I'm Gonna Go Loot the Dream Lands

Melzenger Stein by Albert H. Leindecker (c.1935)

I've been listening to the Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft Audiobook by the HPLHS--excellent performances from the narrators, by the way--and I have noticed that there were several stories spliced throughout with a very different tone from the expected "cosmic horrors beyond our mortal comprehension." Several of them revolve around a kind of lush, decadent dreamscape otherworld which I have come to find out is actually recognized as an official cycle, and it has even received an official series of modules for Call of Cthulhu.

I haven't read very much of either, but I had an epiphany listening to Celephaïs by HPL that this cycle of stories is remarkably similar to some of the writings of Dunsany and Poe. Lovecraft and his critics regard these romantic, dreamlike stories as more of an apprentice venture compared to his later writings, but I do think the ennui and longing evident in these tales and their inspirations are the necessary stepping stones for the creation of the types of game worlds we play in today.

The mythic, romantic approach to a fantastic dream world is all well and good to observe passively, but they are inspiring enough to make others want to know more. Writers of sword & sorcery like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith take the surreal circumstances and ethereal strangeness of these kinds stories and reimagine them with a protagonist that, for lack of a better reduction, isn't a coward and carries something sharp. Even Dunsany dabbles in this this kind of reflection with The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth wherein the hero just kind of cuts through a wizard's dream castle with a cool sword.

Much like I don't like listening to other people talk about their dreams, I think the audience wants to experience wonder and fantasy while also feeling like they have a choice in the matter, especially when they stand to gain something from prodding at it. When we stop fully understanding the high-minded conceptual framework of layered meanings and metaphors that these visuals represent, seeing as it is presented as a physical place, we start experimenting.

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GM: "You enter the gilded hall of the Elf-king, the high arches of the ceiling bleeding into a haze of twinkling stars that illuminates the long chamber with a delicate twilight. The table is set with every morsel imaginable: sumptuous meats, fruit glistening with dew, and rivers of rainbow wine flowing from gem-studded pitchers. The living wood of the furniture perches beneath the revelers sat around the feast seems like it had been grown for the forms now sat upon them with perfect intention, and the beaming smiles of the fey lords and ladies are gracefully enraptured in the wonderous merriment of a never-ending banquet."

Player: "You said the hall was gilded? Like gold? I have a pickaxe; when no one is looking, I wanna kinda start, like, chipping away at the walls with it."

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The romantic stories of these writers, as far as I can tell, were the inspiration for later fiction that forms the throughline of the requisite otherworld that we utilize as settings of our adventures, but we've rejected the focus on interpreting fatalistic and sublime beauty in favor of poking things to see what happens. When it comes to OSR TTRPGs, these ephemeral places are not beyond our reach; we are supposed to touch and speak and fight through them, imposing our will to the extent that we feel like we are most benefitted. We tow the line between escapism and cutthroat roguishness with our characters as a medium, not as a rejection of meaning, but because it's fun.

Likely a topic for another time, but hard worldbuilding seems like its the natural outgrowth of not simply experiencing a story about a place, but feeling like you can actually visit it and achieve consistent, expected results from interactions. I should take a look at the less logical programming, more vibe-based inspirations of games like Mythic Bastionland to see how games outside of the OSR are able to achieve an interactive otherworld that doesn't revolve around a gritty, rules-oriented play space.

KNOCK!-off #1.2

A sufficiently badass paperback
cover of a W. H. H. classic

Some of these entries below are the reason I fell in love with OSR theory, design, and the curation thereof by the Merry Mushmen; the streamlining of rules and raw creativity required to populate large random tables is probably what lured me into the space more than anything.

Does Energy Drain Suck? by Gabor Lux

Perhaps it's my neo-trad roots informing my sensibilities, but yes, I think it does. I'm not one to shy away from straight-up killing PCs if the situation calls for it, but there is something really sinister about taking away hard-fought progress and significantly desynchronizing the party's capabilities for future expeditions. Many players would rather have characters die with the potential of resurrection than see their precious good noodle points erased.

Modifying the rules so that energy is drained from attributes instead is a great idea simply because it takes away the butthurt factor while retaining the lethality of encounters with the undead. Personally, I think it also makes more sense in the fiction and for PC metrics management. No one wants to have to reroll max HP or recalculate ability percentages in the negative direction.

