2024 Slush Pile
Here are some posts from this year that didn't quite cross the 'blog-worthy' threshold on their own. (Check out Dwiz's & Prismatic Wasteland's as well!)
RPG-adjacent texts
I was reading about the demons catalogued in the Ars Goetia for an earlier post and was struck by how the formulaic entries sounded like those in an RPG bestiary. Around the same time, I had also been reading Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings (which could almost serve as a system agnostic bestiary) and Patrick Stuart's Gackling Moon. The latter seemed only tenuously an 'RPG book' -- remove a few references to dice and game mastery and you get some kind of postmodern fantasy encyclopedia / travel guide, like Dictionary of the Khazars, or Codex Seraphinianus.
- I have a ratty paperback gazetter for Burroughs' Barsoom setting, which I'd totally use if I wanted to run a Barsoom game (I don't).
- Iirc there's a game called The Dracula Dossier that uses an annotated or expanded version of Dracula.
So the gist of this post was to try to list some RPG texts that only need a little nudge to enter the world of regular literature, and some non-rpg books that could be repurposed as sourcebooks of some sort. If anyone reading this has used a non-rpg book in their game, I'd love to hear about it!
Trivial OD&D Observations
First, OD&D Hexes aren't 5 miles (as we usually think of them). Underworld & Wilderness Adventures says to "Assume the greatest distance across a hex is about 5 miles." The greatest distance across a hex spans opposite corners, which is longer than the distance from the center of a hex to the center of a neighboring hex. A modern player would say that OD&D recommends 4.3 mile hexes.
Second, there is a Thief in the 3LBBs! He lives on page 14 of Monsters & Treasure:
He's literally practicing thievery, so you can't convince me he's just a hireling. This cartoon depicts a Platonic 4-class D&D party.
As it turns out, this illustration occupies the spot where the Balrog description used to reside:
So, it must have been added after the 1977 cease-&-desist letter and definitely post-dates Supplement I: Greyhawk. Even so, I find it funny that the thief snuck back in time this way.
Counterfactual AD&D
It seems like there's an eternal ttrpg dialectic between elegant rules-lite simplicity and "completeness". Light games have gaps, GMs rule on them, someone compiles the rulings into a big compendium, everyone gets fed up wading through pages of armored-werewolf-transformation damage tables and hourly haberdasher wages so someone comes along with an elegant, back-to-basics game with all the clutter removed.
It's obviously an imperfect model, but it has surely played out more than once. Each new elegant simple system requires a revision of existing material to fit the new idiom. And perhaps light games are better for onboarding people, but new players fuel demand for growing the game into a bulky omnibus, scaring off latecomers & repeating the cycle. In any case, I think there's a beautiful hubris inherent to RPGs where they inevitably try to outpace their origins; no matter how clearly you demarcate an elegant gameplay loop, someone's going to come along and write the underwater basket-weaving addon.
With this in mind, I like to think about certain games as alternate - universe AD&D. For example Rod Hampton's Dragons Beyond could be said to be AD&D if the 1973 OD&D draft was released as-is.
Some criteria for a game to qualify as 'counterfactual AD&D' could be:
- Grew out of an earlier, less-complete game.
- Includes extensive guidance for developing one's own campaign (rather than running modules). And most importantly,
- Includes extensive additional rules or procedures for handling situations that would have been GM-rulings in the prior version.
Examples:
- 1973 OD&D ('Dallhun Manuscript' / Beyond this Point be Dragons) becomes the 300-page Dragons Beyond.
- 1974 OD&D becomes Advanced D&D, but also Caltech Warlock and other unlicensed fan spinoffs. For modern retroclones trending this way there's Swords & Wizardry Complete & Seven Voyages of Zylarthen.
- B/X D&D becomes BECMI. Worlds Without Number also approaches the level of 'completeness' needed to qualify as alter-AD&D (imo).
