REVIEW: Improv for Gamers by Karen Twelves

Improv for Gamers started life as a series of seminars that Twelves ran at game conventions. As someone who is both a teacher and trained at Improv, Twelves would rock up at conventions and run gamers through a series of exercises designed to teach them a few improvisation techniques and generally improve their confidence when it comes to making shit up on the fly.

These seminars were evidently a success and people started asking Twelves for her lesson plans, this forced her to actually sit down and work them out and the result was Improv for Gamers, which is now in its second edition and published by Evil Hat Productions, the people who put out Fate, Blades in the Dark, and a load of Powered by the Apocalypse stuff.

Despite the book’s title, this is by no means the only book about RPGs and improvisation. For example, James D’Amato had a big success with The Ultimate RPG Gameplay Guide while Graham Walmsley put out a book called Play Unsafe that approached the question from an entirely different angle.

Twelves’ Improv for Gamers is a lot closer to D’Amato’s book than it is to Walmsley’s in so far as both D’Amato and Twelves have been trained in Improv and are trying to take what they learned from those studies and sell that expertise on to people with an interest in RPGs.

The problem is evident from the title alone: What does it mean to write a book about Improv for gamers? Is it an introduction to Improv for people who happen to be gamers, or is it a book that takes the ideas behind Improv and applies them RPGs? D’Amato’s book is definitely an example of the latter and my first read through of Improv for Gamers left the impression that it had a similar aim. However, the more I think about it, the more I think that we need to bear in mind how this book started out: As a series of classes that were content with introducing Improv to gamers without making any grandiose claims as to how one discipline might learn from another.

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GHR: Animonde

Games Half Remembered is an occasional series about old games. Some of these games I have played, others I have merely admired, but all of them have stuck in my memory for one reason or another.  The rest of the series can be found here.

Animonde was first published in 1988 and was the second RPG to be created by the legendary French game designer Croc. Animonde was originally self-published in the form of an 88-page booklet, which was soon followed by a supplement describing the game world and a collection of pre-written adventures. An attempt was made in the mid-to-late 2000s to produce a second edition but this soon fell by the way-side.

While Croc’s first RPG (Bitume) was an enormously cynical and violent post-apocalyptic game that is best described as what if Fallout and Mad Max hooked up and had a really sarcastic Gitanes-smoking French kid, his second game demonstrated an aesthetic reversal so radical that its basic ideas have yet to be fully understood or processed. Even in an age where itch.io is bursting at the seams with soft, smol bean, queer-friendly indie games about finding love and found family, Animonde still has the power to surprise and delight.

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Thoughts on Clerics, Hierarchy, and the Joys of ‘Levelling-up’

This morning I did something that I have not done for a long time: I disappeared down an internet rabbit-hole. I could not tell you how I got there, but I found myself reading the Wikipedia entry for Holy Orders in the Catholic Church.

What drew my attention is the fact that, from the third century right up until the second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Catholic Church had an internal hierarchy that included both higher and lower holy orders.

The higher holy orders were pretty much what we think of today when we use the term ‘Holy orders’: they start with Sub-deacons, then it’s Deacons, Priests, then finally Bishops. This structure is then complicated by the fact that in addition to those four levels, you also have offices (like Cardinal or Archbishop) and titles like Monsignor that started out as offices before becoming terms of address and honorifics that are kind of the Papal equivalent of a knighthood. Paul VI apparently tried to get rid of papal orders entirely before settling on this weird compromise whereby you only get to be called a Monsignor if you’ve distinguished yourself as career bureaucrat who has served in either the Curia (the sinister motherfuckers who administer the Vatican) or the Vatican’s diplomatic corps. Similar to the way that the British royal family only gives the title ‘Royal Highness’ to members of the family who ‘work’ by opening supermarkets or appearing in public whilst wearing a crown for the purposes of opening a new Lidl or whatever it is those parasites call work.

While I will never not be amused and fascinated by the way that the Catholic church manifests institutional power, what really got me was this Wikipedia graphic of the different colours of hats and number of tassels associated with the different orders:

The comedian Denis Leary once had a bit about how Catholicism is a religion of hats. The closer you get to God; the larger the head-gear and, quite frankly, where is the fucking lie?

