Tag Archives: Mike Carr

The Story of Palace of the Silver Princess, the Adventure so Scandalous That the Print Run Went to a Landfill

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In 1981, Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR printed an adventure so scandalous that when newly printed copies reached key TSR management, they ordered the entire print run sent to dumpsters rather than to distributors. According to legend, the art featured a bound, naked woman menaced by leering monsters, and another art page that mocked TSR’s owners by putting grotesque versions of their faces on three-headed creatures. The legends proved exaggerated, but because surviving copies sold at auction in shrink wrap for sky-high prices, few knew the truth.

B3 Palace of the Silver Princess“I think that the reaction to the module is more interesting than the module itself,” said TSR design head Lawrence Schick. “The actual content of it is only mildly eccentric by current standards. It’s more a matter of what light it shines on the management reaction at the time, and the ‘Satanic Panic.’ It’s like Bigfoot, except the first edition of this module actually exists. It can be seen.” (Teaser: Schick’s likeness appears as one of those monstrous heads.)

The true story mixes the trials of the first woman to work at TSR as a D&D designer, a cheeky bit of rebellion by the TSR art staff, and executives fearful of provoking angry parents at a time when the media consistently painted D&D as a “bizarre” game enjoyed by “secretive” and “cultish” players.

In 1979, 23-year-old Jean Wells responded to an ad in Dragon magazine seeking game designers, D&D co-creator Gary Gygax liked the ideas she pitched well enough to hire her. “Gary and I corresponded from around Thanksgiving until mid-January when he flew me up,” Wells said. “I spent three days at his house.” Wells became friends with Gary and his wife Mary, who Wells taught how to make southern fried chicken and tried to show the game. “We liked each other, but Gary knew I didn’t know how to really write rules. He told me he’d teach me how to do them his way. He was hiring my imagination and would teach me the rest.”

Gygax said he wanted “to give the game material a feminine viewpoint—after all, at least 10% of the players are female!”

D&D insider John Rateliff wrote “Wells’ hiring was a deliberate attempt by Gary Gygax to expand beyond the all-male perspective that had dominated the design department for the company’s first eight years—no doubt with an eye toward attracting a female market to match the burgeoning youth market the game had already tapped.”

Wells became The Sage who answered rules questions for Dragon magazine. Readers enjoyed how she answered even the strangest questions with poise and wit. She contributed art for the eye of the deep and for the rat to new printings of the Monster Manual. For Gygax, she edited B2 Keep on the Borderlands (1981). When Gen Con needed an extra DM to run the D&D Open competition, Jean stepped up. “I grabbed my stuff and met the team and did that. One of the semi-washed teenaged boys on the squad there looked at me, gaping, and said, ‘It’s a woman!’. I said, ‘10 points for perception.’”

However, Gygax lacked time to develop her design skills, and no one else filled in. Instead of getting design assignments, she got filing and administrative tasks. “I don’t think my sex had anything to do with it being difficult for me,” she said. “I lacked a proper mentor and that is what I believe made it difficult. I believe that lacking a mentor cast me into the role of token female.” She underestimates the disadvantage of being dismissed as a token.

Still, Wells paid her dues and earned an assignment writing a teaching module for D&D. That project became B3 Palace of the Silver Princess (1981). But now, her friendship with Gygax may have hurt her chances of success.

The adventure let players explore the haunted ruins of a castle and dungeon 500 years after its silver princess mysteriously disappeared. The adventure includes clues to the princess’s fate for players to discover, and the discoveries can prove surprising. Reviewer Merric Blackman praises the adventure’s attention to non-player characters. “Wells’s work gives hints to the palace existing in a greater world: there’s a wilderness outside it, and NPCs that are described to be more than simple opponents or allies.”

Wells delivered something more than a first adventure; she created the foundation for a campaign. The original describes the wilderness around the palace and includes rumors and random encounters. Wells created the keep above the dungeon to give characters a home base for future adventures. The dungeon includes multiple collapsed tunnels and advises, “To expand the dungeon, the DM need but open up the blocked passageways and add new and challenging dungeon levels.”

