Quote from: Brad;789312Pretty much the reason I bought the PDF. After the whole Dwimmermount fiasco, I was happy to see that someone actually produced a quality product out of that mess.

Cryptozoic got the same favourable reaction from the backers of Doom that Came to Atlantic city when they stepped in to save the game after Erik Chevalier tool the 122k raised and then told backers that the game couldnt be produced and he couldnt refund them because he was broke and hed have to get a job to repay them, some day... So please stop calling him bad names because its ruining his burgeoning movie making career... honest!

Leaving Keith Baker and co holding the bag of very irate backers.

Cryptozoic stepped in and offered to not only fulfill the orders, but to send them to all the backers for free.

Quote from: fuseboy;789251I met James once, and managed to get in a whole gaming session and a long follow-up conversation before I clued in to who he actually was. He didn't come across as a toxic lunatic, which in hindsight is slightly too rare a quality.

In practice, most people are probably relatively mundane and down to earth in person.  It takes a lot of effort and energy to maintain a "larger than life" persona, whether online or offline (in public or in front of a mirror).

Even an individual that is a high functioning autistic, is usually more than a one-dimensional caricature.  (ie.  They're not always like one-dimensional "Sheldon Cooper" types).

Quote from: Haffrung;789188This is what pissed me off. Grognardia marked the shift of OSR from people talking on places like Dragonsfoot about how they played TSR D&D, to pious doctrine about how people should have played D&D. And a bunch of grognards ate it up because they had become fanatical edition-warriors against WotC D&D players, and wanted a strict shared orthodoxy that the troops could rally under.

I started with Holmes Basic in 1979 and I sure as fuck didn't need some pompous blogger to tell me how real old-school D&D was supposed to work. Especially some fucker who never actually played that way.

YES! Exactly.

Pundit, we need to go back to the beginning of this thread...

Quote from: RPGPundit;788999someone on G+ ... is questioning claims about how before starting Grognardia, James Maliszewski was actually not an Old-School gamer (not in the sense that some of the Clonemaniacs use of "you don't play purely the way play so you're not a REAL old-schooler", but in the much more LITERAL sense of "did not play old-school games") and had in fact written many things where he mocked, made fun of, criticized and insulted old-school D&D.

You incorrectly depict the question on G+. (The last phrase, "and had in fact...," is close to a correct depiction though.)

Quotepoint me to evidence in links to articles, forum posts, references to publications, etc./whatever that show James Maliszewski being a complete Swine about D&D

Here you also incorrectly depict the question on G+. (This one slipped past me the first time, but not on a second look. "Swine" is too broad, nebulous, and (potentially) polymorphic of a criteria, since you "own" the criteria's definition.)


This was the actual G+ conversation (source):

QuoteKasimir Urbanski Sep 27, 2014: Seriously?! James as in Grognardia? As in the guy who wrote articles all through the 90s about how fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is, and then when he saw a chance faked a road-to-damascus conversion? ...

Guy Fullerton Sep 27, 2014: "articles all through the 90s about how fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is." Where are these articles? I would like to read some. I see he has credits in some Challenge Magazines and AAB Proceedings. Are they in those? Somewhere else?

To restate the (singular) question: Where are Maliszewski's "articles all through the 90s about how fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is?"


Here is what I (and others) looked through, covering many dozen articles & reviews all through the 90's:
Five issues of AAB Proceedings (from 1990 to 1992)
Eleven issues of Challenge Magazine (from 1991 to 1994)
His columns and reviews from pre-2000 rpg.net (from 1998 and later)
His Roleplay News reviews (from 1998-2000)
The Fourth Millennium Games web site
His circa-2000 web site
The Gamma World yahoo group (started in 1998, which he didn't post on, but I followed Omega's lead, so I included it)
His usenet posts, though this was an ridiculously quick skim through hundreds of posts.
I did not look at any of his Pyramid or InQuest articles. Nor any significant amount of post-1999 content (because Pundit's assertion was "all through the 90s").

What was found:

Reviews of Alternity Player's Guide (4-out-of-5 rating) and Gamemaster Guide (3-out-of-5 rating) that both contain uncharitable* reactions to class and/or level systems.

