And Now Back to our Regular Programming

AKA Random Blog Fodder

Man-o-man, I seem to have quite a few followers these days…pretty cool considering I’m coming up on my one year anniversary and (nearly) my 500th post to the blog. Apparently the traffic has been noticeable enough that I’m being solicited to link with other random sites for mutual financial benefit.

And now a word from our would-be sponsors:

We love the look and feel of your blog and think that your US and Canadian readers might be interested in a giveaway with our sites www.accent-furniture-direct.com, www.toysandgamesonline.com, orwww.cookware.com.

Accent furniture? Cookware?! I’ve talked about Top Chef, what? Twice? If that!

I don’t have any plans in the near future to stock this site with ad ware…right now, it’s purely for my own (and hopefully others’) entertainment. Plus, I’ve got a lot of images parked here without permission, and I’m afraid someone would sue my ass if I tried to make money off ‘em, even though my “art” (blog) may be considered derivative and their pieces available under fair use practice. Whatever…no ads here except for my OWN games.

New web site coming soon.

In other news, yes, I am fully aware of Dio's passing from this Earthly plane. In the past, I’ve said my piece on this this great human being and (as with Frank) I choose to celebrate his life, his deeds, and his artistic accomplishments rather than mourn his death. And that means I’ve been listening to nothing but Dio and Black Sabbath the last two days.
; )

Let’s see, what else…

Should probably write a thing or two about The Compleat Spell Caster…though since each new class presented has its own individual spell list, don’t expect to see conversion write-ups any time soon.

Speaking of conversions, I’ve been REALLY itching to do a new B/X conversion of an old AD&D module. Unfortunately, as maps and text are copyright of the original publisher, conversion notes won’t be helpful to anyone that doesn’t have the original module (the great thing about my White Plume Mountain conversion was that WotC provided the module as a free D20 edition down load, so the maps and text were available to any that wanted it). What to do, what to do…maybe a new poll should be on the agenda!

Yeah...a new poll is definitely in order.

Sex and D&D (Part 4)

In Summation...

Hmmm, actually there’s not much I want to “sum up.” I really just wanted to open up a conversation through my usual method of reminiscing about my old D&D (or in this case, AD&D) campaigns. I would like to note that no character EVER received a single XP for a “sexual conquest” (even in my youth, it was understood that adventuring XP was not gained for that type of “adventure”).

Was it important to our games to have “sex” show up in them? Mmm…that’s hard to say. Maybe. Maybe it was necessary. Perhaps it was part of what kept the campaign going into the higher levels. I don’t know this for sure, but it’s possible that high level “ass kicking” would have gotten boring without the additional drama caused by the inclusion of sex and the consequential soap opera that follows it.

I know this: I had a different trio of friends that played an AD&D campaign from 1st level up into the 20s, but first running the T1-4: Temple of Elemental Evil super-module and then completing a couple of the Bloodstone Mines series. And while I happily listened to their exploits it felt, well…"tedious" is NOT the word I’d use since they obviously had fun and it sounded like fun. But maybe “superficial?” I don’t know if they included the whole sub-plot with the Baron’s daughter as a love interest, but besides being a railroad-y plot element, I can’t see them doing much more than glossing over it…after all, they had ass-kicking to get to! What’s with this namby-pamby romance stuff?

I don’t know…all I DO know is that my friends and I used sex (and its corollaries) in our AD&D games. To me, it appears this is supported by the rules, by the source material, by the Gygax penned modules and the TSR-published literature. It worked in our games and made for memorable experiences…ones that we wanted to continue to revisit with various twists across different campaigns and through different generations.

Would it work with today’s gamers? Hell, would it work with today’s games? Who knows!

Am I the only one that experienced campaigns like this? Somehow I doubt it. Perhaps it wasn’t as explored in as great o depth by other gamers, but SEX is present in AD&D for those with eyes to see it.

I had this conversation with Kris the other day:

“Hey, Doc, can I ask you a semi-sensitive question?” Um, yeah. “But you may not answer?” Right. “How old were you when you started playing AD&D?” Around middle school. “Was there sex in your games?” What? “Sex, was there SEX in your D&D games…like characters having sex with other characters, even if they were only NPCs?” Yeah. “Ok, thanks…that’s all I needed to know.”

And really, that’s all I do need to know.

A few last, final notes:

While I started conceptualizing this series of posts a week ago (I was considering it for Friday, the day of Venus, but got distracted by the sunny weekend), it wasn’t until a day or two ago that I came across Ron Edwards article Naked Went the Gamer on his Adept Press web site.

