Interactive Fantasy 2 - Web (14262881)

interactive fantasy 1.
2 1
2 interactive fantasy 1.2
interactive
fantasy
issue 2
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim
Rudyard Kipling
CONTENTS
3 Editorial by Andrew Rilstone
6 An Interruption from the Publisher by James Wallis
OVERVIEWS
10 GAMA: Gaming and Education Group by David Millians
12 Play-by-Mail by Wayne
15 Multi-User Dungeons by Alan Cox with Malcolm Campbell
RECREATION
22 I Have No Words And I Must Design by Greg Costikyan
40 Trend vs Dogma by Paul Mason
43 Freud and Campbell by Andrew Rilstone, Greg Stafford and James
Wallis
57 On the Vocabulary of Role-Playing by Phil Masters
81 Crossing the Line by Andrew Rilstone
ANALYSIS
92 Gaming in My Classroom by David Millians
103 The Munchkin Examined by Nathan Gribble
109 Role-playing and Dyslexia by Andrew P. Malcolm
113 Chautauqua and the Art of Interactive Education by Nicole Frein
REVIEWS
120 Castle Falkenstein; Nephilim (US); Nephilim (Fr); HÔL; Shattered
Dreams; The Whispering Vault; Khaotic; Theatrix; Karma; The Un-
speakable Oath; Grace Under Pressure; Devil’s Children; Weather the
Cuckoo Likes; Simulation & Gaming; three poetry systems
160 Next issue; subscription information
interactive fantasy 1.2 1

interactive fantasy Address all correspondence to:
Interactive Fantasy
ISSN 1356-6520 Hogshead Publishing Ltd
issue 2 [address redacted]
London [postcode redacted]
Great Britain
[phone number redacted]
Editor:
Andrew Rilstone email: [address defunct]
(editorial)
Writers: [address defunct]
Malcolm Campbell (other matters)
Greg Costikyan
Interactive Fantasy (IF) is a peer-reviewed
Myles Corcoran quarterly quasi-academic journal concern-
Alan Cox ing all aspects of interactive narratives. It is
Brian Duguid intended as a forum for the informed dis-
Nicole Frein cussion of role-playing and story-making
systems. The opinions expressed by its writ-
Steve Gilham
ers are not necessarily those of the publish-
Nathan Gribble ers, and should not be taken as such.
Steve Hatherley Hogshead Publishing recognizes the
Paul Mason status of all copyrights, product names
Phil Masters and registered trademarks, and the use of
the aforementioned within the publication
Andrew P. Malcolm
should not be construed as a challenge to
David Millians such status.
Andrew Rilstone Interactive Fantasy is interested in receiv-
Marcus L. Rowland ing proposals for articles. Prospective writ-
Greg Stafford ers must send a SAE, International Reply
Coupon or email request for more detailed
James Wallis
information on requirements, standards
Wayne and formats.
There is information on subscribing
Cover by Freddie Baer to Interactive Fantasy on page 160. For in-
formation on distributing, stocking or ad-
vertising in the magazine, please contact
Proof-reading by Jane Mitton
James Wallis or Jane Mitton at the address,
and the editorial team phone number or email address above.
All contents are copyright

©1994 by their original crea- Deadlines:
Issue 3
tors. Short excerpts are permit-
Abstracts: 1 Jan 1995
ted for the purposes of review or Manuscripts 15 Jan 1995
reference. Advertising copy: 22 Jan 1995
Issue out 1 March 1995
Printed by McNaughton and
Issue 4
Gunn Inc., Ann Arbor, Michi-
Abstracts: 1 April 1995
gan, USA. Manuscripts: 15 April 1995
Advertising: 22 April 1995
Issue out: 1 June 1995

Editorial
Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to
time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
Ivan Illich (the author of Deschooling Society) wrote that the saddest thing
he had ever seen was a small child lining her collection of dolls and
teddy bears up into neat rows in order to ‘play schools’ with them. It is
easy enough to see what saddened him. The over-regulated world of for-
malized education was the only one that the child could imagine; even
her play-world was one that re-enacted the rituals of her school.
If, as we argued last issue, children’s play is about exploration, about
discovering what their bodies and minds are capable of, and about ex-
perimenting with roles that they may one day take on in ‘real life’, then
no antithesis between ‘play’ and ‘education’ ought to exist. They are, in
the final analysis, the same thing.
That children learn through playing is no great discovery. We see
it in the counting and spelling games of Sesame Street. We see it in an
extreme form in the Steiner schools, where children under seven are
actively discouraged from doing anything other than playing. And of
course, the English have traditionally regarded ‘games’ as the corner-
stone of their educational system. The Victorian poet Henry Newbolt
(‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’) saw an absolute continuity be-
tween school sports and the Crimea, as if war were a form of cricket or
cricket a form of war; Wellington, famously, thought that Waterloo was
won on the playing fields of Eton. It would be easier to laugh at this if
the present Prime Minister had not received roars of applause from his
party conference when he announced that games—meaning, of course,
competitive sports—were fun and were therefore to be made compul-
sory for all schoolchildren. Am I alone in thinking that compulsory play,
let alone compulsory fun, is a contradiction in terms?
It is not likely that any Tory party conference in the near future will
be baying for the compulsory teaching of Dungeons & Dragons; nor have
I ever heard it argued that role-playing builds character or is a corner-
stone of the British way of life. Nevertheless, I am very pleased to be able
to dedicate this issue’s ‘Analysis’ section to discussion of the very positive
educational uses that role-playing games are being put to by a minor-
ity of schoolteachers. Gaming, as Greg Costikyan argues elsewhere this

Editorial
issue, is a democratic form of entertainment, placing the audience and

the creator on a more or less equal footing. I had feared that ‘classroom’
role-playing might overturn this principle; but not a bit of it. Each of the
four essays shows, in different ways, how role-playing games can become
a means by which pupils can participate in and direct their own educa-
tion more fully. This seems to me to represent both ‘play’ and ‘education’
in their truest forms: we explore; we experience; we learn; we develop.
Those of us educated in more autocratic systems and who spent much
of our childhood being told to put those silly games away and do some-
thing useful instead can only look on with envy and admiration.
Children play in order to grow up. Grown-ups, on the other hand,
very often play because it gives them a licence to behave childishly. While
this is not in itself a bad thing, an adult hobby that is substantially mo-
tivated by a nostalgia for an imperfectly remembered childhood seems,
if nothing else, rather sterile. So while we may recognize the child-like
impulses that make us want to play we also, very properly, seek to make
our hobby more mature.
For this reason I was pleased to receive a press release from White
Wolf Game Studio (publisher of Vampire, Werewolf, Mage and the excel-
lent Wraith) announcing the creation of the Black Dog Gaming Factory,
a new imprint dedicated to ‘producing artistic role-playing games and
supplements for an older, more mature reader’. The press release says,
correctly, that ‘role-playing games are not just for kids’ and that Black
Dog intends to ‘artistically pursue themes and issues that gaming has
never been allowed to address’. Andrew Greenberg, the supervisor of the
Vampire line, says that he wants to transform gaming ‘from an embar-
rassing hobby to something approaching art’.
Its attitude to the rest of the gaming industry may be a touch patron-
izing—I certainly don’t regard Pendragon and Amber as immature embar-
rassments, let alone ‘spastic cousins you’re afraid to let at the Thanksgiv-
ing table’ but nevertheless, the aims that Black Dog espouses are very
close to those which Interactive Fantasy was set up to propagate, so I was
fascinated to see what this new, mature, artistic line was to consist of.
The first mature and artistic release for Werewolf is to be entitled Freak
Legion. This game is said to:
deal in an explicit way with … those mortals who have been possessed
by bane spirits and turned into something evil and gross. This is a book
about violation and damnation. It is about those who not only sell their
souls for power, but their bodies, also.
The first supplement for Wraith is entitled Dark Reflections. Like Freak
Legion, it deals with ‘mature themes’:
These may include profanity, sexual situations, scenes of extreme
violence, and material which is just plain disturbing.
Just what is going on here? White Wolf may be right in their belief
that children under ten are likely to be harmed by images of the un-

Editorial
clothed human body, the sexual act, vernacular English and fictitious vi-
olence; I remain resolutely agnostic on this question. But does the pres-
ence of such things automatically make a product ‘mature’ and ‘adult’?
Might not a company that looked for themes other than violence have a
better claim to be ‘adult’ than one which simply makes it more explicit?
Do we regard Clive Barker as a more mature writer than Virginia Woolf
because he depicts more sex, violence and bad language?
Even on its own terms, it is hard to see the purpose of White Wolf ’s
new imprint. Is it really likely that there are parents who would regard
Wraith or Vampire as suitable reading for their eight year old, but would
not wish them to see Dark Reflections? If not, then for whose benefit are
these Black Dog games being created?
Even granted that White Wolf ’s sudden concern for the moral well-
being of the younger generation is sincere, is it not somewhat hypocriti-
cal to pretend that these new, more gory, more sexually explicit games—
games that they themselves describe as ‘splatterpunk’—are adult and
mature, and that they are being created in order to turn role-playing
games into a serious art-form?
Some of the Werewolf supplements depict an imaginary company
called Black Dog Games Factory. The fictitious Black Dog is run by min-
ions of the Wyrm with the objective of corrupting young people by inur-
ing them to violence. This is a small and reasonably funny joke at the
expense of the games industry. I wish I could say the same thing for the
real Black Dog press release.
In this issue’s education section, Nathan Gribble tells us how role-
playing has helped, in a small way, with the problems of bullying and
‘age-ism’. David Millians describes a game in which a potentially dull
history lesson was made exciting and became the catalyst for a lot of
spontaneous creativity—as well as immersing its players in an imaginary
world in ways that most adult gaming groups can only dream of. Andrew
Malcolm tells us how role-playing helped him cope with a disability, and
Nicole Frien shows us how whole communities can come together to
learn about and participate in their country’s history. Against this is set
the world of Black Dog Games Factory:
This is not just a book about gross gore (although gooey stuff will be
shown throughout the book) …
We leave it to the reader to decide which approach to role-playing is
more mature.

An Interruption
from the Publisher
Excuse me for butting in, but there are a couple of things I need to say.
A year ago, two freelance game designers linked by a common vision
and a couple of expensive fax-modems plotted the birth of a new kind
of role-playing magazine, to be called ‘Inter*action’. Twelve months and a
sold-out first issue later, we’ve come a long way and learned a lot. Mostly
about trademark law.
We have been informed that the word ‘Interaction’ is a registered
trademark held by the American software company Sierra On-Line in
the context of a periodical journal concerning educational and enter-
tainment software, and that our use of the word in the context of our
magazine ‘Inter*action’ is an infringement of that trademark. As a result,
we have changed the name of the magazine to ‘Interactive Fantasy’.
We wish to apologize unreservedly to Sierra On-Line and their law-
yers for our inadvertent misuse of their trademark. We were not aware
of the existence of their trademark or magazine at the time we named
ours, and it was not our intention to cause confusion between the two
products. We are deeply sorry and we won’t do it again, ever, ever, ever.
Secondly, when we founded the magazine-formerly-known-as-
Inter*action, we did so not as a money-making venture but because we
thought such a magazine ought to exist. It was a part-time project done
mostly for fun. But times and circumstances change, major games com-
panies headhunt freelancers away from smaller publishers and then de-
cide that they’re not going to publish their work after all, and we have
to eat. A new company, Hogshead Publishing Ltd, has been set up by
the magazine’s founders to publish it and other game and game-related
material; mostly projects we can’t talk about at the moment.
I want to assure readers and subscribers that Interactive Fantasy will
not become a house magazine for Hogshead Publishing Ltd. Although
it will contain advertisements for Hogshead products, it will not be pre-
viewing or reviewing our game designs in these pages. Other writers
may describe Hogshead products in their articles but, in the same way
that we’re not afraid to be rude about products advertised in IF, they
won’t have to be flattering about them. IF will remain an independent
voice.

Editorial
You and I are well aware that other magazines have made similar
claims in the past, and have proceeded to stampede over them in the
rush towards commercial viabilitity and self-congratulation. We’re not
going to do that. However, if you have subscribed to the magazine and
you feel at any time that it is becoming a little too self-serving and smug
for your tastes, write to us and we will refund the remainder of your sub-
scription, with no quibbles or qualms. (Failing that, write to us anyway
and tell us how we’re doing. There is no letters page in this issue for two
basic reasons: lack of space, and lack of letters.)
With IF, we have set ourselves an agenda of championing games
which take the concept of ‘role-play’ in new, unexplored directions; to
advance the state of the art. Hogshead Publishing, being a commer-
cial company trying to survive in a very competitive industry, may not
always be able to follow that agenda. However, if we publish a game it
should be taken as a sign that we believe in it, and we’re producing it for
reasons which are not purely financial. If you ever doubt that, just tell
yourself that the product which offends you is being published in a cyni-
cal money-making move to raise enough funds to let us produce other,
more interesting, more innovative, more artistic, less commercial games.
It won’t be true, but it may make you feel better.
Thank you for your attention. Rest assured, the rest of the magazine
is more interesting than this bit was.
James Wallis
Director of Hogshead Publishing

Overviews
There are many forms of

interactive fiction and role-playing;
the activities can be conducted
through many different media
and put to many different uses—
fun, educational and therapeutic.
In this section, the various
fields of interactive narrative
are introduced and analysed by
experts and leading authorities.
GAMA: Gaming &
Education Group
by David Millians
GAMA, the Game Manufacturer’s Association, is an umbrella group for

the entire game-publishing industry and seeks to further gaming in a
variety of ways. It is primarily a business group, but its interests are wide-
spread. The gaming industry is especially interested in receiving positive
coverage to balance the often negative image it still sometimes suffers
in the media. Game publishers are also naturally interested in any op-
portunity to expand their market.
I have known for years that many types of games can be used pow-
erfully in schools. I have used games in my own classrooms, and other
teachers have always been delighted to learn of the techniques and also
the resources available from publishers of entertainment games. I finally
grew frustrated that there was no discussion of this subject at games con-
ventions, so I volunteered to start them.
Today I have enough experience from working in my own classroom
and from talking with other teachers that I can reasonably conduct a
workshop, sharing a host of ideas and experiences with all comers. But
originally I simply wanted to gather with like-minded thinkers, tell them
my ideas and learn from theirs. This is how I still like to conduct these
seminars. Formal plagiarism may be a crime, but in teaching there is
often nothing more valuable than a colleague’s good idea. While every-
one has the right to profit from a final, well crafted product, it has often
been the more informal ideas exchanged during these discussions that
have been the most important for me as a teacher.
The occasional writer, illustrator or publisher did join the teachers,
students, parents, psychologists, trainers, social workers, prison workers
and others who regularly met at conventions and elsewhere to examine
these possibilities. Two years ago, GAMA approached me formally to
organize the exploration of these ideas. They had the support, logistical
and monetary, for programmes generated during these conversations in
the back rooms of convention halls.
A mailing list began to develop and we now publish a simple newslet-
ter four times a year as a forum for the continuing discussion of gam-

GAMA: Gaming & Education Group by David Millians
ing and education. It is free and available to anyone who is interested.

We publish articles including updates, descriptions by teachers of the
use of games in their own classrooms, reviews of games, news of recent
publications and information about discounts available for teachers.
This newsletter is also posted to several Internet USENET newsgroups,
including rec.games.abstract, rec.games.board, rec.games.frp.advocacy,
rec.games.frp.miniatures and rec.games.frp.misc.
We continue to lead seminars on gaming, education and young peo-
ple at national game conventions and we are working with GAMA in an
effort to bring games into classrooms and make them more accessible
to teachers. We correspond with teachers around the world who teach
students from six years old and upwards. They use a variety of published
and original materials: some favour wargames and simulations, while
others prefer free-form story-telling. They report great success with
these approaches.
We are developing materials to share with teachers who are not them-
selves gamers and an annotated bibliography of games to help inter-
ested teachers find games appropriate for their topic, students, schedule
and budget. We are seeking input for these projects from anyone inter-
ested in these issues and ideas.
We are interested in learning about formal studies of games and we
hope to encourage further study and publication in an effort to promote
games as an educational technique and as a hobby. Anyone engaged in
such work or aware of such projects in the past is encouraged to contact
us.
Teachers have used games for millenniums, but we usually call them
simulations. Transforming an entertaining game into an effective piece
of education often involves only a few changes in vocabulary. Many ex-
cellent teachers are excited about the opportunities offered by games.
As teachers experiment and ideas spread, games may have a wonderful
effect on students’ experiences in school. We all benefit.
If you want to learn more about the GAMA Gaming & Education Group, want
to receive the newsletter, or have other ideas, please contact: David Millians,
Paideia School, 1509 Ponce de Leon Avenue, Atlanta, GA 30307, USA (email:
dragon@netcom.com)

Play-by-Mail Games
From Boardgames to Freeforms
By Wayne
Play-by-Mail (PBM) games existed long before anyone had thought of

the term ‘interactive fiction’. The first documented evidence of games
being played by post was a game of chess between two Chinese generals
many centuries ago.
Chess was the ideal game to be run on a postal basis, as it had a
strict set of rules which were easily understood by both players. Further-
more, the players’ instructions could be written down in an easily under-
standable format and then sent through the post. Over the centuries,
PBM has continued to develop in this way, by taking rules from existing
board games and adapting them for postal play. Scrabble, Monopoly, Risk,
draughts, Cluedo (called Clue in the USA) and even noughts and crosses
have all been successfully turned into postal games.
When the first role-playing games were released, postal games
changed. Once again, the hobby adapted the rules and ideas behind
role-playing and created a postal variant. I credit Kevin Cropper with
creating the first postal RPG, since around 1980 when he turned his
long-running RPG campaign, Crasimoff’s World, into a postal game. He
advertised it in White Dwarf and was inundated with replies and applica-
tions to join. Eventually he had to give up his full-time job in order to
write hand-moderated role-playing turns for a living.
The way his game worked was simple. Using his rules—which cost
around £2.50 each—a player created a party of ten fictional individuals,
who were either priests, fighters or mages. Once a party had been cre-
ated, the player returned information about it to Kevin, who placed it
somewhere in his fantasy world. He sent the players a written description
detailing their starting location, news, recent local events and a page full
of rumours. The players had to write down the equivalent of what they
would have said to Kevin if he had been the referee of an over-the-table
RPG session, and return it to him through the post.
Kevin, using a combination of his refereeing and literary skills, would
write a response to the player’s actions and return it via the post, charg-
ing the player £1.00 for this service. The player would read the turn and
write another reply, which would be returned to Kevin, and the circle
would continue.

Overviews
If one player’s party met another player’s party, Kevin would give
each player the other’s address and they could communicate with each
other outside the game to swap information, news and other pieces of
useful information. Hundreds of people joined Crasimoff’s World and en-
joyed the atmosphere of the campaign world—the game is still being
run to this very day, albeit by different referees from another company.
After Crasimoff’s World came a glut of sword-and-sorcery-based PBMs
which allowed the players to run individual characters in fantasy worlds,
including Saturnalia, a classic among PBM games. However, as the RPG
hobby developed and changed, so did the PBM world. As RPGs such as
Call of Cthulhu, Twilight 2000 and Marvel Super Heroes went on sale, so did
their postal equivalents, and over the last ten years the RPG world and
PBM scene have coexisted.
Now, as the RPG side of the hobby is tending to lean towards inter-
active fiction with games such as Amber, the PBM hobby has once again
followed suit. Several PBM companies are running games with no sta-
tistics for characters whatsoever, leaving the players to design their own
characters simply by describing them. Games such as New Earth—which
is set in the south-west regions of the UK in the future, where every-
thing has returned to the technology of the sixteenth century and the
puritanical battle between God and the Devil is fought out by the play-
ers’ characters—cater for statistic-free postal gaming. Games like The
Wing—a ‘hard’ SF game, set on a Spiral Arm in the far future, where hu-
mans are not the superior race, and caste and status are of supreme im-
portance—are also virtually stat-free and yet provide an excellent postal
role-playing service.
Not everyone would accept that role-playing by post is true role-play-
ing. The purists of the RPG world have looked down upon the PBM
hobby in the past. These purists argue that the most important part of
a role-playing game is the face-to-face interaction between the players.
Since this can’t be done via PBM games their critics do not accept that
they are ‘interactive’.
This is true—to a certain extent. PBM games aren’t immediately in-
teractive, but they are not designed to be. Most PBM players would, I
suspect, say that they would prefer to play an over-the-table game of
interactive fiction than play a PBM game. But when they can’t enjoy
interactive games with their immediate friends, they do so with their
postal friends.
People who play PBM realize that getting a group of people together
at a certain location at a certain time requires a great deal of effort and
organization. However, postal games can be played almost anywhere,
at any time, and by anyone who has a decent postal service. Although
PBM does not allow immediate interaction, it does provide a lot of other
benefits which are not always obvious.

Overviews
For example, PBM allows the players time to think about their cur-
rent predicament and to savour the experience of working out a unique,
interesting and challenging response that will inspire the referee. Al-
though ‘thinking on your feet’ is an integral part of tabletop interactive
gaming, it is nice to have a change and try some well worked-out lateral
thinking.
PBM players are offered wider options than over-the-table gamers.
For example, in PBM a player can play a group of characters who ad-
venture together. This means that players can develope a style of multi-
character role-playing, developing the interaction between their own
characters. They also get to plan, scheme and plot themes and ideas
with a wide range of characters rather than just one. This gives the play-
ers more control over their characters’ actions and a sense of greater
involvement.
As for interaction between players, if you have played PBM then you
will realize how much money you have invested in both the Post Office
and British Telecom—communicating by letter and by telephone is a
integral part of the PBM hobby.
PBMers also interact on a regular basis by email or fax and also meet
up at pub-meets and conventions. Indeed, unlike a traditional interac-
tive fiction game, PBM games are played all the time and don’t end after
one gaming session. Roles are played continually through these letters,
phone calls and meetings—there is no waiting for a next gaming session
for PBMers!
All in all PBMers realize that face-to-face interactive gaming is a lux-
ury. They enjoy it when they can, but in the meantime they play PBM
games as an acceptable and enjoyable alternative. Indeed, PBM games
are not designed to replace games based on interactive fiction, they are
designed to complement them, and they fill the gap between face-to-
face gaming sessions admirably.
Wayne is former editor of the magazines GM and GMI, and was a founder of the
British PBM Association.

Multi-User Dungeons
by Alan Cox, with contributions from Malcolm Campbell

A Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) is a computer program which accepts
connections from a number of simultaneous users over a computer net-
work and provides them with access to a shared ‘adventure game’; that
is, a shared textual virtual environment where players can move between
rooms, interact with each other and manipulate virtual objects; all of
which is described in text.
While there are many multi-user computer games, this article re-
stricts itself to covering those with at least a minimal role-playing con-
tent. For this reason it ignores games like Doom1. Although Doom is closer
than text-based MUDs to what the immersive virtual reality of the future
may be like, the role-playing aspect is very limited when you are a super
space marine who is controlled via ‘fire’, ‘switch weapon’ and ‘operate’
buttons.
Unlike the recently popularized network combat games, the role-
playing MUDs are surprisingly varied and sometimes extremely sophis-
ticated. While common themes and ideas frequently recur, in much the
same way as they do in tabletop role-playing, the games vary enormous-
ly from one another.
What are MUDs?

The textual reality portrayed by MUDs is perhaps closest in format to
the interactive fiction text games popularized by companies like Info-
com. Players are given textual and in some games simple graphical, de-
scriptions of their environment. They are given the ability to interact
with the environment. The environment varies as widely as the setting
of tabletop role-playing games does. Gameplay can vary from exploring
educational exhibits to the infamous Genocide game where the players
are placed in a fantasy environment, given weapons—and the last alive
wins.
The history of multi-user dungeons

The history of role-playing via computer goes back a surprisingly long
way. In 1970 Crowther and Woods wrote Adventure2, which is held to be
the first text-based computer adventure game. There was very little role-
playing, the command set was basic and the goal fixed. Nevertheless,
this was the starting point for computerized fantasy role-playing.