I then moved on to reading the page about minor orders and noticed something fun. There were originally four lower orders: Porters, Lectors, Exorcists, and Acolytes. The Porters were literally the bouncers at the church door while the lectors were the people responsible for reading aloud excerpts from the scriptures or the liturgy. Things get a little bit more interesting once you reach Exorcist as Exorcists were people who had made it to the third level and so were granted the power to expel demons. Level up from being an exorcist and you became an acolyte who not only lit the candles in the church but also administered the Eucharist to the faithful. In other words: Every time you go up a level, you get fancier clothes, you take on more responsibilities, and you gain more spiritual powers.

Is it just me, or does this sound exactly like a cleric in D&D?

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REVIEW: The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe

Having immersed myself to the point of diminishing returns in the story of Gary Gygax and TSR, I have recently been enjoying thinking about the differences between US and UK RPG culture and how Britain reacted to the invention of RPGs.

My first attempt to investigate the question was somewhat frustrating as Livingstone and Jackson’s Dice Men turned out to be a desperately mundane business memoir by a very nice man who made some money selling table-top games only to then go on and make a whole lot more money making and selling video games. I don’t regret reading Dice Men, it was interesting in its own way but I realise if I am going to make any inroads into the history of the British RPG scene, I really need to look at histories written by obsessive nerds and those are precisely the words that spring to mind when I think of Mark Barrowcliffe’s rather charming memoir The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons, and Growing up Strange.

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Thoughts on Platforms, Monetisation and the D&D Community

So, last week news began to leak out about an investors’ conference call at which Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks and Wizards of the Coast CEO Cynthia Williams commented that while D&D is a popular brand with loads of fans and a ton of active engagement, “the brand is really under-monetised”.

This has apparently sent very online D&D nerds into a bit of a tizzy as people have started catastrophizing about what this judgement will mean for the new generation of D&D that is due to drop next year. For example, Williams added that while only 20% of D&D players run games, those that do account for the vast majority of D&D-related spending. People have taken this to mean that WOTC might be looking for ways to include player-facing micro-transactions in their online gaming platforms. The range of hypothetical player-facing products range from dice skins, improved character animations, and higher-powered character creation options all the way through to in-game buffs, magical items, and additional gold pieces that you can buy straight from the platform.

As someone who has minimal investment in the D&D5 ecosystem, I don’t really care but I think that people’s fears are genuine because the move that Hasbro is preparing to make has already been made a number of times.

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REVIEW: Dice Men – The Origin story of Games Workshop by Ian Livingstone with Steve Jackson

Games Workshop occupies a bit of a weird space in my relationship to gaming history: On the one hand, I have always really loved the art design of Games Workshop products and I remember loving the idea of Warhammer 40K and Space Marines long before I ever became aware of RPGs or even miniature-based games. Having grown up in Britain in the 1990s, it was not possible to be interested in this kind of stuff without encountering the vibes and visuals that radiated off of Games Workshop’s products. On the other hand, I became aware of RPGs a little too late to remember the days when Games Workshop were a presence in the RPG landscape and so, as far as I am concerned, Games Workshop is just that place on the high street that sells really well-designed but horrifically overpriced miniatures used in a series of really rather dull and uninteresting war-games.

Because of this slightly weird relationship with Games Workshop, I did not buy Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop out of a sense of nostalgia but rather out of a desire to learn a little bit more about the early days of the British RPG scene. It turns out that this was a bit of a mistake as while Livingstone does mention RPGs, it is merely as part of a list of products produced by a company that Livingstone happened to set up. Those expecting insights into the RPG industry or even social history are doomed to be disappointed as Dice Men reads less like a personal slice of geek history and more like a polite and really rather mundane business memoir written by a man who entered and exited the world of table-top games without much in the way of emotional attachment one way or the other. While this is a bit of a disappointment, it is also a refreshing change from the high-pitched melodrama that tends to echo through the pages of every published history of Dungeons & Dragons. This being said, the book is not without its own brand of quiet revelations.

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REVIEW: Slaying the Dragon by Ben Riggs

To paraphrase Homer Simpson: We’ve all thought about writing a history of Dungeons & Dragons at one time or another, but what about the victims? Hardworking historians like Jon Peterson, Michael Witwer or David M. Ewalt. These are people who saw an overcrowded market and said ‘Me too!’

