Dungeon Do-Over

   Regular readers of this blog know about the First Edition AD&D campaign I’ve been running for almost two years now. We have 2 game sessions a year – it’s not much – and we’ve just played Game #5 on May 21. Huge success.

   This time around the guys returned to the dungeon they’d explored exactly one year ago (that’s four months, in the game world). They wanted to retrieve the big silver menhir they’d seen before. This 3-ton block of pure alchemical silver is worth somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 g.p. but the players absolutely need a Dwarven engineer and some equipment in order to dislodge and carry that thing: tree trunks, logs, chains, pulleys and levers. This Dwarf is the NPC I created to help them along. PCs tackle the dungeon denizens, and the engineer will take care of that menhir.

   For once, they knew exactly where the first teleport would take them – they’ve been in that room before, fighting goblins and a trapper. Four months later, monsters have been replaced / replenished... and the DM also put in much more work.

Notice the giant scorpion INSIDE the pit...

That gnoll had a wood palisade providing 80% cover.

   Since the party knows this dungeon and has two accurate maps for it, there was quite a lot of movement / routing around / backtracking. The mind flayer was home (it is his dungeon, after all), and he had 14 “dominated” human mercenaries with him, plus a gnoll captain, many kobolds, an air elemental, and a grell. The players didn’t want to fight this daunting assortment head-on, and so they used the dungeon layout to their best advantage: we saw meleeing in corridors, staircases, and smaller chambers, as shown in these pictures.

Kobolds tried to “smoke them out”.

Air elemental? Toughest monster of the game lasted only 5 rounds!

The mighty Battle of the Corridor.

   I’m glad I could make use of my two favorite full page AD&D pictures: the kobolds (Monster Manual), and the awesome grell (Fiend Folio).

    This image is all the more fitting because one of my players, a magic-user, cast his newly acquired web spell on the kobolds – just like in the pic!

   The grell image is also rather fitting since it was the ranger who got himself all tangled up in the creature’s paralyzing tentacles – and that sword-wielding dude in the picture kinda looks like a ranger in splint or scale mail...

Thieves love to do stuff all by themselves...

   After many hours of play and numerous skirmishes, the final clash happened with the mind flayer and his dreaded pet grell, but I really dropped the ball on this one. A penultimate corridor engagement had occurred without the spellcasters using up any of their spells, because they said they needed that “heavy artillery” to kill the mind flayer stone dead in three rounds flat. They kept repeating that over and over again – and the effect on me was similar to a hypnotic pattern I suppose, because when Dr. Flayer showed his ugly mug, I totally forgot about his 90% magic resistance. All the players (not just those two magic-users) were definitely pumped and ready to unleash a spell storm. I focused on the mind blasts – but it wasn’t enough. Sorry, illithid friends. I guess two pints of 6% beer isn’t a good idea towards the end of a 9-hour session...

   My stinking cloud marker is a piece of dyed cotton coil, and my new web marker is a 4″ × 4″ piece of gauze. Of course the guys cast one on top of the other, and it looked like a glazed pistachio donut or something. Then they lit that web on fire and promptly blasted six magic missiles into the nauseating mess...

   Cleric used 2 out of 4 Beads of Karma to keep his spiritual hammer going for much longer than it should have. Each hit scored maximum damage, because the spell had been prepared using the Incense of Meditation found a year ago in the mind flayer’s own stash – isn’t that ironic!

   They deserve that silver menhir; they did everything right. I’m the one who botched the final scene. All six players were eager and exhilarated – so, let’s call this a “good” boss fight, despite my mistake. Better that than an unenthusiastic clash with a fearsome and fully magic resistant mind flayer... Deadly boss fights will come soon enough, don’t worry. I’m gonna have to bust out the beholder or red dragon within a year or so. This party kicks ass.

   For those readers mostly interested in the actual “game session” recaps, here’s the complete list again. Not click-on, though. Jot it down + look through the archives for those posts.

