Lord of the Rings

There’s a classic (?) scene in the movie “Clerks II” in which Randall harshly criticizes his fellow co-worker and customer who are Lord of the Rings fans, whereas he is a Star Wars fan – “there’s only one ‘Return’, and that’s of The Jedi.”  I like them both, and don’t see why they are mutually exclusive; nor, for that matter, are Star Wars and Star Trek.  But I was into Star Wars long before I could bring myself to read the J. R.R. Tolkien classics.  Something about a story focused on Frodo Baggins, a hobbit, could scarcely grab me.  Especially since I had Elric of Melnibone, and his demonic sword Stormbringer, to compare it to.  But eventually I did read the books, long after high school but well before the movies came out.  And I did enjoy them, despite (or more likely, because of) the hobbits.

 Fellowship of the Ring.  Tolkien intended the story to be one book, but the publisher convinced him that it would be too big that way, split it up into 3 separate books, and even suggested the titles.   They were originally published between 1954-55.  The first book sold so well that the publisher advanced the releases of the two subsequent books.  Tolkien lived to see his books develop enormous popularity, unlike H.P. Lovecraft, who was virtually unknown when he died in 1937 and only achieved notoriety posthumously in the 1960s.

            In Fellowship, we get the story which Tolkien started with The Hobbit: the Shire, the quaint little land where the hobbits live, Bilbo declaring himself retired and passing on “his precious”, the Ring, to Frodo.  We also meet Frodo’s best friend Sam Gamgee, and their ne’er-do-well, mischievous friends Peregrin Took, aka “Pippin”, and Meriadoc Brandybuck, aka “Merry”.  Tolkien deliberately made the Shire and hobbits as gay (as in  lame) as possible, to contrast them with the other members of the Fellowship – a point which Randall missed.  Frodo in particular finds strength and endurance in himself he had no idea he had, as do Sam, Pippin and Merry.  We expect Aragorn and the others to perform heroic deeds – that the hobbits manage to be competitive is what makes these books so enthralling.

 The Ring.  Everything centers around this Ring.  It turns the owner invisible when he actually wears it (except for Tom Bombadil), and confers a twisted form of immortality, corrupting the bearer into a perverse shadow of himself.  Even heavy hitters such as Gandalf and Elrond are loathe to take it, fearing they would become tyrants and menaces to the rest of the world (plus, they can see what it did to Gollum).  Eventually they decide the only appropriate course of action is to destroy it, trusting it to Frodo, as the least likely bearer.  This means bringing the Ring to Mount Doom, a volcano in Mordor, which is the evil place where all the bad things live.

            There were lesser rings, given to the Elves, Dwarves, and nine for men.  For some reason the elven and dwarven versions have no discernable effect, but the human ones turned the nine men into hooded wraiths, the so-called ringwraiths or Nazgul, Sauron’s scouts and spies. 

 Hobbits.  ("Hey faggot, they're not gay, they're hobbits!") They live in the Shire.  They’re short, stubby people with hairy feet who enjoy food, beer, and pipeweed (unknown whether this is tobacco, marijuana, or something else).  With the notable exception of Bilbo Baggins, Frodo’s uncle (or adopted father, I was never sure of their exact relationship), the hobbits never leave the Shire.  The Shire is often interpreted to mean Tolkien’s analogy to traditional, agrarian England, under attack from technology, modern capitalism, and industrialism, as most forcefully exemplified by Isengard.

 The Fellowship.            The good guys put together a crack team of volunteers: 

            Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry: the Four Hobbits of the Apocalypse.

            Gandalf.  An old, wise, and powerful wizard, acts as their advisor and de facto leader

            Legolas, an elf

            Gimli, a dwarf – friendly rival to Legolas

            Aragorn, a human – the heir to the throne of Gondor, but currently employed as a shady ranger

            Boromir, a human – son of Denethor, the Steward of Minas Tirith.  Denethor is supposed to be holding the missing king’s slot open for him until the rightful heir (Aragorn) returns, but he has other plans.  Boromir, though, is more or less a beefy Viking type.

             After hooking up in Rivendell at Elrond’s place, they go off through Moria, an underground dwarven empire now overrun by orcs, lose Gandalf to a Balrog (big-ass demon), and get broken up soon thereafter.

 Gollum.  By the way, there’s this creepy guy, Gollum, formerly known as Smeagol, who had the Ring for several centuries before Bilbo tricked it out of him.  He wants it back, and is determined to do what it takes to get it.  After first shadowing Frodo and Sam, eventually they use him as a guide to get them through Mordor, as he’s the only one who knows it well enough – although they don’t trust him, they have no choice but to go along with him.  He tries – unsuccessfully – to trade them to Shelob (a huge female spider) but eventually catches up with them on Mount Doom.  Surely he must know that Frodo and Sam intend to destroy the Ring (“his precious”) but is calculating to steal it from Frodo when the opportunity presents itself.  For his part, however, Frodo starts becoming corrupted by the Ring as well, and is wary that even Sam will take it.  Gollum tries to split the two friends up and play them off each other, with varying degrees of success.

