I talk a lot about witches here. I mean a crazy amount. It is by far my most commonly used post-label. I am obsessed, and I don't apologize for it.
"What is it with you and Witches?" - My mom, some years back.
I think if I have to point to something in my childhood it was the Wicked Witch of the West. My parents said I was frightened of her when I first saw The Wizard of Oz. I was likely 3-4 at the time. But I don't think scared was the right word. Fascinated. Enthralled. Spellbound. Those are the words I would use.
We had an old "Wonderful Wizard of Oz" book back when I was a kid. I was younger than five. I know this because we had moved into a larger house and these memories are in the older house. Yes...I know memories are fluid, but I am 99.98% confident of this one. I remember looking at pictures of the WWotW in this book and those are the ones I loved the most.
I remember Witchie-Poo from "HR Puffinstuff," but I never really liked her. Any time a witch appeared on a TV show, I was excited.
Then there was Angelique Bouchard of "Dark Shadows." Played by Lara Parker in the original series she was blonde, sexy, and wonderfully evil. I loved her. She would be played by Lysette Anthony in the 1991 reboot, and by Eva Green in the otherwise awful 2012 movie.
This began a love affair that has lasted my entire life. I can't explain it, and honestly, I don't feel the need to.
So, how does this relate to Dungeons & Dragons? Glad you asked!
Witches in Dungeons & Dragons
My history with D&D is a long one, and it began in 1979, when I first read the AD&D Monster Manual. Soon after I was able to get my hands on a poorly Xeroxed copy of the Holmes Basic book. And what treats did I find?
A witch class? A proper Witch?
Of course, by the time I saw this in late 1979/early 1980, the AD&D Player's Handbook was already out, and there was no witch class. All those others were there, but no witch.
That was fine; I had so much to do that I didn't even notice its absence. However, I did notice something. Around age 11 (1981 or so) I began making characters that had a decidedly "witch" cast to them. A Pagan cleric, an alluring Illusionist, and then I made "Marissia" (yes, that is how I spelled it).
I have called Marissia my "First Witch." She wasn't, but she is the first one I committed to paper as a witch. Her name comes from me mishearing the Jerry Reed version of "Pretty Mary Sunlight." I thought he was saying "Pretty Marissa mine." Hey, I was young and I am certain I had heard it from The New Scooby-Doo Movies. In fact, a lot of my early ideas about witches came from Scooby-Doo. It is also very, very likely I based her and her name also on Millissa Wilcox, The Ghost Witch of Salem, from the Scooby-Doo episode "To Switch a Witch." An interesting episode since it featured a gravestone for the witch with a Leviathan Cross on it. I mean seriously, a goddamn Leviathan Cross in 1978? That was a ballsy move on the eve of the Satanic Panic.
Eventually, all of this would take me to 1986 the year I made my first witch class for AD&D. I have documented this time and again here, but it corresponds to my first proper witch character, Larina. She is the character I also use for my own witch experiments in other games.
I first rolled her up in July of 1986. At first, she was a "magic-user," and I would play her like a witch. She had a few adventures that year, but that was also when my then DM was heading out of town, and I was getting ready for my senior year at high school.
I read it all over and wondered how or if I should convert her. The answer became obvious to me right away. She was a witch, only pretending to be a wizard so she could go to Glantri's School of Magic. I kept her magic-user levels and then went on to advance her as a Dragon #114 witch. In the game, I said she ran out of money to keep going, so instead, she got a job at the library in hopes of paying her tuition.
I updated her sheet and declared her birthday was October 25, but she tells everyone it was October 31st.
I have since used witches more and more in my games and I even wrote all these books about how to play witches in D&D, each one looking at a different sort of witch. In my mind, each of these different types was called a Tradition, and each Tradition was reigned over by a Witch Queen.
Long before I was ever known as the "witch guy" I was the "vampire guy." A lot of my peers came to Dungeons & Dragons via the tales of Conan, Elric, and John Carter. Not me. I came to it from Hammer Horror, Dracula, and Dark Shadows. Many players wanted to play mighty thewed barbarians or fighting men. I wanted to play Van Helsing.
This is not my first time doing vampires for the A to Z challenge either.
Not to mention all the posts I have with the Vampire label. In this A to Z, I also briefly discussed the various Vampire Queens in my game.
I guess the question becomes. Why Vampires?
Why Vampires?
Dungeons & Dragons is filled with plenty of monsters to fight and defeat. Everything from the lowest Kobold to Dragons and even more dangerous creatures. Vampires are not as powerful as Liches, or Demon Lords, or the Lords of Faerie. So why do I keep coming back to them?
There is the allure of the vampire. It is so close to being human and yet isn't. It is dangerous, but not like, say, Godzilla is dangerous. It can get into your homes, your psyche. It can destroy you from the inside and make you want more of it.
Vampires are a staple of horror fiction, in particular Gothic Horror. They are also a feature of the Swords & Sorcery genre, where Conan famously battles the vampire Akivasha in an underground maze. That scene from "The Hour of the Dragon" is as much a part of D&D's DNA as anything from The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings.
