ROLEGAMING MAGAZINE ISSUE 37 EARLY 2002

issn: 0267-5595Editor: Paul Mason

This publication is freeware. It may be freelycopied and distributed on condition that no money

is charged. All material is copyright © 2001,original authors and artists, and may not be

reproduced without their permission.

Contributions may be sent on paper, on disk, or byemail. The less formatting you insert, the better.Please don’t try to imitate the layout, especiallyusing tabs etc. Italics used for emphasis and forproduct names are fine, but no more. Preferred

format is Word or Rich Text.

Let me know if you want to be advised by emailwhen a new issue is out, or if I should email it to

you direct (all 400K–1Mb of it!)

PostImazine/Paul Mason

101 Green Heights, Shimpo-chð 4-50,Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-0072 japan

Emailpanurge@tcp-ip.or.jp

Webwww.tcp-ip.or.jp/~panurgewww.firedrake.org/panurge

ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/panurge

2 Reviews2 Everway4 The Dying Earth RPG6 Hero Wars9 Chivalry & Sorcery: The Rebirth10 The Fantasy Role-Playing Game

12 Abstraction v MessSome level of abstaction is necessary in a gamesystem, but how much? asks Paul Mason

14 The Need For A Free WorldAn interview with Phil Gallagher published inWarpstone magazine demonstrates how‘intellectual property’ is strangling one gamesetting. By Robert Rees.

17 Lingua FruppaA look at the coverage of language in roleplayinggames – and why it is so poor – with suggestedsolutions. By Gianni Vacca.

19 ColloquyThe usual array of letters, this time presented witha little more of you, and a little less of me.Understanding of terms like ‘adequate’ and‘zunder’ is not obligatory, honest!

27 Brilliance & Dross In RPG ArtworkArtwork and rolegames have always beenintertwined. Matt Stevens gives a personal viewof the this tempestuous relationship.

ye a r a n d a h a l f l a te ? It’s pretty unforgiveable,isn’t it? Not so much a late issue as another period ofhybernation followed by a return from the dead.

In this case, though, the return is different to myreturn after the long gap between issues 20 and 21. It hasbeen evident that I can’t continue to produce imazine in theway I have been, not so much because of a lack of time(although that has also been a problem), but because I refuseto work on the zine unless I’m fully behind it. The fact thatthis issue is so late demonstrates that I haven’t been suffi-ciently motivated, energised, enthused by what I’ve beendoing with the zine. So next issue (if there is a next issue)will probably see some changes.

I started the zine originally to provide a place for discus-sion. Since then the Internet has come along and most peo-

A

ple now prefer their discussions at the speed of a net connec-tion (and with flames to match). So I’m going to be thinkingabout how to modify the method of discussion I use in thezine, as well as trying to make it easier for me to edit. Thisissue sees much larger chunks by way of an experiment.

On top of all this, this issue marks something of a breakwith tradition as I discover that I am prepared to publish art-work: though in this case as part of an article on the subjectof artwork in rolegames rather than as decoration. Becauseof this art, and the extra length from letters, reviews andarticles I believe the file is rather larger than usual; sorryabout that.

Oh, and in the ‘other news’ department, I’ve recentlysecured a new full-time job and will be becoming a father inFebruary. So, little prospect of much extra free time... *

ust about every issue I resolve to ditch the reviewssection, and just about every issue something comesalong that makes me feel I should postpone its demise.This issue, though, demonstrates the way I see things

going in the future: fewer commercial promotions and moreexaminations of games from the point of view of what use-ful ideas we can obtain from them. By coincidence, andprobably partly as a result of the long delay, the reviews areinterelated, not only with each other, but with other con-tents of the zine.

J

r e v i e w s

EverwayDissected by Paul Mason

But, but – isn’t this a crazyidea? I mean, Everway was a

notorious flop: it has beenunavailable for ages. Well, if I

was merely doing a review,that would be true. As it is,

the very fact that Everwaywas a flop is what inter-ests me in taking a lookat it. For just as Last

Action Hero was anotorious flop that

was neverthelessone of ArnoldSchwarzenegger’s

best films, there may beall sorts of precious nuggets to be

found in the unlikeliest places. And with therelease of Dungeons & Dragons third edition, helmed byJonathan Tweet, who has wowed us in the past with suchdelights as Ars Magica and Over The Edge, this seems like agood opportunity to look at his ‘great mistake’ (why noreview of Dungeons & Dragons? That’s a question you shouldbe asking yourself, not me).

In an issue of Alarums & Excursions over a year ago,Jonathan modestly commented on the subject of Everwaythat ‘It dates from a time when I thought I knew how tomake something accessible to new gamers. (Now I’velearned to test my assumptions rather than believe them.)’That parenthetical comment is something I am very familiarwith myself. It’s bizarre how a neat system or idea cantranslate into total rubbish as soon as it is exposed on themountainside of actual play. In the case of Everway, most ofthe basic ideas are fascinating. Indeed, had it not been

2 imazine

pitched as a newcomer’sgame, I suspect it wouldn’thave performed as badly asit did. Because the strangething about this game is that itis a newcomer’s game, but onewhich requires an experiencedreferee to run it.

In this examination of thegame, I’m going to be mainly con-centrating on two of the game’s fea-tures: the cards used to drive themechanic, and the backgroundagainst which the game is set. Thereare, of course, many other points of interestto be found in the game, but I think these two have themost to tell us about designing games of our own.

beginner’s luckBut before I start concentrating on these two features, aword about the idea of Everway as a beginner’s game. Thereare many theories as to what is and isn’t required in such agame, and I wouldn’t like to claim that I have the answers.One thing I did notice, however, was that I found myself,while reading a large proportion of the main book, continu-ally asking myself: ‘Yes, but what do you do? How do youplay the game?’ Given the effort which was put in to makethe game accessible by removing highly culture-specificinformation from the background, there is a tremendousamount of cultural information to wade through before oneis given any concrete information on how to play the game.My impression of beginners is that what they crave, morethan anything, is concrete information, specifics on how toplay the game and what is expected of them. Like it or not,that means the game mechanics. And Everway doesn’t seemto me to make this information easy to acquire.

A related point is the notion of using the four elements ascharacteristics. Firstly this is a culture-specific element,though this needn’t matter (it does, however, underminethe game’s carefully cultivated ethnicity – this is a back-ground of many peoples, all of whom speak with anAmerican accent). My worry is that the vagueness of thecharacteristics, while attractive to established players whowill find such a means of describing characters full of reso-nance and possibility, will leave beginners nonplussed. HereI am happy to be contradicted by those who have experiencerunning the game with actual beginners. But it does seem tointroduce an unnecessary level of abstraction. Dungeons &Dragons, for all its faults, allowed a character concept to be

Everway

r e v i e w s

grasped rather quickly through its characteristics. Where itwas weakest was with the vaguer terms, like charisma,which weren’t immediately graspable. But beginners couldquickly understand ‘Your strength is 13, rated on a scalefrom 1 to 20’ (or 3 to 18 or whatever).

Elsewhere in this issue I examine the notion of abstrac-tion, and why I think it can so often undermine immersionin the game experience – or, to be more precise, in thegamed experience. It’s to do with the gap between themechanics and the gamed reality they are supposedly repre-senting. Everway makes an interesting attempt to close thisgap by making the Elements and the Fortune Deck them-selves parts of the background. Thus, while it might seemexcessively abstract to refer to someone as having a firescore of 7, the game is set up such that we understand thatit might be said of someone that she ‘is full of fire’ – thusthat the system models a belief of the world’s inhabitants.

This made me think that I should have had the courage ofmy convictions all those years ago when I determined tobased the Outlaws system on the I Ching. Except… that onlyrepresents one particular (immensely popular, though notuniversal) strand of thought in China, and by basing the sys-tem on it I would have immediately set up a monolithic,arbitrary structure which wouldn’t have been comfortablerepresenting certain other aspects of the culture. Everwaydoes not suffer this problem, of course, since the back-ground is synthetic, but it does mean that the background,for all its apparent variety, is likely to be a monolithic, arbi-trary structure.

worlds apartTalking of the background, let’s have a look. For starters, itis unavowedly and unashamedly fantasy based. Having saidthat, it is ‘multi-planar’. Now I had better straightaway putmy (collectible) cards on the table: I am suspicious of multi-planar game environments. It’s not that I object to the ideaper se: Tékumel has multiple planes, but I don’t feel theyinterfere with the background. Rather, I’m suspicious ofmulti-planar settings because

they so often feellike an excuse for

background-hop-ping. Never mind the

quality, feel thewidth. They obviate

the need to root theplayer characters in a

background culture, andto derive much of the

story from interactionsbetween them.

In this respect, Everwayis odd, and no mistake.

While the author’s work on

Over The Edge suggests that themulti-planar setting is a deliberateattempt to minimise the necessityfor background, as I mentionedabove, you have to wade throughdozens of pages of essentiallybackground information beforeyou even reach character cre-ation. And there’s the settingof Everway itself, a Tanelorn(or perhaps a City-State ofthe Invincible Overlord?) fora new generation. It’s high-ly quirky, that’s for sure.The aspects I like about it(and this goes for thegame in general) arethose which go against fantasy tropes. Instead of awful fan-tasy names – Thrak the Barbarian and his ilk – all the namesare words. This lends a mythic cast to the game, andextends its associations beyond European mythology andinto some of the Asian, African, American and Australasiancultures depicted on the cards. I’ve seen write-ups ofEverway games which really did seem to exploit this feelingto great effect.

But mention of the cards brings us circling back towardsthe rules. The idea of a diceless game is not new (it had beendiscussed and done years before Eric Diceless’s AmberWujcik hit the stands), nor, for that matter, are cards such agreat innovation (the original never-published GamesWorkshop Doctor Who RPG was based on a card deck). Butpitching an interpretative card-based system at the begin-ner’s market was certainly a brave move on the part ofWizards of the Coast. Was this a contributory factor in itsfailure?

It is often imagined that beginners are put off by thedice-rolling in games, and sometimes they are. To replacedice-rolling with what amounts to resolution-by-Tarot-read-ing is a leap a little too great for me. My own, limited, expe-rience is that beginners are far more disturbed by the vague-ness, the lack of understanding of what game terms meanand represent than they are by the dice. The notion of agame representing a story is easy to grasp. More difficult,however, is becoming familiar with the way the game mod-els reality – how the rules relate to the gamed experience.Funnily enough, as D&D demonstrates, abstraction isn’tnecessarily a problem so long as it is clear. Those levels andcharacteristics may be nonsensical, but they have clearnumbers attached and they can been assimilated with a lit-tle effort of willpower. Everway’s system, while in my opin-ion far more interesting, is going to be far more difficult toassimilate because it relies on interpretation, which super-ficially brings it far closer to the playground games and theirarguments, which rules came to save us from. I could well becompletely wrong here. But this is my feeling.

Leaving aside the suitability of the game to beginners,

3imazine

r e v i e w s

Everway

let’s look at the system itself. There are actually three reso-lution mechanics: the Laws of Karma, Drama and Fortune.Karma means that the referee decides all outcomes, basedon the characters’ abilities and the situation. Drama meansthat the referee decides all outcomes, based on the needs ofhis or her plot. Fortune means that the referee determines alloutcomes, based on his or her interpretation of a card drawnfrom the Fortune Deck. You’ll notice that there is a commonelement here…

chaingang bluesWell, card-carrying advocate of player-power that I am, Iwas never going to find myself cheering a game whichexpends so much space in detailing a basic mechanic of ‘thereferee decides all outcomes’. But digging a little deeperthan my rather unfriendly characterisation, is there any-thing worth taking note of?

Of course there is. The license to railroad that is the Lawof Drama can quickly be wrapped up and disposed of in thebin for those who love such things. The Law of Karma is aninteresting formulation of the proposition that many role-playing game situations don’t actually need the rules to beinvoked – the result is obvious in context. In some recentrules speculations in Alarums & Excursions I have extendedthis idea to players, and labelled it ‘privileged assertion’.

That leaves us with the Law of Fortune. One consequenceof this mechanic is that it cultivates the feeling that in-game consequences are being determined by in-gameforces. So if we can get beyond my distaste at the idea thatit is dominated by the referee, and perhaps accept playerinterpretation, we have an interesting random mechanicwhich operates within the game and which should thereforestimulate immersion. The draw of the Fortune Deck repre-sents the way in which the turn of events might be consid-ered by the characters. By analogy, think of the way in whichgamers apply game terms to everyday events. If I knocksomeone’s beer over, I might comment that I ‘fumbled myroll’. Since the Fortune Deck exists within the world, itsmetaphors guide the way that characters consider theevents around them. What better resolution mechanic?

What this suggests is that in games in general, we mightconsider implementing mechanics which reflect, in someway, the beliefs of the culture in which they are to be imple-mented. This probably only really works in closed (ie fanta-sy) cultures, but it’s still worth a thought. I can certainly seeusing the Tarot in order to determine results in aRenaissance-based game (yes, I know it’s strictly anachro-nistic, but it certainly feels close), and I’ve already men-tioned the possibilities of using the I Ching in a Chinesegame.

The main issue is how you actually implement themechanic, and here I think is where Everway cops out rather.Its implementation of the Law of Fortune is little more thana souped-up version of ‘the referee decides’, which may sat-

4 imazine

isfy the railroaders, but does little for me. This doesn’t,however, mean that it can’t be made to work. For myself,I’m inclined to think that some sort of structured diffusionof power (a concept I’m exploring in my Alarums &Excursions ruminations) may do the trick.

Though it was one of the greatest flops in roleplaying his-tory, I nevertheless admire Everway and its creator for thebold steps it took in exploring alternatives. That I have prob-lems with some of the directions taken is irrelevant; what isadmirable is the way in which Everway opened up hithertoconcealed gateways. The greatest shame is that its commer-cial failure may have frightened off other companies frominnovation. And so we find ourselves in a world which hasreturned to the dungeon-bashing 70s, albeit in smarterapparel (courtesy, once again, of the versatile Mr Tweet),and in which d20 is the new standard. In such a world, I findmyself warming to Everway and its foibles…

The Dying Earth RPGReviewed by Matthew Pook

Dungeons & Dragons owes a substantial debt to theauthor Jack Vance and his Tales of The Dying Earth. GaryGygax has acknowledged Tales of The Dying Earth as theinspiration if not the source for the concept behind AD&D’smagic system. Further, some of the Dying Earth’s magicalartefacts also appear in AD&D – most notably Ioun stones.Beyond this, the inspiration for D&D is more Tolkien thanVance and as far as the roleplaying world is concerned, TheDying Earth has been left far behind. All that is set to change

r e v i e w s

with the release of The Dying EarthRoleplaying Game published by a newEnglish company, Pelgrane Press.

the worldThe setting for this game is that ofthe stories – the 21st Aeon, a timefar beyond the distant future whereour own time has been long forgot-ten and science and magic havebecome the same. The Sun, fat andreddish, hangs low in a mauve skyand is given over to the occasionalquavering as it threatens to extin-guish itself and the Earth with it. Allacknowledge that the Sun is nearingits end and though none can saywhen, all have resigned themselvesto their fate. Thus the time of theDying Earth is not a world of greatambitions, but one where scoundrelsand magicians explore, lie, cheat andexhort their way through agelessruins, beast-filled forests and isolat-ed communities with peculiar customs in search of magicalartefacts, strange knowledge or if all else fails, a fine mealand a soft bed for the night. It is these scoundrels and magi-cians that the players will take as their characters, usingtheir cunning, their wits and their persuasive tongues tosurvive and persevere, for as the old adage has it, ‘violenceis the last refuge of the incompetent’.

