Dungeons & Digressions II

I ended up taking two business trips last month.  I did actually take my painting kit along on the first one, and painted a couple of 1/72 scale plastic figures for the Portable Fantasy Campaign.  I still don’t have them based, though, so pictures will follow sooner or later. I ended up using my available free time to think about how I would go about reviving the original Dungeons & Dragons campaign.  Having looked at my old materials, one of the things I would particularly like to do is to update the map of the town of Stoneharrow.

According to my Amazon records, I received my copy of Jared Blando’s second book, Fantasy Mapmaker, back in November 2019, in the late Before Times.  Before I got to it, other events overtook our attention.  Thinking about maps, though, reminded me that I already had this, so I sat down to read it last week.

As with his previous book, How to Draw Fantasy Art and RPG Maps, I found there was enough information to allow me to follow, even though my drawing skills are fairly rudimentary.

I sat down yesterday with an A5 watercolor notebook (about 5” by 8”) with a pencil, some Faber-Castell artist pens, and a 24 color set of Prismacolor pencils to give it a try.

I spent about two hours creating the hamlet of Appletree, which will be placed somewhere in the territory near Stoneharrow.  The actual drawing was all pretty straighforward; just lots and lots of little more or less straight lines for most of it.  In order to get it done quickly enough to try some color, I skipped the pencil and went straight to pen after I figured out where I was going.  

The cold press watercolor paper has quite a bit of texture, so I’m not entirely sure that I like the final effect. However, it is relatively easy to lay some color down quickly, and the intention is to create player handouts, not gallery art.  Nevertheless, for the next one I may go to watercolors and see how tough that is.  I will be through with the two week activation period after my second shot next weekend, so I intend to celebrate with some deferred shopping, which could include a trip to the art supply store.

 

Dungeons & Digressions

It was brought to my attention this morning that yesterday was an important day in D&D history, since Dave Arneson (according to his club zine) scheduled the first Blackmoor game, described as a “medieval Braunstein”, on 17 April 1971.  With that in mind, I hope that this digression from miniatures for a bit of personal D&D history is of some interest.

As I have mentioned before, I was a wargamer with both miniatures and board games before D&D was published, though a young one without too many opponents available to me.  There is a long-running Original D&D discussion forum of which I have been a member for some time, and there is often a lively discussion about how we managed to play the game back in the day, given that the rules (at the beginning) were somewhat in the nature of some broad open-ended suggestions.

Here’s what D&D Book III, The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures, has to say about setting up your campaign:

The so-called Wilderness really consists of unexplored land, cities and castles, not to mention the area immediately surrounding the castle (ruined or otherwise) which housed the dungeons. The referee must do several things in order to conduct wil-derness adventure games. First, he must have a ground level map of his dungeons, a map of the terrain immediately surrounding this, and finally a map of the town or village closest to the dungeons (where adventurers will be most likely to base themselves).

There was a discussion about whether there were actually towns, so I pulled out my binder of preserved campaign material from my original game.  I knew that I had a map of the town of Stoneharrow, drawn pretty early in the campaign preparations.  Given that the example campaigns mentioned in the rules, Blackmoor and Greyhawk, both had names in the form of “adjective noun”, I did the same in coming up with the name of my town, which then lent its name to the campaign.

So there we have the palisaded town of Stoneharrow, with quite a bit of open space within the walls where the peasents (sic) could grow vegetables in peace.  In retrospect, except for peculiarities in urban planning (a subject which I researched in much greater depth much later), I am not dissatisfied with it even now.  There are two named taverns, where mysterious hooded strangers might helpfully lurk in corners to hand out quests (though we didn’t actually do that at the time), boarding houses for adventurers segregated by class, a stable for their beasts, an adventure supply store for all your dungeon outfitting needs, an alchemist, and a temple of the local patriarch (in case you might need to be raised from the dead). I don’t know that the characters ever spent much time wandering around there, but the roots of adventure are there, should they be needed.  I am considering a retro game once the pandemic has ended, and I think that I will go ahead and build on this, by adding a few more non-player characters, and giving the poor patriarch a name. 

