable. It’s not math-heavy and looks to be quite amenable to the kind of off-the-cuff gaming I enjoy these days. It’s also unambiguously old school, as its rules demand both player cleverness and referee adjudication for satisfying use. Likewise, both editions I own are paragons of verbal economy — there’s barely a wasted word in either and their page count is well within my limited tolerance.

Retrospective: Tunnels & Trolls DEC 02, 2009 09:21A.M.

And, yes, Tunnels & Trolls is a bit silly, at least compared to the stolidness of most other RPGs, but that’s OK. Older and wiser now, I no longer see silliness as necessarily antithetical to seriousness. Indeed, I often think it’s an important complement to it. My games nowadays are filled with whimsical asides and comedic moments, in addition to grim and perilous encounters and philosophical musings. This isn’t an either/or situation, at least not in the way I used to think it had to be. Gaming is supposed to be, above all else, fun and, reading T&T, you can tell that author Ken St. Andre had a lot of fun with his creation.

I’ve mentioned before that part of my initiation into the hobby was the adoption of certain prejudices about games other than Dungeons & Dragons. One of the main targets of such irrationality was Tunnels & Trolls, the second RPG published (in 1975) and whose greatest flaw — aside from not being D&D — was that it was “silly.” You have to remember that, while 1979, the year I started gaming, was still several years before fantastic realism became the norm, it was nevertheless a powerful force in many places, including, apparently, among the people by whom I was brought into the hobby. Whimsy and humor were antithetical to “serious roleplaying” and so games that evinced either

That’s as it should be with any RPG and, while I don’t think Tunnels & Trolls should become a model for all other RPGs any more than I think that of OD&D, I do think the hobby might be a more enjoyable place for all if the ethos of T&T were more widely imitated. That, for me, is the greatest lesson I took away from my investigations into this venerable game, whose community, while smaller than that of my own preferred system, is no less enthusiastic, creative, and open to newcomers.

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR [email protected]

3 December 2009

More creditable still is the fact that, after 30+ years, T&T is, essentially, the same game it was at its debut. Certainly there are differences between v7.5 and the 1975 1st edition, but those differences are minuscule compared to the differences between the LBBs and D&D IV. From where I’m sitting, T&T remains the kind of hobbyist game that old school D&D fans wish our game had remained and without the need for imagining an alternate history. In short, there’s a lot to like about it and I wouldn’t hesitate to play in a game if I were ever asked to do so again. I still don’t like the spell names, though.

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