The Semi-Quasi-Unofficial History of the Elthos RPG
From what I have discovered over the years, the inspiration for the game design of Dungeon's & Dragons(tm) was a prior game called "Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures", by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, which was crafted by a war gamming club called "The Castle and Crusade Society". It is indisputably the case that the inspiration for the genre as a whole was Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings", and other works of the fantasy genre that were popular among college students and fantasy fans at the time. Role Playing Games: A New ArtformIt is my opinion that Role Playing Games (RPGs) represent a new art form in which the participants craft an improvisational story together, using a rules system of one sort or another. In the traditional style of RPG, there is a Gamesmaster who acts as both Referee and Author, creates a Fantasy setting in the form of a World, and the Players play Characters in that World using the rules provided by whatever RPG System they are using. At this point there are literally hundreds of RPGs on the market covering many genres of Worlds, such as Sci-Fi, horror, historical, comedy, and pretty much every genre one can imagine. When I got started designing my game, way back in 1978, there was only one RPG, and that was good old D&D, the 1st simple, small, open ended, and somewhat flawed system. My intention was to fix what I thought were the flaws for my own "homebrew" version of the game. This was common practice back in the old days. In fact, from Men & Magic the original D&D rule book, we read in the Introduction:
And so, with this admonition firmly in mind, I went on to create my own generic homegrown system, which I named Elthos RPG. As I said, it has what I consider to be improvements on rough spots in the original rules, but on the whole is, because of this, a fairly traditional system with it's roots very much in the traditional style of the game. Since then many new styles have been created. To be honest, I spent most of my time working on my own game system, and relatively little time exploring others. So you may detect a certain lack of familiarity with the many other systems out there. But since I'm not claiming to be an expert at the entire phenomenon of Role Playing Games, I guess I can leave it at that. To return for a moment to 1978 - as soon as I read the original D&D I immediately wanted my rules to be simplified because I wanted long term stability and a well balanced. And so my first design decision was to decline the seemingly endless temptation to create greater complexity in the game rules. Instead I worked toward the goal of having the Elthos RPG to be based (loosely) on D&D, but designed with a different set of rules and systems that would maintain the game's simplicity. After all, I was equally interested in the Story aspect of the game as the Gamist aspect, and I didn't want the Gamist aspect (the rules mechanics) to overwhelm or take over the Story aspect. Many of my decisions have been based on this wish. So design goal #1: keep it simple. To do this I centralized my conflict resolution system into one basic chart which I named the General Resolution Matrix (GRM), and from there designed the rest of the system around it. The basic concept of having one central chart to handle conflict resolution, rather than an ever expanding set of charts that could never really handle everything, saved me from creating a monster. And so, now, I have a nicely compact and reasonably simple system that does quite a lot. It is not the absolute simplest system out there, but I think it meets my goals of keeping to the traditional tropes of D&D, but in a way that makes my life as GM easier rather than harder. The Gamesmasters Society of ChappaquaWhat gave me the idea to create my own rules to begin with? Well, in New York town of Chappaqua were I spent the idle and serene days of my youth, there formed a small group of Role Playing Game enthusiasts out of the previously existing War Gamers Club. One day, when I was a sophomore in High School, on the day I had finished reading my first Fantasy book "The Sword of Shannara", I happened upon the somewhat (in those days) infamous Eric Tanen, who was standing in the cafeteria with Matt Lunetta, a kid I was on friendly terms with and thought highly of as a really nice guy. Eric was saying, "Matt, if you buy me a donut I'll raise you a Level." Sure enough Matt returned shortly with a Donut. Eric, was reputed to be a rather untrustworthy fellow in those days, though that assessment was a mischaracterization. Eric, I should say now, since he'll be reading this (again) at some point perhaps, is a really great guy who turned me on to my absolute favorite hobby in the world, and in fact became throughout middle school and high school one of my very best friends. Ok that's enough about you, Eric. And so my interest peaked when I asked "Matt, what is a "Level" and why is it worth a donut?", and Eric insisted, "You wouldn't understand D&D!" - ok well if nothing else would do it, that did it. I had to know more. So Matt and I spent many an afternoon at Eric's house playing this strange, fascinating and utterly amazing new game, D&D. I was completely hooked. What I loved about the new game were multi-fold. For one thing it it's a game of imagination where you create stories through the actions of your Characters in the Gamesmaster's World, which your characters explore and have adventures in. D&D happened to have been