Midgard game? Anyone ever seen this?

[thedegenerateelite]

At the bottom of page two of the very first issue of the Stratrgic Review, there is a short blurb which states:

"Postal Dungeons & Dragons Variant, a game which combines D & D and Midgard will be handled through the magazine, Fantasia. "

This magazine would have been published in Canada around mid 75 or so.

The game and D & D postal variant are also mentioned in Europa 6-8.

Anyone seen this or the mentioned game Midgard?

[thedegenerateelite]

Looking further into Strategic Review two there is a mention at the top of page three of a postal campaign run by Scott Rich using Midgard and an attendant newsletter written for it, Bel-Ran Rumor Monger.

There is also mention of the Midgard creator Tom Drake looking for stencil artists.

[Deleted]

I did a lot of research into this game a few months back in the hope of finding an early copy of the rules online (they apparently were posted in a zine, issues which sadly aren't online).

[thedegenerateelite]

The initial Midgard rules were published at some point as the designer offered them for purchase in several Europa magazine listings. How many actually made it out is another issue entirely.

As far as their use with D&D it looks to be fairly limited. I have been unable to find any more specific refer to the Scott Rich zine mentioned above or any issues of Fantasia. These may have been very limited releases.

Interest would have required a possession of Midgard, a possession of D&D, a possession of a specific zine issue, and a desire to run a postal game involving them all. Quite the list really.

[DungeonDevil]

I vaguely remember seeing some mention of it in SR.
It must have been very, very obscure.

www.newsfrombree.co.uk/midintro.htm

[Deleted]

This game first came to my attention through an excellent post on the subject by Paul of the Blog of Holding, a post of which the author of Midgard, Hartley Patterson, left a comment.

One of the reasons I really hoped to see an early copy of this game is that it pre-dated D&D and was inspired not by goings on in the American scene, but in 1970 by a German game called Armageddon (a fascinating subject to study in itself) at a sci-fi convention in Heidelberg.

Patterson wrote an article about the game for the 2nd issue of White Dwarf. I'll post a jpeg of the article (which includes a map of Midgard) in a separate post below as I'm having troubles uploading the file for direct download.

Here's a couple of other tidbits:

Checkpoint #7 (August 1971):

SEA-SERPENTS AVOID ICEBERGS! Rules and maps are now being finalized for the fantasy game of Midgard, master-minded by Hartley Patterson (The Finches, 7 Cambridge Rd, Beaconsfield, Bucks) and loosely based on the German game, Armageddon, which was on display at the Heicon. Players are, for the most part, divided into three groups: wizards, heroes, and merchants. Some may be classed as rulers and given a piece of territory within Midgard (from which they can trade, make war, look for hidden spells, explore, or in which they can build extremely strong castles and retire from active participation); other players may be released to roam free... Anarchic fantasy may be the result, though Hartley should know most of what is occurring in Midgard. Game starts later this year and the end of August is the deadline for would-be rulers. A news-sheet is issued regularly and some thirty players have joined so far, so contact Hartley if you're interested.


War Bulletin #60 (December 1974):




And some information on the German game Armageddon:

An interview with Moritz Eggert

After we moved to Frankfurt I got involved in a fantasy fan society called "FOLLOW" (Fellowship of the Lords of the Lands of Wonder), which was modelled after the US "Society of Creative Anachronism", but much more involved. This was the time when many "pulp"-fantasy/SF series like "Mythor" and "Perry Rhodan" were very popular in Germany, and I was a big fan.

