In Defense of Gor, Part 2: Gor in Gaming

This is actually the
most SFW cover I can find.

I'm pleasantly surprised by the reception my last post received, arguing that the infamous Gor novels are worth a look as a source of inspiration for pulpy, sword-and-sorcery-flavored gaming. But I'm not the first person to make such an argument. The influence of the Gor series goes back almost as far as the TRPG hobby itself. It's often been buried, and given the reputation the series has accrued, that may be a deliberate effort on the parts of various rights-holders - but a look into the history of tabletop gaming reveals that there is a Gorean connection behind some surprisingly influential developments, not just in the world of gaming but pop culture as a whole.

There are many seminal works of fantasy literature in the first edition Dungeon Masters' Guide Appendix N, and the ways in which these works influenced the game, its tropes, and its elements have been studied time and time again by people far more qualified to speak on the subject than I. The Gor novels are not a listed influence in any version of Appendix N. Given how they are directly referenced in other works from the same period, as I will discuss later, I don't think this was an omission based on the content of the series or its reputation. Gor did not accrue the image of something taboo among mainstream discussions of fantasy and science fiction until later. It seems more likely to me that Gygax simply didn't read or wasn't a fan of the novels, and thus they don't appear on a list curated by him.

What is known, however, is that the other co-creator, Dave Arneson, was a fan of Gor and did reference it in his work. Quite a bit, actually. To see the Gorean influence on early D&D, we need to start with materials that were written by him - most famously, Blackmoor, the second supplement to the original 1974 edition of D&D. If we really want to get to the source, though, we should look in particular at The First Fantasy Campaign, a collection of rules Arneson used at his table that was published by Judges' Guild in 1977. This is unfiltered Arneson; it reads like the ramblings of a madman, with no real regard to layout or organization, and shoves you right into the material without a proper introduction or preface. It's a bunch of lists, tables, and house rules in no particular order. It seems that editing Arneson's rules was not a priority. So we can assume that the elements he includes do in fact capture his influences in as pure a form as we can get.

It's worth noting, then, that The First Fantasy Campaign has a lot of rocs in it. They're listed as purchasable, they appear in encounter tables, and many cities are listed as using roc cavalry in their armies. One note, in particular, describes a larger variant of rocs called tarns. In the Gor novels, tarns are large birds used as beasts of burden and are ridden into battle; the series' most recurring protagonist, Tarl Cabot, is a tarnsman, ie. one who rides a tarn. What's more, Arneson's rocs occupy much the same role that tarns do on Gor; stats are listed for "war tarns," "cargo tarns," and "racing tarns," all of which exist on Gor. Furthermore, in "The Temple of the Frog," a dungeon Arneson includes in the Blackmoor supplement, mention is made to "landing points for rocs" on the building's edge - many Gorean buildings include ledges on higher floors for tarns to perch on.

Despite a singular reference to tarns being "same as rocs but larger in some cases," the text seems to use the terms "roc," "tarn" and "eagle" interchangeably, listing "tarn trainer" and "eagle rider" on the same list when listing upkeep of hirelings. The ways in which Arneson uses rocs as rideable animals also implies he isn't thinking of the elephant-eating monsters of Arabian mythology. We can assume any time Arneson refers to a large rideable bird, he has tarns in mind. Since The First Fantasy Campaign still uses the terms "hobbit" and "balrog" instead of "halfling" and "balor," it seems unlikely that rights issues were behind this terminology. Most likely, this is the result of The First Fantasy Campaign being generally unedited; there is little stylistic consistency with the book as a whole.

What's more, on the same list of hirelings and their upkeep requirements, Arneson lists separate rates for "male slave," "female (Red)," female (White)," and "female (Special)". While the color-coding of female slaves is not explained in the text, the terminology is taken directly from Gor. There, a "white silk slave" is a virgin, and a "red silk slave" is not. I'm not sure what "female (Special)" refers to here, and frustratingly, Arneson doesn't give any explanation. It might be a reference to Gor's "exotics;" slaves bred to have inhuman traits such as venom (also a woefully underexplored concept in the series), but in the books this phenomenon is not limited to female slaves, and I would think that there would be more game mechanics for something like that. Seems like a good excuse for a random table.

This is a bit of theorizing on my part, but one idea that seems to have originated with Arneson was oozes as a class of monsters, which cemented slimes, jellies, puddings, and the like as a staple of fantasy bestiaries. It's attested to by Gygax himself that Arneson was the first DM to use a black pudding, and many commentators have traced this back to 1958's The Blob, which is certainly plausible, given Arneson's stated love of monster movies. However, I think it's worth noting that 1969's Nomads of Gor includes a delightfully pulpy interlude where Tarl is fed to a living corrosive ooze, kept in a pit in the palace of a corrupt merchant, and must fight his way out. Given we have hard evidence that Arneson read the Gor books, it's quite possible that this creature influenced his creation.

But if I had to pick the one instance Gor was arguably at its most influential, not only on D&D but on gaming and the fantasy genre as a whole, that traces back to Supplement II.

Let me ask you a question. What comes to your mind when I say the word "assassin?" If you read this blog, probably a guy in a dark cloak, probably with a hood, holding a dagger and sneaking up on someone to stab them. Maybe, if you're younger, a white-clad figure doing parkour up the wall of a Gothic cathedral, or Keanu Reeves in a slick suit dispatching a horde of henchmen with cinematic gunplay. If you ask an older person, or someone who knows nothing about fantasy, they'd probably think of someone with a sniper rifle shooting the President from a book depository. Before the 70s, that's what most people would say. The idea of the assassin as a class, with a distinct set of skills, equipment, and associated tropes, owes itself to two things: the meteoric rise in popularity of the pop-culture ninja (specifically the pop-cultural stock character, which has little in common with the historical ninja of feudal Japan), and the D&D assassin class, first introduced in Blackmoor.

