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!

An Interview with Lew Pulsipher

 

In researching my post from yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking with Lew Pulsipher, a big name in the early days of White Dwarf and Dragon, as well as the creator of the original bar brawl scenario in White Dwarf issue 11. See here for my initial writings on the subject. With his permission, I've chosen to publish our discussion here.

Lunar Lands: As far as my research has led me to believe, it was you who wrote the first [bar brawl] - assuming, of course, that's the same Lew Pulsipher. I was excited to see that you still had an active presence online, and I felt like it might be of use to gaming historians like me. If it is you, and if you can recall the details, I would like to ask you a few questions on the subject, if you don't mind.

Lew Pulsipher: Yes, that was me, and as far as I know it was the first such for FRPG, though you'll notice from the article that I saw a non-FRPG version of a br brawl and went from there. I tried to turn it into a stand-alone game, but didn't get far enough to playtest it. Now how much I'm going to remember otherwise, 40+ years after, is doubtful. But ask away.

LL: It's nice to be able to hear from someone who was around in shaping the hobby in its early days. Yes, I did see in the article that you had adapted this from a Wild West scenario - which helps point, to me, that this truly is the earliest example of bar brawl scenarios being developed for fantasy RPGs. In that regard, having you as an asset is a valuable one to us historians. This is my first time hearing about you having worked on a standalone game, too! That's quite an interesting what-if. I don't suppose you remember anything about it?

LP: The game was called Troll Tavern. IIRC, Games Workshop asked me to adapt the brawl as a separate game, but they lost interest in it later. It was old-fashioned/clumsy from today’s perspective, I’d do a much better job if I tried it today. Big square grid board depicting a tavern. Like other boardgames, no GameMaster, which made it much more difficult to achieve.

I had to devise parts of a standalone RPG, in effect, to govern movement and combat in the game. Nowadays I have a very basic/minimalist RPG that I’ve tested a few times, that probably derives from all that. It may turn up in a book of reprints of my old articles, if I ever get around to finishing it (both game and book).

LL: As I've discussed, in my research I've found that these articles were published extensively in White Dwarf, and by contrast there doesn't seem to be nearly as many examples in the American gaming sphere at the time - which is why I was surprised to discover, in looking up more information on you, that you're from Detroit! What made you want to publish in White Dwarf, as opposed to The Dragon or another domestic publication? Were you living in Britain at the time, or was there greater cross-pollination across the Atlantic during the 70s?

LP: Born in Detroit but grew up in Ohio, and later in Battle Creek Michigan.

I was researching my doctoral dissertation (“Aircraft and the Royal Navy, 1908-1919”), lived in England three years, married someone I met there in a D&D game. Met Albie Fiore, wrote for Games magazine; and met the GW guys Steve and Ian. It was a natural to submit to White Dwarf.

At one point, GW had the D&D license, and I was writing a supplement for them (similar to the early D&D supplements in booklet form), but then they lost the license.

I did have many articles in Dragon, and other magazines, actually, perhaps tending to be later after I came back to the USA.

LL: Do you know how your article was received? I imagine it must have been quite popular if it spawned so many similar scenarios, and Graeme Davis cites it specifically in his retrospective on Rough Night at the Three Feathers. When subsequent bar brawl scenarios were published, did anyone reach out to you, or get your thoughts on their work? Or was this just something people did without asking any questions? Do you have any experience playing any of the other bar brawl scenarios?

LP: How was it received? Often, authors don’t know, especially when there are no online forums. Some people played some variation at conventions (that I wasn’t involved with), so that’s good. I don’t recall seeing the other versions you mention, certainly haven’t played them. No, no one reached out to me about them - not unusual. Even people who have published Britannia-like boardgames have not reached out to me, not a single one; most don’t even mention Brit in those games.