Overviews
The earliest computer-based games that could be said to have a real

role-playing element were not computer-moderated. From quite early in
the history of interactive multi-user computing, systems supported ‘con-
ferences’ where people could talk together. Each message scrolled up
the display, tagged with the sender’s name. While intended for serious
long-distance discussions, they rapidly acquired recreational uses too,
and people began playing Dungeons & Dragons3 over them. Even today,
the playing of traditional RPGs over computers on the internet is quite
common.
While not the first such game, MUD14 which ran at Essex University
was probably the greatest initial influence on the development of MUDs,
including giving the genre its name. In 1979 Roy Trubshaw, then a stu-
dent at Essex University, wrote the basics of the initial game, unaware
that any other such games even existed.
Richard Bartle took over the game and turned it from a simple inter-
active environment into a masterpiece of interactive fiction, with beauti-
fully written prose and consistent, logical game design. Now over ten
years old, the game, in its various expanded forms, is run commercially
around the world.
The Essex MUD was played from numerous sites other than Essex
as the ARPANET and the UK academic computer network took shape.
Essex acquired several other games based on the same system—includ-
ing a multi-user Fraggle Rock. Its impact on the rest of the world was,
however, muted by the fact it wasn’t freely available as source code.
Late in 1987 I was a student at the University College Of Wales in Ab-
erystwyth, and along with a few other Essex MUD players got involved in
a project that later became known as AberMUD5. Two unplanned events
occurred that ignited the explosion of MUDs on the internet. Firstly we
ported the game to a Unix system, and secondly someone asked us for a
copy. We released it with a licence that allowed free non-commercial use,
and half the development team then failed their exams.
AberMUD wasn’t that brilliant a game and the program design itself
was poor, but it resembled MUD1 and was freely available. It spread rap-
idly and soon was influencing other people to look beyond the ideas of
the original MUD. It was very much a self-centred game. You could play
as groups but it was not necessary—and murdering the other players was
a lucrative (and highly popular) business.
Two major shifts in philosophy occurred after this time. Firstly peo-
ple began to look more towards traditional role-playing ideas. This gave
rise to games such as DikuMUD6 where people work together as teams
of players of different character classes. The system, like that of AD&D7,
is structured in such a way that group play is needed to get anywhere.
Second was the shift to pure role-playing and social interaction, with-
out competition or advancement. Jim Aspnes’ TinyMUD8 was the first

Overviews
game to embody this concept. It was a simple system that allowed nu-
merous people to interact within a virtual environment. What made it
innovative was that it allowed all the players to add to and expand the
game world. It rapidly became a cult, with games groaning under hun-
dreds of users. The original TinyMUD game world grew so large that
nobody knew it all, and eventually so big that the computer could not
run it. Tradition being what it is, they haul the original TinyMUD world
back into existence for one day each year, as a sort of memorial to itself.
Before TinyMUD the games tended to be goal-driven and competi-
tive. You got points or kicks from hacking your ‘friend’ to death with
an axe. TinyMUD and the many games that have derived from it have
moved away from this. You no longer needed to even see them as games;
they are closer to being conferencing systems and have been used both
as pure social environments and for more serious purposes9.
Perhaps the best serious example is MicroMUSE10. Initially this Tiny-
MUD-derived game was one person’s simulation of a space station. It
is now the first of several MUD systems intended for learning. What
started as a game is now becoming recognized for its true flexibility.
Conventional role-playing and MUDs

There are three types of MUDs: computer-moderated games which re-
semble multi-player adventure games with a role-playing element; hu-
man-moderated games where a number of referees or judges moderate
the rules and the MUD is used merely as a setting for play; and player-
moderated games where consensual decision-making is used to guide
the outcome of conflicts.
All three types have, like tabletop games, a method of character ad-
vancement. Some computer-moderated games call this ‘score’, whereas
human-moderated games often prefer to follow a published game sys-
tem’s mechanisms for awarding of ‘experience points’. In the consen-
sual role-play of the player-moderated games, there may seem to be no
means of advancement—but in these the advancement is often social. It
is the popular players who get selected to imprint a bronze dragon in
games based on Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, for example.
The settings used in MUDs are similar to traditional games. Over
80 per cent of MUDs listed in the internet mud-list11 are based on a
fantasy theme. A small but increasing number accurately follow the rules
of commercially published game systems (not always with permission)
and games based upon the White Wolf Storyteller games12 are becom-
ing popular and prolific. Several games are based upon well known fan-
tasy fiction, notably the aforementioned Dragonriders of Pern and Terry
Pratchett’s Discworld novels.
The similarities between MUDs and tabletop role-play end all too
abruptly once one gets down to the details. The computer-moderated

Overviews
role-playing MUD suffers very badly in comparison with a human ref-

eree. While the computer can cope happily with an instruction like ‘kill
the orc with my axe’, players cannot give it detailed instructions about
sneaking up on the left side of the orc with a dagger between their teeth.
Despite this limitation, computer-moderated games can work well;
firstly because the players rapidly adapt to the limited set of rules and
options, and secondly because the most obviously unrealistic and jarring
element of tabletop gaming, the rulebook and tables, are hidden from
them.
Human-moderated games do not suffer from this problem of lim-
ited options, but they do have their own difficulties. It may be difficult
for players to get hold of one of the game’s judges, and players may be
unwilling to resolve situations without the human judges to moderate.
The problems of this type of game are a little like those experienced in
live-action role-play, where large numbers of players can all wander off
in different directions.
The player-moderated style of gaming is perhaps closer to tradi-
tional role-playing than the others. It is unusual in that it tends to be a
group-written story rather than being guided by one gamesmaster. Such
games often describe themselves as a society in which to interact, rather
than a game with goals. Nevertheless it is very much a role-playing en-
vironment, and few people behave the same way in both reality and the
game world. In some cases the game world has acquired a complete
political system and behaves more like a society, with petitions, voting
and an elected body of overseers and controllers (often called ‘wizards’
after the highest rank in Essex MUD1). LambdaMOO13 at Xerox Parc is
perhaps the classic example of this and has acquired a complete political
system and, predictably, its own good-for-nothing career politicians.
Where next?
As electronic telecommunications become more affordable and more
commercial vendors move in, many people anticipate a growth in the
area of multi-user games and a significant increase in the quality of such
games. Because most games are written by groups of students with lim-
ited time and experience the majority are of truly terrible quality, and
are even less consistent than the first edition Werewolf manual. There are
exceptions, most notably Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle’s Essex Multi-
User Dungeon. This has become a successful commercial product in the
USA, although success in this country is still limited by the lack of very
cheap phone calls. Another interesting indicator for the future is Micro-
MUSE, the educational MUD system providing a learning environment
for children. With Vice President Al Gore’s vision of a data highway to
every school and college, the future for educational MUDs can be noth-
ing but bright.

Overviews
Alan Cox did support work for Adventure International UK writing single-player
text adventures. His first game, Blizzard Pass, was released as part of a starter
pack for the ZX Spectrum 128K. He is the main author of AberMUD, the first
multi-user game to be released freely to the internet. Further work included the
game driver and support work for HorrorSoft’s Personal Nightmare and El-
vira Mistress of the Dark. He continues to release MUD systems the latest being
AberMUD5. He works for the Institute for Industrial Information Technology
on networking products, and in his spare time on the Linux project.
Malcolm Campbell is active in the running of two role-playing MUDs, and got
involved in MUDs just too late to play on Essex MUD. He has been following
and contributing to research on virtual communities for four years.
Notes
1
Doom: Id Software, episode 1 of 3 available as shareware.
2
Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, New York,
Dell, 1984.
3
Dungeons & Dragons, probably the first published role-playing game.
4
Richard Bartle, Interactive Multi-User Computer Games, MUSE Ltd. Re-
search Report, December 1990.
5
History of AberMUD in AberMUD5 distribution.
6 DikuMUD was developed at Datalogisk Institut ver Kbenhavns Uni-
versitat in March 1990. More information is available in the USENET
newsgroup rec.games.mud.diku
7
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, TSR Inc., 1978.
8
TinyMUD is now effectively obsolete but is available on the internet
from any site carrying the comp.sources.unix archive. More contempo-
rary derivatives of TinyMUD exist: eg; TinyMUSH and TinyMUSE. These
can be found via anonymous ftp from caisr2.caisr.cwru.edu
9
Pavel Curtis and David A. Nichols, MUDs Grow Up: Social Virtual Re-
ality in the Real World.
10
MicroMUSE lives at MIT, and on the internet as ‘chezmoto.ai.mit.
edu’. The Charter defining the purpose and organization of the system
as well as numerous historical pieces are available via internet anony-
mous ftp from that site.
11
The internet mud-list. This is a list posted regularly to the USENET
group ‘rec.games.mud.misc’. Like most things on the internet it is not
published in paper form.
12
White Wolf Games Studio: Vampire: the Masquerade; Werewolf: the Apoc-
alypse; Mage: the Ascension; Wraith: the Oblivion.
13
R. David Murrey, The Voting Of Reality (LambdaMOO), META Novem-
ber 1993.

Overviews
Bibliography
Benedikt, Michael, Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 1991.
Curtis, Pavel,‘Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Re-
alities.’ Proceedings of the 1992 Conference on Directions and Implications of
Advanced Computing, Berkeley, May 1992. (Also: XeroxPARC technical
report CSL-92-4).
Dibbel, Julian, ‘Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian
Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database
into a Society.’ Village Voice Vol 38 No 51.
Dunlop, Charles and Kling, Robert, editors, Communication and Contro-
versy, Academic Press, 1991.
Garza, Christina Elnora, ‘Deeper Understanding: Game and Reality in
DragonMud, a Text-Based Virtual Reality’, Ethnographic Methods, May 1,
1992.
Germain, Ellen, ‘In the Jungle of MUD.’ Time, September 13, 1993: 49.
Hiltz, S.R. and Turoff, M., ‘The evolution of user behavior in a com-
puterised conference system.’ Communications of the ACM No. 24 (1981):
739-751.
Leslie, Jacques, ‘MUDroom.’ The Atlantic, September, 1993: 28-34.
Levy, Steven, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Dell,
1984.
Reid, Elizabeth, Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities,
Masters Thesis, Department of English, University of Melbourne.
Sterling, Bruce, ‘The Strange History of the Internet.’ The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1993.

RECREATION
This section looks at role-playing

and story-telling as they are used
in the hobby field.The writers
take a serious look at games as
they are and can be played, the
state of the art and the state of
the industry: examining games in
terms of their development, their
design, their potential and some
of the issues that they raise
I Have No Words
And I Must Design

By Greg Costikyan
There’s a lot of different kinds of games out there. A helluva lot. Cart-
based, computer, CD-ROM, network, arcade, PBM, PBEM, mass-mar-
ket adult, wargames, card games, tabletop RPGs, LARPs, freeforms. And
hell, don’t forget paintball, virtual reality, sports and the horses. It’s all
gaming.
Do these things have anything at all in common? What is a game?
How can you tell a good one from a bad one?
Well, we can all do the latter: ‘Good game, Joe,’ you say, as you leap
the net. Or put away the counters. Or reluctantly hand over your Earth
Elemental card. Or divvy up the treasure. Unfortunately that’s no better
than saying, ‘Good book,’ as you turn the last page. It may be true, but it
doesn’t help you to write a better one. As game designers, we need a way
to analyse games, to try to understand them, and to understand what
works and what makes them interesting.
We need a critical language. And since this is basically a new form,
despite its tremendous growth and staggering diversity, we need to in-
vent one.
What Is a Game, Anyhow?

It’s not a puzzle
In The Art of Computer Game Design, Chris Crawford contrasts what he
call ‘games’ with ‘puzzles’. Puzzles are static; they present the ‘player’
with a logic structure to be solved with the assistance of clues. ‘Games’,
by contrast, are not static, but change with the players’ actions. Some
puzzles are obviously so; no one would call a crossword a ‘game’. How-
ever, according to Crawford, some ‘games’ are really just puzzles: Zork,
for instance. The game’s sole objective is the solution of puzzles; finding
objects and using them in particular ways to cause desired changes in the
game-state. There is no opposition, there is no role-playing, and there
are no resources to manage; victory is solely a consequence of puzzle-
solving.
To be sure, Zork is not entirely static; the character moves from set-
ting to setting, allowable actions vary by setting and inventory changes

I Have No Words And I Must Design by Greg Costikyan
with action. We must think of a continuum, rather than a dichotomy; if

a crossword is 100% puzzle, Zork is 90% puzzle and 10% game.
Almost every game has some degree of puzzle-solving. Even a pure
military strategy game requires players to solve the puzzle of making an
optimum attack at this point with these units. To eliminate puzzle-solving
entirely would require a game that was almost entirely exploration. Just
Grandma and Me (a CD-ROM interactive storybook with game-like ele-
ments of decision-making and exploration) is a good example. Clicking
objects on the screen causes entertaining sounds and animations, but
there’s nothing to ‘solve’: in fact, no strategy whatsoever.
A puzzle is static. A game is interactive.
It’s not a toy

According to Will Wright, his Sim City is not a game at all, but a toy.
Wright offers a ball as an illuminating comparison. It offers many in-
teresting behaviours which you may explore. You can bounce it, twirl
it, throw it, dribble it. If you wish, you may use it in a game: soccer, bas-
ketball or whatever; but the game is not intrinsic in the toy, it is a set of
player-defined objectives overlaid on the toy. Just so Sim City. Like many
computer games, it creates a world which the player may manipulate,
but unlike a real game it provides no objective. You may choose one: to
see if you can build a city without slums, perhaps. But Sim City itself has
no victory conditions, no goals; it is a software toy.
A toy is interactive. A game has goals.
It’s not a story

Again and again, we hear about story; interactive literature; creating a
story through role-play. The idea that games have something to do with
stories has such a hold on designers’ imaginations that it probably can’t
be expunged. It deserves at least to be challenged.
Stories are inherently linear. However much characters may agonize
over the decisions they make, they make them in the same way every time
we reread the story, and the outcome is always the same. Indeed, this is a
strength; the author chose precisely those characters, those events, those
decisions and that outcome because it made for the strongest story. If the
characters did something else, the story wouldn’t be as interesting.
Games are inherently non-linear. They depend on decision-making.
Decisions have to pose real, plausible alternatives, or they aren’t real
decisions. It must be entirely reasonable for a player to make a decision
one way in one game, and a different way in the next. To the degree that
a game is made more like a story—more linear, fewer real options—it is
made less like a game.
Consider: you buy a book, or see a movie, because it has a great story.
How would you react if your game referee were to tell you: ‘I don’t want

Recreation
you players to do that, because it will ruin the story’? This may well be
right, but that’s beside the point. Gaming is not about telling stories.
That said, games often, and fruitfully, borrow elements from fiction.
Role-playing games depend on characters; computer adventures and
LARPs are often driven by plots. The notion of increasing narrative ten-
sion is a useful one for any game that comes to a definite conclusion. To
try to hew too closely to a storyline, however, is to limit players’ freedom
of action and their ability to make meaningful decisions.
The hypertext fiction movement is interesting in this respect. Hyper-
text is inherently non-linear, so that the traditional narrative is wholly
inappropriate to a hypertext work. Writers of hypertext fiction are trying
to explore the nature of human existence, as does the traditional story,
but in a way that permits multiple viewpoints, temporal leaps, and read-
er construction of the experience. Hypertext writers share something—
more than they know— with games designers, and also something with
the writers of traditional narrative; but if hypertext fiction ever becomes
artistically successful (nothing I’ve read so far is), it will be through the
creation of a new narrative form, something that we will be hard-pressed
to call a ‘story’.
Stories are linear. Games are not.
It demands participation
In a traditional art-form, the audience is passive. When you look at a
painting you may imagine things in it, you may see something other
than what the artist intended, but your role in constructing the experi-
ence is slight. The artist painted. You see. You are passive.
When you go to the movies, or watch TV, or visit the theatre, you sit
and watch and listen. Again, you do interpret, to a degree; but you are
the audience. You are passive. The art is created by others.
When you read a book, most of it goes on in your head and not on
the page; but still—you’re receiving the author’s words. You’re passive.
It’s all too, too autocratic: the mighty artist condescends to share
their genius with lesser mortals. How can it be that, two hundred years
after the American War of Independence, we still have such aristocratic
forms? Surely we need forms in spirit with the times; forms which permit
the common man to create his own artistic experience.
Enter the game. Games provide a set of rules; but the players use
them to create their own consequences. It’s something like the music of
John Cage: he wrote themes around which the musicians were expected
to improvise. Games are like that; the designer provides the theme, the
players the music. A democratic art-form for a democratic age.
Traditional artforms play to a passive audience. Games require active partici-
pation.

What Is a Game?
A game is a form of art in which participants, termed players, make deci-
sions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of
a goal.
Decision-making
I offer this term in an effort to destroy the inane and overhyped word
‘interactive’. The future, we are told, will be interactive. You might as
well say, ‘The future will be fnurglewitz.’ It would be about as enlight-
ening. A light switch is interactive. You flick it up, the light turns on.
You flick it down, the light turns off. That’s interaction, but it’s not a
lot of fun.
All games are interactive. The game-state changes with the players’
actions. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a game; it would be a puzzle. But ‘in-
teraction’ has no value in itself. Interaction must have purpose.
Suppose we have a product that’s interactive. At some point, you are
faced with a choice: You may choose to do A, or to do B. What makes
A better than B? Or is B better than A at some times but not at others?
What factors go into the decision? What resources are to be managed?
What’s the eventual goal?
Aha! Now we’re not talking about ‘interaction’. Now we’re talking
about decision-making.
The thing that makes a game a game is the need to make decisions.
Consider Chess1. It has few of the aspects that make games appealing: no
element of simulation, no role-playing and damn little colour. What it’s
got is the need to make decisions. The rules are tightly constrained, the
objectives clear, and victory requires you to think several moves ahead.
Excellence in decision-making is what brings success.
What do players do in any game? Some things depend on the medi-
um. In some games, they roll dice. In some games, they chats with their
friends. In some games, they whack at a keyboard. But in every game,
they make decisions.
At every point, they consider the game-state. That might be what
they see on the screen. Or it might be what the referee has just told
them. Or it might be the arrangement on the pieces on the board. Then
they consider their objectives, and the game tokens and resources avail-
able to them. They consider their opposition, the forces they must strug-
gle against. They try to decide on the best course of action.
And they make a decision.
What’s the key here? Goals. Opposition. Resource management. In-
formation. We’ll talk about them in a moment.
What decisions do players make in this game?

Recreation
Goals
Sim City has no goals. Is it not a game?
No, as its own designer willingly maintains. It is a toy.
The only way to stay interested in it for very long is to turn it into
a game by setting goals, by defining objectives for yourself. Build the
grandest possible megalopolis; maximize how much your people love
you; build a city that relies solely on mass transit. Whatever goal you’ve
chosen, you’ve turned it into a game.
Even so, the software doesn’t support your goal. It wasn’t designed
with your goal in mind. Trying to do something with a piece of software
that it wasn’t intended for can be awfully frustrating.
Since there’s no goal, Sim City soon palls. By contrast, Sid Meier and
Bruce Shelley’s Civilization—an obviously derivative product—has ex-
plicit goals and is far more involving and addictive.
‘But what about role-playing games?’ you may say. ‘They have no vic-
tory conditions.’
No victory conditions, true, but certainly they have goals; lots of
them. Rack up the old experience points. Fulfil the quest your friendly
referee has just inflicted on you. Rebuild the Imperium and stave off
civilization’s final collapse. Strive toward spiritual perfection. Whatever.
If, for some reason, your player characters don’t have a goal, they’ll
find one right quick. Otherwise, they’ll have nothing better to do than sit
around the tavern and grouse about how boring the game is. Until the
referee gets pissed off and has a bunch of orcs show up and try to beat
their heads in. Now they’ve got a goal. Personal survival is a good goal.
One of the best.
If you have no goal, decisions are meaningless. Choice A is as good
as Choice B; pick a card, any card. Who cares? What does it matter?
For it to matter, for the game to be meaningful, you need something
to strive toward. You need goals.
What are the players’ goals? Can the game support a variety of different
goals? What facilities exist to allow players to strive toward their various goals?
Opposition
Oh, say the politically correct. Those bad, icky games. They’re so com-
petitive. Why can’t we have co-operative games?
‘Co-operative games’ generally seem to be variants of ‘let’s all throw
a ball around’. Oh golly, how fascinating, I’ll stop playing Mortal Kombat
for that, you betcha.
Are we really talking about competition?
Yes and no; many players do get a kick out of beating others with
their naked minds alone, which is at least better than naked fists. Chess
players are particularly obnoxious in this regard. Still, the real interest is
in struggling toward a goal.

The most important word in that sentence is: struggling.

Here’s a game. It’s called Plucky Little England, and it simulates the
situation faced by the United Kingdom after the fall of France in World
War II. Your goal: preserve liberty and democracy and defeat the forces
of darkness and oppression. You have a choice:
A. Surrender.
B. Spit in Hitler’s eye! Rule Britannia! Britons never, never, never shall be
slaves!
You chose B? Congratulations! You won!
Now, wasn’t that satisfying? Ah, the thrill of victory.
There is no thrill of victory, of course; it was all too easy, wasn’t it?
There wasn’t any struggle.
In a two-player, head-to-head game, your opponent is the opposi-
tion, your struggle against him; the game is a direct competition.
And this is a first-rate way of providing opposition. Nothing is as
sneaky and as hard to overcome as a determined human opponent. Di-
rect competition isn’t the only way to do it, though.
Think of fiction. The ur-story, the Standard Model Narrative, works
like this: character A has a goal. He faces obstacles B, C, D, and E. He
struggles with each, in turn, growing as a person as he does so. Ulti-
mately, he overcomes the last and greatest obstacle.
Do these obstacles all need to be The Villain, The Bad Guy, The
Opponent, The Foe? No, though a good villain makes for a first-rate ob-
stacle. The forces of nature, cantankerous mothers-in-law, crashing hard
drives and the hero’s own feelings of inadequacy can make for good
obstacles too.
Just so in games.
In most RPGs, the ‘opposition’ consists of non-player characters, and
players are expected to co-operate with one another. In many computer
games, the ‘opposition’ consists of puzzles you must solve. In LARPs, the
‘opposition’ is often the sheer difficulty of finding the player who has
the clue or the widget or the special power you need. In most solitaire
games, your ‘opposition’ is really a random element, or a set of semi-
random algorithms against which you are pitted.
Whatever goals you set your players, you must make the players work
to achieve their goals. Setting them against each other is one way to do
that, but not the only one. Even when a player has an opponent, putting
other obstacles in the game can increase its richness and emotional ap-
peal.
The desire for ‘co-operative games’ is the desire for an end to strife.
There can be none. Life is the struggle for survival and growth. There is
no end to strife, not this side of the grave. A game without struggle is a
game that’s dead.
What provides opposition? What makes the game a struggle?

Recreation
Managing resources
Trivial decisions aren’t any fun. Remember Plucky Little England? There
wasn’t any real decision, was there?
Or consider Robert Harris’s Talisman. Each turn, you roll the die.
The result is the number of spaces you can move. You may move to the
left, or to the right, around the track.
Well, this is a little better than a traditional track game; the player
has got a choice. But 99 times out of 100, either there’s no difference
between the two spaces, or one is obviously better than the other. The
choice is bogus.
The way to make choices meaningful is to give players resources to
manage.
‘Resources’ can be anything. Panzer divisions. Supply points. Cards.
Experience points. Knowledge of spells. Ownership of fiefs. The love of
a good woman. Favours from the boss. The good will of an NPC. Money.
Food. Sex. Fame. Information.
If the game has more than one ‘resource’, decisions suddenly become
more complex. If I do this, I get money and experience, but will Lisa still
love me? If I steal the food, I get to eat, but I might get caught and have
my hand cut off. If I declare against the Valois, Edward Plantagenet will
grant me the Duchy of Gascony, but the Pope may excommunicate me,
imperilling my immortal soul.
These are not just complex decisions; these are interesting ones. In-
teresting decisions make for interesting games.
The resources in question have to have a game role; if ‘your immortal
soul’ has no meaning, neither does excommunication. (Unless it reduces
the loyalty of your peasants, or makes it difficult to recruit armies, or …
but these are game roles, n’est-ce pas?) Ultimately, ‘managing resources’
means managing game elements in pursuit of a goal. A ‘resource’ that
has no game role has nothing to contribute to success or failure and is
ultimately void.
What resources does the player manage? Is there enough diversity in them to
require trade-offs in making decisions? Do they make those decisions interesting?
Game tokens
You affect actions in the game through your game tokens. A game token
is any entity you may manipulate directly. In a boardgame, it is your
pieces. In a cardgame, it is your cards. In a role-playing game, it is your
character. In a sports game, it is you yourself.
What is the difference between ‘resources’ and ‘tokens’? Resources
are things that must be managed efficiently to achieve the goals; tokens
are the means of managing them. In a board wargame, combat strength
is a resource; counters are tokens. In a role-playing game, money is a
resource used through player characters.

