Englandia: Two Design Principles

The more I studied history, the more trouble I had with the supernatural, with magic, monsters, and the divine. Although a great source of gaming fun and a powerful tool in the DM's arsenal for expanding the game's horizons, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that almost any magic item or spell from Dungeons & Dragons could have changed the course of history at some time in some place. If the world were a Gygaxian cornucopia of magic items and crawling with monsters, history would not even remotely have unfolded the way it actually did. Likewise, the divine.

No, to run a historically-based campaign, balancing verisimilitude and fantasy correctly would have to become a central goal. This led to my first design principle:

In Englandia, the supernatural is real but rare.

In 1997 when I was designing Englandia, I had been gaming for twenty years, so I knew this principle was going to be a problem for me. I was spoiled by the supernatural glut of my previous campaigns, in which magic was always at hand to spice up an adventure. As I've written before in this blog, I used it too readily, especially in Dagorëa, leaning on it as upon a crutch, and it delayed my ability to create convincing non-player characters by a decade during which I tried to compensate with the wild imagination of my monsters and magicks. I'd come a long way since then, but still, cutting the supernatural back enough in my games to keep the setting remotely related to real history was going to be a real challenge.

The solution lay in the adoption of a second, balancing design principle. As rare as the supernatural had to be to protect the historical integrity of the setting, it would have to be just that much more interesting than it was usually handled, to get every bit as much gaming juice out of it. That is, I would reduce its power to change history, but increase its originality and memorability.

For example, if I eliminated dwarves, elves, gnomes, hobbits, and half-orcs as choices for player-character races, I could compnsate by making human beings that much more interesting. After all, any DM worthy of the name ought to be able to create endlessly interesting player races out of the diversity of humanity: God-fearing Roman Catholic Saxons, enbattled pagan Mercians, heathen Scottish tribesmen, shamanic and tattooed Picts, headhunting Irishmen on chariots, fatalistic Northmen in long ships, sullen and xenophobic fenfolk, devout and cosmopolitan Moors, and so many more.

So that's how I would pump up my diminished supernatural, too, how the second design principle would work:

In Englandia, the supernatural varies culturally; it works the way each culture believed it did, most strongly in that culture's homeland.

So, for example, though there would be very few magic-users in Englandia, they would be extraordinarily different from one another, maybe between one and three wizards per culture to represent the range of magic in that culture. Likewise the monsters: from selkies on the Scottish coasts, to waterhorses and loch monsters in Scotland proper, to redcaps on the Scottish borders, on down to pagan Mercia where night stalkers haunted the land, to Christian Wessex with its demons and hags, and beyond.

Common throughout the British Isles was the belief that such things were disruptions, intrusions from the land of the dead, the otherworld, the faerie lands, and so I could set aside D&D's armies of undifferentiated humanoids and replace them with highly individualized beasties crossing over from beyond, each one carrying more meaning than just itself because it also represented a breakdown in the natural order of things, some unique kind of corruption that also had to be addressed.

Beverly and I already knew this was going to be fun. Even just the choice of setting combined with these two design principles was enough to solve many of the problems I'd had with my previous campaign worlds. The more we talked about these ideas, the more I could feel my creative juices flowing again. What a relief!

Still, we couldn't help feel some regrets. The price of finding a historical backwater and all the freedom that entailed was giving up some diversity, a cost we felt more keenly the more we designed a supernatural that flourished and unfolded ever more beautifully the more cultural diversity it had to work with. What we wouldn't give to be able to use fabled Baghdad, crossroads of the old world, as our setting, but its history was just too well documented and too foundational for the course of world history.

The solution, though, lay in those two design principles. The world so made not only thrived on diversity, it increased it, creating a feedback loop. The supernatural is inherently destabilizing to history, and so could increase its diversity, but also, as shaped by the second principle it could stabilize history by surprising would-be conquerors far from home.

Beverly and I studied British history in detail as we never had before to find the delicate turning points, the places where the application of these two design principles would surely have changed the course of history, searching for the fewest number of changes we could make—to keep history close to its actual course—that would both follow inevitably from those design principles and also increase the cultural diversity of the British isles in the year 1000.

Between April and September of 1997 we settled on just three changes to British history that would help to illustrate those principles and shape the character of Englandia.

Lawful Good, Part One

On February 28, 2009 on Facebook, a few months after I joined, I took the D&D Alignment Test. The results showed me as Lawful Good.

For what that's worth.

These tests never quite offer the right choices. I consistently come out lawful good on alignment tests, but it's not quite accurate.