            The good guys have several opportunities to kill Gollum, but for different reasons, hold off on doing so.  Gandalf notes that “even Gollum has a role to play.”  Sure enough, he comes in handy at the very end.

 Saruman.  Another wizard, not to be confused with Sauron.  Saruman believes Sauron will ultimately win, so he sells out to evil and turns his home tower (Isengard) into a base of operations to develop an orc army.  He briefly imprisons Gandalf in Isengard, but the good wizard manages to escape thanks to the Eagles.   

 Orcs.  The orcs are the primary non-human forces of evil, and come from various tribes (e.g. Uruk-Hai) and don’t even speak the same language – so they have to speak Common Tongue among each other.  They’re piglike, nasty, foul, cannibalistic, aggressive, militaristic, combining all the worst features you can imagine in an enemy race. 

 Humans.  Although Sauron has considerable human allies, e.g. the Black Numenorians and a band of pirates, most of his forces are orcs, and most of the humans are on the “good side”.  The primary humans are the Rohirrim of Rohan, a horse-riding tribe most closely analogous to Vikings, and the Dunedain of Gondor, which is the kingless country with its capital, Minas Tirith.

 Minas Tirith.  The closest thing to a “capital city” or human metropolis in Middle Earth.  It lies right across the river from Mordor, not particularly convenient for defensive purposes.  It has concentric circles of walls and a white tree at the top.  In Return of the King it comes under direct attack by the forces of evil at a huge battle.

 Elves.  Mysterious, long-lived, and arrogant.  Their rep in the Fellowship is Legolas, but the hobbits also meet Elrond (old enough to have participated in the battles in which the Ring was captured from Sauron), and Galadriel, a beautiful elf queen who gives the hobbits some powerful magic items (which prove extremely useful later) and gives Frodo a vague glimpse of the future.  Another major character is Elrond’s daughter Arwen, who falls in love with Aragorn, and he with her – she trades her immortality in order to marry him.

 Dwarves.  A band of them persuaded Bilbo to join them on an adventure in The Hobbit (see below) but in LOTR the only dwarf is Gimli himself. 

 The Two Towers.  Part Two of the story.  Much of this is transition; I have a difficult time distinguishing from the end of this story to the beginning of the next one.  Frodo and Sam end up with Gollum, finding their way into Mordor.  Initially captured by orcs, Pippin and Merry escape and wind up with the Ents, huge living trees.  Although tempted to simply bug out and return to the Shire, P&M realize that if they do so, the bad guys will win and eventually wipe out the Shire itself – so they have to do something.  They manage to persuade the Ents to crush Isengard and send Saruman packing, and are rewarded with Saruman’s huge pipeweed stash.  Gandalf reappears, and the Rohirrim are recruited to join the good side.  …And there was much rejoicing!

 Return of the King.  Part Three, in which everything is wrapped up.  The Battle of Pelennor Fields – the climactic battle outside the gates of Minas Tirith between the massed armies of good and evil.  Pippin is in Minas Tirith itself, as a member of the guards, whereas Merry manages to sneak his way to the battlefield among the Rohirrim.  Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam work their way through Mordor, guided by Gollum, and run into Faramir, Boromir’s brother – and eventually find their way to Mount Doom.  All the good stuff happens then, the hobbits return to the Shire, and the top big shots go to the Grey Havens to disappear forever.

 The Silmarillion.  If you liked the Lord of the Rings trilogy, be sure to read this: this is Tolkien’s extensive prequel, giving a voluminous background to how Middle Earth was developed from the beginning of the world up until the time the trilogy takes place.  It really has no narrative and is more historical/mythological background.  The prog band Marillion take their name from this book.

 The Hobbit.  This was a narrative prequel, focusing on Bilbo Baggins.  It explains how he found the Ring and took it from Gollum.  It’s not, strictly speaking, necessary to read this to understand LOTR.

 Animated Films.  Ralph Bakshi, best known for his adaptation of Robert Crumb’s underground comic Fritz the Cat, took a stab at making an animated version of LOTR in 1978, but the project ran out of money about halfway through the story.  His version uses an animation technique which overlays animation over live action, a effect similar to “A Scanner Darkly”.  The remainder of the film was taken up by the Rankin-Bass people, best known for the various animated Christmas specials we used to watch as kids, and they turned it into a goofy quasi-musical version in 1980.  The coolness of the Bakshi version is cancelled out by the lameness of the Rankin-Bass conclusion.  Rankin-Bass also made a similar animated version of The Hobbit in 1977.