Why is this important? Because without game tokens, you wind up

with a system that operates without much player input. Will Wright and
Fred Haslam’s Sim Earth is a good example. In Sim Earth, the player sets
some parameters and sit back to watch the game play out itself. There’s
very little to do, no tokens to manipulate, no resources to manage. Just a
few parameters to twiddle with. This is mildly interesting, but not very.
To give players a sense that they control their destiny, that they are
playing a game, you need game tokens. The fewer the tokens, the more
detailed they must be. It is no coincidence that role-playing games,
which give the player a single token, also have exceptionally detailed
rules for what that token can do.
What are the players’ tokens? What are these tokens’ abilities? What resources
do they use? What makes them interesting?
Information
I’ve had more than one conversation with a computer game designer
in which he tells me about all the fascinating things his game simulates
while I sit there saying, ‘Really? What do you know, I didn’t realize that.’
Take a computer wargame in which weather affects movement and
defence. If you don’t tell players that weather has an effect, what good is
it? It won’t affect the players’ behaviour; it won’t affect their decisions.
Or maybe you do tell them weather has an effect, but the players
have no way of telling whether it’s raining or snowing or whatever at any
given time. Again, what good is that?
Or maybe they can tell, and they do know, but they have no idea what
effect weather has. Maybe it cuts everyone’s movement in half, or maybe
it slows movement across fields to a crawl but does nothing to units mov-
ing along roads. This is better, but not a whole lot.
The interface must provide the players with relevant information.
And they must have enough information to be able to make sensible
decisions.
That isn’t to say a player must know everything; hiding information
can be very useful. It’s quite reasonable to say, ‘you don’t know just how
strong your units are until they enter combat,’ but in that case the player
must have some idea of the range of possibilities. It’s reasonable to say,
‘you don’t know what card you’ll get if you draw to an inside straight,’ but
only if the player has some idea what the odds are. If I might draw the
Queen of Hearts and might draw Death and might draw the Battleship
Potemkin, I have absolutely no basis on which to make a decision.
More than that, the interface must not provide too much informa-
tion, especially in a time-dependent game. If weather, supply state, the
mood of my commanders, the fatigue of the troops and what Tokyo
Rose said on the radio last night can all affect the outcome of my next
decision, and I have to decide some time in the next five seconds and

Recreation
it would take me five minutes to find all the relevant information by

pulling down menus and looking at screens, the information is still ir-
relevant. I may have access to it, but I can’t reasonably act on it.
Or let’s talk about computer adventures; they often display informa-
tion failure. ‘Oh, to get through the Gate of Thanatos, you need a hatpin
to pick the lock. You can find the hatpin on the floor of the Library. It’s
about three pixels by two pixels, and you can see it, if your vision is good,
between the twelfth and thirteenth floorboards, about three inches from
the top of the screen. What, you missed it?’
Yeah, I missed it. In an adventure, it shouldn’t be ridiculously difficult
to find what is needed, nor should victory be impossible just because you
made a wrong decision three hours and thirty-eight decision points ago.
Nor should the solutions to puzzles be arbitrary or absurd.
Or consider freeforms. In a freeform, players are often given goals,
and achieving them requires them to find out several things—call them
Facts A, B, and C. The freeform’s designer had better make damn sure
that A, B, and C are out there somewhere—known to other characters,
or on a card that’s circulating in the game—whatever they are, they have
to be there and the players have to have some chance of finding them.
Otherwise the players have no chance of achieving their goals, and that’s
no fun.
Given the decisions players are required to make, what information do they
need? Does the game provide the information as and when needed? Will reason-
able players be able to figure out what information they need, and how to find it?
Other Ways To Strengthen Games

Diplomacy
Achieving a goal is meaningless if it comes without work, if there is no
opposition; but that doesn’t mean all decisions must be zero-sum. When-
ever multiple players are involved, games are strengthened if they per-
mit and encourage diplomacy.
Games permit diplomacy if players can assist each other—perhaps
directly, perhaps by combining against a mutual foe. Not all multi-player
games do this; in Monopoly, for instance, there’s no effective way either
to help or hinder anyone else. There’s no point in saying, ‘Let’s all get
Joe’, or, ‘Here, you’re a novice, I’ll help you out, you can scratch my back
later,’ because there’s no way to do it.
Some games permit diplomacy, but not much. In Lawrence Harris’s
Axis & Allies, players can help each other to a limited degree, but every-
one is permanently Axis or permanently Allied, so diplomacy is never a
key element of the game.
One way to encourage diplomacy is by providing non-exclusive goals.
If you’re looking for the Ark of the Covenant, and I want to kill Nazis,
and the Nazis have got the Ark, we can work something out. Maybe our

alliance will end when the French Resistance gets the Ark and we wind
up on opposite sides, but such twists are what make games fun.
Games can encourage diplomacy even when players are directly op-
posed. The diplomatic game par excellence is, of course, Calhammer’s
Diplomacy, in which victory more often goes to the best diplomat than
to the best strategist. The key to the game is the Support order, which
allows one player’s armies to assist another in an attack, encouraging al-
liance.
Alliances never last, to be sure; Russia and Austria may ally to wipe
out Turkey, but only one of them can win. Eventually, one will stab the
other in the back.
Fine. It’s the need to find allies, retain them, and persuade enemies
to change their stripes that makes sure players will keep on talking. If
alliances are set in stone, diplomacy comes to an end.
Computer games are almost inherently solitaire and even when they
permit diplomacy with NPC computer opponents, they generally don’t
make it interesting. Network games are, or ought to be, inherently dip-
lomatic; as network games become more prevalent, we can expect most
developers from the computer design community to miss this point en-
tirely. As an example, when the planners of interactive TV networks talk
about games, they almost exclusively talk about the possibility of down-
loading cart-based (Nintendo, Sega) games over cable. They’re doing so
for a business reason: billions are spent annually on cart-based games,
and they’d like a piece of the action. They don’t seem to realize that net-
works permit a wholly different kind of gaming, which has the potential
to make billions in its own right—and that this is the real business op-
portunity.
How can players help or hinder each other? What incentives do they have to
do so? What resources can they trade?
Colour
Monopoly is a game about property development. Right?
Well, no, obviously not. A property developer would laugh at the no-
tion. A game about property development needs rules for construction
loans and property syndication and union work rules and the bribery of
municipal inspectors.
Monopoly has nothing to do with property development. You could
take the same rules, change the board, pieces and cards, and make it
into a game about space exploration, say. Except that your game would
have as much to do with space exploration as Monopoly has to do with
property development.
Monopoly isn’t really about anything. But it has the ‘colour’ of a prop-
erty game: named properties, little plastic houses and hotels, play mon-
ey. And that’s a big part of its appeal.

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Colour counts for a lot. As a simulation of World War II, Lawrence

Harris’s Axis & Allies is a pathetic effort. Ah, but the colour! Millions of
little plastic airplanes and battleships and tanks! Thundering dice! The
world at war! The game works almost solely because of its colour.
Or consider Frank Chadwick’s Space: 1889. The rules do nothing to
evoke the Burroughsian wonders, the pulp-action thrills, the Kipling-
esque Victorian charms to be gained from the game’s setting. Despite a
clean system and a detailed world, it is curiously colourless and suffers
for it. Pageantry, detail and sense of place can greatly add to a game’s
emotional appeal.
This has almost nothing to do with the game qua game. The original
Nova edition of Axis & Allies was virtually identical to the Milton Bradley
edition. Except that it had a godawful garish paper map, some of the
ugliest counters I’ve ever seen, and a truly amateurish box. I looked at it
once, put it away and never looked at it again.
Yet the Milton Bradley edition, with all the little plastic pieces, still
gets pulled out now and again. Same game. Far better colour.
How does the game evoke the ethos, atmosphere and pageantry of its setting?
What can be done to make it more colourful?
Simulation
Many games simulate nothing. The oriental folk-game Go, say; little
stones on a grid. It’s abstract to perfection. Or John Horton Conway’s
Life; despite the evocative name, it’s merely an exploration of a math-
ematical space.
Nothing wrong with that. But colour adds to a game’s appeal. And
simulation is a way of providing colour.
Suppose I think, for some reason, that a game about the battle of
Waterloo would have great commercial appeal. I could, if I wanted, take
Monopoly, change ‘Park Lane’ to ‘Quatre Bras’ and the hotels to plastic
soldiers, and call it Waterloo. It would work, but wouldn’t it be better to
simulate the battle? To have little battalions manoeuvring over the field?
To hear the thunder of guns?
Or take Star Wars: The Role-Playing Game, which I designed. I could
have taken Gygax and Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons and changed it
around, calling swords ‘blasters’ and magic-users ‘Jedi’. Instead, I set out
to simulate the movies, to encourage the players to attempt far-fetched
cinematic stunts, to use the system itself to reflect something about the
atmosphere and ethos of the films.
Simulation has further value. For one, it improves character identifi-
cation. A Waterloo based on Monopoly would do nothing to make players
think like Wellington and Napoleon; Kevin Zucker’s Napoleon’s Last Bat-
tles does much better, forcing players to think about the strategic prob-
lems those men faced.

It can allow insight into a situation that mere narrative cannot. It

allows players to explore different outcomes—in the fashion of a soft-
ware toy—and thereby come to a gut understanding of the simulation’s
subject. Having played at least a dozen different games about Waterloo,
I understand the battle, why things happened the way they did, and
the nature of Napoleonic warfare, far better than if I had merely read a
dozen books on the subject.
Simulating something is almost always more complicated than sim-
ply exploiting a theme for colour. And it is not, therefore, for every
game. But when the technique is used, it can be powerful.
How can elements of simulation strengthen the game?
Variety of encounter
‘You just got lucky.’
Words of contempt; you won through the vagaries of chance. A game
that permits this is obviously inferior to ones where victory goes to the
skilled, smart and strong. Right?
Not necessarily.
‘Random elements’ in a game are never wholly random. They are
random within a range of possibilities. When, in a board wargame, I
make an attack, I can look at the Combat Results Table. I know what out-
comes are possible, and my chances of achieving what I want to achieve.
I take a calculated risk. Over the whole game, I make dozens or hundreds
of die-rolls. Given so much reliance on randomness, the ‘random ele-
ment’ regresses to a mean. Except in rare cases, my victory or defeat will
be based on my excellence as a strategist, not on my luck with the dice.
Randomness can be useful. It’s one way of providing variety of en-
counter.
What does that mean?
It means that the same old thing all over again is fucking boring. It
means that players like to encounter the unexpected. It means that the
game has to allow lots of different things to happen, so there’s always
something a little different for the players to encounter.
In a game like Chess, that ‘something different’ is the ever-changing
implications of the positions of the pieces. In a game like Richard Gar-
field’s Magic: The Gathering, it’s the sheer variety of cards, the random
order in which they appear and the interesting ways in which they can be
combined. In Arneson and Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons, it’s the stagger-
ing variety of monsters and spells, coupled with the dungeon master’s
ingenuity in throwing new situations at the players.
If a game has inadequate variety, it rapidly palls. That’s why no one
plays graphic adventures more than once; there’s enough variety for a
single game, but it’s the same thing all over again the next time you
play. That’s why Patience, the solitaire cardgame, becomes dull pretty

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fast; you’re doing the same things over and over, and reshuffling the
cards isn’t enough to rekindle your interest, after a time.
What things do the players encounter in this game? Is there enough for them
to explore and discover? What provides variety? How can the variety of encounter
be increased?
Position identification
‘Character identification’ is a common theme of fiction. Writers want
readers to like their protagonists, to identify with them, to care what
happens to them. Character identification lends emotional power to
a story.
The same is true in games. To the degree that players are encour-
aged to care about ‘the side’, to identify with their position in the game,
the game’s emotional impact is increased.
The extreme case is sports; in sports, your ‘position’ is you. You’re
out there on the baseball diamond; winning or losing matters, and you
feel it deeply when you strike out, or smash the ball out of the park. It’s
important to you. So important that fistfights and bitter words are not
uncommon in every sport. So important that we’ve invented a whole
cultural tradition of ‘sportsmanship’ to try to prevent these unpleasant
feelings from coming to the fore.
Role-playing games are one step abstracted; your character isn’t you,
but you invest a lot of time and energy in it. It’s your sole token and
the sum total of your position in the game. Bitter words, and even fist-
fights, are not unknown among role-players, though rather rarer than in
sports.
Getting players to identify with their game position is straightfor-
ward when a player has a single token; it’s harder when they control
many. Few people feel much sadness at the loss of a knight in Chess or
an infantry division in a wargame. But even here, a game’s emotional
power is improved if the player can be made to feel identification with
‘the side’.
One way to achieve this is to make clear the player’s point of view.
Confusion about point of view is a common failing of boardgame design.
For instance, Richard Berg’s Campaigns for North Africa claims to be an
extraordinarily realistic simulation of the Axis campaign in Africa. Yet
the players spend a great deal of time worrying about the locations of in-
dividual pilots and how much water is available to individual batallions.
Rommel’s staff might worry about such things, but Rommel assuredly
did not. Who is the player supposed to be? The accuracy of the simula-
tion is, in a sense, undermined, not supported, by the level of detail.
What can you do to make the players care about their position? Is there a
single game token that’s more important than others to the players, and what can
be done to strengthen identification with it? If not, what is the overall emotional

appeal of the postion, and what can be done to strengthen that appeal? Who ‘are’
the players in the game? What is their point of view?
Role-playing
HeroQuest has been termed a ‘role-playing boardgame’. As in a role-play-
ing game, each player controls a single character which, in HeroQuest’s
case, is a single plastic figure on the board. If you are a single character,
are you not ‘playing a role’? Is the characterization of this game as a
‘role-playing’ game therefore justified?
No, to both questions.
The questions belie confusion between ‘position identification’ and
‘role-playing’. I may identify closely with a game token without feeling
that I am playing a role.
Role-playing occurs when, in some sense, players take on the perso-
na of their positions. Different players and different games may do this
in different ways. Perhaps they try to speak in the language and rhythm
of their characters. Perhaps they talk as if they are feeling the emotions
their characters feel. Perhaps they talk as they normally do, but they give
serious consideration to ‘what my character would do in this case’ as op-
posed to ‘what I want to do next?’
Role-playing is naturally most common in role-playing games,but it
can occur in other environments, as well. I, for one, can’t get through a
game of Vincent Tsao’s Junta without talking in a phoney Spanish accent
somewhere along the line. The game makes me think sufficiently like a
big man in a corrupt banana republic that I start to play the role.
Role-playing is a powerful technique for a whole slew of reasons. It
improves position identification: if players think like their characters,
they’re identifying with them closely. It improves the game’s colour, be-
cause the players become partly responsible for maintaining the willing
suspense of disbelief, the feeling that the game world is alive and colour-
ful and consistent. Plus it is an excellent method of socialization.
Indeed, the connection with socialization is key: role-playing is a form of
performance. In a role-playing game, role-players perform for the amuse-
ment of their friends. If there aren’t any friends, there’s no point to it.
Which is why so-called ‘computer role-playing games’ are nothing
of the kind. They have no more connection with role-playing than does
HeroQuest. That is, they have the trappings of role-playing: characters,
equipment and stories; but there is no mechanism for players to ham it
up, to characterize themselves by their actions, to role-play in any mean-
ingful sense.
This is intrinsic in the technology. Computer games are solitaire and
solitaire gamers have, by definition, no audience. Therefore, computer
games cannot involve role-playing. Add a network, and you can have a
role-playing game. Hence the popularity of MUDs.

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How can players be induced to role-play? What sorts of roles does the system
permit or encourage?
Socializing
Historically, games have mainly been used as a way to socialize. For players
of Bridge, Poker, and Charades, the game is secondary to the socialization
that goes on over the table. One oddity of the present is that the most
commercially successful games are all solitary in nature: cartridge games,
disk-based computer games, CD-ROM games. Once upon a time, our im-
age of gamers was people sitting around a table and playing cards; now,
it’s a solitary adolescent, twitching a joystick before a flickering screen.
Yet at the same time we see the development of role-playing, in both
tabletop and live-action form, which depends utterly on socialization.
And we see that the most successful mass-market boardgames, like Triv-
ial Pursuit and Pictionary, are played almost exclusively in social settings.
I believe that the solitary nature of most computer games is a tempo-
rary aberration, a consequence of the technology, and that as networks
spread and their bandwidth increases, the historical norm will reassert
itself.
When designing any game, it is worthwhile thinking about the game’s
social uses, and how the system encourages or discourages socialization.
For instance, almost every network has on-line versions of classic games
like Poker and Bridge. In almost every case, those games have failed to
attract much usage. The exception: America Online, which permits real-
time chat between players. Their version of network Bridge allows for
table talk, and it has been quite popular.
Or as another example, many tabletop role-playing games spend
far too much effort worrying about ‘realism’ and far too little about the
game’s use by players. Of what use is a combat system that is extraordi-
narily realistic, if playing out a single combat round takes fifteen min-
utes, and a whole battle takes four hours? Players are not spending their
time socializing and talking and hamming it up; they’re spending time
rolling dice and looking things up on charts. What’s the point in that?
How can the game better encourage socialization?
Narrative tension
Nebula-award-winning author Pat Murphy says that the key element of
plot is ‘rising tension’. That is, a story should become more gripping as
it proceeds, until its ultimate climactic resolution.
Suppose you’re a Yankees fan. Of course, you want to see the Yankees
win. Even so, if you go to a game at the ballpark, do you really want to
see them develop a seven-point lead in the first inning and wind up win-
ning 21–2? Yes, you want them to win, but this doesn’t make for a very
interesting game. What would make you rise from your seat in excite-

ment and joy is to see them pull out from behind in the last few seconds
of the game with a smash home run with bases loaded. Tension makes
for fun games.
Ideally, a game should be tense all the way through, but especially
so at the end. The toughest problems, the greatest obstacles, should be
saved for last. You can’t always ensure this, especially in directly competi-
tive games: a Chess game between a grandmaster and a rank beginner is
not going to involve much tension. But it should be possible, especially
in solitaire computer games, to ensure that every stage of the game in-
volves a set of challenges, and that the player’s job is completed only at
the end.
In fact, one of the most common game failures is anticlimax. The
period of maximum tension is not the resolution, but somewhere mid-
way through the game. After a while, the opposition is on the run, or
the player’s position is unassailable. In most cases, this is because the
designer never considered the need for narrative tension.
What can be done to make the game tense?
They’re All Alike Under the Dice

We’re now equipped to answer the questions I posed at the beginning
of this article.
Do all the myriad forms of gaming have anything in common? Most
assuredly. All involve decision-making and managing resources in pur-
suit of a goal; that’s true whether we’re talking about Chess or Seventh
Guest, Mario Brothers or Vampire, Roulette or Magic: The Gathering. It’s
universal; it’s what defines a game.
How can you tell a good game from a bad one? The test is still in the
playing; but we now have some terms to use to analyse a game’s appeal.
Chess involves complex and difficult decisions; Magic has an enor-
mous variety of encounters; Roulette has an extremely compelling goal
(money—the real stuff). More detailed analysis is possible, to be sure,
and is left as an exercise for the reader.
Is the analytical theory presented here hermetic and complete? As-
suredly not; there are games that defy many, though not all, of its conclu-
sions (e.g. Candyland, which involves no decision-making whatsoever).
No doubt there are aspects to the appeal of games it overlooks.
It is to be considered a work in progress: a first stab at codifying the
intellectual analysis of the art of game design. Others are welcome, even
encouraged, to build on its structure—or to propound alternative theo-
ries in its defiance. If we are to produce works worthy to be termed ‘art’,
we must start to think about what it takes to do so, to set ourselves goals
beyond the merely commercial. For we are embarked on a voyage of rev-
olutionary import: the democratic transformation of the arts. Properly
addressed, the voyage will lend grandeur to our civilization; improperly,

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it will create merely another mediocrity of the TV age, another form

wholly devoid of intellectual merit.

Greg Costikyan has designed twenty-three commercially published games, includ-

ing five winners of the Origins Award. Among them are Star Wars: The Role-
Playing Game, Paranoia, Toon, The Creature That Ate Sheboygan and
Madmaze. He is also the author of three novels and numerous short stories, and
resides in Jersey City with two computers and a hamster. Comments on his article
are welcome, and may be directed to costik@ritz.mordor.com.
The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Chris Crawford, Will
Wright, Eric Goldberg, Ken Rolston, Doug Kaufman, Jim Dunnigan, Tappan
King, Sandy Peterson, and Walt Freitag, whose ideas he has liberally stolen.

Note
1
In normal practice, the names of traditional games, e.g. chess, go,
poker, are uncapitalized, as is usual with common nouns. The names
of proprietary games are written with Initial Caps. This usage is incon-
sistent with the thesis that games are an art-form, and that each game,
regardless of its origins, must be viewed as an oeuvre. I capitalize and use
italics for all game names, throughout the article. We capitalize Beowulf,
though it is the product of folk tradition rather than a definite author,
just as we capitalize One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the same fashion, I
capitalize Chess, though it is the product of folk tradition rather than a
definite designer, just as I capitalize Dungeons & Dragons.

Trend and Dogma
The Didactic Urge in Role-Playing Game Criticism
by Paul Mason

Very frequently in the history of the development of ideas the urge to
improve organization and understanding leads to an over-simplification
of the processes of development. In addition, it is all too common for a
supporter of a particular viewpoint to see that viewpoint as the natural
development of previous ideas: in other words to see it as the pinnacle of
current achievement. This leads to a view of history in which ideas pro-
ceed serially, one after the other, with each succeeding idea being seen as
superior to the one which preceded it. The idea of continual progress is
at the heart of the Western conception of history (as well as of the Mao-
ist techniques of historiography, and others) but when taken in such a
simplistic manner it can lead to dangerous distortions.
No clearer example of this can be cited than that of Chinese histories
produced during the Communist period. In a country with such a deep-
rooted sense of history it was inevitable that this would be a high priority
among the Communist leadership after the take-over. However, the tra-
ditional paradigms that all useful ideas and methods were already pre-
served in history, and that the duty of the present is to faithfully follow
the precepts of the past, was replaced by the Marxist dialectical analysis
of history, albeit shone through a Maoist prism. The result, to modern
Western eyes, has an element of black humour. Every incident of the
Chinese past is interpreted in terms of the emerging struggle between
the farmers, the bourgeoisie and the Imperialists1.
I cite this example because I am increasingly reminded of it when I
read articles on the state of game design. There seems to be a confusion
between trend and dogma, and an over-literal view of the procession of
design ideas from Dungeons & Dragons onwards. Many modern com-
mentators are allowing themselves to be excessively subjective about the
issues.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the recent development of commer-
cial diceless systems: specifically Eric Wujcik’s Amber Diceless Role-Playing
and James Wallis’s forthcoming Bugtown. It is interesting that Wujcik
considered the dicelessness of Amber so crucial that he included it in the
title. What is more, Wallis considers the design of any non-diceless game

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to indicate that the designer is somehow ‘out of touch’ with the state of
the art. But let’s face it, this is a most ridiculous dogma. It’s good to be
caught up in the enthusiasm over a great game with an innovative sys-
tem. But to assert that henceforth all games must be done the same way
is absurd, and counter-productive to the free development of ideas.
Greg Porter’s taxonomy of game generations (Inter*action #1) can
also be partly blamed for this misunderstanding. If viewed in a simplistic
way, it appears to present a roughly historical progression from bad to
good to better. Inevitably such a critique will be subjective, and Porter
made strenuous (and mostly successful) efforts to minimize the impact
of his own preferences on the taxonomy. Nevertheless it contains sev-
eral arguable assertions about what constitutes progress in role-playing
games. By way of analogy, consider art. In the distant past, art was sym-
bolic, with little conception of perspective or accurate representation.
We consider progress to have been made as artists learned to represent
the world around them with increasing authenticity. And then, when a
mechanical method made such representation partly redundant, we saw
a return to symbolism. Of course, the return was informed by what had
happened in between. All the same, the progress of art has clearly not
been a straight- line process, measured on one axis.
It is the same with role-playing games. Role-playing had been around
for many years before Arneson and Gygax had the bright idea of tacking
wargames rules on to it. Although their efforts are usually derided, and
a current dogma suggests that the future lies in a return to the virgin soil
of ruleless role-playing, it is clear that D&D was a remarkable advance. It
freed role-players from the shackles of arbitrariness. Granted, the D&D
rules were frequently somewhat arbitrary themselves, but at least this was
an arbitrariness that could be seen as mirroring that of the world around
us. Similarly, the use of dice to decide events (a fixture imported from
wargames) had a number of effects: it limited the power of the referee,
it allowed the players to view the ‘fate’ of the role-playing environment
as something other than the whim of the referee, and it provided a sym-
bolic focus by which certain game actions could be represented with a
heightened sense of excitement (which, as we all know, is enlivened by
genuine uncertainty).
Since D&D, role-playing games have developed in many directions,
and many different methods have been created for handling different
styles of play. In the early days, developments of D&D such as Chivalry &
Sorcery appealed to people who enjoyed game systems in their own right.
It could also be argued that the complexity of the Chivalry & Sorcery
magic system forced player-character sorcerers to adopt the scholarly
attitude suggested by the game background, and actually aided role-
playing. In more modern times, Toon and similar games had transpar-
ently ridiculous systems to represent the absurdity of the subject matter.

