The Nameless City

An image of the City of Petra, which is mentioned as a visual reference point in the upcoming Swords & Wizardry module The Nameless City, by Alphonso Warden.

In addition (and not related to the module) this image also happened to point me to the following text:

We've had a very heavy start to our section on religion as it relates to human burials, what with the massive human sacrifices and the royal tombs at Ur, and with the megalomania behind the great tomb of that first emperor of China, who was trying to express his desire to become immortal himself through his own grave and its elaborate accompaniments. So it's a relief, I think, to turn to a site that presents us with the most life-affirming, joyous funeral ritual known to me: the site of the rock-cut city of Petra in Jordan, where the people had, for several centuries, a tradition of feasting with the dead.
http://teachingcompany.12.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=2250&sid=3c33341da9de9ed7ef43b1c294af1463

The rest of the linked post is also fascinating and worth reading.

Commercialization of the Old School: Part 3

Commercialization of the Old School Part 3

This is the third installment of what has already become a rambling, out-of-control treatise, so if you’re interested in the topic, you might want to read parts one and two rather than trying to dive mid-stream into the ramble.

Quick Recap of Earlier Exciting Conclusions

In the last installment, I talked about the fact that there are fewer production artists (layout, editing, art) in our community than there are good authors, and that these resources aren’t increased – not measurably, at any rate – by the fact that a for-profit publisher can pay for them. Indeed, the fact that a publisher is paying for these resources can actually bypass the de facto “quality filter” that was originally provided by the volunteers themselves. I concluded that even though this effect isn’t large, it probably has a small, net negative effect on the quality of modules that are produced. There’s a benefit, which is that some money gets directed to guys who do a largely thankless task (especially the editors and layout guys). But that doesn’t make them produce more, it just gets them some beer money. Perhaps it keeps them working on modules, in proportion to their desire for beer, which isn’t something that occurred to me.

The Psychological Benefit of Financially Trivial Quantities of Cash

So there’s a nice tangent – it’s possible that even though beer money doesn’t increase the amount of time that production artists spend on old-school modules, the fact that there is a much better “thank-you” than the internet provides might keep them excited about the whole prospect and thus work, over time, on more modules. In other words, they don’t provide more hours in a given week, but over time they provide more weeks. This isn’t a trivial point, actually, because it turns upon a big problem with our community (and the internet in general).

That problem is as**holes.

Internet: The Unpredictable Netscape of Praise and Vilification

When you post up something on the internet, whether it’s a free resource or not, there will be several types of responses. Many people will type “Cool!” whether they’ve read it or not. These people, god love ‘em, are wonderful even though you know that they’re supporting you for what you’re doing, not for the quality of that particular resource. You can’t draw any particular conclusion from “Cool!” but without these guys I believe there wouldn’t be any free old-school gaming resources on the internet at all. The reward for producing a free resource is entirely ego-driven; you want people to see your work and enjoy it, and if there is no response to it you will assume that nobody read it, or perhaps that they did, and didn’t like it. Almost certainly, if you get a zero-reaction, you’re not going to bother to do all that work a second time.

Another response, which is very rare, comes from someone who either likes or dislikes the resource, and takes the time to actually write out the reasons in a review or a thought-out message board post. These are the truly golden people, because they really and truly demonstrate that your resource has been appreciated (even if the conclusion wasn’t great). But it takes effort to write a meaningful reaction to a resource, or a full-scale review, and not everyone will do so. Very, very few.

A Startling Conclusion: A**holes are a Bad Thing

Thirdly, there are the aforementioned a**holes. These are people who will absolutely rip into a resource without much balancing of the positive and negative. They simply post negative reactions. Keep in mind, I think it’s very important that the community gets to hear negative reactions. Information is important. But it’s for that same reason – information being important – that vicious attacks on the quality of a module without the offsetting positives (or at least an explanation of the reviewer’s biases and preferences) are damaging. Just posting, “This module was junk!” helps no one, because it doesn’t provide any useful information about why you think so, and it’s almost always clearly intended to hurt the guy who spent a lot of time creating something for little or no monetary reward.

It’s less of an issue the more prominent the author/publisher gets, I think. That kind of thing bothered me a lot when I had only published a couple of resources, and it really doesn’t get to me any more – but the majority of publishers are putting out their first attempt, and if they get this sort of crap from a troll, it’s likely to be extremely painful. It’s very likely to discourage someone -- whose module might actually be quite good -- from writing more.