[yes, shame on me…I have yet to buy a single copy of Fight On!]

In general, I agree with an awful lot of the stuff Mr. Edwards has to say. In this particular instance, I can’t relate quite the same since my gaming did NOT begin in the 1970s but rather the early 80s. We DID have VCRs, superhero comics were ubiquitous, and my friends and I were all Just Saying No to drugs with Nancy. However we were still playing the Old School, 70’s era AD&D in an admirably visceral style. I agree with the sentiment that somewhere along the way the hobby took a huge wrong turn (the “collective flinch” RE talks about), but I certainly don’t think it’s too late to get back to authenticity in gaming. And that starts with being a little honest about our gaming...what it is, what it was, what it was not.

My intention in sharing my experiences (and my ideas regarding Sex and D&D) has been an attempt to open some honest discussion…that’s about it.

NOT to point to any particular moral high ground. Not to denigrate anyone’s style of play (though I stand by my statement that latter editions of D&D have been “neutered”). Certainly I’m not trying to lead anyone down any particular path.

Well…and maybe I wanted to pry the lid off others’ games…I AM one of those "prying Scorpio types," after all.

Maybe writing about my own experiences will give others the space they need to discuss their own take on the subject of “Sex and D&D.” There are probably some people that have negative feelings on the subject, depending on their own history (especially if there were problems with abuses of power, in-game or out). Perhaps our sharing will help germinate ideas in others’ heads that will allow for a greater depth of role-playing in their games; perhaps it will help us mature a bit…or at least look at the game a little differently.

Okay, that’s enough on the subject for now (at least from me). Thanks for reading folks.

[this link will take you back to Part 1]

Sex and D&D (Part 3)

AKA “You Kids All Right in There?”


I can only speculate why other bloggers don’t write about sex in their D&D campaigns. Maybe people really DON’T do “Sex and D&D” anymore. Maybe they never did, and my gaming group was a bunch of super-perverted adolescents. Maybe they feel that this kind of “role-playing” is private and need not be discussed in the blog-o-sphere. Leave that for those Indie gamer guys that are so “in your face” about role-playing their emotional content anyway.

Or maybe, like myself, folks are kind of/somewhat embarrassed to even bring it up.

I mean, it’s hard to imagine now the games I played as a 12-14 year old kid. I’ve played with other kids in the 12-15 year old range over the course of the last year (acting as DM) and they seemed pretty immature to play the kind of games I used to play, “way back when.” Then again, what do I know? In general the kids always minded their P’s and Q’s around Uncle JB, and I know that at their age I was swearing like a sailor. Who’s to say what kind of game they’d be interested in, if they were hanging with their peers?

Perhaps we all tend to forget how fast we grow up as children. Not that we know everything (God forbid…I was immensely stupid, even in my 20s, and still am about a variety of things!), but kids aren’t nearly as infantile as we assume they are for as long as we assume they are.

Or maybe they are. Hell, my friends and I were reading well above our own grade level at the time (thanks for the education, TSR!)…I think I was tested as have reading skills equal to college freshman when I was still in the 8th grade. So maybe we were “forcing” our games into more mature realms, even as we did so using a game.

A game for ADULTS, at least originally.

So what then, exactly, did our games involve? How did “Sex and D&D” look in-game so to speak? Are we just talking about buying drinks for the resident harlot at the local inn or what?

Well, sure, “wenching” was a part of the game, as might be expected from young adolescents privy to pulp fiction/comics and B Fantasy films. I think a lot of young male players from way back can probably relate to this kind of action. Later on, Comeliness played a good sized role in this.

Character back-story was another place sex showed up…especially the heredity/ancestry of humans and semi-humans. Demihumans, of which there were very few player characters, were left pretty much alone as a kind of “alien” species…practically immortal and inhuman, they could care less about things our mere mortals worried about (i.e. breeding and dying). Halflings (especially post-Dragon Lance) were generally played like kender (after all, every f’ing Halfling in AD&D is an f’ing THIEF), a basically sexless race if ever there was one. Sorry Bilbo, you old batchelor, you!