I'm a big believer in principles, virtues, standards, conventions, and manners, but I also believe the law is often used to enforce injustice, or worse (yes, I think it's worse), that legal systems tend to treat justice or any other higher principle than the law as imaginary. In such cases, the law become a force for nihilism, for the void, for the death of meaning, in short, becomes a tyranny of process over result that destroys any possibility of justice. People at least can understand that overt injustice must be opposed, but nihilistic, inhuman processes tend to confuse people into inaction because there is no clear "bad guy." The corollary to Pogo's "We have met the enemy and he is us" is that it is in such situations, when our own activities inadvertently result in meaningless and justice-blind systems, that we are at our most helpless to fix things.

Thus, lawful, yes, but not in the sense of human law except to the extent that human laws comply with higher laws and principles. When human laws conflict with justice and other deeper principles, I will oppose such laws to the extent available to me because I care too much about the deep principles that should underlie the legal system to let the legal system itself subvert them.

Unfortunately, legal systems tend to make themselves immune to improvement by bloating up themselves and their processes beyond the reach of any individual human beings or even beyond any meaningful organized control by democratic majorities, devolving into self-sustaining amoral systems of processes, a machinery of behavior that is the enemy of individual responsibility and authority.

I am a different kind of lawful than that.

Likewise, good, about which our culture has far less of a clear idea than about lawful, but that's a discussion for another day.

Two more things.

First, the idea of a nation of "laws not men" leads directly to a nihilistic legal system divorced from justice. We need a nation of principles, around which people and laws organize themselves. The law must clearly be subservient to principles and must be edited and adjusted all the time to conform more closely with those principles.

For the law to be a human tool for justice, there must also be few enough laws that dedicated people can actually learn them all. The current situation in which even legal specialists cannot fully know all the laws in their chosen area of expertise is risible, insane, and the legal principle that ignorance of the law is not a defense is actually an evil, a form of cruel and unusual punishment when coupled with a system of laws too vast for the majority of people to be anything but ignorant about most of them. That is, this legal "principle" renders all human beings defenseless against its own inevitable consequences.

Second, what do we do in the meantime? Well, as flawed as the legal system is, it is currently the only tool we have with which to try to bring about some measure of human justice - since there is no formal place in our society for principles, the only sources of true justice - so we do our best to learn about and follow just laws and to learn about and work around the unjust ones.

And we certainly don't flout the law in a vain effort to "prove" how free we are. We save our battles with the legal system for the ones we cannot avoid, where the damage to justice inflicted by the law is so high that it takes precedence over all the other things we could or should be doing with our lives and requires us to sacrifice some part of our lives to this quixotic struggle to eke justice out of a system that cannot conceive of justice yet wraps itself in that very mantle.

That is, we should be law-abiding citizens except when justice demands otherwise.

That is the kind of lawful I am.

One last thing.

Some people's alignments are accidental, just a description of whatever they happen to do, but my alignment is deliberate and very, very important to me. I am passionate about moral, philosophical, and organizational issues. I work hard to understand what the right thing is to do and to try to do it, and I try to sleepwalk through life as little as possible. I fall short plenty in both understanding and execution, as a fallible mortal who overextends himself, but the lifelong struggle to become a good and wise person is almost always on my mind and in my heart.

The Road to Englandia

Englandia, my fourth and ongoing D&D campaign world, is my current recipe for a fun campaign setting to run.

My ravenous studies in science, history, sociology, and anthropology satisfied my drive to learn but left me unable to enjoy either the random fantasies of my first childhood campaign world or the arbitrarily organized and highly derivative fantasies of Dagorëa, my second campaign world. Both originality and intense verisimilitude have become necessary ingredients in my fantasy play.

However, six years of developing and running Nia Revo, my extremely detailed and original third campaign world, was enough to teach me that inventing a reality from scratch is more work than fun. After three years of running games there, from 1989 to 1992, the increasing intensity of my work life reduced my free time and energy too much to support both running games and the necessary investment in inventing their reality, so I gave up active gaming and spent the last three years of Nia Revo building a notebook detailing its physics, languages, writing systems, history, etc. That turned into an expectations trap, in which the more time and energy I put into the development of the game without actually playing, the more impossible it became to justify all that investment. By 1995 I was burned out and had forgotten how to have fun.

It was clear we had to try something else.

Fortunately, that was the summer Mike Ryan interviewed with Beverly to work for Wizards of the Coast as an editor for the game Magic: The Gathering. Mike liked to DM, so for two years I played and did not DM. Those two years rekindled my love of the game and gave my DMing muscles some time off. Playing in Mike's game taught me that I can't DM unless I play, that the fun of play helps me enjoy life and makes me more playful, and that the tensions and irritations of play stimulate my creativity.

