They say the first post is always the trickiest. Why not start with something cliche?
I doubt this blog will circulate much beyond the people I personally share it with, but I may as well give a brief introduction in case someone stumbles in here. Several people I consider close friends, and who I hope would do the same for me, are members of the OSR (not OSRS) community. Some of them are rather prominent, but name-dropping would be gauche, so instead I'll just plug
Save Vs. Worm, written by my dear girlfriend of many years. I've been a fan of tabletop roleplaying in theory since childhood, but owing to my reclusive nature had little practical experience up until being invited into this community. There are some aspects of the approach that I find intriguing, some others I personally wouldn't touch (I never, ever want to track ammunition), and plenty of friendly and supportive people willing to participate in/advise upon my first campaign.
It's traditional to provide an "Appendix N" (in Gygaxian tradition) at some point of works or ideas that serve as inspiration in a given referee's worldbuilding and style. Obviously, as an inhabitant of the nerdosphere of a certain generation, there are some sources too obvious to need naming (Lovecraft, a smattering of Howard and Moorcock, the vaguest recollections of Tolkien). Still, there are other particulars that may be more interesting, or at least more embarrassing and amusing. I'll try and name as many as I can think of, and may edit this post later, if Blogger supports that.
Vaults
I was homeschooled and mostly friendless. Naturally, I had a lot more experience with computerized RPGs than actual social tabletop ones. I'll attempt to glance over the opportunity for self-pity and merely stick to the point - there's a lot of particular aspects of RPG video games, mostly JRPGs but not universally, that have stuck with me for a long time and inform my approach, for good or for ill.
Completely random and procedurally generated dungeons are rarely remembered for their compelling level design. The random dungeon tables are a perfectly nice aid to an underprepared game master, of course, but they're hardly likely to stick deep in player memories themselves - any stories told after the fact are more likely to be about particulars of individual encounters or roleplaying scenes within rather than the donjon* as a whole. Video games are no exception to this rule - this is why 'endless' or unnecessarily long postgame dungeons are usually ill-regarded, as they either necessitate a complete lack of conscious design or the reuse of a limited set of rooms and floors. Of all the subgenres that struggle with this problem, none are so defined by it as the roguelike.
At one extreme lies Angband, which as far as I can determine is essentially wholly randomized, with all of its 100 levels consisting of either vast open wobbly caverns or endlessly winding labyrinths of serpentine corridors and squarish rooms. Its levels are so without identity that even the game does not recall them, re-randomizing each one the moment it is left. More in the bespoke direction is Nethack - there's definitely still some 'sameyness' and lack of identity among MOST floors in a given subregion of the dungeon ("branch"), but each branch distinguishes itself from one another with visibly different layout algorithms, and there are a few non-random levels with big attention-getting setpieces (a moated castle, a gorgon's island, the Elemental Plane of Fire). My favorite approach, perhaps colored by nostalgia, has always been Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's. At first glance, the levels seem as unremarkable as those in many of its peers.
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A maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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However, where Crawl distinguishes itself is with what it internally refers to as "vaults" (not to be confused with The Vaults, a distinct region of the game inhabited by armored knights and such. Don't ask me). Within an otherwise ordinary level, you'll suddenly find clearly intentionally designed setpieces to explore, usually with their own distinct tilesets, and sometimes even with their own fun theming or narrative (There's one where you follow a winding path full of corpses, ending in a cavern inhabited by... a single 1/2 HD Giant Newt, the game's weakest creature). |
| An adventurer finds themself in a blood-spattered temple of Ru, god of Sacrifice. |
In this way, Crawl ensures that almost all of its levels will have something recognizable and memorable to distinguish itself from other floors in its area, if not to wholly define it (some vaults take up the entire map - I have vivid memories of the first floor sometimes being a labyrinthine forest with a river, though I believe whole-map vaults have since been removed from the dungeon entry options specifically). This is, of course, by no means unique to DCSS - vault-like structures are present in all the titles mentioned - but it makes the most thorough, and in my view most effective, use of them.
