Big is Beautiful

It's long been my view that TSR-era D&D, taken as a whole, is the most brilliant game there is. No - I don't mean the system is brilliant: it isn't. No sensible person would design a game that way nowadays, knowing what we now know about game design, which has undoubtedly got better since 1974.

D&D's brilliance comes from the fact that, plain and simply, it has the biggest "brain trust" of any game system on the planet. Like Manchester United, who can draw on football playing talent worldwide, or like the USA, which can siphon off the intelligent and talented multitudes from every corner of the globe, D&D has for decades been the biggest game around, and that means that it can draw on more creativity, talent and innovation than any other system.

The perfect example of this is, of course, the OSR and what is going on nowadays on Google+ (mainly, it has to be said, thanks to this guy more than anybody else). There are hundreds of extremely talented, thoughtful, entertaining and clever gamers pooling their ideas daily on teh internets, and the dead giveaway is that almost (though not entirely) all of it feeds into one game - D&D.

Far from seeing this as a bad thing, I embrace it. Perhaps if I wasn't interested in its own peculiar and idosyncratic take on the fantasy genre I would bemoan D&D's dominance. But I love it, so I don't.

D&D, you are the bestest game in the whole wide world.

Two Themes are a Couple, Three are a Crowd

In the comments on my post on Shadowrun a few days ago, John wrote the following:

Cyberpunk is already a mash-up of hardboiled fiction and science fiction. Fantasy and hardboiled both combine well with science fiction on their own, but trying to combine fantasy with hardboiled without seeming frivolous or banal is a major undertaking in itself. Throw in s.f. as well and you've got a major oversaturation of themes going on.

This got me thinking: perhaps John is right, and mashing up two themes works fine, but adding a third causes the edifice to collapse under its own weight? Are there any famous or successful three-way, or four-way, genre mashups?

An experiment. Roll 3d10 and mashup the genres in this table. What do you get?

2, 7, 3: Noir, gothic horror, hard SF. There's a female vampire disguised on a space ship and gradually killing off the crew, and there's a whiskey-soaked detective on board who is in love with her and trying to solve the crime at the same time; the way he solves the mystery is through application of a clever scientific theory. Yeah, I can see how that wouldn't work - gothic horror and hard SF cancel each other out; if the vampire is really supernatural it isn't hard SF any more, but if there is a scientific solution then it isn't actually really gothic horror. Though both work well with noir.

10, 2, 3: Victoriana, noir, hard SF. A steampunk setting in which the details are meticulously laid out so that every element of the steam-powered world makes perfect sense. A whiskey-soaked detective attempts to solve a murder, but the solution revolves around understanding something specifically to do with steam engines. That kind of works, actually, though I'm taking a very loose definition of "hard SF". You'd have to really like steam engines, and really understand what they're capable of and what the implications would be.

10, 9, 6: Victoriana, literary fiction, western. A steampunk western in which nobody does anything except mope and ponder the imponderables while having ennui-inducing sex and taking mild intoxicants. Could sort of work if the writer made great play of the fact that steam, social conservatism and violence are sort of like the human condition. But would be boring and wasteful of its setting.

Maybe John is onto something.

I Got Some Lovely Fantasies

Because I've spent a lot of time on story-games recently, let's throw some love to the Big Purple. An interesting thread came up entitled The older I get, the less I want fantasy (in which the poster feels that his liking for the fantasy genre has declined with age, and he now prefers historical or modern-era gaming).

This struck a bit of a chord with me, though my feelings aren't quite the same as him. For me, what I can definitely say is that fantasy fiction has lost its lustre as I've got older. From the age of 11 or so, when I first read The Lord of the Rings, to the age of about 25, I read absolute shit-tons of fantasy novels. (And most of it was shit.) You name the series, I'd probably read at least one volume and probably the lot.