However, character back-story (which for us, fed directly into the direction our sandbox campaign moved) wasn’t just limited to who was a bastard or who grew up an orphan. We had broken marriages, widows (and widowers), characters fleeing arranged marriages, at least one semi-incestuous sibling pair (well, maybe not, but the brother sure was over-protective of his sister). Virgins and virginity was a semi-big deal and we did tie it a bit to alignment (Chaotic types being much more “free love” than Lawful characters, and treating a sexual partner badly was sure to draw you closer to the Evil side of the alignment tree). Not that anyone ever faced an XP penalty (or divine “Bolt from the Blue”) for any particular sexual episode (well, with perhaps one particularly memorable sleazy Halfling whose player will remain nameless), but it WAS an influence it how we interpreted character alignment and personality.

As far as actual “sex scenes” being narrated, generally we made good use of “curtains/veils” as described by Ron Edwards. Saying, ‘ok you guys go to bed together,’ or even ‘you screw each other’s brains out and fall asleep’ is not particularly graphic, in my opinion. That’s not to say that a character or two wasn’t interrupted “in the act” (especially finding their spouse/lover in bed with someone else), but we weren’t being overly gross or detailed about it.

Hell, we were 13! What the heck did we know about sex anyway? We weren’t having any! And the idea of doing anything “live action” never crossed our (dirty little) minds…at least not mine. We didn’t even gesture or pantomime (well, not much anyway). In general we were as depraved as good, clean kids from nice homes and non-abusive families can be…which might still be pretty filthy, but it was only 1986. Wow, would you look at what’s on TV today? Even basic cable!

So in addition to “back-story” and “wenching” we actually did have romantic relationships (sexual and non-sexual) between player characters and prominent NPCs. In one campaign, one of these relationships was a driving force, involving multiple PCs (there was a “love quadrangle”) and NPCs, one of whom was especially prone to jealous rages of murderous force. However, in the end the girl chose THAT GUY (perhaps out of fear…for herself or others), and an elaborate plot was hatched to take the asshole out. Unfortunately, despite having a skilled archer with an Arrow of Slaying (the illegitimate bastard son of the intended victim…from a prior relationship!) the ambush went horribly wrong and the bride-to-be ended up slain. It was a sordid, messy affair…though one that will probably be remembered by all of us that took part in the campaign.

What else? Oh, yeah…how about offspring? The usual outcome of sex in a world without birth control (you’d think some magic-user would invent a spell…) we had to come up with random chances of pregnancy (I think it ended up being 1 in 8), especially as the campaign had fairly long-lived, high level characters (half-elves and longevity potions, yo). We even started one whole new secondary campaign composed of just the adult children of our primary characters…which of course meant determining who everyone’s parents were…which then got incorporated (or at least talked about) in the primary campaign.

That idea came straight from Pepsi (“the choice of a NEW generation”) even though we refused to drink anything other than Coca-Cola.

So now some interested parties may ask, “How the hell do you even START incorporating this kind of stuff into your D&D campaign? Do you just roll up a harlot in random city encounter and go from there?” Um, no.

For us, I think it started with trust first and foremost. As a group, we’d been playing for years together (shit, we were growing up together!) and since none us were huge assholes, people had the space to develop these ideas in-game…and the ideas were supported by the source material (1st edition AD&D and the surrounding literature and supplements).

For another thing, I think it was important that we had a good male-female player dynamic. No…males playing female characters does NOT count towards this (what is it about Libras always having to play “both sides of the fence,” anyway?).

[hmmm, it occurs to me I may have just offended a bunch of Libra folks. Sorry; just my experience, please give me the benefit of the doubt. I won’t even talk about my experience with Gemini types]

Trying to introduce sex or sex-related issues into an all male group can be…awkward, to say the least, as occurred with my first Vampire the Masquerade saga (“okay, so, I’m not gay or anything, but…”). Ugh!

Having both male and female players in our group, even though it never got better than a 3 to 2 ratio, provided a degree of balance to the game. I mean we WERE friends after all, so we did listen to each other’s feelings and generally didn’t try to make each other uncomfortable or squeamish (basic Social Contract stuff…we learned it without being taught).

On the other hand, it may have helped that none of us were in a true romantic relationship with anyone else. Rivalries of friendship (which at times reared an ugly head) were bad enough. Keeping our real lives platonic allowed us to be more intimate in-game…which made us a closer and more intimate group of friends in general. While I’ve pretty much lost touch with all these people over the years, I still consider them the best collective group of friends I ever had.

Yeah…like that line from Stand By Me.

To be concluded here...

Sex and D&D (Part 2)

AKA “Did Gary Make You Touch Yourself?”

