Interesting links!  As a side note, just curious on how you all pronounce Sahaugin.  I have heard "saw-wha-gin" and "saw-hog-in" (my feeble attempts to give examples).  I have mixed player groups and every time the sahaugin show up in an encounter people digress on how to pronounce it.  While it doesn't detract from gaming since the side track conversation doesn't go long, I've taken a kind of informal poll to see what the majority is... or if there is some other pronunciation I am not aware of.  Thanks!

mrmanowar wrote in Hawk & Moor: A new D&D book and request for beta readers:every time the sahaugin show up in an encounter people digress on how to pronounce it.

That is how the sahaugin takes its prey. When the adventuring party falls under its spell, they stop to discuss the linguistic possibilities while ignoring the slimy monsters that creep up to surround them. By the time they get around to analyzing the mesoclitic within the context of Proto Indo-European, it's too late for them. Sahaugin-related fatalities have been a significant contributor to death rates in Middle-earth.

Hey Kent---

Are you publishing the H&M books in .pdf format also, or just in epub/mobi/etc.?

robertsconley wrote in Hawk & Moor: A new D&D book and request for beta readers:

darkseraphim wrote in Hawk & Moor: A new D&D book and request for beta readers:  I wish do-it-yourself accessories were more popular, but they're a hard sell sometimes.  The majority wants completed product, not tools.  Cool people who like both seem to be the exception.

Given the response "to how to make a fantasy sandbox" You might try to put it together as part of a SYSTEM. For example if Monster & Treasure assortment was part of a hypothetical "How to make and manage a dungeon" by E. Gary Gygax. I but it would have sold a lot better.

I haven't done it myself because it taking me a long time in assembling a set of original tables that I can publish and without those table I don't think anything I publish would be anymore useful than the blog posts I already have up.

darkseraphim wrote in Hawk & Moor: A new D&D book and request for beta readers: The nice balance that I've found is in "tools that inspire."  My favorite examples are the Ultimate Toolbox, the Ready Ref Sheets, and Kellri's Netbook #4 (Old School Encounter Reference I think it's called).  I make a lot of my own accessories in that way - you give the DM/reader a great hook idea, but you don't give them the details.  It's kind of like Mad Libs as an adventure intro, and then the 1-page "treatment" gets fleshed out by the DM to create the adventure.  I think that's a cool way to encourage people to create their own stuff with a little more guidance.

I think this reinforces my point. My opinion is that a reason why Ready Ref sheets and Netbook #4 are so well received because they are comprehensive. While they are not part of a system but they cover so much that just about everybody finds something useful.

darkseraphim wrote in Hawk & Moor: A new D&D book and request for beta readers:I'm also embarrassed to note that some of my own early dungeons were based on Choose Your Own Adventure type books or fantasy adventures ... I did one on The Mystery of Chimney Rock, one on Zork and another on A Spell for Chameleon (my first wilderness type of adventure).  They weren't good, but I learned a lot following someone else's framework and trying to make a different story out of it.  :wink:

My "sin" what I used a lot of published adventure lightly reskinned for the campaign. I was way better at managing a sandbox where player were free to do whatever then coming up with prepared location. Now thanks to my OSR experience and everything I learned (You and Peterson are part of this). I am much more comfortable in making my own adventure as I now have a bunch of assembled tools that gets me over the hump.

Hi guys, I was up in the mountains for awhile but am back  Robert, I totally agree ... I write my Castle Oldskull books to provide comprehensive takes on detailed subjects.  My problem is I get too wordy though.  My book on city encounters is 200-300 pages, my monster tables for dungeons are about 800 pages and my trap book is about 200 pages.  I have a tricks book in draft form which I haven't published yet, but will probably be about 150-200 pages.  At this rate I should have a 15,000 page random dungeon design system completed in about 30 years  

I'm planning on making a much more brief version of everything, which is based on D20 tables used in conjunction.  (For example, roll 1D20 on table A for NPC long-term motivations, and table B for short-term needs, and end up with 400 different NPCs based on a single 2D20 roll.)  But I'm waiting to see if WotC do an OGL for 5E before I write more for the OSR.

But I'll definitely try to offer more comprehensive materials!

Hi all, here is a draft of a new essay that will appear in future editions of Book II.  This one is about the science fiction elements of D&D, the post-apocalyptic background potential of D&D, and how natural the fantasy-sci fi merger appeared from the perspective of the early 70s, as opposed to our own historical view.

**

Dungeons & Dragons:
A Secret History of the Apocalypse?