I thought back over my life and realized that D&D was the fountain of my creativity. I learned to draw better for D&D. I learned to write better for D&D. I learned cartography, linguistics, calendars, architecture, geography, storytelling, psychology, and dozens of other things to improve my D&D games. And it worked. My adult games were so much more interesting to me and my players than those of my childhood.

So.

After Mike's game ended in 1996, Beverly and I talked about the rundown of Nia Revo and the lesson I learned from playing with Mike, that I needed to play and DM—that I needed to play to be able to DM—and that I was a better and happier person for doing both.

We talked about the tension between my need for verisimilitude and my need to have the work of DMing be manageable, to fit within our crazy work lives. The limited free time in our schedules meant I had to give up on achieving fantasy realism by inventing it.

Instead, we decided to borrow it.

From history.

Because ultimately, no matter how good I am at simulating history and geography, the results will never be as realistic as reality itself. In hindsight it's obvious, but it took me about twenty years of gaming to relent and admit it to myself.

So over dinner one night in April of 1997, Beverly and I talked through the range of options for when and where to set a new historical campaign. We needed an era that had a lot of interesting cultural diversity, intensity, and turmoil, a time that had a lot of historical material to work with, but a place that didn't, a place where the historical record was sparse enough that we could embroider without unraveling it.

As students of history, we knew that during the Dark Ages the Arab world was the dazzling place to be—and China, the Americas, and many other places were also historically rich and marvelous—but that Europe was a poorly documented cultural backwater, some places more than others. Case in point, from the time the Romans left until the Conqueror's scribes compiled the Domesday Book lie six hundred years only sketchily documented by some chronicles, law codes, deeds, legal documentation, and so on—a lovely but tattered weave on which to embroider our little revels.

And so it was we settled on Saxons and Celts and Picts, Vikings and Magyars and Moors, a series of adventures set on the British Isles starting January 1st, 1000. I named it Englandia in honor of Alfred the Great's lifework and in echo of Jean Sibelius's masterful anthem.

. . .

I never realized it before researching this blog, but Englandia may well never have come about were it not for Mike's fun and fascinating 1995–6 D&D game with us, which rekindled my love of the game. He's like Englandia's godfather, and he was one of its first players. Thanks, man.

Postponing the Story to Resume the Blog

Evidently I don't want to write about Nia Revo right now, since the prospect brought me to an abrupt halt. So, let's finish the story of how we got here later, and for now, let's skip ahead to the present.

Tables! Tables! Tables! And Snails!

My favorite posting so far by Sam Kisko on his blog Valley of Blue Snails is this marvelous post called "You spy your long time love laying eggs in the wilderness one evening." It contains a truly baroque suite of tables called the Traumatic Adolescent Background Generator, which is one of the wonderfully weirder things I've read in a while. Although most of these are more fun to read than to have inflicted on your character, I suspect, a few of these are very close to events from my campaign:

19 – You awake most mornings with smallish fey creatures cuddled against you. They leave tiny offerings of flowers, sweet food, and perfumes.

14 – While near a waterfall you think you saw a pair of feline eyes behind it. Exploring behind the waterfall you see a crevice that sinks into the depths. You also find a huge discarded cat-claw larger than you are.

1 – A fey creature leaves a child at your door step. (if taken) The child grows to adulthood in 1d4 years, looking exactly like you.

Overall, these tables start out hilariously depressing and mean-spirited - I particularly like the Comeliness table in which no matter how beautiful or ugly you are it still works out badly for you - but gradually grow increasingly weird and charming. Here's one of my favorites from near the end:

18 – A small duck billed Hadrosaurid will periodically approach you when it thinks you are asleep and clean any parasites from your skin and hair. This is strangely soothing and does not wake you.

I'm not sure why this makes me so happy.

My second favorite posting of his is "A fire-breathing were-mammoth destroys half the village while calling your name." This is his earlier table suite, the Traumatic Childhood Background PC Generator, which is slightly less weird but still highly entertaining. The first few tables are generic enough, but once it gets into the events tables the weirdness begins. Some of these sound like things I've done to my players, like:

13 – The PC finds a large tar pit and strange fey creatures appear to live within. They have invited the PC into the pit to see their home but the PC has yet to accept.

14 – A traveling Elf maid gives the PC an orchid plant. The orchid never changes and is perpetually pointing towards one direction, even if turned or moved. If the Orchid is followed like a compass, it leads to a strange and wondrous place leagues away.

