Z is for Zorro

One of the rituals of growing up in California is the fourth grade mission project. Every fourth grader in California learns the history of the twenty-one missions built by the Spanish in Alta California. In our school, we each built a model of a mission - the building materials of choice were sugar cubes and popsicle sticks - and we went on a field trip to Mission San Fernando Rey de España, where we learned about life at the mission, or at least its material culture and subsistence practices - instruction on the forced conversions of the disease-ravaged indigenous Tongva by the Franciscans was notably absent in hindsight.

The missions are frequent tourist destinations, to break up long drives up and down the state. We visited Mission San Juan Capistrano on a camping trip to Mission Bay in San Diego, and Mission Santa Barbara on another camping trip to Morro Bay. Our church youth group visited Mission San Gabriel Archangel on an outing. It's a pretty common experience for anyone growing up near the California coast.

The missions are California's most significant architectural vestige of our colonial history, as a part of New Spain. Nearly all of them have been restored to one degree or another - in a land of wildfires, floods, and earthquakes, buildings made of mud bricks tend to be ephemeral. Adobes from the Spanish era in California are vanishingly rare.

Perhaps that's why I so strongly associate the missions with Zorro.

I saw Tyrone Power's The Mark of Zorro for the first time around the same time as our mission projects - either the autumn before or the autumn after - on a Saturday tee-vee matinee. Up to then, swashbucklers were musketeers in Paris or pirates in the Caribbean, but now here were dueling swordsmen right here in California! Even to a guero from the suburbs - unless you grew up here, you'll never really understand "Mexican Radio" - it was filled with names and places that were intimately, immediately familiar in a way that The Three Musketeers or Captain Blood couldn't be.

I eventually found The Curse of Capistrano in either my school or community library, but though Johnston McCulley wrote scores of Zoro stories, most were buried and largely forgotten in the magazines where they were first published. Still, Zorro remains my swashbuckler.

One of these days I'll show my kids The Mark of Zorro on dvd. They'll get to see two great movie swordsmen - Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone - in a classic duel, and hear all those names that were new and yet familiar to me.

But first I'll take them to Mission San Juan Capistrano.

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M is for Musketeers!

Fight! Fight! Musketeers!
Peel off the crooks' ears!
Fight with your swords!
Give to the poor!

Brave Musketeers!

- My daughter, age 7

Yes, I posted this already a couple of months ago, but if a proud dad can't show off his daughter's poetry on his blog, then what's the intreweb for?

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You Never Forget Your First

My father took me to see The Three Musketeers when I was nine years old.

It was the Richard Lester film, with Michael York, Oliver Reed, et al., still perhaps the most faithful movie version of the tale. During the first duel, in the convent amid the laundry drying on the lines, I was literally on the edge of my seat. I take my love of reading from both my parents, but my love of movies comes very much from my dad. He introduced me to The Adventures of Robin Hood, Quentin Durward, and The Crimson Pirate during Saturday afternoon matinees on our black-and-white Sears television. Seeing swashbucklers on the big screen - in Technicolor! - was utterly breathtaking.

We used to visit our local bookstore in downtown Montrose regularly - every other Friday, on mom's payday, I could purchase two Hardy Boys books, which I would usually end up finishing by Sunday night. Prowling the stacks one Friday evening, I spotted The Three Musketeers on the shelf. It was the Signet movie tie-in, an abridged version of the original tale, and my parents let me get it along with my bi-weekly Franklin W. Dixon fix. Up to that point, Treasure Island was my favorite story, but that abridged TTM soon sat on the shelf beside it. I read it again and again.

The following year, browsing the Revell and Monogram model kits at Michael's Toy Store in the Glendale Galleria, I discovered wargames - Tobruk, from Avalon Hill, was the first, and with each birthday and Christmas - and any payday I could wheedle a parent successfully - my collection of games, then metal miniatures, expanded.

And at the tail end of 1977, I was introduced to roleplaying games.

Like many gamers, I started with D&D and its pseudo-medieval fantasy of knights in chainmail and wizards in pointy hats. From my pervious incarnation as a tabletop warlord, the tactics the game rewarded seemed intuitive. I backed up my characters with men-at-arms wielding polearms effective against both charging horses and evil warriors in plate mail - yes, I'm one of those rare gamers who used the weapons versus armor class modifiers - and archers to harry magic-users. My tactical acumen would make William Marshall proud.

I still enjoyed board games as well, of course, and in 1980 I found an unusual game, Swashbuckler. Whereas Avalon Hill had its 'bookcase games,' Yaquinto Publishing offered its own line of 'album games,' roughly the same size and shape as the cardboard slipcovers of vinyl LPs. Billed as "a game of Swordplay and Derring-Do," it offered me the chance to play the pirates and musketeers who captured my imagination as a young boy on the living room couch and in a darkened theatre with my dad.