Reality Check: Not Being a Pollyanna

These trolls aren’t going to go away – they’re part of the internet landscape in any hobby – so my point isn’t “let’s all play nice.” My point is that beer money is a MEASURABLE index of appreciation when the internet itself doesn’t provide very predictable feedback. You might not see a single post saying “good job,” but if there’s some money – even if it’s not much – you know that your work was appreciated out there somewhere, by people who simply didn’t post about their appreciation.

Suddenly, Major Points in Favor of For-Profit Publishing

This, I think, is one of the major arguments in favor of for-profit publishing. The money might not be financially significant, but it’s psychologically invaluable as feedback. I definitely think it keeps people producing more resources than they would if they relied solely on the internet for the pats on the back that are so vital to a writer’s continued willingness to put pen to paper.

Now, this might seem to indicate that, “hey, there’s no reason to publish for free!” That’s not so, because obviously (I think) the trolls tend to direct their venom against for-profit publications more than against free ones. That’s a trend, though, not a rule. I have seen some truly vicious, conclusory posts made about free products. Overall, I think the value of money-as-psychological reward is very, very significant, but it’s not overriding. Many people – Chris Gonnerman of BFRPG clearly being a good example – get more reward from the fact that the resource itself is freely given. For these guys, the value of giving is psychologically rewarding enough to allow them to ignore trolls. When this is the case, money’s benefit as a source of positive feedback isn’t present. It takes a thick skin to approach it this way, but I have to give all due props to Chris, Bill Silvey, Stuart Marshall, and others like them – they are soldiers, and definitely mentally tougher than I am. Like my earlier conclusion that money causes a slight reduction in the quality-filter, this observation about money’s importance as psychological feedback rather than financial reward isn’t a one-for-one fact. It’s a general feature. However, this one is pretty big, at least in my experience. As I mentioned, when I started out I had a very thin skin about troll-type criticism, and the feedback provided by people purchasing the odd module or resource almost certainly kept me from dropping the whole hobby of writing. So as a thin-skinned guy, I tend to assign a lot of importance to money as a psychological reward.

Team-Building

I think that people don’t form teams very easily over the internet, and there is a very big benefit to working with other people on a project. Editing, in particular, is very important. Not just proofreading, but developmental editing where there’s a second person to say, “this might work better if you…”

Dragonsfoot and various of the for-profit publishers are both good ways of forming teams. However, I can’t really see any way in which there’s a difference between Dragonsfoot forming a team as opposed to a for-profit publisher forming a team. So, unless some brilliant idea strikes me later on, I think that for-profit publishing provides neither a benefit nor a drawback on this.

Possibly, the raw number of for-profit publishers is enough to be drawing teams together, in which case the general effect of for-profit publishing has been good on this count. In fact, I think this is probably true, so actually there’s a benefit here, although I can’t see why Dragonsfoot wouldn’t have been drawing the same volunteers to the same sorts of projects. If for some reason it were easier to approach a for-profit publisher than to approach the moderators at DF, then there’d be a benefit. But I don’t see why there would be, and in fact there appears to be some kind of “figure-on-high” effect with for-profit publishers. Several people have contacted me as if I’m something far beyond a dude with a typewriter and a lulu account, so I have to conclude that for some reason, some people appear to be a bit intimidated by the trappings of “for-profit.” Perhaps some people are equally intimidated by the trappings of a Dragonsfoot moderator. I don’t personally understand why either would be the case (we are all dudes with typewriters: the DF mods just have DF passwords instead of the lulu accounts). Either way, I still think there’s a net zero effect on team-creation.

Effects on Resource Structure

Here’s something interesting, and I’ll start it with a kind of a story. When Stuart Marshall decided to expand OSRIC 1 (essentially nothing more than a Players Handbook with some rules imported from the 1e DMG) into OSRIC 2 (a full set of rules), he decided to put it all into one book. His reasoning was based on a fundamental fact about publishing a printed book: most of the cost, unless the book is quite long, comes from the set-up costs, not from the page count. Since OSRIC had no profit markup on lulu, the value equation was very clear: it would cost the buyer less money to get the game if Stuart added pages to a single book than it would if the game were split into two books. This was also a consideration in adding more material in the first place – it wouldn’t add very significantly to the cost, because it’s cheap to add pages to a book.