My family of Paladins, the Werpers, are all Vampire Hunters. I even had a character was a pretty blonde girl with a supernatural background who was a hunter of vampires. Yes, my Raven, was doing her thing long before anyone knew of "Buffy."
If you follow my annual October Horror Movie Marathon you know I have pretty much seen every vampire movie ever made.
Vampires are Everywhere
The Doctor: Do you know, it just occurs to me there are vampire legends on almost every inhabited planet. Romana: Really? The Doctor: Yes. - The Fourth Doctor and Romana II, "State of Decay"
Nearly every culture on the planet has some form of vampire myth. Pottery dating back to ancient Babylon has vampires on it. The Greeks had several different types, as did the Romans and so on. Sure these all could come from a shared human fear of the dead returning to take from us what they miss; life. It also could be the inheritor of a tradition dating back to the Pre-Indo-European peoples where so many of us get our current languages. In any case, vampires are all over, and they are not going anywhere.
Vampires are also one of the few monsters that move effortlessly between RPG genres. Fantasy and Horror are a given, but they also appear in Steampunk, Superheroes, Pulp, Modern, and even some Sci-fi. Each takes a different approach as to why they are around.
Darlessa
Strahd, Dracula, & Darlessa
There is an old saying, "A Hero is only as good as the villain."
If I want the characters in my games to be heroes, then I need to make sure their villains are up to the challenge. This is another great place for the Vampire to shine.
In books or movies the bad guy can get away to fight another day. In games? Well, a great set of rolls by the players and some bad ones from the GM, and suddenly your Big Bad Evil Guy is no more! But death is not always the end for vampires. They can keep coming back for more. Christopher Lee made a career out of this.
I have used Dracula in games in the past, but not as much as I could have. He is like David Bowie. He can turn up, but it needs to be memorable.
Count Strahd von Zarovich is the star of Ravenloft. All things considered, I like to keep him there.
That leaves me with Darlessa and my other Vampire Queens. I should come up with some more, to be honest. Never can have too many vampires around.
I honestly should be writing more vampire-themed adventures. Especially ones that I can use cross-genres.
I do have a Basic Bestiary on just Vampires and Undead, but that is a long way away right now.
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Tomorrow is W day, and I think you know what I am going to talk about.
Often times the campaign settings of Dungeons & Dragons are known as "worlds." If there are multiple worlds then there must be a Dungeons & Dragons Universe.
So what are these worlds, and where do they come from? My "map" below features the names of the worlds, so when I talk about them below, I'll go by the "Campaign Setting."
Let's start with the three "Core" worlds and work our way out.
Greyhawk (Oerth)
Greyhawk was one of the first campaign settings released. It was certainly the first full setting. Blackmoor, created by D&D co-creator Dave Arneson, was published first, but it was never a full world. Both Greyhawk and Mystara would later adopt different versions of Blackmoor for their own world. The World of Greyhawk setting takes place on the world of Oerth and was the home setting of Gary Gygax.
Greyhawk is often considered to be the core D&D world for 1st Edition AD&D.
This is the world that most people are familiar with. It got its start during the end of 1st Edition but really grew in popularity during AD&D's 2nd Edition. It only got bigger during 3rd edition and today is the setting of the insanely popular Baldur's Gate 3 video game.
Created by Ed Greenwood as a place to set tales of his own invention. He later sold it to TSR for D&D after spending years writing for Dragon magazine.
I have spent all year talking about the Realms and I really enjoy them.
The "world" of Abeir-Toril, is really two worlds that exist in the same space just shifted. It's weird and its fun and I really love it. I am going to spend some more time talking about it here.
Kara-Tur, Al-Qadim, and Maztica
These are all larger settings in the world of Toril in the Forgotten Realms. Kara-Tur began as part of the World of Greyhawk (in theory), but it was later moved here.
The world of Krynn is home to the Dragonlance Saga introduced in AD&D's 1st edition as part of the so-called Hickman Revolution. Created by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman it was TSR's first attempts at epic storytelling. It had adventures, books, novels (especially novels!) and even a movie. Ok, lets not talk about the movie.
Krynn is often depicted as being very removed and remote from all the other worlds and fiercely guarded by its gods. I put it closer to the core because of the importance it has to D&D's history.
As we move out to the rim worlds, as Star Wars or Traveller might call them.
The world and campaign setting of Mystara was introduced with the Basic/Expert sets known as "The Known World." It could have been a core world, but I wanted to limit it to just three.
Hollow World and Red Steel
These are two larger settings for Mystara. Mystara is a hollow world with people and creatures living on the inside! I have also included Birthright with Mystara.
Mystoerth
This is totally cheating. Mystoerth is my camping world that combines Mystara and Oerth. It's my map, I get to make the rules. My world also includes Kara-Tur, Blackmoor, and an Al-Qadim/Dark Sun/Necropolis mix.
Urt
Urt was the name Frank Mentzer gave for the world of the BECMI set before it was renamed to Mystara. In his vision, Urt was akin to Oerth. Also, Urt was not hollow but a living planet! There are gates between Urt and Oerth but not between Urt and Mystara.
This is the world of Dark Sun. This is a desert world ravaged by magical despots. Everyone has some level of psychic powers, and the world is brutal. I have not talked much about it, but I have stolen a lot of ideas from here.
