A Spy In Isengard

Stop the presses!

Stop. The. Fracking. Presses.

I just found A Spy in Isengard online. What is this, you ask? I wasn't quite sure either. All I knew was that as a kid I played this the crap out of this book, and it was a critical link in my jump from Choose Your own Adventure to Dungeons and Dragons.

As I remember it, the book was basically a choose-your-own-adventure format, but with a few interesting advanced steps. You have to create a character in the beginning, there is a character sheet with inventory list at the back, and a random numbers table in case you don't have 2d6 lying around (or if you're squeezed in the back of a station wagon with two younger brothers on family vacation).

Middle Earth Quest Character Sheet: Awesomeness from the 80s.

By the magic of Google, I have come to learn more. A Spy in Isengard was a Middle Earth Quest (MEQ) book published by Iron Crown Enterprises, which also published Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP), a system based on Rolemaster. I'm guessing that this book was a way to publicize MERP or maybe even it was designed to be a gateway drug book to heavier MERP games. I'm still not sure, but I'm struck by a couple things.

One, it's a little baffling to me that one publisher could produce so much at that time. Rolemaster, MERP, MEQ, a few books, and I recall couple similar Sherlock Homes books produced around the same time. For one, it drives home just how much the gaming industry was producing in the 1980s. But how big of an operation was Iron Crown? Was it a couple guys working out of a garage? If so, how did they get wide enough market access to be successful? Was it a wing of some giant corporate conglomerate? If so, how did they fund enough staff? Did the really sell that many copies of Rolemaster and A Spy in Isengard to turn a profit? Is that why the MEQ system ceased to be?

Two, it hits on the importance of having proper introductions to games. Not long ago on Google+, some folks were having a discussion about how a game product should be properly introduced to a kid who just picks it up off the shelf. Rightly, the issue is that many kids like myself grab something cool (A Spy in Isengard) at a local store and have no way to tie it in to anything.

I remember wondering as a kid what MERP was, but I had no idea how to find it. The local library didn't have information on it. Not even the country library had any information in the whole card catalog! Even if I had found something, I was beholden to the preferences of our friendly neighborhood game shop, and to my mom's willingness to drive me there.We didn't even have a comic book store in my town until I was 14. As a result, A Spy in Isengard was the only MEQ product I ever purchased.

What I'm saying is that an awesome product like A Spy in Isengard produced today would come replete with links to a website where more information could be had and more products purchased. I see on the Iron Crown Enterprises website they have produced a Sherlock Holmes game app. This is great. Hopefully ICE will be able to continue making great gaming products and not lose potential customers because they can be linked in to the magic of the internets.

Meanwhile, I'm totally going to rip a copy of A Spy in Isengard from Scribd and print it on the work Xerox.

Knights of the Astral Sea #27

One of the players in our group writes up each Knights of the Astral Sea session in the form of a letter from his character. The latest installment can be found here at the Eleven Day Empire and here at Risus Money.

The highlight from my character's perspective: Imagine this little girl and a cat walking into a room of captured sailors/privateers to interrogate them. Not surprisingly, the had nothing to say until the officer's "exquisite mustache" was set aflame, a scrawny pirate was electrocuted, and the big fellow's brain was possessed, forcing him to beg for mercy. Only the cat spoke Spanish, by the way - the little girl was just there for effect. It was fun!

Microscope: Who Colonizes the Colonizers?

It turns out we were short a key person for our scheduled gaming session this weekend, so instead we pulled out Microscope.  It was an awesome session with the usual suspects.

At the outset, everyone wrote down two ideas for the Big Picture on index cards, and we compared them to see where there may be synergy. After four of five players suggested themes dealing with colonialism, we decided the big picture would be "Colonizers from a different world displace the native inhabitants."

It's hard to give a narrative of a Microscope game, since it really captures historical snapshots more than a consistent story. But here are some of the interesting moments we encountered along the way:

• The colonizers, who arrived in generation ships, had super-human powers, and at least the colonial council (known as the League of the New Dawn) seemed to be dominated by super villains. This is what gave rise to the session's tagline: "Who colonizes the colonizers?"

• We eventually determined that the natives were smallish, fuzzy and purple with flying squirrel-like membranes, vestigial displacer beast tentacles, and six fingers per hand. The supers derisively call them Lemmings, but we never came up with any other name. They are not exceedingly bright, but eventually learned how to imbue themselves with super traits which they used to massacre the colonists.

• The colonists had names like Blue Duke, Hollow Johnny, Crystal Gale, and Neurolock. The "Lemmings" had terrible names that roughly paralleled those of their colonizers: Gut Hornet, Lt. Agent Orange Jar, and Mustard Love, for example. 

I'm freakin' Picasso.

• While the poor Lemmings sat on hoards of unobtainium, which they made into beautiful jewelry, the supers needed it to enhance their abilities and ward off the dreaded Elker Plague. The Trail of Lemming Tears inevitably ensued.

• One time the Lemmings managed to hijack a generation ship, only to crash it into a mountain! Lulz!

As is inevitable in Microscope, we discussed which eras we would like to run games in. Risus Monkey wanted to play in the Age of Exploration, when the supers arrive on the new world. Oddysey wanted to play during the war the Lemmings and humans fought against the supers. Personally, I'd like to explore the era when the Lemmings somehow get their own powers and seriously fight back against the colonists. Clearly the Monkey is in the idealized Marvel 1602 camp and while I'm over reading Orientalism with Oddysey.

Yeah, our group is kinda awesome like that.

What do you mean, the gnolls ate your brother???

Since I’m late to blogging, I’m late to chiming on my place among the D&D Generations. According to Cyclopeatron, I am solidly a "4^th Generation" D&D player, although I did start with the 3^rd generation box sets, especially the famous Red Box.

My mom bought me the Red Box, I’m guessing for my 12^th birthday, which would have made it 1990 - a bit later than most, but I suppose some surplus materials were still kicking around South Jersey's gaming stores. I had only been a solo “player” before that, building armies conscripted from a friend’s Monstrous Manual (1988). So getting the Red Box was my first chance to actually play for real… but who would I play with?

Fortunately, our family had an awesome tradition: every Sunday night was Family Night. The kids would take turns choosing a game for the whole family to play, and then we would watch the Sunday night Disney movie. So one evening in early 1990, I became Dungeon Master for the first time and made my whole family play Dungeons & Dragons. It was great.

I don’t remember many details, but I do remember the coolness of my parents breaking out of jail and slaying orcs. Also, at some point my brother decided he was bored and didn’t want to play any more. He announced that his character was charging ahead while everyone else snuck about, and then he went off to do something else. A couple minutes later he came back wanting to play again. I said he couldn’t because he had run off into the gnolls’ lair and gotten eaten. This upset him, which upset my mom. Fortunately it was about time for Michael Eisner to come on and we had to wrap up. But my first session of D&D ended with my mother yelling at me for allowing my little brother to be eaten by gnolls.

Whatever. It was his own fault.

Over the next few years my brothers and I took turns creating terrible dungeon crawls and amassing untold fortune. Eventually, we conquered the world using said fortune and the aforementioned Monstrous Manual Army. I remember reading through the various boxed sets, but never had the chance to actually play them. When I got to high school, I found that my friends were into D&D, and we played AD&D 2e pretty regularly, which is what makes me solidly 4^th generation. I never got my parents to play again, but my mom would ask after our adventures, and laugh as the same guy had to roll up a new character every session (“How’d you kill Taylor this time?”).

But anyway, I guess I fall into that “small number” that was introduced by the boxed sets, but invested heavily in the 2e merchandise – just as TSR had hoped!