My favorite writing tool at the time was the Bic 4-color pen, and all of the early material was drawn on 10 square to the inch graph paper.  (I wish that I was getting a sponsorship reward, but I might note that I am still a fan of multi-pens, thought my favorite these days is this fine point Jetstream pen, which also includes a 0.5mm lead pencil.)

Since I was leafing through the binder, I also took a look at the dungeon.  Level 1 (below) is the actual carefully preserved first dungeon map I drew, in which the first dungeon expedition was undertaken by my brother, probably in April 1976.

Like the town map, it was drawn on 10 square to the inch graph paper with the 4-color pen.  I have heard assertions over the years that the early dungeons were intended to be mapped so that you could deduce the existence of secret rooms and such, but the 10/inch paper gave me plenty of room to draw, and I had a lot of solid rock in between rooms and corridors. 

There was quite a bit of space on the sheet of paper when I was done. Later, as the levels were elaborated, I added a level 1.5(B) to the same sheet, and using the same color conventions (black walls, blue secret doors, green room numbers).  Within a few levels, I shifted my color conventions, and eventually habitually drew levels with blue corridors, black cross-hatching marking solid interstitial rock, and red room numbers, like this later level:

For all of the elaborate labyrinth drawing, the actual key was pretty rudimentary.  Here’s an excerpt from the original level 1, down in the lower right corner:

Elsewhere, the book shows evidence of room contents being crossed out as the rooms were entered and cleared. The presence of an unguarded treasure including a pair of Gauntlets of Ogre Power in Room 62 would indicate that nobody ever got to that particular corner of the dungeon, probably because they had found a stairway down to deeper levels. From some of the discussions on rpg.net, I get the impression that modern players have a tendency to clean out levels entirely.  

I did my best to stack my dungeon levels in such a way as to try to avoid overlapping them in theoretical three-dimensional space.  So I did have a diagram on a large sheet of 10/inch graph paper with the relative position of all the entrances laid out.  There was one set of stairs, and a selection of shafts, mostly leading directly to deeper levels.  What there was NOT was any indication of what the surface terrain looked like. When I go back to this, I think that there will be a fence around the entrances, and a set of guards who will collect your entry fee and log your names and, for an extra fee, be ready to send notice to your next of kin if you don’t return.  The local lord will also demand a cut of your plunder, in proper medieval style.  But, back in the day, we were pretty casual about getting to the dungeon entrance.

My wilderness map evolved over time. The rules books refer you to Avalon Hill’s Outdoor Survival for “offhand” wilderness adventures, and the monster encounter tables are keyed to the Outdoor Survival terrain types.  I did not personally have a copy of the game, but one of the other group members did, so it seemed obvious to me that the expectation was that you would draw your own map. Hex paper was not easy to come by in 1976.  My first tiny section of the area around Stoneharrow and the dungeon was drawn on “hex paper” made by drawing circles around a coin in a hexagonally close-packed configuration. That map does not survive.  It was replaced by a second map, which also does not survive, which was drawn on a copy of an 8.5x11” blank hex sheet which we scavenged from someone’s copy of Fact and Fantasy Game’s Siege! (in fact, the blank sheet can be seen on the linked Noble Knight illustration of the game).  I attempted to fit several of these copies together, and they were not quite regular, so I had corners that didn’t match up.  After that, I bit the bullet and ordered a package of 6 blank hex paper sheets from SPI, the size of a standard SPI wargame map, and transferred the earlier map. Since the players hadn’t wandered around much, I’m not sure that they would have noticed any transcription errors anyway.

Here is a closeup of the area.  The dungeon entrance is in hex 1933, across the Great River from Stoneharrow (hex 2231), and Lord Harmon’s castle is between, in hex 2132.  All of this was considered to be at the standard recommended 5 miles per hex.  If I were running a game in this region today, Harmon (or his heirs—it’s been 45 years, after all) would certainly be monitoring the comings and goings of adventurers, and making sure that he collected his cut.  

