Clubhouse Row (Part One: A Proper D&D Club)
Let us start with the most common reason for any of you reading this to entertain the idea of forming a Clubhouse: you want to foster a brotherhood of hobbyists devoted to fantastic adventure gaming.
The Game
That, in practice, means Dungeons & Dragons. Not the Current Edition, but the first (and, in retrospect, only) excellent one: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition.
“Not the Current Edition?”
No, not the Current Edition. The reason for sticking with AD&D1e is simple: it is a complete and comprehensive fantastic adventure game with just the three core manuals. Current Edition is a deliberately crippled product meant to induce user dependence upon the publisher to “fix” what is “broken”, in the same manner that videogame publishers now routinely push out broken product with mandatory Day One patches and (in all but name) mandatory expansions.1
The Clubhouse does not exist to promote Consumerism of any kind. It is hobbyist, not consumerist, and therefore the edition of the game that needs no consumerism for the product to work both as promised and as intended is the one that shall be preferred.
Only AD&D1e fits this criteria. There are few other viable options.2 In case you need a reminder, or you didn’t see this previously, Jon Mollison explained why in a video.
Which leads to the next part.
The Campaign
No commercial product of any kind is necessary. It may even be counter-productive.
There are two modes or tiers of play. You’re familiar with the dungeon exploration mode of play. The part that throws everyone off is that this is not the only one, and (as the #BROSR has found) it’s not even the most important or compelling one.
The dungeon delving is the side show to the real game, which is the contention between factions vying for dominance over the land. It is a wargame first and an adventure game second.
Specifically, it is a faction-based wargame where Player-vs-Player conflict is core to the game. AD&D1e handles this without needing supplements. The actions of the factions shape the setting, and smaller adventuring bands can take advantage of the liminal spaces between them (literal and metaphorical alike) to seek out their own objectives (often as not found in a dungeon somewhere).
That faction can be as small as an individual, or as large as a cosmic god-ruled empire, but for most we’re looking as kingdoms and tribes and their subsets. Maybe the odd city-state Republic here and there, but kingdoms dominate for very obvious reasons.
This may confuse prospects and members alike, which is why AD&D1e’s Dungeon Masters’ Guide has Appendix N. In that appendix is a list of the fantastic adventure literature that Gary Gygax stated was important to the game’s design, with some far more important than others.3
Which leads to the last element.
The Culture
A competent D&D Clubhouse makes certain that its membership read every single book listed in Appendix N. Every. Single. One.
The leadership of the Clubhouse encourages its members to read the whole corpus by every author listed in Appendix N, especially those long subjected to suppression after 1980 or otherwise thrown down the Memory Hole or deliberately misrepresented by the taste-makers.4
The leadership should also take measures to include the real history informing all of that literature, as it was often as fantastic as the fictional adventures themselves.5
A lot of the rules, procedures, and presumptions of AD&D1e come from this literature and it is this lost literacy and the cornerstone of culture it created that leads to all of the bad and wrong takes about the game, about the hobby, and about the medium. A competent Clubhouse makes remedying this lack part of its mission.6 They should also encourage members to read more such authors, such as those featured in Cirsova Magazine.
This is to be done via the establishment and maintenance of a private Clubhouse library, where members can read the literature and discuss it among themselves7
The Clubhouse also needs to have its members report their play activities in the form of Session Reports, where they write up the events of a session at the table where the other members (be they active in the campaign or not) can read it. This is an After Action Report, and the specifics of this practice should be specified in the rules of the Clubhouse.
The Clubhouse should make the effort for its members to teach each other Best Practices for things related to play such as map generation, tracking play actions, and so on because none of us are as smart as all of us. Iron Sharpens Iron.
The Clubhouse
Online: A Discord server, with a minimum of a chat channel for session play, a dicebot in the chat channel, and a voice channel for players to use in-session. I recommend a few other chat channels, including (for most) a Read Only channel for the Library function. Use the Role Function to strictly define Permissions for the members, and do not allow anyone but the shot-caller to do server invitations.
For paid memberships, Patreon has Discord access as a known feature; Subscribestar, Ko-Fi, Buy Me A Coffee, and (with more work due to the need to manually handle it all) Paypal can handle the dues payments; the former two are best for tiered memberships. If you incorporate Substack into the online presence, Substack paid memberships may also be used to grant server access but it needs to be done manually.8
In-Person: You need a securable climate-controlled main room with securable storage space within as a minimum viable physical plant. The Library is in that room, along with play aides for session play. Paid memberships can be handled as above, with the difference that allowing independent access (i.e. a key) can be a higher tier of membership. As soon as possible, get a full building—working up over time to an actual house—and move things like the Library to their own rooms.9
Closing Comments
You can get started on your own D&D Clubhouse today. For all its faults, the Internet has made this possible and it can reach a global membership. The tools now exist to not only set one up, but also to do so as a paid membership organization like those London Clubs.
However, a local group that operates out of a local location is the true cornerstone of the hobby and being so particular to a specific place encourages members to take care of their community as much as they do the Clubhouse itself. Engaging locally, much like the characters we play in our campaigns, will do far more over time to keep both the hobby and the culture it stems from alive and thriving than being entirely online.10
As this model shows, you can replicate it to focus on other cultural interests. Change the game, change the campaign, change the culture- change the Clubhouse, and thus who wants to be part of its membership. In Part Two, I’ll start showing how little you need to change to get big shifts, and if you appreciate this then consider becoming a paid subscriber. Every little bit helps.
As the C-Suite at Wizards of the Coast consists of former Microsoft and Zynga executives, this should not be a surprise to anyone. The tabletop game business had been following the videogame business in predatory operational practices for some time when this manifested.
Again I point out Adventurer, Conqueror, King as it is explicitly designed for this. You can try, and many have, with Basic D&D but you run into problems without the systems introduced in the later BECMI sets.
No, Tolkien is not that important. He and those who knew him reported this repeatedly over the decades. It was players like Mike Monard that pushed for the Tolkien elements, as Mike himself reported in person and online. Too many do not understand how depreciated Tolkien is in the game.
Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack Vance- those three should be first on the New Member Reading List.
You can start with William Marshall’s life story. That’s a straight up Player Character. Many other warlords, generals, emperors, conquerors, kings, etc. had real lives as fantastic as seen in any of the masters of adventure literature but they really happened.
This reading list will now include Jeffro Johnson’s Appendix N and How To Win At D&D books. The most hardcore will also read Jon Peterson’s Playing At The World and The Elusive Shift, and to see how the old-timers did it they can read Griffith Morgan’s Blackmoor Foundations and the documentary film Secrets of Blackmoor.
This works as well online as PDFs and ebooks without DRM exist, and free readers that handle multiple formats also exist such as Calibre. For a physical Clubhouse, I recommend adhering to the London Club norm of the library being in-house use only; they can read, but not check out.
Most Clubhouses will rarely approach Dunbar’s Number, so this is merely inconvenient and not a massive burden.
Your typical Victorian/Edwardian house is what you should shoot for in North and parts of South America. You folks in the United Kingdom should copy the London Clubs, while you folks in Europe have similar architecture that will suit these needs. If you’re reading this in Asia, look at comparable architecture from the same period where you live to find something like it- chances are it will be influenced by one or another European power.
He says as he writes for an entirely online publication that only others online will even see.