Wizard Weaknesses by Daniel Sell

Wizards are weirdos. Anything that reinforces this idea is essential in my book. Some of the entries on this table may be hard to communicate or discover without environmental context clues or deeply embedded NPCs, but I think the strongest aspect of the table isn't necessarily the weaknesses themselves so much as how they inform the image and roleplaying of the weirdo they are tied to. "Direct sunlight causes the warlock’s crystallised plasmic crown to evaporate. It is otherwise invulnerable and irremovable." This goober is a pale, dark-dwelling creep with delusions of royal grandeur. "The wizard is careful to surround himself with mirrors at all times. While in the presence of a reflective surface he maintains his elevated state." The second coming of Narcissus, he's easy on the eyes but hopelessly aloof. There's immediate fodder in each of these in terms of tropes and characterization that paint a picture of who this person is.

My least favorite of these is table entries is "The wizard has an agreement with a dark(er) lord to boost his powers." Sorry Daniel, but that's kind of lame. I feel like most of them basically do that already. My personal replacement for this entry would be "The sorcerer is actually identical twins that share their pact-made magical power remotely on the condition that they remain unseen to one another. Never in the same place at the same time, if they are brought together their power diminishes significantly."

Get your gear! by Nobboc

A table for randomized starting gear. I think these entries are fun, but it seems like it may only work for classes that can suffer a wide variety of armor and weapons like fighters and (sometimes) clerics. Not to be a drag, but I would not be excited to roll on this table as a spellcaster class. This table feels Knave-coded in that it wants to get you up and dungeoneering without a lot of fuss, irrespective of your intended party role. I personally would use this to equip new PCs in a classless system or spur-of-the-moment companions with the chops for combat.

Consider the following as an additional entry: vibrant gambeson (2-in-6 mistaken for nobility), plumed cap, flamberge rapier, decoy coin pouch (any pebbles placed inside appear as coins), a provisioned charcuterie board.

The village's local retired adventurer... by Daniel Sell

A Daniel double-feature day. In lieu of an alternative entry or pithy remark, I'll leave you with a poignant, abbreviated quote from an underappreciated Appendix N contemporary:

"Yet that, after such age, if a youth desired greatly to make the adventure, he should receive… a strict account of the mutilatings and horrid deeds done to those who had so adventured.”

William Hope Hodgson — The Night Land

Dungeon Checklist by Arnold K.

A certified GLOG banger: a shortlist of things to include in your dungeon-to-be to maximize playability and cover your design variety bases. What interests me the most about this list is that it serves as the old-school foil to the lauded (and loathed) 5 room dungeon of the contemporary dragon game and friends. Rather than structuring a dungeon around premeditated narrative beats, the checklist insists on design elements to be included without a presumption of where and when. This sandbox approach provides the necessary constraints to defeat blank canvas syndrome while opening the door to jaquaysing the layout. Player choice and interactivity are central to OSR gameplay, and each part of this list is critical for providing a manifestation of this in a dungeon.

Pairing this list with a more structured layout creator (such as Sersa Victory's cyclic dungeon generation) basically does all of the work for you in terms of prep, leaving a GM the opportunity to flavor the dungeon however they want. My personal pick for tying together the theme of the dungeon is Map Crow's wedding aphorism approach since it has practically no overlap with the mechanical application of the items prescribed by Arnold, focusing instead on set dressing.

It's probably worth investigating the dungeon design course by Rise Up Comus to see how well the advice laid out here is integrated/endorsed by the now editor-in-chief of KNOCK!

KNOCK!-off #1.1

Lich King by Peter Mullen (2020)

I ended up only submitting to the Appx. N Jam since I frankly haven't been in a mechanically-minded mood as of late. Let's see if I can remedy that with the first real installment of this series. I'll tackle the first 4 or so entries from KNOCK! #1 in this post.

d12 PAMPHLETS FOUND IN A DUNGEON

Just a little goofy random "table" here that doesn't really serve anything other than a quick giggle. If I had to throw something out to populate it, it'd probably be something akin to "Warlocks & Weirdos: Recognizing an Enemy Spellcaster Before Being Turned Into Goo."

A Note on the Foreword

As a doom-scrolling, brain-rotted Zoomer, I resent the lack of recognition in this particular prologue, but considering how young myself and others in my generation would have been during the first stirrings of the OSR and a general assurance that none of us actively used Google+, I suppose it's understandable. That said, the OSR is assured to see an influx of Gen Z creators and ideas seep in with enough time, if indeed we are still referring to it as the OSR. As we become more atomized in our interests and more willing to accept processing longform content with age, I think rediscovering seminal blogs of this space will be a real treat for many. It's also interesting to note what I perceive to be a lack of confidence in this foreword, as if the creators were unsure that this kind of project would actually materialize. I cannot help but notice how far it has come.