"FOLLOW" was based on a game called the "Ewige Spiel" (the eternal game), basically a set of very abstract fantasy battle rules called Armageddon. The game was played on a huge board depicting several fantasy continents with dozens of countries. Each country existed as a real life sub-group of "FOLLOW", each with a unique culture and history. All of these subgroups met often regionally, but once a year there was a big meeting where the leaders of each culture would play the "Eternal game" on a huge board (and I mean huge – it took several tables to set it up) for days on end, deciding the fate of their people for the year to come. This event was called the "Fantasy Fest", and was also a convention with lots of other games and "Fantasymärsche" (Fantasy trips), the roots of Live Role Playing games, basically a moderated trip through the woods with everybody dressed up in full costume. I was part of the "Drachenorden" (Dragon's order), a culture loosely based on M.A.R. Barker's world of "Tekumel", and one of the largest subgroups of "Magira", the world of "FOLLOW". The "Drachenorden" was one of the first groups to introduce Role Playing to their members, at that time still a very new concept, and I remember that I was totally blown away by it. The gaming sessions at the "Drachenorden" were enormous affairs – I remember that we once played a scenario based on the Seven Samurai which took place on a huge board depicting the village we had to defend, and one continuous battle that took virtually days to play out. In fact this particular battle took us 4 sessions to finish (each session taking 2-3 days), I remember that my magician managed to move from one end of the board to the other in this time, that was basically it. But this shouldn't be a surprise when you consider that there were usually around 20-30 players involved!

[Deleted]

[akooser]

Thanks for digging up all this Midgard stuff. I was also looking for the original ruleset or something close to it.

ara

[thedegenerateelite]

Fantastic information. Thank you!

[tavis]

Anyone know what the relationship between this and the Wargamer's World stuff Hugh Megira was doing in Germany might have been?

[aldarron]

Apr 17, 2012 19:04:44 GMT -6 tavis said:

Anyone know what the relationship between this and the Wargamer's World stuff Hugh Megira was doing in Germany might have been?

From the information Dave has gathered midgard seems to be inspired by the FOllOW club gamers. Magira and Armageddon are different iterations of the same game. It doesn't seem to be the case that actual rules from the follow group were incorporated into midgard, just the idea of a character driven fantasy boardgame.

[captainjapan]

Armageddon. It’s amazing to me that 4 years before Chainmail was published, a german pulp fiction author was conducting ongoing convention scale fantasy wargames and writing novels based on the results. And, they're still running, today! Thanks for digging this up, increment.

For those who don't speak the language, here is a copy of the (poorly)translated Wikipedia page:

drive.google.com/file/d/1bq-B7gYlUSgGnnMJfK2oDkqoXvlSr0Cu/view?usp=drivesdk

A photo of actual play can be seen on Chris Kutalik’s Hill Cantons blog, from several years back. Warning: the links out to Midgard content are most decidedly not to the 1972 Hartley Patterson pbp game.

hillcantons.blogspot.com/2011/02/map-and-links-for-magira-and-midgard.html?m=1

[captainjapan]

”The first ARMAGEDDON set of rules appeared in 1968, at that time only 30 pages long. In the preface, Hugh Walker wrote:

This game was created without bonds. It has grown organically in these two years. Every new idea had to be harmonious to be woven into the chaos. Chaos because until a few weeks ago, the entire collection of rules agreed limited handwritten pieces of paper.

But MAGIRA itself has also developed organically. I remember the first games: The world was a four-part game large world map (Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia - just the right distribution of land and water that we wished). A mess here too. The fields were partly irregular hexagons, even quadrilaterals and triangles messed up to capture the irregular coasts and mountains. Of course there were difficulties! about certain things could be argued, because there was no uniform obstacle to the fight with long-range weapons, little uniform directions for the ships and a number of other inconveniences, so that we eventually set out to invent a world with regular hexagonal fields, clear boundaries between water and Country, highlands and mountains, away from old names like Australia, Europe, etc. The thought of your own mythologies, peoples, Races came up. Even the thought of writing stories about it.

The new world has been diced! At least their rough outline. Just with the old card is just the concept of three continents and an island kingdom that we probably liked back then. A naval power and four land powers. The Starting point: five realms. Everything is open, everything can happen.

Now it's almost done. The first ever game has already taken place. The second is coming. The first stories are finished. Legends, myths, peoples, individual characters, heroes, kings, warriors, they are becoming ever clearer. empires arise and burn to ashes. It's fun to dream and have your hand in the game. Here is a world in the making, detail for detail, the reality of which would hardly be desirable, but which I believe to "escape" worth."


