Designers & Dragons: The Column
Though Grimoire Games' publication history is short, they left their mark on the hobby by releasing the works of David Hargrave's Arduin to the world.
The San Francisco Bay Area Before Grimoire Games: 1975-1977
The Great Lakes region was the earliest locus of the roleplaying hobby from Milwaukee (as described in the TSR history) to Detroit (as described in the Palladium history) and beyond. However, a community of RPG players also developed very early on in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Local players such as Clint Bigglestone, Dave Hargrave, Steve Henderson, Jerry Jacks, Bill Keyes, Adrienne Martine, Jim Mathis, Gordon Monson, Steve Perrin, Dan Piersen, Jeff Pimper, Niall Shapero, and Anders Swenson would soon be numbered among the earliest designers in the hobby.
| "Chaos reigned for the better part of the next year. Arguments over rule interpretations took up almost as much time as dungeoning
[a]nd at least one of our number flunked out of Berkeley at least in part due to the amount of time spent arguing and playing D&D as opposed to studying." Niall Shapero, "My Life & Role-Playing", Different Worlds #1 (1979) |
The San Francisco Bay Area also saw some of the earliest Dungeons & Dragons conventions. DunDraCon organized by Bigglestone and Martine for President's Day, early in 1976 was the first. Author Fritz Leiber attended as a guest, and in honor of that Bigglestone, Jacks, and Perrin prepared a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser inspired dungeon called The Ophidian Palace. Later that year over Labor Day weekend DunDraCon was joined by a second major Bay Area convention, Gen Con West (1976-1978). The new con started out in San Jose, moved to San Mateo, then mutated into Pacific Encounters (1979), which became the long-running Pacificon (1980, 1982-1997). A major national convention even came to the Bay Area in 1981, when Pacificon was run as Pacific Origins (1981) back when the Origins convention used to move around the country.
In between the gaming conventions, roleplayers could also visit a huge multitude of gaming retail stores in the Bay Area, to keep in touch with the newest releases in the then-tiny niche of roleplaying. The best known store of the era was probably The Gambit, which was located in San Francisco but later expanded into Berkeley when it merged with the East Asia Book and Game Center there. Many people who would later influence the industry worked at The Gambit in the late '70s and early '80s, including: Charlie Krank of Chaosium, Tadashi Ehara of Different Worlds, and Donald Reents of Chessex. Rory Root, the founder of Comic Relief one of the most forward-thinking comic stores in the country also worked at The Gambit for a time.
There were several other game stores of note. GameTable of Campbell was opened in 1976 by Larry Duffield. D&D entered the store in 1977 when Dave Arneson himself came to run a few games. Gamemaster's of San Francisco was founded around 1978 by Shelton Yee who'd learned to play Dungeons & Dragons at DunDraCon I. Around 1983 Yee would also create Gamemaster Distribution at least the third distribution company in the Bay Area, following Armageddon and Donald Reent's Berkeley Games Distributors. Today he is still coordinating events at Bay Area cons. Older stores like D&J Hobby founded way back in 1971 were also entering the roleplaying sphere.
Returning to the gamers themselves, we find that early Bay Area players of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) were doing much the same thing as their peers across the country designing their own variants to fill the gaps in that original ruleset and thus creating a somewhat unique style of "California Gaming". Given the distance from the epicenter of roleplaying, it's no surprise that California Gaming was more farflung than the variants of the Great Lakes. Steve Perrin collected together many of these early house rules from Bay Area players in The Perrin Conventions (March, 1976), which was published for the first DunDraCon and then made more widely available in All the World's Monsters II (1977).
That latter book a primordial monster manual edited by Perrin & Pimper was published by Chaosium, likely the first hobbyist gaming company of the Bay Area. Owner Greg Stafford founded the company to publish White Bear & Red Moon (1975), a wargame set in his own world of Glorantha. Chaosium didn't get into the RPG hobby itself until 1977 with the publication of the World's Monsters trilogy nor was Stafford much involved with the roleplaying community at the time. Nonetheless his company was another indicator of the interest in fantasy gaming in the Bay Area at the time. Chaosium is covered extensively in their own history, but they'll nonetheless return to this history of Grimoire Games and Arduin momentarily.