That makes perfect sense from the perspective of cost-per-page. From my perspective, I think it might have been better to have two books, though, even if the total cost ended up being higher. The reason being that players don’t need to have a great big book, and it’s easier to use a smaller book if you’re a player rather than a DM. There are considerations other than cost per page. This isn’t a criticism of Stuart’s decision; it’s just to illustrate that there are inevitable judgment calls involved with publishing a resource. I had a conversation with Benoist at one point in which he asked why Swords & Wizardry couldn’t have been better served if it were structured as a core book with supplements for playing it different ways. My answer was that when I’m at a gaming table, I prefer not to have to look at two books if I’m a player. I like complete books. Note: that appears to be the reverse logic I used with OSRIC, but the difference is between two books with separate topics as opposed to one book that (as a supplement) contradicts or changes the other. I’ve always found that to be a pain.

The point being that publishers have to make judgment calls about things like page counts, number of volumes, complete books versus supplements, and even font size/ text density. To what degree are these decisions affected by whether the resource is written for free or for profit?

One possibly negative effect is that in a free resource, people don’t select what to read based on cost per page. A publisher can be tempted to “pad” the page count in order to make it seem like the value of the resource is higher. I definitely ran into this with Knockspell Magazine at one point. My first decision was that a relatively large font size would be good because it’s easier for those of us with failing vision to read. However, after looking at a couple of issues, I felt that it somehow didn’t look like a magazine, so I decreased the font size quite significantly. And then … here comes someone on the internet who very seriously points out to all and sundry that Knockspell is somewhat more expensive per page than Fight On! Fight On! was designed with the same objective as Knockspell’s early issues – font size is based on being easy to read without having to don your lenses of middle-aged seeing. So, by switching to a higher text density in Knockspell (and thus lowering the page count) based on considerations of visual impact came back to bite me on the butt. Clearly, if Knockspell were a free resource, I wouldn’t have cared in the slightest.

I picked that example, by the way, because FO! can’t be accused of padding pages – Calithena has always been quite clear about the reason for the font size – so I can make my point without actually pointing fingers and saying “j’accuse” on the padding of page count.

One quick other point – printed books have to be in page-count multiples of 4, so if someone fills three pages with advertisements or something, don’t jump to criticize. They’ve got to fill any excess pages with something, or leave them blank. Yes, you could invent an appendix and some tonsils to add to the end of a module, but filler material is filler material. End of digression.

So, is there a tendency to pad page-counts? I think to a certain degree there is. As I mentioned, the cost of additional pages is quite small, and you can “mark them up” fairly unnoticeably. Result: adding page count without new material increases your profit. More importantly in terms of people’s considerations on this, though, is that if you try to condense your text for visual or usability reasons, there will be people who assume that because you’re offering fewer pages, you’re offering less value – even if the actual word count is the same or higher.

And there are good reasons for using a higher density of text, even though it doesn’t actually add much dollar-value (pages are cheap). For instance, when doing layout on a module, depending on the module, it is sometimes very useful to have several encounter areas all visible in that two-page visual “window.” If your rooms are interlocked – say, the orcs in room 3 are likely to reinforce the ones in room 7 – then it’s a real benefit to have room 3 and room 7 both visible at the same time. That militates toward denser text (or smaller font, or whatever). On the other hand, I have to wear my glasses to know that the word says “orcs” and not “ogres,” so if I forgot my glasses the module might suddenly become more challenging than expected.

So, charging money for a resource creates a slight tendency toward larger fonts, when that might - possibly - not be the best structural approach. In my case, with Knockspell Magazine, I decided, “well, screw it, if it’s going to hurt the magazine otherwise, I can live with using the same size font as FO! does.” For the magazine, that was a trivial decision, since density of text was just an aesthetic decision. And I’ve never padded the pages of a module because they aren’t long enough to bother with it. But the potential is out there.

I’m tempted to say that this is an area where for-profit publishing reduces quality, but to a degree this has the same effect on free publications that are put up for printing – at no mark-up – on places like lulu. The OSRIC book, even though it’s not for profit, is still going to be evaluated by those who are considering buying a printed copy in the same way. Count the pages, but forget to count the words.