---translation(again, poor) from the preface of what I take to be the current edition of the rules. Magira is the name of the campaign world.

[Deleted]

I've never played Magira, but - as some of you might perhaps remember because I've written about this a little bit in the past - but I've played many years in/with Midgard (mostly Midrgard 2e and 3e, from 1985 and 1989, respectively), and I know a bit about the in-detail publication history. Bottom line is, *maybe* it's not the first RPG, but *maybe* it's a pretty close contender. - The problem that I personally believe to have observed, especially, in later editions, is that the game and its world are not very original: Especially in comparison to AD&D, from which it borrows a lot of the combat- and the skill-check-related rules, IIRC, Midgard is simply the less interesting choice. - Not a "bad" choice, by any means, and, back in the day, when kids didn't speak English everywhere, certainly a very, very important thing to have around. From our current perspective, today, though, asking why it's kind of passé de mode is kind of the same thing as to ask why we here focus primarily on OD&D rather than on, whatever, "DragonQuest", or on "Swordbearer".

[captainjapan]

Dec 25, 2019 6:02:39 GMT -6 @rafael said:

I've never played Magira, but - as some of you might perhaps remember because I've written about this a little bit in the past - but I've played many years in/with Midgard (mostly Midrgard 2e and 3e, from 1985 and 1989, respectively), and I know a bit about the in-detail publication history. Bottom line is, *maybe* it's not the first RPG, but *maybe* it's a pretty close contender. - The problem that I personally believe to have observed, especially, in later editions, is that the game and its world are not very original: Especially in comparison to AD&D, from which it borrows a lot of the combat- and the skill-check-related rules, IIRC, Midgard is simply the less interesting choice. - Not a "bad" choice, by any means, and, back in the day, when kids didn't speak English everywhere, certainly a very, very important thing to have around. From our current perspective, today, though, asking why it's kind of passé de mode is kind of the same thing as to ask why we here focus primarily on OD&D rather than on, whatever, "DragonQuest", or on "Swordbearer".

I don’t believe the game you played, called Midgard, is related to the Midgard mentioned in Playing at the World. That game was much earlier and barely got played before D&D appeared. There have been many types of game over the years also called Midgard. The Wikipedia link you posted for Midgard does say that the publisher had changed the name from Magira because of a legal dispute. Interesting.

[Deleted]

Sorry if I was mudding the waters here - but just so we're clear, YES, Armageddon/Magira spawned Midgard the same way Braunstein spawned Blackmoor. That connection is known to every nerd worth his salt around here. The game, Midgard, as currently being published by Midgard Press, is the 5th edition (and thus quite far removed) of the game that was spawned by Armageddon/Magira in the 1970s, as developed by Jürgen E. Franke.

I played 2e and 3e, and it's reasonable to assume that those games were already pretty far removed from anything that happened in the 1970s, except perhaps for some core mechanics, and for some names used in the setting. ("Alba" is Midgard's default setting, a proto-Celtic country somewhat comparable to Lloyd Alexander's Prydain, and it's kind of the heart of every story.)

Franke's games were set in the world of "Magira", by the the Austrian fantasy author Hubert Franz Straßl who writes Zelazny-style shorter paperback fiction, and German pulp fiction (which is different in format than US pulp fiction). Notably, Straßl apparently has NO OTHER RELATION to the "Magira" campaign that spawned "Midgard", and that's where the legal issues appear to have come from.

You can check the German Wiki article here: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magira_(Fantasywelt)


As to Midgard's relation to other RPGs of its time, I think 2e and 3e were very influenced by AD&D, as I wrote, but I think RQ/Glorantha might also have been strong influences. FWIW, what I have seen of Straßl, who also writes as "Hugh Walker", seems mainly influenced by Zelazny, per Amber, and - as Walker's main source of inspiration - by Michael Moorcock's eternal champion novels.