Full disclosure alert: I have NEVER masturbated to a single nude (or semi-nude) illustration in an RPG book or supplement, Dungeons & Dragons or otherwise.

I’m just being honest here, and wanted to get that out of the way, in case anyone was wondering. There was plenty of other “fantasy related inspiration” to be found outside of officially licensed game product in the early 1980s.

I’m sure that some people will find this whole subject more than a little distasteful. What kind of pervert would want to include sex or sexual situations (or sexual scenarios) in a game about kicking in doors, killing monsters, and looting treasure? JB must be one those gamers that helped play-test Erotic D20 or something.

Hey, people, I’m just going with the literary inspirations here.

I stopped reading TSR published novels prior to the release of 2nd edition AD&D, so I’ve never read a Forgotten Realms tale or any of the adventures of Drizzit the Drow (or however you spell his name)…so I really can’t say what those books are like. However, I DID read the first six Dragon Lance books (Chronicles and Legends) and the first two Greyhawk novels (featuring Gord the Gutless…er, the Rogue).

Anyone that read those first few novels by Weiss and Hickman will see an interesting (to me) phenomenon…they get dramatically better over time. Really, I have to say that the first book (Dragons of an Autumn Twilight) is almost un-readably bad (in my opinion), but the quality becomes noticeably better as the series continues. The way I look at it is this: Weiss and Hickman started their careers as adventure module writers, and it shows. Things in that 1st book sound like they’re straight out of an AD&D module (right down to detailed equipment lists)…albeit one with an interesting premise (hey, good modules have interesting premises, too!). The second half of the book is better than the first half as the authors depart more and more from standard D&Disms and simply work on writing a novel and the following two books (Dragons of a Winter Night and Dragons of a Spring Dawning) are much better even as they radically depart from D&D and “the rules of the game,” instead becoming real fantasy stories. But of course the books are better for it…because literature is a different artistic medium than role-playing.

And, man, do those books have a lot of sex in ‘em!

Certainly not in the softcore, romance novel type way (what my old friend Jocelyn liked to call “smut books”)…there are no passages regarding Caramon’s “quivering, purple-headed warrior” or anything. But there is plenty of literal sex and sexual conflict that occurs that is integral to the plot…especially the love triangle of Tanis and Laurana and Kitiara, but also the relationship between Gilthanas and the (polymorphed) silver dragon, Sturm and the Silvanesti elf woman, Caramon and Tika, and Kitiara and her various Dragon Lord lovers.

The second trilogy almost completely revolves around the romance of Raistlin and Crysania and, although they never consummate the relationship, it drives most of the story. Also Kitiara (again) and Dalmar have plenty of steamy moments, under-lacing their eventual conflict with heightened tension and meaning.

To my friends and I, this kind of thing only made sense…after all, we were already playing D&D like this. Love triangles, sexual tension, unrequited love…these things were part of the fabric of the campaign: the relationships between player characters as well as important (and not so important) non-player characters. Dragon Lance was only modeling what we were already doing.

At least, what we were doing by 1985 or so; certainly prior to the release of Gary Gygax’s first Gord novel, Saga of Old City, which I bought as soon as I saw it at the local B. Dalton’s. Hell, having the word Greyhawk on the cover was exciting enough, but being authored by The Great One himself? Oh, boy!

No one could have been more surprised than me when I opened the book and the first line of dialogue on page 1 was “Shiteater!”

I know I felt a bit weird about THAT. Mainly due to the disjointedness of a modern, thoroughly American expletive in what (one might assume) would still contain the pseudo-medieval fantasy tone of Dragon Lance, or even Tolkien. But no, there is plenty of choice expletives sprinkled throughout the text (phrases one won’t find in the DMG, that’s for sure!), which I suppose simply emboldened the way we played D&D. After all, if The Master was using such terminology in his own campaign world, who were we to not do so?

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Likewise, there was plenty of sex, sexual scenarios, and sexually driven conflicts/tensions in Mr. Gygax’s book as well. Perhaps not as steamy as the Dragon Lance novels (themselves, as I said, merely lukewarm) , but definitely present, definitely integral to what made the protagonist tick, something that drove the character Gord towards adventure at least as regularly as the lure of easy treasure.

Which is as it should be. As I said in my last post, the human condition is more than just the acquisition of wealth (well, for the average person), and Dungeons & Dragons allows you to explore that human condition in a fantasy setting. That’s the potential anyway…I don’t know that people are still doing it that much anymore.