This world was developed by Keith Baker for a setting search conducted by Wizards of the Coast for 3rd Edition. This world has some similarities to the other worlds. Low-level magic is common, but higher-level magic is much rarer. There is also a steam-punk feel to it.
This is one of the non-TSR/Wizards of the Coast worlds on my list, but due to the working relationship between Wizards and Kenzer & Co. There have been 1st and 3rd Edition versions, with the 3rd Edition published by Wizards of the Coast.
This is the world of the Campaign setting of Critical Role. It began as a D&D 4e world, switched to Pathfinder, and finally D&D 5e. The books published for it are all D&D 5e.
It is between Golarion and the Core Worlds because they share some gods.
Aihrde is the world of Troll Lord Games' Castles & Crusades. It shares a gritty feel with Oerth and the fact that Gary Gygax contributed to it in the last years of his life. As I have said many times, Castles & Crusades is really the spiritual heir to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
This is my oldest son's campaign word. This is my blog, so I get to include it! It has heavy Lovecraftian influences and Gods from both Oerth and Toril.
The Missing Worlds
Some worlds are not on my map above because they do not fit the general idea of a world but are campaign settings.
Ravenloft is my favorite campaign setting, but it is an extra-dimensional pocket accessed from all worlds. It has no world to call it's own.
Planescape deals with the "Outer Planes" of existence where alignment, ethos, and philosophy are all important.
Spelljammer is...well D&D IN SPACE! The 2nd Edition rules had your characters using "Spelljamming" ships that moved through the phlogiston of space. In D&D 5th Edition, the phlogiston is still there, sort of, but now your characters travel the great Astral Sea.
My map above was made with my limited knowledge of Spelljammer. I was not trying to replicate anything, but something I could use in SJ if I wanted.
All these worlds allow access to the other worlds. Though Ravenloft is more like a "Hotel California" characters can get in, but they can't get out.
Other ways for people to travel to these other worlds are by gates and at least one special place. A while back, I suggested that the infamous Temple of Elemental Evil exists in all worlds simultaneously. You can go in but never be sure of where you will come out. Also, my own Tomb of the Vampire Queen has many unstable portals to many worlds.
There are many, many more worlds out there. I have not included them all, but I could have included a dozen more, and that is not counting all the ones I know about.
It doesn't even count the newest one I have been playing around with, Oestara, which is a reflection of my own Mystoerth world. I don't have anything on that one just yet.
Tomorrow is V day, and of course, I am going to talk about Vampires.
Delving into the history of Dungeons & Dragons, one must spend some time discussing the company (or companies, as it were) that produced and published it. Most of them went by the initials TSR.
To the outsider and indeed to the casual insider, there was only one TSR. This is largely true, but the details are a bit more complicated once you dig into them. It's sort of the theme all month, right?
Tactical Studies Rules (1973–1975)
The first TSR was Tactical Studies Rules, and it was a partnership between Gary Gygax and Don Kaye. The goal of this company was to produce and sell the Dungeons & Dragons rules, but to get there, they did some smaller games, including Gary's Cavaliers and Roundheads miniatures game of the English Civil War. They also sold new copies of Chainmail which had previously been sold by Don Lowry and Gary's Guidon Games. Once Dungeons & Dragons became a success and they took on new partners, namely the Blumes, this company dissolved. It was this time that the company would move out of Gary's basement to their headquarters in Lake Geneva, WI. A place still considered to be "like Mecca" for gamers.
TSR Hobbies, Inc. (1975–1983)
This is the company that most of us growing up playing D&D in the 1980s think of when we think of TSR. This corresponds to what many in RPG circles could refer to as the Golden Age of gaming. It was here that Dungeons & Dragons saw its greatest growth and early popularity. It was during this time that we saw the publication of AD&D, all the Basic sets, Dragon Magazine, and a host of other non-D&D games. Some I'll talk about next month.
This was also a time when TSR Hobbies made some acquisitions and, sadly, when the seeds of their own downfall were planted.
TSR (1983–1985)
In 1983, the company was split into four, TSR, Inc. (the primary successor), TSR International, TSR Ventures, and TSR Entertainment, Inc. The purpose here was to make D&D a multimedia brand long before such an idea was commonplace. So kudos to Gary and the team for coming up with it; it is too bad it did not develop the way they wanted. We did the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon out of it, but long talked about movie never happened. Also some of these business choices also split the company's focus and were never as successful as they needed to be. Long story short, TSR, all of them, was deep in debt and bleeding cash.
This era would end with the firing of Gary Gygax as CEO and the takeover of the company by the Blumes and Lorraine Williams.
TSR (1985–1997) aka The Williams Era
Given the time period, one would imagine that this was the most stable time in TSR's history, and from the outside, it was. D&D was doing well for all appearances. It had weathered controversy and was moving forward. AD&D 2nd Edition came out in 1989, there were novels coming out based on D&D properties that hit the New York Times best-seller lists and things looked good.
Sadly, even under new management, some of the old mistakes were still costing money, and new ones were also being made.
I will not do the en-vogue thing and rip into Lorraine Williams. She may have had only contempt for gamers, but under her leadership (or in spite of it), some really great material was produced. She never talks about her time at TSR anymore; all we have are the words of others. Granted, it did sound like a toxic work environment.
