RPGaDay2024 Redux: Part One
Because the Notes facility on Substack is janky as all get out and because I’ve been busy, this week’s post is a collection of Notes originally posted in August in response to the RPGaDay2024 prompts days 1-10.
#RPGaDAY2024 - Day 1 - First RPG bought this year?
These days, I don’t purchase many RPG core books at all. I find that my bookshelf full of rulebooks provides me with enough mechanical options to run just about any type of game I might want. So, to stretch the terms of the question slightly, my first RPG product purchased this year was Arc Dream’s Impossible Landscapes: A Pursuit of the Terrors of Carcosa and the King In Yellow, written for use with their Delta Green rules set. Released in 2022, I bought this substantial campaign book not because I had any firm intention of running it but because I think Arc Dream’s re-interpretations of Lovecraftian conventions are often interesting. They tap into modern notions of what generates the unsettling sense of a world disturbingly off-kilter by making the direct manifestations of malevolence less the result of ‘cosmic forces’ (though all the usual suspects often still gibber somewhere in the frame) and more the frightening by-product of human fallibility, institutional hubris and the capriciousness of an uncaring universe. This last, of course, was part of Lovecraft’s original vision for the mythos, but has been muddled somewhere along the line in the work of other authors and RPG products which turned towards the more fantastical ‘evil gods and bad wizards casting spells and raising zombies’ genre. This volume has the added bonus of appealing to my own interest in the work of R.W. Chambers and other Victorian and Edwardian authors of ghost stories and weird fiction.
#RPGaDAY2024 - Day 2 - Most recently played RPG?
Last night I played in an ongoing Maelstrom Domesday campaign. The setting for this iteration of the Maelstrom series is England in the years immediately after the Norman Conquest. The campaign is a sandbox game in which the characters are seeking to return order and prosperity to an English hamlet after its near destruction by the Normans during the harrowing of the North. Added to the social and political tensions (the PCs are in the service of the new Norman lord of the manor - also a PC) there is the vague supernatural threat that lurks in the wild countryside. What was intended as being an episodic campaign with quite a lot of down-time between in-game events never quite worked out that way. Over the last couple of years of real time we have collectively managed to pass approximately six months of in-game time.
Maelstrom is a more or less standard percentile stat and skill system - BRP with a few tweaks here and there. What makes it interesting is the magic mechanic which is built on a system of ‘magnitude of effects’ derived from how likely the event desired by the magician is based on the circumstances. The assumption is that the magician is exploiting the Maelstrom, the dangerously chaotic and poorly understood supernatural force of the world. Thus to extinguish a candle in a drafty hall is a very low level effect, but to do the same thing in a still room is more implausible. To summon a storm out of a clear sky to sink a vessel is enormously difficult, but to encourage a storm on the horizon to drift over the target ship is much easier. It is a loose narrative mechanic that will not appeal to all but, when compared to most more elaborate magic systems, it is simple, elegant and flexible. It also preserves what should be important in any magic system - a sense that the practitioner is wielding unpredictable and powerful forces, rather than performing a rather bloodless form of calculus.
#RPGaDAY2024 - Day 3 - Most often played RPG?
I’m not quite sure how to interpret this prompt. Does it mean which game have I played most often over the last 40-ish years, or that which I play most frequently these days?
If the former, then I suppose it would have to be either 1eAD&D or Call of Cthulhu, which were my home group’s ‘go to’ systems between c.1984 and 1994 and, more sporadically, for some years afterwards. Living in rural East Anglia in the 80s and early 90s did not provide too many opportunities to discover new games and so we were content with the two systems that I - as the group’s default GM - happened to possess. Even after moving to a small university city and the advent of the internet in the mid- to late-90s, my face to face games continued to be dominated by those two old warhorses.
The move to online play from c.2010 and the culture of short-form campaigns and one-shots I encountered there marked the beginning of my exposure to more systems. Some weeks I would be playing 3 or 4 different systems from classics like Traveller and WHFRP to niche games like Don’t Walk in Winter Wood or The Outer Presence.
The game that happened to emerge as the one constant from that period is Symbaroum. The mechanics are adequate, but it is the setting - at once evocative while also being open enough to allow it to be tweaked and adjusted to suit what I wanted to do with it - that really drew me. But, truth be told, it was not the game as such that mattered, it was that, during the Covid lockdowns, I started an online Symbaroum campaign and happened upon a group of players that made running the game a particular joy. That campaign continues to this day.
It is a curious thing, but I find that I am incapable of judging the relative amounts of time spent playing those old face to face games I ran for more than a decade compared to the online play I have been involved in almost exclusively since 2010. The issue is muddied by the fact that those in-person games would last 6, 8, 10 hours, whereas today a combination of age and the constraints of remote play mean that sessions now last 3 to 4 hours at most. Can it really be the case that all those hours of running or playing The Desert of Desolation, The Egg of the Phoenix, The Temple of Element Evil, The Curse of the Azure Bonds and all of those individual modules has now been eclipsed?
