The Game: It's A Wargame Of Exploration And Conquest After The Collapse

The implied milieu of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition--the game as it is, without consideration of any commercial setting or supplementary material--is not a nice place.

What Is It?

As most of you reading this are Westerners, I will put it thusly as a summary: it is the centuries immediately following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, when Eastern Rome began its transition (ever so slowly) to Byzantium while Western Europe relied hard on the Church to maintain what unity could be had now that Caesar and His Eagles had died. Then add in the tales of sorcerers, trafficing with gods and demons, and striking pacts with inhuman entities fair and foul alike.

This is not Middle-Earth. Of all the cited materials in Appendix N, it is Vance's Dying Earth followed by Lieber's Lanhkmar and Howard's tales of Kull, Conan, and Bran Mac Morn that fit best.

This is that time when the post-Roman (city-)states find their footing, once more stretching forth their hands to expand their power and influence. This is that time after a ruling dynasty in China collapses, and multiple remnants rise up to claim succession. This is the Sea Peoples raiding all throughout the Mediterraen Ocean after the Bronze Age Collapse.

It is the era of tenuous, fragile recovery after a civilizational collapse when what survived is able to emerge and lay claim to the ruins therof in order to build anew over them- to be Troy 7 build on top of the ruins of Troys 1-6. (h/t Heinrich Schliemann) It is a time of (re)invention, (re)discovery, and (re)conquest.

It is also a time of war- a war to determine whose age this new one shall be.

Those that rise up in such an era are those that can recover the treasures left from the past, master their secrets, and reapply them to best effect here and now. This is not a place where anyone that cannot make themselves king by their own hand can succeed, no matter their birth. This is a place for the brave, the bold, and the brilliant to emerge from the crucible of danger and opportunity--what adventure is--and make real their authority over the land, to impose routine upon the land and create order out of chaos.

One should read more of the early, more martial, tales of knightly valor before the Troubadors showed up and started up the Harlequin Romance movement of the Middle Ages. That is what Howard got at with Conan in particular.

This is not a game whose world is for people who believe they are born special, but not yet gotten to compel the world to recognize and bow down to it. This is a game where most characters fail, most players don't see their man make it to high level, and entire parties become the cautionary warnings for later expeditions. Success--and with it, power and influence--must be earned, and it must be earned on an uneven playing field where things beyond your control can just flat-out kill you and there's nothing you can do about it.

In short, it's a game where the player needs to be persistent to succeed. This was not missed at the time. It spawned one of the earliest computer game adaptations, which you can now get on Steam: Rogue.

The dungeons exist because of the reasons I mentioned previously, and some of my pals also entertain the Dungeon-as-Mythic-Underworld concept that further adds to the appeal. The game is a campaign because there is a level of play all about conquest and control, to which there needs to be an end state (see previous posts on that missing element to typical play). The monsters exist as obvious consequences for allowing Civilization to collapse, and their removal or subdual is necessary to restore Civilization to its rightful place of power and authority.

But whose's Civilization? That is the question.

Who wins the succession to the former age, and rules anew claiming to its its rightful heir? That question drove Europe and China alike for millenia, and smaller realms have their own iterations on this dynamic.

While many players, and too many Referees, are too preoccupied with what's shove into their face the game demands addressing big-picture concerns such as this. It's one of the things that made Macris' Adventurer, Conqueror, King stand out among the retroclones while so many failed to justify their existence- and it is one of the flaws in all later editions of the game, especially after Magic-Users By The Water took over and began aping computer game adaptations for their own designs. (3e is Biablo 2, etc.)

This is not the game.

The game is about rising from the ashes and restoring the authority and power of Civilization over the wilderness. The characters that inhabit the milieu are those who do their part in answering that challenge; many fail, but only a few need to succeed to win the game.

It's about time to play it properly.