JCC Amph Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies - The Tabletop RPG Discussion Thread

I liked that they tried to curtail caster supremacy and that they tried to give all classes interesting things to do. I enjoyed the way they streamlined resource recovery, the way they simplified monster creation, and... honestly everything monster-related, up to the recharge actions, the rich variety of abilities, or the concept of minions and solos.

I hated that all their 5,000 classes were just reskins of the same four classes, and that they all felt exactly the same. I hated that they basically returned to 1E with the lack of non-combat abilities. They took the stated "balanced game" philosophy on 3E and thought "hey, instead of just BSing like 3E did, we should do it" and the result was a flavorless grub.

And the game became absolutely dependent on minis, or at least on battlemats, beyond what the already-mini-heavy 3E had been. Completely unplayable if you wanted to get "theater of to mind." That's the most unforgivable thing it did.

 

The Incomplete History of D&D Settings
Part V: Spelljammer



In the late eighties, it finally became possible to play Dungeons & Dragons... IN SPAAAAAAAAACE. Okay, that doesn't sound that groundbreaking. Kind of "been there, done that", actually. There is a magocracy in Mystara that derives its arcane power from the radioactivity that emanates from the engines of an ancient crashed starship, for example, and Gary Gygax himself already had androids, blaster rifles and mecha armor in his classic Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. But no, I am afraid that if you want to see elves piloting X-wings or orcs wearing massive gundams, I am very sorry: you will have to take a look at Warhammer 40,000 and see if you find anything you like. Because when they decided to depict the official interstellar adventures of the heroes and villains of the biggest RPG in the world, TSR decided to take a... somewhat different approach.

No: a radically different approach.


Brace in, because there's no coming back.

The stardate was 1988.

The second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had just hit the streets, and TSR wanted a new setting to go with it. Wait, what: more settings? This is like the sixth entry in this series! Wasn't that enough?

Apparently, TSR's business strategy was to release new settings regularly, working under the assumption that gaming groups would run a campaign set in the setting and then buy the next one; things didn't work like that, of course, because people just kept creating new campaigns set in the settings they already owned. TSR inadvertently fragmented its own audience, and this was in part one of the culprits in its eventual bankruptcy. But there was still a decade to go: Lorraine Williams (TSR CEO during its later years and undoubtedly guilty of almost everything wrong that happened to the company) was drunk with success and clamoring for new and expensive boxes to sell to those disgusting nerds for exorbitant sums. So the two R&D directors of TSR, Jim Ward and Warren Spector (yes, that Warren Spector who later became a video game designer and gave us jewels such as Ultima VI, Thief, System Shock or Deus Ex), took their designers to the best possible place to come up with new boxed sets to try to placate the Beast Williams: the pub.


Yeah, "AD&D Adventures in Space" was its subtitle, for some reason. Other settings should have followed suit. "Dragonlance: AD&D Adventures in Mormonism!"

And there in a cozy pub, between drink and drink, our dorky heroes came up with ideas for two new boxes: Time of the Dragon, a Dragonlance expansion that we already mentioned in a previous post, and a weird thing called Spelljammer that was going to fall into the hands of Jeff Grubb, a man who had been working in the shadows of all the previous AD&D settings.

And Grubb was fed up with all the cookie-cutter fantasy TSR had been publishing, perhaps because he had been involved in all of it. The concept of "D&D in space" was quite common, of course, and not just in the official examples we've mentioned before but in the campaigns of numerous DMs across the globe, campaigns that often included a crashed little starship or two (oh, yes, mine too, of course.) But Grubb's idea was quite different, perhaps somewhat inspired by an adventure module for Mystara called Into The Maelstrom: Grubb had asked his colleagues to imagine a knight in shining armor on the deck of a galleon that was sailing through space. No, he did not freeze. Yes, he could breathe air. Yes, his feet were firmly on the deck. Why? Because it's fantasy, you idiot. Grubb's idea was to expand what they could do with fantasy without veering into science fiction, something that many others had already done (including TSR themselves with other games like Metamorphosis Alpha.) His presentation drew applause, perhaps thanks to the drinking. (Apparently, the waitress who brought them the drinks was convinced that they were Hollywood people discussing their next movie, thanks in part to Warren Spector kind of looking like Steven Spielberg.)


D&D and drugs have always gone together like peanut butter and chocolate, but Spelljammer was the peak of the psychedelic high.

