Stranger in a Strange Land

Do you have a strange, special snowflake campaign setting that steers away from D&D tropes? Would it make more sense for the PCs to be "strangers in a strange land" than natives, given that the players aren't going to get to know the setting well enough to behave like they're indigenous? There is plenty of historical precedent for groups of adventurers stranded in foreign lands of which they know nothing, with no way to get home. For instance:

The Russian Expeditionary Force in France was a brigade-strength unit sent from Russia to the Western Front to fight alongside France in the First World War. A considerable portion were Estonians. In one of those bizarre twists of globalization in which the First and Second World War abounded, a group of them ended up serving with the 1st Moroccan Division: Russians and Estonians in France, fighting with North Africans against Germans.

The Czech Legion was formed from Czech and Slovak volunteers and served with the Imperial Russian Army; after the revolution in 1917 they began to trek Eastwards through Siberia all the way to Vladivostok to get on board ships bound for France. On the way they tangled with the Bolsheviks and became involved in the Siberian Intervention, when Japanese, American, French, Canadian, British and Italian troops landed in Vladivostok to support the Whites against the Reds in the Russian Civil War. It is also said that, on the way, the Legion ended up in possession of 8 train carriages of gold bullion from the Imperial Reserve. It is also said that some of the Czechs remained in Siberia into the 1920s, and helped the Koreans defeat the Japanese at the Battle of Qingshanli.

After the surrender of the Emperor in September 1945, thousands of Japanese troops remained in China fighting alongside the nationalists against warlords and communists. Some were there for years afterwards.

The Blue Division were Spanish volunteers in the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. In total 286 of them were held captive after the way until 1954, when they were repatriated to Spain.

Basques from Northern Spain were fishing cod off Newfoundland from the beginning of the 16th Century; some even argue the Basques may have discovered North America before Columbus (though after the Vikings, obviously). Some of the earliest trade jargons in the New World were mixtures of Basque and local Native American tongues.

The notion of a bunch of rubes fumbling their way around a weird place they know nothing about, then, is remarkably common in human history. There isn't much of a better excuse to set players loose on a hex crawl than "you are stranded here for reason x, now what?"

The Humble Sling

I've always thought slings are under-rated. If you ask me, there is something much more frightening about having a rock flung at you at supersonic speed than an arrow - something hideous and terrifying about the thought of a hefty chunk of stone hitting you FULL IN THE FACE and shattering teeth and bone. 

From Charles C. Mann's 1491:

Although Andean troops carried bows, javelins, maces and clubs, their most fearsome weapon, the sling, was made out of cloth. A sling is a woven pouch attached to two strings. The slinger puts a stone or slug in the pouch, picks up the strings by the free ends, spins them around a few times, and releases one of the strings at the proper moment. Expert users could hurl a stone, the Spanish adventurer Alonso Enriquez de Guzman wrote, "with such force that it will kill a horse...I have seen a stone, thus hurled from a sling, break a sword in two pieces when it was held in a man's hand at a distance of thirty paces". (Experimenting with a five foot long, Andean-style sling and an egg-sized rock from my garden, I was able, according to my rough calculation, to throw the stone at more than one hundred miles per hour. My aim was terrible though.) 

In a frightening innovation, the Inka heated stones in camp fires until they were red hot, wrapped them in pitch-soaked cotton, and hurled them at their targets. The cotton caught fire in mid-air. In a sudden onslaught the sky would rain burning missiles. During a counter attack in May 1536 an Inka army used these missiles to burn Spanish-occupied Qosqo to the ground. Unable to step outside, the conquistadors cowered in shelters beneath a relentless, weeks-long barrage of flaming stone...

I'm toying with bumping sling damage up to d6 for my games, or allowing two attacks at d4 damage to reflect the speed with which they can be fired.

They're also one of those weapons that no sensible adventurer should be without. The ideal D&D fighter, in my view, uses a hafted weapon - a spear or trident - and sling combination, probably also with a bola or net if the DM allows it, and a shield, of course. The spear or trident doubles up as a pokey-thing for poking stuff, which is one of the most crucial adventuring tasks. And the sling provides essentially infinite ranged attacks: if for some ungodly reason you can't find rocks to fire, you fling copper coins instead. If push comes to shove, you can also use it is a club by putting a big rock in the pouch and whipping your opponents.

Finally, there are records of troops in resistance movements in World War II using slings to fling molotov cocktails. No problems with flasks not breaking there, I think.

Dungeons & Discoveries

One D&D variant I'd like to run would be a campaign I call Salomon's House, after Sir Francis Bacon's college of sages in his book New Atlantis. This institution, in Bacon's mythical utopia of Bensalem, was set up to "to discern between divine miracles, works of nature, works of art, and impostures and illusions of all sorts" by discovering "the works of Creation, and the secrets of them".

Salomon's House in the original is supposed to be a place where scientific experiments are conducted - it is sort of a blueprint for the modern research university - but in my version it would be about sending adventurers forth into creation, to discover monsters, strange beings, divers creatures and magicks, wondrous places, and mysteries of the universe. Things of that nature. Basically, a guild of sages who send groups out into fantastical wildernesses, ruins, and other planes, to bring back whatever they can for sages to study and analyse.

This would require rejigging the XP system, I think: the aim is not to gather gold and advance that way, but to gather knowledge. So XP would be awarded for mapping new locations, finding new archives and bestiaries, capturing new creatures, bringing back the bodies of bizarre life forms, exploring new experiences, eating new foodstuffs, trying new drugs, shagging new alien races, or whatever. This could just map to gold for XP, ultimately (the sages pay money for all this information) but I also quite like the idea of people doing it for the sake of knowledge. A little like a mixture of the Fraternity of Order and the Society of Sensation in Planescape, but more cerebral than the latter and more chaotic than the former. Perhaps a forerunner of the empiricists, though more interested in cataloguing and enumerating than experimentation. So you might have a system of XP awards for the importance of the discovery and the risks associated with it.

Naturally, this would make extensive use of random generators, so the DM is partially in on the act of discovery too. It would also have different character classes, because most of the standard D&D ones don't fit. Handily, Bacon supplies us with different categories of sages working at Salomon's House who have ridiculously cool 17th century names:

• Merchants of light
• Depredators
• Mystery-men
• Pioneers
• Compilers
• Dowry-men
• Lamps
• Inoculators
• Interpreters of nature

I don't know about you, but if I could play a character class called a "mystery-man" I would be all over it like a rash.