So, for printing, I think there’s no effect one way or the other. The same temptations and considerations exist for people who are publishing for free and those who are publishing for profit. In the (now relatively rare) case when something is released purely as a pdf and not as a printed product, the for-profit publisher might have more of a temptation to pad pages than a free publisher would.

And for those of us who need glasses, that’s a good thing anyway – unless those orcs in room 3 are willing to risk their lives on behalf of the orcs in room 7.

There’s still more to come, but this chapter is probably long enough to tax the patience of most gentle readers, so I will break it off here.

Commercialization of the Old School Part 2

Commercialization of the Old School Part 2: Judgment Day

In the first post about commercialization of the OSR, I stopped short just before reaching James Raggi’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess game, which I think represents the cusp of the evolving shift into a matured market. I realized, though, that Jim actually probably falls into the earlier phase, since the current phase might best be characterized by the appearance of “outside” publishers as well as numbers of small publishers, and Jim’s definitely not an outsider to the community. So I probably broke my history into the wrong phases.

In any case, just to clarify, the for-profit “market” operates within the context of hobby message-boards and disparate blogs – I don’t mean to suggest that the commercial side of the OSR is the sum totality of the OSR. Quite the contrary, in fact. Because I have been tracing the commercializing trend, though, I’ve basically ignored (up until now) the fact that the for-profit publishers like me are similar to the birds that clean hippopotamus teeth – they can’t exist without the hippopotamus. In this post I want to focus on the question of whether we’re the equivalent of the tooth-cleaning bird, or whether the proper analogy is to a blood-sucking lamprey instead. In either case, it’s time to broaden the context a bit and look at the old-school community outside the for-profit publishers.

First of all, the way I evaluate “good” and “bad” in this discussion is based on the idea that we’re judging things based on whether it is productive or unproductive for the hobbyist community of old-school gamers. Mainly I’m thinking about the internet community, but there’s an elephant in the room: the gamers who aren’t interested in online discussions about gaming on the internet. I can completely relate to this – as a long-distance runner I have zero interest in reading blogs or articles about long-distance running. No interest at all. So I assume that there are plenty of old-school gamers who feel the same about the old-school internet community.

In addition to that relatively silent (majority?), there is a second offline aspect to the old-school gaming community, the old-school conventions. These are GaryCon and North Texas RPG Con. Granted, the critical mass for these endeavors probably comes from the availability of a thriving net community, but the events themselves are brick-and-mortar, face to face gaming. Great stuff. Thirdly, there are the non-specialized message boards – the largest I assume are, in order of size: Dragonsfoot, Knights & Knaves Alehouse, and ODD74. The Acaeum sort of appears in there, but since it’s about collecting rather than gaming, it’s a bit tangential. Fourthly, there’s the vast community of bloggers.

What is the effect of having for-profit publishers appearing in these various sub-parts of our community?

A few people believe that on moral grounds it is inappropriate to profit from a hobby at all. When I’ve seen this viewpoint expressed, it’s usually predicated on the position that since all resources for roleplaying games derive from the work of the original authors, even modules, that it’s like thievery to profit from such a resource. I’m not going to spend any time on this viewpoint because frankly I think it’s so weak that it would be a straw-man attack if I did. Resources have been published by third-party publishers ever since mimeograph machines fired up across the USA to publish modules and other resources in response to the 1974 publication of OD&D. That doesn’t make it morally justified, if you happen to think that it’s immoral, but most people would place the line further back, at the question of whether for-profit resources are productive or unproductive to the community.

One aspect of for-profit publishing is that it allows the publisher to hire the skills he doesn’t personally have, whether that’s illustrating, doing layout, editing, or whatever. I’d like to add something else to that list: printing, handling money, packaging, and sending things in the mail – in other words, the back office tasks that are involved in distributing something.

The OSR of 2004 had effectively two distribution channels: Dragonsfoot (free materials) and Troll Lord Games (some C&C freebies and some for-profit). If you had a great module that you wanted to share with others, you could either hand it to Dragonsfoot or sell or give it to the Troll Lords. In both cases, that’s all you had to do: volunteers at DF would edit and illustrate your resource, and it would get posted in the DF archive. You didn’t have to pay money for printing it (although it’s true that it wouldn’t get printed except at people’s houses), and you didn’t have to maintain your own website to store it. You didn’t have to do any publicity for it, because people would find it at DF, where the vast majority of the community was centered. And TLG operated in similar fashion, as long as your resource was written for Castles & Crusades.

