John O’Neill’s editorial in Black Gate 14 touched on gaming, on wargaming and role-playing, and on the way these things shaped the way friends interact. It hit home for me, because I recognised in my life much the same sort of phenomenon John described in his own.

I didn’t play Nova, the game he and many of his friends played as a sort of long-form creative wargaming campaign. I did play, and in one case referee, long-running role-playing campaigns that gave everybody who took part a special vocabulary, a shared set of touchstones and references that (I think) acquired a particular power from being our own: our own stories, independent from the culture at large, shaped by us and our choices.

I was about seventeen when I met a group of role-playing gamers who’d created their own world for the Marvel Super-Heroes role-playing system. I think the game had been going on for something like eight years at the point I met them, and it’s still going today. (Jeff Grubb has a thoughtful reminiscence on the secret origins of MSH here.)

The world, as such, was not and is not stable; it has been re-invented several times over, as campaigns and storylines begin and end (and, this being a super-hero game, occasionally lead to a reboot of the timeline in the course of play), sometimes incorporating actual comic-book characters and sometimes not, but always using many of the same heroes and villains created by our group of gamers.

The characters were, are, the essence of the game; not their histories, but their concepts, and if you played in that world you could add something to it that would become a part of the ongoing tale.

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So Echo Bazaar, the free browser game set in the Fallen London, “a mile underground and a boat ride from Hell,” is a fantastic diversion. (I’ve mentioned it before.)

One of the things I love about it is that, despite its pseudohistorical goth neo-Victorian/steampunk setting (it’s like what might happen if steampunks discovered black), it’s not all that hateful about sex.

Which is a fine line with historical or pseudohistorical fantasy, right? You don’t want to be intolerably oppressive with your historical attitudes, and you don’t want to be irritatingly anachronistic by jamming in progressiveness where it doesn’t go.

And with history, at least you can rely on being accurate: with fantasy there’s a whole nother element where you have to be plausible, which basically means subscribing to historical fanon. There were blacks living in Victorian London, but if what you know about it comes from seeing fifteen different versions of A Christmas Carol, you’ll probably think that the Repentant Forger is an example of unrealistic political correctness.

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Over at Grognardia, James Maliszewski has posted a retrospective review of one of my favorite RPG relics, Oracle Game’s Alma Mater, the role playing game of high school life in the 1970s.

And I do mean relic. I collect role playing games and, after nearly two decades of fruitless searching, I finally gave up and paid an outrageous sum for an unused copy on eBay a few years ago. It was the last significant RPG title from the era I didn’t own.

It was worth it.  Alma Mater was notorious when it was released in 1982, and it retained much of that notoriety through the years.  It was banned from Gencon by TSR, and well-known artist and editor Liz Danforth wrote a famously scathing editorial in Sorcerers Apprentice magazine attacking the game.

Today though, Alma Mater is chiefly remembered for its artwork, by old-school TSR artist Erol Otus (who did the classic cover for Deities & Demigods, and interior artwork for the AD&D Monster Manual, among many others).  The content of the game itself, as you’d doubtless expect, is fairly tame by modern standards, but the artwork can still raise eyebrows. You can see much of it collected at the Cyclopeatron blog.

I’ve never played the game. Not a lot of people did, as a matter of fact — it quickly vanished, despite (or perhaps because of) all the publicity. Hence its relatively scarcity today, and the delight it still brings to bloodless eBay vulture sellers, may they suffer a thousand deaths.

I’m not sure why more game companies didn’t stumble on this idea — it seems completely natural to me now.  Let’s be honest; not much scares me any more.  My senior biology teacher, Ms. Bray?  She still scares me.

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Role-playing games have always interested me because, at heart, they’re about stories. They’re ways to tell stories that you don’t know in advance, ways to bring people together to create something unpredictable but still structured in a narrative form. Now, that said, the question is: how do you go about doing that? If you’re writing a module, an adventure, that referees are going to pick up off a store shelf (or download from a web site), what do you give them to help create that story with their players?

The traditional first edition Dungeons & Dragons answer to this was: you give them a dungeon. You give them a sandbox, an area to explore filled with monsters and treasure, and maybe a few adventure hooks. What will the players do with it? Who knows?