Trend and Dogma by Paul Mason
And despite the trend towards more minimal systems, GURPS is still
hugely popular. For its players, the very close focus and detail provided
by its combat system assist in visualization.
We are now at an excellent point in the development of role-playing
games. Any referee has a large choice of systems and styles to choose
from. A designer who has followed something of the development of
games now has a wide selection of approaches, systems and philosophies
which can be used to design a game tailored to the requirements of play-
ers. Unlike James Wallis (Inter*action #1)2, I don’t consider that the only
advances in role-playing games are to be gained by throwing out all we
have done to date and starting anew. Sure, that’s a good thing to do
occasionally as a spur to new ideas. But check the bath water for babies
first, eh?
Diceless role-playing games, the current dogma, are not a new phe-
nomenon. I was playing in diceless games back in 1982, and I was by
no means a pioneer. Any reader of the American magazine Alarums &
Excursions during the late 1970s and early 1980s was frequently exposed
to intelligent analysis of the relative merits and demerits of such ideas.
What is good about Amber is that Wujcik has found a way to take the idea
of dicelessness and incorporate it into the design of his game so that it
suits the game environment being created.
The problem of abolishing dice as a design technique has always
been that it increased the sense of arbitrariness in the game. Particularly
at a time when commercial scenarios were leaning towards heavily plot-
ted scripts which deprived the players of most of their freedom to act
(a necessity for characterization), the dice could be seen as providing a
slight buffer for the players, or at least the illusion of such.
There is, however, another element to this design problem. As James
Wallis lucidly explained in his article in the first issue of Inter*action3, any
game environment represents to a certain extent the world-view of its
designer. The presence of a chance-based system in a game expresses
the idea that chance is an integral component of the game environment.
For those who believe this to be true in the real world, dice are a useful
tool for heightening the sensation of believability in the environment. In
other words, by modelling a phenomenon (chance, as it operates in the
world) in such a way that it is clearly understood and internalized by the
players, a dice-based system increases the transparency of a set of rules.
This is not to say the dice are an inevitable way of conducting a role-
playing game, and that they must always be used. Amber itself proves the
fallacy of this point of view. However, any designer who removes dice
from their game must recognize the effect it will have. Wujcik’s trick was
to combine the removal of the dice with an increase in the power of the
players to affect the story. In other words, he compensated for one ad-
vantage of dice by replacing it with an alternative system. All the same,

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it only works because the sense of inevitability (unless cleverness or guile

intercede) suits the background. A deterministic background lends itself
superbly to a diceless system.
So if Wujcik’s (as yet unpublished) Mystic China game is, like Amber,
diceless, then it will in all likelihood create the feeling of a determinis-
tic China, a not-at-all inappropriate environment, since the concept of
fate in various forms underlies all three of the principal Chinese philo-
sophical religions. A game underpinned less by philosophy and more
by popular Chinese fiction and movies, however, might use dice as an
expressive way of representing the changeability of life: effectively the
Dice become the Dao. Both approaches are valid per se, and the critic’s
job is to decide how well the designers have employed their design tools
in the expression of their chosen approaches.
The essential thesis of this article is this: rather than assessing the
value of a role-playing game based on dogmas about ‘ideal’ systems,
we should remember to be relative. What are the intentions of the de-
signer? What atmosphere are they striving to convey? Do the game
systems enhance or hamper the creation of this atmosphere? How do
the elements of the game fit with each other? Any review will involve
an element of subjectivity. Reviewers have their own preferences, and
should express them clearly. However they shouldn’t make the mistake
of confusing their own preferences and the ‘state of the art’ of gaming
design. Role-playing is a multi-faceted phenomenon. This is one of its
great strengths. Let’s not follow the Maoist path.

Paul Mason is an opinionated bugger whose sole claim to fame was seven months
as a tea-boy at Games Workshop. He is also the editor of Imazine and the author
of several game-books.
Notes
1 See, for example, Bai Shouyi, An Outline History of China, Beijing:
Foreign Languages Press, 1982; or He, Bu, Tang and Sun, An Intellec-
tual History of China, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991.
2 James Wallis, ‘Realism and Playability,’ from Inter*action #1 , 66-83,
1994.
3 Wallis, ibid.

Freud and Campbell
Myth, Archetype and Role-Playing
by Andrew Rilstone, Greg Stafford and James Wallis
This is a transcription of a moderated panel discussion held on Saturday 23rd

July 1994, during the Convulsion games convention in Leicester.
The panel consisted of Greg Stafford and Andrew Rilstone, with discussion
moderated by James Wallis, who also transcribed and edited the recording. To
complicate matters, the session began with a role-playing conceit: Greg Stafford
took the role of ‘Joey’ Campbell Jr. and Andrew Rilstone played ‘Siggy’ Freud the
second, the recently discovered offspring of their eponymous and better-known
parents. These roles were dropped as the discussion expanded beyond its original
brief.
Throughout the transcription, GS is Greg Stafford, AR is Andrew Rilstone
and the occasional JW is James Wallis. Members of the audience have been identi-
fied where possible: MC is Myles Corcoran; GH is Geoff Hogan; RH is Ralph
Horsley; DR is David Renton; DS is David Scott.
Andrew Rilstone [as ‘Siggy’ Freud]: I’ve been very interested by this
new phenomenon of role-playing games, this use of a therapeutic tool
in a recreational context. It seems to me that you have people who call
themselves ‘dungeon masters’ or ‘referees’, which I’m sure is bound up
with something very patriarchal, who put themselves in a therapeutic re-
lationship to the players. It looks very much to me like a session of group
therapy, except that they seem to be doing it for fun—even though the
sexual and analytical overtones of what they’re doing is obvious enough:
competition for experience and levels and magic swords, we could talk
about that all night. But there’s a game which I imagine Mr Campbell
will have heard of, Pendragon1, which has an appendix that talks in gen-
eral terms about the psychological benefits of role-playing, although this
seems to be contaminated with ideas from Jung.
Greg Stafford [as ‘Joey’ Campbell]: We feel it’s about time that these
therapeutic uses were liberated from the hands of people who set them-
selves up on the great phallic pillar of wisdom, and put into the hands of
ordinary people, into the general realm of experience. This sort of thing
does not need to be handled by professionals.

Recreation
Everybody has within themselves the ability to interact with the ar-
chetypal plane in an ordinary manner, without the leadership of profes-
sionals. I think everybody’s got it in their hearts, I think every one of
us has—well, not everybody: if everybody had this, everybody would be
role-playing, wouldn’t they? But among the varieties of human beings,
there’s a large number of us who are naturally drawn to participate in
the mythic atmosphere, and I think that role-playing games are one of
the best outlets for it these days. In the old days they had rituals, they
had ceremonies, they had a whole set of things to do so that they could
all be fed in this way, and these just don’t exist in the modern world.
They’ve been pretty well stamped out by Western culture. Christianity
has done a good job of stamping it out; and science, as people think of
it, has gone further to stamp out a lot of our own innate contact with our
dream-worlds, with our own archetypal fantasy internal/external selves.
And that’s why I think people play role-playing games: because it’s a
natural and pleasant and enjoyable thing, besides being fun.
AR: You talk about the interaction with the archetypal plane, which in-
volves ‘archetypal’, a Jungian idea, and ‘plane’, which is some sort of
mystical idea. Basically, without my Freud hat on, I’m interested in the
statements in Pendragon about the game being hardwired into mythic
archetypes, and how seriously this was intended from your point of view,
and if so what does it mean?
I read Joseph Campbell’s works, and he says that reading fairy-tales
and myths is in itself a process of psychoanalysis. The process of psy-
choanalysis which Freud talks about—and indeed Jung, although he was
working within a different framework—is a process which goes on for
years and involves unpicking all those ghastly things that have ever hap-
pened to you, and transferring your relationship with your father onto
the analyst. I want to know in what sense playing Pendragon or read-
ing ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ is analogous to that. I feel when reading
Campbell that he is excellent so long as he is talking about relationships
between the different mythologies and recurrent motifs and such, but
when he gets on to talking about what they really mean, he gets into
ideas like ‘follow your bliss’. I didn’t need to read two thousand pages of
The Masks of God and study every mythology in the world to find out that
a good way of being happy is to find out what makes you happy and then
go and do it.
GS: I understand that the author of Pendragon believes [audience laugh-
ter] that we are hardwired to this stuff, that the fact that it can be used
by some tyrannical therapist to line their pockets with your hard-earned
money . . .
AR: Which a game designer would never do.
GS: If you compare my annual income statement to that of any thera-
pist I know, you will see that this is absolutely true. But I do believe

Freud and Campbell by Andrew Rilstone and Greg Stafford
that we are hardwired. I think that ever since human consciousness was
spawned, the alienation that is inherent within our human conscious-
ness requires an outlet, an interface with the world that we can no longer
know; that all of the archetypal mythic themes are real. Whether you
want to deal with it or not, the fact is that we’re all going to die someday.
In a hundred years, no one in this room will be sitting in this room. The
fact is that we don’t know everything, we’re not even in contact with our
own emotions, certainly not with the larger cosmos. There are things we
don’t understand and things we can’t understand, and we want to have
some understanding and relationship with these things. I think that’s
hardwired into us.
Our separation from nature, if that’s an acceptable analogue of the
fall, has widened the gap between us as modern people and the world
of nature. And we do live within the world of nature, whether we want
to cope with it or not. We still require fulfilling, feeding that part of
ourselves that lives within nature, and this is done through story-telling,
or through psychoanalysis if you want to do it in that manner. Role-
playing games do the same thing. You don’t need to kill something to
understand death. You don’t need to go out and burn down a village to
experience the tremendous pleasure that we can get from destroying
our enemies. We do it with our imaginations, which is much safer. And I
think this is what it’s all about: it’s our opportunity to experience these
things, both the particular and the universal.
AR: I’m much more in tune with that kind of reasoning: the idea that
what’s valuable in role-playing or in analysis is playing through situa-
tions in some controlled way—playing through things we haven’t ex-
perienced, like burning down a village or being in a violent situation.
In analysis it might be playing through a piece of a relationship with
a parent or something similar. That is healing, because it helps you to
understand it.
What I remain to be convinced by is the idea that, when playing Dun-
geons & Dragons or Pendragon, that wizards and knights have an innate
power because they reside in our collective unconscious somewhere—
which seems to be Joseph Campbell’s thing—and that just experiencing
these things changes you in some way. My experience with playing Pen-
dragon is that you’re not acting out something mystical and hardwired
because you’re playing through the relationship of a knight and a squire
and lady; it’s a convenient code for exploring things about family life.
A Pendragon campaign I ran for about eighteen months centred on a
squire coming to terms with the fact that he wasn’t going to be as won-
derful a knight as his father. That could have had the same effect on the
players if I’d set it up as a young executive realizing he wasn’t going to
be as wonderful a businessman as his father, but it would have been less
dramatic.

Recreation
GS: I think that the fact is not that these images and symbols have a
life unto themselves, but that they are the interface through which we
work with the archetypes which do have a life unto themselves. We can’t
mistake the mask for the thing behind the mask. I think that it’s abso-
lutely true that if you play a Pendragon game you may—depending on
your game master and yourself—deal with this family thing: I think it’s
inherent within the entire story, and because these things are built into
the stories, they’re built into the game as well. And you don’t need to do
it consciously, that’s one of the splendid things. You may play through
the entire story and not deal with it consciously, but unconsciously you’ll
be understanding it.
AR: If it’s true that role-playing games have got this hidden psycho-
analytic or mind-expanding or whatever-it-is potential—this has been
addressed directly in Pendragon and in some of the Storyteller2 games—
isn’t there a danger that by saying it’s there and saying ‘do it,’ that you
could actually be taking the potential away? With Dungeons & Dragons, I
think that all of this going down dungeons and gaining experience, it’s
all undoubtedly bound up with adolescence. Getting magic swords from
wise old wizards could not be more Freudian, it couldn’t be more—well,
not necessarily phallic in the old Freudian sense, but in terms of an ini-
tiation into manhood, it’s there. It didn’t occur to us that it was there. To
lots of people, playing this very superficial form of D&D may have been
very important to adolescence. I strongly suspect that if you’d explained
all this in the D&D rulebook it wouldn’t have worked.
GS: I think if you’d explained it in the rulebook it would have been
ignored—‘Bunch of rubbish, let’s just go and kill something.’
JW: If Gary Gygax had explained it in the D&D rulebook, it would have
been unintelligible. [Audience laughter.]
GS: I don’t think that exposing the psychological underpinnings of it is
going to undermine the game itself, certainly not the enjoyment of it,
unless you have a real problem with the whole idea and say, ‘I’d never
do such a thing.’
AR: I’m not so sure. Campbell is very pro-religion and mythology but
very against the institutionalization of it. If you accept Campbell’s theo-
ries, someone making a sacrifice to a god could be doing all sorts of
crucial psychological things to themselves in terms of their relationship
to the natural world, death and their father, but I would have thought
that this would only work so long as they actually believed they were re-
ally sacrificing to a god.
People have faith in their gods, and they perform rituals which they
believe have a place in the universe and a place in their relationship with
nature and the supernatural order. Campbell says that’s good, but they
shouldn’t think that they’re actually affecting the universe or the god;
that this god isn’t real, it’s something inside them and they are acting out

something psychological. I would have thought that knowing that would

remove the faith and the participation in the myth, which by hypothesis
is what’s having the good psychological effect.
Geoff Hogan [from the audience]: The question might be about what’s
useful about psychoanalysis anyway, and whether it’s internal or resolu-
tion through transference. What I think happens in role-playing games
is that the transferring occurs anyway, so what is therapeutic about some-
body sacrificing to their god is the transference. That happens whether
the person’s got insight or not, but is actually more useful if the person
hasn’t got the insight.
AR: Are we talking about transference in terms of coming to regard the
analyst or the game’s referee as a father-figure, or in terms of putting
aggression onto the animal that’s being sacrificed?
GH: Freud moves on to say that it’s not necessarily insight that is thera-
peutic in the therapeutic relationship. What happens is that the worker
and the client work on the transference between them and as that trans-
ference gets resolved the emotional conflicts, perhaps between child and
father-figure, get resolved. Certainly Winnicott would follow on from
that by asking what are we going to do now with this person. How are
we going to give them an experience, and arrange a transference which
will help this person to develop better? Some of this comes more from
English psychoanalysis than from American, but this does lead me to
think that’s what happens in role-playing games.
The transference happens right from the time when the player cre-
ates their character and gives it a name. When I look at the names of
characters who play in my group, one woman called her first character, a
priestess, Jezarene. Which, in terms of Freudian slips and parapraxia, is
a combination of ‘Jesus’ and ‘Nazarene’. This character went on to form
a church called ‘The Guiding Light’. Of course, the player was blissfully
unaware of all this, but I’m sure that something was resolved for her
through it.
AR: What do you think would have happened if you’d explained that
to her?
GH: I don’t think interpretation would have helped her at all. But I
think that the experience did, and I was trying to focus a bit more on
that. Transference relies on a blank screen and, as the games master, all
I can be is like a screen. I have a scenario that’s a medium for people
to approach, there’s a plot with a beginning, middle and end, but I still
think of the blank screen so people can bring their own personal objec-
tives to the group
AR: It’s a blank screen which seems to be structured in a very archetypal
way: I don’t know what universe you’re in but it’s probably full of caves,
swords, beautiful women imprisoned by large reptilian things—it strikes
me as being loaded to start with, I don’t know how blank it really is.

Recreation
GH: That kind of screen gives them unconditional positive regard as

well, because they kill the monsters, take the treasure and are told that
that’s fine, so we’re giving them permission to be all those things that
as parents we can’t let our children be. That is actually quite a healing
experience.
GS: I’ve been reflecting on Andrew’s earlier statement, and was thinking
that perhaps the fault in the comment he had made was the confusion
about making the sacrifice, to think that it has no effect out there, only
in the head; that psychological assumption that there is no ‘out there’,
there is only ‘in there’—that in fact if there is an ‘out there’ then your
statement is false?
AR: If the religious ritual—I suppose there are two things that go on in
Joseph Campbell’s work . . .
GS: I’m negating Dad here.
AR: I was thinking about Campbell’s idea—I think he borrowed it from
Kant—of there being ways of relating to the ‘X’, which could be the un-
conscious, or could be God, or could be the spirit plane or whatever. If
you believe that that ‘X’ is something real, that there are spirits or an-
other dimension or whatever, then in performing the ritual you are in-
teracting with this unknown. I think my criticism of Campbell is that he
assumes psychoanalysis a lot of the time: you’re talking about the mythic
symbols being masks, but when Campbell takes the masks off, what he
thinks is underneath is something very Freudian.
GS: Or Jungian. Something psychological.
AR: Yes, but it’s something to do with the meaning of these myths being
to do with a descent into an underworld which contains a fierce father-
figure who you confront, who you either slay, or he gives you permission
to marry the woman, or who you are reconciled with.
GS: Or else you just lop his nuts off. One or the other, yeah. But yes, that
assumption is particularly psychological. Also Joseph Campbell has the
problem of presenting individualization as opposed to individuation,
the worship of the individual over all else, a particularly Western disease,
in which the individual is sacred and everything else is secondary to that.
And I think that the idea of the personalization of the imagery and the
process is contaminated by this Western ideal as well.
AR: You think the journey of the hero could be read in a more social
way?
GS: I think so. I think there’s a lot to be said for interpreting these things
not just as a totally individual journey or trip. Even Campbell says the
critical point in the journey is the return, not the voyage. If you don’t
come back with that treasure to your village or your castle, you’ve failed.
AR: To him the village is …?
GS: The rest of your psyche. However, I don’t believe that myself. I think
that this [sweeping gesture] is our village. If I had gone off and done all

my Pendragon or all my Gloranthan3 work and had it all locked up in my

cabinet at home, where is my artistic merit? If I haven’t had the opportu-
nity to share it with you and put it out there as something to be criticized,
to be played with; something to be enjoyed, even adapted and slagged
off, it has no value whatsoever. And I personally don’t think it just has to
do with the internal aspect of it.
Ralph Horsley [from the audience]: I’d like to ask how you deal with
the aspect of successful resolutions. Overcoming difficulties is admittedly
important, but the possibility that the character could be overcome is
also important within the structure of the game. Do you think characters
should finally overcome their problems?
GS: No, not necessarily. I’ve had games where it took three generations
of characters to achieve a goal. So it’s not the fact that the characters suc-
ceed, but ultimately that the player succeeds. I think that’s an important
part, but it’s not what I always use. I’m happy to have players fail.
RH: If you’re using this psychological tool where the benefit comes from
resolving the conflict, does the benefit only derive when you achieve that
end, or simply from being in that situation? Is it the participation or the
resolution?
GS: I think that success in a character is not actually important. It de-
pends on how you define success. Is the death of a character a failure?
Well, maybe. But if your character is the person who turns to the party
and says, ‘I’ll stay here, I can hold them for five minutes. Say good-bye to
my wife for me,’ and goes away, is that a success or a failure? It depends
on the terms. I think in general the interaction is more important than
the success, but the story-teller in me wants some success.
AR: In all these discussions we’re probably talking about a very small
minority of role-playing games, when the emotional commitment from
players and referees is actually going to have any effect at all. But if
you’re talking about a game in which you’ve invested a lot into your
character and they’ve become your hero-figure who has embarked on
this quest, which we’re saying might have archetypal or Freudian sig-
nificance, and they descend into the underworld and confront this evil
father-figure—and the referee doesn’t know this but the player is actu-
ally very screwed up about their own father—and they confront the char-
acter, roll a fumble and are killed … I don’t know, is that going to have
some less therapeutic effect or not?
GS: That’s dependent on the reaction of the individual. If he suddenly
gets up, throws down his dice and says, ‘Goddamn it, just like my old
man!’ [audience laughter] then that could be a very valuable insight. It’s
not up to us to judge or even to arrange his success; I think that we’d be
cheating ourselves and him. But you did raise a point: how many people
here play characters with no emotional commitment?
[Audience: Cries of ‘sometimes’]

Recreation
JW: This leads to something I’ve been working on recently: the differ-
ence between role-playing games and character playing-games. The
former is what a lot of the academic work on role-playing has been
about, in which you play a role within society, for example in a train-
ing situation you might play the Head of Marketing or the Secretary of
Defence, and you fill in the blanks of that person’s character from your
own. Character-playing games, in which you actually act the part of a
rounded personality not yourself, are far more dramatic but paradoxi-
cally, because they’re not dealing with archetypal roles onto which the
players can project themselves, the players are less emotionally attached
to the characters, despite the fact that the characters seem much more
three-dimensional.
[Audience: Cries of ‘bollocks!’]
AR: You’re saying that in a character-playing game you visualize a char-
acter very different from yourself—for example, an old woman with a
terror of cats, someone who is very different from the player, whereas
in a role-playing game I’d play ‘a fighter’ or ‘a cleric’ or ‘a magic-user’.
GS: But nobody ends up with ‘a fighter’. You end up with ‘Grug the two-
sworded, six-toed fighter who’s done this, that and the other’.
JW: Maybe you and I do, but when you’re fourteen you start off with ‘Jim
the fighter’, and he’s got a big sword and some cool armour, but essen-
tially it’s you inside that armour. You project yourself onto the archetypal
character in the fantasy world.
RH: As far as characterization went, the role-playing I was doing when
I was fourteen was a lot cruder than what I’m doing now, but as far as
emotional attachment goes I was probably a lot more upset about a char-
acter dying then than I would be now, because now I can appreciate that
a character dying while holding someone off on a bridge can be good
role-playing in itself. D&D ten years ago was a competitive game: you
were playing a game, not role-playing, you were trying to achieve some
success. You were not necessarily trying to beat the other players but try-
ing to beat the system, it was you against the person running the game.
Myles Corcoran [from the audience]: More importantly, at the age of
fourteen, when you fail in a role-playing game it’s as much as anything
a failure in your everyday life. We’re more used to failing because we’ve
got older and failed a lot more often. At fourteen it’s more of a shock
to you because you are confronted with the fact that you are not going
to live forever in the role-playing game, but at that age you’re not nec-
essarily sure that you’re not going to live forever in real life as well. By
the time you reach twenty-five, thirty-five, forty-five you’ve had failed
relationships, failed working situations, failed everything. We’re used to
the failure, and we now know that we can learn from that kind of failure,
so it’s useful to fail in a role-playing game as much as it’s useful to fail in
any other activity.

Audience member 1: Can I ask the two eminent panellists, when you
play these games, to what extent are you playing with therapeutic func-
tions and to what extent as game masters are you putting people in touch
with the unknown or whatever you want to call it? And do you think that
a game master needs to notice that they’re doing this consciously, or do
you think it just happens? I’m concerned that you might have to be a
trained therapist to run a game.
AR: When I run games, I am not consciously putting myself in a thera-
peutic role at all. In some of the games which I would rate as good ones,
I have increasingly become alarmed by types of relationships and situa-
tions breaking out in the group which seem to have some sort of analogy
with therapeutic situations.
I can remember a Pendragon character, an eight- or nine-year-old
squire who was going to become a major character, and we started talk-
ing through this character’s childhood, one on one, in quite a lot of
depth and it was becoming a quite personal, in-depth discussion. It was
a very powerful piece of role-playing and the subsequent playing of this
character as an adult was incredibly real. But it struck me that something
was going on there, there is an analogy with therapy, and should referees
be aware of the psychological potential of these games? The Storyteller
system says yes, the point of these games is the exploration of the dark
side of yourself. The majority of role-players would say don’t be silly,
they’re just games. I don’t know.
RH: You’re almost drawn into it subconsciously anyway. I play with a
group that’s been together about five years. I know that they’re quite
good role-players, they can play in character, but they’re still essentially
playing themselves, and I know that certain things will upset certain
players but won’t upset other players, I can do things to certain charac-
ters and their players will be happy to role-play those situations, while
other people will feel that they’re being put upon. You’ve got a social,
emotional situation which you can’t get away from, and it can be quite
difficult sometimes because you’re aware of that, whether you want it to
be there or not.
GS: That’s a responsibility that games masters have and it’s not neces-
sarily psychological in focus. When I game-master, even when I write
games, I never sit down and go, ‘Okay, I’m going to make this one so we
can all deal with our fathers.’ I don’t care about that. If my players have
some issues, I don’t build scenarios around that. On the other hand, the
responsibility that everyone has as a game master or just as a friend is to
try not to deliberately provoke or hurt your friends. It’s not a psychologi-
cal orientation, it’s a social one.
There is a responsibility: I don’t think you need to be conscious of it,
I don’t think you need to know that this has a potential for doing this or
that in a psychological realm, but just be aware of your own power as an

Recreation
individual. I think the empowerment of the individual as a game master

or as a player is a major issue here. It comes with the terrain.
AR: What about the first part of the question: do you consciously encour-
age your players, or enable them, to interact with the mystical unknown
as you see it? Do you consciously do that or do you just tell a story?
GS: I don’t know if I could tell a story without doing that. I do it, but not
consciously.
GH: On the subject of responsibility, my game’s been running for about
ten years and twice in it I think I’ve actually got it wrong, and I think it’s
because someone once said to me that as a referee I have the power to
make other people come into my dreams. Dreams resolve things for me
that are difficult to resolve normally. Rather than simply dream, I create
scenarios that resolve issues for me, and I let other people resolve it for
me: I watch and they talk about it to me, and I feel better and inspired.
My example may be a bit extreme, but I think that as referees we
do have a responsibility to help people reorientate into reality after the
game. I try to have a half-hour, to do something to reorientate the play-
ers.
AR: Yes, I think there are too few referees who worry about grounding
players afterwards. If you’re just playing for fun then that’s great, but if
you are playing an intense game it does worry me if people then have
to leave immediately. I’m not saying that people are going to go off and
have nervous breakdowns, but it doesn’t seem like a very kind thing to
do.
GS: I agree. It’s a great compliment to be a game master in a game
where you can emotionally engage people in a real way, but it’s a real
responsibility.
Audience member 2: We’ve all been aware of times when we’ve perhaps
accidentally stepped on a player’s major problem, and you think, ‘God,
what a gaffe! What have I done? How am I going to make it right again?’
You can see from the fact that they’re a little bit upset—perhaps they’ve
got one arm and their character gets their arm chopped off. We’ve all
done it, and sometimes they’re upset and sometimes they’re not, but you
always think they are. But the next week they’re fine—it’s all just a game.
AR: I’ve never understood what that expression means. Yes, it’s just a
game, it’s not a game and a banana.
GS: What you mean is that the trivialization of ‘game’ in the phrase
‘oh, it’s just a game’ is an artificial construct. It’s just a ‘game’—but it’s
a ‘game’!
Audience member 2: It’s something you say to protect yourself. If you
get in that state of mind, you can say, ‘It’s just a game.’
AR: If we mean ‘don’t confuse this with reality’, I don’t believe there’s an-
yone in the history of the world who’s ever confused a game with reality.
JW: When you were two or three years old you played ‘let’s pretend’. It’s

a role-playing game, and you knew it was a game, but it helped you learn
about the real world.
David Scott [from the audience]: When is a game not a game? When
does it start to overlap with reality too much, and where is the cut-off
point? I don’t think you can say ‘it’s a game’. Whatever you’re doing,
even if it’s just in yourself, you’re taking on some part of the real world.
Even if you’re just slaying monsters, if you have this feeling and have to
get it out, then it’s not a game; it’s something you really feel you have to
do at some subconscious level. I come away from monster-bashing and I
feel really good: you come away with a buzz, you don’t think, ‘Oh yeah,
I was really upset about killing the monsters’, you think, ‘That felt really
good, I really enjoyed myself.’ Perhaps the enjoyment is the release that
we get, so perhaps it’s not a game at all. Is role-playing a game?
GS: As David says, what do we mean by ‘game’? A game is real. It’s not
as real as this [knocks on table] but the experience, the emotional charge
you get can be real. It’s not something you can throw away like an old
piece of paper and forget about it, it’s a real thing. Children play games
to practise reality.
I have a friend who was messed up psychologically. His girlfriend
had dumped him, he had a crisis in faith, he was flunking school and he
couldn’t deal with his parents, so he did what half the people in America
do. Half take drugs, the other half join the military. He joined the Navy,
and became involved in Dungeons & Dragons. He was on a nuclear sub
[audience laughter] and they would go out for months and never sur-
face. This was a great time for a game, and they had very long and in-
tense gaming sessions. And at one point he said, ‘You know, I’m a pretty
unhappy guy. I wonder what I’d need to do to be happy?’ So he con-
sciously constructed his characters to test out personalities—‘I think I’ll
be a bastard with this guy,’ and tried it out; ‘I think I’ll be a really friendly
wimp guy on this,’ and tried it out through the games and really got into
it, played them in character and tried to hold to it. He used it literally as
a test ground for his personality. And he’s a pretty nice guy these days,
he’s got a wife, he’s okay with his parents, he finished school and—well,
he became a fundamentalist Christian [audience laughter] but you can’t
have it all.
But this was play! That’s the whole point. He was conscious of it as
play, but it had real effects. It’s not just a game, as if gaming is a trivial,
unimportant and unreal thing. It has real effects. It’s got its own reality.
It’s not the same reality where we earn our paycheques, you can’t eat
game-food and live, but nevertheless it has its own validity and reality.
AR: To a small child, a play-world can be much more important than the
real world. They’re not confused about which is which, but they might
be much more worried about what they’re doing with their toy soldiers
than what they’re doing at school. I think there are probably role-players

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in that situation as well.