WHAT I WANT IN AN OSR GAME by Brooks Dailey

Alright, here we go, the meat and potatoes. This article discusses some of the maxims and aims of the OSR as compared with a more generalized, modern TTRPG experience. Essentially, Brooks asserts that the OSR is a distinct experience because it actively eschews the need for narrative continuance and cohesion in favor of, well, a game. The GM presents a game world, the players describe what they do, and the GM tells them what happens. Something something tactical infinity, something something rulings over rules. The OSR is a challenge or puzzle that requires players to be skilled in order to "solve" the problems presented.

I think Brooks hits the nail on the head when name-dropping pulp fiction stories and characters: we're not lounging on who's and why's so much as exploding into the when's and how's. The conceit of OSR play is that it is a challenge-based experience where the story unfolds not according to narrative arcs but logical results of interaction with a weird, unpredictable world. I think 5e players have a hard time adjusting to this style of play because the culture of play it's associated with is almost diametrically opposed to players as agents of change in the world. Yes, you did save the world and find closure on your tragic ten-page backstory, but all of that was intentionally facilitated by the GM's plotlines. In the OSR, your achievements are exactly that: achievements. Your characters earned them because you as a player won at playing, and the GM was just there to tell you what the world does in response to your actions. This doesn't (necessarily) mean that the GM was playing against you, but the world sure as shit was, and you beat it anyway.

This was a smart first piece on the part of the editors since it functions as a distillation of the ideas of the oft cited Principia Apocrypha lightly juxtaposed with features of other modern games. This helps orient neophytes to the OSR mindset without abandoning what might have been a psychological anchor for some people's understanding of roleplaying.

A comparison of old and new D&D by Gavin Norman

Man, this article originated in the shrouded annals of anno domini 2011, and Gavin asserts in the original digital version that this was his first "OSR philosophy" post. That's bananas to me considering the first OSR system I became familiar with was OSE, and I'm pretty sure that game is the de facto system for old-school play today. Anyways, the bottom line of the text is in a similar vein to the one before it, but this one hones in on what I see as two important concepts: reactionary rulings (over rules) and table individualization.

The more amorphous nature of procedure and character metrics in the older games make it hard for players not to settle into the idea that rather than playing a piece of paper, they need to play like they are actually trying to fight a monster or disarm a trap by torchlight. This echoes the challenge-based focus of Brooks' piece from a slightly different angle: the fiction of what is happening is not centered in narrative motivations, and characters are not centered in ability quantification. You have to play like you are trying to win, and your character is a cool vehicle in the game to impose your will and die horribly in your stead when you screw up. A lack of rules (that players can see) means that a GM is empowered and encouraged to negotiate the creative actions of players into a rules framework that is stretchy enough to accommodate quite a bit of tomfoolery.

A corollary to this is the recognition that different GMs will likely rule things differently because of how they have structured their internal rulings process in conjunction with the written rules. Gavin asserts that this creates a dialogue between players and GMs seeking to reach consensus on what is appropriate for what crops up during play, avoiding the need to process or memorize extensive situational rules. I can't help but agree that this works better for me in many ways because I find needing to digest or even look up rules to be much less fun than just going with whatever sounds cool (as long as it doesn't irreparably damage the game's logic). 

Monster Design from Classics - The Lich by Chris McDowall

Chris talks about how to vary the stats of a lich in a way to create new monsters in a variety of flavors while retaining the balance/essence of the original. Frankly, I'm not a huge fan of the writing in this one, despite the fact that I utilize the concept regularly. I think Chris doesn't do a great job of actually retaining the essence of his example monster as a throughline for all of the variations he arrives at and presents. 

It would have been better if he established some archetypes and shown how a lich might have functioned within them, or shown how creatures within the same archetype might differ because of flavor. Whether it's the "Big and Dumb" or "Small and Smart" categorization, or something outside of these, there's a way to make a monster feel like a lich if you nail the tone and abilities. Likewise, there are tons of ways to make a physically weak but magically adept enemy not make people think "oh, like a lich." It doesn't seem fruitful to just name a bunch of creatures that could be any other monster with a unique theme and say "ah yes, this is obviously an extremely warped variation of a lich."