Not that things were all wine and roses outside the company either. Gary had left and become vocal of the new management. Many who were loyal to him also left. Others left, or were fired and their names, names we all knew, began showing up at other companies.
The Internet was in its early days, and like the Personal Computers before it, this was a technology readily adopted by and adapted by gamers. TSR saw people talking about D&D online and threatened to sue them, earning TSR's new name, "They Sue Regularly," and their new "logo," T$R.
As fondly as people talk about the "good ole days" of TSR they forget how terrible they were in the end.
1997 And Beyond
There is no TSR beyond 1997. Wizards of the Coast, a company flush with cash thanks to the run-away success of the Magic the Gathering card game, saved TSR, and Dungeons & Dragons, from landing into deeper financial ruin. Wizards operated TSR as a standalone entity (a walled garden as it is sometimes called) but by the time Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition was ready TSR was gone.
Now, 25+ years later, we are seeing some similar patterns with Wizards of the Coast and their parent company, Hasbro. The difference is that Hasbro is not likely to run out of money any time soon.
For me, well I choose to remember TSR like this. It was a great company that fell into the problems that many companies do. But I will say this, talking to all the people who worked there and hearing them talk to each other at places like Gary Con, I choose to look beyond the stories, the rumors, the internet gossip, and the financial records and instead see it through their eyes.
When it was good, it must have been fantastic.
If you want to know more, there are some fantastic books on the topic.
Ewalt, D. M., & Manganiello, J. (2024). Of dice and men: The story of dungeons & dragons and the people who play it. Scribner.
Kushner, D., & Shadmi, K. (2017). Rise of the dungeon master: Gary Gygax and the creation of D&D. Nation Books.
Peterson, J. (2012). Playing at the world: A history of simulating wars, people and Fantastic Adventures, from chess to role-playing games. Unreason Press.
Peterson, J. (2021). Game Wizards. the epic battle for Dungeons & Dragons. The MIT Press.
Riggs, B. (2022). Slaying the dragon: A secret history of Dungeons and dragons. St. Martin’s Press.
Witwer, M. (2015). Empire of imagination: Gary Gygax and the birth of Dungeons & Dragons. Bloomsbury USA, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc.
All are available, well, everywhere there are books. Each presents a different point of view, but all get around to the same ideas. I enjoyed reading them all.
Tomorrow is U day and I am going to talk about the Universe!
Now, this is always a fun topic. It would be difficult to talk about the history of Dungeons & Dragons and not talk about the 1980s moral panic known as The Satanic Panic.
Note: I will liberally use outside links in this one because I want to cite my sources and educate.
Background
Let me set the stage first. It is the start of the 1980s. Regan is in office riding a wave of conservatism and backed by "The Moral Majority." The 1970s were a time when there was a great Occult Revival (mentioned many times here) and this was the natural reaction.
In addition to flamboyant fashion choices, some really excellent music, and questionable hairspray techniques, we also got a strange moral panic in the form of everyday people accusing their neighbors of being secret practicing Satanists.
While there are a lot of triggers for this panic, the one that almost everyone agrees on is the publication of a book called Michelle Remembers, a lurid tale of repressed memories of Satanic Ritual abuse. Now, reading this there are just a lot of things that don't add up. At all. A recent Skeptical Inquirer article goes into more detail, but suffice to say that despite no tangible proof, this was the spark that lit the flames and the model that all so-called Satanic Experts would follow. This book leads to the tragic travesty of the criminal court system in the McMartin preschool trial. People lost their careers, their homes, and their lives, all for nothing but a panic. It was The Crucible all over again. This is not the last time I will use a witch analogy. While that was going on other forms of media were not immune. Rock and Roll music took a hard hit, and it led to the creation of the PMRC. Movies had had their troubles before with the Hays Code, and comics had the Comics Code Authority, which had kept both mediums very conservative. But what didn't have those was the brand new pass time of mostly young high school and college age kids with higher than average IQs and a penchant for not conforming. That pass time was Dungeons & Dragons.
How does the Satanic Panic lead to Dungeons & Dragons? Well, there is a great summary of the Satanic Panic and how D&D was involved from Goddless Panther.
Going back to 1980 to 1985, the most popular version of the Dungeons & Dragons game was the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules. While all the above insanity is going on D&D is about to take a hit. That hit comes in the form of James Dallas Egbert III and private investigator William Dear. James was a smart but depressed kid who had gone missing from his Michigan State University dorm room in 1979. He had played D&D and listened to some Metal music, but had suicidal thoughts. Mostly around him coming to terms with his own homosexuality (the 1980s were shit for many kids). He went down into the steam tunnels under the University (where it was rumored that people would play D&D) and had planned on killing himself with some quaaludes. He was not successful and went to hide out with some friends, and then he traveled around.
Enter William Dear. Egbert's mother hired Dear to locate him after what she perceived as the authorities' inaction. Dear went to Egbert's dorm, saw his D&D books, and came up with this notion of a cult conspiracy whole-cloth. This was substantiated in his mind when reports came out that he had been spotted at the Gen Con game fair in nearby Wisconsin.
