Spirits & Spookiness: BECMI Boxed Sets (1977-1991)

BECMI (1977-1991)

The first of the two parallel branches of 20th century D&D we'll be looking at is Basic D&D and all its rules expansions, which I will collectively refer to as BECMI for consistency's sake. This post will not cover shamans found in individual first-party products outside of the core boxed sets; those will receive their own respective posts later.

BECMI is the closer of the two editions to the Original D&D compared to Advanced D&D, owing to such mainstays as race-as-class, the use of a combined to-hit table instead of THAC0 for individual classes, and avoidance of the 9-point alignment chart. But it quickly distinguished itself with changes and additions that turned it into its own unique beast, including some that have to do with how shamans were implemented and portrayed.

Basic Sets (1977, 1981, 1983)

Holmes, Moldvay, and Mentzer editions of Basic.

There are technically 3 different versions of Basic D&D released over a span of 6 years, each with subtle differences between them. But none of those differences impact the (admittedly niche and hyper-specific) focus of this project, so I'm going to treat the editions as more-or-less interchangeable.

Basic D&D continued the use of character level titles started in OD&D, but dropped the Anti-Cleric distinction in favor of letting a regular cleric be any of the 3 alignments (or any of the 4 extremes out of the 5 in Holmes' edition).¹ ² ³  As such, there were no more 3rd level shamans running around doing dark, culty stuff. Shamans do not appear at all in Holmes’ Basic, nor Moldvay's or Mentzer's.

Alas, its reign was brief and weird.

To get to the next instance of shamans we have to go forward in time to 1981 when Thomas Moldvay wrote his version of Basic, followed quickly thereafter by the Expert set edited by David Cook and Stephen Marsh (with Mentzer once again hot on their heels).

Expert Sets (1981, 1983)

Cook & Marsh and Mentzer editions of Expert.

To get to the shamans in the Expert rules, we have to skip past all the player character information and head straight to the monsters chapter. This section lists several humans whom players might come into violent or peaceful contact with, including your standard brigands and pirates, nomads, merchants, and an uncomfortably holy war-y group of desert-dwelling “dervishes”.

Then there are the natives.

Natives are tribal jungle- or island-dwelling people who are explicitly described as “primitive”. Some of them are warlike cannibals, some are peaceful, and some (1 person in 50% of every village with at least 100 people) are shamans. Shamans in this context are clerics or magic-users of at least 5h level, with nothing more than their primitive culture given to distinguish them from other members of the same class.⁴ ⁵

It is in the native shamans that we see the first appearance of one of the primary kinds of shaman in D&D: the shaman-as-tribal-cleric. Although it is rather unique that a single-classed magic-user can also be classified as a shaman in the case of native shamans- we won’t be seeing much of that again in our survey. But the shaman as a functionally standard priest whose primary distinction is the culture they come from and the tribal aesthetics of that culture will be a recurring idea in D&D going forward.

This art from the 1983 edition helps illustrate the vague mix of Polynesian and Austronesian coding the natives were written with. Humans and shamanism don’t mix very often in old D&D relative to other species, but when they do they tend to rely upon real-world, non-Western racial stereotypes to inform their flavor. We have more of that in store for us as we continue our journey.

Including in this very same boxed set, actually.

X1: The Isle of Dread

The Cook & Marsh edition of the Expert boxed set included a copy of module X1: The Isle of Dread, also by Cook (as well as Moldvay). It's an introductory wilderness exploration, lost world adventure, and treasure hunt full of pirates, dinosaurs, and raccoon-monkeys. The module takes place in and around the eponymous Isle of Dread, which was located in the Thanegioth Archipelago, placed south of Karameikos in the Mystara campaign setting, which was brand-new at the time. The island has moved around between editions and remakes since then, including Greyhawk and the Plane of Water at one point.

It's one of the most widely played modules in D&D history thanks to its inclusion in the boxed set, and there are entire posts worth of things to say about it and its contributions to the history of D&D. Posts that I'm not going to write, because I'm busy enough as it is. So I'll try to keep its inclusion brief:

The adventurers make landfall near the native village of Tanoroa/Tanaroa (spelling varies throughout the book) and soon visit others as they expand across the jungle. Rory Barbarosa, the dead explorer whose ship's log entry kicks off the adventure, speculates the natives once had a more advanced civilization that they have since declined from (just in case we forget these folks are written to scream "primitive").⁶ Some are complex societies with urban planning, large stone architecture, and a matriarchal political system, while others are little more than hunter camps in the jungle.

Along the way the party encounters several religious leaders and spellcasters among the natives who are variously identified as shamans, native clerics, and in one instance a witchdoctor. One, Umlat, is a priest of a specific god (Oloron, Lord of the Skies) in the same vein as many traditional henotheistic D&D clerics, while other shamans belong to a necromantic zombie laborer cult, venerate what seem to be ancestral idols, and/or practice a form of animal totemism.⁷ ⁸

Other natives worship more vague "gods" that are ultimately revealed to be the Lovecraftian Deep One-esque kopru. The kopru are malicious amphibian creatures who once ruled the island and seek to do so again through mind control and manipulation of the locals (and any adventurers who fall into their slimy clutches).⁹ The native shamans are never shown to be knowingly complicit in the kopru plot so they don't appear to be examples of the shaman-as-charlatan archetype, but they're still depicted with more variety in implied beliefs and cultural practices than I was expecting when I first looked through the module.

The book is still full of colonialist tropes like headhunting, cannibalism, and large numbers of superstitious natives obediently acting as guides and porters for the party of enterprising military-adventurists who just waltzed in, and that always bears pointing out. But the natives' internal diversity—and thus the variety of their shamans—is also notable for the time, especially considering how new and experimental modules and their approaches to lore and worldbuilding still were.

Companion Set (1984)

You may have sensed the common theme here and guessed that there are no playable shamans in the Companion rules, but the druid class appears here for the first time since OD&D’s Supplement III. In this rendition, the druid is the result of a Neutral-aligned cleric who reaches 9th level and, instead of founding a stronghold and becoming a landholding ruler, retreats into the wilderness and learns the ways of nature under a tutor before officially becoming a druid.¹⁰

This is similar to how fighters of the same level can become Paladins, questing Knights, or Avengers depending on if they are Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic in alignment and if they fulfill other specific requirements.¹¹ It’s a little bit like a precursor to the Prestige Classes, Paragon Paths, and Subclasses of later editions, but handled differently (and frankly, better) than say the Bard class of AD&D 1E.

I bring this up to show that while the designers didn’t seem to have plans for other types of cleric specialties at this stage of D&D (since the druid is alone among cleric types, unlike the aforementioned fighters), they were equipped with a way in which they could have slotted them into the existing rules with relatively little fuss. I wonder what D&D might have been like had they continued to use and refine this branching class system rather than dumping the idea until 4E. Maybe they might have even made a PC shaman option.

I should tinker with that idea one of these days when I return to writing Destige Class posts.

Druids in BECMI are broadly similar to their OD&D precursors in that they are nature-oriented divine spellcasters. But curiously they lack several iconic features that they had previously been printed with, including animal shapeshifting, proficiency with spears or crescent-shaped blades like sickles and scimitars, and resistance to spell effects from fey and other creatures of nature. It's odd seeing the class briefly bend back toward its clerical parent so soon after branching off of it.

I guess it's one of the few elements of Basic D&D that strove to be truly "basic" in its density of rules.

Master Set (1985)

Once again there are no playable shamans in this piece of BECMI, but NPC shamans do get expanded in scope, in ways that would greatly shape how they were portrayed throughout the remainder of the BECMI/AD&D split. No longer was shamanism limited to humans stereotyped as tribal and primitive; now they could belong to any species stereotyped as tribal and primitive!

The defining characteristic of the NPC shaman in the Master D&D set is that they are a cleric of a non-human, most often humanoid tribe. The position of shaman is overtly political, more so than the mere implied political power of player clerics who wander the land serving their god’s interests. In fact, humanoid shamans are often deeply intertwined with tribal governance.¹²

Speaking generally, what you’ll often see in monster writeups after this point throughout BECMI is that any given humanoid settlement with a large-enough population will sport at least 1 shaman who acts as advisor to the chieftain, perhaps with an apprentice or two in tow. Sometimes their religious leadership will exist in harmony with the secular power of the chieftain or war leader, and sometimes the chief may be in danger of getting usurped by a shaman with their own power base, allowing them to take full control of the tribe. It often depends on the species of humanoid in question.

