The 'Seek What You Need On The Wurm Road ' Incident & More Temporal Adventuring

So last night I dropped in the Clash of the Titans film from 1981in the Bluray  & it brought back a a load of bitter sweat memories. Our group of twelve  players or so had an ever changing roster of players back in the Nineties. The table top hobby scene in Connecticut was a explosive as the OSR seems to now.

The big engine fueling this heady mix back then was White Wolf & it was a monster as Larping exploded in Hartford much to the disgust of the D&D crowd. Sort of because they paid lip service to the hobby shoppers  all the while doing some of the events on the weekends. There were lots of girls in that end of the scene & I did my fair share of White Wolf games back then. Looking over Clash of the of The Titans brought back my experiences with Arduin Grimoire especially with the Dave Hargrave title Shadowlands.



We had back to back games going with a mix of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition, original Dungeons & Dragons plus bits of B/X where necessary plus a back bone of the Arduin Grimoire. I was traveling down to New Town Ct for the weekends & staying with friends for a marathon of twelve players plus four DM sharing duties it was glorious. We ran it like a Con game with PC's coming in & out, the campaign was a monster evolving from the West Hartford War & Pieces game. 

We were doing delves into past temporal shadows, warring with Deodanths in the corridors & shadows of world monuments right before temporal demons devoured them, taking on necromancers in the gloomier aspects of the Negative material planes while moon dogs nipped at our heels, and then finally coming up against a series of medusa agents of something really nasty.



Dave Trampier's perfectly nasty medusa  from the AD&D Monster Manual, TSR, 1977 was exactly the sort of mid level monster that we kept dealing with.

We needed answers & we needed them fast!? The blind seer witches sent us down into the 'Wurm Road' of Arduin for our answers. I was fresh back from a trip to England during this time & the 'Wurm Road' reminded me of some of the archeological digs that I had seen while there. An underworld road built on the back of other past urban  civilizations. It was a tough haul through miles & miles of trackless underground alien wilderness. And the monsters we ran into down there was the stuff of nightmares. Everyone lost at least one PC during those sessions. Our techno bought it right outside the ruins of the  temple of Hades when his throat was ripped out by Cushous Lightbreaker. Cushous Lightbreaker was one of seven major Vampusa in the service of the 21 Hells.
We did what any good group of adventurers would do. We ran our asses off & covered our tracks like the little bitches that we were!



Forget this BS you'll often hear about high level games where they kill gods. We played hide & seek with the temporal shadows only a few games ago we thought of as nothing more then just another 'jaded adventure location'. We hid ourselves in the temporal ruined shadows where time demons feed on the remains of yesterdays. The leeched out & time bleached  remains of an airport in Bangor Maine was our first stop but we knew that that thing's Deodanth hunters & its moondogs would be on our trail. The really big problem was that Cushous Lightbreaker had gotten the magical artifact first!?!
We saw the first of the time demons show up to drag their maws of entropy across the tired reality of the place meaning that we had to get moving to the next shadow. One of our clerics of Thoth needed a moment to contact her divine master but we couldn't risk it. And we ran as fast as our mana points allowed us! We burned each & every teleport scroll, & time back door that we could. Any snake or snake like monster we ran across we burnt its remains & fled.
We were a long way from these folks on the Arduin Grimoire & we had hardcore Rifts players & game masters shaking in their boots. As I said it was glorious!


I'll tie this back into the OSR next time & no more cats!

Allan Dean Foster, Arduin, The OSR, & Temporal Campaign Adventuring

So I've been rereading the Arduin books & getting into the back end of some campaign ideas when the latest BS in the OSR reared its head. Man, these things seem to come up every three seconds & so I headed back down memory lane a bit to Nineteen Eighty Nine. Its been a bit of a bumpy ride all of the way back there.



Advanced Dungeons & Dragons second edition  was in full swing along with its prepackaged campaign settings. If you like second edition AD&D's campaign worlds  then more power too you but for those of us into campaign building this wasn't the way. There were dust ups & such in letter columns in Dragon magazine, & various other hobby fanzines of the time. For me I felt like a fish out of water then. Sure I had Gamma World, Traveller, & a bunch of other classic TSR books to fall back on. But three things changed this funk the first was I discovered Clark Ashton Smith, the second was the movie House II, & then Allan Dean Foster's To The Vanishing Point fell into my lap. I was literally taking a bus from my home town to the gaming store down in War & Pieces in West Hartford,Ct. in the back seat of the empty bus was this book.
Its a very Eighties science fantasy book even back then & seems to have aged itself right into the same turf as the net flix  show Stranger Things. The book has a light weight cosmology similar to Poul Anderson's chaos vs law material worked in with a bit of Dante's Hell on Chaos/Entropy's side.

