Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go, Ganubi go go
Ganubi did good
The tentacled denizens of the desert city—Las Vegas, if you haven’t figured that out—were Morgan’s variation on the classic D&D creatures known as illithids, or mind flayers. Usually, they’re evil beings bent on eating people’s brains; in Morgan’s world they were friendly, though worryingly interested in “tasting” Ganubi’s thoughts.
Because his game is set on postapocalyptic Earth, Morgan had to figure out a way to fill the world with D&D’s customary fantastic creatures. I’ve always admired his solution: Vampires wanted to make the world outside their pens inhospitable to escaped humans, so they released a magically enchanted virus that mutated ordinary flora and fauna. It’s a neat trick that lets him use classic D&D tropes but subvert them in interesting ways—like putting mind-reading monsters on the streets of Sin City.9
It’s that kind of storytelling that keeps me addicted to Dungeons & Dragons, and it’s what attracts my friends too. “Role-playing appealed to me because I always liked to tell stories,” Phil says. “Even before I was in kindergarten, I was making stuff up. I always got caught in a lie, because if I told the truth it was kind of boring, but if I told a lie—elephants were stampeding, there’s a comet that hit the earth, and didn’t you notice it was dark for the last three days?”
Phil says the narrative nature of the game drew him in, but it also reinforced his interest: The more he and his friends played, the more they learned about what makes a good story, and the game got better and better. “They don’t teach you until high school about things like rising exposition and falling action . . . but if you’re [a role-player], you’re familiar with it because you’ve been creating stories, more than being formally taught.”
A good D&D campaign is like a mini storytelling workshop. Novelist Neal Stephenson played D&D in college and it helped him on the path to becoming a writer: “I think it dovetails quite naturally,” he says. “Dungeons & Dragons is fundamentally a procedure for collaborative storytelling. You can do it in a purely mechanical way, just rolling the dice and consulting the rules. But the games that people really get involved with and really enjoy are ones that have legitimate narrative—storytelling, good characters, good situations, plot twists, and an interesting world. The better Dungeon Masters are the ones who have legit storytelling and world-building chops and are able to create a fun experience for the players by improvising good narratives in real time.”
Pendleton Ward, creator of the animated television series Adventure Time, says D&D helped him develop a unique narrative style. “I like seeing characters move through a fantasy world in a realistic way,” he says. “I mean, if I was in a dungeon full of gold, I would stop and pick up some of that gold. So whenever [Adventure Time protagonists] Finn and Jake are following a story through a dungeon full of treasure, I try to have them stop and pick some up, even if it interrupts the story. Jake loots corpses in an episode . . . but Finn tells him that it’s wrong.”
After spending a day with the illithids, Ganubi lost his taste for plundering their city. He told us they didn’t know about the treasure buried beneath the pyramid, because it was considered a holy place. He said its subterranean passageways were forbidden and that it would be wrong to desecrate a temple. He said if we proceeded, we’d be stealing from friends.
He was outvoted. The next morning, Jhaden and I entered the city and met with their leaders. I proposed that we escort a group of illithids back to San Francisco, accompanied by a wagonload of goods, in order to establish a trade route. They eagerly accepted the offer.
Meanwhile, hidden from sight by an Invisibility spell, and from mind’s eye by our magic amulet, Ganubi slipped into the city on his own. He made his way to the temple, sneaked past the guards, and entered its forbidden passageways in search of the ancient treasure.
When our negotiations were completed, Jhaden and I returned to camp to share the news. The merchants were not impressed. “To hell with trade goods,” they said. “Where’s your friend with the treasure?”
Their question was answered early the next morning, when Ganubi returned to the camp. He was empty-handed, and the merchants demanded to know what he’d found.
“No treasure,” he told them. “Just piles and piles of this.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a stack of old paper.
I took a piece off the top. It was old and brittle, but I could still read the words printed on one side.
THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR
ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS
Worthless junk.
Morgan knew that we’d eventually find the “treasure,” but he didn’t know how. He certainly didn’t know that we’d befriend the illithids or that we’d act on behalf of humanity to establish diplomatic relations and interspecies trade. That’s the thing I love the most about role-playing games—not that they’re social, not that they’re creative, but that they combine those things in a totally unique way. They’re stories that friends tell together.