But in 1981, such an old-school, sandbox design might have just seemed old fashioned to the rest of the design team. Surely, one of Wells’s instructional tricks seemed outdated. Like in B1 In Search of the Unknown (1978) by Mike Carr, Wells left blank spaces for new DMs to fill with their own traps, monsters, and treasures. Gygax had already dropped that technique when he wrote Descent Into the Depths of the Earth (1978). To be fair, Wells improved on the method by leaving the spaces for rooms that start empty but that a DM might want to fill later. Justin Alexander writes, that the space “emphasizes that dungeon keys are designed to evolve and change over time: These rooms are empty now, but perhaps they will not be the next time the PCs come here.”

Later when Tom Moldvay redesigned Silver Princess to create the version that reached stores, he abandoned the content that created the backbone for a campaign. He reworked the sandbox adventure in favor of the newer fashion of designing for a particular story. For example, he eliminated a staircase leading to the lower level, forcing players to take a more linear path through the dungeon to the final foe and to the story’s climax.

For all the original adventure’s virtues, it suffered from inevitable rough edges. “Jean did pretty well, though there were a few errors characteristic of a newbie who didn’t know the ropes,” wrote TSR insider Frank Mentzer. “I was also involved in the playtests. I helped a bit, critiquing some of the details, but didn’t give it a full checkover. I didn’t have time.” Mentzer assumed development and editing would lead to improvements, but Wells’s friendship with Gygax let the project skip some of the usual development process.

After a year of paying dues, the adventure stood as even more than Wells’s big shot, it also gained a personal investment, perhaps too personal. “The Silver Princess character was also her persona in the Society of Creative Anachronism—a hauntingly lovely woman who destroyed hearts,” artist Bill Willingham wrote. “It was clearly the private fantasies of the author.”

Wells wanted to protect her work, and so she leveraged her relationship with Gary Gygax. Game developer and designer Kevin Hendrix wrote, “When this thing came through, and the development people wanted to edit it, Jean went to Gary and said—and I know I’m going to make this sound more harsh than it actually was—‘They’re changing my stuff, tell them not to do it.’ And Gary reminded us all that we were not to change the designers’ word or intent in the work.” So, a new hire, editor Ed Sollers, got the project and only did proofreading.

Despite the flaws that skipped development, Menzer still rated it as publishable “and potentially popular for Jean’s style (notably different from other writers).”

Instead, the adventure’s art destroyed Well’s chance at design success and landed virtually the entire print run into a Lake Geneva landfill.

Part 2: Scandal!

How Dungeons & Dragons Got Its Ability Scores

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The earliest character sheet for the game that inspired Dungeons & Dragons includes 8 character traits: Brains, Looks, Credibility, Sex, Health, Strength, Courage, and Cunning. The character comes from Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign, which launched in 1971. See A History of D&D in 12 Treasures from author Jon Peterson.

The sheet organizes these traits under the heading, “Personality,” and measures of personality dominate the list more than abilities like strength and health. The Blackmoor campaign represented Charisma with three scores—Credibility, Looks, and Sex, as in “sexual prowess.”

Blackmoor evolved from miniature wargame campaigns. These games only represented individuals when they served as commanders for military units or as leaders of countries. When the referee needed to determine how well a commander followed orders or honored an alliance, measures of personality such as courage and loyalty mattered. One early campaign adopted a system for generating life events such as marriages and sickness for important characters. You can imagine how health and even sexual prowess could factor in such a game. Abilities like strength never figured in play.

Blackmoor started with players controlling single characters who would act in political intrigue and as leaders in battle, so the game emphasized traits for personality and leadership. The characters could fight solo or learn magic, so Strength, Health, and Brains found a place in the game.

In the Blackmoor campaign, Dave used ability scores as the basis of tests that resemble modern saving throws or ability checks. “Players would roll against a trait, Strength for example, to see if they were successful at an attempt,” writes Blackmoor scholar D. H. Boggs. For example, on page 28 of The First Fantasy Campaign (1977), Dave describes how characters had to roll under their Dexterity score to remove their armor before drowning in Blackmoor Bay.

That example cites D&D’s Dexterity attribute, a score the original Blackmoor characters lacked. If Dave and his players used ability scores for saves, how did the rules omit a score for dodging? For his game, Dave also borrowed the saving throw categories from Chainmail—a 1971 set of rules for miniature-figure battles. Boggs speculates that these types for Dragon Breath, Spider Poison, Basilisk Gaze, and Spells covered enough cases to make a Dexterity attribute unnecessary.

