Mythic Armorica for Mythras

The Mythic Britain series for Mythras has a new instalment: Mythic Armorica. (I first mentioned this supplement – and included a preview of its maps – back in December.)

Here’s the description from the Design Mechanism site:

Across the Narrow Sea separating Britain from Europe, lie the three kingdoms of Armorica: Poher, Benoic, and Broërec. And across the heartland, the mighty, enchanted Forest of Broceliande.

Settled a 150 years ago by Britons from the mainland, they displaced the native Gauls and created their own lands. But now Armorica is a land under siege. The Franks and the Visigoths fight on the eastern border and threaten to make Armorica their battleground. Meanwhile, the bishops of Armorica fight a war against pagan practice, and under their urging, Broceliande is shrinking every year. Finally, a dark force is working from within, waging a covert war of conquest against the three kingdoms.

Mythic Britain: Armorica is a campaign expansion for the Mythic Britain setting. You will need both Mythras and Mythic Britain to make full use of this book.

With Mythic Britain, Logres, Waterlands, Gwynedd, and now Armorica, Mythras has the ultimate “historical fantasy” British setting for role-playing campaigns!

‘Level Up’ exhibit at the Chicago Writers Museum

While Toronto is my ‘home base’ these days, as my wife and I own a condo there (and her job is based there), I also currently live part of the time in Chicago due to work (until the end of 2025, barring some catastrophe). Last weekend my wife was visiting Chicago, and by chance we discovered that it was a “free Sunday” at the American Writers Museum (located at 180 North Michigan Avenue – about a fifteen minute walk north of my present “crash pad”).

The museum currently has a special exhibit called “Level Up.” Here’s the description:

“Our special exhibit, Level Up: Writers & Gamers, explores how Americans use role-playing and video games to define and respond to our culture. The exhibit guides visitors into the world of game writing, from the 1970s to the present. Some of the games featured include Dungeons & Dragons, Zork, Apocalypse World, Baldur’s Gate III, and game writers from the last 50 years such as Michael Pondsmith, Porpentine, and Tanya DePass.” 

 The exhibit was small but had some artifacts of note:

It looks like this set was once owned by Terry Kuntz (older brother of Rob Kuntz).

The good old Holmes Basic Set – the game that started it all for me!

Anyhow, the exhibit runs until 5 May 2025. More information can be found here. If you’re in Chicago and have some time to kill, I recommend checking it out.

How B2 became part of Basic Dungeons and Dragons

As I’ve mentioned before, my “gateway drug” into this hobby was the “Holmes” Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set, a gift from my parents over four decades ago. My version included the infamous “chits” instead of dice, and the classic Gary Gygax module B2: Keep on the Borderlands.

 [Erol Otus's evocative picture of the keep on the back of B2]

 

I later learned that earlier versions of the Holmes box set included Mike Carr’s module, B1: In Search of the Unknown. I always had been puzzled as to why this change was made. (At the time I also was confused as to why my box had irritating chits and others had dice, but I later learned that that was because TSR couldn’t obtain enough dice to include in all their fast-selling sets.)

 

Both modules (B1 and B2) include lots of helpful advice for neophyte DMs. And while B2 is, I think, the superior module overall—it includes a fleshed-out “safe haven,” a “mini-wilderness,” and a complex “dungeon” environment that, in addition to providing a variety of different kinds of monsters and challenges, can enable the players to engage in some role-playing (e.g., allying with some groups against others). Nonetheless, for starting DMs, I think B1 is a better option. It is a classic, straightforward “dungeon crawl.” Also, I thought at the time, shouldn’t B1 be included in the Basic Set?

 

The explanation for this change, it turns out, was Gygax’s avarice. Jon Peterson explains:

“With the Basic Set carrying In Search of the Unknown now bringing in nearly 100,000 sales per quarter and rising, the 11 cents per copy due to Mike Carr started to amount to real money, especially in pre-1980 dollars.

[…]

It was then that Gygax apparently grasped that […] perhaps TSR could try substituting in a different module to the Basic Set — one of Gygax’s own creation, Keep on the Borderlands (B2), which began to ship early in 1980.”

The full story involves TSR’s legal dispute with Dave Arneson and is explained by Peterson in his Polygon article, “How a pending lawsuit changed the original Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set.” (The article was posted two months ago—alas, I’ve been pretty “out of it” over the past few months and only read it today.)

 

This is hardly the biggest story in the history of role-playing games. But it’s something I distinctly remember wondering about back in the day. It’s nice to know the answer, some forty years later.

Temple of the Flayed Lord

In case you need some inspiration for a new Cthulhu Mythos style cult (also eminently useable for fantasy and historical role-playing games):

Mexican experts say they have found the first temple of the Flayed Lord, a pre-Hispanic fertility god depicted as a skinned human corpse.
[...]
The institute said experts found two skull-like stone carvings and a stone trunk depicting the god, Xipe Totec. It had an extra hand dangling off one arm, suggesting the god was wearing the skin of a sacrificial victim.
Priests worshipped Xipe Totec by skinning human victims and then donning their skins. The ritual was seen as a way to ensure fertility and regeneration.
The Popolocas built the temple at a complex known as Ndachjian-Tehuacan between AD 1000 and 1260 and were later conquered by the Aztecs.

More information on the charming Xipe Totec and his ancient Popolocas followers can be found here.