   Game #1   2014: July 28

   Game #2   2014: December 11

   Game #3   2015: June 10

   Game #4   2015: September 13

  

Mean & Silly RPGs

   This is serious business. Goofiness has been systematically expunged from role-playing games. No more little comic strips like the ones we had in the ’78 Players Handbook. No more preposterous adventures like White Plume Mountain or the 1988 Castle Greyhawk. No more ludicrous monsters or magical items. But the very first dragon was named Gertie – let’s not forget that. And the first Orc King was named Funk III. Dragons nowadays are called Murozond or Shimmergloom, and Orc Kings are called Krôthzmûsht-Vgorth or something. It has to be manly. It has to be badass. Just look at the elaborate artwork – Half-orc “smashers” and Elven “wardancers” and Space Marines with unwavering resting bitch faces. God forbid we’d ever pass for anything less than real men.

    I’ve never even held a 5E Dungeons & Dragons product in my hands, but lots of folks talked to me about it, and one thing I still remember is this. Someone told me that for any first-level character, a single skeleton or a single kobold means Instant Death. Well, it’s one of two things: either that guy told me a big fat lie, or 5E is really terrible, because kobolds and skeletons are expected to be weak. They’ve been puny since ’77 and before. They are “timeless classic” weak monsters. You start messing with that for the sake of expunging every last ounce of silliness from the game, and lo and behold – you’ve ruined that game.

   That is one of the reasons why I stick to 1E. It’s not like Windows XP: you don’t have to switch, you’re always gonna be able to play; and me, I do not want a different game, I want to keep enjoying the game I fell in love with thirty-three years ago. Adkison, Tweet, Heinsoo and Perkins all offered a different D&D, and why wouldn’t they? TSR evolved from a miniature wargaming company while Wizards of the Coast evolved from a collectible card game company: it cannot be the same approach or philosophy. It just can’t.

   Silliness now is a flaw – unless you have the confidence or star power to sustain it unflinchingly. Leeroy Jenkins is silly, sure, but Ben Schulz have nothing to worry about: he is now a star of the online gaming world. But if your friend Bruno’s PC suddenly becomes “silly-ed”, he’s gonna be mortified. Silly is no good. Epic / ruthless is the way to go. Don’t ask me. That’s not at all how it was in the beginning.

Silly Beholder / Badass Unfuckwithable Beholder

   In this blog right here, THE most popular post is a 100% silly little thing called “Behold!”, written a year and a half ago. I still don’t understand why so many people linked to it – but it is proof, right? Proof that there is a demand for RPG silliness.

   Real men aren’t good game designers / scriptwriters / DMs. They shouldn’t decide which class or race is cool, and which one isn’t. Insecurity is a slow and pervading disease eating at almost everything: politics, religion, entertainment. For now, though, let’s concentrate on pen and paper RPGs.

   The phenomenon really started to manifest itself around the time Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play first came out. Keep the Dwarves, minimize the Elves, almost exclude the Hobbits. Dwarves are cool – they kick ass, grow huge beards, dig tunnels and wield hammers: they’re men – well, technically not, but you see my point.

   Elves are refined, educated and artsy. It verges on silliness. Let’s give them one big forest on the western edge of the Empire, and forget about them. Gnomes and Hobbits are even sillier. I’m not sure there were Gnomes in Warhammer. And here’s how Hobbits were depicted:

    A picture is worth a thousand words! Look at those ridiculous bulging eyes: is he sucking on some dildo? Raise your hand if you’d like to play that little fella. Huh, I don’t see a single hand? What gives?

   In one of the very first issues of White Dwarf, a guy named Roger Musson wrote a complaint: he didn’t like the magazine’s little cartoon strips. “Childish rubbish is the prerogative of The Dragon,” he said.

