[Attention conservation notice: 4,300 words on a low-fantasy roleplaying game module, which boil down to 'Nice try,' and which could have been (more) profitably spent discussing, say, the excellent books I'm reading (Brasyl, Mindfulness in Plain English) or the movie we rewatched last night (The Spanish Prisoner, 2/3 of which is perfect). Ho hum. The intended audience of this article is the module's author, though it's not directly addressed to him. This is not a fine work of criticism. It's just one guy commenting on another guy's stuff, hoping for better stuff down the line.]
[On further reflection: In case it's not clear, I liked the module in question, and look forward to reading some of Raggi's other stuff. But this article focuses on the module's shortcomings for a variety of reasons.]
I've just read (not played) No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides, a ~40-page 'old school' RPG (i.e. D&D 0e, AD&D 1e) adventure by metalhead gadfly James Raggi. I'll say this up front: Raggi has strong idiosyncratic opinions about his main hobby (which he's bravely/foolishly made his part-time job), and he's willing to put his money where his mouth is. I admire his tenacity, focus, and bluntness, and I wish him all the best in his future creative pursuits.
Three Brides is a noble and interesting failure, or else a very small success; its specific weaknesses are worth studying; it's surely a fine resource with several neat ideas on offer, and worth buying despite its shortcomings.
My Biases
I don't find 'old school' modules like, say, Tomb of Horrors terribly interesting, nor do I care for classic RPG settings like Greyhawk, Toril, Krynn, etc. At age 14 I would have been the first guy in line to buy such things - and yes, I've read thousands of pages of absolutely dreadful Dragonlance novels, though I never played D&D before grad school and never joined a campaign 'til age 29 - but I'm a couple weeks shy of 31 now, and it's impossible for me to get amped up about unmotivated puzzle-solving, shabby worldbuilding, and endlessly overwritten genre-by-numbers pastiche. I think the AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide is one of the worst-written, worst-organized, most overwrought pieces of rubbish I've ever paid six dollars for, but still way more interesting and inspiring than the 1e Players Handbook; I have no problem with a preference for 'old school' gaming, as distinct from modern RPGs, but I don't believe there's even a single aspect of 0e and 1e D&D that hasn't been superseded, in elegance and effectiveness of design and presentation, by subsequent game designs. That said, these are founding documents of an important hobby - sequels to the original DMG include World of Warcraft and The Matrix - and Gygax's work is worthy of study.
To my eye, Ken Hite's The Day After Ragnarok, S. John Ross's Uresia: Grave of Heaven, Dale and Thomas's GURPS Goblins, Luke Crane's Mouse Guard, and Jonathan Tweet's Over the Edge are masterpieces of RPG/setting writing and design: evocative, generative, and elegant. I believe Gary Gygax's importance to the hobby is incalculable, his presence largely beneficent, his generosity admirable, his creative and literary catholicism a worthy example for young writers, and his vision of roleplaying games myopic, juvenile, and ultimately a drag on the creative development of RPGs.
Of greatest importance to this particular review: I think that fealty to 'Gygaxian' design principles is misguided, except insofar as it will make roleplaying games more accessible to children and new players. But I don't think the module in question is particularly 'Gygaxian,' beyond the basic tropes of the 'old school' dungeon crawl and an ancestral relation to Gygax's Hommlet, though Raggi would perhaps disagree and I remain open to disputation on the subject, which (in any case) has little to do with what follows.
Mere Objects
The PDF of Three Brides is full of text in a single wide column, its typography undistinguished (which is to say 'unhelpful,' but also 'unobtrusive'). The maps will do. The artwork by Laura Jahlo is similarly undistinguished, though a couple of pieces are quite well-done and all are certainly mood-appropriate. It's clear that the art and writing have little in common with modern D&D material, but - crucially - they don't have much in common with TSR material of the 70's and 80's either. This is a good thing! Better to put out idiosyncratic stuff than ape the cartoon aesthetics of your father's generation.
But the presentation isn't terribly important. This is a low-cost self-published module, a labour of love, and I don't care that it looks unprofessional. It's readable and Raggi doesn't hide behind flash. That's admirable.
