The Art of Character Sketches

While not practiced by every player making a sketch of your character is a time honored tradition. Especially if you character sheet has a little box to put it in. Even better when the character sheet has an outline to help the artistically challenged.

I doubt I will ever turn into a triple threat like Paul Jaquays (writer, artist, cartographer) but here are a few of mine. Mostly of NPCs I had over the years.

The feared tin-can orc Grandar. Virtually unhittable in GURPS 3rd edition and even if you do his plate armor soaked up most of the damage.

Just went kinda of crazy in sketching out the whole scene. An otherwise nondescript hafling fighter NPC.

A crack halfling archer. Had a quirk of shooting small game continually while on the trail.

A priest of the Nature God Silvanus. The colors represented the seasons.

Gil-Tarin the one handed elf. Just to show that not all elves are sweetness and light.

A priest of Set and they don't use frickin maces. This guy was Lareth the Beautiful from the Village of Hommlet. I created a GURPS version of Hommlett in the early 90s.

Serina a necromancer from one of my adventure. She is an albino which is not much of disadvantage for her profession when you think about it.

Menstice the Rogue from a GURPS Campaign where all the players played 50 point characters. The normal start is 100 pts. 50 pts in GURPS is pretty close to playing a 0-level character in AD&D.

A Myrmidon of Set my LE variant of a paladin

Calurin a priest of Mitra I played in a GURPS Campaign that revolved around going into Judges Guild Dark Tower. It was some campaign I tell you.

What Tolkien meant for roleplaying.

At the height of RPG's popularity in the early 80's one element of Tolkien's Style stood out above all else.

The appendixes for the Return of the King.

From the Greyhawk Folio to latest Forgotten Realm Hardback. From Wizard to well just about any RPG company. The appendix of the Return of the King was the ur-document on how to present a setting. After Shannara this format dominated the alternative formats notably Judge's Guild Wilderlands and GDW's Traveller.

As a 13 year old gamer in the late 70's Tolkien was the only source I had for writing up a campaign world. With King Lists and Timelines galore. However Tolkien has some major weakness as a source for RPG campaigns. Only a dozen or so elements made for good additions to a D&D game.

It the same problem that drove me from Greyhawk to the Wilderlands. The howling emptiness of the map. While Tolkien had a wealth of details in the appendixes, only a few areas were detailed enough to run an RPG campaign in: Bree, the Shire, Rohan, etc.

Myself and I am sure others turned to other sources to plug in the gaps and after Shannara there plenty to be found for whatever taste of fantasy the group preferred. One thing I learned that the format of Bob Bledsaw's Wilderlands and Marc Miller's Traveller was way better for running a campaign then Tolkien style.

Some Sandbox campaigning advice

A lot of referees feel a little lost when running their first sandbox campaign. Feeling overwhelmed by the need to generate dozens of locales and having no idea what the PCs ultimate objective will be.

A good way to over come this is to make a sandbox setting but have a campaign where the PC are doing missions at the start. They are all members of the City Guard, one of the Guilds, or the King's Court. The mission helps focuses your preparations. Then let the players have free reign to decide how to accomplish the mission.

Then follow up on the consequences of their decision both bad and good. The follow up is important because this establish the sandbox nature of the campaign. Several sessions in, the players find themselves driving the campaign as they follow up on the consequences of the consequences of the consequences of ... well hopefully you get the picture.

By this point you will have learned what tricks and techniques work best for you. How to best use your (limited) prep time.

Shannara and the Long Shadow of Tolkien

While Tolkien was fundamental to the development of the D&D rules, Lord of the Rings was just one of many influences on roleplaying games as a whole. Swords & Sorcery, other fantasy subgenres and even science-fiction were all thrown into the mix of those early games.

Why?

Just because it was cool in the eyes of the players and referees.

As for Tolkien the author and the Lord of the Rings rose in popularity through the late 60s and the 70s. However he didn't spawn much in the way of imitators. Far more popular among authors were the 1001 variants of swords & sorcery with a sprinkling of original works like Elric, Earthsea, the early Deryni novels and many of the novels of Appendix N of Gygax's DMG.

Then came Terry Brooks and the Sword of Shannara around 1977.

It didn't have much of literary impact. Many ripped it apart for being a pastiche of Tolkien. Even among gamers I never heard of anyone saying stuff from Shannara was really cool.

However Brooks did manage to break into the New York Times bestseller list. Something that no fantasy author including Tolkien managed to do.

My opinion of the book was that it was a fun and easy book to read. But not memorable in any particular way. I never followed up on the sequels after taking a stab at the Elfstones of Shannara, once was fine.

Since it was a big epic fantasy in the mode of Tolkien that cracked the NY Times list every fantasy imprint started putting out epic fantasies. Another early success was the Thomas Covenant series.

Despite the emphasis on the big epic the resulting market expansion brought in a lot of different styles of fantasy. Two of my group's favorites were the Guardian of the Flames series and Thieves World. My personal capstone of the era was Elisabeth's Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion series released in the late 80s.

After Shannara, Tolkien's style dominated the mass market for fantasy which had a lasting impact on RPGs. The most visible result was the release of Dragonlance.

D&D would not exist without Lord of the Rings

But not in the way you think.

The consensus is that roleplaying started to jell with the Braustein games of Major David Wesley. The short version is that every player portrayed a spy in a Napoleonic era town of Germany. Each player had their own motivations and goals. They were free to whatever they wanted within the town limits. Wesley refereed any actions taken by the players.