"It was just a boring drive through the Nevada desert.  The Sonderberg family doesn’t know it yet, but this isn’t going to be any ordinary road trip. After they pick up up a beautiful unassuming young hitchhiker named Mouse, a quiet drive down Interstate 40 becomes a trip into an alternate reality -- a wild, careening ride down the exit ramp to Hell. It turns out the family has just given a ride to an alien who has the fate of the universe resting on her shoulders, who must find and heal the dying cosmic Spinner who controls the very fabric of reality.

Now the Sonderberg family must fight evil alongside their new alien friend Mouse, a transdimensional alien, in a desperate attempt to save the world they love. Suddenly attacked by a demonic gas station attendant, axe-wielding rats and fire-breathing cops, the Sondberg family must become warriors in a now-mystical motor home and battle pangalactic diners, weird worlds, impossible voids, and brain-bending realms of madness.  The fate of the world rests on the success of Mouse's mission." 
To The Vanishing Point's plot from here

So what does this have to do with the classic Arduin Grimoire ? Well down at War & Pieces someone had an original Dungeons & Dragons game going on in full swing with bits & pieces of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons interspersed with Arduin. The premise of that game was this book?! The owner of the book had left it on the earlier bus. The lesson learned was simple. Just because the latest thing is out in the wilds of the rpg market doesn't mean that it has an effect on an on going campaign. The peer pressure of the market has no effect on what happens at the table. For the record, I gave the gentleman back his copy of Allen Dean Foster's book & grabbed my copy over at Walden Books.
We fought hard against the forces of the 'Twenty One Hells' during that campaign. I learned a great deal of respect for juggling technology, gonzoness, & what really constitutes a 'monster'.

We had PC's battling wizards raiding WWII battle fields, trolls taking on Dwarven fortresses, the destruction of Fairy mounds, & the end of timelines eaten bare by Chaos itself.



We  explored various dungeon locations & past shadows of the temporal war. We recovered artifacts, killed a few wizards, & generally got on with the idea of our PC's being heroes. Allan Dean Fosters novel remains on my shelf & gets read from time to time.

The idea of an artifact having a life of its own & its essence being the anchor of a god's soul came directly from this Arduin campaign. The movie House II used this in spades within its plot's adventure location. 
The Lion & Dragon rpg takes this occult idea & tosses it in a different direction. Now Rpg Pundit & I have had discussions via email about the fact that he personally separates gonzo rpging & historical campaigns. For me this idea didn't gell & the reason is because of the fact that Lamentations of the Flame Princess's adventures often used real world historical events as their background. But Arduin used the alternative Earth's, planes, etc. as part of their setting material. So early on I got the idea of learning & using history as a dungeon master to my advantage.


The lessons I learned early in this hobby have stayed with me & I'm very thankful for the early kick in the pants that Dave Hargrave gave me. The truth is that today I often mix & match both OSR & old school resources.
Next time Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea, Clark Ashton Smith, & Cats.

Lessons In Dungeons & Divorce - Or How It All Falls Apart And Came Back Together With Portals of Irontooth (1981) From Judges Guild

Right so it's weird Wednesday and I've been thinking about past games of AD&D 1st edition that happened right in the middle of West Hartford because I suddenly find myself in a similar situation once again. As when back in the early 2000's and I was running a pretty extensive campaign using a bunch of Judge's Guild modules. There were was a whole lot of Arduin and Delos material as backdrop to this world.
But it was about to fall apart!



Now this game began at about three in the afternoon in our favorite Chinese restaurant. West Hartford,Ct. had a nice Chinese place where we would gather for a meal. Everything in our groups always revolved around food. And especially Chinese,pizza, or whatever food the players and myself agreed on.
The meal allows the players to unwind from school, work, or whatever and play catch up,life events, and besides  we were all friends as well as gamers. The meal allowed us to meet new players in a public setting, even play catch up with parents at times, get whatever was happening off our chest,etc.,etc.
It also allowed us get distractions off our plate before diving back into our campaign. This is a tradition that I've tried to keep over the years.



