How would you treat sentient plants?

Should they be mobile? how would they communicate? How would they react to harvesting their fruit?

I never so much as considered this sort of thing in any of my games, even though Ents, the Aldryami, and the various plant peoples in Stapledon's Star Maker were part of the genre background. (My exposure to the possible motile sentient plants of SimEarth came only shortly before my burnout.) But I do have one war story about them.

It was one of our “armageddon” games — a bring a couple of characters for a wild weekend's gaming — back in the mid 80s, aimed at superheroes and using Champions. As some players were lacking any Champions characters, they brought along character concepts for statting up. One of them was Pete Windsor's character, Falain, a sentient, motile tumbleweed, with a Judge Dredd-style hoverbike — apart from that it was generally a Pete character (aligned chaotic-daft); apart from its making disparaging comments about animals (the other PCs), I can't recall any other details at this decade-plus remove. ISTR that was also the game where another player had a swarm of killer bees — People's Attack Regiment #5 — with a yellow rain area effect NND.

Not quite a sentient plant war story — One player's non-gaming wife, had managed to take on board, from games being held at their house, that Gloranthan elves were walking sentient plants; so some while after the Glorantha game crashed, and we were playing Shadowrun, she commented, à propos of something that the elf street samurai did “But aren't you supposed to be a lettuce?”
The character was ever after known as the Electric Lettuce.

Memorable games

So what does make a game memorable? And is it for the right reasons? This is an essay I wrote for the 300th issue of the venerable treeware publication, Alarums & Excursions.

To a first approximation, games from the long ago were either great or forgettable; while more recent ones have been so-so or dreadful. Asking which were more enjoyable than more recent memorable ones is, on one level, facile. The true question is “why did it stop being good?”

I feel a major factor is that the early games were run while innocent; later games cannot regain that state of grace.

Although I got into D&D in late '76, I just tinkered with game systems for the next couple of years primarily because I didn't find a group I wanted to join whose schedules meshed with mine (i.e. not an all-nighter every Sunday), and actually did more than one or two sessions before folding. So the '78-9 when I finally got into a regular game, and got a character through more than a couple of levels was the real start of my practical experiences. Yes, it was a dungeon crawl, with maps kept neatly on graph paper, one 2mm square to the pace, with one-pace-thick walls, and I couldn't repeat it and enjoy it these days — but, oh!, the memories!

• Like the time some randomly encountered mage dropped an Ice Storm (not your wimpy D&D version, but an proper area-denial spell doing a few dice per 2s melee round for several minutes) on the party, and Ororo (my elementalist) tumbled out of the room at his feet with just a handful of hitpoints left, and had to do a highly risky fast-cast Dimension Door to get the hell out of there.
• Like the infamous 36+ hours with only a few cat-naps post-exam Overland Expedition to the fabled Crystal Pyramid — so we were getting stoned on sleep deprivation by the time the characters reached their goal — and dealing with the thousands of vampire bats arising from the trees ringing the pyramid — one mage's owl familiar strafing them with a wand of fireballs (“How many charges are you using?” “As many as it takes.” “30 seem reasonable?”), and mopping up stragglers by waiting until flocks were strung out chasing flying mages, and then Cone of Colding them. Plus the escape from the surrounding gardens with the wagon train going hell-for-leather ahead of a horde of nasties — ropers, shambling mounds, probably more — and the STR37-equivalent Knock Ororo cast (involving major rolling up an open-ended 20 on the casting roll) to blast open the gate to get out of the surrounding garden.
• Like the time when, lacking other healing, and with the front line fighters well down on hit-points, we broke out the herbal tea acquired from a group of pot-head pixies from the Planet Gong — which did the healing required, but left them stoned and chatting amiably with the guy in black leather with a guitar who strolled by. Meanwhile the rest of us were having to deal with a type V demon and her friends.

About the only early memorable negative I can remember is the campaign where characters were assigned, rather than rolled or designed, and when the GM presented us with what was in effect the script outline for the campaign's second season, everyone declined.