15 – The PC finds a lone boulder marbled with lapis. Before the PC can take any, a deer-spirit emerges and begs the PC to leave it. (if heeded) A yellow deer can be seen in the distance when the PC is in the wilds. (if ignored) Gain 1500gp in lapis.

Others - I'm sure my players are thankful - I never have and never will. After reading through these bizarre entries, we can all appreciate this one:

1 – Perfectly normal childhood. The PC's peers mock the child for his normalcy.

Because if these are the things that usually happen, normalcy would be tres outré.

My Second Campaign Setting: Get Real

Early into my senior year at Walla Walla High School, in September or early October 1983, Cathy Couch decided I would make a nice addition to the group of friends she was creating, so she sought me out and recruited me.

Her timing was excellent. Several of my SAD&D gaming friends were in the year ahead of me and had just graduated and left Walla Walla, so my gaming group was suddenly smaller. Cathy reconnected me with Linda Yaw (who I had met in Spanish class in tenth grade but never gamed with before), introduced me to Ron Richardson, Chris Wilke, Wayne Burley, Mike Gilbreath, Mark Mulkerin, Cecily Fuhr, Angela Marks, and others, and brought me together with my future wife Beverly Marshall. (On October 17th Beverly and I began dating. We've been together twenty-six years.)

Cathy's group was independent of the SAD&D gaming community (at least until Cathy and Peter became an item a year or two later), so the group she brought me into played at far more normal power levels and more vanilla rules. More importantly, she emphasized character role-playing, and stories often turned on the basis of character interactions rather than monsters slain or treasure found. Certainly there was plenty of standard-fare adventuring, but the additional element of human drama forced me to develop as a player and as a DM.

The cosmic powers in Dagorëa thus became a background tapestry, and the new stories began to emphasize low-power PCs at the beginning of their careers facing unusual situations.

During my SAD&D years part of my campaign stock-in-trade had become a combination of cosmic struggles and immersive sensory detail, describing scenes in enough detail that players could visualize their characters' experiences and thus get more emotionally involved in the events themselves. With the epic scale removed to the background in my post-SAD&D years, the immersion, the detail, the verisimilitude became my DMing obsession.

I got better and better at bringing a scene to life, sometimes to the benefit of the game, sometimes to its detriment as a distraction or an imprudent end in itself.

At its best, this focus on setting produced amazing adventure sequences like the time Ron's character Arhíriel had to escape an enraged dragon by leaping from its nest atop an icy mile-high spire and then sky-diving without a parachute through the winter air and arranging to survive by landing just right in a deep alpine lake. It took all Ron's ingenuity as a player to work out how to survive this astonishing sequence of events, but in the end, with dislocated shoulders, cut feet, broken bones, a broken nose, black eyes, frostbite, and nearly drowned, Arhíriel could nevertheless look up afterward from her shelter beneath the snow-blanketed boughs of a fir tree, up the impossibly high and sheer spire of rock, to see the dragon circling far, far above. Afterward, Ron and I both chortled with glee at how cool that session was. I can still see it clearly in my mind to this day.

At its worst, a new character we'd spent an hour putting together would fall into a river during a rainstorm and lose all her possessions fifteen minutes into the game - all lovingly described in vivid detail but not actually any fun to play. Sorry, Beverly; my bad.

The other tool of immersion I learned by playing with Cathy's group was more of an unalloyed good: how to develop and run compelling non-player characters. It had always been a weakness of mine, but playing in campaigns that emphasized character interaction - plus actually socializing myself with this new group of friends - finally taught me by example what makes conversations and other social interactions fun. I practiced turning these lessons into good gaming material the usual way - by practicing over and over, making and running lots of bad NPCs until I'd made enough to learn from so I could finally began making less cliche, more interesting people.

By the middle of 1984 I'd worked out the art of making NPCs so engaging that I could hook the players into adventures just through social interaction alone. I knew I'd arrived when Ron and Beverly grieved over the tragic death of the NPC Bulano, a ranger who had been Arhíriel's mentor and Tinaelin's friend. Beverly actually wrote him an elegy. Likewise, although it was inconvenient, I recognized that when Tinaelin ended her association with Arhíriel because Ron's character blasphemed against Tinaelin's goddess, it meant my campaign finally had such compelling social interactions that the characters were more interesting than the monsters and adventures, a degree of social realism completely impossible for me to achieve only a few years before.

