Jeff salutes Thomas Filmore

Last month in my salute to Paul Crabaugh I mentioned my adoration of The Best of The Dragon, volume 1. It chock full of gaming goodness from the good ol' days. Most of the collected articles have a real sense of light fun to them, except for all the ones where Gary Gygax uses his Professor Dad voice. But I always found that to be awesome in a totally different way. Every year or two I re-read the the first edition Dungeon Master's Guide, partly for that Gygaxian prose.

But today I really want to talk about "The Play's The Thing...", a nifty little article by Thomas Filmore that originally appeared in The Dragon issue 11. (Old timers might remember #11 for the first appearance of Snits.) As far as I can suss, this little half-page article is Filmore's only published contribution to the hobby. But it had a big impact on me as a kid, as Filmore's article was a primer on the concepts of character personality and background. "The Play's The Thing..." taught me that the combination of race, class, and alignment aren't enough to make a character sheet into an actual character. Most importantly, Filmore gives a great sample background for a PC. Dig it:

Saltair: Lowly dwarf of the Seven Hills who had always been underground for most of his life and is uncomfortable outside. He was a miner in the hills, before that son of an orc Tasp got killed and the blame went to him. To solve his problem, he took to drinking and everytime he is outside he usually hits the stuff hard. He is belligerent, hates almost everything, and just wants enough money to keep him in drink while he looks for the big strike. Then he will head back to the hills and pay off everyone and their brother and live the rest of his life in those hills. Between drinking and gambling, he rapidly loses most of the money he gathers by adventuring.

I have great love for Saltair. The history of the hobby is littered with surly little dwarf fuckers, but Saltair will always have a special place in my heart. In this one paragraph Filmore teaches everything you need to know about writing character backgrounds. Saltair has a reason to go adventuring. He has a reason not to stop (he blows his loot on drink). There's a shiny plot hook dangling for the DM. (Does Tasp have vengeful brothers? Could a dwarvish bounty hunter be on his trail?). The background doesn't include anything that's going to bend or break the DM's campaign world. And most important of all, it's short. Not to beat on anyone else's play preferences, but I don't see the need for a character backstory longer than a few sentences.

Jeff salutes: Paul Montgomery Crabaugh

You may not have heard the name Paul Montgomery Crabaugh before. As far as I know he was never credited as author or designer for any books. Instead, he was the author of several excellent articles that appeared in 80's era gaming magazines, particularly Dragon and Different Worlds. My first encounter with his work was the little gem "Random Monsters", a nifty set of dice charts designed for creating new OD&D critters. "Random Monsters" originally appeared in Dragon #10 (same issues as Jon Pickens's fabulous article "Orgies, Inc."), but I originally read the piece in the Best of The Dragon compilation.

Incidentally, Best of The Dragon was one of the first supplements I ever owned and the free-wheeling spirit of many of those articles from the early days probably had a deep impact on my approach to the hobby. Paizo still has some copies for sale. They want 15 bucks though, so eBay might actually be cheaper.

From '84 or so to the release of 2nd edition AD&D in 1989 my original game group played a crapload of Basic/Expert D&D. One of the Dragon articles we got the most mileage out of was Crabaugh's "Customized Classes" from Dragon #109, May 1986. "Customized Classes" was the first build-your-own class system I had ever seen. Using this system we built a couple dozen classes for our local campaigns. My favorite was our version of the Barbarian, which dispensed with all the extra cruft found in the Unearthed Arcana version. Our barbarian was a souped-up fighter who rolled around in leather armor. Dave Dalley's fabulously memorable Axe Hobbit-hater was run under those rules. If I recall correctly Axe was one of the few PCs I've ever seen to survive expeditions to both the Caves of Chaos and the Isle of Dread. And he always attacked halflings on site, Grodd bless him.

I didn't really recognize Crabaugh as a particular name in the hobby until I got deep into Traveller and started looking for old articles for the game. Issue 51 of Dragon featured seven articles on Traveller, four of which were written by Mr. Crabaugh. They were all short, punchy pieces that got the job done without messing around. "In Defense of Traveller Computers", for example, does a great job in just two pages. Every single one of Crabaugh's articles from that issue could still be of use to a Classic Traveller referee.

Crabaugh also did excellent work in Different Worlds #15, with his 2-page article "More Citizens: Six New Classes For Traveller". The Cavalry, Artillery, and Technician careers demonstrate clearly that Crabaugh wrote from a particular point of view. Each career fills a mechanical need that would only be clear to someone deeply emmeshed in actual Traveller play. You can dice up Cav and Art soldiers and Technicians using well-known career paths from Mercenary and Citizens of the Imperium. But it's not easy. It takes a lot of die-rolling with few useable results. As he puts it in the article "you can spend all day generating a few Mercenary characters and never see a decent artillerist".

Mr. Crabaugh also won my heart with the Civilian career. Finally, a lifepath for the average joe in the 3rd Imperium! I love playing regular guys in extraordinary circumstances, but until I got my hand on Different Worlds #15 I had to settle for the Bureaucrat and the Other career. The other two careers he presents, the Engineer and the Reporter, also have their uses.

As I look over the Crabaugh pieces in my gaming collection several commonalities come to light. All his articles are short. Two pages is about typical. You can tell in every one of them that they are written by a practical gamer for use by a practical gamer. Nothing high-falutin' or artsy-fartsy about this guy's work. This is why I like Crabaugh: he has something useful to say, he says it, and then he shuts up.

"Customized Classes" from '86 is the latest piece I have from Paul Crabaugh. After that he falls off my radar. Googling has failed to turn up any new work of his. And if he has an online presence he must operate strictly under a pseudonym. I hope he's still out there somewhere, still gaming. But wherever he might be, Paul Montgomery Crabaugh, I salute you.

This cute little illo appeared at the end of Crabaugh's "Random Monsters". I really feel for the guy in the front of the party.