It was 2010.  I had found out who among my friends would be receptive, and who had a violent reaction to anything D&D related.  I invited them to my house for the first time I had played D&D since being a teenager.

The people (names have been changed to protect the innocent):
Melisande - my wife, social worker, late 30s, had played 3rd edition D&D
Zebulon - my friend, computer guy, early 30s, had played 2nd edition D&D
Isobel - also my friend and Zebulon's wife, late 30s, artist, had never played D&D, only collaborative story games

Material components (besides what would be expected):
Primitive beef jerky
Clean mini-notepads
Factory-sharpened pencils
Read-this-and-choose-your-faction handouts
Big cubes of naturally-occurring metal I had painted dice pips on - The "Iron Dice"
Laptop computer

I had been reading OSR blogs:  Middenmurk, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Playing D&D with Porn Stars, Hill Cantons, Telecanter's Receding Rules, and Blood of Prokopius, among others.

I wanted to run games according to the ideals many of these blogs had been promoting:

• An open sandbox instead of railroading
• Maximum player choice
• Ad hoc DM rulings as much as possible instead of consulting book rules; avoid skill rolls
• Actions, NPCs, places the players find interesting vs. what the DM only finds interesting
• Lots of randomness, tables to let chance and serendipity shape the game, rather than preconceived DM notions

Some of my own proclivities at the time which I can't blame on the blogs:

• No minis.  Never have been a fan of lead miniatures.
• A Dung Age, low fantasy, low magic aesthetic - no buying tickets for a train which runs on magic, for example,
• I wanted to run players through a miserycrawl in which they would appreciate ordinary items as treasure and have to find creative uses or make money from every thing they found - I was reacting to the bloat of fabulous, valuable magical treasure which can be seen in many parts of the modern game.

I made up a newly-converted, still-somewhat-pagan East Slavic setting.  Foreign invasion and civil war, much of it with religious overtones, inspired mostly by Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium    It was a wide-open sandbox, but I inserted hooks I thought the players would want to follow up on. There was a haunted village, inspired by this and these and a neolithic barrow.

I showed the players a minute-long movie I had made on the laptop of mood-setting pictures dissolving into one another with a basso profundo Russian Orthodox choir piece as the soundtrack.

They rolled up characters. They read the faction handouts and chose a faction in lieu of choosing alignment.

Isobel - Level 1 Cleric, Faction: Pagan - an old, white-haired man
Zebulon - Level 1 Fighter, Faction: Axe-Wielders - a neophyte sent from the deep forest redoubt of the purist sect, the Axe-Wielders (my reskinned Skoptsy) to spy on the (reskinned Orthodox) majority population of the larger towns and cities
Melisande - Level 1 Fighter, Faction: The Straight Way (Orthodox), but not prone to care too much about whether his companions were SW, heretics or pagans

Everyone started out in a small village church which was sheltering more and more refugees each day.  People filled the church to the breaking point, hygiene was poor, food was running out, people were getting sick & dying, families were living in makeshift tents among the graves outside the church. I passed out the beef jerky to the players to simulate what meager rations might be shared among the NPCs huddled around the campfires outside the church.  I wanted and expected the players to talk to NPCs about places to scrounge more than a living from old barrows, etc., form an expedition to the sandbox location of their choice, and get out of there, maybe with the blessing of the church's priest.

No such luck! The best-laid plans never survive contact with real life unscathed (and my not-so-well-laid plans definitely did not survive contact with real people and the gaming table).

The misery element was laid on too thick and hit too close to real situations in which the only decent behavior is sympathy with the victims, especially kids.  Isobel's character wanted the PCs to make the dangerous journey through the war-torn countryside to the relatively-unscathed city of Polivka, famous for its soup.  Isobel also wanted to lead the near-starving mothers and children camping inside and outside the church to Polivka with the PCs.  A hardened D&D player, swimming like a fish in the tropes of Sword & Sorcery, would jump at the hooks of "treasure for the taking" which various NPCs of various degrees of sketchiness were dangling in front of the players and would recruit expedition members based on their toughness, experience, useful skills & equipment, etc.

Not the case with Isobel, and could you blame her?  Would you trust sketchy NPCs in your own real life and go adventuring with these strangers?  Would you loot tomb mounds and dead villages?  Would you go down into a hole in the ground, possibly filled with hostile beings which want to kill you and which you probably have to kill?