If it sounds like I'm bragging or describing a triumphant march of progress, then I'm telling this all wrong. It's embarrassing to reflect upon and describe just how socially backward I was for so long, or how grandly shallow my adventures were. For a long time my adventures had to be cosmic and wildly original because I was incapable of engaging my players with anything less overtly interesting than that, like a bad novelist who can't create drama without putting women and children in danger or whose villains are always threatening the existence of all life in the universe in order to try to keep the audience's attention. I was such a slow learner. But I have to describe these things to characterize Dagorëa, because above all it was my most important setting for learning how to DM well.

By 1986 I'd worked out most of the fundamentals. I wasn't yet a great DM, but after years of practice and study I'd finally reached the point in my gaming career where I was often a good DM. Intermixed with the occasional dud, I ran a lot of entertaining adventures.

Unfortunately for Dagorëa, success bred failure. I outgrew it. My passion for realism grew into a demand that my first true campaign setting, created so early in my life in such epic, erratic, implausible gestures, could never meet. Over the next few years I DMed adventures set there less and less often until in 1989 I bid farewell to Atlantis, Dagorëa, all its history, and all its dynasties of characters for a new, wild, fantastic, original setting I would create from scratch: geography, biology, languages, writing systems, and all.

At the same time, I decided my RPG rules weren't realistic enough either, so I also bid farewell to D&D, AD&D, and SAD&D in favor of the hot new thing in RPG rule systems, Steve Jackson's Generic Universal Role Playing System, better known as GURPS.

I thought these changes were unique to me, that I was making a personal decision to introduce more realism in my game based on my individual development as a DM and a player, but I was unconsciously part of a mass migration. In the late eighties, at the same time many new DMs were coming to AD&D for the first time, many experienced DMs were leaving it for skill-based systems, which we all thought were more advanced and realistic. As the crowd roared in Monty Python's Life of Brian, "We're all individuals!" Or as Oscar Wilde said, "Most people are other people."

So, in 1989, for the sake of realism, I created my third campaign setting, Nia Revo.

My Second Campaign Setting: SAD&D

The summer of 1981, much to my surprise, my brother Rob and I moved abruptly from Seattle (me) and New York (him) to Walla Walla to live with our mom. This move was very good for Rob, who'd already been uprooted from Seattle the year before to move with our dad to New York, a move that disrupted his life and traumatized him. Moving to Walla Walla was a great relief for him. For me at the time it was a more ambivalent and problematic change. Although there were many good things about the move, like living with mom, Rob, our younger brother Tom, and a great many pets, it cut me off from my step-mother, my friends, my gaming group, my girlfriend, my karate dojo and sensei, and the city and surrounding wilderness I'd grown up in and around all my life.

Although many good things about my family and about Walla Walla eased our transition, D&D itself especially helped. Rob and I played regularly, so we gradually found the other Walla Walla players. First, at Walla Walla High School, I found John Boen, Frank Beeson, Wade Hilmo, Todd Lincoln, Lea Rush, Danny Barer, and others. John and Frank helped me find the larger and more serious Walla Walla gaming community, people like J.J. Hays, Bob McSwain, Jr., Roger Rojo, Peter Adkison, C.J. Jones, Russ Woodall, Chris Van Hooser, and many many more. These gamers and I would later form the Northwest Dungeon Masters' Association, a precursor to Wizards of the Coast.

Somehow, partly because of the three colleges in such a small town and partly for reasons I still don't quite understand to this day, Walla Walla's gaming community became intensely creative and eclectic. They coined the term Super Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (SAD&D) for their approach to the game, which sounds like hubris, but after pondering it for years I have to conclude they named their style well.

Why?

First, just like AD&D added a baroque level of complexity to original D&D, so SAD&D upped that quality dramatically. Specifically, SAD&D rejected TSR's growing interest in standardization and official rules, returning to original D&D's hobbyist, do-it-yourself mentality, but it embraced and extended AD&D's taste for more complex rule systems and options.

SAD&D was a "system" (more of a human system than a rules system, a gaming culture) of catholic tastes, absorbing every supplement, every rule system, every scrap of interest from everything anywhere in the role-playing game (RPG) world, no matter how obscure, and every original idea from every fantasy or horror book published. This was not pragmatic eclecticism; it was a ravenous eclecticism for its own sake, systematized universal plagiarism to create a very messy and tumultuous but also very fun creative ferment. This gaming community had an insatiable appetite for RPG novelty and for synthesizing anything and everything into highly idiosyncratic and intricate campaign settings and rule systems.