Review of Apocalypse Never containing an uncharitable* characterization of gamma world and (maybe) 80's games in a somewhat-general sense.

Review of Imagine Players' Guide (3-out-of-10 rating) containing an uncharitable* characterization of 70's era AD&D. (This is perhaps the most extreme viewpoint of those found.)

*I use "uncharitable" in order to be intentionally ambiguous about how critical his words are, so you are forced to read the articles in their entirety. There is context beyond the short quotes, and he sometimes delivers caveats with his criticisms.


SUMMARY

Among roughly sixty articles plus various other content, from 1991-1999, I found four articles with potentially-applicable criticisms. There are dozens of articles & reviews & posts with no such criticisms.

Pundit: Is this it? Are these four sources the "articles all through the 90s about how fucking lame D&D and especially old-school is?" Are these the "many things where he mocked, made fun of, criticized and insulted old-school D&D?"

Quote from: Haffrung;789244So why are megadungeons regarded as some hallmark of old-school D&D? Because a bunch of fans dug around forums and old D&D arcana and uncovered the premise like archaeologists dusting off the rosetta stone. Again, which is perfectly fine. But then every wannabee old-school DM and his brother (including Maliszewski) had to publish one just to establish their OSR cred. In the space of a couple years, the OSR was synonymous with megadungeons - something which was outside the experience of 95 per cent of D&D players in 1982.

I'm unclear how you're tracing this to Maliszewski, though. The big megadungeon threads on Dragonsfoot predate Grognardia by nearly two years. And Philotomy's "Dungeon as Mythic Underworld" is basically contemporaneous with Grognardia's appearance.

I also agree with Rob that the OSR has produced a lot of stuff and megadungeons have only been a small fraction of that output.

I was bored at a game session, and came home hoping to at least be entertained by some game-related discussion online.

Fuck you, Pundit, for being boring today.

Something I noticed about JM's infamous megadungeon is that it has plenty of cool elements but has a lot more extra blibber blubber than I associate with hte OSR dungeons that are actually 'O'. I think the page count this thing spends on explaining to me how special clerics and dwarves are, all the various political connections among the factions, the history of the dungeon, etc. is not dissimilar from the page count on the entirety of D1-3 (arguably the first seriously massive underground geographic space published for D&D). I didn't have much of an interpretation of it when I first saw it (other than swiping left until I could get to the actual dungeon...). But perhaps it is some sort of residual taint from before his conversion to one true way ism. I feel like a really proper old goat who ran shit like this in the 70's wouldn't throw a small telephone book of exposition at you as introduction to his megadungeon. Though perhaps that is unfair.

Quote from: estar;789339Seriously? Have you looked at the Horde and Hoard list? Sorted it by adventure and publication date?

By 2008 there were 64 free and commercial module released for classic D&D or near clones.

In 2008 there was 31 modules released
2009 62 modules
2010 72 modules
2011 92 modules
Up to may of 2012 21 modules

with names like I2 Beyond the Black Wall, The Horrendous Heap of Sixteen Cities, Isle of the Unknown, G8 Manor of the Mountain Giant King, etc.

Yeah there was Stonehell, Barrowdown, and yes Dwimmermount. But I think the megadungeons are dwarfed by the sheer multitude of releases.

Point taken. I don't go delving around the hoard and horde site, so I am indeed ignorant of those figures. Good to see. However, I do think it's the megadungeons that are prominent and talked about in the general RPG scene.

Quote from: Iosue;789344I think this also goes to one reason for JMal's popularity.  He may have, as Pundit suggests, appealed to an ultra-orthodox wing of old-school D&D gaming.  But that isn't what made him popular.  For a lot of folks who never stopped playing whatever flavor of TSR-D&D they liked, he was harmless at worst.  They may not agree with all of his takes, but within his prolific output there'd be some stuff that really hit the nail on the head.  But that'd just make him another blogger.

