The Book of Shamans (1978)

Until recently, I was ignorant of just how many games and game-adjacent products besides Dungeons & Dragons already existed in the 1970s.

Before D&D reached mainstream recognition in the '80s, countless small independent creators were publishing zines and digest-sized books about gaming in fictional worlds. They ran the gamut of science-fiction, horror, military fiction, and vaguely medieval European fantasy, but they were all typically lumped under the umbrella of Fantasy Role-Playing, or FRP. The term FRP was broadly used throughout the '70s and '80s until enough people knew what the heck an RPG was that we collectively shifted over to using that instead.

Even more surprising to me is that among these dingy little cardstock volumes were some of the first third-party rules supplements in the hobby. After the first wave of legal spats with TSR, most of these books erased any name reference to D&D or similar games, but it was usually pretty obvious what game and edition you were meant to use them with. A rare few were self-consciously system-agnostic products meant to be employed with any game on the market; or at least any game that chiefly used a d20 or d100, as the case often was.

To close out one of my most weirdly productive blogging months in years, I want to share one of those supplements with my Burrowers today. I chose it because it is an almost suspiciously convenient confluence of my interests: The Book of Shamans.

Pictured: Not mine, because I don't have
~$200 to gamble on an eBay purchase.

The Book Itself

The Book of Shamans was written by Ed Lipsett, illustrated by Robert N. Charrette, and published in 1978 by Little Soldier Games, which was at the time an imprint of Phoenix Games. It was the last in the Book of... series of supplementals published by Little Soldier before it and Phoenix went out of business, as so many small publishers of the time did. The books were later collected and reprinted in 1983 in the 54-page The Fantasy Gamer's Compendium by Gamescience, which to my surprise is still in business. That collection is the only reason I'm able to read this book today, thanks to some kind soul who photocopied and uploaded the whole thing.

The pages of this book are thin, so thin that you can see ghosts of the text and black-and-white illustrations hiding on the other side. Even without a physical copy in front of me, I can perfectly imagine the feeling of the paper beneath my fingertips; the same as the pages in that old Webster's dictionary with the tearing blue cover that's collecting dust somewhere in my closet right now. Perhaps it's good I don't have a physical copy, or else my scrabbly little fingers so prone to creasing and wrinkling things might rip the pages.

There was apparently a nicer Revised & Expanded edition of the compendium released in 1990 that I don't have access to, but the actual differences in text seem to be minimal, so I don't have any qualms about carrying on with the first edition.

The Classes

The Book of Shamans offers a pair of alternate character classes for players, and rules on how to play them; The shamanic Warrior, and the Shaman proper. They are both members of a tribal society steeped in the natural world and the world of spirits that intersects it, able to call upon the powers of both to overcome challenges faced by their tribes, or their own souls.

Prospective members of either class must first undergo an extensive vision quest. First they fast and undergo a purification ritual, before journeying into the lonely wilderness for weeks on end while working to clear their mind of all worldly thoughts. If they're ready, a vision will appear to the would-be shaman and reveal their animal spirit, and their True Name. The spirit then tears their soul away from their body in a flight through the soul plane that ends in the so-called "spirit-of-spirits" weighing the shaman's soul to decide its fate.

Once that fate has been decided, the shaman's soul is placed in a nest in a seven-branched world tree of sorts, where it meditates and shrinks under the care of the shaman's animal spirit, who is now a sort of "foster-father" to the shaman. Once the soul has shrunken down to the size of a doll after months of meditation, the shaman's body and soul are reunited and they return to their tribe, where they may be inducted into a brotherhood or shamanic society if one exists in their culture.

As esoteric and involved as that all sounds, the actual mechanics of the quest only involve a few rolls on some tables during character creation.

The Warrior is essentially the Fighter class of D&D, with the addition of a shamanic animal spirit whom the warrior can call upon for assistance once per year. This assistance is determined by rolling on a d100 table that includes summoning the animal to your aid, chanting to make everyone nearby believe your words, chanting to control the weather, or getting a sweet new magic weapon made out of natural materials like bone or stone.