Zebulon took his character on an informal recon around the palisaded village and outside it, using his stealth and woodcraft.  I rolled on my customized events table and showed him on the laptop a picture of something vague and scary in the forest.  He piloted his character back into the village and tried to tell Isobel's character what he had seen, but she was in the midst of inviting the PCs and NPCs she felt were trustworthy to sneak outside the makeshift camp at the church at midnight, exit the village, and have a meeting in the woods to plan a trip to Polivka.

I had imagined the village priest as a kind, sincere, but recently very harried old fellow, who would give people who decided to leave the overcrowded place his gratitude, his blessing and maybe some equipment or information.  But Isobel wasn't feeling that, maybe tapping into her character's anti-clericalism and adding on her own personal anti-clerical tendencies.  She might have thought the priest and his co-religionists were spying on the refugees and PCs.  The rest of the PCs went along with her conviction. I had the more trustworthy-seeming NPCs the party had allowed to join them to voice their doubts about setting off for a secret meeting at night in the woods.

The something scary that Zebulon's character had seen (and still hadn't been able to tell anyone about) came forth snarling from the woods after the PCs and NPCs had set up a campfire in a small clearing.  The PCs (and combatant NPCs) tried to protect the NPC mothers and children.  The creature fought all of the PCs down to zero hit points in a few rounds of combat and had damaged the combatant NPCs.   Everyone ran for the village stockade, carrying the unconscious zero hp comrades. The creature broke off pursuit.
 
It would have been extremely disappointing if the PCs were killed in their first encounter and we had to re-roll new ones.  I suppose I could have given NPCs for the players to control, but I would have rather done that for them later into the session.

Anyway, the PCs rested and recuperated slowly back at the refugee-filled church, with mild admonishments from the priest.  When they were ready to set out again, this time in daylight, this time with the idea of trekking all the way to Polivka and safety, the priest blessed them and gave them some equipment and kind words but no food.

I suppose I could have had the mothers and children refuse to set out from the frying pan of the village into the fire of the dangerous outside forests and long journey ahead, but they were driven by hunger, and I admired Isobel's player-originated quest to escort these NPCs to safety, and I thought that the PCs now might not move out of the village if the moms & kids weren't going.

Other events (determined by my customized tables) happened along the way.  Zebulon's character and an NPC hunted small game and fed the group.  Isobel's cleric cleaned up and reconsecrated a pagan shrine (which her character would get xp credit for).

Then a random encounter with a merchant caravan occurred.  Isobel, used to story games, said, "My character knows this merchant and is deeply afraid of him.  Don't let him see me!"  I should have asked Isobel if she wanted to have the merchant  be fleshed out as a major antagonist, but for all my expressed ideals about player agency, I just had the merchant not recognize her and chat amicably with the other PCs.

Finally, the party got to the gates of Polivka and we decided to halt the game on that note.

I asked Zebulon and Isobel: "Is this fun?"  They said so, and said they liked the use of the laptop for the intro film-let and the various images which were shown at appropriate points during the game.  But when I invited them to play again, they declined and we ended up doing normal dinner parties and things with them instead.

I really should have done better by them.  Next time I DM, I will try not to adhere to all my contradictory idealisms at once.  I will limit the absolute freedom of the sandbox at the very start, because too much freedom is overwhelming.  I will have an initial set-up for the adventure which WILL encourage PCs to descend into dungeons for compelling reasons (I think a dungeoncrawl, because it limits choice a bit, won't be a bad intro to D&D for new players).  I will skip the miserycrawl idea.  

What have you done before, as a DM, which failed miserably?  What do you do differently now? 




   

A Trap & Know Alignment Spell on an Old Dining Room Table

I was 39 years old. I was at a friend's house party in 2009 in a hippie neighborhood where I used to live. The friend had been cleaning up and sorting through his stuff and had laid out a pile of books on his old, battered dining room table with the idea that his friends would take away something he was tired of but would be new and fun to someone else.  One book turned out to be a weird litmus test- the 1983 red Mentzer Basic D&D book with the Larry Elmore dragon leering on the cover.

As I mentioned before, my impressionable young self had imprinted on the 1977 Dr. J. Eric Holmes blue Basic D&D book with its polyhedral dice shortage apologies ("Please cut out these lame paper chits and put them in a styrofoam cup until you can send in this coupon and get dice from TSR nine months later") and erudite, evocative tone - something like:  "...tunnels beneath the sorcerer Zenopus' tower leading to the disused catacombs or all the way to the pirate-infested sea, mingling with the foundations of the older, pre-human city..."