LL: When I was reading your article in White Dwarf, I was struck by how, despite using D&D rules, it seems much more reminiscent of a wargame, what with having multiple players controlling different sides and giving their orders to the DM independently on pieces of paper. The evolution of D&D from Chainmail is well-documented, but at this point in time, would you say that competitive player-vs-player scenarios like this were still fairly common? Or was this supposed to be more of a minigame built on a D&D chassis, going off of you working on your own game on the subject?

LP: My own game came later. The original D&Ders were from wargame fandom. Some people, including me, always used a square grid to govern movement in encounters. I’ve never been a “theater of the mind” guy, too loosey-goosey. And if you play it as a game, rather than as a storytelling mechanism, it naturally feels like a wargame at times.

I don’t keep track, but I cannot think of many player-vs.-player D&D or RPG scenarios, period. I think that I saw the Wild West scenario, thought it would be interesting to do similar for D&D, and did it, without thought of competitiveness. Not that it’s so much competitive as it is amusing.

LL: I feel like the separation between RPGs and wargames happened later in Britain than it did in the US - Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Fantasy Battle are at least theoretically compatible between each other, for instance, and the first edition of 40k had heavy RPG elements. I don't know if you would know or not, but would you say that there was any sort of regional divide going on? If so, why do you think that the wargaming aspects persisted so much longer in Britain?

LP: Britain has always seemed, to me, to be more interested in miniatures battles than the USA. If you say “wargame” to a Brit, often they’ll think miniatures battles. Say the same to an American, and they’ll think board game battles. The kind of books Don Featherstone wrote were rare in the USA. Perhaps because minis often involve more than two people, while board wargames involve just two, they prospered more in Britain where population density is much higher? Nah, I don’t buy that.

Perhaps because we had Avalon Hill in the USA from an early date, we became wargame oriented? It was a Baby Boomer hobby, here, and didn’t transfer to later generations. Keep in mind, Baby Boomers heard a LOT about World War II (I certainly did, though born six years after it ended).

A big thanks to Dr. Pulsipher for his help in my research on this genre! You can find his own blog here.

A Bar Brawl Addendum

A while back, I posted an article about the forgotten genre of bar brawl scenarios, once a staple feature of White Dwarf. Since then, I've done further research into the topic, and I have more to share.

For starters, a few more examples of this trend. After digging up another post on the subject from Interloper Miniatures, I have discovered that - regrettably - I've overlooked another classic entry in the canon of bar brawls! White Dwarf issue 33 featured another bar brawl scenario entitled Rumble at the Tin Inn, this one for RuneQuest. In addition to showing the breadth of tabletop content that White Dwarf once covered, this gives further indication that bar brawl scenarios were so popular they warranted support for multiple different systems and settings, at least in the British scene. Furthermore, from the scans I've found, Michael Cule, the writer of this adventure, explicitly credits Lew Pulsipher's D&D bar brawl from issue 11, which further points to that scenario being our Patient Zero.

In addition to the other examples I discussed in my previous post, Interloper gives a newer example of the genre in Bust-Up at the Moon and Parrot from Fight On! magazine's issue 11 (fittingly!). I also managed to dig up a retrospective post from Graeme Davis himself, discussing A Rough Night at the Three Feathers. In it, he does in fact cite the trend of previous White Dwarf bar brawl scenarios as inspiring his work, and helpfully names a few more recent examples he's worked on - The Last Resort in Tales of Freeport, Nastassia's Wedding in Pyramid issue 19, and The Edge of Night for third edition WFRP. The latter two use the same setup of a conflict-rife situation with multiple interesting NPCs involved, but move it to different settings by placing the action at a wedding and a ball respectively. I'd be interested in seeing what other situations could lead to a classic bar brawl setup.

If Davis's thoughts on the matter were so readily available, however, it gave me another lead. I decided to go straight to the source and track down anything I could about who wrote these scenarios. In terms of who had an online presence, I could only readily find access to Alan Merrett, one of the credits for Brewhouse Bash in White Dwarf 223, and Lew Pulsipher, the writer of the first bar brawl scenario for D&D in issue 11.

But I was lucky enough to pick their brains, which dug up many interesting details.

