Wormskin #01–#08 (2015–2018)
by Gavin Norman and Greg Gorgonmilk (with
further contributions by Yves Geens, Matthew Schmeer, Andrew Walter and Brian
Richmond)
Published by Necrotic Gnome Productions
Low-to-mid-level
Fanzines may be the ideal
vehicle to publish offbeat, visionary RPG ideas. The format is suitably
inexpensive to produce and buy, and the scope of a single issue just right for personal,
creative takes on a game or setting. Zines can speak to niche audiences, and
afford to be small enough to be unconcerned by the dictates of mass-market
viability – if you have a zine you are selling to a circle of 30 happy friends
and acquaintances, it may still be worth it just for the pleasure of creating
something. That is the theory: in practice, zines are all over the place, from
the deadly dull to the inspired, and from dodgy photocopies to lavishly
produced physical artefacts. A lot of them will have no meaning outside a small
scene – they are memorabilia, physical embodiments of collective memories and
ephemeral personal networks. A lot of them are, also, hipster bullshit. Yet sometimes,
zine creators strike solid gold, and produce a run that develops into something
amazing, and sets standards for years to come. Welcome to Wormskin.
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| Wormskin #1-3 |
Wormskin
is a
zine with a precisely defined theme: it presents guidelines, background detail,
and materials for Dolmenwood, a faerie-haunted woodland setting “somewhere” in
a fantastic England. It is a setting with no link to a precise time and place,
and if you look deeper, it is a mishmash of mediaeval superstitions and folk
tales, Victorian fantasy (mostly Dunsany and Morris), and romanticised
Georgian-era rural life – in roughly the same way vanilla D&D is a hodgepodge
of disparate influences from the “Appendix N” novels to monster movies, fantasy
wargaming, and comic books. And yet, this mixture has a strong internal
consistency, with a characteristic rustic and earthy feel to it, conjuring
images of muddy roads, mossy tree trunks, crumbling monasteries in the deeper
forests, stone circles avoided by men, and rowdy taverns offering sweet and
savoury delicacies with bitter ales and the warmth of the fireplace.
This imagery has a long presence
in D&D, whose idyllic forests, wayside inns and sleepy rural communities
are intristic parts of the assumed milieu, even if they often feel more like more
early 1900s American farming settlements than historical English villages.
Which is not a criticism: D&D, even at its most specific (and it can get
very specific), deals with a wider range of influences from westerns to
planetary romance, while Dolmenwood focuses on a much narrower range in an
undiluted fashion. It is a setting with a strong and peculiar flavour,
something that has been done before many times, and subsumed into the tired
cliché of Merrie Olde Englande
so that all its individuality has been lost in modern renfaire fantasy. But
Dolmenwood is not that setting: by returning to its imaginary roots, it
highlights the fresh, fantastic and uncanny aspects of the English countryside.
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| Issue #02, back cover |
One of the primary strengths of
Dolmenwood come precisely from its synthesising
and (particularly) transformative
nature: it can accommodate and blend together ideas from very dissimilar
sources, and make them work in a whole that becomes a new, original thing of
its own. It takes folktales and ballads about forest-dwelling faeries and
witches, and recreates them as the powerful antagonists of a role-playing game;
or it tackles the legends of druids as the secretive order of the Drune,
complete with machinations around ley lines and places of power. All of this
has a veneer of familiarity, but the end result always comes with a clever
twist or surprise – not deconstruction (a gotcha that’s more tired now than playing
things straight), but a few steps towards reaffirming the unfamiliarity and
oddness of the woodlands.
In particular, the zine is very
skilful about repurposing Victorian kitsch: syrupy and domestic source material
(bowdlerised fairy tales with red-cheeked garden gnomes and talking animals,
idealised depictions of “the good country life” with its rotund monks and beer-loving
farmers, and so on) becomes great game fodder in the creators’ hands; random
public domain woodcuts are given new life in a newly imagined context. The village
of Prigwort, renowned for its brewmasters, is accompanied by a random table of
fantastic beverages (the minstrel’s cordial is a frothy orange with a taste of
malty rye, and encourages the imbiber to engage in unexpected poetry), and
gingerbread golems have been known to lurk in certain bakeries. The zines pay a
lot of attention to the material comforts of the region – beers, common tavern
fare, fashionable garments and places worth visiting all receive their due.
This is a place painted with warm tones, yet without sentimentalism.
***
The articles in Wormskin range
from setting background and hex descriptions to game procedures, the obligatory
monsters/magic items, and random tables. Not unlike early Judges Guild, it offers
a diverse selection of materials, which are useful enough on their own, but
also come together to form a certain vision of running a campaign. There is a free
introductory PDF to serve as an overview; but Dolmenwood is mostly
described by way of example, through the tone and content of its more specific
articles. Somehow, it works admirably well.
