Overview
I am a great proponent of introductory RPG’s, cold-start games intended to ease a newcomer into the hobby. Unfortunately, truly introductory role-playing games are few and far between. And I don’t mean the typical beginners’ sets of simplified D&D or some suchlike that are supposed to prepare their reader’s for the full game, but games or books designed to bring a potential gamer over into the hobby in general rather than just make them a player of one company’s game or series of games in particular. I could probably count the games that face this under-appreciated task on the fingers of one hand, and most of them (Toon, Ghostbusters, Star Wars D6) are qualified as being simple games that are friendly towards beginners rather than being designed specifically with the starting gamer in mind. In fact the only one I’ve ever seen that embraced this as its main task was The Adventurer’s Handbook. I chanced upon a used copy of The Handbook in a knick-knack shop some years ago and was immediately intrigued. I had never heard of it before which, given that the ranks of obscure RPG’s are legion, wasn’t odd except for the fact that Greg Stafford was listed as co-author, he being well-known from Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, Pendragon and other games from the Chaosium pantheon (however, as you may have noticed, it is not a Chaosium publication but in fact comes from Reston, the same folks who brought High Fantasy to the masses; if you’ve never heard of that either, don’t worry, you’re not missing much). I had never heard anyone discuss this particular footnote to Mr. Stafford’s output, nor have I seen any mention of it since. In subsequent years I’ve formulated the theory that it may be because this book was not distributed through normal gaming circles; it’s layout, design and lack of a suggested retail price lead me to wonder if perhaps it was sold to educators and libraries and never intended to end up in the hands of individuals. It is amusing to think that in grade school libraries across the country old copies of this game may be lurking, ready to ensnare the curious into the arcane domain of Resistence Tables and POW Rolls (sort of like a more benign Necronomican).
The Handbook is clearly intended for beginners. On its back cover, it proclaims that it will let you, “Create a King, Pamper a Princess [and/or] Decimate a Dragon,” then goes on to invoke the works of J.RR. Tolkien, Ursala Leguin and Michael Moorcock as the sort of inspiration the reader should call upon. Apparently the writers assume that the players will have some familiararity with fantastic fiction. That assumption of a common base may explain some of the lackings of the book I describe later.
The Handbook is divided into two parts, each one offering a means of entrance into the hobby. The first part, “How to Play”, is an extended description of a simple set of role-playing rules. The second, “Known Games and Sources”, is a guide to what games and companies composed the gaming field at the time of writing.
Graphic Design
A standard game-book size soft cover, the best term I can think of to describe its appearance is “functional”. The black-on-white text is large, easily readable and completely free of the sort of typographical jazz that is endemic to any modern publication. A barely artistic border contains every page, and the outside margins are very wide to accommodate subject headings and illustrations (and possibly the notes of the reader). The blocks of text are frequently broken by changes of section and many, many charts and tables. It looks like a school workbook, and that’s without even getting in the particulars of how the rules are presented (see below).
The book is copiously illustrated. However the images are only schematic, un-colored line drawings of such generic form that they seem like a fantasy-world subset of the sort of clip art used in workplace newsletters. Woodenly plain-faced men and women with anachronistically modern hair styles stand ram-rod straight with sword in hand, or mildly contemplate the situation the nearby text informs us might lead to their death. The impression they make isn’t so much that of stout-hearted heroes in a world of magical adventure as that of the junior accounting office goes to Ren’ Fair. The cover illustration is of the same style of art (though colored in) showing a row of unemotional players with their fantasy selves floating above them in a similar rank and file. Amusingly in this image the only difference between the players and their characters seems to be a change of wardrobe, as they otherwise share the same gender, hairstyle and even apparent age. The overall impression is, again, that this book is intended for middle-school students, as it looks like the sort of artistic choice one would make if you were concerned about not over-stimulating your audience.
Which would also seem to explain the book’s mascot, a stubby-winged dragon who prances merrily in the occasional margin, often demanding via thought balloon that we “Use a pencil!” and once making the dubious statement, “Remember, 3D6 gives a number from 3 to 10.” Perhaps the adorable little flame-spewing Hell beast is a touch dyslexic and also responsible for inverting the illustrations of the various types of dice. Besides appearances that alternate between annoying and pointless, It serves no greater purpose in the book, and neither should it in this review.
