NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)

By: Joshua Glenn
October 28, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of (one of) their nerdy obsessions.

ARDUIN

My cousin Marty introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons in 1978 or ’79, bequeathing to me not only the original DIY booklets (e.g., Men & Magic, Greyhawk, Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes) but the boxed Basic Set and various supplements and modules. He was at that point moving on to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. We D&D players are a people of the book — which means that, at the tender age of 11 or 12, I was confronted with a nerd-halakhic conundrum. By what particular textual authority was the Dungeon Master empowered to adjudicate? Which set of D&D rules ought one to internalize and enforce?

I fretted over this sort of thing… until I discovered Arduin. Building upon the D&D rule variants that he’d developed in his own campaigns, in 1977 David Hargrave, a contumacious Bay Area fantasy RPG game-master and prolific contributor to APA newsletters, self-published The Arduin Grimoire — a fictional universe and fantasy role-playing system incorporating sci-fi and horror elements. Think of Heinlein’s Glory Road, or Bradley’s Hunters of the Red Moon: magic, monsters, medieval combat… Martians!

I forget whether Marty gave me The Arduin Grimoire or if I found it at Games People Play, a Harvard Square hobby shop that from 1980–1984 absorbed every penny that I hadn’t already spent on comics at Million Year Picnic. What I do remember is mining Hargrave’s densely printed booklet for ideas with which to dazzle the players (shout-out to my brother Pat, my cousins Willy and Christian, Dooley, Tommy, Lucinda, and various members of Boston Latin School’s Strategic Gaming Society) who participated in the long-running D&D campaign that I DMed during those years.

“If you want what is in effect a D&D supplement, don’t mind the price and are prepared to be selective in what you extract from it,” advised a 1979 Arduin review in White Dwarf, “there will no doubt be useful snippets you could find.” This is accurate enough but ungenerous. Hargrave’s fecund imagination produced new character types like the Star Powered Mage, witty magic weapons and items like Shark Bolts and the Cloak of Never, and truly useful guides like the Critical Hit Table and the Weapon Breakage Chart. Not to mention innumerable randomized lists of road houses, religious sects, coins, etc., etc. — all of which provide an object lesson in “inside-out” worldbuilding.

What Arduin suggested was that D&D was not an eternal, inevitable phenomenon. It was a construct, invented by someone like me. To participate in this system, I didn’t need to worry about getting the rules exactly right. D&D was a game — like life itself, I’d discover — that I could hack, modify, make uniquely my own.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

NERD YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)

Categories

Tags