In the Thrall of the Mountain KIng

 Substitute teachers - where do they come from? Where do they go? What's their story?

In my school years I endured a small number of substitute teachers - usually one-offs, but some lasted a little bit longer. In fact, in my fourth form year in particular, it's probably fairer to say they endured us, precocious little brats that we were. I don't remember many of them now, but one struck a chord with me.

I was in the third form, Year Zero for my Dungeons and Dragons experience, and my knowledge of the game and its fantastic worlds is new to me - still developing with every impression and suggestion that I encounter. It's a time I find myself drawn back to increasingly, before the codification and regulation by the rulebooks, magazines and artwork I'd encounter not long afterwards. But at this time there was none of that; my imagination was in the driver's seat, my mind was open, and my senses were alert to this fantastic new world and something - anything that would feed it further.

Mr R was a local part-time teacher, and we had him for a day - maybe two, tops. What subject he covered I don't know, but the subject he brought to us on one of those days was fantastical - music and literature in Grieg's Peer Gynt and in particular its most famous and fantastic chapter The Hall of the Mountain King.

Edvard Grieg's building, thunderous piece is well known enough - I was sure to have heard it before that day, but I wasn't aware of its story, which our sub dutifully filled in, of the hero Gynt and his wandering into the titular hall to be discovered by the monstrous gathering attending the great Mountain King within. There were even lyrics - we were challenged to find the "Slay Him! Hack Him!" in the one-two of the finale, and, hands splayed as if casting long fingers of firelit shadow against cave walls, our teacher roused us to picture the scene as the music played. Well, it worked for me at least.I was there, in that Hall, running for my life mere months before any would-be hero I could conceive in a roleplaying game would get the chance to.

I met Mr R a few weeks later in the local library while I was photocopying the fold-out maps from some hardback Tolkiens, destined to be stuck together an displayed on my wall. The end of the year was coming, and with it my first proper foray. I don't remember much of our conversation, but I do recall him looking over my evening's work and encouraging me to continue using my imagination, perhaps to make stories of my own. And so I did, to the best of my ability. Stories with ogres and caves and bellowing hordes lurking in stone catacombs with great shadows hunched and grasping behind them. Vast, brutal and sluglike chiefs at their head, ordering nasty ends to any interlopers in his domain. They were basic ideas, soon to be overwritten by 'authoritative' and 'official' creature descriptions and depictions, but their primal origins haven't been forgotten. They're still be best versions of those monsters, for me

We Never Leave a Man Behind!

 Good news in the Simian household with the arrival of a box of weird stuff from my teenage years!

This was quite the thing. Collected (I think) from various stages of a garage tidy-up by my Dad, it's presumably passed through two houses since some of it was first packed away - and it shows. Things have got dusty, some a bit worse for wear over time, and even the moths have had a go (eek)

But amongst the old scout badges (of more later), and early modelling gear (again, later), a prize. 

This dude:

Once again, this is a Grenadier model - one of a blister pack of four, including a fallen orc, goblin and thief/magic-user (I could never tell), which a scan of Miniatures Workshop tells me was Fantasy Lords release 110: 'Casualties'.  I think this was an early purchase - 1984 or 1985, as the spread of subjects was probably economically attractive, and I was very keen on dioramas and dungeon dressing back then. He's clearly had a few paintjobs. Well, judging by the way he's laid out he may have just had a few. Here he is after an initial bath and scrub in Simple Green:

Those are enamel paints, so the soak might need to be a bit longer. It's telling that some of the colours here were the mainstays of my 'Humbrol Years' of model painting: there's a burgundy, for example, which was one of the few paints I purchased which wasn't a hangover from earlier WW2 model painting (of which more, etc) Underneath that, of course, is the white undercoat. These days I use black and work up to light, but I think for a novice painter it was a blessing - as was the enamel I used. Both worked really well for washes, and the paint jobs held impressively after years of being knocked around - as the bath above shows. At least I only have one side to clean.

So now all of my old minis are present and accounted for. I'm pleased as punch. Time to get painting! 

Under Hill

I've been required to do a fair bit of travelling recently. A bit of flying (I love landscapes from above), and a lot of driving. Though New Zealand varies region by region, and certainly it's not the postcasrd travelogue recent movies have CG-ed up, there are parts of this country that are gorgeous in their mute simplicity.