Nowadays, I barely read any, and to be frank, while the Fantasy & SF section is the first one I go to when I go to a bookshop, whenever I pick up a new fantasy book and flick through to see what it's like, it usually makes me cringe. Boring, samey writing; banal dialogue; by-the-numbers plots; awful unimaginative world-building dressed up as "unique" settings; inside-front-cover maps covered with place names like 'Franconia' and 'L'k'xhklhaj'... It's a veritable hell-on-earth of literary bollocks, only a step removed from Mills & Boon, and without the compensating factor of sex (unless it's GRRM, who only writes The Most Stupid Sex Scenes Ever^TM anyway).

There are nowadays only a handful of fantasy authors who I can really stand to read: Tolkien, Dunsany, Howard, M. John Harrison, China Mieville, Wolfe, Vance, and, okay, GRRM, because I have to finish off that bloody series if it kills me. The rest of the genre can go hang, quite frankly.

But this is why, I think, I'm still very much into fantasy gaming: a function of finding modern fantasy literature so soul-destroyingly awful that I can't bear to read it is that I have to get my imaginative kicks elsewhere.

Moreover, I'd say that if what you're interested in is expanding your mind, imagining weird shit, dreaming up half-crazed nonsense, escaping somewhat humdrum reality, and many of the other things that fantasy lit is supposed to do, I'd argue that fantasy gaming does it much better. Your imagination is constrained far less if you and your friends are the ones coming up with the entire thing - if you are not letting some third-rate author do your imagining for you - so why have cotton when you can have silk?

In fact, maybe that's what my rule of thumb for fantasy literature is: from now on I'll look at the blurb on the back of the book, and if the whole thing sounds like I could imagine something better in a session of D&D, the author isn't trying hard enough and the book gets binned. If I can't imagine something better in a session of D&D, it's worth a try.

Science Fiction Illiteracy

There's been a bit of talk about Inception lately, on the film review show I regularly tune into, since it set out its "films of the year" list for 2010. Naturally Inception features highly on that list, and I think it would be hard to dispute that it was definitely one of the best films in a pretty forgettable year for cinema.

But what everybody - reviewers, fans calling in, and the film's participants - seems to talk about is something that I can't relate to at all; the supposed difficulty of following the plot. Now, I'll grant you that Inception has a more convoluted plot than most films. I guess if all you're used to watching is Marley and Me and Transformers 2, it might have been a minor shock to the system. But really, to anybody who has done any reading of Gibson, Zelazny, Wolfe or even Alastair Reynolds, it should present any sort of challenge at all - par for the course, really.

Though aye, there's the rub - ordinary cinema audiences and, perhaps more critically, supposedly well-educated intellectual film reviewers, are not science fiction literate. They aren't used to following a relatively complex plot while also keeping track of new information and concepts that require them to stretch their imagination in any way. When presented with something just a little bit mind-bending they find it very difficult to handle and they shut down into "Crikey, does not compute, pass the popcorn" mode.

It's at times like these that I find myself succumbing to the arrogance of the snobbish geek. Join me in wallowing in it.

Me me me

I couldn't partake in the 15 games in 15 minutes thing because, really, I don't think I could actually even think of 15 games off the top of my head. But Scott has started a newer and more relevant-to-my-interests meme (10 fantasy books you would take to a desert island, no more than one by a single author) so hey, why not? Mine would be, in no particular order:

• Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber omnibus edition.
• Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun omnibus edition.
• Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth omnibus edition.
• Tolkien's Lord of the Rings omnibus edition (noticing a trend here?).
• China Mieville's The Scar (not an omnibus edition).
• M. John Harrison's Viriconium omnibus edition.
• George R. R. Martin's A Clash of Kings. (I can't go with the entire Song of Ice and Fire to date, and I think the second one was probably my favourite volume so far...)
• John Grant's The Sacrifice of Ruanon. (Probably my favourite "young adult" fantasy book.
• Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule. (People complain about this series but I've only read the first volume and thought it was rather good, actually.)
• C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia omnibus edition.

What? Including omnibuses (omnibi?) is cheating? Well I'm fucked if I'm going to decide which single volume from each one I'd take - you think I have all day?

