Heroic Worlds – Encyclopedic Endeavour

On By ArthurIn Prometheus Books, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

Published in 1991, Lawrence Schick’s Heroic Worlds has been out of print for a good long time and can take patience to track down at a sensible price. Nonetheless, I persisted in searching for it and eventually landed a copy and I’m broadly glad that I did, because it’s a highly interesting reference text for anyone interested in RPG history. What Schick tries to present here is nothing less than a full directory of all commercially published tabletop RPG products (setting aside magazines and fanzines) from the original Dungeons & Dragons box up to the end of 1990.

Though there’s a few introductory articles and appendices of interest – like a rundown of RPG award results up to 1990 and an intriguing attempt to tabulate landmarks and trends in RPG design over the years, the meat of the book is an eyewateringly expansive directory of products, arranged by genre and then by game system under that genre. Occasionally, Schick will make categorisation decisions I don’t agree with – he seems to have decided that Judge Dredd belongs in the “Comic-Book Superheroes” chapter, when “Science Fiction: Dark Future” is right there and fits much better, and I’d guess that’s soley because Dredd is a comic book character and Schick probably hadn’t read the source material.

The odds of Schick personally having given serious attention to each and every product in here is essentially negligible – sure, I suppose it’s possible, but I absolutely would not expect him to read all of these products and the book isn’t really made less useful if he didn’t. Although Stu Horvath referenced this a lot in Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground, the entries in here by and large are nowhere near as detailed as the entries in that – this is about cataloguing, not deep dives, to the extent where Schick proposes a standardised system for categorising RPGs which, had subsequent editions of this come out, would surely have continued. You can see how Schick dearly wanted this to be the Dewey Decimal System of RPGs, and it’s got the potential to be that, but dependent as it is on Schick himself being able to find a publisher to put out updates to Heroic Worlds it was doomed to be a niche oddity, though collectors with an especially broad collection may find it useful to adopt for their own personal cataloguing.

Even though the book has some pretty significant limitations – no zines, English language products only, nothing beyond 1990 – it still manages to incorporate an impressively broad range of products within those constraints. That being the case, it’s interesting to flip through it and consider what games – and what releases for those games – have remained in vogue and in print since then, either continuously or with a hiatus here and there, and which have fallen by the wayside.

On top of that, by releasing it when he did Schick accidentally provided us with an incredibly detailed snapshot of a very, very interesting point in time in the industry. In discussing how the hobby had spread from its inception to the point in time where he makes his cut-off point, Schick talks about how endeavours to broaden the appeal of tabletop RPGs had come and gone and recently appeared to have started to fizzle out, and suggests that the industry has reached its high water mark – that RPGs, by their nature, are incapable of growing their appeal much beyond the scope they had already reached.

Schick is wrong, and he’s wrong in particular because at the time he’s compiling all this, Vampire: the Masquerade‘s first edition is creeping towards publication. Vampire doesn’t make Schick’s cut-off point – indeed, in the Ars Magica entry Lion Rampant is still listed as the publisher and the only “White Wolf” noted in the index is a product for Stormbringer, not the publishing company. It emerges onto the market shortly after Heroic Worlds does, and almost immediately blows his assumptions about the hobby’s trajectory and the limits of recruitment out of the water by appealing to audiences the pre-Vampire industry had hitherto simply overlooked. Glancing over Heroic Worlds will get across, on the one hand, how diverse the offerings of the industry are, and on the other hand how much of them are concentrated on a few, limited genres.

Vampire came and went, of course, but we’ve had other recruitment booms since, the most recent arguably being the rise of actual play shows like Critical Role; although I would argue that following such shows is a distinct and separate interest from actually participating in tabletop RPGs and it’s a fallacy to assume that people interested in one will automatically be keen on the other, nonetheless these things are a factor. But it was Vampire which offered the first really big boom since Basic D&D and Fighting Fantasy offered gateway drugs to impressionable minds back in the early 1980s.

What Schick has inadvertently created here, then, is a comprehensive guide to the English-language RPG industry as it existed right before Vampire hit and changed everything – a useful thing indeed for those who want to get a handle on what Vampire did and did not contribute. For instance, though it’s a common shorthand to assume that 1980s game design was all about complexity and 1990s game design saw a pendulum swing back to a rules-light approach, Schick is able to document here that it’s more nuanced than that; the boom in complex systems was an early-to-mid-1980s thing which had already come and gone, and there were already systems establishing themselves which touted a rules-light approach by the time Schick was compiling this. (Similarly, Schick notes that a precursor to the “Hero point” rules of James Bond 007 so widely celebrated can fact be found in TSR’s own spy RPG, Top Secret, and specifically identifies this as the sort of mechanic which can put aspects of narrative control in the hands of the players.)