The little town of Walla Walla added an early but measurable statistical bump to the bottom line of every RPG company in the world. These gamers built up remarkable collections of published material, and those too poor to buy were supported with Xerox copies from those who did until they could afford to buy their own. In turn, they then produced and passed around new reference sheets and cards that pulled together the ideas into new forms for their games. This feeding frenzy and drive for synthesis and integration was one of the more important qualities that led these people in particular to later form such a successful RPG company as Wizards of the Coast.

Second, in the same way AD&D represents a jump in power levels over basic D&D, SAD&D was another jump in power. Killer dungeons & megadungeons were all the rage. Everyone built and ran them, and we played almost every day, so everyone's characters - those who survived - rapidly shot upward in power. As characters grew more powerful, the power levels of the adventures were ratcheted upward in sudden and dramatic quantum jumps. Characters played heroes, superheroes, demigods, lesser gods, then greater gods. Adventures moved beyond dungeons to battles and wars, to apocalyptic struggles, and - this is where it really moved into SAD&D territory - into the realms of science fiction, interdimensional warfare, multiverses, alternate systems of science and magic, and ultimately mythological and cosmological revolutions.

It's not that other gamers in other cities and towns around the world didn't do these things, too - after all, planes and planar adventures are described in the Dungeon Masters Guide - but rather that the Walla Walla gamers self-identified as doing it enough to coin a term for it and for their happy power-gaming community. They regularly played the whole range of powers from untrained commoners to pantheons of deities and kept having to stretch their adventures, their rules, and their settings to accommodate that range.

Third, under these two pressures, the Walla Walla DMs worked hard to differentiate their campaigns dramatically from one another, right down to the rules of magic, science, and fundamental reality. In theory this should have made movement between these campaigns more difficult. For example, how does a wizard who casts spells using a spell-points system work in a campaign setting in which magic does not work that way? Instead, the Walla Walla DMs compensated by cooperating with one another, by being flexible about temporarily accepting unusual characters into their settings to encourage high-level character travel between their multiverses. With players free to take their characters wherever they wanted, SAD&D became a medium for the Walla Walla DMs to each come up with something original and interesting to offer those players, to draw them to adventures in their setting. The DMs competed to offer the most original and interesting adventures and settings.

During the four years I lived in Walla Walla I was increasingly drawn into that SAD&D culture. Although Dagorëa was already coming into its own as a campaign setting when I lived in Seattle, it really blossomed in reaction to all these gamers and their play style. I was lonely, so I wanted to impress them enough that they'd accept me into their community. They were a smart and experienced bunch with wildly varying educational backgrounds, so to find something original to contribute I leaned hard on my lifelong immersion in science to create situations, treasures, powers, and challenges they'd never seen before.

My strength in this creative competition among DMs was my ability to think orthogonally, to come up with challenges that legitimately circumvented their powers and defenses by expanding their understanding of reality, revealing new avenues of attack, defense, and exploration. I used time travel, alternate dimensions, new laws of physics, advanced chemistry, new phases of matter, principles of biology, and really anything I could think of from my understanding of science, architecture, and mythology to create new gaming opportunities. I translated Lovecraft's cosmic approach to horror into a cosmic approach to fantasy to keep up with my players, to surprise and delight them.

My weaknesses as a world builder and adventure designer were equally distinctive. As a lifelong outsider, I understood human psychology poorly; other people just didn't make sense to me. As a result, my magic and monsters were always more interesting and compelling than the non-player characters (NPCs) I designed to interact with the players. Likewise, and closely related, sociology, politics, and dynastic struggles remained areas I couldn't adequately develop. My NPCs tended to be loners, outcasts, individualists, interesting singly or in small groups but unable to cohere into compelling clans or societies. Oh, Dagorëa certainly had cities and nations, but they were abstract, institutional, lacking that exciting tension between the one, the few, and the many that makes fictional societies interesting. So, as players, we looked to other Walla Walla DMs and their more political campaign settings for those kinds of delights.

This wasn't a competition I could win. No one could. It wasn't that kind of competition. The drive of the Walla Walla SAD&D culture wasn't toward one victorious campaign but toward a community of highly original campaign settings. Over a couple years, Dagorëa developed into one of maybe six foundational campaign settings in Walla Walla, not the best, but one of the most unusual.

Those were heady times for me as a DM, but by October 1983 I was leaving behind the SAD&D style of play in Dagorëa, because something unprecedented happened to me and to my campaign setting.

I met my future wife.