 Peter Jackson trilogy.  PJ was determined to do this right, and wouldn’t handle the project unless the studio committed itself to making all three movies – a huge gamble, but it paid off handsomely.  The films were all made at the same time and released year by year (2001, 2002, and 2003).  Big name actors: Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Viggo Mortenssen as Aragorn, Hugo Weaving (the bad guy from “The Matrix”) as Elrond, Sean Bean as Boromir, Liv Tyler as Arwen, Elijah Wood as Frodo, Ian Holm as Bilbo, and Kate Blanchett as Galadriel.  Orlando Bloom was fairly unknown before his portrayal of Legolas made him a star – combined with his role as Will Turner in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy.  The production was fantastic, the actors all did well, and the movie finally did the books the justice they deserved. The third film dominated the Oscars.  The extended DVD versions splice in the extra footage where they would have been in the films, and extend each of the three films by 30-45 minutes.  I borrowed the set from my brother and watched them back-to-back on a day when I was snowed in. 

 Bored of the Rings.  This was a 1969 parody by the National Lampoon people.  Frodo turns into Frito, and the whole thing is ridiculed in a fairly lame way – a weak, meager attempt far beneath the scale and heroism of the original.  I also noted that “Epic Movie”, one of the recent parody movies, made no references to LOTR and focused its attacks on The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – which was written by C.S. Lewis, a colleague, contemporary and friend of Tolkien’s.

 Middle Earth.  This is the fantasy world in which the Lord of the Rings takes place.  The map shows one large continent, but the Silmarillion shows much more – neither of which bears any resemblance to our own map, or to New Zealand, for that matter.  The question is whether this is our own Earth or a completely fictional world.  Tolkien himself contradicted himself, but the books themselves tend to point towards Earth, albeit a very long time ago – 6,000 years?  A million years?  Who knows, but it would have to have been a considerable time to allow for continental drift.  Part of the reason for the departure of the elves (+ Bilbo & Frodo) [Arwen, of course, is the exception – staying behind to marry Aragorn] at the Grey Havens was to put these ancient races out of the contemporary picture, although this wouldn’t explain the absence of dwarves or orcs.  Gandalf observes that younger hobbits such as Pippin and Merry are taller than the older generation, implying that hobbits and humans will converge in size and cease to be separate races, but the most obvious means of doing so – intermarriage – doesn’t appear to be going on.  Also, magic was prevalent then, and is no longer possible now.  Moorcock’s explanation (in his Elric books) was that the current world was formed by the Lords of Law (of reason and science); Heinlein would push his characters into alternate dimensions to engage in magic, similar to Zelazny’s approach in the Amber series.  A plausible explanation in the Middle Earth context is that anyone who knew magic – the wizards and elves – is long gone.  In any case, the simplest explanation is usually the best, as it is here: Middle Earth is a fantasy world corresponding to Earth in the extremely distant past in between the dinosaurs and our own time. 

 The Scouring of the Shire.  If there is one complaint I have with the Peter Jackson movies, it’s the omission of this epilogue in Return of the King.  I can’t fault PJ for leaving out Tom Bombadil, as that early segment was strategically meaningless to the story.  While this chapter is also inconsequential to the plot, it was very entertaining.

            Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry return to the Shire after these adventures, laden with armor, weapons, treasure, and an intangible wealth of combat experience.  They find the Shire locked down in terror to a mysterious character referred to as “Sharkey”, who turns out to be Saruman, accompanied by Grima Wormtongue.  After having faced down Gollum, Shelob, orc armies and the worst Mordor had to offer (Frodo and Sam), and participated in the Battle of Pelennor Fields (Pippin and Merry), these four “combat hobbits” are ill-inclined to be intimidated by Saruman.  They quickly raise a local army of hobbits and bring him down.  NOW the story can end.   

H.P. Lovecraft

This one was way overdue. I’d actually referred to Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft in previous entries but never gave him star billing until now. He’s a horror writer whose active years were 1915 to 1936, but who didn’t become famous until the 60s, thirty years after his death. I started reading his stories in high school, and re-read them periodically to this day. I’m not a fan of horror, whether books (haven’t read a single Steven King story) or movies (don’t waste my time with that crap) but I make an exception for Lovecraft.