Jeff Grubb was reputed to have a unique talent when it came to define what I like to call "adorable cosmic madness." One of his many past successes had been Manual of the Planes, a sourcebook where he had taken dozens of vague references to alternate dimensions that were spread through adventures and individual sourcebooks and molded them into a single consistent cosmology. He was undoubtedly the right person to lead the new setting.

Its name evolved from the word windjammer, a sailing ship, and apparently caused the TSR legal department to hate him for using a rather difficult term to trademark. Spelljammer's central concept was quite simple: outer space as it had been imagined in times past, as a breathable medium where living creatures lived, a medium that could be sailed by ships moved by arcane energies called spelljammers. An original mix of Ptolemy, Jules Verne, and the Baron of Munchausen, something that had never been seen before in Dungeons & Dragons. This setting was also going to be the first setting wholly created from scratch: it did not have the support of an earlier line of adventures like Dragonlance or Mystara, nor of a long RPG campaign like Greyhawk, nor of a fantasy world dreamed up by an eight-year-old boy like the Forgotten Realms.

Everything about it was new.


"And then I told her, 'Myrtle, I don't care that your mother lost her place to the bank, she just can't come live with us. She hates me.'"
"Look, I just came for this chest."

Although the original idea had been just "D&D in space" everyone soon realized that the spelljamming system was also a neat way of linking the existing D&D worlds: a flying ship could buy merchandise in Krynn, take it to Oerth and sell it, and then land on Toril and have a few beers; this felt like a way of traveling between worlds much more entertaining than merely looking for a shining portal in some ruins. This desire to have Spelljammer fit with all published settings spawned the idea that each campaign world existed within a crystal sphere, based on the famous image The Discoverers, with all these spheres floating inside the phlogiston, a medium based on archaic ideas about oxidation that practically took the place of hyperspace (and that Grubb did not call "aether" simply because he considered it too cliche.) Even our Earth is mentioned as a possible destination!

The setting started taking shape: it gained a kind of campaign center in the Rock of Bral, a pirate harbor in an asteroid, although it was very poorly developed and is one of the flaws that people often see with the setting. It also gained a central opponent thanks to some old acquaintances, the illithid, who, having always been described by Gygax as aliens from outer space, became the setting's ersatz Galactic Empire. The association between Spelljammer and Illithid would become so strong that the designers of, for example, Ravenloft, had to ask for permission to use them in their setting!

The setting was also marked by a very peculiar sense of humor, perhaps similar to Mystara's, maybe even another attempt to distance itself from the very serious and very epic Dragonlance. In the infinite phlogiston, it was possible to run into gnomic ships powered by giant hamsters that trotted inside huge wheels (a concept that was later honored in the video game Baldur's Gate through the barbarian Minsc and his pet) and the British Navy on duty were the giff, humanoid hippos dressed like Master and Commander characters. I suspect the setting's central idea (galleons sailing through space) was so absurd that, if you bought it, you ended up believing everything they threw at you: nothing seemed too incredible for Spelljammer, from robotic steam-powered spiders to living asteroids that peed shooting stars (yes, these are all real examples.)


This is just a British person. I thought this was supposed to be fantasy!

Spelljammer was quite popular. Although not everyone liked it (I, for example, never got its charm), those who did became fans for life. A simplified version called Spelljammer: Shadow of the Spider Moon, that basically used the "Grubbian physics" and many of the setting's most unique traits but reduced the playing field to a single solar system, appeared during Third Edition in Dungeon Magazine and was quite well received, but since then Spelljammer has lain asleep.

Asleep, yet not dead: Fifth Edition continues to hint at it, and just a few months ago, the demo video for Baldur's Gate III showed that one of the game's scenarios is going to be a nautiloid, one of the Illithid Navy's ships. Our space galleons are hard to kill.


This, for example, was a videogame that took place in the solar system around the Forgotten Realms, because the Realms have to be EVERYWHERE.

Jeff Grubb often comments that, at the time, he thought that Spelljammer was breaking the mold, redefining what D&D was, only to discover that, only a few weeks after its release, the industry was already complaining about how "normal" and "generic" the setting was. TSR's control over fantasy RPGs was so absolute that whatever they did instantly became the new normal. How would they break this limitation?

We will see it soon, because from here on we are going to see a very creative final era of AD&D settings that was dominated by precisely that: expanding the limits of fantasy.

