Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Russell Bailey

The early editions of Tunnels & Trolls are a good example of two class design schema:

• Classes to fill holes
• Classes on a spectrum

The two base classes are warrior and wizard. The warrior is a straightforward arms and armor type, noted in the game’s fifth-and-a-half edition as being based on Conan. Wizards have a mix of dungeon utility spells and combat spells.

T&T‘s mechanics are somewhat more regular than D&D‘s. “Take that you fiend!,” the equivalent of “Magic Missile,” simply allows the character to wield his intelligence as a weapon.

The spectrum element comes in when rogues are added to the basic mix. Like D&D‘s thieves, they appear to have been modeled on the Gray Mouser, but they are essentially fighters with who dabble in magic. They represent an in-between space between the warrior and wizard class, illustrating the spectrum principle.

Initially, rogues were required to choose to become either warriors or wizards as they leveled up… a choice the Mouser himself made at a young age. In practice, apparently, players tried to avoid making this choice, and thus T&T introduced a mirror-class: the warrior-wizard.

The warrior-wizard is interesting not only in that it completes the spectrum of character classes, but in that it requires the rolling of unusually high attributes at character creation. The combination of fighting, spellcasting, and attribute requirements is suggestive of D&D‘s paladin (though I doubt there’s a direct line of inspiration). As of T&T 5.5e, then, the classes form a sort of circle.

Unlike most fantasy games which followed, Tunnels & Trolls embraced Dungeons & Dragons‘ milieu of dungeon delving wholeheartedly, but casually rejected many of D&D‘s other additions to the fantasy genre, such as the thief-specialist and the fighting cleric. In other words, it absorbed D&D‘s gameplay innovations while ignoring its class design.

It’s particularly tantalizing to imagine a version of D&D with the more elegant class structure of T&T. Indeed, while the thief has only occasionally been imagined as a subclass of the fighter, reimagining the cleric as a variant wizard has a long heritage. The “White Mage” is a fixture of franchise like Final Fantasy, and is echoed in TSR’s mid-90s Lankhmar boxed set.

It’s almost criminal to go this far down into an article about Tunnels & Trolls without mentioning that the game’s far more lighthearted than D&D grew up to be. The spell names are, largely, cheap jokes. The tone of Liz Danforth’s 5.5e is tongue-in-cheek, and rather charming.

I was raised on two kinds of fantasy gaming. The first were the Sierra and Lucasarts adventure games, which were full of puns and jokes. Although the humor was  of a slightly different breed, they fit well with my readings of Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance, as well as Robert Aspirin, J. R. R. Tolkien¹, and, dare I say it, Piers Anthony.

The second were the Dungeons & Dragons variants and The Lord of the Rings, plus the Elric books. Though all three have more humor than they’re generally given credit for, they are by comparison dreadfully serious. I think Aaron Allston makes it through the Rules Cyclopedia without so much as an ironic aside. The third edition of Dungeons & Dragons admonishes (though not absolutely) against the use of cheap gags in your characters or campaign.

At this stage of my life, I appreciate the humorous side of fantasy gaming more. I’m compelled by Conan’s rarely-detailed “gigantic mirths,” and the heroic laughter of Fafhrd and the Mouser in “Adept’s Gambit.”² I’m attracted by the absurdity of creations like the rust monster and the beholder. That makes a review of Tunnels & Trolls rather a welcome evening chore.

Gary Gygax

So I talked about my disconnect with the cleric and fantasy religion in general yesterday. Apparently, Gygax had a few words on the issue:¹

This capable and knowledgeable individual² suggests that data on the deities is insufficient for usefulness in an AD&D™ campaign. That religion, being so much a part of our real history, must likewise play a part in your campaign.

J. R. R. Tolkien did not agree, for he wrote many pages without mention of religion. Most of the heroic fantasy and swords & sorcery books written do not feature any particular religious zeal on the part of their protagonists. Consider Conan, Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, Harold Shea, and the list goes on and on.

I do not agree that it needs be a significant part of the campaign. As AD&D™ games depend on participant input for their character, the detailing of deities and those who serve them is strictly a part of the role playing aspect of the game.

Must all evil characters sound sinister? Does an elf have to be flighty? Need a ranger be lugubrious? Actually, the game system tells you what is necessary for a campaign, but how the campaign is role-played is strictly up to the DM and players.

I’ll admit I don’t know what Gygax means in the last paragraph.³ Gods aren’t necessary. Cool. Got that, agree. Fiction need not match one reader’s view of history. Check. Play it your own damn way. Correctamundo.

But, ah, are elves flighty in conventional views of history? Did evil-aligned personages⁴ actually speak in a sinister fashion? I’m really not sure what the Father of Roleplaying⁵ means here, even though I suspect I agree.

I should probably mention that my current campaigns tend to have gods, but I don’t really mention them all that often. I more or less assume that you must believe in something, and that sometimes that something’s real. That sometimes she talks to angels, when she has her little fits, even.

I don’t, though, typically involve gods overmuch. They get little shrines and prayers and sometimes saints⁶. But my desire to rewrite Dune has dwindled over the years,⁷ and I’ve simultaneously become very frustrated with playing or playing with Religious Character Who is Crazy Because Religion is Crazy.⁸

One of the fastest ways, in fact, to turn me off your game⁹ is to start telling me how important religion is to your setting. I don’t object to it, but if you’re at the place in the creative process where that’s what you’re most passionate about, well, then, I’m in a different place.