based on the genre of story that I had just discovered so recently - swords & sorcery - and so I found the game immensely intriguing. The other thing that I liked was that it involves a variety of game-skills. In some ways it is like chess when playing the tactical aspect of combat. At other times, it involves theatrical improvisation in the role playing aspect which I always enjoyed. It also required some math skills, planning, negotiation, teamwork and good sportsmanship. It incorporates elements of luck and skill and theater in a way that I found entirely captivating. I still do, of course. As soon as I started playing I knew immediately I wanted to Gamesmaster. Well, "No," says Eric, "You have to apprentice for one full year before you can even start to think about Gamesmastering!" He went on to add that in our "Society of Gamesmasters" everyone had to make up their own rules, and that none of us would be allowed to get away with simply playing the much reviled-at-the-time Gygaxian System, which for some reason we all considered to be just a stab in the right direction, but itself hopelessly flawed in too many ways to tolerate. Yes, we were RPG snobs right off the bat. Needless to say, in no time I had my own boards and my own rules and was happily creating and Gamesmastering Elthos. There were few Gamesmasters in those days, as it was quite a time consuming job to create rules and run a world, nor were there many books on the subject except for the original magical three. Chief among the Gamesmasters I knew of at the time was the ever venerable David Kahn, a somewhat mad genius from Chappaqua, the son of the world-famous Herman Kahn, physicist-futurologist who wrote the book "On Thermonuclear War" upon which the international policy of Mutual Assured Destruction was based. David was in my view the Gamesmaster of Gamesmasters, a true genius at the art. And so there was a merry band of RPG enthusiasts in Chappaqua in those years, and the players tended to be super creative, dynamic, and generally speaking fantastically fun people. The Birth of ElthosMeanwhile, I was busy creating Elthos which takes its inspiration from Terry Brooks, Tolkien, CS Lewis, Attanasio, L'Engle, Burroughs, Choprah, Kipling, and Zelazny, Greek and Norse mythology, Arthurian Romance (Troyes, Strassburg, Eschenbach, et al), as well as many other sources which I studied over the decades. And of course I had my own rules system, named Elthos Prime. It was a nice streamlined system (compared with D&D), and I was assured by my players that it really "Worked". So that's what I played, mostly, for the next couple of dozen years. Very early on I calculated that Gary Gygax and David Arneson were in the business of selling rules books, and therefore had an interest in expanding the rules and making them ever more complex, requiring ever more volumes. That was, after all, the only logical business model for a game rules publishing company. I had already decided that I wanted my rules system to be nice and neat and clean and centralized so that it would handle a wide variety of circumstances without requiring a huge number of tack-on rules and a Godzillion charts. Thus the Elthos Rules were designed perfectly for one thing, though at the time it was the last thing I would have thought of... Elthos is a modular system that can be relatively easily programmed. Over the years, naturally, we all kind of assumed that someone would program a Role Playing Game System that would keep track of stats and do the math for us... it always seemed like something that would happen any time soon... but it never did. This would not happen for a long, long time as it turns out. Longer than we thought possible. D&D had a lot of internal contradictions, which amounted to conflicting requirements from a programmer's point of view. I'm pretty sure that that hampered the various attempts over the years to program the D&D rules into a computer system. It was a large and unwieldy rules set that I think most programmers would find very difficult to program against. As a professional program, I think I'm not very far off base when I say that. Intermission: The Hero's JourneyAfter my first year in college in 1981, I decided that the world had wandered off the path of Sweetness and Light, with lots of sinister news coming out in those years, and having watched the Sith take over the Galaxy on the Big Screen and with a world of troubles behind me, and the alternate High Reality on my mind, I hit the road, pretty much willing to die in the attempt to maintain my sense of integrity as a human being in a world that I felt had gone pretty darn mad, or was at least heading rapidly in that direction. I couldn't support the direction, nor did I feel I could contribute to it. I think time has proven that I was not very far wrong about the direction things were going, though I would admit that the downward slide is taking longer than I expected. Thank goodness for that at least. It gave me time to explore my Universe. So I travelled around the country with no money, a bed role on my back, and hope in my heart that one day I'd find a community of people who saw things they way I did. My enlightenment consisted of a very simple premis: "Love is Real" and that there is secretly a great and mystical beauty all around us all the time, if we would but open our eyes to see it. I spent a lot of my time opening my eyes to the beauty of the Universe. However, nothing that I did seemed to alter the vastly inevitable inertia of world events, and so I wandered on the road pretty