 

Looks beautiful. Did they use 3-D maps for planets' locations?

 

No, the cartography was pretty primitive. This is a fan map that can give you an idea of how they were depicted.

 

I don't have much commentary on this one. To me, Spelljammer was more of a prototype of what was to come - it united all the various 'campaign settings' into meta-setting while creating a unique setting for itself, something we'll see in (IMO) a much better format.
Also, I was out of D&D for the most part during this time, apart from home-brewed campaign worlds run by friends, none of whom were interested in Spelljammer.

 

My favorite thing about Mystara, it became the home of Sir Fleetwood and Aleena from the D&D Red Box and apparently official lore says she actually was brought back to life, perhaps the clerics had another go.

 

It is probably worth noting that by 1988 "what if this standard fantasy WENT TO SPACE" was even old hat for games (Ultima I and its TIE Fighter spring to mind, but there's probably something older), to say nothing of old pulp novels, so it's also possible that taken in broadest possible strokes it kind of was "normal" from the jump even beyond TSR's outsize influence on the field. Like "Yeah, of course you went to space. Everyone goes to space. You ****s."

 

Still, that weird Ptolemaic angle that they took had little to do with sword-and-planet pulp. It feels like a weird criticism to make on the setting.

 

You're right, but also, I guess I could totally see the reductive "Oh but really it's just space. Everyone goes to space." argument carrying the day because that seems like the nerd argument thing to do.

 

I admit, I unabashedly love Spelljammer but even I admit that if you wanted "fantasy in space" you sort of had Palladium get there first with their 1981 series and then the Robotech license, and then varying combinations of high tech/sorcery with Rifts (Palladium) and Shadowrun (FASA) -- though admittedly SR never went to space (that I am aware of) and Palladium went full on to space in later things...

 

Just exactly how many Dungeons and dragons campaigns or realms are there?

I do know that there is greyhawk, forgotten realms, dragonlance and etc. I just like to know the exact number and there is also new realms being made too.

Can you guys imagine wizards of the coast to be a streaming service like DC?

 

this many

 

Holy cow, each realm has tons of novels and games to play and there will be still more realms and novels to come.

I also just learned even though most of you guys already knew that Wizard of the coasts is not the only company that publishes D&D.

 

WOTC licenses the Dungeons & Dragons rules, which is a standard for a number of RPG companies.

In fact, 3rd edition (aka the 'd20 system') was an Open Gaming License, which meant that as long as proper credit was given, anyone could use it; this was primarily to try to become, in essence, the Microsoft Windows of the RPG universe. However, it ended up meaning that:
a) Quality control was out the window, and a lot of **** got released by third parties, and
b) WOTC started to find their strongest competitors turned out to be the people using their rules.
Paizo's Pathfinder game system is one of the best selling RPGs right now, and it is really just 3rd edition D&D with extras; it is usually (jokingly) called "3.75 edition". WOTC learned their lesson, or a lesson, and went back to traditional licensing.
Unfortunately, WOTC also reacted poorly and went far in the other direction. They had licensed out game worlds they had no interest in developing - Ravenloft, Dragonlance (to Margaret Weis, one of the co-creators), and even the earlier 1st and 2nd edition rules. They abruptly ended all these licensings citing, again, of the idea of 'giving material to their competitors' (despite getting paid to use them and for products they themselves weren't going to publish), and even denied Paizo's request to license Greyhawk, one of the things I'll never forgive WOTC for.

 

I believe wizards of the coast is still writing novels from some of the realms and on the contrary, greyhawk seems to be done with it’s source material.

 

As noted prior, WOTC released The Ghosts of Saltmarsh recently, which has new original Greyhawk content.
In addition, Goodman Games has licensed old 1st edition modules, and are expanding them - both Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and the upcoming Temple of Elemental Evil are both firmly within the Greyhawk setting.

 

The Incomplete History of D&D Settings
Part VI: Ravenloft



The next setting would come out just a year after Spelljammer, following what was to become an annual tradition, and it was quite possibly as different from humorous space pirates as we can imagine.