Humanoid. I’ve been throwing that word around a lot without explaining its nuances.

For everyone who didn’t play D&D in the late 20th century, “humanoid” has a different and somewhat more specific meaning than it does in 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions. It refers to all roughly human-shaped, bipedal, intelligent or semi-intelligent creatures, up to and including giants, who are not members of the typical player species. Meanwhile, non-human player species with their own class are typically called demi-humans.

Thus an orc or a goblin is humanoid, but an elf or dwarf is demi-human, and humans themselves are neither; just humans, the mechanical gold standard and center of the universe. There’s something of a brutish, primitive, antagonistic connotation to the category of humanoid in early editions, so the older association of shamans with evil still holds true in a lot of cases in this era, albeit in a roundabout way unlike the shaman = chaotic cleric rule of old.

That isn't to say the humanoid association with evil is universally true, of course; there are exceptions depending on the species or, when the plot permits, the individual. Additionally, exceptions would slowly become more and more common over the years, right up until the modern era where alignment and species are very close to being fully decoupled, but just aren't all the way there yet.

As with the shamans of human natives, there are few mechanical distinctions between non-human shamans and other clerics. One is that non-human shamans have a limited selection of spells drawn from the cleric list, as well as generally low clerical spellcasting level limits, which ensure that shamans will never be as good at divine magic as human clerics. This is in contrast to how flashy they are when they cast that magic: shamanic magic is full of strange gestures, rituals, howling, and waving around sacred items where a human cleric might simply hold out their holy symbol. Shamans are also barred from some magic items normally available to clerics, mostly scrolls, which might be meant to imply illiteracy or at least a cultural aliteracy.

The other notable difference exists thanks to the Companion set. Because the druid was reimplemented as a character class, there are actually two different divine spell lists available. Shamans may cast either the limited cleric spells I already noted, or anything from the druid list, depending on the species (and implicitly, the unique magico-religious tradition) they hail from. Thus a hobgoblin shaman casts from the cleric spell list, while a centaur shaman casts from the druid spell list. This gives us the first, faintest hint of the shaman-as-druid archetype that we will see much more of in the future, while also setting shamanism up as a sort of spectrum located in between clerical and druidic magic.

Opposite the shaman sits another NPC spellcasting class called the Wicca.

As the name that gestures vaguely at the notion of witchy things indicates, the wicca uses limited arcane magic drawn from the magic-user spell list. But beyond this mechanical distinction, there isn't a lot that separates wiccas and shamans. Humanoids are stereotyped as fearful and ignorant of magic, so the two classes often rise to similar positions of power within their tribes to fulfill the same functions. 

Further blurring the line between the two is the fact that some spellcasters can be both shaman and wicca, albeit at 1/2 the max levels of each. These shaman/wicca are essentially multiclassing in a system where that mechanic doesn't normally exist- another thing we'll see more of as we dive into the specific books of BECMI.

It's not enough to warrant calling the wicca a shaman-as-wizard in my opinion, but it adds to that hint of a rich and complex spectrum of approaches to magic within humanoid societies that can't be found among more "civilized" species with their stricter arcane/divine binary. I find that both amusing and compelling.

Immortals Set (1986)

There are no shamans of any sort anywhere in the Immortal boxed set, since it's chiefly concerned with how to run and challenge characters that have ascended to godhood in all but name. This entry is just here for completeness' sake, and also to show off the weird cavity in the cover art dude's six-pack.

He reminds me of an action figure I had as a kid, whose belly had a weird squishy guts window that you could poke inside. Eventually the guts part popped out from wear and tear (or maybe me just deliberately prying it out), leaving behind a cavity quite like this.

Anyway, let's wrap up this step of our survey.

Rules Cyclopedia (1991)

The Rules Cyclopedia was the last of the Basic remakes, synthesizing everything from the Basic to Master boxed sets together into a single cohesive text that dispensed with most of the godhood simulation rules of Immortals. It made several minor changes throughout, such as making the druid a standalone optional class decoupled from the 9th-level options/subclasses of the cleric.¹³

The cyclopedia also continued the tradition of monstrous spellcasters, with shamans and wiccas returning. Only, they're not wiccas anymore. Beginning in 1990 with Mystara's Hollow World Campaign Setting (which we'll get to eventually), all instances of the wicca class were changed to "wokan", plural wokani.¹⁴

At first I thought this change could be chalked up to the power of the early Wiccan lobby, but I think the real reason behind this change is that it was the latest in a series of PR name-changes for a different sort of butt-covering. It was the ‘90s, but the Satanic Panic was still having far-reaching impacts on popular culture and media. Wicca was one of the last remaining words in a TSR product that could in some way be misconstrued as Satanic, and I think they just kind of forgot about it until they were editing these books.

Just like when they changed demons and devils to Tanar’ri and Baatezu in AD&D 2E a year earlier in order to assuage the reactionary twits who were gripped by moral panic, I think TSR filed the serial numbers off of something vaguely witchy but left it mechanically unchanged, figuring it'd give them plausible deniability where useful and that nobody else who'd notice would care.

Interestingly, the BECMI shaman didn’t share that fate. Perhaps ‘shaman’ was generic-enough a word by now not to suggest a connection to black magic, Satanism, kids harming themselves in particularly deranged Chick Tracts, and all that stuff.

Or perhaps shaman was more distant and exotic, still having clear connotations but none of them negative or strong enough to elicit the same response in some readers. Clearly, something about the public perception of the word shaman and the ideas associated with it were different than those associated with witches and Wicca.

Again, this is just my speculation. I could be completely wrong.

The monstrous spellcaster section also treats us to a cyclops wokan and a pair of returning native humans together in an illustration of, uh... whatever this is.

I'm with Insensitive Caricature #1 on the left over there. I can't believe this shit either.

BECMI and all its permutations stayed in print right up until Wizards of the Coast's acquisition of D&D and the development of 3rd edition, which was a pretty decent run of over 20 years all told. In that time, BECMI would experiment with new ideas that further distinguished itself from AD&D, but also left it as anything but "basic" by comparison. Over the next few posts we'll dive into specific sourcebooks for a cross-section of these innovations and how they relate to the ways shamans were conceived of, written, and at long last, played as viable PC options.

Next time we'll start looking through the Mystaran Gazetteers.

Or you can click here to return to the Shamans in D&D archive.

¹ Holmes, Eric. Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. 1977. P. 11.

² Moldvay, Tom. Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rulebook. 1981. P. B8.

³ Mentzer, Frank. Dungeons & Dragons Set 1: Basic Rules. 1983. P. 24.

⁴ Mentzer, Frank. Dungeons & Dragons Expert Rulebook.. 1983. P. 31.

⁵ Cook, David, Tom Moldvay. Dungeon Module X1: The Isle of Dread. 1981. P. 29.

⁶ The Isle of Dread. P. 4.

⁷ Ibid. P. 7, 22-23.

⁸ Totemism is a whole other can of worms that we will be cracking open, but not quite yet. I don't have the room for it in this post. Fortunately there is no shortage of shaman classes that in some way involve totems, totem animals, spirit animals, spirit guides, or some other permutation of one of those loosely associated terms. You can probably look forward to that midway through our look at the Gazetteer series.

⁹ The Isle of Dread. P. 23-24, 26.

¹⁰ Mentzer, Frank. Dungeons & Dragons Players Companion: Book One. 1984. P. 14.

¹¹ Players Companion: Book One. P. 17-18.

¹² Mentzer, Frank. Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters' Book. 1985. P. 21-22.

¹³ Allston, Aaron. Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia. Edit. Pickens, Jon, Steven E. Schend, Dori Jean Watry. 1991. P. 28-29.

¹⁴ Rules Cyclopedia. P. 215-216.