Many, citing Arneson's established precedent of drawing from Gor, have posited that this class was inspired by the Gorean Assassin Caste. If this is true, this means that Gor directly inspired an entire character archetype, and that Pa-Kur the Master Assassin has as much of a valid claim to fame as being such a model as Aragorn does for rangers. However, I'm not entirely convinced this is the case. The primary class features of the original assassin class are the use of disguises, which we do not have much textual evidence of Gorean assassins using, and the use of poisons, which Gorean assassins explicitly do not use, as they view it as impersonal and cowardly. There are some links, however. Blackmoor's assassins work in guilds, with temples and a defined structure, much like how Gorean assassins, though termed a caste, are not born into it and instead join such an order, pledging their lives to its service. Also, Blackmoor's assassins gain the right to challenge their guildmaster in a duel at 12th level, and take over the position if they kill them. This could be related to how Gorean assassins are always trained in pairs, with their final task being for one of them to hunt and kill the other in order to be inducted into the caste. Gor may have influenced the assassin class, but I do not think it was the only source.

All in all, looking at both textual and contextual evidence, it is undeniable that Gor was an influence on Dave Arneson in particular, and by extension D&D. However, its influence on the gaming scene didn't stop there, and Gor references continued to crop up in gaming materials.

In terms of official material, Dragon Magazine used to run a feature called "Giants in the Earth," listing game stats for characters from existing works of fiction. Issue #61, from 1982, stats Tarl Cabot, courtesy of Glenn Rahman. What's interesting is that he is listed as Lawful Evil and his misogyny is described as a character trait, but the text explicitly connects this to his upbringing with an abusive aunt, an in-universe explanation for his outlook. This might indicate that at this time, at least with this one author, Cabot was viewed as a flawed anti-hero, not as a mouthpiece for Norman's alleged views, and his outlook on women was viewed as just a character trait, not something assumed to be "natural" in a man. One could argue that Rahman may have portrayed Cabot this way as a means to criticize the novels, but the text makes several allusions to the events of the books as late as Raiders of Gor from 1971, which most people online will tell you is well after the series took on a BDSM tint. If Rahman truly disliked the series, I doubt he would know as much about the plot as he alludes to. Most people bail out by that point. If true, this would support the evidence that it was relatively socially acceptable to read and enjoy Gor novels, even later Gor novels, in the gaming community at this time.

There's something charming in
the naive earnestness of early
third-party gaming mag covers.

Also, Judges' Guild's magazine, Pegasus, published Gor-related gaming content. While I was unable to find any scans, the sixth issue (also from 1982) boasts on the cover that it features an article by Paul Elkmann with rules for kaissa, a chess-like game described in the series. Of note to me is that kaissa would not feature into the plot of any of the novels until Players of Gor two years later - remember that title, we'll come back to it - and even then, the full canonical rules have never been established. It would be interesting to compare this interpretation of kaissa to what we know now. But it also confirms what we know - there were people in the tabletop RPG community in the late 70s and early 80s who openly read the Gor books and used them as a source of inspiration at the table. If the kaissa from the Pegasus article is intended as a minigame as part of an existing campaign, it may indicate that people then were even using D&D or other RPGs to play campaigns in the world of Gor.

What about across the pond? I've long posited the existence of a British old school tradition, linked to but possessing distinct qualities from its American counterpart. There, too, Gor was known and accepted in the gaming sphere. Both Rick Priestly
and Tony Ackland note Gor among the books they read in developing Warhammer in this interview; Ackland in particular allegedly designed Warhammer's war eagles after the tarns, but I was unable to find a source to back up this anecdote. To me, though, the clearest sign of Gorean DNA in Warhammer isn't the war eagles, but something else entirely: the Skaven.

This book walked so
Vermintide could run.

Yes! Numerous people have written on the various sources that came together to form the Skaven over the years. And, while I don't think anyone involved in their development confirmed this one way or another, I would not be surprised if Gor was one of those sources.

You see, in 1984's Players of Gor, one minor character is Nim Nim, a slave who belongs to a race known as "the Urt People." Nim Nim is a fairly minor character, all things considered. He only appears in one book, and we never meet any other Urt People before or since. However, from his example, we do know that such a race exists in the setting, and are described as having hairy bodies, large eyes, narrow faces, a hunched stance, and a habit of travelling in large packs. It should be noted that in Gor's ecology of made-up animals, an urt is a small rodent pest that takes the role a rat would on Earth. Thus, the Urt People are essentially rat people (I should now clarify, for the sanity of my readers, that although Nim Nim is a slave, there is no indication he is a pleasure slave; as I said before, that is not all slavery on Gor is about). They debuted in a book that came out two years before the Skaven first debuted in "Vengeance of the Lichemaster," a Warhammer scenario published in the Citadel Spring Journal.

None of this means anything on its own - there have been many examples of rat people popping up in fantasy. However, the Urt People speak in a particular dialect that includes repeating most things they say twice, much like Skaven are known for doing.

"What do they call you here?" I asked.

"Nim, Nim," it said.

"I am called Bosk," I said.

"Bosk, Bosk," it said. "Nice Bosk. Pretty Bosk. More larma! More larma!"

I gave the creature more of the hard larma.

"Good Bosk, nice Bosk," it said.

I handed it another bit of larma.

"Bosk want escape?" it asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Bad men want do terrible thing to Bosk," it said.

"What?" I asked.

"Nim Nim afraid talk," it said.

I did not press the creature.

"Few cells have table," it said, fearfully. "Bosk not chained."

I nodded. "I think I understand," I said. Not being chained, and because of the table, I had been able to witness the cruel spectacle in the courtyard. That I supposed now, given the hints of the small creature, was perhaps intended to give me something to think about. I shuddered. Much hatred must I be borne in this place.

"More larma!" said the creature. "More larma!"

I gave it some more larma. There was not much left. "They intend to use me in the baiting pit," I speculated.

"No," said the creature. "Worse. Far worse. Nim Nim help."

"I don't understand," I said.

"Bosk want escape?" it asked.

"Yes," I said.

"More larma," it said. "More larma!"

I gave it the last of the larma.

"Bosk want escape?" it asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Nim Nim help," it said.

