Freehanding Gone Wild

So the 35" x 25" aged 60-pound parchment paper arrived.

Map geek excitement building.  Dare I say my scroll case was pitching a tent.

I immediately developed two uses for my humonguous uber-paper for my Dunlyle campaign:

• Tolkeinesque overland maps, in black & white -- and in Judges Guild style, a player's map showing the "known world" for their own use and exploration (and, yes, marking on it!) and my own DM's map;
• Large freehand custom dungeon maps, in 1" = 5' scale for use as a gridless playing surface.  That's right -- no more wet-erase battlemat!  We will play on the map.  I will also take the opportunity to use color (pencils, mainly) where appropriate, though I'm going for a black & white aesthetic generally.

And then, when we're done with a particular dungeon map, the map will represent mapping by the player-characters.  It will be a map-log of the campaign.  I imagine the players will be making various notes on them -- much like their characters would.

Some practical issues -- obviously, I need to figure out a way to photocopy these before the players get their hands on them.  I don't want to have to redraw them.  Also, they are obviously vulnerable to spills, tears, etc.  Then there is the matter of storage -- I'm thinking of either buying a blueprint tube or getting a large luggage-like portfolio to carry them in.  Lastly, in game play I need to figure out a way to cover up the unseen map sections.

I'll post some pictures in my next post.  Exciting stuff -- it's a lot of work but I'm hoping my first playtest of Dunlyle with my home group goes well.  The first set of maps are for the campaign opening -- after that, at the end of each session I'll be asking them their next intentions so I can keep up with the mapping duties.

P.S. Next time, I'll order more paper.  At $.50 per page as of this writing, more than half the cost was shipping and packaging.

Judges Guild Retrospective #4: Tarantis

And so, as promised in my earlier post, a retrospective reivew of Tarantis:

This 1983 publication from Judges Guild was the last of its kind, a city-state guidebook for the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.  Joining the inimitable City State of the Invincible Overlord and the City State of the World Emperor, Tarantis was the third city state to be detailed.  Written by Bob Bledsaw, it bears many marks of his authorship -- namely, attention to detail and a strong sense of setting.  It's also "Bledsawian" in the sense that, like the rest of the Wilderlands, it's a sandbox too.  There are no dungeons detailed here or plotlines to follow.

Overall, I give Tarantis a "C" grade and can only recommend its purchase for collectors and those running a Wilderlands sandbox campaign.

Setting & Flavor

One of the nice things about a Bledsaw work -- you always have a great sense of location.  On the shores of an Eastern subcontinent in the Wilderlands, Tarantis is a port city and home to a people reminiscent of the Turks, the Sumerians, and a dash of distant India.  Bledsaw captures the maritime flavor of the area with a nice historical overview of the area.  Like the other large cities of the Wilderlands, Tarantis is an orderly place with a relatively brutal government with a Lawful Evil / Neutral flavor.  How much of this is a reflection of Bledsaw's politics or worldview is hard to say, but it is a recurring theme in the Wilderlands.

On the edge of an Asiatic wilderness with its own Mongol analogue, Tarantis, while interesting, lacks much of the fantastic whimsy of the City State of the Invincible Overlord.  Rather like the nations of the Kingdoms of Kalamar setting, Tarantis is very much a human-focused nation; the elements of fantasy are few and far between.  With its mercantile/piratical/barbarian-horde-avoiding tone, the area feels more like a low fantasy swords & sandals locale than one where elves and ogres and mind flayers congregate.  That's a minor quibble, but perhaps it's a strength as well -- perhaps Bledsaw deliberately wanted to give "Judges" a low fantasy city option.

Other bits of flavor are sprinkled throughout.  A particular standout is a huge rumor table (provided in a d100 list that is much easier to use than the rumor in the CSIO (which were one rumor per city locale).  The rumors themselves evoke the setting and provide Judges with a huge repository of adventure ideas.

The artwork, all black and white other than the cover, is of fair quality and overall evokes the setting well.  My overall impression is that it is light on art.

