Quote from: amacris;789231We received a portion of the money back (about 60%). The other 40% was either retained by James as a license fee to give us the rights or had already been spent by him.  

Had we simply laid out and delivered his manuscript as-is, we probably would have turned a profit, even so; but because of the re-write Tavis and I did, the cost of layout, printing, and shipping ended up notably higher. Some of the special components also cost more than we projected. So we lost money, and if you add the opportunity cost of the delays it posed on our other projects, we lost a lot of money.

But I'm hopeful that our decision to deliver the best product we could will prove the right decision in the long term, in terms of Autarch as a brand and company.

Thank you for clearing this up. And the implications about his "manuscript as-is" are noted.

I'm sure your decision was the right one, because pretty well everyone I've seen at this point agrees that Autarch, unlike Maliszewski, comported themselves really as well as they possibly could in an absolutely terrible situation.

Quote from: Haffrung;789244Revisionism and the New Orthodoxy have most certainly affected what is published and played.

A few years ago, a local DM set up a B/X campaign and posted session reports on a forum. He was a player of about the same providence as I was (he started with Moldvay Basic, not Holmes). One of his players was another guy who started playing in 1980. Another had started with 2E.

So they play in a mini-sandbox. They go to a few locations. PCs die. New ones are created. They miss a lot of content. After about four sessions, the campaign dies.

Afterwards, the DM basically scolded the players for not following key old-school procedures. The didn't solicit rumors actively. The didn't hire enough hirelings. They didn't have enough rope and poles. They didn't use this mapping technique, or that protocol for checking for traps. etc. etc. From the sounds of it, the players shrugged and moved to a different DM. The upshot is the DM believed they were playing wrong, even though the right way (which he had clearly read on some OSR blog) isn't the way either he or the other long-time player had every played. They were trying to mimic something the DM had read about on the internet and they didn't have fun doing it.

Then there's megadungeons. Now, megadungeons are a very cool premise. But let's not pretend they were any kind of widespread thing outside Gygax's own campaign or the first few years of OD&D. I expect the number of people who played Steading of the Hill Giant - even just the monochrome edition - dwarfs the number who had played in a megadungeon up to that point.

So 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.

Smaller, setting-based dungeons like Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, or In Search of the Unknown, were overlooked as models of old-school play. And you saw nary a whisper about linked adventure series, like the U series or A series, as adventure models. Why not? Far more old-school players have experience with those sorts of adventures than with megadungeons. And they were a common topic of conservation on forums like Dragonsfoot and the Necromancer Games forums long before the old-school movement metastasized into an ultra-conservative jihad that looked to how Gygax played for guidance, rather than how most gamers themselves played back in the day.

So the embrace of ultra-conservative orthodoxy by the OSR did affect what people talked about, played, and published. It also alienated a lot of long-time gamers who frankly didn't give a shit how Gygax played, and saw no particular reason to imitate his play-style at their own table.

Precisely.  To pretend that what bandwagons end up on the racetrack has no effect on anything is an absurdity.  It obviously had effects.

Quote from: Old Geezer;789272It's called "The Jakallan Underworld."

Where do you think Barker got it from?

I used the original material. I considered doing some kind of veiled pastiche like Barker did, but in the end concluded that anything I could imagine on my own (or indeed, anything almost anyone could imagine on their own) would be less impressive and less effective than the product of four thousand years of myth.

That, and the lack of a linguistics and anthropology prerequisite, are what make Arrows of Indra better than Tekumel.

RPGPundit

Quote from: JeremyR;789321Unfortunately, it's just a few page of random tables. Not even long random tables. It's almost worthless in practice because it's just the same stuff over and over.  

No, now you're lying.  

The AoI section on the Patala Underworld is by itself, about 10 pages long.
It has:
-random tables for generating cavern formations, with variations according the levels of the underworld, as well as tables for the interconnecting areas between levels.
-random tables for the contents of cavern areas; which, I'll note, are a fuckload more interesting than "4 giant rats and precisely 2000cp".
-random tables for creatures in each region of Patala, with notes on types of encounters and special conditions.

It is inherently NOT just the same stuff over and over. Any two levels of the Patala underworld will not look alike, and any two regions/complexes generated will not look alike.  There are tunnels that look like ant warrens, there are complexes that look like a standard D&D cave complex, and there are country-sized caverns with their own kingdoms, cities, rivers, forests, etc.

There's also several pages of descriptive text that detail what each of the levels is about and the major features/races/demons/etc found in each level.

There's additional descriptive text in the section on monsters for those monsters relevant to the underworld.