Spirits & Spookiness Interlude: Basic & Advanced D&D Split (1977)

Admittedly this post isn't actually going to be about shaman classes, but it is valuable connective tissue in the history of D&D that I didn't feel right about skipping entirely. So bear with Uncle Furt as he bumbles through regaling you with an ancient past that he himself never lived through.

When 1977 rolled around, D&D had been selling extremely well for several years, especially considering its original $2,000 budget and the “whatever our friends and family can doodle on a napkin” style of art direction. It sold tens of thousands of copies and made millions of dollars; well enough that its publisher, TSR, wanted more products to sell, and to a wider audience this time. To accomplish this, the ruleset of OD&D was rewritten and cleaned up by a guy named John Eric Holmes to make it more accessible to newbies and people from outside of the tabletop hobbyist scene. It also excised copyright-sensitive words like "hobbit" or "balrog" from the text.

This new edition of D&D—for that's what it was, even if it was never numbered like one—was given a lower character level cap and an explicit endpoint: when you played all that you could in this Basic edition of D&D, it was time to move up to the shiny new Advanced D&D compiled by Gygax.¹

Once graduated, you'd hang out with Gary and all the other big boys, and you'd get to enjoy more options, more monsters, and more spells, not to mention tournaments and other big, prestigious things that necessitated having a lager body of codified rules to be able to referee objectively. Essentially, Basic was what you'd play at home with your friend group to get a taste, and AD&D was what you'd go to a big fancy convention to play (and pay).²

Thus the Basic and Advanced split was one of the first big “rulings vs rules” philosophical divides the hobby would see, and from where I'm standing it was entirely motivated by sales, marketing, and a desire to expand what this nascent market was even capable of.

I also can’t pass up the opportunity to remind everyone that AD&D was also meant to be legally distinct enough from OD&D that TSR didn’t have to pay Arneson royalties for any of its sales, despite Dave being a co-creator of the original game. According to Gary, Arneson only ever sent him notes from the Blackmoor game he was running using Gygax's Chainmail rules, which Gary then consulted while writing D&D mostly by himself.

This wasn't the first time they fought like this; there was an episode in 1976 where TSR tried to lay claim to all of Arneson and other writers' personal creations written during or even after their employment at TSR through a revised contract, ³ like some kind of tabletop Disney Vault with (hopefully) far fewer smut illustrations locked away in its depths.

That incident led to Dave quitting, but that was far from the end of their disputes. Arneson took his removal from the royalties to court in 1979 in a series of lawsuits that would drag on until 1981. This kerfuffle would come to be known as the "Great War", in Arneson's own dramatic words.

According to Dave, he provided much of the raw basis for D&D which was later edited and prettied up by certain other people he didn't care to name. But he further asserted that he and his Blackmoor group had never been all that focused on the mechanical side of gameplay to begin with. Instead, he emphasized his role in developing fundamental but less material components of play. The big example of this was "roleplaying", which was still a novel concept at the time. His contribution then, was to the sense of wonder and creativity that gave meaning and purpose to the pile of rules; animating the physical game with its own spirit.

This protracted legal battle led to the genesis of the somewhat artificial “Arnesonian” style of game design, which then proliferated within tabletop communities. The court of public opinion was as much a battlefield as the courtroom, and Dave and TSR slung countless printed articles and interviews back and forth over who should be thought of as the True father of D&D. All of this just so Dave could argue his case in court and get the money he believed TSR owed him (and rightly so, in my opinion).

Not to disparage the guy, but the free-wheeling and rules-lite style of play attributed to him doesn't exactly line up with the sometimes very chunky and simulationist rules he wrote. This is especially evident in the rules of his own books post-TSR, many of which he claimed to have wanted for D&D if it weren't for Gygax's role in cowriting it.⁴

Eventually they settled out of court and Arneson got his royalties on AD&D products, ⁵ but by then the bifurcation of D&D was complete.

Imagine reshaping the trajectory of an entire hobby just to stiff your business partner.

Anyway, the two-pronged approach to D&D emphasizing two parallel newbie/veteran systems ended up not lasting all that long. What ended up happening is that Basic and Advanced D&D each followed their own trajectory independent of one another. AD&D eventually released a 2nd edition, while Basic D&D gradually got a bunch of rules expansions that raised the max level and added more stuff to do while remaining more-or-less the same edition it started off as. By the time Basic was joined by Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortal rules (completing the BECMI series we know today), the rules were arguably as complex as those in AD&D, and the level cap was a staggering 36.

Has anyone here ever gotten a character even close to that from level 1? What was that campaign like? I’d like to know.

Speaking of BECMI, now’s a good time to bring up a bit of a faux pas you’ll run into in my writing. I almost always refer to all versions of Basic collectively as BECMI, rather than differentiating between B/X as a stand-alone entity and BECMI as something else that came later, or further specifying Holmes vs Moldvay vs Mentzer, etc. I know some folks will chafe at that, but I do this for simplicity’s sake, and because it’s the lens I learned about Basic through.

These two branches of D&D ran separate-yet-parallel for over twenty years before Wizards of the Coast bought D&D and either merged the branches back together, cut one of them off, or just grew an entirely different tree, depending on your point of view.

More important to our story is that from both these branches, several shaman-shaped fruit grew over the years.

As I said, Basic and Advanced ran concurrently, but we’ll look at the full lifespan of one edition before the other in the following entries, again just for simplicity’s sake.

Begin the delve into BECMI.

Or return to the Shamans in D&D archive.

¹ Gygax, Gary, & Dave Arneson. Dungeons & Dragons. TSR. 1977. Edit. Eric Holmes. P. 2.

² Schick, Lawrence. Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games. 1991. P. 130–131.

³ Jon Peterson. Game Wizards: The Epic Battle For Dungeons & Dragons. 2021. P. 114. (At least those are the page numbers on the EPUB converted to a PDF that I have access to at the moment.)

⁴ I often think back to the Lich van Winkle article pointing out a formula that includes a "Players Intelligence" statistic in Arneson & Snider's Adventures in Fantasy (1979), among other game design arcana.

⁵ Game Wizards. P. 170.

Ride Ze Shoopuf? (TROIKA! Background & Creature)

Shoopuf Driver

You are one of the froglike Hypello, clammy and laidback in the extreme. So laidback in fact, that when the river decided to change its course during a routine cruise and dump you and your elephantine mount across the hump-backed sky, you didn't fret. You just hopped back up on top of your shoopuf, picked a direction, and started walking.

Wherever you go, you're sure it will all be Shmooth Shailing.

Possessions

• Shoopuf Mount with Howdah
• 1d6 Preserved Moonlilies
• A Stack of Moonflow River Tour Brochures (Soggy)
• Bottle of Shoopuf Milk (Not Yet Fermented)
• An extremely Lackadaisical Disposition

Advanced Skills

4 Swim (Shwim good, yesh?)
3 Shoopuf Riding (All aboards!)

2 Awareness (For inveshtitagating dangerous waters)

2 Etiquette (Befriend ebullibody!)

1 Blitzball (When you feels like it)

Special

You are amphibious. You can breathe water and take no penalty to your Swim skill for item slots filled, but you are torpid and slow on dry land, moving at half the speed you otherwise would.

Addishunally, you finds it imposhibibble to loshe your akshent.

Shoopuf card from Mobius Final Fantasy

Shoopuf

SKILL: 4

STAMINA: 16

INITIATIVE: 1

ARMOUR: 2

DAMAGE: Proboscis Slap (As Large Beast)

A placid leviathan of the Moonflow, normally found wading its depths and snorkeling up food with its long trunk-like appendage. Often tamed by the Hypello and saddled with enormous howdahs befitting their great size and strength. Despite this, they are typically very gentle creatures, willing to help pilgrims cross the river free of charge- so long as no drunken Blitzballers mistake them for fiends and start swinging at their ankles.

SPECIAL

Anyone successfully hit by a Shoopuf's proboscis must Test their Luck (or Skill for Enemies) or become Grappled as it winds back up around them like a party horn.

