Ready Gamer One, the Other Old School Gaming …

TL;DR. I’ve already mentioned that when I was a kid, we were not really fond of corporate backed game design, but as I think about it, there is more going on here than meets the eye. Just as biological organisms evolve over time, so have TTRPGs. And there are two branches of gaming evolution which trace their origins to the 1970s. The first is nowadays called OSR which stims from D&D and licensed products. And the second is represented by the d100 family of games which emerges from Runequest. This second branch has a very different OSR feel, but it is still going strong. The games of this family use the idea of “homebrew” as a positive element of gaming, rather than a negative.

Old School Two: Make the game follow your vision, not the vision which provides the greatest profit to the corporate IP holders.

 

Background Links. I’ve already talked about how in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Northern California gamers, my friends and I were not big fans of corporate-sponsored games. If a game was published by TSR, it had to work harder for our acceptance. They were the mega-corp of gaming just as cyberpunk was taking form. Here are the links to my old posts on this.

Old-school Leftcoast Gaming. 

Magic systems. 

I think this attitude has had an important influence on the development of TTRPGs over the last half century, an influence that can still be seen in games today.

But, hang-on kids, our writer is a science nerd, and he’s going to make his point in his own way.

A Primer on Evolutionary Biology. Stay with me, I think this is important. When most people think of biological evolution, I suspect they think about mammalian evolution, or really almost any large, multicellular eukaryotic organism’s evolution. There is a slow change of a complex organism as it adapts to changing environment. Populations get isolated and eventually change until one population is different enough from the other that they are considered separate species. The normal stuff that most people learn in Highschool. There is a nice wiki page on it.

But there is another kind of evolution. Something called reticulate evolution (reticulate means basically “net like”). This is when two or more organisms merge large parts of their genetic material and create something new. It also has a nice wiki page, but it is shorter.

Complex multicellular organisms have a really hard time experiencing reticulate evolution. This is because developmental biology is really highly tuned. The slightest mistake can lead to a completely dysfunctional organism.  Our developmental programming locks us into a ridged state where we can only make tiny, little changes.

But single celled bacteria don’t have this limitation. They can change their genetic code wildly and still be a viable cell. Bacteria of very different linages—different species—even further apart—like to swap genes with the folks the met, at least from time to time. And this lets them explore a much wider range of living states.

In a sense, this is exactly what happens with TTRPGs.

Copyleft. In the 1980s, particularly in Boston and the Pacific Northwest, there was a strong sentiment against copyrights. Particularly with software. This is when we see the Free Software movement and the Berkely BSD license and so much more. This would eventually lead to modern open-source software and Linux and so much more. I suspect, but I don’t know, that it is even the earliest development in the modern Open Science movement.

So as a teenager in Northern California, this was a real thing. We understood that copyright, as it is usually represented, was a corporate thing. Cyberpunk was king, and copyright is what the corps do, copyleft is what the punks do.

And this showed in out TTRPGs!

Early Leftcoast Games. The first real Leftcoast game (that I can think of) was the Arduin Grimoire. But, let’s be honest. It was never a stand-alone game. It didn’t have enough rules. It was always meant as an extension for D&D. It was, in effect, a massive homebrew. You could grab bits and pieces that you liked and add them to your game. The background tables, of course. Kill Kitties, maybe. Phraint, sure.

And Arduin’s author David Hargrave famously had a falling out with the other big name of Northern California gaming Greg Stafford (who I never met). But both these authors worked in a much more left-leaning environment than our corporate friends at TSR.

And their games have evolved differently.

Evolution of Games. We can make an interesting comparison between the ways different games evolve. Early D&D (until it was bought by the Leftcoast company, Wizards of the Coast) was controlled by an American Midwest corporation that locked the game into a profit-driven evolution that resembles that of multicellular eukaryotes. Slow, structured change with minor variants being tested to determine their profitability. Those that win move on and those that fail are abandoned.

Hargrave’s work hasn’t moved on much—reasons. But Stafford’s games, and those published by his Bay Area company, Chaosium, still represent one of the largest, most popular family of games in the world.

“But Richard,” I hear you yell, “The d100 games represent hundreds of different games, published by countless small and mid-sized gaming companies. They don’t represent any ‘one thing’.”

And that is because the d100 games have always been advancing with reticulate evolution. Games like Call of Cthulhu and DragonBane and Mythras at first blush look to be completely different (and all appear different from my Rubble and Ruin). But they are not. With the d100 world of games, we take parts that we like and kludge them together into a functioning system. If you look at Basic Roleplaying  (The Big Yellow Book) it has countless optional rules that are included or excluded as the GM sees fit. And over time, more and more options have appeared.

But the underlying skill-based structure remains unchanged. Characters are not forced into roles based on “class” but rather develop organically with skills going up during play as independent of any corporate-ordained structure.

The Second Old School. I have a WIP, a new game I’m putting together. I call it Rustic Fantasy and it is the game I wish I had in 1980. The rules are a combination of a number of open RPGs, most are ORC Licensed, including Mythras Imperative, BRP, and Open Quest. And I would say this game is strongly in the second Old Scholl.

In the second Old School, you take the parts of all the games that you have, and you assemble something new and unique. Frequently you are creating a world and the rules that go with it. You, as a GM and invested players, are trying to fulfill a vision and make that vision come alive.