Finally, there is room left in the mechanic for cavern-complex-creation to permit a GM to modify to their taste or add their own stuff, and the interpretation of random results obviously requires and contributes to GM creativity.

But yeah, I guess Gygaxian Naturalism is 4 giant rats and 2000cp.  That's waaaay better than an OSR that's actually creative.

Quote from: RPGPundit;789499That, and the lack of a linguistics and anthropology prerequisite, are what make Arrows of Indra better than Tekumel.

No matter how many times you repeat this, it's still bullshit, and merely testifies to your laziness and/or bad faith. Straight out of the so-called "swine" playbook.

Quote from: estar;789339I am not seeing the embrace of ultra-conservativism you are talking about. Certainly James Raggi of Lamentation marches to the beat of his own drummer. Kevin Crawford, Tim Shorts, and myself all do things that have little to with slavishly re-creating old materials.

The people you're naming there (including yourself) were precisely the ones who BROKE the ultra-conservative dominance of the "Pure Clones".

Quote from: Guy Fullerton;789358Pundit, we need to go back to the beginning of this thread...


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


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):



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?"

Aren't they enough? Shit, isn't the fact that in other writings he was a confirmable White Wolf-style Swine enough?  It was a prereq of being in that in-crowd that you look down on D&D (and its Class-based systems) as "inferior roll-play of the unwashed masses".

Look at the "uncharitable" things he said in the articles you cite, and you can clearly extrapolate from that exactly what he thought about D&D at that time.

And to further clarify, the reason that whole thing came up in the G+ discussion was only because people were trying to pretend like JMal had ALWAYS been a stalwart fan of old-school and of D&D.   Its now not only evident that he was not, but that ANYONE who was a fan/reader of his blog (which one would assume just about all his G+ apologists are, and hardcore; otherwise why would they keep trying to defend a guy who so obviously didn't give a fuck about taking people's money and running away from his responisiblity while betraying and abandoning the publisher that vouched for him?) would have certainly known that he was not!

Shit, how the fuck do you think I knew?!  I was very far from a daily-reader of Maliszewski's blog, and yet my relatively few forays into it were enough for me to know his Apostolic Conversion Heroic Origin Narrative that he felt entitled him to be the new Prophet of the Pure Way of Gygax.

So let's look at the most important issue here:
Summary:

a) my statement about "having wrote articles all through the 90s" is only slightly incorrect.

b) Its now been shown that he was clearly an anti-D&D swine throughout the 90s, which was my point in the first place.

c) More importantly, its been shown that anyone who is enough of a drooling fanboy of JMal to keep defending him even after he showed himself the be the King of Shit would undoubtedly have known this.

In other words, in everything that matters except semantic quibbling, I WAS RIGHT.

Pundit, thank you for answering.

Quote from: RPGPundit;789503And to further clarify, the reason that whole thing came up in the G+ discussion was only because people were trying to pretend like JMal had ALWAYS been a stalwart fan of old-school and of D&D.

You are probably misrepresenting again. (TBH, I'm not sure who you mean by "people:" People's posts in that thread vs. something different.)

The date of this thread is clear; the date of my question in the G+ thread is clear. None of that G+ thread (up to the dates in question) contains a person making such a proclamation about Maliszewski. Ditto for the related threads/posts that spawned from it.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/116753362008267799901/posts/TfrBqeAsVs1
https://plus.google.com/+ErikTenkar/posts/E6a5bhtDJnJ
http://therpgpundit.blogspot.com/2014/09/historical-blinders-in-origin-story-of.html

Quote from: RPGPundit;789502The people you're naming there (including yourself) were precisely the ones who BROKE the ultra-conservative dominance of the "Pure Clones".

Speaking as someone who is more interested in "pure clones" than most of what I think of as "pseudo-clones" or "kinda clones" (i.e., systems that are mostly compatible with D&D, but usually throw in some subsystems or approaches or elements that are more common in recent/modern RPGs), I'm not sure why that is a big deal.  I mean, I don't have any problem with people making "inspired by" kind of games that are mostly D&D (or sorta D&D).  I don't see it as a Pure vs. Non Pure (or "Creative") kind of thing.  The "breaking" of the pure clones seems like a non-event, to me.  Maybe even a predictable one.  I'm left going, "...and?"

My interest in clones is the fact that they're clones, so the closer they are, the better.  For example, I like OSRIC, but I don't consider OSRIC a game to be played.  Instead, I'd play AD&D, and use OSRIC as a compatible resource in my game.  In other words, I'm not looking for OSRIC to be a creative, innovative game.  I'm looking for OSRIC to be as compatible as possible with the game I'm playing (i.e. AD&D).  To me, *THAT* is the place (and the point) of a "pure clone."