But let’s get back to “sexual inspiration.”

Even if one isn’t reading these early published novels specifically referencing Dungeons & Dragons, certainly the “inspirational reading lists” of the DMG's Appendix N (even the bibliography in Moldvay's basic set!) are rife with "adult" (i.e. sexual) situations.

But even without fantasy literature (game inspired or not)…which we recognize as a different medium than role-playing…even without books with “characters” and “plots,” and whatnot…look at the early adventure modules.

The Drow…from their first appearance in G3 up through Q1 in 1981...are sleazy, sexual creatures. Sex and its ramifications are deeply imperative to the Drow culture, right down to in-game effectiveness based on gender-specific attributes. A matriarchal society, the Drow are most often encountered in male-female (mated?) pairs, working in combination.

And every depiction of NPC Drow dwellings and quarters are uniformly described as lurid, lewd, and obscenely decorated. There’s no way I’m inclined to interpret that besides being “sexual” in nature. Drow like sex! With each other, with other races (review the D3 description of half-Drow), with demons (the vamp Drow and his succubus consort, also in D3)…probably all manner of other critters.

Not to mention Igwilvv and Graz’zt and Iuz and cambion demons in general. You don’t get half-demons except by having sex with a demon.

I wrote earlier that AD&D has an implied, specific setting, with setting specific classes, spells, magic items, and monsters. Well, that implied, specific setting has an implied sexuality to it as well: creatures mate with each other and form half-human monsters that found kingdoms and stir up trouble. If that kind of deviancy ain’t to your taste, you may want to be playing something other than AD&D.

My friends and I wanted to play AD&D…and our games had sex in ‘em. Coming up in Part 3, I’ll try to give y’all some examples of the hot and heavy!

Sex and D&D (Part 1)

AKA How 2nd Edition Neutered AD&D

I now embark on a journey exploring what is probably a delicate subject…one that I will no doubt probably stomp all over. I can’t recall having ever been described as “gentle” or “delicate,” so I’ll apologize in advance as I crush my way through what will be a three part series of posts.

Mmm…how even to start?

Phil Foglio’s comic strip What’s New With Phil & Dixie ran in Dragon Magazine for several years ending with the April 1984 issue, shortly before I ever started collecting Dragon. As such, while I later knew Foglio’s art from the Robert Aspirin MythAdventure novels (not to mention Buck Godot), it probably wasn’t till the 1990s or later that I had a chance to read some of the old What’s New strips in back issues I picked up here and there. Fortunately, one can get them on-line now, and I’ve had the opportunity to read ‘em all.

Interesting the long-running gag regarding “Sex and D&D” in these comics, only eventually “resolved” long after Foglio’s exodus from Dragon.

Welp, I want to talk about sex and D&D now myself.

Maybe I’m reading the wrong blogs or something, but it just doesn’t seem to be a subject that’s been addressed in any particular depth…hell, not even really in passing. I started thinking about this a couple weeks ago when I read someone’s blog post regarding how surprised he was to hear that “rape” had appeared in some folks’ D&D games.

[no, I do NOT equate sex with rape; they are two extremely different things]

What got me thinking were the comments I saw from other posters that seemed to imply (or from which I inferred) that people had been running games completely devoid of anything intercourse-related (consensual or not)…which got me thinking of the differences between different editions of Dungeons & Dragons…which led me to some interesting thoughts I hadn’t previously considered.

SEX and sexuality is implicit within the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game. This, more than anything else, is what has been removed from the 2nd (and later) editions.

I have written before, here and elsewhere, how I feel 2nd edition has “no balls.” I didn’t realize till now how literal that castration was. I’ve said before that I consider earlier editions of D&D to be “more mature.” I did not consider till now a literal lack of maturation (i.e. puberty/adulthood) in the 2nd and later editions of D&D.

And no, I am not just talking about the lack of nipples in illustrations.

There is sexuality implied in the original AD&D manuals. Girdles of masculinity/femininity, philters of love, artifacts and relics that instill individuals with satyriasis (the male equivalent of the better known term “nymphomania”) or kill their sexual desire, diseases to "generative organs," random prostitute encounter tables…and let’s not forget the cutting of the half-orc from the 2nd edition. Oh a half-elf may represent two loving, beautiful people of compatible stock joined in Lawful matrimony…what the hell does a half-orc represent? Someone that wants to get down and dirty with a goblinoid (or giant-kin as the ranger description might call it…shades of Lilith and Biblical naughtiness)? Or, of course, the possibility of rape (orc on human or human on orc…either way it’s a pretty foul way to procreate).