How did Blackmoor’s personality traits turn into D&D’s six ability scores?

In 1972, Dave introduced his Blackmoor campaign to Gary Gygax, the author of Chainmail. Dave’s game transformed bits of Chainmail into something new and irresistible—something that broadly resembled D&D.

Based on Dave’s demonstration, feedback, and notes, Gary added his own contributions to make the D&D game that reached print. Dave recalled that Gary and his Lake Geneva group “had a lot more spare time than I did and they had a lot of ideas, so they came up with their own version of the rules.”

In the case of ability scores, Gary reworked the Blackmoor attributes into D&D’s. For example, Gary never favored simple, informal terminology like “Brains” and “Health,” so he opted for Intelligence and Constitution.

Gary consolidated Credibility, Looks, and Sex into Charisma. (Later, Unearthed Arcana and other roleplaying games would experiment with splitting Charisma back into traits for charm and beauty.)

Gary’s early games paired players with gangs of followers, so Charisma helped recruitment and retention. As play styles turned away from henchmen and hirelings, Charisma became less important. The 1977 Basic Set provided no rules crunch for Charisma.

On the Blackmoor character sheet, Cunning looks like a late addition. In both Dave and Gary’s pre-D&D campaigns, Cunning became the prime requisite for clerics. “Cunning” suggests a faith-healing charlatan more than a priest who’s spells worked. Still, the first cleric character, as played by Mike Carr in Dave’s Blackmoor game, had working spells. So eventually Cunning turned to Wisdom and became a measure of spirituality.

Unlike fighters, wizards, and thieves, the cleric lacks a clear archetype in the fantasy tales that inspired D&D. Instead, the class draws inspiration from bits of Christian priest and crusader, from Friar Tuck and Van Helsing. These clerics made an awkward fit in the pulp-fantasy world of D&D and lacked a place in other games. In 1975, when TSR adapted the D&D rules to different settings to create Metamorphosis Alpha and Empire of the Petal Throne, the games dropped clerics and their Wisdom attribute.

Instead designers saw a need to measure a character’s mental toughness with a sort of mental counterpart to Strength and Constitution. Metamorphosis Alpha swaps Wisdom for Mental Resistance. Empire of the Petal Throne replaces Wisdom with Psychic Strength.

Apparently, these games led Gary to see a need for a similar rating for D&D characters. Instead of adding a new attribute, Gary broadened Wisdom to include willpower. The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook grants characters with high wisdom a bonus to saves against “mental attack forms involving will force.” Only a strained definition of wisdom includes willpower, but until then Wisdom only served clerics. The broader scope gave Wisdom similar weight to the other attributes.

Years later, Wisdom would gain an association with perception. Games without Wisdom tend to associate perception with Intelligence.

Dexterity arrived to the game last. Gary must have felt that Strength needed a counterpart for characters wielding crossbows, so Dexterity showed aptitude for ranged weapons. After the original books reached the public, the Thief entered the game and took Dexterity as a prime requisite.

Even though the original D&D release turned the scores from measures of personality into measures of ability, the game still says that the scores aid players “in selecting a role” like one of those personality tests that help students select a career.

When Gary wrote D&D, he never explained how to use ability scores for checks. In his own game, Gary preferred a loose method where he decided on a character’s chance of success and improvised a die roll to match. For saves, Gary just elaborated on the system from the Chainmail rules.

So according to D&D’s original rules, ability scores counted for little. The abilities barely deliver any game effects: At most a +1 to hit or an extra hit point per die.

These slight effects mean that early D&D characters in the same class all played much the same. But ability scores ranging from 3 to 18 seemed to promise bigger game effects than a mere +1. With the release of the Greyhawk supplement in 1975, Gary began linking more game effects to the scores: High strength meant more damage, high Wisdom and Intelligence yielded more spells, and so on.

With that development, D&D started down the road to the modern game, which builds on ability scores as the foundation for every check and save.

Related:
The awkward role of Wisdom in fantasy role playing.

Ability Checks—From the Worst Mechanic in Role-Playing Game History to a Foundation Of D&D

For 25 Years, D&D Put Saving Throws In Groups Made For Just 3 Creatures and 2 Spells