For a long time, probably starting in the mid-80s at about the point where I started seriously playing D&D, this approach was in disrepute. A dungeon with a bunch of monsters isn’t a story, the argument ran. A story should have a structure, and ideally different moods, maybe even different settings. It should end in a different place than it began. You could see this philosophy settle in at TSR with the Dragonlance series of modules, taking firmer hold with second edition D&D.

Nowadays, though, at least a few people are beginning to swing back to the first approach. Structuring stories out ahead of time kills the spontaneity of the game, one might argue. Let the players and referee develop the story at the table, not by going through the motions worked out ahead of time by some designer. Don’t railroad the players; give them the situation, and see what they do on their own. (I’m vastly simplifying all these positions, and only presenting some of the arguments. I think I’m getting at the essence, though.)

I’ve come around to that last argument. I want to explain why, because I’ve recently wrapped up a First Edition game in which I was fascinated to see a story I never anticipated arise out of a module that features little in the way of pre-structured narrative: The Temple of Elemental Evil by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer (TSR, 1985).

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Bloodbones
Jonathan Green (Wizard Books, 2010)

In 1982, Puffin Books unleashed The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the first in the Fighting Fantasy line of gamebooks. The book was conceived and written by Steve Jackson (the British one) and Ian Livingstone, co-founders of Games Workshop. Although predated by solitaire RPG scenarios, Fighting Fantasy combined a choose-your-own-adventure decision-tree structure with a simple dice mechanic to mimic an RPG experience. The quick-start rules, brisk pacing, and art by New Wavey fantasists like Iain McCraig, Chris Achilleos, and Richard Corben, all bundled in a mass-market paperback retailing for $1.95, made Fighting Fantasy wildly successful. The series ran until 1995, along the way spawning ancillary media like novels, computer games, even a full-blown Fighting Fantasy RPG. Fan enthusiasm still burns bright today, with a downloadable fanzine and its own wiki.

Screw Narnia; had I ever discovered some magic wardrobe, I would have jumped with both feet into Titan. As it was, chores were done and allowances scraped together in anticipation of infrequent family expeditions to the mall bookstore. There I could pay to wade through the mire of the Scorpion Swamp, survive Baron Sukumvit’s Deathtrap Dungeon, rally freed slaves to overcome the sinister Gonchong on the Island of the Lizard King. Now I’ve been playing the books all over again, this time with my young sons, imparting to them the same vital life lessons I learned as a young boy: don’t trust strangers; never put your hand in someplace you can’t see; and if you kill someone, you might as well go ahead and take his wallet.

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To promote their new science-fiction role-playing game At Empire’s End, Dark City Games has created S.O.S, a short solitaire SF role-playing game. We’re pleased to reprint the game in its entirety here on the Black Gate blog.

You can either read the text as choose-your-own-adventure style paragraphs, or grab some dice and play according to the short rules. Experienced role players, or those familiar with The Fantasy Trip, should be able to jump right into the action.

Without further ado, we present S.O.S, a Legends of Time and Space science-fiction role-playing adventure by George Dew.

You come out of hyperspace around the barren, rocky, waste-planet of Lemm. It orbits a distant star, and lacks an atmosphere. As a result, the inhospitable grey surface boasts temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero.

Your sensors scan for traces of the distress signal, when suddenly, an alien contact flashes across your navigation screen. Do you want to hail it (001) or attack with initiative (002)?

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To call me a “gamer” would do a serious injustice to those hardcore cyber-warriors who are universally recognized for their pale complexion and calloused thumbs. But as someone who has spent many a windfall dollar at the local GameStop, foregone more than one sunny summer day hunched over a keyboard in a darkened room, and lives at least partially in a world where an Easter Egg has zero to do with a bunny, I think that on some level I can relate.

I also fraternize quite openly, both at work and at home, with software developers. Those in the game industry never cease to dream of a world where they would create the games they truly wished to, without the constant and creativity-killing demands of the margin-hungry corporations they work for.

Which is a little scary when you think about it.

What if game developers were allowed to run amok and create any character, any story line or any outcome their imaginations could devise, and could thrust their creations out into an unsuspecting marketplace with nary a care for bottom line returns or movie-deal conversions?

Of course, to imagine that world you would also need to imagine one without the parental rating system. Or aggression therapy.

But that being said, I have always gravitated toward those releases that game developers admire themselves. Their criteria for what is “good” is sometimes but not always represented in the best seller area of your favorite game retailer and many are difficult even to find these days, not just because they’re out of production, but because they’re banned outright.

