Traverse Fantasy

( Previous Post ) I’m going to invoke the death of the author here before anyone else does (never mind). It’s easy to talk and argue about intent when discussing texts, especially when the question is whether a text contains contradictory perspectives or priorities. At least we don’t know what either author thought on the topic, so we can’t take that as a faulty basis. Anyway, when I refer to authorial priority, I want to determine if the passages attributed to either author have different notions of play or its telos —or perhaps, if we didn’t know which passage could be attributed to which author, if such differences in the text would still be manifest in predictable ways. Any reference to intent per se here is a heuristic for the text’s own significance (in the Lacanian sense, of a meaning generated rather than given). Hypothesis I: Differing Priorities Now that I’ve cast this protection spell against bullshit lit-crit pedantry, I can submit my hypothesis that OD&D alternat...

I did the oopsie of assuming that a controversial, or at least non-consensus, position was actually a non-controversial consensus. From “ Inaugurating the Icon0clasm Ball ”: Not only was OD&D interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text. Did you catch that? In other words, “Gary and Dave had different priorities collaborating on Dungeons & Dragons , and this is apparent from the text as received.” I promised myself I wouldn’t do any more exegesis of this fucking thing, but that’s a big-ass claim. Is it true? Back when I was working on FMC , I was interested in the development of the OD&D text which consisted of a back-and-forth between its two authors. I’m indebted to Dan Boggs’ Hidden in Shadows blog which I read and internalized years ago, and the timeline below is from his original 2012 post on Beyond This Point Be Dragons : In 1972, ...

Hashtag OSRisOverParty, Hashtag RIPBozo, etc etc. The initial… “edition” of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition tried to present itself as a reactionary return to some ideal past paradigm of D&D —be it Third Edition to win back territory lost prior to Paizo’s Pathfinder , or an even older Gygaxian edition to get in the pants of the sort-of nascent OSR. Practically, this resulted in a final product that was like a simple Third Edition with dogwhistle-like nods to OSR conventions (since the play-style’s influence in the end was tenuous at best and mostly abandoned after the public test phase). It’s maybe more succinctly described as a people-pleasing game, with the caveat that people-pleasers don’t please anyone. So, how did it become popular? And how does the new 2024 not-edition reflect major differences between then and now, in terms of how D&D is perceived and played? This is my ramble. Sent from iPhone. Fifth Edition: Born in 2014 Of course, nobody plays D&D as ...

This is a revision of my 2022 blog post , shortened for publication in Knock! and also for clarification. Is the OSR dead yet? If you asked some, they would say yes. There was a body of cultural knowledge which has been rendered inaccessible (for some reason) to hobbyists who are working in the same space. What is old is new again, so people are talking about random encounters and reaction rolls as if they had discovered them themselves like Christopher Columbus discovering the Americas. They weren’t the first ones there and, if you were to ask Ramanan Sivaranjan from the Save Vs. Total Party Kill blog, no one had left either. The OSR is not dead because he’s still there, as are others from the time of G+ who are also still doing their own thing. How can something be dead and alive at the same time? It could be a difference of definitions. It could also be a zombie. An authoritative definition of the OSR is difficult to arrive at because any one definition is sure to attract conten...

One of the most common misconceptions I’ve seen about the original Dungeons & Dragons is that it tells players to use the Avalon Hill board game Outdoor Survival to handle wilderness exploration (in the same way, perhaps, that it recommends Chainmail for handling combat encounters). Strictly speaking, this is not true; the passage only says to use the board from that game as a map for wilderness adventures, but does not say to use any of its rules. However, it’s entirely possible that original D&D wilderness exploration procedure does indeed take specific influence from the Outdoor Survival ruleset. In this post, I’m going to closely read these rulesets to see what relationship may exist besides what is explicitly stated. OD&D’s Wilderness Adventures The adventuring party moves around a hex map to explore the wilderness and claim territory for themselves. Each turn represents a day of travel, where each mode of transport (e.g. on foot or on horseback) affords a differ...

The second part in my series about the evolution of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Evolution during the play-testing period from 2012-2013 when it was known as DnDNext ! If you haven’t read the first part, you should. The first look we got at DnDNext dated to May 2012, consisting of: a bestiary, an explanation of ability checks, a scant section on exploration, a ruleset for combat, and some sample characters. Three months later in August 2012, we get a vastly expanded play-test packet focused on how to create characters in the everchanging system. And then another play-test release just five days later, offering two new spell-casting classes with totally different mechanical relationships to magic. Let’s see what they cooked up! Bestiary Monsters have been slightly changed: some getting more hit points, most getting less. What’s more interesting is a new attribute that’s appeared, called “level”. Each monster has a level, up to 6 in this packet, which factors into how encounters ar...