I think people role-play for three reasons, and the most important
is to have fun with your mates, the social thing, to drink beer and eat
peanuts and mess around. The second reason is to experience a fun
story, to entertain yourself, to be hanging off the edge of a cliff by your
fingernails. The third reason is the more intense character insight stuff,
and that tends to come along when you’ve been doing good, fun, excit-
ing stories for a long time, and you’ve had all the adventures.
A mistake that I’ve made and which some commercial systems are
pushing towards is starting with the character insights, saying, ‘Hey eve-
ry-body, design these really detailed characters, put a lot of insight into
them, and we’re going to have this really intense session.’ What actually
happens is you don’t have the fun story, you don’t have the messing
around with peanuts, and everybody’s bored. There are games which say
that the purpose of the game is to discover the nature of evil and explore
your dark side, but that could actually prevent itself from doing the very
thing it’s setting out to do.
JW: The moment you say, ‘We’re going to get together to do some very
purposeful escapism,’ you’re taking that away, because the players will be
thinking about what they’re doing rather than just doing it.
DS: If I could ask our two eminent panellists, do they think that referees
should have a responsibility to channel the results of role-playing into a
more positive line? Whenever you finish a game, whether it be a hack-
and-slash or an emotional release, people come out happy. Geoff Hogan
was talking about a wind-down session which I think is a very good idea,
but do you not think that there is a need for referees to be responsible
and actually have these wind-down sessions at the end?
AR: Certainly there’s a need for referees to act responsibly. I like the idea
of a comedown session very much, but I would shrink away from a ses-
sion of sitting around and saying, ‘Well, what have we all learned from
this? How can we now apply it to our daily lives?’
Audience member 3: What’s wrong with doing that?
GS: Because it’s not appropriate to the situation. Dogma fails at some
time, always, and you need to adjust to the circumstances. If it’s a highly
charged, emotional situation, I would say yes, try to ground it down,
ground it out a bit before we go home. I would hate to set it as dogma,
though.
David Renton [from the audience]: You’ve mentioned that people
come to games for all sorts of reasons. Some come to have fun, some
bring their emotional hang-ups and explore them as part of the game.
The referee will run the game but they’re not a psychoanalyst, it’s not
their responsibility to find out why people are doing what they’re do-
ing and to help them along their lives. If they want to come, let them
explore what they want to explore. Your role as referee is to provide an

adventure setting. When the players leave the game and go away, maybe
they’ve learned something, maybe not, maybe they’re going to bring it
back next week; but it’s that individual’s problem. If they’re resolving
it in a role-playing context that’s their own personal thing. There’s no
reason why everybody else in the game and the referee has to have the
responsibility to help them.
AR: They do have a responsibility not to do anything harmful, though.
DR: You let them explore what they want to explore, you don’t start at-
tacking them or telling them what they should do.
AR: The problem is that for me, some of the things that people define
as good games are the ones where players have had a really good experi-
ence, a really intense experience, which can mean an emotionally churn-
ing-up experience. The referee could say, ‘The bit in the game where the
guy’s father was cut up on the battlefield, that was a really good session,
he really seemed very moved and upset by that,’ and then remember
that the player’s father is in hospital with cancer—that might not be a
very good thing to do, even though it gave a really good experience.
DR: You still don’t have the skill to know whether that person is going to
be damaged by that experience or heartened from it.
GS: I agree with you there.
JW: Once you’ve accepted that role-playing games are inherently psy-
chological or psychoanalytic—because they are, you can’t get away from
it, they are about archetypes and acting out fantasies—you can’t then
ignore that. You don’t have to act on it, but you can’t just say, ‘I don’t
want anything to do with it.’
GS: We’re not therapists, but one thing I know is that you can trust the
process. If it’s the mythological process that we’re activating, it has its
own solution and resolution within it, whether we’re aware of it or not.
You may tweak this person and provoke some ill-feelings but, you know,
that may be just what they need. We can trust the process.
AR: Do you think that the nature of mythology is such that it can by its
nature never go badly wrong?
GS: Oh no, it can go badly wrong, but it’s not our responsibility if it does.
Sure, you can manipulate it and intentionally be extremely cruel and
hurtful in a game. I can see the possibilities for this, but that’s not what
we’re talking about. Sure, it can go badly wrong, intentionally or not, but
in general I think the process is trustworthy.
Greg Stafford is the creator of Glorantha and Pendragon, and president of

Chaosium games.
Andrew Rilstone is editor of Interactive Fantasy.
James Wallis is director of Hogshead Publishing Ltd.

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Notes
1 King Arthur Pendragon by Greg Stafford, published by Chaosium Inc.,
1985. ISBN 0-933635-59-1
2 Storyteller is a name used to cover the range of role-playing products
produced by White Wolf, including Vampire [1991], Werewolf [1992], Mage
[1993], Wraith [1994] and Streetfighter [1994].
3 Glorantha is the detailed imaginary world in which the Runequest
role-playing game is set.

On The Vocabulary
of Roleplaying
Notes Towards Critical Consistency?

by Phil Masters

Ever since formalized role-playing first took off, players and GMs have
been developing a fairly extensive specialized vocabulary, which has of-
ten been terse, expressive and descriptive. Unfortunately for this journal
its contents have rarely been formally defined, and inevitably ambigui-
ties and variations of meaning have developed.
It would be pleasant to say that this article is designed to remedy
this. However, the author is slightly too much of a democrat, and far too
flippant, to try any such thing. As the subtitle says, what follows is a set
of notes. Others are welcome to use them to develop something more
substantial.
This article is partly descriptive (describing terms in widespread use),
a little prescriptive (suggesting some definitions that the author thinks
deserve more popularity), and frequently combative (suggesting where
existing terms, or the thoughts they embody, are misleading or misguid-
ed). This is not, perhaps, the most academically respectable way to do
things; but the author enjoys it, and he has attempted to make clear
distinctions between the different modes of discourse.
The Terms
Actor: A player or GM (qq.v.) who attempts to simulate the voice, facial
expression, etc., of a character being played, rather than using detached
or third-person descriptions of behaviour.
Actors are generally good role-players who provide the other par-
ticipants with a great deal of entertainment (intentionally or otherwise),
but at their worst, they may come to dominate a game at the expense of
less extrovert players. Actors who use their performance to intimidate or
pressurize the GM can be a particular problem.
Beer and Pretzels: A term, clearly of American origin, for games that
can be played without undue mental effort, in a highly sociable context,
often with a substantial humorous content. Consumption of alcohol or
snacks while playing such is not obligatory, but should be possible.

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The words may originally have been used by board war-game manu-
facturer SPI to describe largely non-humorous games that were simple
by SPI’s standards. It was subsequently co-opted by role-players.
Classic Beer and Pretzels RPGs usually simulate frenetically humor-
ous genres such as cartoons. However, the complexity and commitment
involved in role-playing often clash with the demands of Beer and Pret-
zels play, and many role-players tend to opt for non-role-playing games
when they are looking for such amusement.
Blue-Booking: A term originated by Aaron Allston for a role-playing
technique in which the actions of individual characters, especially out
of combat and away from the main character group, are described in
writing rather than speech, creating a permanent log of the character’s
fictional life. Blue-Booking allows for character development and minor
‘solo’ plot activity without distracting the GM unduly from the main,
group-based, plot. It evolved from the note-passing common in many
playing groups as a means of dealing with individual character actions
of which the rest of the PCs are unaware.
Many playing groups who engage in Blue-Booking enjoy it im-
mensely, and regard it as a major role-playing refinement. However, it
can be criticized on the grounds that it de-emphasises the social group
aspects of the game, and may lead players to shift from interactive gam-
ing to a highly self-indulgent form of solitary fiction-writing.
Builder: Another of Aaron Allston’s terms: a player who ‘wants to have
his characters have an impact on the world—to build institutions, to
clean up a city, to change things’.
Builders are generally harmless and even useful players, who can
add much to the interest value of a game for all concerned. However,
their interests sometimes clash with those of other participants, as they
demand that the campaign focuses on their character’s achievements.
Like any highly-motivated player, a Builder can have a strong influence
on the game—to its benefit or detriment.
Campaign: A term adopted from formalized role-playing’s early roots in
wargaming, meaning a linked series of game ‘incidents’, usually set in an
internally consistent gameworld and featuring a recurring cast of player
and non-player characters. Campaigns may be open-ended, lasting as
long as players choose to continue with them, or limited-duration, with
a fixed objective or plot-climax that terminates the story.
Some role-players have come to dislike this term, feeling that it over-
emphasizes the military aspect of games. Certainly its meaning is more
self-evident in the context of wargaming, where individual games usually
represent single, simulated battles, and a ‘campaign’ is a linking frame-
work for a series of such. However, the term has now become so firmly
established in role-playing that it is hard to foresee its demise, especially
as no better alternative seems to be on offer.

On the Vocabulary of Roleplaying by Phil Masters
Character Design: A type of role-playing game-system in which charac-

ters are created, usually by the allocation of a set number of points, with
little or no random element. Contrast ‘Random Generation’ (but note
that part-random, part-design systems are possible, and many exist).
Character Design systems emerged later than Random types, but
rapidly caught on, as they gave players greater control, and eliminated
the feeling that blind chance could produce an especially strong or hope-
less playing piece. (Hero Games’ Champions was an early, fairly complex
and typical example; its designers give due credit for inspiration to a
rather different system designed by American gamer Wayne Shaw, but
never formally published.) They might now be in the majority, but for
the continuing popularity of the long-established Random Generation
system Dungeons & Dragons (in its several variants).
A common criticism of Design-based systems, especially the more
complex ones, is that they are open to exploitation by Mini-Maxers
(q.v.), who studiously analyse and exploit imbalances in their mecha-
nisms. This is indeed often a problem; the usual answer is to say that
a Design-based system requires and presupposes a sensibly attentive
GM to bar or otherwise counter gross manipulations of the rules. A less
common but perhaps equally valid criticism is that Random Generation
systems can and do lead players to explore the possibilities of character
types they would otherwise avoid. However, many players simply reject
randomly created characters who do not meet their tastes, or become
disenchanted with games that force them to play such.
Character Disadvantage: Character Design (q.v.) systems sometimes al-
low increased character power at the cost of accepting specific Disadvan-
tages.
This can be a useful tool in encouraging the creation of detailed,
balanced characters. However, even non-Mini-Maxer (q.v.) players may
become overly interested in the benefits granted by taking extensive Dis-
advantages, leading to distorted characters. If these characters’ Disad-
vantages are enforced, they may become the centre of the campaign, at
the expense of plot and other elements; if the GM avoids this by under-
playing some Disadvantages, the players may come to regard them as
free points, and protest volubly if they are enforced later. As it is essential
for the GM to be perceived as fair, this can wreck campaigns.
Class and Level: Rules systems, such as Dungeons & Dragons, that define
characters by reference to a limited set of ‘classes’—professional or func-
tional categories (‘soldier’, ‘wizard’, ‘priest’, ‘pilot’, etc.)—and model the
development of character abilities by relatively large, fixed increases in
general ‘level’. Often contrasted with ‘Skills-Based’ (q.v.) rules systems.
Class and Level systems are long-established, and considered dated
and crude by more sophisticated gamers. However, this terminology de-
fines a set of paradigms rather than a sharp dividing line; even D&D

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nowadays has rules to incorporate a fair amount of flexibility in charac-

ters within a class, and many other systems incorporate ‘Class and Level’
concepts into other, more flexible devices: for example, many games
provide modifiable character templates linked to various professions, or
include tribes or clans which specialize in various abilities.
Combat Monster: Allston’s term for a player who ‘wants his character to
fight, fight, fight’. This is not necessarily equivalent to Mad Slasher (q.v.)
play, Power-Gaming (q.v.), or even to a taste for Hack and Slash (q.v.);
the Combat Monster may recognize the existence of other aspects of the
game, but chooses to emphasize this one.
The Combat Monster’s chief interest in a game appears to be cathar-
sis. Although such a player can contribute a useful element in a group of
PCs (most games having aspects that require a violent solution), single-
minded obsession with combat can be tiresome to other players.
Complexity: References to games as more or less complex or simple
are almost invariably concerned with rules mechanisms, and usually em-
body some kind of subjective judgement. Complexity in game settings
is almost universally considered desirable and probably inevitable if a
campaign (q.v.) is to evolve and display any kind of depth or subtlety.
Complexity in rules systems is usually mentioned only to be criti-
cized. The fashion among those who compare and contrast systems is
to prefer simple mechanisms which are seen as less likely to obstruct the
more important aspects of the game. However, a case can be made for
employing complex rules, if they genuinely model the complexities of
a complex gameworld with efficiency and descriptive power. The auto-
matic condemnation of complex games may well prove to be a passing
phase, in both individual gamers and the hobby as a whole.
Problems may have originated with rules designers who increased
complexity on the assumption that it was equivalent to Realism (q.v.) of
some kind. This led to baroque, unplayable systems. Another real diffi-
culty may be to disentangle concepts at the other end of the scale—such
as ‘simple’, ‘simplistic’, and ‘abstracted’—which are often matters of per-
sonal taste. One gamer may be content with a single die roll to resolve
the success or failure of a character’s activity, while another might prefer
hours of discussion and (possibly) dozens of rolls for subsidiary activities.
Computer-Moderated Gaming: Games in which a computer is used to
administer elements of the mechanical side of the game. This can range
from simple use of word processors and random number generators to
highly mechanics-oriented games where the main interest lies in the
challenge of working successfully within the system.
Despite the enthusiastic adoption of the term ‘role-playing’ by the
computer industry, many enthusiasts of conventional (non-computer-
ized) games consider that no computer is capable of the subtlety, flexi-
bility, and characterization demanded by ‘true’ role-playing. Extensively

computer-moderated role-playing games, in the sense defined here, are

probably rare, and can perhaps only be considered ‘role-playing’ to the
extent that the human referee acts to introduce elements of characteriza-
tion and personality.
Co-operative Playing Style: A player may co-operate usefully with
the GM, other players, or ideally both. Co-operation with other play-
ers means acknowledging their interests, the nature of their own play-
ing styles, and the need for their characters to accomplish their own
goals. As the problems set in role-playing games often require team so-
lutions, even intelligent Power-Gamers (q.v.) are usually co-operative in
this sense; the opposite approach leads to breakdowns in both the game
and inter-player social relations. Co-operating with the GM is perhaps
the more important meaning of this term. Fully co‑operative groups all
work together to explore the game, setting and plot. As the GM has the
largest task in a game, a co‑operative approach implies respecting the
GM’s personal interests and ‘style’.
As most gamers acknowledge that role-playing is a group endeavour,
co-operative play of both sorts is generally admired. However, the pres-
sure to conform to group norms may become restrictive. If role-playing
is about the creation of fully-rounded characters, such characters cannot
always be expected to co-operate with each other, and their actions may
not always be within the range expected by the GM. Furthermore, an
overly co‑operative group may develop a style that precludes much of
the excitement and uncertainty found in other games. Contrast the GM-
as-Enemy style (q.v.).
The problems implicit in all this have no easy solutions; some groups
regard failure to conform as tantamount to sabotage and selfishness,
whereas others revel in stress and the unexpected—perhaps at some cost
to campaign development.
Copier: Allston’s term for a player who is strongly interested in recon-
structing a character (or a close equivalent) from another source—usu-
ally a favourite book or film. Although not impossible in any game, this
behaviour is most encouraged under a Character Design system (q.v.).
Copiers are often enthusiastic players, but their approach to a game
is sometimes rather one-dimensional, as their sole concern may be in
adapting the game to the model.
A variant of this model is the ‘One-Character Player’, who ‘copies’
the same character—from whatever source—into every game they play.
This might indicate a deep interest in developing a particular charac-
terization; it might also indicate narrow-mindedness and lack of imagi-
nation.
Diceless: Systems in which no random-result moderation mechanism
is employed. Diceless system enthusiasts consider the use of a card deck
or other such mechanisms in place of dice to be missing the point; de-

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termination of random factors should be the province of conscious GM

and player decision.
Diceless games are sometimes lauded as the next big (or trendy)
thing, but they remain rare. The only one in commercial circulation,
Amber, inspires considerable dedication from its minority following.
Aside from market inertia, the use of randomizing elements in games
can be justified rationally because, amongst other things, they restrain
unconscious GM bias and frequently inspire the GM with possibilities
that would not have otherwise occurred to them.
DM: Abbreviation for ‘Dungeon Master’, the term widespread among
early games players—especially players of Dungeons & Dragons—as a
synonym of GM (q.v.). ‘Dungeon Master’ and the abbreviation are trade-
marks of TSR Inc.
This term has now fallen into some disrepute, perceived as implying
that a game is restricted to Dungeon-Bashing (q.v.). The same letters
were also used by the first edition of Traveller as an abbreviation for ‘Dice
Modifier’, a fairly self-explanatory rules mechanism. Steve Gilham has
pointed out that the latter expansion described the prime function of
many DMs in the former sense.
Dungeon: This word has developed a broad, loose meaning, covering
any more-or-less subterranean complex of rooms and passages, usually
in a fantasy gameworld. See ‘Dungeon-Bashing’.
Since many early games focused heavily on dungeon-bashing, the
word was often used in a very broad sense. Any Scenario (q.v.) that fo-
cused on a specific location in detail might be termed a Dungeon and
sometimes, the usage became even broader—see ‘World’. This terminol-
ogy has been inherited by computerized MUDs (q.v.).
Dungeon-Bashing: A term used, with varying levels of self-deprecation
and disdain, for the once-common style of game play based around the
exploration of (mostly subterranean) complexes, combat with monsters
and the plundering of treasure. This type of game (aptly summarized,
possibly first by Steve Gilham, as ‘skirmish wargaming in an under-
ground menagerie’) does not embody many of the more intellectually
respectable aspects of the hobby. Nonetheless, even the most pretentious
of gamers may sometimes become nostalgic for its simple pleasures—a
fact that may partly explain the continuing widespread enthusiasm for
variations of the original Dungeons & Dragons rules.
Entropy: See Power Level.
Four-Way Split: A concept suggested by Glenn Blacow as long ago as
the late 1970s; the categorization of types of role-playing behaviour into
‘Role-Playing’, ‘Story-Telling’, ‘Powergaming’, and ‘Wargaming’. Blacow
may have been the first to attempt to formalize use of these four terms,
much as they are defined in this article.
Freeform: Perhaps the role-playing game term with the widest and most

deceptively subtle range of functional definitions. Different groups have

defined it variously as play with no fixed set of rules; games with an ex-
tremely loosely-defined setting, high levels of player input to the plot,
and simple rules; diceless games; and games with a large element of
Live-Action (q.v.) play and a great deal of non-violent social interaction
between characters.
It would be pleasant to achieve a consensus on this term, but since all
the other meanings would require new names, ambiguity looks to be the
pattern for the foreseeable future. The word ‘freeform’ should only be
used with care and a lot of attached explanation.
Generations (of Games): Attempts to define ‘generations’ of games, in
terms of qualitative developments in rules mechanisms, playing styles or
whatever, have been made on several occasions. However, no consensus
seems ever to have been reached on such analyses, and this term cannot
yet be regarded as defined.
(See also ‘Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going’ by Greg Porter, in
the first issue of Inter*action.)
Genre Fiend: Yet another Allston term, referring to a player (or GM)
who is determined that a game should emulate all the conventions,
Tropes (q.v.), and possibly clichés of the fictional genre on which it is
based.
To the large extent that role-playing games are a highly derivative
form, the genre fiend can be a useful stabilizing force. However, such
an individual can also seem tiresomely obsessive in their attachment to
cliché, and may disrupt attempts by other individuals to explore, modify
or subvert the genre.
GM: Abbreviation for ‘Games Master’ (sometimes, perhaps pretentious-
ly, ‘Game Moderator’)—the individual acting as referee and scene-setter
in a game.
Many games have used their own names for this function, starting
with Dungeons & Dragons’s ‘DM’ (q.v.), and including Call of Cthulhu’s
‘Keeper (of the Arcane Lore)’, Toon’s ‘Animator’ and Ars Magica’s ‘Sto-
ryguide’; early variations were more or less serious attempts to avoid
the genre-specific implications of ‘DM’ before ‘GM’ became widespread,
while later efforts attempted to emphasize various aspects of the games.
Traveller, rather puritanically, prefers ‘Referee’. However, ‘GM’ has be-
come commonplace and is certainly useful, simply because of its flexibil-
ity (and despite the slight hint of sexism—‘Games Mistresses’ are rarely
discussed).1
GM-as-Enemy Playing Style: The opposite of fully Co‑operative play
(q.v.)—an approach to gaming in which the GM is assumed to be setting
the characters serious and potentially lethal problems, and the players
set out to defeat these by any means permitted by the rules. In such a
game, disruption of the GM’s intentions is often seen as desirable.