(I brought this up to Gideon in the comments of a now-deleted post on the history of the Skaven at Awesome Lies, one of the best blogs out there for Warhammer history, and he actually went back and edited his post to mention the Urt People. Alas, he's dealing with technical issues that prevent me from linking that one. So you get the full quote to see what I'm talking about.)

Now, Skaven would not develop these particular speech patterns until later, with the Kaleb Daark comics. But knowing the time frame, and the fact that people at Games Workshop did read Gor novels and considered them an influence, it seems reasonable to theorize that Nim Nim was on the writers' minds when they needed to come up with a distinct speech pattern for a rat-like humanoid. In all other regards, Urt People are nothing like Skaven - they certainly don't seem to be a threat to any Gorean city, and don't appear particularly warlike - but the similarities cannot be denied.

Whether one likes the series or not, it is inarguable that Gor was one of the many sources that informed the early development of tabletop gaming as a community, and the tropes, stories, and settings that grew during this era. At this time, it was not particularly regarded as anything to be ashamed of or to reject, and was mined for inspiration just as much as other works of the genre. Regardless of whether or not we feel this source material is offensive, obscene, or objectionable, we shouldn't bury the truth. I think it's important to recognize that Gor did play a role in the perfect storm that allowed tabletop RPGs to flourish, and that it is a part of the canon of inspirational material that underpinned D&D and beyond, for better or for worse.

But why Gor? Was it simply the fact that the people behind the scene would read any fantasy literature they could get there hands on?

I think there's more to it than that. Gor, in my opinion, is actually a very gameable setting. I don't doubt that in those days, more than a few would-be DMs looked at the books as a source of inspiration, either in terms of the ideas contained within themselves or how they were presented. With its focus on worldbuilding, I can easily see how it would appeal to the same sorts of people interested in the lore of TRPG settings. Even I have a hard time reading Gor lore and not thinking of ways it could drive scenarios at the table. And in my next few posts, I'm going to shed light on why. See you next time!

In Defense of Gor, Part 1: Addressing Misconceptions

Also, no one feels the need to hesitate
about defending Forgotten Realms -
and I could tell you some things.

A while back, as a Christmas present, I got a set of Attillan Rough Riders for Warhammer 40,000. As-is, they don't really fit with any of the projects I'm working on at the moment, but they do look pretty cool, and I've been able to incorporate some of the parts into a few kitbashes. But in doing so, an idea sprung into my head - the parts, or at the very least some of the heads, would be a decent base for kitbashing an army of Wagon People from one of my biggest guilty pleasures in fantasy literature - John Norman's Chronicles of Gor.

Yes, that Gor.

I'm willing to bet that most people reading this have never heard of Gor, or have only heard it as the most profane and reprehensible hate literature in existence. Anyone who brings it up these days is either a fan of the books or doing so disparagingly, and the former category have essentially cordoned themselves off from the rest of society so as to be impenetrable to outsiders. Even 1d4chan/1d6chan, normally the South Park of the TRPG community when it comes to shock humor, has an article on the series that's one of their most vitriolic.

What might surprise you is that things weren't always this way. In fact, Gor was surprisingly influential in the early science fiction and fantasy communities - and, yes, that includes the early tabletop gaming community. It was never exactly mainstream, but it did have its influence, and there was a time where you could say you were a fan of Gor and people wouldn't recoil from you making the sign of the cross. It even got a few (very bad) film adaptations, one of which made it onto Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Outlaw, S05 E19 - it has absolutely nothing to do with the source material, but Jack Palance is in it, with predictable results).

And you know what? I know where those early names in the community were coming from - because Gor might well be one of the most gameable settings out there.

Let me back up a little, though. And put down those torches and pitchforks. Let me answer a few questions, and hopefully we can come away with a little more understanding.

What's a Gor?

A Beastman warrior, forming the majority of the Brayherds of Chaos, which have threatened the Empire for generations.

Okay, but all jokes aside. Chronicles of Gor is a long-running series of pulp sword-and-planet novels (a la John Carter of Mars) written by John Norman, starting with Tarnsman of Gor in 1966, and still being published to this day. Not all the stories feature the same characters or narrative, but they largely concern a university professor who is abducted by aliens and taken to a planet called Gor, orbiting the Earth on the other side of the sun and inhabited by the descendants of various human civilizations from throughout history coexisting at a roughly Iron Age technology level, where he becomes a powerful warlord.

Okay. What's so bad about that?

So to understand why Gor developed the reputation that it did, you need to understand the context surrounding it.

See, the books themselves are not really very good. The writing is dry, and the stories are largely an excuse to get the characters from place to place. But what really sets it apart is the worldbuilding. The world of Gor is incredibly intricate and detailed, and large swathes of the books are devoted to detailing different parts of the setting, its various cultures, and their practices.

It just so happens that these practices involve slavery, including sexual slavery. John Norman was writing in the time of the Sexual Revolution, and he has a few nonfiction publications exploring the rising fetish culture of the era. That context shaped the books, too. As such, the books detail various practices the Goreans use to keep, train, and use sex slaves. And when the BDSM community was rising in prominence at the time, many latched onto the descriptions in the books and used the information to shape how they handled things in the bedroom.

It's important to realize that the earlier Gor novels don't focus on this all that much. It's always there, but it's not really given much more focus than, say, Gorean honor culture, or weaponry, or the caste structure. The novels themselves aren't much different than what you would find in, say, a Conan the Barbarian story.

But due to the timing, some of the most prominent and most vocal members of the fandom were those people in the early BDSM community. And for better or worse, John Norman knew his audience. He realized that his books were selling because people read them for the smut, and he started writing more and more for those people specifically, with later books focusing much more on sexual slavery and including more focus on erotica. As such, the perception of Gor shifted to being "a sex thing" more than anything else, and that fact made it harder for outsiders, who might have liked pulp sword-and-planet adventure but had no interest in BDSM, to get involved. This in turn led to the community becoming increasingly tied to fetish culture.

That does not take away from the fact that, if you look past the sex stuff, it's still a wonderfully detailed, evocative, and elaborate setting that's just asking to be played in.

But Gor is about how all women should be sex slaves and how the ones that don't want that should be raped until they do!

