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Author: Bob Byrne

Why I Went Old School — or Swords & Wizardry vs. Pathfinder

Why I Went Old School — or Swords & Wizardry vs. Pathfinder

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Swords&Wizardry_CoverWhen I got back into playing RPGs, I chose Pathfinder over 4th Edition D&D (as a whole lot of people seemed to do). I was familiar with 3rd Edition and the plethora of rules, skill checks, etc… I’m still pretty well versed in Pathfinder, which is a great product, and I’m a big fan both of Golarion, the campaign world, and of the company, Paizo.

Two members of my gaming group have never played an actual pen and paper RPG. One (she) is a hardcore World of Warcraft player, and the other (he) is a veteran PC gamer, with a lot of hours on Baldur’s Gate and Oblivion (among others). Both have also played the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords (which I LOVE!) with me. So, they get the skill check concept.

I decided to run them through a dice-rolling, paper mapping, minis on said paper, character-sheet adventure.

I initially considered Pathfinder. I have a lot of resources available, and I definitely know the system well enough to teach it to them. I even have a Beginner’s Box, still in the plastic (how about that, John O’Neill!).  But I quickly discarded that system.

Pathfinder is extremely rules heavy. I’ve seen it grow over the years and, as seems inevitable for any ongoing, lively edition, suffer from rules bloat and options bloat. The last game I ran, I limited players to the core rulebook just because I didn’t want to deal with so much “stuff.” Also, I’m not particularly interested in half-angel, half-goblin mammoth-riding gunslingers.

BTW – Gary Gygax had some very specific thoughts related to the expansion of the game (presumably through options), in his book, Role Playing Mastery:

Too often, new material purporting to add to a game system is nothing more than a veiled attempt to dominate the game milieu through power, not skill. Such creativity, if it can be called that, amounts to a perversion of the game. It is much like cheating at solitaire. Understanding the scope of opportunity offered to PCs by the game system will certainly discourage the intelligent player  from such useless activity.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Master Plot Formula (per Lester Dent)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Master Plot Formula (per Lester Dent)

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Dent1Lester Dent was a prolific pulp author, best remembered for creating the adventure hero, Doc Savage.

And speaking of Doc Savage, there is currently a Shane Black film project to star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as The Man of Bronze. Hopefully it will introduce Savage and Dent to a new generation.

The Doc Savage stories were published under the house name of Kenneth Robeson, which is a reason Dent’s name isn’t as well-remembered as it should be.

Dent cranked out 159 Doc Savage novels, but he also wrote hundreds of short stories for the pulps across several genres, including war, westerns and mysteries. The John D. MacDonald fan (which should be everyone!) might want to check out his two Oscar Sail stories for a little hint of Travis McGee. “Sail” is included in the massive (over a thousand pages!) anthology from Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.

Will Murray (whose name you’re going to be seeing again here at Black Mask very soon) compiled a thorough bibliography, and it includes a very nice intro about Dent.

Dent, who died in 1959, a few weeks after suffering a heart attack, left behind a master plot formula for generating 6,000 word short stories. I’m going to let you read it below, in full, then give you some comments related to it from one of the top fantasy authors of all time.

This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words. No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell. The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.

Here’s how it starts:

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Heavy Metal Lyrics, Sword & Sorcery Fantasy and Video Games: A Cultural Synergy by Dr. Fred Adams

Heavy Metal Lyrics, Sword & Sorcery Fantasy and Video Games: A Cultural Synergy by Dr. Fred Adams

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Fred_SpaceInvadersLast year, Dr Fred C. Adams, Ph.D., joined our parade of writers in the Discovering Robert E. Howard series with an entry on Esau Cairn, REH’s classic science fiction character. Dr. Adams is back for another guest post here at Black Gate. Put on your headphones and go!

The parallel (and almost simultaneous) ascensions of heavy metal music, video game technology (which later migrated to personal computers), and sword and sorcery fantasy to mass popularity from the early 1970s forward are not coincidental. Rather, they are synergistic. All three draw from the late 20th century youth culture’s fatalism and nihilism, honed to a fine edge in the fin de siècle era of the 1990s.

Consider the aesthetic of the Ur-arcade-video game of the 1980s, Space Invaders: ranks of grotesque aliens march across the screen as space ships fly overhead firing missiles. You, represented by a screen icon, scuttle back and forth, trapped in a small area firing and dodging missiles while trying to destroy the oncoming ranks of invaders before they reach you and symbolically stomp you into the earth.

The more you destroy, the more ranks appear, starting closer and advancing more quickly. You can forestall death for a time, but the denouement is inevitable. You will lose; the programming foreordains that you will die no matter how well or how long you fight. Other games of the era, like Missile Command, and Asteroids followed suit.

An occasional arcade game like Dragonquest allowed victory, but most reduced play to a life-and-death struggle the player will never win. The kill tally represents the only satisfaction—how many of them do I take with me? As the Time Traveler of Wells’ famous novel says of fighting an impossible number of Morlocks in the darkened forest, “I will make them pay for their meat.”