   “Silly-phobia” later spilled to AD&D. I remember this quite well. By 1987 one of my friends (and a DM himself) had already given each class a color code. Red meant you did NOT want to play this class in a group of 17-year-old guys with long hair and Iron Maiden T-shirts. As I recall, paladins, bards, and illusionists each had a code red slapped on them. Code yellow was for clerics, monks, and maybe druids – I don’t remember clearly. These were classes that could be cool, but you really had to design your character carefully and / or choose your god among the “awesome” gods. Code green was for fighters, rangers, magic-users, thieves and assassins; you just couldn’t go wrong with these. I was in my fourth year of playing a redhead ranger named Dälvik, so I was in the safe zone when my friend first came up with these color codes. He didn’t use the word “silly”, though. But that’s exactly what it was – a Silly Index for AD&D classes.

   Paladins are lawful good; they have to be gentle and devoted and respectful: they can’t burn villages to the ground or steal a wounded NPC’s +3 broadsword... Bards are just guys with flutes or lyres... And illusionists are boring magic-users without fireballs or magic missiles. It figures.

   Castle Greyhawk’s only real flaw was to come out maybe five or six years too late. Fighting Colonel Sanders in ’88 isn’t much more hurtful than fighting the Cheshire Cat in ’83 or encountering the Greyhawk Construction Company in ’79 or a druid armed with a phaser in ’72. In the early eighties, that adventure would have been “normal”. In the late eighties, whimsical already had a bit of a bad rep.

   By 1991 the French published Bloodlust, which was very nice, but the strain of silly-phobia took a turn for the worse. Elves were now extinct for not reproducing fast enough, and the few remaining half-breeds worked as high-end prostitutes. For a bunch of 21-year-old metalheads, what a laugh!

   By the time White Wolf started releasing game products, the “goth” craze was already going strong. Goths like things serious. You would be hard-pressed to find one silly clan in Vampire: The Masquerade or a silly tribe in Werewolf: The Apocalypse. It’s all brawn and flair and all-around greatness: Gangrel, Fianna, Brujah, Black Furies, Nosferatu, Red Talons, Malkavian...

   In 2006 Wizards of the Coast introduced a new killer race: the Dragonborn. Who would even want to pass this up and play a Gnome illusionist, right? But I did play a Hobbit pedlar in Warhammer, back in ’96, and I used to munch on dry sausage all the time – like that little fella in the picture. I was a bit older, by then. Somebody had to do it, I think. You can’t let insecure game designers bully their readers like that, under no circumstances.

   Now that I am done blogging for the day, I’m gonna log into World of Warcraft; Killstroy Blackdoom, karl of Gothsküll, my level 94 barbarian, awaits.

What Lovecraft Really Meant

   Plato had a theory. To help our understanding of it, he invented a Cave. We soon dismissed that Cave, but understood the theory itself.

   Lovecraft also had a theory. To help us understand, he created a Mythos. We loved that Mythos, but somewhat failed to understand the core message.

   Plato’s point was this: what is discernible with our five senses may not be the whole truth. If someone was to be chained in a cave since early childhood, and only ever saw shadows on a rock cliff, he / she would be unable of even imagining the world outside the Cave – the world that actually makes those shadows. So, now, how do we know this isn’t the case for us too, in this world?

   Lovecraft’s message was this:

   “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

   Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s first and foremost intention was not to craft an elaborate horror mythos, but simply to tell a cautionary tale about science. Science is very useful, yes; it saves lives and provides us with clean drinking water, comfortable shelter, and the like. But at one point, science is gonna fail us. Lovecraft was absolutely spot-on about that. The higher “up” we go towards the extremely vast (e.g. Dark Matter), science fails us. The further “down” we go towards the extremely small (e.g. Higgs boson), science fails us. And yet maybe Higgs boson and Dark Matter are one and the same...

   Yep – now that would certainly be the Elder Gods’ cruelest joke.

Hommlet: New Developments

   Village of Hommlet. CY 599, developers moved in and bought most of the land, building luxury mansions and two hotels. Then the Temple of Elemental Evil merged with a larger evil corporation, and after a few short years these new guys decided to outsource all the “eviling” in and around the Temple to India.