On Wickedness

The two most recent books I have read are Antony Beevor's The Second World War, and Empire of the Summer Moon. These two books are radically different in scope, one covering the biggest and most intense conflict in human history, the other a series of tiny skirmishes fought over decades in a near-empty wilderness. And yet they have one thing in common: they make you aware, in no uncertain terms, of the absolutely extraordinary extent of "man's inhumanity to man".

In Beevor's book we read of SS men at Treblinka picking young children up by their ankles and swinging them down like mallets to dash their brains out on rocks, Red Army soldiers gang raping and murdering Russian women who were enslaved by Germans and who they had just "liberated" on their invasion of East Prussia, Japanese soldiers from different units abducting each other to cannibalise, Soviet officers who have done nothing wrong being summarily shot by their superiors to instil discipline into others, Allied bombers flattening Dresden just because it was the only city in Germany they hadn't flattened, the USAAF judging the success of its missions in Japan on how many innocent Japanese women and children it had burned to death, citizens of Leningrad abducting and killing their own neighbours' children to eat during the winter of 1941....and so on and so on.

In Gwynne's, we read of Comanche raiders gang raping and scalping pregnant women; slicing off rival tribe members' noses, arms and legs and then burning them alive; cutting off the bottoms of captives' feet and making them walk around for their own amusement; Texan militiamen shooting Cheyenne women and children who surrender to them and then mutilating their corpses in horrific ways; Texas rangers killing thousands of head of horses in cold blood to stop them falling into Comanche hands; Ute women bludgeoning helpless octogenarian Comanches to death with axes...and so on and so on.

It's enough to make one wonder: if this is the kind of thing human beings routinely do to one another in certain circumstances, what kind of stuff would orcs do? And let alone orcs - what would demons and devils do? What, indeed, does "evil" really even mean, given what we know about history?

This is the main reason why I lean increasingly towards humans as the key protagonists and antagonists in my campaign settings. Anything an orc can do, we can do better. And who needs a goblin when the thought of being tortured to death by a fellow human being is so much more plausible and disturbing?

Anthropological Titbit

I read a lot of non-fiction, and I often come across little titbits of information that I feel like using for setting material.

For instance, I've recently been reading Empire of the Summer Moon, which explains one of the main reasons why plains indian raiders were always keen to take children captive: when women are in the saddle a lot, they often have miscarriages and become infertile. Plains indian tribes had chronically low fertility rates, so they would literally steal other people's children to keep themselves going (as well as adopting exiles, runaways, and so on). That's something I've never heard of before, but will certainly use as grist for the setting-depth mill if horse-riding nomads come into things.

D&D my Cyberpunk; or, Hit points? We don't need no stinking hit points!

Some of the comments on yesterday's post got me thinking. It would be perfectly possible to run a game of D&D and using its core themes (bunch of adventurers seeking glory, wealth, fame and fortune through exploring ancient tombs and ruins and hexcrawling) in a setting with more up-to-date technology - taking inspiration from, say, the American Wild West, Brazil in the era of the bandeirantes, the exploration of Australia's interior by whites, the Russian conquest of Siberia, Livingstone's journeys in to "darkest Africa", and so on - but with dragons - were it not for the fact that D&D as a system just doesn't model guns very well. You can explain away the fact that 9th level characters have so many hit points by abstraction in a normal game of D&D, but the abstraction gets stretched to breaking point once it comes to bullets (this is part of the reason why I loathed my experience playing d20 Modern, despite perfectly good DM and players).

There is a simple solution to this, of course: as characters gain levels they don't gain hit points. A 9th-level character has the same number he started out with. (The DM might want to be generous and give starting characters max hit points for their class.) So an ambush of 9th-level characters by shotgun wielding goblins would retain the sense of fear and danger that a real gunfight would have, and make things suitably concrete.

Another thought occurs, however: Cyberpunk 2020 is a surprisingly robust and effective generic system if you want something that is easier to learn than GURPS while retaining a decent level of grit and crunch. I know this because I ran a WWII-era zombie game with it and thought it worked very effectively. (The only complaint would be that dice rolls are irritating and fiddly when it comes to damage - if you get hit by a 7.62mmx54mmR round you have to roll and add up 6d6+2 damage, which is clearly enough to render an unarmoured target dead in almost all cases but not quite enough to justify saying 'a hit is a kill', so in big gun fights you are constantly rolling and totalling up fistfuls of d6s.)

I also think that, the more 'modern' ones D&D becomes, the more it needs to have skills. In a low-technology world, people are not particularly specialised, because adventuring skills are not hard to learn: everybody can swim, use a rope, climb, pick locks, look for secret doors, etc. But the more technologically advanced a society becomes, the more career-type skills become necessary - it's more plausible to imagine somebody would have to sacrifice learning other skills in order to become a train driver, or astronomer, or demolitions expert, or whatever. A system that wants to model this would have to have a skill system, and Cyberpunk 2020 has a simple and reasonably effective one.

You would probably need to have some sort of wealth-for-XP mechanic on top of it, of course, but that would be easy to cobble together. As characters gained levels they would become more skilful, and the magic-users would get to use more powerful spells, but their basic physicality - their attributes and hit points - would remain the same and they would be as frail as ever in combat. I think this would be an interesting marriage between adventuresome exploration and hijinks and the constant risk of sudden death.

The Historical Context of D&D

I sometimes wonder whether or not Gygax, Arneson and the like had the right idea in setting D&D in a resolutely pseudo-medieval era. It's because that's the kind of era in which fantasy stories take place, of course. But if we view D&D's default mode of play as being about parties of adventurers venturing into the unknown to seek their fame and fortune, we would be much better off imagining it as taking place in a pseudo-renaissance, pseudo-Victorian, or perhaps pseudo-late-antiquity, era.