“When I tell other people who have never played D&D about the game, I describe it as communal storytelling,” says Morgan. “I lay out the broad strokes, but you guys fill in the details, and sometimes set up entirely new plotlines that I wasn’t expecting. I love that. We get a much more interesting story that way.”
I’ve been addicted to TV shows. I have favorite books that I reread year after year. If I see even a minute of The Godfather, I have to watch the entire film. But I’m just a spectator to those stories. While they may reflect my thoughts and experiences, they’re not made from them. Few things can compete with a good story that you actually helped construct. That’s why I’m addicted to role-playing games. They grab me at my core.
“I think it goes way back to cavemen sitting around the fire,” says Morgan. “We’re a storytelling species. Sitting around with a group and telling a story fills a primal urge. It’s why I keep playing D&D.”
* * *
1. Thankfully, Kara was more tolerant of my obsessions than Duchamp’s wife, Lydie Sarazin-Levassor, who waited until her new husband was asleep and glued his chess pieces to the board. Three months later they got a divorce.
2. “As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring,” Clifford wrote in an essay entitled “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” It’s now considered a classic anthropological text—and how could it not, with deliberate double entendres like this: “To anyone who has been in Bali any length of time, the deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable.”
3. If you’ve ever flipped a game board over in anger following a loss or performed a little dance to celebrate a victory, you know what I’m talking about.
4. Kanterman is a doctor of internal medicine based in Ohio and the author of several games, including 1978’s Starships & Spacemen, one of the earliest sci-fi RPGs.
5. I still believe role-playing games have prepared me to survive the apocalypse, but I have come to accept the value of enjoying the company of cheerleaders while you can.
6. “Comeliness reflects physical attractiveness, social grace, and personal beauty of the character. It is used to determine initial reactions to the character, and characters with a high comeliness may affect the wills and actions of others. While charisma deals specifically with leadership and interactions between characters, comeliness deals with attractiveness and first impressions.” Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Unearthed Arcana, page 6.
7. Of course, role-playing game fans have been known to overstate the value of their hobby. There’s a great scene in a 1996 episode of The X-Files called “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’ ” where Jose Chung, an author working on a book about alien abductions, interviews Blaine Faulkner, a man who discovered an alien corpse:
Chung: “Aren’t you nervous telling me all this?”
Faulkner: “Well, hey, I didn’t spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.”
8. Sung to the tune of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”
9. Morgan has never revealed the mind flayers’ previral heritage, but my personal theory is that they’re mutated progeny of the dolphins that live in Siegfried and Roy’s Secret Garden at the Mirage hotel and casino.
9
ARNESON VS. GYGAX
Whether he caused it or not, Gary Gygax was ready for David Arneson’s departure from TSR. He’d already begun work on a new version of Dungeons & Dragons—one that didn’t require the game’s cocreator.
“Before the third supplement (Eldritch Wizardry) was in print, it had been decided that some major steps would have to be taken to unify and clarify the D&D game system,” Gygax wrote in The Dragon. “Organizational work was in progress when correspondence with J. Eric Holmes . . . disclosed that [he] was interested in undertaking the first stage of the project.”
John Eric Holmes, MD, was a neurologist, a writer, and a fan of Dungeons & Dragons. When he contacted TSR with a proposal to clean up the legendarily confusing D&D rule books, Gygax was already at work on his own revision. But where Gygax had planned to rationalize the game by adding more structure and complexity, Holmes proposed the opposite: taking everything that had been published about the game—three original rule books, five supplements, and dozens of articles in The Strategic Review and The Dragon—and editing it down to a single, simplified rule set.
Gygax decided the two men would work on separate but complementary versions of Dungeons & Dragons. Holmes’s mission was to simplify and rewrite the rules until they were accessible to inexperienced players, particularly kids; Gygax worked toward a bigger and better game, meant for existing players and hard-core grognards.
Holmes’s game was finished first and released in July 1977. The Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set was packaged in an attractive box, suitable for display in toy stores; on the outside, a full-color illustration of a roaring dragon (drawn by TSR staff artist David Sutherland) beckoned fantasy-minded shoppers into a world of action and adventure.