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Vincent Starrett on the Great Detective

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Vincent Starrett on the Great Detective

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Starrett_PenzlerbooksOtto Penzler is a larger than life name in the mystery field. He is the man behind New York City’s ‘Mysterious Bookstore’ as well as the Mysterious Press (Nero Wolfe’s current imprint!). He’s a true mystery maven. You can read about his recent The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories here.  From 1993 through 1995, under the Otto Penzler Books imprint, he reissued nine hard-to-find works of Sherlockiana.

The Otto Penzler Sherlock Holmes Library consists of the following books, originally published between 1906 and 1967:

221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes — Vincent Starrett
Baker Street By-Ways — James Edward Holroyd
Baker Street Studies — Ed. By H.W. Bell
Holmes & Watson — S.C. Roberts
My Dear Holmes — Gavin Brend
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes — Vincent Starrett
Holmes & Company — John Kendrick Bangs
Seventeen Steps to 221B — Ed. By James Edward Holroyd
Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction? — T.S. Blakeney

Bear in mind, every bit of anything you ever wanted to know wasn’t available on the internet back when Penzler republished these books. Heck, the Baker Street Journal wasn’t even available as a collection on CD yet. This collection of Sherlockiana was uncommon for the time. Some entries are better than others, but they are all an affectionate part of my Sherlockian bookshelf (except, maybe for Bangs’ book).

Read on for reviews of the two Vincent Starrett entries in the series. You may remember reading his outstanding introduction to the first Solar Pons collection.

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Steve Russell of Rite Publishing – RIP

Steve Russell of Rite Publishing – RIP

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SteveRussell2Steve Russell was the CEO and man behind Rite Publishing, a third party RPG publisher that was quite active with Pathfinder, including the very cool magazine, Adventure Quarterly. Pathways, Rite’s free e-zine, is one of the best Pathfinder periodicals you’ll find.

Steve and his pregnant wife, Miranda, had just moved back to his hometown of Dayton, OH, in late June. They were embarking on a new phase in their life when, sadly, Steve was killed in an auto accident.

I backed his Adventure Quarterly kickstarter. We exchanged a few emails about it, but I don’t claim to know him. But he was friendly to me and he was very earnest about Rite’s deliverables.

You can read Steve’s obituary here (with almost two dozen comments from friends and fans) and also tributes from Matt McElroy and Boric Glanduum.

We here at Black Gate send our prayers and condolences to Steve’s family.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dungeon! – A New Kind of Board Game

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Dungeon! – A New Kind of Board Game

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Dungeon_boardTSR’s Dungeon! came out in 1975, just one year after Gary Gygax revolutionized gaming with Dungeons and Dragons.

The ground-breaking board game is still an excellent introduction to fantasy gaming over forty years later. The board represents a dungeon, divided into six areas (representing levels) of varying difficulty, differentiated by color.  There are monster and treasure cards for level and the harder the level, the tougher the monsters and of course, the greater the treasures.

The character classes have been changed over the years, but the player chooses from a Rogue, Cleric, Fighter and Wizard and each class needs to collect a certain amount of gold pieces (earned from treasure cards), ranging from 10,000 to 30,000. Also, each hero class performs at its best in certain levels. So you don’t want to take a Cleric to level six, but your Wizard is never going to win by traipsing around level one.

When a hero enters a room or a chamber, they draw a monster card (which might also be a trap). Every monster has a value assigned to each hero (as well as two spell values for the Wizard). The player rolls two six-sided dice and wins on a tie or greater. The monster is dead and the player gets a treasure card. If the Hero loses the fight, one of five things happens, ranging from nothing to dying and losing all of their treasure. The monster and any treasures remain in the room, waiting for another hero to enter.

Heroes explore until they gain the required amount of treasure for their class. The first Hero to make it back to the starting chamber with the requisite treasure wins the game. Bad things can happen on the way back to the starting chamber and the Hero may no longer have enough treasure. And once in awhile, it becomes a race to the finish.

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Need Some Cthulhu?

Need Some Cthulhu?

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AP_Sanity1Way back in 2003, The Shackled City began appearing in the pages of Dungeon magazine. Spread over twelve installments, it let characters adventure in a connected storyline from first to twentieth level and really, it was the first incarnation of the modern Adventure Path. Paizo followed this up with two others, Age of Worms and Savage Tide. A post about the real evolution of the Adventure Path, going back to the ‘Giants’ modules from TSR, would be a pretty interesting read. But that’s not this post.

Paizo lost Dungeon when Wizards of the Coast brought it back in-house. As we all know, Paizo went from developing 3.5 materials to the massively successful Pathfinder RPG. And at the heart of Pathfinder has been the Adventure Path: a six module, linked storyline, written by multiple authors, covering levels 1 to 20. Rise of the Runelords kicked things off in 2007-2008 (I highly recommend the Anniversary Edition ) and later this month, Paizo’s nineteenth Adventure Path comes out.

That’s 114 modules of adventuring. Wow. They range all over the Pathfinder world of Golarion and really showcase what a fantastic campaign world it is. I put it up there with the Forgotten Realms as my favorite (I’m not a big Greyhawk guy, myself).