What are some examples of real world adventurers? The ones which spring to my mind are:

• The vikings, who spread throughout Europe in late antiquity as, essentially, adventurers, mercenaries and pillagers, and who ended up founding kingdoms in Normandy, Sicily, the Middle East, and Russia
• The conquistadors who sailed across the Atlantic in search of gold, slaves and glory
• The explorers of Africa and Asia in the era of European empire building
• The forerunners of the settlers of the great North and South American interiors - prospectors, slavers, explorers, scientists

High medieval societies were rather hidebound by feudalism and religion. They were not the kind of societies which bred adventurers. Historically, adventurers have mostly been fostered by a mix of variables - relatively high poverty (the motivation to escape), relative lack of opportunity for advancement (another motivation to escape), relatively high change of glory (discoveries of new areas of the globe to explore), breakthroughs in travel technology (e.g. ocean going vessels that could make it all the way to China from Portugal) and relatively large numbers of young men with nothing to do (big pool to draw from). This was true, for instance, in post-reconquista Spain, when there were thousands of men who had successfully fought the Moors sitting around with nothing much to do except set sail for the New World. It was true in late 18th to late 19th Century Britain, when the population was booming and the interior of Africa was opening up, and there was a sudden opportunity to escape a life of misery working in some godforsaken shit hole factory. It was true in the mid-18th Century USA, when opportunity called thanks to the opening up of the West and, likewise, the population was booming and life in cities in the East was pretty crappy. I think it was also probably true in the Scandinavia of late antiquity - the Roman Empire had fallen and, hey presto, Europe was laying wide open for impoverished young men with nothing to lose to go and raid.

It makes more sense to me, then, to imagine D&D campaigns taking place in a context of societal change, when there are new areas of the map to explore thanks to discoveries or advances in travel technology (or perhaps due to catastrophe), and where people are seeing an opportunity to improve their lives and with relatively little to lose. It seems more realistic to set it in an era of technological or cultural revolution like the renaissance or the imperial age, then, rather than the Tolkien-esque quasi-medieval settings it has traditionally been found in. Out with long swords and chain mail, in other words, and in with sabres and muskets.

Druids

The Druid has always been a problematic D&D or AD&D character class, for me. I never understood the point of drawing a distinction between a druid and a cleric; like the barbarian, which is surely just a fighter who happens to be from a certain cultural background, the druid must surely only be a cleric who happens to worship nature, or a nature god, of some kind. The division between the two classes is entirely arbitrary and artificial, and also rather blandly Eurocentric (Christian versus pagan).

The D&D druid also flies in the face of almost everything I know about real druids (which admittedly isn't very much and is mainly gleaned from Julius Caesar's writings). These weren't hippy-dippy nature lovers, by most accounts: they were astronomers and diviners, who also acted as judges in Celtic society and had a penchant for burning people alive in giant wicker structures, a la Edward Woodward. 

That said, the druid is also probably my absolute favourite 2nd edition AD&D class, and the one I played the most during my formative years. I put this down to two factors:

1) Shapechanging.
2) You get to call yourself a "heirophant".

Over the next few days I'm going to put up my 'take' on the druid as a character class for LOTFP, focusing on these two factors: shapechanging and heirophancy. Watch this space.

On Gaming with Teenagers and Ageing

The weekly game of LotFP I'm involved in (as a player) has been an interesting experience, as the players are divided between old fogeys and yoof in roughly equal measures. The DM, Patrick, is I think 29 (though he'll correct me on that). Then there's me, 30, and a 31 year-old. On the other side of the adult/child divide are David and Adam, affectionally referred to as the "gruesome twosome", who are 16 or 17-ish; Adam is a nephew of one of the other players, and David is his strange friend. This is a new thing for me, as for my entire gaming life, such as it is, I've gamed with people who are broadly my age or older.

On Wednesday the gruesome twosome brought along two more friends. I viewed this with a little trepidation; I don't get along with anybody below the age of about 25, unless they have breasts and nice dimples, so I wasn't expecting it to be a great deal of fun. This is compounded by the fact that the "gruesome twosome" have a tendency towards the...chaotic. And in real life, not in alignment terms.

Yet, surprisingly, it went very well. One thing I noticed is that the youngsters were actually quite keen to be deferential to us seniors, looking to us for their lead on a number of occasions. But I also noticed that age-old truism in action: the older you get, the more conservative you become. The younger players at the table's approach to the game can be best described as devil-may-care. There's a corridor? Let's charge down it. There's a room full of bats ahead? Let's kill them. There's a load of old crates in the room? Let's search them. On a number of occasions this resulted in extremely awkward and dangerous results, and yet the natural exuberance of youth meant they never really learned their lesson.

By contrast, the oldsters were caution personified. We spent the initial, lengthy encounter essentially hiding in long grass while the others did everything. In the dungeon, I was trying to parlay with the creatures we met, and frightening off bats by yelling and making noise; anything to avoid a fight. Every corridor we came down had pebbles thrown down it to make sure there wasn't a trap. We made clever use of spells to avoid direct confrontation.

Patrick is a much cuddlier DM than I am, and he was also going easy on the newbies a bit, which I think was fair enough and probably the correct way to play it. But I think, in a more rules-as-written version of the game, it wouldn't have been long before the PCs of the youngsters were all dead.

It made me realise something that we all know already: D&D was originally a game for adults. Gary Gygax was 35 or 36 when it was first released. Dave Arneson was a spring chicken at 26ish. These weren't nerdish teenage boys, young, dumb and full of cum. They were nerdish men. The game rewards the kind of caution and conservatism that adults will bring to the table.

This means that in its purest form the game is best enjoyed by grown-ups. And yet it has, throughout most of the past 30 years, been a preserve of adolescents. I believe this may be one of, if not the, major explanation for the gradual kid-gloving of the game over the preceding decades - adolescents, particularly adolescent boys, are idiots. You can't leave them in charge of a game like OD&D without them abusing and misunderstanding it horribly, which in turn leads them to think it is broken and unfair. And thus: 4e.

A Spearprising Statistic

As a long-time resident of Japan who doesn't really buy into the Japanophile scene, I'm always entertained when myths about Japanese society (particularly to do with samurai) get busted. (See posts passim like this one.) So I was pleased to discover some statistics while reading Sir George Sansom's magisterial, and somewhat dry, A History of Japan:

There are no exact records of the arms carried by the troops engaged at Sekigahara, but a general idea can be gained from the composition of a reinforcement sent to Ieyasu by Date Masamune in October 1600. Of a total of 3,000 men, 420 were mounted, probably carrying swords, 1,200 carried firearms, 850 carried spears, and 200 carried bows; there are no particulars for 330 men. 

A similar contingent of some 2,000 men from another quarter included 270 mounted men, 700 men carrying firearms, 550 carrying spears, and 250 carrying bows; there are no particulars for the rest. These and other records show that by 1600 the most important weapons were firearms, followed by spears and next by bows. Swords came last.

So there you have it: katana look nice, but ask those who were in the know and they'd always have gone for trusty old yari, and they liked teppo best of all.

