Surprise Kills Obmi

Obmi is dead. That supervillainous boss of the third level of the Castle of the Mad Archmage, uncatchable nemesis of Gary Gygax's players, was rushed in his lair and taken apart by the terrible force of the Muleteers. And they weren't even at full spells and hits. Here's how (spoilers for CotMA obviously).

"Just go right at 'em" - Captain Aubrey

1. Strategic surprise. Good intentions paid off. Over the last few sessions, the adventurers had been probing and chipping away at the force of hobgoblins, bugbears and goblins in the northeast of the level. A rival party, the Lightning's Hand, had meanwhile fallen foul of Obmi; in cleaning out the last of the orcs in the southeast, they ran across the hobgoblins, with whom they thought they had a deal. But Obmi had been doing dungeon diplomacy to unite the humanoid groups, and the hobgoblins turned on the Hand, killing their main fighter with the aid of a hold person spell from their cleric. Fleeing, they ran into the conveniently placed Obmi and his minions, and (seeing as I rolled snake eyes for the success of this encounter, when playing through the actions of the NPC party) had to surrender after some brutal treatment.

The party was originally planning to go after the hobgoblins, at which point the tribe would have sent a runner to warn Obmi, who would have hooked around with his gnoll squad and a couple of other friends to block their retreat. Even with the aid of the Knights of Antonius, a group of holy warriors who were helping them out, this would have been serious Surtrouble for the Muleteers. But then the voice of morality spoke up in the form of Freya, the hermit, who reminded them of their duty to rescue the Hand.

In their reconnaissance the Knights had found a couple of passages forking off with the intersection marked with the dwarven rune for "O." It was there that dungeon doctrine was again ignored, and the Knights and Muleteers split up, each having one passage to search. Luck, too, came into it as the Muleteers picked the one that would lead them straight to Obmi's lab and lair.

2. Tactical surprise. Ordinarily on their way to Obmi's lair the Mules would have run across a small group of orcs, all that remained of the once mighty Grinning Skull tribe, who had be set by Obmi to patrol the maze. However, at the very same time, the goblin runner from the hobgoblins had been banging on one of the one-way doors into the maze, and the orcs were escorting him back to the door of the lair, which a gnoll guard opened.

Just then Titus the gnome and self-styled muleborne knight decided to try to sneak down the corridor behind them, wearing metal armor,and thus failing. "Hey!" The orcs swiveled around and everyone rushed forward, led by Titus, who started incanting the syllables of his Choke spell... only to fail and cast a different random spell of the same level instead at the targets (he must have mispronounced Choke as Shock) ... the most fortuitous Lightning Bolt. Bouncing around in the confined space, the bolt fried all the humanoids and miraculously stopped just short of hitting the caster.

The path to the huge lair room was now clear and everyone rushed in as fast as they could. Five gnolls were at various places in the room, Obmi was over by the wall tormenting one of the Hand party captives, who were all strapped and locked into various devices and tables. A huge swiveling brass machine with a pointy end was installed in the middle of the room. Bort the fighter, running to engage Obmi, placed himself in a position to fight the six remaining gnolls as they tried to come out of their adjacent barracks room. This was a crucial if unwitting decision that gave the party tactical control of the room.

With a few good decisions and strokes of luck the party had given themselves a huge positional advantage, which was to widen when Obmi, acting out a tragic flaw, chose to use his invisibility ring and boots of speed not to get away, but to make it to his pride and joy, the repulsor ray machine in the middle of the room. (This flaw was activated by some unusually high morale rolls I threw for Obmi.) The beam pushed back a column of party reinforcements as they tried to enter the room, but the energy wizard Orbit managed to get off a Shatter spell that blew a hose on the contraption. With most of the gnolls in the lair now dead, and the rest hemmed into their barracks, the party swarmed around the dwarf, cutting off his escape and eventually finishing him.

I could have further ruled that the invisibility and boots of speed would allow Obmi to slip past engaging enemies, but the result felt like a just reward for audacious action, phenomenal luck, and the folly of the usually slippery villain. Things would have been very different if Obmi had been shielded by a swarm of gnolls and able to pound the front line with his returnng hammer. What I observed years ago was borne out that day: the advantage of surprise is not always to the home team.