(Glimpses of the "Gamma World" in Early D&D)

DESPITE THE omnipresent temptation which might lead us to label Dave's and Gary's signature masterpiece — Dungeons & Dragons — as a mere clone of Professor Tolkien's hallowed and now-legendary fantasy setting of Middle Earth, there is a far more unusual background to the game which I feel it is crucial for the historical reader to consider.  It is an open secret [1] that D&D, as published in January of 1974, can very easily be interpreted as a fantasy simulation of a post-apocalyptic environment.  In other words, Greyhawk and/or Blackmoor — and all the ruin-filled realms in between — might actually represent the healed and forgotten remnants of a far more ancient world, one ravaged by a nuclear war or other technological cataclysm.

This suggestion might seem laughable at first, but when we peel back the layers of preconception and consider both Dave's and Gary's love of science fiction, it really is not unlikely at all.  Gary's favorite author Jack Vance wrote The Dying Earth, in which a far-flung and post-apocalyptic world is filled with eccentric wizards who battle and vie against strange monstrosities.  The Hawkmoon stories (of Michael Moorcock), along with Hiero's Journey (Sterling Lanier), Sign of the Labrys (Margaret St. Clair), and Changeling Earth (Fred Saberhagen) — all exceedingly post-apocalyptic works — were also held dear among Gary's favorite tales.  All of these stories inspired pieces of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and all were featured in Gary's recommended reading list for AD&D, Appendix N.  Several of these tales were also included in Gary's earlier "Fantasy / Swords & Sorcery:  Recommended Reading" list as well, featured in The Dragon #4 (December 1976).

But there are also hints beyond the mere recollection of Gary's preferred reading material.  The Greyhawk dungeons of 1973 would feature beaming teleporters and dimensional gates to other worlds, inspired in part by the technology of Star Trek.  It is also remarkable that in 1974, when James M. Ward expressed an interest in seeing a pure science fiction version of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary's answer was not "No."  Rather, Gary loved the concept, but he simply did not have enough time to write the new game by himself.  Therefore, he let James run with the idea.  The result would be Metamorphosis Alpha, published in late 1976 … some six months before Star Wars told the tale of ravaged worlds "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away."  Star Wars, in turn, would convince everyone that high technology and Jedi mysticism could co-exist in the fabled past, and not just in the future.  In Star Wars as in Greyhawk, the Golden Age of the world has already come and gone, and who is to say that the Golden Age was not celebrated through the omnipresence of magic-like technology?  After all, Gary — very much like George Lucas — was a fan of the "Sword & Planet" genre exemplified by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom stories, the first of which — as Under the Moons of Mars — had been written more than twenty-five years before Gary was even alive.  And Barsoom in turn was based on the premise of a declining civilization, where the past culture's technology had fallen into ruin.  There, apocalypse took hold in the form of a worldwide climate disruption, and the survivors grew to favor swords and other melee weapons as a result of their gradual degeneration into barbarism.

TSR's game Warriors of Mars, celebrating Barsoom and linking it explicitly to D&D, would be released in 1974.  And certainly by 1975, Gary was also a devout admirer of M. A. R. Barker's post-apocalyptic Tékumel setting, which would then premiere to the public in TSR's Empire of the Petal Throne.  While James Ward continued his work on "sci fi D&D," Gary too would mix sci fi and fantasy in his own Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, conceived in early 1976 as a tournament-driven introduction to Metamorphosis Alpha as an adjunct to Dungeons & Dragons.  Even as late as 1979, Gary's Dungeon Masters Guide would feature conversion rules syncing AD&D to TSR's most forthright post-apocalyptic game, Gamma World.

And there is more.  There are deeper clues to D&D's apocalyptic background buried within the rules which deal with artifacts and relics.  Several of these powerful nonesuch gadgets are obviously hints that the world of fantasy possessed much more technology in its ancient past.  These anachronistic and ancient contraptions include Heward's Mystical Organ, the Mighty Servant of Leuk-O, and the micro-automaton "device" known as Queen Ahlissa's Marvelous Nightingale.  Most especially telling is the Machine of Lum the Mad:  "Perhaps this strange device was built by gods long forgotten and survived the eons since their passing," we read, "for it is incredibly ancient and of workmanship unlike anything known today." [2]

So it is clear, then:  Gary acknowledged many links of inspiration and development between post-apocalyptic fiction and D&D, to the point that they became irrevocably intertwined.  But how early, exactly, did he link the apocalypse and lost technology to simpler precepts of historical and medieval fantasy?  It may have been very early indeed, before D&D or even Chainmail had been conceived of.  He once wrote that he read Jack Vance's The Eyes of the Overworld in 1966, [3] and then read The Dying Earth thereafter.  But despite all of these later links, was Gary thinking of post-apocalyptic fantasy while he was writing the early rules for Dungeons & Dragons?  He almost certainly was.  In the original set's volumes (written in 1973, published in January of 1974), we find direct references not only to Barsoom, but also to cyborgs, robots, and androids.  Early on in Volume 1, Gary noted that D&D's scope could easily "stretch from the prehistoric to the imagined future," although he urged an exploration of medieval fantasy prior to any engagement with such further flights of fancy.  From the beginning, it seems, D&D's ties to the post-apocalyptic were both hinted and hidden in equal measure.