#RPGaDAY2024 - Day 4 - RPG with great art?
I have never cared much about art in RPG products. This does not mean that there aren’t individual pieces that I find striking or evocative - there are, and I’ll get to them. But I am certain that I have never purchased any RPG book because I liked the art and, conversely, I have never not bought a book because I disliked the illustrations.
Clearly, I have preferences, but I have never thought about it long enough to be able to say what those subjective opinions are based upon. I think this might have something to do with the way that my brain tends to process information more readily that is ingested in the form of text. I am quite sure that I have declined to buy an RPG book because, on opening it at a random page while in the store or in an on-line preview, I’ve come across some ugly, clumsy or sloppy prose.
To take the prompt literally and nominate a single RPG with great art, I think I’d probably have to go with the Symbaroum core rulebook. Martin Grip’s (Bergstrom’s?) sometimes impressionistic paintings featuring largely silhouetted foreground figures against a misty and indistinct background may or may not be ‘great art’ in any technical sense - I have no competency to judge. But my word they create a mood, an atmosphere and a sense of place. Symbaroum is one of the very rare instances in which I have used the artwork as the basis for an in-game description of scenes, people and places.
#RPGaDAY2024 - Day 5 - RPG with great writing?
This is a malformed question. What makes ‘great art’ in an RPG is subjective enough, but at least one can look at any individual illustration and say ‘This is striking’ or ‘That’s technically proficient’ or even ‘I happen to like this’. But art in an RPG really has only one job - to depict some aspect of the game in a way that communicates something about the game or its setting to the viewer. But ‘great writing’ in an RPG must be of at least two types that are mutually exclusive.
When elucidating rules the case has been plausibly made that an RPG book should read like stereo instructions - terse, unambiguous, strictly to the point and dry. In order to be effective at communicating rules, the text should be a species of ‘technical writing’ without flourish or poetry. However, against this must be measured those parts of a book that should be descriptive either of the setting or the operation of the rules in play. Here the language should be evocative, colourful, unafraid to include throw-away asides that hint at the world that is being described. Most games do one or other of these two types of writing badly but, somehow, it is the consistent averageness of both sides of this equation that I find so frustrating.
So, my choice is profoundly quixotic. The game is published in English as Shadows of Esteren. The core book makes almost no effort to attempt the former, technical, writing and concerns itself almost exclusively with the latter. Even more oddly, this is a game the premise of which - the presence of magic and technology in a fantasy world - is one that I mislike. Worse still, the prose descriptive of the world and the game - in the form of letters and diaries - is deeply uneven in quality, not helped by the fact that it was translated from French into English. Despite all these caveats, I can’t help but admire the purity of intention - to confine mechanical discussion to a couple of pages and then plunge with gusto into a riot of sometimes barmy literary self-indulgence. You have to respect the commitment to the bit.
#RPGaDAY2024 - Day 6 - RPG that is easy to use?
This depends on what is meant by ‘use’. Does it mean how easy are the core and splatt books to use as objects? As tools of reference? Or is it intended that ‘easy to use’ is being employed here as a synonym for ‘simple to play’? Somewhat arbitrarily, I’m going to go with the former approach.
I am not a graphic or product designer and, in fact, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to identify good (or bad) layout and design any more than I can read cuneiform. Or, at least, even if I could identify it, I would have no idea what qualities or technical aspects make it good or bad. Any comment I have to make on this subject, therefore, is like some ancient Greek marble quarryman asking Polycleitos why his human figures tend to have a raised heel.
In the context of playing a game at a table an ‘easy to use’ game is one that is rationally laid out in terms of content, has clear graphic indicators on each page to tell you where you are in the volume, has a comprehensive index and, if we are really asking for the moon, not one but two placeholding ribbons. Now I suppose I should name a product that possesses these qualities but, like Withnail and Marwood, I find that I’ve gone on holiday by mistake and so don’t have my library to hand. It says something not altogether flattering about me that, absent the books themselves to prod my memory, I can’t actually remember which games meet these criteria.
#RPGaDAY2024 - Day 7 - RPG with ‘good form’?
I have to assume that this question is phrased with deliberate ambiguity. After all, what does ‘good form’ actually mean? Entirely arbitrarily, I’m going to decide that it means ‘an RPG session that does the thing that you want an RPG to do’. Obviously, the qualities that make an RPG session excellent are enormously variable - rules and setting play important roles - but, in the context of how I have chosen to interpret the question - what lends an RPG (session) ‘good form’ - what matters is the symbiosis between players and GM and the proper use of meta-gaming..