The Dying Earth RPG is written and designed by Robin DLaws, the renowned creator of Atlas Games’ Feng Shui,Hogshead’s Pantheon and Issaries Inc’s Hero Wars; andcomes with a magic system designed by John Snead.Although the cover does little for me, Allen Varney nicelylays out the inside of this hardback book in black and white.Mainly illustrated by Ralph Horsley [whose work appeared inimazine many years ago – Ed], The Dying Earth RPG acts as ashowcase for his art, a mixture of pen and ink and paintedpieces. Many of these illustrations come with witty cap-tions and quotes from the Dying Earth stories liberally sprin-kled throughout. Only one thing lets the presentation downand this is Peter Freeman’s map of Cugel’s journey. It hasbitmapped quite horridly and is rather difficult to read.Peter Freeman also contributes several pieces of fiction forthose not familiar with the works of Jack Vance. These arerather successful in emulating the singular style of the talesof the Dying Earth.

The game begins with an excellent first chapter aimed atboth the novice new to role-playing, and the veteran gamernew to the Dying Earth. This is a necessity as there are fun-damental differences in feel and tone between this and themore traditional goal-orientated fantasy rpg. These differ-

In A NuHighs: Fantastic

setting through bing, with an engin

role-playing nLows: None real

object to the morof the rules – reverof their character

of control of theithe g

Overall: A fantaent vein, not so

Sorcery but Chicanpromotes the u

brawn and where about entertainin

about achieving love Tales Of The you’ll love Pelgra

Earth

Dying Earth RPG

ences ooze out of the games’ rules,writing and advice. For example,players are asked to select a suitablyexotic name, but warned that if theychoose a mundane or anachronisticname such as Nigel or Sue, the gm hasfull permission to brutally slay thecharacter within the first few min-utes of the game!

the charactersThe type of campaign determinesthe type of character the playersdesign. A Cugel-level game providescharacters with a few good skills andlittle in the way of magic who mustrely upon their wits and guile to sur-vive, whereas Turjan and Rhialto-level campaigns are increasingly ori-entated to magically capable charac-ters. Each level provides points tospend on Ability Ratings in numerousabilities – Persuade, Rebuff, Attack,Defence and optionally Magic. A

style is selected for each rating or determined randomly togain bonus points. gms should be careful here as it is possi-ble for players to roll most abilities and thus gain a lot ofpoints here, so I would recommend limiting the number oftimes that ratings can be rolled for. Points are spent onskills, health, possessions and resistances to round out thecharacter. Each Ability Dating determines the Ability Poolfor each skill and it is from these Pools that players spendpoints to accomplish things. Finally three taglines are noteddown for the character to use within the game – more ofthose latter.

The game system is very simple, and to be blunt, will notplease everyone as it is highly random and there are no skillsas such in the game to modify any roll. It uses a simple D6,with results three and below indicating ever-worsening fail-ure. Likewise, results four and above indicating ever-increasing success. Literally it is as simple as that! The firstroll on any action is usually free, but subsequent rolls – ifinvolved in a contest of skills, or the roll was not the resultdesired, each cost a single point from the appropriateAbility Pool. A player can go on rolling until such times as acontest is lost or won, or the Pool is emptied. There can be abonus or levy to a roll because of a task’s difficulty orbecause the opposed rolls are employing Abilities includeone style that might trump another. For example, in combatthe Speed Attack style trumps the Dodge Defence style. In apersuasion attempt, the Charming Persuasion style istrumped by Contrary Rebuff style. Ability Pools can berefreshed through suitable actions and these are given for allstyles and skills. The simple game engine reflects the ebb

tshell evocation of the

oth rules and writ-e geared towards

ot roll-playing.ly, but some maye Vancian aspectssals in the fortunesand occasional lossr character withiname.sy rpg in a differ- much Swords &ery & Sorcery that

se of brains overthe play is as muchg the group as it isobjectives. If youDying Earth, thenne Press’s Dying RPG.

5imazine

Dying Earth RPG

r e v i e w s

and flow of a character’s fortunes upon the Dying Earth andmeans that characters with higher Pools are just as likely tofail as those with lower Pools. Their advantage instead,comes in the fact that they have more to spend from theirPool in subsequent attempts to buy off any rolled failure.

One aspect of a successful Persuasion attempt againstyour character (from either an npc or another player charac-ter) is that you have no choice but to acquiesce to the sug-gestions put to you. The game strongly advises that you doso, because refusing gives the gm the right to take control ofyour character for the duration of the effects of the persua-sion. Some players may object to this, but again it is verymuch a part of the books, and thus of the game.

Magic, of course, plays a large part in the game with thecampaign level also setting the type of magician allowed:dabblers at Cugel-level, Magicians at Turjan-level and Arch-Magicians at Rhialto-level. Dabblers may know commonmagical tongues and a few simple spells or cantraps. Arch-Magicians know this and much more, commanding the nearomnipotent, but surly Sandestins, that have the ability tocreate almost any effect. This makes Arch-Magiciansamongst the most powerful and learned of figures of the21st Aeon. John Snead’s rules cover a simple, flexible andpotentially powerful magic system, including guidelines forcreating new spells and enchanted items. This is backed upwith a grimoire of thirty-eight spells, most taken from thebooks, though six are original creations. They include thefamous Excellent Prismatic Spray, which unlike its anaemicDungeons & Dragons counterpart, is most deadly.

A Magician or Arch-Magician campaign is a differentprospect to a Cugel-level one. Designing a character for ittakes longer as players must select their grimoires, buildtheir manses and possibly create a Sandestin or two. Suchcampaigns are neither bound to the Earth nor the 21st Aeon,as the magicians search for knowledge, new spells and cre-ate new artefacts. John Snead’s provides good advice to runthis style of campaign, especially how to stop potentialabuses that the simplicity of the system can allow.

the parlourBeyond the rules, The Dying Earth RPG is stuffed full of infor-mation for both players and gm. Each has a separate chapterof tips that serves as a thoroughly useful and necessaryguide to playing and running a Dying Earth game. For theVance fan there are chapters detailing the places, person-ages and creatures of note, all culled from the books for thegame. These seem to lack a little depth in places, but this ismore a reflection of the tales themselves and matches per-fectly the world and the slightly drawn characters that theplayers will role-play. The last chapter is a very Vancianadventure involving the characters in a town’s cooking andeating competition. gms looking for more information andadventures should check out The Excellent Prismatic Spray,Pelgrane Press’ magazine devoted to The Dying Earth RPG.

6 imazine

(Indeed they will be pleased to note that a copy of the firstissue comes with the game).

The Dying Earth RPG is for the mature gamer of a whimsi-cal persuasion. Its aim is to have the players not just achieveparticular objectives, but more entertain themselves andthe gm. Indeed the only way to gain Improvement Points isto be entertaining! This is through the use of taglines, suchas ‘Trust me to outwit this moon-calf!’ and ‘I could alsomake threats, were I not bound by the tenets of civiliseddiscourse.’ Each player selects two and is given a thirdtagline by the gm from the game’s list taken from the books,but the players are free to create their own. When used at anappropriate and hopefully entertaining juncture within agame, the gm will award points to the user.

If I were to think of a game similar to this, it would beHogshead Publishing’s The Extraordinary Adventures of BaronMunchausen, as in both the aim is to be entertaining as it isanything else. The Dying Earth RPG is a more traditional rpgthan Baron Munchausen, but still a thoroughly singular gameall of its own. Once again Robin D Laws has written anotherexcellent game, one that invokes its source throughout. Forthe fan of Jack Vance’s tales of The Dying Earth, this is anrpg they deserve to enjoy. For the gamer not as familiar withthe books, but who are willing to try a game in a lighter,whimsical, but above all entertaining game, then The DyingEarth RPG is just the thing.

Hero WarsReviewed by Paul Mason

Cards on the table: I was never a great Glorantha fan. Iadmired the mechanics of Runequest and cannibalised them,but the game’s background seemed to me like a bit of amish-mash. A very well-realised mish-mash, I grant you, butfar from the mythic edifice it was claimed to be. I suspectthe great achievement of Glorantha, like all such creations,is to touch on some mythic associations within the psychesof its admirers; thus its cues and references activate atmos-phere and emotional reactions inaccessible to one such as Iwho has never experienced a Glorantha aficionado’s game.

All of this is by-the-by, though. Although they are to agreat extent inextricably linked, it is the mechanical imple-mentation of this game that interests me rather than thecultural background. I don’t propose to examine the culturalbackground here save to comment on how the rules go aboutrepresenting it. And since this is undoubtedly a culturegame, and one that expresses some rules ideas that havehitherto only existed in the realms of theoretical discussionin magazines/usenet, or in homebrew games, my interest isconsiderable.

r e v i e w s

Hero Wars

Like The Dying Earth, also reviewed this issue, the game isprimarily by Robin Laws. While my reaction to The DyingEarth was somewhat different to Matthew Pook’s (I foundthe character taglines – explicitly described as a mechanismto enable referee railroading – a mechanic apparentlypurpose-designed to inhibit or interrupt immersion) myreview of Feng Shui should have made clear that I admire theway that Laws goes about innovating, attempting to extendthe possibilities of roleplaying (though it’s a shame that inPantheon he feels it necessary to indulge in snide commentsdirected at players who don’t dance to his tune).

One more thing I should point out. Nowadays I find it verydifficult to read roleplaying games. Wading through all theverbiage; trying to put all the explanations together into agrasp of the whole: it just bores me. Maybe I’m going theway of a certain famous British roleplaying publisher… butno, I still like roleplaying games themselves as much as ever.Dissatisfaction with the whole edifice of roleplaying game-rule explanation is one of many reasons why no progress hasbeen made on my own Outlaws game for several years; if Iam bored by the rules explanations of others, how muchmore will I be bored by my own?

Caveats out of the way, let’s dive in to the Hero Wars.Iconoclasts will no doubt be distressed to learn that the

main book opens with character generation. This raisessome problems (how can you know who your character is ifyou know little about where they are?) but as the game isclearly aimed in practice, if not in theory, at establishedGlorantha buffs, it’s not unreasonable.

originsCharacter creation is one aspect of this game I like; I like itvery much. But I would say that, as it is more or less thesame system I’ve been using in practice in my own game fora decade. Three options are presented: writing a 100-worddescription of your character; writing a list of keywords;discovering your character in play. These three options spanthe divide between ‘design at start’ and ‘design in play’without straying into needless complexity. All three end upsupplying the traditional numerically defined traits andcharacteristics. What I like about this approach is its econo-my. You describe what you need to and don’t waste time onunnecessary details. The only wrinkles come in when charac-ters attempt actions for which they don’t have skills explic-itly defined: you can either assume that all other such skillsare ‘average’ (the Outlaws approach) or you can have a sys-tem of defaults.

When it comes to the rules themselves, we are in familiarRobin Laws territory. Roleplaying is best served by aping thenarrative conventions and logic of film and television, runsthe Laws Law. There is certainly something to be said forthis. It does, at least, recognise that the goal of pure ‘simu-lation’, a hangover from roleplaying’s wargaming roots, israther nonsensical (though I don’t think very many peopleactually advocate pure simulation). On the other hand, thereare certainly some roleplayers like myself who don’t see anyreason why our entertainment should be so determined bythe demon box. So much of our life already is, anyway, and itsometimes seems there are many people for whom televi-sion is more ‘real’ than lived experience (Ally McBeal produc-er Alice West reputedly wired the White House to say that ‘I

wish Ally McBeal and other shows could be there [inAfghanistan] to show them what the real

world is like.’).Personally I want to explore the

distinctive narrative conventionswhich emerge from the roleplaying

method itself. But this is a stylisticcavil. How does Laws go about repre-

senting his televisual narrative structurewithin the game here? By betting, it

turns out.

systemsThe basic superstructure of the mechanic is

admirably simple. Skills are rated, with highbeing best. You roll a D20, and if you get lower

than your rating, you succeed. For all the attemptsto reinvent the wheel that we’ve had over the last

25 years, this basic mechanic is still all we reallyneed. But one reason why people have been soldiering

away at wheel-replacements is that this basic mechanicruns into problems at its extremes. Here, we have a sys-

7imazine

Hero Wars

r e v i e w s

tem of ‘masteries’ which unfortunately introduces arcanesymbols and nerd-notation into the mix (which is better:Fight 17 or Fight 5w2? Hardly intuitive, is it?). It does, how-ever, enable the modelling of an immense range of abilitylevel while maintaining subtle gradations between those ofsimilar ability. Masteries enable you to ‘bump up’ yourscore, from failure to success, or from success to criticalsuccess. Thus someone with a score of 17 taking on some-one with a score of 5w (the arcane symbol indicates a mas-tery) would have to roll a 1 to obtain critical success, whilehis opponent would get one on a 1–5, and would only fail ona roll of 20.

What happened to the betting I mentioned? Well, thiscomes in when you decide to resolve something in anextended exchange. In traditional games, combat is anexample of an extended exchange; instead of decidingeverything with just a single roll, or an opposed roll, youextend matters. Hero Wars is admirable in that it extendsthe idea in principle to any opposed activity, and it makessome attempt to counteract the problems that led me towrite about fractal rules. The implementation, though, ishighly abstract, and this causes difficulty for some people.You have a certain number of action points (APs) and eachround of an exchange one character stakes a number on thatround’s roll. This is interesting in that it enables the simula-tion of relative commitment (though in a somewhatabstract way). The exchanges continue until one or otheropponent is reduced to zero APs. Then you determine whatit all means. Here is a problem. While you are actuallyrolling, the system is abstract. It isn’t really possible todecide in concrete, game-level terms what any particularexchange represents. Thus this system works fine for thosewho want to experience the game at a (narrated) distance,but runs into problems for immersivists. Laws providesadvice on how to modify descriptions during a combat con-test (basically it advocates vagueness rather than specificphysical consequences) but it feels like what it is: a compro-mise to the system.

bookiesAs with all systems, there is a swings-and-roundabouts pay-off here. The betting system does enable a number of veryuseful consequences. Instead of the usual tedious attritionof most game systems, you can model a more cinematicconflict of opponents sparring with each other before afinal, decisive blow. Which is all very well so long as the con-flict imagined by the participants matches up with theafter-fight rationalisation.

This system demonstrates perfectly the knife-edge uponwhich the whole issue of rules abstraction (discussed else-where this issue) is balanced. I certainly admire it, and Imay even like it enough to try using it, but I can’t help feelthat a couple of tweaks might be necessary…

There is also the problem of the betting mechanic itself.

8 imazine

This perfectly simulates certain forms of conflict but may beout of place in others. It may also fail the Jamie Test, in thatit may lead to players spending a long time making deci-sions, and figuring out the odds, which can be very tediousfor those not so inclined.

Perhaps the most significant criticism comes from withinthe book itself. Describing events in the past tense, says theNarrator’s Book, ‘is death to the immediacy of a shared role-playing experience’. The problem is that by introducingdeliberate vagueness about the nature of actions as theyhappen, the system encourages a past tense view of things.One can rationalise this in some cases – in the heat of battleyou don’t always know exactly how wounded you are – butit’s a rationalisation, and it isn’t appropriate to all conflicts.

experienceOne other system artefact I should mention is that of HeroPoints. These are basically eeps writ large, with all the tradi-tional characteristics (there’s a whole debate on whetheryou should get experience points for ‘good roleplaying’which has been rumbling along for years) as well as the moremodern ‘spend them to boost your chances’, and those whohave a problem with eeps and luck/hero points in othergames are likely to have a problem with these.