You Stupid Bookers

The 2010 Man Booker Prize winner was announced recently; it ended up being Harold Jacobson's The Finkler Question, which I'm willing to bet was probably an entertaining read - something that is quite unusual in Booker winners - as I've read some of Jacobson's stuff before and always liked it. (I doubt any American readers have heard of him; he's sort of like the British Jewish equivalent of Tom Robbins without so much of the fourth-wall-breaking.)

But it comes just as I'm re-reading Vance's Dying Earth stories, and the confluence of the two events really does hit home precisely how stupid and blinkered supposedly intellectual people can be. We fantasy fans are worldly enough by now to know that the literati loathe the genre, and fantasy authors will never get recognition even when they deserve it - that's par for the course; indeed it's a truism. But every so often a moment like this comes along and really hammers home the point: a man who could write something so absolutely perfect in every way as the Cugel stories had more creative power in his little finger than every Man Booker prize winner since the competition began, and yet his career gets almost no mention in any sort of discourse on modern literature - indeed I would be surprised to learn any literary establishment figures in the UK had even heard of him (I can't speak for the US.)

There are moments reading Vance where he is simply so brilliant, so much of a virtuoso, that you can hardly stand it. My particular favourite episode in all of the work of his that I've read is the chapter called (I think; I don't have the book in front of me) "At the Inn of the Blue Lamps", which comes near the start of Cugel's Saga. The depiction of gradual descent into drunkenness of the characters involved, the understated humour, the slightly sardonic detached tone in which it is written, and the joyous unfurling of the tightly-wrought and carefully constructed plot (the creation of which you haven't even noticed because it has been done with such aplomb) - it's enough to make you remember all over again just why literature is enjoyable and important. And yet, because it doesn't pretend to say anything about the human condition, or contemporary geopolitics, or gender, or multiculturalism, or [insert liberal bete noire of the week here], it apparently isn't worthy of the attention of anybody with a brain. What a strange and mysterious world we live in.

The Creativity of Constraint

Regular readers will know that China Mieville is kind of an obsession round these parts. It's not deliberate; the guy just insists on saying provocative things that he knows I'll want to comment on. At the gym just now I was listening to his interview on The City and The City, in which he talks at some length about how genre constraints and rules are not in fact barriers to creativity but, on the contrary, spur it. Working around strict tropes and genre expectations forces, in some respects, ever greater leaps of imagination in the drive for something new. (Of course, being a total pseud, like me, he mostly ended up talking about the Oulipo school.)

This is something I can identify with, as it's true of all the RPGs I really enjoy. Being constrained by either expectation (e.g., it's D&D so there will be a dungeon) or starting point (e.g., it's D&D so you can be a fighter, a wizard, a cleric, a dwarf, or an elf) forces both players and DMs to continually re-invent, rejig, and genuflect their games and characters in ways in which a blank slate somehow could not. (At least in theory. There are of course plenty of players who end up being Bob the Fighter in every game.) If you're playing D&D and you know therefore there are to be dungeons, you put in the extra effort to make those dungeons unique and interesting so they don't come across as old. If you're playing D&D so you know you're going to end up being the cleric, you invent some weird and wonderful new deity, religion and trappings to keep things fresh.

RPGs accomplish creativity through constraint in three different ways:

• The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Model. This uses hardcore randomness in character generation to force players into boxes they weren't expecting to be put inside. They then have to shape their character on unsure and unexpected footing.
• The BECMI D&D Model. This allows some choice of role, but the roles are highly rigid archetypes that allow for little variation. This forces players to come up with cosmetic and character-based variety; if you have to be an elf you're going to play an elf who is scared of water, whose culture is modelled on Turkish horse nomads.
• The Pendragon Model. This is the ultimate in constraint: in its purest form Pendragon insists that the players will all without exception take on the role of squires about to be knighted and taken into the service of King Uther (or King Arthur). Players therefore come up with highly creative means of distinguishing themselves from each other in looks, personality, abilities and history.

