My introduction to fantasy role playing games was first edition AD&D in the mid nineteen eighties. My mom found my first books at a yard sale. They may have been a birthday present—I don’t really remember. At any rate, those books turned out to be one of the best and most lasting gifts I ever received. With them, I gathered together a small fellowship of adventurers, and together we discovered a whole new world. It would be hard to tell the story of my childhood or my childhood friendships without mentioning that world. Doing heroic things together in make-believe lands was a very big part of what my friends and I did together. One of those friends is C.S. Barnhart, the main author of the Ice Kingdoms and the principal designer and creator behind Mad Martian Games. The Ice Kingdoms is set within the same campaign world we explored as kids. The maps in the setting book were prepared with the tools of current technology, but they were developed from an old paper drawing I found in a box.
Though I had a hand in the project here and there as C.S. was gestating it, I really got involved once he brought the Ice Kingdoms to Kickstarter. I did some of the editing on the setting book and added some contributions and revisions of my own. Along the way, I became a partner in Mad Martian Games. The Kickstarter and the production work since have been an intensive practical training. We have a vision for creating the stories that will bring our setting to life, but we are growing into that vision, developing our workplan and our editorial and production processes. We’ve been helped both by encouraging words and critical ones.
Like everything else, my ideas about role playing games and fantasy in general have changed over the last thirty years. Today, I am more drawn to sword & sorcery settings and stories, and less inclined to seek out high fantasy settings for my own heroic flights. I am happy enough to share in the wonder of Harry Potter or the Colour of Magic with my kids, but I prefer grittier scenes for my own adventures. What are the materials of heroic narrative? For me, the most compelling recipes always reprise the same ingredients—blood and guts, fire and steel, treasure and fame. Magic too goes in the broth, but seasoned with a pinch of horror, marked indelibly with the reak of strangeness. And monsters. Is heroic fantasy even possible without dangerous enemies who lurk in the night?
These sensibilities, more than any purism about rules or mechanics, led me to the OSR. Over the years, my resurgent interest would lead me to join younger groups who were playing newer editions. And I would have fun, but it always left me feeling vaguely disappointed and nostalgic. Perhaps it is more a matter of timing than anything else, but when my interest reemerged again most recently, I found a developed community of old school gamers that had come of age. Orphaned no more by the market drifts of the hobby, old school gamers had become designers and tinkerers themselves. More than anything, that’s what the OSR represents for me—a fellowship of gaming comrades who have taken charge of their hobby. Not content to watch wistfully, they were building, producing, and publishing their own games, systems, and supplements, and remaking the whole infrastructure of production and commentary behind it.
Retroclone games—supplemented by recourse to the old books themselves—are the most natural system habitat for me. Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, OSRIC, For Gold & Glory, or any one of a thousand other hybrids or hacks—I am not especially picky. If you are willing to run it, I will play almost anything, especially if it’s recognizable to an old player of advanced or basic D&D. I have too a few games on my shelf (and on my hard drive) that I’m very eager to try out in the Ice Kingdoms setting. Low Fantasy Gaming seems ideal for the sword & sorcery settings, and it incorporates some of the newest edition mechanics that seem to have won over many old gamers. The author of LFG, Steve Grodzicki, has also looked at our setting for his system. He wrote a really useful review of it that we’ve linked on this blog. Both Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea (AS&SH) and Adventurer, Conqueror, King System (ACKS) include their own settings, but they also seem especially well suited to ours. Eric Fabiaschi (swords and stitchery blog) and Glen Hallstrom (Ol’ Man Grognard), have also both suggested it as a good match for gaming with AS&SH. I’m eager to hear how it goes with any game, but I’m particularly curious for that meeting. If you can help make it happen, drop me a line.
I hope too that you’ll find some things to interest you here in my little column. I’ll be posting bits that interest me, from blogs and other sources, especially OSR or even O5R sources. I’ll also report occasionally on current Ice Kingdoms projects, and maybe offer a review here or there of an adventure or a supplement that I think might fit our setting.
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