The downside to this centralized distribution set-up was that the volunteers at DF could only handle a certain amount of material – and also, there was a bit of a problem if someone turned in a resource that was absolutely terrible. I don’t know if that actually happened, but I’m willing to bet that it did, and that the volunteers were faced with a dilemma about how to handle it. They certainly didn’t sign on to be the arbiters of quality, but by the same token they didn’t sign on to rebuild a poorly written or ill-conceived resource. But the real obstacle, I think, was simply the matter of time. Most DMs in this hobby are writers by temperament. It’s almost built in. But layout artists, illustrators, editors? Those skills are only incidentally present in the community; it’s much less of a given – if at all – that just because you play D&D you’re going to be good at layout or drawing. In other words, the skills of the production team are MUCH rarer than the skills of the author in our community. The number of good authors out there can utterly swamp the available free time of those who happen to be skilled at the production side.

So here’s where we end up: lots of potential authors, not many skilled production teams. It might seem obvious that injecting money into this system would help out, right? If the authors became publishers, and could pull in some cash from the eventual sale of the modules, this ought to allow the author to hire the production guys, which would mean that more modules actually see the light of day. But I don’t think it works that way, or at least, it doesn’t work nearly as well as one might think.

The reason it doesn’t work is because you haven’t really – not to any great degree – increased the number of guys doing the production work. It’s not like we’d make enough money to hire an editor at $20 an hour, or to pay an artist $500 or more to get awesome cover art. So to a large degree, it’s still the same production teams, which means that there aren’t more modules. All that happens is that the production teams get beer money (which is good) and that the modules being published are no longer prioritized by volunteers at Dragonsfoot, but are prioritized based on who has money to invest (or blow) on getting a module published. All that has happened – mostly – is that the selection process has changed.

That’s not a neutral change, either. It’s a bad one. I’m guessing that the volunteers at Dragonsfoot tended to prioritize their efforts on the resources they felt were the best ones. There was a quality filter in operation. When the structure shifts around, all of a sudden money allows you to circumvent that quality filter. So, all other things being equal, the advent of for-profit publishing definitely has the potential to cause the community’s resources to shift away from the higher quality material and focus on materials that might be of lower quality. That’s the risk, anyway. I think it ends up being more complicated, but the very first effect of for-profit publishing is that it creates a cliff-edge. It has the potential, by removing the quality-filter provided by busy volunteers, to divert their time into lower-quality products than they’d otherwise focus on.

I should say that this process started very gradually; in most cases the artists, editors, and layout artists were still donating their time to projects such as OSRIC 2.0, Fight On! and Knockspell Magazines, and so forth, including Dragonsfoot, which certainly didn’t disappear from the scene. Moreover, I don’t think that most of the production artists base their decisions on monetary concerns any more than the publishers do – which given the razor-thin profits of old school publishing means not much. So although I think we have created that cliff-edge, and although I assume it has re-allocated some resources, I don’t think the effect is particularly big. Let’s call it a –2 impact, measured in metric whatsits. It’s not worth an artist’s time to do highly discounted work on a module that’s a piece of crap – certainly not based on the mere prospect of beer money – so that quality-filter is still in operation, just less so. As I mentioned before, there’s not a shortage of good writing, so it’s not like every time the filter got circumvented it would mean that something bad was necessarily being published – just that it might be pulling resources from something better. It doesn’t create an influx of awful materials, it just means that overall, somewhere, somehow, it’s probably having an effect.

Obviously I am in the course of writing a much longer essay than I’d realized, here, so I’ll split this into another installment, leaving things at this exciting cliff-hanger of a moment.

The Nameless City: A Teaser

A teaser announcement for the latest new Swords & Wizardry Module:

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had dared to see.

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why.

-H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

Commercialization of the Old School: Part 1

Commercialization of the “Old School Renaissance” Part I

Is for-profit publishing an Aboleth?

A History of the Trend

First, just a disclaimer about using the term “Old School Renaissance.” For purposes of this post, please read that to mean “the effects of the increase in the volume of communication we have seen in the community of out-of-print FRPG gamers since the advent of the Internet.” When I use the term, I don’t freight it with any sort of moral imperative to buy things or donate things to that community, I just use it as the best currently available term to describe the effects of having the internet as a new vehicle for communicating with each other.