Physical Product

You knew this was coming, but here it comes regardless: Tarantis' overall physical presentation is poor, especially by 1983 standards.  Once you get past the single-page glossy color cover sheet, you are dealing with two 96-page newsprint-paper staple-bound books in the traditional JG mold, along with the campaign map (DM/Judge and Player versions).  I find these production values increasingly hard to justify, but JG at this point in their lifespan was trying to keep costs down by having an arrangement with a newspaper printer that did JG stuff "on the side" on the condition that the material be prepped for printing in a precise way, run once on their paper with no do-overs, and be done.  While this low-cost printing strategy kept JG in business in the short-term, it crippled them in the long-term from a competitive standpoint.  It also led to questionable editorial decisions where full-page artwork of dubious quality was slapped into a product to fatten it up so that the manuscript could get to the required number of pages.

Overall then, we are left with a fairly shocking conclusion: that a 1983 JG publication was of lower quality than TSR's original white box OD&D offerings of 1975.  Let that soak in for a moment.

Content & Organization

The maps, as always, are great.  They are as usable now as they were in '83.

My initial beef with Tarantis' content is that a large portion of it is regurgitated, particularly many of the tables and charts.  I estimate that no less than 10-15% of the content (encounter charts, terrain generation, etc.) was previously-published.  More infuriating is that this is content that likely Tarantis buyers already owned by virtue of having a copy of the CSIO, the Campaign Hexagon System, or some of the Wilderlands releases.

On top of that, there is unnecessary content.  Pages and pages are devoted, for instance, to a listing of settlements in the entire 18-map Wilderlands.  How this information was supposed to be useful to a purchaser of one-map Tarantis is beyond me.

Editorially, Bledsaw also fumbled, allowing his military fetish to shine through as he waxes about every significant military unit within Tarantis' military.  Four to five pages are taken up with descriptions of company commanders and their troops with tangential, if any, interest to player-characters adventuring in a typical exploration/dungeon-based sandbox setting.  Those were five pages that reasonable purchasers in 1983 would have wanted back -- pages that could have been used to supply actual adventure-related content.

By way of comparison, the CSIO contained adventure seeds and some blank dungeon maps.  It was screaming for adventure.  Gimme some encounter charts and let's head off to Thunderhold!  Sadly, Tarantis has no adventuring locales even partially described, requiring the DM to do all of the work.  This is not a fatal flaw, but it certainly renders Tarantis less "ready-to-play."

As I have previously explained in other posts, in 1982 JG lost the license to publish gaming materials using  "approved for use with D&D / AD&D."  Thus, Tarantis was printed with the "Universal Fantasy System" imprint, a thinly-veiled attempt to make the game statistics as generic as possible.  Miscellaneous odd statistics were added, rendering characters as a long statblock of sometimes-comprehensible abbreviations.

Which brings me to my final gripe: the organization of the city locales themselves, being laid out as though each were another room in an above ground dungeon.  A rote name-and-description style works for a dungeon because the DM needs to read it a few times to understand the contents so that he can describe it in-game.  Consider, however, how players actually interact with an urban setting.  Unless a given location plays into a particular adventure, all I as DM want to know is the name and personality of the main NPC at the location (so that I can roleplay his part) and what products and services are available at the location.  The game stats of the NPC and remaining fluff (e.g., that the NPC has a chest with 500 gp and a toy doll, etc.) is simply filler that can be placed elsewhere or eliminated entirely.  While town/shopping adventures can be fun for low-level parties, they rarely devolve into wholesale blood lettings involving the shopkeepers.

I am experimenting presently with a facing-page urban layout with the map and key on the left (the key merely identifying the location) and a chart on the right describing the NPCs, products and services, and random encounter chart.

Conclusion: It's a C, and I'm being rather generous.

While it is a useful and evocative product, in retrospect Tarantis is an uneven and rather sad coda to the Wilderlands offerings of Judges Guild.  Not even my nostalgia and love of the Wilderlands and its cartography can get me past the numerous failings of JG's later offerings.