This rendering of aid assumes the character rolled well enough on the table for a vision quest to acquire that animal spirit: failing the quest means you have to wait 1 month before trying again. Failing to see a vision is also a traumatizing experience that requires an Intelligence check to avoid committing suicide over, meaning that you can theoretically die during character creation if you roll poorly enough.

The Shaman takes the rite of passage a step farther. They roll for an animal spirit the same way, but only after sacrificing all but 6 of their Intelligence and Psychic Ability, an ability score used in the preceding The Book of Sorcery. The reduction in Intelligence seems to be an implicit sacrifice to the spirits after having their soul and body remade, since shamans can also transfer points from their Dexterity score to Strength and/or Constitution upon graduating into the role. It still comes across as a mechanical way of enforcing the perceived primitivism or hidebound adherence to traditions that the book paints shamans with, though. Adding to that idea is the fact that it's almost impossible for shamans to learn to read here. (As an aside, it also makes rolling on the animal spirit table even more risky, because if they fail, their Int check vs. Suicide is now a 6-in-20 at best.)

Any excess ability score points you're left with after reducing Int and Psy to 6 are transferred to yet another brand-new ability score, this one unique to the shaman: mana. Mana is the resource that shamans spend to use their magical abilities, instead of traditional Vancian spell slot preparation.

That Big Blue Bar, Mana

On the topic of Mana, it's a good time to talk about this book's influences.

Most of you probably know 'mana' from fiction. It can be used as the name for a magical force, a blue energy meter, or part of the title of several video game franchises. Most people (myself included) didn't know about the term's origins or how it came to be used so ubiquitously in video and tabletop games until fairly recently, and I'm glad that lack of knowledge is reversing course. I'll still take a second to soapbox about it to you though.

Mana is the name for a weirdly diverse range of religious and mythological concepts from across the world, including an old spelling of the Biblical and Quranic manna, a conception of the soul in Mandaeism, and an alternative name for the Finnish underworld. But the usage that made its way into popular culture is the Mana of the Polynesian and Melanesian cultures of the Pacific.

I don't want to risk falling into the trap of pop-anthropological misrepresentation that landed us in this situation to begin with, so I'll be broad: traditionally, mana is a supernatural force that permeates the universe in  many Oceanian worldviews. Sometimes it is a power that can exist in nature, but sometimes it can also be cultivated within oneself, and the possession of mana can confer qualities like authority or strength, making it a component of traditional power structures. It can mean a lot of things; the linguistic uses of mana are almost as diverse as the Oceanic cultures who have a word for it.

Of course, when a couple of Western academics learned about the concept in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they found that with a little bending, it could be slotted rather neatly into a theory they were developing. Anthropologists of the era were looking for the universal origin of religion that explained what they saw as a linear progression from simple or primitive beliefs toward complex, civilized beliefs. The idea of mana as a latent spiritual power recognized by so many cultures over such a large area of the planet caused some to believe that mana was the first step in that chain; a kind of primeval pre-animism that they began to connect with separate ideas from elsewhere around the world, like the Haudenosaunee concept of orenda. Needless to say, this theory is kind of garbage and full of false equivocation and Eurocentrism.

Thankfully, the inherent bias and absurdity of a linear evolution of human religion was eventually recognized and those theories were largely abandoned by academia. But by that point the idea of mana as magical power had been injected into pop-culture, and the fiction writers of the mid-to-late 20th century took it and ran with it. Thus today we get mana bars, blue potions, Secret of Mana, etc. and so on. D&D might well have done the same, had Arneson, Gygax, & co. not been infatuated with Vancian magic at the time. 

If you'd like to know more or see the actual bibliography backing these ideas up, I first learned about the subject from this older ReligionForBreakfast episode.

