Enter the Octopus

RELEASED FROM CAGES OF IDENTITY

“Geeks are a tolerant people. They take in ‘the other,’ the misfit toys, and not simply because no one else would sit with them at the cafeteria table. They have felt the sting of not being included. They know what it is like to not feel cool. Thus, it didn’t surprise me to learn during my quest that gamers and costumers—particularly LARPers or medieval reenactment groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA)—accept gays, lesbians cross-dressers, and transgendered folk without hesitation.

Populated with cross-bred elves and dwarves, fantasy realms make people feel not quite so freakish, releasing them from their cages of identity. Playing half- or non-human characters can be an exploration of their freak side, a new door into themselves…”

pp. 56-57, Chapter Four, “Into the Dungeon Again”

Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, by Ethan Gilsdorf.

BUY

And maybe you’re better off for it. Carry on.

For the rest of us? More here.

Fantasy Flight Games, the current rights holder for the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game, has just announced a third edition of that cult favorite.  I enjoyed the first edition of the game, and am a very big fan of the second edition (I have almost every single product in that line), and I’m not especially averse to a reboot per se, but this one doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. From the release:

(SNIP)

Fantasy Flight Games (“FFG”) announced today they will release Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition, a new version of the classic roleplaying game set in Games Workshop’s Warhammer world. This version features an entirely new innovative approach to role-playing, one that FFG hopes will attract a whole new generation of gamers to the role-playing experience…

(SNIP)

…The massive Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition box, which will retail for $99.95, contains everything a group of adventurers will need to play – four different rule-books, 36 custom dice, over 300 cards, counters, “character keeper” boxes, and much more.

First of all, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I think that the role-playing hobby is graying and that there’s little to no chance that it’s going to catch on with young people again like it did in the eighties.  Those days are over. The kids have moved on to video games and to a lesser extent collectible card games. Secondly, the fact that they’re pricing this behemoth at almost $100 bucks makes me wonder if they’re really sincere about trying to capture that “new generation” at all. Who’s really going to plunk that much cash down for a role-playing game, especially if they’re new to the hobby? The only people that I can see that might would be already established adult gamers, and I suspect that “character keepers”, scores of “custom dice” and oodles of cards probably won’t feel like role-playing to them.

James Maliszewski of the Grognardia Blog posted a fine recollection of “Fantasy Wargaming”, an obscure also-ran from the early days of gaming. Not exactly a wargame, not exactly a roleplaying game, “Fantasy Wargaming” failed at both spectacularly.

I bought the original large format of this book at WaldenBooks in the early eighties (surprising in light of the demon on the cover, but my parents, at least in this aspect of my various proclivities, were tolerant) and eventually lost it, loaned to one gaming friend or another and never returned. Well, maybe lost isn’t the best word, as I didn’t particularly consider it much of a loss at all at the time.

I felt the rules were utterly opaque and far too persnickety about minor details that at that time I felt just slowed down the adventure aspects of role-playing. I remember being upset that there were not enough Dungeons & Dragons style monsters, precious pages instead devoted to monster cows who farted their opponents to death, and there weren’t any “spells”, their place taken up by charts listing star signs, minerals and their mystical correspondences.

Many years later I found the second, smaller copy at a church booksale (!) and snapped it up. Again, I found it nigh unplayable, but as my tastes in gaming have changed, a useful sourcebook for the same minutiae that I once found so onerous: its magic system, with its emphasis on cabalist correspondences and star signs, its weapon charts and armor charts for footmen from various cultures and all of the authentically medieval monsters in its bestiary can in moderation be useful in lending some grit and verisimilitude to other medieval fantasy games.

Ironically, I think that it was a lack of moderation that made “Fantasy Wargaming” such an awful waste of money for most young gamers. Most of us at the time could memorize monster stats and the the names of dozens of obscure pole-arms, but the total medieval immersion that “Fantasy Wargaming” trafficked in was just way too much. Especially when we had been raised on the (relative) simplicity of Dungeons & Dragons.

Combining rules systems, borrowing this from that and the other and combining it with your own favorite system, wasn’t something that I ever considered as a young gamer. It was an “all or nothing” thing for me then: either you ran “Runequest” (or whatever system I was trying) exactly in the way that Greg Stafford and God intended, or you didn’t run it at all. It took me a long time to learn that “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” – then my game of choice – itself was the result of this sort of synthesis, and that its application at gaming tables around the world continued to exhibit wild variation – that no group was really playing the same game, and that this was alright.

I just finished reading a story about a French village whose residents are reporting to local news that there’s some sort of “monster” – possibly an escaped crocodile – in a nearby lake. Apparently, they’ve gone so far as to leave a chicken out to draw their monster out of hiding.

It got me thinking that you could build a really fun one-shot adventure fantasy game adventure for low-level characters out of this scenario with a minimum of preparation. Here’s the gist:

A local rural village has had several sheep – and even a small child or two – go missing in or near the village lake. Some witnesses, credible or otherwise, claim to have seen a dragon surface at dusk and dawn. The characters are charged to root out this monster and slay it if possible.

A little investigation turns up the fact that a traveling autumn carnival passed through about several  months ago, although the killings didn’t start until spring or summer. Further investigation reveals that a “dragon” was one of the curiosities on display in the carnival menagerie. The town’s sheriff, if pressed, may even be able to recall the name of the carnival owner. The owner may be locatable. In this case, with a little pressure, he’ll reveal that the “dragon” escaped a few months back, and that he’s been quietly trying to locate it ever since. He doesn’t want to let too many people know about the creature’s disappearance because he’s worried about being held responsible for any injuries, deaths or missing livestock.

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Let’s talk about Rounder. Rounder was a friend of mine back in the late 90’s or early 2000s. It was around the time that the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons had been released. At that time I had just picked up playing again after several moribund years. I had fallen out of love with D&D when the system became so setting-specific, and at that time, I had also gotten into what I thought were more “sophisticated” games – games that eschewed long classes in favor of long skill lists and open-formed character generation.

Well, I had walked into a hobby store one day and caught myself flipping through the third edition Players Handbook, and before you could say “nostalgia”, I had walked out the door with it plus the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual. Not too much later, I was running regular games for friends and family. That was about the time that I met Rounder.

MORE AFTER THE JUMP

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