   Evil Hindu goddess Kali dispatched a whole lot of her eight armed minions to the Temple and the moathouse, but she didn’t want to go herself and manage operations; she subcontracted that gig to the Chinese demigod Chih-Chiang Fyu-Ya.

    In hindsight, this move wasn’t smart, because many disgruntled Caucasian adventurers went away and never returned to Hommlet, seeking “whiter” dungeons south of the Kron Hills.

  

Batman V Superman: The Dark Knight Doesn't Return

   I have stated before that Hollywood is like a wood chipper – throw any source material in there, good or bad, and it’s instantly turned to crap. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, you’re up.

   Haven’t seen Batman V Superman yet, but I will. I just wanted to post something about it right away, and maybe I’ll write a second post on that same topic after I have actually seen the movie. For now, here are my preliminary impressions.

   They seem to have rubbed out my favorite character: Carrie. Why? It makes no sense. Look at all the Millennial stuff out there: The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Shannara Chronicles – new trend now is to have strong female heroines. You even have Cinderella in Space, a.k.a. Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I’ve got nothing against Girl Power, but why scrap the one strong female character that’s already present in the source material? Carrie is right there, DC, she’s right under your nose!!!

   Good God almighty, this is painful.

   I loved Carrie since I first read that book. She is awesome, and the only “hopeful” character in an otherwise grim and depressed world. Come to think of it, The Dark Knight Returns is kind of her story. Parts 1 and 2 make up her origin story. In parts 3 and 4, you sometimes get the impression that Bruce keeps going simply because Carrie is looking up to him and he’s the only decent father figure she’s ever had in her life. And that’s beautiful.

   They’re deleting all that, and throwing Wonder Woman in the mix just to be able to check that “strong female” box.

   When there is no strong female character in the source material, they go ahead and invent one, like Tauriel in The Hobbit. And when there is a strong female character in the source material – well, they ignore it. What a damn shame.

   The second thing I love in The Dark Knight Returns is the passage of time, as Alan Moore put it in the Foreword. Ten years have gone by since Batman retired. Bruce is fifty-five. Jim Gordon is seventy. Alfred is eighty-something. Clark haven’t aged a bit, but he’s the only one.

   Having seen the trailers, I can say that the “passage of time” is not an element here. We are suddenly back in the heyday of superheroes: Wonder Woman, Lex Luthor, in “the perpetual limbo of their mid-to-late twenties”, to quote Alan Moore again. In one of the trailers, Affleck says he is “old”, but he’s not fifty-five, no way. More like forty. And Alfred is certainly not eighty.

   The “big blue boy scout” ain’t big enough or blue enough for my taste. And where are Two-Face and the Joker? And what the hell is Zuckerberg doing in there?

   It is NOT really The Dark Knight Returns, anyway. I can see that now. They just borrowed the book’s main premise – two heroes squaring off against each other in quite a dramatic way – and threw out the rest. Superman might still intercept a nuclear missile, yes. Batman and Superman might fight for a while, sure. But they’ll become friends soon enough and unite their efforts to rid the world of a greater evil: Facebook.

   How come the source material never seems to be good enough for the big screen? Hollywood cut out the huge “alien” monster from The Watchmen. Hollywood replaced Galactus with a big black space-smudge in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. That is like those big studios saying to comic books in general, “You’re no good. You’re not screen-worthy. We will use you as raw material – but you need some fine-tuning.”

   Fuck the source material. That seems to be Hollywood’s Prime Directive these days.

   No Boy Wonder because it’s kinda gay. No Carrie alongside a hunk like Affleck, because that would be creepy. Let’s stick Wonder Woman in between Batman and Superman – between the bad boy and the clean-cut dude –, just like Bella, you know: will she choose Edward or Jacob? Mainstream. Recipes. They work.