Life. Born in 1890, died in 1937, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England, specifically Providence, Rhode Island, where he’s buried – with a brief spell spent in New York City when he was married to Sonia Greene. Hardly surprisingly, most of his stories take place there too – with one story, “The Horror at Red Hook”, based in NYC. He wrote short stories for Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, plus a fair amount of amateur journalism, the latter recently compiled into a book called Miscellaneous Writings, which collects his nonfiction. He missed out on WWI (“The Great War”). He travelled to the South and was both a major Anglophile – making it a point to give all his words English spellings when appropriate – and a Confederate sympathizer despite being a Yankee’s Yankee.

Stories. These were published separately during his lifetime and mostly ignored except by other writers in his circle of friends, which included Robert E. Howard of “Conan” fame. His friend August Derleth compiled them into book format in the 60s, and at this point finally – long after his death – people began to pay attention to him at last. They vary from short stories and poems all the way to longer epics like “At The Mountains of Madness” and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”

By now there are two volumes of “Annotated H.P. Lovecraft”, which include extremely helpful and illuminating annotations to the stories, explaining obscure references or archaic terms, in many cases clarifying points which may have been common knowledge to a reader of Weird Tales in the 20s and 30s but would be completely alien to a modern reader. Unfortunately the two books come nowhere close to covering all of Lovecraft’s stories.

   Lovecraft’s angle is that there are vast, cosmic secrets which man is too small, puny, and insignificant to understand or even grasp. Man is alone in a hostile universe. Strange entities from outer space, including Cthulhu, the Deep Ones, the Old Ones, the Great Race, all colonized Earth before even the dinosaurs roamed the planet, building vast cities in what are now remote, desolate areas. These deities and races consistently pop up in his stories, referred by him as “Yog Sothery” but today are well known as “the Cthulhu Mythos”.

His top stories are:

At the Mountains of Madness. Actually published in Astounding Stories instead of Weird Tales, which rejected it. Antarctic explorers find an ancient alien civilization dating before the dinosaurs, buried deep within the mountains. The aliens are the Old Ones, barrel-shaped with star-shaped heads and membranous wings. Their slaves are the shoggoths, semi-sentient gelatinous beings. The hero, stunned enough to find all this, finds even more horrors: the civilization isn’t quite dead….

The Call of Cthulhu. Considered his masterpiece. An artist has mysterious dreams, and finds that others around the world have been having similar nightmares at the same time. A police detective finds a bizarre cult in the swamps of Louisiana – which matches other cults in equally remote locations across the world, all disturbingly similar. Finally, a ship finds Rl’yeh, a city of non-Euclidian geometry sunken deep in the Pacific, which rises above the waves “when the stars are right.” The HP Lovecraft Appreciation Society produced a B&W silent movie version of this story which is probably the best movie adaptation of any Lovecraft story produced by anyone at any time.

The Shadow Out of Time. A university professor falls into a bizarre trance for 5 years, then wakes up with a strange, but imperfect, form of amnesia. Soon thereafter he starts having strange nightmares of a prehistoric city in Australia full of cone-shaped aliens – and he is one of them. Eventually he goes to Australia and finds the city…and finds that he knows his way around despite never having been there before. As if the city itself wasn’t horrifying enough, he finds something even worse.

The Colour Out of Space. A strange meteor lands in backwoods New England. Soon the farm near it is corrupted, everything turning to grey dust. The family goes mad and eventually perish in a horrible fashion. The excellent horror of this is that the malevolent entity is not some doofus in a hockey mask or a Fedora with wisecracks and razor nails, but an impersonal, mindless substance from outer space which defies the scientists’ best efforts to identify it or analyze it.

The Whisperer in Darkness. A Vermont man is abducted by strange fungi-like aliens from Yuggoth (Pluto) and horribly corrupted.  The HPLHS people followed up "The Call of Cthulhu" with an adaptation of this one as a "talkie", which they couldn't resist: the buzzing sound made by the Mi-Go as they attempt human speech.  The film adaptation is super creepy and very well done.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth. A Massachusetts town has a horrible secret: it has been cross-breeding with bizarre monsters from beneath the waves. The protagonist discovers the secret and barely escapes, for the time being. After doing some research into his own genealogy, he finds his own relationship to Innsmouth is closer than he imagined – too close.

The Dunwich Horror. A corrupt family breeds a half-monster son, Wilbur Whatley, whose quest for The Necronomicon at Miskatonic University ends in his death. But the monster he had been hiding at home, an invisible monstrosity, no longer fed prodigious amounts of raw meat, breaks out and terrorizes the local town. Finally a doctor, who has himself educated himself with The Necronomicon, leads a small group of brave townspeople to defeat the monster – with magic.

He also liked fantasy, indulged in the extended epic “Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath”. It’s good, but not nearly as good as Howard, Tolkien or Moorcock. He has one (1!) science fiction story, “In The Walls of Eryx.” He co-wrote a story with Harry Houdini, “Imprisoned with Pharaohs”, which I read on my trip to Egypt in high school.