Despite Gary's reticence on the subject, there are very much clearer ties between D&D and a technology-imbued former age, which can all be found in the realm of Greyhawk's ancestor:  Dave Arneson's science fantasy campaign of Blackmoor.  Blackmoor's earliest arch-villain is the Egg of Coot, who would later be described in this manner:  "All communications with this beast are through direct mental contact or via his throne room, which is dominated by a huge old world artifact said to be an ancient war machine." [4]

And the blatant references to a technology-focused world of Blackmoor do not end there.  In 1973, John Snider — a player in Dave's campaign who contributed significant additional rules — introduced guidelines for Star Trek-style exploration missions to be enjoyed by the Blackmoor players.  These rules would later be published in part by TSR, as Star Probe and Star Empire.  In that stars-and-fantasy campaign, the world which Blackmoor resides upon was designated as a unique planet which could be visited by spaceships.  One ship's crew in particular visited this world and became stranded, with one ambitious member — Security Officer Stephen Rocklin, known as "The Rock" — becoming a villain of special note.  Stephen would control the Temple of the Frog, as later featured in D&D Supplement II:  Blackmoor (1975).  Dave's genre-spanning campaign would also come to feature phasers, nanotech healing kits, and Starship Troopers-style powered armor (as worn by William of the Heath, the "Blue Rider").  Perhaps most significant of all, the region of Blackmoor was home to the City of the Gods:  a half-buried spaceship, apparently hailing from the times of old.

These many hints of the apocalypse in Blackmoor's history were certainly no accident.  In fact, D&D writer and commentator Tavis Allison has noted that he once asked Mr. Arneson flat out if Blackmoor was a post-apocalyptic setting, with ruins standing over lost remnants of technology.  Reportedly, Dave stated, "Yes.  My players haven't figured that out yet." [5]

And that is a revelation.  The world's foremost fantasy game has a hidden layer of science fiction, and these two genres are deeply merged via significant post-apocalyptic elements and imagery.  D&D is arguably a science fiction game.

It may be surprising, but the revelation is also welcome.  If we do consider the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons as being post-apocalyptic, many of the game's stranger "magical" trappings begin to make much more sense.  Magic exists because the high-tech devastation caused the laws of science to become permeable, with the dream logic of chaos magic taking hold wherever the physical laws might falter.  (This is the premise behind Fred Saberhagen's Changeling Earth, which was published while Gary was writing the draft of D&D.)  "Monsters" are the long-lost descendants of mutants, biologically corrupted lifeforms, sentient flora and fungi, and degenerated species.  Such a background also provides a logical explanation for the absence of crude black powder weapons, or gunpowder of any kind, in the World of Greyhawk:  with the laws of physics disrupted and replaced in part by magic, humans would be forever coming to grasp with an ever-changing world with shifting laws.  The old technologies, despite all attempts at replication, would not always function.  And why would humans continue to attempt recreating a form of technology that would never work again?  Instead, they could simply innovate anew, using magic and ingenuity to work out similar effects (such as Magic Missiles and Fireballs) in sync with the new ways of the world.

And best of all, a post-apocalyptic background can offer a firm rationale for the existence of hundreds of dungeons!  After all, if the world had been filled with fallout shelters, subterranean fortresses and vast underground sanctuaries (as seems to be the case in Margaret St. Clair's Sign of the Labrys), those places would certainly be filled with mutated survivors.  If the surface of the planet remained poisoned for thousands of years, would the denizens not dig deeper in every direction, because they could not return to the surface?  Wouldn't such places be filled with storerooms and vaults filled with "treasure," protected by traps and guardians?  There would be ruins everywhere after the apocalypse, many with these "dungeons" far below.  And after thousands of years, the new surface dwellers would only know that these netherworld environs were filled with strange creatures, magical wonders and mysterious rooms and secret tunnels of every description.