And that brings us back to another of those early Bay Area gamers, Dave Hargrave. He'd contributed to The Perrin Conventions, but he had many more ideas for how Dungeons & Dragons should be run, and the scope of his variants rules would end up being much, much larger.
Dave Hargrave Before Grimoire Games: 1968-1978
Dave Hargrave got into RPGs through a variety of different paths. He first heard of roleplaying in 1968 at the Military Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, Maryland prior to his work with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Later he played miniatures naval battles and Russell Powell's Air Aces (1975), a game of miniatures dogfighting. He was also a lifetime member of the International Gamers Association. This organization was founded by Powell in 1974 in the Los Angeles area which has its own history of early gaming culture, just as the San Francisco Bay Area did. Most notably, Hargrave was playing Chainmail (1971, 1972) by 1973 or 1974 and was corresponding with TSR regarding the game. They told him about their new Dungeons & Dragons (1974) release, and suddenly Hargrave found his interests in roleplaying and gaming combined.
Upon obtaining Dungeons & Dragons, Hargrave began running a weekly campaign that would last for years. It was set on the world of Khaas, once ruled by a reptilian race called the Great Grey Beasts from beyond time now long-since overthrown. Its focus was on Arduin, a neutral ground between many formerly warring nations and the home of the powerful nexus gates. It was also heavily house ruled, so that within a few years Hargrave's game system was practically a D&D variant.
As with many early RPG campaigns, Hargrave's Arduin games had numerous players. In later days, after Hargrave moved out of the Bay Area into Northern California, some of them would drive 250 miles just to play. The Arduin game also featured the high mortality and high power level of many primal roleplaying campaigns. Writing in Different Worlds #2 (1979), four or five years after the campaign's start, Hargrave noted that a jaw-dropping seven hundred player characters had died in his campaign and that "two have become Princes, two have become Dukes, and about eight more have become Barons ... One even managed to marry into the ruling Royal family."
Now we return to Greg Stafford of Chaosium. Around 1976 neither he nor his company was that involved in the roleplaying community, but then he played in Hargrave's Arduin game for a bit. Afterward Stafford asked Hargrave about publishing the game system as a book called "The Arduin Grimoire". The book was soon placed on Chaosium's schedule for February, 1977 which would have made it Chaosium's first roleplaying release. Hargrave and Stafford previewed the game system in Wyrm's Footnotes #2 (1977) which included Arduin write-ups for some of Glorantha's main NPCs, from Prince Argrath to Beat-Pot Aelwrin. The stats looked sort of like D&D, but had classes such as "Warrior Priest", alignments such as "amoral" and "cyclical", and an "ego" stat.
Unfortunately, the partnership was short-lived. Stafford had expected to receive a complete game that might be appropriate for a novice roleplayer. Instead he got a complex manuscript full of additions and variations to the D&D game. His typist also found the numerous charts in the manuscript hard to enter. The typographical issues turned out to be the last straw, leading Stafford to return Arduin to Hargrave. Chaosium's Tadashi Ehara announced the change in Wyrm's Footnotes #3 (1977) released just a few months after the previous issue had brought Arduin to wider attention. It showed how fast things were moving and changing in those early days of roleplaying.
| "We wanted a thoroughly complete set of rules for the beginning gamer of role-playing games. Instead Arduin Grimoire is full of charts and specifications for the experienced, a supplement if you will, and practically useless for the noviciate." Tadashi Ehara, Wyrm's Footnotes #3 (1977) |
Hargrave was annoyed enough by Stafford's reversal that they didn't talk for years afterward. Hargrave even named an Arduin spell after the incident: "Stafford's Star Bridge." It could be used to selectively drop the floor out from under various peoples.
Despite Hargrave's anger toward Stafford, he continued contributing to Chaosium products at least those being managed by other people. Thus, he submitted numerous Arduin critters to Perrin & Pimper's All the World's Monsters volumes (1977-1980), wrote a biography for Tadashi Ehara's "My Life and Role-Playing" series in Different Worlds #1 (1979) and even penned an extensive history of Arduin's world of Khaas for Different Worlds #2 (1979).