This gets into the other side of the coin with the changing perceptions of Gor - the books started out as a part of the science fiction and fantasy fandom, but switched focus over time to instead be targeted at the BDSM community. These later books contained material that was characteristic of erotica, particularly BDSM erotica, including depictions of sexual slavery and sexual violence that were intended to titillate readers. But the books were still viewed through the lens, and judged by the standards, of people in the speculative fiction community, where this material was not commonplace. Naturally, this led to people believing that the BDSM content was in some way a reflection of the themes of the stories, or the personal beliefs of their author.

This isn't exactly true, on either aspect. Gor as a setting is not really about sex slavery or misogyny. It is stated on numerous occasions in the books that 98% of Gorean women are free. We don't have a figure for the entire planet, but it is mentioned that about 10% of the population of the city of Ar is made up of slaves - which is proportionate to some estimates of the Roman Empire, if not lower. Most slaves are female, but of these, many of these are used for labor, not sex. It's just that much of the writing focuses on female sex slaves, but this is not stated nor intended to be a representative sample of the norm. Norman focused on it because it sold. And the themes of the stories themselves are not unusual for BDSM erotica - if anything, they're tame by those standards; the books do not go into graphic detail on abusive or degrading practices, and a surprising amount of the sexual content is told through implication and occurs "off-screen." This is more than what can be said about some of the novels your bookstore probably has on the erotica shelf. The Gor novels, then, only seem offensive by the standards of "serious" science fiction.

As for John Norman himself, we have no reason to believe that the content of the later Gor novels is reflective of his personal philosophy. If you look into his nonfiction writings on sex, his outlook is not dissimilar to that of accepted voices in the modern BDSM community. His 1974 book Imaginative Sex focuses on the practice of erotic roleplay, and there he specifically lists consent and trust of one's partner as paramount in such a sexual relationship, as well as the fact that there are boundaries in one's sex life and personal life that must be respected.

In fact, some of his advice is hilariously quaint by modern standards. When discussing BDSM practices, he goes as far as to insist that using an actual whip on your partner is unacceptable; one should instead pretend to whip their partner because the fantasy of being whipped is erotic, but actually evoking physical pain is an inherently abusive act. I've never been to one, but I can say with confidence that if you said that in most BDSM clubs you would be laughed out of the room.

Also fun fact: Imaginative Sex presents several femdom scenarios. Just in case you thought he actually believed the stuff about men being naturally dominant. Sorry, try again.

But isn't there a culture based on Native Americans that are literally called "Red Savages?"

Yeah, I'll give you that one, that's pretty bad. That's why I'd call them Plainsmen if they came up in a game instead. There. Done.

It's important to realize that the Gor novels are products of their time. They were written in the 60s by a man who was born in 1931 - for reference, that's not a baby boomer; boomers are younger than that. Of course they're going to have things that won't fly by modern standards. So do plenty of stories that are beloved by the TRPG community. Kuo-Toa remain a staple of the Monster Manual, and they are based on a story about how mixed race people are disgusting and horrifying. We can accept that times were different then and strive to be better.

But wasn't there a Gorean sex cult involved in human trafficking? And don't a lot of Gorean BDSM people think you shouldn't use safewords?

Yeah, and they're pieces of shit. As previously stated, those people do not represent John Norman's beliefs or vision. There are going to be people like that in any fandom; they shouldn't be allowed to tarnish the good parts of the community. Should we judge D&D players by the standards of that guy who died LARPing in a steam tunnel in the 80s? Oh, wait, people did, and we laugh at them to this day.

But the Gor novels are poorly written anyway!

Yeah, you're not wrong there. John Norman is not a particularly good writer. What he is is a good worldbuilder, and the quality (or lack thereof) of his prose shouldn't devalue the genuinely interesting and gameable ideas he puts forward.

I'm uncomfortable with RPing sex at the table. Especially with strangers.

So am I. But as stated, there is plenty of material in Gor, as a setting, that has nothing to do with sex. There is no reason a Gor campaign has to address the topic of sex at all, let alone BDSM. It's important to know the boundaries of your players and what they're comfortable with and what they aren't (hey, that sounds familiar...). Yes, the official Gor TRPG includes sexual skills. I get why they did that, but I still find that weird and uncomfortable and I wouldn't use them if I was running it.

If you think the entire setting is too closely associated with fetish culture to feel comfortable using it at the table, that's fine. You can always take inspiration from certain parts without using the whole thing. You can just change certain names, and hey, anyone who notices can't call you out on it without outing themselves. There's plenty of ways you can make use of the material and stay well within your comfort zone.

I was in the Gorean RP community and it's full of elitists who think people who don't follow the books exactly are subhuman!

I wouldn't want to play with those people either. Again, we shouldn't let bad actors color a given fandom or community. When I'm running an established setting, regardless of what it is, that is essentially our version of that setting at the table, and canon only matters as long as it's fun. Hell, there are aspects of Gor canon I would do differently (more on that in a future post). Anyone who doesn't like that isn't going to be fun to play around, and games are supposed to be fun, so there's no room for them at the table. You don't have to play with them if it's going to make for a miserable experience.

I'm in the Gorean RP community and I think people who don't follow the books exactly are subhuman! Gor isn't a game, it's a way of life!

Fuck you. Next.

Something something Houseplants of Gor! Hahaha, look at how funny and original I am!

Please, for the love of god, get another joke. People who don't like Gor have fewer jokes than Imperial Guard players or transphobes. Seriously, that was kind of funny in like the 90s, but it doesn't need to get brought up every time someone mentions Gor. Give it a rest.

Well, that does it for the first post in a perhaps ill-advised series of essays. Now that we've got that out of the way, I'm going to devote my next posts in this series to exploring the influence Gor had on the fantasy gaming scene (you'd be surprised!), discussing the factors that make it lend well to RPGs, and highlighting some parts I personally find cool. Stay tuned!

Friday Encounter: Don't Feed the Bears

Here's an encounter that ties into my previous points about how wilderness survival can make for interesting challenges in RPGs, making travel more realistic and engaging. It's best suited for a wilderness location, but could work on a road as well if the party makes camp there, or even in a dungeon with appropriate changes to the fauna in question.