much alone for quite some time, hither, thither and yon. It was a great adventure and I had a lot of amazing experiences, met a lot of fantastic Characters, and generally had an incredible time. But it was hard on my mom. Eventually I realized that fact, and so after seven years on the road I returned back home and settled down, got a job, and went back to college and got my degree in History, and then became a computer programmer. Weird, huh? And so, with nothing better to do with my life, I decided to dedicate myself to one great and worthy project that I intend to leave as my legacy to the world, should I get so far. An artistic endeavor for the purpose of delivering at least one thing of value before I carry on to the next Life, whatever that is. It was toward this end that I decided to take the Elthos World and Rules and publish it as a game. This was somewhere around the spring of 1990. During my travels I happen to have met a number of life-altering individuals, and one in particular who influenced greatly the course of the Elthos Project, a highly mysterious Road-Mage named Count Lowengrin VIII. He said he was born of Japanese and German Royalty, had been brought up as a Samauri and Medieval Alchemist, and had mystical powers of the Wazzu. I honestly think he did. He bought for me my first medieval classic, "Tristan" (Gottfried von Strassburg). I can very much recommend it. It's wonderful, though quite sad really. He advised me, "If you like this then follow the bibliographic references to other books of its kind". I did enjoy it very much, and I did follow his advice. And then he vanished like a puff of smoke and I never saw him again. And so, over the decade or two I read nearly every medieval and classical literature book I could dig up in every used book store from coast to coast. All of these rich and fabulous stories of the ancients infusing into the essence Elthos. This was all while I was still on the road. So I had plenty of great literature to read along the way, which is really most of what I did while I travelled. In between 1990 and 1994 I majored in Medieval History at the University of Maine, and the University of Edinburgh. I learned a great deal about the history of the medieval world, which added context to what I had learned from the literature. All of which reflects in a myriad of ways within Elthos. Between those studies and the independent readings I did on classical and medieval literature, I was building up quite a foundation for my world's back-story. There were certain brief, yet shining, moments akin to Arthurian Romance along the way which brought to light certain hidden facets of the Universe for me. There were adventures in the primordial forests, dances on the mountains, songs sung by wandering bards, and the sighing of certain beautiful and lonely souls that touched me very deeply. All of these experiences slowly infusing into Elthos. Such has been my Hero's Journey. Joyful and sorrowful in turns as it may have been. Yet beautiful, for me. And it is from this journey that Elthos derives much of its inner meaning. The Elthos WorldAnd so, along the peculiar path which I followed were strewn the myriads of flowers now blossoming in the heart of Elthos, and seeds of fantastical concepts pollinate the Elthosian Universe with ideas. The Elthos World is a Fairytale, wrapped in an Arthurian Romance, at the heart of a Greek Epic, swirling through a nearby Parallel Universe that is dancing not so terribly far away on the shores of the Celestial Sea. It is a journey through Cosmological Wisdom among Jungian Archetypes towards a deeper comprehension of the landscapes of the soul. That's my mystical explanation of what the Elthos World is about. Maybe it will be different for you. Maybe. The New York GroupOnce I returned to civilization I remembered the notion of Gamesmaster Software that would act as an enhanced Gamesmaster's Toolbox to help crunch the numbers and archive historical information about the adventures played in my World. By 1994 I was asking "What happened to the Computer Assisted Gamesmaster's Toolbox that someone was supposed to have invented by now, anyway?" It just hadn't happenned. Weird. I decided that I should do something about it. And so I called David Kahn and Evan Jones, his brilliant cousin, and we got together on a phone conference and I pitched the idea "Hey, you guys are great game designers (and they are), and we've done this for years now, we have experience, and knowledge and ... we should be doing something with this... the Game Industry is going to grow to billions a year and we should be a part of it." David, an old world programmer with really solid skills and concepts, spent that summer teaching me the basics of computers, in exchange for cataloging his rather massive science fiction collection. I then returned to Maine and taught myself programming using QBasic, and created the first algorithms for Elthos. A character generator, and a Hex Map Screen. It was a beginning. And so in 1997, when David moved back to New York from out west, the New York Group was established as a working entity, for better and/or worse. It was ill-fated and tragically flawed effort in some respects. Its a pity, and I count myself as a large part of the flaw. Our new association had diverging goals which could not be easily overcome. And for quite some time we pretended that not overcoming them would somehow work in the end. But it didn't, and so in a series of breakups the New York Group ground to a halt as a single operational entity in 2000. I split