Therapeutic Dungeon Creation

Amongst my other vices, as I've approached, and passed, my 30th birthday, I've become a complete workaholic. Since Christmas I think I've worked every single day including weekends except for New Year's Day and one or two other days I can think of. You would never have guessed that I'd turn into that sort of person if you'd met me when I was 25. Just goes to show you never can tell.

So today I took the day off. And I spent almost all of it drawing up a dungeon - one called Sangmenzhang which I've been working on for a long time, and which has been through several iterations.

And it feels good. Along with its many other virtues, there is something therapeutic and stress-relieving about creating materials to use in a game. In a nice quiet room with paper, coloured pencils, dice and some music you can while away hours in a fugue-like, relaxing state, just keying in rooms and writing up random encounter tables. In this age of instant gratification there's something almost retro about it, and perhaps that's part of the charm - the idea that you're putting time and effort into something that won't see any "pay-off" for quite some time.

But also, just exercising your creative muscles is a tool for de-stressing, and in that regard there's really no difference between writing up dungeons and painting, playing an instrument or whatever. It's just that for some reason the former would be viewed as odd and aberrant whereas the latter two aren't. Strange. 

I don't have any answers

I'm not sure what spurred him on to writing it, but Zak S has a great post up on women in gaming. Go and read it.

Anyway, it got me thinking about discrimination law and gaming. There is a lot of discourse amongst both economists and lawyers on the value of anti-discrimination and affirmative action legislation and what real effects it has. I've heard the argument made by those of the pro-market persuasion that ultimately discrimination law doesn't have a great deal of an effect beyond what can be achieved by the market: if you as an employer deliberately restrict your own access to huge pools of potential talent because you are sexist, racist or homophonic, you will pretty much by definition end up losing out to other employers who don't restrict themselves and will thus have more talent to draw on. Ultimately you will have to rethink your attitudes if you wish to remain competitive. This fact, coupled with the financial implications of regulation, make discrimination law at best irrelevant and at worst a net negative.

Whether or not this is true is by-the-by (it presupposes that all employers will not adopt discriminatory hiring practices, and it also presupposes that you could possibly hold enough other factors constant to be able to discover whether it was true), it's an interesting thought. Think about the RPG industry, such as it is: the people who are traditionally less participatory in RPGs (women, but also non-nerdish men, older people in general, people from certain ethnic minorities within the Western world, and members of the non-English-speaking world to a certain degree) are a huge and largely untapped pool of game-creating talent. Are we persuaded that game systems, gaming movements, or gaming companies which, for whatever reason, appeal to this largely untapped pool, are more likely to succeed in the long run than those that do not? Will we see a Darwinian process by which those systems/movements/companies which tend to remain the province of the nerdish male decline in comparison with those which extend beyond it?

[NB: I'm not saying anything about actual discrimination in the gaming industry here. When I compare those systems/companies which appeal to wider audiences to those which appeal mostly to nerdish men, I'm not talking about anything purposive - I'm talking about the way things appear on a prima facie level.]

I don't think it's a clear-cut case, because I think it's possible to construct the argument that the RPG industry is about niche marketing, and systems/movements/companies which either identify a certain niche or come to be associated with a certain niche can achieve greater success than those intended to have broader cross-market appeal. 

Anyway, discuss. What are you looking at me for? I don't have any answers.

Microscope Dungeon Creation

For people who mostly play "trad" games, the immediately obvious use for Microscope is to spend a session or three creating a setting and history, both GM and players together, and then using that setting as the backdrop for 'ordinary' games of D&D, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulu, or whatever. This sort of thing is apparently already going on, all over the place, and lends itself to 'troupe play' with rotating GM-ships and adventuring parties, a la Ars Magica.

Now I learn that it's being taken a step further and people are creating dungeon histories using Microscope. To which I can only say, "Cool, or what?" ("What" is the wrong answer. "Cool" is the correct one.) I wouldn't want to do it all the time, because let's face it, discovering the history of a dungeon (that the DM has come up with by himself, in a darkened room) is part of the joy of dungeoneering Old School Style. But certainly I think there's room for it in the kind of 'troupe play' I mentioned above. This would see the dungeon as being, basically, a shared world, which people could GM and run games in on a casual basis.