Actual matchlock firearms were only introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in about 1540, so it was only in the course of 60 years that they came to surpass the bow in terms of importance. Almost like with the Maori musket wars, a foreign technology was introduced which totally revolutionised Japanese warfare and changed social mores indelibly (though in this case, in the opposite direction to that of the Maori: Japan became more conservative and backward as a consequence). This is a lesson for any DM who is interested in creating a living, breathing, sort of a world: imagine what could happen to an orc society once firearms (or a certain type of magic) is introduced.

But I'm more interested in spears. To put it simply, I'm a spear fan when it comes to D&D, and never create a fighter who doesn't have one (or a trident or similar). Swords don't interest me much: a spear is just as good in a fight - or better, because it lets you fight from a rear rank or from above/below - but it's also an invaluable tool: it's a 10' pole with a spike on the end. It's a trap-finding, hole-poking, enemy-tripping, depth-finding device extrordinaire which no self-respecting dungeoneer should leave home without. No wonder the medieval Japanese liked it so much.

 

A Walk Down Memory Lane

Like many role playing enthusiasts of my generation, I spent my formative years not so much dicking around with D&D as dicking around with Cyberpunk 2020 and, to a slightly lesser extent, Shadowrun. It's difficult to believe now, because times have changed so much, but these games really were popular back then. At my local Virgin Megastore (which shows how far back in time this is going; not only did Virgin Megastores stop stocking RPG books about 15 years ago, they disappeared entirely about 10 years ago) CP2020 and Shadowrun books were probably second only in volume to AD&D ones, with MERP and Rifts stuff being vastly distant fourth and fifth. Before the hideous rise of Vampire: The Masquerade, I think it's safe to say that CP2020 bore the mantle of the "credible alternative" to AD&D (inasmuch as any role playing game can be "credible"). Where AD&D (by now in its 2nd edition) was seen as stale, cliched, and trite, there was still something edgy about CP2020, with its extremely deadly and realistic combat system, its rules for drug use, and sassy writing style.

Of course, nowadays when you page through the rule-book, the edginess seems amazingly tame and endearingly non-edgy. Mike Pondsmith's authorial voice is still very much in evidence and it's not hard to imagine why my 14-year-old self was impressed with lines like:

[So] you're starting to look over the list of cyberenhancements, and you're thinking, "I don't have the kind of Eurobucks I need to swing this newtech." At this point, you have to ask yourself "How desperate am I? Am I really hard up enough to risk death and dismemberment just to get a lousy cyberarm?"

Sure you are.

In fact, fuck it, I'm still impressed with it now; cheesy it may be, but this guy really knew how to make a rulebook fun to read, and, more importantly, he knew how to make a rulebook make you really want to play the game.

But it's all quite safe and charming, from a 2011 perspective. One of the illustrations has a guy with two guns and a tattoo of a pentagram with '666' on his shoulder (ooh!). In the section on how to design/buy drugs, the reader is reminded that drugs will "mess up [your character] beyond repair - just like in real life". And there's no bad language, so we get hilarious "melon farmer" style quasi-swearing ("Who does this choob think he is?").

More noticeably, of course - and this, ultimately, is probably the reason for the demise of cyberpunk in general as a literary, cinematic, or ludic genre - it's all so very, very wrong about how the future has turned out. Although, notionally, CP2020 was "set" in the year 2020, and we can't say what might happen in the next 9 years, so many of its predictions about how the world would be have turned out to be laughably wrong. (Indeed, I find it neatly ironic that the main message of one of William Gibson's early stories, The Gernsbeck Continuum, which took the piss out of 1930s sci-fi's vision of the future, could quite easily be applied to cyberpunk.)

So, in the CP2020 rulebook, we are told that a cellular phone will cost $400 and a contract for cell phone service $100/month. You are expected to pay $1/minute at a phone-box-esque "Data Term" in order to access newspapers and other information online. Cyberdecks are used not for social networking, creating wikipedia articles, or arguing on forums because "somebody is wrong on the internet", but only for the very limited purposes of data mining and sabotage. Pocket computers have "100 pages of alphanumeric memory" (gasp!). And if you're a music fan, you can buy "digital music chips" containing up to 6 (!) albums to listen to on your "digital chip player".

More significantly perhaps, because these are just cosmetic, cyberpunk as a genre and CP2020 as a game was just wrong in its vision of how society would develop. CP2020 asks us to imagine a future in which the streets are ruled by crazed boostergangs, corporations fight wars against nation-states, nuclear meltdown has made entire areas of the globe uninhabitable, and the Soviet Union is still a dominant force. We don't live in that kind of dystopia, and some blips notwithstanding, our lives are immeasurably better now than they were in 1985.

This is undoubtedly why CP2020 slipped from the minds of role players. Tastes change, and set against the WoD games I suppose it began to seem quaint, old-fashioned, and just a bit naff. Just as you don't see films like Blade Runner being made any more, you don't see cyberpunk having any legs as a genre of RPG; it's not so much that CP2020 has disappeared, it's that nothing has replaced it.

But in a sense none of that really matters, because as a game it did work once, and there's no reason why it can't still work today. Some day I'd like to pick up my old CP2020 rulebook and, like the old school movement did for D&D, play the game on its own merits, warts and all, and see what charms I can discover. Forget the internet; we have cyberspace. Never mind facebook; cyberspace is for hacking into other peoples' bank accounts. Forget ubiquitous iPhones; cell-phones are the preserve of the super-rich and still weigh a kilo. Laptops cost thousands of dollars and, if you're lucky, might hold 8 MB of RAM. And yet at the same time, we're able to literally create replacement eyes out of silicon and metal. Soviet-created bio-plagues and radioactive fallout pass on hideous diseases to the unprotected. And all the while, in the mean streets of vast dystopian cityscapes, anarchy reigns, and cyberpsychos stalk the earth...

Of Hares and Quolls and Da Gama, Ceiling Wax and Kings

[Apologies for the lack of posting the last few days. We visited the in-laws, in darkest Tohoku, where internet access is patchy at best.]

I've been reading Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration by Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto recently. It's an excellent overview of human explorers from prehistoric times to the current day, with the bulk naturally focused on the Iberian voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries, though I confess to a slight irritation at the author. (Fernandez-Arnesto believes that it was the poverty of Western Europe, especially Iberia, which caused the burst in exploration and colonisation - not technological advances - and that this is generally the rule around the world. Fair enough, but it leads him to be overly dismissive of other factors, such as personal bravery - Vasco da Gama for example is portrayed as a fool and an incompetent who could barely tell his arse from his elbow, which simply doesn't square with his achievements. There are also a heck of a lot of unsourced assertions throughout the book; whatever happened to popular history books with actual bibliographies?) You can also quibble about whether mass migrations such as the Polynesian colonisation of the Pacific, however impressive, really qualify as "exploration" in the same sense that Magellan's voyage did.