However, those contributions ended around 1980 after the publication of Moira Johnston's article, "It's Only a Game or Is It?", in New West magazine (August 25, 1980). The article was somewhat typical of that era's sensationalistic media coverage of RPGs, but it still managed to offer a pretty good snapshot of Californian roleplaying at decade's end. Along the way, it presented a fairly positive view of Greg Stafford who'd run a RuneQuest game for Johnston and her son and a largely negative view of Dave Hargrave who was lambasted for the violence of the critical hit tables in The Arduin Grimoire and the sexuality of its art. Johnston even went so far as to say, "the mother in me rebels at my kids playing in the garbage dump of Hargrave's unhappy life." Apparently the marked contrast that Johnston showed in her attitude toward the two creators was enough to fuel the feud even further.
Stafford managed to bury the hatchet when he asked Hargrave to contribute to The Asylum & Other Tales (1983), the second supplement for Call of Cthulhu (1981). The resulting adventure, "Black Devil Mountain", was essentially a dungeon (containing no less than 28 monsters, among them three ghouls, two chthonians, and a full dozen zombies) that Stafford thought "really contrary to the game". It probably was, but Stafford opted to publish it anyway. Hargrave would later apologize to Stafford for the discord between them and even authored a second "My Life and Role-Playing" article (1983) as well as one more Call of Cthulhu adventure: "Dark Carnival" for Curse of the Chthonians (1984). That one was a bit more in tune with Call of Cthulhu's style though it ended with a dungeon too.
All of that work lay in Hargrave's future, however. Back in 1977 he was still trying to decide what to do with his first manuscript, The Arduin Grimoire (1977). In the end he published it himself as a 96-page digest-sized book. That same year, Hargrave emerged into the gaming field in a second way: he opened a game store called The Multiversal Trading Company in Concord, California. That's probably what delayed the release of the next two Grimoires until the next year. They were Arduin Grimoire Vol. II: Welcome to Skull Tower (1978) and Arduin Grimoire Vol. III: The Runes of Doom (1978), each produced in the same format and all self-published. Together the three books have become known as The Arduin Trilogy.
With those books published though net yet by Grimoire Games we can now take a moment to examine The Arduin Trilogy and its place in gaming history.
By early 1977, there were about a dozen RPGs on the market, but D&D was clearly the market leader. As a result, third parties had begun supplementing the game, with the most notable early supplements including Wee Warrior's The Character Archaic (1975) and Palace of the Vampire Queen (1976), Little Soldier's The Book of Monsters (1976) and The Book of Demons (1976), and Judges Guild's City-State of the Invincible Overlord (1976) and Dungeon Tac Reference Cards (1976). It would be 1977 or 1978 before "generic fantasy" supplements intended for D&D really started to proliferate, but even then most would fit into the categories defined by these early publishers: accessories (like The Character Archaic), adventures (like Palace), monsters manuals (like Little Soldier's Books), and setting books (like City-State).
Meanwhile, TSR was publishing a totally different sort of supplement: rules expansions. In the same time period, they put out Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975), Supplement II: Blackmoor (1975), and Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry (1976). These supplements included new classes, new spells, new artifacts, and generally new rules and almost none of the third-party publishers were duplicating them. Little Soldier did present some black magic rules in The Book of Demons, but that was a rare and much more focused exception. Enter The Arduin Trilogy, which was about to fill a niche among (unofficial) third-party D&D publishers that no one even realized was there.
Today we'd probably define The Arduin Trilogy as a collection of rather "gonzo" house rules.
As in those early D&D supplements, there were new classes. However, Arduin really pushed the limits of the genre, with The Arduin Grimoire alone containing psychics, technos, barbarians, witch hunters, and medicine men. The techno classes also showed one of the particular focuses of Arduin: science fantasy. Later books in the Trilogy would expand that by providing details on space critters and other aliens.