And so we fast-forward over the 80s. More recent memorable gaming incidents from the early to mid 90s (i.e. as recent as they get) are somewhat different, such as

• Having designed a character in a 60's spy genre campaign to complement the skills of the team (the other characters were a boffin and a proper secret agent) a hippy with a VW bus who was mainly a driver/mechanic with a bit of Kung Fu on the side (having to have some combat skill, but with stats in the Star Wars based system being used that made firearms a liability), we found out that the villain organization, Paradox, was actually from out of paratime. Essentially without exception, the parallel worlds encountered either had vehicles that even the boffin couldn't figure out how to tinker with, or used horses. It was bad enough violating character when the agent's player — who did fine with the suave jet-setting role-play aspects I can't handle — couldn't remember the genre clichés required to pull off the field operations! I didn't want also to buy, from an unfavourable base, a duplicate of the other characters' strong points. So I gritted my teeth and made a silent protest by usually leaving 2-3 sessions worth of xp unspent, and never — at least never voluntarily — improving firearms skill (I can't remember if towards the end I was forced to). To cap it all, he kept on getting into situations where his hair got cut and beard shaved, while none of the other characters were exposed to any equivalent indignity.
• The RQ2.8 (later Pendragon based) Glorantha game which involved a little bit of sightseeing, and a lot of running away from small groups of trollkin, while acting as gophers for the agents of the aides of the people who looked like they might actually be the ones going to make a difference in Dragon Pass. And including a shameless bit of coerced power-gaming (having been knocked over by a werewolf while companions were dealing with its packmates, I DI'd out — and then rather than let me fold my hand with a POW 2 character, I was argued into buying POW by the process of buying a spell, getting a POW check from the spirit combat, forgetting the spell to free up INT, lather, rinse, repeat). Pendragon made things worse in that it went from having to take a couple of volleys from emplaced trollkin slingers when closing to melee from extreme range to dozens. This destroyed my faith in a couple of game systems and a world that had been for many years almost a gold standard to me.

Those weren't the entirety of my playing during the 90s — there was an AD&D2 gritty Central European campaign, which fell over when the first story arc concluded and the characters were converted to Ars Magica; but I was playing like a lump all through and never really got drawn in. About the only thing that sticks in mind as exceptional was finding that after the systems conversion, my Uruk-hai warrior was even more heedless of damage than she had been before (Soaking all of an attack doesn't whittle away any hit-points). Another Ars Magica game started when 4th edition came out, but I just zoned out when faced with assigning skills for my magus, and never finished chargen (having no good idea as to what level was beginner, what competent, what expert).

Note that all the above events have been from the player perspective, where the visceral experiences have been, even if in the latter days it was desperately trying to prevent my frustration bursting out in a fit of petulance that would be more appropriate to a two year old. GMing has always been a much more cerebral pursuit, since I can see the hidden side of all the stage scenery, and have to manage the cast of thousands. I know I've GMd more than I've played, but the olden days on that side of the table are lost in the haze, with very few flashes where an incident has remained clear in memory. All I know is that I must have enjoyed doing it, even if designing a session was mainly an issue of setting up two fight scenes and threading them together.

I have more positive memories of later GMing — the catharsis of the AD&D2 modules I ran (the Horde campaign) after the RQ mentioned above; the quiet satisfaction of watching the players thinking their way through a run of Shadowrun modules (when those used to be good); the ambiguous Vampire run, which was technically well executed, albeit at the cost of far harder work than the result justified.

And then there was the worst — a few sessions where I foolishly agreed to GM because no one else had anything ready, and after frantic ad-libbing I just burned out hard.

So, after all that, the conclusions? That the really good experiences were early times, with no preconceptions. Yes, the PC was just a thin proxy — I know the adrenaline was pumping when rolling for the DimDoor, but at the same time I was thinking how long it would take to work a new PC up to the same level — what I was fighting for was to protect an investment in playing time. Later games also suffered under the load of raised expectations while familiarity was breeding contempt — a feeling of “once you've gotten a mage to 12th level, doing the same again is just going through the motions”.

And then there was role-playing in the character crafting sense rather than “my tactical role is as combat air patrol” which was good enough for Ororo at high levels. This has been held out by some as a source of high-octane emotional charge when done right (just see the archives of the r.g.f.advocacy newsgroup during 1995, for example).

Naturally, I was seduced by this concept, and threw myself into it; alas also getting infected by the rider to the meme, that “if it isn't working for you, you're not trying hard enough” which seems to be the sub-text of most role-play evangelism — and is well crafted for inducing guilt trips. Note for example the difference in terminology between the 1970s and 1990s era experiences discussed above.