My Second Campaign Setting: Mainore, Atlantis, Dagorëa

From age five (January 1972) to age eight (1975), my subscription to Time-Life Books's series The Emergence of Man brought each of the twenty volumes to me, one at a time, from Life Before Man to The Persians (and many blessings upon my father for realizing that even at that young age I would love and devour these books intended for adults). As a very young child, I was most interested in the early volumes, dinosaurs and Neanderthals being more to my taste than early civilizations, but later, in 1979, in eighth grade, when I was searching for a model for a glorious palace to be my characters' home base, it was the later volumes on Greece, Rome, and ultimately Persia I searched for inspiration.

In the end, I modeled our home base of Mainore on the floor plan of a royal Persian palace from The Persians. For some reason, the players were a bit aggressive with one another, seeking out and attacking one another's home bases (not an activity I participated in, except as a defender against it), so Mainore had to be more than a palace. It had to be fortified as well, a castle. True to the original D&D end game, my characters recruited armies of followers and made use of magical items and spells to defend Mainore from the henchmen of the other players. Evidently my several generations of maps of the palace of Mainore are long-since lost, though I could easily and may yet recreate the first draft, which was a near-copy of the Persian original.

Although at first that was sufficient defense, during the escalating inter-player struggles of late eighth grade it wasn't long before I needed to find a far more obscure, far more difficult-to-find or -reach location for the palace. Using one of my characters' powerful magics, my characters traveled back in time to long before the sinking of Atlantis and rebuilt their palace-castle there and then (in the ten mile by ten mile area granted them by the deal described in the previous post) where the other players' more conventional characters could not possibly reach us.

The Atlantis my characters lived in was based on Athanasius Kircher's 1669 map from his work Mundus Subterraneus, as reproduced in Charles Berlitz's 1969 book The Mystery of Atlantis. I inverted it to place north at the top of the map and added details based on descriptions of Atlantis by Plato and others. For names of the seven kingdoms and geographical features I coined names from the Sindarin and Quenya languages invented by Tolkien as documented in the appendices to The Return of the King.

Since my brother Rob's characters also needed safe haven and land to develop a home base of their own, I developed an island archipelago to the south of Atlantis inspired by the maps in Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea.

By ninth grade, the D&D players of south Seattle outgrew their pointless internecine competition and matured into DMs, and their home bases were increasingly converted and developed into campaign settings for other players to enjoy. As relations improved, I too converted Atlantis from a hidden home base to a campaign setting, first sinking it to the bottom of the ocean, then relocating it on the moon, then transplanting it by 1981 (tenth grade, after moving from Seattle to Walla Walla) onto a planet of its own, then finally to an artificial planet in the shape of a great wheel that spun through space on an alternate plane of existence (a fairly original idea arrived at quite pragmatically after a year of struggling with the problem of accurately transposing a spherical map onto a flat piece of paper).

From its peculiar origins in 1979 until my abandonment of it and of D&D for many years starting in 1989, Dagorëa, as the wheelworld and my campaign was named, was my first serious campaign setting. It developed into one of maybe a half dozen core campaigns of the Walla Walla Super Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (SAD&D) gaming community, and it single-handedly changed my life.

My Second Campaign Setting: Home Base

In the late 1970s I was a fan of the TV show In Search Of (yay Leonard Nimoy!), and on May 22, 1977 it ran the episode In Search of Atlantis, which blew me away at the time. I was so excited about the idea of Atlantis that with my allowance I bought off the rack in a grocery store a paperback by Charles Berlitz called The Mystery of Atlantis, which I devoured in a credulous frenzy. By eighth grade (1979-80), when the in thing for D&D players at South Shore to do was to make up a home base for our characters between adventures, there was no question where I was going to choose.

Sometimes the line between player and DM got a bit blurred in those early teen years, and illogical wish-fulfillment frequently drove our actions. In hindsight, it isn't clear what else could have. After all, since none of us had a developed campaign setting, our characters more or less didn't exist between dungeon adventures. Those of us dissatisfied with that state of affairs found the idea of creating home bases for our characters the more obvious next step rather than creating entire campaign settings for everyone else's characters. It seemed the most direct solution.

I don't know how everyone else at South Shore went about this, but in an effort to be fair I DMed my own player characters (PCs) as though they were someone else's characters through the process of discovering Atlantis, fighting dinosaurs on behalf of the ruling council (hey, what teenage nerd-boy doesn't dream of either owning or fighting dinosaurs?), and negotiating the purchase of land on which to build my characters' home base. The deal struck was this: my player characters defended the existing Atlantean kingdoms from the nasty monsters, and in return we got to take some vacant land to create the seventh kingdom. Armed with a magical Lyre of Building won in more normal D&D adventures, we worked week by week between dungeon crawls to construct that perfect home base at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

This isn't quite as weird as it seems for that era, given the precedent of solo-gaming established in the back of the Dungeon Masters' Guide and given the absence of any better options for between-adventures existence, but certainly by today's standards when campaign settings are a dime a dozen it'd be completely unacceptable. I suspect some of my peers were building their home bases in even less acceptable ways, by inventing everything from whole cloth by fiat and giving it to themselves (we used to say "His DM is the #2 pencil!").