After the PCs make camp and consume their rations, wild animals are attracted to their location. This might happen while they're asleep, in which case anyone on watch will be the first to deal with it, potentially alone - you are keeping track of who's on watch, right? Alternatively, it could happen while the PCs are eating, and now they have to deal with an incursion while they're trying to settle in, which could catch them unawares and underprepared. You can even use this encounter to punish a party that fails to follow proper precautions when setting up camp like keeping food uncovered and accessible. If you have something like this happen to your PCs, your players might see it as a wakeup call to pay closer attention to these matters going forward!

Exactly what shows up is up to you - or your random wildlife encounter tables. There are a number of compelling options here. The most obvious, of course, is bears, as anyone who's ever gone camping (or has read Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque) can tell you. They have several advantages - they're easily attracted to the scent of food, they're dangerous if provoked, and they can make for a tense encounter. This can be a combat encounter, but a more realistic scenario, where the bear doesn't attack on sight and the PCs have to remain still and avoid any sudden movements or loud noises so as not to provoke it, can be just as fun. In a fantasy or sci-fi setting, you even have the option to make it something worse than a bear.

However, it's also valuable to consider other ways curious beasts can impact the party. Even if small animals like rats or raccoons don't pose an obvious threat, they can still make noise (such as by rustling underbrush or dry leaves) that can alert more apparent dangers. If these creatures make off with the food, they could deplete the party's resources, something that could prove just as dangerous in the long run. They may even decide that it's worth following the party if they're a consistent food source, which could prolong the problem, and the PCs might not even know it at first until they notice food keeps going missing and it's suddenly harder to be stealthy. In a more fantastic setting, beings that can speak with animals, like elves or druids, might use these scavengers as a means to spy on the party and report on their doings. There's a lot of possibilities here, which goes to show you how the things they teach you about when going into the outdoors can be mined for exciting gameplay opportunities.

Saga of the Ortegids: Dials and Inspiration

The Saga of the Ortegids is intended as a dialed setting - that is, there are several main streams of inspiration behind it that influence its tone, look, and feel. A DM interested in fine-tuning the details and creating a mood that seems right to them can turn these "dials" up or down, exaggerating or downplaying certain elements to make the setting their own. Trey at Sorcerer's Skull explores a similar paradigm with Star Wars - identifying the main sources of influence as swashbuckling, classic science fiction, Orientalism, and mid-century Americana, and how giving these aspects more or less focus could create a setting still identifiably influenced by Star Wars but with its own distinct flavor. This is a vast oversimplification of Trey's point, but it shaped how I think about Saga of the Ortegids and how it could be approached.

The three major dials of the setting are:

1. Western Dragon Warrior Art

These are the same people -
You probably didn't need me
to tell you that.

As discussed in my last post, the idea behind Saga of the Ortegids as a setting is to create the connective tissue between the art pieces produced by Nintendo, Enix of America, and others to market the Dragon Quest games in the west during the late 80s and early 90s. Nintendo tried very hard to sell people on Dragon Warrior, even giving out cartridges for free with subscriptions to Nintendo Power, and there's a great wealth of art out there that illustrates how I envision the world of the Ortegids looking. The folks over at Dragon's Den, some of the most in-depth archivists of all things Dragon Quest, have been invaluable in this project, and I suggest anyone interested in the subject to click around.

I've seen people describe this art as "a bastardization of Toriyama's art to appeal to western audiences," but that's quite dismissive of the hard work of the artists, and to the audiences they captivated. It also ignores the fact that in Japan, Toriyama's art is considered much less integral to the Dragon Quest experience than it is in the west; there have been numerous projects, including the long-running manga The Adventures of Dai, which he was not involved with at all. What's very interesting to me is that elements of Toriyama's original designs actually crop up quite frequently in this art - the artists clearly knew what they were doing, and wanted to translate the imagery of the series to a different visual style. They could easily have thrown some unrelated fantasy art on the cover, but they didn’t. They used artists who had played the games, or at least saw the original concept art, and reproduced the designs faithfully.

This is, admittedly, a hard dial to turn up. It mostly relies on these images being in the minds of the people at the table, and it's hard to control that unless you use visual aids and handouts (I don't). I would suggest looking at this art as a way to get in the mood. Lean into its visual tropes in your descriptions - shadowy taverns, horned helmets, Moebius-like tall grassy plains. The first two games rewrote all the dialogue in Shakespearean speech, so throwing around some Elizabethan pronouns might help evoke this mood if your players won't kill you for it. Alternatively, you can turn down this dial if you'd rather have a world that looks and feels like Toriyama's depictions, emphasizing the anime influences of the world.

Inspirational Reading: Nintendo Power circa 1989; NES manuals and strategy guides; if you hate yourself you can watch the two Captain N episodes that adapted Dragon Warrior.

2. Norse and Germanic Sagas

The thought that kicked off this whole experiment in the first place was the idle musing I had that the Erdrick Trilogy is an Icelandic saga. I don't know how intentional this was - given the trilogy's use of Norse motifs, it's certainly possible - but structurally and thematically, there are very strong similarities. The conceit of the first three Dragon Quest games is that they take place in the same world(s), generations apart from one another, all following a single lineage of heroes. A constant recurring theme is living up to one's legacy - protagonists of one game must prove their mettle by weighing their deeds against those of their ancestors, which are shown on-screen in other games in the series. Even though DQ3 is the first game chronologically, it too plays with this, as your NPC father and his heroic exploits are constantly mentioned.

This is the same throughline found in Norse sagas, which tend to be genealogical in nature, recounting several successive generations of a given clan and having the actions of one hero resonate through the ages to impact their descendants for good or ill. It grounds the trilogy in the context of a mythic tradition, and that tradition can easily be used to provide color and texture to the setting.

More superficially, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the plot of the original Dragon Quest starts with a warrior arriving in the court of a foreign king, seeking to prove himself so that he can be trusted with dealing with the king's problems with a marauding monster that has broken into his castle. There's a kidnapped princess, which immediately casts things in a fairy-tale lens to most people, but it's also not hard to see the similarities to Beowulf.