Now… obviously there is some degree of truth to this gag. Dungeons and Dragons has been around for nearly fifty years and for most of that time the closest you could get to a book about gaming was Shannon Appelcline’s industrial histories, some stuff written from the point of view of theatre studies, and a sociological study that says a lot more about male-dominated social clubs at mid-western universities in the 1970s than it does about RPGs themselves. Then, after literally decades, the dam broke and it feels like we’re getting a new history of D&D published every six months or so.

While this is all technically true, it kind of fails to acknowledge that not all of those histories are particularly good and those that are good are quite often attempting to do subtly different things with subtly different results. Thankfully, Ben Riggs’ Slaying the Dragon is attempting something that is not only quite precise and well-executed but also a welcome addition to the field.

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Into the OSR – Post Zero

Into the OSR is an occasional series in which I write up some of the creative decisions I have made in the preparation of my old school sandbox D&D style fantasy RPG campaign. The rest of the series can be found here.

What is the OSR?

OSR stands alternatively for Old School Revolution, Old School Revival, or Old School Renaissance depending upon whom you ask and when it is you ask them. The term OSR dates back to the mid-00s when people on a number of online forums began trying to re-connect with a style of gaming associated with the origins of the hobby and the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

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Thoughts on Adventure Design and Nephilim’s “Les Veilleurs”

Looking back over the scenario reviews that I have published on this site, I am struck by the fact that most published scenarios seem to miss my personal sweet-spot when it comes to the trade-off between providing content and empowering GMs to create their own content: Those scenarios that go long on detail feel restrictive and that sense of restriction makes me second-guess and resent the author’s creative decisions. Meanwhile, those scenarios that are short on detail under the guise of allowing GMs more freedom to write and/or improvise often feel thin, poorly structured, and a waste of money. I would argue that this sense of dissatisfaction is inevitable and unavoidable.

The problem is that every group has its own energy and every GM has their own creative workflow. Indeed, before we even address the question of what constitutes a ‘creative workflow’ we need to recognise that while some groups are happy taking action and driving their own narratives, other groups will be much happier sitting back and allowing GMs to narrate a story around them. Back in the day, we would have said that the first group were simply better or more experienced players but my time in the hobby inclines me to think that this is as much a reflection of personality as it is of experience. Either way, a group of people who are happy to have a story told to them are going to want something very different from a scenario than a group that wants to create its own stories. There is no such thing as a one-size fits all published scenario. Even the greatest and most legendary of campaigns is likely to fall flat if your group don’t vibe with the type of story that a campaign contains.

Moving beyond the players to the people running the games, I think that different GMs have different levels of comfort with the idea of a mutable text. Even GMs who do enjoy improvising will sometimes struggle to deal with groups that depart too violently from narratives laid out in published materials and some people do not want to improvise at all. Indeed, if you look at your average published dungeon crawl you will find very little room for ambiguity or the kinds of mutable narratives that are unlikely to survive initial contact with a group of players determined to pursue their own goals and create their own stories. I am even tempted to say that the emergence of a non-traditional RPG scene has allowed traditional RPG designers to double-down on the use of linear narratives. After all, if you want your players to assume control over the narrative, why not play a game that explicitly gives them narrative powers?

The best RPG sessions I have ever run were those in which the players were free to explore and engage with the things that were of interest to them. While it would be impossible to produce a published scenario that allowed for every possible narrative swerve groups throw at their GMs, it should be possible to produce published adventures rich enough to encourage player agency whilst supporting a GM’s ability to deal with that freedom. This is what I mean when I talk about my personal sweet-spot for adventure design and I find it really interesting that so few scenarios and campaigns have any interest in positioning themselves anywhere near it.

Reflecting on this point, I tried to remember which (if any) published adventures manage to get that balance right and while my first thoughts went to Gary Gygax’s The Village of Hommlet (opening chapter of his famous Temple of Elemental Evil module) I then remembered the first supplement put out in support of the original French edition of Nephilim.

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GHR: Scales

Games Half Remembered is an occasional series about old games. Some of these games I have played, others I have merely admired, but all of them have stuck in my memory for one reason or another.  The rest of the series can be found here.

Published in January 1994 by INS/MV publisher Siroz (who later changed their name to Asmodee Editions) and written by the legendary designer Croc, Scales is an urban fantasy game with a contemporary setting that feels very much like it was inspired by Nephilim, the World of Darkness, and older French initiatic games like Hurlements.

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