The Writing
The plot of each of the module's three sections is relatively straightforward: in 'Small Town Murder,' a bride is killed on her wedding night, gypsies are (obviously) falsely accused, and the PCs can choose (or not) to find out the truth. In 'The Great Games,' a pagan ceremony takes place, a bride is to be sacrificed to spirits (or a dragon), and the PCs can choose (or not) to save her life. In 'A Lonely House on a Lonely Hill,' there's a haunted cottage to be explored, with a couple of monsters to fight or avoid. The strength of the module, all its readers agree, is its weird flavour: bloody footprints, wailing banshees, pagan rituals, an isolated village full of madmen. So the writing of Three Brides bears the heavy weight of expectations: this is to be a hard left turn away from the baroque adolescent fantasy of Gygax and his endless litany of imitators (in both pulp and epic fantasy/sci-fi modes).
The key problem with The Three Brides is that its writing is as middling as everything else about the module. Not 'middling' because it's like everything else in the RPG hobby - it's not! - but because it's inconsistent and flat, not precise enough to be really creepy, not wild enough to bring off its attempts at humour and human liveliness.
This modules deserves praise, and receives it at the end of this review. But we've got a long way to go before that.
I started worrying when I reached the third paragraph of the introduction:
Just a note about the gypsies in this adventure. When I first moved to Finland, I noted the local “gypsy” population was not well thought-of by the public at large. Not having ever seen these people in the States, and thinking that Europe was supposed to be far more enlightened, I was fascinated by the whole thing. I decided to make the victims in an adventure gypsies, just to see what my Finnish players would do with that setup. But I don’t know anything about the real-life culture, and the adventure is in no way social commentary or trying to teach a moral lesson about racism. I intentionally made the gypsies as “Hollywood” as possible, with any resemblance to any real-life ethnicity superficial, to keep that distance between real life and the fictional idea of gypsies. The 1941 version of The Wolf Man and the Ultima computer games were what influenced some of the characteristics of the gypsies in this adventure, combined with the kind of antics that traveling entertainers indulge in. I know this caricature depiction of gypsies has been ill-received in other games, and I thought a word of explanation about their appearance here would be in order.
This is a bad and somewhat evasive explanation for the thinness of the 'gypsy' characters, but I'd have been willing to let that thinness go by without explanation anyhow. Yes, they're a cliché - so what? It's D&D for god's sake, nearly everything about it has been a cliché for decades. The tackiness of their depiction in the adventure is not unexpected.
Yet Raggi says nothing about the hamfisted inconsistency of all the other characters in the first part of the module ('Small Town Murder'). He describes the setting of Pembrooktonshire (yes, the name is an authorial joke, though not a particularly coherent or style-appropriate one) as a 'medieval' village with a population of 2,000. The citizens are without exception simpleminded parochial idiots...with a 'high-grade manufacturing economy.' They have rich trade with the nearby towns, apparently, yet they're all afraid to venture in the mountains around the village. They...well, just read:
Approximately 2000 people live in Pembrooktonshire, and it has a high-grade manufacturing economy. Their craftsmen are highly skilled and fetch high prices amongst the wealthy throughout the realm, and the people here have quite a progressive stance on social welfare, so the standard of living is quite comfortable, even for the hardest working laborer. They are far off enough off the beaten track to never be involved in wars, and somehow even with all their riches, bandits and other organized criminals have never been a problem in Pembrooktonshire. However, while the populace is well educated in civic and mercantile matters, they are not so prepared to face trouble.
What exactly is Raggi basing this description on? I grew up in an aggressively parochial rural village that nonetheless had a thriving high-end mercantile character (it was a ski town). But Raggi's offhand details - 'quite a progressive stance on social welfare,' comfortable standard of living, unprepared for any harsh dealings with anyone else - are incoherent. The lack of banditry is nicely explained in 'Small Town Murder' - for a long time a dragon kept the village safe, now it's watched over by a clan of dwarves - but as the module develops, the town gets less coherent, not moreso.
A 'Knight of Science' comes to town to make trouble. Very well - terrible name but a nice idea. He's zealous, self-righteous, lordly, and a showoffy pompous ass - and yet his devotion to his religious cause is in no way compromised or complicated by his worldly limitations. The character of the Knight is almost compelling, but falls apart after a moment's consideration: a materialist who luxuriates in earthly things, an authoritarian religious zealot, a murderous asshole, and yet...
