Notes from the Margins

Sample Introductions from Volume 1 of the Grognardia Anthology

This week, I’d like to share a couple examples of the added content that will be included in each volume of the Grognardia anthologies. My hope is that doing so will offer a clearer picture of what the finished product will look like — and why it might be worth your time when it's released.

I genuinely hope that Volume 1 is well received, as I’d love to produce multiple volumes to preserve what I believe are the best of my posts for posterity. As I’ve begun the work of assembling this project, I’ve been reminded just how many thoughtful, passionate pieces I’ve written over the years — and how much Grognardia has meant to me personally during that time.

Each example I’m sharing includes the original blog post’s title, date of publication, and the full text — mostly unchanged. In a few places, I’ve corrected obvious typos, misspellings, or small omissions, but I’ve resisted the urge to revise anything more substantial, even when I made factual errors. In those instances, I’ve added a note in the introduction to clarify the mistake. I’m proud of Grognardia and the influence it’s had, but I value honesty and transparency just as much.

Where I’ve written a new introduction for a post, it will appear in italics beneath the title and before the main text. This is to clearly distinguish between new commentary and the original material, especially for those who might be encountering these posts for the first time. As the shape of Volume 1 becomes clearer, I may adjust how I present these introductions, so if you have any thoughts on the format, I’d welcome your suggestions. As always, feel free to leave a comment below or email me directly at jdmaliszewskiATgmail.com.

What’s a Grognard? (March 30, 2008)

I wrote the following post as my very first entry on Grognardia. At the time, I had no idea where this blog would lead or how influential it might become within the burgeoning Old School Renaissance. What follows is thus both an introduction to the blog’s name and a first stab at a statement of why I started writing it and what I hoped to explore through it. Like a lot of my early posts, this one is a little rough around the edges, but it captures the spirit in which Grognardia was launched: a mixture of curiosity, nostalgia, and a desire to recover and reexamine the overlooked aspects of the early days of the hobby of roleplaying.

Also, as of this writing, I now sport a beard, so I’m one step closer to being a proper grognard …

Welcome to the beginning of a new online venture.

This blog takes its name from the French word, grognard, which means roughly "grumbler" or "grouch." The original grognards were a group of veteran soldiers of the Napoleonic wars. Also called "the Old Guard," they had fought under Napoleon in many of his campaigns and, though loyal to him, were often unhappy with the way they were used in battle by the emperor. So they did what any unhappy soldier does in that situation — they complained. A lot.

(To their credit, les grognards reputedly complained in the presence of Napoleon himself rather than being backbiters. Most versions of the word's origin imply or outright state that the term was coined by Napoleon himself and was one of affection.)

When the board wargames craze took off in the early 1970s (yes, there really was a wargames craze), John Young, the editor of SPI's Strategy & Tactics, one of the most influential wargaming periodicals at the time, took to calling the hobby's old guard —those who played prior to 1970 — grognards. Like the original grognards, the wargames versions complained a lot, but they also had a great deal of experience and so were seen as a valuable resource when designing and playtesting new games. The term eventually took broader hold and, since roleplaying games evolved out of wargaming, it came to be used in that hobby as well, although with a bit less affection than either the Napoleonic or wargames version of the term.

RPG grognards are popularly held to be fat, bearded guys who go on and on about how things were better "back in the day" before "the kids" ruined everything. I don't think the history of roleplaying games since 1974 has been one of continual decline, but I do think a lot of good stuff has been lost or at least forgotten since then. One of the purposes of this blog is to discuss that good stuff and its importance for and applicability to the hobby today.

Never fear: there will also be grumbling, grouchiness, and complaining aplenty! I may be neither fat nor bearded, but I can rant about kids today with the best of them.

Pulp Fantasy D&D (March 31, 2008)

One of the things with which Grognardia would ultimately become most strongly associated is its championing of “pulp fantasy” and, more specifically, Appendix N of Gary Gygax’s AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. At the time this blog post was originally written, neither of these topics was a common subject of discussion within the D&D fandom, even among those who favored older editions of the game. That might be hard to imagine now, when Appendix N has become a touchstone for a whole subculture of designers and players, but, back then, it was mostly overlooked, its literary references seen as curiosities rather than guiding stars.