"How to pick up girls", by Strahd Von Zarovich

Do we remember Tracy Hickman, the creator of Dragonlance, and that adventure he had created with his wife in 1983? The adventure module was called Ravenloft. It pitted the heroes against an evil but cunning vampire named Strahd Von Zarovich, who drew them to his cursed castle in the land of Barovia, a fantastic take on Transylvania. Ravenloft was an adventure that had been groundbreaking at the time, and it was still one of the most popular that TSR had ever produced. In 1990, it was decided to take advantage of that popularity. It is not clear who gave the order, but it came to be something like: "Psst, guys, that adventure with bats and mummies or whatever? You are going to turn it into one of those expensive boxed sets that we sell, eh? There are nerds to loot!" (We laugh about it, but Lorraine Williams's attitude toward her audience was apparently not that much different.)

So yes: D&D was about to go horror.


So much detailed black and white art!

The new setting had the mission to compete with two very popular horror RPGs at the time, Chill and chiefly Call of Cthulhu (although it's often said that it was intended to compete with Vampire: The Masquerade, White Wolf's game actually came out in 1991, when the Ravenloft setting had already been on the shelves for a few months.) The task fell to two creators, Bruce Nesmith and Andria Hayday, both TSR veterans who had not yet had the opportunity to see their names in large print on the cover of a boxed set. Their first idea, of course, was to turn Barovia into a setting. It's what had always been done since the Greyhawk days: you start with a single castle and start building up, slowly transforming it into a whole world. But Barovia fell short of their expectations: "Transylvania but with elves" was not a flexible or varied enough concept to support an entire campaign, or so they thought.

The answer to their dilemma might have come from Ravenloft II: The House on Gryphon Hill, a 1986 sequel to the classic which had introduced the lich Azalin as a worthy rival to Strahd and continued Ravenloft primarily thanks to its gloomy mood. That could be the distinctive feature of the new setting: the atmosphere! Instead of their competitors' horror type, Nesmith and Hayday decided to focus on Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde. Would it be possible to combine epic fantasy and gothic horror? And could the end result be popular? Although the original adventure was well-liked, the more dated style of horror they opted for wasn't exactly in vogue. Still, they decided that this was precisely the best way to distinguish themselves from the competition, and got down to business.


"Before I bite you, listen to the song of my people."

The first Ravenloft boxed set, Realm of Terror, popularly known as "the black box," came out in 1990 and was an immediate critical success, grabbing that year the main awards in the RPG industry. The box introduced us to the Demiplane of Dread, a patchwork land made of bits the Dark Powers have stolen from other worlds. In this artificial world, the mysterious Dark Powers imprison the evilest beings in the multiverse, such as Strahd or Azalin, and make them experience ironic punishments for the rest of eternity, each the center of a "domain of dread" created by these Powers. These "dark lords" have immense power within their domains, but each of the lands is a prison explicitly designed to frustrate and torture them: Strahd is cursed to see his late beloved continually getting reincarnated in Barovia but to never be able to reach her, for example. Players can either be natives of these domains (raising a metaphysical question that the setting never answers about whether they are also mere creations of the Dark Powers) or poor travelers from other settings who have been brought to Ravenloft by mistake or by the design of the irritatingly inscrutable Dark Powers. This default approach, which the setting called "a weekend in hell," has been widely criticized for the past decades. Still, I personally find it consistent with their strategy: if TSR really intended to release a setting a year, it was not unreasonable to design the world thinking of a way to fit existing player characters that a few months later could jump into the next world. This is how I used it myself in my old AD&D campaign!


A small artificial world surrounded by impenetrable mists where the darkest people are imprisoned and tortured.
The Demiplane of Dread has often been described as "hell, but nor for you." I prefer to describe it as "Mary Shelley's Secret Wars."

It is more debatable whether the setting really managed to bring Gothic horror into the game. The box described techniques to create the sense of vulnerability inherent in the genre, as well as mechanics like fear and madness controls directly borrowed from Call of Cthulhu. But D&D has always had a very high power fantasy component: it is complicated to create subtle terror when a typical character can incinerate a whole city by pointing at it, and removing those abilities in the name of "the atmosphere" ends up being very frustrating. In a way, the game system played against the setting. The enormous power of the personalities that give its character to the setting, the "dark lords" like Strahd, served in large part to create that feeling of helplessness but also brought with them the very nineties problem of the metaplot: over the next years, Ravenloft would become the stage where the lords' plots would play out, with the player characters often being mere pawns and sometimes just spectators, with new modules and supplements continually changing the face of the Demiplane of Dread and creating an intricate storyline that undoubtedly helped to sell books but that also damaged the setting as a game world.