[captainjapan]

I managed to find Hugh Walker's archived website where he has this to say about Armageddon's development-

The beginnings of MAGIRA

My friend Edi Lukschandl and I started tinkering with a fantastic game world in the mid-1960s. At that point we were already old hands in science fiction fandom, had worked on Axel Melhardt's great fan magazine PIONEER and published articles, reviews, translations and stories in it.

We both collected English-language SF books and magazines, and we found the American paperback edition of JRR Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS and the edition of Robert E. Howards CONAN edited by L. Sprague de Camp with the exciting cover art by Frank Frazetta a new world. We became fantasy fans, and semi-professional magazines like AMRA (in which authors such as L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Poul Anderson and Fritz Leiber discussed and published about fantasy) and THE HOWARD COLLECTOR opened more and more doors for us in the new genre.

This also gave us new opportunities to be fanatical. Science fiction was largely established. But you could break a lance for the fantasy that was just beginning to become popular in America. We prepared our own fanzine called LANDS OF WONDER. And we wanted to start a fantasy club.

MAGIRA might not have been created had we not both been very interested in strategic games. We first experimented with a large world map and irregular fields, finally returned to a grid of regular hexagons, and since the time of the fantasy world had dawned - Tolkien's Middle Earth, Howard's Hyboric Era, Leiber's Lankhmar - we designed our own game world: The Old World (the name MAGIRA did not exist back then) and we called the game ARMAGEDDON.

So, the order of interests seems to correspond to the Hartley Patterson game-

Read science fiction
then, start a fanzine
then, start writing rules.

The difference being that Walker wrote a board wargame and Patterson wrote basically a play-by-mail diplomacy variant. The roleplaying aspect of these two games would be difficult to surmise from just a reading of the rules(which I would desperately love to get a peak at if someone happens to have kept issues of FOLLOW that old)

Gygax and Arneson might have known of Patterson's Midgard zine, before D&D publication, but I think it's highly doubtful that Gygax knew of the existence of Armageddon when he was writing Chainmail. That would be the interesting part, a chain of influence.

[Deleted]

This is more of a question for increment, but what I've read over the years in German sources doesn't suggest ANY sort of proximity between Straßl/Walker, and TSR or other D&D-related companies, like, say Judges Guild. - Like, I live in the town with one of the very biggest German-language fantasy archives/used book stores, at least back then: I've read some of those stone-old books and booklets ("Terra", I think) as a teen, and looking back, the main thing I remember about them is that Moorcock seemed like the guy everyone wanted to copy. I don't know REH well enough to really comment, but I think especially the Corum and Hawkmoon stories were EVERYWHERE, back then. D&D, however, was non-existent in that particular corner of the genre, likely because knowing English at a read-a-book level was the exception in Germany until the 1990s.

Midkemia Press seems to have been a major influence on German Midgard, though - many of the Midgard sourcebooks were extensively rewritten and altered versions of the late-'70s publications by MP. The backstory to this seems kind of random, though - Franke and his family apparently simply *loved* the Feist novels (LIKE I DO, RAAH RAAH), and so they took the opportunity.

[increment]

No real proximity, no, it's transitive: from "Walker" to Patterson in the UK in 1970-1 to Americans like Drake who ran the Midgard family of games that started ramping up in the summer of 1972. The existence of those Patterson/Drake games, at least, did not go unnoticed in Diplomacy/wargaming circles. But people seemed confused about its origins, and the connection to FOLLOW seems lost on the American community back then.

[captainjapan]

Rob Kuntz has said that one of Gary Gygax' first impressions(video at around 7:30 mins. in) of playing with Arneson and Megarry in '72 was that, he thought it(the play session) would be a good way to generate story ideas. Did he mean to make published fiction of adventurers' play reports? I wonder. Gygax ultimately did have his fiction published.