Beyond these new classes (and new magic items and new spells), The Arduin Trilogy also featured rules variants that were extensive and varied. This is where Arduin went far beyond what D&D's official supplements were doing. Hargrave extended levels out to 105(!). He explained standard rules like combat and alignment through the lens of his own point of view and often expanded and supplemented them as well such as the addition of "amoral" to the alignment list. Many of these rules variants showed off the gonzo elements of Arduin, but so do other parts of the rules, such as the discussions of 24-color prismatic walls and the description of not nine but 21 planes of hell.
Way back in the late '70s, Arduin was unique and groundbreaking. There were several reasons that it was particularly appealing.
- Its gonzo-ness offered a pure joy in gaming that appealed directly to the 13-year-old in every roleplayer.
- Hand-in-hand with that, it argued the philosophy that gaming should be fun, even if you had to diverge from the "official" rules to achieve that. This directly contrasted with the direction that the new AD&D (1977) game was trending, with its emphasis on precise rules to better support tournament play.
- It offered one of the first public and unedited views of how a single individual might mash together his own D&D game, creating a unique campaign that matched his own vision. Thus, it was almost a guide to gamemastering.
- In showing Hargrave's unique vision, it also displayed possibilities in D&D that weren't a part of TSR's "official" vision. It was imaginative and original and it sparked imagination in its players.
Much of the first edition of The Arduin Grimoire was illustrated by Erol Otus, who later became one of the hobby's most iconic artists thanks to his covers for the Tom Moldvay Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (1980) and the Zeb Cook Dungeons & Dragons Expert Set (1980). It was Otus' first major work, postdating only a remorhaz he drew for The Dragon #2 (August, 1976).
Otus didn't work on Hargrave's books after The Arduin Grimoire (and his art was removed from later printings of that first book), but he did go on to coauthor two of his own Arduin-influenced "generic fantasy" RPG supplements, Booty and the Beasts (1979) and The Necromican (1979), which were published by super small-press Fantasy Art Enterprises. This company was itself located in the hills north of the UC Berkeley campus, continuing to highlight the gaming and creativity of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late '70s. Most consider Fantasy Art's books even more gonzo than Arduin itself.
A later Arduin artist, Brad Schenck (or Morno), offered up another link to a California gaming company. That's because Morno is better known for his work with Cosmic Frog Productions and Wee Warriors located at various times in Morro Bay and San Luis Obisbo, all toward the south of the state.
Though he didn't connect Arduin to any other game companies, it's probably fair also noting Greg Espinoza, who would become Arduin's most prolific artist in those early years.
Besides any acclaim that the Arduin books received for their content and for their artwork, they also received some controversy. Some thought the game violent, a topic which Vietnam vet Hargrave found very hurtful. There was also (probably) a minor confrontation with industry leader TSR. Everyone seems to agree that Hargrave specifically mentioned Dungeons & Dragons in the first edition of the Arduin Trilogy and received a cease & desist from TSR as a result. As the story goes, he removed the name from his books with white-out and/or correction tape, but otherwise continued selling them with no interruption. The source of this story and thus its veracity isn't clear, but it certainly wouldn't be at variance with TSR's approach to IP, especially moving into the '80s.
True or not, this sort of issue soon wouldn't be Hargrave's problem. Following the self-publication of The Runes of Doom, he was apparently done with Arduin. In a special message to fans of Arduin at the end of the book, Hargrave announced that he was heading on to "new worlds" and that he'd be releasing a "new game" in the spring of 1979. He also said that he'd sold The Arduin Trilogy to someone that he described as a "true friend".
| "Due to financial considerations, I have sold the rights to these three books (and only to someone I trust as a true friend). I hope you will give the new publisher all of the support you gave me." Dave Hargrave, The Arduin Grimoire Vol. III: The Runes of Doom (October, 1978) |
And that at last brings us to the story of Grimoire Games proper.
And with that teaser, I leave you until next month. In the meantime, thanks to the folks at UK Game Expo who gave Designers & Dragons a Special Award. For any of you currently at Origins Game Fair, I hope you'll consider voting for Designers & Dragons at the Awards there. It's in the Game-Related Publication category.
