Black Gate

Do you ever wonder why we fight? What is it in our DNA that makes us want to pound something if the mood strikes? I suppose I’d say it’s simple human nature, because what other reason makes sense? I mean, I always hated the saying ‘boys will be boys’ and yet when my son was two I took him to a park to play and got an odd wake-up call. You see, my wife and I took every pain and precaution to be sure that he never, ever, saw or was around a gun, and yet he walked right up to two abandoned squirt guns, lifted them up like he was in a John Woo movie and started pretending to shoot stuff. Seriously, I was looking around for the release of doves and a slow motion jump from the slide to the sand-pit.

I guess at our very core there’s a fighter in all of us. It’s probably the reason why Jon Schindehette over at ArtOrder was so surprised with the response to his art request for an ultimate fighter art composition. People just plain like human fighters, and the numbers involved in the impetus of the competition hold to that fact.

Certainly, the groundwork for many a gamer starts with the fighter. He’s essentially the ‘easy one’, the character class you give the new player because all you have to do is swing a weapon and hope the dice are lucky. There are no magic spells to learn, no prayer lists, holy symbols, or thieves tools. It’s just put on some armor, grab a sword, and go, and you know, I really love that!

So, when I started my rather epic quest in the realms of RPGs, just like discussed in my discourse on Basic D&D’s Red Box, I of course played a fighter. As a matter of fact, I was so obviously unoriginal, I stole Frank Mentzer’s Sir Fleetwood name example right along wth Jeff Easley’s image for the fighter I wanted to play and went from there.

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Orcus, Prince of the Undead. He’s an ancient legend, more so than any D&D text, but for the purpose of this article I’m going address the Gygaxian version and not the Etruscan.

Why Orcus? Well, because I’m upset with Orcus, that’s why. I feel like the big fella let me down. Once, back in the long, long, ago, I got the original AD&D Monster Manual, and in those pages I found the section on Demons and was captivated by it.

Here stood the tentacle-armed Demogorgon, and slime-spurting Juiblex, and the flail-wielding Yeenoghu, Demon Lord of Gnolls, but of all of them, Orcus jumped out into my imagination because he was so drastically different.

Orcus was this fat demon with a wand [I mean really, what self-respecting demon lord carries a wand?] He had the cloven hooves and legs of a goat, a beer belly, and the head of a ram. He wasn’t cool, or epic, and certainly wasn’t someone who would fill you with fear, but the reality in his visage gave me pause.

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‘Basic’, it’s a term I always took as a kind of derogatory statement regarding the type of D&D that I was first introduced to. I mean, why wouldn’t someone think that since there was an ‘Advanced’ version of D&D out there with all those wonderful hardcover books?

Well, that might have been the case, and eventually I would convert to those lofty hardcovers, but in my fundamental and formative years I played from a ‘box’ that provided everything I needed on my path to adventure.

I have a special love for TSR’s Basic rules and the boxes that provided them. They are kind of like a browning picture of you riding a bike before the world was more than school and what to play afterward. I’m reminded of simpler times when there weren’t multiple editions of the game, when the internet wasn’t weighted down with reference materials for feats, powers, prestige classes, and the like.

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With all the news that The Hobbit has begun filming, my stalwart partner here at Black Gate L.A., Ryan Harvey, has been spending his days reenacting the Battle of Five Armies using mini-figs he’s collected since before the release of the LOTR trilogy. Although endlessly funny hearing him deliver Thorin’s final speech to Bilbo over and over again, I forced myself out on the seaside balcony to watch surfers and come up with this week’s blog.

All the cinematic excitement reminded me of my own days in Tolkien’s realms, the reading of his novels just the cusp of my experience as I delved deeply into Iron Crown Enterprise’s Middle-Earth The Role-Playing Game in 1986. MERP, as it is more affectionately called, became the second leading RPG sold in the 1980s, and although miss-management and rather daunting licensing dealings with the Tolkien estate finally resulted in the games dissolution and the company’s bankruptcy, the body of work put out by I.C.E. in a little over a decade remains the Middle-Earth canon for all role-players who truly take the genre seriously.