For those of us who cannibalised Runequest in order tomake Chivalry & Sorcery playable, the magic system wasalways the weak point. Hero Wars improves the portrayal ofGloranthan magic, primarily through its connection tomyth, as well as to the surrounding culture (whichRunequest did achieve to a certain extent). Hero questingwas always the holy grail of Gloranthan gaming, the gamealways promised but never emerging, and Hero Wars pres-ents the opportunity for characters to participate in, andeven change, myths, in a manner that brings to mind RobertHoldstock’s seminal Mythago Wood (Hero Wars is too muchof an auteur’s product to feature a bibliography, though).Actually a very large chunk of the basic book is devoted todetailing the different approaches to magic and how theywork. This makes a very refreshing change from spell lists.

The Narrator’s Book goes into more detail on heroquest-ing. As it now stands, this offers an interesting alternativeto the primeval dungeon as a structured adventure setting.Indeed, here Laws has found a means of legitimising hisbeloved referee railroading, far superior to the Dying Earth’streatment. Comparing the two, however, the dungeon’sstructure is defined by its limited physical dimensions;within them it is based on freedom of action. Conversely theheroquest’s structure is a narrative structure derived fromthe re-enactment of myth: its very nature is restriction offreedom of action. Both methods have interesting philos-ophical ramifications. The heroquest, from a postmodernperspective, is interesting in that the activity itself is a‘reenactment’ of an abiding modern myth: the concept ofthe universal mythic story described by Joseph Campbell in

r e v i e w s

Hero Wars

Hero With A Thousand Faces, and elsewhere. It may be worthasking to what extent the nature of a mythic reenactment isaltered by a transcendent awareness of the enactment of apattern (or were the myth-spinners of old also consciouslyaware of the monomyth?). The dungeon, on the other hand(and here I am using the term in its loosest possible sense),does not preclude the operation of the monomyth, but itdoes raise problems of its own.

One more thing I like in Hero Wars is the extensive body ofmaterial devoted to integrating a character with the worldbackground. Material about communities, followers, depen-dants etc ensures that there is no excuse for the sort of indi-vidualistic, alienated characters so anachronistically foundin many roleplaying games. The game includes the idea of‘hero bands’ to form a justification for the roleplaying‘party’ and integrate it into the background. I suppose thisidea originated with Runequest and its cults, and then cameinto full flower with the White Wolf games, but here it feelsmore natural than the mere taxonomy of its predecessors.

looksI haven’t mentioned layout, have I? Messy and uninspiringare the two words that spring to mind, though I do like thelarge paperback format. Unfortunately the sloppy typeset-ting leads to stray symbols appearing in the text which isconfusing in places (especially when it is evident that theyare meant to be other symbols: Ω and ° apparently representfractions, but which ones?). It also leads to tables in whichthe headings are on a different page to the rest of the table!While the basic book usefully has headers which tell youwhat chapter it is, the Narrator’s Book adopts an annoyinginconsistency in heading versos ‘Narrator’s Book’ and rectos‘Hero Wars’. A moment’s thought would have revealed thatthe function of a running head is navigation. From the pointof view of a reader it is far more useful to be told which sec-tion of the book a page is in, than which book (I imaginethat most readers of the book will be sufficiently clear-head-ed that they can tell which book they are reading withoutbeing told on every page…). In other respects the Narrator’sbook seems slapped together: horribly inconsistent spacingand use of dashes, for example.

Overall, I only have the main book and the Narrator’sBook. In practice, to play this game properly you would needeither additional books, or to do a lot of planning or impro-vising yourself. I think in terms of advancing roleplayinggame design this takes two steps forward. I am inclined tosay that it takes a step backwards because of its author’spenchant for railroading and TV analogies, but that is mere-ly my own prejudice speaking. I’ve heard mixed reports onhow effectively the betting mechanic works in practice; Ithink much depends on the level at which you want to expe-rience the game. For those who operate at sufficient dis-tance that abstraction poses no problems, Hero Wars has alot to offer.

Chivalry & Sorcery:

The RebirthReviewed by Paul Mason

It seems to be my fate with imazine that every so often anew edition of Chivalry & Sorcery rolls up, and I feel com-pelled not only to buy it but to review it. As with the previ-ous occasion (imazine 33) I find myself having to precedemy comments with a disclaimer. This time it isn’t that Ihave any personal involvement with the game – I’m glad tosay that Francis Tiffany has taken over as the head of theC&S China project, something which will not only give it afighting chance of coming out (which it wouldn’t had I stillbeen weighing it down) but will ensure that its contents areas thorough as you would expect from a C&S supplement.

No, on this occasion my disclaimer is because I simplywasn’t able to read the game through. I’m accustomed toskipping occasional bits when I look at a game, but here Iwent well beyond this. There were whole swaths of thisgame which I was just unable to read, and had to merelyglance over before flicking to the next page.

This is not, you may be surprised to learn, because of anyfault in the layout of the book. It’s not pretty, certainly, andit does some ugly things with fake-italic fake-small capitalsthat didn’t exactly cheer me, but on the other hand it ishighly functional. I’d rather more games looked like Chivalry& Sorcery, to be honest – unpretentiousness is a virtue.

No, the reason I found Chivalry & Sorcery such heavygoing is because this ‘rebirth’ is exactly that. It is a returnto the authenticity which made the first and second edi-tions legendary. In my review of the game’s 3rd edition(imazine 27) I applauded the rationalisation of systems,while bemoaning the way in which the game had been repo-sitioned as a generic fantasy game, a pointless manoeuvre ifever there was one. Who on earth would imagine we needyet another generic fantasy roleplaying game? No, C&S’sstrength always lay in its detail, and in its portrayal of themediaeval setting, and I’m glad to say that this editionmarks an emphatic return to that tradition.

9imazine

1

Chivalry & Sorcery: The Rebirth

r e v i e w s

At the same time, the rules rationalisation is retained –though I should note that it still remains about four levelsmore complex than I could bear myself.

So why a new edition? Well, leaving aside the unfortu-nate legal reasons deriving in part from the previous pub-lisher’s behaviour, The Rebirth sees a more thourogh-goingexposition of the feudal background than ever before. WhileI am assured that there are still niggles with certain terms(‘man-at-arms’ for example, is apparently anachronistic: ifused in the Middle Ages it would have meant a knight), over-all it has been given a historical once-over.

And the tables... by Crom the tables! I wouldn’t say thatevery page has a table, but I don’t think I’d be far wrong tosuggest that the game has an average of one table per page(and at three 100-page books that’s a fair number!).

It is actually these – along with the magic system whichhas had much of its previous arcanity restored – which arethe reason I’m reviewing the game here. For while I cannotsay anything much about the rules themselves (them beingway too complex for me), the game does constitute anextraordinary resource for anyone who wants to add a bitmore mediaeval verisimilitude to their games. And if youneed extensive equipment lists, phobia lists or curse tables,you know where to go, right?

The Fantasy Role-

Playing GameReviewed by Paul Mason

There have, inevitably, been a few ‘academic’ treatiseson role-playing games since 1974 (though perhaps notenough for some people). Here’s the latest, subtitled ‘A NewPerforming Art’. You may remember an article on ‘art’ byBrian Duguid which appeared in imazine 34, and which pro-voked a slight argument afterwards. The article originallyappeared in Interactive Fantasy in response to an article byRobin Laws (who wrote both The Dying Earth and Hero Warsrpgs, reviewed this issue). I printed it because I thoughtBrian’s points were right on the button, but of course thenext issue saw a swath of ‘Is it art?’, ‘What is art?’, ‘Whocares’ letters.

So you might expect that the mere sight of ‘A NewPerforming Art’ on the cover of this book would raise myhackles right away. Actually, no, because I don’t tend toscrutinise the covers of books until I’ve have a glance attheir insides, and in this case I was intrigued to find thatDaniel Mackay, the author, actually opens his text with quo-tations from both of the articles I mentioned above, and

0 imazine

goes on toquote suchluminaries asAndrewRilstone andGary Alan Fine.So he is at leastaware of thearguments thathave gone on, andwe can’t dismisshim as anotherivory tower gimpdesperate for publi-cations, dipping hisdick into whateversubculture he lightson.

Indeed, as we readon in this book, we learnthat Daniel is one of us. Which is a silly way of expressingthe fact that he has run games, and although the book iswritten in standard academicese, he is unable to obscure hisenthusiasm. In places, he even comes over as the classicgamer, regaling you with stories about his characters.

So all of the superficial reasons one might have for adopt-ing what was once dubbed (in imazine 13) the ‘Mason sneer’wither on the vine and we can turn instead to the actual con-tents...

Oops, no. I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t comment on one lit-tle niggle. I know the Redmond pod people are taking overthe planet, but in some corners of the globe it is still a littlemuch to insert [sic] marks after every quotation which uses‘which’. Those of you who use Word will know that it getsflagged by the grammar checker. Scant excuse for flagging itwith ‘sic’, especially when done by someone who can’t spell‘exemplar’ and doesn’t know the difference between ‘allu-sive’ and ‘elusive’. Hrrumph!

Anyway, I’d like at this point to throw in an instructivequotation. In a sense, this is the book’s thesis.

The theater of the role-playing game restores the productart of popular culture while cloaking the process with theshimmering mirage of an alternate reality far, far awayfrom the voluminous excess of the popular culture behindthe mirage. Each role-playing games session—of peoplewho think they are escaping to another world is, in actu-ality, a restoration, recapitulation, (sometimes) criticalevaluation, and even recuperation of the buried socialpotential embedded in the forms of popular culture.

Got it? I think it’s well worth thinking about. There’s nodoubt that ideas such as these inform the design of gamessuch as Over The Edge. And I think it is also supported by theexperience of gaming itself. Interestingly, it also ties inwith Keith Johnstone’s Impro, reviewed in these pages notso long ago. One of the main problems I had withJohnstone’s approach was that it did seem to be almost

The Fantasy Role-Playing Game

r e v i e w s

entirely based on recapitulation.So where does this leave me? In a similar situation to

Foucault in his history of madness: chasing after an ‘Other’which can never be attained. When the Other is grasped, itbecomes assimilated and is no longer the Other. Foucaultlater realised that his attempt to conceptualise an ‘Other’form of Reason was doomed, but that it was neverthelesspossible to push back boundaries. And this is what I want todo with ‘culture games’.

You might therefore expect me to rail against the thesisof this book. I don’t, because I recognise that as an observa-tion of what actually takes place in roleplaying games it’squite perceptive. Moreover, as with all talk of approaches,the boundaries are never so clear-cut. Even the most earth-bound game, with character names plucked straight fromDragonlance, will nevertheless contain sparks of the numi-nous. My own games contain frequent recapitulations ofpopular culture, just as Mackay describes.

Instead I’m grateful to this book for identifying moreclearly the direction in which I want to strive. Mackaymakes a compelling case for why people would want to playan imaginative game in such an apparently derivative fash-ion. While I accept this, I still want more myself. I want toescape from the limits of my own consciousness (this is whyI find casual dismissal of the term ‘escapism’ somewhatannoying). As my comments about Foucault above demon-strate, this is actually an impossible goal, as the very act ofescaping the limits of my consciousness pushes out said lim-its. Nevertheless the process carries with it something thatI, at least, feel is of value. This thing is what keeps me play-ing rolegames when I nevertheless feel the urge to flee, as somany others before me have, to fiction or even computergames.

Mihali Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Flow, describes howmost moments of optimal experience (when you areengrossed in some activity that provides a real challenge toyour skills) involve a loss of consciousness of self. The para-dox is that after such experience, consciousness of selffloods back in sharper than before. This is the sort of thingI’m after: a mind-expanding experience. Scoff if you will(but you might as well bugger off and stop reading imazineif you do), though roleplaying seems to have relatively littleto offer in competition with, say, an evening down the pub,if you don’t aim for personal development of some kind oranother.

Back to the book.Mackay attempts to analyse the roleplaying experience,

taking full account of its complexity. While his analysis canbe a little opaque at times, resting heavily on ‘performancetheory’ with which gamer readers may well be unfamiliar, itneverthless contains some fascinating insights. It starts bypointing out that not only is the in-game character con-structed, but the player role is also a social consstruct. Hegoes on to explore the various levels (or ‘spheres’) of inter-action. He does this by adopting an analysis of theatredeveloped by Richard Schechner, and it is here that I think

some of the rough edges enter the picture.One point, however, is clear: that roleplaying involves

switching between multiple levels (‘frames’) through whichthe game is approached, and that skill in switching thus con-stitutes skill in the game. The frames in this book expand onthe three suggested by Gary Alan Fine’s Shared Fantasy to:

1) the social frame inhabited by the person:2) the game grame [sic] inhabited by the player;3) the narrative frame inhabited by the raconteur;4) the constative frame inhabited by the addresser;5) the performative frame inhabited by the character.

Most of the above are obvious, though I should explainthat the ‘constative’ frame refers to those parts where thereferee sets the scene, employing for the most part descrip-tion.

Mackay goes on to explore social implications and con-text for roleplaying, including references to the alreadymentioned Csikszentmihalyi. Some of the most interestingfor me were where he refers to Michel Foucault’s Discipline& Punish in order to isolate the power structures at work inthe average game. Experience points are identified as anexample of one of the disciplinary structures within thegame. He takes the metaphor further, wondering to whatextent the power structure is used to inhibit player expres-sion, and provide some fascinating real-world examples ofwhere certain areas of expression (for example sexuality)appeared in one group to be informally prohibited

Another interesting area of exploration is the game expe-rience itself. Mackay notes that like a dramatic perform-ance, a roleplaying game disappears in the act of becoming.He then identifies the way in which the experience is recon-stituted in the memory of its participants, which I think is avery useful point, especially as it relates to that problematicphenomenon, the game write-up.

Finally, as hinted at at the start of this review, the booktackles head on the issue of art. Mackay doesn’t shrink frompointing out the relatively recent, arbitrary foundations forour modern conception of art, and he points out ways inwhich, perhaps, roleplaying could be somewhat more thanart. After all, the modern (post-Renaissance) concept of artis as something dissociated from everyday experience –though this, like most other things, is being challenged bypostmodern artists. Roleplaying, at least in theory, operatesin such a way as to bridge the artificial divide between artand life, performer and audience.

When it comes right down to it, I don’t think this latterdirection of speculation is all that important. I couldn’t givea toss whether people regard roleplaying as art or not. Butperformance is undoubtedly is, and Mackay’s book containsenough performance theory-derived nuggets to offer newways of looking at roleplaying. And in my experience, newways of looking at roleplaying can be very helpful in stimu-lating better ways of doing it. For this reason, at least, I rec-ommend this book. I don’t agree with everything in it, by along shot, but I’d very much like to see some of its pointsfollowed up.