Generic games like GURPS, the HERO system, Savage Worlds and so forth therefore leave me somewhat cold. The vast blank canvasses they provide often intimidate and confuse. Better to restrict, better to constrain, better to make lack of options the spark.

Nihilism and Robin Hood in 2020 AD

Mr. faustusnotes, regular hand-wringing cry-me-a-river liberal commenter on my entries (just kidding) in my last entry made the comment that Cyberpunk 2020 encourages nihilism and criminal behaviour. I challenged this, pointing out that most RPGs seem to take this sort of behaviour as standard. He then followed up with the contention:

I don't think most PCs [in most games] are nihilists and criminals. Most PCs cooperate with a group of people to save the world from evil. The fantasy genre context for nihilism is completely different to the cyberpunk context.

Thinking about this, I realised that nihilistic criminals tended to be type of characters my group and I always made up for our CP 2020 campaigns, because we were teenage boys, but the game itself can be played in a moral way - and that this is very consistent with the genre.

Bruce Sterling's introductory essay to William Gibson's short-story collection Burning Chrome is a vital read for anybody who wants to understand cyberpunk as a genre. (In fact Burning Chrome, far more so than Neuromancer, is I think Gibson's true masterpiece. None of the stories dip in quality below excellent; all of them paint a compelling vision of the future.) As I've written several times, the key point that Sterling makes is that Gibson's stories - in contrast to sci-fi's general obsession with the square-jawed two-fisted heroic technocratic Ralph 124C 41+ type - concern themselves with the underbelly of society, the Victims of the New. His characters are those who have been crushed, eaten, chewed up, swallowed, and then spat out again by a society which has no place for them and does not care. This in my opinion is an almost Dickensian mode of fiction writing and highly moral: it says "These are the victims of this bleak future, here is their story, and here is how they win (or lose with defiance)."

CP 2020 can be all about that too. Ideas for Robin Hood style campaigns, off the top of my head:

• A group of 'nomads' (Roma/Sinti or Travellers in Europe, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, tribal communities in Asia) are turfed off their land by the government or a corporation - how do they fight back?
• The PCs are crusading investigative reporters uncovering dastardly exploitation of land or labour/war crimes/criminal activity/political corruption
• The PCs are an ambulance crew/vice squad in the roughest part of a major city, trying to do some little good
• The PCs are a group of vigilantes attempting to restore order in their neighbourhood in the face of police apathy
  

There are plenty more options for games which focus on stemming the tide of nihilism, rather than require nihilistic behaviour from the PCs.

Those Death Gates and Their Cycles

I've written before about the utter preposterousness of Dragonlance, and how ashamed I am to like it, though today I'm having trouble locating where. (I wish I had made a better archive of this blog.) However, although Weis and Hickman are by no means Great Talents or Towering Geniuses of Our Age, it's impossible to dispute that they have written some very entertaining books over the years. A comment in yesterday's post reminded me of one of their post-TSR series - The Death Gate Cycle - which was in its own way just as preposterous as Dragonlance, but a lot of fun in spite of (because of?) it.

The basic setting of the series is a far future earth, which a magical war has split into four separate worlds, each based on a certain element (earth, fire etc.); outside of this is a labyrinth, where the defeated faction (the Patryn) are kept eternally prisoner. There's also a swirly vortex thing in the middle which allows communication between the worlds. (I warned you it was preposterous.) The plot follows people from the various 'earths', who are united by an escaped Patryn who is attempting to re-start said magical war. Of particular note is an attempt to explain away the existence of elves and dwarves in the far future (they disappeared during the Renaissance, but emerged later) and a pseudo-scholastic style to the writing which sees extensive use of footnotes and glossaries, as if we're reading a kind of popular history book of something that really happened.