One of the effects of the internet on our community has been the emergence of “old-school” for-profit publishers. Early in the OSR (when Dragonsfoot was still pretty much the hub of the entire community instead of just the biggest of several venues), there was a big push to create free resources. Adventure modules and Footprints magazine were the flagships of this effort, but if you take a look at the archives of Dragonsfoot you will see a huge quantity of free material there.

The next step was the publication of Castles & Crusades, which was the first fully-commercialized old school venture. I don’t think that C&C made a long-term inroad into the existing community of old-school gamers, but I do think (from my own experience) that it pulled lots of disgruntled 3e gamers back into the old school community. I suppose, also, that Necromancer Games should at least get mentioned here too, since although they were definitely a 3e publisher they kept it in people’s minds that there was a “first edition feel” quite different from the official 3e “feel.” And that almost certainly helped pave the way for Castles & Crusades to scoop up people who were starting to decide that if “First Edition Feel” was so fun, “First Edition Rules” would be even more fun.

Then, a couple of years after C&C was released, and all right about the same time, three events moved things forward into the realm of actual for-profit production of gaming resources for the actual first edition rules. First, Rob Kuntz and Kenzer Games [note: this may have been Goodman] came out with adventures designed for AD&D, and charged money for them (I count that as two events). Rob Kuntz was the first, I think, with his Dark Druids module, but his first attempt involved getting people to send actual checks in the mail, so by the time he shifted to a realistic method of payment, it put him roughly in the same time frame as Kenzer’s module (which was a limited GenCon release). He gets props for being an early commercial publisher, but his impact didn’t really manifest until he switched to a workable internet business model. I recall him saying that he’d sold 14 copies of Dark Druids using the “send me a check” model – this might have been meant facetiously, but there’s no question that when he started taking paypal it also increased awareness in the community that he was writing again.

The third event, other than the two for-profit modules, was the publication of OSRIC. OSRIC was somewhat different from the modules in that it was a free product, but as a free product it was designed to foster publishing (whether free or for-profit). Because it was perceived as a huge leap into lawsuit risk, OSRIC gained a tremendous amount of publicity. It worked extraordinarily well as a spur to publication; Joe Browning immediately began publishing a line of adventures for OSRIC using professional art, layout, and cover design. 0One Games threw its hat into the ring in short order as well.

And then came the next development, which was Dan Proctor’s Labyrinth Lord system, a retro-clone of Moldvay Basic in the same fashion that OSRIC had used to clone 1e. Dan followed a different business model than OSRIC, in that he made profits from the game system itself (although giving away free pdfs), and also supported the system with a message board and resources. This model, of creating a “living” retro-clone, was extremely successful – in other words, Dan was actually able to create a community and discussion about a retro-clone game. Up to that point, I think everyone but Dan assumed that a clone game simply couldn’t gain enough traction to support a community with any measurable critical mass. Dan turned out to have been right on the money with his prediction, and thereby created the first true publishing company focused upon a retro-clone game and its resources.

My own role in things in between the release of OSRIC and the release of Labyrinth Lord had been relatively small. I don’t credit myself with the success of OSRIC, only for recognizing the legal framework that allowed a true retro-clone. The success of OSRIC was due to Stuart Marshall. I did a lot of the art (all of it in the first release, which has thankfully been leavened with more skillful work from others in the later versions), and obviously my original draft comprised the majority of the text, but basically I was out of the loop before OSRIC’s release. In retrospect, too, I was hitting a bipolar downslope right at that point, so I wasn’t doing much of anything.

However, around the time that Labyrinth Lord was released, I had been talking with Jerry Mapes, the founder of Knights & Knaves Alehouse, about doing a clone of Original D&D. That’s what Jerry played, and toward the end of his life he was really regretful that there was no clone of the edition that he preferred. After several discussions about it, I agreed to do an OD&D clone provided that Jerry helped me with it. Although I play OD&D, my version of it at that time was a mishmash of Holmes, stripped-down AD&D, and all the OD&D supplements, so even though I was playing OD&D, it was at the very late end of the game’s time spectrum. Jerry, on the other hand, played using only the three books from the White Box. Late OD&D and early OD&D are pretty different animals. This was ultimately the reason why Swords & Wizardry has from its earliest days had two different versions.