But anyway, I'm getting off on a tangent. Reading the book has given me an idea: Animal fantasy in the Age of Sail. Think of it. European animals (Rabbits and lynx from Spain and Portugal, Hares and foxes from the British Isles, frogs from France) venturing across the mighty ocean on cogs and caravels, discovering strange foreign lands populated by weird and unimagined beings (quolls, bandicoots and wombats in Australia, dholes and cobras in India, ocelots and caymans in South America) and getting up to all kinds of hijinks.

It surprises me that there isn't a game, much less a series of novels, about this. (There may be and I'm just not aware of it, of course.) It seems so obvious.

Anyway, I'm of the growing opinion that the world needs more Animal Fantasy role playing games, if only to seize the ground back from the furries - who as we all know are the lowest of all the many forms of geek, sitting just below LARPers and people who write stories about Kirk and Spock naked bedtopwrestling.

More thoughts on this tomorrow. By which I mean Animal Fantasy, not Star Trek slash fiction. Just to be clear.

Colonialpunk

I've been wanting for a long time to come up with a campaign setting for Cyberpunk 2020 - a kind of alternate history of the future. Nothing like as detailed or out-there as Sirlarkins' fantastic Rifts setting idea, but perhaps vaguely in that vein, imagining a world in which Something Big happened at some point in the 20th Century that radically changed the course of history.

I have a lot of nostalgia for nuclear apocalypse as a trope of sci-fi/fantasy. Perhaps it's because my generation was the last to grow up in a world in which it was a genuine possibility. (I vividly remember in primary school - probably at the age of about 10 - me and another kid were chosen to debate the advantages and disadvantages of spending tax income on Britain's Trident nuclear programme, compared to the NHS. Being 10 year old boys, we naturally came down on the side of Trident.) However, nuclear apocalypse is too decisive an event for a cyberpunk world; cyberpunk is about malaise, about decay, and about slow decline. A nuclear apocalypse is a watershed. In cyberpunk, there is no watershed - just a steady worsening.

I enjoyed the concept behind The Arabesk Trilogy, John Courtenay Grimwood's cyberpunk future, based in an Ottoman Empire which never fell. The execution was lacking (Grimwood, like Neal Stephenson, is one of those writers whose prose I actually actively dislike), but the idea was there. However, World War I what-ifs are a too familiar a point of deviation for alternate history, just like World War II and the American Civil War. There needs to be something less obvious and less obviously world changing. Subtle difference.

One possibility which I've often considered is that imperialism never failed. (I'm no imperialist, quite the opposite; but remember, this is about dystopia.) There is every reason to believe that it might not have, had the first and second world wars - its death knells - never happened. The major powers in the fin de siecle period were extraordinarily self-confident and strong, and ruled practically the entire globe. Without the wars, which broke down the great powers' economies and ushered in concepts such as human rights, that strength might have proved unshakeable and we might still live in a colonial world.

The key to all this is Austria-Hungary. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries two ideas were floating around Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his cronies, who were well aware of the problems which faced them (and which would eventually boil over with catastrophic consequences in Sarajevo in 1914). The first of these ideas was the complete reform of the Dual Monarchy into an entity known as the United States of Greater Austria - a federal state comprised of 15 separate autonomous entities for the various ethnic groups found within its borders. This may have served to satisfy the nascent nationalist movements within the empire - whose main complaint was lack of political representation - and placated terrorist groups such as the Black Hand. Hey presto! - no World War I.

The second idea was the elevation of the Kingdom of Croatia to the same level as Austria and Hungary - creating a Triple, rather than a Dual, monarchy. This would have been accompanied by greater regional autonomy within each of the three monarchies, and a far greater balance of power between all of the empire's ethnic groups.

The glory of alternate histories such as these is that they don't have to be particularly plausible. I have no idea if the United States of Greater Austria would ever have worked. All I need, however, is the knowledge that there was a slim chance it could. And then work from there.

Implications of this idea in another post sometime, maybe.

Exoticism

In a post the other day I mentioned that I liked settings with non-European influences. This is mainly because, like many people, I'm just sick to death of what have become the 'standard' fantasy tropes, and since those tropes are (superficially) European in flavour, the desire to get away from cliche manifests itself in a liking for things that are not European.

On reflection, this is a mistake. Actually, it's pretty stupid for two reasons. First, 'Europe' is historically a geographic entity and not a geopolitical one. Second, medieval Europe is as exotic to European people today as medieval Timbuktu. In fact, modern English people probably have more in common with people living in modern Timbuktu than they do with people who lived in 11th Century England.

This was brought home to me yesterday, when I was reading through the Internet Medieval Sourcebook - specifically, the Formula for Conducting the Ordeal of Boiling Water. In case you haven't read it, I'll summarise the gist: the ancestors of modern Germans used to decide the guilt of an accused man based on whether or not his hand was burned by being submerged in boiling water.

The other legal texts make for equally fascinating reading. We have rules for marriages between a freedwoman and a serf, on the sale of daughters as concubines, on the murder of slaves (punishable by two years of penance!) and on, er...what to do about Jewish people. This was another world, and to claim it wasn't exotic is utterly bizarre.

And on its outskirts, parts of Europe probably had more in common with other continents than they did with the supposed 'European culture'. Consider the Highland Scots, tribal and stratified along clan lines, who seemed to fit in better with the Creeks and Cherokee of North America than they did with their Lowland and English neighbours. The Hungarians - Central Asian nomads transplanted to Central-Eastern Europe. The Castilians, culturally more similar to the Moors than to the French. The Lithuanians and Prussians, pagan tribes sandwiched between Christian powers.

It ought to be perfectly possible for people to come up with fantasy settings based on 'Europe' that are just as, if not more exotic, than Rokugan or Kara-Tur or any of the other 'non-European' inspired stuff that's out there. See, this is why I need to know more about medieval history...