Ancient ship = Eldritch horrors

From NPR's article: "'Oldest Intact Shipwreck Known To Mankind' Found In Depths Of Black Sea":

“More than a mile beneath the surface of the Black Sea, shrouded in darkness, an ancient ship sat for millennia unseen by human eyes — until the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project happened upon its watery grave last year.… [T]he trading vessel plied the waves in the days of Plato and Sophocles, when the city-states of ancient Greece had scattered colonies all around the Black Sea.”

Sometimes a real world news event writes a cool Call of Cthulhu scenario for you…

(Though I’d replace the “Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project” with the “Black Sea Miskatonic Archaeology Project” -- and move everything back to ~1930.)

Forthcoming visual history of D&D

I am curious about this forthcoming book: Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History. One thing that it reveals is that many iconic D&D monsters—such as mindflayers and beholders—were sketched initially by teenagers for Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

An aspect of D&D that I have long loved—and which distinguishes it from most of the other RPGs that I have played over the years—is its unique creatures and mythology. (As I’ve mentioned before here, this is one of the reasons why Planescape is probably my favourite ‘official’ D&D setting, as it builds on these distinctive elements instead of merely mashing together ideas from mythology and fiction.)

Also, if this page is representative of what will be found in the book, it should be well worth obtaining for the art alone:

The True Origin of the Flail Snail?

Of the many strange and absurd creatures included in the original AD&D Fiend Folio, perhaps none has been more often mocked and ridiculed than the poor 'flail snail'. Personally, I've always had a bit of a soft spot (er...) for the monster, as it strikes me as a perfect example of the whimsical 'a-wizard-did-it' approach that was employed in the construction of so many classic AD&D beasts.

But perhaps the flail snail has some historical legitimacy? Apparently, as this Vox video explains, Medieval illuminated texts often included pictures of knights fighting snails in their margins...

Remembering the 1980s panic over Dungeons and Dragons

I finally got around to watching this ‘retro-report’ from the New York Times: When Dungeons and Dragons Set Off a ‘Moral Panic’.

I think that it’s quite good. It summarizes some of the main elements of the great D&D panic of the early 1980s, including the claims that playing D&D ‘causes’ suicide and murder amongst teens (by making them loose touch with reality, by glorifying violence, and the like), and that it promotes ‘Satanism’ and ‘the occult’.

It has some interesting clips of Gary Gygax from 30+ years ago, as well as other news reports from that era, and some recent comments from Tim Kask. It also includes some contemporary reflections on the hobby, including great remarks from well-known authors like Cory Doctorow and Junot Diaz. Towards the end of the report, Diaz touchingly comments on the value of role-playing games like D&D in cultivating creativity, providing a ‘safe place’ for ‘unpopular’ kids to socialize and develop self-confidence, and so forth. It’s a very ‘pro’ D&D piece overall.

Watching the report reminded me of my own experience with the 1980s hysteria over Dungeons and Dragons. Fears of ‘Satanism’ and the like concerning the hobby were never as intense or widespread in Canada as they were in the United States. (I think this was, at least in part, because of the absence of anything comparable to the American ‘Bible Belt’ in Canada. While of course there are Canadian fundamentalist Christians, they are a much smaller portion of the overall population than they are within the United States.)  Nonetheless, there was something of an echo of the panic in Canada, and especially in southern Ontario where I grew up, probably because of its proximity to Michigan (where one of the famous incidents that inflamed the D&D panic occurred in 1979, as explained within the retro-report).

Here’s what happened to me. There was a role-playing club in my high school in London Ontario (I think it may simply have been called the ‘Dungeons and Dragons club,’ even though we played games other than D&D; I can’t remember now). One day, in 1985 I think, a news reporter and a cameraman from the local television station asked to film one of our games. Needless to say, this was quite a thrill for a gang of nerdy adolescent boys!  And it was especially thrilling for me, since I was the Dungeon Master. I was dizzy at the prospect of having ‘my’ game displayed on television. The glory!

So we played our game for about an hour. Afterwards the reporter asked us some questions about it. Stuff like:

1. “Were you scared when the creature in the well surprised you and attacked your character?”
2. “Why is your character named ‘Feldene’? Isn’t that a drug?” (I’m amazed that I still remember this.)
3. “Do you get upset or angry when your character is hurt or killed?”

 We gave pretty boring answers to all of her (rather leading) questions:

1. “No, I wasn’t scared, this is only a game.”
2. “My dad is taking Feldene, and I thought it sounded like a cool name for an elf.”
3. "I get a little upset when my character dies, but, you know, this is just a game.”

Over the subsequent two weeks I watched the six o’clock news like a hawk, waiting for my 15 minutes of fame. But it never happened. There never was any news story on our amazing high school RPG club. I was crushed.

One of my friends in the group understood why: “We just weren’t controversial enough; actually, we weren’t controversial at all.” If only my friend had named his elf ‘Heroin’! Or if only one of us had started weeping and screaming at the prospect of his third-level cleric being killed!

Perhaps having a DM like Ms. Frost would’ve helped us get on TV:

*sigh*

King Tut’s meteorite dagger

Cool: “A famous dagger found in the wrapping of Egyptian King Tutankhamun's mummy was made with iron from a meteorite.”

My D&D stats for this meteorite dagger: +3 to hit and damage; double damage versus undead creatures; mummies hit have a 50% change of being disintegrated (no save).

The Epic of Gilgamesh: Expanded Edition

After only 4000 years, the Epic of Gilgamesh is being updated.

Six-packs of Ancient Greece

Ever wonder why the cuirasses of those ancient hoplites had such well-sculpted muscles?  Well here is the answer.