MIEN
1	Gentle
2	Timid
3	Filter Feeding
4	Curious
5	Splashing Around
6	Amok

The One Where Furt Reads a Second Dragonlance Novel in as Many Years to Quell the Gnashing Anxiety in the Back of His Head and Then Ends up Summarizing it Again

Late last year I wrote at length about my experiences trying to read a book for the first time in ages. In typical Furtive fashion I laid bare all my worries and neuroses and then just did a bunch of word-vomit about a thing that interests me.

This time, I've decided there's going to be a 'this time', and it's going to have less of the former but just as much of the latter. Because I'm invested in Jean Rabe's Stonetellers trilogy now, and I feel compelled to see it through to the end. Plus this year has been unnerving in the extreme, and I could use another distraction from my slowly growing age and shrinking bank balance.

At the time of publication we've just finished our two weeks of real autumn before all the leaves die and a long, damp pre-winter settles in. Something about the wind and the leaves reminds me of the schoolyear, which invariably leads to a series of panic attacks as I think back to that period of my life.

Can homework legitimately trigger PTSD? Asking for a me.

Another thing that this time of year fills me with is brief moments of swelling inspiration to do... something? Anything? Oftentimes the urge takes the form of something vaguely scholastic, like reading or writing or discussing a topic with passionate others. It echoes back to the feeling of walking my high school or college campuses in the rare moments when I wasn't quite so rushed or scared and I could imagine what a better being in my shoes would have accomplished by now. 

I don't know why I get these moments, but I've experienced them for a long time. I think it comes down to some deep subconscious association from my youth. When the light hits the trees just right and I look out over the admittedly beautiful land that the Hudson River School romanticized and propagandized so effectively from a place just across the creek from me, I feel it. I get it. I am consumed by that licentious poison of the soul that we call the sublime, and I am moved to propagate or harness the feeling in some way. It's like somebody's beaming one of those silly academia aesthetic playlists directly into my lizard brain.

Invariably, the feeling deflates a second later as I remember why I can't do anything smart or academic or vaguely gesturing toward the notion of personal growth or learning because of reasons X, Y, and Z.

But this time I remembered my incredibly low-stakes struggle with these books, and where I left off.

... I said there would be less neurosis this time, didn't I?

-

To simplify greatly, the first book in the series, The Rebellion, is about a group of enslaved goblin miners on the Dragonlance world of Krynn who rise up against their Dark Knight masters during a massive earthquake. They then endure the volcanic brutality of the Khalkist Mountains of Neraka, the world capital of Evil. They are led through much fiery death and bloody dismemberment by the begrudging hobgoblin foreman Direfang and the auguries of the self-interested geomantic shaman Mudwort. Along the way they team up with (and enslave) some of the knights who enslaved them, most notably the half-elf wizard Grallik N'sera.

The ragtag bunch survives long enough to stumble into the ruins of Godshome, where most of the gods of Krynn once schmoozed together with their followers before they punished the many for the sins of the few and nuked the planet from orbit. Here, Mudwort and the other Stonetellers of the goblin refugee army scried the entirety of the continent of Ansalon and glimpsed a prospective home for a new goblin nation far away in the forests of Qualinesti. They then set off on the long road south, unwittingly leaving behind them the still-warm corpse of Moon-eye, the first of many goblins about to get shanked in the back as power-hungry clan leaders throughout the army plot Direfang's overthrow.

Simple, right?

The sequel, Death March, focuses on that grueling journey southwest to Qualinesti, and all the challenges and intrigues the goblins are sure to face along the way.

It's also pretty metal as far as DL covers go.

Speaking of Qualinesti, I want to touch on something that I don't think I gave enough attention to at the end of my first post.

The Rebellion began somewhere in Neraka, close to the city of Jelek that actually gets placed on maps on occasion. The exact location of Godshome changes from map to map over the years, but we can confidently say it's within the same neck of the woods. So let's say they ended the book somewhere within this area, using an excerpt from the map that appears in the 1992 Tales of the Lance boxed set that happens to be pretty detailed and accessible.

At the beginning of the book the goblin refugee column is over 1,000 strong. By the end, through a combination of attrition and smaller bands splitting off from the main body, that number is reduced to less than 500. Let's zoom out a little, and see how much farther they have to go with those numbers.

As you can see here, the refugees have quite a ways to go before they reach the-

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't zoom out far enough. Silly me.

There we go.

They've lost over half their number traveling less than 50 miles of what is conservatively a 400+ mile journey, and that's if you measure in a straight line as the crow flies, through some of the most hostile territories on the planet. If things keep going at this rate, these folks are screwed!

I mean, obviously not entirely screwed since there is a third book in the series and I'm pretty sure I saw trees on the cover when I downloaded an image of it. But I still don't have high hopes for anyone besides the named protagonists reaching their destination- heck, not even that will save them, considering how quickly the list of named goblins got chewed through in the first book.

I guess we shall see. Let's get this show on the road.

Spirits & Spookiness: Etymologies & Definitions of "Shaman"

The first challenge I experienced in writing this history was defining what I’m actually talking about. 

In fantasy, “shaman” is a vague and often generic term that may be used to describe a wide range of characters. They might be a traditional healer, an old wise person, a spooky skull-wearing witch, a wielder of elemental magic clad in furs and summoning wolf spirits, or any number of other things. As a child I uncritically ate every single one of these aesthetic stereotypes up, and even today I struggle to completely disentangle my own writing from automatic and unthinking recycling of those tropes.

By my reckoning, the only thing fictional shamans have in common is that they are often coded as foreign or exotic to whatever the “normal” of their fantasy world is. Compare it with how terms like “witch doctor” and “medicine man” are thrown around in other media.

So if the fiction is so garbled, what can real life history tell us about the meaning of the word “shaman”?

Well, it turns out it’s not quite as concrete an answer as we might hope for.

Much like in pop-culture, there are many overlapping or contradictory definitions of shaman and shamanism in academia, developed over centuries of study. I think this is due in part to the fact that a lot of what we believe we know about shamanism(s) stems from a European, sometimes colonialist understanding of the indigenous cultures of the world, particularly Siberia where many of the traditions we associate with shamanism and even the word shaman itself originate.

Buryat böö offering a libation of milk.
Wikimedia Commons

Etymology

As far as we know, shaman is a word of Tungusic origin that reached Europe by way of becoming a Russian loanword in the Early Modern Period. The Russian Empire encountered the Tungusic peoples while they were conquering and colonizing large sections of North Asia, much the same way Western Europeans were colonizing the Americas at the time.

The Tungusic language family includes Manchu, Evenki, Jurchen, and other related languages found in Siberia and Manchuria.¹

Shaman derives from the Evenki word şamān (or samān or hamān, depending on the dialect in question) which itself might come from the root word şa- which means "to know". There are some linguistic irregularities in this theory that make it only plausible rather than concrete fact, and other proposed roots include sebe- ("spirit/idol"), nïmƞa- ("to tell tales"), and yaya- ("to sing shamanic songs"). All of them are words of indigenous Evenki origin, however.²

There are other theories that shaman derives from outside sources, like the Sanskrit word śramaṇa (an ascetic Buddhist monk) or even Arabic shaiṭān (a demon or devil). I find these theories doubtful, partly because of the huge area of land and the number of different peoples living within it that employ different cognates of the word shaman, many of whom didn't have extensive exposure to Buddhism or Abrahamic religions up until after they entered the written historical record, at which point shamans were already an established group. We have archaeological evidence of shamanic practices going back millennia, and the idea that all their descendants suddenly came to be uniformly referred to by a term that was imported from another religion feels far-fetched to me.³

You may have noticed by now that I use the plural “shamans”. You might be used to the singular and plural forms both being just “shaman”, and that’s fine. Both are acceptable in English. If you wanted to be a stickler about it, the etymologically-consistent plural for shaman uses the uncommon marker -sal to make shamasal.⁴ I was tempted to use that form, but I’m not that pretentious, so I will continue to use "shamans" in this series for the sake of familiarity. Terms like shamen are hyper-corrections caused by the visual similarity between shaman and English words like fireman. We will see it pop up occasionally in D&D, and I will try not to grind my teeth at it- my dentist already yelled at me once.