11imazine

a b s t r a c t i o nv

Mess

a designer’s dilemma

by paul mason

What are some of the problems involvedin abstracting game systems? What

effect does abstraction have on the gameand how do you decide if it is necessary

or not?

ow do you deal with money in your game? Do youkeep track of every coin carried by your characters? Doyou represent every trivial purchase and expenditure? Idon’t think it’s too presumptuous of me to expect the

answer to this question to be no.On the other hand, in my experience, relatively few role-

players represent money in completely abstract terms. Itwas quite a wrench for me to switch to this model forOutlaws, turning spending power into, effectively, an abili-ty, rather than a matter of how many taels you happened tohave written on your character sheet.

In the Sengoku game I’m playing in at the moment,money is effectively abstracted, but that’s just because wedon’t explicitly concern ourselves with it. When I (which isto say, my character, the shðmyð Kamiya no Kiyotomo)recently had occasion to buy a consignment of musketsfrom Tanegashima gaijin, we didn’t worry too much aboutthe precise quantity. I simply said that I’d take some gold(which I didn’t need, as it happened – the gaijin betrayed us,so we fought them off and nicked the muskets).

In this article, though, I want to consider this issue of thelevel of abstraction, not only as it applies to money – whichis the area in which I’ve encountered it most glaringly – butin systems in general. I think it’s one of those areas withhidden depths, and perhaps unexpected conclusions to bedrawn.

For starters, let’s return to this issue of money. For a longtime it struck me as odd that, no matter how much a set ofrules was simplified, no matter how abstract task resolutionbecame, personal finances still came down to bean-count-

H

12 imazine

ing. There would be that box somewhere near the bottom ofyour character sheet in which you would record the numberof gold pieces your character possessed.

Although I went along with this state of affairs, I wasoften disappointed with it, because it suffered so obviouslyfrom that bane of roleplaying games: the bias towards‘adventuring activity’. What I mean by this is the skills sys-tem which has 30 different combat skills, but a single gener-alised skill for engineering. This can be defended in terms ofwhat is required in a particular game – the focus of events,but it is patently ridiculous from the point of simulation.And while pooh-poohing simulation has been de rigeur in theroleplaying community for many years, it’s hard to defend asystem of anything other than the most elementary com-plexity without appealing to the likes of ‘realism’, ‘believ-ability’, ‘consistency’ or even ‘genre-authenticity’, all ofwhich secretly require a minimum level of simulation tofunction.

As with all such things, an extreme state breeds a reac-tion, and so I found myself with an abstracted finance sys-tem. What mattered, when it boiled down to it, waswhether you could afford something that might have amaterial impact on the game. If you could, that was enough.So the obvious solution was to have wealth represented as askill, and all purchases rated for difficulty. Any purchase ofdifficulty less than the skill could be bought without furtherworries: otherwise a roll would have to be made.

Neat and simple, with little bookkeeping – who could askfor more? And to be honest, it does work cleanly enough.The systems I want to use are those which can be ignoredeasily by common consent, being called upon only when thereferee or player sees a point in using them. And this fits thebill admirably.

The trouble is that there is something missing. It’s some-thing that always bothered me about D&D, so I don’t seeany reason to stop worrying about it now. It’s to do with adistancing from the events portrayed. Any game existssomewhere along a continuum between chess at one endand full-immersion virtual reality at the other. While theremay be occasions when it may be better to move chessward,I find that roleplaying has more to offer when it tends moretowards immersion, and that means representing things interms that feel real. Any abstraction comes at a price: the

a b s t r a c t i o n

continued on page 16

enactment of distance. In most cases the price is worth pay-ing because the alternative would be tedium or rules com-plexity which would interfere even more with immersionand involvement (not to mention enjoyment, which strange-ly enough does seem to be the main point of the whole busi-ness).

The consequence of the above is, however, that when anabstraction is not being done in order to save you from agreater evil, it shouldn’t be done at all.

direct problemsComing back to my example of money, I think the mainproblem was that my exposure to traditional roleplaying hadbrought me up to feel that any direct representation ofmoney within the game had to be bean counting. With myparticular aversion to accounting (it was part of my bache-lor’s degree) I wanted to avoid it at all costs. Yet I havenoticed over the last few years that something is lost whenmoney is no longer directly represented within the gamereality. It seems to diminish the story, to make it feel lessauthentic and directly experienced. While I don’t like mak-ing such analogies very much, I am inclined to consider thatsuch abstractions are rarely found in novels.

This means that what I want now is to have the directexperience without the bean counting. This is trickier thanit might appear at first thought, but if it can be achieved,the principles will be of use in all kinds of other situations.First of all, then, I should consider some of the problemswith direct experience, that I have so far labelled beancounting.

The first is the necessity of writing everything down. Inthe ‘adventuring’ days, just about the only activities involv-ing money were obtaining treasure in the dungeon, and buy-ing things with it. Even that could become rather tedious,but once any pretence was made at representing everydayexpenditures, something had to be done. Here abstractioncame onto the scene. Everyday expenses (and in some casesincome) could be stated as average sums, or rolled for orwhatever. So we ended up with a combination of beancounting and abstraction. This certainly didn’t keep mehappy, mainly because it increased complexity.

A second problem is the elusive nature of direct experi-ence itself. In the case of money, it’s a fiendishly complexsubject. If I were to try to represent the reality of 12th cen-tury Chinese money correctly in my game I’d be looking at a500-page section on money alone. I kid you not. The variousdiscount rates available for different forms of currency; theambiguous nature of ‘flying money’ (proto-paper money);taxation laws and privatised minting: it’s bad enough hav-ing to boil it down to some sort of workable abstraction. Asa roleplaying system it would be unworkable for all but theworld’s most anal-retentive accountant.

A third problem, oddly enough, is the potential for argu-ment that direct experience raises. One consequence of my

living in Japan is that I have gained a greater appreciation ofthe purposes of vagueness. Many gaijin rail against Japan’snotorious vagueness, but it is there for a reason. Wherethere is vagueness, there is the possibility for two conflict-ing perceptions of reality to coexistb peacefully. Such anattitude is not very popular in the absolutist West.Westerners, though we may pretend otherwise, are OneTrue Wayers. Although the use of vague terms in our gamesmay lead to argument, the notion that some kind of precisespecification, tying matters to concrete details, will obvi-ate it is evidently flawed. There’s not only the problem thatevery historical game faces, of the pedant who knows morethan the ref (or thinks he does). There’s the science fictiongame facing the onslaught of physics or engineering gradu-ates. There’s any game at all facing an anthropologist… andso on ad nauseam.

Given these problems, and the fact that Hero Wars, by thegolden boy of rolegame design, Robin Laws, basically uses amoney system identical to the one I’ve had in Outlaws forfive years, why do I now find myself rejecting abstraction?The answer is relatively simple. Every time the game rulesabstract a game situation, you are pulled out of the narra-tive. This probably doesn’t matter much in Laws’s games,which are more about representing genre and impressingothers with one’s own genius. But I’ve played enough cha-

rades, fictionary dictionary and Whose Line Is It Anyway?-inspired games at conventions that I don’t especially need

such an approach to invade my roleplaying. I want an immer-sive experience. I want what Mihali Csikszentmihalyi

describes as ‘flow’.

vague problemsUnlike these postmodern prodigies who can effortlesslydwell on multiple levels of game consciousness, I find thatanything that draws my attention to the artificiality of agame inhibits my ability to immerse myself in my character,and thence in the story which is being discovered. The moreabstracted mechanics are, the more they draw my attentionto themselves rather than whatever it is that they are sup-posed to represent.

This is an old problem. Original D&D abstracted humanadventurers into ‘character classes’, and the arbitrary limitsthis entailed was one of the great turn-offs for many who,like me, rejected the game after a few years of play. It isinstructive to note that in many cases this aspect of D&Dwas ‘solved’ by redefining the game world to accord withthe rules. Thus character classes became fixtures of the fan-tasy worlds people played in. Is it any wonder that themajority of post-D&D fantasy fiction is such a load of crap?

The problem can be observed most clearly by trying todescribe the events of the game. A cliché of roleplaying wasalways the nerd who insisted on collaring you and describ-

13imazine

14 imazine

t h e n e e dfor a freew o r l d

or why

Phil Gallagher

is so wrong

by Robert Rees

ast year phil gallagher, one of the writers behindthe original wfrp books and former Company Secretaryfor GW gave an interview to UK fanzine, Warpstone.The result was published in Warpstone 10 and if you

have not read it, while I recommend picking up a copy, donot worry as I’ll be reproducing some of the more interest-ing parts here. Generally the tone of the interview was thatof someone who is generally given an understanding press;if Warpstone was an adversarial periodical in the imazinestyle I think Phil might have received a roasting for some ofthe more dodgy statements he made.

For me the interview was shocking, partly because of thecandour but mostly because despite frequently decrying therpg industry you often think that its problems are those ofthe ‘system’ rather that the result of those who work withinit.

Early in the interview, Phil answers the all-importantquestion; do you game?

I have two small children and the demands of fatherhoodmake it difficult to spend too many weekends playinggames … These days I can’t make the commitment to aregular slot for role-playing.

At first glance this seems a normal answer, echoed count-less times in the imazine letters column. ‘I used to be agamer but then along came the job/girlfriend/spouse/kids/life’, something I’m sure we’re all familiar with. Hold onthough, isn’t Phil meant to be working with a games compa-ny? Surely if his personal time is so crowded there should beplenty of gaming in his work hours?

[I’m] now all round in-house legal person—beats workingfor a living, that’s for sure! … I keep tabs (in, hopefully, aquiet unobtrusive kind of way) on Hogshead’s proposalsand drafts.

Right, so Phil is the kind of gamer who doesn’t game butcan tell others what constitutes a good game.

Phil seems to embody a certain attitude. Business can beconsidered purely in abstract terms, a ‘process’ that leadssubsequently to ‘proƒt’. The fact that in the abstraction the

L

purpose of the business is lost does not bother ‘business’people—after all it is all business at the end of the day isn’tit? The impression given is that Phil does legal stuff for agames company but really it could be any old thing. ‘Hey, Ido legal stuff for a cheese cracker firm. It sure beats work-ing!’

abstractionSo Phil isn’t a passionate committed gamer, get over it! Wellno, I refuse to accept this for two reasons: ƒrstly it makesfor bad business. It’s unusual, perhaps, to take this tack butfrom my own observations of British industry and businessit seems that the worst kinds of managers and executivesare those who are disengaged from their product. All toooften the abstraction of business allows people to hide awayform the fact they are producing actual goods or servicesthat they themselves would not use or even want to use. Iwould think it the saddest thing if a copywriter could notbear to read their own advert, a car manufacturer droveanother company’s car, a sausage maker would not servetheir own bangers to their children. That’s pride and involve-ment in your business but beyond this you have to be inter-ested in the whole field you work in if you want to excel.How do my competitors’ products work? Are they better,easier to use, more innovative? Could I imagine ever usingsomething other than my own product?

The reason GW has released W40K umpteen times in thelast decade and studiously failed to create a new area or con-cept in the gaming field is because they are increasinglyreferring only to themselves. By failing to engage their com-petitors in a constructive and critical commercial dialoguethey are stagnating, relying on the old tricks on ever largerscales to get them through. [Such stagnation has led them tosuccess beyond the dreams of Livingstone—Ed]

Secondly, how can Gallagher make informed decisionsabout the activities of his licensees when he has only thememory of what they actually do day to day? If Gallagher

a f r e e w o r l d

last wrote a rolegame in the Eighties how can he have some-thing meaningful to say to a modern rolegame publisher?

Indeed Gallagher then goes on to admit that he has littleto contribute:

I’ve tried to stay in touch, but won’t pretend to have myfinger on the pulse. It seems to me that more than any-thing it’s become a players’ game—belonging to thegamers rather than the publisher.

Despite this the mindless hand of the corporation keeps afirm grasp of the helm.

The control is about quality and consistency. The artworkis very precious to us. New illustrations have to be consis-tent with the world and of a comparable quality.Translations have to use the same terminology as our owntranslators of Warhammer. Otherwise the licensee can dowhat they like … I don’t like surprises! Every licensee hasto get approval before they publish.

You see? As long as the artwork is good then you must begetting something kosher innit just? You’ll probably noticethat imazine doesn’t have that much artwork, stands to rea-son it must be rubbish. Already the Gallagher theory of quali-ty is benefiting you in your everyday life.

I’d be very reluctant to let someone casually introduce anew race to wfrp , say, or to publish a Nippon or Cathaysupplement. The very fact that they were enteringuncharted waters would attract so much interest that thepressure to please everyone would be overwhelming; andyet, of course, it isn’t possible to please everyone.

The ultimate corporate conservatism bound up with sur-prisingly nihilistic pessimism. You cannot please everyoneso why should we even try?

Apart from that … it does not have to be bound by whatwe publish for Warhammer.

Ahem, maybe with such a vested interest [Robert is in theprocess of publishing Dave Morris’s Nippon supplement forwfrp] I should not be trying to rock the boat. But goddamnit I’m not the only one involved in a half-life project.Warpstone is constantly adding bits to the wfrp universeand I bet they have not been run past Phil!

Wake up Foody! Can’t you see that by editing a wfrp zineyou’re doing the whole of roleplaying fandom a disservice?You cannot please everyone so why do you constantly try toplease some people?

fan effortSeriously though, and this is the crux of my argument sobear with me, reading this kind of thing makes you reassessthe relationship between commercial roleplaying publishersand roleplayers.

wfrp is a ‘player’s game’ dropped from its original pub-lisher because:

Games Workshop is a business … It has a responsibilitybeyond that of the individual gamer … a bloody awkwardsod who can never be satisfied … to its shareholders …looks what’s happened to the rpg companies … Steve

Jackson Games, White Wolf, Chaosium? … rpg publish-ers who are happy to stay small and exclusive

So when the game is finally unearthed essentially by dintof the effort of its fans why the hell should the original pub-lisher suddenly re-appear from the wings and get to decidewhether this supplement gets made or whether that sce-nario should be ‘allowed’ to be published?

Now do not get me wrong, all of the above is legal and theonly complaint I have with it is from the ethical and moraldimension of things. Still, why do we allow companies touse the law against us like this? Why do we as gamers allowourselves to get given such a raw deal?

When I first read the interview I could not understandhow the editorial team of Warpstone could bear to finish theissue let alone put it all into print. How could you find thewill to continue when some ex-rpg writer could shut youdown if he does not like your artwork?

The truth is that when a writer, sorry, when a gamer cre-ates something that is used in a roleplaying game theyshould realise that what they create is only the originalimage of something, not the totality of it.

At the time the interview was published I was writing awfrp scenario for carnel; I decided to try and change thebackground and setting damn sharpish but let us use it as anexample.

In the scenario there is a character called ‘Keenan’. I madehim up and barring any subconscious plagiarism the charac-ter is original. Now technically speaking I ‘own’ Keenan. Ican proceed to write new scenarios, fiction, biographies,etc. with him. I can also make badges, posters and any otherkind of Keenan merchandising I want to. If Keenan becomespopular enough I could even ™ him.

The one thing I cannot do though is tell you who Keenanis. When (if) you play my scenario you will not encounter‘my’ Keenan. The gm might add an accent, a mannerism,change the description of his clothes, appearance. Keenan’smotivations might change or his life story might be tweakedsubtlety. In short the gm will put their own particular ‘spin’on the character.