The books also have a (reasonably) unique take on magic, which is cast by tracing runic shapes in the air with ones forefinger, a little like a kid with a sparkler. These shapes can also be tattood onto ones body for extra strength or toughness, and etched or drawn on objects to imbue them with magical properties. That strikes me as a very radical and interesting idea for a new D&D class - somebody who tattoos himself every time he wants to cast a spell; you only have a finite amount of flesh, and what do you do when you run out?


Anyway, that's by the by. If you're a fan of the sub-genre of fantasy which I call 'daft fiction' (Weis & Hickman, Piers Anthony, Michael Stackpole) you'll appreciate it. Take a look at the Pseuds Corner-esque quotes about the series from the authors, too. Amongst other things, Hickman has claimed that the inspiration for the novels were the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and that he and Weis "always tried to take fantasy literature in new directions". As if! My particular favourite, though, is the idea that the books had "a wonderful and sensible pair of magic systems that made sense because they were modeled on quantum and chaos theories". Now that's a great idea, but the Death Gate Cycle isn't it. Who is he trying to kid?

On Warhammer, British vs. American Fantasy, and Pessimism

As a teenager (let's say until the age of about 16 or so) the biggest drain on my time and pocket money was not girls, cigarettes or alchohol, but Citadel Miniatures (at the time a separate company from Games Workshop but which made all of its figures). I loved Warhammer. My friends and I played a lot of Warhammer 40,000 and Blood Bowl too, and we even created our own gang-warfare battle game a few years before Necromunda came out. But Warhammer was always what we came back to and what we did basically every weekday night after school and often all day at weekends. I like it just as much, if not more so, than D&D, and it's probably only because I can't cart hundreds of lead figures across Eurasia every couple of months that this blog isn't a Warhammer- rather than an RPG-focused one.

There are lots of things to love about Warhammer - the gonzo weirdness, the random generators, the endearing amorality, the sheer gothicness of the whole thing. But I think what I like most about it is the pessimism. Pessimism seeps through all of Games Workshop's lines like a sickness; from Warhammer 40,000's tagline that "In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, There is Only War", to Necromunda's bleak vision of gangs and mutants squabbling over radioaction-scarred urban jungle, these games are not in any way nice.

Warhammer's own particular twist on that theme is the spread of Chaos, whose tendrils are gradually extending themselves over the world and who will never, can never, be defeated - no matter how hard it is fought against. Humanity will slowly be brought under the dominion of the Chaos Gods, and the best that can be hoped for is that the process will be prolonged. There is something compelling about the idea of The Empire, ramshackle and disease-ridden but having to be constantly vigilant against betrayal by its own people - almost like the USSR under Stalin - terrified of spies and fifth-columns, forever jumping at its own shadow, and doomed to inevitable failure.




I believe I am right in saying that Warhammer owes much about this incredibly bleak meta-narrative to the works of Tolkien. Many people mistakenly (in my opinion) believe that The Lord of the Rings has a happy ending, forgetting that, taken in context, it is really just an account of the last hurrah of a once mighty and beautiful civilisation that has been slowly collapsing over the course of thousands of years. Something of this atmosphere fed into Warhammer at its inception and has strongly influenced it ever since. But I also think that there is something in the British, and particularly in the English, view of the world, that influenced both Tolkien and Games Workshop (and also Moorcock and the Fighting Fantasy creators - the other points of the British fantasy square).

In comparison to people from other countries, British people are deeply pessimistic. I can say that, having grown up in the country but spent a lot of time in others. I notice it every time I go back home. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is one of their/our defining national characteristics. Of course there are many exceptions to this rule, but I don't think the sheer numb weight of cynicism and world-weariness present in British culture can really be ignored. (This can be a great quality, of course - it's what makes the British sense of humour so richly ironic, which is incidentally something else that can be noticed in Warhammer - but more on that in another entry.) And it sets the British in direct contrast to Americans, for whom a defining national characteristic is optimism.