I wouldn’t advise paying an amount of money you’d consider expensive for Heroic Worlds – but if you are interested in RPG history or collect old games, you could do a lot worse than keeping your eye out for a copy going at a price you find reasonable. There’s stuff in here I had absolutely never heard of before, and likely will never encounter outside of its pages – systems and products that have fallen by the wayside, but whose documentation here means that they aren’t wholly forgotten. And that’s heroic in its own right.

The One Ring: Drums In the Deep, Adventures In the Wilderness

On By ArthurIn Free League, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, The One Ring3 Comments

It’s been a couple of years or so since Free League released their new edition of The One Ring. The pace of releasing new products seems a little slower than when the line was under Cubicle 7’s watch, but then again Free League have been putting out D&D 5E equivalents of their different One Ring products in parallel from the get-go, rather than moving into that sideline later on like Cubicle 7 eventually did. One suspects that the 5E equivalents basically exist to bankroll the One Ring versions, and if that’s a model which works for Free League then more power to them, but for my part I think the full-fat One Ring versions are just more elegant than trying to patch the 5E system into resembling The One Ring.

Recently, Free League ran a Kickstarter to fund Moria: Through the Doors of Durin, a bumper-size supplement detailing the titular underground realm, which I was glad to back given how smoothly the One Ring 2nd Edition Kickstarter went. I also took the opportunity to pick up Tales From the Lone-Lands, an adventure supplement that was released in between the first wave of One Ring products and Moria. Let’s see how they shake out…

Moria: Through the Doors of Durin

This feels like a product which was a long time coming; at Dragonmeet a few years back, back in the days of The One Ring‘s original edition before Cubicle 7 lost the licence, I visited Cubicle 7’s stand and chatted with them about forthcoming products and one of the things they said they were working on was a boxed set based around Moria. In addition, the main designer credited on this is Gareth Hanrahan; he’s a prolific RPG freelancer and his work gets around a ton, so that’s not concrete evidence by any stretch of the imagination, but nonetheless he is one of Cubicle 7’s go-to guys who had lots of credits on the prior edition, so it seems entirely likely that much of the material from that planned boxed set got folded into here.

This isn’t a boxed set, but you can sort of imagine how it would have been one. What you get with your hard copy is a nice, chunky book, comfortably over 200 pages long, along with a poster map of Moria – the famed mines, the underground city of the Dwarrowdelf that grew to service the mines, the hidden lairs of the orcs and other thralls of the Balrog that brought doom to Moria back in the day, and various places in the immediate vicinity.

Continue reading “The One Ring: Drums In the Deep, Adventures In the Wilderness” →

Pendragon Sallies Forth the Sixth Time!

On By ArthurIn Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Core Rules, Pendragon, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Tabletop RPGs7 Comments

Following in the wake of the rather lovely Starter Set, the Core Rulebook for Pendragon 6th Edition has now been published. In some quarters I’ve seen a bit of grumping about the name, because it’s very much a player-facing book – it’s got all the rules you need to create knights from Salisbury, understand stat blocks, and handle both the action of adventures and the downtime of the famed “Winter Phase”, which is the heart of the generational gameplay that makes Pendragon unique. It’s light on referee-facing stuff in the extreme; you could probably knock together some scenarios for players with it, especially if they were heavy on encounters with NPC knights or drew extensively on materials from the Starter Set, but you’d have a little job doing it.

However, I’m not fussed. Maybe the book should have been called the Player’s Book instead of the Core Rulebook, but equally I think that would undersell how much effort has been gone to make this an important book to digest and consider for the referee too, because it’s replete with important setting material (especially in terms of what it means to actually be a knight) and does a fantastic job of getting across the basic ethos both of the game and the mythic worldview it’s trying to steep itself in.

