Vintage RPG

A rigorous critic of RPGs would round out the week with a post on his copy of Danger International, to highlight the contrast between it and Espionage!, and to give a glimpse at where the Hero System would be heading in the future. But not me! Because I just remembered I’ve never posted about Bad Medicine for Doctor Drugs (1983), a Superworld scenario that has one of the all-time best titles in RPGs. Despite being published by Chaosium, it is dual-statted for Champions, more evidence of collaboration in the West Coast scene.

It’s an extremely interesting scenario focusing on teen heroes. It provides guidance for making them (they’re weaker and have more disadvantages, but also more energy) and running them (players are bound by a code of conduct that keeps the characters in a kid frame), then gives a whole bunch of pre-gens for players to pick from. They’re all well-developed and interconnected and go to the high school that Doctor Drugs has been plying his trade at.

The scenario kicks off with the teens investigating the drug-related death of a fellow student and uncovering the rather elaborate narcotics trade at their high school. The presentation of the school is pretty great, with factions to navigate and a general challenge of how to surveil the school without revealing their powers. All roads lead to the Doctor, whose real scheme is pushing drugs that unlock people’s super powers. He’s…an interesting character: pretty likable, even agreeable, wrestling over what to do with a potentially world-changing dilemma while working a shitty criminal day job. And, worth noting, a lot of the teens aren’t likable, specifically Brain, an obnoxious genius and the Doctor’s opposite number: he gave the teens their powers, though through science rather than dangerous drugs. In fact, the bulk of the book is dedicated to character profiles, which really drive the action within the brief framework of events. It’s really good!

Cover and interiors are all by Butch Guice, too. I don’t love the cover, honestly, but all the interior work is sharp. The choice to make Doctor Drugs a skinny hippie dude was inspired.

Justice, Inc. (1984) is the third RPG from Hero Games. As with Espionage!, it uses the core point-buy system developed for Champions, though instead of powers, this game features toned-down “talents.” The idea here, as you can probably tell from the cover, is to simulate pulp-style games and the rules basically account for everything from hardboiled detectives to slightly supernatural mystery men like The Shadow to stranger types of characters like the Invisible Man. You could probably do Hellboy with this, certainly Lobster Johnson. Oddly, you could probably run a better gizmo-filled James Bond game with this than with Espionage!.

It’s interesting to see how much more generic this is with the lower power level, versus the supers game. Judging from the illustrations alone, the game is meant to cater to a wide range of genres (worth noting that the two adventure modules that came out for Justice were dual statted for Call of Cthulhu). This is made explicit in the second book in the box, which offers guidance on a number of campaign types — horror, action, espionage, spicy stories, science fiction and so on. There is a perplexing sourcebook section which includes a list of World Series winners for some reason, and a slang glossary. Then there is a campaign frame called the Empire Club and a handful of adventures — a haunted house and two mystery scenarios.

It’s also interesting seeing how the scene was developing. As I mentioned, Hero Games was collaborating with Chaosium. But there is cross-over here with Flying Buffalo — Michael Stackpole is one of the main authors and Liz Danforth contributes illustrations. Another author, Aaron Allston, had previously worked on Steve Jackson Games’ Autoduel and illustrator Denis Loubet had also worked with both SJG and MetaGaming.

Espionage! (1983) is the second RPG developed by Hero Games, the makers of Champions. It essentially shares the same system as the superhero game, which makes this really Hero Games’ first step toward building their universal ruleset, the unsurprisingly named Hero System.

Weirdly, though, I think the rules are a mess. You’d think after having worked out a superhero game (what I would think was a more complicated genre to simulate) that a spy game would be feather-light in comparison. But it isn’t at all. I think Top Secret is easier to grok? The whole thing is ponderous and weirdly un-fun. That extends to some of the greater philosophies of the game, which are deeply rooted in real-world spycraft (characters here work for the CIA) and thus the pulpier aspects of James Bond, like gadgets, death traps and weirdo villains, are missing from the game — that shark on the cover is totally false advertising.

When you finally figure out how things are supposed to work, I think the results are pretty satisfyingly realistic, but I don’t want to work that hard. I want to shoot a shark while driving a Ferrari, you know? This feels more in line with some of the military simulation games coming out around the same time. Someone at Hero must have gotten the message, though, because the game was retooled as Danger International in 1985, and is a lighter, less serious spy game, more in line with my expectations from the genre.

It’s cool to see how quickly Hero Games is upping their production values, though. The interiors feel much cleaner than Champions. Neat catalog, too.

