Tag / History

by Moreau Vazh

HHQ1 – Fighter’s Challenge

HHQ is an occasional column about the HHQ series of modules published by TSR in the early- to mid-1990s. Designed to be played either by a single player or by very small groups, the HHQ series offers a fascinating portrait of what D&D adventure design looked like before the collapse of TSR.

Nowadays, we are all accustomed to playing TTRPGs with smaller groups. Older gamers may remember the time when GMs would contend with adventuring groups that were 10, 12, 15-characters strong but nowadays groups tend to be smaller and even groups that manage to hold together long enough to support a campaign tend to have absences. Launching in the early 1990s, the HHQ series of modules was designed for duet play but often allowed for smaller groups of 2-3 PCs.

While the historical narrative regarding the quality of TSR’s output may sing of gradual decline, I thought it might be interesting to return to the final years of TSR’s existence and consider whether designers in the early-to-mid 1990s might have had any insight into writing adventures for smaller groups.

The answer was not what I expected.

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by Moreau Vazh

INSPO: Elizabeth R

INSPO is a series of posts about non-horror topics that could nonetheless be used as inspiration for a horror game. The rest of the series can be found here.

Like most living entities, Britain has a tendency to assemble its identity from episodes cherry-picked from its own past. In some cases, episodes have been selected to fit the vibes of a particular moment only for these moments and their cultural signifiers to be discarded when the vibes change and the old memories no longer serve as a buttress for who we want to be.

This practice is most evident in the case of modern Britain’s relationship with the Victorian era where growing awkwardness about Britain’s blood-spattered colonial history has resulted in whole facets of Victorian life being either ignored or quietly memory-holed until all that’s left of the British empire is some vaguely Dickensian imagery in a Christmas supermarket advert for Oreo-flavoured mince pies.

One of the biggest differences between today’s Britain and Britain in the 1990s is a change in its favoured royal spirit-animal. Contemporary Britain finds solace in the idea of an obese and visibly drunk Henry VIII driving a digger through a load of boxes and declaring his intention to get Brexit done and by formally severing all ecclesiastical ties between Rome and the Church of England. Back in the 1990s, people tended to look to the reign of Elizabeth I as the early stages of Britain’s colonial project seemed to chime with British companies outsourcing all of their manufacturing capacity to Third World sweatshops. Elizabeth I also seems ‘liberal’ by the standards of British monarchs but I suspect that was mostly down to the fact that she ended her half-sister’s policy of torturing Protestants and burning them at the stake. The British royal family doesn’t get many W’s when it comes to being progressive but not having town councils burn people alive was definitely one of them. Kudos Good Queen Bess… welcome to the Resistance.

The 90s reclamation of Elizabeth and all things Elizabethan resulted in a number of film and TV series including Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth starring Cate Blanchette. The success of Elizabeth meant that Kapur and Blanchette were able to team up again to produce a sequel entitled Elizabeth: The Golden Age that featured a more mature and confident Elizabeth facing down the might of Spain.  The Golden Age has less of a cultural finger-print than the original partly by virtue of the fact that it appeared nine years later and partly by virtue of the fact that the film’s bright and hyper-saturated visual palette was so radically at odds with the shadowy grimness of the original that it felt like a completely unrelated project. This was deliberate as while the first film is all about Elizabeth trying to secure and hold onto her throne, the second film is about high-level strategic decisions made by a woman who was in absolute control of her body-politic.

This deliberate tonal shift intended to represent different stages of Elizabeth’s life was not entirely original. Though well-remembered and well-loved, Elizabeth is a film that borrowed quite freely from a much older TV adaptation of Elizabeth’s life entitled Elizabeth R. This is a series that has much to teach us about an interesting approach to structuring campaigns.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry

The original vision for this blog was a place for me to write about ‘hauntings’ in the most expansive sense of the word. What I mean by that is that while I definitely wanted to write about ghosts and ghost-stories, I also wanted to write about memory, trauma, and all the ways in which the past imposes itself upon the present and helps to shape the future. While this original vision may have never come fully to pass, I remain deeply fascinated by this more expansive conception of the haunting. Evidently I am not alone in this fascination as Ghosts of the Tsunami is a book about just such a form of haunting written by the Asia editor of the London Times.

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by Moreau Vazh

REVIEW: Occult London by Merlin Coverley

One of the nice things about returning to an old hobby is discovering the way that time and emotional detachment translate into critical distance.

When Lockdown gave me the excuse/opportunity to start a regular RPG campaign, my first instinct was to approach writing a game in the way that RPG publishers suggest. In other words, I chose a game, then some setting books, and then I tried to find a story I wanted to tell using that game and that setting. However, the second I sat down and started reading, I remembered why I tended not to make much use of setting books…

I was always happy to spend money on RPG supplements but when the time came to actually sit down and prepare a session, I always wound up looking elsewhere for my inspiration. At the time, I assumed that this was down to my being either lazy or inattentive but revisiting these kinds of books as a mature adult has really brought home the profound mediocrity of your average RPG: Poorly written, poorly organised, under-imagined, and almost completely devoid of useful information, your average RPG supplement promises to save you time but inevitably turns out to be little more than a waste of money.

However, rather than turning myself into a purveyor of hatchet jobs, I thought it might be useful to cast the net a little wider and take a look at books which, though not written with games in mind, could be used as inspiration for your campaigns. Who knows… reading more abstract source material might even help me work out what I actually want from RPG supplements in future.

Merlin Coverley is a British author best known for his book on psychogeography, a literary tradition best described as producing essays about place that draw as much upon first-person experience of these places as they do from conceptual frameworks dreamt up by critical theorists. If this sounds rather like using a sledgehammer to crack an egg then you are already most of the way towards grasping the aesthetics of the form as psychogeography is all about bringing together the visceral, the mundane, and the impossibly high-minded.

What this means in practice is that psychogeographers often wind up writing about the present in terms of abandoned pasts and potential futures, and this is where the connection with RPG setting books becomes most obvious as it turns out that there is a long tradition of writing about London in terms of its occult history. Coverley’s Occult London offers an entertaining, accessible, and fascinating overview of London’s occult history that could easily inspire any number of RPG supplements let alone sessions.

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