Eventually the wilderness map was elaborated onto all six sheets of the hex paper, of which this one, the Stoneharrow map, was originally the upper right corner in a 2 wide by 3 high array.  Additionally, several of the original players advanced in level to the point where they built their own castles, which were duly drawn onto the map, generally north of the area including Stoneharrow.

I don’t recall how long it took, but I eventually added three more packs of paper, for a total of 24 sheets in a 3 wide/8 high array. In our house today, there is no room large enough to lay it all out at once, but here is the northern half.  The Stoneharrow segment is now the second map from the top in the right hand column.

There are a few geographical peculiarities that are partly the result of my earlier lack of a sense of geography, and partly a result of usually only being able to deploy one map at a time for drawing.  I can remember that I occasionally set them up in the lounge of the dormitory I lived in during my first two years in college (fall 1978 to spring 1980), and that I was still drawing the southern half up until graduation in 1981. By then, we had shifted over to the AD&D rules for the actual game.  I went through a lot of blue, brown, and green magic markers.  Each map is 32” wide by 21” tall, so the whole array laid out would be 96” wide by 168” tall, or 8 feet by 14 feet.  At 60 hexes wide by 32 hexes tall per sheet, that’s a total theoretical area about 900 miles by 1280 miles.  Let’s just say that this was seriously a lot more than was needed to play the game, and most of it was only very lightly described.  

With this year marking the 45th anniversary of my own D&D game, I am still hoping to stage a little revival, and send a party or two back into the Great Dungeon of Stoneharrow, using the original rules as first acquired, without Greyhawk or any of the later supplements.  We might even dig out (recently painted) examples of the early Minifigs lines (Mythical Earth and Sword & Sorcery) to represent the adventurers and their opponents. 

I did a brief revival campaign back in 2015 or so, and advanced the official timeline the forty years since the original game had begun.  The original characters were occasionally alluded to as the local lords whose neglect of the current situation was allowing goblins to menace the local village.  When I go back to this, I’ll probably continue on from there.

My first campaign ran from 1976 to 1979 using the original rules.  We shifted over to the AD&D rules (at least theoretically) following the publication of the vital excerpts from the Dungeon Masters Guide in Dragon #22 (February 1979) but before the actual DMG was available late that summer.  We continued to play until I moved to Maryland in 1982, but have dusted off the characters during occasional reunions, most recently in 2013 (although we did fight a theoretically linked mass battle using Chaos Wars in 2017).

My second campaign, in Maryland, ran from 1982 to 1985 or so, and was based down in the southwest corner of the overall map, so some of that drawing was eventually put to use.  Eventually other games edged out D&D for play time, and I got back into historical miniatures as my main hobby outlet, but, as you can see, D&D was carefully preserved and stored away, awaiting a return.

So, thanks to Dave Arneson and all the Blackmoor crew, for originating this pleasantly all-consuming activity that has given me so many friends and so much pleasure for three quarters of my life (so far). 

 

The first hobbits — Minifigs ME6

 In addition to digging out my original Dungeons & Dragons for my birthday last week, I also took the opportunity to haul all of the 25mm fantasy boxes (of painted figures, that is) up from the basement.  I needed to return the last set of troops sorted out for a batle to their proper storage locations, and I also wanted to conduct a quick census, since I was pretty sure that my estimate of numbers in my running project diary was off.  (I had somewhat over 1600, by the way, rather than the 900 I had estimated—so I hadn’t caught up in a while.)

In the course of that, I took a look at all of the Minifigs ME figures I have painted so far, and decided that I was ready to get back to that project.

The family gamers have been meeting for a group discussion, and sometimes a painting session, on Saturday afternoons for a while. Painting seemed like a good idea yesterday, so I dug around in my supply of figures already primed, and came up with some ME hobbits that had been awaiting attention for a while.  As noted in the title, these would have been the first purpose-cast hobbit figures released, back in the dawn of fantasy miniature production.