To be clear: I don’t claim to have originated the term “pulp fantasy,” nor was I the first to draw attention to Appendix N. I’m fairly certain, for example, that Erik Mona at Paizo was already championing Gygax’s reading list before I came on the scene. However, I do think it’s fair to say that Grognardia played an outsize role in popularizing and promoting these two essential elements of the early Old School Renaissance. If others planted the seeds, this blog helped water and nurture them.

That’s not intended as a boast. Rather, it’s an attempt to explain why these ideas matter — not just to me, but to the project of understanding what Dungeons & Dragons was and what it could be. When you strip away the decades of accumulated assumptions, branding, and mechanical cruft that now cling to the name “D&D,” you begin to see the outlines of a game that was once stranger, rawer, and far more open in its imaginative possibilities. It was a game born not from epic myth but from the feverish pages of pulp magazines, where morally ambiguous protagonists crossed weird, alien landscapes in search of fortune, vengeance, or survival.

That’s the version of D&D this post seeks to rediscover, not out of nostalgia, but out of a conviction that there is something creatively vital in that original vision. It is worth reclaiming, not because it is old, but because it is different — and because, in its difference, it may offer us new paths forward as players, referees, and creators.

The second purpose of this blog is to develop what I've taken to calling "pulp fantasy D&D." The idea for this began on my LiveJournal shortly after the announcement of the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I felt then, as I feel even more strongly now, that, whatever the relative merits or flaws of 4e, "D&D," as an idea, has now moved so far beyond what it was originally intended to be that, when most people use the term, it's meaningless. At best, it's purely positivist: whatever the current holder of the trademark chooses to call "Dungeons & Dragons" is Dungeons & Dragons. I find that approach remarkably unsatisfying and, as I studied the history of the roleplaying hobby more, I came to the inescapable conclusion that D&D was now, both conceptually and mechanically, not the same game Gygax and Arneson published in 1974.

One of the things that's very clear, if you know anything about the history of roleplaying, is that Gygax and Arneson lived in a time before what we now think of as "fantasy" literature existed. That's partly because D&D's success helped create and popularize that genre. Back in the early 1970s, "fantasy" was subsumed within "science fiction." Consider, for example, that in 1970, the winner of the Nebula Award for best novel was Ringworld by Larry Niven, while the winner for best novella was "Ill Met in Lankhmar" by Fritz Leiber. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, though published in 1954-1955, didn't achieve widespread influence or fame until the 1960s and 1970s, at once driving the growing popularity of fantasy and benefiting from it. The strange synergy between D&D and The Lord of the Rings remains a controversial one, since early D&D products clearly referenced Tolkien's creations, which were eventually removed due to the threat of a lawsuit by Tolkien's estate. Gary Gygax consistently maintained that he did this to capitalize on the "then-current 'craze' for Tolkien's literature" rather than to any liking for The Lord of the Rings (which he claimed to have in fact disliked).

My own feeling is that Gygax was probably telling the truth, as D&D owes very little, conceptually, to The Lord of the Rings. Instead, as bibliographies in early D&D books attest, the game was in fact inspired by a wide variety of what we'd today call "pulp" fantasies, such as those by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, and Fritz Leiber, along with other less well known authors, such as Abraham Merritt. These fantasies have a very different feel than Tolkien's oeuvre, being primarily escapist tales of pure adventure whose protagonists are often morally ambiguous in their beliefs and actions. Ironically, though, it was the Tolkien elements that many players of D&D latched on to and emphasized, which inexorably dragged the game away from its roots and toward what came to be known as "high" fantasy.

The subsequent history of D&D is one of its ceasing to be an engine of popular imagination and in turn being influenced by the very imaginative movements it helped to create. My own preference is for the older pulp fantasy style that inspired the game in the early 1970s. "Pulp fantasy D&D" is my name for a version of the game that, mechanically and conceptually, returns to the game's literary roots. The high fantasy version of the game, let alone the comic book and video game-inspired versions of the 21st century, holds little interest for me. At minimum, they speak to an outright rejection of the original vision of the game and, at most, outright ignorance of its origins.

Consequently, interspersed with my exploration of the history of the roleplaying hobby, I'll offer musings on how to return D&D to its roots and inspirations. Ultimately, my goal is to produce a playable version of the game that both respects its history and literary origins.