In fact, I believe that in many ways Warhammer and D&D can be taken as representative of the cultures which created them. On the one hand you have a cynical, nasty, bleak and darkly humurous setting whose dominant idea is decay. And on the other you have a game basically founded on the principles of rugged individualism and self-betterment - in which a set of characters fight to success all on their own, without much in the way of a helping hand, or else die trying. In a strange sort of way, you don't get anything more representative of British values than Warhammer, nor anything more representative of American values than D&D.

What that shouldn't mean is that D&D campaigns can't take some of the pessimism of Warhammer and make it their own. It's perfectly possible to be a rugged individualist in a world slowly collapsing. I'm not talking about 'doing' Warhammer with D&D (why have that cotton when you can have the silk of WHFRP?) but introducing that key idea of an inevitable turn for the worse in the wheel of history... I like it and want to build a campaign around it.

This rather rambling entry doesn't have much else to it apart from that. I hope it makes at least some vague sort of sense.

Bummed Out on Fantasy Lit

This post is not a rant - more a kind of pitiful whine. Bear with me.

I've been increasingly irritated by most fantasy literature of the last decades - especially that produced by younger authors, who seem to fall into two categories:

• The desperate-to-be-hip type, who either try to turn everything into a commentary on modern day politics (usually from a leftish angle) or else introduce silly anachronisms like characters who say 'fuck' every other word;
• The stuck-in-the-past conservative type, who are trapped in an endless repeating cycle of yetanotherfantasybildungsromanwhichseemstogoon foreverandoffersnothingnew.

I find it worrying that all of the fantasy writers who I consider myself to be a big fan of are either dead or getting old. Who is going to take up the mantle of people like Gene Wolfe, M. John Harrison, Michael Moorcock, Guy Gavriel Kay, or George R. R. Martin when they're gone? China Mieville is a talented writer, no doubt about it, but he can never seem to make his characters really sing. Other than him, though, who really is there? Naomi Novik? It's a sad state of affairs that the genre is in such a trough.

Anyway, I'm going to the big Kinokuniya in Shinjuku today to see what I can find in the way of interesting English fantasy books, and maybe it's just the thought of staring at the shelves and seeing nothing that catches my eye which is getting me down. If you have something you can recommend, let me know.

My Boredom Has Outshone The Sun

There's been too much sweetness and light in this blog recently, hasn't there? So, Inspired by this thread: a list of tropes/cliches that I'd be happy to never see in a game, novel, or film, again, ever. Ever.

1. It is evil, so it talks in a deep, husky, sinister darth vader type voice. Exemplified by the Lord of the Nazgul in Peter Jackson's Rings films. Now become such a cliche that it is no longer even remotely sinister or frightening, but just sounds like a guy with a cold wheezing into some kind of voice synthesizer.

2. It is an alien race, and yet it looks like a human but with an animal head. Just fuck off if the best you can come up with for an alien species is a bloke with a lion/wolf/eagle's head. Especially if the race has the percieved characteristics of that animal species - like pride and laziness for a lion. Bonus points if your animal-head race has a name that can be identified with the creature, like 'Aslan'.

3. She is a woman in a man's world, and is gorgeous and can kick ass with the best of them, but she has an attitude because nobody gives her any respect, and eventually she falls in love with the hero. There is so much that annoys me about this particular trope that I can't put it into words. When will speculative fiction game writers, novelists etc. be able to write convincing female characters? Oh, wait, Le Guin, Wolfe, Martin and a whole load of others have been able to. So why can't you?

4. They are characters, and this is a fantasy setting, and yet it seems like a thinly veiled mouthpiece for broadcasting the stale and trite political views of the author/designer/player. China Mieville and the people who made Blue Rose are shining examples. Also, see staunch atheist players who always create characters who turn out to be..... atheists! Wiccan players who always create characters who turn out to be..... against the established religious order! And so on.

5. They are an analog of white Europe during the Crusading era/Age of Sail, and they are evil and domineering and oppressive. Because the idea that white Europeans did some bad stuff in the past is, like, so controversial and edgy, isn't it?

Tch. And bah.