I would have been equally disparaging of terms like shawoman, shamanka (-ka being a feminine Russian suffix), and shamaness had I written this history a few years ago. But I’ve learned things recently that helped me re-contextualize those terms and stop thinking of them as entirely without merit.

Consider how most Siberian cultures with a masculine shamanist tradition also seem to have a parallel but distinct feminine tradition with a separate set of roles and a separate name. Note also that most feminine Siberian shamanic titles derive from the name of the old Turkic and Mongolic mother goddess Etügen, whose name also has connotations to the earth or womb depending on language and context. Examples of the gendered shamanism divide include Evenk; šaman (masculine) vs udugan (feminine), Mongol/Buryat; böö (masculine) vs idugan/udagan (feminine), Tatar; qam/kham (masculine) vs üdege (feminine), etc.

Several anthropologists over the centuries have argued that this implies a widely shared origin of feminine Siberian shamanism unlike their disparate and more local masculine counterparts, although that is beyond the scope of my work here.⁵

All of this is to say that I prefer gender-neutral terminology wherever and whenever possible, but there’s certainly a case in my mind for the phenomenon of female shamans to have their own discrete word, as it were.

Definitions

Now that we have established where the word shaman probably comes from, we have to address how it’s actually used.

As I alluded to before, there is no single definition for “shaman” in 21st century academia. Scholars do at least seem to acknowledge that English use of the term is a construct meant to group together what people see as similar practices and belief systems; but what those similarities are is up for debate. There are at least three or four conceptions of shaman, depending on how nuanced you want to get.⁶ They vary in scope, each with broad overlap as well as specific differences. The pre-Christian religion and modern paganism historian Ronald Hutton divided them this way in his 2001 book Shamans, and I will be following his lead here because I think it's a useful starting point:

• At its most narrow, shaman refers to no one except the traditional practitioners of the indigenous Siberian religions that the word shaman comes from. These practitioners interact with the spirits and other supernatural beings in order to effect worldly change on behalf of their communities, often by way of altered states of consciousness.
• More broadly, shaman can be inclusive of any sort of priest or other magico-religious specialist who is believed to contact the spirit world, usually at the behest of others such as their tribe or community, regardless of geographical origin in the world.
• Some scholars who use the above definition try to find a particular mechanism or technique that sets shamans apart from similar specialists like mediums and aforementioned witch doctors, but nobody can agree on what that defining feature is. Even the ecstatic trance and drumming that are commonly seen as central to shamanic practice are not so ubiquitous.
• The widest definition of shaman includes anyone who is believed to contact the spirit world in an altered state of consciousness for any reason. This definition encompasses aspects of other world religions such as Shintoism and several Native American or Sub-Saharan African faiths, as well as all manner of modern syncretic neopagan movements.⁷

That last one is the definition of shaman that attracts the most criticism. Rolled up in its usage are accusations of cultural appropriation, gross oversimplification, and misuse, and I tend to agree with that criticism- it’s extremely broad. Hutton himself ran afoul of that in his own presentation of medieval Scandinavian Seiðr and Sámi traditional religious practices. Full disclosure, I've used this kind of cultural equation gloss many times in my own writing for the sake of convenience, and it's a tricky habit to kick.

Whether or not something pings as shamanic also affects the rest of a religion or tradition surrounding it. Shamanic practitioners are often the most "visible" facets of a belief system to outsiders, and that can sometimes lead to the assumption that they are also the most important aspect of it. In the process, complex and diverse religious traditions that include at least one arguably shamanic practice or substrate sometimes get glossed as "shamanism" in their entirety.⁸

Of course you don’t have to listen to anything I say here as if it's gospel; I’m not your auntie, and I'm not trying to make you shift your terminology; although it's always good to be mindful. Outside of certain avenues of discourse where definitions are extremely important, I lean toward a descriptive as opposed to prescriptive approach to everyday language; we use words how we use them, and make new ones when we feel the need. Heck, I’m the guy who says “remound” instead of “reminded” all the time.

I lay these definitions out not to pick which one is “correct” (my stated opinions aside), but to give you an idea of the range of shamans that we’ll come across in our survey. This list is by no means exhaustive- it doesn't even scratch the surface of the even more weird and/or wonderful interpretations of shamanism that exist only within D&D, let alone the full breadth of genre fiction.

Speaking of which, I should probably get on to the actual D&D already. 

Onward to the 1970s!

Or click here to return to the Shamans in D&D archive.

¹ Please note that "Tungus" originated as a pejorative exonym used by the Evenks’ neighbors, who were mostly Turkic-speaking peoples. Tungus most likely derives from the Old Turkic word tongaz which means “pig” or “wild boar”. A competing etymological theory posits that Tungus actually derives from the Donghu people or “Eastern Barbarians” referenced in Han Chinese histories, but that isn’t very flattering either. Hence I only use the term Tungusic languages here for lack of a more neutral equivalent. Get on it, linguists!

² Janhunen, Juha. “Siberian Shamanistic Terminology.” Mémoires De La Société Finno-Ougrienne 194, 1986. P. 98-99.

³ Personal bias time, it also just feels weird to try and attribute such an important element of several indigenous cultures to the actions of their more urbanized and politically dominant neighbors at the time. In the absence of hard supporting evidence, it just feels like kind of an unfair claim to make.

⁴ Howard Isaac Aronson, Dee Ann Holisky, and Kevin Tuite. “Dialect Continua in Tungusic: Plural Morphology”. Current Trends in Caucasian, East European, and Inner Asian Linguistics. 2003. P. 103

⁵ If those topics interest you, I recommend you check out the body of research that began with the Polish anthropologist Maria Czaplicka way back in the day. Her original theory was that feminine shamanism actually predates masculine traditions, though I don't know if that idea has proven to have merit or if it has gone the way of the Great Goddess hypothesis and other ideas of uniform prehistoric matriarchy. You can find some of her stuff over on the ISTA. Please note that being over a century old, the academic language used by Czaplicka and the sources she cites is sometimes racist, sexist, homophobic, and/or transphobic. "Berdache" and all that sort of stuff.

⁶ Hutton, Donald. Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination. 2001. P. VII-VIII.

⁷ Arguably, it even includes that uncle of yours who used to go to Woodstock and keeps trying to loan you his collection of Alan Watts CDs because they really “opened him up”.

⁸ This is why you might see traditional Turkic and Mongolian religions referred to as shamanism, despite the fact that most people interact with shamans rarely and only for specific reasons, and more often seek community leaders or other specialists for daily practices. Heck, at various points throughout history such as the height of the Mongol Empire or the 20th century Burkhanism movement among the Altai, there was even strident anti-shamanist sentiment among political elites and common people that drastically reshaped religious practice.

Spirits & Spookiness: OD&D (1974-1977)

Original Dungeons & Dragons (1974)

Cover of the famous White Box reprint.

There’s no better place to start off than the Original Dungeons & Dragons: the 1974, 3-volume publication of D&D, popularly known as the “White Box” set, so-named for the iconic packaging it was sold in during its 1976 reprint. It was technically not its own standalone game, but rather a fantasy roleplaying supplement/rules expansion for Gygax’s previous tabletop wargame, Chainmail. Indeed, the booklet assumes the reader is familiar with wargaming already and periodically refers back to rules found in the Chainmail book without elaboration.

OD&D began the curious tradition of assigning each level of each character class a corresponding title that the character would presumably be known by within the fictional world of the game. Some of these are quite sensible for the fiction OD&D had in mind, while others feel more and more peculiar the older the game gets. For example a 1st-level Cleric is called an Acolyte, while an 8th-level Fighting-Man is given the pulp fiction’y moniker of Superhero, and a 10th-level Magic-User is a Necromancer regardless of what types of magic they actually use.¹

To talk about shamans, we first have to talk about those clerics.

The original cleric was heavily inspired by medieval depictions of Christian warrior-priests like Odo of Bayeux anor Archbishop Tilpin, who as their legends say occasionally waded into battle for king and country and whatnot. Many of these portrayals are fictitious, including the idea that they wielded blunt instruments in order to circumvent their priestly vows against “shedding blood” through one of the most absurd loopholes I’ve ever heard of. If you know what blunt force trauma can do to bone and soft tissues, you know it ain’t bloodless.