Adventurequest (et al.)
There are 2 RPGs I specifically remember being introduced to by my father in my childhood. One I know he played himself, at least occasionally. The other I assume, in retrospect, that he just found to keep me occupied; I recall (in that hazy way early childhood memories are usually recalled) creating my account for this one in a hotel room. AdventureQuest, the flagship product of indie(?) game company Artix Entertainment, was one of the biggest influences on my childhood understanding of RPGs and fantasy.
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The ways in which it has aged are... mixed. (Picture from a deleted user on Reddit).
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Technically, Adventurequest and its sister products (Dragonfable, Mechquest, Adventurequest Worlds and Adventurequest 3D... what the fuck is Oversoul?) are still alive and in active development, but the pace of new content has slowed somewhat, the focus on any individual game has weakened greatly, and you would be more than forgiven if you thought they were among the many unforgivable casualties of the discontinuation of Adobe Flash. Their approach to fantasy is very sandboxy, with an odd mix of 'early lore that was clearly just some guys fucking around and making something super basic' and 'super dense plots building on the early lore as they matured and got more comfortable with their medium' that, I'm given to understand, a lot of the earliest and/or longest-running campaigns also carry inside them.also does anyone know how to beat the dragonbone phylactery at the end of the new necromancer quest line PLEASE i want to reach the last class level
The Battle for Wesnoth
Now this one I definitely remember watching my father play. I don't know precisely when I was introduced to this open-source strategy game, but I still remember some of its earliest creature designs before they were revised, so it would have to have been at least while I was in single-digit ages.
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| 72 by 72 pixels is more than enough for anyone. |
The design of Wesnoth was pretty good and deep, but I was never particularly good at it as a child, and still only have the most rudimentary grasp of the tactics required. The big thing about it, aside from its nifty little creatures and maps, was its endless moddability. The development team actively encouraged the creation of entirely new factions, storylines, skirmish maps, even completely new styles of gameplay built on top of the engine (Single-character RPGs were reasonably common, but I also vividly remember a 4x-style pirate simulation and a janky attempt at translating Survivor into the framework; and, of course, older versions came with Wesbowl, an American Football-type variant where ghoulies and dragonmen compete to run a ball to the endzone). It's an inspiration in terms of modularity and how much can be built on top of a relatively (RELATIVELY) simple set of mechanics. |
| This is still the first thing I think of when I hear "Naga". |
The 6(?) good Final Fantasies, especially V I try not to be much of a hater, but I have no qualms being a contrarian. No Final Fantasy game after the fifth one, except MAYBE VI (I'm warming up on it, but it still represents the start of a lot of aesthetic and tonal shifts in the series that I'm not a fan of), has been good. The fact that this is when they switched to 3D and I stopped being able to look at nice, crisp sprites on RPGClassics is a total coincidence. XIV is a good enough MMO, but it's never gonna be V.
Final Fantasy as a series was pretty obviously born as an attempt at implementing AD&D on the NES, and the first installment makes this very clear in basically every regard. The Otyugh, Bullette and Carrion Crawler populate its dungeon environments, the bulk of the difficulty comes from resource management (potions, spell slots, inventory space), and one of its most important characters (insofar as it has characters at all) is a Marilith.
I don't need to tell you, if you're reading this, that Final Fantasy grew beyond those roots and became a juggernaut of a cultural phenomenon constantly trying to outdo its own narratives. What's of interest to me is that transitional phase, back before VI and VII became A Masterpiece and Square-Enix-Goya kept trying to innovate in more dismal plotlines, broodier protagonists and muddier shades of gray and brown. Games 2 through 5 still have a lot of that D&D identity under the skin, but it's in tension with its own emerging recognizable creative and mechanical identity. V, in particular, is my favorite - partly because of my ironic(?) crush on its main villain, partly because the class mechanics and a lot of its gimmicky subsystems appeal to me on a level I can't really articulate beyond 'cool', but also because of something harder for me to define.