That's not to say that some of the pseudo-clones don't interest me.  The ones that are most likely to interest me as games to be played are the ones that put a different spin on D&D, or offer something quite different from standard vanilla D&D.  If it's basically regular D&D, but just a little different/more modern/etc., then I'm left yawning -- I just don't care.  That's why 5e doesn't enthuse me: I just don't need another vanilla D&D.  These days, I'd be much more likely to play something like Crypts & Things or Arrows of Indra than I would 5e or C&C.

But I'd also be much more likely to play AD&D or original D&D than a pseudo-clone -- and use material from the "pure clones" with those games.  What can I say?  I like those games.

Quote from: RPGPundit;789503In other words, in everything that matters except semantic quibbling, I WAS RIGHT.

I see a difference between "Not being Old School" and "Being Anti-Old School" and that difference is more then just semantics.

You want to say JMal was "Not Old School", pretty sure the text supports that, but most of the text I can find is based on Sci-Fi games anyway.  It's possible he lambastes D&D in his usenet stuff about Sorcerer's Crusade, but all I see is a kind of indifference in a "those are old, dated rules" kind of way without being actually against them as a valid playstyle or system.

You want to say JMal was actively Anti-Old School and thus his switch is an extreme "road to Damascus" conversion that shows true hypocrisy - that's what I don't see.

Quote from: The Butcher;789501No matter how many times you repeat this, it's still bullshit, and merely testifies to your laziness and/or bad faith. Straight out of the so-called "swine" playbook.

Have pity, he can't help it his wiener is little.

Quote from: RPGPundit;789502The people you're naming there (including yourself) were precisely the ones who BROKE the ultra-conservative dominance of the "Pure Clones".

Jeff Rients, Gonzo D&D, and Fight On! all preceded James Raggi right at the beginning of the OSR. And this wasn't at the fringe but one of the major communities involved and one of the first to embrace the OSR label itself.

Sorry you are going to have to try harder with the OSR was captured by the "clonemanics" meme.

I never got your inability to acknowledge that even at the beginning the OSR was more than just people devoted to making clones of the original rules.


I found your 2009 post complaining about the OSR. Now you say I have to find an earlier one? I will take a crack at it but but any further back you start going back before the term Old School Renaissance was in widespread use.

And Frankly I am getting fucking annoyed at your inability to come up with a detailed timeline of who what and when. As a historian you should know better.  Guy Fullerton, myself, and others have been posting links, names, and timelines to refute your opinions with specifics. What do you counter with? your opinion or I wrote a post back in the day but can't find it.

Fuck that. Do the research, name names, and post the links.  Construct the narrative of what YOU think happened. And quit posting opinions to specific points.

And don't give the excuse that you don't have access your xanga blog. I was able to demonstrate several times that with the original link I can pull it up from the Internet Archive. You stated several times you have the dump from Xanga. Go through it find your links and use it to pull up the Internet Archive. Failing that then just repost in your forum here like you already have been.

This time you need to quit acting like the RPG Pundit and start acting like the RPG Historian.

And while I am critical and harsh of what you been saying lately. Like Arrows of Indra, I strongly encourage you to do this. I think what you would come with, if you put the work into it, would be informative and interesting.

Estar,

Is any of this going to change how or what you play? Didn't think so. As for the OSR, you know what happened, I know what happened, and so does Guy. The only person in this discussion who doesn't but continues to insist that they do is Pundit, and apparently he's interested more in winning teh internets than actually gaining any substantive insight. As for any of our respective pieces of work, that should speak for itself. I know I find it a lot more satisfying responding to emails from people actually using something I've written and then finding some common ground for future collaboration than ranting to strangers about how much better my thing is. If that makes me a swine, well so be it - bacon tastes pretty fucking good.

Estar, may I ask what draw you to the OSR initialy ?

Quote from: Kellri;789564Estar,

Is any of this going to change how or what you play? Didn't think so. As for the OSR, you know what happened, I know what happened, and so does Guy. The only person in this discussion who doesn't but continues to insist that they do is Pundit, and apparently he's interested more in winning teh internets than actually gaining any substantive insight. As for any of our respective pieces of work, that should speak for itself. I know I find it a lot more satisfying responding to emails from people actually using something I've written and then finding some common ground for future collaboration than ranting to strangers about how much better my thing is. If that makes me a swine, well so be it - bacon tastes pretty fucking good.

vietnamise pig