Moreover… this is kind of the same as it ever was. Bar for 4th Edition – which most people agree was, if anything, a bit overstuffed in its core – Pendragon‘s core books have always been dominated by “Here’s how you play a knight” and been light on other offerings. To my eyes, the 6th Edition core is covering roughly the same ground as, say, that of 3rd Edition or 5th, and if a few things are being held back for the GM book, none of them are so essential that this will pose a problem to an imaginative referee willing to do a bit of legwork.

We can get some idea of the future product line planned out here; as with 5th Edition, there’ll be a separate supplement providing advanced character generation rules for concepts beyond “Knights from Salisbury”, and as with editions going way back to 1st Edition a supplement will be devoted to playing higher-ranking members of the nobility in due course. The Great Pendragon Campaign is going to come out in multiple volumes, but frankly that just makes sense; the hard copy I have from White Wolf’s ArtHaus imprint is grand and imposing, but I can say from lived experience that it’s a fucking pain to lug around, and being able to just pick out the book for the current era of play for my game bag and leave the rest on the shelf at home for reference would be welcome indeed.

Continue reading “Pendragon Sallies Forth the Sixth Time!” →

Solemn Vale, Densely Detailed

On By ArthurIn Core Rules, Dirty Vortex, Referee's Bookshelf, Solemn Vale, Tabletop RPGs1 Comment

Solemn Vale is an RPG from Dirty Vortex; according to the back cover it’s “a roleplaying game within The Neon Dream“, but the Neon Dream concept isn’t mentioned at all within the book so what exactly this means is hard to say. That said, there’s a sort of neon-tinged aesthetic to a lot of the art, and The Neon Dream is a product offered by Dirty Vortex on their itch.io page, the blurb for which suggests it’s the overarching setting of several of their horror games. Fine, whatever. Either way, it’s a folk horror-themed game set in the late 1970s – in fact, there’s regular mention of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership as one of the blights afflicting Britain at the time, so it must assume a default date of somewhere between 4th May and 31st December 1979. It’s set in and around the titular English town, a small and insular community near the Cornish coastline where strange traditions and eldritch horrors lurk.

The System: Clicking the Beads Back and Forth

The underlying system is called the Wyrd Abacus, and is a fairly rules-light affair. Player characters have three stats – Body, Mind, and Soul – ranging from a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 9. Each stat is associated with three different types of challenge – so for instance Mind is used in challenges of Logic, Pressure, and Wits. The different challenge types are relevant because Stage Rules – situational rules that can apply to an entire scenario, or particular locations of periods of time within a scenario, or are tied to the presence of a particular NPC or whatever – could potentially make some tyles of challenge easier or more difficult. You’re encouraged to jot down any Stage Rules which are currently in effect and lay them out on the gaming table – or “Abacus” – to help everyone keep track of them, because you can end up with a fair number of them in play.

Two types of roll come up in the game. Influence rolls are for utilisation when there isn’t really a prospect of failure, but it’d be useful to figure out which PC stumbles across a key clue first, who gets targeted by the killer, who holds up better under some form of continued pressure, or whatever. In these you simply roll a number of D6 equal to your score in an attribute, and you look at who rolled high (or for some purposes low). If you need a tiebreak, you look at the number of highest rolls – so for instance if player A rolls 4, 5, 3, player B rolls 6, 2, 1, and player C rolls 6, 6, 2, then player A definitely lost because their highest roll was only a 5, and player C wins because they got two 6s and player B only got one.

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Kickstopper: The Mothership Connection

On By ArthurIn Anodyne Printworks, Core Rules, Kickstopper, Mothership, Periodicals, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, Tuesday Knight Games4 Comments

It seems genuinely difficult for a 100% new tabletop RPG to take off these days, especially one with a brand new system and an original setting. New editions, hacks of existing games, new applications of pre-existing systems, and adaptations from other media (like RPGs based on movie or novel licenses) can all tap into a pre-existing audience for the game, system, or setting in question.

It’s far from impossible, of course. For as long as the RPG industry has been a thing, a steady stream of new games has arisen – fads like the D20 System glut around the release of D&D 3E and the original OGL may sometimes cause the river of inspiration to run low a little (as far as all-new games go), but it never completely dries up. And it’s always been the case, even in the earliest days of the hobby, that a chunk of new games and product lines have emerged only to be faced with total indifference in the wider hobby, failing to build enough of a fanbase of enthusiasts around the game in question to sustain it over the years.