The USP, of course, is that you know the broad sweep of the dungeon's history, so you could have different adventuring parties exploring it at different points in the timeline. You could even have groups of adventurers discovering things the aftermath of previous forays by other adventuring groups from decades or centuries earlier. To which I also can only say, "Cool, or what?"

Vancian Detachment

I've written before in this blog about how much work and pressure gets put on the GM if everybody has unrealistic expectations of an RPG campaign being a 'story', and if everybody expects the GM's role to be about providing the players with 'fun'. That way lies a madness of scripted encounters, fretting over 'plot' contrivances, and obsession with balance.

I think here that "Vancianism" has been underplayed. People talk a great deal about "Vancian magic" in early D&D, failing to realise that Vance's influence is far more to do with mood and feel than it is about mechanics. I'm currently in the process of reading The Complete Lyonesse, and something I've noticed is that, like with the Dying Earth books, the feeling of emotional detachment from the plot allows you to put the thing down for a week or more without losing momentum, or your interest. (It is this which allows me to read other books alongside it.) The pleasure of reading Vance, I think, is different to the pleasure of reading most modern novels - fantasy or otherwise. It doesn't come from a strong emotional engagement in the characters and what they are doing. It comes from the strange people and locations, the wonderful dialogue, the remarkable efficiency of style and exposition, and the clarity of his vision. It's the opposite of what we think of as a 'page-turner' - you want it to last as long as possible, and the reading actually benefits from taking place in small chunks dispersed across days or weeks, letting you digest it and ruminate over it little by little. Here, the characters, the story, and the narrative are almost secondary to the other pleasures.

In other words, where other novels require a level of emotional investment in the characters and their story, which by turn requires you to read more-or-less every day to keep up momentum and remain part of things, Vance needs almost the opposite.

This is how I feel traditional D&D works, in comparison to the mainstream of modern games. While what the characters are doing in trad D&D is, of course, a big part of what goes on at the table, it feels less like the be-all and end-all than it does as a framing device for a lot of other things - strange people, locations, monsters and ideas; puzzle-solving; lateral thinking; exercising creativity; and, frankly, laughing at the awful mishaps that befall the protagonists at every turn. Rather than being about the characters, it feels more like it is about the players, the world, and the game, with the characters being merely the framework on which it all hangs.

This has far more in common with the atmosphere in Vance than it does in just about any author working in fantasy - probably, in any genre. And this is no doubt why it all feels very un-pressured in comparison with the mainstream vision which I outlined at the start of this post. In the same way that you can dip in-and-out of Vance, because it isn't predicated on emotional investment, you can take trad D&D as it comes, without it having to be wonderfully climactic and narratively important every single session.

This also means that you can dip in and out of trad D&D very easily. You don't need to play the same characters each week - you don't even need to play the same group each week. It also means you can alternate players, West Marches and Flailsnails style, extremely easily.

Of course, this isn't limited to traditional D&D. My campaigns veer this way almost regardless of system, but there are certain other games which lend themselves to Vancian Detachment - including Call of Cthulu (the mood is more important than the PCs, who are disposable and who go mad or get eaten by Shub-Niggurath almost constantly), Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (ditto), and Rolemaster (roll dice, consult table, see how many arms your PC loses in the round). I wonder if it's any accident that these are probably still among the most popular systems being used today.

[Inspirational Pictures VII]

Naoki Ishikawa's work combines beauty with melancholy and undertones of the purely sinister.

Ghosts of wilderbeast in the dusk. Do they want you to follow?

A path to God knows where, between trees hiding God knows what. 

Abandoned ships, like those at Moynaq. Full of forgotten, decaying cargos. And inhabitants new and old. 

You don't want to go down this path. And yet you must.

Statues of monks at a forgotten monastery. As you passed, you could have sworn you felt one turn its head to watch you. 

(Last Ishikawa-esque picture is by Sukree Sukplang of Reuters.)

High Concept: The Cassandra Syndrome

A random hipster story-game idea that came to me on the way home from work: The player-characters are Cassandra-esque figures, cursed to know the future but unable to convince anybody that they do. Every so often the GM randomly generates a future scenario for a randomly determined player-character - "Your wife dies in a car crash"; "The woman who lives next door to you gets murdered"; "An earthquake strikes" - and the players can do whatever they want with that information except convince any NPC that they are telling anything but lies.