Street Guide Without Streets

Cities in adventure games demand a different logic than underground or wilderness adventures. The house-to-house detail that has traditionally characterized city supplements doesn't work and isn't needed, as Zak S first figured out in Vornheim.

Is all of this strictly necessary?

Wildernesses or dungeons are places where access is difficult (so mapping them is fun),but cities are places usually set up so that access is easy through a network of streets (so mapping them is pointless). There is discovery, but it doesn't follow geographical lines. The exceptions to openness -- forbidden cities of privilege; no-go slums of peril -- prove the rule. These areas cease to work as cities do in an adventure game, and begin to work as dungeons, like the hoary cliches of the monster-infested urban sewers or necropolis.

In my own Muleteers campaign, built from Joe Bloch's works, the Grey City counterpoises the tentpole dungeon of the Mad Archmage. Visits to the city sometimes end in impatience to get on with the adventuring, but still can take up to half of a four-hour session. But even though I'm using a detailed street map of the place, the geography never seems to stick, I don't keep a good idea of what shops are where, what they are like, and so on.

This suggests that I need a way to write down and systematize what matters in the city experience.

The Muleteers use the city for the following activities:

1. Buying equipment
2. Selling and identifying treasure finds
3. Leveling up (taking one day per new level, in my rules)
4. Carousing and other means of spending money for experience
5. Brokering deals with religious, trade, scholarly and government bodies
6. In the campaign's early days (less so now, as action has concentrated onto the megadungeon and frontier village), mini-misadventures from random encounters in the streets

For the first five, the journey and exact location are not as important as what can be done there. The random happenings (#6) do sometimes spill out into a full-fledged chase, but for this only a vague sense of geography is needed: the city is divided into districts; each district's streets all connect to each other and the process of finding out where things are is usually trivial; only between districts are there changes of atmosphere, walls and divisions.

The result is this template and guide (click to enlarge):

You'll see that with access to private and secret establishments, there is a process of discovery in the city too, but it works differently. The examples give an idea how: random encounters and establishments, if treated right, give clues and leads to others. This can be expanded to whole districts of social elites being off-limits unless you know the right people. I'm going to try this method at the next city phase of our adventures and see how it turns out.

Getting Bothered on the Street of Most Gods

In my Mad Archmage campaign I have recently found it appropriate to represent the nearby Grey City by inverting Greyhawk Grognard's reconstruction of Gygaxian Greyhawk, from several sources. However, the players had previously run across a "Street of Most Gods" that did not exist canonically, so I had to take a sparse quarter just south (formerly north) of the Citadel, draw in some buildings, and designate it thus.

"Most Gods" excludes the obviously demonic and Chaotic cults, the beast cults, nature and druidical religions (some have shrines in the park), gods of faraway nations (some shrines in the Foreign Quarter) and various other misfits. The gods themselves are a mixture of historical, fictional, and the best of Greyhawk. Some, like Crom, Ygg and various saints, have a long pedigree across my campaigns.


The key to the Street may also be used as a botherment table. Roll d% on it, with the stipulation that 31-40 involves a vicarious conflict between two or more religions (roll twice, and twice more if 31-40 show up, etc.) A result of 1-30 means you are approached by a proselytizing member of that religion, who makes a morale roll to determine dedication (low: easily dismissed; medium: moderately patient; high: dogged and annoying) and a reaction roll to determine approach (low: overbearing; medium: reasonable; high: ingratiating).

1. The Grey Goddess (One of the two patrons of the city, beloved of the common folk and of those grander folk running for office, she watches over the river side to the west. Her clergy are not against trade, but tend to support aggressive policies regarding the neighboring towns and regions.)

2. The Lake Goddess (As the Grey Goddess but watching over the lake side, and with a more conciliatory, free-trade politics. Supporters of the two goddesses sometimes come to heated discussion and blows, especially at sporting events and festivals. )

3. Ishtar (Childbirth, motherhood. Propitiated in the practicalities of bearing and raising children.)

4. The Cyprian (Love, sex, prostitution - the latter two of which are carried out as sacraments within. Unspeakable carvings and murals on the temple facade mean that chaste folks often enter the Street through the southern entrances).

