TL;DR: My lived-experience as a young, Northern California gamer in the late 1970s and early 1980s did not venerate TSR and their licensees but rather vilified their corporate practices while still playing a few of their products.
What now? I was doom scrolling the other day when I
saw images of long, rantie posts by someone claiming to have been a
mover-and-shaker in the early days of gaming. The individual was going on espousing
how he hated modern, politically Left, “woke” game publishing and that in the “old
days” gamers of all backgrounds got along fine working for “Christian” corporations.
This was not my experience, so I thought I should document my relationship with
published modules and publishing companies.
Backstory. I
started playing D&D in the 1970s and moved on to other TTRPGs by the early
1980s and have been a life-long gamer, and more recently even producing some
small content. Here, I will jot a few paragraphs of my lived-experience just because
it was different from that of this other person.
Left-coast boy. I self-identify as being from the
Left Coast. That is, from a rural, coastal California town with strong ties to
the political Left. (After I left my home town, I believe they were the first
city in the US to have a Green Party majority on the city council.) I am definitely
what the political Right would call “woke”. Have been all my life. Never regretted
it. And I’ve been playing table-top Roleplaying games for the last half
century.
Early D&D. I had an Eric Holmes Basic D&D
set that did not come with a gaming module, instead I had what Google tells me
where Dungeon Geomorphs. It was a set of tiles you could mix-and-match
to create mega dungeons. I don’t think I ever used them but played around with
them when I was bored.
We had the idea that you were supposed to come up with your
own adventures. At that time, I looked down on pre-written adventures. The idea
was that you were supposed to create your own adventures. (And I was the worst
of snobby nerds as a teenager.)
We played a lot of D&D until about 1981 or 82, when we
switched over to other games, but TSR sanctioned adventures were never a big
thing for us. I am just now running B2 Keep on the Borderlands for the
first time in my life. I bought a pdf a few months ago and have converted it to
Mongoose Legend. I have set up a world with B2, B5 Horror on the Hill,
and U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (Here is an overview of what I’m running, for those who care). My
current group has just finished exploring the haunted house in Saltmarsh and
are heading off to rescue a missing NPC from the Caves of Chaos in B2. This is –almost
– the first time I’ve ever touched the modules. We didn’t play “corporate made”
adventures. We made our own.
Almost.
Early Module Experiences. My brother James would buy
some Judges Guild modules and start them, but we never got very far. He had
Judges Guild’s Tegel Manor and we started it. We maybe got two or three
adventures in. The problem was the architecture. It came with a large, fold-out
map that was really cool, but there was no rhythm or reason for the layout of
the building. It was a dungeon that was supposed to be a building. We loved the
big map, but we couldn’t get over the implausibility of the building. Anyway,
we drifted away from that.
And then there was the time we started U1, Saltmarsh.
I think Will Handrich was running it. I know we were using AD&D. We had a
largish group and we encountered kobolds setting traps on the way to the
haunted house. We played one or two sessions but never got in the building.
There were two modules that we did like. T1 The Village
of Hommlet and Apple Lane. Both of these modules provided a base for
your adventures that you could drop into whatever dungeon you were
planning. They each did get a little bit
of play in my early days. Of course, Apple Lane is for Runequest.
Somewhere along in here—and I forget exactly when—news reached
us that TSR had sued our beloved Arduin Grimoire. The word was that Hargrave had to go through
and remove the words “Dungeons and Dragons” from the text of his books. So he did
and replaced it with “Other Games”. I have a memory of seeing one of these
later versions and—this was before computer typesetting—there was white space
on either side of the words. I’ve tried to find this to check that the memory
is true, but I don’t have my old Hargrave books, and I don’t know what happened
to my brother’s copies when he passed. (So, it might not be true.)
But true or not, that did change my view of TSR. From then
on, they were the evil corporation—just like in the emerging cyberpunk stories
of the time. Myself, and many of my friends, viewed them as corporate bad guys
out to make a quick buck. The fact that they ended up being gutted by a
multinational toy company matches my expectations.
Mid-1980s. By the time we got to the mid-1980s I was
active in a gaming club at the local university (which, last time I looked, it
is still running). We would meet on Friday night in a university building and
there would frequently be around six different games running. We would write on
a blackboard whose games were running that night, what room each game was in,
and if it was accepting new players.
I only have two memories of anyone ever running a published
module. I could be wrong, I was deep into Aftermath at the time, and not
attending too closely, but there was one time when a fellow ran Snakepipe
Hollow over the summer—I didn’t get to play, but I heard it was fun. And
one night we played a Top Secret one-shot.
Late 1980s. In the late 1980s I moved to Carbondale
Illinois for graduate school. I might as well have been moving to a different
world. Gaming here was very different. We also had a gaming club—it met on
Saturdays—and you could float between a multitude of different games. But
Judges Guild, which had been headquartered just a few hours away, had (apparently)
just gone out of business and every used bookstore in town had three or four
boxes of various Judges Guild products, still wrapped, at massively reduced
prices. One of the shop owners told me that someone had traveled all over the
region selling full boxes of books, and he had bought three.
It was here that I got a copy of Ravenscrag. Can not recommend this module enough! If I had had it back in my D&D days, it would have totally changed my relationship with pre-made adventures… but I didn’t. I still haven’t had a chance to play it.
In summery. Myself, and I think many of my West Coast
friends, did not have our gaming experiences driven by the products coming out
of the Midwest publishing houses. We would occasionally shift through published
adventures for good ideas we could add to our own works, but in general we created
our own adventures and, for the most part, our own worlds.
Thank you for reading this far. If you found this
interesting, I have a few other posts related to my early gaming experiences you
might enjoy. As always, please feel free to leave questions or comments below.
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