Thoughts on the British Old School

I first shared this post to the OSR subreddit seven years ago, long before I had a blog. It garnered some very interesting discussion in the day - I even inspired an entire blog centered around the subject that offered some great insights but sadly no longer appears to be online. It's still a topic that I'm interested by. I consider the Lunar Lands to be, spiritually, a setting in the British old-school RPG tradition, as it draws consciously or unconsciously on much of the same ground - and perhaps for that reason, I've felt more of a resonance with British fantasy of the era than with the stuff from across the pond. So I figured it would be helpful to have an archive on my blog.

Some trends in the OSR community that I cited back then aren't quite as relevant these days; the OSR hasn't trended so heavily toward weird fantasy since...what, 2019? But I still think it's helpful to outline the qualities I find a consistent, and identifiable, thread across British fantasy gaming from the 70s to the 90s, and in a place I can easily look up and link to. Besides, I think it's a subject that's still ripe for exploration.

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!

Good Artists Borrow...

This is somewhat of a follow-up to my previous post about the role of "canon lore" as it pertains to TRPGs, and how I care for it (answer: not very much). One thing I admire about the OSR community is their commitment to the open-ended freedom of the hobby - they're not ones to concern themselves with how things "should" be, and they take pride in mixing and matching content from different sources.

You'll often see published adventures being referred to as "modules," and even though that parlance isn't in official use over at Wizards of the Coast, people still use the term to refer to their 5e adventures. This reflects a conception of the purpose of published adventures as being, well, modular - the idea is that they would be quests, encounters, and locations you could drop into an ongoing campaign so you wouldn't have to draw out a bunch of maps in advance. Over time, this gave way to adventures being entire pre-built campaigns expected to be played from start to finish, and with it, some of the do-it-yourself nature of campaign worlds has been lost. But it's definitely not lost in the OSR scene, and often you'll find DMs discussing how they work different modules into their settings.

I use the Lunar Lands to run almost all of my games. This includes campaigns I've run from modules - and I've made use of modules that originally came from a number of different settings and even systems (as Dave Hargrave put it, the numbers don't matter, only the ideas). As a result, my campaign map is a patchwork of original content and stuff taken from various writers. Yes, this does often result in me needing to tweak material to fit my setting - changing NPC names, scaling back the level of magic, and so forth - but I find that can be just as engaging as writing original material. It's like putting pieces of a puzzle together and seeing how well they can fit, and I hope to create something that's more than the sum of its parts.

To put things in perspective, here's a list of the different locations I've used from different modules, and where I placed them in the Lunar Lands. Some of these are locations I've used; others are locations I placed on the map should I need them in any of my sandbox campaigns. I should warn anyone now, this post is not safe for canon purists!

And a big shout-out to Bryce of Ten Foot Pole, who picks up the burden of reviewing more modules than you could expect one man to do so and stay sane. Without him, I wouldn't have known about some of these.

Click to enlarge

Classic Modules

• I've seen it written once that every old-school D&D setting should have the Keep on the Borderlands and the Village of Hommlett in them somewhere, and this is no exception. I placed Hommlett in the territory of Redwald, while the Keep (named Snowhall Keep) is on the border between the Vardessian imperial core and the Ukian March, across from the Caves of Chaos (now named Broken Skull Cavern).
• Although I haven't read as much of the original Clark Ashton Smith stories as I perhaps should, I do find the hex map of Averoigne included in Castle Amber to be a nifty little mini-setting inspired by medieval history and folklore, which of course I can't get enough of. It's been dropped in as the City-State of Vyonnes.
• As an avowed follower of the British Old-School, I have a special soft spot for the modules put out by TSR UK, before they were Games Workshop. I've run The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh in my setting, even before Ghosts of Saltmarsh was released, and the town of Saltmarsh is in the Vardessian province of Gundarsland. Yes, I'm aware it should be Salzsumpf, but my players still called it Saltmarsh and I got used to it.
• As part of a sandbox campaign, I had plans to throw in the Fell Pass from The Dragon issue 32 on the border between Taldameer and Golnir as an obstacle for my players to get past as part of an overland journey to Quel'Ahma. The campaign didn't last that long, unfortunately, but it's still there on the map.
• Little-known fact: during the 2e era, TSR put out a few sourcebooks on gaming in different historical eras. One of them, Charlemagne's Paladins, was based on the early Holy Roman Empire, so naturally I was going to crib from that for Vardessy. The villages of Eigenmacht and Fabelhaft come from one of the modules included - and yes, their names are different German expressions amounting to "not real." Nice try, TSR, but future generations have Google Translate on their side.
• And finally, yes, I did put the Tomb of Horrors in Quel'Ahma. Just in case.