Without creating a self-sustaining community of people who like playing the game, reading its game materials, discussing the game, designing material for the game, and propagating the game, an RPG faces extinction. This doesn’t just apply to commercial flops – though a game which utterly fails to sell will obviously fail to make a community that extends much beyond the immediate friends and acquaintances of the designers, a fragile network prone to going extinct if the key movers lose enthusiasm for the game in question. Whilst I suppose it is possible that someone out there has an active Tales of Gargentihr campaign going, I think the odds are against it, and if there’s an ongoing game out there it’s more likely than not run by one of the designers or someone in their circle of friends, because that thing sank like a stone and has had basically no attention for years outside of my own review.

However, it’s also possible for an RPG to get published, have a period of flash-in-the-pan popularity, be the flavour of the month for a while, but fail to build a truly self-sustaining community which doesn’t just drift away once the game’s time in the spotlight has come and gone. Take the portfolio of Atlas Games; lines like Feng Shui or Over the Edge had their time in the Sun, got a bit of a buzz around them, had commercial success and critical acclaim, but then the scene seemed to move on. There was enough affection for both games to sustain Kickstarters for glossy rereleased editions later on, but that was after long periods of commercial dormancy, and neither game has seen that much in the way of supplement support after delivery of the core materials (not that they particularly need it). The result is that both games fell out of the conversation a little in between their original runs and the Kickstarters, and the sense I have is that whilst they had enough fans that people would take them out for a spin now and then, they aren’t games which inspire the sustained passion of an invested community.

Then take Ars Magica, a game which has supported LARP adaptations, fanzines, web forums, and other community endeavours for decades and continues to do so even after new commercial products have ceased emerging, and regularly comes up in the conversation still. That’s the difference having a self-sustaining community around a game and temporary hype; in the former case, the community will find ways and means of sustaining itself even when it isn’t getting much love from an official publisher, in the latter case a game might sustain a fanbase of interested customers whilst a steady stream of commercial releases are coming out, but only a few will keep talking about and playing the game once the hype ends.

When analysing this sort of thing, a certain amount of survivorship bias exists – the games we see thriving today which can trace their roots back a substantial period of time are inevitably those which developed that self-sustaining community around them, games that didn’t did not. Sure, you only really test whether a game has that self-sustaining community when it goes through a bit of a publishing hiatus – but other than Dungeons & Dragons, pretty much every major RPG has had its periods of hiatus or slack release schedules from time to time. Retro-clones – particularly Pathfinder – have kept old editions of D&D in the conversation even when current editions have been riding high, Vampire: the Masquerade and other classic World of Darkness games retained strong fanbases even during that span of time when White Wolf had gone all-in on what would eventually be known as Chronicles of Darkness and had retired the old lines, Call of Cthulhu retained massive popularity even when Chaosium went through a fallow period before Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen mounted a boardroom coup to put things back on an even keep, and people kept writing about, discussing, and playing Paranoia even in the years between West End collapsing and Mongoose picking it up again.

It’s obviously quite exciting, then, when you spot an RPG which seems to be actively creating that sort of self-sustaining community around it. Like I said, you don’t really know if that community is self-sustaining or not until a publishing hiatus happens – but you can spot the sort of infrastructure developing which suggests that something exciting is brewing. Hallmarks of that can include:

  • The game is doing well enough that the current publishers are able to put out more ambitious products and run large-scale Kickstarters, an indication that people are invested enough in the game to put their money where their mouth is.
  • The game is inspiring discussion and commentary. Forums and platforms dedicated to the game itself can be useful, but such venues can rapidly become ghost towns if a community moves on. Discussion in the wider scene can sometimes be a better sign because that suggests the game is being noticed outside of the niche it’s carved out for itself – and that there are therefore routes and byways to lead people into that niche in the first place.
  • The game is inspiring creativity not just from the main publisher, but from third party publishers and solo designers (either through officially permitted commercial third party publications or through non-profit fan releases), suggesting a level of engagement going beyond consumption of first-party material and which can keep interesting stuff coming should the first party pipeline get cut off.

So it makes me sit up and take notice when a game like Mothership comes along and hits all of those criteria.

Created by Sean McCoy and put out by Tuesday Knight Games, Mothership already has a dense thicket of products out for it; as well as permitting the creation of third-party products for Mothership, Tuesday Knight Games is also happy to stock and sell products by third party publishers and individuals. It’s attracted a decent amount of discussion and critical acclaim; notably, Stu Horvath’s massive trawl through games of yesteryear, Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground describes itself as “A guide to tabletop roleplaying games from D&D to Mothership“, and that’s despite the fact that Mothership is not the most recent game covered in that book.