The third edition of Champions (1984) is basically a quality-of-life upgrade that leverages three years of publishing and design experience to produce a clearer, more polished experience. There’s typesetting and spacious layout! If you think that’s a silly thing to crow about, you’ve not tried to navigate the mono-spaced first and second edition rules to make a character.

I am sure there are changes to the rules that came with a third editing pass and a greater attention to the larger universal rules ecosystem, but I can’t really tell. But it certainly reads better. Also, as with Justice, Inc. (which we’ll see in a couple days), we have the addition of a campaign book that gives advice on running campaigns, building worlds and writing scenarios. This is complimented by a series of scenarios detailing actions against the local VIPER cell and a suite of character profiles to start populating your world.

Cover art by mainstay Mark Williams. He’s joined inside by Mike Witherby; those two have similar styles that mesh nicely. Pat Zircher’s art is a little rougher, but then Denis Loubet is a little more polished. I find his line work to be almost unnervingly smooth. In a good way!

Also, copyright is listed as 1984 on the insides, but the text casually mentions the possibility that player might have experience with Danger International, which did not hit shelve until 1985. Did this actually hit shelves in 1985? I can’t find any ads in a random pull of three 1984 issues of Dragon Magazine. On the other hand, it is possible that the text originally referred to Espionage! and was changed to reflect the forthcoming revamp of that game. That would be smart and clever!

It belongs in a museum! Oh, wait, that doesn’t work here…

This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we check out Thousand Year Old Campfire, also known as Old Morris Cave: A Continuous Use Campsite in Mammoth Cave National Park. A descendant of Thousand Year Old Vampire, this game examines presence, absence and time through the excavation of an archaeological site. It’s less emotionally charged than TYOV, but no less thought provoking.

Lotta folks have been waiting a long time for this one: Villains and Vigilantes! This is the revised edition, from 1982, but the game originally came out in 1979. Both editions were published by Fantasy Games Unlimited.

V&V, I believe, is the second superhero RPG, but the first to make a big splash (Superhero 2044 came out in 1977, but its main contribution was really inspiring the creation of Champions), though it never really took off the way Champions did, perhaps because of FGU’s spotty support. It’s got a lot of things going for it. For one, character generation starts with you, the player. You’re the superhero’s secret identity. You then roll for your secret origin and random powers and skills (the rules say the GM can opt to let players pick, or modify these often-bizarre combinations of powers, but that seems less fun, honestly, and more in the spirit of the super-noodly Champions and GURPS Supers). There are weaknesses, of course, and guidance for costumes; all told the power and character generation takes up 20 out of the 48 pages.

Another thing going for the game is Jeff Dee’s dynamic, comic-trained art (Dee co-designed the game with Jack Herman). You don’t really get a sense of it in the core box, but the supplements have a really deep understanding of comics and how they work and what makes them entertaining (and funny — they’re called funny books, remember?).

There is some odd stuff, like the five-page summary of the penal code. And the game mechanics…were definitely designed in 1979. Much of the system feels very D&Dish. Roll a d20 to hit! What doesn’t feel like D&D, like the four steps of tables players need to check to find out the to-hit number they are looking to beat, is extremely cumbersome (though they probably influenced the Marvel universal table). Contemporary reviews had a habit of calling V&V an excellent beginner game, which makes me laugh, because it took me at least ten minutes to confirm the combat roll used a d20.

Still, a classic, and well-deserving of the status.

Last October, I took a look at Roger Elwood’s Horror Tales from 1974. This is its predecessor, Monster Tales: Vampires, Werewolves & Things (1973). As with that previous volume, not a single author is familiar to me, aside of Robert Bloch, who pens the introduction. I’m here primarily for the gloopy, sploopy art of Franz Altschuler, which is pretty forbidding for a book aimed at kids (then again, the back cover copy clearly hypes Psycho so what do I know about what’s appropriate for kids?). I dimly recall this book from the Kearny Public Library, specifically that extremely creepy illustration for “Wendigo’s Child” with the bone creature.

Learned some stuff about Roger Elwood since last year that maybe explains some things. He was a prolific anthologist and seems to have been a quantity over quality guy. A lot of folks seem to have thought his collections were dull. I’ve also seen some stuff about his hiring of unknown writers and paying low fees (in theory, to keep more of the budget for himself, I guess?). Some critics claim his low-quality collections drove away the audience for anthologies and contributed to destroying a fairly lucrative market. But then, there are still a lot of anthologies getting published, so who knows, really?

Dark Gods (1985) is a large part of T.E.D. Klein’s rather small body of work — the rest consists of the novel The Ceremonies, which is an expansion of the short story “Events at Poroth Farm,” a collection of shockingly mediocre short stories called Reassuring Tales (2006)and collection of essays, Providence After Dark (2019), in which he goes full Boomer. If you stick to the 20th century stuff, though, you’re in for a treat. Especially this volume.