Hell Yes

L'Ange du Foyer, by Max Ernst.

On My Bookshelf

Are the following unread books:

• On, by Adam Roberts.
• Swiftly, by Adam Roberts. 
• Embassytown, by China Mieville (both this and Swiftly are signed copies I got at Q&A/readings events at my local Waterstone's last summer, organised by a guy I play Call of Cthulu with on an irregular basis).
• House of Chains, by Steven Erikson, which is half-read; one of those rare occasions I started a book and couldn't bear finishing it.
• Acacia, by David Anthony Durham... which, I dunno, I bought because I suppose I thought it looked interesting - but obviously not interesting enough to actually sit down and read.
• To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis.
• Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra, which I've tried reading three times and never got past the first few chapters.
• The Behaviour of Moths, by Poppy Adams - I try to make a point of not reading anything written by anybody called 'Poppy', so I don't really have any idea where this one has come from, but there it is, anyway.

From which we can only conclude that my pace of book-buying is not commensurate with my pace of book-reading.

I happen to be coming to the end of my most recent purchase (The Dervish House), so let's hear it: which of these unread books should I read next?

Citadel Combat Cards; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Gutlagg the Ogre Shaman

When I was a kid my friends and I went through a period of playing the original series of Citadel Combat Cards. These were, essentially, a species of Top Trump made, as the name suggest, by Citadel Miniatures. They sprang unbidden into my mind while reading Jeff's latest entry, which had me recollecting my 11-year-old Warhammer-playing self; I hadn't so much as thought about them in years.

The concept behind the cards was simple. You deal out the cards between the players and each player takes it in turns to call out an ability from the card at the top of his hand (say, "Strength 10"). The other players have to compare the card at the top of their hand with this. The card with the highest score in that abililty "wins" and the others "die", being cast aside. The game ends when there is only one player left with any cards.

My best friend at the time had two brothers, and the four of us spent an inordinate amount of time playing Citadel Combat Cards. I'm not sure where we got the decks from, but we had 5 - Monsters, Chaos, Warriors, Space War, and Goblinoids - which we mixed together in one super-deck; it felt like games could go on for hours (especially if you played it like Top Trumps, where the winning card "captures" the losing cards each turn, allowing them to be re-used).

It turns out that somebody has posted slideshows of all the decks on youtube: Chaos, Goblinoids, Monsters, Dwarfs, Warriors, and Space War. Looking at them, it seems there was an entire subset of rules that we never used - underneath each picture you see sigils containing things like a bow and arrow, an explosion, fangs, and so on. Presumably these had some sort of meaning which we piledrived away.

The thing I most notice about the cards now is the names. There's a real charm in things like "Gutlagg the Ogre Shaman", "Zoat the Forest Guardian", "Klaus Half-man, Mutant Thug", "Drakarth the Ravening: Mutant Spawn of Chaos", "Narx the Whiner, Goblin Musician", and "Fungus the Snotling Brave". When did Games Workship and Citadel Miniatures products get so bland?

Parachuting from a Plane while DJ-ing

The set-up: the players in my Cyberpunk: 2020 campaign owe Gazprom £20,000, which has to be paid back in two weeks (this is because they got into a fire-fight and had to pull strings to get Gazprom to airlift them from danger). They're also being pursued by a nefarious and as-yet unidentified organisation, who might be connected to a security firm whose employees they killed "in the course of their investigations". They are also under suspicion from the police for the abduction and murder of a high-class call girl, with some justification. Meanwhile, they are trying to think up a way to get £200,000-worth of heroin from a cottage outside Douglas, on the Isle of Mann, to Liverpool, without being detected by the authorities, in exchange for 10% of the cut, for a Cameroonian pentecostal church leader-cum-drug baron.

Their plan? To parachute the drugs into an inner-city park. Under the auspices of a 24-hour charity gig performed by the rockerboy character (an East German DJ), the climax of which will see him parachuting with his turntables (containing the heroin) from a plane flown from Douglas to Liverpool, while continuously DJing. The theory being that, if you want something hidden, you should hide it in plain sight.

This is why I play role playing games. You never, ever know what you're going to get until everybody sits down at the table and starts play.