And perhaps most impressively, Mothership has been able to generate that buzz despite releasing its “0th Edition” on itch.io as a zine-style ashcan effort. From these humble beginnings, enough buzz has been generated that not only did Tuesday Knight raise over $1.4 million on Kickstarter to produce a 1st Edition core set for the game, but third party Kickstarter projects like Anodyne Printworks’ Hull Breach campaign can also hit a high bar (Hull Breach earned over $480,000). To get that level of enthusiasm for a game where the products available are basically PDFs or cheap and cheerful print zine-style products is incredibly good going, especially when it isn’t tied to a more popular game system or well-known setting.

I don’t know that Mothership has a self-sustaining community around it just yet – but I do know that it’s the most recent game I’ve seen which feels like it’s well on the way to forging one (if it hasn’t done so already), and it’s worth taking note. I was interested enough to back both the core set Kickstarter and the Hull Breach one; let’s see how my swag turned out.

Continue reading “Kickstopper: The Mothership Connection” →

Shadow World: In the Days of the Loremasters

On By ArthurIn Iron Crown Enterprises, Referee's Bookshelf, Rolemaster, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs3 Comments

ICE, the publishers of Rolemaster, made no secret of their love for Tolkien right out of the gate – their very name, Iron Crown Enterprises, is a reference to the crown of Morgoth in the Silmarillion. Landing the tabletop RPG licence for Middle-Earth and getting to make Middle-Earth Role Playing was probably a dream come true for them, but at the same time a tabletop RPG company which relies exclusively on a licensed setting is setting up a trap for itself (as ICE would discover when their income near-evaporated once the Tolkien licence got pulled).

ICE, however, would not put out their first Middle-Earth material until 1982, in the form of the system-neutral Campaign and Adventure Guidebook For Middle Earth. The development of MERP as a stripped-down version of Rolemaster would come later – ICE naturally wanted to get something on the market quick, ideally in a form which people using any fantasy RPG system could buy and use without being faced with unfamiliar stats, and it’s worth bearing in mind that Rolemaster had only just come together as a full standalone RPG (as opposed to supplements providing an alternate combat/magic system for other games) at that time.

Before that, they would put out in 1980 the first version of The Iron Wind – an adventure supplement which was one of their first releases, alongside the original version of Arms Law (the first plank of what would become the Rolemaster system). The original version of The Iron Wind was billed as being usable with any game system and as the first of the Loremaster series of setting supplements (to run in parallel with the Rolemaster rules releases), with more products promised soon.

It’s evident that ICE quickly got sidetracked with developing Rolemaster and exploiting their absurd good fortune in landing the Middle-Earth licence, however, because the Loremaster concept would not be revisited until 1984, when a heavily revised version of The Iron Wind and three new supplements in a broadly similar vein would emerge. In the long run, these would become the seeds of what would be known as Shadow World – the all-original Rolemaster campaign setting. With the Tolkien licence well and truly out of ICE’s hands, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to rerelease any of their MERP stuff any time soon, but the Loremaster and Shadow World material should in principle still be theirs to develop, refresh, and rerelease for their new Rolemaster Unified system. Let’s take a look at those old modules and see whether they still have much in the way of potential even after all this time…

The Iron Wind

This module leads off with a broad-brushstrokes description of the world and its overarching history. It’s highly Tolkien-influenced, right down to history being divided into three Ages. Back in the First Age, the Lords of Essence – magic users who had attained godlike power – warred, reshaping the world. In the Second Age the Loremasters, who are basically Tolkien-esque Istari, spread throughout the world to galvanise its peoples against the spread of resurgent evil, and though the Loremasters were mere shadows of what the Lords of Essence had been, they won through in the end. Now it is the Third Age, and the Loremasters have gone from being lordly presences to humble travellers (think of the Second Age ones as being like Gandalf the White, whilst the Third Age ones are a bit more Gandalf the Grey or Radagast the Brown in nature), and evil is rising again.