On the inside, there was treasure. Two staple-bound booklets—a rule book and a compilation of lists of monsters and treasure—provided everything a group of new players needed to start the game. A third booklet, Dungeon Geomorphs, consisted of predesigned map sections meant to be cut out and assembled into unique settings for adventures. And for the first time, a D&D box set included the tools of the trade—five polyhedral dice in a small plastic bag.1
The Basic Set, widely referred to as “the Blue Box,” brought much-needed clarity to Dungeons & Dragons. In just forty-eight pages, the rule book explains the concept of fantasy role-playing, provides instructions for creating a character from one of four basic classes (fighting man, magic-user, cleric, and thief), teaches the basics of combat and movement, and demonstrates how to gain experience and level-up a character. Holmes used plain English and assumed his audience had no war-gaming experience; set at a low price of $9.50 and sold in stores other than hobby shops, the Blue Box brought D&D to the masses. It did to Original D&D what Calculus for Dummies did to Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.
What the Blue Box didn’t do was teach players how to advance their characters beyond level three—that was left for Gygax’s half of the project. “The ‘Basic Set’ of D&D is aimed at new players, those persons as yet uninitiated to the wonders of fantasy role playing,” Gygax explained in The Dragon. “It can lead to either the original game or to the new, as yet unfinished, Advanced D&D . . . AD&D will be a better, cleaner system aimed at improving the understanding of the role playing game system.” Gamers had to take his word for it, though, because Gygax’s new rules were nowhere near completed.
Meanwhile, TSR’s most valuable customers—veteran D&D players who wanted better rules, and new ones who loved the Blue Box and were hungry for more—were anxious to buy but had nothing new to purchase.2 So competitors rushed to fill the vacuum. Fantasy Games Unlimited’s Chivalry & Sorcery continued the “ampersands & alliterations” trend started by Tunnels & Trolls, but not its sense of humor; the rules, written by Ed Simbalist and Wilf Backhaus, emphasized historical detail and complex simulation. In contrast, Metagaming Concepts’ Melee, written by American designer Steve Jackson, was much simpler, focusing on one-on-one combat between heroes and monsters. The fact that both games looked a lot like Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t a coincidence but wasn’t cynical imitation either; many of the new games had evolved out of D&D home campaigns, as players changed the rules to reflect their own interests.
One of the biggest games of 1977 owed its success to a different kind of swords and sorcery. On May 25, geeks across the U.S. stepped away from the game table to stand in line for George Lucas’s Star Wars; the film remained in theaters over a year and started a space craze that helped popularize a new science fiction role-playing game. Game Designers’ Workshop’s Traveller wasn’t the first sci-fi RPG, but it was the most complete and most epic. Inspired by tales of galactic empires like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, author Marc Miller created a game that let players feel like they were Han Solo or Luke Skywalker. An innovative character-generation system helped draw players into the fantasy: Instead of starting out as inexperienced, mostly useless adventurers, new Traveller characters go through a complex life-development process to determine their background, schooling, career choices, and skills. This helped players identify with their characters and ensured that they were capable of heroics as soon as they hit the table. Traveller was well received and a quick hit—even Gygax had to admit that it was “an imaginative game,” and “an imitation by no possible stretch of the imagination.”
It’s possible Gygax was more concerned with a smaller but more personal threat: new material from Dave Arneson. Now working for himself, Arneson contracted with a small Texas publisher in early 1977 to print the first D&D product he’d authored since Blackmoor. The Dungeonmaster’s Index advertised his former associations proudly: The cover illustration depicted a grinning hooded character standing above a battlefield, controlling wizards and warriors like marionettes, and the credit “By Dave Arneson . . . Co-Author of Dungeons & Dragons.” While Arneson still owned a piece of TSR and retained some rights to the game itself, he didn’t control the copyright to publish new content. So the thirty-eight-page book is little more than an index to existing TSR-owned products; it lists various D&D monsters, spells, and magic items, and provides page references for The Strategic Review and the five original D&D rule books.