If you wanted to play up the higher literary influences on the setting, you could simply throw around more runestones and longboats, but to go a little deeper than that, you could make reference to themes of fate (even better if you call it wyrd) and cite legendary heroes of the past, who may or may not be related to the PCs. Use of the word "hwaet" is optional. Turn this dial down, and you have a setting that pays greater homage to pulp fiction, emphasizing action and exotic locales.

Inspirational Reading: Beowulf; The Saga of the Volsungs; the Kalevala.

3. Sword and Sorcery Fiction

In my previous post, I talked about how Conan the Barbarian does a better job in bringing the basic story beats of Dragon Quest V to the big screen than that game's official movie adaptation does. But it goes both ways, too. Here's another revelation I had - Dragon Quest III is the closest a video game has ever come to capturing Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age.

Yes, I know about Age of Conan and Exiles and all the other official Hyborian Age games, but a significant portion of these games are drawn from the aesthetics of the movies. And I've come to realize on my replay that DQ3 feels very much like Howard's original stories, before Milius and Schwarzenegger's interpretations colored the public perception. As I've discussed on the blog before, the setting of DQ3 is very much a History's Greatest Hits setting, taking an Earth-like map but populating it with areas based on very different eras of history. On your adventure, you encounter characters who appear to be stand-ins for Cleopatra, Henry the Navigator, Galileo, Simon Bolivar(!), and Queen Himiko, among others. Does it make sense for all these people, and the settings they are grounded in, to be around at the same time? Absolutely not, but the game does not care. Much like Howard, it's more concerned with creating a fun venue to have exotic globe-trotting adventures than maintaining internal coherency.

Furthermore, the protagonist of DQ3 can easily be imagined as a Conan figure. Spoilers for a 40-year-old game to follow (for the record, the recent HD remakes did not even bother to try hiding this any more): at the third act of the game, you travel from one world to another, seemingly located on the inside of a hollow planet, which turns out to be the setting of the original two games. By the end of the game, it's become clear that you are in fact the same legendary hero who was mentioned in the first two games and set the legacy their heroes will follow. But this also means that DQ3 is about a hero leaving their homeland, having adventures that span the globe, and then settling in a foreign land to become a figure of legend, much like how Conan left Cimmeria and became the king of Aquilonia.

Also, there's a female pirate captain, and by picking the right dialogue options you can apparently seduce her. I sincerely doubt this was a deliberate nod to Queen of the Black Coast, but it makes for a fortuitous coincidence. The antagonists of Dragon Quest II are a doomsday cult that worships a sinister reptilian god, so there's that.

Luckily, there's a rich vein of imagery associated with pulp sword-and-sorcery stories you can tap into to play up this dial. For more superficial examples, use fewer historical names in favor of imagined two-syllable constructions (bonus points if hyphenated), put in some slave girls, giant snakes, and carnivorous and/or winged apes (both of which, incidentally, appear in the Erdrick Trilogy), and use the term "mighty thews" at least once. Or emphasize the sweeping scope of adventure and the exotic locales it takes place in, and provide the party with plenty of examples to cause mayhem. Turning this dial down will result in a more "highbrow" Saga of the Ortegids, emphasizing its roots in mythic traditions.

Inspirational Reading: Conan the Barbarian (books, comics, and films); Thongor of Lemuria; Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser; that one sadly short-lived Beowulf comic DC did where Grendel kills Satan for favoring Dracula over him.

The Saga of the Ortegids

Know, O prince, that between the years of the fall of the Sons of Aliahan, and the years when the moonless sky drank the Great Pit of Giaga, there was an Age undreamed of, where shining kingdoms lay spread across the worlds above and below like blue mantles beneath the stars - Romalia, Samanao, Ashalam and Baharata, Zipangu with its dark-haired women and towers of dragon-haunted mystery, Edina with its chivalry, Isis that bordered on the rich lands of Portoga, Rhone with its shadow-guarded tombs, Moonbrooke whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Alefgard, reigning supreme in the dreaming heartland. Hither came Erdrick, the Aliahanian - black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of Torland under his sandalled feet.

- The Midenhall Chronicles

This is basically my vision,
summarized in one image.

I don't think I need to introduce that I'm a fan of the Dragon Quest games. I've posted about them many a time, and I maintain to this day that were it not for me playing the third game on the Game Boy Advance as a kid, I would never have become the DM I am now. Not only was that game my first real introduction to an interactive, open-ended game world with player-driven exploration, the excellent Prima strategy guide was a major source of inspiration for my campaigns and homebrew creations. I borrowed a lot of quests, dungeons, items, and locations from that game in my early days.

Now, I would like to explore taking things a step further - creating a full-fledged campaign setting out of the world of Dragon Quest.

I'm not the first person to suggest such a thing. On the subreddit for the series, I've seen a number of players ask for advice on how to take the Dragon Quest games and adapt them to the tabletop. Usually, the advice I see focuses on making D&D play more like a console JRPG, or using a system specifically designed to mimic one.

I get where this line of thinking comes from. In Japan, Dragon Quest is a much bigger phenomenon than it is here, and defined the popular perception of the fantasy genre in the way The Lord of the Rings did in the west. As such, a lot of Japanese fantasy pastiches heavily ape the games, not only in aesthetics but also in its tropes and mechanics. I'd like to do a post on this phenomenon somewhere down the line, but you'll notice, for example, that in a lot of modern fantasy anime like Konosuba, you'll see such things as "heroes" and "monsters" being defined and recognized metaphysical classes of beings ontologically different than regular people or animals, and sometimes even people having recognized "levels." That can all be traced to Dragon Quest - for much of Japan, part of the fantasy genre, at least a very popular subgenre thereof, is things acting like they're in a video game.

I, instead, would like to go in the opposite direction.

Lately, I've been constructing a setting I'm calling The Saga of the Ortegids around this conceit - what happens to the setting of Dragon Quest when anything "video gamey" about it is treated as indeed a construct of game mechanics, rather than a diegetic in-universe truth? Take the maps, the characters, the plots, but strip back the video game artifacts to bring the setting back in line with its roots in classical Western fantasy and TRPGs.