Redsticks and Jacobites: Campaign Idea

A friend and I used to write a blog together. Our enthusiasm gradually petered out and now we don't update it, but today I took a look over the old entries and reminisced. Here's a post from July 2007 which, with hindsight, would I think make a great starting point for a campaign:

I've recently become interested in what I've decided to christen the "things that make you go 'hmmm'" school of historical study: the way certain events - often barely noticed ones - from history can conspire odd and unexpected ways; ways that nobody could have predicted and which seem so incongruous and fitting as to have almost been planned by a fiction writer.

An example of this is the curious link between the Jacobite Rebellion of the Scottish Highlands and the Red Stick War of the Creeks against the United States government.

From the late 17th century to the mid-18th, Scottish independence from England took its last throw of the dice, when James VII and later Bonnie Prince Charlie launched insurgencies, with the aid of Highland Scottish clans, against the London government. A century of massacres, battle and guerilla warfare resulted, in which ancient Highland clan rivalries played as much a part as the question of independence, before finally the rebellion was ended at the 1746 Battle of Culloden. (My own genes played something of a role in the story: my great-grandmother had her roots in Clan Campbell, a large and powerful Highland clan which sided with the British in the rebellion in order to settle long-held grudges against Clans Lohan, MacDonald and MacGregor.)


After the Jacobite Rebellion had been stamped out, the British government proceeded with a policy of ethnic cleansing (an anachronistic but appropriate term) in which Scottish Highland society and culture were effectively destroyed. Large numbers of disposessed clansmen, cast out from their homeland, found themselves on ships bound for the New World. It's hard to imagine, these days, the situation of these men, plucked from an insular world of high, wet moorland, narrow valleys and deep dark lochs, to the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean; our own experience of overseas travel is utterly alien to it. It must have been terrifying and awe-inspiring at the same time.

The place they found themselves in, on the opposite side of the planet, would, I think, have been surprisingly familiar. Native American society, with its tribalism, its clan bonds, and its endemic violence, wouldn't have been dissimilar to Highlands life; it's natural that the Scots would have made their ways to the frontiers, where they were often the vanguard of expansion.

Three of their descendants were to become a coterie of young leaders at the heart of the Creek nation at the turn of the 19th century: 'Menawa', William Weatherford (Red Eagle) and Peter McQueen, each half-Scottish, born to frontiersmen and Creek women, versed in both cultures, and often posessing startlingly incongruous eccentricities - like the regular playing of bagpipes before a battle. They came to prominence as the central force of the Red Stick movement - a group of young Creeks who believed in violent resistance to white expansion - which in 1812 began an insurgency against settlers, government forces and "civilized Creeks" in the American South. Massacre and guerilla warfare continued for some years before the rebellion reached its bloody conclusion at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and its aftermath.



The parallels are obvious - both rebellions were categorised by slaughter of civilians (the Massacre at Glencoe and The Fort Mims Massacre); both were considerably more complicated than "native against government" (some Highlanders, like the men of Clan Campbell, fought for the British, and many Lower Creeks and Cherokees joined the US government against the Red Sticks - not to mention another Scots/Creek, William McIntosh); and, most sadly, both ended in the destruction of a way of life and an ancient culture. How interesting, though, and how like the plot of a novel, that it should be the very descendants of the Jacobites who should go on to be the driving force of the Red Sticks, in a land thousands of miles away and as ostensibly far removed as possible, and that their experience should be so similar.

Makes you go 'hmmm', see?

The Threat Within

There is a strong thread running through Warhammer: that of corruption from within. This gives it a thematic strength that is rare in fantasy settings. Where most such settings tend to be exercises in imagination, Warhammer feels like it is genuinely about something - the conflict between Man and Self.

The first and most important element of this is, of course, Chaos - a force which corrupts from within and thereby destroys. Each of the major Chaos Gods tempts mankind in different ways, drawing people away from their essential humanity and transforming them into something baser, by playing on their fears, hopes and instincts. Khorne does it through awakening rage and bloodlust, Nurgle through despair, Tzeentch through the lust for knowledge and Slaanesh through plain old lust. People are drawn to their worship from an inherent weakness, a chink in their armour, and are taken - like those who cry out to Nurgle to protect them from plague, or who give themselves to Tzeentch in return for hidden knowledge. Chaos is a constant threat which seethes below human society; everybody must be on their guard lest they become tempted. This sense of danger at the roots of mankind is personified by the Skaven, a clandestine race of rat-men who live right under the foundations of human society, unknown and unsuspected but constantly gnawing, spreading disease and pestilence and gradually gathering their strength for the moment when they strike.

I likened the Empire to the USSR under Stalin in my post the other day, and I like that analogy - the difference, of course, being that the threats which faced the USSR were mostly made up and trumped up, whereas those facing the Empire are all too real. By coincidence at the moment I'm reading Orlando Figes' The Whisperers, a massive collection of oral testimony from people who lived through the Stalin years. The sense that foreign spies were everywhere and that anti-Bolshevik 'cosmopolitans' and 'class enemies' were lurking in the shadows around every corner pervaded the Soviet regime in its early years (though the real danger for most people was in fact the NKVD): the struggles which families of those accused of being 'class enemies' went through could well be compared to those of the familes of traitors given over to Chaos. Warhammer is like a 'what-if' scenario which imagines what a world would be like in which the lies of totalitarian dictatorships were actually true. Except transported to an incredibly baroque and blackly humourous fantasy setting.




This sort of thing is something I'd like to play with with Yoon-suin. Not the straight plundering of Chaos or Skaven or class-enemies, but the creation of some sense of an all-pervading and ever-present danger threatening to consume everything from within. Something to make players feel as though they have to keep a constant guard on their own behaviour lest they take a wrong step somewhere and find themselves slipping into something which might endanger their immortal soul. But which at the same time wouldn't mean an ending, just as the man who gives himself to the pleasures of Slaanesh loses his humanity but gains something Other.

Armour, Combat Descriptions and the One Minute Round

I've just finished reading Azincourt, the latest from Bernard Cornwell. It's an account of Henry V's Agincourt campaign from the perspective of one of the archers who took part, and a riproaring read which begins with murder in a small English village and climaxes in the famous battle, where around 6,000 English and Welsh archers and men-at-arms destroyed a French army of 20-30,000. I read it in a single day; by no means is it great art, but there's no writer quite like Bernard Cornwell for sheer barnstorming excitement and great fight scenes. (Without a doubt, when it comes to describing a battle from the point of view of the ordinary soldier, he's the best there is.) It's heartily recommended.