Part One
The majority of The Adventurer’s Handbook (at least three-fourths of its length) is taken up by an introductory RPG system divided into nine hand-holding chapters. Each chapter discusses a few new concepts that build upon what was introduced in the previous chapter and contains frequent pauses for the reader to answer series of questions or perform exercises. No, really. Here are some examples:
“Role-playing games use several types of dice. Complete the following table showing the number of sides and abbreviations for five types of dice.”
“What is the probability of rolling a character like Aloysius Anonymous, for whom every characteristic is between 9 and 12?”
“Aloysius wants to CLIMB a tree. We roll a 56. Does he climb the tree?”
There are even answer keys at the end of each chapter; it all sparked flashbacks to my sixth grade spelling primer. For someone with even a modicum of RPG experience, the pace would be quite tedious as (seemingly) obvious ideas are explained in excruciating detail. However, this is not intended for an experienced reader and such careful exposition can be very helpful to a neophyte who doesn’t even know what a polyhedral die is, let alone how to use one to resolve a melee between a sorcerer’s apprentice and a rabid beast-wolf. By the time such a beginner has worked through this part of the book, they’ll have picked up all they need to know to play a character in a basic role-playing system. Actually its the Basic Role-Playing system, the house engine of Chaosium used in all those Greg Stafford games I listed before. In fact much of the text is taken verbatim from the BRP pamphlet which Chaosium included in all their boxed RPG’s. In this incarnation it has, as noted, been expanded to make all concepts more plain and discussions of things the weren’t even touched on in the BRP pamphlet (like probability, the bell-curve of rolling 3D6 and a system for building rather than randomly generating a character) are added. No doubt the writers hope that the player will move on to games that will make use of this familiar system, and in fact the last chapter of Part 1 suggests that the character the reader has made over the course of learning the game can be carried over into Runequest or Worlds of Wonder (Chaosium’s more detailed introductory RPG). However this is not necessary as the final chapter summarizes the game mechanics and provides lists of equipment, spells and a short roster of monsters all tied to a simple campaign setting (Wundervale) so it would be possible to run adventures using just this book.
Even if cross-over appeal wasn’t a factor BRP is a simple and solid system that is easy for beginners to understand (the details of which I will not go into, as I assume they are well-known enough to make such a reiteration unnecessary). However, there are drawbacks. Despite the back cover’s offers to cater to your most heroic fantasies, characters in BRP are painfully under-powered. They all start at an age of 16 with a skill set that accurately models the awkwardness of the teenage years. This graceless state will last a while in play, as the skill system is percentile based and advancement comes one point at a time; it will take quite a few adventures to develop any reliable abilities. And of course, the rules assume a generic fantasy setting, giving the impression that all role-playing is fantasy role-playing. Then there is the unrelenting dryness of the game. The emphasis is heavily on the math and mechanics of the system, with nearly no mention of the potential for drama or mystery that is one of role-playing’s great draws. The uninformed reader could easily get the impression that an RPG is nothing more than an exercise in probability mechanics and that one designs an adventure by setting up rationales for a series of skill rolls, followed by the allocation of improvement points. What it actually means to play a role , or to build a character in the literary sense are mentioned in passing and never brought up again.
Admittedly, these are problems that were part of nearly all RPG’s at the time, so these criticisms could perhaps be turned around and presented as proof that the Handbook is an accurate summation of what the hobby was like. But even basic D&D caught my interest by promising Adventures, dammit, and leavened its charts and tables with flashes of descriptive color. And the player isn’t the only one who isn’t properly called upon to exercise their creativity. The greatest failing of The Adventurer’s Handbook is the nearly complete lack of GM instruction. There is no discussion of challenging the players, balancing the group, long-term campaign planning or even how to write a basic adventure (with a caveat for the comparison of three different styles of play: “power gaming”, “story-telling” and “role-playing”). Again making allowances for the era in which it was written, at the time most gamers felt the GM’s main responsibility was to make maps and keep the monster rosters straight; I can just imagine how the average Tunnels & Trolls group would have reacted if their referee deemed to call himself a Narrator. But even T&T encouraged the GM to be slyly creative when designing a dungeon, and to be positively fecund in coming up with unique monsters. Without this call upon the reader’s creative instinct, perhaps the greatest aspect of fantasy gaming’s appeal is lost.
Part Two
The second smaller section, only three chapters long, serves as an overview of what constituted the hobby of role-playing when the Handbook was written. The first chapter is a list of companies that produced games and role-playing paraphernalia such as dice and miniatures, giving a mailing address and a brief outline of what each does. Obviously it is all terribly out of date, and I think only four of the companies listed (Chaosium, Flying Buffalo, Games Workshop and Iron Crown Enterprises) are still in operation. The litany of the lost can stir quite a fit of melancholy in those who remember them (Avalon Hill, Fantasy Games Unlimited, GDW, Gamescience, Judges Guild, Metagaming...sigh).