There's more precedent here than you might think. Let's take a trip back in time. Today, in the west, the series is known primarily for its designs courtesy of the famed manga artist Akira Toriyama, better known as the creator of Dragon Ball. In fact, it's so associated with Toriyama that most people don't even know about its other two co-creators, Yuji Horii and Koichi Sugiyama (and if they know the latter, it's mostly as "that guy who said some homophobic things"), despite the fact that in Japan, all three were established as big names by the time the first game came out. Since the original Dragon Quest came out shortly after Dragon Ball started its run, Toriyama was already a household name, and his involvement was a major boost for sales, coupled with advertisements in Shonen Jump, the magazine that Dragon Ball ran in.

However, when the first game was released in the West in 1989 as Dragon Warrior (due to trademark issues with TSR), no one knew who Toriyama was. The game's main selling point in Japan was useless. Instead, the marketing heavily stressed the game's inspiration in tabletop RPGs and classical fantasy, with art inspired by the likes of Larry Elmore. I've seen some people blame the series never catching on stateside on this, but that overlooks the historical context involved. And I do think that the western art is beautiful and evocative in its own right. Consider that these games started coming out on the NES, with limited resources and often highly abstracted 8-bit graphics. For many, art like this was required for players to visualize what was going on. I don't doubt that what American gamers had in their heads back in the late 80s looked much more like Elmore than Toriyama.

My intent, with The Saga of the Ortegids, is to reverse-engineer the world that western players imagined all those years ago in the original Dragon Quest games, and to explore it as a setting for tabletop campaigns. If we prod a bit at the implications underpinning it, it's actually quite a compelling setting, with strong undertones of Norse mythology mixed with Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age and the occasional dash of gonzo pulp, as I'll be elaborating on over the next few posts.

I'd like to set myself some ground rules here:

1. The primary focus here will be on the original three NES titles - the so-called Erdrick Trilogy. This is for a number of reasons. For one, they all take place in the same continuity, whereas the later games are mostly stand-alone affairs. The overarching narrative of the trilogy is also surprisingly akin to a Norse saga, which is something I want to play up. They also were all released for the NES under the Dragon Warrior name (IV was as well, but that one won't fit as nicely), while later titles were not released in the west until much later, and under Toriyama's original art. While I may reference elements from later in the series, they will be used sparingly, with a strong preference toward cosmic entities like gods or demons that could conceivably cross universes. I recognize this disqualifies Dragon Quest V, easily the most sword-and-sorcery-flavored entry in the series (I am of the opinion that 1982's Conan the Barbarian is a better DQ5 movie than the actual DQ5 movie, Your Story), but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
2. The conceit here is that the events of the games are mostly canon, but not necessarily in the way they are portrayed in games. As stated above, game mechanics will be treated as just that, game mechanics; it will be assumed that the way the story actually played out in-universe was more realistic. For instance, "monsters" are not a discrete class of beings as portrayed in later games, but instead refers to a variety of unrelated creatures that might be encountered, as is the case in D&D.

3. 

   Maybe not like a poorly-drawn
   Keanu Reeves, though.

   Similar to the above, in-game graphics are taken to be a representation, not a literal image of how the world looks. Western art, from manuals, box art, posters, and the like, will be treated as being closer to a literal depiction of the setting. Ergo, Erdrick existed, but he did not resemble Gohan (and probably looked quite a bit like John Buscema's Conan, as a matter of fact - there's more to this than the ramblings of a madman, as you'll see).
4. The official English releases of the Dragon Quest series were handled by a different studio from Dragon Quest VIII onward. In my personal opinion, this marked a major decline in quality of the translations, as the studio decided to heavily play up the comedic aspects of the franchise over translating the Japanese script faithfully, adding in jokes in previously dramatic scenes, and renamed most characters and locations. I will be using the English terminology used in the NES and GBC releases wherever possible, both out of personal preference and because these were the versions western audiences would have had access to when the series was marketed using Elmore-style art. You may have noticed that my riff on Howard at the start of this article used a few of the newer names - this is because I feel like some of them work better as names for countries as opposed to cities, but I will still be using the original English names for capitals.
5. On the same lines, there will be a strong preference for using material present in the original NES releases of the original trilogy over that added in later remakes. Only NES content will be treated as guaranteed canon; material from later releases may or may not be used as I see fit.

To close, a visual guide to the project. The world of The Saga of the Ortegids is a world where the heroes look like this:

And battle villains who look like this:

With items that look like this:

In places that look like this:

In scenes that look like this!

Join me in the Year of the Barbarian, as we explore an age undreamed of since 1992!

Friday Encounter: Lost Spellbook

Here's a simple encounter that can fuel further developments in the campaign, and potentially give rise to a recurring adversary for the PCs. It is suited to any environment - in a dungeon, the wilderness, on the road, or possibly even in a town (such as in an alleyway somewhere). To best make use of this encounter, there should be at least one wizard in the party.

One way or another, the party should come across a discarded spellbook somewhere - either cast aside haphazardly, or guarded by some sort of trap or guardian. If a wizard can retrieve the book, and possesses the necessary spell slots and components, they will have access to whatever spells were recorded in its pages and can prepare and cast them.

To make this encounter the most fun, you should plan it in advance so the book contains spells that the wizard in the party does not already know, but that would benefit their character or play style (use your judgment here). This will expand the list of spells at their disposal. Incidentally, this is something I think DMs should do more of to tie PC advancement into the world - why have your players just pick new spells on leveling up when they can find them in books, or learn them from mentors? To make things really fun, include some spells that require spell slots the wizard doesn't have access to at their current level - this will provide an incentive to the player to pursue advancement so they can use their new spells, and gives them something to look forward to.

However, there is always a catch - and the spellbooks of unfamiliar wizards are not things to meddle with so lightly. The spellbook is attuned to its original user - although they may have misplaced it once, as soon as a different mage begins to draw power from the pages, the enchantments written into the book will alert its original owner to its current whereabouts, and that owner will surely be unhappy with something as priceless as a well-crafted spellbook containing years of study falling into the wrong hands.