Naturally enough, since (at a conservative estimate) 70% of the book involves people killing each other, it got me thinking about combat. In particular, it got me thinking about medieval combat and the one-minute-combat round, as well as conceptions of combat in pre-3e D&D generally; probably this is because there has been a bit of discussion about the matter here and here in recent weeks so it's been lurking around in the back of my mind. To cut a long story short, I've always known in a theoretical sense that combat rounds in AD&D last a minute, and even paid attention to the passages in the 2nd edition PHB which say things like:

During a one-minute combat round, each character is assumed to block many attempted attacks and see many of his own attacks blocked. In normal combat, characters parry all the time--there's no need to single out each parry.

and:

When making an attack, a character is likely to close with his opponent, circle for an opening, feint here, jab there, block a thrust, leap back, and perhaps finally make a telling blow. A spellcaster may fumble for his components, dodge an attacker, mentally review the steps of the spell, intone the spell, and then move to safety when it is all done. It has already been shown what drinking a potion might entail. All of these things might happen in a bit less than a minute or a bit more, but the standard is one minute and one action to the round.

But in practice, I've found that what tends to happen in older D&D games goes something like this:

Hector: I attack the troll. [Rolls dice]
DM: You cut the troll with your falchion, roll for damage.
Hector: Yay. [Rolls dice]
DM: [Rolls dice] The troll whacks you with his fist for 8 points of damage.
Hector: I attack him again. [Rolls dice]
DM: Your swing misses by an inch. [Rolls dice] The troll sinks his teeth into your face for 6 points of damage.

Admittedly a boring example, but you get the point: The idea of combat being a one-minute round of thrills and spills during the course of which people may or may not be injured and spells may or may not be cast goes out of the window, and is replaced by a hyper-detailed blow-by-blow account which might as well be second-by-second rather than minute-by-minute.

The thing is, an abstract combat round of one minute is difficult to envisage if all it involves is lots of dodging, parrying, feinting and fencing. That might simulate swordfighting duels from old films like those between Erroll Flynn and Basil Rathbone, or Tony Curtis and Ross Martin, but it doesn't seem to sit very well with the reality of messy, brutal melee. How do we conceptualise or envisage one minute of balls-to-the-wall violence in which participants might very well end up suffering trivial or no injury?




It's all about the armour. As one of the commenters in the Grognardia entry notes, "It's important to keep in mind that people wore the stuff because it worked." And work it did. In Azincourt, Cornwell describes how 5,000 or so French armoured men-at-arms were able to slog their way across 300 yards of open ground through knee-deep mud while enduring a hail of literally tens of thousands of arrows; even at close range a shot from a longbow could not penetrate the thick steel of a breast plate or greave. Nor was a sword or spear likely to - only a lucky or particularly well-aimed blow could cause injury, otherwise the worst that might happen would be the victim being knocked off his feet. Indeed, according to Cromwell (and Keegan) the vast majority of casualties in battles like Agincourt were execution-style killings of prone opponents: A man-at-arms would be knocked over in the melee, flounder in the mud, and then be disposed of either by a knife through the eyeslits in his visor, or by having his head bashed in with a poleaxe. The poleaxe was one of the few weapons which had a decent chance of cracking half-way serious armour.

An AD&D combat round, then, is actually like to involve lots of 'hits' that just don't cause injury. Even the lighter 'adventurer' armours such as chain mail or boiled leather were capable of turning a sword or spear blade, and in the cramped conditions in which most AD&D fights take place it's much more credible to imagine blows being landed but not causing injury than endless dodging, feinting and parrying.

The problem, as I've often thought, is that the 'to hit' roll is a misnomer which leads to unnecessary confusion. The rules would have been better served by called it the 'potential to cause damage' roll instead; a successful roll does not mean that you have hit so much as it means that you have been lucky or skilled enough to hit well, and a failed roll does not mean that you haven't hit - only that you haven't caused injury. 'Potential to cause damage' is an unwieldy term, but a much more accurate one than currently exists.

Gaming in, and Games set in, Japan

[Foreword: Don't read this is you like manga and are easily offended. You won't like it.]

I've lived in Japan for over four years now, in total, and I like RPGs. You'd think this would be a good mix, but in fact it really isn't. You see, the Japanese nerd tropes - anime, manga, J-pop, cosplay, all the things which drive so many Western geek-types to distraction - those things do absolutely nothing for me. I couldn't be less interested. I can barely stand Western adult comics (a "good comic" to me is Dilbert, Garfield, Peanuts, Asterix the Gaul), let alone Japanese ones, with their hideous big-eyed shiny faced hyper-cuteness and their awful nonsensical storylines. The whole recent manga-fad is reminiscent of The Emperor's New Clothes, and I'm just waiting for the moment when the penny drops and people realise that just because something has Japanese writing on it, that doesn't automatically make it cool.

I think it's because I came to Japan "cold". I adored (and still adore) Kurosawa's films, ever since I was first exposed to them at the age of 10 when I ransacked my Dad's video collection and dug out something called The Hidden Fortress. (Incidentally, has there ever been a more intriguing film title than that?) But when I stepped off the plane at Narita airport in March 2003 - a wide-eyed 21 year old at loose in a foreign land - I wasn't your typical manga geek and my only contact with anime had been through Akira. It wasn't my scene at all, and still isn't. Japan was fresh to me and I got to know it by living and working here.

(I did try to get into manga, by the way. When I first started studying Japanese I would often buy comics to practice with. This is how I learned the truth about how godawful the storylines usually are. Aside from the work of genuine talents like Tezuka Osamu and Oguri Saori, none of what I read stuck in my mind as being of any value whatsoever. Almost all of it is mindless fluff, or - radical concept! - written for kids. [Disclaimer: This is all my subjective opinion.])

Nor am I really into samurai and the like, much as I love a good Kurosawa epic. The romanticisation of the samurai (exemplified in films like The Last Samurai and novels like Shogun) is something I actually find deeply sinister; worse, it is based on a Japanese culture that never really existed - or at least only existed in the minds of Westerners and Japanese imperalist/fascists.

I also have to admit a certain distaste for the current trendiness of Japanese culture in Western society. The popularity of manga, cosplaying and the like is really just a new form of orientalism - although at least the old orientalism gave us Van Gogh. And for somebody who actually lives in the country and has to get on with people as people - not grotesque caricatures on a comic book page - I can't help but get mightily pissed off at the image of Japan which the whole thing perpetuates: a land of perverted, socially inept weirdos, basically, which it really isn't. And the whole thing stands in the way of people getting to know the real greats of Japanese art and literature - fantastically gifted nobel-prize winning authors, brilliant painters, great visionary film makers.