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Obviously, given the power available to any GM, unrestrained hos-

tility from that quarter will quickly lead to the extermination of player
characters; however, GMs who are willing to play ‘hard but fair’ can pro-
vide players with genuine but not insuperable challenges. This may lead
to a more exciting and engrossing game than one with overmuch co-
operation—in which players may come to rely on friendship with the
GM to save their characters from the consequences of inept behaviour.
Because of the need to maintain a balance of perceived threat and sur-
vivability, and the incentive to players to identify and disrupt the GM’s
plans, true ‘GM-as-Enemy’ games are a great deal harder to referee than
may appear.
Like truly ‘Co‑operative’ games, ‘GM-as-Enemy’ play is something of
an extreme case; the paradigm may only rarely be found in reality, and
most real games contain elements of both styles. However, the two terms
reflect real components of gamers’ mind-sets—differences in expecta-
tions between players and GM in this area has probably led to more
problems in games than almost anything else.
Hack and Slash (often abbreviated to Hack’n’Slash): A style of game
dominated by combat, in which player-characters resolve most problems
by violence, and character development is de-emphasized.
Although all styles of game have their occasional defenders,
Hack’n’Slash is widely regarded as tedious; players who never discover
anything else seem certain to sooner or later become bored with the
entire hobby.
Linear (Plots): Scenario (q.v.) or Campaign (q.v.) plots with a single nar-
rative strand—usually heavily enforced by the GM. Linear plotting is of-
ten the result of a determined Story-Teller (q.v.) GM or games designer,
or simply an unimaginative one, who conceives of a scenario consisting
of a complete set of incidents leading to a single conclusion, and who
is not prepared, practically or emotionally, for any deviation by players
from this plan.
Linear plots are easier to design, can be entertaining and are of-
ten the best that a beginning GM can manage. However, they can also
lead to problems with players who expect more or who simply delight in
wrong-footing the GM; improvement in refereeing skills is often a mat-
ter of learning greater flexibility. Arguably, highly skilled GMs may learn
to anticipate player behaviour so well that they can create plots that are
highly linear, while retaining an illusion of complete PC free will.
No obvious word for the opposite of ‘linearity’ has yet been suggest-
ed, but would be useful.
Live-Action Role-Playing (‘LARP’; occasionally ‘LRP’): Games in
which players act out many elements of their characters’ activities in
person—usually while wearing more or less appropriate costumes. To
avoid injury to the players, combat is simulated with dummy weapons

and a large number of rules and restrictions. Live Action play seems to
have evolved mostly from a large number of games in which the primary
activities were combat and treasure-hunting—which in turn owe their
inspiration to Dungeon-Bashing (q.v.) table-top play.
Some gamers have an aversion to LARP, for several reasons. Those
who have studied other forms of simulated or real combat tend to argue
that LARP combat is so stylized and frivolous that it bears no relation to
reality. Further, obvious limitations make LARP less effective than Tab-
letop (q.v.) play at simulating extreme environments, bizarre characters
(or simply characters of the opposite sex) and some social interactions.
To the extent that players bring their personal attributes and social skills
to their characters, it also limits and distorts characterization.
A third reason is that the general press, in attempting to find photo-
genic aspects of the hobby as a whole, tend to concentrate on individuals
wearing bizarre costumes and wielding obviously fake weapons, creating
an eccentric and limited image that less extrovert gamers find tiresome.
To the extent that the costumes imply and flaunt a childish detachment
from reality, this ‘image problem’ is a serious one. That said, many LARP
players point out that, combat aside, a little practical experience soon
expands a player’s appreciation of certain aspects of adventuring—such
as what can and cannot be carried and used in a dark, narrow, under-
ground corridor—and anyway, they enjoy their version of the hobby,
and should not be deterred by a few lazy newspaper reporters. Certainly
LARP is not going to disappear in the foreseeable future.
(See also ‘Live Role-Playing: the meta-play’ by Jay Gooby, in the first
issue of Inter*action.)
Mad Slasher: Aaron Allston’s label for a type of gamer at the extreme
end of the Combat Monster and Hack and Slash spectrum (qq.v.); some-
one whose sole concern with games is to use the combat system for per-
sonal catharsis. The Mad Slasher’s character responds to all obstructions
by killing the other characters involved.
Generally, Mad Slashers are either immature personalities who find
the repetitious description of extreme violence amusing, or genuinely
disturbed and frustrated individuals. Fortunately, the former are per-
haps the more common, and less violent playing groups eventually re-
spond by ejecting them. However, there is a suggestion that, like other
player vices, this one has a subtle, player-level variation.
The Player-Level Mad Slasher is one who responds to personal frus-
trations by attempting to dominate the player group. This is unlikely to
involve physical force, but it can involve a great deal of psychological
and emotional manipulation. This type of play is also seen from person-
ally assertive Power-Gamers (q.v.), and here the two types may overlap.
Mini-Maxer: A player who attempts to exploit every aspect of a game’s
rules to maximize character power for minimum cost of any kind—

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hence, by implication, a variety of Power-Gamer (q.v.).

Mini-Maxing is often easiest within Complex (q.v.) Character Design
(q.v.) systems, but any game that allows a degree of player choice within
the rule system—say, in combat—may potentially be susceptible to this
treatment. Mini-Maxers are not widely admired, at least in their extreme
form, but many numerically adept players behave this way from time to
time, and they at least serve to demonstrate the potentialities and quirks
of any system. Arguably, too few games on the market were properly
play-tested by competent Mini-Maxers before publication.
Modes (Child, Parent, and Adult): Terms for styles of behaviour, bor-
rowed from a brand of pop psychology by the author of this article.
Three Modes are defined. Child-Mode behaviour is playful, irreverent
and frivolous. Parent-Mode behaviour involves criticism of others and
an implicit assertion of superiority. Adult-Mode behaviour is practical
and pragmatic, and accepts responsibility for necessary tasks.
Role-players and their characters tend to demonstrate all three
modes; arguably, a good campaign demands all three. GMs operate
primarily in Adult-Mode; Child-Mode behaviour can destroy the at-
mosphere and sense of structure in a game, and Parent-Mode GMing
tends to be perceived as restrictive and coercive. The players have more
freedom, and often amuse themselves by shifting to Child-Mode, but if
they wish to achieve a goal, some Adult-Mode behaviour is necessary.
Parent-Mode play is rare, but not unknown, especially from players who
become annoyed with others who will not shift out of Child-Mode, or
with other problems of any kind.
Character behaviour tends to reflect the player Mode—but not al-
ways completely; a Child-Mode player may depict a character behav-
ing in a ludicrously excessive Adult-Mode or Parent-Mode way, while an
Adult-Mode player can acknowledge a character’s tendency to behave in
any Mode. Parent-Mode players tend to make their characters behave in
Parent-Mode, but may ‘pointedly’ shift to Adult Mode.
MUD: Abbreviation for ‘Multi-User Dungeon’, a form of computerized
game, usually played over networks and longer-range telecommunica-
tions links, in which a number of participants operate characters who
can interact with both the environment and each other. MUDs are su-
pervised by human referees, but much of the routine activity is purely
computer-controlled. The activity has generated its own ‘sub-subcul-
ture’, which overlaps with the rest of the role-playing community, but
retains a clear separate existence.
MUDs may be considered an impressive example of heavily Com-
puter-Moderated Gaming (q.v.), and have achieved considerable com-
plexity in recent years. However, the practical constraints imposed by
the medium imply limitations. For example, the need for a relatively
simple, definable setting leads to a style of game-world that many table-

top gamers would consider rather dated; the retention, in this context,
of the word ‘Dungeon’ (q.v.) is indicative. However, MUDs are a thriving
area (albeit with a relatively small following as yet), with advantages of
their own, even in terms of characterization; a player who cannot be
seen by other participants may feel less inhibited about playing charac-
ters of the opposite sex, with exotic personal quirks, or whatever. Future
developments in the world of MUDs may well be very interesting.
(See also ‘Multi-User Dungeons’ by Alan Cox and Malcolm Camp-
bell, in this issue.)
Narra-Real: See Realism.
NPC: Abbreviation for ‘Non-Player Character’—a game-world charac-
ter operated by the GM.
Some writers seem to have taken against this term, presumably be-
cause the GM is, in a sense, a player, or because the term is defined
as a negative—which may indicate limited personality development in
the NPC. Alternatives on offer include, plausibly enough, ‘GMC’ (‘GM
Character’). However, ‘NPC’ is yet another term that is probably too
well-established to shift.
Patron: A stock NPC role first formally defined in Traveller, but known
in many games. They are socially significant characters who employ the
PCs to perform a particular task, conferring financial and social benefits
on them in exchange for (in the game world) assistance and (on the GM/
player level) willing involvement in the plot.
As Traveller demonstrated, such functions could sometimes be per-
formed by characters who did not meet any traditional definition of a
‘Patron’, such as an impoverished bar-fly who provides the PCs with a
string of interesting clues. Role-playing adaptation of conventional lan-
guage in such ways can be both fascinating and dangerous to observe.
Plamondon’s Test: Defined by American gamer Robert Plamondon,
this test is embodied in a principle: ‘If incidents in a game cannot be
described without reference to the game’s mechanics, then those game
mechanics are too intrusive’.
This rule has a glaring weakness; namely that a sufficiently dedicated
and imaginative narrator can rationalize and rephrase almost any inci-
dent into non-game terms, no matter how intrusive and unrealistic the
rules involved. However, the philosophy implicit in the Test has its uses;
any description of a game that refers to ‘character level’, ‘points totals’,
behaviour that was mandated by ‘character class’, or whatever, suggests
that the speaker is not visualizing game-events fully.
Play-By-Mail (PBM): Games (not necessarily role-playing) in which
moves are processed by postal communication between players and ref-
eree (or between players).
Although many very popular non-role-playing PBM games exist,
depending on the Post Office for role-playing is rather limiting; good

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characterization and development often depends on interchanges at

conversational speed. On the other hand, slower speed play may often
be more thoughtful and subtle.
The growth of computerized communications has led to variations
on this theme—sometimes known as ‘Play-By-Modem’ games. These
may allow a faster turn-round speed, if not necessarily enough to raise
the flexibility of the game to face-to-face levels. In the USA, where inter-
net access is relatively cheap and easy, ‘Play-By-Email’ (PBEM) games are
very common—it is said that one or two start up every week on Usenet.
The rate of subsequent disappearances is not reported. This category
merges into MUDs and hence into other computer-moderated games
(qq.v.).
(See also the article ‘Play-By-Mail’ by Wayne, in this issue.)
Player: A game-participant other than the GM (q.v.); one who operates
very few characters (often one), in relative ignorance of the plot, without
the GM’s (sometimes only theoretical) power of fiat.
Like most long-established terms, ‘player’ has met objections from
some quarters, if only because the GM is ‘playing’ too. However, it does
have the virtue of reasonable clarity, with a meaning obvious to anyone
who has encountered it in other games or sports.
Plumber: Aaron Allston describes this type of player as liking to ‘cre-
ate a character with a finely detailed and intricate personality, and then
spend his gaming career plumbing this character to its depths’. Such
an exploration generally demands a morally and emotionally complex
game-plot.
While the Plumber would be regarded by many as the epitome of
good role-playing, see the comments below under ‘Power-Gamer’ for
reasons to qualify this praise.
Power-Gamer: A player whose primary interest in the game is the ac-
quisition of a sense of raw power. This is usually taken to mean physical
power in the context of the gameworld, pursued either by legitimate if
limited character tactics, or manipulation of the game rules.
However, it is interesting to consider that the underlying urge— per-
sonal dominance in the context of the game—may find other, more sub-
tle forms of expression. For example, a player might seek power over
plot development, or simply over other players.
Thus, an ‘Emotional Power-Gamer’ might be defined as a player who
seeks (perhaps not consciously) to dominate and manipulate the process
of characterization and the more melodramatic aspects of plot develop-
ment in a game. Some such players attempt to dictate to others—usually
by assertively expressed ‘suggestions’—the personalities and past his-
tories of their characters; others dominate other players more crudely,
through put-downs and snide remarks.
It might be desirable to find separate terms for the two types. A ‘Plot

Power-Gamer’ would be a player who attempts to influence the cam-

paign’s narrative by psychological manipulation of the GM, a ‘Rules
Power-Gamer’ continuously suggests revisions to the games mechanics,
a ‘Time Power-Gamer’ simply takes up as much playing time as possible
with their own ideas and concerns—and so on.
See also Four-Way Split.
Power Level: The ‘Level’ of a campaign is usually defined by the person-
al physical power of the player characters, and hence of their opponents.
This may be related, albeit not very exactly, to their personal significance
in the gameworld. Power levels are most easily measured by comparison
with other games using the same rule-system.
Some gamers have used the word ‘Entropy’ for this concept, which
may be slightly more precise, but is liable to confuse readers who are
unaware of its exact significance in thermodynamics.
Random Generation: In effect the opposite of Character Design (q.v.) in
the philosophy of game mechanics; the basis of a system in which char-
acters are created by a chance-based mechanism, usually the roll of a die.
For all their capacities for serendipity and amusement value, Ran-
dom systems always cause annoyance for gamers who would prefer ei-
ther more control over, or more power for, their characters. It is mildly
amusing to note how much the oldest Random Generation systems have
mutated over the years as publishers have sought to assuage such im-
pulses.
Realism: This word, in terms of game systems, can have various, subtly
divergent, meanings. Early in the history of role-playing, it was often
taken literally, so that criticisms of rules as ‘unrealistic’ were dismissed
with the comment that magic and the like, which loom large in games,
are not ‘real’. However, even on those terms it is possible to argue for
realism in the depiction of non-fantastical elements such as weights and
measurements of mundane items, and ‘realism’ was soon consciously re-
defined as something like ‘fidelity to the implicit laws of nature in the
fictional genre being simulated’.
This, of course, begs questions about what those implicit laws are,
and the exercise of deciding this can itself be interesting. Of course,
many genres embody strong assumptions about the nature of elements
such as ‘heroism’ or ‘fate’, but attempting to simulate these in game rules
can be dangerous, as it tends to conflict with the right of the GM and
players to make their own decisions. Perhaps the best approach to Real-
ism in games is to attempt to ensure that willing Suspension of Disbelief
(q.v.) is generally maintained—which makes different gamers’ idea of
Realism potentially very different.
Robin D. Laws has coined a set of terms such as ‘Narra-Real’ and
‘Simu-Real’ to describe fidelity to the various implicit laws of narrative,
objective reality, and so on, but these phrases are not widespread.

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Referee: See GM.

Role-Player: Generally, anyone participating in role-play; more narrow-
ly, any player whose primary interest is the depiction of PC personality.
Although the narrow use of the term is at least as old as the concept
of the Four-Way Split (q.v.), the potential for confusion with the broad
meaning, and the value-judgement implicit in the suggestion that only
a narrow-definition Role-Player truly merits the term, makes its accept-
ance undesirable. On the other hand, a better word for the behaviour
pattern may be needed.
Romantic: A player who is most interested in their characters’ personal
relationships—especially (but not uniquely) romantic ones. Such rela-
tionships may be central to a campaign’s plot, but if the campaign is
highly ‘action-oriented’, they may be seen by other players and the GM
as peripheral. This is another of Aaron Allston’s terms.
Romantics, with their interest in character and some aspects of nar-
rative, are often highly regarded as players. However, they can be rather
obsessive personalities, and in their attempts to ‘romanticize’ every as-
pect of a campaign, they can prove to be the worst kind of ‘Emotional
Power-Gamers’ (q.v.).
RPG: The accepted abbreviation for ‘role-playing game’, little-known
outside the hobby, nearly universal within.
The author of this article spent several years of his life as a computer
programmer specializing in a language called RPG (‘Report Program
Generator’), and military technology (a subject which some role-players
study obsessively) give us Rocket-Propelled Grenades—but confusion is
not usually a problem.
Rules Hacker: An individual with a strong and persistent interest in
the mechanical aspects of a game’s rules, and particularly a tendency to
tinker with and fine-tune them.
Although Rules Hackers have a very different approach to many
other players, who would prefer to get on with actual play, they are gen-
erally regarded as mostly harmless, lacking the vanity and abrasiveness
of Power-Gamers or Rules Lawyers (qq.v.). It should be said that few suc-
cessful published systems have been designed by Rules Hackers; their
productions tend to be overly detailed, reflecting too many personal
quirks—and in any case, a real Rules Hacker never considers a set of
rules entirely complete, which makes publication difficult.
Rules Lawyer: A player who seeks to gain game advantage by invoca-
tion of the letter of the game’s rules.
Rules Lawyers may be the product of too much GM-as-Enemy (q.v.)
style play. They are widely regarded as annoying; play to the letter of
the rules is not usually seen as the point of role-playing. That said, they
can be a useful brake on the whims of an overly self-indulgent GM, and
their attitude is as likely to result from an over-developed sense of fair-

ness and precision as from an urge to Power-Game. A true Rules Lawyer

may even insist on a literal reading of the rules which may work against
the interests of their own character. Rules Lawyers who become GMs are
usually tolerable as long as they know the rules system properly (other-
wise they spend too much time leafing through rulebooks), but they may
not display as much flexibility as player enjoyment demands, and their
games will be unforgiving of incompetence.
Rules Rapist: Another Aaron Allston term; the Rules Rapist is a player
who gains amusement by stretching the game mechanics in use to the
limit, usually in an extreme display of Power-Gaming (q.v.).
The Rules Rapist can be distinguished from the Rules Lawyer (q.v.),
despite their similarities. The Lawyer usually has some respect for the
rules system—perhaps too much. The Rules Rapist, by contrast, displays
contempt for the spirit of the rules by exploiting them.
Scenario: Another long-established term, imported via board wargam-
ing from the movie business and futurology. A Scenario is a more or
less self-contained game situation which can be played out as a piece of
coherent narrative—usually an adventure. Published ‘full’ scenarios usu-
ally include geographical data on their settings, personality descriptions
and game details on NPCs involved, and notes on incidents in which
PCs may become involved. ‘Mini-Scenarios’ and ‘Scenario Seeds’, which
often appear as space fillers in games, supplements, and magazines,
usually contain only the central idea and a few NPC personality notes.
Scenarios may be compared, very roughly, with short stories—in
which case, campaigns might be compared to novels. Most campaigns
are made up of a number of linked scenarios—but then, picaresque and
‘fix-up’ novels bear the same relationship to short fiction.
Sense of Wonder: A term much used by SF fans in describing the emo-
tional effect of the genre, and sometimes transferred to role-playing.
The phrase has also been defined by Alison Brooks as: ‘Why many of
us bother.’ Arguably, the evocation of such a sense is something that all
games should aim for, and too few achieve.
Simu-Real: See Realism.
Skills-Based: Term for a rules system in which characters are defined
by a list of discrete skills and abilities, possibly at widely varying levels of
competence. Contrast Class and Level (q.v.).
The advantage of Skills-Based systems is that they generally allow
the simple definition of much more varied characters than Class-Based
systems; to the extent that skills reflect personality, they make for more
flexible characterization. The disadvantage is that they may lead to the
creation of characters with an implausible mixture of unrelated strengths
and weaknesses—although many rules include mechanisms to control
this problem. These definitions are to a greater or lesser extent carica-
tures; many rules systems combine elements of the Class-and-Level and

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Skills-Based approaches.
Story-Teller: A type of GM (or occasionally player) whose primary in-
terest is in the development of narrative structures in the course of the
game. The American company White Wolf formally adopted the idea by
referring to their products as ‘storytelling games’, although the words
had been in widespread use long before, and were employed by Blacow
in defining the Four-Way Split (q.v.).
Story-Telling is often presented as the highest aim of role-playing,
and a campaign or scenario with a strong, rich narrative thread is cer-
tainly an impressive thing. However, GMs who regard their activities
primarily or solely as ‘telling stories’ can be something of a problem for
their players, as they frequently attempt to enforce their predetermined
concepts of plot and character development on the players, without
regard for the players’ own tastes or ideas. At its worst, this behaviour
shows the GM up as a failed novelist—and demonstrates the reason for
this failure.
Suspension of Disbelief: A fairly self-explanatory term; the mental pro-
cess involved in engaging with the plot of a book, film or game with any
regard for its emotional dynamic.
The degree of Suspension of Disbelief seen in games varies widely,
from deep emotional commitment to amused, cynical detachment.
Tabletop: Originally wargames played with miniature figures and model
scenery, as opposed to those played with cardboard counters on printed
boards (and other games of any sort). The term may even have had a yet
more specific usage, being contrasted with very early wargames in which
the scenery was modelled in a sand-box. Today, it is used in contrast to
‘Live Action’ (q.v.), for role-playing game-play that takes place as a set of
verbal descriptions between players and GM, with or without the aid of
small props such as miniature figures. LARP gamers seem to have initi-
ated this use of the term.
Like many other terms given here, this one is slightly inaccurate—
not all groups use a table—but generally useful and widely understood,
providing that non-role-playing games are explicitly or implicitly ex-
cluded from the discussion.
Template: A generalized character definition that may be adopted by
a player for use as a PC, usually with the option of modifications. See
Class and Level.
Tragedian: Another Allston-originated term, describing a player who
‘likes literary tragedy and wants to play out something similar’.
This term is rare but useful; the same can be said of the player type
it describes. As Allston remarks, a tragedian may help develop the rich-
ness and depth of a campaign, and provide an outlet for the GM’s more
sadistic urges. Plumbers and Romantics often pass through phases of
tragedy-obsession, and the popularity of White Wolf ’s game Vampire: the

Masquerade may indicate the existence of greater impulses to tragedy

than previously realized (if it is being played as its rulebooks suggest).
However, Tragedian GMs, while known, may be regarded as a menace
by non-Tragedian players, for obvious reasons.
Trope: A term borrowed from literary criticism, defined by Chambers
as: ‘A figure of speech, properly one in which a word or expression is
used in other than its literal sense’. Genre critics often use it for the stock
features of SF or fantasy, with implications similar to, but less pejorative
than, ‘cliché’.
Role-playing can be said to have tropes independent of the liter-
ary genres from which it borrows, such as the Dungeon and the Patron
(qq.v.).
War-Gamer: Literally, one who plays wargames—the simulations of mil-
itary activity that are both cousins and antecedents to formalized role-
playing. More colloquially, one who plays role-playing games ‘as war-
games’—as conflicts to be won by optimized strategy, with little regard
for characterization or narrative. As role-playing games rarely involve
much balanced or impartial conflict, this attitude may be somewhat mis-
guided, although a GM may be willing and able to set up such conflicts
in the course of a game, and hence satisfy the player’s impulse. The term
is part of the definition of the Four-Way Split (q.v.).
A War-Gamer may be a rather more cerebral personality than a
Combat Monster (q.v.), being potentially willing to avoid actual combat
if this is an effective way to ‘win’. However, the two types certainly over-
lap. That said, War-Gaming—in the broad sense of problem-solving and
conflict resolution—can certainly be an enjoyable aspect of role-playing,
and many playing groups find that War-Gaming members provided a
useful element of discipline and efficiency in play.
World (or Game-World): The setting and background for a game—es-
pecially for a campaign (q.v.).
Many game-worlds are, in fact, fictional worlds, in the sense of being
single planets (or similar). However, others may be either smaller (per-
haps a loosely delimited region, country, or continent) or larger (say, the
explorable universe of a space-travelling science fiction game). Even so,
the word ‘World’ may be used as a loose, convenient term. In the early
days, whole, detailed game-worlds were sometimes referred to as Dun-
geons, especially if they evolved from simple Dungeon-Bashing settings
(qq.v.). Other gamers have preferred ‘Universe’, as not implying a single
planet—although their creations have not necessarily been particularly
extensive or detailed.
A Game-World may also be defined as a world or setting created orig-
inally for a game, and perhaps subsequently developed in other media,
such as novels. As many such ‘developed’ game-worlds have featured in
unremarkable novels, dominated by the intrusive tropes and excessive

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detailing of the originating game, the word has become somewhat de-
rogatory in its use by some literary critics.
Phil Masters had an article in an early issue of White Dwarf and two monsters in
the original Fiend Folio. Since then it has been downhill all the way.
The author thanks the contributors to Alarums and Excursions, especially
Alison Brooks, Dave Flin, and Steve Gilham, along with the editor of Interactive
Fantasy, for their many, invaluable comments on early drafts of this article. A
number of terms are drawn from the Champions supplement Strikeforce by Aar-
ron Allston, a shrewd and perceptive writer whose analyses apply well beyond one
game system.
1
Interactive Fantasy uses ‘referee’ as its standard term for administrators,
co-ordinators, facilitators, story-leaders, umpires or whatever else they
may be called in all the various fields of interactive story-telling. Make of
that what you will.—Editor

Crossing the Line
Fiction, Reality and the ‘Occult’ in Role-Playing Games:
a Christian’s Perspective
by Andrew Rilstone
After years of study of the history of occultism, and after having

researched a book on the subject, and having consulted with scholars
in the field of historical research, I can say with confidence; these games
are the most effective, most magnificently packaged, most profitably
marketed, most thoroughly researched introduction to the occult in
man’s recorded history.
Dr Gary North, cited in Turmoil in the Toybox, an anti-RPG tract.1
In over 20 years of studying the Western Mystery Tradition and playing

role-playing games, I have never before encountered a game system
that so skilfully blends real-world occult knowledge with an exciting and
compelling role-playing game.
Donald H. Frew, cited on the back cover of Nephilim.2

Almost since their inception, role-playing games have been criticized
and attacked by religious groups of varying degrees of sanity. The single
most common accusation these groups make is that role-playing games
are a form of ideological propaganda, designed to promote and encour-
age belief in the ‘occult’.3 Tracts with titles like Dungeons & Dragons Will
Blow Your Mind Apart! and Danger! Children At Play give dire warnings
about what will happen to those foolish enough to engage in such Sa-
tanic pursuits. One Christian writer claims that:
Dungeons & Dragons is not a game at all. Instead … it is teaching on
demonology, murder, witchcraft, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination,
insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, Satan worship,
gambling, Jungian psychology, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism,
desecration, demon summonsing, necromantics and divination.4
Another evangelical group circulated a now-notorious tract called Dark
Dungeons5 that told the (fictional) story of how ‘the intense occult train-
ing of Dungeons & Dragons’ qualified a girl ‘to enter a witches coven as
a priestess’. The story, of course, had an edifying conclusion: Debbie
gives her life to Jesus, and burns all her ‘occult’ paraphernalia, includ-
ing Dungeons & Dragons ‘boards’, rock records and the works of Tolkien
and C. S. Lewis.
The publishers of Dark Dungeons—who also produced a tract that