5. The Iron God (Metallurgy, endurance. Little is known of this mysterious deity except for the large and curiously stylized iron statue that dwells within.)

6. Arcade of Petty Gods (Storefront chapels, rented by the month. Choose or invent an implausible yet sometimes-useful deity on the spot.)

7. The Sisters Three (Freya, maiden; Urda, mother; Yaga, crone. These are a trinity of Northern goddesses with a grim and fatalistic outlook on life, but nonetheless they help those who deserve it.)

8. Ygg (Knowledge, at any price. This Northern god of caves and valleys exhorts his followers to seek out experience and understanding, but seems to be open to all kind of legends and hearsay. Priests rise in the ranks by telling of seven wonders they have seen since their last elevation, undergoing a physical ordeal that gets tougher as they rise higher.)

9. Crom (Strength and self-reliance. This Northern god is the rival of Ygg and prefers a straightforward approach, being associated with bare skin, big weapons and mountain tops.)

10. Dame Fortuna (Fate and fortune. A remote goddess who supposedly controls all manner of fates, dooms and coincidences. People propitiate her and her insane consort Tirtir of the Wheel, in spite of the general belief that doing so has no effect on the ordainments of the future.)

11. Ralishaz (Bad luck and tragedy. Often an offering to Fortuna will be followed by a visit to this temple, adjacent, to ensure the avoidance of misfortune as well as the courting of good fortune. Invoked in the same spirit as our world invokes Murphy's law.)

12. Diabolic Cathedral (Closed by decree of the Council, ostensibly because it was being operated as an untaxed saloon, prostibulum and gambling den, in spite of  -- or because of? -- its dedication to the netherworld forces that justify Law by tempting man to sin and punishing him for it.)

13. The Reaper (Serenity in death. Opposed to Chaos, demons and the undead but not strictly lawful and more than a little evil. Assassins, morticians, mourners and the suicidal are the congregation. Self-sacrifice is a common rite.)

14. Hextor (Violence, brutality, war. A god of the Great Kingdom, formerly Great Empire, to the east. The cruellest of the three gods of war, worshipped by soldiers and bodyguards.)

15. The Silent God (Commerce and crime. This huge and wealthy temple shows the effect of pitting merchants and thieves against each other to gain the Silent God's favor in their struggle. Together with Grey and Lake Goddesses, one of those deities worshipped chiefly within the Grey City.)

16. Bellona (Strategy, competition, war. A neutral presence worshipped mainly by mercenary officers, as well as by game players, suitors, merchants, and politicians.)

17. Pholtus of the Blinding Light (A Lawful god whose followers believe other gods don’t exist, and are most intemperate in their fanaticism, especially towards other "backsliding" Law believers.)

18. Hieroneus (The Lawful god of holy war, righteousness, the brother of Hextor and another Great Kingdom god, worshipped by paladins and the self-styled righteous.)

19. St. Cuthbert (A Lawful saint of tradition and determination, known for a curmudgeonly outlook.)

20. St. Gary (A strange but Lawful cult of self-knowledge that for a fee will characterize you in terms of "alignment," "abilities," "level" and other abstruse and divisive concepts. Their gospel of success and self-improvement appeals to entrepreneurs and adventurers.)

21. Great Brigid (The patron of sanctified motherhood. She is the Lawful alternative to both Ishtar and the Cyprian and her clergy pushes a judgmental, marriage-and-chastity line heavily.)

22. St. Eulena (A Lawful figure of mercy, all-forgiving, compassionate and nonviolent, which would be great except she expects you to behave the same way.)

23. Celestian (An old and benevolent if remote god, associated with night and stars, cosmic vision, and far travels. The dome of his temple is an observatory, and the spire a curious structure rumored to be a dock for some kind of aerial vessel; the interior continues the cosmic theme.)

24. Fharlanghn (God of the road and terrestrial journeys, kind but not lawful. Merchants, teamsters and adventurers honor him. His temple has many entrances, and devotion is shown by walking the paths within correctly.)