The four us arrived as usual and three of my players were already at the table. And they didn't look happy at all. They had news from W&P, the fire marshal stopped the store from having games in the basement. That canceled things right there. But it got much worse. Barbara and Tom were in their thirties, computer programmers and married. And they didn't look happy at all. For months there had been something weird in the background of their marriage now it came out, they were getting a divorce. As a group we were devastated. We weren't simply a group of players, again we were friends and this event divided the whole dynamic of the group straight down the middle. They parted as the best of friends but they wished to remain with the group. So we still bought our gaming material from W&P  but the dynamic changed.




So I had to roll with the punches, and I asked for suggestions of people's homes or places to play. Well fortunately one of our players William had a very clever and cunning plan. He was a bonded house sitter as a side job for wealthy clients, suddenly our AD&D games became a floating one across the state of Ct.
We found ourselves later that evening in a lovely home in the hills of Northwestern Ct much closer to our respective homes and so the evening began.

And so we began our journey with Portals of Iron Tooth a continuation of the Tosh series. This series has a series of alternative worlds and Earths. This series is perfect for traders across the multiverse.
"This is the second product in the "Portals" series. The first product in the series, Portals of Torsh, deals with a world in which mammals never evolved and the primary inhabitants are the reptilian Lizard Men. This product Details a section of a completely different world. One where the native animals have iron teeth and a strange resistance to the powers of magic.
Both of these products can be used as independent campaigns but have been especially designed to link up with an ongoing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tm campaign through a limited number of teleport doors or portals (as they will be called in this booklet). It is no secret that many, if not most, Judges use the published playing aids as special environments which can be entered only through portals. This series of products has been designed to be especially suited to that sort of adaptation..."

1981 ... 48 pages ... Rudy Kraft ... JG 560
There is a boat load more information right over HERE

Grab It Right
HERE

The Second of the portals series of adventures presents a series of gateways across a wide variety of fantasy and science fantasy worlds. There's some really interesting and cool concepts mixed into the background.
Personally I always loved the Gateway series of modules. I love the Portal series, they allow flexible play and bring an entirely new dynamic to AD&D 1st edition of play.
The kick in the head with that early 2000's game campaign? Well, at the end of the evening there was a huge blowup between Barbara and Tom, it divided friend against friend as folks took sides as they are prone to do. It was an ugly scene and the group broke into a much smaller core of players but why dregs up ancient history? Because it's repeated itself.
 As my friend Peter is getting a divorce from his wife of twenty years. I find myself once again without a larger group of players, as people take sides and the debris begins to fly.
But as always the core will remain and we'll roll with the punches in the Northwest Hills of Ct.
More later. Don't worry,I've got a clever and cunning plan ;-).
And now that my special little snowflake of a campaign  has melted in a blow torch, I'm I worried? Umm no because at the end of the day its only a game. I go back to writing. I'm dealing with the fact that one of my best friends is getting a divorce and his world as well as family is going down in flames which is actually real life.
Finding players is really simply the easy part; real life is much,much, more complicated. 

Note that the names of friends have of course been changed and so have circumstances as well to protect the privacy of everyone involved. Cheers folks 

Back Handed AD&D Campaigning or How Shield Maidens of Sea Runes From 1982 Was My Gate Way 'Drug' For Campaigning

Since the Winter isn't really letting me get together with either of my regular groups of players at the moment I'm quietly been thinking about the later half of the early 2000's when War and Pieces in West Hartford, Connecticut was still in operation.
This hobby shop sold mostly models, classic board games, modeling material, and a wide variety of board games. It was a pretty happening store back in those days. I frequented any number of comic and hobby shops back then across the state. Connecticut has always had a weird vibe when it came to gaming. There were quite a few mom and pop smaller hobby shops but those mostly carried the D20 glut titles or the  White Wolf lines along with a boat load of Magic, new school 40K, and a ton of Pokemon stuff.
To get to the real table top rpg  games, a dungeon master had to travel or do the two cons that were around then. My choice was to travel to West Hartford and get in a game at War and Pieces or Dragon's lair that was down the road. This was a process that started way back in the 90's and continued through the early 2000's regardless of circumstances.
There were several back room campaigns that were going on with OD&D and AD&D 1st edition. There were several reasons for this. One the AD&D 1st edition  & 2nd edition books were dirt cheap back then (well they still are). Second everyone knew the rules and there was an extensive thriving minis market that went hand in hand with the war games that were being played back then. Mutant Chronicles, 40K, and some real table top war games, such as Dirt Side rules, Car Wars, and much more.
I also learned of several campaigns in the Northwest Hills that used AD&D and OD&D rules going back to the Seventies several of which I think might be still on going. These are the games where I really cut my teeth in the hobby and were responsible to my trips to GenCon and other cons. Some of this goes back to the 90's. 