I have lost provenance on these, but I think that they are ones that I collected back from my brother, so they’ve been in the family since 1975 or thereabouts, if true.  The ME6 catalog number was a strip of three hobbits, as can be seen on the Lost Minis Wiki.  These guys are one strip, plus a spare spearman presumably representing a lost second strip.  They stand about 16mm tall from the base of the foot to the top of their hairy heads, and therefore are a rather small canvas upon which to work.  The MEs were sculpted in the traditional Minifig manner, prior to the invention of the greenstuff/epoxy sculpting pioneered by Tom Meier (if memory servies correctly), and there was a whole lot of detail with which to work.  The faces, in particular, are quite rudimentary.

When it came to basing them, I decided that I didn’t want to base them individually.  My brother and I have several times run the 1975 Lord of the Rings strategic tabletop game Ringbearer at conventions, and that calls for the Fellowship of the Ring to be pared down to 2 hobbit bases, the Ranger, the Elf, the Dwarf, and the Gray Wizard.  I have been gradually working toward the ability to run Ringbearer alone, and to do the whole thing with Minifigs, so I decided that i would make these guys my 2 hobbit bases, by mounting them in pairs on 25mm circular bases.

I checked my unpainted cache yesterday as well, and found that I have three more strips of these, plus three strips of ME48, the better-armed hobbit militia strip.  If I mount them all in pairs, I will only need to find one more strip to be able to field 2 Dragon Rampant units of hobbit militia.  That’s not enough to reproduce the Battle of Bywater (from “The Scouring of the Shire” in The Return of the King), but would add something unusual to a larger army of allied Free Peoples.

A Significant Birthday

I was going to post something about this earlier this weekend, but got caught up in events.  As I mentioned in my 2020 retrospective, my 60th birthday is this year, or, more specifically, last week...

While I don’t remember exactly when I was introduced to rules for wargaming in the spring of 1971, 50 years ago, I do remember that I received my original Dungeons & Dragons for my birthday in 1976, 45 years ago.  So, thank you, Mom and Dad! I’m not sure what I would have been doing without games and the friends I’ve made gaming all of these years.

As you can see, my D&D set is still in playable condition.  Since it’s worn and has my notes (mostly pencil) scattered throughout, I had no particular qualms about reinforcing weak covers and rebuilding the box with library tape last year.  Sometime this year, I’d like to get at least a short campaign on the table for old times sake.

When I do, I’m considering staffing it with the vintage miniatures I’ve been collecting more recently. I probably will not restrict things to just the Minifigs that I started with, more recently painted examples of which are shown below:

More on that when it occurs...

Thinking About What to Do With Those Russian 54mm Flats; A Limited Fantasy Environment (Part 1)

 I don’t know how the rest of you think about this, but I have my miniatures divided up conceptually into “projects”, which is my term for a batch of miniatures that “go” together.  This is usually a combination of period (e.g., Late Bronze Age, Hundred Years War, Renaissance, Fantasy) to include various IPs (e.g. Buck Rogers, Burrows and Badgers) and scale (e.g. 1/72, small 25mm, heroic 25/28/30/32mm, 40mm).  For each project, I usually have a baseline rules set that I am using or planning to use.  Some projects have multiple sets of rules. Usually figures are based consistently, but projects intended to support multiple different styles of rules sometimes end up with a mix of basing.  My old school 25mm fantasy is probably the worst offender in this category, with a mix of 60mm squares with 4-8 foot figures for mass battles, individually mounted vintage figures generally on 25mm wooden bases with flexible steel underlayers, and figures mounted on steel washers (generally 1” or 0.75”). I have 60mm square magnetic movement bases to allow the individuals to be grouped for easier participation in mass battle games.  

 

I belong to a wargames club, the HAWKs, that specializes in historical miniatures wargaming, although we all play a broader range of tabletop games in our personal capacities.  Because of the commitment to miniatures,  though, we sometimes have a need for something that can be set up quickly, especially for times when (in the Before Times) we had an unexpectedly large number of players show up for a club night, or for when it’s too quiet at a convention.  We have evolved the Battle in a Box format to address that need, as described in the write up for a contest we ran for producing interesting BiaBs. The ideal BiaB is one that has its own scenery and the rest of the support gear (dice, rules, rules, handouts), and can sit quietly on a shelf waiting to be grabbed on the way out the door to a club meeting or convention.