If I could be for only an hour, if I could be for an hour every day....

When people say that fantasy, science fiction, horror and so on are just escapism, I always inwardly roll my eyes, even though I have to recognise that the description is fundamentally sound. What annoys me is that it is also fundamentally sound for every genre of fiction. You're telling me The Secret History, White Teeth, Bleak House, Pride & Prejudice and Midnight's Children aren't about escape from real life? Saying that 'fantasy is just escapism' is simply another of the many ways in which the Literati consign the genre to the Untouchable Shelf in the book shop where the Not Real Literature books go.

The problem, you see, is the word just. 'Fantasy is about escapism' is a proposition I have no difficulty with. 'Fantasy is just escapism' is dismissive and wrong, not only because the genre is about so much more than that, but also because it implies that there's something bad about escapism - like it's an insignificant or unworthy goal. As we have seen, such an implication is idiotic because if it applies to fantasy it equally applies to 'literary fiction' or whatever label you want to give the Proper Novels - but it is also idiotic because escapism is at core a good thing.

Let me tell you about escapism. I spent much of last year in a kind of limbo between finishing a Master's degree and starting my Ph.D, mainly because of problems with the funding body who pay me for my research. During that time-between-times I was working as a translator and editor cum Head of English at a small company in Yokohama, and it was The Dullest and Most Soul Destroying Job in the world. I spent most of my time sitting at a desk in my office painstakingly translating patents and employee contracts that didn't have a modicum of anything approaching interesting content; getting up to grab another cup of coffee every hour or so from the lobby; idly flirting with the receptionists while drinking said coffee; staring out of the window; and listening to the clock tick on the wall. My boss didn't allow us to listen to music and I worked 10, 11 or 12 hour shifts at a time. I have never known longer days.

I think four things kept me sane during that period. One was the financial renumeration, which wasn't at all bad. Second was the fact that I knew I would be leaving in October. Third was going drinking after work. And fourth was the escapism offered by the fact that I was alone in an office and could post in various PBeM games during the day without anybody knowing.

The fourth thing was perhaps the most important. I would sit in my silent, grey, deathly boring office while life crept by outside at glacial pace, and I wouldn't mind the dullness, because for a few minutes every hour I was creating an imaginary world with good friends: slaying dragons, assassinating politicians, exploring ocean depths or just shooting the breeze about what we were going to do next. That's escapism for you. It ain't a bad thing.

On Steampunk

I've always loved the aesthetic of Steampunk. The problem is that I've never really been sure what the genre is supposed to be about.

Let me expand on that: Science Fiction is, for me, about examining issues of humanity, politics, sexuality etc. by taking them out of our context and placing them in another, very realistic and plausible one. Fantasy is about escapism - getting out of this world and exploring a better and more interesting one. Horror is about "the oldest and strongest emotion" and the adrenaline kick it gives you. But what is steampunk about, other than the certain visual style with which it is associated? Is it just a sub-genre of Fantasy or Science Fiction, or is it there to explore something else?


One idea is that Steampunk is about the fraught and nervous relationship between mankind and technology. New things are being created, but their very production and maintenance - the coal it wastes and pollution it produces - is debilitating for society as much as it works for the good. This neatly reflects our uncomfortable relationship with scientific progress, wherein new technologies create further problems for our culture and the environment.

In that respect Steampunk should be the genre of choice for a new supplement for 'legacy' games: as Gamma World was a way to play around with the world's crisis of the day (nuclear war), so a Steampunk game would be ideal for tapping into some form of zeitgeist or contemporary angst about environmental catastrophe. I can envisage a world in which the Industrial Revolution never stopped, and pollution-belching factories and vehicles ruined the atmosphere to such an extent that global warming has become frightening reality, with sea levels rising, desertification increasing and disappearance of animals. As land becomes scarcer wars and famine ravage the nations and societies collapse. And hey presto, Steampunk post-apocalypse is the result.

You could call it, "Carbon World".