The Book of Shamans fell right into that era of fantasy fiction, and it shows. As I and the few other places online that've reviewed this book like to point out, you don't see many RPG books with bibliographies these days. It's a short list of 9 sources related to world religions and shamanism in some way, including a Funk & Wagnalls' dictionary of mythology, a history of shamanism by that one Romanian fascist who just kinda made things up while he was hiding from the communists, two books by Joseph Campbell (including Hero With a Thousand Faces, naturally), and two texts on "American Indians", among others. And while I think the list is flawed (no indigenous voices, spotty empirical evidence, the aforementioned Iron Guard-lite doing vibes-as-history while hanging around postwar Paris), I still find the writer's effort to ground the fiction in a well-researched and plausible mythological basis admirable. It's more than I think you could expect of an amateur RPG writer in the '70s. We should do more of that, where it's both appropriate for the story being told and responsible toward the people experiencing it. Just, ya know, do it better.

But I was talking about mechanics, wasn't I?

Shamanizing

The shaman class uses a mana pool similar to the power points used in AD&D's psionics, although thankfully they aren't as annoying to calculate as 1E psionics rules made them. Each ability (not explicitly referred to as spells, but effectively acting that way) cost varying amounts of mana to cast. There are 27 abilities in total, divided up by power level from 0 to 9. Each typically has an elaborate ritual, magical implements, or other necessary prep work involved, so you can't cast most of them in the middle of combat unlike a priest or wizard.

The book repeatedly places shamans in contrast with the more established clerics and magic-users of D&D and other games of the time. They contrast both for the mechanical differences in the way they exercise their powers, and for the ways they exist in the fiction. Clerics and magic-users are "normal" and "civilized" and get their magic from a known source which is supported by a huge corpus of arcane or religious knowledge to rely upon. Shamans, meanwhile, embody the noble savage stereotype. They get their powers from the strength of their own soul, intuitive knowledge of nature, and direct contact with the spirits. They're outsiders to the existing magical paradigm whom nobody can really pin down, and that breeds a lot of mutual distrust between them and Vancian casters.

I would have liked it if the book described the relationship between shamans and druids, which I think would be a lot more nuanced. But that might have been signposting a little too hard that this book is literally just a D&D class masquerading as a system-agnostic supplement at a time when TSR was first earning its chops in suing over copyright infringement.

The effects of the shaman's powers are all over the place, both mechanically and inspirationally. Every belief system on every continent that can be glossed as "shamanism" has a gamified spell or effect somewhere in this list attached to it in some way, although you have to go digging deep in the bibliography to find a lot of the source myths. A smattering of Native American beliefs are the most visible, but there are also a significant number of Aboriginal Australian influences, as well as those from "shamans" from across Afro-Eurasia. There are also a few other concepts thrown in from other belief systems like various ancient paganisms or Greek philosophy of all things, for good measure.

There is a massive academic debate over the proper definition(s) for shamanism that has been raging for decades. Eventually I will touch on it, once I've completed one of my biggest background projects to date. But unless I want to double the length of this post after just finishing with a history of mana, I better suffice it to say that The Book of Shamans uses the very loose, broad, and vague definition of shaman that you see in many pieces of fiction, as well as older anthropology. It's used more as a bundle of connotations to animism (another controversial term), tribal cultures, "primitive" peoples, and a certain religious aesthetic than it is used with a clear definition in mind.

The one common thread through all of these abilities (besides mana) is the theme of ritual purity. Shamans often have to spend days fasting or otherwise purifying their bodies, and many spell components or creations can be ruined forever by a single touch from another living being. It encourages the shaman through game mechanics to be secretive and standoffish even among their own allies, because even a well-meaning accident can destroy that bird feather cloak you spent literally a year making and gods damn it Todd, look don't touch!

There are surprisingly low-level abilities to challenge someone to a soul duel, or to control a being using its true name. At higher levels, shamans can divine the future with scapulomancy, cure disease using a mannikin, astral project into the netherworld, fly like a bird, retrieve the souls of the dead, transfer their own souls into other people, clay dolls, or their own shadows to avoid damage, etc. Most of them are poorly suited to the minute-to-minute rhythms of dungeon crawling, but can be extremely powerful in a larger campaign where one can use them to control and negate entire encounters or plot beats the way a 3E Batman Wizard might. It makes up for the fact that shamans gain hit points as magic-users in whatever game they're used for, despite starting off as 'warriors'.

... Did I mention the solid quartz intestines yet? That's also a thing.