At one extreme, characters are nothing but barriers (condoms?) between me and the action, where I have to consciously work through their thought processes to arrive at their responses; at the other extreme where they work naturally, both of them that got this far said “Sod this for a game of soldiers, I'm off somewhere safer.” and continued in play only under protest, and not for very long.

Role-playing games and me

I got into the hobby from SPI games and thus reading about this D&D thing in the SimPubs UK 'zine in the spring of '76, which was during my first undergraduate year. It then took me six months, finding only a random copy of either Greyhawk or Blackmoor in one of the general games shops in Soho, before I tracked a copy down, and a group of gamers who were using a highly variant home-brew set of systems. Taking it home at the Yuletide holidays that year, I plunged immediately into DMing (mainly for the crowd at my old school), and system tinkering.

I would probably have drifted out of the hobby in a couple of years, as my brother did, but for meeting Karen. Shortly after we had gotten together, she told me about this wonderful game one of her friends had been playing, and wondered did I know about it. I said that I did and advised she probably didn't want to. But she wasn't deterred.

That became the classic 78/9 highly variant dungeon crawling game that really (mis-)informs my opinions of (original, pre-Basic, pre-Advanced) D&D. That in turn drove me to stop tinkering and start DMing again myself, on a regular basis this time.

This early period while still in and around Cambridge was marked by a lot of variously successful home-brew FRP systems, many unrecognisable as derivatives from D&D, as well as some “roll a d20 and see what it looks like” super-hero games (finding Superhero 2044 unusable as it stood). There were attempts at C&S, DragonQuest and TFT which came to naught, and a little variant RQ. Burnout with fantasy by the early '80s, and moving away for work, led to playing a bit of Trav that got nowhere, and then Champions, the latter turning into an open campaign where everyone who had something to run GMd, until the flaws (bricks rule, energy projectors suck) were too blatant to ignore. One off (and never again) sessions in this time also included Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia.

Returning to Cambridge in the late 80s, gaming mainly alternated between myself and one other GM (who has now gone on to run the Saxum Caribetum Ars Magica Saga), with AD&D2 being the default system, but also RQ2.8/Glorantha (later Pendragon 3rd edition), Shadowrun (1st & 2nd), V:tM (2nd), and Ars Magica(3rd), with a little bit of Trav, MegaTrav, and Star Wars (2nd) (this last being used as a generic RPG) on the side.

Gaming keynotes

• in 1984, while preparing for a “everyone bring a couple of favourite characters” gaming weekend, while others were exercised narrowing down to a couple of characters from a vast portfolio, my problem was coming up with characters to shortlist. I could now call upon the many Champions PCs I later designed - but it established that I was already more the GM than the player
• my first character of any consequence (as opposed to first that lasted to gain levels at all) was an elementalist mage from the 78/9 game, almost the only mage I've ever played. The later PCs have tended to be simple “walk up to other people and hit them a lot” types, perhaps with a little magic on the side (e.g. RQ characters or AD&D2 priests).
• the all-comers Champions aside, I've not run or played in a long running “signature” campaign. Too many one-shots that folded ignominiously, and campaign longevity meaning lasting 6 months.
• In 1995 I went through a serious bit of burnout, and that's why I'm only in 2003, so many years later, actually getting round to scanning and uploading all this stuff.
• In summer 2003, I went to the Conjuration, the biennial con at New Hall, and saw the demo games of HeroQuest, almost on the 25^th anniversary of the original RuneQuest which promised it as one of the few detailed “To be published” sources. And it fired my enthusiasm enough to start to look for players — but these turned out to be thin on the ground, and by the time I'd managed to accumulate a possible quorum (and that needing to take account of players with children having to work around their bed-times), work was going through a “as many hours as it take” patch, and after that, I'd managed to get distracted by watching anime DVDs on the PC, and finding that other things had then arisen to take up my creative energies, away from dealing with flea-bitten barbarians. And so I'm in total RPG burn-out.