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A while back I placed an order with one of my favorite online vendors, FRP Games, whose selection and discounts are both excellent. At the last minute I added an item to my cart that I hadn’t budgeted for: James Ward’s Towers of Adventure, a boxed set for Castles & Crusades from Troll Lord Games.

Not only had I not planned to buy it, I’d never even heard of it until I saw it in FRP’s product newsletter.  What can I say, I’m a sucker for marketing copy:

Towers of Adventure offers the Castle Keeper a marvelous set of interchangeable tower levels, rooms, monsters, NPCs, traps and treasures. This box set allows you to make literally millions of exciting towers for your players to explore. Treasures, tower inhabitants, and tower maps are at your fingers and so easy to use you can put together a complex adventure in five minutes or less.

It’s true!  This isn’t a typical adventure supplement, with a set of interlinked encounters and rooms carefully described for the game master. In fact, while the box contains designs for 15 wildly different towers – including a Zombie Tower, Vampire Tower, Cloud Giant Tower, and Lonely Wizard’s Tower – I couldn’t find a room description anywhere.

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Heroscape’s 11th wave arrived the other day and some valiant play testers stepped up to try out the new pieces with me.

Some of you might have missed the battle recap of an epic Heroscape battle posted at Eric Knight’s blog; these play tests weren’t nearly as involved, but they were a lot of fun.

As you might remember from my last Heroscape review, a wave is a new issue of figures in four packages. This one is titled Champions of the Forgotten Realms, in reference to the Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign world, which ties into the most recent Heroscape expansion set.

Of the four packages of the new wave, the easiest one to get the hang of was The Warriors of Ghostlight Fen. Its hydra and phantom warriors were pretty easy to figure out how to deploy on the battlefield. One of the great things about Heroscape is that the best way to use the figures isn’t always obvious – it requires experimentation, which is nice, because if the battle outcomes were obvious the game simply wouldn’t be as much fun.

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Theodore Beale interviewed Marc Miller, the co-founder of Game Designer’s Workshop and designer of the Traveller science fiction role-playing game, for Black Gate on April 21st, 2010.  For the previous part, read  Part I of II.

MM: Well, first of all, when Dungeons & Dragons appeared, it revolutionized everything. It changed everything. We had to make our own formal rule that you couldn’t play during the workday because everybody was playing and nobody was working. This was 1975 or 1976. We all understood it immediately. Frank Chadwick did En Garde! in 1975. It was an alternative system and Gary Gygax really liked it because it was not a copy of Dungeons & Dragons. It was real role-playing without being a D&D imitation. I frankly sat down with D&D, looked at it, and said, there is no space game out there like this and we should do it. I set about doing that. I spent close to a year just thinking about what it would be like, and as you noticed, what I came up with was a character generation that is totally derived from what the military does. Here’s an army, here’s a navy, here’s space marines, and here’s how you generate characters. We just went from there.

TB: Traveller is obviously the game that you think of when you think about space and science fiction role-playing. But it never reached the level of cultural consciousness that AD&D did. For some reason, despite the fact that there is a fair amount of space and science fiction out there, we haven’t seen Traveller make the leap into the mainstream the way some other science fiction stuff has. How do you explain that?

I think that Dungeons & Dragons really captured this sense of the fantastic for what people could do. And there is basically one fantasy realm in which people play, as opposed to 100 science fiction concepts. The generic Lord of the Rings concept is, in one form or another, what most fantasy is about. The fantasy settings that range outside of that, they’re esoteric. I think that Traveller didn’t make the leap because Traveller tended to facilitate a solitary pursuit of the game. Although it wasn’t billed as solitaire, there were so many things that people could do alone that it was very popular with people who ended up doing a lot of things alone and preparing to play without actually playing.

I did a lot of that myself. I was fortunate in having one friend who would play it with me, but I spent a lot more time reading the books, going through the system, and spending more time preparing than actually playing.

With Traveller, as a designer, I had a hard time coming to grips with telling people “this is how it works.” As a result, Traveller was a lot about giving people tools to do anything they wanted. Not here’s a list of the fourteen worlds in our universe and here they are, no, here’s how to create a million worlds. You create them and deal with what you created. It was telling them how to create a million beasts to encounter instead of me saying that this world has Blink Dogs and this other world has Octopuppies.

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