Shamans don't get the once-a-year boon that Warriors do. Instead, they roll for extra mana points at creation, landing them on one of the branches of the spirit tree. Members of the highest 6th and 7th branches, a 96-99 and 00 on a d100 roll respectively, get the highest bonus of +6 or +7 to mana. They also get their intestines remade in quartz by the spirits. This is done so that the shaman is always in touch with the earth that grants them their power.

I thought this was 100% invented by the writer, but as it turns out it's a real belief, or at least it was written about as if it was one by Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen in their 1899 book Native Tribes of Central Australia. It's one facet of the beliefs surrounding the ritual passage of medicine men among the Arrernte (often written as Aranda) peoples of north-central Australia. Other aspects of that spiritual journey not included in The Book of Shamans is getting stabbed by spirit lances and having your tongue pierced wide enough to fit your pinky finger through the hole. I learned a thing.

Resource Management

Silicate digestive tract or no, mana regenerates at a rate of 1 point per every 12 or 24 hours, depending on if the shaman is standing on "home soil" or not. That's pretty slow for a resource that you gain 1d6 of per level but have to spend dozens or even hundreds of in order to use bigger abilities. Mana costs are further multiplied when you're trying to use abilities it in cities or when not in contact with natural earth or water. There are other means of acquiring mana, but they are... particular.

Probably the most versatile method is to carry extra mana on your person by collecting power objects. These are essentially batteries of mana created from spiritually significant remains of powerful foes that the shaman has slain using their powers (rather than plain old physical combat or letting someone else in the party get the killing blow). These trophies each hold up to 5 mana points which replenish every full moon on their own, which creates the first player resource economy designed around the lunar cycle that I've ever seen.

Does Werewolf: The Whatevering do something similar? I've never read anything by White Wolf.

Naturally, these power objects are also ruined if anyone other than the shaman touches them, so expect any high-level and well-established shaman to be extremely protective of their ever-growing hoard of claws, teeth, and fingers. I feel a weird sense of kinship with that last part, as someone who's had their baby teeth suspended in a jar of vodka on the shelf for decades.

The second method is less portable but possibly more powerful. The shaman may double or even triple their mana pool as long as they stay in physical contact with a place of great natural power. Because of how many shamanic abilities are used at a great distance or many days in advance of what they're being prepared for, this is actually a pretty fair deal that can lead to a lot of creativity beyond just the dramatic set-piece moments you'd expect to go down at a place of power in a shaman-focused game. There's no rule saying you can't permanently set up shop on one of these sites and use it as your base of operations after you find it, but I expect there'd be complications related to taboos, angering spirits, or keeping the site pure the longer someone inhabits it.

The third method is severe, and probably reserved only for emergencies. A shaman may sacrifice one of their limbs or both eyes. Obviously the shaman loses use of the sacrificed body parts in the physical world, but they retain full use of them on the soul plane, where they also enjoy 10 to 20 permanent bonus mana, depending on what was given up. No word on whether or not you could have someone regenerate the lost parts after the fact and keep the bonus mana, but I expect the spirits would frown on that.

The last way for shamans to gain extra mana is the most unexpectedly skeevy. You can permanently drain 1 point of mana from a person and add it to your pool by "sleeping with them" without the person or anyone else knowing it. At the same time, the book specifies that it can't be done using coercion or drugs, so I think the implication is that you just kind of lurk next to the person while they sleep like some kind of bogeyman or memetic sleep paralysis demon, rather than the sexual assault that the language of the text evokes? Not that that interpretation completely absolves it; it's still an act of explicitly gendered violence, with male shamans draining women of their mana and vice versa.

After doing this to a person 5 times they also die, so go ahead and add first degree murder next to serial breaking-and-entering and being a creep onto your list of possible charges if you go this route. I suppose it could make for an interesting murder mystery villain in a dark, low-fantasy game. Townsfolk keep waking up dead after reporting the feeling of being watched, friends and family find signs of burglary but nothing stolen, the current victim-in-progress is wasting away or seems almost metaphysically tired, etc. It's a very vampiric take on a shaman you don't often see.