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| The Drugsssss of Dolmenwood |
Some of the ideas are idiosyncratic,
and open up new aspects of play. Moss dwarves (stunted gnomes from the deep
forests) and grimalkin (a race of mischievous and creepy talking cats) are not
simple character options, they are more or less new specialist character types,
adding a specific spin to the way we play D&D. A set of guidelines on identifying,
consuming, and buying/selling the fungi of Dolmenwood introduces a new possibility
for wilderness expeditions, and comes with a d30 table featuring such entries
as sludgenuts (smell like wet dog, nourishing but repulsively slimy), polkadot
pig (a mild psychedelic causing creeping paranoia), or jack-in-the-green (found
in fairy rings, random enchantment). This is a table I adapted for my own
campaign, for the benefit of a hobbit character, whose expertise in mushrooms
added flavour to both the character, and the fun of wilderness expeditions. A
different issue features guidelines for camping out – these are way too
detailed for my taste, with fiddly modifiers for fetching firewood and the
effectiveness of sleep, but they can be scaled down, and there is, again, a
table of random campsites which can lead to new adventures (a ring of identical
trees haunted by strange sounds, or a verdant clearing with signs of ancient
habitation). What these ideas have in common is encouraging actual play, and
providing new ideas to expand the scope of running a game in an enchanted
forest.
It bears mention that Dolmenwood
is a complex and heavily interconnected mini-setting. You can run it by using
the details (and you can also take it apart to use the bits and pieces), but
there is a deeper layer to the setting where the pieces fit together, and even the
footnotes refer to other footnotes. Locations, rival factions, setting-crossing
elements like the ley lines and sun stones, and new guidelines make for a mighty
tangle of moving parts. The resulting network of references is very rich, revealing
the thought and careful planning behind the milieu; it is also too much for a
casual game, and rather hard to keep in mind. It does not help that, owing to
its piecemeal publication history and the variety of content on the pages of a
zine, all of this material is disorganised, lacking any sort of index or reference.
This level of the Wormskin materials is perhaps best used as an
occasional spice, instead of the compulsion to use all of it all the time. In a
way, “learning” your way around Dolmenwood is fairly close to learning a new D&D-based
game system – and it is best done gradually.
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| Don't Lose Your Head |
Occasionally, the wealth of detail
also obscures the clarity and intent of the articles. This is not that apparent
in the case of the hex descriptions, even if they are far more detailed than
the usual hex-crawl fare. These issues do, however, haunt the faction
descriptions and the adventure scenarios. The Ruined Abbey of St. Clewd,
a major adventure location, is split between two issues – and while it is a
good one, it is rather overdone for a place with 26 keyed areas. In another
issue, the description of a three-room cottage (The Atacorn’s Retreat)
spans seven pages, offering a loving detail of interesting clutter. It is a
very good article, yet it is overpoweringly dense, and would be a logistical
nightmare to run at the table. In these aspects, Wormskin feels like too
much of a good thing.
And with these flaws in mind, it
still comes across very clearly. Perhaps the best aspect of the articles is how
the pieces reflect the whole, and vice versa. Even after eight issues, the
materials on Dolmenwood are fragmentary – there are guidelines for magical
waters, but no comprehensive encounter tables; we know the goat-headed lords of
Lankshorn, but not the Court of the Nag-Lord or the lake of the Dark Mirror. A
lot is missing, and a lot is too much to commit into memory. However, even
after a single issue, the reader gets a sufficient idea about the
setting and its workings that allows him to extrapolate from the details. The
campaign materials are very helpful in setting the tone and encouraging you to
go further on your own. And this is what great game supplements are made of.
***
With respect to production
values, issues of Wormskin come in the form of handsome digest-sized
booklets. It is printed in colour, and features colour maps and artwork. Once
again, its use and repurposing of “found art” from the fin de siècle tradition
is exemplary, and it is done with such a sure hand that it feels visionary rather
than cheap. Tasteful layout and good accessibility are also a positive. It has
a rich writing style which is a pleasure to read in comparison with the myriad stale
game texts you can encounter out in the wild. This is a classy, elegant series.
Perhaps it even feels “out of genre” for the wild and unruly zine scene – are zines
allowed to look so good?
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| The Drune Issue |
In summary, Wormskin is a
visionary product with an intriguing setting. It uses its source material
masterfully, turning the generica of Old England into a particular, cohesive
experience. Once you get the central idea, it works like a charm. Dolmenwood
wears the B/X D&D rules like a familiar and comfortable outfit, while
altering them to fit its own tone and set of influences. It doesn’t simply
present a few house rules, or small variations on the basic D&D framework,
neither does it create something radically new; rather, it presents a new way of thinking about D&D’s core
concepts and building blocks without compromising either. Campaigns set in
Dolmenwood should be halfway between the familiar and the strange, with
sufficiently fresh takes on a lot of D&D’s common elements to feel fresh
and ripe for exploration. I do not believe much in the proliferation of
old-school systems as long as they offer the same underlying experience (once
you have one system based on OD&D, AD&D and B/X, you are set for life),
but I would make the jump into a Dolmenwood campaign because the distance is
just right to make that jump worthwhile.
All that is old
is new again: like the best of the old school on offer, Wormskin provides
a fresh take on concepts we had thought tired, and innovates while staying true
to the game’s traditions. It is visionary, colourful, game-oriented and above
all, just very well made. This is the reason why Wormskin ranks among
the best of the best in old-school gaming, a position previously shared by The
Tome of Adventure Design, Anomalous Subsurface Environment, and Yoon-Suin.
For the first time in the history of this blog, I hereby award
Wormskin a rating of five stars with the Prestigious Monocled Bird of
Excellence.
Rating: ***** 
/
*****
/
*****