* * * * *

And what might end the world?  The cataclysm could be technological, or it might instead be magical.  Or perhaps both?  In Gary's World of Greyhawk, the great advanced civilizations of the past were destroyed by the Invoked Devastation and the Rain of Colorless Fire.  Gary once wrote that these were not thermonuclear effects, but rather the result of massive waves of uncontrollable magic. [6]  Here, however, we are reminded not only of Gary's love of post-apocalyptic fiction, but also of Clarke's Third Law:  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."  Greyhawk, despite being spared the devastation of nuclear holocaust, might have fallen prey to post-industrial progress after all.

In Blackmoor, the devastation's cause is a mystery.  In Sign of the Labrys, humanity fell victim to the plague.  And in the world of Changeling Earth, the cataclysm which caused the death of the technological societies is simply called "The Change."  It seems that in that near future, a nuclear war occurred and a desperate experiment was conducted in an attempt to save some of North America:  some of the laws of physics were deliberately altered at the sub-molecular level, resulting in fewer fissionable reactions, making nuclear weapons much less likely to detonate.  But these very changes caused the laws of physics to become more mutable, and gave birth to both chaos magic and the Demon Lord born of an interrupted nuclear explosion, the Lord Orcus himself.  "Magic" and "technology" in such a world are simply different words for the same concept, spoken from two vantage points which are diametrically opposed.

Not everyone, however, is comfortable with such a definition of "magic-tech" as a unifying theory.  In our own age of the 21st century, where genre fiction is highly striated and fandoms forever divided, many readers have returned to "Tolkien worship."  Some fans today embrace fantasy as solely representing the medieval period, merged with the lost dream world of fairy tales.  Under such a strict definition, any whispers of technology at all appear to be out-of-genre, upsetting, and perhaps even faintly ridiculous.  But from the perspective of the open-minded, or from the viewpoint of the early 1970s, such genre-merging mischief is precisely the spice which serves to create the very exciting grounds where many new and unpredictable ideas take root and flourish into the future.

* * * * *

Despite all of the compelling evidence hinting at an apocalyptic background for D&D, it seems clear that Gary set out to write a medieval fantasy game — and only that — in early 1971.  Chainmail (March 1971) was sub-titled "Rules for Medieval Miniatures," with the Fantasy Supplement's introductory justification stating that "Most of the fantastic battles related in novels more closely resemble medieval warfare than they do earlier or later forms of combat."  And D&D itself (January 1974) would subsequently be sub-titled in part, "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames."  In other words, Chainmail and D&D were at first games which reflected a Tolkien-inspired background:  a world of the fairy tale past, where technology never rose out of the Dark Ages to alter the fate of humanity.

Nevertheless, it seems that Gary's orthodox premise came to an end as soon as Dave Arneson began tampering with Chainmail Fantasy to create the Barony of Blackmoor and the Egg of Coot in April of 1971.  The strictly "medieval" trappings of the game swiftly went out the door.  The interesting question then becomes:  When exactly was Gary inspired by post-apocalyptic fiction to lend sci fi aspects to the background of his own game of dungeon exploration?  Was it perhaps in November 1972, when he played an adventurer in Dave's Blackmoor dungeons?  Or in early 1973, when Changeling Earth was published and he was busy writing the second draft of Dungeons & Dragons?  Or (despite mentioning robots and cyborgs in D&D!) did he not become obsessed with the concept until after D&D's publication, when writing Warriors of Mars (early 1974), or while publishing Empire of the Petal Throne (1975), or perhaps only while writing Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (early 1976)?  When did D&D become post-apocalyptic, and to what degree?  And why is it that Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977-1979) is so much more heavily vested with these science fiction ideas, while (at the very same time) the game's many new fans were pining for a more Tolkien-modeled conception of traditional fantasy?

There are no easy answers to these questions, and there probably never will be a definitive resolution which would assuage our collective confusion.  But the next time someone derides the science fiction elements in Dungeons & Dragons, you might want to point out to them that those elements have a very solid and justifiable place in the earliest foundations of the game.  Perhaps, even, the 1974 game was written as a post-apocalyptic setting filled with mutant "monsters" and technological "treasures," where the worlds of (Grey) Hawk and (Black) Moor hide the utmost secrets of the apocalypse under their shared and riddling histories … riddles which were waiting, all along, to be unveiled and appreciated by our deeper understanding.