   What do Katniss, Tris, Princess Amberle and the other “Millennial” heroines have in common? They’re all ass-kicking teenage girls. But now, you get a VINTAGE ass-kicking teenage girl from way back in ’86 – and you just pass on that?

   Bummer.

   I’m still gonna do something I didn’t do for any of the Hobbit movies or the new Star Trek movies or Indy 4 or The Force Awakens – I’m going to actually walk into a theater and see Batman V Superman. Then (maybe) I’ll come back here and blog a bit more about all the hoohah, whether I liked or hated the film.

Arneson & Saint Paul (not the city)

   There is bad blood between Team Arneson and Team Gygax, that’s no secret. The sad thing is: it didn’t have to come to that. Not at all.

   You and I are partners and we write a game called Cobbles & Creeps – and we make a lot of dough. Then I go my separate way and write Advanced Cobbles & Creeps and keep making a lot of dough without you because, if you’ll understand, Advanced Cobbles & Creeps is “an entirely different product”, so I don’t need to share its profits with you, buddy.

   What does it mean?

   Anyone could start a company and call it “Advanced Apple” or “Advanced Google” and that would be legal.

   Absurd, right?

   Still, that’s what happened back in ’77. So yes, there is bad blood between Team Arneson and Team Gygax. But then again, Gygax lived by the sword and died by the sword: ten years after he’d screwed Dave Arneson, the Blume brothers and especially Lorraine Williams screwed him over and booted him out of his own company. You know what they say about karma––

   These two guys created Dungeons & Dragons together. Role-playing games wouldn’t exist without both of them. The analogy I’d like to make is this: Arneson is Jesus, and Gygax is Saint Paul. Bear with me here...

   Jesus didn’t write anything down. Jesus just spoke to the people – and he was good at it. He was spontaneous. After Jesus’ death, a man named Saul, who would later be known as Saint Paul, decided to jot down some things and “organize” the new faith. He worked tirelessly, he traveled a lot, and founded many early Christian churches. He gave that newborn religion a fighting chance against the Roman gods and against Zoroastrianism. Without his texts and his energy and his travels, who knows what would have become of the unofficial, unpopular, underground “sect” of Christ?

   It seems there’s always a Jesus and a Saint Paul. There was Tesla and there was Edison. There was Einstein and Oppenheimer. There was Wozniak and Jobs. There was Bob Hunter and Patrick Moore...

   One man is not enough to “give birth” to any grandiose thing. It takes two – sometimes even more – to do it.

   Dave was spontaneous. Gary was an organized writer and worker. Without Dave, Gary couldn’t have written Dungeons & Dragons, or any role-playing game for that matter. Without Gary, Dave’s clever invention couldn’t have made it out of his circle of friends. Both geniuses were needed to really accomplish what was accomplished.

   That unofficial / unpopular “sect” can be equated to Arneson’s original Blackmoor campaign. Publication of the OD&D White Box can be equated to Saint Paul’s Epistles. What came after can be equated to the four Gospels.

   But then the “Advanced” thing happened.

   It’s like if Saint Paul had somewhat managed to modify Christianity just enough to call it his own – and not have to pay Jesus any royalties. But royalties didn’t exist back then. And Jesus was already dead, anyway. And Jesus had no heirs or widow (sorry folks, it’s not The Da Vinci Code).

   Gary Gygax once said: “Dave Arneson was running a game up there, using my Chainmail rules, and I believe he called it Blackmoor.”

   Seriously, Gary?

   You “believe” he called it Blackmoor? You played that game yourself in November of 1972 when Arneson and Megarry drove down to Lake Geneva and showed you both their games – Blackmoor and Dungeon! It was your first RPG session ever. Your son Ernie was there with you, and both Rob and Terry Kuntz. Everybody saw how this new game was NOT Chainmail.

   It’s almost tragic – this great man trying to fool himself and everybody else, again and again, by changing the story. Such awkward denial, and for what? Is E. Gary Gygax less of a giant for not actually inventing RPGs?