off from the group to continue with the programming aspect of the Elthos Game System, and to basically go it alone. Now all that said, I have to also add that David was a tremendous help, in a general sense, to the project, in that he really gave me a wonderful foundation on which to develop the software. He is a master of logic and system design, and I learned a huge amount from him. It helped me both with the project, and gave me the start I needed on my career as a Programmer / Analyst for a major corporation. I will always be deeply grateful to him for that. The Birth of Elthos Software - First GenerationAs it turned out, while I have a rules system vastly simpler than the D&D rules, it is still sufficiently complex to make the programming a rather large project. First, I had to teach myself programming. That as it turned out would take a bit longer than I expected. I started, logically enough, with the simplest language I could find, QBasic. I sat with the 450 page manual for several months every night after work and taught myself how to program, and created the first batch of Gamesmaster's utilities. In 1996 I began programming my Elthos Game System Rules into a Windows application using Visual Basic. Ok so it took me roughly 11 years (roughly two and a half man years, actually, since I work full time as a programmer and could only work on the project in my spare time) to get it to the point where I have all the features I like, and the design is satisfactory. Fine. Don't rush me. And as well, now, having spent over two decades reading and researching classical literature and mythology, I have a much deeper concept of the Elthos World, and its many reflections. In order to game test the Elthos Gamesmaster's Toolbox Windows Application I spent a couple of months playing a series of test games on Internet Relay Chat. The transcripts and pertinent information on that experiment can be found here: Elthos IRC. As an experiment in IRC RPG for the Elthos Game System I thought it was quite successful, and I believe that for the brief time it lasted, the players also had fun with it. It gave me some very useful (hopefully) experience with that environment, and some ideas on how to hook my application up to IRC and allow users of Chat rooms to run their own Elthos Games. That code is sitting the shelf, but it does exist and may come into play at some point. Professional Gamesmastering! 1st Gig: Chappaqua Community CenterDuring this era I managed to work out a brief but satisfying gig as a Professional Gamesmaster at the local community center in Chappaqua. For $6 per hour I got to Gamesmaster for what grew into a group of thirty six kids! Holy Guacamole! That was managed by a very simple mechanic. I had the kids sit in their chairs in six rows of six columns, and assigned one kid to be the Group Leader who would negotiate with all the other kids and arrive at instructions for me the Gamesmaster for the group. While a little choppy at times, it worked, everyone had a great time, and I made a small amount of money doing so. But it did put me on the map as the First Professional Gamesmaster that I or my friends knew of. I won't claim status as the the absolute first, because who knows, but I did make about $600 Gamesmastering in the early 1990's, and I think not too many GMs had done that. It gave me a good many thoughts about how to turn GMing into a potential profession. But those ideas will have to wait as well. All things in their season. Professional Gamesmastering! 2nd Gig: The Hamfest Hellhounds!
It was tremendously successful both as a play test and as an extremely enjoyable experience. And as I earned a total of $1360 in twelve weeks, and came out of it with a fantastic twelve chapter story, I couldn't have been more delighted. The only reason I didn't continue with it was because it was simply too demanding on my time to do both the game, and finish the programming for the Toolbox, and work full time. So after the end of the Spring Season game I made some vague promises about doing something again in the future sometime to the groans and pleadings of the little ones. Alas. I will try to do something like it again as soon as possible though. It was great fun! The Birth of the LRPGSW & The Elthos ODSIn 2006 I began working on the creation of the Literary Role Playing Game Society of Westchester with Jarod and Guild, two Gamesmasters I met though, again, the Westchester Gaming Group. It was for the LRPGSW that I created the Elthos One Die System (ODS) in order to be able to run small games in the pub setting where the LRPGSW has been meeting. The objective was to create a distilled set of game rules from the Elthos Prime system that would be easy and simple enough for us to discretely play in the pub so that we could use it to experiment with Gamesmastering ideas without appearing to be absurd RPG geeks, sitting there with a huge pile of books, charts, more books, scads of dice, and Gamesmaster shields. Uh... no. So the idea for a simple system that could be played with 1 six sided die came into being. Once I created the ODS, however, it became immediately apparent that I had a new and potentially exciting possibility for a computer application. I also realized that this would be even easier to program into an Internet Application than the Elthos Prime rules. It occurred to me that I could convert the Elthos Prime Toolbox into an Internet Application, and I figured the ODS would be a perfect starting point. And so the Elthos ODS Project was born. Super! Only four years later would it go online