 

So, what’s the difference between our established Battle in a Box and the Limited Environment that I am thinking about?

 

I am thinking of the Limited Environment as something that would be portable, and support several different play styles; ideally these would include role playing games using miniatures, skirmish games (1:1 small unit actions), mass battle games, and wargames campaigns (i.e. map games with armies and politics with the potential to generate tabletop battles). It would be “limited” in the sense that anything that would cause you to lay down a mat and a bunch of miniatures would be capable of being represented in miniatures, so that your armies will not have horse archers if no horse archer models are available, and your role playing characters are going to encounter wolves if that’s what you have models for.  I tend to believe that art (and miniatures games are a form of performance art) is better for limitations anyway.

 

Since this is just for my own purposes, and not designed to meet any external criteria such as those provided by the Battle in a Box Contest, the question of just how portable in needs to be can be answered with some flexibility.  My Portable Fantasy Campaign currently resides in 1 12-liter Really Useful Box, 3 6-liter Boxes, and 1 2.5-liter Box.  I have tested this out; the 12, the 2.5, and ONE 6-liter Box can be banded together into a lightweight package which will fit (as seen below) in the overhead compartment on a typical commercial airliner. (I’m guessing this was a Southwest 737, since it was on the way to GenCon a couple of years ago).  For a road trip, all three 6-liter boxes are still manageable.

So, with a fairly comprehensive Limited Environment already in hand, why start another?  Because it’s there? That’s probably the real answer, but I also do like my games to attract attention at a convention, and 54mm, even if flat (or maybe especially if flat) are easier to see than the 1/72s...

...And rode madly off in all directions...

 Things might be simpler if I had just one period of history (or type of fantasy) which interested me for gaming, but, for better or for worse, this is not the case.  So, like the fellow in the title, I’m off in all directions this week.

I have been experiencing a fair amount of pandemic fatigue recently, and have gotten behind on keeping up with the rest of the wargaming blogosphere.  Last month, however, Ross Macfarlane caught my attention with a few posts on Russian semi-flat figures.  I poked around the web a little to see what sort of background information there was on the history of these figures.  I like German flat zinnfiguren, even if I find them to be very difficult to paint, and I liked the look of these Soviet-era figures.  I probably would have left it at that, but shortly after that, the Michigan Toy Soldier Company (MTS) had an article discussing the work of a new Russian designer in a similar style.  The Warriors and Battles line includes a wide array of non-combatants, so my mind immediately went to some sort of roleplaying game, rather than a straight up wargame.  In any case, I couldn’t resist buying some samples.

Individuals are in a resin material

Figures from group packages are in the usual toy soldier plastic

I am an old enough wargamer that I have been caught unprepared by the sudden unavailability of figures more than a few times.  From these experiences, I have developed a general rule.  If I can’t buy enough figures to stage some sort of game with the first purchase, don’t buy anything. With figures being imported from Russia (i.e. chancy supply chain) and the possibility that the appeal was a little speciaized, I concluded that this was definitely a time to follow that rule, and ordered a box with 8 SKUs—three knights with retinues, a group of peasants, a group of bandits, a pack of wolves, and a pair of individual ladies. MTS shipped it promptly, and I was very pleased with the figures once they had arrived.

I told myself that I was going to be good and try painting some of the figures before ordering more.  I discovered that the soft plastic would hold the usual primers that I have been using on 1/72 scale figures, and that the resin could be primed with a Krylon primer advertised as being suitable for use on plastic.  

The figures are pretty flat; with the soft plastic ones being even thinner than the resin lady shown above, but the sculpting nevertheless has enough texture to make shading a relatively straightforward matter. I found them to be fun and relaxing to paint, enough so that I ended up spending three hours at the desk painting the two samples, and needed a good stretch when I was done.

I was pleased with how they came out, and have set up five more and primed them.

I haven’t quite decided how I am going to base them.  They are quite light, and I can imagine them easily being knock over at a convention by the wind, or fans, or passing attendees, so I am thinking that they will end up with rectangular steel bases to give them just a bit of heft.