Egbert was a troubled kid. I don't want to make light of that. He did finally kill himself and it is sad. He needed therapy, and at that time, he would not have gotten it, and he certainly didn't get the support.
No. This sad tale was made worse by the utter incompetence and attention seeking of Dear. He recounted his investigation in the book The Dungeon Master. You can read more about it in this article in two parts by Shaun Hately, The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, Part I and Part II. The events would be fictionalized in Rona Jaffe's novel Mazes and Monsters, and the movie of the same name starring a very young Tom Hanks. Every gamer I know hated it, and every mother in 1982 had to ask me about it.
Then 60 Minutes happened.
D&D's 60-Minutes of Fame
D&D's popularity made the target of some sketchy reporting back in the day. Watching some of the videos from back then are always entertaining; at least now they are with the distance of time.
CBS, the station that not only aired the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon on Saturday mornings and the rather terrible Mazes and Monsters made for TV movie also was, more famously, the home of the weekly TV news magazine 60 Minutes. Ed Bradley presented what was supposed to be a balanced view on the game with interviews by D&D creator Gary Gygax and someone who we (the gamers that is) had not heard of, but would soon know all too well, Patricia Pulling of B.A.D.D. or "Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons." She would team up with former Dr. (he lost his license) and convicted sex criminal Thomas Radecki to try and discredit the game.
Here is the clip below. If it looks like a bad VHS copy...well it is.
Reports from many credible sources and even Gygax himself (in the pages of Dragon magazine) was livid and called the whole thing a "Witch hunt." However, one thing is certain. After the 60 Minutes clip aired there was a rash of D&D book burnings. If there is ever a side that is burning books your best place is to be on the side they are not on. Ben Riggs, in his Slaying the Dragon, comments on how anytime the staff at TSR saw a book burning advertised, they would increase the number of books going to that town's retailers because they knew they would sell out.
Pulling, Radecki, and BADD would be around to bother D&D players for a while. Pulling had started B.A.D.D. due to the suicide of her son Irving. I get she had pain and grief and a need to lash out. But her target was all wrong. Long story short, while Pulling, Radecki, and Dear would all get pulled into high-profile cases, which all seemed to involve the same secret cabal of D&D Playing Cultists (weird, I never got a call from them for the meetings), eventually, they were shown to be the frauds they were.
One of the biggest blows to Pulling and B.A.D.D. was from game designer Michael A. Stackpole who piece by piece dismantled Pulling and all her arguments in his Game Hysteria and the Truth. I would read this later when he re-published it as The Pulling Report.
You could not believe the elation I felt when I had discovered that on the internet. Everything I had heard for YEARS from "concerned people" and all the shit I got from ignorant fucks. Stackpole destroyed them all. Every single argument. I am still friends with Michael today.
Too late for some who were destroyed by this bullshit.
What happened to D&D?
Soon after the 60 Minutes piece, Gary was out of TSR for unrelated reasons. The specter of the Satanic Panic still held over them, though. When AD&D 2nd Edition was released, demons, devils, and overt signs of evil had all been removed in an enforced morality.
And like the pendulum that swang to make things more conservative, it swang back the other way. I can recall a LOT of books, both in stores and online, in the early days of the Internet, that were like, "Oh, you think D&D is evil? I give you fucking evil!" I am not blameless in that, either.
My Life with the Satanic Cult
Now, I am not a Satanist. I am an atheist. But growing up in a small mid-Western town, the average person on the street doesn't know, or even care to know, the difference. Add in my D&D playing in the 1980s? Yeah.
There was this time, I think around 1985-1986 or so, that "someone" had found a "satanic altar" in the cornfield just south of my High School. The panic that shot through the school was amazing to watch. I was equally fascinated and horrified. Fascinated by how much it affected everyone and horrified by how quickly it ripped through the school and what it did. The next day, people were wearing their "satan busters" armbands. These were homemade armbands with an inverted cross in a red "busters" circle with a slash through it.
The "Satan Busters." Yes, this is what they wore.
The assistant principal, who was always a pretty good guy, came to me and some of my other gamer friends and basically said until this stupid shit blows over, we should keep our D&D books at home. I chaffed under the notion that something *I* wanted to read had to be dictated by a mob of scared idiots. It pissed me off, but the guy had a point. Plus, he was a 6'2" guy who would regularly bench press 350+ lbs, and I was an asthmatic 15-16-year-old who weighed 125 soaking wet. I wasn't going to argue. Plus, over the next few days, shit got really weird. I think my love of psychology was certainly strengthened then. As was my love for witches. I felt I understood them a little better after that. Not that anyone was trying to burn me (far from it), but they were trying to burn the things they feared. There were at least two or three book burnings in my town by people on the conservative religious side. Which was, in truth, the vast majority of the town.
As the panic spread, the stories got crazier and crazier. One involved one of the few openly gay kids in my glass, which sucks, really, but sadly all too predictable. Rumors that "they" were going to sacrifice a cheerleader. I remember seeing girls crying. And more. People were going to have prayer vigils to keep the cultists back, and some were going to bring weapons (mostly knives).