   I hear that John Kentner’s documentary, Dragons in the Basement, is delayed still because of Gygax legal issues. We don’t get to hear what Dave Arneson and Professor Barker have to say about the origins of RPGs... because of legal issues?

   Kentner must obtain a permit in order to use the name “Gygax” in his film – but I’m also told that Mrs. Gygax was very pleased when she discovered she didn’t need any permit to erect a Gary Gygax monument in Lake Geneva. Isn’t that a little bit twisted, or is it just me?

   Solution #1. Every time Gygax appears on-screen, call him Mordenkainen. When someone else says his name out loud, bleep it over and put a little “Mordenkainen” sign on that person’s mouth. Even in the end credits, just put: Mordenkainen. Everybody will understand perfectly – and Mrs. Gygax doesn’t own the name Mordenkainen, does she?

   Solution #2. Cut Gygax out of the doc completely. Gamers of the world still want to hear what Professor Barker and the three Daves have to say. Gygax is not our only “founding father”. I’d rather see and hear Washington + Franklin + Adams + Madison, without Jefferson, than not see or hear any of them.

   Pick Solution #1, John. It’ll work. But I digress.

   If Jesus himself had written a Gospel, it would probably confuse today’s religious scholars just as much as The First Fantasy Campaign confuses most of today’s efficient / practical DMs. Dave Wesely said, “Arneson had favored a wide-open system that put a lot of burden on the ingenuity and style of the ref.” Strangely, that is also what Jesus had favored: he replaced all the complicated rules with one simple, overriding rule. But that proved, well, too simple. So Saint Paul stepped in shortly after Christ’s death and created a bunch of new, sharper rules.

   Role-playing games wouldn’t exist today without both Arneson and Gygax – just as Christianity wouldn’t exist as we know it without both Jesus and Saint Paul. Jesus alone is not enough.

   And by the way, I am not a religious nut. Again, this was just an analogy.

   Amen.

  

Next Gen

   We were fourteen years old. Our hair was long but not yet too long. Each of us drank half a can of beer and nothing else, because we couldn’t risk stealing more than 2 cans from the fridge without some parent taking notice. And we played AD&D while listening to Iron Maiden and Dio (in my opinion, Sacred Heart remains the best dungeoneering song ever). Good times – hell yeah!

   But hang on. What’s gonna be the Millennials’ mind-blowing good memories? Instead of that D&D / metal combo, Millennials had a Masquerade / grunge deal. And what about those kids who just turned fourteen this year? What’s it gonna be for them?

   This post is a collection of tidbits, thoughts and observations about the younger players, typed in no particular order, because winter is making me lazy.

*

   Twenty-year-old gamers have bizarre misconceptions about 1E. Two of them recently said to me: “You play with THAC0? Are you crazy? It’s complicated! You have to calculate Armor Classes in the negatives???” What did they mean by that? There is no calculating involved. You’re a fighter, level 7, monster is AC -2, you need 16. Do they think it works like the To Hit roll in Ashardalon?

   They probably didn’t give AD&D a single browse, that’s what I think.

*

   Everybody also seemed to freak out because they didn’t get a list of all the monsters from the new Monster Manual “by challenge level”. What’s the big fuss? You just look at the monster’s stats, like we did. Beholder: that’s strong. Kobold: that’s weak. Wight: that’s in between. Easy enough. What do you need lists for? I never used any “lists” of monsters in any of my campaigns; I went in prepared, always, and regularly play-tested my shit beforehand, with copies of the PCs record sheets, to adjust things.

*

   The old Retreat & Recharge strategy was already in use back in the day, before Fallout and Halo and the rest of it, but I don’t remember players ever abusing it, retreating & recharging after every single room / encounter, systematically. It’s annoying and it feels fake. In a novel, that would be completely unpalatable: you’d tear out a whole bunch of pages from the book while yelling at Elric or Caramon or Fafhrd, “Come on, dammit! COME ON! Storm the place already!!! Quit doing this!!!!!!!” But Elric never retreats & recharges, thank the gods. Neither does Caramon, or Fafhrd. They’re heroes. Now, why can’t most modern players do the same? There is an evil sorcerer in the cave ahead – get him, or die trying. Don’t come back 6 times over a period of 48 hours!?