His writing is extremely pedantic and he uses lots of arcane, obscure, and archaic verbiage. Women are almost nonexistent, except the villain in “The Thing on the Doorstep”, and the hero never has a love interest (no, not even a male love interest – according to Sonia Greene, Lovecraft was not gay) unlike the Robert E. Howard stories based on the same mythos; Howard takes the pedantic language down a notch and his heroes – notably Conan – are more muscular men of action than Lovecraft’s intellectual dreamers. The compendium of Howard-written Cthulhu Mythos stories is called Nameless Cults. Many stories begin with the narrator about to commit suicide because he can’t live with the horrible knowledge he now possesses, and the story consists of telling us what he learned (so we, in turn, can also kill ourselves. Thanks, asshole.) Others, such as “The Lurking Fear” and “The Rats in the Walls”, concern bloodlines irretrievably corrupted with debauchery and insanity. Insanity is also a common theme: someone’s mind breaks from having seen too much, and they end up locked away in an asylum, babbling disjointed fragments of Cthulhu Mythos jargon in various obscure, ancient, and dead languages no one would have occasion to learn.

Since by now I’ve read all the stories, some more than twice, my tolerance for his ponderous verbosity is less than when I was 15 and reading the stories for the first time. Even Tolkien is easier to digest in large quantities than Lovecraft. And I find that, unlike many other books, such as Atlas Shrugged, where I found something much different as a 30-something reader than I did as a 15 year old, with Lovecraft I still find the same thing over and over again. Even so, for a newcomer the charm and horror should be fresh and new.

The Necronomicon. Throughout the stories a fictional book, The Necronomicon, periodically plays a role, most importantly in “The Dunwich Horror”. Supposedly written by a mad Arab in the Middle Ages, it contains horrific knowledge and means to summon various unbelievably vile monsters and deities. Of course, the book doesn’t exist, it was merely created by Lovecraft as a plot device, though that hasn’t stopped plenty of people from believing, quite seriously, that it does exist. In fact, twenty years ago I found a “real copy” years ago at B. Dalton, of all places, which turned out to be a complete paperback Charmin – full of “Sumerian mythos” spells in Enochian and having zero to do with Lovecraft. Apparently someone thought they could throw this BS together, call it “The Necronomicon” and make some easy cash. Avoid at all costs, as it’s not even particularly interesting on its own merits. It’s not even worth picking up for $1 at a used book store, thrift shop, or garage sale.
More recently Donald Tyson took a stab at it, and scored 100%. Not only does he evoke the Mad Arab – giving him a complete motive behind his depraved lifestyle – he takes us on a tour of Egypt, Damascus, Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, the Nameless City of Irem, Stonehenge, the Plateau of Leng, the Tower of Babel, and even the Garden of Eden. All your favorite Lovecraft villains are here: Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Yig, Shub-Niggurath, and Dagon. He dovetails the Cthulhu Mythos into the Bible and everything we think of as pre-Christian Middle Eastern history, weaving it in with a subtlety and cleverness that even Lovecraft couldn’t manage. I like that he effected the style of how Arabs write, and didn’t fall into the trap of trying to evoke Lovecraft’s style of writing. It’s probably the best Lovecraft-related fiction not written by Lovecraft himself.

Movies. Some of his stories have been made into movies, with varying degrees of faithfulness and success. The most notable are “Herbert West: Reanimator” and “The Dunwich Horror” (featuring Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whately). John Carpenter’s “The Thing” takes place in Antarctica and has a definite Lovecraft influence. Even “Ghostbusters” had a Lovecraft element, this whole business of the post-WWI architect and the apartment building; and there is an episode of the animated Ghostbusters series in which they actually take on Cthulhu himself. Probably the best was the “Call of Cthulhu” silent movie mentioned above. Part of the problem with the Lovecraft movies is that he became popular in the 60s, and the idiots cluelessly expropriating the story names to make films had NO IDEA what his books were about and simply took a stock “ooh, scary spooky monster!” type film and slapped the Lovecraft name on it, obviously hoping to cash in on it. The recent Stuart Gordon films (“Reanimator” and “From Beyond”) are a case in point: 99% gross-out, disgusting crap, when Lovecraft was all about situations and horrible truths, a huge, horrible cosmic picture, not someone’s intestines falling out on the floor. I’m not a fan of horror movies, for that reason, aside from “The Sixth Sense”, which was put together like a Swiss watch and not simply an endless barrage of decapitations and disembowlments.