Penny (4th June 1998 - 14th April 2007)

Penny was a pedigree chocolate Burmese. She's looking very serious in the first photo, in reaction to the new arrivals Bleys and Jemima.. Before this, she still seemed very kittenish by comparison with older cats, playing serious games of tig, when Smoke was in the mood to join in. Later she spendt a lot of time fighting over her place in the hierarchy with Bleys; and then eventually became subordinate to Jemima (twice her size) at the feeding bowls.

As expected, she has become a mighty huntress, as well as a scrounging alley-cat, preferring her food well aged; and to the end made use of other cats as a hot water bottle, first Smoke, and later Jemima.

With the newer arrivals, there was a lot more communal sleeping.

An unhappy death.

Bleys (June 2001 - 30th September 2005)

Bleys (ginger) was a softie — happy to be cuddled and stroked, and purring when fussed or when eating, much like Smoke. Not the swiftest on the up-take, but compensated for it by being very beautiful — and knowing it!

Run over on a dark Friday evening.

Smoke (1st March 1989 - 22nd November 2004)

Smoke had a long tenure as the senior cat. He was a generally affable cat, and for all his size (a lean mean eight kilos in his prime, though getting a bit scrawny towards the end due to hyperthyroidism) somewhat unwilling to allow other cats to see that he was a great softy. He allowed other cats to snuggle up to him — here he is with our late lamented brown Burmese, Shen Kuei who was the previous top cat (and thus considered any other cat or person who stayed still long enough a valid hot-water bottle) — and, showing that this was not a fluke, with later Burmese members of the household, Kundalini and Penny, the latter picture being taken less than 24 hours after Penny's arrival.

Smoke's favourite food used to be cat biscuit. But as his teeth failed and he got crankier, and always hungry it was just the jelly from lumps-in-jelly, or occasional mouthfuls of senior cat food.

At the end, suddenly, on a mild day after a cold snap, he demanded to be let out. I half noticed his absence when I gave the other cats the end of a tin before we went out to dinner. He didn't show when we got back, so I went out, fearing the worst, to find him curled up under the rhododendron by the conservatory door, cold, but not yet with rigor set in. I guess he knew it was his time.

My Life in Glorantha

As anyone who's read my other RPG posts — and especially my background page — will know, I burned out on gaming in early 1995 — and that I spend a lot of time on those pages talking about either variant D&D or Champions, but other systems are only mentioned in passing.

As it happens, I've had a love/hate relationship with RQ/Glorantha for going on 25 years now.

I first encountered Glorantha in the form of the original Nomad Gods game at the Wargames Soc. at college, and thought it a little bit silly — though by no means as bad as Greg Costikyan's humour in the SPI Swords and Sorcery game. It was a while later, when looking to other systems to find bits to plunder to fix D&D, that I picked up a copy of RQ2 (the new edition at £8, as opposed to the old one at £5, this being back in about '78). RQ2 had a lot of things that I thought made for an ideal game — individual skill ratings rather than blanket levels, fixed hit-points — but it didn't have a splashy magic system in that way that *D&D always has, so while I tried a few one-off sessions, and Karen even did her first bit of GMing c1980 with RQ set in a setting of her own, Glorantha languished as something I read fragments of in Cults of Prax, Trollpak, and Cults of Terror, but never did anything with.

Neil Taylor picked up a copy of Borderlands, and started to run a campaign based on that set. The characters were mainly Orlanthi (Sartar's equivalent of the Church of England), with a neo with a death wish playing an Humakti. With the limited source material, we modelled Sartar after high classical Greece, like the pictures in the rule-book suggested, and the Praxians — at Horn Gate, at least — as Arabs at the stereotypical oasis.

And at that sort of time, the group burned out on the whole fantasy genre, and Karen and I moved house from Cambridge to Stevenage because I needed a job. When we found our feet there, we started playing other games with a new set of players (the group that Phil Masters had accumulated), mainly Champions. Meanwhile HeroQuest had gone from being a “source to be published” in the list at the back of the RQ2 rulebook, to an item in the Spring 1982 issue of the Chaosium Games catalogue in which promised it for that summer.

Time passed. RQ3 happened, and the combination of the dollar price hike, and the pound falling almost to parity meant that it cost 5 times what the previous edition did — £40 in 1985 money [by comparison, HeroQuest is priced at about £24 in 2003 money]. I did pick up the hideously expensive boxes of Gloranthan background (Gods of... , Genertela) and pored over them for arcane details, while the modified rules stayed on the games' shop shelves.