and become a reality. That's not bad, for me. I started programming the Elthos ODS in November of 2006. I took a quick crash course on the kind of OOP design I was interested in, finished my design specs, and got started. Once I had finished that programming, in the February 2007, I began the process of doing marketing research, business research, legal communications, and learning about the RPG community. Wow. I had no idea how big a topic this would turn out to be, and how much things had changed in 'the scene'. I hadn't paid any attention to the outer world for quite some time since I was so busy with my own project, had my own rules, and world, and so it came as something of a shock to me to discover that there's now about 10 new RPGs coming out every month. Another shock was that all of these games make maybe a total of $5,000 to $10,000 and and those are considered "Wildly Successful Runs", before new Independent ("Indie") RPGs supplant them. It's a *rough* world out there! And yet, that the old stalwart, D&D is still king of the hill, dominating the market with a steady lion's share of the Pencil & Paper RPG game industry. Neat. But still, none of that was particularly germane because Elthos RPG is a lot more than just a Pencil & Paper Rules Book. It's a full blown internet application that runs the system. The Elthos Cosmological SystemI'd always found the RPG concept, first demonstrated in the original D&D rules, of Alignment (Good vs. Evil, Law vs. Chaos) to be fascinating. I wanted to work within that framework in order to help me Gamesmaster stories that made a kind of "internal" sense. And so over the years I worked out a Cosmology for Elthos that incorporated the Alignment system, to which I associated a simple but effective mathematics. I then went on to begin the process of rationalizing the Mystical aspects of the World of Elthos as they related to Alignment. There were the Gods, whom in Elthos are named Elkron, and I gave a lot of consideration to who they were, and what they were, and how they were related to the Alignment system. In the end I derived a comprehensive, powerful, and sensible system to make the concept of the Elkron coherent. In the process I derived a Tarot Deck, called the Elthosian Tarot. This deck is central to the cosmological correspondences of the Elthos World. It incorporates correspondences to many mystical systems, including Runes, Kabala, and the I-Ching. It's a very interesting system, and I find that when I use it, because of it's nature, it very much expands the scope of meaning within my world for each element, place, character and activity. Did the party that is associated to The High Priestess of the Earth head Northeast into the Lands associated to the Sun, and further into the Realm of Leo? That information in Elthos is significant in so far as it helps me to Gamesmaster my world with a deeper coherency than hitherto was possible. The problem, I found, with Gamesmastering without such a system is that the interactions with the mystical forces of my World were always somewhat random, and unable to attain a deeper level of meaning. It's very simple to see why now... I had no mystical correspondence system to work from. Now I do. It's been great. Prognosis & Dreams of GrandeurSo this leaves me at the new beginning of what promises to be the next challenging road, and hopefully a rewarding one. The advantages that the Elthos Game System has may overcome the difficulties I foresee. However, there is some cause for hope...The Elthos ODS has these advantages:
1. Simplicity. Of course, the Elthos game is up against some fierce competition. And there is the matter of what the Forge website calls "Fantasy Heart-breakers" which happen to have a great deal in common with my own efforts, though I do not think I shall fall into that category in the end. The only thing I can say is that my game system has some differences, in particular the advancement of computer applications to support the rules and some pretty spectacular elements of the World Setting. It also has a fun story which I've been writing along the way, concerning the adventures of the various Characters who have played in Elthos. Many thanks for that to my players! How will the Elthos Game System fair? Only time will tell, but I remain cautiously optimistic. It is, after all, a great game system. Special ThanksAbove all, in regards to the Elthos Project and its existence, David Kahn who has been my inspiration as a Gamesmaster, computer guru, career advisor, game designer and friend. May his own projects flourish and prosper! I would also like to thank Evan Jones, as well. And my many friends and supporters in the community of game designers and outside in the "real world". My mom, of course. Vince for his help with thinking through the business side of things, and being generally an enthusiastic, yet level headed supporter of the concept. And Charles, for being incredibly generous with his time in giving me a leg up on the legal stuff. And my friends at work. And the LRPGSW for their support. And of course all of the mystical dream walkers who have been helping me along the way of my Hero's Journey. And of course, many thanks go out to Sovereignty, who shows her beauty here and there as she so pleases. I hope Elthos will live a good long time, prosper and bring a lot of joy to people. |
ONCE UPON A TIME, Long ago, in the days of yore when I was but a wee lad in grade school, two very strange and wonderful men, Gary Gygax and David Arneson, published the first three slender volumes of the