Music. The obvious one here is the band H.P. Lovecraft, a 60s psychedelic band similar to Iron Butterfly. They have two albums, but only one song, “At the Mountains of Madness”, based on Lovecraft: the rest is typical 60s pop music. Metallica have two songs, “The Call of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should Not Be”, based on Lovecraft. But I discovered that you can literally write a whole book just on Lovecraft-inspired music, because someone did: The Strange Sound of Cthulhu, by Gary Hill.

Of course, the best site to check out is the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society at http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html. Check it out.

Role Playing Games (Revised 2022)

[Updated 2022.   With "Stranger Things" bringing '80s nostalgia, including D&D, back into mainstream attention, it's time to revisit this topic.]

It all started back in September 1981, when our friend Danton came back to Paris from summer vacation in the US. He got us hooked on a new type of game: the role playing game, with character sheets and strange dice – d4, d8, d10, d12, d20, as well as the common d6. We started off with Dungeons & Dragons for one night and the next day started with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (commonly known as AD&D).

For those of you who know what these are, this will be a nostalgia trip. For others, maybe I’ll be able to clue you in. You create a fictional person – a character – in a make-believe world, with stats (strength, wisdom, intelligence, constitution, dexterity and charisma) and hopefully a few comrades to share the journey (a fellowship) and if you’re really lucky, a good Dungeon Master (DM) with a sense of humor and a good imagination, who understands the rules as well as you do and isn’t an arbitrary SOB. You start off simply and easy, clueless and weak, but after killing off a few weak monsters and grabbing their measly copper pieces, you work your way up to stronger monsters with better loot, and accumulate power, spells, gold, magic items, etc. Yeah, it’s all in your head, so if your imagination sucks, the game will too. But for those of us who could handle it and enjoy it, it was a trip.

AD&D. The most popular, by far.  Generally referred to as D&D, in practice most players are actually playing AD&D, which is the standard version; D&D itself is actually pretty basic and dull compared to AD&D.   It’s closest to Tolkien and Middle Earth, though they called hobbits “halflings” and wizards “magic-users”, warriors were “fighters” (not “sword-users”). The combat doctors were clerics (not “mace-users”) (though no one seemed to care which deity you worshipped and the spells were all the same anyway) and for traps and locked doors, we had thieves (“lockpick users”?). My top character was a 13th level cleric of Thor, with my 2nd favorite a drow (black elf) fighter-magic-user. We played this one for ages, working our way through all the mainstream modules, most notably “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks”.

For all its simplicity and popularity, though, the game was fairly unrealistic and most of the rules were somewhat arbitrary. Automatic parries? No dodge? All your skills go up equally when you go up a level? Rigid classes – fighter/ranger/paladin, cleric/druid, magic-user/illusionist, thief/assassin – with level limits for non-human races? All magic-users and clerics get the same spells? And this business of clerics not using edged weapons, or magic-users and thieves being severely restricted on armor and weapons. Don’t get me started on alignments – good/neutral/evil vs. chaotic/neutral/lawful, and most bizarre, “alignment languages”. Bah. And no one really developed a coherent idea of WHERE this was supposed to take place (e.g. did anyone seriously use Greyhawk?). The most obvious, Middle Earth, was not an option (I don’t think TSR ever got the rights). Swords and sorcery, sure, but very little depth. But we enjoyed it for awhile, at least until we discovered RuneQuest (see below).

Main personal character:  Trumgeld, 13th level cleric of Thor.  

Top Secret. Also by TSR, this time a spy RPG set in contemporary Earth. My guy was a German BND agent who carried an MP40; my brother’s CIA character carried a shotgun. We followed through quite a few modules of this. I recall one adventure where my bloodthirsty comrades literally killed everyone (even those who weren’t on a hitlist) and took everything that wasn’t nailed down, even down to a sack of potatoes (it must be worth something to the agency!). Crazy Top Secret rule: a grenade does 1d10 damage, so it’s theoretically possible to survive a grenade attack at point blank range and get no more than a scratch.

Main personal character:  Fritz Muller, agent of BND (West German intelligence).

Gangbusters. We must have played this TSR game set in the 1920-30s about 15 minutes. Not bad, but too few modules. Also, TSR had this odd policy – completely different than Chaosium – of literally developing an entirely new game system for each different RPG they developed. Because we’re playing gangsters and FBI agents in '30s Chicago means we need a completely different system than spies shooting each other up in the 1980s.

Star Frontiers was the TSR space RPG, which wasn’t too impressive. I suppose the high point was having a race of intelligent amoebas. Cool.

Gamma World. Think you can survive a post-apocalyptic nuclear holocaust world? Check this one out. TSR did a decent job of this one. The best part was all the mutations. I had a huge argument with the DM about PST (pure strain humans) being immune to mutation. My top guy was a PST, go figure – the only race without any mutations at all. The weapons were almost as cool as the mutations.