Furthermore, I managed to dig up a copy of White Dwarf issue 11 to see the genesis of the bar brawl genre myself. In the introduction, Pulsipher mentions that he decided to base the scenario on a (presumably unpublished) Wild West adventure he had heard of at a Games Day event. So, although we do have precedent for these kinds of games before, the one in issue 11 appears to be the first example of these scenarios in the fantasy genre - something he himself corroborated in my talks with him.

He was not, however, aware of further scenarios being written with his own as a model until I brought it up to him! At the time, it wasn't exactly common practice at White Dwarf to keep writers in the loop of how their articles were received, or to reach out to them when writing derivative works. However, Merrett made it clear that the scenario was quite popular, and that he and others around Games Workshop enjoyed playing it, leading to a proliferation of similar scenarios.

What else immediately struck me about the White Dwarf article is that it appears to play more like a wargame than a traditional RPG scenario - there are only eight NPCs, while 15(!) of the bar-goers are intended to be controlled by different players. Each of these premade characters has their own goals and agenda, some of which conflict directly with those of others, and the adventure instructs each player to write down their actions and hand them to the DM without the knowledge of others at the table. This may suggest why bar brawl scenarios tend to be so chaotic and full of opposing goals, as initially, the roles of the different participants would be taken by players competing against one another.

I find this particularly interesting, because from what I've seen of British gaming, the crossover between wargames and RPGs seemed to have persisted much longer than it did across the Atlantic - for instance, there were at least attempts to ensure cross-compatability of character stats between Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Roleplay, and Rogue Trader notoriously includes many RPG-like elements. Pulsipher's scenario, then, fits naturally into this continuum - a wargame-like scenario using D&D rules (although he emphasized that the idea behind it was more to have fun enjoying the chaos caused by having multiple players involved than to win - which I feel is an admirable goal anyway!). When I spoke to him, he speculated that this may have been a result of the prominence of Avalon Hill leading to board-based wargames becoming more popular in the US than miniatures, or the greater availability of Featherstone books in Europe, but he isn't quite sure about how this came to be himself.

As for the popularity of bar brawl scenarios? Merrett believes that they caught on as much as they did because of the cross-genre universality of a rowdy bar fight. Regardless of what setting you're playing in, there's always room for a bar brawl, and the concept is immediately recognizable. He also posited their utility for RPGs as stemming from the prominence of taverns in the popular imagination of D&D as the starting point to most adventures and as a place to meet patrons, trade, rest, and acquire new skills. To that end, he believed that it was only inevitable that someone would write an adventure centered around a bar brawl - and apparently, among the Games Workshop offices, the idea was popular enough to be recycled multiple times in various forms.

The holy grail of bar brawls?

Not all these examples made it into the pages of White Dwarf. In addition to the unused Dragon Warriors entry I discussed in the previous post, Merrett revealed that Rick Priestly designed a board game version of the concept that was sold exclusively at Games Workshop's in-house bar, Bugman's Bar - and, due to such exclusivity, it's predictably rare today. Similarly, Lew Pulsipher was working on adapting his bar brawl rules to a standalone board game called Troll Tavern, but it never saw the light of day, in part because of the difficulties in adjuciating the chaos that can happen in a bar brawl without a DM.

Regardless, though, his creation definitely cemented itself as an important piece of British gaming history, and the legacy it created is undeniable.

Tomorrow, I'll post the full interview with Lew Pulsipher for the curious. And I'm still working on a related project of my own - so watch this space!

Forgotten Adventure Design: Bar Brawls

I probably don't need to wax poetical about the taxonomy of RPG adventures - people have been doing that far better than I ever could long before I began this blog. We all know the difference between a dungeon crawl, a hexcrawl, and a pointcrawl. One thing I rarely seen being brought up, however, is a type of adventure that used to be quite popular but has since all but disappeared - the bar brawl.

Art by velinov

The idea behind a bar brawl adventure is simple: a tavern setting, and a collection of NPCs (or pregenerated PCs) with distinct personalities and often quite differing views, possibly with some being previously acquainted with others. The implication is that sooner or later - possibly as a result of the PC's actions, or possibly independently of them - everything is going to erupt into violence.