Greyhawk and the Fall of Judges Guild

It's 1983, and Dungeons & Dragons, despite the documented problems within TSR's ownership group, is apparently doing well by all external measures.  Its core gamer base remains in an expansion mode despite the protestations of satan-fearing religious types, and many of the kids and adults who started playing over the prior eight years are clamoring for new and better content and game aids.  While TSR was fighting its own internal battles, a few hundred miles south in Decatur, Illinois, a competitor and sometimes-friendly colleague in the RPG publishing business, Judges Guild, is in deep trouble.

I am not breaking any news here, but my thesis is that JG was at its best in publishing two categories of gaming product: campaign setting content and maps related to the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and game aids (tables, charts, and mapping materials) for use in the Wilderlands or in homebrew settings.  JG was at its weakest, with a few notable exceptions (Tegel Manor and Dark Tower among them), in writing adventures and rules-related offerings.  In this way, JG was a great complimentary publisher to TSR, which had roughly opposite strengths and weaknesses.

To give you an example of why I adore JG campaign materials:

A "Player Map" of Tarantis: Campaign Map Four, printed in 1977

For its time, JG printed wonderful maps.  Not because they were beautiful (though I thought they were), but because they were big, they were on the faux-parchmentish paper, and because you were expected to write on them and actually use them.  The Player Maps were exactly that -- to be filled out as the players explored the unknown, with only a coastline, a few rivers, and some distant mountain ranges to guide them.  Now THAT is how you sandbox, people.

So as you read this post, please don't think I'm dancing on JG's grave.  If anything, I am angry that this company didn't recognize and capitalize on its niche while it had the opportunity.  Bledsaw and Owens, the main operators of JG in the 70s, had a virtual monopoly on officially-licensed campaign settings.  They came up with two fabulous ideas: (1) the Wilderlands itself, a huge sandbox of a game-world (really, about the size of Europe) and (2) an ahead-of-its-time subscription-based publishing strategy to put out setting-related materials, supplemented by the Pegasus magazine, one of the main functions of which was to promote and support the Wilderlands setting.  They had a good plan.  They did not execute the plan.

With respect to the maps of the Wilderlands, 18 campaign maps (with mostly-blank Player versions) were published and distributed on or before 1978.  The often imititated, never duplicated, City State of the Invincible Overlord (launched in 1976) was the centerpiece of the game world.  JG's setting-related offerings (e.g., Modron, Shield Maidens of Sea Rune, Verbosh) often focused on nearby locations within easy reach of the City State.  Thus, in fairness, JG's main intent was in supporting City State-based campaigns, rather than necessarily expanding the Wilderlands.  The Wilderlands' next most substantial content-related expansion arguably was the 1980 release of the City State of the World Emperor, detailing the Overlord's main rival to the West and the surrounding lands.

In prior posts, I have more or less identified the core reasons for Judges Guild's fall (from a product standpoint only; I can't speak to JG's financials or ownership issues), to wit: low-quality and stale production values, poor art, missing-in-action editing, a tendency to regurgitate previously-published material, and a failure to adapt to the rapidly increasing sophistication of TSR's product line (as well as the D&D target market itself) in the early 80s.  The coup de grace, however, was JG's 1982 loss of the license to put the D&D and Advanced D&D logos on its products.  JG already was moving into second-class publisher status; the licensing debacle relegated it to the role of gonzo publisher -- though one with a fairly impressive back catalog.

The Kiss of Death

So in 1983, my guess is that Bob Bledsaw, one of the founders and the remaining owners of JG, decided to stick to what had worked in the past (and frankly, something that capitalized on his best personal skills -- writing and setting design), and published Tarantis, a city-state in the eastern portion of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy. 

At first blush, one would think this was a significant upgrade for JG, which in some sense it was.  A glossy color cover certainly was de rigueur in the early 80's.  As with many JG offerings, however, this was lipstick on a production pig, for under the single-page glossy cover, under the shrink wrap, were two 96-page staple-bound cheap paper books. 