In any case, the strategy for releasing Swords & Wizardry as a 0e clone was to follow Dan’s model of a company that would support a “living game.” This was particularly important for OD&D because of the small number of available books and the small following (relative to AD&D and Basic, which had been mass-market products). My other goal was to use Swords & Wizardry as an outreach of free-form gaming into the mainstream gamer population. These two objectives have shaped a lot of the decisions I’ve made with the Swords & Wizardry game, some of which have worked much better than expected, and some of which were stupid (multiple revisions of rulebooks are NOT something that people generally appreciate, note to self and others).

That’s my summary background history of how the structure of commercial publishing has developed thus far in our community. We are in a next step right now, I think, in that there is a huge proliferation of clone games that has followed the “big three,” and a mature market for modules (eg, more than one can keep up with), with lots of third-party publishers involved. We are also seeing Joe Goodman of Goodman Games working on a non-clone game system that’s intended to capture the old school market. The terrain is completely different from the days when the release of a module was electrifying news for the entire community.

So far, I haven’t said anything about what’s bad or good in this trend, and where that new phase (a mature market) is going to take us. In the next installment, I’m going to pick up the question about whether for-profit publishing has been a benefit or a poison to our community, or whether it has been both. One way or the other, I think those who have been watching the development of our community since 2004 or thereabouts would all agree that there has been a sea change in the way things operate. Good or bad? Moral or immoral? Cool or irritating? That’s the next topic.

Armored beetle-cowboys of the wastelands

Here is a preliminary write-up of the rangadillos, the beetle-herding, beer-swilling, unpredictable denizens of the barren lands near the strange village of Cho-Shen. Since the principal crop of Cho-Shen is a honey-like sap harvested from desert-growing cane, the potential for disputes and even violence between the two communities is obvious. How exactly it will play into the adventure isn't yet clear. I'm seeing a battle in the village with the characters defending a honey-warehouse from rangadillo desert-raiders, but that's still only a visual image.

Obviously, the backbone of this module is to create a spaghetti-western type of conflict without actually crossing the genres. The weird Vance-like culture of Cho-Shen, plus the R.E. Howard pict, will hopefully turn the adventure into something that's merely bizarre rather than "a Western with swords and armadillos." Unless that's what the referee wants.

The stats below are arranged for Swords & Wizardry Complete Rules, or for the Core/Freestyle rules. I was going to post some WhiteBox stats, but I realized that the only difference here would be that the rangadillos would have 1 attack for 1d6 damage instead of two. I'll write up the giant armadillo and the giant beer-beetles at some point, but that's not done yet.

RANGADILLOS

Hit Dice: 3

Armor Class: 3 [16]

Attacks: 2 claws (1d6)

Saving Throw: 14

Special: Burrow

Move: 9

Alignment: Neutrality

Challenge Level/XP: 3/60

Rangadillos are related to armadillos, but they are as large and as intelligent as humans, living in extensive, far-flung burrow complexes dug into the soil or bedrock of barren wastelands and deserts. Although they are not bipedal, rangadillos can stand on their hind legs for long periods of time when they need to use tools or reach things on tall shelves. Although rangadillos are highly independent and individualistic, their social organization follows the same pattern in virtually every settlement, evidencing the fact that at some point in time this race was tampered with in some way - or even bred into existence - by a powerful wizard or mad experimenter.

Rangadillo towns are generally isolated in wasteland areas, where the creatures maintain herds of giant fermentation beetles that produce beer in a somewhat unmentionable way. The beer – beer of any kind – is vitally important to the health of the rangadillos, for it staves off leprosy in the same way that fruit staves off scurvy in human beings. Without a supply of some sort of fermented drink, a rangadillo community will begin to contract leprosy, and eventually become a diseased, insane blight in the area, their contagious warriors raiding viciously and indiscriminately into nearby lands, seeking beer.

A rangadillo community generally consists of 4d10+10 “citizens.” The community will be led by a “Revenuer” with 5HD, and 1 or 2 “Preachers.” Rangadillo preachers have the spell-casting ability of a cleric with as many levels as the preacher has hit dice. The lead preacher of a settlement will have 1HD per 5 rangadillo citizens in the settlement, and the second preacher (if one is present) will have 1HD fewer than the lead preacher. Thus, a rangadillo town with 10-14 citizens would have a lead preacher with 2HD and a secondary preacher – again, if one is present – with 1HD. A rangadillo town with 45-49 citizens would have a lead preacher with 9HD, and a rangadillo town with maximum population would have a preacher with 10HD.