25. Tritherea (Goddess of the three beasts, which represent land, sky and sea. She promotes heroism and freedom, appealing to Robin Hood types and those who stand to benefit from such activity. Viewed as subversive by the Council, the temple stands under constant surveillance and possibly infiltration.)

26. Arcade of Dead Gods (Eerie and mostly deserted enclosed arcade memorializing gods who have died, or at least vacated this plane, due to lack of patronage. Clergy are usually lone individuals who seek to re-awaken the god through group worship.)

27. Arcade of Apocryphal Saints (Maintained by popular contribution and studiously ignored by the Church, this arcade holds chapels to popular but un-canonical religious figures such as SS. Hermas, Eracle, Uncumber, Gumption, Guinefort the Hound, Foutin, Amaro, Santa Muerte, etc.)

28-30: Grand Cathedral of Law: dedicated to the Spirit of Law, to the Pancreator, and to all canonical saints and Lawful gods without a separate temple.

Another Greyhawk-Chicago Correspondence

Yes, it's widely known that Gary Gygax explicitly said that the city of Greyhawk in his original campaign was located on an altered map of North America where Chicago was, and Dyvers, likewise, was based on the location of Milwaukee.

But I don't think it's been observed that when it came time for him to draw the city ...


(based on the map from City of Hawks, which he approved)

it looks a bit like an upside-down map of Chicago's downtown area, "The Loop," with a large body of fresh water on one side and a smaller river curving around to enclose the city proper:

This also lends credence to the idea that on a larger scale, the World of Greyhawk more or less corresponds to an upside-down North America, with snippets of right-side-up geography like Lake Superior thrown in.

Castle of the Mad Archmage (2014): Short Review

This weekend BRW Publishing finally released the commercial version of Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage megadungeon. I've been running people through (mostly) my homemade level one and the shallower levels of the free fan-release since I started DMing again, so I immediately ordered it from RPGNow in pdf and print.

Really, the Castle's unique virtue is that it's truly capable of taking an old-school party from level 1 to name level, with loads left over. No other product can make that boast. With 12 major levels averaging over 150 areas each, and abounding in special areas and challenges, the Castle is first past the post and still uncontested as a truly complete Old School megadungeon experience.

The other part of the Castle's appeal is that it's constructed, where possible, to match the reports and reminiscences of Gary Gygax and his players about the original Castle Greyhawk dungeon. Here you'll find analogues of the Great Stone Face, the Man of Gold, the chute to China, Obmi the dwarf, and many other legendary features. In the BRW release, necessarily so, the Greyhawk intellectual-property serial numbers have been filed off, but I suppose those who care about the difference will by definition know enough about the old Greyhawk campaign to make their own substitutions in play.

The main added material beyond the older, free pdf includes a complete upper castle works and Level 1, both of which are nicely designed, with a mix of weak monsters, powerful NPCs, and factions who -- much as in the original Castle Greyhawk -- extort tolls and tribute from parties venturing deeper. There's also an illustration booklet, Tomb of Horrors style, for some of the key sights in the dungeon. A nice touch, although I'm thinking some of the pages could have been used to illustrate difficult-to-describe puzzles like the Greek letter or ping-pong ones, rather than dungeon landmarks that can more easily be described verbally.

For the most part, except for some format changes and minor rewriting, the levels and rooms appear much the the same as in the previous product, at least from my perusal of the most familiar Level 2. There are expanded notes on play, including a huge table of rumors, a selection of quests, and improved information about the factions on each level. A nice touch at the start of each level chapter is a miniature map showing the location of any factions or special areas. The full-sized maps have their own booklet and are resized to fit a two-page spread. That's very useful, although I miss the grayscale rather than black background of the maps, as being easier to write notes on.

And notes there will be, because as before, much of the dungeon is given over to essentially empty or undetailed rooms, with one or two sentences describing by-the-book inhabitants and treasure. Many of the tricks and puzzles seem dead-dropped into the dungeon, bringing to mind the likes of White Plume Mountain. Along with certain features, these give a decidedly goofy feel to the environment; nonsense limericks, skeletal musicians, clown murals, and the like.