The second chapter begins by telling us that there are “50 or more” RPG’s in existence, but that only nine of them can be considered major systems. It then goes on to describe and rate each of these major games, with the emphasis on how “complete” a system they offer and how appropriate they are for beginning gamers. The nine games granted this exalted status are Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, Chivalry & Sorcery, Traveller, Runequest, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, The Fantasy Trip, Dragonquest and Worlds of Wonder. That is also the sequence in which they are reviewed, to reflect the chronological order of their publication. The most heavily praised systems are T&T, Traveller, Runequest and Worlds of Wonder, though only D&D is derided for being particularly crude and, given that it’s original tan box/white box D&D, the judgement is hardly unwarranted. The reviews appear fair and reasonable except for a bit of a rant against the prevalence of dungeon-delving adventures in AD&D (shocking news: RPG.net was not the first place this controversial viewpoint was broached) and the gushing quality of the praise heaped upon Runequest raises some doubts about how objective the authors remained when reviewing the other systems. Also it seems a bit of a stretch to include Worlds of Wonder as a major system, which is all the worse for the sanctioning it received in Part One. If Mr. Stafford wanted tp promote his own company’s game, he should have just done so and dropped the objective pretense.
Those not-major games are the subject of the final chapter of the book, a selection of brief descriptions of RPG’s sorted by genre, plus one for “Beginner’s Games” Actually the Beginner’s Games are those from the previous “major system” chapter, all of them except for C&S and the two versions of D&D, which have been relegated to the “Fantasy, General” listings. Each description includes contact information to reach the publisher, a one to four star rating of how well suited the game is for beginners (as opposed to overall quality) and a succinct description of the game’s character and good or bad points. Again, by now these are old and often very dead games, though reading the impressions they made before the hype around them solidified or their reputation grew in the telling is interesting. For instance, Gamma World is criticized for its mock science and Dallas (remember Dallas? There was a game about Dallas) is praised for being a pure role-playing game. One annoyance: the list of games includes one under the “Literary” category called Reckless Adventure, but there is no actual description of it. Too bad, it sounds intriguing.
The book ends with an index...that only covers Part One.
Conclusions
The second part of The Adventurer’s Handbook can’t really be reviewed in the normal sense. It is what it is and if the march if time has rendered its contents irrelevant, such is the nature of all things. However the first part can be more fairly scrutinized. If part one of the Handbook set out to be a means by which a reader could become a role-player without any outside help, it fails. It has little difficulty conveying concrete aspects such as dice and mathematics, but seems to have found more esoteric concepts too nebulous to pin down, and failing that didn’t even attempt to acknowledge them. I feel that the book thus erred in the wrong direction; six pages of light “let’s pretend” text that encouraged the reader to imagine a battle with a great dragon would be far more effective for evoking the appeal of role-playing than the sixty here which gives them a skill called “Hit With Fist”. It is as if the writers felt that the appeal of role-playing was unspokenly manifest, or were not consciously aware of it (the way certain people describe what they like as good or “cool” without being able to explain why it appeals to them). Or perhaps they felt the reader would already have been exposed to RPG’s , but for whatever reason hadn’t learned the details yet. An unlikely scenario I think; most folks who encounter role-playing do so through an already practicing group and if they find it appeals to them will be initiated into that group.
But I feel the Handbook earns more praise for trying than it loses for trying badly. Most currently self-described introductory games make no effort to imbue their reader with the sense of a wider hobby. They are in a sense predatory, targeting their reader as a consumer and hoping to ensnare them into playing that particular game, or its more advanced version from the same company. In the early days of this hobby, it was not uncommon for games to exhort that if you liked what it had to offer, you could try a list of given suggestions as well. The Adventurer’s Handbook dedicates a significant portion of itself to just that end. In the current field, which has now chosen to refer to itself as an “industry” rather than a hobby (steel is an industry; amateur theater is a hobby. What are you getting so high and mighty about?) Such sense of community is sadly lacking, and I would very much like to see an introductory RPG written that put the priority of reviving it before the writer’s vanity or (sadly misguided) mercenary aims.
Please help support RPGnet by purchasing the following (probably) related items through DriveThruRPG.