One reason why roleplaying is not clearly identifiable as‘Art’ is that it is unconventional in respect of the fact that itis a collaborative process rather than an object that is con-sumed or ‘transmitted’ to an audience. The gm and the play-ers create the ‘thing’ (space, construct, entity, idea) knownas the ‘Game’. The creator of any material used to create theGame is reduced to a ghostly third party, they are not autho-rial figure that an artist is. This is the essence of ‘Punk rpg’for me. It is a philosophy that guides not dictates what role-playing is. It is whatever you are doing with your gamesnow.

habeus lud(icro)usAll game companies try to claim the Game. WoTC, WW, GW– they are all the same in this respect. They say that as theycreated the rules or the characters or the background of the

15imazine

Abstraction v Mess

a f r e e w o r l d

ing his xth level fighter with a +y sword. A key point aboutthese descriptions is that they were codified in rules terms.What fantasy produced prior to D&D describes people in‘levels’ and rates magic weapons with a number? Just as mygoal in character creation was to take a description of acharacter containing no rules terms and translate it seam-lessly into the rules (this is also the approach of Hero Wars,reviewed this issue), I also want the reverse: I want a gameexperience that is remembered without reference tomechanics. While there may be some dice rolling involved inthe actual play of the game, it is entirely subservient to thein-game ‘reality’. This is to say, using the terms of DanielMackay’s book (reviewed elsewhere this issue), I want toprivilege the performative frame, the level of game experi-ence inhabited and activated by the character.

Thus, wherever necessary, the terms used at other framesof experience in the game (such as the game, narrative orconstative frames) should correspond to those of the perfor-mative frame in order to minimise dissonance.

It was dissonance that led to my dissatisfaction with anabstracted money system. Characters who should have beentalking about strings of cash were being represented byrolling against levels of wealth. In fact, it’s interesting tonote that within the game we did start referring to strings,taels etc, even though these weren’t explicitly part of theabstracted system (and D&D has shown how this sort ofthing can break a system).

How do we encourage this immersion, this privileging ofthe performative frame?

resolution problemsSo far I’ve been bouncing back and forth like a pinballagainst a couple of targets: abstraction is bad; direct repre-sentation is bad. How is this all to be resolved? Well, the res-olution obviously has to be some sort of compromise. That’shardly a revelation. Is it possible to specify a little more pre-cisely what sort of a compromise we need?

My solution involves a quality which I am going to dubexpressibility. What this means is that any abstract gamemechanic should be directly expressible in in-game terms.

16 imazine

‘Directly’ means without the aid of tables, or any calculationmore difficult that a multiplication by ten. Obviously thereis still a grey area, but I think the idea of expressibilitymakes it easier to establish principles on which a decisioncan be made.

So, to return to my point of departure – money – I findmyself accepting that some sort of abstraction is necessaryif we are not to see our game disappear under a mound offinancial details. Part of this abstraction can be achieved bysimplifying our representation. In Outlaws, for example, Iquietly forget about the complexities of varying discountrates for different commodities, and the variability ofexchange rates for different forms of coinage. Some of thesecan be reintroduced, if necessary, as spice in a scenario (aslong as the inconsistency problem can be skilfully avoided).But overall they add far less than they take away.

The remaining abstraction should be guided by the princi-pal that it could easily be converted to in-game expression.These means that rather than the Outlaws and Hero Warsapproach of rating purchasables in essentially skill-systemterminology, they should be rated in price terms within thegame, and any superstructure of game abstraction should bebuilt on top of this. Questions of wealth and income canprofitably be represented by an abstract number, but whenit comes to buying little things in an inn, if it’s worth repre-senting at all, it should be represented in terms of the actualmonetary units being used within the game.

This may seem unaesthetic, in that it may well lead to anon-unified system. But as has become obvious, a unifiedsystem is something of a conceit, an imposition of an exter-nal abstract form upon a multifaceted in-game reality.

The implications of all this for rules design in generalshould be obvious, and it messes up a lot of grand plans. Atthe same time, once we (and I probably mean ‘I’ there,because most of you are way ahead of me and never wereseduced by the pristine form of a unified system) rid our-selves of an obsession with form, it provides opportunities.Actually, it doesn’t even mean that we have to return to theramshackle ad hoc mechanics of AD&D as it’s probably stillpossible to develop a core mechanic, so long as we remem-ber that rather than impose our core mechanic on game real-ity, we have to use it to express game reality. *

game they, in fact, own the Game.The truth is that the minute that any of these elements

were created they did not assume the immutable nature ofTruth. The written words were not the ‘fact’. The fact wasthat each reader of the original manuscript creates instanta-neously a copy of the original idea that is uniquely theirown. My Keenan becomes hundreds of Keenans, each slight-ly different.

At most a commercial product creates a mutual founda-tion for the Game. It is a collaborative bridge between theparticipants. Any attempt to claim ownership of the whole

entity is unjust. Any attempt to control the Game is unjust.Furthermore any attempt to control the recording of theGame is unjust.

If I play a wfrp game set in Cathay and record the resultas a write-up, supplement, scenario, whatever, GW shouldnot and in fact does not own the result. It as a body hasbecome a witness to the creation of my players and myself.Companies need to accept that they are not producing con-sumables, they are in collaboration with us – the gamers.

We need a free world and we deserve a free world. *

l i n g u a f r u p p aN o t e : This article was originally written in

French for the French fanzine Holobar Soir in

1992. I quite profoundly modified and

expanded it – rather than simply translating it –

for imazine.

Language in Rolegamesby Gianni Vacca

introductionThis article is a mere rant on the subject of linguistic real-ism, or at least verisimilitude, in a pseudo-mediaeval frpgcampaign. I know it does not make any sense to write aboutrealism with regard to frpgs. In a universe where beastsbreathe flames, men can walk through walls and, above all,where resurrecting dead comrades is routine, the word ‘real-ism’ should be avoided at all costs. Nonetheless, I shall tryand establish what limits we can put to linguistic delusion,by drawing on what – after all – is the source of all theseimaginary worlds: ours, and more specifically betweenantiquity and the Renaissance.

language in rolegames: ouchIn all fantasy worlds, settings, or campaigns, we’re alwaysserved the same junk food: a common language. I know of nosingle frpgwithout this fundamental myth of ‘common’.Even in Outlaws, a culture rolegame, we are given the fol-lowing:

In modern China, a large proportion of the populationunderstand Mandarin Chinese, as it has been propagatedas a standard language by the government. This certainlywasn’t true in the past: Mandarin (which was far morecomplex than it is now) was, as the name suggests, thelanguage of the bureaucracy. Ordinary people wouldspeak different languages, some of which were related,others of which were as dissimilar as French and German.I decided to have a ‘standard’ spoken Chinese to makeplay easier.

It is true that it would be most difficult to teleport roundthe world, to infiltrate enemy strongholds, to disguise one-self, to chat with gods and demons alike without this arti-fice. Ninety-nine per cent of commercial adventures beingbased on like stories, it would be naïve to assume gamedesigners would make an effort to take some more linguis-tics into account when designing their games. Yet this iswhat I expect whenever I buy a game or game supplement. Ifwe analyse the history of our world (i.e. the source, avowedor not, of frpg worlds), we realise that there never was sucha thing as a common language. In antiquity, for instance,there were certainly fewer languages than today, but therewere still many, and extremely diverse at that. AncientEgyptian had nothing to do with Persian, which in turn had

nothing to do with Phoenician, which in turn had nothing todo with Cretan. That is why scribes played such a major role;they not only knew how to read and write (which wasalready something of an achievement in those days), butmost of them also knew how to speak foreign languages,which made them invaluable for diplomatic or commercialmissions.

I expect to hear the usual counter-example of theHellenistic world or the Roman Empire. Well, in Alexander’sempire, as in the successor states, only the upper classesspoke Greek. In each province, the people kept speaking thelanguage in use before the Macedonian conquest. InPtolemaic Egypt, for instance, if Greek was the language ofcourt, ethnic Egyptians still spoke their language inter-spersed with Greek, yet purer and purer as you travelled farfrom Alexandria.

The same situation could be observed in the RomanEmpire. Only the ruling classes spoke Latin (and not always!At certain times, it was trendy to speak Greek). People usu-ally spoke a patois consisting of their original languagemixed with Vulgar Latin, and all the less Latinised as the con-quest of the land was recent. In those provinces that hadbeen conquered a long time ago, people spoke Gallo-Roman,Liguro-Roman, Veneto-Roman, Rhaeto-Roman, etc. InBritain, people still spoke Celtic; in Africa, Berber; in Illyria,Illyrian. In Rome, people spoke Vulgar Latin, as in thecolonies that had been settled with war veterans who hadbeen given some land as their ‘pension savings’ (whichexplains Swiss place names such as Romanens or Römerswil).But even in the very heart of the Empire, in Southern Italyand in Tuscany, people were not really speaking Latin. Wemust not forget that it was the triumphant Christian reli-gion that brought back Classical Latin, which was all butlost, for liturgy, communication between prelates, etc.

But even this Church Latin cannot be considered in anyway the ‘common language’ of Mediaeval Europe. At thetime, there were even more languages than to-day. In theKingdom of France, for instance, people from Picardy andBurgundy, or from Maine and Champagne, were unable tounderstand each other. As for Brittany or Lorraine, the lan-guages there were altogether foreign. If common under-standing was very difficult between Paris and Compiègne(100 to 200 km), and impossible between Paris and Toulouse(800 km), I would like it to be explained how it could be pos-sible between places several thousand km away (like, say,Damara and Chondath in the Forgotten Realms). This is why Iadvocate using, for frpgs, a system at least as good as the

17imazine

l i n g u a f r u p p a

continued on page 26

one in merp. Every country has its language(s), and itsinhabitants understand more or less the neighbouringdialects. Intercomprehension may vary between very goodand none, depending on the linguistic family each dialectbelongs to. For instance, there are way more chances ofintercomprehension between two langue d’oïl dialects thanbetween a langue d’oïl dialect and a langue d’oc one.

writing systems in rolegames: oouch!Another thing I simply cannot stand (even more than this‘common’ thing) is the way tsr (for instance, though Idoubt other companies did any better) tackled the issue ofwriting systems. In the Forgotten Realms booklets, only twoor three alphabets are presented, and they are ridiculous. Ifail to see why the languages of the Forgotten Realms shouldbe written using 26 letters just like Latin or English. If wehave a short look at the way European languages that do notuse Latin script are written, we can see that, of course, thealphabets they use do not number exactly 26 letters (Greek:24 letters; Russian: 32 letters). And yet they are Indo-European languages, and I guess very much closer to Englishthan any imaginary Damarese or Thavyan language. Eventwo extremely similar languages like Italian or Spanish donot really have, on a close inspection, the same alphabet: inSpanish, they use the letters ñ and ü, which are not used inItalian.

I could go on at wish (German ß, French ç, Scandinavian å,all kinds of accents, umlauts, tildes, cedillas...). Also, letterstake on very different values depending on the language(compare the English, French, Spanish and German ‘j’s:they’re all pronounced in a different way!); some letters aremute, other are not always pronounced the same way... Theissue is almost beyond comprehension. And cannot be dealtwith, as in tsr’s material, in two or three lines of text. Oncemore, merp defines what is acceptable, with logical anddiverse alphabets (runes, Fëanorian letters, all having differ-ent values depending on the language or the age they’reused... this is good!)

place names in rolegames: yikes!!!Another laboured constant (yes, another!) in almost all fan-tasy worlds is the utter stupidity of place names, and espe-cially of cities. I’d say at least half of all frpg cities arenamed Xwzlz, Yawalla, Zglur’k, or maybe Rhunge.

What people do not seem to have understood is that placenames do have a meaning. Our ancestors just did not goround and randomly distribute whimsical names; usually,the place name was created after its owner, or it could havebeen a short description of the place or of the kind of pro-duce it would yield. Some of these names are, as of to-day,still extremely clear or at least quite clear (e.g. Maidstone);others can only be deciphered by linguistically skilled people

18 imazine

(e.g. Champreveyres in Switzerland means ‘the priest’sfield’). But, and I know I am repeating myself, all placenames did originally have a meaning, a meaning that wasrendered obscure by the passing of time and by pronuncia-tion – or even language – shift.

solutionsWhingeing is all and good, but what about any practicalsolutions?

We saw that contemplating a single, universal languagefor a whole universe was more than unrealistic.

Yet this does not mean that we should consider each andevery frpg world as a potential Babel. I propose the follow-ing system: all the languages of the setting are divided ingroups; every group is divided in subgroups; every subgroupin families. There is no intercomprehension betweengroups. There is next-to-no comprehension between lan-guages pertaining to different subgroups within a givengroup (one might recognise the most ancient words, like thenames of numbers or family ties). There is little intercom-prehension between languages pertaining to different fami-lies within a given subgroup. Then there is slight intercom-prehension between languages pertaining to the same fami-ly.

To illustrate my system, let me use Italian, of the Indo-European group and the Romance subgroup (for gaming pur-poses only; this is not a scientific article). Compared withItalian, Turkish is from another group (Altaic): no intercom-prehension. German is from another subgroup (Germanic):next-to-no intercomprehension, one might notice that dreiand tre are similar, as are mutter and madre, but that’s aboutthe farthest you can get. French is from the same subgroup,but not the same family; one might be able to explain thathe’s hungry or thirsty, or that he wants to know the way toSaint Denis. There is going to be misunderstanding aplenty(comedies draw inspiration from such situations... so shoulda skilful referee, and put the too-confident party on thewrong foot).

What about writing systems? According to the ones inthe Forgotten Realms booklets, there are no runes for ‘ch’,‘sh’, ‘th’, etc, and the latter are written, just like in Latinscript, ‘c+h’ or ‘s+h’! I am wordless in face of such profoundincompetence.

Ancient or mediaeval languages always went for syllabicwriting systems or for alphabetic scripts – yet always pho-netic ones (in Old English, ‘light’ was pronounced as it is inGerman to-day) – or for logographs. Game designers and ref-erees, please bear this in mind! No more ‘c+h’ runes to write‘ch’, create a new, additional one. Or maybe decide that in agiven alphabet the sound ‘ch’ is represented by the ‘k+j’combination. Be inventive and consistent. Also devising aphonetic alphabet is very useful for naming people and

c o l l o q u y

nother bunch of letters for you here, this time insome quantity because of the delay in the publicationof this issue. This means also that many of these lettersare rather old, and I would like to apologise in advance

to anyone whose views are thereby being misrepresented.Just call me an ‘immoral butcher’; it’s all the rage nowadays.Still, butcher or not, you’ll find more letters intact thistime, and less intervention from me. It happens occasional-ly; make the most of it.

hors d’oeuvres

Ian MarshI liked the new layout. What happened to the content?You’ve become as bad as I ever was...

• Well, the content is still all about roleplaying games. Is itpossible that ‘what happened to the content’ was that itcontinued to be about roleplaying, while you were look-ing for something else?

Rob AlexanderI am pleased to say that although I have suffered a total lossof interest in tabletop gaming, I still find Imazine to be fineand readable.

I also wish it to be known that Imagine is the first thing Ihave won in over a decade.

Robert ReesI liked the idea of ‘Zundering’; almost as good as ‘adequate’.

Tom ZunderNice issue, best in a series of good ones.Good wodge of reviews.Layout... well if you mustBill Hoad must dieHiya Bill!

• Nobody zunders like the master...

Kociak aka KittenAs for the reviews in this issue, while I find their contentboth amusing and informative, I am somewhat surprised bythe amount of space devoted to Dragon Fist, as it seems nei-ther a seminal work nor a very major release (or a possible

A

'cult classic,' for that matter). I suppose the reason is itsOriental setting, which you seem to be quite fond of, but Iwould have still preferred a shorter rebuttal (as this wasbasically what it amounted to).