It all began to sound like a pretty cool D&D adventure. The characters would have been the ones fighting evil. But it also had about as much to do with reality as a D&D game.
It blew over, of course, and a few days later, the whole thing looked rather silly. I never really knew if someone had found something and thought it was an altar or if it was all made up whole cloth. Hard to say. I never really got over how insane everyone was.
I have to admit my own (at the time) anti-theism influenced my early D&D games. So, there were lots of undead, demons, and (you guessed it) witches. An immature reaction? Yeah, of course! But I was a teen at the time, so by definition, I was immature.
Present Day
I would love to say that this happened in the past, and then we woke up. But that is never the case, is it? Yeah, Dungeons & Dragons has largely been fine for the last few years and is gaining incredible support from high-profile players like Stephen Colbert, Vin Diesel, Joe Manganiello (who I just missed at Gary Con), Deborah Ann Woll, Anderson Cooper, and the entire cast of Critical Role.
D&D is largely safe these days, but the Satanic Panic still rears its ugly head. Pizzagate is just one recent and really stupid example. Another making the rounds is the "fact" that Taylor Swift is the daughter of (or a clone of) Zeena Schreck nee Lavey. Even better, she is the daughter of Zeena and Zeena's own father, Anton Lavey, the founder of the Church of Satan. So Anton is her father AND grandfather.
Taylor Swift & Zeena Lavey. Not related. Or clones.
Seriously. I wouldn't put this into a game because my players would never believe it.
So, put on some Ozzy or Iron Maiden, grab some dice, and let's play some D&D! It's 2024, all of those critics have been shown to be frauds, and none of the rumors about D&D from 40+ years ago ever came close to coming true.
This Sunday A to Z special we are talking about the most controversial version of D&D put out. That would be 2008's Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons.
Dungeons & Dragons, 4th Edition
Again, lets set the stage. It is 2007, and Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, now in its 3.5 edition, has been going on for 7 years. There are hundreds of D&D 3e books out there, and if you count the ones released by 3rd party publishers, then there are thousands.
Rumor has it that the Powers that Be at Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro saw all that money these publishers had made and also saw that they were getting none of it. So they had the D&D team design a new version of D&D. Now, seven years is not a bad run for a set of core rules; a little light, yes, but not bad. But it was not the normal dropping off of sales that prompted this change; rather, it was a desire to reign back in the OGL and SRD. Thus, 4th edition was born. Or so the story goes.
Now I have heard these tales for a long time. While I can certainly see where they could be true I have never seen a smoking gun or anything like that to confirm it. I do know that out of all the editions 4th is the least compatible with all the others. I also know that the license used to support 4e products was restrictive and slow to come out.
Pathfinder, as I mentioned on P day came out and took over the market from 3e, and many other gamers saw the new 4e rules and went back even further still to older games.
Much like the hydra of old the problem only got bigger.
This is too bad, really, because there is nothing really wrong with 4e.
I loved the art and the attention to detail in the game's design. Was it D&D? I can't answer that for you. For me, it was "near D&D," just like Pathfinder was/is. In some ways, Pathfinder was more D&D 4 than D&D 4 was. They were cousins, born at the same time, whose grandparents had trouble telling apart as their favorite.
DrivethruRPG has a sizable collection now of Fourth Edition PDFs. A few I have already bought. I could simply unload a few of those books, not sure how or where, and then rebuy them on PDF.
I love that 4e was very modular in layout. I very easily could cut up all the books and reshuffle them to have all the classes in one place and all the skills and feats in another. All the monsters, mostly alphabetical in yet another. The organization appeals to my innate sense of order and collection (or is that OCD?).
The real question is, is it worth it? Obviously, if I played the game more then yes. But I only dabble. Here and there now. I like the fluff. I have talked about 4e in terms of sunk cost fallacy and how I would later go on to adapt the materials for my 5e games. But I still feel it never really got a fair shake.
Maybe I'll come back to it someday.
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Tomorrow is back at it with S Day, and I'll talk about a topic very close to the heart of many Dungeons & Dragons players in the 1980s, the Satanic Panic!
One would think I didn't have any more to say, but those are just two of 56 posts I have here about Ravenloft (soon to be 57). But yet here I am with more to say.
What is Ravenloft?
Ravenloft was originally an adventure for First Edition AD&D, released back in 1983, and written by Tracy and Laura Hickman's husband and wife team. It was part of the "I" or intermediate series of adventures. Most of these were not linked and only shared that they were higher level than beginning adventures. Ravenloft, given the code I6, was for character levels 5 to 7.
Ravenloft was a huge change from many of the adventures TSR had published to that date. For starters the adventure featured an antagonist, Count Strahd von Zarovich, who was no mere monster. Yes he was an AD&D Vampire, but he was meant to be run as an intelligent Non-player Character. Prior to this the vampires have been the unnamed Vampire Queen of the Palace of the Vampire Queen, Drelnza the vampire daughter of Iggwilv in The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and Belgos the Drow Vampire in Vault of the Drow. By 1983 the amount written on all three of these vampires would not even be as long as this post will be. Strahd was different.
Strahd had a backstory, he had motivation, and he was intelligent and ruthless. Destroying him was the goal and that was not an easy feat by any stretch of the imagination.
