Judges Guild: Older-School Adventures…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 28, 2011

This weekend – in between bouts of some kind of illness that made me it’s punching bag – I stumbled across some unpublished work I did for Necromancer Games several years ago. This was principally work converting and updating some old Judges Guild materials over to to 3rd edition D20 rules. Yep, dice-and-paper, baby. Sadly, back then the guys at Necromancer Games were able to talk to the founder of Judges Guild, Bob Bledsaw, for additional information. Bledsaw died of cancer a few years later (2008).

I am an old-school gamer, but not quite that old-school. By the time I was seriously playing D&D, Judges’ Guild was… well, it was still around, but it was being overshadowed by TSR in such a way that I didn’t really recognize what they had been. It seems – based on my limited understanding – they were the first licensed third-party maker of game accessories for Dungeons & Dragons.  TSR was happy to have them make accessories that they thought were in an insignificant niche — things like adventure modules and a campaign setting. When TSR saw that JG was selling quite well, they jumped onto the ol’ bandwagon and started publishing their own modules and similar supplements – with slicker, more professional production values.

Since I missed them the first time around, I was able to be introduced to the Judges Guild line “fresh” around 2002 and 2003. I was able to learn “Old school” that made my own version of “old school” seem downright modern. “Older school?” It was really fun to work on, but everything I did was pretty much dropped when the transition to 3.5 came in the middle of 2003, which put a bullet in the head of the already sagging 3.0-compatible market.

It really was a mixed bag. I guess at that point, they were dealing with a different kind of audience, and really they were still kind of working out what their audience really wanted. One project I worked on was what would eventually become the Wilderlands of High Fantasy boxed set.  The original consisted of a number of numbered hex-grid maps of the world. The numbered hexes were keyed into several collections of encounters or lairs. Some had interesting write-ups that could be termed adventure seeds today. But the bulk of them – pretty much all of them that I was working with – could have been easily generated by a short computer program today.  The listings had the hex number, a monster type, and quantity. “Hex 1234  Manticores  (4).”

Seriously. That was it. Why that was superior to simply rolling up a random wilderness encounter, I will never know. Maybe it was because of the community – anybody who played in that world would encounter 4 manticores when they traveled through that hex. My task was to flesh these out into somewhat interesting encounters. This was a tall order. So I’d take something like an encounter with 8 giant poisonous snakes, and make it a one- or two-paragraph setup describing the ruins of an ancient, long-forgotten temple to a serpent god. The encounter with snakes would involve the ancient descendants of the  fierce giant snakes used by ancient cultists in their ceremonies. Or something along those lines.

The two old JG modules I was asked to convert (co-writing with another Necromancer Games writer) were considerably more interesting. These were Modron, and The Witches Court Marshes. My favorite was definitely the latter, by Bryan Hinnen and published in 1982 (apparently when Judge’s Guild started moving away from the D&D system to their own “generic” system which was designed to be converted easily). Unlike the Wilderlands, which tried to describe an entire world in a tiny collection of packages, the module was able to go into detail about a single region. While a dungeon was included, most of the booklet defined the Witch class (complete with lots of new spells), and included a general description of the main town (Grita Heath) and the smaller villages, and a table of events. Modron was really just a city-state with a more detailed description of important locations and characters, and – like The Witches Court Marshes – some interesting cultural twists.

Though I didn’t work on it, I’d want to include The Caverns of Thracia on the list, another JG module I have at least a small amount of familiarity with (I think I have a couple more in my collection, as well as — I think — a couple of JG Traveller adventures).  But the interesting thing about these older modules is they really weren’t adventures on their own… they were more of a “kit” for DMs to build adventures. This is probably in-line with TSR’s original vision that D&D was a creative endeavor for DMs, who would prefer to create their own adventures.

