Retreat Forward

There is an important lesson that RPG players of any stripe can learn from the “sport” of professional wrestling. Before I make my central point, allow me to share some of the similarities that wrestling and tabletop roleplaying share. Wrestling, like roleplaying games, is often very silly. The storylines are over-the-top, the violence is sometimes cartoonish, and the outcomes of the matches don't really matter. At its best, though, wrestling (and gaming) is a lot of fun for both the performers and the audience, who all experience many of the same kinds of emotional highs and lows associated with a legitimate sporting event. The key to making all of these unbelievable parts come together into a cohesive, entertaining whole in wrestling is a concept called kayfabe. The word itself dates back to the secret trade language of carnival workers; It is basically a pig latin way of saying “fake.” The simplest definition would be to say that kayfabe is about suspending disbelief, but i...

The Original Here is a creature that doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. The problem, I think, is that gargoyles are not based on any monster from mythology or literature but a piece of decorative architecture. This seems to be the reason that gargoyles are often depicted as creatures made of stone, or at least with stone-like skin; they're inspired by statues. Why would gargoyles have stoney skin at all? Wouldn't it make more sense if they were just flesh-and-blood creatures that people, for whatever reason, often made into statues? This is certainly what medieval architects were thinking when they put gargoyles in cathedrals. Their inspiration was the demons of the bible. They only chose stone because it was a logical material from which to carve a statue. Gargoyles, then, are a weird case of art imitating art, in which the D&D monster is made of stone because it is inspired by a type of statute, yet the statues that inspired the monster also exist in the typ...

Monsters Remastered is a semi-regular feature I plan to write that takes classic monsters and fits them into my home-brewed fantasy world. Some of the featured monsters will be creatures that, for whatever reason, don't quite jibe with me. Others will just be creatures that I want to give my own creative bit of fluff. Think of these writeups as an alternate “ecology” entry for each monster. Hopefully, while explaining how the creature works in my world, I can still keep things generic enough that others can use them as well. Each Monsters Remastered will start with an examination of how I view the monster and its role in the generic gameworld and real-world mythology. From there, I'll talk about how the creature works in my setting and then give game mechanics to back up my ideas. The brunt of this, I think, will be open gaming content so that anyone who wants to can use what I've come up with. My first creature will be the gargoyle, a D&D monster that comes, I thin...

(Continued from Part 4 , read Part 3 , Part 2 , or start at Part 1 ) My cousin is the oldest of three brothers and lived in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. He always seemed about two steps cooler than me. His house was full of fantastic things: boardgames, books, movies, and a computer! Not only did he have a computer, but he had the most amazing computer games. We spent hours with the likes of Police Quest, Shadows of Yserbius, and others I no longer recall. My cousin also owned an impressive library of second edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books. For some reason, his basement always smelled like cedar. Even now, that smell brings with it memories of flipping wide-eyed through book after book of D&D goodness. My favorites were the monster books; huge binders full of strange creatures! I was struck by how cohesive everything seemed, as if the authors had developed an entire universe and were slowly leaking parts of it out one book at a time. It didn't seem stupid to m...

There was a bit on Saturday Night Live that featured a parody of the Dating Game in which a desperate Ted Kaczynski tried to convince the various bachelorettes to read his manifesto. I'm taking a break from all my posts about my personal RPG history to talk about something equally narcissistic: my purpose for creating and updating this blog. Unlike our friend the Unibomber, I'm not particularly concerned with anyone reading this section. It's here mainly for me, so that I can return to it if I need it a reminder of why I started this and why it should continue. So, if you don't care a whit about why I'm here or what my motives are, move along. In following various RPG-themed blogs over the past, I've seen a few of them close up shop. Usually, the author makes some grand declaration that they've been soured by the online gaming community and they're taking themselves out of the limelight for good. I don't know the situations that led to these partic...