Now, here is Hugh Walker fictionalizing play of this annual board wargame. For anyone who has read the Magira series of fiction and also attended FOLLOWfest( I think it's called), how close could Walker(Strassl) possibly adhere to battle reports of Das ewige Spiel in prose?


increment,

Only one question: Did you understand Armageddon to be an unmoderated affair? That's how I also understand Chainmail to be. 

Either way, Armageddon appears to me to be the German equivalent of Siege of Bodenburg, in that Patterson only took thematic inspiration(fantasy, in this case), whereas Gygax was inspired to play the medieval. Rules inspiration did not follow. 

[increment]

Well, Armageddon is a set of rules for a board game on which some campaigns were built, most famously the Eternal Game. So while the base game doesn't require a referee, there are responsibilities for a game master in the Eternal Game to maintain hidden movement and secret information. Pretty much the same conditions that you see the need for a third-party judge in Chainmail.

[captainjapan]

The 'zine is the thing.

FOLLOW is/was at it's essence the subscriber base for the Lands of Wonder zine. It's hard to solicit zine submissions enough to put out a monthly. So, Strassl and friends invented the Clans(realms/kingdoms) lead by their most prolific contributors. And, behind those "lords" and "ladies" formed a heirarchy of membership based on the volume of fiction they produced for the zine. The wargame, Armageddon was only one of several convention activities like cosplay, filk, and larp. Magira, the fictional world only begins as a setting for the tabletop game.

The continuation of the 'zine is the real world focus of activity.

[Deleted]

No offense, captainjapan, but can you ellaborate again what you mean? - I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. ...But it's a pretty interesting topic.

[captainjapan]

Dec 28, 2019 9:38:27 GMT -6 @rafael said:

No offense, captainjapan , but can you ellaborate again what you mean? - I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. ...But it's a pretty interesting topic.

No offense taken. I'm having a good time thinking out loud. My objective is to compare the features of Castle & Crusades Society with FOLLOW(Fellowship of the Lords of the Lands of Wonder) of the same period, late 1960's - early 1970's. More analysis to come.

Here is the blog entry that I have just been reading, that prompted my last comment: hillcantons.blogspot.com/2011/02/follow-up-interview-on-german-worldgame.html

I am also reading sections 4.4 - 4.6 of increment's Playing at the World with a special interest toward topics like "immersed speech", the "visitation" theme, and the 2-mode play model. I think I am finding variations on these concepts in FOLLOW. To be honest, none of my thoughts are very original or would be better elucidated than has already been done in the book. There is already a section on Armageddon, there.

I will now research more about the Fantasy Fest(not called FOLLOWFest, as I originally thought) and Fantasymarsches(the LARP?). If there is anyone who has attended these, please do contribute? Also, it is now my my question whether das Ewige Spiel served the same function for FOLLOW as the Penssic war serves for the SCA.

[captainjapan]

Dec 26, 2019 13:34:20 GMT -6 @rafael said:

Sorry if I was mudding the waters here - but just so we're clear, YES, Armageddon/Magira spawned Midgard the same way Braunstein spawned Blackmoor. That connection is known to every nerd worth his salt around here. The game, Midgard, as currently being published by Midgard Press, is the 5th edition (and thus quite far removed) of the game that was spawned by Armageddon/Magira in the 1970s, as developed by Jürgen E. Franke.

So, here is the origin of the Midgard game that you played, Raphael:

fantasyguide.de/spezial-midgard/midgardanekdoten.html

In short, Franke was a FOLLOW member. His first rpg experience was playing the actual published 3lbb's at the festival of 1977(they were purchased by a friend, in the UK). By New Year's 1978, Franke was refereeing his own game, but his new rules weren't based directly on Dungeons & Dragons, they were adapted from Empire of the Petal Throne. There were already Tolkien properties circulating in Germany at the time, perhaps even a Tolkien rpg. So, EPT was chosen. All other details were of the shared literary world of the players, Magira. The name of Franke's original manuscript was "Empires of Magira". However, it was not published with FOLLOW, but with a splinter organization that decided to focus in gaming rather than fiction writing. The name of this group was CFS eV or Club for Fantasy and Simulation Games. Magira content was de-emphasized, again because of a great potential for copyright violations with Hugh Walker and with all the other FOLLOW members who originated the shared world. Franke's Midgard was finally published in 1981. Now, if you can tell me why he also settled on the name Midgard for his final product, I would be most interested.