Still, give ICE this much credit: when it comes to riffing on Tolkien like this they actually aren’t that bad. The World of Loremaster, as Shadow World is referred to at this point, at its best shows the same knack as Tolkien for tying in geographic features with ancient lore – for instance, the world consists of lots of mountain ranges and has a low ratio of land to ocean in part because of the conflicts of the past, so by mentioning that a region of the world has a lot of extinct volcanos that’s a nod to it having been the site of a particular Lord of Essence’s activities in the past.

The main purpose of the worldbuilding, however, is to justify a setup where the world is divided into little regions and it’s quite hard to travel from region to region, but the world as a whole has a common cosmological underpinning rooted in the Rolemaster system’s assumptions. The intention seems to have been to allow for designers to cook up small settings for the world that could be slotted in wherever, without worrying overly much about what’s going on in neighbouring regions, which is unrealistic in terms of verisimilitude but is also probably a big help when it comes to managing and editing different projects being developed in parallel. It also means each Loremaster module can be dragged and dropped into your own fantasy campaign world should you wish – just pick an out of the way area you’ve not defined and doesn’t have much in the way of outside dealings and has more or less the correct climate and poof! You’ve got a fresh new locale ripe for adventure!

Continue reading “Shadow World: In the Days of the Loremasters” →

Twilight: 2000’s New Dawn

On By ArthurIn Core Rules, Free League, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs, Twilight: 2000, Year Zero EngineLeave a comment

Thanks to buying into a Bundle of Holding a while back, I’ve ended up with a cluster of Free League PDFs, and I’ve just gotten around to taking a look at their new version of Twilight: 2000 – the game’s 4th Edition. As I noted in my review of Twilight: 2000 1st Edition, the most widely-known versions of the game were put out by GDW; the original 1st Edition boxed set was a startlingly good seller for them, outstripping sales of the roughly contemporary MegaTraveller boxed set with ease. Their 2nd Edition started out strong, but they managed to confuse the market with a rapid patch to a “2.2” edition, as part of a perhaps misguided impulse to try and convert all of their RPGs to their house system. (The same drive saw the creation of Traveller: The New Era, kicking off one of the earliest truly nasty edition wars in the hobby.)

After the shuttering of GDW in the mid-1990s, Traveller creator Marc Miller and his Far Future Enterprises became the curators of the GDW legacy, producing reprint material here and issuing licenses for new games there. In 2006, 93 Games Studio announced that they’d be putting out Twilight: 2013, a third edition of the game with a tweaked timeline (due to the passage of time making the old one anachronistic); a PDF limped out in late 2008, print products followed, but then they swiftly shuttered in 2010.

That’s hardly likely to be the case with Free League – or if it happens, it probably won’t be Twilight: 2000 that does for them. They seem to be going from strength to strength, they have a series of widely celebrated game lines under their belts, their Kickstarters are operating smoothly, and they didn’t touch Twilight: 2000 before they were already fairly well-established as a publisher. It’s an apt subject for them to kick on – with games like Mutant: Year Zero, they’ve already proved their chops at the post-apocalyptic genre, after all.

On top of that, the folks at Free League are gamers like the rest of us; according to the designer’s notes in this edition, the brainwave to actually go for the licence came about because some of the key people there ended up running a Twilight: 2000 1st Edition campaign, with the action shifted from Poland to their native Sweden, and had such a blast that they realised that they could apply lessons learned from Mutant: Year Zero and its very similar “open-world survival simulation” approach to Twilight: 2000. After checking in with Marc Miller to secure the licence, they ran a Kickstarter, and this new edition is the result.

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Castle Falkenstein: A Stirring Journey To a Europe That Never Was

On By ArthurIn Castle Falkenstein, Core Rules, R. Talsorian Games, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs2 Comments

I realised a while ago that the body of work of R. Talsorian Games – which pretty much equates the body of work of Mike Pondsmith, since he was the core designer of all of their key RPG lines – makes a ton of sense if you think of them in terms of anime. For Mekton, the connection is obvious – the mecha genre originates in anime, after all – and for Cyberpunk, though the company would turn to the literary genre for inspiration I still think the game “clicks” best once you view it in terms of slick, violent cyberpunk anime of the era.

Carry this through, and even though Castle Falkenstein is perhaps the most literary of Pondsmith’s designs, you can still defnitely see it as being set in a very particular type of fantastic Europe – the sort of mingling of steampunk and romance you might get if you blended elements of Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle In the Sky, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Castle of Cagliostro. (Damn, Miyazaki really loves castles, doesn’t he?) Sure, on the face of it Cagliostro is set outside the time period, but it riffs enough on The Prisoner of Zenda that you can imagine it as an adventure of Lupin I instead of Lupin III. It’s a Europe of mystery, steampunk invention, and magic, seen through a lens distant enough to make the old continent feel unfamiliar and romantic to those of us that live there, which I rather appreciate.