By the late 80s, I was back in Cambridge and working at the same company as Neil Taylor. As the Champions game folded due to increasing dissatisfaction with the Hero System, he and I would spend hours going over the minutiae as revealed, especially the new scraps in a new fanzine, Tales of the Reaching Moon. I remember fascinating discussions about recherché topics like the implications of the RQ2 Prax map showing the burial mound of a prehistoric hero even larger that the specially large mountain pictogram used for Kero Fin, the mighty goddess-mountain.

And so he set up an RQ3 game based in a slightly variant Glorantha (the big conflict was Tarsh — oriental in flavour — vs. Sartar — more like the current received wisdom, though Babeester Gor was in the role now occupied by the Vinga cult which hadn't been discovered at the time, and Yelmalio was taken as the cult accepted as the Sun among Storm), based alternately in Pavis and Sartar. I had problems stumbling over bits of rules that had changed subtly since the previous edition; other players had problems with other bits of the system like the experience rolls (one Unicorn Woman had her most frequently used combat skills stick at ~45% while others went up to ~70% because the dice would hardly ever convert a skill check into a % increase). We all found that the restraints on spirit magic meant that the old standby of “Glue” (Healing 6) battle-magic that made combat a survivable thing was no longer a plausible strategy. A belated change to Pendragon, to use the virtues and passions system as part of the cult attributes just made things worse — the movement rates and ranges meant that we had something like five times as many rounds to take damage from emplaced trollkin slingers when advancing from their extreme range to contact. [From this experience, I'm somewhat dubious about Pendragon's ability to truly emulate the almost D&D-like combats in Malory.]

The game also suffered from the “tourist trap” tendency — with a detailed world, the temptation comes to play tour guide, and escort the PCs around all the interesting parts — so our lowly step-and-fetch PCs were sent hither and yon, until the game folded under cumulative dissatisfaction, and I ran some cathartic high level D&D to permit some righteous ass-kicking that the RQ had denied us.

With the '90s also came the RQ-revival, spearheaded by a group that gave the appearance of seeking to play something between “Morris-dancing, the RPG” and “Iron John, the RPG”, which is still present in Hero Wars material like Thunder Rebels. The Glorantha that came out of this was trapped in a Procrustean bed of unsatisfactory mechanics, and with revelations that changed my perception of the world — not essentially trivial things like the (Y)elmal(io) flap, but that the Sartar/Lunar conflict was a lot more German/Roman rather than Greek/Persian as the RQ2 art implied. Yes, Orlanth is meant to be Tiw, not Zeus, and the new vanguard had only contempt for the stuckist grognards who liked the old way better.

In the middle of this I burned out on gaming, and when Hero Wars came out, I couldn't even gather the energy to focus my eyes on Neil's copy. I knew I had reservations about what I heard about the system — important events getting handled in a quantum box, with abstract action points expended until the state collapses and you can tell what happened — like who got wounded and how much. Later on, I did buy Storm Tribe, another gods book, and without the damnable barbarian culture.

But this year, HeroQuest — I did like what I saw at Conjuration enough to look out Storm Tribe, if only to try and answer the question “who are all these strange gods that the demo game PCs were devotees of?” and then get a copy of HQ for my birthday. I'm still not sure about the system, the extended resolution in particular; and when I'm in a mood to worry about having too much arbitrary fiat power as GM at the totally free scope of attributes (like Over the Edge, but more so). The rules hacker in me starts to think about perhaps using something like the West End Games' StarWars D6 system, with a HQ keyword corresponding to an SW stat. But I was motivated to at least think about doing something.

Having been out of the loop for a while, I found much Gregging and counter-Gregging had gone on, but I think that Glorantha has reached a point where it has completed a metamorphosis, to a new understanding and a new system, unlike the very awkward state in the '90s when the New True Way and the uninspired changes that went into RQ3 mechanics tore in different directions. Now at last we have a mechanical exposition that supports, rather than thwarts the subjectivist approach.