It just so happens that, this evening, I played my first ever game of Mausritter with two other players well known to me and a GM with whom I had not played before. For those who don’t know it, Mausritter is a rules-lite game with three stats which serve as the basis for a d20 roll low mechanic. The setting is, as the name suggests, one of anthropomorphic mice in a sort of semi-feudal or at least pre-modern pastoral setting.
The session was possessed of ‘good form’ because all of us at the (virtual) table shared a common assumption about RPGs: that they are a collective endeavour. The elements presented by the GM were responded to and built upon by the players and those player contributions fed back into the GM’s descriptions and influenced the direction and tone of the story. What began as quite a light fantasy with the levity that, in my experience, is common to anthropomorphic games, was soon transformed by this positive feedback loop between players and GM into a dark and bloody tale that ended with the tragic death of a character that had real meaning.
Further, this tragedy was achieved by that most misunderstood concept in the hobby - meta-gaming. I won’t bore everyone with a long disquisition on when and how meta-gaming is ‘right’. It is enough here to say that the death of the character was given import because, in a single session of play (and a preparatory session 0) we had established things about the characters by recounting at a ‘meta’ level facts about them and how they felt about the events that were being described by the GM.
This was expressed in the form of the players stepping ‘out of character’ to describe internal thoughts and feelings or to recount brief flashbacks that related to the current situation to reveal information that the other characters could not have known but, because we as players had that knowledge, we were able to use it to further the collective decisions that guided the story.
#RPGaDAY2024 - Day 8 - RPG accessory I appreciate?
I am very much a ‘low church’ gamer. I neither need nor do I want fripperies and baubles like battle-maps and minis. VTTs. GM screens, ability cards or any of the other extraneous stuff. I know people who use these things and swear by them as useful tools but, having experience of both sides of the question - I spent a few years in a Pathfinder Society Play face to face group with all that that entails about the use of maps and figures - I know where I land on this question.
Amusingly, after a hiatus from playing and running games for a couple of years, when I decided to jump back in, I thought I might have ‘forgotten’ how to do theatre of the mind. Did I still have the ability to track characters and NPCs in combat in my head? Could I still summon up a useful description of a place either from a map in front of me or just making it up on the fly?
Worried that these were muscles that had atrophied, I spent a long time getting to grips with Roll20 and, as an IT idiot, when I say ‘getting to grips with’ I actually mean ‘struggling to understand the basic functionality of’. Come the night of the first game (FFG’s Star Wars: Edge of the Empire), the players all logged on to the Google Hangout (yes, it was that long ago) and we fired up Roll20. Less than quarter of an hour later, Roll20 sat idling in the background, unused and, to this day, unloved.
So what is the accessory that I appreciate? Graph paper.
#RPGaDAY2024 - Day 9 - RPG accessory I would like to see?
I’m now so entrenched in my ‘theatre of the mind’ habit and style of playing and running RPGs that I honestly can’t envisage a novel accessory that would matter to me. As long as I have a reliable means of communication (I moved to a paid Zoom account after the winding down of Hangouts and the Covid lockdowns) I don’t need anything else. I suppose the next wave of accessories will be digital or some novel IT application. But because my style of GMing and playing requires quite a lot of concentration, I find that any tech that is meant to make my life easier uses up so much of my cognitive bandwidth while playing that it ends up making my life harder.
Accessory I’d like to see? A miracle injection that allows a 50+ year old brain to regain the plasticity and capacity of a 25 year old.
#RPGaDAY2024 - Day 10 - RPG I would like to see on TV?
I think this probably has to be interpreted as a TV show derived from an RPG that is an original IP that exists only as an RPG rules’ set or setting. After all, to say that one wants a TV adaptation of the Alien RPG is really only to say that one wants a series based on the Ridley Scott universe. There are a large number of fantasy-based programmes, but I don’t think we would say that any of them are a D&D TV show.
Has any TV show ever evolved solely from an RPG other than the handful of - in my view - dreadful D&D tie-ins? This is not an arch question. I am wholly ignorant of the sprawling gaming and televisual culture of Japan where it seems perfectly plausible such a thing could exist but that I’ve never heard of it.
In fact, I don’t think it’s surprising that the transition from RPG to TV show is (apparently) so uncommon. RPG core books can’t provide a plot for showrunners to adapt and most modules, scenarios and campaigns are either highly specific to the rules’ set or adaptations of commonplace story tropes and so they are not usefully unique as source material.
Some RPG settings might make for interesting TV adaptations. Done right, Ravenloft and Barovia could be compelling. But here too, the material is an existing genre of gothic horror that RPGs cannot claim any originality for nor monopoly over. If pressed for perhaps one example of a series that amounted to a conversion of an RPG to a televisual medium, I’d probably go for the first season of True Detective, which was a Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green scenario even if (as far as I know) it was never expressly created as such.