Even the Unearthed Arcana did its part in the name of attraction and (sexual) relationships, in the form of the Comeliness attribute (because apparently, Charisma wasn’t enough) and the random tables to determine not only social class, but MARITAL STATUS of one’s parents.

Because these things MATTER…in a game that is about more than “kick in the door, kill the monster, take the treasure.”

I don’t know how Gygax ran HIS games (I’ve got some guesses), but I can tell you how we (my friends and I) ran OUR games back in the day, and SEX and personal relationships were a big part of it. I’ll delve into that in a bit.

Taken by itself (this is important), 2nd edition AD&D seems to me to be little more than an over-complicated “child’s fantasy adventure game.” And 3rd edition is much the same. And I’m guessing (since I haven’t read it) that 4th edition continues this eunuch tradition. Which perhaps is why these latter editions seem (to me) so childish. Yes, yes describe all the blood-letting you wish…you can get that in any Rated M video game these days. If all you’re doing is defeating challenges and collecting points (XPs, GPs)…well, in my opinion that’s under-utilizing the potential of the RPG medium.

Because one of the beauties of the medium is that it is only limited by one’s imagination. Monopoly pieces don’t unite their empires through marital unions. No one ever pulls a peg out of the plastic car in Life because someone was having an affair with someone else (maybe with an orc!). You might say I’m comparing apples to watermelons and that’s EXACTLY my point: though D&D and Monopoly are both games (really! That’s what it is!), D&D is on a completely different playing field from any board game.

Unless you make it about moving tokens around little squares on a battle mat.

Sex and issues related to sex (family, children, parents, partners, spouses, heredity, inheritance, alliances, trust, betrayal, jealousy, etc.) are part of our human condition. We don’t just get up and go to work and make money and come home and eat a meal with the money we made and sleep and eventually die. There is more to life than that. And Dungeons & Dragons (and role-playing games in general) gives us the ability to model a FANTASY life. To play for a while as a warrior or a wizard or a thief or a king. And incorporating real life issues into one’s fantasy game can make for a richer experience.

At least that’s been my experience.

But I grew up playing AD&D. Oh, I started with B/X as a little kid, but the hardcore play didn’t begin until we got our hands on those 1st edition hardcovers, after which our world was consumed with the soap opera of our fantasy simulation. And it was hella’ fun! AND as far as I’m aware it did not turn any of us into miscreants (I don’t know about my friend Jason after he was removed from our circle of friends due to his mom finding a new religion).

Because if I had to guess, I would imagine that the neutering of AD&D took place in direct response to the outcry against D&D. There is little that I can find in the game that would appear to promote the often-cited “devil worship” danger of Dungeons & Dragons, but there is definitely an implicit sexuality to the game that might offend the puritanical Christian Right.

Welp, I am here to tell you I got straight A’s in school, was an active member of my church (including being an altar boy), ended up going to college (unlike my parents) without trying to jump from a rooftop (thanks, Tom Hanks), and I seem to be successfully living a (moderate) version of the American Dream without a criminal record or illegal drug habit…and I NEVER capitulated in my Dungeons & Dragons play and had gaming sessions before the age of 13 that would burn the ears of most Christian fundamentalists and probably damn me straight to Hell (in their opinion).

Fuck that noise. It’s a game.

Coming up! Part 2 in which I explain our inspiration to get “down and dirty” in Dungeons & Dragons. Yes, I wanted to play a half-ogre character…but I wanted my original character to father it himself! Woo-hoo!

Monday Morning Blues

AKA “Self Pity”

I’ve never considered myself an extremely creative person…or rather, I’ve always considered my creativity to be a bit of a sham. Certainly, it’s always felt like a lesser creativity, a derivative one.

Or maybe I should qualify that and say “until lately,” because I think I’m starting to honor and respect my creative juices; or (if not that) maybe I’ve been redefining for myself what “creativity” is.

For example, I don’t think my blog is particularly creative. Oh, it is definitely a form of “creative expression,” and I am “creating something” that wasn’t in existence prior to me putting it there. But is it wholly of my imagination? All I’m doing is stringing together words, words other folks have used many times before, just putting them in slightly different order. All I’m doing is distilling ideas, combining multiple concepts into singular ones. Riffing off the “true creativity” of others more often than not.

Or so I sometimes worry. After all, blogging seems pretty damn easy to me…too easy to be considered “art.”