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claimed that Mohammed was an agent of the Pope—can safely be con-

signed to the lunatic fringe. It would be nice to be able to claim, as role-
players often do, that this is where all such attacks originate. However, as
moderate a group as the General Synod of the Church of England has
voiced similar concerns. A report on children’s evangelism mentions in
passing that:
Dungeons and Dragons can have an addictive effect, and educates children
into the working of the occult and supernatural evil … there is a real
danger that children playing such games will want to explore occult
practices as a result.6
Should anyone in the role-playing hobby care about accusations of this
kind? There is a strong case for saying that they should not. Since the
majority of gamers are non-believers, then one might suppose that what
Christians say about their hobby would be a matter of extreme indiffer-
ence to them. The so called ‘religion versus role-playing’ debate ought,
perhaps, to be regarded as a discussion between Christian role-players
and those of their fellow Christians who disapprove of their hobby. The
only truly sensible response for a non-Christian gamer would be some-
thing like: ‘I suppose you have a right to your opinions, but since I’m
not a believer, what you are saying obviously doesn’t apply to me’. If the
role-playing hobby were prepared to treat the discussion in this way, then
there would be little else to say on the matter.
But in my experience the role-playing hobby does care, very much,
about these attacks. The subject is frequently discussed on convention
panels, on the internet and in hobby magazines and fanzines. These dis-
cussions often border on the hysterical. A debate on the letters page of
the now-defunct GM7 magazine referred to the hobby’s critics as ‘Bible
bashers’, ‘extremists’, ‘the moron majority’ and ‘a bunch of loonies who
are scared of their own shadows’: all terms that are hard to apply to the
General Synod.
It is not clear why hobbyists care so much about the opinions of a
group that they have so little respect for. There are at least four possible
reasons.
1. Role-players simply find it unpleasant to hear their hobby being
attacked.
2. They are concerned that attacks on role-playing by the Church
could do considerable harm, for example to those who wish to make
constructive use of the hobby in an educational context. While consistent
religious belief in the UK seems to be on the decrease, Christian nomi-
nalism is still widespread. This means that pronouncements by Anglican
clergymen carry a disproportionate amount of weight.
3. There is a genuine fear—particularly in the United States, where
fundamentalism is a considerable political force—that religious anti-
role-playing propaganda could cause the hobby to be prohibited.
4. Some role-players would like their hobby to be regarded as a

Crossing the Line by Andrew Rilstone
mainstream form of expression: they feel that attacks on it by the reli-

gious establishment tend to marginalize it. It would, of course, be cynical
to suggest that there is also a portion of the role-playing industry that
wishes to be seen as radical and anti-establishment, and therefore wel-
comes and even encourages religious condemnation.
From the point of view of Christian gamers like myself, the issue is
much more clear-cut. If one believes in a personal Devil, one is naturally
going to be hostile to activities that one thinks may attract its attention.
Christians have traditionally believed that apparently innocuous activi-
ties such as horoscopes and tarot cards may come into this category. Sa-
tanism and witchcraft certainly do.8 Granted, ‘Satanism’ and ‘the occult’
are not synonymous: indeed, it is questionable whether ‘Satanism’, in
the popular meaning of that term, exists at all. A lot of Christian anti-
role-playing material is decidedly vague in its use of terminology, using
expressions like ‘wiccan’, ‘witchcraft’, ‘the occult’ and ‘Satanism’ inter-
changeably. (One document, bizarrely, defined an ‘occult toy’ as one that
teaches ‘witchcraft, violence, sex and humanism.’9) ‘Occultists’ are cor-
rect to condemn this sloppy thinking. But to most Christians the point
is somewhat academic: even the most benign forms of ‘occult’ activity
(neo-paganism, say, or wiccanism) belong to a world-view and a form of
religious practice that they reject.
It is axiomatic that Christians can have nothing to do with a hobby
that promotes the ‘occult’. However, before Christian gamers abandon
role-playing, it is necessary to show that role-playing as a whole is an ‘oc-
cult’ pastime. This would be the case only if it could be shown that the
hobby was dominated by games that put forward an ‘occult’ world-view,
or by people who were comitted to such a world-view; or that there was
something inherently ‘occult’ in the role-playing process itself. The exist-
ence of one or more ‘occult’ games ought not to pose a problem for any
thinking Christian, any more than the existence of one or more ‘right-
wing’ games would pose a problem to a socialist gamer.
If, on the other hand, the accusation that role-playing games pro-
mote the ‘occult’ is untrue, then Christian gamers naturally wish to reas-
sure their co-religionists that their hobby is entirely innocent.
Assuming that we care about this debate, and assuming that we do
not wish to indulge in pointless name-calling, then we have to examine
the validity of the Christian claims. To do this, we must answer two ques-
tions:
1. Is it true that role-playing promotes the ‘occult’?
2. If it were true, would this be a bad thing?
The first is a question about facts; the second a question about reli-
gious conviction. It would be very difficult to establish a consensus be-
tween a Christian and a rationalist about whether the promotion of the
‘occult’ in gaming was a bad thing. The two differ from one another on

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fundamental philosophical premises. Fortunately, weighty discussions

about reality and metaphysics have not been necessary up to now, be-
cause both Christian and non-Christian gamers could agree on one ba-
sic fact: the claim that Dungeons & Dragons ‘promoted the occult’ could
be dismissed as entirely fanciful.
No one could possibly acquire any ‘occult training’ from D&D; the
game contains no details of magical rituals or spells, or any other in-
formation that would be even remotely helpful to anyone wanting to
conduct a magical ceremony. It is even questionable whether, within the
specialized vocabulary of role-playing games, words like ‘magic’, ‘god’,
‘demon’ and ‘cleric’ carry anything like the same meaning that they do
for a Christian or an ‘occultist’. It ought to be clear that in the following
sentences:
1. W. B. Yeats practised ritual magic
2. Snow White’s stepmother had a magic mirror
the word ‘magic’ carries two very different meanings. It is in the second
sense that the term is used in role-playing games. Fantasy ‘magic’ has
very little in common with the meditation and ritual techniques prac-
tised by ‘real’ magicians. If a role-player were to buy an Aleister Crowley
book in the hope that it would tell them how to become a D&D mage,
they would be grievously disappointed. As Gary Gygax himself com-
mented, ‘I made up all the spells out of my head. How could anyone
take them seriously?’10 A leaflet produced by the Games Manufacturers
Association (GAMA) very sensibly argues:
It is claimed that the games contain spells, incantations, and other
descriptions of how to work magic but all are acknowledged to be
imaginary. Most importantly, these ‘magical’ activities are presented as
things to be done by a player’s character as part of the game … no game
assumes that a player will actually … cast a spell or call up a demon.11
Even the Christian writer David Porter, in a book otherwise quite critical
of role-playing games, is even-handed enough to comment:
As a matter of plain fact, much of the material in AD&D … is dreamed
up by the game’s authors, and some is the result of competitions held
among players to find the most innovative monster. Such monsters really
do not exist and are pure invention.’12
Some of the more general criticisms of the moral content of role-playing
games are, admittedly, harder to dismiss, but they have never formed the
core of the Christian case. The Church of England’s report expressed
concern that many role-playing games depicted a world in which evil is
defeated by strength, rather than by moral fortitude and faith, and in
which God, if He exists at all, is distant and impersonal. David Porter
is worried that the world of Call of Cthulhu13 is nightmarish, amoral and
nihilistic, and therefore unsuitable for Christian children. From a Chris-
tian viewpoint, these may be fair comments; but they could be countered
by pointing to rather moralistic games like Star Wars or Champions. Even

AD&D—once accused of ethical neutrality in its alignment system—has

taken on an increasingly moral tone. Its Second Edition removes the
Assassin character class and exorcises the ‘demons’ and ‘devils’ from its
monster list.
Over and over again people have stated and re-stated that what we
are dealing with are simply games; that they do not set out to preach
any moral or ideological message, let alone to indoctrinate; and that the
worlds in which they are set are purely fictional, and represented as such.
In short, we could state unequivocally that the accusations that role-play-
ing games were a form of ‘occult’ practice, or that they promoted such
practice, or that they intentionally proselytized an ‘occult’ or otherwise
non-Christian world-view was factually untrue.
It seems to me that this debate has recently taken on a new dimen-
sion, and the factual un-truth of the Christian case against role-playing
can no longer be assumed. If gamers wish to continue to defend their
hobby against its most outspoken critics, they must recognize that the
goal-posts have been moved. Christian gamers like myself must ask
themselves serious questions about which aspects of the hobby they can
continue to be involved with.
The first hints that some games designers may have been changing
their perception of role-playing came from what might be regarded as
the hobby’s very own ‘lunatic fringe’. J. H. Brennen, author of the justly
forgotten RPGs Man, Myth and Magic and Timeship14, argues in his book
Astral Doorways: Simple Magical Techniques for Exploring the Astral Plane15
that role-playing games are:
an amusement that is coincidentally an excellent preparatory training for
the use of doorways—and, indeed, for a variety of magical operations.16
Brennen’s book treats ritual technique as a form of a form of therapeutic
self-help, an approach apparently not uncommon even among serious
magicians like Crowley. Nevertheless, it is interesting to recall that the
extreme fundamentalist Phil Phillips claimed that parents who allowed
their children to play role-playing games were:
opening their homes and their children to the subtle introduction to the
occult and malignant world of psychotherapy.17
While it may appear ludicrous to link psychotherapy and the ‘occult’ it
seems that this is precisely what some ‘occultists’ and/or pop-psycholo-
gists are, in fact, doing.
According to Brennen, in the magical technique that he calls ‘caba-
listic path working’ a leader presents a verbal picture of a gateway to the
astral plane, which the other participants must do their best to picture in
their minds. This does indeed seem uncomfortably close to a role-play-
ing game, although the two activities have very different ends in view:
no role-player has ever entered into the trance-like state that the ‘astral
traveller’ hopes to achieve. Nevertheless, it is interesting to speculate
whether the idea that role-playing games might be a jumping-off point

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for ‘astral travel’ lay behind Brennen’s attempts to introduce ritualistic

elements into Timeship18.
To say that role-playing games ‘are’ magical, or even that they are
form of training for magic seems far-fetched: it might be more accurate
to say that some ritual magicians use techniques that somewhat resemble
role-playing. The ritual magic filmed in Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising
does bear comparison with a rather self-conscious live-action role-play-
ing session. On the other hand, I have seen imaginative techniques used
in Christian contemplation. One might even say that some of the Spir-
itual Exercises of St Ignatius are a form of sacred role-playing19. Never-
theless, the fact that an author who has published role-playing games
has linked magic with role-playing is intensely interesting and, from the
point of view of the Christian role-player or the role-player who wishes
to argue a case against Christians, rather worrying.
A second and much more complex example comes from a man at the
very centre of the mainstream role-playing hobby. In an appendix to his
monumental Pendragon system, Greg Stafford briefly makes a case for
the psychological value of role-playing games:
Joseph Campbell keeps saying that modern people must find a way to
interact with mythology and find their own private mythology to help
them through life … This game is to me a vehicle for exploring the
Arthurian legend, and through that, our own psyches.20
Joseph Campbell was, of course, the anthropologist and secular mystic
whose most famous book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, argues for the
existence of a ‘monomyth’ underlying all mythology. Campbell inter-
prets this mythology in psychological terms. Mythological figures have
no objective reality but they do contain psychological truths. Campbell
claims that the mere process of reading mythological narratives—and
therefore, we might reasonably assume, the process of enacting them in
role-playing games—is an inherently healing, life-enhancing and psy-
choanalytic process.
Despite his deep admiration for Joseph Campbell, Stafford’s own
beliefs go far beyond this expression of psychological ideas in mythical
terms. It is mythology itself, not any psychological interpretation of it,
which he takes seriously and values. Stafford is a practising shaman who
claims to have had visionary experiences that he connects with the spir-
its of Native American mythology. He recognizes that the game-world
Glorantha, in which the popular role-playing game RuneQuest is set, is
an outgrowth of these beliefs. Most interestingly, he argues that partici-
pating in role-playing games may be a means by which people who are
unable to ‘fast for days in the desert’ can get in touch with their mytho-
logical consciousness, or with what he calls the spirit world.
No one who listened to Greg’s talk at the British role-playing con-
vention Convulsion 94, or who reads his contributions to the ‘Freud and
Campbell’ debate in this issue of Interactive Fiction, can be in any doubt

as to the sincerity of his belief in the spirit world, nor to the positive,
life- changing effects that this belief has had for him. What sceptics and
Christians are to make of these visions is another question; and perhaps
not one to be addressed in a gaming magazine. The real questions are
more pragmatic than theological. Should Stafford’s beliefs affect Chris-
tian role-players’ view of their hobby, or the terms in which non-Christian
gamers should engage in dialogue with Christians? Were an evangelist
to say that a practising pagan priest had claimed that role-playing was a
branch of his religion, how far would he be twisting the facts? Knowing
that the author of Pendragon presides over sweat-lodge ceremonies in
which he invokes spirits that he calls Merlin and Percival, could we, with
conviction, reassure that evangelist that role-playing games are not con-
nected in any way with ‘occult’ practices?
Greg Stafford’s ideas are clearly the product of sincere religious con-
viction, and should be respected as such. Can the same be said of the
philosophy in White Wolf ’s Storyteller system? Mark Rein*Hagen is
quite forthright and explicit in explaining what he sees as the philosoph-
ical underpinning of his immensely successful game Vampire: the Mas-
querade21. Like Stafford, Rein*Hagen uses religious language, although
where Stafford’s is shamanistic, Rein*Hagen’s seems drawn from some
dualistic version of Christianity. There are moments, reading Vampire,
when one could be forgiven for thinking that one was again in the mid-
dle of a religious tract:
Deep within all of us resides a demon, or so the medieval folk believed.
Explore your inner evil, discover that which makes you unclean, and
then cleanse your sores. Become good in spite of yourself. Fight against
your instincts. Take the high road.22
It is difficult to understand what ReinlHagen is thinking of when he talks
about ‘evil’ and ‘inner demons’. Sometimes he seems to be talking about
repressed emotions and instinct: at others, an almost Manichean hatred
of the physical body:
Our reasoning, capacity and self awareness put us on a practically divine
level, yet our animal bodies and biological needs chain us to evil reality.23
This—in my view rather unhealthy—suspicion of the body may come
from a genuine Gnostic philosophy: it may on the other hand be a prod-
uct of the adolescent tenor of the whole Storyteller project. At any rate,
Rein*Hagen is in no doubt as to what we must do to ‘cleanse our sores’:
Just as the hero of legend must descend into the pit of purgatory24 to
face the tormentor … so must we descend into the depths of our own
soul … That is the real journey of Prometheus. It is the meaning of the
myth.25
Thus:
Vampire is an exploration of evil, and as such, it is unsafe. You are digging
deep when you play this game.26
‘And as such, it is unsafe’. For the first time in print, a role-playing prod-

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uct conceded one of the central points being made by the hobby’s detrac-
tors. The entire text of Vampire confirms the fears voiced by the Church
of England; one could hardly imagine a game more preoccupied with
the ‘supernaturally evil’. Granted, the Church of England was concerned
about the supernatural dangers implicit in playing games that deal with
‘occult’ themes, whereas the dangers that Rein*Hagen warns us about
are (presumably) purely psychological. Nevertheless, anyone who cares
to look in the rules can read in black and white, almost as if it were a sell-
ing point: this game is unsafe.
Does Rein*Hagen actually believe any of this? It is possible, after all,
that he intends these passages to be taken not as a statement of his per-
sonal philosophy, but as part of the overall ethos of the game. As players,
we are to pretend that we are pseudo-Gnostics who hate our bodies, but
this does not mean that we, or the game’s inventor, take the ideas seri-
ously in real life. We would not assume that players taking on the roles
of Jedi Knights in Star Wars are doing so because they are pantheists. On
this view Rein*Hagen’s nihilism and gnosticism are, at most, methods of
achieving the desired atmosphere, the necessary style. This is philoso-
phy as fashion accessory.
When I have put this question to Vampire players in the past, I have
sometimes been told that it makes little difference, as few gamers pay
any attention to the relevant passages. Introductions and appendices
are simply the boring bits that you skip to get on to the weapons table.
Rein*Hagen may pontificate all he likes, but real people will not play
Vampire as means of exploring and purging their shadow selves.
Brennen uses the language of the ‘occult’; but seems to view ‘astral
travel’ as a purely psychological phenomenon. Stafford uses language
drawn from both mythology and psychology, but seems to believe in
shamanistic contact with gods and spirits who have a real, external exist-
ence. Stafford does not believe that in role-playing we are performing
shamanistic rituals or contacting the spirit realm, but he does believe
that we are participating in a mythological process that is efficacious and
trustworthy in its own right. Brennen sees role-playing as, shall we say,
good practice for participation in magical rituals, and seems to think
that these rituals have at least some similarities with role-playing games.
Rein*Hagen’s views are less coherently expressed, but his ‘demons’ are
almost certainly to be understood in psychological terms. However he
claims (which Brennen and Stafford do not) that the participation in a
game of Vampire is in itself an exploration of or confrontation with this
‘shadow self ’; that the game is in its own right an ‘exploration of evil’
and that playing it may, in itself, be a means to ‘cleanse your sores’. This
comes rather close to claiming a religious or spiritual function for the
game.27
Sam Shirley, the editor of Chaosium’s new game Nephilim, has ar-

gued28 that it differs radically from Vampire in philosophical outlook.

Nevertheless the two games are superficially similar. Both have a mark-
edly dark, gothic tone; both cast the players in the roles of powerful,
manipulative, immortal beings; and both deal, or claim to deal, with
spiritual themes. Indeed, Nephilim is probably the more ‘spiritual’ of the
two products. A vampire is a lost soul who can only hope to achieve
a state of spiritual apathy. A Nephilim, on the other hand, is actively
seeking a transforming spiritual enlightenment. And certainly, while a
Vampire player could ignore the game’s spiritual and philosophical ideas,
in Nephilim, they are the game.
Nephilim is based around the idea of a gigantic ‘occult’ conspiracy
theory of the sort that Umberto Eco ridiculed in Foucault’s Pendulum.
The player characters are newly reincarnated Nephilim: mystical beings
who are the secret controllers of human history. How this will stand up as
a role-playing game is, thankfully, no concern of this department. There
may be gamers who will welcome an eighty-page character generation
system, a sixty-page magic system, and practically no information about
what you are actually intended to do with the game. On the other hand,
it would be churlish to deny that the secret history of the world is skilfully
written, and that a cosmos that includes Atlantis, ancient Egypt, Jack the
Ripper and computer crime is going to appeal to an awful lot of gamers.
At one level, Nephilim is little more than a rather literate, well-researched
and well-thought-out fantasy game, complete with gods, demi-gods,
spell lists and monsters.
But the research that the game’s authors have so skilfully carried out
is research into the ‘occult’ traditions of the real world, which they mix
freely with the beliefs and histories of more mainstream religions. To
pick a passage not even remotely at random:
The Nephilim say that Jesus was a Zero Arcanum Nephilim. More
importantly, he was the first Nephilim to be embodied within the
foetus of a human being, and was thus born incarnate … The Wheel
of Fortune, forewarned through calculations of conjunctions, joined
with two other Arcanas, the Sun and Temperance, to manipulate the
gigantic magical energies that would be realized at that time … As had
occurred with Ahknaton, the established powers found this new way to
be threatening and dangerous … The Templars, using their arm called
the Mysteries of Dumuzi, the Rosicrucians and the Roman government
each independently sought to find the child … The Templars founded
a new organization under the leadership of Saul, who became Paul and
who was a Nephilim in Shouit.29
Christianity, Judaism, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the tarot and
Egyptian mythology are all merged into one vast, ahistorical confection,
and all equally regarded as mere fodder; raw material with which to
create something that—whatever philosophical underpinning it may
have—is presumably intended primarily as entertainment.

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That Nephilim presents a non-standard view of Jesus Christ is, I as-

sume, of interest only to Christians and to those non-believers who are
worried about offending other people’s beliefs. However, the very first
sentence of the game appears to be an attempt to implicate the whole of
the role-playing hobby in the authors’ world-view:
Role-players and readers of fantasy, you have already approached the
occult. You may have encountered it unwittingly. Your understanding
begins by admitting that already you know such words as magic, alchemy,
or kabbala. With Nephilim, we invite you to go further. We invite you to
cross the threshold of fantasy in order to discover the hidden side of our
everyday universe . . .
A remark of this sort, if taken seriously, appears to me to disenfranchise
the substantial minority of Christians who play role-playing games. It
also positively encourages attacks on role-playing games from within
the Church. Nephilim says that role-players, simply by being role-play-
ers, have already ‘approached’ the ‘occult’. Christians believe—rightly
or wrongly—that the ‘occult’ is something which should never, under
any circumstances, be approached. Thus, either the first sentence of
Nephilim is pretentious nonsense, or it is impossible for Christians to
remain, with good faith, in the role-playing hobby. It goes without saying
that I take the first view, and that I think it a little unreasonable of Chao-
sium to attempt to hijack the entire hobby to support their religious
agenda. Had the first paragraph of the game read:
Role-players and readers of fantasy: the magic that you have read about
up to now has been treated in a laughably superficial manner. The magic
that is depicted in Other Games is pure fantasy; yet there are, in the real
world, learned people who claim to be magicians. This game intends,
for the first time, to treat non-Christian spirituality with seriousness and
respect. The world of Nephilim is. of course, imaginary, but we hope that
it will encourage you to consider the hidden meanings that exist in our
own world.
t hen my only argument with the designers would have been theological.
This first sentence was, apparently, suggested by a conversation with
someone called the Duke de Saint Amand, who, along with ‘the master
of the three moons … and the talking yellow dog’ helped the authors
compile Nephilim. Saint Armand contributes a ‘forward’ (sic) to the game.
The main section of the background—a description of the rise of the
Nephilim and the fall of Atlantis—is said to be based on a translation, by
St Armand, of a seventeenth-century transcript of a second-century text.
What is going on here? Is Saint Armand a real person—someone
I would have heard of if I were interested in ‘occult’ lore? Or is he a
fictitious person, someone who exists only in the game’s imaginary uni-
verse? If he is real, then what are the authors doing attributing their fan-
tasy background to him? If he is fictional, why is he said to have written
the foreword? Or have I misread the whole thing? Perhaps ‘Before All’
really is the translation of something old, and the Nephilim really are

figures that ‘occultists’ believe in? In any event, this represents a blurring
of reality and fiction—either claiming reality for a fictitious character,
or fictionalizing a real one—that I am deeply uncomfortable with. Role-
players, we have been claiming for a decade, know the difference be-
tween reality and fiction. These ones evidently do not, or wish to pretend
that they do not.
This goes on all the way though the game. Although the game con-
tains a bibliography, there are no footnotes. This means that the reader
has no way of finding out which fragmentary quotations and references
to secret societies are derived from historical sources, and which are
products of the authors’ imaginations.
Is this mixing of reality, belief and fantasy a legitimate technique for
a game to use? There is a long and honourable tradition of the merging
of reality with fiction: a novel which carries off such an illusion success-
fully is praised for realism and verisimilitude. Granted that we know
that there was no attempt to rescue Charles I from the execution block
or to assassinate De Gaulle, then we praise Dumas and Forsyth as good
writers because they enable us to suspend our disbelief. If, on the other
hand, there is an attempt to deceive us into treating a work of fiction as
history or biography, then we generally believe that the author has acted
reprehensibly.
The subject matter of Nephilim, by its very nature, involves a blurring
of the distinction between what is real and what is imaginary. The game
does carry an epigram that reads, ‘This game is not real: you are.’ This
may be intended as a disclaimer, signalling to the reader that every-
thing that follows, including the foreword, is to be regarded as fantasy.
However, in the context of a game sold under the slogan ‘Science is an
illusion, history is a lie’, such a disclaimer must be seen as ambiguous at
best. The line between reality and fiction; between fictionalized reality
and deception is a thin one: Nephilim is perilously close to the edge. One
cannot say with confidence that the magic depicted in the game is purely
fictional; one cannot say with confidence that the world of the game is
represented as purely imaginary; and one cannot say with confidence
that the game is not intended to promote the authors’ ‘occult’ world-
view. A kind of rubicon has been crossed.
What will the hobby’s reaction be to this game? A barely literate re-
view in the first issue of the new British magazine Valkyrie asserted with
undisguised glee that:
Without releasing Christ: the Role Playing Game quickly followed by the
Crucifixion Sourcebook, I don’t think Chaosium are going to upset the
various fundamentalist (and non-fundamentalist) groups that are out to
put a stop to the role playing hobby as much as they could do with the
release of what has been labelled the ‘Occult Role Playing Game’30
This is a remarkable statement for a news-stand magazine to make:
Nephilim is not merely controversial or provocative, but the most upset-