...where there is actual evil, there are no allies more trustworthy, and fewer more effective, than a Knight of Science. They are incorruptible and uncompromising in their drive to eradicate extraplanar evil. Local rulers and clergy defer to the authority of the Knights not simply out of fear, but because at their core the Knights are nothing less than pure champions for the common, mortal man.
If Raggi had given in and written 'The Knight is Azrael from the Batman comics' I'd have accepted the silliness of the fiction. But all these efforts at characterization have little effect. The module offers plenty of suggestions on how to play him line-to-line, but there isn't actually a character there. Just a thinly-connected behaviour set.
Burn it into your brain, would-be RPG scribes: character creation is dramatic writing.
Well, no big deal. The Knight is just one of a fistful of characters in the tripartite module. His Squire is a bigger problem. Here's Raggi's complete description of the Squire:
Faustius is the Knight’s squire. He will act even more snobbish than the Knight himself, warning that anyone helping the gypsies would be seen to be in league with evil and that isn’t such a good idea. He will dismiss the PCs as “unread beggars” and always be “finding time to broaden my mind with great literature” and hanging out in the book binderies when not toadying up to the Knight and going out of his way to be a slave and errand boy. He has a complete collection of Bumblebee Bandit novels in his trunk (The Bumblebee Bandit (signed by the author!), The Bumblebee Bandit Battles the Bourgeoisie, The Bumblebee Bandit and the Dragon That Ate Ten Towns of Some Size, The Bumblebee Bandit and a Monkey Named Fred, The Inconvenience of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Death of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Return of the Bumblebee Bandit, Son of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Bumblebee Bandit Meets The Creature From Bog Dell Swamp, The Bumblebee Bandit: Critical Review Edition with Bonus Chapter!, The Many Loves of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Bumblebee Bandit Rides Again, The Legend of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Son of the Bumblebee Bandit Meets the Many Loves of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Unauthorized Biography of the Bumblebee Bandit, The Bumblebee Bandit and the Writing Ghosts, Earnest Wilde Exposed: The Wild True Story Behind the Bumblebee Bandit (with never before seen Bumblebee Bandit short yarns!), and The Strange Case of Dr. Bumble and Mr. Bee Bandit) but has told the others that it is his collection of prayer books. Faustius wears shined plate mail and wields a two-handed sword. His light warhorse is stabled in town. He is a first level fighter.
Umberto Eco might have good things to say about this use of resources but I'm afraid I can't. Y'know, several of those titles are actually funny - particularly the last one and The Son of the Bumblebee Bandit Meets the Many Loves of the Bumblebee Bandit. But again, it's incoherent - subtly undisciplined. Is Raggi spoofing the titles of, say, boys' adventure novels? Sherlock Holmes stories? Comic books? I'm all for juggling tones and styles if you can make it work, but this list is a mess. (Read Pynchon's Against the Day to see this specific joke done right!) Couldn't Raggi have just given us four entries that established a style, and actually fleshed out the character of the Squire instead? Particularly since -
- get ready -
- the Squire is the goddamn murderer?!
An Unsuccessful Mystery Story
Though the first movement of Three Brides is framed as a small-town murder mystery, there's no real mystery to it. The Squire did it, as a very brief investigation will reveal. But that would do for a short one-off adventure, if Raggi didn't piss on his own work as follows, in a passage describing what the players can learn by questioning the dead bride herself:
Can the party speak with the dead? The Squire committed the murder, that handsome, dashing man who would be a Knight... and dressed up and acted like her favorite storybook hero! She couldn’t leave her family and village (oh yeah, and that nerd husband of hers) for a squire though, so he killed her when he realized she’d reconsidered after he’d already risked his position as the Knight’s squire.Yet it might be too obvious to make the one guy the players will want to most see dead the real killer. The actual culprit can be almost anyone. Just come up with a motive and stick the Bumblebee Bandit suit in their closet, and there you go. Maybe one of the others gypsies did it as sort of a lover’s spat or jealousy thing trying to keep Anthoni away from her. Maybe it was Ursula, thinking Jessica was going to run off with the gypsy and bring shame on the family. Maybe it was Franz, who got blamed for a missing copy of the book (which spawned the leaked page) and taking his revenge on the real culprit, who due to nepotism wasn’t going to be punished anyway. As long as it makes sense and the players aren’t going to throw dice at you once the killer is revealed, it should be OK.