*

   Something new appeared about the time Millennials really hit the gaming scene: the “exceptional” characters. You are a vampire, but the basic humans don’t know about it. You are a werewolf, or an exalted, and the “rest” of the population is just normal, dull people. Your power sets you apart. You’re a vampire: you’re glorious, you’re sublime, you’re beautiful, you are indeed a superior species!

   Of course, characters in Dungeons & Dragons, Tékumel and even Cthulhu sometimes got very, very powerful, but they were not “set apart” right from the get-go. Any level 1 D&D character who got struck by a wight still had to temporarily downgrade to level zero ordinary human.

   Millennials think very highly of themselves. Gen X, not as much: you had to become exceptional, but were not born exceptional. Two distinct philosophies. Games like Mage: The Ascension and Masquerade and Exalted came around in ’91 or ’93... it could be a simple coincidence, but I doubt it.

*

   I don’t like Elder Sign as much as I do Arkham Horror, with as many supplements as you want. But the younger generation – late twenties and early thirties – prefers Elder Sign because it’s “light” and “shorter” (those are the adjectives I’ve heard).

   There is absolutely no lovecraftian atmosphere in a game of Elder Sign. It’s just math. Players don’t even bother to read the flavor text on the various quests available; they just look at what you can gain if you succeed, how much Stamina or Sanity you lose if you fail, and what dice rolls you must make in order to nail it. Then it’s merely strategy. “This one’s too difficult for me – I’ll leave it to you, because you have the yellow die and your special re-roll ability. We get two more Elder Signs: it’s worth it.”

   It’s quicker all right, but you really can go through an entire game without “feeling” anything remotely Cthulhu, and that’s sad. The monsters themselves kind of disappear in that big equation: one more dice roll in Quest #3 (it got a bit more difficult). Monster tokens are thumbnails, nothing more. I’ve seen players draw them up from the cup and not even look at what they are. Ghoul? Dhole? There’s a huge difference! But no: it’s one more challenging dice roll, that’s all.

   If Arkham Horror is a blog, then Elder Sign is Twitter: everything’s tiny in there, every token, every card – and the texts on the quests are about 140 characters, yes, and you can play the game without reading them...

   Thirty-year-olds say they don’t have the time for a full game of Arkham Horror with Bokrug as the Ancient One. Too bad, guys. You are missing out on a really terrific thing.

*

   I played several games of The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow with my cousins and their boyfriends – Millennials again – and I made the effort to role-play just a bit because there is not much role-play going on in that game. For example when I got the Lord, I talked like some medieval count or baron: “Ah! My good subjects! my loyal villagers! Certainly you won’t suspect your beloved Lord and Master of being the werewolf, will you? That would qualify as peasant treason indeed...”

   One guy then told me I’d be an excellent LARPer. Well, I don’t know. I could have said, “I sat at tables and ran campaigns before you were even born, and long before LARP was ever a thing, so yes, I suppose I can role-play a baron off the top of my head.” But the guy didn’t know about RPGs at all. He knew the words Dungeons & Dragons of course, but he thought it was a board game – and seemed to think LARP had just appeared outta the blue one morning, without any previous base or mechanics. That’s like saying the iPad appeared on its own, and computers didn’t exist before: no VIC-20, no DOS, nada.

   Oh, and one of my cousins believed Star Wars first began as a series of books... and then was made into those first three movies. Her boyfriend added, “Like Harry Potter, y’know?”

   Anyway, I still love Next Gen. They’re OK – as long as you keep your list of Elder Sign monsters sorted out by challenge level, and LARP without THAC0.