Main personal character: Urchin Clapton, pure strain human

Traveller. I can’t remember who made this one, but it wasn’t TSR. This was an RPG set in space, in the distant future. All the books were small and black, and the whole thing was played with d6, which was unique among RPGs. Unfortunately, the most fun of all was CREATING the character. Developing his (or her) military career until mustering out was more fun than playing the game itself.

MERP. Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) managed to get the rights to do a Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) game – and dropped the ball completely. Its game system was indecipherable. Sure, you could really be a hobbit, an elf, a dwarf, a Dunedain, or a Beorning (but not a Balrog...damn!) but why would you want to, where would you go, and what would you do? There were no modules, only sourcebooks. Our friend Myles, usually our DM, quoted the Moria sourcebook: “There are lots of dwarves here.....” Uhh, yeah. And there are elves in the forest, and orcs in the dungeons. Thanks, we’ll take it from there.

Call of Cthulhu. Starting the Chaosium games. Chaosium started off with RuneQuest and did the smart thing of simply re-using its basic system for all the other games it made, with slight variations. This one was based on the H.P. Lovecraft stories and extremely well done. The killer element here was SANITY. In other games you can get wounded or killed (boring!). Here you risked going completely insane – cool! Moreover, this was one system with an amazing array of adventures supporting it. They seemed to put out more than we could handle. Surprisingly, despite dozens of Lovecraft stories to draw upon, the writers managed to develop original scenario plots yet remain faithful to the Mythos and ideas of the stories. My favorite two characters were Charles Marx, a West Point graduate and veteran of “The Great War” (aka WWI); and Muller, a German member of a little known reactionary party known as the NSDAP – who also fought, on the other side, in the Great War (I made him the father of my Top Secret character). This was a game we kept up with, mainly because the support was so fantastic. I’ll never forget that one where the DM rolled a “critical” (.01%) for finding a ladder when we needed it!

Main personal character:  Charles Marx

Stormbringer. Chaosium tackles Elric and the Young Kingdoms, the Michael Moorcock books. Modest support, but still fun. My top character was a Melnibonean warrior-sorceror, Jermyn Relic. Thanks to a module called “Hall of Risk”, he managed to create Demon Armor which was practically impenetrable and a Demon Sword which could do 2d8 + 97d6 damage (far more damage than Elric himself could have done with Stormbringer) – and he was an Agent of Arioch. Maybe he got a little TOO powerful. The Chaos characters had the most fun, and if you weren’t from Melnibone or Pan Tang and at least a sorceror of some sort, you were almost certainly dead meat. My first character, Ozzic of the Purple Towns, did OK, but it was Jermyn Relic I liked the most.

Main personal character:  Jermyn-Relic, Melnibonean Agent of Arioch.

Superworld.  Also by Chaosium.  After "The Boys" maybe we should play this again.  You make super heroes and role play them.  Somehow they get a variety of superpowers, handicaps, and even hero points.  Since it was from Chaosium it shared their skill-based system.  My own character, Necroman, got into trouble for actually killing a supervillain, which I found out the hard way was a no-no.

Main personal character:  Necroman

RuneQuest. Finally. This was, by far, the best of all the RPGs. My high school buddies turned me on to this one, and I loved it far more than any of the others – I was addicted. Chaosium started RQI and II, and Avalon Hill perfected it as RQIII. By now it’s gone through multiple changes since 1986, so the current version could be called RQ VII.  We actually played a brief scenario of this last year with our gaming buddy before he returned to Germany, but changes in the game meant we had to create new characters to do so, and we didn't have time to do much to develop those characters.  

Where do I start? Skills you develop individually – and can master beyond 100%. Anyone can use any weapon or armor – no arbitrary limitations or classes. If you want to be a sorceror and wear full plate armor, or be a priest and carry a sword, go right ahead. Priests worship specific deities and different gods give different spells: combat and death spells from the war god (Humakt), healing spells from the healing god, etc. so you have an incentive to join specific cults, and cult allegiances provide incentives for friendship – or war (and thus plenty of scenario inspiration). The “gods” catalog listed the requirements to join cults, the benefits of each one, and the special spells each one provided – NOT like AD&D where all gods give you exactly the same thing and they’re listed with combat stats as if you’re actually going to meet and fight them. Come on.