Bet you wondered if I was ever gonna pay off the post’s title, didn’t you? Well, I am. Here’s a description of Strange Aeons:

In a distant land polluted by an alien menace from beyond the stars, a great cancer grows within the earth. As its tendrils reach out through the dreams of those who learn and study its existence, a sinister cult grows more active in preparing the way for a devastation that will destroy more than the minds of would-be heroes. Can the adventures reclaim lost memories in time to stop the advance of a cataclysmic contagion that could threaten all of Golarion? Can they resist the mind-shattering truths revealed by the Yellow Sign, and the monstrous force it symbolizes? The Strange Aeons Adventure Path pits the heroes against the cosmic horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos, with new monsters, mind-shattering terrors, and explorations far beyond the known lands of Golarion.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Musical Fairy Tale – Mt. Vernon and Fairway

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Musical Fairy Tale – Mt. Vernon and Fairway

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MtVernon_HollandI’m fortunate in that my boss here at Black Gate lets me wander afield from Sherlock Holmes and mystery-related topics. Now, I think I’ve managed to nominally stay within the milieu of Black Gate,  though my Humphrey Bogart – George Raft post might have stretched things a bit (I’ve got a reasonable argument ready!). So, for example, I haven’t written anything (yet…) about my hero, Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson. Today I’m going to stretch the rubber band a ways.

I think that Brian Wilson, the musical force behind the Beach Boys, is a genius. Before you could find almost any unreleased song on Youtube, I was avidly collecting bootleg albums, then CDs. I probably have a bigger SMiLE collection than anybody else you know.

It’s a rare week that I don’t listen to at least one Beach Boys song. And if you’re my Facebook friend, you’ve almost certainly learned something about their music from my posts (like this one about the Lei’d in Hawaii album). Today, I’m going to bring the Beach Boys to Black Gate: assuming it actually gets posted.

It’s well documented that Brian increasingly withdrew from the band (and for the most part, life…) after the SMiLE album was aborted in 1967. His participation level varied on succeeding albums (Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, 20/20, Sunflower, Surf’s Up and Carl and the Passions: So Tough), but it’s indisputable that he wasn’t running the Beach Boys anymore and his brother Carl was largely filling his shoes.

In the summer of 1972, the entire band, with family and friends, relocated to the Netherlands, recording in a studio that had been sent over from California and rebuilt (yes, the Beach Boys did those kinds of odd things back then). Brian co-wrote only two of the nine songs on the album, and they were late additions to boot.

But Brian’s contribution to the Holland album loomed large – in a way. The record included a bonus EP (any of you youngsters who don’t know what an EP is, go look it up).  You can click here to listen to what we’re going to be talking about.

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The Shannara Chronicles Will Be Back (Though Amber will Not…)

The Shannara Chronicles Will Be Back (Though Amber will Not…)

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Shannara_titleBack in January, I wrote about the then-in progress Shannara Chronicles miniseries on MTV. I was less than overwhelmed. Even though Terry Brooks was involved, and while it did some things nicely, it most certainly was not the Shannara project some of us have been waiting decades for. Granted, it was decent enough that I stuck through all ten episodes.

While the main storyline got closure in the final episode, others (which had nothing to do with The Elfstones of Shannara, the book the series was based on) were left wide open.

I missed this, but back in April, MTV signed on for a second season, though I haven’t come across any kind of timeline.

“This dream team delivered a beautiful, ground breaking show with compelling stories and character journeys which brought in new viewers. I can’t wait to see what season 2 brings,” said Mina Lefevre, Executive Vice President and Head of Scripted Development at MTV.

The show did extremely well in digital format, with over 16 million streams and becoming the most downloaded single-season show ever for MTV. Since it was aimed at the teens and twenties crowd, that’s a good sign.

I liked it enough that I will watch season two, where I’m sure we’ll get more pretty people and lots of the angst, which is the hallmark of the target age group.

Terry Brooks has said that the story is leaning towards The Wishsong of Shannara (which followed Elfstones), with some of Sword of Shannara mixed in.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Arsenic and Old Lace

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Arsenic and Old Lace

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In Brooklyn during World War II, a pair of black widows were luring men to their deaths. They preyed upon older, lonely men without family or close friends. With a “Room for rent” sign hanging in the front window of their idyllic-looking home, they fed arsenic-laced wine to their victims. A male relative who lived with them buried the bodies in the basement, with no one the wiser. The women were in fact little old ladies: think Aunt Bee as a serial killer.

But a nephew came over and found a body in window seat – the thirteenth victim. He slowly realized that his two loveable old aunts were killers. Then, his brother, a murderer on the lam from the police, showed up with his lackey in tow. It’s a hardboiled, true crime story that curiously, is largely forgotten today.

Just kidding! It’s actually Arsenic and Old Lace, a smash stage play that became a popular movie starring Cary Grant, Raymond Massey and Peter Lorre. The play ran on Broadway for 1,444 performances and is still in wide use today.

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