So I never had any affection or interest or nostalgia for the 1983 red book or box.   But of course the overwhelming majority of people don't know or care about 1977 vs. 1979 vs. 1981 vs. 1983 or Holmes vs. Cook vs. Mentzer.  Most of the people at the party, and people around the city, if they had any ideas about the lurid red book at all, would think "Comic books or something", "Whiff of geek" and "Dungeons & Dragons - Wasn't that a cartoon show in the '80s?" 

Plastic beer cup in hand, I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room.  Over people's shoulders, around their hairdos, I caught glimpses of people digging around the pile of books on the table. 

Zebulon [as you might guess, not his real name] saw the book, did a double-take, smiled broadly, exclaimed like he had been surprised by bumping into a long-lost friend: "Aw, cool!  D&D!  I haven't seen this in forever!"

Alberich [not his real name either, and not usually a callous or bad guy] wheeled around and very loudly began to rip on his friend Zebulon and on the book-redistributing party host [also his friend] for liking D&D, role-playing games, etc.  The rant went on and on at high intensity and volume.  The monologue wasn't gentle ribbing or funny or clever observations (which were Alberich's usual speciality).  Something was swirling around here, below the murky surface.  It was fascinating to watch.

Here's a D&D metaphor:  The red book was a trap, which sprung a Know Alignment spell on people who stopped to look at it.  If you want a less D&D-oriented metaphor it was a litmus test.  Zebulon was revealed to me as D&D positive - someone who knows and likes some kind of D&D.  Alberich was revealed as a person who can recognize D&D materials and vehemently, publicly rejects them and everything about them.  He had the fervor of someone who played before, maybe was into the game, but then wanted to utterly disassociate the elements of himself which reveal a past, discarded persona, a vulnerable, uncool, self-judged childish part of himself.

The Know Alignment spell-spewing red book had an interesting and useful effect- I could see who hated D&D, who didn't know or care about it, and which of my friends might be receptive to the idea of playing D&D again, maybe after a decades-long hiatus like mine. Later at the party, Alberich, Zebulon and I talked amicably about subjects that had nothing to do with D&D.  Alb's outburst was never mentioned, and we're all still cordial.

So anyway, I invited Zebulon and his artist wife Isobel to play D&D with me and my wife, in a game helmed by me.  I hadn't played, much less DMed for 25 years. Do you predict an impending trainwreck?  What dramas unfolded will be told in the next post.

How I got from there to here

About 6 years ago, I was looking at PostSecret.com and was surprised and moved by one of the secrets.  This deep dark secret was: "I just realized that the greatest fun I've ever had, even including sex, was playing Dungeons & Dragons for the first time."  There were blue old-style TSR inside-of-a-module-cover maps as the artsy background for the secret.  I was deeply struck by that idea, even though I can't fully agree (duh- shtupping is awesome! Mostly).

I really got turned off D&D when the Saturday morning cartoon started and when action figure toys like "Strongheart- Good Fighter" came out.   What had seemed so cool, adult, intellectual and counter-cultural when Mike told me in 4th grade, in 1979, about black pudding and beholders now made me feel claustrophobic and childish and embarrassed to be associated with it.  I avoided anything to do with what people now call 2nd edition D&D.  I was completely ignorant of 3rd edition and 3.5.

But in 2010, my wife was pregnant with our first child. I read the PostSecret post and admitted to myself that D&D, back in the late 70s-early 80s, was a lot of fun for me.  Searching google, I found the archipelago of Old School Renaissance blogs.  I was pleased to find people who were annoyed with full-color flashy spiky-haired dungeon punk anime aesthetics and appreciated the black-and-white, sometimes awkwardly-rendered Holmes Basic Blue Book D&D and 1977 Monster Manual drawings "like some mysterious medieval woodcuts".  I forgot who wrote that, but it hit the nail on the head for me.

I gave in to the compulsion, chewed up a lot of material, and then regurgitated it into my own DIY creations with Holmes Basic rules (mostly because I am too busy and can't be bothered to learn new systems).  I inhaled Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium: Mystical Anarchists and Revolutionary Millenarians on the Eve of the Reformation in Europe (my favorite book), the Middenmurk blog, Telecanter's Receding Rules, Luc Sante's Low Life (another favorite book I keep buying copies of to give to friends), dual-faith among newly (and longtime) converted medieval Slavs, Hill Cantons blog, World Current Archaeology magazine.

Some really kind friends indulged me in playing shortly before my kid was born.  More on that debacle and what I learned from it in a future post.

Another friend tried to be a D&D yenta and set me up with this DM my own (middle aged) age who creeped me out with his cheesy 3rd edition aesthetics.

More recently, I have been eating Byzantine brain food - Dumbarton Oaks, etc.  The product of this diet will appear coiled atop this blog shortly.