For example, back in RQ2 days, there was the assumption that a warrior would be an Humakti, and there was the one-size-fits-all cult of Humakt; but in ST, Humakt is a seriously scary god that only dangerous weirdos follow (normal warriors would follow Orlanth sub-cults that no-one who hasn't been following Gloranthan events in detail for the last few years will have heard of, like Hedkoranth and Helamakt). In HQ, he's back to being a standard warrior god – but only for cultures neighbouring Sartar. This I interpret as being because the core Orlanthi culture has access to all the minor attributes/associates of Orlanth, which squeezes the other big gods out into the margins. A similar process seems to have taken place with Babeester Gor, with the Orlanthi having Vinga in the place that the Earth Avenger takes in related cultures who don't also have the Defender Storm.

Of course the process is not 100% – it doesn't fix the (Y)elma(io) problem that really set the cat amongst the pigeons over a decade ago, and had been just about reconciled (provided you don't enquire too deeply into how the myths fitted together) – the ST version of Elmal as the Orlanthi sun-god doesn't really hang together as a myth (it singularly ignores who it was that the Orlanthi think was the object of the Lightbringer quest, or the fact that Yelmalio is the light of the sunless sky i.e. twilight). So far he's swept under the carpet in HQ, in favour of (St.) Ehilm (a Saint in Aeolian Esvulia (formerly Heortland)) — and we last heard of Ehilm as a western figure, the sorcerer who had become too entangled in solar powers, cognate to Yelm.

It is interesting to note that, having the assumption in the examples of a PC party made up from folk all across the continent, and with only distant ties to their kinfolk (occsaional calling in of favours for support in the play examples), the game has drawn back from the anthropological style of RPG that was going to have killed the setting eventually. The rigid tribal Sartarite society is alien to most 21^st century players, more so than easy things like feudalism. Indeed the restrictive elements are stronger than some in real-world societies which are causing active harm to people in the UK caught between their ancestral ways imported from the Indian sub-continent and the ways of their peers and age-cohort.

Having the God of the New Way of Things associated with the people of “We've always done it this way” isn't something that most people will get.

One thing that hasn't changed in HW, and by adoption, HQ, are the rather silly monsters, which hark me back to the first encounter with Nomad Gods. One thing that has improved a bit are the scenarios. I dismissed an early famous RQ scenario with this summary:

The adventurers are approached by a man seeking armed assistance. He explains that he has bought, for resale, a sacred item. The person who he'd bought it from had stolen it from a small nomad tribe, killing most of the adults in the process. When two of the survivors demanded its return from the man now seeking PC assistance, he had his assistant shoot one. He has now found out that they intend to return in force to recover their property, and is seeking help to defend his house and this item. – What do your characters do?

The scenarios in HQ are better than this.

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Happy Fun Legal Text

Glorantha is a trademark of Issaries, Inc. HeroQuest, Hero Wars, and Issaries are registered trademarks of Issaries, Inc. These they tell me about on their web site.

Nomad Gods, Borderlands, Cults of Prax, Trollpak, Cults of Terror, Gods of Glorantha, Glorantha : Genertela were presumably Chaosium trademarks (and are presumably with Issaries, Inc. now). Presumably Storm Tribe and Thunder Rebels are trademarks of Issaries, Inc. [I have to guess not only the changes of ownership, but also the trademark status of the current material as the books lack any legal indicia, unlike the usual case with comic-books. Pick up a copy of, say Lucifer, and the On the Ledge section tells you that indicia — and that would include Lucifer and On the Ledge — are trademarks of DC Comics].

I'm not certain of the exact status of the RuneQuest trademark these days. Ditto for Tales of the Reaching Moon. King Arthur Pendragon used to be a Chaosium trademark, but they sold the property on, and I can't remember to whom (Green Knight?).

Over the Edge is a (registered?) trademark of Atlas Games.

D&D is a (registered?) trademark of Hasbro, Inc. Swords and Sorcery turns out to have reverted to Greg Costikyan, rather than having been inherited in the Hasbro buys WotC buys TSR acquires SPI chain of events; Champions and Hero System are (registered?) trademarks of Hero Games.

Star Wars is ultimately a LucasFilms registered trademark, though the game rights are currently with Hasbro, Inc.

Conjuration might well have been a service mark of the British Role-playing Association.

All omissions are purely accidental. I'm certainly not an owner of any of the cited intellectual properties.

Doesn't it get complicated when you try to cover yourself while writing an overview that spans much of the life of this turbulent hobby industry!