Dave Arneson took Wesley's ideas and applied them to the exploration of Blackmoor and it's environs. It is in Arneson's Blackmoor games where all the major elements of roleplaying came together in one game.

Gygax then learned about the Blackmoor game and developed his own Greyhawk game. This turned into the original 3 booklets of Dungeons and Dragons.

In this whole chain of events there is little mentioned of Tolkien. Greyhawk and Blackmoor were no clones of Middle Earth. So Lord of the Rings doesn't look like it had much or any impact on the development of roleplaying.

However where it did have an impact was in the development of the rules for Dungeon & Dragons. And it all goes back to the fantasy supplement to Chainmail.

The first editions of Chainmail did not have any fantasy supplement. In the late 60s Tolkien was rising in popularity. Both the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit had these cool descriptions of battles that the miniature wargamers of the time wanted to fight out. Coupled with the stories of Howard (Conan) and other fantasy writers of the time you had a strong push to come up with some rules to allow these battles to be fought.

Thus the fantasy supplement to Chainmail was born. Gygax and Perren say flat out why they included these rules

Most of the fantastic battles related in novels more closely resemble medieval warfare than they do earlier or later forms of combat. Because of this we are including a brief set of rules which will allow the medieval miniatures wargamer to a new facet to his hobby, and either refight the epic struggles related by J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers; or you can devise your own "world," and conduct fantastic campaigs and conflicts based on it.

If you look at the original list of monsters you will see Tolkien creates dominate the list.

The fantasy supplement to Chainmail provided the foundation for the rules used in Blackmoor and Greyhawk and later Dungeons & Dragons itself.

Now Gygax said numerous times that Tolkien wasn't a big influence on him writing D&D and I believe him. When it came time to write original D&D that Gygax was using every source of inspiration available to him.

So while the roleplaying side had little to do with the Tolkien. The game side would not have existed without the desire to refight the battles of Middle Earth. What started out as a way to fight the Hobbit's Battle of Five Armies became much more.

I would say that Tolkien influence waned in the early days of D&D and RPGs as people were using the just about anything they could find or think of to drag into their games. It only rebounded after the Sword of Shannara was published in 1977 and fantasy exploded into mainstream publishing. After the Shannara the big epic fantasy in the style of Tolkien dominated fantasy for a long time with a similar effect on the imagination of the players of D&D.

A new spell and class of magic items for OD&D.

Enchant Charm
Spell Level: Magic-user 4th level, Cleric 3rd Level
Range: Touch
Duration: Permanent

This spell is used to create magical charms, in addition to whatever research, special ingredients, and other efforts the Referee may determine are necessary for the task. Charms are similar to scrolls and wands in that they are used to cast the spells stored within them. Unlike scrolls the charm can have another spell infused them at a considerably cheaper cost; 50 gp per spell level. The creation of the charm itself is twice as much as a scroll cost to make; 200 gp per spell level. A charm can only be infused with spells at the level they are made or less.

For example a 5th level Charm can have 3rd level Fireball infused it in it but not a 6th level Flesh to Stone. Charms are made out of materials worth at least 10 gp time the spell level stored. They take the forms of pendants, rings, cords, and other items that are easy to wear. Only one charm may cast on an object.

---

This represents a intermediate level between a scroll and a full blown magic item. Basically charms are one charge magic items. My version is assumes that scroll cost 100 gp per spell level to create. If your campaign uses a different figure then the cost of CREATING charms should be DOUBLE your cost, and the cost to RECHARGE charms should be HALF of your scroll cost.

This addition may appear trivial in combination with other additions and variants it allows me to create different magic user classes and order without straying from OD&D roots.

Charms form the basis of rune magic which lead to the rune-caster class. The Enchant Charm assumes that you are using an amulet, bracelet, etc as your charm. The rune variant allow the charm to be cast into a rune. The advantage is that the you can inscribe runes into anything that can take writing including tattoos on a human body.

A quest for all concerned

There are a few missing bits from the origins of Dungeons & Dragons that are not preserved on-line. For example the 13 to 14 issues of the Domesday book published by the Castles & Crusade society.

The one thing I would like to get my hands on is a photo or scan of the map referenced in the forward to original Dungeons & Dragons

"ONCE UPON A TIME, long, long ago there was a little group known as the Castle and Crusade Society. Their fantasy rules were published, and to this writer's knowledge, brought about much of the current interest in fantasy wargaming. For a time the group grew and prospered, and Dave Arneson decided to begin a medieval fantasy campaign game for his active Twin Cities club. From the map of the "land" of the "Great Kingdom" and environs — the territory of the C & C Society — Dave located a nice bog wherein to nest the weird enclave of "Blackmoor", a spot between the "Great Kingdom" and the fearsome "Egg of Coot". From the CHAINMAIL fantasy rules he drew ideas for a far more complex and exciting game, and thus began a campaign which still thrives as of this writing! In due course the news reached my ears, and the result is what you have in your hands at this moment. While the C & C Society is no longer, its spirit lives on, and we believe that all wargamers who are interested in the medieval period, not just fantasy buffs, will enjoy playing DUNGEONS and DRAGONS. Its possibilities go far beyond any previous offerings anywhere!

Any help with this would be appreciated. I have messages throughout the various old school forums hopefully somebody reading this will know somebody with a copy that can be scanned. My intent is not only have this preserved for everybody to look at. But re-render it like I did with Blackmarsh so people can make their own version for their campaigns.