Gradually, Ravenloft began to drop the pretense of their initial "gothic horror" tone and adopted an intermediate "dark fantasy" tone that probably fit better with D&D. However, and honestly, Ravenloft's tone was always all over the place. Some modules were pure psychological terror and carefully-designed atmosphere; others had the main characters hacking dozens of zombies as if more than a horror world Ravenloft was just the Forgotten Realms on Halloween. Allegedly, Lorraine and her minions continually pressured designers to adopt a more twisted, urban, and violent style of horror close to that of Vampire: The Masquerade. Nevertheless, the design group resisted doing anything like that until the last days of the setting. Still, a small sub-setting called Masque of the Red Death attempted to transplant Ravenloft's rules to a world called Gothic Earth, basically a magical version of our world in the 18th century; although the idea was good, its repercussion was minimal, in part because AD&D was not a set of rules that could fit any well with a moderately realistic world.


Compare this picture with the early art shown in this post.

Ravenloft was the first TSR setting to take a blatantly narrative approach, literally telling you that the campaign was not about killing monsters but about sharing stories with friends. It was also the first to give much importance to art and graphic design, a philosophy that the two following settings would wisely exploit. Its style has influenced things as diverse as the long-lived and successful Castlevania video game series (enough that the cover of the second game directly plagiarized the cover of the original adventure!) Its survived and sold very well until TSR's death (Ravenloft is the third most used brand in AD&D history!), had a well-received revision in 1994 (known as the "red box"). During the d20 System era, a new version of excellent quality was released by White Wolf (yeah, the Vampire: The Masquerade guys, closing the circle) until Wizards of the Coast rescinded their license back in 2005 and let Ravenloft rest.


Welcome to Fifth Edition: Strahd is hot now

Fifteen years of life for a horror setting is not bad. Fourth and Fifth Editions have included the concept of "domains of dread" in their cosmologies, although divorced from the plot of the original setting. A recent version of the original adventure called Curse of Strahd includes numerous references and winks to the Demiplane of Dread. You know who hated Ravenloft from the start, by the way? Tracy Hickman, who never liked that their adventure was being turned into a whole world and who, for some reason, hates the idea of crossovers between D&D worlds. He hated that Lord Soth, a character of his Dragonlance novels, became one of Ravenloft's dark lords to the point of ignoring this plot development in his later books. You can't make everyone happy!

 

It's nice that this chapter comes out right after I discovered Castlevania on Netflix!

I don't know how D&D handled this, but while i like the two genres separately I believe that mixing them really doesn't work. In Warhammer they introduced a "race" that was all composed by vampires and I think it really felt out of place completely when put together with the rest of the fantastic world.

 

Yeah, it never really worked. That's why the setting's tone slowly shifted towards a more fantastical one.

I'm a big Ravenloft fan, by the way, despite all the failings it had. It changed the way I saw D&D in many ways. And the books were some great reading!

 

Someone asked him about that once, how Lord Soth's time in Ravenloft fit in with Lord Soth after he returned to the Dragonlance setting. Hickman's response was "Ravenloft? What's that?" Serious shade, man...
Munchkins certainly hated the setting - the idea that you couldn't just kill the beings that controlled the Demiplane of Dread, much less the various "realm lords", didn't sit well with them. They hadn't see anything yet, though!

Well, "Senator" is one of the occupations listed, as are "Patrician" and "Prefect".

 

Remember how Mordenkainen, Elminster, and Dalamar hung out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_of_the_Black_Rose

Yeah, everyone's favorite Death Knight, Lord Soth, ends up in the Demiplane of Dread (I believe, it's been a while, chasing Kitiara's soul that he never locates). Also, fun fact, Christie Golden -- of Star Wars and World of Warcraft fame -- wrote the first Ravenloft novel.

 

You can also try reading the entry first, David

 

tl,dr -- I skim.

 

Yeah, I certainly ran into that, both when I took our long-lived campaign on a "world tour" that stranded them in the Demiplane of Dread for a few in-game years, and during a short true-Ravenloft series that I ran a few years later.

To a certain point, I get it. The original game let you kill Demogorgon and Orcus if you were powerful enough. The idea that certain characters were "plot devices" seemed completely foreign to what D&D was supposed to be and, after 3E started giving stats to everything again, Ravenloft and Planescape almost seemed like flukes. That's what made Curse of Strahd so... interesting