The adventure also introduced some new elements as well. The dungeon crawl was gone, replaced by a huge gothic castle and a nearby village. The adventure could be replayed ab unique given the "Fortunes of Ravenloft" mechanic that allows key items, people, and motives to change based on a fortune card reading.
And there were the iso-morphic, 3D looking maps, that helped give perspective to many levels of Castle Ravenloft.
The adventure was an immediate and resounding hit. This adventure, along with the Dragonlance Adventures also by Tracy Hickman (and Margaret Weis) led to something many old-school gamers call "The Hickman Revolution" and claim it marks the time between the Golden Age and Silver Age of AD&D, with the Silver age coming after 1983. While yes there was a change, a lot of it was for the better.
For me, it was a dream come true. Vampires had always been my favorite creatures to fight in D&D, and I was an avid Dracula fan. I bought this adventure and then threw it at my DM, saying, "Run this!"
I grew up on a steady stream of Universal Monsters, Hammer Horror, and Dark Shadows. That's my Appendix N. So, an adventure set in pretty much the Hammer Hamlet where I get strange locals and have to fight a vampire? Yeah, that is what D&D was to me.
I find that the people who don't like this adventure don't see what makes it great. This is not Lord of the Rings, Conan, or some other Appendix N pulp fantasy. This is Hammer Horror. Strahd has to be played with a combination of charisma, scene-chewing villainy, and absolute brutality. In other words, it is exactly like Christopher Lee playing Dracula. Even the nearby village is filled with terrified, but the pitchfork in the ready village is a Hammer Hamlet.
I even got my original module from 1983 signed by Tracy Hickman.
This adventure was so popular that it spawned a sequel, Ravenloft House on Gryphon Hill and an entire campaign setting.
Ravenloft: The Setting
I mention that in college, I played AD&D 2nd Edition. The biggest selling point of AD&D 2nd ed was the campaign settings. There were a lot of them. Too many. But my favorite was Ravenloft. They took the events of the 1983 adventure and built an entire world around it with people, magic and lots of horror monsters. It was Gothic horror, to start with, but soon expanded into other realms of horror using the AD&D 2nd Ed rules. Not always a perfect fit, but I made it work.
It has been so popular that it is one of the few settings to see publication across all five major editions of D&D. 4th Edition made some changes, as did 5th Edition. But that is all within the same vein (so to speak) as all Horror movies, and Dracula in particular, get reinterpreted to fit the times better. Horror is always about what people in the here and now are concerned with. Ravenloft follows suit.
In truth I kind of use them all interchangeably, with some emphasis on Darlessa. As they have all evolved in my games, I am slowly sifting out which traits belong to which queen.
Interestingly enough, both Darlessa and Xaltana are also both Witch Queens. Xaltana combines Iggwilv (a witch queen) and Drelzna her vampire daughter.
The Witch Queens
While the Vampire Queens are here to challenge the characters as adversaries, the Witch Queens play a much different and far more wide-reaching role.
This began as an idea of me finding and then stating up every witch ever mentioned in the pages of a D&D or related game. The premise here was that every 13 years the witches of these worlds would meet in one place to discuss what they are up to in their worlds and plan to generally stay out of each other's way. The gathering, known as the Tredecim, became a big part of my games. At the Tredecim, the 13 ruling witches then choose a new High Witch Queen to serve over the next 13 years. In my campaign, War of the Witch Queens, the then-current High Witch Queen is murdered before a new one can be chosen. This sends the witches into war against each other, but due to their pacts with Baba Yaga, they can't outright fight each other. So, all their worlds get dragged into the conflict. This includes the characters.
The characters learn first that a once-in-a-century storm has destroyed their home, and they are refugees helping move their fellow town folk to a new home in East Haven. While their first obvious goal is to stop all the weird happenings going on in their own world, they discover these events are playing out across the worlds. To stop it, they need to stop the all-powerful Witch Queens, but to do that, they will need to discover who murdered the High Queen, how, and why.
Since I started working on this and developing it more and more, I have gone over 13 Witch Queens and my planned 13 Adventures. I am using Basic B/X D&D as my rules of choice here, which limits the levels characters can achieve to 14.
I am running it with my family now, but I'd also like to run it for a dedicated group someday. I think for that I would take all the adventures I am using for it and edit them all a bit.
If I keep the levels 1-14 then the obvious choice is D&D Basic B/X. If I expand it all to level 20 then my choice will be Castles & Crusades.
Either way, I have a lot to look forward to!
Tomorrow is R Day, and I am going with the campaign setting I ran for all of the AD&D 2nd Edition era, Ravenloft.
OH? Like the art of my Witch Queens up there? The artist is Brian Brinlee and he has a Kickstarter of his new art book going on now! Check it out.
A bit of a divergence today for, well, a bit of divergence. Let me set the stage a bit. It is 2007, and Wizards of the Coast has decided to end the publication of the wildly successful Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition line and will now produce Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition. D&D 3e was the edition that brought many back to the game. It was the edition that rekindled my enjoyment of the game after so many years. The idea that this would end only after 7 years (10 years per edition had been the average) seemed a bit odd.
