Back in early 1980s, when I was in high school, I was the Dungeon Master for a campaign of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. That is of course when the bug bit me; been chasing that dragon ever since. Last summer, I tried to run AD&D again, but of course even before I got it to the table I was messing around with it, trying to turn it into the game I wished I knew how to make it into back in the day. My bad! You can’t go home again.
But I thought the setting for the campaign was kind of cool. It was this gothic world of shadows and fog where the sun never moves from the horizon, the perpetual twilight making everything dark and gloomy.
So this week I tried again. I made a map using icons from game-icons.net, and wrote up some rules. It’s not AD&D this time—I know I can’t pull that off anymore—but instead a whole different game system that I am calling The Perilous Realm if anyone asks but it’s in a folder labeled “Avant-Garde Retrogame” and the file itself is named “Retrohack Alpha.”
Six players showed up at my house! Friends from work: two math professors, an economics professor, and an engineering professor; a friend from book club; and my brother, who also played in my AD&D game back in high school. The players had a range of experience ranging from none at all, to “modern” WotC versions of D&D, to early 80s TSR D&D just like me. Once everyone arrived, I gave a brief spiel about the setting and we rolled right into character creation.
You choose your kindred and your class, with some classes being typically associated with a specific kindred. So we had a dwarf seer, an elf corsair, a gnome druid, and a goblin monk. But you could pick a class from a different kindred! So we had a goblin hag (who’d learned magical arts from the trolls who’d used his player-devised minor magical property to, um, dehumidify their food stores. And a gnome priest, unfortunately nicknamed “Turd,” (players, man) who’d been left at the church doors as an infant and been brought up by a kindly hobgoblin cleric of the Anagnorisis.
I had given the players had this rundown:
The Chief Sacerdote of the Anagnorites has pronounced anathema upon the hobgoblin Baron of Excelsior Keep and his advisor, the defrocked goblin Anagnorite monk whose investigations of the lost art of Wizardry have scandalized the Church. Baron Excelsior has defied the Chief Sacerdote’s demand to bind over the neo-Wizard heretic for trial and execution, and in response the Church has called the faithful barons to punish the recreants. Now armies of the faithful march toward Excelsior Keep, intending to besiege its nigh impregnable walls and force the Baron to surrender and submit to the Church’s will.”
I told them to create “kickers” that would connect them to the situation, using language I lifted from Sorcerer: “A kicker is ‘an event or realization that your character has experienced just before play begins’ [that] spurs you into some action.” I told them that opportunities (a chance to do something has just opened up!) and mysteries (a puzzle has just arisen for you!) were probably the most appropriate sorts of kickers, but shockers (there’s a horse head in your bed!) were okay too.
We wound up with the gnome druid and the dwarf seer accompanying some goblins from Sentinel Keep through the Valley of Ferns to the Cyclopean Gate. The gnome had been seized by the goblins, who were forcing him to guide them there. The dwarf had fallen in with the goblins because they were en route to Excelsior Keep after they’d freed whatever was imprisoned beyond the Gate and it went and smashed down its walls. His wife had banished him until he could deal with his anger issues (a flaw he’d rolled during character creation), and he thought maybe the Wizard could help.
The goblin monk decided that he had gone to the Azadi Oasis in the middle of the Desert of Long Shadows and was just practicing his art there. Not terribly exciting, but I thought it was good enough for someone totally new to role-playing games. It worked out, too. The goblin hag had managed to get free from his trollish captors and was making his way to the Oasis looking for his vanished family, whom he had reason to believe had gone there. And the elf corsair had left his ship because of a dream that made him believe he needed to reach the place where the sun met the horizon, so he was bound into the desert as well, since he needed to cross it to get there.
Finally, the goblin priest had left his kindly father-figure Father Lazardus back in the Umbrelspires and joined up as a chaplain in one of the armies marching toward Excelsior Keep. His motivation was to prove his worth and maybe become a big damn hero!
With that all business taken care of, play could begin. When it came time for players to roll dice, it worked like this: You have a “basic die” that gets smaller as you go up in level, and when you roll if it comes up 1 or prime, you prevail; otherwise, you fall short. Some abilities let you roll a smaller or make you roll a bigger die, or bump the die up or down in terms of what you need to prevail.
One of the players told the group in a post-mortem e-mail:
Oh, and here is something interesting. The probability of rolling a 1 or any prime on a d12 is 50% (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11). The probability of rolling a 1 or a prime on a d10 is also 50% (1, 2, 3, 5, 7). So, all else being equal, rolling a d10 only feels better than rolling a d12. The difference, of course, is that there is a greater chance of rolling the top result on a d10, so having an edge matters. There’s a lot going on with the math here! The only boring prime is the Prime Directive!
Many circumstances call for an opposed roll. If you prevail and the opposition doesn’t, complete success. If they prevail and you don’t, absolute failure. Symmetrical results produced either qualified success or mitigated failure.
We’re doing other stuff to get us there, of course.
The captive gnome druid managed to get his hands on his pouch of rune stones and tried to mesmerize the goblins with his Beholder rune, which disappointingly didn’t work because they made their save, so they just got more insistent. But then they all ran into a shambling mound, and the dwarf seer stabbed it right in its vegetable heart after it crushed a goblin’s skull! The dwarf player, who had played AD&D back in the day, was very pleased to have been able to name the monster from my version of its Monster Manual description. The gnome ran away, but when he came face-to-face with a giant stag beetle, he ran back.
Meanwhile, with the hobgoblin army marching toward Excelsior Keep from the Umbrelspires, the gnome priest gave an inspiring sermon to the troops, and I give the player credit for gamely doing it in a gnomish falsetto. Delightful! This led to an opportunity to prove himself—he convinced the Knight-Captain of his battalion to give him a chance to do more important jobs, but the Knight-Captain told him he needed to produce a sign of the Sun’s favor or something.
But before he could come up with anything, tragedy struck!
An elf ambush waylaid his battalion as it brought up the rear of the march, and Turd was captured by elven rangers, who brought him as prisoner to Excelsior Keep! He met an elf princeling, and talked his way into being sent to the Anagnorite contingent who, though prisoners, were keeping the bells ringing.
Finally, the goblin hag met the elf corsair in the desert just outside the oasis, with the goblin monk watching, and tried to trick him into drinking some poison. This completely didn’t work, but the monk followed the corsair as he made his way into the oasis proper, then knocked him out and took his stuff. When the elf came to, he explained his mission to the monk, who seemed to think this was crazy. “You are as close to the sun as you are going to get,” he told him. He dispatched the hag to Castle Excelsior because he’d heard there were elves there, and maybe they would ransom him. With his family encouraging him to show loyalty to the monk, the hag set out, brewing potions to use along the way.
And that was the game! We started creating characters at 7 pm; at 10 o’clock, we called it quits. I think everyone had a good time playing; the goblin monk told me via e-mail, “Although I probably seemed confused most of the time, I had a great time at your house. Thank you for inviting me.” This strikes me as the perfect neophyte reaction.
We’ll continue the game sometime in July, I hope.