Arneson’s second product was a more direct assault against TSR’s castle. The cover of The First Fantasy Campaign, published by TSR licensee Judges Guild, promises “the history and details of the original fantasy roleplaying game” and invites players to “visit the dread Egg of Coot, Loch Gloomen and the underworld below Blackmoor castle.” The First Fantasy Campaign is drawn directly from Arneson’s notes for his Blackmoor campaign—perhaps the same notes that Gary Gygax used to create Dungeons & Dragons. But where Gygax took those ideas and gave them structure, organizing rough concepts into a game system and salable product, Arneson presented them in the raw, so as to inspire Dungeon Masters to make their own system. A small line of text on the bottom of the front cover half disclaims, half boasted, “Fantasy game system not included.”
The book contains rough maps, not to scale, of the Blackmoor environs; random facts about the area’s population (“approximately 1,000 Peasants, 100 Soldiers and Nobles, 4 Wizards or Sorcerers, 1 Dragon, several Trolls . . .”) and natural resources (“the main livestock consists of an oversized member of the Bison family . . .”); short bios of characters from the game (including the Blue Rider, a warrior unable to remove his magically enchanted armor); tables of figures (like the costs to hire personnel to staff a castle); and descriptions of points of interest, including, of course, a tavern (the “Comeback Inn” offers half-price booze and lodgings, but
its doorway is magically enchanted, so that “when you leave you find yourself coming back in”).
The First Fantasy Campaign is rough and random but awfully charming. It’s meant to be a jumping-off point, and it speaks volumes about Arneson’s philosophy, which emphasized inspiration over commodification. It also makes it clear that Dungeons & Dragons could never have happened without Gygax’s help—left to his own devices, Arneson publishes notes rather than a fully formed game product.
Surprisingly, TSR let Arneson publish both The First Fantasy Campaign and the Dungeonmaster’s Index without protest—while there is some evidence that the company considered sending out its usual cease-and-desist letters, for whatever reason, it didn’t follow through.
Other competitors weren’t so lucky. California gamer Steve Perrin had spent a year compiling fantasy role-playing game monsters from various sources, including home campaigns, game magazines, and rule books, when he received a TSR cease-and-desist letter. But instead of killing the project, Perrin edited out any monsters from official TSR sources and released All the Worlds’ Monsters through Chaosium Inc., a small game publisher based in Oakland. The bestiary didn’t get much attention from fans, but Perrin succeeded at embarrassing Gygax into action: Just weeks after All the Worlds’ Monsters went up for sale, TSR published its first Advanced D&D book.
The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual may have been a rush job, but its quality is undeniable. The 108-page volume was the first role-playing game book printed in hardcover; it had a stitched binding and was clad in the same rough, nearly indestructible material used for schoolbooks in the 1970s. Written entirely by Gygax, the manual compiled over 350 monsters from the five D&D rule books, The Strategic Review, and The Dragon; each entry included a few statistics for use in the game and a description of the beast’s behavior and habitat.
The beholder, a “hateful, aggressive, and avaricious” creature, is described as having a spherical body that’s covered in chitinous plates; “atop the sphere are 10 eyestalks, while in its central area are a great eleventh eye and a large mouth filled with pointed teeth.”3 Displacer beasts look like pumas with thorn-covered tentacles growing out of their shoulders; “the molecular vibrations of the displacer beast are such that it always appears to be 3´ (left, right, ahead, or behind) its actual position. Thus, these monsters always cause opponents to subtract 2 from attack dice rolls.” The catoblepas “is loathsome beyond description and has no redeeming features”—picture an overweight buffalo with stumpy legs, a giraffe-like neck, and a warthog’s head. “Perhaps its habitat—fetid swamps and miasmal marshes—caused the bizarre combination of genetic characteristics in this monster, or perhaps it was due to some ghastly tinkering with life by a demented godling.” The gelatinous cube is a dungeon scavenger, a living mound of transparent jelly that’s “ideal for cleaning all living organisms, as well as carrion, from the floor and walls of underground passageways.” And woe unto the armor-wearing adventurer who encounters a rust monster deep in some dark subterranean passage: “They roam such places in search of their food—metals of all sorts, but principally ferrous based metals such as iron, steel, and steel alloys.”
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Page 13