All of these reasons are why I avoid games in Japan or pseudo-Japanese settings like the plague. This is despite the fact that I would like to run them. I know a lot about the country, speak its language fluently, and have an intimate knowledge of its history. I want to put that knowledge to good use. If only I could find people who I could trust not to behave like manga geeks - because the alternative (a game with those who know a little, but not enough) would be a fate worse than death.


ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that this post goes against my recent promise to stop ranting and be positive instead. So here's what I'll do: a series of articles next week on how to Japan-ise your game! Can't say fairer than that, now, can you?

Great Blog Posts, and Lessons of History

There was a brilliant post on d21 gaming the other day about Pizzaro and the conquest of the Incas, and what that has to say about D&D and pillaging/tomb-robbing/ethical considerations in general. It's a thoroughly thought-provoking read, and the kind of stuff that makes having my so-big-it's-positively-unwieldy google reader list worthwhile. The author makes the point that:

In D&D parlance, we are expectant of a similar truth [to that which the conquistadors believed in]– there’s gold and jewels and magic just lying around in dark and dangerous places. It’s all yours, you just have to go get it yourself. A necessary evil of this conceit is the necessity of evil: adventuring companies are good, because monsters are evil.

The necessity of evil: almost a motto for D&D itself, you might say.

Now, I don't wish to get into the ethical argument here. It depends very much on the kind of game you want to run. I can see the value of a campaign in which the moral ambiguities of 'adventuring' are addressed, and I can see it being fun and interesting. But I equally enjoy the straightforward 'adventures' of long tradition, where moral ambiguities are ignored, and wouldn't want to give those kind of games up. There is room for both.

What I want to talk about is the concept of adventurer as well armed entrepeneur, in the words of Kim MacQuarrie.The d21 Gaming author sums it up as follows:

The Spanish conquest, plunder, and colonization of the New World was hardly an organized affair. It was not carried out by career soldiers, and indeed Europe had been bereft of such ever since the Roman legions ceased to be. Rather it was carried out by adventuring companies, who applied for and were granted charters by the government to explore blank areas on the map; rather not unlike getting a fishing license. Would-be adventurers typically hailed from the poorest and meanest regions of Spain – Extremadura (best region name ever!) and its surroundings produced not only Cortes and Pizarro, but also Balboa, Ponce de Leon and de Soto.

A novice adventurer would sign on with a seasoned band of leaders who were recruiting a new company, themselves likely veterans of the same system. Such a company might have a few hundred members – what could reasonably be transported and deployed with a few ships. The charter would detail the value of what each member was contributing in material value – weapons, armor, horses, tack, other provisions, and the proceeds of the expedition were to be divided among any surviving members in proportion to what was “put in”. Basically these were commoners or thugs with not a shred of practical experience...

...just like 1st level D&D characters.

So this has me thinking. A few months ago I was toying with the idea of an Adventurer's Guild - a central, semi-organised authority on the edge of a great wilderness, which adventurers would join for special benefits, in return for handing over a tithe of all their findings. The idea of a conquistador company is remarkably similar - the only difference being that the Adventurer's Guild is static, whereas the conquistador company is mobile. So what if we merge the two ideas and come up with a static Adventurer's Guild which was founded by a conquistador company? I think that's a capital idea.

The early colonial era is my favourite period of history, but my favourite explorers were mostly Portuguese, rather than Spanish. It was the Portuguese who did it first, after all. So my Adventurer's/Conquistador's Guild is going to be based around the Bandeirantes - the 'colonial scouts' of old Brazil, who struck deep into the rainforest, seeking mineral wealth and pushing the boundaries of Portuguese rule from the coast right through to the borders with Peru. Unlike the Spanish conquistadors, the Bandeirantes were mestizos and Indians much more than they were Europeans, and their main language was the Tupi-based Lingua Geral, not Portuguese. There is plenty of moral ambiguity about them if you look for it (they were motivated as much by the capture of slaves as they were by finding mineral wealth), but if you are willing to ignore that aspect, what you have is jungle explorers somewhat akin to Indiana Jones, striking out into almost impenetrable rainforest in search of gold and magical artifacts, and you can't get much cooler than that.

On the Formation of a Gaming Philosophy

I've been discussing character classes with Rachel in the comments to this entry, and as a corollary to that conversation started thinking about why I look at RPGs the way I do. If I had to sum up my role playing philosophy, I suppose I would paraphrase the late great Gary Gygax and say: "Why let game designers and writers do your imagining for you?" In other words, I believe that the amount of fun you get out of the game has little or nothing to do with the wide variety of rules, variations, and supplements which most games are accompanied by. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that the less rules, variants and supplements you have, the better. 3.X D&D was crushingly unfun for me because I just could not be bothered with the wide range of feats and skills I was forced to choose. And that was only in the core rules. The later supplements made that problem thousands of times worse.

But why do I think like this? I recognise that my view of gaming isn't objectively better than any other. This is how I put it to Rachel:

Strange as it may seem to say, I think my D&D philosophy mostly came about due to economics. My formative D&D experiences all came about when I was an adolescent, and then teenager, with basically no money to spend on books and supplements. One set of core rules between us was about all my friends and I could afford. So we had to get creative with what we had!

I come from a working class background, and like most kids growing up in Liverpool in the 1980s and 1990s, our family was far from being financially secure. We weren't on the breadline, or anything, but times were tough. I just never had any money to spend on games, and neither did my friends. For a long time we survived on just the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual and DMG. (We didn't even have a PHB, and just made up characters from what we could glean from the DMG and remember from the Basic D&D set. I've still never owned a single module for any version of the D&D game except Monte Cook's Dead Gods.) One of us eventually bought the Cyberpunk 2020 core rules, then another bought Shadowrun, and we made do with those, until our later teenage years arrived when we could get part-time work and buy much more of the stuff. (Most kids our age spent all their disposable income on cheap super-strength alcohol and pot. We were after more mind-blowing stuff than that - in the form of the entire Planescape line and Runequest II.)

Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying, my formative gaming years were spent making the best of a pretty threadbare collection. I'm really glad that it turned out that way, because it forced me to rely more on my imagination than what was in books. There's probably nothing superior in my imagination than anyone else's, but maybe I feel more confident in prioritising it above rules and sourcebooks. I think that's probably true of most gamers of my generation.