As a young Simian I would travel the main highway to Dunedin with my parents when visiting family down there, and from the back set of our car I'd watch the contryside change as we travelled further south, becoming hillier, greener, the low slopes and mrangeds alternately withdrawing and approaching as we wound our way through places with evocative names: Blueskin Bay, the Kilmog Hill, Pigeon Flat, Flagstaff . As I grew older and took books with me for the journey these places would become proxies for Tolkein's Middle Earth locations: Weathertop, Amon Hen, the Dead Marshes, the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood.

Kilmog Hill by Ian@NZFlickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/nzpix/28102631315

For me, reading has always been a very visual experience. I'm unable to follow a story unless I can build a picture of it in my mind, with locations, casting (for want of a better term) and so forth. I've no idea if this is normal, but it's been the habit of a lifetime. Similarly, my Dungeons & Dragons experiences were also visual, and informed by the same landscapes I travelled though at the time. Travelling through the lower rolling countryside of the Kapiti Coast and lower Manawatu, Rotorua's Waioekea Gorge, and the Rimutaka incline brings back those fancies of a younger me, head full of roleplaying and fantasy scenarios. What armies of goblins and unspeakable creatures lurked inside those emerald grassy domes carved by rivers and wind?

Landscape plays a part in roleplaying, but I'm interested to know how much this matters to players from different locales. I was of course extremely fortunate to have literally just outside town the countryside that would become Peter Jackson's Middle Earth (and no, I've not yet made it to Matamata/Hobbiton!), but did city-locked Inner Birmingham and Greater Manchester players of my generation plant themselves in fantasy worlds built from their surroundings? Did the experience of players in the US work the landscapes seen from their bedroom and car windows into the same sweeping prairies and cliff and pine tree panoramas that the likes of Larry Elmore made a career painting into the rulebooks I lost myself in?

Answers on a postcard. Really.

"From out of the cell runs an Elf..."

On Boxing Day 1984 a quiet revolution took place inside my head.

I am fourteen, and my newest alter ego, an Elven princeling by the name of Aben Silverstone has just been rescued by a party of trepidatious, no-nonsense adventurers led by a Dwarf with the unlikely name of Thorin Oakenshield.

It's a big deal for me to be playing Dungeons and Dragons with my older brother's group. Although also in attendance is my best friend Derek, and we're on neutral ground (Derek and his older brother's family home), it's understood that my presence there has been achieved by no small amount of wheedling and pleading by myself (and possibly some parents interested in some time out from their growing kids), and is at times barely tolerated. I am enthusiastic, and equipped with the nervous rashness and oafery of a new, young player. I'm on best behaviour, because I am still somewhat in awe of these older boys I'm playing alongside with their quick wit and occasional ruthlessness. Nevertheless, my Elf stays with his rescuers, and we make it to the end of the module in textbook-style, with only one casualty, as I recall - a thief by the equally-unlikely name of Edmund Blackadder.

I've played this particular module before, of course, as it's the only one we own, Douglas Nile's Horror on the Hill with its pine forest Jim Roslof cover and slightly goofy internal Jim Holloway artwork. But that last time I was a different character, in a different party, and we barely scratched the surface of the dungeon. This was the real baptism of fire, and over that summer I'd join in at least one other game over several nights (Palace of the Silver Princess, a logical follow-up) before I would be dismissed with the directive to find my own group to play with. So Derek and I did, and that became a large part of my adolescence for the next two years until different friends, different priorities, and the inevitable girlfriends broke up the band. By then Aben had dropped his earnest folksy nickname and become Habenath Celebrant, moody Elven badass, and another story, really.

 Nile's module is simple fun, with some pitfalls along the way. It's less of a meat grinder than its obvious inspiration, The Keep on the Borderlands, but it has elements I'd reuse in my own original games later on (warring goblin or hobgoblin tribes in the same dungeon, surprise berserker NPCs, a magic fountain which gives and takes in equal measure) not to mention a pretty hefty end-of-game adversary, of which still I'm skeptical of our besting to this day. More significant of course are the things that my friends and me brought into our self-made games in the following months - bits of our teenage world, in fact, form the music we listened to, the books and comics we read, and the movies we watched. A shared world can be a strange wild-growing creation, but hold it up to the light and perhaps it's not that different from many other adolescent activities in retrospect.

Thirty years on I'm surprised that it can still be brought back by the odd Proustian trigger - a reliable home-made ginger beer, the new taste of that summer in Barbeque Shapes (they were better back then), the smell of old pulp paperbacks, and the incongruous contemporary tune. Funny things, really, but all part of the mix. This, then, is my true gateway to adventure.