Despite this close association with Crusades-era Catholicism, clerics also filled in for other sorts of priests or holy figures. In the early days this was mostly limited to the vaguely Greco-Roman, very henotheistic depiction of polytheism depicted in in D&D. But as printed D&D material expanded and covered a wider range of real-world mythology as well as fantasy tropes, the clerical umbrella would also widen. Keep that in mind going forward.

The full list of Cleric titles is Acolyte (1), Adept (2), Village Priest (3), Vicar (4), Curate (5), Bishop (6), Lama (7), and Patriarch (8). Patriarch is also the title for any cleric of 9th or 10th level. Most of these are real positions taken from various denominations of Christianity, with the rather visible exception of Lama, (which is a title that originates in Tibetan Buddhism and merely indicates a “teacher”).

At least, those are the titles for heroic Clerics on the side of Law, one of the three moral alignments in D&D that were inspired by the cosmologies of Poul Anderson and to a lesser extent Michael Moorcock.

The way the DNA from those two cosmologies mixed to inspire part of D&D’s deserves an entire essay of its own, but here I will simplify it greatly: Law is shorthand for order, civilization, community, honor, the Greater Good, and all of that, whereas Chaos is synonymous with hyper-individuality, selfishness, cruelty, destruction, insanity, and diabolic evil. Neutrality between them is mild indifference or naturalism at best, and an obnoxious brand of both-sidesy centrism at worst.

Back in OD&D there were no Neutral Clerics, at least not above 6th level. They must pick a side in the cosmic battle between Law and Chaos, and stick with it. Clerics of Law are just plain Clerics, whereas Clerics of Chaos are referred to as Anti-Clerics.

Anti-Clerics exemplify the early D&D understanding that Chaos = Evil & Destruction. They are overwhelmingly depicted as villains who consort with monsters and the undead. They worship malicious gods or demons. They use the same list of spells as regular Clerics, only perverted and reversed.

Reversible spells are spells that can have their effects inverted; a reversed Cure Light Wounds spell deals 1d6+1 damage rather than healing it, a Protection from Evil spell becomes Protection from Good, etc. Therefore, an Anti-Cleric is one whose nature is not to heal or aid others. They can only harm, curse, spread darkness and disease, and otherwise do villainous things.

Because of this, the Anti-Cleric level titles are as follows: Evil Acolyte, Evil Adept, Shaman, Evil Priest, Evil Curate, Evil Bishop, Evil Lama, Evil High Priest.²

Every single title in that list includes the descriptor “Evil” except for Shaman, which implies that shamans are automatically evil and chaotic within the fiction of OD&D, to the point of not needing such a qualifier. The shaman of D&D started off as nothing more than an evil shadow of a 3rd-level cleric, synonymous with the spooky robed cultists lurking in the shadows, waiting for low-level adventurers to come along and foil their vague but undoubtedly nefarious plans.

Think of the creepy schmucks from the 1970 novella The Eye of Argon as a literary example of this kind of shaman-as-cultist. Or don’t. Maybe just don’t. The awful writing in that story is funny at first, but it wears on you kind of quick. There’s also a lot more male slut-shaming in that story than your average sword & sorcery romp.

What jumps out at me about this is that the first-ever appearance of shamans in D&D was kind of a crap deal, all told. They were exclusively villains unless you were consciously running a mixed or all-evil party, with nothing meaningful to differentiate them from other priests except class level.

On the other hand, it’s kind of hilarious that some form of shaman was technically playable long before many other iconic D&D classes were first printed. This was before paladins, rangers, and bards. Heck, even the thief class didn’t exist yet!

I don’t mean to suggest that this naming convention was done with malicious intent. In all likelihood, Gary and/or Arneson were just struggling to come up with enough synonyms for all the lists they made for themselves, and they really didn’t give much thought to how shaman (or any other title) was being used in this context, except in terms of what sounded like a proper escalation in power and prestige from the last.

But intentional or not, this little list helped set the tone for how shamans would appear in D&D for years to come. They put the 'spooky' in spirits & spookiness from day one.

Other OD&D Shamans

Other than that cameo in the first booklet, shamans didn’t appear much in OD&D or its first-party supplements:

Pictish Shamans from R.E. Howard’s Conan universe are given a monster stat block in Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes where they are described again as evil priests, and given the spellcasting power of Lamas.³

A few early issues of the Dragon and Dungeon magazines that were directly written by Gary & Co reference shamans, though not in much depth, and about half of those shamans are actually android faux-mystic charlatans from Metamorphosis Alpha.⁴

I’m actually surprised that this was the closest thing to the “shaman-as-charlatan” trope that I found in my research. This flavor of shaman stereotype is portrayed in media as nothing more than a self-interested huckster using their mysticism to browbeat their superstitious tribespeople, who are invariably depicted as too gullible and primitive to recognize the smoke-and-mirrors act.

Part of that is a holdover from colonialism, but I get the feeling part of it is also informed by the experiences of naïve modern Westerners who got conned by the global industry of plastic shamans that cropped up in the wake of said colonialism.

Oh, and while we’re off topic, let’s talk about druids real quick.

Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry (1976)

Another important foundation for this project is the Druid class, which first debuted two years after OD&D in Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry. Technically they first appeared in the original Greyhawk booklet as a sort of hybrid cleric/magic-user NPC with limited shapeshifting, but Wizardry is where they became playable.

The Druid began as a Neutral sub-class of the Cleric, which as mentioned earlier did not exist in the base game. They are priests of Nature, more concerned with plants and animals than their fellow humans (as all druids were human back in the day). They tend to stay aloof from mortal matters, protect forests and other areas of great natural importance, and strike against despoilers with a vengeance.⁵

Theirs is an identity that has gone virtually unchanged over the last 40+ years through so many iterations of the game, among so many other classes that have gone through major thematic changes, such as the shaman(s) we will be discussing. I can’t tell if the strong and stable identity of the druid class is in spite of or because of the hyperspecific-yet-obscure nature of druids in real life.

Historically, druids were the elite members of a priestly class found in many Iron Age Celtic societies. We don’t know a ton about their functions or rites because what little written evidence of them that we have comes from Roman elites, who had it in their interest to smear the druids, because they were kind of trying to conquer the Celtic peoples at the time. Gaius Julius Caesar personally got in on the dunking-on-druids game, and his account of the druids is the most famous as a result. He played up the human sacrifice that may or may not have occurred in Continental Celtic cultures, and made them seem as nefarious and mysterious as was convenient for him.⁶

Modern archaeology has given us a somewhat more nuanced view of the druids, but there’s still so much we don’t know. And that knowledge vacuum allowed early fiction writers to ascribe whatever the hell they wanted to druids, up to and including the forest magic and animal transformations so iconic to druid character classes today.

The reason I bring druids up is because the trope of a nature-priest has, at times, a lot of overlap with the fantasy idea of a shaman. Because of this, later iterations of the shaman that we’ll see will often have some amount of DNA from the druid- a sort of thematic cross-pollination that I find intriguing.

I think it also explains why shamans have never had the same kind of presence and identity as other classes in D&D: with the distinct flavors of cleric and druid cemented very early on, shamans often occupy an edge of the Venn Diagram between them. I think that goes a long way toward explaining why shamans only ever appear in splatbooks or sequels to core materials, when they appear in an edition at all.

Original D&D and its supplements stayed in print until ‘79, but by then it had been overtaken by newer versions of D&D that were released as it became a popular and recognizable brand across America. 

Next up, we will look at how D&D branched as a property, and the long-term consequences that had.

Or you can click here to return to the Shamans in D&D archive.

¹ Arneson, Dave & Gary Gygax. Dungeons & Dragons Volume I: Men & Magic. 1974. P. 16.

² Men & Magic, P. 34.

³ Kuntz, Robert, James Ward. Dungeons & Dragons Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes. 1976. P. 47-48.

⁴ For those who don’t know, Metamorphosis Alpha was a science fiction RPG about space colonists and mutants on a generational spaceship in the far future. It was also published by TSR, and its 1st edition heavily utilized OD&D rules like ability scores and its combat system. Excerpts from the campaign played by Gygax and his son sometimes appeared in early issues, back when the magazines catered to pulp and sci-fi as much as to fantasy.

