Alchemist Witch – Alex Drummond

The image of the game often seems to be “Conan and Merlin adventuring in Middle Earth”. But in my campaigns the strange vistas, cyclopean mysteries, and byzantine darkness of Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Jack Vance are an important part of the mix. And I wanted them to be part of the mix of artwork in Legends & Labyrinths, too.

This particular illustration seemed to just ooze the arcane; the alien; the weird. I don’t know what she’s casting, but it’s nothing pretty or pyrotechnic.

Way back in Dragon #285, James Jacobs presented the Breathdrinker: A creature of evil, elemental air that could silently steal the air from your very body. This is the illustration which accompanied the article–

I was immediately struck by how delightfully creepy they were, and in my first 3E campaign two of them were sent as assassins to ambush the PCs in the night. (This was actually in retaliation for what the PCs had done In the Depths of Khunbaral.) As I wrote in my notes:

• They come in the night.
• Glowing red eyes. Silverish-gray skin, taut against bone. Translucent and insubstantial. Glide with utter silence.
• One attacks the party member farthest from the guard. The other attempts to paralyze the guard one round later.

(If you really want to recreate the experience, I cued the encounter to track 26 on the Final Fantasy IX Plus soundtrack, which you can listen to here.)

A couple years later, the breathdrinker was picked up for inclusion in Monster Manual II. And I was like, “Of course they did. That’s an awesome monster and it gave me an awesome encounter.”

Here’s the illustration which appeared in Monster Manual II:

Maybe this is an admission of shallowness on my part, but I don’t think I end up with my creeptacular encounter of eery, silvery forms if that illustration had been my introduction to breathdrinkers. (Actually, I suspect I would have skipped right over breathdrinkers and never given them a second thought.)

If you look at the history of mechanical design for roleplaying games, I think there’s a very clear arc:

(1) You start with games that have very specific game structure that has been placed into a wider “world simulation”. (The influence from wargames is clear here.)

(2) The level of detail in the world simulation begins to grow, but is still largely contained to clear game structures. (Basically, the desire to simulate reality found within the existing wargames community began to expand as the focus of the games expanded beyond the battlefield.)

(3) Generic games appear. In seeking to provide universal rules, however, these games actually end up stripping out the vestigial game structures that still existed in RPGs. (Reading contemporary documents, it seems pretty clear that people at the time weren’t really conscious of the game structures in RPGs. In fact, most gamers still aren’t.)

(4) Between the universal focus and the removal of game structures, the desire for simulation metastasizes. Throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s, every game that came out tried to graft on more and more detail, accuracy, and specificity. (For example, look at the first edition of Paranoia: Hilarious, evocative game universe. But the rule system is completely obsessed with detailed simulation.)

(5) Around the mid-’80s, however, you start to see the backlash. A growing body of games are being designed with deliberately simpler rules because other games have gotten too complex (this is even talked about in the rulebooks themselves). (I generally point to West End Games as an early instigator for this with Ghostbusters and Star Wars, but that may just be a perspective bias on my part.)

(6) The first wave of these “rules lighter” games generally just scaled back the rules while maintaining the same focus on world simulation, but by the early ’90s you start seeing some designers really embrace the rules-light movement by looking at radically alternative approaches. (Amber Diceless Roleplaying and other diceless games are a really noticeable part of this.)

The fallout from this, IMO and IME, was that the entire spectrum of RPG system design was basically open for business: We’d explored rules heavy, bounced back to rules light (now featuring unified mechanics), and now people were basically experimenting all over the place.

If there was a major trendline in the ’90s it was the boom of splatbook-universes (Torg, World of Darkness, Legend of the 5 Rings, Deadlands, Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Fading Suns, AD&D’s campaign worlds, and a ton of wannabes). As you hit the late ’90s, these product lines all burn out their supplement treadmills. Shortly thereafter you get the D20 boom and the STG revolution.

Tagline: Possibly the funniest gamer-related cartoon of all time, Knights of the Dinner Table has well-deserved its position as a cult classic. All true gamers should be reading this. Hoody hoo!

I would now give the title of “funniest gamer-related cartoon of all time” to the early strips of Order of the Stick. I have long since let my subscription to Knights of the Dinner Table lapse, but these early strips are still hilarious good fun.

Although this review purports to focus primarily on the reprint volume Bundle of Trouble it’s really going to be a general assessment of the Knights of the Dinner Table (KODT) strip as a whole.

KODT debuted in the pages of Shadis several years ago when its creator, Jolly Blackburn, was still serving as the editor of the magazine he had created. Jolly would eventually leave Shadis and KODT would make the transition to the back of Dragon Magazine. More recently KODT has become its own stand-alone comic/magazine and is now well over the twenty issue mark. The first few issues have become scarce and impossible to track down, which brings us to Bundle of Trouble — a reprint volume of the first three issues.

Although gamer-oriented comics have had a place in the hobby for years, KODT was the first strip to truly take the humor of those strips out of the game settings and place it on the gamers themselves. It focuses on the escapades of B.A. Felton, the GM, and his players: Bob Herzog, Dave Bozwell, Brian Van Hoose, and (more recently) Sara Felton (B.A.’s cousin). In addition, a large supporting cast has been established, including Gary Jackson (the creator of the HackMaster(TM) game); Nitro Ferguson (infamous for his LARP involving steam tunnels and college students); and Weird Pete (everyone’s favorite game store owner and Keeper of the Lore).

It has become clear over the years of KODT’s growing popularity and success that Jolly Blackburn has successfully tapped into the gamer’s consciousness. His strips repeatedly strike far too close to home not to elicit peals of laughter while raising the question, “Where has he hidden the camera he’s filming my gaming group with?” Again and again Jolly succeeds at pinioning the classic stereotypes and realities of gamers in a hilarious fashion. His quirky, amateur style – which he constantly pokes fun at himself – only serves to heighten the effect. It has well-deserved its reputation as a cult classic and is quite possibly the funniest gaming-related comic every produced. All true gamers should be reading this strip, and Bundle of Trouble would be an excellent place to start.

Hoody hoo!

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Jolly Blackburn
Company/Publisher: Kenzer & Company
Cost: $9.95
Page count: 96
ISBN: n/a
Originally Posted: 1998/12/14

No offense to my former self, but this is a terrible review: It summarizes content without explaining why the summary is significant, and it spends far too much time saying “it’s really funny!” without explaining why I think it’s funny. It starts to pull itself together in the last paragraph, but then abruptly stops instead.

Ah, well. Can’t win ’em all.

On the other hand, I am going to go pull my collections down off the shelf.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

End of the Adventure – Alex Drummond

Is this an illustration of an aquatic adventure or an urban adventure?

Given where the PCs are heading, maybe it’s the start of a wilderness adventure.

(Memo to my players: This may constitute minor spoilers. Also, you’re all going to die.)

A couple of other random thoughts here: First, a lot of modern gaming is predicated on the philosophy that failure isn’t fun. I, on the other hand, think that failure can be entertaining. And I think it also sets up greater opportunities for entertainment down the road.

Second, what I love about this illustration is that it dares to dream big. And I hope it will dare you to dream big, too. I think orcs in a 10′ room are great; I think gritty fantasy is cool.

But every so often you’ve got to release the kraken, right?