There's a conversation going on about hacking megadungeons, and I'll write soon about what I do to add  to the Castle myself. One thing to realize - there's not much to choose between a set of rooms left empty for the filling, versus a set of rooms filled with random monsters, undetailed treasure, clues and dungeon dressing features that lead nowhere, and so on. While the Castle has many subtly interesting situations and set-pieces, there is also a lot of filler in the spaces. Still, the thing is finished and out there, so I can't criticize too much ...

In conclusion, serious old school aficionados should put the Castle at the top of their shopping lists this year. Again ... there is nothing else like it. The full set of pdfs is $20 and the full set of softcover books (plus pdfs) will run you about twice that, plus shipping.

The Mississippi Sea

As Joe Bloch has observed, the Greyhawk map has a lot of interesting coastline, unlike boring maps like Middle Earth. This is, perhaps, just a conscious design decision made by Gary Gygax as he transitioned his Greyhawk campaign from the map of North America to an actual commercial product. In place of a big chunk of land in the Flanaess' equivalent of the US South and Midwest, we have a great two-armed sea.

Great maps by Anne B Meyer.

Could be this a homage to the great inland sea that spread over the Midwest in Cretaceous times? Perhaps, but only indirectly. In fact, the sea was far to the west of the present-day Great Lakes. Still, the idea of a North American inland sea would have been known in the 60's from archeology. Its receding phase as the Pierre Sea, shown below in a map by Ron Blakeley, presents an intriguing profile in the spirit of the Greyhawk map.

A geographically closer influence, perhaps, is the idea that the Mississippi Plain which stretches up to southern Illinois, surrounded by hills and bluffs on every side, is in danger of becoming submerged. Although mass media often focus on the possibility that California might drown or become an island from the activity of the San Andreas Fault, another equally severe seismic zone is located along the Mississippi. The New Madrid earthquakes in 1811-1812 were the strongest and most extensive recorded in North America.

Perhaps on the basis of this anxiety, a series of psychics since at least 1983 have produced remarkably similar-looking visionary maps of the future North America with huge inundations of California and the Mississippi Valley, often connecting the Great Lakes with the Gulf of Mexico. A risen Atlantis, accounting for sea level rises elsewhere, is optional. A handy compilation of these is provided by a diligent poster on the David Icke forums, although the bloom somewhat goes off these prophecies when you notice that they were all predicted for different dates ranging from 1994 to 2012. Although a little late to have influenced Greyhawk, Gygax had avowedly read up on Theosophy and may have come across the 1940's cataclysmic geographical prophecies of the psychic Edgar Cayce, who attributed his "future map" with a marine Mississippi to a coming pole shift:

Of course, geological facts make the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys the most low-lying parts of the Midwest, so it is no great stretch to imagine them as the basis for a more watery continent. Indeed, extreme global warming scenarios also put Chicago - the location for Greyhawk in the early campaign - in a position to trade between lakes and sea, with the Ozarks standing in for the Pomarj peninsula:

Conspiracy believers, however, generally reject global warming and see the coming Mississippi Sea as the plot of a purposefully evil government, with levee demolitions, sinkholes and FEMA preparations all pointing to the cataclysm, in which a polar shift may or may not be involved. Thus we stand in the 21st Century.

Anyway! All of this suggests a slightly different look to the North American Greyhawk map. Greyhawk and Dyvers reclaim their positions as Chicago and Milwaukee, respectively, and some combination of seismic activity and sea level rise produces this geography, on a scale of 125 miles to the hex:

The three cities of the Greyhawk campaign, here, are a buffer between the proud kingdom of Acrondy and the plains realms to the west, while also profiting from north-south trade in raw materials from the woods and mines of the Lakes region. Ashland, from the etymology of Nashville, is a secretive realm ruled by druids and bards, where something real bad happened to blast the mountains in the east. The Four Winds kingdom is a nod to the etymology of Kansas, while Acrondy is a breakaway state from the declining Great Kingdom over the mountains. And somewhere in Manitoba, Iuz weaves his plots ...