- Errant originally inspired this line of thinking, since I'd argue Errant is to NSR games like Into The Odd, Mausritter, Knave, & Cairn as AD&D is to OD&D.
- I haven't read either but it sounds like Cairn 2e and Knave 2e did this for their respective first editions. Block, Dodge, Parry also does a lot to AD&D-ify Cairn.
- Advanced Fantasy Dungeons by Idle Cartulary bills itself as a 'para-clone' of AD&D 2e (not familiar enough to say whether it fits in with the schema here but it sound similar?)
Arbor Gary & Rhizome Dave
Reading Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, playing OD&D, & comparing The First Fantasy Campaign to the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, I developed the half-baked notion that Arneson brought a rhizomatic tendency to D&D & Gary provided an arborescent approach.
- Rhizome: an interconnected network with no central node, no command & control, just open-ended connections, forming & reforming. My impression of Arneson's design approach is of messy, ad-hoc rulings and rules pasted together & discarded to serve the needs of his collaborative Blackmoor campaign.
- Arborescence: a system branching out from a central node. Both when compiling OD&D from Dave's inscrutable notes and trying to wrest creative control away from insurgent fanzines, Gary played the role of centralizer/organizer. Even 'Gygaxian Naturalism' and his house style of scenario fortress dungeons reflects a desire to subsume mythic underworld chaos under an intelligible, rational plan.
Perhaps (but only perhaps) OD&D's 'lighting in a bottle' quality came from the inherent tension between these approaches.
(Also, c.f. Tom Van Winkle on how Arneson was never rules-light. I think that people making that association are really picking up on his rhizomatic approach to rules, which isn't 'light' but is perhaps relatively flexible and not reliant on a central textual authority or uniform mechanics (?). I think this is actually a useful distinction, though I don't know enough about Arneson or his games to confidently say it applies to him specifically.)
(ALSO, this would be purely in an isolated game-design context; politically they were both pretty reactionary afaik & therefore arborescent)
Inward- & Outward-pointing Mechanics
I have a loose theory that some game mechanics (or procedures/conventions/'game elements') point 'inward', redirecting attention toward the assumed focus of a game, and others 'outward', prompting improvisation. For example, "every session starts and ends in town" points inward because it prevents having to improvise dungeon camping and bookmarks the start & end of each session with a predictable game state. Carousing tables with entries like 'you wake up in jail' and the hazard die are outward-pointing, potentially requiring the GM & players to resolve novel situations that may not be accounted for in session prep or even the rules.
I find this distinction useful because outward-pointing mechanics are:
- Prone to stimulating the imagination, sounding novel & exciting when read on a blog post (strong memetic potential).
- Divisive among those who have tested them in play.
- Probably best used in moderation, with each table having their own sweet spot.
A game with mostly outward-pointing elements would be constant improvisation, but a game where all the mechanics point inwards is a board game.
I don't get to play that often, so when I do get my group together I usually want to direct attention back toward the dungeon or wilderness scenario I have prepared, rather than getting sidetracked running an off-the-cuff prison escape. But I can acknowledge the appeal of spontaneity & do enjoy putting weird shit on my encounter tables.
Having language to talk about this is probably useful, even if the terms 'inward-pointing' and 'outward-pointing' are clunky -- being able to say "the hazard die requires more improvisation than I'm comfortable with" is more constructive than "I don't like the hazard die".
Finally,
So-called "hard" magic systems are biased toward emulating (a crude approximation of) physics & chemistry, but reality is weird when you stray into the life sciences. I think the typical 'hard magic system' assumes limes will be more like lemons than polar bears.
Insane idea: build a phone app that runs some kind of cellular automata with complex emergent properties. Present mages with a snapshot of the current state and base the result of their spells on the subsequent iterations; it would be hard magic insofar as the underlying process is driven by simple, intelligible rules, but macro-level engagement would require fuzzy heuristics (player skill) and would be subject to chance.
Earthsea is actually an example of a "hard" magic system, but one based off ecology.