I mentioned that Falkenstein was rather literary in its conception, and I meant it: Pondsmith goes highbrow with the presentation on this one, based around a premise which I was worried would make the rulebook burdensome to navigate but is actually rather neat – specifically he gives the game an honest to goodness framing device. This is based around the fictional conceit that the Castle Falkenstein core rulebook wasn’t written by Pondsmith, he only edited it – like how William Goldman poses as only being the editor of The Princess Bride. The “real” author is Tom Olam – a videogame artist and old friend of Pondsmith’s who disappeared on a holiday in Europe some years ago. One day, a package showed up at Pondsmith’s house, containing a bundle of documents and illustrations – and a covering letter from Olam, explaining that he was safe and well; he’d just been isekai’d into a parallel world whilst visiting Castle Neuschwanstein, one of Crown Prince Ludwig’s castles in Bavaria.

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Best Practice, Bushido Style

On By ArthurIn Bushido, Fantasy Games Unlimited, Phoenix System, Referee's Bookshelf, Scenarios, Tabletop RPGs9 Comments

Bushido is a tricky game. On the one hand, it pushed genre boundaries in tabletop RPGs when it emerged and, despite being the product of Western writers holding forth on someone else’s culture, it’s actually aged reasonably well on that front; authors Bob Chartette and Paul Hume gave every impression of having done their research and made a very wise decision to say “this is set in a fantasy version of Japan we will call ‘Nippon’ to distinguish it from the real Japan, the two will diverge in important respects and we encourage you not to conflate them”, as well as being fairly forward thinking for 1970s game designers when it came to saying “yeah, let’s have women warriors if you like, we can diverge from historical norms and assumptions for the sake of a more enjoyable experience”. Despite a system which is rather of its time, it’s aged better than you would expect.

At the same time, it’s had incredibly sparse support over the years – a consequence in part of the fire-and-forget approach taken for much of its history by publisher Fantasy Games Unlimited, who long took an approach of picking up games looking for a home, unleashing a core book, and then kind of not bothering with a support line unless the game’s creators or highly motivated fans were willing to put in the work essentially themselves to cook up product proposals. (The major exception seems to be Villains & Vigilantes, which seems to be the one RPG from FGU to really get a sustained promotional campaign behind it.) This does mean there’s a bit of a gap when it comes to the question of what you actually do with the game.

Despite this, though, Bushido ended up sustaining a fanbase for a surprisingly long time for a product which was essentially tossed out onto the marketplace and left to sink or swim. Thanks to sales of imports and coverage in magazines like White Dwarf it seems that the UK managed to develop a small but enthusiastic Bushido fanbase – enough for the game to pop up in the Arcane top 50 RPGs poll in the mid-1990s despite over a decade of neglect by FGU. In fact, it managed to get the number 17 spot, which considering some of the games it beat (including then-hot material like Rifts, Earthdawn, and Werewolf: the Apocalypse) is incredibly good going.

Now, to be fair, whilst Bushido had very little support beyond the core set at that point, it didn’t have no support; beyond those magazine articles, a smattering of adventure material came out in the early 1980s, and more recently FGU made a return to the line. One of these products would offer an interesting model of best practice when designing Bushido scenarios. The others… would not follow best practice.

Valley of the Mists

Designed by Bushido co-creator Bob Charrette, this is pretty much the only source material beyond the original core rules that FGU ever put out in the game’s early years, and is mainly significant for how it sets the model for subsequent published scenarios. Opening with a rundown of mountainous Hida Province which gives an overview of the basic terrain, the general political situation, and the disposition of the samurai clans, yakuza, and ninja in the area (as well as a cantankerous hermit-wizard who could be a potential contact for the player characters and an overview of the main town of the area), it then provides two plot-based scenarios and a sandbox area for exploration.

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Paranoia Perfected?

