Paying Homage

Back when I first started gaming, I didn't live in a town with a game store. In fact, the only place I could get RPG products was the local B. Dalton's, and I'm telling you -- back in the seventies and into the early eighties, B. Dalton's was not exactly your well-stocked gaming supply house. But they were good about ordering things, so I got by.

But then, at some point (perhaps around 1981, 1982, or so) I was out of town and got the chance to go to a real game store. What treasures were laid before me! Roleplaying game products other than those produced by TSR? I'd never beheld such a sight. Traveller? Champions? Who'd ever heard of such things?

But what really caught my eye were some underproduced little booklets with the word "Arduin" on them. I flipped through them, and while they were clearly talking about D&D, it was no D&D I'd heard of. Cool bug-men as PCs. Strange new classes like "witch hunters" and "rune casters." Laser guns and robots meant to be used and fought by D&D fighters and wizards.

What had I found?

A treasure trove of creativity is what I'd found. In 1977, Dave Hargrave released The Arduin Grimoire, a half-size, stapled booklet. It wasn't typeset, just typewritten, with hand-drawn (and lettered) diagrams, and bits of artwork strewn throughout. There was little in the way of organization, with each page being a sort of section unto itself. But no one knew any better in 1977. It was like being handed someone's campaign notes -- but what a campaign! It was full of wonderfully creative things. While traditional D&D was caught up in pseudo-medieval simulation, these books threw all that out the game designer's window and inserted things that made your average gamer (i.e., me) gasp and drool.

Morgorn's Spell of Red Death turned anyone with up to the same number of Hit Dice as you "messily noisily and very fatally" inside out.

The Golden Drops of Heavenly Essence restored life to anyone they touched as long as one particle of the person remained.

The Melting Sickness was a disease that caused the victim's skin to slowly liquefy.

Air Sharks were monsters that looked and acted like sharks but swam through the air.

Maybe by today's standards, a person reads about such things and says, "Yeah, seen that before." The thing is, in 1977 (or for me, 1981), no one had. D&D was +1 swords, magic missiles, and orcs. Owlbears were as wacky as it got (and yeah, they were pretty wacky). I'm not bashing D&D here -- D&D was a huge leap and bound of creativity all by itself. I'm just saying that, while D&D was presenting the standard, Dave Hargrave was presenting cutting-edge cool.

The Arduin Grimoire Volume 2: Welcome to Skull Tower, as well as Volume 3: The Runes of Doom, were both released in 1978. They had the same production values and the same rapid-fire presentation of cool new stuff. In theory, these three volumes presented a complete roleplaying game, but of course they didn't. The idea here was that the reader played D&D, and these books told you how to play D&D Dave's way (they don't really present, for example, a combat system, just ways to change the D&D combat system -- same with magic, character creation, etc.). And it was amazingly complicated. Characters could advance to 100th level. The rules for determining if you dropped a weapon in combat used different percentage chances based on the direction (on a hex grid) the attack came from. Each weapon has 12 damage ratings based on the armor worn by the target. Things were poorly explained, and -- in my favorite parts -- Dave writes directly to the reader, telling you why a D&D rule makes no sense and his are so much better.

"There still seems to be quite a bit of concern over just what role alignment plays in fantasy games -- in fact much confusion on just what alignment is. Well folks, I have the one true answer!" --Dave Hargrave, Welcome to Skull Tower.

Dave constantly refers, in fact, to rules debates and questions for which he has the answer, as if there were this huge contentious community of people who couldn't agree on how the game worked (or should work). But back then, that wasn't so inaccurate. D&D then was worlds different than it is now -- if you think you've seen rule debates on Internet forums, back then the rules didn't tell you how to gain levels. The game was so new, and the rules so brief, that someone had to come along and straighten it all out. That person, however, was not Dave Hargrave.

The original D&D booklets had a typo. In the monster entries, instead of saying "%Lair" (for the percentage chance that the creature would be found in its lair), it said "%Liar." The Arduin books embraced that concept (I'm guessing without knowing it was a typo): In those books, that game stat reflected the percentage chance that, if you talked to it, the creature would lie -- apparently at any given time. It was a rule to handle the roleplaying of the creature. And along with the expected "%Liar: 45%," the Arduin books even had monster entries that said, "%Liar: too stupid." So the monster was too stupid to lie.

(Dragon columnist Ray Winninger has a hilarious story from back then. His group, who also believed that the stat determined how often a creature would lie, applied this rule to the elf henchman with the party. The PCs would ask the henchman if he had enough food, or whether he needed healing after the last battle, and the DM would roll to see if he told them the truth. You can just imagine the poor, starving, beat-up henchman, when asked if he needed any help, feeling this odd compunction to lie... shaking his head "no" with a look of profound regret and helplessness on his face.)

But I digress. No, Dave was not the guy to bring D&D together as a cohesive, logical whole. Instead, he was a catalyst for creativity. His books gave me, and I'm sure many others, a push toward more interesting, descriptive games. Dave's style was fairly zany (sometimes too silly for me, with monsters like "freeze bees") and incorporated everything he'd obviously come across -- from Lovecraft to Star Wars to the Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and more.

Dave also wrote a number of adventures. These are room after room in chaotic mazes with a monster and treasure in each area -- nothing more. They are full of wonderfully exotic traps, monsters, and magic items, however, and came with cardstock sheets that could be cut apart so that some of the new monsters and items would have a card, with an interesting illustration on one side and the game stats on the other.

Arduin Grimoire Volumes 4 through 8 (The Lost Grimoire, Dark Dreams, House of the Rising Sun, The Shadow Lands, and The Winds of Chance) came out through 1984 to 1988, one each year. Unfortunately, Dave Hargrave passed away on August 29, 1988 prior to completing Volume 9. He intended on calling it "End War." Those that knew him (I did not) say that although charismatic, he could be hard to deal with sometimes. No one, however, doubted his fevered genius.

I think he said it best himself in the first Arduin Grimoire. He was talking about playing exotic characters versus traditional "Tolkeinesque" characters, but his remark applies to all of his material. "... [It is] another way to put life back into a game that could get boring if played too cautiously and similarly all the time. So be a little adventurous and take a troll to lunch today."

These books are gaming history, pure and simple. You can find them in reprint online. However, this isn't meant to be an advertisement for the products. Some Arduin stuff has been collected and re-edited and actually made into a separate game, but I don't know what these more recent Arduin products are like. I've never seen them. And I honestly don't know what it would be like to buy the old books and actually try to use them in a game. My view is far too tainted with nostalgia. While you might see them as poorly written mishmash products, when I look at them I see the beginning of a new way of thinking. Dave Hargrave taught me that the sky was the limit. To keep pushing the envelope and take fantasy roleplaying games to new places -- to never be content with the same old predictable stuff.

Thanks, Dave.

My thanks to Rick Brown and Mark Schynert for their help with some of the details on Dave and Arduin.

 

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