North American Greyhawk

The clearest sign that Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk was based on an earlier campaign that used a map of North America is the Lake Superior/Nyr Dyv resemblance.

Recently, I decided to develop a little more the small campaign world that had grown up around the university gaming society's forays into the Castle of the Mad Archmage. Player-named, a village named Linton and a town named Burwell coexisted with the "Grey City" (Greyhawk with numbers filed off). I wanted the world to have the same feel, looking like a slightly different derivation of Gygax's North America campaign with an homage as transparent as the "Mad Archmage" dungeon itself.

Southern Wisconsin, then, is the new location of the Grey City, and it sits in the hills at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi. Except that, using the same translation gimmick as the Atlas of True Names, it is now at the Great Grand River and the Redley (red-lay). It benefits from brisk river trade between the realms of Blackmoor up the river, the lands of Ernst to the east, and the cities downriver.

Lake Superior: Lake of Unknown depths

Lake Michigan: Lake of Fog (undoubtedly sorcerous)

Site of Chicago: Ruins of the Stinking City

Lake Geneva: Shrine of St. Cuthbert and the location of many pilgrimages and conclaves.

But what about points south? Well, that is where the real craziness comes in. Get ready for psychic visions, conspiratoids, and Cretaceous hijinks as ... the Bay gets Woolly, next time on Roles, Rules and Rolls!

Dungeon Poetics

When I used to write poetry (that other, extinct hobby of mine that hewed closer to my twentysomething New York idea of adulthood) I ended up setting two rules for myself: Write concisely; avoid cliches. In hindsight I would have done well to add a third: The damn thing must still mean something.

These laws work equally well for adventure writing. This genre, too, requires striking imagery to succeed; rewards going behind the scenes to find new connections and insights. And yes, the damn thing must still mean something - how you get there is your own concern, but imaginative fiction does not simply mean pulling six-legged animals named smeerps out of a hat and making them whistle Dixie. There has to be some evocative link to a consistent and rooted world, no matter how strange or oblique, to make it work.

I realized this connection after Zak S recently dicussed the legendary megadungeon disappointments, 3rd edition Castle Greyhawk and 2nd edition Undermountain. The former was shown up to be full of cliches and meaningless misses, the latter full of padding.

But besides mining the "gem" ideas from those clunkers, what would it take to make them more meaningful? Let's take a closer look at Old-School whipping boy Undermountain - specifically, the first room of the first level - then Old School Revival whipping boy Dwimmermount - three rooms from a page chosen at random. I can't get the image to size just right, so you're probably going to have to click to read it.

Even leaving out the boxed text, Ed Greenwood's Undermountain room 1 presents a no-fun-house of random features that lead nowhere and contribute nothing to the sense of gradual discovery through exploration. When the off-message and filler material is removed, we're left with a sly,mocking marker that this is the starting room of the weakest level: 1 rat, 1 gold piece, enjoy. The hidden compartment is actually a much better anticlimax if it's empty. A smart party will find ways to use it as a cache. Using this logic the DM can do a better job of figuring out what might actually, reasonably be cached there.

Speaking of rats and small change, let's give James Maliszewski's Dwimmermount more of a chance by looking at its deeper levels. For purpose of criticism, here are three rooms from the top of a randomly chosen page of the backer draft, which happens to be on level 5. Comments on the right.

With Dwimmermount, there's better style but similar problems in substance: the prose is lots more economical, but meaning and unique twists still prove elusive, although they are there.

I think the main problem of both these and similar efforts is, well, that they're megadungeons. The amount of time required to put poetic craft into each and every one of a thousand or more rooms is practically impossible. Some corners inevitably have to be cut.

Greenwood did it by actually presenting only about 30 super-prolix rooms per level, filling the rest of the map with "do it yourself" maze wallpaper. Joe Bloch's Castle of the Mad Archmage is honest about having lots of super-short room descriptions but thrives on the set-pieces and the grand plan; it helps that he's intentionally recreating the gonzo-ish Greyhawk legend, which sets low expectations for coherence and dungeon cliche avoidance to begin with. Somehow we expect more of Dwimmermount, with its much-trumpeted world, story and secrets. I haven't gotten Barrowmaze yet, but have a thumbs up for Patrick Wetmore's Anomalous Subsurface Environment, which achieves its goals by using smaller (yet still expansive) megadungeon levels and a number of creative back-stories to sow meaning. Even that one, though, isn't complete yet.