No this is towards the early 2000's and the end of an era for my part of the table top hobby.
Hobby shops  and comic shops in the area were closing left,right, and center. The internet had started to put pressure on the hobby and the little operations were closing fast. I got some pretty good deals but to tell the truth, I would have walked away from any of it if only the hobby locally had remained more robust.



One of the middle period titles that springs to mind from Judge's Guild is Shield Maidens of Sea Rune. This was one of the titles that came my way because of a trade. And it was one of the only old school  modules up to this time that featured an Anti paladin. That nasty piece of business NPC class  from the Best Of Dragon Magazine series.
Shield Maidens of Sea Rune had a plot straight out of the early days of the hobby. 

Shield Maidens of Sea Rune By Bryan Hinnem & Dan Hauffe

The third book in the "Wilderness Series". 22 wilderness hexes of Campaign Map 1 are detailed in these 80-pages along with description and maps of the major points of interest. Warrior Women plot to regain their home lost to the barbarous Skandiks, fearsome sea reavers all. Torn between their Gods of the North and the Druidic worship of nature, the Skandiks grow weak. Beware the cruel and evil Anti-Paladin who stalks this area looking for blood; he may be the death of you yet! Can you thread the perilous path to fame and riches in this saga of unforgettble Adventure? A Judges Guild Universal Fantasy Supplement.

Grab It Right
HERE

Shield Maidens has many of the themes and things I love about JG products. Comic book style artwork, well done maps and very detailed encounter descriptions. There are also present some of the little details that make the Judge's Guild product lines interesting. Issues with the gods, elements of science fantasy, weird monsters, and a universal system that makes adapting JG's adventures a snap at least for me.
Was there more to that universal system that allowed a DM to convert these adventures over to your favorite edition? Yeah, I actually think so and so does the gentleman who runs the Hill Cantons blog HERE  and he did a full spectrum going over of the system HERE.
The fact is that there's a tradition of old school balls to the walls D&D goodness that includes Delos,Bloody,Bloody, Arduin, Blackmoor, and other settings that go back to the roots of the hobby. A friend of mine gave me quite the education about all of this way back then. He also gave me a copy of the City State of The Invinible Overlord book. This is the Revised City State of the Invincible Overlord (1981–1983, three printings), 96-page book. This has since gone missing in various moves and such. 

See Shield Maidens of Sea Rune has everything I was looking for in a real super module. This module had clear links to the City State Of The Invincible Overlord more info on that HERE
The background details set this adventure clearly in the back yard of Calandia [City-State of the Invincible Overlord and Wilderlands]  as needed by the DM . The sci fi aspects of the Judge's Guild adventures are built right into the history of this adventure. The  Semi-Celtic and semi-Nordic cultural aspects of the various factions are present as well. I love the pulptastic aspects of the module from the lurid cover art to the build up of the factions in Shield maidens and I was going to need all of them. 
Now believe it or not there was an AD&D game second edition campaign that was happening and it was falling apart big time and it fell right into my lap. The DM was one of those DM's  who likes to get into every single little written detail of play which includes things like statting up the menu of his Forgotten Realms campaign for  adventures. But he forgot to let his players play the adventure that he had written. I inherited the campaign after things fell apart. Needless to say that I let the players keep their PC's and simply moved them over to the City State of The Invincible Overlord via the gates of Tosh. 

How Druids of Doom (1982) From Judges Guild Saved My Gaming Life & More.