⁵ Blume, Brian, Gary Gygax. Dungeons & Dragons Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry. 1976. P. 1-2.

⁶ Gaius Julius Caesar. Commentarii de Bello Gallico. 58-49 BCE. Trans. McDevitte, W. A., W. S. Bohn. 1859. Book VI.

Spirits & Spookiness: A History of Shamans in D&D

An explanation, justification, and archive for my ongoing survey of the depictions of shamans and shamanism throughout the history of Dungeons & Dragons. Scroll down to the bottom to skip the cruft and get to the posts.

The Un-Pivot to Video

A few years ago I got the idea to try and start a YouTube channel, partially in emulation of the video essayists I put on a pedestal so much, and partly so I could hop on that sweet, sweet 15¢ a month ad revenue gravy train. So I bought a microphone, downloaded some software, and started writing a script.

Obviously it never worked out because I don't have any production or editing skills or on-mic charisma, and I can't speak for more than 2 minutes without the fire station or car wash across the street exploding into background static. But the script for what was to be my inaugural video was more than half-written, and I haven't deleted it from Google Docs yet.

That video was going to be about shamans. Specifically, the portrayal of shamans and shamanism throughout the history of official (and semi-official) Dungeons & Dragons publications.

I've been obsessed with shamans ever since they first appeared to me in early 2000s pop-fantasy games and visual media. Usually they were mangled beyond all recognition of their origins, but I still found them interesting for what they were. Over time that interest led me to research the reality behind them and come to a fuller appreciation of the character archetype and real-world religious practices both- which gives me some faint hope that comically historically-inaccurate movies are not the societal doom I've always feared they are.

From the surprisingly early appearance of the concept right at the game's inception all the way through the '80s, '90s, and early 21st century, shamans appear haphazardly and without a consistent class identity like clerics or wizards enjoy. Yet they keep popping up throughout D&D's history as generations of writers revisit the concept to tweak, fiddle, or completely transform it again and again.

I find that story really compelling, and not just because it lies at an intersection between my fixations on history, fantasy games, and real world mythology. There's something tantalizing about shamanism and animism through the eyes of a lot of Western fantasy media that undeniably has an Orientalist aspect, but it can't be entirely explained away with just that. There's a complex relationship at play here that's worth exploring. And I figured I'd try, in a medium that is more conducive to going back and correcting mistakes than video, where everything is written in digital stone barring a highly disruptive reupload.

So I'm taking the old script and editing and carving it up into chunks that you can read at your leisure, rather than strapping in and listening to my nasally caffeine voice for I-don't-know-how-many combined hours.

This project freely weaves in and out of the history of D&D as a whole as well, so you might pick up a couple of fun facts along the way, like behind-the-scenes legal battles or Gary Gygax's coke habit.

Fun stuff!

Disclaimer

A quick disclaimer before we get into it: I am not a trained anthropologist. I went to school for historical studies, and while I might have familiarity with the ethnographic histories of cultures where shamanism can be found, that does not mean anything I say here is a replacement for an up-to-date professional anthropological take on any of the complex topics I bring up.

Note also that a strictly academic perspective cannot fill in for the perspectives of the indigenous peoples who are so often muffled when they are written about from the outside by scholars and fiction writers alike. Those too are perspectives which I lack as a shut-in of mostly Euro-American upbringing (with just a dash of Puerto Rican for seasoning, if I’m being generous).

I bring these points up not to shield myself from criticism, but to welcome it- I'm bound to make mistakes or misrepresent things. My sources are often general, and sometimes decades old (but at least most of them are of the 21st century). I'm a novice writing about two intersecting interests, and I want to be as accurate and open to discussion as possible.

Another structural bit to bring up ahead of time is that I will be mostly limiting myself to official, first-party D&D publications, whoever that party happens to be at that moment in history. I will briefly touch on magazines like Dragon and Dungeon when relevant, but if I allowed the scope to expand much past that point, this project would start to bloat with a lot of redundancies. Not to mention it would never be finished.

Let's Go!

Now that I’ve thoroughly disqualified myself, I feel comfortable getting into it.

We have a long road ahead, and lots of academia to discuss before we get to the actual fantasy bits, because this is my show and I want to be thorough. I'm publishing two posts to start off, but after that you can probably expect a new chapter every few weeks or once-per-month until we hit modern times, and I run out of material. You will see the word “shaman” written so many times that it will cease to be a word with meaning and become just letters and sounds.

So join me for a ramble as I look through past and present presentations of the shaman and shamanism throughout the many eras of Dungeons & Dragons, the World’s Oldest RPG.

Or whatever stupid prestige euphemism Wizards of the Coast is trying to get us to call it to guard their precious copyright these days. Honestly, it's like there’s a bigger taboo against writing the letters “D&D” than there is against speaking of the Devil, or Candleja-

Spirits & Spookiness: A History of Shamans in D&D

Nomad Shaman by Jason Engle,
Dragonlance: Age of Mortals

Entries in chronological order:

• Preface: Etymologies & Definitions of "Shaman"
• OD&D (1974-1979)
• Interlude: Basic & Advanced D&D Split (1977)
• BECMI Boxed Sets (1977-1991)

Bridgetown on Bundle of Holding

For the handful of readers who don't use any form of social media, I wanted to let you know that my book Bridgetown (as well as a bunch of other great books) are part of the latest Bundle of Holding for TROIKA! 

There are 10 days left at the time of posting. Can't believe I took this long to make a post here about it!

Bundle of Holding is a lot like your other electronic product bundling websites; grab a bunch of related games or books or other pieces of media all at once for a crazy-good discount. This comes with the added bonus of everything sold by BH being DRM-free, and a chunk of the proceeds going to charity.

Less than $10US gets you a $90 value including the full core Troika book line, Swann Castle, Goblin Mail, and of course Bridgetown. If you spend $19.98, you get another 6 books added to the bundle including big names like The Big Squirm and Slate & Chalcedony. So if you've been waiting to jump into Troika or want to gift-bomb a friend of yours who might be interested in it, now's a great time to start or expand a collection.

My cowriter TheLawfulNeutral and I are also splitting the profits Bridgetown makes 50/50 because our publisher David over at Technical Grimoire is pretty cool, so buy the bundle if you want to support us in making... whatever the heck you call the stuff we make!

The Collector

I think I've mentioned here or elsewhere that I listen to a lot of dungeon synth. It occupies the chunk of musical bandwidth I have leftover when I'm done listening to all the Mongolian throat singing, lo-fi jazz, parody covers, royalty-free rock tracks or themes to anime I've never watched that I hear in the backgrounds of video essays, and whatever TikTok videos my SO sends me.

Dungeon synth has its origins in the harsh and sometimes hateful black metal and dark ambient music scenes of the '90s. But the genre has since grown, matured, and experimented far beyond that to encompass a huge range of subgenres with porous and overlapping margins, as the case eventually is with all types of music. Whether you need to unwind to the sounds of nature, curl up with some tea to some cozy wintery noises, find a soundtrack for your tabletop game tonight, take an inadvisable amount of substances and mentally transcend to outer space, or just be a neurodivergent little boy with a fixation on Tolkien for a while, dungeon synth has a flavor for you.

Recently, I've been listening to a creator called Witch Bolt, who seems to have exploded into existence and popularity all of a sudden after releasing like 7 albums within the span of a few months earlier this year. In fact, in the time I've spent writing this post I had to go back and add that they just released another album.

Witch Bolt is decidedly in the ambient/nature synth subgenre, but each album has a unique flavor that I've thus far enjoyed. I'd say I like them almost as much as DIM, who might be my favorite artist in the scene. Shoutout to Tales Under The Oak and all their froggy excellence, too.

Witch Bolt's most recent second-most-recent album is The Collector, which combines moody soundscapes with some very delicate instrumental touches I keep coming back to.

It's also got a pretty solid album cover.