Depending on what cult you belonged to, if you mastered (90%+) 5 or more specific skills (usually combat skills) you could become a Rune Lord – and RQIII combined priesthood (reusable badass spells) with Rune Lord for the top combat cults. Becoming a RuneLord of a combat cult was one of the top goals of the game for your character, and when you achieved that status – developing a character from a clueless, wuss of a peasant into a bas-ass death machine (e.g. Luke Skywalker’s transformation from Tattoine farmboy into Vader-nailing black-uniformed Jedi) – you felt fantastic....even though this was a completely fictional character (!). It’s hard to describe if you weren’t into it.

 RuneQuest chucked wisdom as an attribute and substituted size (SIZ) as a quantified number, not merely small/medium/large as in AD&D. The monsters had the same format as player characters, so theoretically you could use any monster as a PC, though as a practical matter the “races” – human, dwarves, elves, trolls, broos, ducks, morocanth (intelligent tapirs), and dragonewts – were the most suitable.

 The combat system alone was fantastic. 10x more realistic AND no less playable than AD&D. Hit points per location (arm, leg, etc.) and not merely general hit points. Armor points to be exceeded by damage to inflict wounds: not this arbitrary nonsense of “armor classes”; you roll to hit and then roll damage to see if you actually penetrate armor. You could get special hits – impales – and critical hits, ignoring armor; and even screw up big time: fumbles. You have to roll to parry or dodge. A parry, if successful, added the armor points of the parry item (usually a shield or a two-handed weapon) to the armor on your body; a successful dodge, if rolled, avoided all damage. There were hit points per location, and you rolled a location when hitting, not merely doing general damage (so you could decapitate someone) and even aim blows at specific locations, strike to destroy a parrying weapon (e.g. shield) or for knockback (to push someone back or over).

Skills were on a percentage basis, from base level (the level of someone with no training or experience), up to 100%, but somewhat oddly, the game let you advance past 100% in skills.  Rolling below the skill number on d100 (usually two d10, one for the 10s and another for the 1s) was a success.  96-100 is always a failure (fumble) no matter how high your skill.  Rolling under 20% of your skill was a special (impaling weapons do double damage), and under 5% a critical (weapon does maximum damage and ignores armor).  Every skill successfully used on an adventure can be rolled to increase, so gradually you achieved mastery (> 90%) in various skills.  As noted you have to roll to parry or dodge.

 Magic: three different types of magic, which theoretically anyone could learn. Spirit (“battle”) magic was the easiest to get but the weakest, but at least a simple warrior could have a healing spell without being a priest. He couldn’t raise the dead, but he could patch himself up. Priests, for their part, do get the most powerful spells, divine magic, including Sever Spirit (death spell) and Resurrection (you can figure that one out). RQIII added sorcery, with its own rules; mainly it made spellcasting very skill-intensive and added wizardry as an art, something which had been missing in RQII. There are even spirits, spirit combat, and shamans.

 Glorantha. RQI & II were based in a proprietary world, Glorantha, with its own races, gods, and mythology. They actually fleshed it out more than Middle Earth (who are the gods of Middle Earth?). While RQIII divorced it, in theory, from Glorantha, nominally setting it in "Fantasy Earth", as a practical matter we only played in Glorantha. The races were well done, particularly the trolls (darkness race originally from Hell, with a sonar that let them see in total darkness), ducks (yes, like Donald and Daffy) and broos (goatlike race of chaos who urinated on everything, could impregnate any living being, even other males, and spread disease). Even chaos was introduced as a concept: a foul, degenerate force of impersonal enthropy which corrupts whatever it touches, spewing bizarre montrosities such as broos, scorpion men (a centaur variant based on a scorpion instead of a horse), jack’o’bear (bear with jack-o-lantern for a head), walktapus (man with octopus for a head....like Cthulhu) and gorps, amorphous acidic blobs. The chaos cults had the baddest spells. Add in chaotic features – bizarre mutations so that no two broos were the same – and you have a recipe for some crazy stuff.

Basically it all came together with RuneQuest, which is why it was my favorite. Unfortunately, our gaming buddies all went off to different places after high school, scattered across the globe: Canada, Ireland (our best and irreplaceable DM), Germany, and combine that with the “wife & kids” deal. As you may suspect, our gaming group was 100% male, except for a brief spell in junior high when I DM’ed a group of female classmates for AD&D for a few weeks (it was fun while it lasted).

Main personal characters:  Necrovern, human Sword of Humakt; Detruncari, High Priest of Dark Truths, Thanatar; Lenyn Frehwynd, Wind Lord of Orlanth; Sweet Leaf, green elf Wood Lord of Aldrya and Light Servant of Yelmalio; Uzzy Uzko, dark troll Death Lord of Zorak Zoran; Dark Zunk, dark troll Karrg's Son of Kyger Litor and acolyte of Argan Argar; Clovehoof Bladebroo, broo Sword of Humakt; Lemmy Atum, tusk rider adept sorceror