On By ArthurIn Core Rules, Edition Warrior Bullshit, Paranoia, Referee's Bookshelf, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs, West End Games13 Comments

In looking over Stu Horvath’s Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground – and its supplementary zine, Experience Points – I got to thinking about Paranoia again; a new edition came out last year, and I’ve been slack about getting hold of it. But to properly talk about that, I need to talk about the game’s history. I covered that a while back in fairly epic Kickstopper article concerning the release of the previous edition, but a quick recap for anyone who doesn’t want to trawl through that article is probably sensible. The story so far…

  • 1984: The 1st Edition of the game is released by West End Games. The core book is alright, but it’s really in the supplement line that the distinctive Paranoia style comes into its own.
  • 1987: A tightened-up 2nd Edition of the game is put out by West End, a grand improvement over 1st Edition’s core book on all fronts. The early 2nd Edition line continues the game’s golden age, but eventually things go a bit awry when a series of misguided metaplot events see the game straying from its original concept (and the style of play it handles best), and the writers who best “get it” drift away from writing for West End.
  • 1995: West End, circling the drain somewhat by this point, put out the “Fifth” Edition. The bit about it being the 5th version of the game when it was, in fact, the 3rd is the funniest joke involved by quite some margin – and given how stunningly un-funny it is, that should give you an idea of how poorly it is regarded.
  • 2004: Having retrieved the rights from the wreckage of West End, the game’s original creators give Mongoose the licence and they put out the edition initially known as Paranoia XP until Microsoft suffer a lack of sense of humour about it. It’s an excellent return to form, most particularly because it recognises three distinct playstyles popular among Paranoia players – from slapstick “Zap” games to gag-light, satire-heavy “Straight” play, with the “Classic” style somewhere in the middle – and provides both clear guidance on how to cater to each of these.
  • 2009: A 25th Anniversary repackaging essentially provides a slimmed-down edit of the 2004 core rulebook – now called Paranoia: Troubleshooters – and two other core books, Paranoia: Internal Security and Paranoia: High Programmers, bids at fleshing out styles of play alluded to in past supplements like HIL Sector Blues and Extreme Paranoia but which, it’s probably fair to say, don’t seem to have the same legs as the decades-old tried-and-true Troubleshooter-focused version of the game.
  • 2014: Mongoose began the fractious, much-delayed, ill-tempered Kickstarter process which led to the release of the “Red Clearance Edition” (RCE) of the game in 2017 – a major system revision spearheaded by James Wallis of Alas Vegas infamy and Grant Howitt, whose preceding Goblin Quest was a fun fantasy take on Paranoia and whose subsequent Spire shows some influence from design ideas he worked into Red Clearance Edition.

As I outlined in my previous article, the Red Clearance Edition had a difficult beginning. It was subjected to extensive delays which caused no small amount of ill will; the Kickstarter backers were badly annoyed by the delays, and became outright furious when one backer was given a preview PDF to use at a convention but the same courtesy wasn’t extended to the backers in general, creating an impression of undue favouritism. In the process of mollifying the backers, Matt Sprange – founder and head honcho at Mongoose – laid the blame for the delays squarely and unambiguously at James Wallis’s feet. (Not, let’s be very clear, Grant Howitt – I say that not because I take any joy from slamming James Wallis, I’ve done that enough in the Alas Vegas articles, but because it’s not fair to include Grant Howitt in the blast radius here; at no stage did I see Matt Sprange express any dissatisfaction with how Grant had been handling his end of things.) In the annotated versions of the core materials that Kickstarter backers at some tiers received, Grant and James expressed dissatisfaction with Mongoose’s editing, proofreading, and quality control processes. Everyone was left just a bit sore-headed and grumpy by the whole thing.

That included me, especially once I got the final product, which ended up looking cheap and with a similarly uninspiring tactile feel to it; between the lacklustre hard copies and the somewhat shaky artwork (particularly on the cards and in the internal art), it felt like a tatty and half-hearted sort of product. The shift to incorporating special dice and a set of bespoke cards as key game components – not a Wallis & Howitt decision, the cards were apparently a Mongoose mandate – might have made a degree of sense if Paranoia were being repackaged as a pick-up-and-play game, something which could sit attractively and eye-catchingly on a boardgame shelf and be pulled out for a quick game when the mood strikes, but the apparent desire in the text for somewhat more sustained play, combined with the less than appealing quality of the final product, kind of combined to sabotage that. (Those proofreading and editing complaints Wallis and Howitt had don’t exactly add to the sense of a well-honed product either.)

Continue reading “Paranoia Perfected?” →