Swashbuckler's fidelity to the genre remains remarkable to me. Sharing written orders like those of En Garde! the players choose not only to attack or parry with rapier or cutlass, but to kick, shove, throw a dagger or sword, flip a table, toss a chair, throw a mug of beer - and slip on the drink and get cut by the broken shards - yank a carpet, jump from a balcony or poop deck, swing on a chandelier or a rigging line, and wave a plumed hat in an opponent's face.

Players could choose cutlass-armed pirates or rapier-wielding musketeers for their characters in the game - my friend John and I played mostly musketeer games in the tavern half of the game-board, but perhaps our most epic games were the ones which began with a fight in the tavern and then spilled onto one of the pirate ships to claim a treasure chest or two.

The game includes rules for the players' swashbucklers to improve with experience, and we soon had our stables of characters. Mortality would claim them periodically, but one of my characters, a musketeer named André, came to outlast them all, surviving tavern brawls and boardings at sea, against rapier and cutlass and dagger and beer mug. André became nigh unstoppable - in fact, he never lost a fight in three years of dueling. His prowess legendary, I decided he needed his own character portrait, and I found the perfect picture for him, which I sketched freehand onto a custom character record, reversing the image to put the sword in his right hand where it belonged.

I took the image from the cover of my abridged paperback movie tie-in of The Three Musketeers.

I graduated high school in 1983, and John and I slowly drifted apart - I don't think I played Swashbuckler more than a couple of times after graduation. But I noticed a change in my roleplaying game tactics. I tended to use improvised weapons more often, tried to distract and befuddle my enemies rather than simply outmaneuver or overpower them. I ran a high Dexterity fighter in an AD&D game with a short sword in one hand and a spiked buckler in the other; my thieves nearly always had a dagger in their off-hands and fought from whatever high ground could be found. I became less William Marshall and more Percy Blakeney.

And in 1984, I saw a new roleplaying game, Flashing Blades, on the shelf at The Gamekeeper in the same mall were I discovered Tobruk.

My inner nine year-old remains thrilled to this day.

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Grumbler

I am a grognard.

Like many introduced to roleplaying games in the mid- to late Seventies, I was a wargamer first. I started with board-and-chit games - specifically Avalon Hill's 'Bookcase Games,' starting with Tobruk, and later Third Reich, Squad Leader, Panzer Blitz/Leader, and my favorite to this day, Kingmaker, along with several others - then added metal minis, first learning the 15mm Napoleonics house rules used at my local gaming shop, encased in plastic covers in three-ring binders chained the sandtable in the back of the shop.

Roleplaying games slowly consumed more of my free time; my Starfleet Wars Terran squadron was given away around my sophmore year of high school after I started playing Traveller in 1979, for example. The exception was The Sword and the Flame, which I continued to play through high school, publishing a few issues of a 'zine my senior year for TSatF campaigns on the North-West Frontier; rather than falling by the wayside, my TSatF scenarios spun off a couple of 'Great Game' adventures using Boot Hill, with my 25mm Minifigs Punjab Irregulars serving double-duty with some 1:72 plastic Italeri or Atlantic Pathans.

Mashing up wargames and roleplaying games was pretty common, sometimes by design. GDW specifically integrated Traveller with Mayday, Snapshot, and Striker, of course, and I used the rules from TSR's Divine Right for resolving the clash of fantasy armies in my AD&D campaign.

Much has been written about the wargaming roots of roleplaying games. Personally I'm most often reminded of this history when discussions turn to combat in rpgs. After twelve years away from the hobby, I returned with 3e D&D, and I found myself a bit bumfuzzled by gamers who gushed about how 'tactical' 3e was, with its rules for flanking and attacks of opportunity and so forth.

I was puzzled by this for a couple of reasons. First, many, if not most, of the 'tactical' rules that 3e gamers prattled on about had their origins in AD&D. Second, and more bizarrely from my perspective, so much of what they talked about seemed to have more to do with Magic: The Gathering deck building and little if anything to do with tactics as I understand the word.

Coming into the hobby as a wargamer, I found the combat rules in games like AD&D to be simple and intuitive. Frex, nowhere does AD&D spell out the advantage of placing a rank of pikemen ahead of two ranks of heavy crossbowmen, and from my perspective it wasn't necessary for the rules to do so - the pikemen receive a to-hit and damage bonus for setting their pikes against a charge, and the ranks of crossbowmen alternate their fire, as expected from their 1/2 rate of fire, to maintain a steady barrage of bolts. The rules reward tactical thinking, provided you understand the tactics the rules are designed to reward.

But many gamers who came into the hobby after me were not wargamers. The implicit tactics of the rules were lost on them. Furthermore many learned the game through oral tradition rather than reading the rules in the first place, adding a further remove from the wargaming origins. I never realized until I started sharing experiences with other gamers on bulletin boards how exceptional my high school gaming group was: four of us rotated through the referee's chair, and we each poured through rulebooks like the DMG or Mayday, hunting for obscure rules to spring on one another during our turns behind the screen. The net effect was to give us an intimate familiarity with the rules - what the current jargon calls 'game mastery' - that many of our peers apparently never acquired.