**

[1] This idea has been explored many times over the decades, and I was reminded of the theme by Tavis Allison's 2010 article for The Escapist Magazine, "The Day After:  D&D Is the Apocalypse."  I owe a debt to Tavis's insightful precedent as I tackle the subject herein, from my own perspective.
[2] DMG159
[3] Jack Vance and the D&D Game
[4] The First Fantasy Campaign, pg. 14.
[5] |  | The Escapist
[6] GREYHAWK-L Archives -- May 2000, week 2 (#66)

darkseraphim wrote in Hawk & Moor: A new D&D book and request for beta readers: And why is it that Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977-1979) is so much more heavily vested with these science fiction ideas, while (at the very same time) the game's many new fans were pining for a more Tolkien-modeled conception of traditional fantasy?

Are you hinting at Ralph Bakshi's Wizards & the Sword of Shannara, both 1977? There seem to be a few things suggested, but not directly addressed. The nuclear threat of the Cold War of course, but also the direction of mainstream society by the early 1970s. That is, the mid-20th-century world of modernism had been supplanted by medievalist hippies.

sauromatian wrote in Hawk & Moor: A new D&D book and request for beta readers:

darkseraphim wrote in Hawk & Moor: A new D&D book and request for beta readers: And why is it that Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977-1979) is so much more heavily vested with these science fiction ideas, while (at the very same time) the game's many new fans were pining for a more Tolkien-modeled conception of traditional fantasy?

Are you hinting at Ralph Bakshi's Wizards & the Sword of Shannara, both 1977? There seem to be a few things suggested, but not directly addressed. The nuclear threat of the Cold War of course, but also the direction of mainstream society by the early 1970s. That is, the mid-20th-century world of modernism had been supplanted by medievalist hippies.

Yes, very much    Those were definitely two I wanted to discuss but didn't due to the narrowness of the topic.  (The essay is an interlude between two chapters discussing the Greyhawk dungeons in 1973, with a few hints of Blackmoor, within a larger timeline discussing the writing of D&D 1972-1974.)  There's a few other things I was going to touch on, including The Time Machine (Wells 1895), By the Waters of Babylon (Benet 1937), I Am Legend (Matheson 1954), The Drowned World (Ballard 1962) and maybe even the time loop which frames The Worm Ouroboros (Eddison 1922) … but I decided to limit it to Greyhawk, Blackmoor, MA and Appendix N.  I may include Star Man's Son (1952) because it's Andre Norton and almost fits, but I don't know if Gary and/or Dave liked it.

darkseraphim wrote in Hawk & Moor: A new D&D book and request for beta readers: There's a few other things I was going to touch on

You mentioned Tolkien as an example of depicting the past, but that's a matter of interpretation. Many saw the War of the Ring as symbolism for WWII & for modern industrialism, while Tolkien himself denied the former but confirmed the latter. He said that it depicted our world 6000 years ago, but his timeline would also match up with more recent events: the end of Middle-earth's Second Age with the end of the Bronze Age c. 1100 BC (involving the mass-movement of peoples), the settling of the Shire with the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain c. 500 AD (each involving two brothers), & the War of the Ring in modern times.

Also the novel I Am Legend, which in its early-'70s film adaption symbolizes the older generation's alienation from a changing society. The main character feels so distanced from all the other millions of people he lives among that it's as if they aren't there at all. The only other people he acknowledges as existing are those goddamn hippies & bikers who manage to raise his ire. My point being that in this era, a lot of writers were using a post-apocalyptic setting to depict the mundane world of the 1970s. Walker Percy's novel Love in the Ruins & the first Mad Max film would be examples of settings that are recognizable as the real world of the then-present day, but with exaggerated social decay.

A few other notes to consider when thinking about the cross-genre nature of D&D  

Rob Kuntz said of fantasy-themed D&D that "its relation to other genres such as SF, Steam Punk, Sword & Planet, Planetary Romance, Post-Apocalyptic and other such related matter has never been far and away from the game as originally conceived and played-tested and that this easily included core matter was instead separated into distinct RPG types for commercial reasons only."
Lord of the Green Dragons: Taking D&D "Back" To Its Future Level:  Part 1

Also of note:
"Even though our genre inclusive game experience was soon to be fragmented into several RPG types—with medieval fantasy claiming sole rights in the original version of the game--this initial segmentation was a weighed choice made for D&D's immediate commercial introduction only.  We had previously felt that the game had more range and infinitely more possibilities than what the lone S&S element produced."
And:
"EGG's up front insistence of Barsoom's relevance in his original foreword had already paved the way for Hiero's Journey in Appendix N.  This ‘addenda' was in fact the natural outgrowth of both our realized views as experienced through play, 1972 onward."
Lord of the Green Dragons: THE MACHINE LEVEL:  SPECIAL WEB INTRODUCTION