What made JMal such a major voice in the wilderness is that there a lot of folks like him.  Some of them had played back in the 80s, but not quite in the dungeon/wilderness exploration mode.  Some of them had played 2nd Ed. in the 90s, when that mode had been largely abandoned.  Some of them had seen 3e as the realization of all their fervent wishes, but then realized that you must be careful what you wish for; you just may get it.  Even some people who'd started with 3e or 4e, but were intrigued by what JMal described, entirely different from the D&D they had learned.

For these somewhat disparate groups, JMal's "outsider going in" stance and the archaeological aspect of his "discoveries" were a major part of the draw.  This was an audience who'd never played OD&D, AD&D, or B/X by the book, and they were suddenly saying, "Hey, if you just assume that the designers knew what they were doing, you find there's a really interesting game here!"
Further, it was that position that meant when someone said, "Hey, I'm new to the OSR and want to find out more about.  What are some resources?" they were invariably pointed to Grognardia.

Another fair point. In that sense JMal was an OSR hipster, immersing himself in retro gaming in the search for authenticity, and sharing his discoveries and opinions with others too young to have experienced it themselves. Like the 30-something who is an expert on turntables and other stereo equipment from the 70s.

Quote from: Larsdangly;789417Something I noticed about JM's infamous megadungeon is that it has plenty of cool elements but has a lot more extra blibber blubber than I associate with hte OSR dungeons that are actually 'O'. I think the page count this thing spends on explaining to me how special clerics and dwarves are, all the various political connections among the factions, the history of the dungeon, etc. is not dissimilar from the page count on the entirety of D1-3 (arguably the first seriously massive underground geographic space published for D&D). I didn't have much of an interpretation of it when I first saw it (other than swiping left until I could get to the actual dungeon...). But perhaps it is some sort of residual taint from before his conversion to one true way ism. I feel like a really proper old goat who ran shit like this in the 70's wouldn't throw a small telephone book of exposition at you as introduction to his megadungeon. Though perhaps that is unfair.

Let me kick the pinata before I punch the beehive: Grognardia always gave me massive heartburn, not because he and his people are converts but because when they converted, they assumed there wasn't a community already in place when they showed up. Some converts are humble and mostly lurk. They want to learn. That's the kind I was, sitting in the back on the Acaeum and Dragonsfoot all those years before the Great OSR Awakening.

Then there's the kind of who see nothing but blank decades to "excavate" as they "reconstruct" what happened between when they quit D&D to do other things and when they came back. That's the kind of convert who cheerfully drives a bulldozer through somebody's house in order to build a shrine, trading post or other commercial venture on the rubble. Ahem.

But time to punch the beehive and take my stings: I didn't buy Dwimmermount because I knew it would be overwritten for my taste, but that's neither Maliszewski's fault or Autarch's, and it's not even a sign of them getting the 1970s "wrong." The proper old goats would have sold their souls to have the resources to overwrite on such a scale. It would have been the ultimate luxury in a world where EPT is the market-breaking price point at $30. It would have meant they'd finally "arrived."

Would they have puffed out the page count in the same way? Hard to tell. But it's hard to expand from a 32-page Vault of the Drow to a 400-page behemoth without diluting the density of ideas at least a little. The added scale requires more connective tissue and less muscle. You're not a lean power trio any more. You're a symphony orchestra paying a guy to ding the triangle four times a night.

From what I can tell, Dwimmermount is a state-of-the-art 400-page behemoth. That's what a lot of the post-3E kids demand as a price point nowadays. The old goats might have been forced to cut those ideas into 12 or more 32-page modules because that's the market they had to work with. Maybe one or two would be awesome and there'd be those cutie-pie adventurer maps floating around today. Maybe the rest would be mercifully forgettable and nobody takes the surviving copies out of shrink wrap for a reason.

Since you bought the thing and are now swiping left over vast swathes of page count, it might be an interesting experiment to try cutting up Dwimmermount into whatever we consider "old school chunks." Maybe it's a little brown supplement and a series of three 16- to 32-page modules. Who knows?

Quote from: econobus;789422Since you bought the thing and are now swiping left over vast swathes of page count, it might be an interesting experiment to try cutting up Dwimmermount into whatever we consider "old school chunks." Maybe it's a little brown supplement and a series of three 16- to 32-page modules. Who knows?