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this piece is kind of a stinker in my opinion when it comes to the writing and presentation. There are better ways to illustrate this concept. I'm not even really a fan, but Pointy Hat knocked this idea out of the park in my opinion by comparison, and he's firmly rooted in solely the 5e ecosystem. As good of a writer and designer Chris is, it's very strange that this is one of the things representing him in KNOCK!

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That's all for now. As I was writing this, Questing Beast uploaded a video on what the OSR playstyle is, and I'm glad that I detected a significant degree of continuity with how I define it.

Appendix N and Roleplaying's Ongoing Dialogue with Fiction

From one of my personal bookshelves

Since I took the time to write it out in the community posts section of the Appx. N Game Jam, I might as well post it here for posterity (with minor alterations for the consideration of the intended audience).

I had actually done a lot of personal research on Appendix N for a different project, and I wanted to share some resources and knowledge in case anyone was interested in exploring the topic further.

Where did it come from and who is on the list?

The original Appendix N comes from the tail end of the Advanced D&D Dungeon Master's Guide developed by Gary Gygax. An earlier version of this list actually appeared in Dragon Magazine #4, but it was expanded by the time of the official release in the DMG into the list we refer to today. Gygax states both in the DMG and in Dragon Magazine #95 the works of Jack Vance, Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, A. Merritt, and H. P. Lovecraft were the primary fictional influences on the development of the game. He actually goes out of his way to downplay the influence of fantasy genre titans like J. R. R. Tolkien and Michael Moorcock as "minimal" in that latter magazine article despite their now historic legacy, but he does give them a nod in the original list anyway. The underdiscussed "little brother" of the appendix (though perhaps more comprehensive) is the Inspirational Source Material list featured at the back of Tom Moldvay's Basic D&D that was first published only a few years later. However, even in the OSR space where B/X is the lingua franca of game design, this list barely holds a candle to Gygax's brainchild in terms of the level of recognition and popularity.

What is the list's influence on roleplaying games and literature today?

Many people continue to reference works from the original list as part of their inspiration for fantastic game ideas, and the concept of including an appendix of influential works still endures. Appendix N was reissued as Appendix E with the release of D&D's fifth edition Player's Handbook, now updated to include seminal works of speculative fiction published since the release of AD&D, best-fit titles for authors only mentioned by name in the original list, and some of the game designers' personal picks for major influences on the game's development. Other games, like The Electrum Archive and Vaults of Vaarn, include their own unique appendices of influences like books and other media, and some games like Hyperborea and Black Sword Hack are stylized as homages to specific works and subgenres featured in Appendix N. Goodman Games, the publisher of Dungeon Crawl Classics and many old-school 5e modules, maintains an active blog talking about the writings and ideas of the list's authors. As D&D and roleplaying have become cultural titans in their own right, some authors have flipped the script and used games as inspiration for their own writings.

TTRPGs and speculative fiction are basically in constant conversation, and Appendix N is a touchstone for this exchange. For example, after playing D&D with Gygax, Andre Norton (of Appendix N fame) wrote a novel inspired by the session: Quag Keep. Decades later, this book is listed as inspirational reading in the aforementioned 5e Appendix E. Another case is the influence of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, which not only inspired the early tone and structure of D&D, but also led to the1980s Conan films, which in turn were adapted into official D&D adventure modules. Circle of life, baby.

Man, that's a lot of books, but I want to try reading some. Where should I start?

Start wherever you like, but I also recommend perhaps reading a short story anthology to see which authors you might like to read more from. One of the latest and greatest in my opinion is the aptly named Appendix N, Revised and Expanded Edition: Weird Tales from the Roots of Dungeons & Dragons, featuring works by authors from the original list and their contemporaries. It was originally titled with the word "Eldritch" instead of "Weird" so it's a little confusing now that it shares a name with the long-running Weird Tales magazine, the very same where many of Appendix N's authors got their publishing start. Speaking of which, I personally like Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird for its inclusion of a variety of swords-and-sorcery and horror stories from both classic and new authors. If you wanted to look a little bit deeper into the history of the literature itself as a cultural movement, I've heard good things about Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery. Lots of research has been done on the history of this subsection of literature and of the history of TTRPGs themselves, and a quick search yields a ton of rabbit holes, I promise.

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Hopefully some of you find this topic interesting, and I hope it helps you discover something inspiring for yourself!