Reflections on Gary Gygax and Dangerous Journeys

   

This is the might-have-been cover for Gary Gygax's game, from an advertisement in White Wolf, before the name was changed because TSR claimed that Dangerous Dimensions was too close to Dungeons & Dragons.  Next to it is the cover of the book that I picked up as a 12-year-old kid, when it was hot of the presses in 1992.

Unfortunately, day 4 of Con on the Cob ended with my wife rolling her ankle in the parking lot, so the fun ended on Day 3.  No question, though, Con on the Cob is a lot of fun, and I want to make it a regular part of however many autumns I spend in this area.

I had the change to have an interesting conversation with a woman who was at the convention, running one of those traveling stands with rpg books in crates, jewelry, odds and ends, old board games, that kind of thing.  They're the Hell on Wheels Traveling Hobby Shop, and they're at something like 40+ conventions a year.

I picked up a copy of Epic of Aerth, the last book I was looking for from Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys game.  It is the setting book for Dangerous Journeys, kind of a re-imagined alternate history, where not only magic but also magical locations, like the hollow earth and Lemuria and Atlantis, are real.  Like most of the things he wrote, Epic of Aerth represents a huge amount of research

In talking to the woman who sold me the book, I learned that Hell on Wheels came across a number of signed copies of old Dangerous Journeys books.  When Gary Gygax died, so her story went, his widow asked that the old books that didn't sell that year be destroyed.  At Gen Con, Hell on Wheels decided to buy all of the remaining books and re-sell them.  Apparently, I just missed getting a signed copy.

As I've mentioned before, Dangerous Journeys was the first rpg I ever picked up and played.  I found it wandering the Fantasy and Sci-Fi section of the local bookstore.  After Gary Gygax was no longer working with TSR on D&D, Dangerous Journeys is the game he wrote.  It never seems to have caught on, though.  Most people I talk to have never heard of it, and I almost never see it mentioned, even in the gaming blogosphere, which is often obsessed with obscure games.  Of course, it makes sense that not a lot of copies of the game are out there, since TSR sued Gygax as soon as Dangerous Journeys was published, won rights to the game, and then permanently shelved it.

Dick move.

I've always thought it was interesting that, left to his own devices, not collaborating with anyone, Dangerous Journeys is what he came up with.  It is unlike most of his modules - very down-to-earth, in a sense, with far more consideration for real-world history and societies than ever existed in any edition of Dungeons and Dragons.  Frankly, in a lot of ways, Dangerous Journeys is a better game than D&D, and if it was in its 4th edition, I bet it would still be a hell of a game.

I got to run Dangerous Journeys once, at Gamescape North in San Rafael, for a game night held there.  It took a tremendously long time to create the characters for the scenario, but the game, it still plays just fine.

Lurid Tales of Gaming Industry Perfidy!

This is, to me, an amazing story about my very first RPG and a true "giant" of the hobbistry.

Colin's tale of being a GenCon spy for TSR

Nostalgia II: What Makes A Gamer?

Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys was the first rolelpaying game that I played as a kid. I remember a trip to the bookstore - my parents felt like they should feed my book addiction with library and bookstore trips now and then. I was wandering the fantasy/sci-fi section, having just been turned on to this kind of stuff by Hobbits, Narnia, Earthsea and so on. There was this little section that stood out on the bookshelf, of larger books. One of them was the one pictured above.

I got the book and read it over and over, trying to figure out what the heck it was about. It took me a little while to figure out how a book could also be a game. It came packaged with two little ten-sided dice in shrink-wrap (I still have them, actually) and after a bunch of readings I finally caught on. Dangerous Journeys starts off with Mythus Prime, which is a very simplified version of the Mythus system. The other three hundred or so pages of the book, small print, double columns, was the full Mythus system in all of its convoluted Gygaxian glory.

So a weekend came up when we went camping, and as usual I brought along a friend, and I talked him into playing this game. It was goofy and absurd in every way that a game run by an middle-school kid would be, but we both had a lot of fun. We gamed an entire day, afternoon and evening by. People were worried because we just sat in the tent and played this game. We intuitively knew that it would be almost impossible to explain to my parents and their friends, so we probably didn't make a lot of sense when they asked. By the afternoon, though, they were all pretty drunk, so they liked that we were quiet, and when it started raining, we had something to do to keep ourselves occupied.

I got to thinking yesterday - what would have happened if I never found this book, if I never decided to give it a try? Is a gamer geek born, or is a gamer geek made? At this point, I can't imagine not gaming for any length of time. I can get by on MMORPGs the way prisoners can get by on bread and water, but they aren't real sustenance by comparison. Reading and writing stories and poems and nonfiction is also great, but not enough by itself. But would I have felt this way regardless, or is this the person I've become?

Part of why I am wondering this is because I wonder how someone gets into gaming in the first place. Is it a natural affinity? Or do you have to be sold on it (by a book, a friend, etc.)? I also talked to my older brother on the phone about Parsec last night, and gaming in general. He's past the point where he's worried that I'm going to Hell, it seems, but he still doesn't really get what it is that I enjoy doing so much.

Maybe its just one of those things.