It all open content, so folks can have at it and show how its done.

Quote from: Haffrung;789421I do think it's the megadungeons that are prominent and talked about in the general RPG scene.

I imagine they get a bigger-than-usual share of the press because they have such a romantic product differentiator - "you could play a whole campaign in this place!"  This or that little indie-written module might be twice the quality, but to tell that, you've gotta buy it and read it.  (Other differentiators that pop to mind are really slick cover art, "shocking" subject matter, or a celebrity author.)

Quote from: estar;789426It all open content, so folks can have at it and show how its done.

So let's do it! But the "all open content" bit confuses me if part of that $19,000 that Maliszewski retained was considered a licensing fee, which to me implies intellectual property is not exactly up for grabs.

Hey, amacris, would you guys feel chagrined if a thousand Dwimmermounts mount? I guess the good thing there is that people would need to buy the PDF in order to play along.

Quote from: econobus;789428So let's do it! But the "all open content" bit confuses me if part of that $19,000 that Maliszewski retained was considered a licensing fee, which to me implies intellectual property is not exactly up for grabs.

The details are here
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/dwimmermount/posts/439546?ref=activity

and in Dwimmermount itself on page 410 of the PDF

QuoteDESIGNATION OF OPEN GAME CONTENT
All maps, text, tables, and game statistics are open game content, with the exception of text and terms defined above as product identity.

Now there is one caveat and that the name Dwimmermount is declared product identity. So you can't call it Dwimmermount unless you agree to use a separate license.

And there is one one Page 412 called the Dwimmermount Product Identity License.

And what it requires that the derivative work using the Dwimmermount name not be obscene i..e rated NC-17 and that the various trademarks are acknowledged. Either one is likely not an issue for the project you are talking about.

I was one of the ones to initially pushes. Some of it due to the fact I view open content as a good things, a good part due to me figured that given all the drama and ensuing shitstorm the community ought to have something beyond the product itself, and last like my Blackmarsh an easily obtainable example for hexcrawl setting, Dwimmermount can stand likewise  as an example for megadungeons.

Personally I think a minimalist Dwimmermount would be excellent in that it will be more accessible thus increasing the audience for the full product and its accessories. If nothing else the 5e situation is demonstrates that a stripped down but fully functional free product leader can do wonder for sales of the core product. One reason that GURPS by SJ Games has hung on is that GURP Lite is pretty darn good as well as standing on it own.

I don't own that many of these new megadungeons, but the one I really really love is Stonehell. I'm probably preaching to the choir, but that shit is just excellent, and it is completely efficient and on point. You could rip any couple pages you want from that thing and play for 2 weeks. My group is still on the first level, but begging to play another session literally every day.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;789360I'm unclear how you're tracing this to Maliszewski, though. The big megadungeon threads on Dragonsfoot predate Grognardia by nearly two years. And Philotomy's "Dungeon as Mythic Underworld" is basically contemporaneous with Grognardia's appearance.

I also agree with Rob that the OSR has produced a lot of stuff and megadungeons have only been a small fraction of that output.

Yeah.  I see people blaming James M. for all the "ultra-conservative" folks in the OSR, but as far as I could tell he was a lot more moderate.  He even had a few posts I believe critiquing some of those elements I think.  From what I see in his blog archives, it was more friendly discussion of things.  Occasionally he got opinionated but the only thing I saw that was irksome was his anti-commercial sentiments.

James M. isn't responsible for the people Pundit says took things too conservative.  From what I can tell, those ranks existed before Grognardia, and many of them didn't like James.

What happened with Dwimmermount was awful, and in retrospect James deserves the criticism (I could see personal problems affecting him but lurking and not even addressing the issue years later is not very respectable).  But a lot of the criticism about Grognardia seems to be mostly based on people's personal tastes and dislike of him, rather than any sort of proof of him "hijacking the OSR".  He just wrote a blog that entertained some and irritated others, and people seem more concerned about how popular he became than anything else.