As it happens, though, the illegitimacy of our campaign settings' origins quickly became moot as those characters were gradually retired and we began to realize what else our home bases could be used for.

My First D&D Campaign Setting

My first campaign setting was that amorphous "gaming land" most gamers begin with, a world of detailed dungeons and vaguely medieval towns in which to recuperate. It developed like this.

At first all our focus was on home-drawn dungeons, and we always started each adventure descending the staircase into the darkness.

Within the first six months of gaming, about the time we began rotating TSR's early dungeon modules into our mix, we also began starting adventures outside the dungeon, at first in the immediate wilderness environs, and later in the proverbial tavern.

Gradually, within the first year and a half, this expanded to include stores and other features of the villages containing the tavern, partly prompted by the nondungeon settings in The Keep on the Borderlands and The Village of Hommlet and by such marvelous Judges Guild settings as Tegel Manor, Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and City State of the Invincible Overlord (the release of World of Greyhawk was still a year and a half off at that point). The Wilderlands made a certain amount of wacky, wonderful sense, but unfortunately we only rarely used them as our settings (only when playing a Judges Guild module) because, honestly, we didn't fully understand what settings were for at this point.

No, the "settings" we made up made a whole lot less sense and tended to lack any permanence between dungeon adventures, except the proverbial tavern which was always much the same no matter which village we put it in.

It didn't take more than a couple years before all the gamers at South Shore were shifting their energies from dungeon design to continent building. Their original impulse was to create homebases for their characters between dungeons using the rather excessive treasure and power they'd stockpiled from their early and ill-conceived Monty Haul adventures, but it didn't take long before they began recycling and expanding their home-base designs into venues for running other people's characters through adventures. Sheeple that I was in middle school, I did the same, and so my second D&D campaign setting was born.

In the Beginning

At South Shore Middle School in Seattle, when I entered sixth grade in the fall of 1977, I found a new craze sweeping the school. Students were drawing maps of imaginary places with pencil and paper and then pretending to explore those imaginary places. At the time I didn't realize they were playing a game with published rules. I just thought the maps and imaginary explorations were wonderful all by themselves.

I wanted to play, but at the time I was so uncool that even the uncool kids who played didn't want much to do with me, though they did tell me it was published under the name Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). My brother Rob and I were electrified to that level of frantic obsession that only children are capable of, so to regain some peace and quiet our stepmother, Jean, drove us down to Heritage Bookstore in Renton. We discovered that the white boxed-set of D&D being played by all the other kids was sold out, but a new colored boxed-set edited by J. Eric Holmes had just come out, so that's what Jean bought us (many blessings upon her).

Since that time, D&D's been a major part of our lives. D&D helped me learn many things and helped me socialize to the point that I eventually even became intermittently cool. I played all the time as a teenager and met most of my childhood friends through D&D, including my future wife. Wizards of the Coast was started by our Walla Walla gaming friends, and my wife was Wizards's second employee. She still works in the gaming industry and we still play (once a week when we're lucky).

I've been blogging since 2004 but not until now about gaming. I've started this blog in part to explore my D&D campaign world Englandia publicly, where other people can discuss it and debate it and take ideas from it for their own campaigns, and in part to discuss gaming theory - because I've arrived at a cross-roads. Although I've been playing for thirty-two years, in recent years I've found my creativity flagging and my joy in running games bogging down in rules and planning.

I've also arrived at a realization. Reading the D&D old-school-renaissance (OSR) blogs over the last year has helped me to understand that these problems aren't specific to me, much to my surprise, but are instead a not uncommon reaction to modern D&D rulesets. The more I study the OSR observations and theories, the more I think the decline in my capacities as a Dungeon Master (DM) is related in part to the very problems the OSR movement has been criticizing. Maybe not, but maybe, and if it is true, then maybe the OSR prescription for this ailment is also right.

Maybe by simplifying my gaming rules, by changing the focus from the characters to the players, by shifting from static scripting to dynamic scripting, and by making a homemade megadungeon environment one of the pillars of my campaign, this will dramatically ease the burden of DMing and return gaming to the creative recreation it used to be for me.

Let's find out.