Before we go on, though, I want to note that two of these novellas, “Black Man with a Horn” and “Children of the Kingdom” tackle racism in varying degrees, mostly focusing on the idea of white fear of the Other. For some folks, the division between the characters being racists and the author being a racist is unclear. I don’t really agree with that; I think Klein is obviously positioning his narrators as being wrong-headed, but I also don’t think the way Klein goes about it would be regarded as acceptable if they were written today — it’s more than possible to portray racist characters without perpetuating racist tropes and language. I don’t love using the “for their time” argument, but, well, I think we ought to give these stories a little room.

Anyway, there are four novellas here. “Children of the Kingdom” concerns the supposed machinations of horrible things living underneath Manhattan. “Petey” is about a cocktail party and how it ends. “Black Man with a Horn” is about a mediocre writer of Lovecraftian pastiche getting caught in a Lovecraftian pastiche. Finally, “Nadelman’s God,” which won a World Fantasy Award, tells the story of an ad man discovering the far-reaching consequences of writing bad poetry.

To say more about the individual plots is to spoil them. I’m not one for spoiler warnings, but Klein’s real talent is putting his straightforward, unadorned style to the task of slowly building dread, usually amidst an array of seemingly mundane social situations. I would say, though, that his use of the urban environment is groundbreaking (only Fritz Leiber in Our Lady of Darkness really beats him to the punch) with the concept of the “City,” or its shadow, looming large in all the stories. More than anything, though, I think Klein is the first iron clad proof that “Cosmic Horror,” so long tied to the views and stylings of Lovecraft, actually has varied applications. His whole corpus is Cosmic, without being terribly Lovecraftian (even the pastiche), and in demonstrating that possibility, he opened the door for other, later writers to go even further abroad.

Now, Monsters Monsters Monsters (1975) is a real humdinger of a Helen Hoke anthology, and my personal favorite, because monsters, duh. And while Devils Devils Devils introduced me to the Cthulhu Mythos via faux Lovecraft, this volume introduced me to the old gent himself, with “The Outsider,” which in terms of formal construction is probably among his very best, though I’ve come to regard it as a self-insert that’s a little too on the nose.

Anyway, some all-timers in the TOC. Bradbury’s “The Foghorn” is the headliner for sure — scared the crap out of me at the time to the point that I don’t really want to revisit it in case it does so again. E.F. Benson’s slug/leech creature from “Negotium Perambulans” is another stand out, as is “Slime,” by Joseph Payne Brennan. H.G. Wells’ giant bat from “In the Avu Observatory” is pretty cool, but he’s definitely outdone by Arthur Conan Doyle’s flying jellyfish from “The Horror in The Heights.”

Charles Keeping’s work here is frickin’ amazing. Sooooo goopy. I know his work primarily from an adaptation of Beowulf and a Folio Society edition of M.R. James’ ghost stories, but neither comes close to how grisly this grouping of work is. That illustration for “Slime” is wooooof terrifying.

Helen Hoke is an unsung hero. A prolific editor, she put together a gigantic stack of collections on a wide array of subjects. Joke books, pets, dolls, but increasingly, over the years, horror stories. Her books, horror collections included, were marketed not for bookstores, but rather libraries, where they poisoned the minds of countless children. Children like me! The Kearny Public Library had a whole shelf of Hoke. I wish I had been paying attention when the withdrew them for sale, because boy, is it hard to find some of my favorites that are both in good condition and not expensive. And, sadly, because most of her work wound up in libraries and was inevitably weeded, she doesn’t get the credit she is due. Maybe this post (and tomorrow’s) will change that a bit.

This is Devils Devils Devils (1975), the UK version, which features a marginally better cover. Carol Barker’s art does a lot of work selling the horribleness of the stories here. There aren’t a lot of bangers here, to be quite honest — the real headliner is Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp.” The various retellings of folktales are OK, though nothing you wouldn’t expect, same with Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” A. E. Coppard’s “The Devil in the Churchyard” is pretty good though.

Why is this somewhat underwhelming anthology important to me? Because of the last story, “Witches’ Hollow,” credited to both H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (but that’s a lie of Derleth’s telling). Of his “posthumous collaborations” with HPL, though, this is probably one of the best, features some fantastically spooky rural atmosphere, a creeptastic kid and an awesome monster (Barker’s illustration is real good!). This story was Young Stu’s first encounter with Lovecraft and his mythos! It took a looooong time before I realized it wasn’t.