Stonehell by Michael Curtis is another interesting case. I think that deserves a post all of its own.

My World, Your World

I have recently been looking over some of the online material about the World of Greyhawk setting, inspired by Grendelwulf's compilation of the army lists for most of the eastern map, and contemplating bringing back to life the campaign system I used in high school to game out the Herzog's invasion of the Iron League.

But what struck me about the history of Greyhawk is how similar some of the issues are to the Legend of the Five Rings setting.

There is a tension in every setting between "My World" (the company's) and "Your World" (the customer's). Setting-neutral games like D&D, of course, avoid this to a large degree by letting gamemasters play god to the full extent and shape the continents, religions and kings of their own little realm. But for others, there's the attraction of letting someone else do all the grunt work of fleshing out a setting. What's more, if the setting becomes popular enough or derives from an already popular fictional world, you have the coolness factor of gaming in THE Middle-Earth, THE Star Wars Galaxy, THE Forgotten Realms.

Or is it really cool? I never really got the appeal of big franchise settings. There's nothing less interesting to me than gaming where the jobs of world savers and earth shakers have already been filled. OK, Frodo is taking the Ring to Mount Doom, but we're fighting wolves and investigating a haunted tower over here in west Eriador. Whoopee.

Setting the game in the past or the future of the fantasy world doesn't quite work, either. In the past, you're still conscious of continuity. You really need a setting where history is cheerfully rewritten and stability is the norm, so a campaign set in the past won't cause too many time-ripples. John Wick used this to good advantage in setting his L5R role playing game in a peaceful era before the events of the Big Storyline. Many gamemasters took this opportunity to present their own alternative versions of those great events, to keep the players guessing and maybe even able to alter history.

In a future campaign set after the big story events, the temptation is to replay the Apocalypse over and over again or risk anticlimax. Then even the Apocalypse becomes an anticlimax no matter how many times the stakes are raised, former enemies become allies, and so on. Legend of the Five Rings fans and Star Wars novel readers know this all too well.

See, what roleplayers need is a setting sufficiently fleshed out to spare the GM hard labor, but sufficiently skeletal to develop with a free hand. The original World of Greyhawk and even the 1983 reissue were perfect for this. Big blank expanses of minty green hexes, generic medieval backdrop with a wide range of realms and terrains, enough quirkiness to be memorable.

But inevitably sclerosis sets in. Game companies, like academics, must publish or perish. So in come the sourcebooks, splatbooks and supplements, filling in the blank expanses. Novels have to be sold, too. Someone decides that what this world needs is more drama, and an Apocalypse shows up. The iron weight of Canon is lowered, and your games are no longer free; they have to bend to the megaplot.

There are rumors that TSR unleashed the Greyhawk Wars to ruin Gygax's creation after he had left the company. While there may have been some spite to the proceedings, there was no such rupture with Ed Greenwood, and yet the Realms fell to much the same temptation.

It's a natural process brought on by the business model of the industry. L5R roleplayers continually grouse about the apocalyptic canon being forced on them, story arc after story arc of a collectible card game that advances its story through tournament results and, like the shark, will die without constant movement. They may complain, but the card game funds the role playing game, not the other way around. In fact, the latest edition of the roleplaying game has wisely gone back to being timeline-neutral, so that sourcebooks can still be sold without forcing the action to happen in the current era.

When all is said and done, in any given living room you, the GM, are sovereign. It's your responsibility to bring surprise to whatever the players do. If they want to play in Middle Earth, OK, but all bets are off. Build an alternate story where the Ring is a red herring, the shards of Anduril are the real McGuffin, and if the players screw up all of Middle-Earth goes to hell.

There are reasons why published material has to stick to canon. It's the long fingers of copyright lawyers and estate guardians, and the rabid hordes of Internet fan-sticklers. But they can't see into your living room. Use that freedom.