Now as I said this is a life-long doubt that’s nagged at me regarding ALL my different attempts at artistic expression…my singing, my writing, my drawing, my acting. Hell, of all of ‘em, I think my acting was the best part and the greatest potential…in the end, I just wasn’t willing to do the hard “starving” part necessary to commit to the art. My singing is/was probably my second strongest suit, and perhaps strongest…but I haven’t taken care of the pipes over the years and my vocal chords just don’t have the same range and power that they once did.

Such is getting older.

Writing, I list as third on the list of “artsy things I’m good at” and yet writing wasn’t even my first love…that would have been drawing. Something I have never actively pursued beyond the doodling of figures and cartoons or the occasional sketch portrait.

I think that a lot of my self-doubt may actually be tied to my drawing ability and the comparisons I’ve drawn between my own artwork and those of others. Throughout school…elementary to high school and even some years in college…I have been surrounded by friends who were gifted artists in the visual/drawing sense of the term. ALL my friends could draw, to a greater or lesser degree, and in general I found most of their artwork superior to my own.

One of the few things I recall from the 1st grade (age 6-7) was a drawing contest between my friend and myself. I’ve mentioned Jason before…up until the 3rd grade or so, if anyone had asked I would probably have cited him as my “best friend.” When I started playing D&D, he would become one of the first “regular” members of the campaign with his thief, Sneakshadow (d4 hit dice folks, as God and Gary intended). He would also be the first of us to pick up Marvel Superheroes and start us on that particular path. Eventually, his single mom would become a Born Again Christian and D&D would be replaced with real life “communing in tongues” and well…he’d drift out of my life.

Jason was artistically gifted. He played the drums from a young age, and would be playing the electric guitar and growing his hair long by middle school. He was also THE best artist I knew until the age of 10 or 12.

However, I considered myself pretty hot stuff in the 1st grade.

How exactly we got into our dispute, I don’t recall. As I said this is one of only a handful of memories I can dredge up from 30+ years ago (no wonder people have such difficulty remembering past lives!). Jason and I were drawing monsters (something we did a LOT of back in 1980) and arguing over who was the best “drawer.” For some reason, our normal teacher wasn’t present, but rather two older girls (eighth graders, I think) that were “watching the class” for an hour or so…probably the reason the 1st graders had been given the time to draw and get into trouble in the first place.

So to settle our disagreement before we came to blows, our teachers/baby sitters decided Jason and I would each draw the best and scariest monster we could…and then our art would be judged by the entire class!

Well, we set about drawing our best mean and nasty, trying our darnedest to out-do the other. From what I can recall, my drawing was in profile, the monster a bit like Godzilla with “goggley eyes,” perhaps even on stalks, perhaps multiple arms, definitely with scaly skin. We drew on big poster board and the young ladies put our pictures on display in the front of the classroom for all to judge. Then they had the entire class vote on who they thought had the better drawing.

This was done by a show of hands…with our heads down on our desks and our eyes closed so only the teachers could see who voted for whom.

When the counting was done, the student teachers announced that the vote was dead even and the contest a tie…no one had received more votes than the other. Even at that age I considered this to be disingenuous…rigged to spare us any hard feelings of “losing” to the other. And this upset me more than simply losing.

What’s more, I remember feeling at the time that Jason’s drawing, hanging from the blackboard, was clearly superior to mine. More polished, more adult, definitely 100% better than mine. Even though I had been handed (or felt I’d been handed) a face-saving tie, I knew in my heart that I had lost. I never considered myself an equal to Jason in art ever again.

Strangely, I can’t recall a single thing about his drawing today.

Looking back on it, I wonder if this didn’t have a profoundly negative impact on me as a child. In a way, there was a “teachable moment” that got missed in this instance. Just because one loses a contest on a particular day doesn’t mean you’re going to lose the next day. Nor does it mean that you can’t get better with practice and effort. Nor does it mean that your effort is not a work of pure creativity, in and of itself, and worthy of celebration for that.

Instead, I took my tie result and my place of Co-Best Artist of the 1st Grade. And felt like a sham. And continued to feel like a sham for many years…at least in the fields of art and writing (my friend Scott, who I would also meet in the 1st grade was, in addition to being a good artist was an excellent creative story writer). Later, when I would get some accolades in the singing and acting fields, I certainly felt like I had something “special” about myself…but then again I wasn’t writing my own music or my own scripts. And what I was creatively expressing on-stage could not be bottled or packaged, picked up later and looked at and reviewed.