In a way, bar brawls could be considered a sort of mini-sandbox. Although the scope is limited to a single establishment, there is almost never any indication for the DM as to how interactions between the characters are supposed to play out, and any conflict is generated by the interplay between their different traits. This has its ups and downs - they can be daunting for some DMs to run, given the vast array of potential incidents and outcomes and the need to keep track of so many different NPCs, their agendas, and their relationships to each other. But that open-endedness gives them replayability, ensuring no two runs will be the same. They can be fun to sit back and watch the chaos unfold, and the fact that the tension results from the interplay of the characters can help the world feel dynamic and remind players that things go on outside of the personal narratives of their PCs. And, because the action rarely leaves a single tavern room, they're easy to drop into an ongoing campaign whenever the party is at a tavern - or just to use as a self-contained one-shot for a night of inconsequential mayhem.

For whatever reason, these sorts of scenarios were especially popular in British publications during the era of old-school gaming. Despite being American, and despite being introduced to D&D with third edition, I find the British old-school tradition to inform my games more than anything else, and I've posited its existence as a unique phenomenon distinct from American old-school gaming in an old Reddit post, which led to some discussion - Uncaring Cosmos has discussed this subject in great detail, and it's a very good read. Right now, though, I'm looking specifically at the example of bar brawl adventures.

The most famous example would have to be A Rough Night at the Three Feathers from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - in fact, it's so iconic that it's been reprinted time and time again, to the point where modern GMs often don't know how to run it since the times have changed and the context in which it originally existed in has been forgotten. However, when it was first published, it was just one of a multitude of similar scenarios for all sorts of games. Many of these came from the pages of White Dwarf - it was doing this as early as the 11th issue, which featured a bar brawl scenario for D&D. Issue 96 contains another one for WFRP called Mayhem in the Mermaid. And while it was perhaps a bit past the classic era, Issue 223 featured a minigame about drunk, rowdy Orks entitled Brewhouse Bash. While it didn't make it into the final magazine, my spiritual liege Dave Morris was writing up a similar scenario for Dragon Warriors, which he was kind enough to post over on his blog.

What I'm getting at is, back in the 80s, a gamer - at least a British gamer - would have no problem understanding Rough Night because adventures just like it were a regular fixture. But for whatever reason, they seem to have fallen out of favor.

Perhaps the decline of gaming magazines plays a part in this - while these short, simple adventures are perfect for taking up a couple of pages in a periodical, most don't exactly have enough meat on them for a full retail book. But there still are a couple more recent adventures in this vein.

The example adventure included in Machinations of the Space Princess is easily recognizable as a classic bar brawl scenario - although it's rethemed to take place in a seedy space station cantina, it still follows the formula of throwing PCs into a chaotic situation, with plenty of interesting NPCs to spice up the mix. James Raggi's Zak Has Nothing To Do With This Book - while, yes, a puerile example of rage-baiting in reference to the ongoing community discourse at the time - is a servicable example of this kind of scenario if you can look past its deliberately inflammatory title. The Age of Dusk blog describes this as a "powder keg" adventure in its review and cites Rough Night in the comments, which depending on who you ask may be synonymous with or inclusive of bar brawls. And, while I don't know if any of this was deliberate, the (very good!) Labyrinth Lord adventure The Inn of Lost Heroes starts out with two colorful adventuring parties antagonizing each other at a tavern, with the PCs caught in the middle, before everything descends into survival horror. When running it as a Halloween one-shot last year, I couldn't help but notice that the first segment of the adventure could've easily been published in a 1986 issue of White Dwarf.

Perhaps I'll try my hand at writing my own bar brawl adventure. I'd be quite interested in seeing if anyone reading this has any experiences running, playing, or writing scenarios of this sort, or if they know of any other examples out there. But as a bit of gaming history, I feel it's one that bears a mention.