• Oh no – that wasn’t a rebuttal! By my standards it waspretty favourable. The main reason for its inclusion wasthe Asian setting. And the opportunity to discuss somegeneral issues relating to this idea of publishing ‘culture’games which appropriate elements of an Earth culture yetlocate them in a fantasy setting.

Robert ReesI was deeply insulted by Matthew Pook’s insinuation that Iactually read Imazine. Of course I don’t! Writing letters toImazine is the job of my crack team of untrained drunkenmonkeys. The very idea!

I do think that this is another competition time though. Ifanyone can answer Matthew’s question and my own pet vex-ation ‘Why do so many people called Robert write letters toImazine?’ then I would be happy to chip in part of the prize.How about Lords of the Rising Sun by Dave Morris and JamieThomson?

• That, like most of the other Fabled Lands books, is appar-ently something of a collector’s item. Feel free to enterthe competition if you like...

Jeff DiamondI am offended at your remarks regarding my alleged use ofbig breasted alien cat-girls to sell copies of my sci-fi rpg,Orbit. There are also some excellent ass shots inside thebook.

• Jeff is issuing a more ‘professional’ edition of Orbit soon,and has released another game, so check out his web siteat http://www.geocities.com/~allianceprime/

George PletzAll this heady talk about games and gaming has really start-ed me to wondering how you run a game. Have you writtenabout this and I just missed it? How one runs things is reallyindicative of what one wants from a game.

• If that’s the case then I apparently want interminablejourneys from a game… I’m reluctant to write about how Irun a game. I don’t think I’m very good at it, for starters.On balance I prefer being a player to being a ref, though

19imazine

c o l l o q u y

when a bunch of improvising players start bouncingthings off each other in my games I might change mymind.

Robert ReesI liked the ‘immoral butcher’ tag, sums up your letter editingstyle to a tee.

Didn’t Traveller have Mazon guns? I think they damagedthe crew but not the ship by squirting overly complicatedgame design theories through the target’s intercom system.

Ashley SouthcottI thought Imazine had died around February after its non-appearance, the reasons probably being uni work and effortstowards your forthcoming Masters thesis. It was thus a nicesurprise to find it had merely gone into fandom’s no man’sland for a while. Incidentally, shouldn’t the Imagine guidehave gone to Robert Rees as part of his hobby elite initiationkit?

Having first looked at Puppetland when it came free withan old copy of Arcane it seems that John Tynes has come upwith a genuinely novel idea – for a roleplaying game. I sus-pect it was never thought of as a potential boardgame, yetthe subject matter might make for an entertaining one.Being disposable would you recommend it to newcomersprecisely because it can be immediately picked up?

• Never having seen the H*gsh**d edition, I can’t really rec-ommend it.

art & character

George PletzMost of the talk about gaming I have had in real-time life ismore about how things went and how they can be improved.Never has it come done to someone saying too arty or notgeeky enough. And to extend even further, no one has saidthere is not enough culture or ‘hey this doesn’t follow genreconvention.’ All the players I’ve had, from good to poor,either grasped what was going on intuitively or didn’t. Muchof rpg as I have played it and seen it played is an unspoken.When something is askew or missing, you know it.

Sure I probably missed out on a lot of good insights but Ilearned as much from running something as I had from play-ing in other people’s games.

Robert ReesAs a good post-modernist I am suspicious of art’s need forconsumers to act as an audience. Art is one-way communi-cation from artist to audience; the audience is often shack-

20 imazine

led to the role of consumer. That’s why I hate all the exhibi-tion rules about no touching, no photographs, no fun – justadmire the greatness of the elite. Roleplaying is a collabora-tive system in which you rightly point out the roles of cre-ator and audience become hopelessly muddled until the dis-tinction is almost irrelevant.

I think the question is not so much is roleplaying art? Asshouldn’t art be more like roleplaying?

Bill Hoad’s suggestion that roleplaying has no right tobring raw emotion to the player’s seems daft to me. What ishe suggesting? That rpgs introduce only rarefied emotionor no emotion at all? From the outset rpg have relied on theplayer having a strong emotional connection to their protag-onist in the game. I might be able to agree that creating agame that has deliberately been structured to offend theplayers might be poor taste I cannot really agree that youhave to set out to ‘disconnect’ the players from the gamethough. The latter seems pointless, if I were to play a gameof CoC that genuinely had me feeling proxy fear through mycharacter I wouldn’t call foul on the gm for introducing ‘rawemotion’ I would be more likely to congratulate the gm forrunning a great game.

I couldn’t agree more that not all art is ‘one stepremoved’, perhaps that is true of well-known or familiar artwhere its status as ‘art’ precedes its content. Perhaps alsotrue of abstract or abtruse art where the meaning of thepiece takes time to unravel but there is far more art thatconnects on a visceral emotional level before acquiring anintellectual level. In the latter I would offer examples fromHurst, Chapman brothers, Goya, Otto Dix, Picasso; exam-ples of the former Richard Long, Picasso (again – too prolificand varied for his own good), Warhol, Henry Moore.Straddling the divide Pollack, Vietnam photographers...what the fuck is this? Art Today?

More generally music often connects purely on an emo-tional level and rarely on the intellectual level. Performanceart ditto.

Kociak aka KittenI'd like to point out to Robert Rees that it was MarcelDuchamp rather than Piet Mondrian who exhibited a urinal entitled ‘fountain.’

• Apparently this is Art Today. And why not?

Andy McBrienI thought I’d send some thoughts on different approaches toplaying characters in roleplay. Our last session got quiteheated which has lead me to thinking about this aspect ofplay.

You could perhaps simplistically split the issue into twobroad camps: those who play their characters such as tomake what they say ‘in character’ sound like they (the play-er) really mean what they’re saying, i.e. when another char-

c o l l o q u y

acter pisses them off they might call them ‘a fucking dick-head’, in other words say exactly what the player reallywould say if he was pissed off by someone. The other campare those who play their character such as to make whatthey say ‘in character’ sound like they (the player) do notreally mean it (though their characters do), i.e. the playermakes it clear that they are just pretending in the situationbeing played. For example the player might call someone ‘apointy-eared old-aged fairycake’, thus making it obviousthat the sentiments expressed are not directed personallytowards another player.

As you might expect, I am very much of the former camp.From my experience the first approach compares to ‘methodacting’, and the second only to ‘ham acting’ (given that role-players are usually crap actors). While in the ‘method’approach you obviously will not be talking in the style ofyour character: this is sacrificed. But what is expressed isdone so with conviction. All attention is concentrated onmaking it seem as real as possible. In the ‘ham’ approach,the player makes sure that nobody confuses the sentimentsexpressed for their character, with those of themselves. Buthe sacrifices some conviction in the way those things areexpressed.

The key thing about the method approach, I think, is thatyou are not trying to pretend to have particularfeelings/emotions. You just express the feelings you have (asa player), assuming the conditions described for your char-acter. This means that when another player ‘in character’pisses you off, you (the player) get pissed off with them. Ifthey haven’t pissed you off, you don’t try and roleplay/pre-tend that they have.

Cutting the number of pretence elements of a game downto just those necessary for the needs of the game, is verymuch what I advocate in roleplay. Another example of this isexcluding players from the room when their charactersaren’t present, so the players don’t have to pretend theydon’t know stuff that they do know. I suppose the methodapproach relies on the players having a certain amount ofconfidence in their roleplaying, so that when things do getreally heated they are really enjoying it, rather than just get-ting really upset.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m revising myattitudes to roleplay, one of the things I do is look back tomy best roleplay experience as a player, when everythingclicked. And use this as a sort of model to test whatever ideaI’m thinking about. One of the chief elements of the exam-ple I go back to, is that although me and another player gotcompletely pissed off with each other, instead of the role-play suffering as a result of this, it sort of got pushed furtherthan we had gone before. So we ended up basking in all theexcitement instead of frustrated by our inability to roleplay.One of the really exciting things about it was the discoverythat losing control was nothing to do with bad playing: infact it was good playing. It was something to promote notsomething to avoid.

But that’s not quite right. Losing control is a problem.

What I should have said is expressing emotions you feel as aplayer is not something to be avoided (and regarded as poorroleplaying) but is to be promoted. Provided they are theresult of identifying with your character. If the player (aswell as his character), is completely pissed off about some-thing/someone it doesn’t mean the he’s lost control/isn’troleplaying. It isn’t a problem. It’s good not bad! That’swhat I meant.

This makes it sound such an elementary matter and nodoubt it’s completely obvious to very many players. But Ithink it is an issue worth highlighting because it’s not obvi-ous to everyone.

The really exciting discovery was that losing control isnot a problem etc, etc... provided you keep roleplaying ‘incharacter’.

What motivated me to write was not the idea to convertthose who prefer the alternative (equally valid) approach toplaying a character. What I was shooting at was the attitudethat ‘if the player isn’t pretending then they aren’t roleplay-ing’ (and then are thought to be a problem). My own atti-tude (the immersive approach) is that the roleplay tends tobe better the less a player is pretending.

What I see as a problem are situations where players iden-tify ‘out of character’ influences on the way a character isplayed and see this as not roleplaying. But I suggest it’smuch more productive if it’s not reacted to as a problemeven when non-character issues are obviously influencinghow the character is being played. For example if John ispissed off because he had to go for the chips again and thenplays his character pissed off, the other players can eithersuggest he’s not really playing his character, or they canaccept that the character seems pissed off.

It is of course better if outside influences don’t intrude somuch on play (John is not roleplaying very well). But theyinevitably do to some degree and it’s better to play withthem rather than let play break down as a result of them. Themost productive attitude is to avoid letting ‘out-of-charac-ter’ issues dominate the way you play your own character,but to accept that they will influence the way the other char-acters will be played, and that their emotions are validwhatever way they are played.

layout

Sergio MascarenhasI’ve read your column with interest, since this is one of mypreferred old issues about rpg design. I must say that Iagree with most of the points you raise.

For instance, the idea of an introductory fast-play sectionis something that I think should be standard fare by now inrpgs. In a sense, I learned this with my first rpg, RunequestII boxed set which included the Basic Role Playing gamebooklet. This was a short, fast, wonderful way to introduce

21imazine

c o l l o q u y

a new player to the game. Yes, it had no setting or adven-ture, but it allowed one to understand the rules, and thenjust move on to more complex issues. The key thing is that,in order to do this, the whole game must be developedaround a core set of basic concepts, instead of being anaccumulation of disparate elements.

Most companies seem to be heading in this direction any-way, at least to a certain extent, by providing free, rules-litemodules.

A second aspect where I agree with you is the idea of agame book as a reference instrument. It seems that, as rpgsdeparted from their wargame and boardgame roots, theyalso departed from some basic game design rules that greatwargames and boardgames seem never to forget. One of thethings that was lost is the notion of scalability. Manyboardgames and wargames have scalable rules: Both rulesand scenarios are organized according to complexity anddepth, so that the player learns to play while playing, eachstep leading to new rules and new scenarios that apply thosenew rules (while the players can re-play the scenarios in theprevious steps with the new rules, and get new twists intheir gaming experience). I think that rpg rules should fol-low this example, and be organized according level of com-plexity/depth; and that any scenario should be playable atany level of the rules. This means that players can do twothings: learn the rules step by step, alternating rules acquisi-tion with playing; decide at which level they want to play.So, we may have two players playing fighters where playerdecides that he wants to play combat the basic level, whilethe other player wants to play combat at the advanced level.Or a player may want to play combat at the basic level,magic at the advanced level, and social interaction at theintermediate level; another player wants to play combat atthe advanced level, no magic, but alchemy at the intermedi-ate level, and social interaction at the basic level.

One of the problems with rule book design is that, whenthey undertook the ‘literary’ paradigm, they chose thewrong paradigm (novels and storytelling). I mean, this para-digm may be valid for actual play, but it’s completely wrongfor game books. Game books should follow two other para-digms instead: one is the one you mentioned, referencebooks. This is useful for presenting rules and the system.The other is journalism writing. This is to be used for pre-senting setting material. Another thing that people writingrpg books should familiarize themselves with is the tech-niques for producing books intended for distance learning.After all, many players are distance learners: they buy abook, read it, and attempt to play without a tutor. (Theymay also learn with a playing group, but usually suffers fromthe fact that the focus is on playing right away, without tak-ing time to learn how to play... unless the gm is also learningthe game.)

Finally, what I would like to see is a book that:1. Presents setting information separate from system infor-

mation. Of course, system information should be illus-trated with situations that comply to the setting.

22 imazine

2. Organizes both setting information and system informa-tion in a simple-to-complex way.

3. Has two types of indexing: based on complexity vs. basedon content. What I mean is, one may separate info by lev-els of complexity: In this case we have, first the simplerrules for all the different aspects of the game, next theintermediate rules, next the advanced rules. Or one mayseparate info by content: magic, combat, social interac-tion, etc. The ideal game will have both these types ofindexing. This means that it will have pagination, tablesof contents, and indexes based both on content, andbased on complexity. Of course, the book as sold wouldbe organized according to order of complexity, since thisfacilitates learning, but latter the player would be able toseparate the pages of the book, and put them in a binderorganized the way that suited his tastes (he may evenseparate the sections he knows he is not going to use).What’s more, this ability to separate different info wouldmean that, even if setting and system info would be sepa-rate (see 1 above), it could be alternated along the book,in order to facilitate the learning of these two compo-nents. Latter the owner of the book could organize itaccording to his tastes, either combining setting and sys-tem info, or separating it all together.

I know that this can be hard to do, and involve difficult pagi-nation issues, but I’m sure it can be done.

John MorrowConcerning your comments that:a ‘Better to have four sentences on a topic, which can be

found very rapidly, than two pages which take time tofind.’

b ‘What culture game requires is as much detail as is neces-sary for what’s happening, and no more.’

I think you are implying (but not explicitly clearly stating) avery important point for all role-playing settings. The mate-rial in a role-playing setting book should be relevant to whatthe players will be doing in the setting and should not focuson elements that no normal person would worry about.When someone gets off of a space ship onto a new world,they want to know what the weather is like. Instead, mostspace games leave the players and gm with planetary orbitaldistances from a primary star, all specified in exact detail.

Player: What’s the weather like when I step off the ship?’gm: Well, the planet is 1.1 au from a G0 primary with a

17 degree tilt and 2 moons and...Player: But is it hot or cold outside?

George PletzAs someone who recently ventured into game design (anddecided to leave it to the professionals. House rules is one

c o l l o q u y

thing, design another.), I found this article particularlyinsightful.

Since I am not entirely familiar with some of the gamesmentioned, I, as a reformed gurpshead, have something toadd. One of the interesting gimmicks about gurps is howthey do this bait and switch manoeuvre on you. They try tosell you on this ‘your only limits are your mind’ and then pro-ceed to sell a ton of supplements. In the end you are have agurps library larger than your D&D library. How they got mehad a lot to do with shoving ‘this is the only book you’ll everneed except...’ philosophy at every turn. (We won’t even getinto how gurps is the ideal system for people who startedout playing D&D but got sick of it.) I admit it, the idea ofthe one book system is up there with ‘these are guidelinesnot rules’ as a desired trait. Truth is that for gaming compa-nies to make money, so says the conventional wisdom, is toget you hooked. How many one book one system games canyou think of?

