Black Gate

The firing squad lines up across the ruined courtyard.Perspiration drips into Tahm’s eyes. The not-flies settle on his face. He strains against his cuffs, the rough wood of the post scraping his arms.

The sergeant barks an order, startling a swarm of lizard-birds into the sky. Twelve rifles come to bear.

Tahm watches the lizard-birds, mentally follows them to where they will roost. He’s a scout and the jungle is his life. Was his life. Soon the jungle will gain life by feeding on his body.

There’s a cracking sound like lightning striking distant treetops, screams, more cracking. Then silence.

Tahm looks down into the courtyard. The execution party now lie sprawled in the mud, smoke billowing from ruined heads and torsos.

A man in scarred battle armour emerges from the ruins. He carries no unit insignia, belongs to neither side in the civil war. Nor does his gun belong; a sleek energy weapon that can only have come from orbital factories of the Grim system.

Their eyes meet.

“Don’t shoot me,” says Tahm.

The gun man’s eyes narrow. “You didn’t see anything.” He turns away and vanishes back into the rubble.

Moments later, the dead men’s assault shuttle roars into the sky, leaving Tahm still tied to the post, now surrounded by corpses.

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As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I entered the tabletop roleplaying world in late 1979 at the ripe old age of 10. By that point, Dungeons & Dragons – and, by extension, the hobby it spawned – were already five years old. Consequently, I can’t be numbered amongst the earliest adopters of this new form of entertainment. Even by that date, there was a lot of water under the bridge of which I was very much unaware. Moreover, unlike many of my elders in the hobby, I wasn’t a wargamer (either miniatures or hex-and-chit) and I wasn’t all that well read in the fantasy literature that inspired D&D. I was most definitely a Johnny-come-lately, loath though I would have been to admit it. In fact, it rankled me a bit. I didn’t want to be one of “the kids,” as my friends and I were often called by the teenagers and college students who frequented the hobby shops. Besides, I reasoned, how could I be a kid when my beloved Holmes boxed set proclaimed that D&D was “the original adult fantasy role-playing game?”

I eventually got my own turn to look down my nose at D&D players younger than myself when the multi-colored boxed editions written and edited by Frank Mentzer started to appear in 1983. I loudly proclaimed those “kiddie Dungeons & Dragons” and didn’t want anything to do with them – except for the Companion Rules released in 1984. I had expected the Companion Rules since 1981, when they were mentioned in David Cook’s original Expert Rulebook. Despite my disdain for these new editions, with their Larry Elmore covers and Bowdlerized presentation of D&D, I nevertheless furtively bought a copy of the Companion Rules, hoping it would live up to my expectations. It didn’t–I’m not sure there’s any way it could have – but I liked it anyway. I liked it enough that I still have my copy of it to this day and frequently pull it off the shelf to read. 

I did this the other day and read its preface for the first time in many years. In it, Mentzer says the following:

This game is like a huge tree, grown from the seeds planted in 1972 and even earlier. But as a plant needs water and sun, so does a game need proper “backing” – a company to make it. As the saying goes, “for want of a nail, the war was lost”; and for want of a company, the D&D game might have been lost amidst the lean and turbulent years of the last decade. This set is therefore dedicated to an oft-neglected leader of TSR, Inc; who, with Gary Gygax, founded this company and made it grow. The D&D Companion Set is dedicated to

BRIAN BLUME

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