The only specific people that it would be unwise to set as the murderer would be the Knight (they will lose all mystique if they are actual villains instead of icons of supreme in/justice) or Anthoni (how much of a let-down would it be if you set up this big murder mystery, and the accused is actually guilty?). If you decide to make the killer someone not otherwise noted in this adventure, it would be best to write some sort of part for them, because it’s supremely unsatisfying (and unfair!) to find out the killer was some guy you never heard of until the moment he’s implicated. However, the important thing is that it must be possible to successfully investigate the truth and as a result free the prisoners. If Anthoni is the killer, then the rest of the gypsy family is still doomed and anything the players decided to do was for naught. That is dreadful refereeing. Failing to save the gypsies is certainly a valid outcome; not being able to even if successfully learning the truth and doing every single thing correctly is just crap. Choose the killer wisely so that success is possible if the players care to try.
That's good advice as far as it goes, but I kept hoping there was some truly weird twist coming - the Squire having conjured up the living spirit of the Bumblebee Bandit, say, which escaped from the comic books in the form of a feral man-bee, ravaged the bride on behalf of his Reader, murdered her in the thrall of animal passion, etc. That'd make the roles of the Squire and Knight a good deal more complicated - and give the players a different sort of climactic encounter to look forward to, in addition to the written climax (stop the execution of the wrongly-accused gypsies). And written/played well, it'd suit the module's atmosphere of eldritch weirdness.
Well, here's the problem with the adventure as written. Raggi says outright that he's chosen the wrong answer to the central mystery. In other words, he recognizes a failure of craft, but does not fix it. Why, in heaven's name?! If the ending of the story as written is thin, clunky, obvious, then rewrite it! Asking the referee to provide a fix for the module doesn't 'grant agency,' it just pawns off part of the work on the buyer. If you set up a mystery, deliver a mystery - or make its anticlimactic or weird shape a feature.
As written, the module might end with the PCs interceding on the gypsies' behalf, stopping their execution at swordpoint. That's a great setup for a scene, particularly if it falls to the PCs to convince the Knight that his Squire is a killer. Bravo, James! But Raggi's plot-agnostic attitude leads him to repeatedly emphasize that it doesn't matter whether that event occurs; it doesn't matter how the story ends. I'll grant that this is a full-blown philosophical stance, one which fell out of favour in the RPG industry 25 years ago. And though it's fine in other contexts, it hampers 'Small Town Murder,' which is a plot-centric module despite Raggi's apparent interest in writing an atmospheric interlude and leaving plotty bits to the referee.
A murder has taken place. The PCs have no involvement in any events in the town other than investigating the murder. And the investigation builds to...nothing much.
Even 'old school' adventure writers benefit from building suspense and plotting the 'intensity curve' of their modules.
The Other Two Parts
'A Lonely House on a Lonely Hill' is a nicely atmospheric adventure locale, a Zork-like 'dungeon crawl' in disguise, which stands out from other such sites in its compactness and spooky austerity. There's not much to do, but the fun is presumably being there, and it can be dropped into nearly any existing rural campaign, under most any RPG rules system, with no trouble. Raggi wastes few words here.
The middle section of Three Brides is entitled 'The Great Games,' and it's an interesting bit of writing: macabre background events and a script describing what happens if the PCs mouth any objections to the goings-on. Six young grooms compete for the dubious 'honour' of martyrdom, which will placate the spirits watching over the town; the bride of the 'winner' is taken up to the mountains and never seen again. If the PCs mention to anyone else in town that they find this odd - i.e. if the party plays out an encounter in which nothing happens but a discussion of the background events - then a group of townspeople in robes tell the PCs there are no spirits, just a dragon, and by the way they have a potion that controls dragons, and could they go and get the young lady from the mountains without telling anyone what they've done?
But - the final twist - the dragon's dead; a band of dwarves does its town-watching job, and they don't particularly care about the girl, and (as written) simply allow each decennial sacrifice to die of dehydration.
Raggi provides a few suggestions to the referee in case the PCs discover what's going on and run off with the girl. His main suggestion: if they tell anyone what's up, a war happens, and the region turns into 'just another hell on earth.' This is a neat bit of telescoping action - a stupid little village ritual sets off a race war in the mountains, leaving chaos in its wake - but I find nothing satisfying or interesting in it, and the language in this climactic section is poor.