Furthermore, the higher one climbs in any artistic endeavor, the more outright brilliant people one finds. People that seem to outstrip your own personal glory by a mile-and-a-half. And if you have a giant ego like mine, and are trying to be “honest” with yourself, it sure is hard to be kept from those Upper Echelons; it’s hard enough to come up #2 or #3, but even more disheartening to not make the Top 20 or 100.

NOW having written all that, and having finished my morning coffee (perhaps waking myself a bit from that Monday Morning Funk). I have this to say:

No single person is responsible for all the joy and beauty found in any particular form of art.

Whether singing or dancing or acting or drawing or…yes indeed…writing role-playing games, there is no ONE person that is most responsible…or most ORIGINAL… with regard to the creativity found in these artistic endeavors. Yes, certain geniuses do occasionally emerge with innovative techniques…say Eddie Van Halen and finger-boarding…but even the “non-geniuses” are still making music (or whatever)…they are still CREATING. They are still expressing the Divine (God, the Universe, Spirit) into our material world through their own actions. THAT is what creativity is.

I stand for the possibility that all people have the freedom to fully express their own creativity.

Personally, I think this makes a better world. There is only One Source from which all things come, and humans’ ability to channel that source into the world as a form of inspiration and enjoyment for others is one of the greatest Gifts we have as a species.

Which, I guess, is all preamble to saying: keep doing whatever you are doing. Blogging, game design, doodling, writing Tolkien-esque poetry…whatever is your personal, inspired form of creativity keep doing it and don’t ever get down on yourself for what you do. And when OTHERS get down on you (as folks sometimes do), don’t let THAT stop you. They may not be your target audience after all (hell, your target audience may only be YOU yourself!).

I just want everyone to remember that I really, truly believe this…as I once again prepare to rip apart someone else’s beloved RPG system.
; )

You Just Don't Understand...

It's not that I don't WANT to post a bunch of stuff on my day off. I've got, literally, near half-a-dozen posts in mind and I TOTALLY want to pick up the slack in the Old School Blog-o-sphere left by Mr. Maliszewski "taking Fridays off."

But it is a beautiful, gorgeous sunny day in Seattle, and for those who haven't visited the Northwest in the May to September months...well, ya' just don't know what you're missing. I've been out biking, sat in the front yard chatting with neighbors...hell, I even walked to Gary's not once but twice today, just to feel the sun on me.

'Course I also picked up a copy of The Compleat [sic] Spell Caster. More on that later.

Still haven't purchased my ISBN for the B/X Companion, but that is happening today. The snag I've run into is: am I willing to commit to a ten pack? Because it's a helluva' lot cheaper than buying 'em singly. Of course, it means I have to put out 9 more book products. Which I want to do...but will my wife stand for it?

Hmmm...

Tim at Gary's offered me one of his ISBNs (his game isn't scheduled for release till October, and apparently he has extras). Plus I really want to be my own publisher, I've decided.

I DID spend a good chunk of time working with Chaldean numerology today with regard to the names of various games and game companies, and checking to make sure I wasn't setting myself up for any serious disasters. Yes...I'm sure you all think I'm crazy. However, I find it fascinating how various name changes, especially with regard to the original publisher of Dungeons and Dragons, led to such disparity in company fortunes. Really:

Tactical Studies Rules

TSR Hobbies Inc., and

TSR, Inc.

all have wildly varying numerology attached to them, the first foretelling the falling out of Gygax and Arneson, the second the brilliant, imaginative innovation that excited a feeding frenzy and the third the wanton self-destruction wrought upon themselves.

But whatever. It is also interesting that Wizards of the Coast changes its numerology by abbreviating itself to WotC...to the same as Hasbro. And Hasbro has the same number whether it's "Hasbro" or "Hasbro, Inc."

Huh. Funny.

The reason I was checking was because I couldn't decide whether I wanted to publish under the moniker "Beagle Games" or "Beagle Game Design." However, after "crunching the numbers" I find that both carry the exact same numbers. Even the same compound number karma. Both have the same number as "Wizards of the Coast," though without the associated karmic implications.

Again...interesting.

Anyway, it's 5:30 (Pacific time) and I have cracked my first beer of the (still sunny) evening. The beagles are playing outdoors, the wife's getting a pedicure, and it is time for me to hunker down and do some work. Hope everyone is looking forward to a great weekend!