One book systems are cult items not franchises.I detected a certain distaste for games which latch onto

genre conventions. It is to be expected with your advocacyof ‘culture’ games. I can understand the frustration but thething that is good about games like Feng Shui is that is moreuniversal than so many so called generic rpgs. Sure you haveto ignore the backstory but that is generally the way it is ifyou want to create a new thing opposed to play into acanon. Outlaws is more about a setting than a system?

One of the many insightful ideas I have gotten from thenew breed of games, indie and otherwise, is that rules andsetting are linked. gurps and D&D are the same in that theyare about shoehorning one into the other. A good system isfused to its setting. It seems to me that an ideal system isone that mirrors the world you want to play in. While thisdoes show the universal idea to be bunk, the downside isthat allows for the game world to be the ideal world for thebusy and harried gamer. And that means money for the com-pany. Not to get all anti-capitalist on you but one of theappeals of rpg is the inexpensive nature of the hobby.

(And yes it has been made known to me how relativelycheap gaming is but then again there is movies books com-puters and living costs to account for. I couldn’t be thatinteresting a gamer without these things.)

This rule and setting relation, in my mind, brings up, as itdoes in your article, the fiction element in game format.Maybe I am the only one on the planet but I wish there wasless fiction in games. And this has nothing to do with quali-ty, which is fair at best, but instead with the fact that gam-ing is different than fiction. Writing for a game is like writ-ing for a weekly television not a novel. You have real peopleputting demands on you in a game. They have wants andneeds! Game fiction perpetuates this idea that a gm tellsplayers what to do and they do it. It is deceptive. I’d soonerread examples of play than stories. This dovetails with youridea of the example scenario which teaches mechanics andgets the player accustomed to play.

And play is the thing. I don’t care how cool the system

seems in the reading it comes down to how it plays. The for-mat of a rpg comes down to getting across how a game willplay out. Demo-ing a game is the only ideal way to know if agame is going to fly or not and the format should focus ongetting us to that point as swiftly and easily as possible.

Which brings up an interesting problem. How to make agame that is interesting to the novice as well as the experi-enced gamer? And I am not sure if another cleverly written‘what is roleplaying’ chapter is going to cut it.

Much of this talk of explaining a system or game doesmore harm than good. It makes it seem unnatural when the‘art’ of telling a story is actually one of the most naturalthings a society does. So how do we demystify the game toseem natural and not some sort of arcane divination ormathematical equation? To be honest I don’t know. Perhapsthis is why roleplaying will be a fringe hobby. How do youtell people at large that anyone can be an actor or a writer?(if that’s even true...)

• Even though you managed to slip Laws’s Law into themiddle of that comment, I will forgive you, George.Perhaps telling people at large that anyone can be an actoror a writer is the problem? We are constantly seeking tolegitimise roleplaying by making analogies with otherforms, as you do with t v , and as many others do with‘storytelling’ or whatever. I can’t help feeling that themore we do this, the more we constrict our possibilities,and dilute the form. While it is no doubt true that‘anyone’ can be an actor or a writer (usually a crap one),shouldn’t we rather be saying that anyone can be a role-player?

George PletzI was looking over the New Outlaws New Layout articleagain the other day. I had an idea about layout. You weretalking about trying to express background and mechanicsin a measured holistic way. I detected a slightly disparagingtone on the use of colour and ‘fancy’ design tricks, so I amnot sure of how any of these suggestions will go over.Couldn’t you do a split column page with one track beingmechanics and the other track being setting? If not thatwhat about opposing pages with every other page being theother track? ( ie Page one setting, Page two mechanics) Itwould make locating information a little easier. Maybe cer-tain sections of the book could be in one of these stylesevery set number of pages. Well at least it is not as busy asoverlays of colour coded boxes, the first idea I had.

This of course should be in tandem with a good detailedindex. Most games which have indexes read like the indexesfound in the back of appliance manuals. Simply useless whenit comes to the nitty gritty.

Other aesthetics like rules briefs at strategic locations aswell as easy on the eyes fonts also seem crucial. I can seethat presentation of rules in an user-friendly pattern is keybut, if the structure of the book were somehow symmetri-

23imazine

c o l l o q u y

cal, for lack of a better word, then the density of the materi-al would be evenly distributed.

My quick example of ‘informational density’ is FirstEdition dmg with all its information weighted at the centrewith its not as dense intro and outro bits. Not that you’dnoticed with that awful tiny print.

Another element of this density is how you see the bookin your head. Most rule hunts are not leisurely searches butmad by the seat of your pants dashes for pertinent informa-tion. Don’t you hate when you think you know where some-thing is but it isn’t there where you thought it was?

Finally running a game again , I am using highlighters,post it notes and a rule ‘cheat’. It is like an open book testwhere opening the book is a sign of defeat. Opening thebook means the rules aren’t taking. A structure which couldbe grasped intuitively would go a long way towards welcom-ing people inside.

• After the fear and loathing I had to overcome before wad-ing into the games I reviewed this issue, I find myself intotal agreement with you. I want a rule book that is easyto read, but rarely read during a game.

Ashley SouthcottYour comments on ‘getting people started’ are laudable, butI have yet to see a game which does this and still manages tocontain enough about the setting to reveal how to play acharacter according to his place in that setting’s society.Take Pendragon. This goes to huge lengths to emphasise acharacter’s place in Arthurian society. Is this in part becauseits rules and background are interspersed? It doesn’t imme-diately spring to mind as a game which gets its playersimmersed in minutes in part because of its organisation. ArsMagica is another example that, in going all-out to empha-sise the setting and pcs’ social positions in it, misses thechance to get players started immediately.

I have no problem comparing boardgames and roleplayinggames. When you buy a boardgame, the setting and theboard layout are both explicit and immediate (well; they areon any game I’d spend my money on). The challenge there-fore is to transfer this explicitness and immediacy to narra-tive games. Granted that boardgames impose a certain lin-earity on play, but a rules setup that insists on your going tojail and not passing Go isn’t a must. The artwork on aboardgame constitutes not just a selling point but also con-veys a feel for the setting in which the game is set. I’m sug-gesting something similar for describing settings.

I can live with short fictional pieces to ‘set the stage’ butthis isn’t an ideal solution and doubtless unpopular withColloquy’s regulars. Decent artwork for a game, and I don’tjust mean industry-published games is one idea I’d like tobandy around, properly supported by rules on task resolu-tion and combat (which are down to personal taste). I’mtoying with the idea because good artwork allows you toget a feel of the setting without having to wade through 10-

24 imazine

point text. Participants’ different views on the settingviewed through the artwork are a possible conflict area, ofcourse.

If you’re really not looking at the rules much duringSengoku games, why gripe about its rules layout? It soundsvery much like you’re merely adapting the game to yourgroup’s style and referring to the rules whenever you’reuncomfortable with making a personal judgement.In transferring your ideas for teaching roleplaying ontopaper, I think a minimalist rules preference (or at least astyle where a minimum of rules in published systems areused) is now one taken by the majority of experiencedgamers. Most games seek to encourage non-slavishness totheir rules (funnily enough, unlike boardgames which rely onadherence to the rules to make them work). Going back tocharacter generation, however, why bother with back-ground in any detail? Old hands will probably say ‘because acharacter’s background helps explain his actions and definewho he is’. Not necessarily. Insane characters’ actions aredefined by their warped viewed of the world, which mayderive from a freak event, e.g. falling into a snake pit or los-ing one’s family during an earthquake. It strikes me thatdefining a character closely is better done in play, since hisactions in front of other characters in part contributetowards his definition. You can see this through npcs’ reac-tions in social situations, but I’m also thinking of other pcs’reactions to a character’s behaviour within the party. A‘discovery’ style of character generation merely serves tobolster design-in-play over design-at-start. Show me a so-called disposable rules setup that insists on defining a char-acter’s past.

I understand why the likes of C&S and Pendragon go to thelengths they do to define a character, but would argue thatdefining a character to the nth degree – particularly at thebeginning – takes something away from the player’s free-dom to play. You will correctly have spotted the magic con-cept ‘limitation’ (been there, discussed that). The length oftime these systems take to complete detailed definitions is,of course, one of the reasons they remain very small nichegames. I guess players of such games adapt those parts oflengthy cg systems they like and discard the rest – what wasyour reaction when you played Pendragon?

As to your conclusion that a brief indexed set of notes onbackground is preferable to two or three chapters in a rule-book, this is all very well at the beginning, but sooner orlater everyone’s going to want more. Conventional gamesrespond to this with supplements; is this really a viableroute for Outlaws?

• It’s been too long since I played Pendragon to have a clearrecollection of my reaction, but I don’t honestly recall itscharacter generation being overly long and detailed – notin the C&S league, for sure.

The last point is dead easy – one of the reasons for bas-ing Outlaws on the world rather than constructing someartificial simulacrum is so that the game’s ‘supplements’

c o l l o q u y

will be the huge corpus of published material about China,a suitable selection of which appears in the Outlaws bibli-ography.

systems

Robert ReesOn ‘interesting results’: more thoughts, one thing thatannoys me about a lot of combat systems is that they ofteninvolve a lot of mechanistic calculation to finally resolve thefact that someone has been hit for 1 hp damage. I think it’sokay to have involved systems providing they ramp up incomplexity as the result becomes more critical. For exampleI don’t think any armour resolution should become involvedunless it is actually going to save your life or offer the differ-ence between being mauled or being able to continue anoth-er round.

As a side issue as laptops and mini-computers (Palm tops)become more prevalent is it possible that complex statisti-cal calculations can be hived off to machines that simplyhave the initial conditions entered in and then feed ‘criticalmoments’ to the gm for incorporation in the narrative?

I think the problem with ‘gaming geeks’ (and this is pure-ly a personal perspective) is that they see the game as beingthe alpha and omega of the gaming experience. It is the sys-tem that matters, the stats of the character and so on ratherthan the experience of the game itself. I think it must berather liberating to have players that are not used to role-playing but are willing to be open-minded and take the gamefor what it is rather than having to draw from the ‘corrupt-ed’ pool of gaming geeks who enter the game determined to‘win’ or build ‘kick ass characters’ rather than go with thegame as it stands and see where it takes them.

With these people I firmly side with Robert Irwin (afterall us Imazine non-readers must stick together) I don’t knowhow to create a meaningful dialogue with these kinds ofpeople. There is a mental block as they understand roleplay-ing to be the tangible – books, rules, dice – and I understandroleplaying to be the intangible – the resulting narrative.

Then again maybe it’s just my poor social skills. One inci-dent sticks in my mind though: I went to my local universitygaming club intent on running a kind of sci-fi game withsome home-grown rules based on fudge . I tried to interestpeople but no-one seemed that interested and they said theywould rather play AD&D. I couldn’t get across the idea thatthe game wasn’t in the rules but in the scenario I was goingto run. In many ways I thought I would have been better offwith complete novices who would have accepted that therewere some rules but that they were not wholly relevant andthat the rules would work around the character conceptsthey came up with once they had heard the background.

I think the failure to explain to get across the ‘point’ ofthe game and my failure to think of an alternative tack to

get the idea across have contributed in my inability toreturn to an organised gaming club and try to recruit moreplayers. I just have the feeling that unless I say somethinglike it’s <name of systemTM> set in <name ofbackgroundTM> then I’m not going to persuade people togive it a go.

I have also noticed a certain amount of prejudice based onnot using the ‘right’ rules for a setting. For example recentlyI have been running a Greyhawk campaign with theRunequest (Avalon Hill) system – even with my establishedplayers this seems to cause concern.

culture

John MorrowIn many articles on writing science fiction and fantasy,authors and editors say that you can only change so manythings in a setting before it becomes impossible for peopleto keep track of all the changes and you should establishthose changes early and quickly. Many suggest only one ortwo changes. Similarly, if you try to change too many cultur-al elements on a person playing the game, they will find itdifficult to grasp any of them. If someone needs to becomean expert on a culture before they role-play, it will be diffi-cult to find players. And if even only the game master has tobe an expert, it will still have only limited appeal. For betteror worse, I think that when other people play Outlaws, theywill probably drop out large hunks of authentic Chinese cul-ture that they have trouble grasping and stick with thebasics.

Fiction and role-playing games are (once you get beyondthe visceral mind-candy level) about exploring issues andevents in a milieu that is clearer than reality. Since few peo-ple are experts at everything and since these media are lim-ited by the failings of language to fully convey an experi-ence, they work by emphasizing the dramatic and impor-tant. Why do so many science fiction and fantasy settingshave mono-cultural races despite the fact that most 20thcentury Americans would be horrified by a non-fiction bookthat says ‘All blacks are X’ or ‘All Irish are Y’? Because identi-fying a culture with a race serves much the same purpose asputting a white had on the good guys and a black hat (ordark goatee moustache) on the bad guys. It removes theuncertainties and vagueness of reality and makes sure thateveryone gets the same point the same way. Is it cheap andobvious? Yes. Does it have impact, though? Oh yes.

The book The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes(And How To Avoid Them) by Jack M. Bickham makes quite afew suggestions that are sure to annoy someone whodoesn’t like cheap literary devices. Among them, he sug-gests don’t use real people in your story (Chapter 7), don’thave things happen for no reason (Chapter 10), and don’tworry about being obvious (Chapter 26). Those sections

25imazine

2

c o l l o q u y

Lingua Fruppa

places (see below).Depending on your gaming style you might or might not

value immersion in the imaginary world you are playing in.If, like myself, you do value immersion, then verisimilarcharacter and place names are paramount for the gamingexperience. For games who are not featuring a well-devel-oped background (ie not Tolkien’s Middle Earth), the burdenis on the referee.

The first step is setting up a limitation in sound patternsfor any given language or culture of the game world. In thereal world, for instance, if you meet someone called Arnaldoor Roberto, you’ll guess he’s from Southern Europe or LatinAmerica by the very sound of his name: lots of vowels, andliquid consonant clusters. This can be achieved in an easierway if the referee has already devised a phonetic alphabetfor each language/culture of his world (see previous para-graph) – he’ll have a pool of phonemes to draw from to cre-ate names, and this step then is limited to creating rules asto how names are built (e.g. no names shall end with a con-sonant, or all male names shall end with an -a).

The second step is deciding how people are named in eachculture. In the real world, for instance, most Europeans havea name and a surname. Americans love the additional middlename (or initial), whereas Russians have a patronymic.Arabs may go by a variety of names, and even change theirname in the course of their lifespan to reflect an importantevent (the birth of a male child). Most Asians also have a sur-

6 imazine

name and a name (in this order), the surname being usedmore frequently than the name.

Primitive cultures tend to use a given name only: in a vil-lage of sixty, that is usually enough. They still can resort to avariety of tricks to show family ties (e.g. all names in a givenfamily might begin with the same sound).