Raggi delights in his own 'edginess' and bluntness, as his blog, zine, and LotFP products make clear (cf. the embarrassing original cover to his remarkable, iconoclastic Random Esoteric Creature Generator), but for all the self-conscious Wicker Man weirdness of 'The Great Games,' the module leaves me cold. The story isn't terribly compelling in itself - does it matter whether there's a dragon or a clan of dwarves there, if the PCs and their players never meet either? - and Raggi has provided no shape, no movement, just an odd circumstance and a surprisingly (intentionally?) insignificant role for the PCs to play. (James Maliszewski had the same criticism - and we rarely agree on such matters, so that's, um, something.)
Praise and Summing Up
Of the three sections of Three Brides, the first is promising and substantial but awkward, the second evocative but anticlimactic, and the third wonderfully spooky but ultimately weightless. The feel of the thing is powerful and unique; Raggi is going for an otherworldly spookiness that reminds me of Riddley Walker, a 'Miss Marple Meets Cthulhu' vibe unlike anything in the fantasy RPG/D&D mainstream, and for several long stretches of this work he succeeds. He's going for delicacy and in places attains it; this is Neil Gaiman's bailiwick, if that makes sense. Yet the writing is marred by tonal inconsistency of a young-writer sort: the juxtaposition of the Bumblebee Bandit (and that booklist!) with the surreal oddity of 'The Great Games,' or (say) this character description:
Nataliya Lezarovich
This is Zindelo’s wife and Josef’s aunt. She doesn’t understand why everyone was so upset with Anthoni at the wedding. A simple “no” should have sufficed if they didn’t want to include him on their wedding night. She herself had an extra admirer on her wedding night, what’s the big deal? She is sad that her family has been accused but does not blame the Knight since “his kind knows only simple truths” and “looks only for easy solutions.” Thinks highly of the priest (Cantrovius) who came to visit them overnight but hates the Squire who laughed “in a most disgusting manner” at their accusing until the men-at-arms hushed him up.
'Simple truths' is a clunker, as is Nataliya's half-written blithe/ignorant voice and the obligatory subversive-by-numbers priestly visit. Not to mention the phrase 'What's the big deal,' which is thuddingly misplaced. If you're going to provide a strong ethnic coding for a group of gypsies - and indeed call them 'gypsies'(!) - then it behooves you to spend some time enriching their voices rather than falling back on paper-thin cliché. (It's not even worth talking about the gender dynamics of the module: the women are dimwits, sluts, fortune tellers, or dead brides. Standard D&D fare, alas.)
Yet it all works, more or less, for some value of the word 'works.' Reading through Three Brides, I kept thinking, 'Our campaign could use more of this.' Not the anachronisms and sloppiness, but the Weird Tales vibe, the prickling Lovecraftian sense of horror creeping up out of the past. The three mini-modules don't sum to much, but when Raggi is able to keep a close rein on his writing, the result is unusually evocative. Is anything in Three Brides on the level of Uresia, GURPS Cabal, Deadlands, even Ravenloft? No, no, maybe, maybe. And it's not easy to generalize from this module to the rest of Pembrooktonshire; the flavour of Three Brides doesn't seem likely to scale to a campaign world or even Pembrooktonshire itself. (Raggi has released another supplement, dealing exclusively with the denizens of his little village, which some reviewers have called too much of a muchness.) Yet that's not the point - Three Brides is a one-off (or three-off) item, a quick look at a quiet lonely village hidden from human eyes and free to get a little weird over the years. It's enough in itself, as itself.
Should you buy No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides? Well, if you're the sort who buys RPG stuff, has $6.00 to spare, and is interested in supporting independent artists/designers in an era of expensive glossy corporate products, then absolutely you should. Not much has come out of the so-called 'old school renaissance' that's of any interest beyond nostalgia, but Raggi's work qualifies; he has it in him to become an elegant miniaturist, his imagination is fertile and well-tended, and his various geeky parochialisms are well within parameters for the RPG business, should he choose to pursue a full-time living making storygames. His aesthetics are very definitely not mine, but I appreciate the work he did on Three Brides (which to my mind is a far better title than 'No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides' - oh come on, James...).
I'm not 100% convinced you should play it. But I'd love to know how that goes.
The surprising and salutary effect of reading Three Brides seems to be this: I find myself rooting for James Raggi. I'm glad of it, and glad for him, and so this turns out to have been time well spent.