[Desparil]

Dec 28, 2019 14:28:30 GMT -6 captainjapan said:

Dec 26, 2019 13:34:20 GMT -6 @rafael said:

Sorry if I was mudding the waters here - but just so we're clear, YES, Armageddon/Magira spawned Midgard the same way Braunstein spawned Blackmoor. That connection is known to every nerd worth his salt around here. The game, Midgard, as currently being published by Midgard Press, is the 5th edition (and thus quite far removed) of the game that was spawned by Armageddon/Magira in the 1970s, as developed by Jürgen E. Franke.

So, here is the origin of the Midgard game that you played, Raphael:

fantasyguide.de/spezial-midgard/midgardanekdoten.html

In short, Franke was a FOLLOW member. His first rpg experience was playing the actual published 3lbb's at the festival of 1977(they were purchased by a friend, in the UK). By New Year's 1978, Franke was refereeing his own game, but his new rules weren't based directly on Dungeons & Dragons, they were adapted from Empire of the Petal Throne. There were already Tolkien properties circulating in Germany at the time, perhaps even a Tolkien rpg. So, EPT was chosen. All other details were of the shared literary world of the players, Magira. The name of Franke's original manuscript was "Empires of Magira". However, it was not published with FOLLOW, but with a splinter organization that decided to focus in gaming rather than fiction writing. The name of this group was CFS eV or Club for Fantasy and Simulation Games. Magira content was de-emphasized, again because of a great potential for copyright violations with Hugh Walker and with all the other FOLLOW members who originated the shared world. Franke's Midgard was finally published in 1981. Now, if you can tell me why he also settled on the name Midgard for his final product, I would be most interested.

Just speculation, but since Midgard is just the mythological Germanic/Norse name for the world, specifically the real, human world as distinct from the separate worlds that gods, spirits, and jötnar lived in. My assumption would be that he picked it because it's in the public domain, but still has a cool mythic sound to it.

[captainjapan]

Desparil

I'm right with you on that. I had hoped for a more meaningful origin, seeing as how Hartley Patterson chose the name for his PBP game also, but like I said before, there were more than a few Midgards over the years

[Deleted]

Super cool, this! Thank you very much, CJ! - Tell you what, as my avatar perhaps might indicate to the knowing spectator, this conversation reignited my interest in Moorcock's "Corum" stories. I'll be working near that comic book store with the big archive, one of these days, and I'll try to drop by there, and ask them if they still have some "Terra Fantasy" books and magazines there from the 70s. If the prize they make me is reasonable, I'll buy those, and check them for possible additional info on the topic. - Personally, from my experience with the later versions of Midgard, I'd guess that there might be a connection to D&D - via "Gods, Demi-Gods and Heroes", or via "Deities and Demigods". - The core world of Midgard is Celtic, but the religion, and many tropes are Germanic. That's a mix that smells of "early D&D", not necessarily of what I recall of Hugh Walker.

There is a pretty good Wiki for Midgard out there. There, I found this (German) description of the first two published Midgard adventures:

www.midgard-wiki.de/index.php?title=Publikation:Midgard_Abenteuer_1

Both have about ZERO to do with Germanic mythology.

[Deleted]

The plot thickens:

So, the Celtic environment of Midgard is taken from "Magira".

www.midgard-wiki.de/index.php?title=Das_Hügelgrab_bei_Clydach (German)


...And "Ywerddon" is one of the locations that were borrowed from "Magira", under whatever circumstances.

[Deleted]

Apropos of nothing - there's a description of the Midgard/Armageddon campaign in White Dwarf #2 (August 1977).