To gamers who didn't grok the implied tactics, combat in early roleplaying games could seem sterile, as I learned from many fans of 3e on my return to gaming. But I noticed that after awhile, the 'tactics' of many roleplaying games came to resemble ordering from a Chinese menu, matching class ability from column A against supernatural ability from column B to get the free bowl of egg drop soup or a side of spring rolls. The real-world tactics that wargames attempt to model was increasingly replaced with dissociated mechanics which primarily reward game rules-knowledge.

Experience with wargames contributed to the differences between characters as well. One of the complaints leveled against early editions of the D&D, frex, is that there is nothing to distinguish two fighters of the same level, yet I never found this to be the case because different players chose to emphasize different tactics. Some players wanted their characters to fight like heavy infantry battling toe-to-toe to break the enemy's line, while others wanted theirs to perform more like skirmishers harassing and wearing down the enemy, and they would equip and play their characters accordingly, so even if they were more-or-less identical mechanically, their tactics and peformance in combat varied consistently during actual play.

Even now if you scratch my roleplayer surface you'll find the wargamer gleaming dully underneath. I can't play a game with automatic weapons without adding in rules for suppressing fire, and the fact that I frequently have to do so is a ridiculously common oversight on the part of game designers - I'm looking at you, d20 Modern. One of the reasons I chose Flashing Blades for my current campaign is that it has rules for throwing sand in an opponent's face and kicking him in the junk as well as trying to stick a rapier in his eye, and not Enhanced Mobility and Elaborate Parry. And I still like to mash up wargames and roleplaying games, like AK-47 Republic with Top Secret and Field of Glory with Flashing Blades - I need to set aside some portion of my disposable income toward building 2mm armies for FoG.

Now you kids get off my lawn, or I'll turn the hose on ya.

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No. Appearing 30-500

I originally intended to name this blog 'No. Appearing: 30-500.'

The piratical theme was determined by a recently discovered N.C. Wyeth painting I used for the banner and the handle I adopted a few years back for my Obsidian Portal account, Black Vulmea, after the Robert E. Howard buccaneer. I wanted the blog name to have an old school vibe, so I flipped to the entry for Men in the 1e AD&D Monster Manual, to read what it said about Buccaneers.

And there was No. Appearing: 30-500.

I was honestly never a huge fan of any edition of D&D - I played it mostly because that was the game that most people played. That said, I enjoyed the process of making dungeons for the players and their characters to explore, which explains why I refereed far more than I played, and by all accounts I did at least an okay job of it.

My approach to creating a dungeon was heavily influenced by a couple of sources. First was the Temple of the Frog contained in the second OD&D supplement, Blackmoor. From the Temple of the Frog I gleaned the idea of the dungeon with a raison d'être, an active place with a purpose and functionality in the game-world beyond rooms with orcs and pies waiting for adventurers to arrive.

Second was Dave Trampier's "Wormy" cartoon, which inspired me to populate my dungeons with different monsters working together.

Third was the adventure The Lost Abbey of Calthonwey, which featured conflicting factions of monks and clerics locked in a timeless struggle with one another, as well as intra-factional power struggles, all of which clever adventurers could exploit.

The number appearing stat in the MM similarly inspired me in this vein. Number appearing "indicates a good average spread. This number is furnished as a guideline only, and it should be altered to suit the circumstances particular to any adventure as the need arises. It is not generally recommended for use in establishing the population of dungeon levels." Except that last part is exactly what I did: if I decided that a dungeon had goblins in it, then there might be forty to four hundred of the little buggers down there, with leaders and sub-chiefs and, if it was their lair, a chief and his bodyguards. What I didn't do was cram them all in one room, which seems to be the source of the admonition in the MM.

Within those goblins there would be factions. For every forty goblins there is a leader and four assistants - basically a platoon of goblins - and of course none of them liked each other, or trusted one another, so they were constantly trying to get the other guy's goblins to do the fighting while collecting more of the loot for themselves. One of the leaders might take to feeding his rivals' goblins to dire bear in a cavern near where his troops were positioned, while another might lure his rivals to a pit with ghouls in the bottom. And of course these platoon leaders were pawns in the bitter rivalry between the sub-chief and the chief of the tribe.

Number appearing suggests a living world to me.

This digression from discussing cape-and-sword roleplaying was inspired by Zak Smith's advice column the other day, which included the suggestion, "Life's too short for No. Appearing."

Now I'm willing to bet that Zak doesn't really care about number appearing except as it pertains to those who forget that it's "furnished as a guideline only, and it should be altered to suit the circumstances particular to any adventure as the need arises." Constraining yourself because 'the book sez so' is to miss part of what makes roleplaying games so insanely great.

So take your inspiration wherever you find it, but never fear altering it to suit.

And watch out for five hundred buccaneers on the horizon.

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Musketeers!

Fight! Fight! Musketeers!
Peel off the crooks' ears!
Fight with your swords!
Give to the poor!

Brave Musketeers!

- My daughter, age 7

Okay, so how could I not post this?

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