Rangadillo lairs will also contain 1d4 giant armadillos, and will have 3d10 of the giant beer-producing beetles grazing on the surface unless these have been brought into belowground stables for protection from rustlers, raiders, or bad weather.

Rangadillos are not enemies of humanity or human civilization per se, but they are inveterate raiders. Their beetle-produced beer, while it is necessary to their survival, is not particularly palatable. In consequence, they are often tempted to raid human settlements for beer, ale, mead, or the grains (or honey) required to brew these drinks. In some cases they will trade for such items, but they consider this to be unduly expensive. In general, they consider their raids to be more in the nature of a tithe or tax levied upon nearby settlements, which is the reason why their leaders bear the title of “Revenuer.”

Most rangadillo settlements will include at least one alchemist skilled in brewing beer, who will also have the ability to produce the occasional magic potion if the ingredients are available. Brewers are no different from ordinary rangadillo citizens in terms of hit dice or fighting skill.

Picts and Armadillos

In the course of various discussions on the Swords & Wizardry message boards, Jim Raggi suggested that a better way of getting out the word when a Swords & Wizardry module comes out would be to create a blog. As it turns out, I already had one, with a single post that read, in its entirety, "Testing." Apparently, this was enough data to have been carefully preserved on my behalf for more than two years. Fair enough.

I don't like the idea of using a blog purely for announcements, though, so I'll leaven the sensationalism with some gaming ideas. The most recent idea is for a module I'm planning to write as a free download either for Swords & Wizardry WhiteBox, Core/Freestyle Rules, or perhaps for both of the two.

It started simply as the idea for a new monster: the Wrangadillo. I'm not done with the write-up yet, but we're talking large and intelligent (although not brilliant) armadillos that live in sprawling, shallow, tunnel systems in wasteland areas. Much as normal armadillos do. Since armadillos are one of the only animals other than humankind that can carry leprosy, and since giant armadillos featured prominently in TV commercials for Lone Star beer some years ago, it seems axiomatic that these guys drink beer to prevent leprosy. Actually, it's going to be mead, not beer, because I invented a plant from which they can make their booze, and it's more of a mead type of drink.

They are highly territorial, and are led by two leader-types: preachers and revenuers. The preachers are basically clerics, at least, at this point in time. The revenuers are the leaders of the burrows - they got their name simply because of the connection with the booze, but it occurred to me that a good reason for giant armadillos to raid human settlements would be because the armadillos decided to tax someone other than themselves. Frankly, this motivation is well paralleled in human history as well.

We're probably talking about a critter with an excellent armor class and about 3 hit dice. They herd some kind of giant beetle on the surface around their underground warrens, and they have some (very big) giant armadillos they use as bulldozers/tanks.

On to the next part of the situation. In the grand tradition, we have a human village inconveniently close to the Wrangadillo town. To avoid simply descending into a Western, the village is not named "Tumbleweed" or something like that. It is name Cho-Shen. It's not going to be a total knockoff of Chinese culture, but enough to let it break the "Western" feel. Also, in a somewhat Jack Vance touch, there are creatures called the Yirks who live at the outskirts of the village. They aren't human, and all they seem to do is go out into the wastes to sing and make masks out of sand. This apparently sustains them without food or water. Occasionally one of them will help with the Sapcane harvesting.

Sapcane. I forgot. This is what grows in the area to support the village of Cho-Shen. Whatever mineral makes the badlands unsuitable for agriculture is what supports the Sapcane. This cane-like plant is rich with a honey-like sap. That's how you make the mead, and that's why the mead-swilling wrangadillo raiders are a problem.

Enter the picts. Savages that are coming down from the mountains, the picts are clearly planning on doing what every stouthearted fantasy barbarian tribe does best: killing everyone and probably eating them for good measure.

I think the triad of village, picts, and wrangadillos creates a nice little wilderness area that can be used for an adventure or two. I just need to work up some details on the actual adventure (unless it's just a wide open free-for-all battle against anyone who looks like they might have loot). But I've got in mind the idea that the wrangadillos might be one of those monster-forts that could be used either as allies or enemies depending on how the players choose to make their approach. It might even create an interesting home base. Especially if the picts wipe out the village of Cho-Shen at some point....