But I'm not just here to talk about the music. The Collector has a short description attached which, alongside the track titles, turns it into a concept album with a plot of sorts. It reads as follows:

"Witch Bolt's seventh release, The Collector, is the story of a nomadic figure navigating the boundaries that separate the planes of existence. The Collector gathers overlooked fragments of nature and humanity, bestowing upon them a renewed honor and purpose.

Through their mystical craftsmanship, they reveal the inherent dignity concealed within the humble.

The Collector scatters these creations, weapons, armor, treasures, imbued with enchantments across the land and in the paths of those deemed worthy. The Collector is a beacon of hope and renewal."

I was smitten by this concept right away. From playing the part of lonely, wandering god to a being associated with the lucky discovery of magic items, the Collector feels tailor-made to appear in someone's tabletop campaign. Which got me wondering how there aren't more gods like that in existing games where roving adventurers rolling on loot tables in weird and out-of-the-way places is a fundamental pillar of the play experience. Certainly there are hundreds of deities of luck, or craftsmanship, or wanderers, but you almost never get all three of those portfolios in one.

So, I decided to fiddle around and rectify that by doing a little god writeup of my own.

I'm doing this using a fun and flexible format I stole from As the Gods Demand, a system-agnostic and level-less divine magic supplement where anyone can become a cleric. It's by the excellent art-friend and bagel gremlin Charles Ferguson-Avery, and you should definitely check it out if you like more eldritch and inhuman takes on tabletop deities.

But considerably less spooky and severe than them is our friend of the day, the Collector.

The Collector, Beacon of Hope & Renewal

There once lived a quiet, gentle, and very shy thing. Their zest for life was only matched by their unease around other living things. They wished to see the world, but not to be seen. So they wandered in secret, keeping to backroads and the silent gulfs between realms.

But even out there, amidst the beauty of the forgotten and the gracefully crumbling, they still happened upon other souls. They came in search of quiet solitude, a balm for their woes amid a life of hardship and pain. But in seeking out eternal stillness, they stirred that little thing's heart to action. A yearning to help filled them until it threatened to burst, and so they poured it out into the rubble and ruin of that forgotten place.

To their surprise, that tender care imbued the things they touched with strength, dignity, and renewed purpose. Or perhaps, they merely helped bring those innate qualities back up to the surface, through the layers of time and neglect. The wandering thing went about gathering these blessings together, before scattering them in their wake, just ahead of those lost and lonesome souls.

A quiet joy like never before filled them, and they at last knew their own purpose. Even now, the Collector wanders the spheres in search of forgotten things in need of a home, and forgotten beings in need of hope.

The Borrowers

The Collector has no organized clergy, and those who behave as priests would never call themselves such. Instead, they have admirers. People who long ago caught the Collector's eye, and who took notice of them in turn. They see the worth and beauty in what the nomad does, and seek to aid their cause however they can.

So they wander the land as pilgrims and sightseers in search of overlooked places, things, and people. They carry with them the Collector's gifts, knowing that they keep them in their possession only as a passing thing, until the item's true purpose is revealed by time and circumstance. Then, they secret their treasures into the paths of the worthy-in-need. In short they are not keepers, but mere Borrowers.

Initiation: Gifts Left Behind

To become a Borrower, you must first catch the Collector's attention, and then come to the realization that they exist at all. This is easier said than done, considering how discreet and willing to let others take credit for their acts the Collector is. But once that is all said and done, the act of cementing one's friendship with the Collector is quite straightforward: sacrifice something precious.

This item can't merely be powerful, magical, or materially valuable. It must hold great personal significance to you- both you the character, and you the player. It must represent something about your life, experiences, and/or worldview. Family heirlooms, mementos, childhood toys, or tried-and-true pieces of equipment with their own inferred personalities and nicknames are common selections.

You must hide this object in an out-of-the-way but not completely inaccessible location, such as tucked into a hollow in a tree stump off a dirt road, or buried in the earth of a shallow cave mouth. In time the Collector will find your offering and consider it carefully, before imbuing it with new qualities and leaving it in the hands of a future someone who dearly needs it.

You will never know what your sacrifice does for that stranger, and they will never know it was you who aided them. Nor will they ever know the history of this item or the way it was cherished. Instead they will give it a whole new life, and in doing so kindle that beacon of hope and renewal, to be cast into the future in turn.

Such is faith.

Daily Invocation: A Quiet Prayer

• Do not hoard resources or possessions from those in need.
• Maintain humility in the face of gifts and good fortune.
• Do not reveal the Collector's existence to outsiders.
• Live life humbly and surreptitiously.

Initial Miracle: Journey Home

Borrowers are wanderers who have no one place they call home; rather, home is wherever they are most needed.

You may divine the location of the nearest forgotten little thing. The miracle can specifically look for an abandoned location like a ruin, old den, or shrine, a long-lost object, or a lonesome creature, or it can look for any/all of the above. You know the direction and distance to your target "as the crow flies", but not the exact path needed to reach it, such as through a maze.

Rites

I Pass

Sometimes, we are what the Collector places in the paths of others.

You must stop wandering long enough to help someone through a particularly dark time in their life. Merely rescuing them from a dangerous situation is not enough; you must come to know them and their struggles, befriend them, and help them to rise above their hardships. Then you must let go, and allow the friendship to conclude so that you each may return to your respective lives. When you bid farewell to one another with finality and carry with you all the bittersweet memories and experiences into the future, the rite is complete.

Miracle: In Praise of Gentleness

You may sooth the target's woes, removing all natural or supernatural fear, doubt, anger, or other negative emotions from them and replacing them with a contemplative calm that grants the target Advantage on their next Saving Throw related to the mind, emotions, mental state, etc.

You may instead target two or more groups who are about to come to blows with this miracle, in which case they are dissuaded from physical violence for a number of hours equal to your Hit Dice.

Wandering Artisan

In emulation of our foulweather benefactor, we furnish the worthy in need with the fruit of our sweat, labor, and love.

You must craft an object of surpassing quality for one of your skill level; if you are a novice at a given craft it must be competent, if you're a master it must be exceedingly high quality, if creating magic items is well within your ability it must be truly extraordinary, etc. This step may take months or more by itself, and call for you to find and obtain rare materials.

Once it is completed, the item must be anonymously donated to a worthy cause or person whom you believe will use it for good. You must be present to witness them doing so, but may not betray the item's origins while in their company. The rite is complete when the bearer of your gift accomplishes (or at least tries their best at) a feat that aligns with the Collector's goals.

Miracle: Treasures Left

You may spend some of the goodwill you've earned with the Collector to receive a short "advance" of sorts on their gifts. Choose Providence or Luck:

Providence allows you to stumble upon just the sort of mundane or low-magic item you'd need in a given encounter for a specific purpose, such as a healing potion to save a downed companion or a replacement weapon for one that's snapped. The item lasts until it is consumed or the encounter ends, at which point it vanishes when you take your eyes off it.

Luck allows you to reroll once on a random loot table and take whichever option you prefer. Note that the referee doesn't have to disclose everything about the two choices (curses, specific magical effects, etc).

Extremist/Heretical Rite: Humble Harvest

These are the Collector's gifts. They are given, but never earned. If someone abuses them, is it not our duty to intercede?

You must dispense with the Collector's gentle discretion for a time, and take the fight to those who would take advantage of their kindness. This person must be a tyrant of some sort who has enriched or empowered themselves using magical items that ultimately came from the Collector. Merely defeating them is not enough; you must see their every means of effecting evil systematically dismantled and neutralized.

You must personally disenchant or destroy the misused item(s) in their presence while explaining to them precisely how powerless and wrong they are. Once the former tyrant is thoroughly broken and made an example of, the rite is complete. Whether or not they can be convinced to make amends is outside the scope of this rite.

Miracle: Desolation

You may permanently snuff out all enchantments and effects on a single item held by the target, rendering it a completely nonmagical object. If the item is a powerful artifact (or other object of huge plot significance that would cause your referee a real headache to destroy just like that), its powers are instead suppressed for a number of weeks equal to your Hit Dice.

Favor: Honored Things

• Encourage others to give and share resources freely.
• Disperse ill-gotten hoards, with force if necessary.
• Undermine those who deny others peace and dignity.
• Pass another object of great value on to the Collector.