It was in these pages I was first introduced to the art of Liz Danforth. She, and fellow femme fatal Gail B McIntosh, were constants involved in the supplements of the game along with perhaps the least remembered but unlimitedly talented color-cover man, Angus McBride [1931-2007] who in my opinion will always be THE visionary of what Middle-Earth should be.

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Sometimes art pulls you into a game, sometimes its marketing, sometimes it takes place in a genre or storyline you like, but most times I find people get into games because of a friend. In 1998 my friend Mark bought three copies of the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, trucked them eight-hundred miles to my house in Maryland, and forced me to play it. I’ve never been so happy about being bullied into a game in my life.

L5R was epic, a Matt Wilson cover making me sit up and take notice, and the mechanics of game play a fresh change from the D20 of D&D and the D6 of Shadowrun as L5R introduced ‘exploding D10s’. The setting, an amalgam of Asian culture called Rokugan, overwhelmed, and although my mindset is distinctly and irrevocably western, I still fell into this game head first.

I credit this addiction to two things, the absolutely incredible writing of John Wick, and the stellar black and white artwork of Cris Dornaus.

Let me first start off with John Wick. I know absolutely nothing about John personally, but my experience reading his RPG work leaves only one singular fact, he can write! If you’ve ever sat down to read an RPG, you typically get a good feel for the game, perhaps have a laugh, and come away educated on the subject. When you read L5R 1st Edition, you come away entrenched in a world so deep that you’d swear it had been around for decades.

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Ryan Harvey is at it again in the Black Gate L.A. offices, his collection of vintage zoot suits making the reception area look like a rainbow of color from the 30s. Having no desire to see him try on another while our two receptionists cheer him on, I decided to take my recently received VIP passes to the premiere of Sucker Punch at Mann’s Chinese Theatre [BG membership has its privileges] and exited to the observation deck.

L.A. is a funny place, bright, beautiful, and hiding a pasty underbelly that’s only seen if you know where to look. It’s nothing like Indiana, my place of birth, where poverty isn’t hidden behind a veil of Botox and palm trees.

I’d just returned from the Hoosier state, my little town surrounded by corn fields and meth labs, but no matter what, it’s there I can truly feel comfortable. Seated in the house where I was raised on the banks of the Tippecanoe, I found myself surrounded by friends I’ve had for thirty-five years, and the reason we’re still friends is and will always be role-playing.

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What is the Cat Lord? Well, to me it’s something my friend Mark told me about when he was reading Gord of Greyhawk back in high school, a magical character with awesome power. Having owned three cats in my lifetime, I’d say he has to be an interesting fellow, a rather profound god of feline things. This of course isn’t to be confused with Bast, the Egyptian goddess of cats, but something more D&D based.

I’d picked up D&D 1st Edition’s Monster Manual II at some point, and certainly the Cat Lord appeared in there, two great pictures of him done by Larry Elmore and Harry Quinn helping to flesh out this mysterious demi-god.

He seems an interesting enough fellow, all cats digging him, and if you ever play a campaign based on the planes, particularly Planescape, I’d suggest throwing him in. I mean, why not, he’s the perfect neutral foil to either a good or evil party who could lead the characters on a wild quest of whimsy. It doesn’t even have to be based in his home plane of The Beastlands, just throw him in anywhere, having him show up in a tavern with a girl on each arm, or maybe on a fence playing with a mouse.

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I’ve managed to do a couple of posts in a row on serious topics, and although there is certainly a place for serious things in fantasy [ask Joe Abecrombie as he is the current villain of all things serious in fantasy] I like the fact that fantasy can, and should be, funny.

Now I’m not talking Terry Pratchett funny, who I don’t really find to be that funny, and I’m also not talking Robert Asprin funny, but more along the lines of visually funny. To me, the art of gaming and fantasy began in a time when people like Gary Gygax were struggling to define what it meant to be a fantasy role-player and just was that should ‘look like’.

By the late 1970s RPG art was pretty comic book inspired, and although it went to realism with Elmore, Easley, and Parkinson, that didn’t mean that the people actually playing the games were losing hours of sleep wondering how the socio-economic events of returning to their player-character villages with massive amounts of gold would actually negatively impact the lives of the citizenry from an inflationary standpoint.

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