It’s very likely – based upon reading these and early D&D modules from TSR – that the encounters in these modules weren’t intended to be quite as static as they were often played.  In the Caverns of Thracia, in particular, different factions between monsters are described. As James Maliszewski put it in a review at Grognardia:

While perhaps not large enough to be called a true “megadungeon,” the four levels of the caverns are nevertheless expansive and filled with a wide variety of humanoid factions — a few of them mutually antagonistic — which contributes greatly to the feeling of dynamism the module evokes. This is a “living” environment that puts paid to the notion that old school dungeons are static places with monsters statically side by side without any interactions between them.

Granted, the module was also designed by Jennell Jaquays, who has done phenomenal stuff both in dice-and-paper gaming in the 70s and 80s, and in video games today (including being a veteran of the Quake development team).

Each of the modules also describes a place that is given gravity by being steeped in history and ancient lore. Modron was a city built around (literally) an ancient goddess. The history of the Witches Court Marshes was even more inspiring, with horrors far predating the original ancient settlers to the land. And the Caverns of Thracia mark an ancient empire that predated even the rise of human civilization, before the powerful race of reptilians devolved over centuries into mere lizard-men. It’s meaty, inspiring stuff to get the creative juices flowing and provide a thematic foundation for the module.

Another interesting point with Witches and Caverns is the existence of environmental hazards that often require player skill to figure out. In the computer game analog, these would be very adventure-gamey rather than typical role-playing-gamey. While many times skill (or rather, attribute) checks were called for to succeed in certain actions, there are many challenges (not quite “puzzles,” but they did require logical thinking and careful observation) where success was based on player decisions, not character actions.  Time your movement through the geyser room incorrectly (or pay no attention to the warnings), and characters would be killed – no matter how many hit points they had remaining.

Threats are not necessarily organized by expected player level. This is a Big Deal, and a major difference from modern adventures. Gary Gygax, if I recall, actually implied that video games were the cause of the change. Modern gamers tend to have a “clear the level” mentality, expecting a tough but beatable level-boss at the end before progressing to the next tier of difficulty.  The older modules didn’t have that structure, though they still tended to have easier challenges in the more accessible areas, and the main threat of the dungeon in the more remote section. But players would expect to have to flee, parlay, or simply avoid trouble until they could regroup and mount another assault – with the enemies taking appropriate action in the interim.

Another point that would be familiar to old-school computer RPG fans would be the less believable elements that seemed created merely to frustrate would-be adventurers. Giant, weird, funky traps that would spin rooms, or have entire bridges fall away, dumping the party down a deep shaft into magma if they touched a door with anything other than the key, that kind of thing. Good game design? Probably not. And the arbitrary and “sudden death” nature of some traps probably added to the feeling of an adversarial relationship between the players and the game master.  And what was up with these villainous beings (like succubi) who simply stood around in dungeons masquerading as imprisoned maidens? Or mimics that just sat around all day disguised as a treasure chest? How did something like that evolve?

But these elements – gamey as they were – still contributed to the feeling of an actively hostile environment for the player. Dungeons were apparently designed by the inhabitants exactly as they were designed in the real world – to frustrate and destroy invading adventurers. There isn’t much by explanation as to WHY a particular key is enchanted to zap the first non-lawful-evil person to touch it for 6d6 damage… it just was. Explanations weren’t required.

Many CRPGs up through the early 90’s sort of followed suit.  However, there were two major differences here: In CRPGs, players didn’t usually have access to the kinds of spells or detailed observation that allowed these things to be considered remotely fair in the pen-and-paper world.  And pen-and-paper games didn’t have save games or respawning, as did the CRPGs that actually had significant environmental-based puzzles beyond simple traps or spinning / teleporting tiles.

I know Caverns of Thracia was converted into a Neverwinter Nights module more than once, but I never played any of them, and I don’t know how faithfully they were done. It’d be cool to see a reasonably faithful conversion of these titles someday, a la Temple of Elemental Evil, but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

But it’s interesting to go back and see these old adventures. Are newer pen-and-paper modules superior? In most ways, I’d say so. I think Necromancer Games had a good idea there in trying to recapture that flavor.

 

Filed Under: Dice & Paper, Retro - Comments: 8 Comments to Read



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