And do keep in mind, as I say this, that I’m someone who writes about vampires from a very Catholic perspective for money and enjoys the hell out of it. It’s just that, again, I view religion these days as something of a given.

A game designer

Oh, and if your main original idea is that Christianity Was Wrong, well, then, you can show yourself the door. I’ve got my own opinions on Christianity by the loads, a fair few of them unfriendly, but I nonetheless don’t need another game designer going “ha ha, I wrote the end of the world just slightly different from Revelation, buy this big WoDalike to find out about it.”

The device I'm employing here is actually a "straw man," but I like this picture better.

Oh, and by the way, sorry, if the Celts were a world superpower I think I’d be awfully tired of them, too, so don’t think “ha ha Christopher Lee was right” is going to sell me on your latest “dark fantasy epic” either.¹⁰ And by the way, we all know that fairy tales are dark, that Santa is creepy, and that Lilith was Adam’s first wife.¹¹

God save us.

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“Vatican II led to many changes in the Catholic Church, notable ones being the use of mother-tongues – instead of Latin – for parts of the mass, the empowerment of the laity, and allowing priests to use bladed weapons in combat.”

– Critical Miss #8

I suppose I’d know who the cleric was, if I’d started with her. I understand girls you can’t save, no matter what god they work for.

You couldn't save her. Just like all the others, a million little boys who couldn't. Forgive yourself.

As it happens, though, I didn’t. I started here.

Ultima 3: Exodus Character Creation

Actually, let’s zoom in a bit…

Ultima 3: Exodus Cleric

There. See. Now, what I knew in… 1988… sounds right… was that a cleric was another word for priest, and a priest was someone who worked for God.

Just one problem. Fantasy didn’t have God. Oh, sure, there was a cross on Link’s shield, but there’d been one on He-Man’s armor, too, hadn’t there? Just a device, a heraldic symbol.

Now, in 1989, someone conveniently introduced me to the pagan gods¹, and they found their way right into my world of magic and elves². My carefully envisioned narrative-driven side-scroller had elves and Greek gods.

But those gods didn’t have priests, did they? I mean, you read the Bible, there are priests all over the place, and usually mucking things up. Got Jesus hanged, I’d been told, and that’s why we couldn’t let the Church have undue influence on the state.³ But the Greek myths, nooo… people prayed, maybe there were some burnt offerings, but pagan gods didn’t need priests. They did things themselves.⁴

Yet, Ultima had priests. Briefly. I was very glad when the next Ultima came around and got that fixed. Shrines, virtues, no gods. Very sensible, and I could continue being a bold maverick having Zeus meet the elves. I’d played Hero’s Quest by now, too, and read Lloyd Alexander, and while there were certainly hints of greater supernatural forces⁵, there was hardly a celestial hierarchy.

Even King Arthur, well, God occasionally popped up in his life, but no priests. I’m not sure what they were all doing at the time, but he had a proper wizard to cast his spells for him, just like Pharoah had had.⁶ Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser had gods, and Lankhmar had a whole street devoted to them, but both the priests and the gods were more than a little silly.

The holes filled, gradually — I was a weird kid, but hardly a dumb one, but my fantasy worlds never really had need of magic priests, even as they developed pantheons of their own. Even reading Moorcock and Lewis, the gods all took care of their own business.

The idea that a whole class of adventurer might need to be priestly never really occurred to me until I got my hands on the Rules Cyclopedia. Even since then, I’ve never been sure why clerics weren’t just a sort of mage, and seeing fantasy through the eyes of D&D hasn’t really helped that at all. In gaming, I came to understand, clerics were somewhere between fighters and wizards… but so were elves, and for that matter, there were paladins. And some paladins had gods, too.⁷

But in the better sort of fantasy video games, there never were priests. The Ultimas were neatly atheistic, and when they got around to coping with gods, in Pagan, it was in a very Star Trek way. Gods, fantasy said to me, better off without ‘em, and their priests are all liars and idiots and just occasionally Theleb Kaarna.

Badasses, like this guy.

Yet, for some reason, there was always someone who wanted to play one in my games. Sometimes, they weren’t very serious — I’d heard of Bob, the God of Donkeys out there in another campaign. But all too often, they were devout worshipers of gods who never seemed good for anything except a daily spell allotment. Sometimes they were badasses.

And he hung out with this hottie. Just saying.

And there seemed to be roleplaying games that shared my indifference. Tunnels & Trolls had no clerics, and Stormbringer certainly didn’t go out of its way to suggest the idea.⁸

The first time I ever encountered a proper cleric adventurer was in college, as it turned out. Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish officer who got lost in Florida, made his way to Mexico casting out demons and disease in the name of God, gaining and losing fellow soldiers and native adventurers along the way. And around that point, through that lens, the cleric started making sense to me.

The cleric? He’s Moses. He’s Samuel⁹. He’s Martin de Porres. She’s Joan of Arc.

And don’t worry. Someday Aleena will come back.¹⁰

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