Other Games

• It's no secret that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has been a big influence on my setting, and the game put out some very nice city guides and adventures, so of course I would integrate some of those in my setting. Both the town of Bogenhaufen from Shadow Over Bogenhaufen and the city of Middenheim (renamed Torvaldshaupt to fit with its new status as the center of the cult of the god Torvald) from City of Chaos are included in Vardessy. Similarly, the city of Rolanfels is an adaptation of the very good fan-made guide to Bergsburg you can find here.
• The castle of Corteaguila in Taldameer is based on an old module on Weathertop from Middle-Earth Roleplaying, and is the result of me throwing a landmark on the road for my players on the spot when I didn't have anything prepared. MERP has a number of very handy fortress modules with detailed and realistic maps, so they're helpful for this purpose.
• The city of Sirka in Kvesland is an adaptation of Dave Morris's city of Brymstone for Dragon Warriors. I owe more to Dave than I do to perhaps any other individual creator in the TRPG world, so in terms of if his creations would show up in my setting it was only a matter of "when."

Newer Stuff

• Among one of the campaigns I've run that's been most dear to my heart was a run of 5e's Curse of Strahd, moving the setting of Barovia to a backwater barony in Togarmah. No impenetrable mists here - I don't believe in trapping my players if they're truly not invested, and many stories can attest to how that's more likely to burn players out than make them want to escape, so I just made it part of the material plane. However, I would later discover that Curse of Strahd only details the northern half of the Barovia that was established in previous editions. In order to make use of those materials as well, the southern part - including Immol, Mount Sawtooth, and the village of Krofberg from the 3.5e setting guide - was made into a Vardessian-controlled subdivision of the Togarman March known as Neiderbaroven. On the border is where I set the excellent fan expansion to Curse of Strahd, The Beast of Graenseskov.
• As part of a later campaign taking advantage of the release of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft (one that was actually run by one of my players from the aforementioned campaign), a few other Domains made it into my setting, including Dementlieu being in the City-States and the valley of Tepest, including the village of Viktal, being in Halvardy. It was a great time, and I'm happy to make it canon.
• There's a funny story behind Porto Libre, the capital of Valossa. Green Ronin's Freeport: City of Adventure book(s) is one that hews closely to the old-school ethos of publications being setting-neutral and able to be dropped into any world, and I saw fit to place the city into the Lunar Lands. The only problem...I grew up in Freeport, Maine, and I am incapable of seeing it as a city of adventure. My solution was to rename it and make everything feel slightly Spanish - and, when I already had a Spain stand-in in Taldameer, it eventually evolved into being the capital of an entire fantastic Mexico analogue.
• Similarly, another setting-neutral city - Bard's Gate by Frog God Games - was adapted into the city of Pylithopon in Golnir.
• And, yes, I have something from 4e on here. Horror of horrors! Don't worry, I dislike the system as much as anyone else, but remember what I said about numbers not mattering, only ideas? Reavers of Harkenwold is an interesting module, seeing the PCs gathering allies and waging a guerilla war on a barony taken over by bandits. It's one I hope to run (in 5e) some time, so Harkenwold is here on the map, in Vardessy - the Holy Roman-inspired empire seems like the perfect place for petty coups and robber barons.

The OSR

• I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Dolmenwood - the folkloric, low-fantasy setting is the kind of stuff I want to inject directly into my veins. Naturally, the Duchy of Brackenwold is in the setting as one of the many fiefs of Vardessy. And yes, I do intend to put both Winter's Daughter and Barrowmaze in there too.
• If there's one thing I love, it's modules that present a regional sandbox with a number of areas and sidequests to explore. Curse of Strahd is one - and Dungeon Crawl Classics' The Chained Coffin is another I've had the pleasure to run. The Shudder Mountains has been placed in Vardessy under the name of the Schaderbergen, with the Appalachian influences reskinned to a more ancient Germanic vibe (and a little bit of Pennsylvania Dutch). As for the town of Dondern, that's a special case - although I was inspired by the town of Thundercrack described in The Almanac of the Shudder Mountains included in the boxed set, the description of a town built on platforms over water brought Lake-Town from The Hobbit to mind, and I have the MERP module on it saved up in case I need to represent the town.
• The ruined dwarven hold of Amudid (Thunder Rock) is an adaptation of Sanjikar from the excellent OSR module Mines, Claws, and Princesses - another one I hope to run some time.
• The island of Al-Awali off the coast of Quel'Ahma is based on Kalmatta from The Treasure Vaults of Zadabad - I had to change the name because I kept thinking of olives.
• And you'd better believe that Yoon-Suin and Qelong exist over the sea to the east.

Altogether, it's a diverse bunch - but it's brought us many hours of fun, and I like to think I make it all work. What about you? What modules have you integrated into your game worlds? I'd be interested in seeing what others have made!

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.