The current best example, in my mind, is DragonBane. This game is currently hot. I bought my copy at a local, independent bookstore. Didn’t need to special order it from my FLAG.

But it is just a form of Basic Roleplaying that has undergone decades of reticulate evolution. They’ve divided skills by five and added D&D “Advantage” and “Disadvantage” on rolls. And they have added new elements to match their vision. It’s a great game. A buddy of mine is running it on Monday nights and I’m really enjoying it. It is one strand of a net of games that are now and have always been popular.

Homebrew is Old School. Some folks use the term “homebrew” in a derogatory way to refer to games that are not run according to the rules written and approved by the corporate owners of the intellectual properties of a given game. I argue that this is where “the art” is. This is where the creativity comes in. Corporate games are so automatable that if you want to experience D&D 5e you can go play Baldur’s Gate. To me, the interesting part of the game is when you start changing the mechanics to reflect a different imagined reality.

Old School Two: Make the game follow your vision, not the vision that provides the greatest profit to a corporation.

We’ve been doing it since the dawn of gaming. It’s popular. It’s fun. If you haven’t, give it a try.

As always, thanks for reading my posts and I invite comments and questions below.

 

Remembering when Illinois was a slave state?

Trigger warning. This is a nasty piece of history that slipped into a song intended to be lighthearted and for children. It centers on American slavery.

I have a peculiar little story about a piece of mostly overlooked American history. It’s tragic, and forgotten, and I think it shouldn’t be.

Back in the day I was a direct  report to a fellow who happened to have a PhD in History – great guy—we’re still friends on social media even though we haven’t worked together since the late 1990s. So anyway, one day when we were working together somehow the conversation got around to slavery and Illinois, and I mentioned that there was some kind of exemption back in the early 1800s for two counties in Illinois, Saline and Gallatin. They had legal slavery. Well, he said “No way”, and quoted line and verse about how certain laws prohibited that, and I said, “That may be, but I’ve toured the Old Slave House.”

He didn’t believe me, but that was okay, and life went on. I knew what I had seen. The shackles and the beds the slaves would be chained to is what has stuck with me all these years.

A decade later, long after we had both moved on, I got an email from him with the subject line “Mia Coupa”. It turns out he was going through some old archives and found a document which referenced slavery in Southern Illinois. (The internet tells me it was an exemption written into the Illinois State Constitution—but I didn’t learn that until I started writing this post.)

What they said at the Old Slave House was that there had been salt mines in Saline and Gallatin Counties, along the Saline River—first clue was in the name. Apparently, the river was full of dissolved salt, which was easy to get and very valuable on the frontier, but the water needed to be boiled until the salt crystalized and this was such hard, hot, nasty work that they couldn’t pay people to do it. So, they made an exemption to allow slaves just for processing the salt.

For those with a weak understanding of US geography, the Ohio river was the boundary between free and slave states, and the Saline River is a small tributary of the Ohio, just on the wrong side. Well, wrong for the moneyed elites that needed slaves.

And Lincoln is said to have visited there before taking office. Just saying.

Fast forward to last week. My kid liked sea chanties before they were cool, and we’ve listened to a lot of them on YouTube. One of my favorite groups is The Longest Johns. Now just to be clear, I don’t think these fellows have the slightest idea about this upcoming connection. They are folk musicians from the UK, and they perform a large number of folk songs and sea chanties.

Here is a link to Shawneetown, by the Longest Johns.

Last week the algorithm thought I would like to listen to “Shawneetown”. Well, right away I recognized that the song is about Shawneetown Illinois—the ancient (by American standards) town in Little Egypt, near the southern tip of the state of Illinois. A region that holds a special place in my heart. If for no other reason than it is the best place in the world to set a Call of Cthulhu campaign. And, my wife is from Southern Illinois, and I’ve spent a lot of time there.

According to this fan site, the song Shawneetown is a 1970’s folk song written around some fragments of song preserved from the keelboat era of the early 1800s.

So, I’m listening to the song, for the first time, and yes, it is about Southern Illinois—or at least traveling down the Ohio River. In the song, the travelers are going to Shawneetown to sell produce and buy rock salt.

Where did the Shawneetown rock salt come from?

Remember those salt mines?  There is a route from the mines to the nearby Ohio River and Shawneetown. (Actually, now it’s Old Shawneetown. They moved the town after some flooding during the Great Depression.)

Here’s a picture of the Bank in Old Shawneetown from when I visited about ten years ago. There is not much left in town, but this building is still standing. It was built before the American Civil War and stored money associated with the salt trade.

In the early 1800s, the sale of rock salt was filling the Shawneetown Bank vaults with money. This trade was still being referenced in folk songs 150-years-later. And half-a-century on the song is sung by a popular band in Great Britain. And through all of this, people don’t mention that the rock salt was boiled out of the water of the Saline River by Illinois slaves.

I don’t think this requires any action on the part of the reader. I just feel that people should be aware of Illinois slavery. We should remember that people with money can write for themselves exceptions in just about any rule or law. This has been happening for a very long time, and unless continuous action and vigilance is taken, it will continue happening in the future.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this and your comments and questions are always welcome.