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| Azulmagia, my favorite of the endgame bosses. This foe is a "blue mage", a character class your heroes can train in specializing in learning attacks from monsters that target them - and if you use any blue magic of your own on him, he'll add it to his own repertoire. |
Final Fantasy V has a lot of
weird shit. There are scenes that don't really contribute much, or anything, to the plot. There are esoteric secrets. There's a secret summon that does nothing that only appears if you use a combat item 19 times after it becomes useless. There's a trapped treasure chest that randomly contains one of two enemies, completely unique to this one encounter, both of which play the boss music, neither of which are particularly impressive. Like what people did with Wesnoth, a lot of this has the feeling of
playing around with the game's mechanics, seeing what the engine can do, in and out of combat. While Wesnoth was a wild west sandbox for anyone to build on top of, FFV reflects - in both its design and its storytelling - the official developers themselves experimenting and attempting to see what their systems could do that was interesting, or funny, or unique, or just weird.
Dungeons and Dragons, 4th Edition
Hear me out.
4e gets a lot of critique, some well-earned and some decidedly not. It definitely wears its new allegiance to capital, as a vehicle to sell goods, a lot more openly than even 3.x did. A lot of it was shamelessly built around the corporate mandate to sell as many overpriced cardboard sheets and plastic elves as possible. For what it's worth, it seems to me like 4e's design is good enough at what it wants to do, but I don't think it should have been a mainline edition of Dungeons and Dragons itself - it would have been better-served as a spinoff, a successor to Miniatures or Chainmail. It was, however, my first real point of contact with the series - I got into D&D after purchasing the first two 4e Monster Manuals at a hobby shop, which seems to be a
classic variant on how to get into roleplaying.
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Picture this: you're like 11 years old, you decide to check out this 'role-playing' thing after reading Order of the Stick, and you find this screaming withered intestine-beast on page 2.
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Beyond the formative influence of the Beastie Books, there's one other 4e product that stands out as a model to me, and it also happens to tie in with my next entry. Dungeon Delve was a book that was, in some ways, the epitome of the worst tendencies in 4th Edition. It consisted of 30 3-room dungeons (one for each level player characters could achieve in that edition), all linear, all consisting solely of combat encounters (or traps/puzzles/social interactions that played like combat encounters), all carefully marked with exactly what official Dungeon Tile products you would need to buy (and, naturally, some of the later ones required duplicates). But it also made an attempt to be an aide to the DM and the large degree of prep they would need to do, and each entry came with suggestions on expanding it into a slightly meatier adventure, while at the same time giving them the option of just being quick self-contained experiences. |
| This is, of course, one of the better examples. Rose-tinted glasses, and all. |
That seems as good a place as any to lead into the last thing I wanted to mention (tonight, at any rate), and one I always feel corny talking about.
Mighty Max
I never actually owned a Mighty Max playset, or anything particularly like one. They were decades before my time. But I found images of them on Virtualtoybox once, and good god, I was instantly enamored.
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| Mighty Max Conquers the Palace of Poison(TM). (Photos by Reddit user myloxyloto1987). |
The closest things I had as a kid to these were a
folding Matchbox set and a
Playmobil treasure chest. But I can guarantee you I would have flipped for these if I had them. I still would flip for them now. They pack so much detail and theme into such a contained, comprehensible space. I always want to design my dungeons like playsets, like midpoints between a 4e delve and a Mighty Max Doom Zone(TM). Concise, heavily built around a simple but flavorful idea, with neat things to interact with but not large enough to sprawl or overstay its welcome. Whether I achieve success in these endeavors is debatable (I don't), but it's still a goal and it's still something that colors my approach.
*Get used to this. It is one of my most common, and worst, affectations.