In any case, 4th edition was released, and ... well, I'll talk about that on Sunday. But people were not ready to give up their 3rd Edition rules. Enter Paizo and Pathfinder!
Back when 3rd Edition was popular, Wizards of the Coast had licensed out the RPG Hobby's flagship gaming Magazines, Dragon and Dungeon, to Paizo, Inc. Here they helmed both magazines for many years and built a few 3rd Edition compatible products thanks to the Open Gaming Licence. In 2007 Wizards of the Coast announced 4th edition they did not renew the contract with Paizo to produce material. So Paizo went on to produce their own Pathfinder periodical, a set of publications similar to the Dungeon magazine.
In 2008 D&D 4e started out with good sales, but soon they began to fall. Fall faster than expected. Paizo saw there was still a market for 3rd-edition compatible material, but they also wanted to make some changes. Thus, in 2009 the Pathfinder RPG rules were born.
So in 2009, we both did D&D 4e, which was not compatible with D&D 3x or any other D&D rules set. And Pathfinder, which was 95% compatible with D&D 3.x. That last 5% is for the differences in the D&D 3 and 3.5 rules and the extras Pathfinder added in. But honestly, you could take your D&D 3.0 characters, fight D&D 3.5 monsters while the Game Master ran Pathfinder rules, and everyone would be fine.
Sadly, Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro has a very bad habit of firing people. The good news here though is that some of those people would go on to be hired by Paizo to work on Pathfinder. I mentioned before that Pathfinder is often thought of as being "Dungeons & Dragons 3.75" and there is a lot of truth to that. There is a lot here that feels like D&D 3.x perfected. They certainly had the advantage of 9 more years of playing and writing to help them out.
Pathfinder then did the impossible, it dethroned D&D as the best selling Fantasy RPG. They beat D&D at their own game. If the OGL was one of the reasons 4e got made, it was 4e's failures that got 5e made. In the meantime, Pathfinder just kept moving along and doing its thing.
Pathfinder 2nd Edition came along in 2019. It was different. While the rules were still very much tied to the OGL and the system first created for D&D 3, these rules had more divergence. The Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules were created to go after the D&D 5th edition, which by this time had reclaimed its market superiority.
This would change again in 2023 when Wizards announced they were going to "revoke" the OGL (something they actually could not do legally). Pathfinder relied on the safe harbor of the OGL (as do many publishers) so in April of 2023 they announced their Pathfinder 2e Remastered. This would be their 2e ruleset, rewritten to avoid using the OGL and instead their own ORC license. While this did not deal the blow to D&D 5e that Pathfinder did to 4e, it was enough to have some people (myself included) move from D&D 5e to Pathfinder 2eR.
Pathfinder 2e and 2eR. I am still a sucker for a ribbon in my book.
I can find no significant differences between the Pathfinder 2e rules and the Pathfinder 2eR ones. I know Paizo is no longer selling the 2e rules in favor of the 2eR, which is as it should be. Pathfinder 2e is a fine game in its own right, and I like it better as long as I am not trying to compare it to either D&D 3e or 5e. And then only because they can all do the same sorts of games, just in different ways.
Tomorrow is Q Day, and I am going with a tried and true one. I will talk about the various Queens of Dungeons & Dragons.
I can't properly celebrate 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons and not talk about where the game started. So let's go back to 1974 and the Original edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
This is the original 3-Volume set of Dungeons & Dragons, plus the Chainmail rules for fantasy minatures.
The rules...are arcane to say the least. These rules assumed that the player and the Referee (what would later be named Dungeon Master) already had a background in wargames or had access to those who did. Some have even gone as far as call the rules indecipherable, but I think that is obviously not the case. These rules say several reprints into the 1980s, with the 6th reprint being the most common. Mine is a mix of 3rd and 4th printings. You can still buy copies of it on DriveThruRPG if you are curious (it sells for the same price as it did back then), OR if you are super serious about it, score one of the collectible editions Wizards of the Coast did 10 years back.
There were only three character classes back then: Fighting Men, Magic Users, and Clerics. Races were humans, dwarves, hobbits/halflings, and elves, who had to decide whether to begin their day as Fighting Men or Magic Users.
Even the rolling of a d20 (twenty-sided die) was the "optional" rule for combat.
I did not start with this one. However, in 1987, I played a summer session with these rules. It was an educational experience, and I am certainly happy I did. I don't know if I will repeat it like that; I would add in more of the later supplements that made it into the game I know now. But it is something every gamer, especially every D&D player, needs to try at least once.
These rules, though, were the absolute standard for gaming from 1974 to 1977, when TSR launched the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line. Even other game companies mimicked TSR's approach.
A prime example is Traveller, the premier science fiction RPG, which began as a same-sized box with three books. If the D&D game books were called "The Three Little Brown Books, " the Traveller books were "The Three Little Black Books."
These little books are a very humble start to what would become a worldwide phenomenon. As the game grew and progressed, so did its players. We are now at a point where there is truly a game out there for everyone's needs and wants. And if the game you are playing doesn't do that, well there are thousands of choices.
I still love reading these little books. They never get old to me.
Tomorrow is P Day, and I'll talk about Pathfinder, the divergence of Dungeons & Dragons.
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