Genre Emulating Mechanics: Risus and Burning Wheel

There's some fascinating stuff here about genre emulation.

I'm all about genre in the sense that I like my games to have a clearly defined one - be it Sword & Sorcery or Space Opera or Cyberpunk - and to remain within its bounds. (Genre-busting has never interested me in the slightest.) But until now I've never given a huge amount of thought to how mechanics support genre - there have just been mechanics I've liked and mechanics I haven't, and I've taken the ones I've liked and tried to crowbar them into different genres depending on my mood. To wit: I once ran a game, for example, which mixed Lovecraftian horror with Australian Aboriginal mythology, but used 1st edition AD&D mechanics to do so.

Needless to say that sort of thing is pretty unsatisfactory, and if it is to work it requires a lot of effort that I frankly don't have time or inclination for anymore. Risus - and I suppose other games like FATE and SOTC - strike me as a better alternative, because their core mechanics (Cliche in Risus, Aspects in FATE and SOTC) are so amenable to genre and to what genre is trying to do. This is especially true of Risus. That is to say: genre is cliche, and as that game's mechanics revolve entirely around cliche it should be a perfect fit.

(For example, if you want to play a Superhero game with Risus, you can emulate the genre very easily by giving characters cliches such as "Evil Genius", "Stronger than 10 tigers", "Well brought up small-town boy", "Snazzy suit", or "Reluctant hero." (Hooks also help you do this.) If on the other hand you want a swashbuckling pirate game, you can come up with cliches like "Rope-swinger par excellence", "Looks good in a cod piece" or "Bloodthirsty maniac".)

But then you read a post like this and you think, hang on, these fellows could be onto something:

An example [of how Risus isn't perfect for genre emulation] could be Cold War spying - you could use Risus and cliches would help create a specific mood of betrayal and cloak-and-dagger, but you're still not getting the direct mechanical oomph that a Trust mechanic like Cold City uses supplies - in that game, the more Trust in each other you have, the more effective you are, but at the same time the more vulnerable to betrayal. Everyone also has Hidden Agendas which give bonus dice too, so you have a system-supported tension between trusting one another and betraying one another to achieve your agendas.

You could end up with exactly the same amount of double-dealing and subterfuge in a Risus game, complete with secret agendas, but with Cold City you not only have player expectation and the flavour of the traits/cliches pointing you in that direction, you've also got the system nudging you towards those kinds of outcomes and stories.

Coincidentally, I was listening to an old Godzilla Gaming Podcast today in which the guys interviewed Luke Crane, creator of the highly successful Burning Wheel family of games. He spoke very forcefully about the future of RPGs and made it clear that he believes (to paraphrase) that said future will involve games "which do a specific thing, but do it very well" - i.e. games that take a rather narrow concept (politicking in Heian era Japan, to use the example of his new game, Blossoms are falling) but which allow you to do that concept to the max. (He said at one point in the interview that Blossoms are falling allows you to be, say, a Regent trying to manipulate a child emperor and competing for influence against a retired emperor, and that such a situation won't come about by accident or in spite of the rules - it will come about because that sort of thing is what the game is designed for.)

This is heady stuff, and makes me wonder about the value of my relentless attempts to fit the square peg of AD&D/Classic D&D into the round holes of Aboriginal Lovecraft, Amazon Exploration, Pacific Island Myth and Arthurian Legend. Should I not be designing specific rulesets to support those 'genres' rather than relying on existent but unsuitable mechanics?

Probably. And yet there's still a part of me that keeps whispering, "It isn't about the system, it's about the setting, the DM and the players," because broadly speaking that is what I think, fundamentally. What does the system matter, at the end of the day, if the DM and players are all singing from the same hymn sheet regarding what they want the game to be? And I worry that increased genre-emulating-mechanics will result in greater balkanization in the role playing community - because who wants to learn a brand new set of mechanics every time they take up a slightly different game?

Still, food for thought. Let's get those Risus rules whirring into action and see what we can come up with vis-a-vis Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and go from there.