(Continued from Part 3 , read Part 2 , or start at Part 1 ) If D&D was the first roleplaying game I ever played, even if the first adventure only lasted 10 minutes, the first game I ever GM'd was TSR's Top Secret: The Espionage Roleplaying Game . I inherited the Top Secret boxed set from my brother, as well as a copy of the Operation: Orient Express boxed set and two adventures taken from the pages of Dragon Magazine: Wacko World and Whiteout. When I first started running Top Secret, I literally had no idea what I was doing, and neither did my cousin, who was my one and only player. I had once played spectator while my brother ran Top Secret for some friends, although I don't recall the setting or the circumstances for that particular game. In my brother's adventure, the characters were investigating some kind of abandoned house that turned out to be the front for a secret bad guy headquarters. I remember that there were ninja involved. Also, in the house's ...

(Continued from Part 2 or start at Part 1 ) This next part is tricky to write, mainly because I don't want to give the wrong impression of my mother. She is one of the most giving people I know, wonderful and understanding, and my oldest son's favorite person in the whole world. I don't want her to sound closed-minded, or terribly harsh, or even very strict; she's none of those things. Mom is, however, a Christian with a strong faith. I believe this is one of her most admirable traits and I like to think that she passed a lot of that faith on to me, faith which has helped me through hardships and homesickness in my job as a Soldier and elsewhere. I said before that my brother played D&D during its peak as a national fad in the 1980s. Along with the fad popularity, and some would say the fuel of that popularity, was the anti-D&D panic. Pat Pulling, a mother who tragically lost her teenage son to suicide, began a crusade to convince the world that D&D wa...

(Continued from Part 1 ) I lived in the same town from the year I was born until I was 28, when I raised my right hand and asked the U.S. Military to please send me all over the earth to film stuff. From the day I came home from the hospital until I moved out around 18, I lived in the same house. Thus, it's very easy for me to visualize the exact setting of my very first game of Dungeons and Dragons. Until my brother moved out, he and I shared a room. As you entered our bedroom, our bunkbed was straight across from you, flush with the wall. We played right there on the floor, with my brother's back to our bunkbed, my back to the door, and a whole bunch of papers and dice between us. Originally, my childhood home had two stories. At some point before we lived there, it was split horizontally and divided into two separate homes. That seems strange to me now, but growing up I easily accepted the fact that my house was actually the bottom half of a totally different house, t...

It's hard for me to remember a time before I knew what a tabletop roleplaying game was. I was a young boy in the 1980s, growing up in a small town that was usually a few years behind whatever fad or fashion was sweeping the rest of the country. My older brother, who moved out when I was ten or so, was caught up in the tail-end of the D&D boom. I'm not sure exactly how I became aware of the game; I don't remember ever watching him play. I was aware of it in more of an indirect fashion. All I knew is that it was a game full of monsters and magic and that it was something my older brother liked to do. I think it was this latter fact that truly peaked my interest in tabletop RPGs. My brother is about eight years older than me. He was into the normal things for a kid his age, which in the late 70s and early 80s logically included comic books and Dungeons and Dragons. I can remember tagging along with him and a few of his friends while they visiting the local comic/gaming ...

The phrase “retreat forward” originally referred to a style of D&D in which the players keep pressing on, deeper and deeper into the action, regardless of consequences. It's not the wisest way to play the game, particularly if one values his character's life, but it's certainly a lot of fun. In the traditional D&D dungeon, the deeper levels contained the most interesting puzzles, the most exciting monsters, and the greatest treasures. “Retreat forward” is about shouldering past the boring orcs so you can get to the good stuff, even if the good stuff might turn you to stone and then blow you up. I've adapted the spirit of the forward retreat as a kind of tongue-in-cheek life philosophy as well. Sometimes, we all have to do things that we don't want to do, and the only way out is to just go through it. For me, Basic Combat Training was that way. Leaving my family behind for a year while I move to South Korea is a “retreat forward” situation as well. As much ...