This is a great way to introduce an rival magic-user to the campaign - ideally, one more learned and powerful than the PC wizard in order to provide some tension (and to explain the presence of higher-level spells - and again, to give the player something to aspire to!). I've deliberately left this open-ended so you can develop an antagonist suited to the PC in question. Their pursuit of the book can easily provide fodder for multiple adventures. They might send their servants after the party to try and retrieve the book, or inflict the PCs with curses or other obstacles. Sooner or later, though, they'll inevitably want to seek the thief out face-to-face for a battle of magical prowess!

The Year of the Gazetteer: A Retrospective

Click here to enlargee

With the Year of the Gazetteer behind us, I'd like to think back on how much it has done for this blog in the last twelve months. We went from averaging about two and a half posts a month in 2022 and 2023 to having at least 10 a month, with 2024 having 149 posts - my most productive year by far. I created 13 hex maps (counting Ochsebad) of various regions in my long-running Lunar Lands setting, which has hosted almost every campaign I've run since middle school - altogether detailing 33,543 hexes and 229,233 square miles of setting. That's an area a little smaller than Madagascar if smushed together, although the areas are not contiguous. I also wrote several articles, including lore, adventure hooks, and homebrew game material, that detailed different parts of my setting, fulfilling the purpose I made this blog for in the first place but never knew where to start with. Keep your eyes out for a Lunar Lands index in the future, where I will catalogue this material.

I learned a couple things along the way. Originally, I intended to use three-mile hexes for every map - I'm inclined to agree with Mythlands' points about this scale - but as I expanded beyond Switzerland-sized Lescatie I realized that it would just be unfeasible to keep making maps in that scale on a regular basis. After the undertaking that was Togarmah, I realized that even doing six-mile-hex maps of many regions was too big to do in detail, and most of the maps are only partial segments of their respective regions. Nevertheless, I still think there's more than enough to last a good few campaigns. Maybe some day I'll go back and fill in the gaps with hex maps of the remaining areas, but for now, it's a project I'm quite satisfied with.

Out of all the maps, the one that's gotten the most attention has been that of the Freikantons, which has sat in my list of most popular posts for some time now. I suspect this comes from its links to Ochsebad, which I submitted for the Summer Lego RPG Setting Jam at DIY & Dragons, realizing how I could contribute to both projects (which was a lot of fun!). Or maybe bitches just love the Old Swiss Confederacy. Who knows.

From here, I want to go from a big success (at the time of this writing, my post on terrain rules for combat is still my biggest success) to what I consider my biggest failed experiment. This didn't happen last year but the year before, but back then, I wrote a post about how the setting of the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica would work well for an OSR campaign. I still think that, but I'm sad to say I don't think that's a campaign that will ever see the light of day. Though the post brought a lot of attention to my blog - even making it onto the OSR subreddit, somehow - a lot of the discourse there made me realize that there is not a lot of overlap between why I enjoyed Madoka Magica and why everyone else did.

I should note that I got into the series very early on in its run, I believe the day it blew up online as soon as the third episode aired (if you know, you know), and at that time, there had not been much in the way of character development; what drew me in was the interesting and very gameable setting and magic system, which seemed like it was going somewhere. I thought that setting would lend itself well to OSR gameplay. However, most of the reception I got was about how OSR systems don't model interpersonal dynamics well, despite me stating this was the aspect of the series I found the weakest. What I realized was that it's been over ten years, and most people now know Madoka Magica for the character-driven show it ended up becoming. I found the setting interesting but the characters unlikeable, whereas the fandom generally finds the characters likeable but the setting uninteresting (or at least unimportant). Nowadays, anyone wanting to play a game in the Madoka Magica universe is probably going to expect a depressed lesbian psychodrama instead of the horror-infused dungeon-delving sandbox about grappling with the limits of your own humanity I wanted to run, and that isn't really the kind of campaign I would be interested in running.

Anyway, I bring all of this up because this experience has taught me absolutely nothing.

Art by Martin Rodriguez

2025: The Year of the Barbarian

Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.

- Robert E. Howard

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

Gee, if only I was a half-naked, super-ripped dude who could solve every single problem with one blow from his enchanted blade, THEN maybe I could get some gasoline and a lower interest rate on my home loan.

- Misterkitty's Stupid Comics

Lately, I've gotten deeply into a specific kind of fantasy. Sword-and-sorcery blood-and-thunder barbarian hero pulp heroic fantasy. The likes of Conan, Kull, Red Sonja, Fafhrd, Thongor, we can offer an honorable mention to Dave. While barbarians in the Lunar Lands tend to look more like ancient Celts or Germanics, I can't deny that I don't love myself a good Frazetta or Vallejo mighty-thewed warrior, in its own context.

I've been getting into not only 30s barbarian pulp, but also 70s barbarian comics, a surprisingly deep genre that Trey at From the Sorcerer's Skull has written plenty about. He's even done some writings of a game meant to emulate that milieu. I have him to credit for introducing me to Arak, Son of Thunder, which would have gotten into the Lunar Lands Appendix N had I not discovered it so recently and had there not been other, longer-standing influences to include It got me thinking of how I could do something like that myself - and, in particular, there are a few settings I've looked at that I feel would lend themselves well to such an approach. Neither are my own creation, but both I feel tap into the well of sword and sorcery goodness in their own ways.

One is a setting from the second big wave of pulp fantasy that I find incredibly gameable, and which has had a much bigger influence on the tabletop RPG world than many people realize, most likely due to its (in my opinion undeserved) bad reputation. The other is a setting I have talked about here on the blog several times already, one which, despite its association with another popular comic artist (to the point where most people overestimate how much involvement he had in it), I think would shine with a reinterpretation in the Mighty Marvel Manner under the theoretical pen of Roy Thomas. I intend to explore each of these in a forthcoming series of posts.

I'll still be posting the occasional Lunar Lands lore, of course - but we'll take a detour that will ring in the Year of the Barbarian! Stay tuned for what's to come!