Snakes in the Grass

About This Site

Forums (Temporarily Offline)

Snakes in the Grass?

Someone once said "You, too, can make hundreds of dollars a year in the role-playing game publishing business!" Never has that been more true than now. The tepidity of the d20 system has diluted originality and product appeal to the point where even inspired authors can only hope to sell a few hundred copies of a game supplement. Indeed, over a thousand sales of any one title is considered an unqualified success these days.

D20's siren song has lured many an author and business venture on to the rocks. In a market where Hasbro/WotC themselves are getting by on the thinnest of margins, who can hope to make more than a few pennies with a vanity-press supplement? D20 has proven the old adeage that just because something can be done, doesn't necessarily mean it should be done. The vast majority of D20 items are half-baked, badly executed ideas that read as though they were tongue-in-cheek ideas spun around the gaming table in the basement during a lull in the action, whereupon someone comes up with the bright idea that it should be published. D20 has given an outlet, and bad ideas have followed with bad books.

Of course the refreshing news about this is that this has resulted in a long-hoped-for (by myself, anyway) wearing away of the "big money" infrastructure currently draped over the gaming industry. Companies who have no business in this market spent the waning years of the 20th century and opening years of the 21st dumping money and ideas into a hobby that was, while suffering an overall malaise due to CCGs and "amature thespianism" of WhiteWolf's games, perfectly content and happy to go on its way.

The net result is that companies like Verant, Sony, Electronic Arts and others have invaded the space of the pen-and-paper RPG, raising their gilt heads at GenCon (which is now its own multimillion dollar event, trying to best E3, apparently) in an attempt to lure gamers away. To those who'd waste their time with the twitch-based, hack-and-slay "gameplay" of MMO games, I say: good riddance.

Observing the trainwreck-in-slow-motion, some clever folks in the pen-and-paper industry have realized that there is an untapped market of gamers (like myself) who wish for a simpler time. A time of d6s, d8s and yes, d20s, quadrille graph paper, Erol Otus artwork and a Saturday evening to waste. The net result is that there has been a quiet resurgence of old-school game supplements being published. The first and most notable of these was the (now "dead", for all intents and purposes) Hackmaster game from Kenzer & Co. This MAD Magazine meets D&D "license" from WotC was to some a godsend and to others (like myself) an insult. Rather than try and work around WotC's "you must parody old D&D" clause for the license, Kenzer & Co. instead rode shotgun on a mess of self-repeating in-jokes and pokes at Gary's work with 1e that left me flat, quite frankly.

A more sincere approach was tried by Goodman Games with their "Dungeon Crawl Classics" series of modules. Up to 20 and going strong, my first inclination with the DCC series was that it was a return to form - someone was pushing the D20 license to the breaking point and releasing AD&D products that got in just under the wire. I was sorely disappointed to find each of the modules published thus far a mess of 3e game supplements, Erol Otus and Jeff Dee artwork aside.

The next best thing as it were was the release by Troll Lord Games of their Castles & Crusades game. Castles & Crusades is an ultra-light version of Hasbro's incarnation of D&D, wholly stripped of the mess of rules that are found in D20 Fantasy, yet close enough to the letter of the D20 license so as to not incite the ire of the IP holders. Does it work? Well, remember what I said about an "unqualified success" is in RPG publishing these days? Apparently, C&C is an unqualified success. Having playtested the game, I can say that C&C is adaptable enough that OD&D and AD&D rules can be folded in with little to no effort. Don't like C&C's saving throw system (based on the D20 Fantasy rules)? Use AD&D's and have done with. Nothing will change. The armor class system of D20 is used, but apparently that's a matter of subtracting 20 from the noted AC which will then return the appropriate AD&D rating. Still, C&C may suffer from the ill effects brought on by trying to please everyone at once. Rather than offering a clean break from D20 in its entirety, the game seems to angle more towards the attitude that it's not a more modernized AD&D, but a leaner D20 Fantasy. On the plus side, a massive amount of materiel is being created for C&C by Gary Gygax and a bevy of talented writers (myself included in that august body); Gary's contribution will bring to fruition at least most of his Casle Greyhawk campaign works, some of which haven't seen the light of day in at least twenty years.

The most recent offering is one from occasional AD&D contributor Rob Kuntz, in the form of his Cairn of the Skeleton King module. While nothing has been published, if the adventure appears as promised it will feature an old-school dungeon romp with artwork by fromer TSR artist Jim Holloway. Mr. Hollway's artwork was never my favorite, but certainly he has a good portfolio and is responsible for much of the artwork in Monster Manual II. The strange thing about this offering from RJK is the way in which we, the gaming public, can purchase it. I'm still not one hundred percent sure exactly what the scheme is; apparently some sort of buy-in or opt-in or stock plan or something is the way the module is offered. I myself am adopting a wait-and-see attitude.