To make matters worse, look what else came out in 1983:

As you will recall, this was the fabulous boxed set for which fans of D&D had been clamoring for years.  It had a polished gazetteer and of course the iconic Darlene Pekul map of the Flanaess.  Tarantis (as good as it is -- see below) -- had no shot.  This was the "game over" moment for JG, because TSR had officially gotten into the campaign setting business.  JG's Wilderlands of High Fantasy had a six-year virtual monopoly on this sub-industry -- and the World of Greyhawk smacked it aside like the proverbial redheaded stepchild.

As a side note, 1983 also saw the release of Ravenloft, which was in itself a seminal moment in the development of D&D.  JG had long since fallen behind the curve on adventure publishing, which TSR absolutely dominated since around 1978 (despite a few Paul Jacquays standout offerings for JG).

Now here's the punchline: remember the date on that Tarantis Player map?  1977.  When was Tarantis published?  1983.  Why did it take Judges Guild six years to publish Tarantis?  Or to put a finer point on it -- why couldn't Judges Guild fully flesh out the Wilderlands with a six year head start?

So to recap -- JG had no D&D license, third-class citizen status amongst the game-buying public, stale production and 1970s sensibilities -- and it lost primacy in its best category.  Frankly, they are fortunate TSR didn't get into the setting business sooner, because if Gygax had published the City of Greyhawk and World of Greyhawk early on in D&D's life-cycle, JG wouldn't have made it past 1978.

In the end, though, Tarantis was a largely forgotten product, which is sad.  As a whole, the Wilderlands is in some ways a superior product to the WoG, especially for OSR players.  I'll post my review of Tarantis in in the coming days.

Edit: a day late and a dollar short: Grognardia's retrospective on the Wilderlands makes many of my points for me -- as usual.  Looks like I'm playing catch-up!

The "Explorer" Wildlands Campaign and the Campaign Hexagon System

I've long been a fan of the D&D campaign based around exploration, both on a micro (dungeon) and macro (wilderness) level.  No publisher highlighted this aspect of D&D better than Judges Guild, whose Wilderlands of High Fantasy setting was built around the idea that there was a lot of unexplored stuff out there.  Sure, there were cities -- big ones, too -- but there was space.  Bob Bledsaw's crowning achievement (other than the City State of the Invincible Overlord) was the Campaign Hexagon System and its specific implementation in the Wilderlands.

Be assured that the system was more than mere wilderness maps on hex paper.  The first benefit of the system was that it was scalar, taking the DM from large-scale campaign hex maps to individual hex maps of a particular campaign hex to two scales of square-grid map for city plans and small scale dungeon floorplans.  Like a nested Russian doll, the map scales all fit within each other.

The second benefit of the system was that Judges Guild published maps and blank sheets (the Fantasy Cartographer's Guide is simply wonderful) for keying said maps in large, easy-to-use booklets, and provided numerous tables and charts to help DMs populate those maps with terrain, features, monsters, and treasures as needed.

Lastly, Bledsaw ensured that all JG "content" publications actually used the Campaign Hexagon system, and took it to the next level with the inclusion of TWO maps for every wilderness area -- a DM's map and a player's map that was blank, other than coastlines and known features.  Talk about an incentive to explore -- there was a whole map to fill out!  And after that, 15 more in the Wilderlands setting.  For my money, the Wilderlands Setting was the ultimate sandbox for OSR-style gaming.  JG products were at their strongest when providing game aids to enable this style of sandbox play.

I am a huge fan of Greyhawk, but the exploration element and sense of the unknown is largely missing (at least in the aboveground of the Eastern Flanaess).  The Greyhawk setting (and Faerun too, for the most part) is one of nations; the Wilderlands is one of wilderness, and is therefore the first setting that comes to mind when the "points of light" concept is bandied about. 

Sadly, exploration as a player and character motivator seemingly became phased out as the game transformed into one of character customization and battlemat-driven tactical combat.  I honestly can't remember the last time someone actually mapped in a 3.x game.  I wonder if a raised-on-4th-edition player would even understand the point of mapping.