While I was not looking for a new project, especially not another individually-based medieval project, here we are...

Down the Rabbit Hole — Part 8 and Final

 With last weekend’s painting, I finally had enough newly completed Prince August figures to run a little solo skirmish with A Song of Blades and Heroes (SBH). SBH recommends a typical game of 300 to 500 points.  I have noticed previously that the point system doesn’t seem to be as finely balanced as the carefully calibrated two-significant-figure point values would suggest, but, there’s a lot of randomness in the game, and it was going to be a solo game anyway.

One warband consisted of orcs and friends (an orc leader, three orc warriors, a troll, two goblin wolf riders, and a spare goblin warrior).  The other was all human (a leader, two warriors, two archers, an apprentice magician, and a cavalryman), and I managed to finesse them so that each was exactly 300 points. 

I set up a battlefield on my dining room table, using a “Kill Team-sized” neoprene matte (22x30”). The road and river are also neoprene pieces.  The road predates the pandemic, and the river was purchased just as everything was locking down.  The three-dimensional elements of the terrain are all pieces that have been completed in the last year, as were the troops.  So this game finally closes out this little digression, by having been created (almost; roads excepted) since the lockdowns started.

Upon looking over the table, a scenario suggested itself. The humans simply need to cross the table, unlock the tower, and get inside.  Had this been properly planned as a narrative battle, I would have given everything names, but, after months of delay, I got a bit impatient and just played...

The horseman rides out ahead to scuffle with a wolf rider

 

Initiative in SBH is handled on a “push your luck” system of choosing to roll dice for 1, 2, or 3 actions per figure.  Failing two rolls will hand the turn over to the opponent, until they have activated each of their figures, or hand it back after two failures.  Since you need actions to get anything done, you can’t be too cautious, but it also means that your turn has a tendency to end at some unpredictable time, and, not infrequently, when some figure is in a desperate situation.  The uncertainty makes it a decent solo game without further modification, since it’s pretty easy to swap hats and be able to see what the most desperate situation is, or the one with the greatest opportunity.

The skirmish began with each side sending out their fast-moving mounted troops, to see what the situation was.  On the human side, the archers were also pushed forward to provide some covering fire.  This proved to be entirely ineffective this game; no orc fell to a human arrow.  

The horseman quickly found himself embroiled in combat with half of the orcs, a situation which was bound to end badly for him sooner or later. (And did...)

Following the death of the horsemen a wolf rider scored a lucky kill against a human

The sorceress approached the combat guarded by the two warriors, but one was forced to hold off several orcs, and the other fell in an attempt to protect her from a wolf rider. As seen above, one of the archers was forced to abandon his futile attempt to shoot something and to leap in to protect the sorceress with his sword.

The human leader falls to the troll

As the initiative passed back and forth unpredictably, the human leader jumped into the combat in an attempt to save the warrior outnumbered by the orcs.  Unfortunately for him, he found himself facing the ferocious troll.  While the Prince August troll is not particularly impressive as a casting, in the game is is big and tough, and made short work of the unfortunate leader.  Disheartened by the fall of their leader, the humans all attempted to run, with the surviving warrior cut down as he attemtped to flee combat.  

The sorceress and the two archers were able to flee the field, hoping to find their way back to other friends, and await a more favorable day.

The orcs, meanwhile, were able to obtain the key to the tower from the fallen leader, decisively winning the day.  Did they loot the tower and depart, or choose to occupy it as a base for future operations?  That is a scenario for a different day, perhaps...

So, all in all, the game played out in 45 minutes.  Had I had an actual opponent it probably would have taken a little longer, perhaps an hour.  All in all, it was a satisfying little encounter, and I will look for an opportunity to use these rules again, both solo and with an opponent.

Vaccination is still in the future, so this may not be the last solo game before this is all over, but it does conclude my little self-imposed quest to create a game from scratch.  Had I not had a couple of long gaps of not painting, and of working on other projects, I probably could have gotten this knocked together in two to three months’ worth of weekends.