You can also pool your mana together with other people by directly transferring it into another shaman. This can refill your depleted mana, or allow you to go over your normal maximum limit for "a few minutes". The time limit is brief, but can potentially allowing a group of shamans to work together to perform a ritual with a cost that far exceeds what any of them can do individually, which also makes for a great cinematic moment, whether you're part of the ritual or trying to stop it.

Uncommon Experiences

One last bit that sets the shaman apart from other classes, even its cousin the shamanic warrior, is how they can acquire the experience to grow in power.

AD&D 1E is the closest thing to a natural fit for the Book of... series, including Shamans. It was also adamant about keeping XP gain a factor of money pocketed and monsters murdered to the point of taking a quick aside on page 106 of the Player's Handbook to argue about it. It explicitly brings up all the ways in which the different classes 'realistically' should gain experience (fighters training, thieves being sneaky and skillful, magic-users plumbing the arcane, clerics doing their gods' work, etc.) and then rejects them as being downtime activities unsuitable for gaming. I personally see that as awful and backwards design, and several innovations in tabletop gaming over the last 20 to 30 years agree with me there, but Gary and company were resolute in their creative vision that D&D was a game of fighting and looting.

But even in '78, some folks didn't agree with that.

"The shaman gains experience at one half the rate of a fighter, but he also gets full experience for certain specialized tasks", as the book reads. The way I interpret that sentence is that when doing normal adventurer stuff they suffer a -50% XP penalty, and that sounds absolutely miserable and crushing to actually play through, like a multiclass demi-human with even less to show for it at low levels.

But, the book then offers a host of other actions taken during play that can result in a discrete XP award.

And wouldn't you know it, they all involve the shaman doing shamany stuff!

Shamans get XP for learning the true names of things, for traveling to the netherworld and back, for engaging in soul duels, crafting items like soul-eating stones and cloaks of flight, discovering natural places of power; they even earn XP if they transfer their soul into another body and their original body is destroyed. And all of these awards are given a suggested scale depending on how big the particular risk taken is. You're mechanically incentivized to play to your class's strengths and use the shaman's powers cleverly in order to keep up with the pack, and maybe even get ahead.

It's another nod toward shamans being weirdo underdogs and outsiders to the established game. It's also kind of like some primeval, fossilized ancestor of that PbtA mechanic where if you do something appropriate for your playbook, mark XP. And I find that so compelling that I don't completely hate it for requiring even more individual XP tabulation with percentile modifiers on top. The hate is there though- just a little bit.

Were I to run this class in anything I'd throw out the 50% penalty, keep the list of bonus XP objectives, and add in lists for all the other classes being played. I feel like it could only add to the possible fun and hijinks players get up to. At worst, they inch closer to 1,000,000 XP in a slightly shorter span of time that can't be measured on a geological scale.

Closing Thoughts

I'm always excited to read shaman class supplements for any system, and I'm glad that while in the process of getting hopelessly lost looking for the free PDF versions of the old Red Steel campaign setting (which you'll hear about from me soon), I happened to stumble into what might very well be the oldest shaman class in the hobby. I'd pick it apart and clean up the remains if ever I played it, but I suspect nobody from the time it was published would bat an eye at me doing that.

The Book of Shamans is another fascinating artifact of its time. Like many indie books from the era it has a lot of cool ideas with some occasionally very rough edges, indicative of that time when many decentralized scenes of gamers were still largely doing just whatever the hell came to mind, before the market was dominated by a few deeply ensconced names and types of games- before there even was a market, really.

I hate how we tend to describe the early phase of any given thing as the "Wild West of X" because it gives such an ahistorical impression of the Wild West, but the sentiment behind the saying is kind of appropriate here: there were few formal rules for making an RPG at the time, and as long as you didn't get sued over copyright, anything was free game with the chances of success or failure up in the air. But at the same time, the system this class most closely conforms to lets you see where things were already headed. It was far from preordained or inevitable, but still damn hard to shift the powers that be away from. D&D was already getting big, and the West was being "tamed". It makes me happy that we've still somehow wound up with a hobby that's more diverse than ever before.

I have to go look up modern scholarship on the Arrernte people now. The solid quartz intestines left me with so many questions.