The third step is creating place names. The differencewith the previous step is that this one is for ‘internal’ use bythe referee, it is not aimed at players. As explained in thefirst half of this article, place names do have a meaning,even if it may be lost to contemporary people. The system Iuse for my own campaign is as follows: just as with charac-ter names, I devise a few patterns or rule for word creation.Then I draw up a list of the most common words for eachlanguage (colours, terrain, numbers). I then create placenames randomly or on sound combinations I like. Most placenames would be the equivalent of ‘big stone’, ‘John’s farm’,etc. To reflect the passing of time, some territories aregiven place names of a dead or lost language; some othersare applied known linguistic transformation rules (d’sbecome th’s, t’s become ts’s, whatever). Again to keepverisimilitude and consistency the referee must alwaysapply the same set of transformation rules to a given terri-tory/language culture. If you end up with names that do notlook like anything familiar from fantasy literature or frpgs,it might well mean that you were successful. *

(along with a few others) make the point that fiction isn’treality and that you need to take liberties with reality forthe fiction to seem worthwhile and even plausible to thereader. What may seem obvious or important to you whenyou are writing can easily be lost on a reader unless youhammer it home. What seems real or even is real can seeminauthentic or fake to a reader when presented on a writtenpage. They might not get that the bad guy is evil to the coreunless you have them kill one of their underlings or wear ablack hat, even if you feel you are being too obvious.Otherwise, they might actually start sympathizing with thebad guy (as I often do on Star Trek: Voyager) because the badguy has a valid point to make or an understandable motiva-tion.

In several science fiction writing books, they discuss therole of aliens. In short, most agree that if aliens are tooalien, the readers will be unable to relate to them. But whyhave aliens at all? In many cases, the purpose of an alien islargely to take an element of humanity and amplify it tomake it easier to explore. If I discuss race relations usingreal races, people are going to be influence by sympathy fortheir own race. If I move a race relations story into elves anddwarves, I don’t have to worry about people being too closeto the issue to get the objective point.

Remember that historical and non-Western cultures aremore alien to modern Western thought. In his essay ‘Living

the Future: You Are What You Eat’, Gardner Dozois writes(while describing ‘Rome in space’ Star Trek), ‘The RomanEmpire was vastly more complex, contradictory, surprising,and multifaceted than the simplistic version we get fromtelevision, movies, and bad historical novels. And the peoplewho inhabited it were as different from any citizens of2100ad are likely to be. In fact, the Old Egyptians and theOld Romans would be more alien to us than most authors’Martians.’

While I’m not a fan of over-rating the similaritiesbetween rpgs and fiction, I do think there is a parallel here.And the parallel is that in order to get the effect you arelooking for, you often need to emphasize things to anextreme, much in the way that stage make-up emphasizesfacial features so that the person in Seat 19 ZZ can see theexpression on a stage actors face during a scene withoutopera glasses. And you often need to simply things so thatpeople won’t get lost in the details, much as a talking pointslist or outline can convey important points more quicklythan an essay. It is a matter of compensating for the limitedtime and data transmission speed of language.

• All of which brings us to the end of another colloquy withplenty to chew on. While I can’t promise the next issueany time soon, I do imagine it won’t be as late as thisone. If it is, I’ve probably folded.

by Matt Stevens

B r i l l i a n c e &Dross in RPG

A R T W O R K The Cthulhoid unpleasantness of Erol

Otus (top) meets the authentic pulp

nastiness of M A R Barker’s Tékumel

(bottom)

ears ago i saw a small galleryexhibit of pulp magazine art fromthe 1920s, 30s and 40s. As I lookedover the paintings, and admired

their power and imaginativeness, Ithought of the art in roleplayinggames. Decades from now, when we’reall dead or doddering, will rolegameartwork hang on gallery walls? Willfuture generations admire it, and mar-vel at the genius of our work, and won-der why we never appreciated it at thetime? Or will rolegames gather dust inmusty attics, to be regarded as littlemore than period curiosities?

I hope rolegames will be cherishedand admired long after the campaignshave ended and the rolegame ‘industry’is mouldering in the grave. But this willonly happen if people who never playthe games can appreciate our work.The long-term prestige of our hobbymay depend largely on the books andmagazines we leave behind, and theircapacity to fascinate or entertain anon-gaming audience. Two factors areof critical importance: the quality oftheir prose, and the quality of their art-work. In this article, I’m going to lookat the artwork in roleplaying games.

pabulum and

professionalism

Like most roleplayers, I think themajority of rolegame artwork is crap.On the other hand, and again like most

Y

roleplayers, I think at least somerolegame illustrations are fairly good.But when we get down to cases and tryto separate the best work from theshit, I find I often disagree with manyroleplayers. Most rolegamers, it seems,judge artwork on the basis of its real-ism and professionalism. They con-demn the amateurish scribbling of theearly rolegames, comparing themunfavourably to the slick colour printsof today.

I’m not sure that rolegame artworkis getting any better – in some ways,I’d say it’s actually getting worse. Theproblem isn’t the skill of the artists,which has improved greatly over thepast 25 years. Unfortunately, profes-sionalism alone isn’t going to producegreat works of art, and we have to rec-ognize that if we want to promotegreatness in the future.

We could argue for months overwhat makes a ‘great piece of art’ great.But for the sake of argument, I’ll saythat a great piece of artwork intriguesthe spectator. It should catch herattention, fascinate her, show some-thing she never saw before. This ‘some-thing’ can be an unusual subject, some-thing fantastic or surreal. It can also bea strange juxtaposition of common-place objects, or mundane things por-trayed in unusual ways. It can evenrefer to a perplexing expression, a lookthat resists easy interpretation. Agreat piece of art should provoke inter-esting questions, without providingsimple answers to them.

I don’t know if there’s been any truly

27imazine

2

b r i l l i a n c e & d r o s s

All technique and no soul: Todd Lockwood’s

‘Tordek’ from 3rd edition Dungeons &

Dragons

‘great’ roleplaying art, but some of ithas been strikingly inventive, even ifthe vast majority has been bland andunimaginative. The problem, unfortu-nately, is that as roleplaying artistshave become more professional, andthe industry has grown more commer-cially savvy, bland, corporate pabulumis becoming even more prominent thanit used to be.

It’s important for us to recognizethat much of today’s rolegame art isworse than bad. It’s ordinary. The quali-ty of draftsmanship has improvedmightily since the late 1970s. Clearly,there are lots of people in the industrywho know how to draw. This makes itall the more tragic when they producework of little or no value.

Take the artwork in 3rd edition D&DPlayer’s Handbook – please. An illustra-tion by Todd Lockwood is reproducedabove. It’s a picture of a dwarf with anaxe, a shield, a bow and a shitload ofarmour. This dwarf is given a name,‘Tordek,’ but it’s unclear why he’s dif-ferent from the thousands we’ve seenelsewhere, from Lord of the Rings calen-dars to DragonLance paperback covers.He’s a generic short, stocky guy with abeard. So what?

Wizards of the Coast spent thou-

8 imazine

sands to give us a Player’s Handbookwith full-colour illustrations of Tordekand his fun-loving friends, but it’sunclear what, if anything, we’re sup-posed to get from them. ToddLockwood obviously knows how topaint the human figure. His draftsman-ship compares favourably to an old tsrartist like Darlene Pakul, who drew thatnotorious bat-winged succubus in thefirst Dungeon Master’s Guide. ButDarlene’s plump, cowering demonesstitillated thousands of teenage boys.‘Tordek’ will never titillate anyone. Youcould replace his portrait with a photoof a tractor or a piece of cabbage andno one would notice the difference.

I could fill this entire issue withmediocre art from two generations ofroleplaying games, and heap scorn andabuse on every wasted artistic oppor-tunity. It would be far better, though,to point out the best published work,and give well-deserved praise to artistswho transcend the ordinariness of somuch fantasy art. In the next fewpages, I’ll point to some of the work Irespect, and suggest some paths wemight pursue in the future.

transcending naturalismYou’ll almost never see rolegame art-work that transcends a rigid natural-ism. We may talk about creating a ‘newart form,’ but our art is decidedly reac-tionary. We act as if the 20th century –or hell, even the late 19th – never tookplace.

It’s too bad. While one could makean argument for naturalism in rolegameart – one could say it helps make thefantastic seem real, a vital role in aroleplaying product – one could alsoargue that naturalism can never com-pletely mirror the worlds of our imagi-nation, and a freer approach may bemore evocative of other worlds andother cultures. At the very least, in ourefforts to evoke alternate realities, weshould draw upon whatever sources ofinspiration we can find. By ignoring allWestern art after 1850 (not to mentionthe indigenous traditions of Africa andthe Americas), we’ve cut ourselves off

from a huge visual vocabulary. Thosewho transcend the limits of naturalismshould be commended for broadeningartistic possibilities.

Some of the earliest art in roleplay-ing games was more inventive in thisrespect. Consider Erol Otus for exam-ple, an old favourite of mine. His workwas crude, sometimes even revolting,and I would never claim that he wasconsciously attempting to ‘transcendnaturalism.’ He probably couldn’t havepenned a ‘realistic’ work if he wantedto, his technique was far too primitive.Still, I find that many Otus drawingscatch my attention, and stick in mymind far longer than other earlyrolegame artists do. His style evokesthe exotic and the macabre in a waythat few other artists can match. Hisdepictions of the Cthulhu Mythos inDeities and Demigods (see previouspage) fascinated me far more than themuch more professional illustrations inthe Call of Cthulhu rulebooks, and Ibelieve it’s because his folk-art grotes-queries suited the Mythos far betterthan later naturalistic works.

Another early rolegame artist whodeserves a mention is Professor M A RBarker, the visionary behind the worldof Tékumel. I’m not particularly fond ofBarker’s later work, in Swords and Gloryfor example, which are often littlemore than pin-ups of topless babes,rendered in a dull naturalist style. Hismore ambitious works in Empire of thePetal Throne, however, deserve lavishpraise. Check out the illustration on theprevious page. You might respond withknee-jerk hostility to the naked womanin the corner, but it shouldn’t blind youto the power of the work. The masks,which seem to float in the darkness,are an imaginative touch, and there is apalatable sense of horror and dread tothe scene. It’s unfortunate that so littlework in today’s rolegames can matchthe power and imagination of thisprimitive, 25-year old sketch.

Luckily, there are a few artists todaywho transcend the limitations of natu-ralism, and it’s clear that this is a con-scious choice on their part, not just aproduct of limited skill. Dan Smith isone artist who should be familiar to all

b r i l l i a n c e & d r o s s

Dan Smith’s monochromatic moodiness

(above). Everway atmospheres from Amy

Weber (above right). Feng Shui action

depicted with fauvist tendencies by Aaron

Boyd (right).

of us. You can find his work in justabout any recent gurps product, and inmy opinion he deserves all of the workhe gets and more. As you can see, in theillo above, Smith uses strong black-and-white contrasts to great effect.He’s also one of the only rolegameartists who combines collages ofphoto-realistic images with pureabstract design. Smith’s style, uniqueand easily recognizable, hip and ironicyet unsettling all the same, contrastsfavourably to too many artists in theindustry, who produce works of cook-ie-cutter sameness. I look forward toseeing more from him.

While Dan Smith’s work can befound all over the place, other artistsworth noting are harder to find. As faras I know, Aaron Boyd has only beenpublished in Daedalus’s game FengShui; I don’t even believe his work wasreprinted in the Atlas edition of thegame. Considering that the Atlas edi-tion has only black-and-white illustra-tions, though, this was probably forthe best, because Boyd’s trademark is aloose technique with an inventive useof colour. Boyd appears to be one of the

few conscious modernists in the indus-try. His style is clearly inspired byCezanne, and possibly the Fauves aswell. I look forward to seeing his workelsewhere.

Another artist who deserves fulsomepraise is Amy Weber. Like Aaron Boyd,she hasn’t had much work in the indus-try. I’ve only seen her illustrations inEverway’s ‘vision cards,’ one of whichis reproduced above. If Cezanneinspired Aaron Boyd, Weber seems totake her cue from Marc Chagall. Butwhile Chagall painted blissful allegoriesof his Russian childhood, Weber’simages seem inspired by nightmares

and dread. Weber opens the window toa sinister alternate reality, one over-come with darkness and decay, but alsowith a striking, eerie beauty. Sheshows us how a well non-naturalisticstyle can evoke a fantastic world andmake it real. I haven’t seen as much ofAmy Weber as I’d like to – she’s onlycredited with three vision cards in myEverway box. Based on the work I’veseen, though, I’d say she’s perhaps themost talented artist in role-playinggames today. I sincerely hope we get tosee much more from her in the future.

evoking other worldsGood work can be done in a naturaliststyle, but it requires more than just theability to draw realistically. Mostrolegame artwork is mediocre notbecause it’s naturalistic, but becauseits subject matter is dull. That portraitof ‘Tordek’ (previous page) is typical:Someone posing with his weapons. Justabout every rolegame illustration iseither (a) a portrait of someone with aweapon, or (b) a combat scene. Thankthe Gods for creature catalogues andmonster manuals, because they’re theonly reliable sources of imaginativeartwork in the field today.

Still, some artists do good work in anaturalist style. What sets them apartis not their naturalism per se, put theirskill in composition. Consider JimHalloway. His figures are crudelydrawn, but I think he’s better than atleast 80% of today’s rolegame artists.What sets him apart is his imagination,his sense of humour and (again) his tal-ent for composition, all of which areclear in his illustration for Gangbusters.

Another genuine talent is StephenFabian, like Halloway a frequent con-tributor to tsr products. Fabian is oneof the few rolegame artists who seemscomfortable with landscapes. Youwould think landscapes would be a nat-ural subject for fantasy rolegames, butmost artists, sadly, would rather drawhalf-naked barbarians pounding orcsinto oatmeal. Fabian’s paintings,dreamy and imaginative, show us whatrolegame illustrations can do: they can

29imazine

30 imazine

copyrights:Rob Lockwood: Copyright © 2000,Wizards of the Coast, Inc. Erol Otus:Copyright © 1980, tsr Hobbies, Inc.M A R Barker: Copyright © 1975, tsrHobbies, Inc. Dan Smith: Copyright ©1995?, Steve Jackson Games. AaronBoyd: Copyright © 1996 by Aaron BoydAmy Weber: Copyright © 1996?,Wizards of the Coast, Inc. JimHalloway: Copyright © 1982, tsr, Inc.Stephen Fabian: Copyright © 1987,tsr, Inc. Walter O’Connor: Copyright© 1994, Last Unicorn Games

Peasants in a field brought to life by Walter

O’Connor (top), Gangbuster wildness from

Jim Halloway (centre), and plane but far-

from-plain landscapery from Stephen Fabian

(bottom).

b r i l l i a n c e & d r o s s

evoke other worlds and make them real.The illustration above, from the Manualof the Planes, is a good example of hiswork.

Walter O’Connor is another artistwho deserves praise. O’Connor, like

Fabian, works largely in landscapes,but he also seems comfortable withscenes of everyday life – as in the illoon the left, a depiction of peasants inthe fields. (A refreshing change fromthe usual sword fights, gun-battles andFireball spells.) As the illustrationshows, unusual perspective is anO’Connor trademark – most rolegameaction scenes are strictly eye-levelaffairs. O’Connor makes peasants in afield look impressive, while his com-petitors draw the Battle for Algiers andmake it as exciting as Madison,Connecticut on a Sunday afternoon.

new ways of seeingWhat distinguishes the best rolegameartists from the mediocre ones? If youcould summarize the difference in oneword, it’s imagination. The good onesshow us things we never saw before,while the hacks churn out the samestuff over and over again. Luckily,imagination isn’t an inherited trait,like eye colour or blood type – it’ssomething that can be developedthrough experience. I think mostartists in the field can produce good oreven great works. They have the tech-nical skill; they just need the courageto experiment with new ways of see-ing. Only by doing so can they produceartwork that will be admired by futuregenerations. *