So its 2000 something and the D20 revolution is in full swing, and White Wolf is king of the gaming charts at the time. I'm playing their whole catalog of material and I'm starting to suffer from DM burnout. Everyone goes through it from time to time and back then I was stuck working some dead end no nothing job. Life was not great at the time, home was a hassle, I was working some nine to five that wasn't going anywhere. Something was in the air and I needed a major overhaul.
 It was time for a change and at the time I was hanging out at War And Pieces in West Hartford Ct. which I had been doing since the 80's. Anyhow I was sick of the whole D20 scene at the time until a hippie friend of mine Scott pointed out one of those Judge's Guild module packs that W&P used to sell. My guess was it was back stock from a warehouse that had been prepacked to sell off. Anyhow this former  older 'stoner' friend of mine  Scott cornered me and told me what I needed was an infusion of the 'good stuff'. Judge's Guild was the good stuff and all of this newer stuff on the market was simply re marketing of tried and true concepts.
 He was telling me about his PC's adventures in the 'City State of the Invincible Overlord.' & all about the his game on Saturday nights which I was free to join. Those were fun as hell but those are a whole other story for another time.   What the hell, I grabbed two of these packages of Judge's Guild modules and left for the day.

Well, inside one of these packs was Druids of Doom from Judge's Guild, and I read the damn module again and again. This wasn't my first Guild product by any means but I hadn't read one in close to ten years or so. 

So what was so special about a module from 1982?

You can grab this module right over HERE

Druids of Doom is pure Judge's Guild over the top old school goodness. This is only a forty eight page module with an over arch adventure that goes right into the heart of a mini campaign and it dove tails in quite nicely into other adventures that they had put out over the years.
The plot goes something like this:
The House of Euklidies, a temple to Astokph the Diety of Travel and Transporter of the Dead, is asking for a group of adventurers to recover three lost magical items of the temple. Adventures must pass through the portal and enter the Druid's Keep to recover them. Contains 6 maps, 5 new monsters, and over 60 NPCs. A Judges Guild Universal Fantasy Supplement by Bill Pixley and Diane Mortimer. Cover by Wes Crumb.Judge's Guild like so many of the smaller press old school companies broke the conventions and rules of the time. They mixed in elements of science fantasy, weird monsters, and lots of other stuff that I have since learned was really the norm for OD&D style products. But Judge's Guild did it with style and panache all their own. 

Pass through the portal? Well yes, one of the JG conventions is the idea of gates allowing adventurers to pass from world to world of the DM's design years before Star Gate was even a movie, let alone a television show. The other thing about JG products was the inclusion of all kinds of fun concepts like minor gods and goddesses who governed over many different types of aspects of life. This was like a freaking revelation to me? Wait AD&D 1st edition and OD&D had another company that was producing concepts way,way, ahead of its time? Yes they were and they were very,very, good at it in my humble opinion.
You have to remember that I was out of the other end of the gaming loop at this time. D20 was sort of taking the world by storm at the time but it wasn't until years later in 2008 that the Open Game license allowed me to discover Retroclones and kick back into old school gaming. 

Needless to say that I grabbed my trusty AD&D 1st edition players hand book and ran Druids of Doom for some friends whose 3.00 edition game imploded upon itself. I ran Druids of Doom and then the other modules that were in those packages this included  the Portals of Tosh series. 
Judge's Guild material was and is a part of my gaming DNA. I owe that brand a particular debt of gratitude . But that's a story for another time. 
Now Druids of Doom was really a eye opener on a number of levels. First it taught me to loosen up with my approach to gaming again, second it taught me that buying into typical fantasy tropes of D&D was very limiting, and it also resparked the old school fire that had gotten me into the game in the first place. Later I would inherit two binders full of material from this same friend who died of cancer. You see Scott my 'stoner' friend wasn't simply a stoner or hippie at all. He was a Vietnam era special forces veteran and friend. He was a decorated vet, who was actually one of the best war gamers I've ever known. He watched out for me during a particularly rough patch of my life because my dad had asked him to.All throughout my life there have  been gamers like Scott who have passed through my life and my table. People whose presence pass through your life and who you don't realize until much later when your older and wiser just how important they were too you until you are stopped dead in your tracks by a memory of a friend whose passed on. Funny how gaming is sometimes that way. Its always the simple things that stop us dead. 

I really miss the hell out of War and Pieces and Scott.
Do yourself a favor and pick up Druids of Doom, grab some friends and make your own old school memories.