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ting game that it would be possible to produce. Although this is certainly

an exaggeration, the reviewer is correct in his belief that many sensible
Christians will be deeply worried by the game. I cannot share his appa-
rant belief that this will be a good thing.
Where does this leave the religious debate about role-playing games?
If we put the remarks of Brennen to one side, it remains true that no
game has ever instructed players to participate in magical ceremonies
(although, as we have seen, parts of Vampire come close to claiming that
the game itself has a religious function). Certainly, there is nothing in
Nephilim, Vampire or Pendragon which remotely implies that the games
could or should be used as a means of—say—channelling mystical be-
ings. The closest Nephilim comes to actively recommending real-life ‘oc-
cult’ practice is in its bibliography, which includes a number of popular
‘occult’ manuals. That said, the filmography includes Highlander and
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, but omits the films of Kenneth Anger, which
makes me doubt that the thing is intended as a comprehensive occult
handbook. If we were to be asked the question ‘Is Nephilim explicitly an
occult manual?’ we could still give a negative response. Does it follow
that the Christian claims against the hobby are refuted?
Partly. A recommendation or an incitement does not have to be made
explicit in order to exist. Ideological propaganda can take the form of
imaginary stories set in fictitious worlds: a large proportion of children’s
stories come into this category. Stories set in the real world can also carry
messages: Ben Hur promotes Christianity; Philadelphia promotes toler-
ance towards AIDS sufferers. This remains true even though neither
film contains an explicit message from the director saying, ‘go thou and
do likewise.’ Nephilim puts forward a non-Christian world-view, a view
which both the authors of the game and Christians would describe as
‘occult’. It is facile to claim that a game which makes assertions about the
nature of reality, which develops its own Christology and which presents
its own version of the history and nature of the Christian church does
not, at least implicitly, carry an ideological message.
Ought games to be used as vehicles for ideological messages? Doubt-
less any scenario writer will betray some of their beliefs about the world
in the stories that they tell; doubtless any designer will create rules sys-
tems that depict reality as they believe it to be. To that extent, an ideo-
logical content in games is both inevitable and desirable. Nevertheless,
the gaming hobby has tended to be very hostile to games that it feels are
preaching to it. Several reviews were very critical of the perceived far-
right political bias of Price of Freedom and Twilight 2000. When a letter-
writer to the British magazine GMI31 claimed that Weiss and Hickman32
were members of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints, and
that the Dragonlance books were ‘full of Mormon propaganda’ a major
moral panic broke out in the magazine. The magazine’s editor claimed

that he ‘objected to being preached at in what was, after all, a piece of

entertainment’; one letter-writer opined that he ‘threw aside in disgust’
any book that appeared to contain any religious belief whatsoever. This
is an extreme reaction, but if it turned out to be the case that anti-Chris-
tian propaganda was acceptable within the hobby but pro-Christian
propaganda was not, one might see it as an unhealthy sign.
Nephilim is only the most recent and most extreme example of a
growing tendency for role-playing games to offer a more and more seri-
ous treatment of the ‘occult’; a tendency for games to make their philo-
sophical and spiritual themes explicit; and a tendency for them to make
dramatic claims about their spiritual potency. These games concentrate
on one particular form of spirituality. While games like Vampire, Kult
and Nephilim have been gaining devotees, there has not been a parallel
growth in Christian, Islamic, Jewish or Hindu games.
I cannot bring myself to believe that the process of role-playing is, in
itself, an ideologically loaded tool. It is hard to think of a more neutral
process than people facing each other across a gaming table, talking and
creating stories. When either Christians or the publishers of role-playing
games claim that there is something in the nature of role-playing itself
that makes it an ‘occult’ tool, then I think that we can continue, with
great confidence, to tell them that they are simply and straightforwardly
wrong. Five years ago it was also possible to go further and deny that
anyone had ever used role-playing games to disseminate realistic ‘occult’
teaching, or that any game had set out to encourage gamers to explore
the real ‘occult’. Today, this is no longer the case.
I find it hard to applaud such a development.
In 1982, after a lifetime’s study of ancient Hebrew documents, Andrew Rilstone

experienced a paradigm shift. He was subsequently initiated by immersion into
the death and resurrection of Yeshua ben Yosef, called the Anointed One. In his
spare time he plays Star Wars and Pendragon, as well as editing Interactive
Fantasy.
Nephilim is reviewed elsewhere in this issue.
Notes
1
‘None Dare Call it Witchcraft’, cited by Phil Phillips in Turmoil in the
Toybox, published by Starburst Publishers, in 1986 (page 129).
2
Nephilim, by Frederic Weil, Fabrice Lamidey, Sam Shirley and Greg
Stafford, published in 1994 by Chaosium.
3
‘The Occult’ is at best an imprecise term used as everything from a
general term for secret knowledge to a synonym for Satanism. It is used
throughout to mean ‘a wide range of mystical and divination techniques,

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practices and beliefs outside of the religious mainstream’. While not a

technical definition, this does seem to be the way in which the term is
used both by Christians, by ‘occultists’ themselves, and in popular par-
lance.
4
Christian Life Ministries Pro Family Forum, cited by Phil Phillips, op
cit, page 130.
5
Dark Dungeons, published by the Penfold Book and Bible Trust.
6
All God’s Children, General Synod Board of Education and Board of
Mission, published in 1991 by National Society/Church House Publish-
ing, page 31.
7
Published in the UK by Croftward between 1988-1989.
8
‘The acts of the sinful nature are obvious; sexual immorality, impu-
rity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft.’ (Gal 5:19); ‘The cowardly,
the unbelieving, the vile, the murderer, the sexually immoral, those who
practise magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the
fiery lake of burning sulphur.’ (Rev 21:24)
9
Phil Phillips, op cit, page 37.
10
Cited by Phil Phillips, op cit.
11
Games Don’t Kill, Greg Stafford et al, Games Manufacturer’s Associa-
tion, 1988. Italics added.
12
Children at Risk, 1986, Kingsway Publications. Italics added.
13
Porter is unusual in that he acknowledges the existence of role-play-
ing games other than Dungeons & Dragons. Disapproving of Call of Cthul-
hu, he recommends that parents direct their kids towards Middle-earth
Role-Playing instead.
14
Both published by Yaquinto.
15
See the article ‘Sleeping With the Enemy’ by David Castle in Aslan
#13

16 Ibid.
17
Phil Phillips, op cit, page 130.
18
See review by William A. Barton in Space Gamer #70
19
For example, his meditation on the Incarnation of Jesus: ‘The first
point is to see the people, that is, to see Our Lady and St Joseph, and the
maid-servant, and the infant Jesus after he is born … I look at them and
contemplate them, and minister to them in their need, as if I were pre-
sent there, with the utmost respect and reverence.’ (Hodder and Stoug-
ton Christian Classics, page 29).
20
Knights Adventurous, page 130 (Chaosium, 1990).
21
The first of the Storyteller games, published in 1991 by White Wolf
Games.
22
Vampire, page 268.
23
Ibid.
24
It would be pedantic to point out that in Dante, purgatory was a hill.
25
Op cit, page 5.

26
Ibid, page 268.
27
I have only briefly examined the latest of the Storyteller games,
Wraith (1994). While dealing with similar themes to Vampire, it seems re-
freshingly free of philosophical digression, and also contains some very
sensible comments about not playing the game in ways that will disturb
players unduly.
28
In various postings on Usenet.
29
Quoted from Nephilim’s character generation system.
30
Review attributed to ‘Stig’.
31
Published between 1990 and 1991.
32
The authors of the successful series of fantasy novels based on TSR’s
Dragonlance scenarios for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

analysis
This section steps outside the
world of recreational gaming to
look at interactive narrative from
a more theoretical perspective;
bringing in approaches from
philosophy, psychology and art
criticism, and examining other
ways in which the form is used.
This issue, the majority of the

section is given over to those
teachers and educationalists who
are making use of the ideas and
techniques of interactive fiction in
schools, colleges—and tents.
Analysis
Gaming in My Classroom
by David Millians
Another day in school:

‘When do we start?’
‘Can I read the rulebook?’
‘I won!’
‘What if I try this?’
‘What are our choices?’
‘I need your help.’
‘Here’s the plan.’
‘Why did that happen?’
‘This is fun!’
Good teachers throughout history have used games of various types
to work with their students. These challenges have ranged from the
purely physical to the highly cerebral. Some, like chess, have helped
players generally strengthen their problem-solving abilities. Others have
been intended to teach more specific lessons.
Unfortunately, modern mass-education has usually catered to the low-
est common denominators. While there are excellent students, teachers,
administrators and schools within these vast bureaucracies, their efforts
are often blunted by vacuously low or unreasonably high expectations, as
well as by standardization, apathy and turf wars. So many people, born
curious and creative, lose their excitement for discovery, imagination
and learning. Around the world, schools labouring to provide necessary
education find themselves unable to inspire. The simulations and activi-
ties published for these classrooms tend to be weak, shallow, brief and
dull. But good teachers can make a difference.
Danny, 11, after playing in a series of Dungeons & Dragons adventures,
asks, ‘Can I look at your maps? The ones you use to run the game?’ I
agree, and after several days Danny begins to ask questions about the
lands beyond the edges of the paper, those perhaps hinted at but left
without detail. I tell him that I don’t know what’s there, that no one has
ever explored beyond the edge of the map—until Danny.
‘Would you like to make maps of what you think lies beyond the
edge?’ I ask. This is the last I see of Danny for the rest of the day. He
returns later with questions about what symbols to use for deserts and
how best to show trade routes between neighbouring islands. Within a

Gaming in my Classroom by David Millians
week he is producing clear, interesting maps, with loads of description,

both written and oral, delighting his peers and fascinating his teacher
and gamesmaster.
Adam, 12, doesn’t like to write. His stories tend to be as abbreviated
as possible. He loves stories and role-playing games, he loves to play
outdoors and his interest in reading is growing; but he does not like to
write. He is annoyed by his teacher’s weekly writing assignments.
‘We have to write about a sad time? Can I make it up?’
‘I would rather that you didn’t. It’s better to write about something
you know.’
‘But I have an idea about my dwarf character and the worst day in his
life … ’
Pause.
‘Give it a try. Remember, Adam, it has to be at least two pages.’
‘Okay, okay.’
Adam is unusually quiet during writing times that week. On Friday
he hands in a five-page story: ‘The Dwarf ’. He relates a season in the life
of a middle-aged dwarf. Scenes of swashbuckling adventure follow one
after another. Our hero encounters gruesome monsters and fabulous
lands, some of them perhaps gloomy or frightening, but not sad. In the
end, though, he returns to his humble dwelling beneath a great spread-
ing oak. He finds that in his absence goblin raiders have looted the land,
burning his home and killing his young wife. In the final paragraphs he
grieves for his loss and foolish irresponsibility, and vows never to harm
another living creature but to dedicate his life to helping others.
‘Is my story okay?’
‘Yes, Adam, it’s a treasure.’
Quiet Heather, 12, likes her warrior character. As she walks over
to play in the game each week, her walk and manner become that of
a mighty barbarian, trampling the building blocks beneath her san-
dalled feet. She takes whichever seat she wants, and the other players
listen to her respectfully when she describes her plan in little more
than a whisper.
One afternoon, Danny’s character plunges through the weakened
capstones into a deep but dry cistern. His leg is broken, and the other
characters’ rope will not reach him. Heather’s character, the strongest in
the group, climbs down to rescue him. After hefting him onto her back,
she and I begin calculating the effect of his weight on her climbing skill
in the Harnmaster rule system. A blackboard is conveniently nearby, and
we fill one corner with calculations.
Heather suddenly whirls on me and asks in an accusatory tone, ‘Are
you having us play these games just so we’ll do maths?’
No, I wasn’t, but Heather’s words still guide me today as I realize
more and more ways in which games can be used in classrooms. Games—

Analysis
board, war and role—provide a host of opportunities for a classroom. A

small investment for rules and supplies gives a teacher countless lessons
in a form that delights, fascinates and motivates students. Individual
players develop their imagination and creativity. Co-operation and com-
petition, unlike many traditional lessons, foster a range of social skills.
Reading, writing and maths are part of, or can be built into games with
ease. Specific games can be used to teach concepts and skills in social
studies, science and literature. Art and music projects can be woven into
a game-based curriculum. Any good game promotes stronger thinking
and curiosity. Games can be used within any schedule, although like any
piece of quality curriculum, they need time. A game can be used for an
hour or two, once per week, or it can be played in a regular class period
over an entire week or more. Games are designed to be fun— and let’s
keep it that way. But let’s also realize their potential as learning tools.
Learning can be fun too.
Some teachers have one favourite game, and others make use of a
range of game activities. I know of students as young as five years old
using some games, and such exercises are used with all levels up through
professional university curricula. A game might be used to briefly expose
students to the feel of a culture. A teacher might lead a longer simulation
of a battle, war, conference or conflict, and then have students explore
the issues raised through discussions, writing, other challenges, other
games.
I believe that there are five levels at which games can be implement-
ed in a school or other educational environment:
1. After school or lunch time programme. In many schools, stu-
dents are already playing these games during their free time. A teacher
may simply notice this, provide a space for it, supervise it or actually
run a game for the students. As this is all taking place during everyone’s
break time, it is only tangentialy connected with the ordinary school day.
Even at this level, games can provide a host of insights for any adult
who observes the activity, and the players can still reap many of the ben-
efits that games can provide: socializing, co-operating and competing,
problem-solving, language skills and so on.
2. Scheduled activity or choice period. Many primary schools and
some others have an activity or choice time built into the day or week,
during which students might choose from a range of usually teacher-led
activities. A game, perhaps run over a number of consecutive sessions,
might be one of these. Though little different from an after school or
lunch time programme, this level is scheduled within the regular school
day. As a result, students will generally seek to gain more time for any
game they are enjoying. The examples of Danny, Adam and Heather all
arose around this level of involvement.
3. Simulation. Teachers use games all the time, but they tend to

call them simulations. This involves using a game as a formal exercise

in a curriculum. There are a number of simulations published for use in
schools, but most of these are dry, malnourished things compared to the
robust, detailed environment of Avalon Hill’s D-Day or Wizards of the
Coast’s Ars Magica. Whatever the topic, it comes alive for students when
they get a chance to live within or perhaps even control it. This level of
involvement can be a single session, or it might stretch out over a num-
ber of meetings.
4. Primary method. This is merely an extension of the previous
level, wherein simulations become one of the dominant, common ways
in which students are introduced to and learn about a topic or area of
study. It makes for a fun, loud classroom.
5. Focus. Games are the topic of the classroom. Students read
games. They examine the writing and the mathematics within games.
They critique games. They study the game industry itself. This study
would be possible in a primary school or as an aspect of a higher-level
course on language, maths or economics. It has never, to my knowledge,
been done formally. One day . . .
Increasingly I use games as my primary method of teaching. I like
to gather my students around a central topic or focus for the year. Oth-
er related topics and activities, the games I use, planning with special-
ist teachers (in art, music, physical education and science), field trips,
camping trips, class plays and final projects are all developed in light of
this central theme.
Several years ago, I was teaching ten- and eleven-year-olds outside
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (I don’t think it’s an accident that I like
working with ten- and eleven-year olds. This was the age at which I re-
ally discovered these wonderful, rich, endless games. Now, older and
wiser and at least as playful, I go to work each day to enjoy and to spread
these same delightful, potent explorations.) Our focus for that year was
medieval Europe. I have always enjoyed exploring this time period, and
naturally fit a number of published games— board, role, and war— into
my teaching of it. That year was one of the richest I have ever experi-
enced in terms of games in the classroom. What follows is a story I often
tell when working with teachers.
We explored medieval history from a number of angles: political,
culinary, artistic, architectural, religious, fashion and so forth. We used
many techniques, and I thought it was a rich and interesting curriculum.
One facet we had not yet really explored was the economic life of the
medieval ages. We had referred to the great fairs, the trade routes and
the links with the exotic east, but these had been just in passing, and
what I really wanted to emphasize was the economic situation as it was
experienced by typical people, day after day.
I dug out the ‘Manor’ supplement for the Harnmaster rule system

Analysis
from Columbia Games. I like this game system and had run it before on
my own. The students and I actually used the main rules later in the year
to examine other aspects of medieval society, but the ‘Manor’ rules were
obscure and intended only for those Harnmaster players who were really
interested in the many decisions surrounding the healthy operation of a
medieval manor. They were perfect for my needs.
I found a small valley in the Alps on a map of Austria. It was large
enough for my purposes but small and isolated enough to give us a sim-
ple starting place. I expanded and redrew the map, replacing the small
towns with a number of small estates. One of these was a modest ab-
bey and several had mines or forests. The largest and most central con-
trolled the only bridge over the river which ran through the mountains,
flowing down to Lake Constance. All of these lands owed tribute to the
Lord of Bregenz, far away from these tiny domains but no doubt aware
of their existence. He was my character, my role in the simulation.
Using only the overall acreage of each demesne, my own sense of
balance, and the ‘Manor’ rules, we generated the many necessary details
of each land holding, and began the process of making decisions year
to year concerning land use, resources, peasants and tribute to Bregenz.
Everyone had lots of arithmetic practice, struggling to maintain their ba-
sic ledgers. I expected to cycle through this routine for the equivalent of
a couple of years, assess their understanding of manorialism, and move
on to new topics. This was not to be.
Within an hour of their first encounter with these humble imaginary
lands, my students began producing coats of arms, genealogies and, best
of all, plans. Naturally, knowing good curriculum when I saw it, I inte-
grated these projects into our official activities. I gave the students time
to do quality work, provided them with more art and writing supplies,
and lent guidance where I could.
They began to write stories about these minor nobles and their fami-
lies. They attempted to calculate their resources many years into the
future. They mapped their estates, their manor houses, their rooms and
dining halls. A few constructed dioramas, designed stained glass win-
dows (subject to the abbot’s certification of authenticity), and sought to
expand their opportunities and power. The girls examined the history
of women in the Middle Ages, seeking acceptable ways to give them-
selves as much power as possible over their estates. Some were widows
and some were unmarried heirs without a male relative in sight. A few
had a husband, but he seemed little interested in the intricacies of direct-
ing the estate. All of my students began to speak in character, even in
grammar (Latin) class!
Danny, the holder of that largest central village with the bridge (Au),
really wanted to get wealthy. He cast about for solutions. His own vil-
lage had grown so much over the centuries that he was actually losing

valuable land. He valued his position as a centre of craftwork for the val-
ley, but without land he was unsure how to expand his production. He
contemplated placing a tax on the bridge but his neighbours, including
some nominally unaffected, let out such an uproar that his overlord, the
wise Lord of Bregenz, refused to allow this change. Danny’s estates were
some of the best in the valley. They were not the largest, but he was one
of the wealthiest. He wanted more.
Frustrated, Danny finally came to the realization that land was by far
the most valuable possession in his society. The problem was, he didn’t
know how to get any more. It couldn’t be bought or sold. In fact, he
didn’t really own his estate, for he simply had it on loan from his lord
in Bregenz. He didn’t contemplate this frustrating fact for too long. He
needed a way to acquire more land which he could then manage for the
greatest profit. He questioned, he read, he sat pensively during soccer
games and class meetings. Then he saw how it was done.
‘Becca, will you marry me?’ We all looked over to see Danny down
on one knee before his friend and long-time schoolmate. She was strug-
gling not to laugh, but was intrigued at the same time. She knew he was
asking in character, and they handled this potentially embarrassing mo-
ment very well.
‘Just a minute. I need to confer with my advisors.’ She came over to
me, and we discussed the details of brideprice, her lands (the largest in
the valley), her need to protect her son by a previous marriage, and so
forth. Danny and I also spoke, and the negotiations dragged on for over
a week. But in the end they were able to announce their planned nup-
tials to the rest of the class and were received with whoops of approval
and delight. There were a few envious looks.
This is when my class got really busy. Danny and Becca sought the
approval of their overlord, which was speedily granted following pay-
ment of the traditional fee to his lordship. Danny sent out official invita-
tions. He asked the abbot to preside over this important ceremony and
he, of course, agreed, though Danny soon after donated a new altarpiece
to the mountaintop abbey and granted the abbot certain rights in perpe-
tuity. Danny arranged for dancers, musicians and the feast following the
religious ceremony. This was getting expensive.
The attendees planned and in some cases actually constructed their
gifts for the newly-weds. The abbot, Leif, planned his words based on
traditional marriages and his own sense of propriety. This came to over
a page, which he translated into Latin (with the help of his loyal scribe).
He retained Jenny, a less wealthy noble, to assist in the pageant, and
there was some talk of their lengthy and perhaps impropriotous meet-
ings. The hall was prepared. Becca practised her entrance dance with
her attendants. Local cooks (parents) prepared for an authentic medi-
eval marriage feast. The whole school watched with amused and fasci-

Analysis
nated delight as these preparations got underway.

A number of local customs emerged. Becca and Danny were greeted
with whoops on their arrival each morning. Becca wore a red sash from
the day they announced their plans. Danny grimaced and mumbled
about the costs. On the day of the wedding their faces were covered and
they were kept from each other by their excited friends. The cooks ar-
rived to prepare the meal. Becca and her dancers disappeared for their
final preparations. Leif practised for the ceremony. Danny pored over
his ledgers.
The Lord of Bregenz arrived in his finery, and Danny escorted him
to the hall, hoping the expense of sheltering his overlord would not
grow too large. Most of the invited men were gathered. Leif solemnly
entered and led them in a prayer of benediction. The men stepped for-
ward and each gave an egg, a symbol of fertility, to Danny. Leif blessed
them. Music filled the hall and dancers entered, shielding Becca as she
came dancing forward. The dance evoked the seasons of life. Becca came
to her place, and the dancers found their places. Everyone brought the
gift of an egg to Becca. Leif blessed them. Danny, sensing the fulfilment
of all that he had worked and paid for, looked increasingly pleased. He
and Becca dramatically batted their eyelashes at one another. The hall
settled contentedly.
Leif led the hall in a series of Latin prayers for health, long life, fertil-
ity and happiness for all in the years to come. His Latin was solid, and
the congregation participated lustily. Leif read the agreement binding
these two houses, and the Lord of Bregenz blessed the union. Leif pro-
nounced them joined, and this was celebrated by a whoop from those
gathered, who hastened out through the doors. Danny and Becca were
greeted by a shower of oat grains as they emerged from the hall and
made their way to the feast. Music and laughter filled the air. Younger
students swirled about the celebrations, fascinated and delighted.
The feast was delicious and educational. Young lordlings and ladies
bit into spit-roasted meats, half-familiar salads and honeyed desserts;
and they slaked their thirst with apple and grape juice. They sang, and
they cheered every new course. Becca and Danny were applauded and
congratulated. The gifts came forward, and everyone, especially Danny,
was very pleased. He did glance apprehensively at his apparently drowsy
overlord, but for the most part he enjoyed himself.
As the crowd began to relax and consider perhaps some outdoor
amusements on the field, Becca came over to me. She was pleased and
flushed from the celebrations.
‘What happens now, if Danny should happen to die?’ O, my! Within
minutes, talk of poison filled the air, lines were drawn, camps were or-
ganized, and finally tempers defused. The marriage remained whole, if
not sound, and life in the valley proceeded ever onward.

There were further adventures in the Au Valley. Abbot Leif received

a missive from Rome demanding to know his position in the ongoing
conflict between Pope and Emperor. Conflicts over mining and timber
rights exploded. Danny continued to eye that taxable bridge, as well as
his wife. Their estates performed fabulously. Toward the end of the year,
the (First) Crusade was proclaimed, the Lord of Bregenz announced his
intention to join, and the valley was thrown into a muddle concerning
who would go and who would stay.
This was a wonderful piece of our study that year. What began as a
simple, abstract game blossomed into a wondrous examination of cul-
ture and people. It was but one piece, though certainly the most visually
and digestively satisfying, and so much more can be done.
In the years that have followed, teaching now in Atlanta, Georgia, I
have mostly had the history of the United States as my focus. I work with
the same age group. After the success of the Au Valley game, I have usu-
ally designed a large simulation to last the whole year.
Two years ago it was the nineteenth century. Each student led a fam-
ily, beginning in the year 1800, lasting through several generations to
1900. They began as a representative spread of peoples and lifestyles
across the continent. Births and sickness, success and economic peril
shaped their lives and decisions. Some remained fixed to their starting
place, but many sought out opportunity and advancement as the years
rolled past. Jane managed her family’s successful shipping business out
of Boston. Julian led his family westward and panned for gold in Cali-
fornia. Mike tried to build railroads in Texas. They lived this history, and
it mattered to them. By every assessment they knew it inside and out,
better than those taking traditional courses.
This past school year we studied twentieth-century U.S. history. We
had a simulation similar to last year’s in which they experienced the
wars, the depressions, the technology, the shifting demographics and
the personal stories of these years. I led role-playing games, some histor-
ical, some more fantastic and speculative. A Call of Cthulhu scenario had
them arriving in mysterious New York City as Croatian orphans in 1913.
During the Depression and after reading some George Orwell and John
Steinbeck, we played ‘Animal Farm’, a look at prejudice and justice using
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. This was followed by
a game about ‘The Age of Aquarius’ for Werewolf and Mage. We played
Avalon Hill’s Midway and D-Day (from their Smithsonian Series) during
our study of World War Two. In both we were able to explore strategic
issues and historical might-have-beens.
Summer camp is another place I explore games with children, often
with more flexibility than I can have with a focused classroom. I am able
to examine how young people tell a story of far-away places, approach a
challenge in a wargame, or interact with their peers in this shifting land-

Analysis
scape of the imagination. I am able to try out many games, including

some I have not had time to play anywhere else with people of any age.
It was during this most recent summer that several campers introduced
me to the card game Magic: the Gathering. Though I have not been bitten
by the fever that seems to have taken so many, I have noticed that it is
an exciting possibility for the classroom. Here is a game that needs little
introduction, yet offers a range of possibilities and options akin to chess.
That’s a good game— I mean challenge— for growing, young minds.
During the 1994-1995 school year I will focusing my curriculum on
the modern world, so it’s time to pull out Supremacy, Cybergeneration, Twi-
light 2000, Road to the White House and many more.
Games are not a panacea for all of the ills that face the world’s school
systems. Simulations are not the ideal medium within which all students
learn. Not all schools or teachers will be comfortable with the broad use
of games in their area. But games do provide a rich and often over-
looked approach for students and teachers. Everyone needs variety, and
games must be mixed with the more familiar range of techniques— lec-
tures, reading, discussions, research and group presentations, work sta-
tions— available to teachers. Games are a potent tool for teachers, one
that has a long history of use but which has been forgotten by many, one
that with the explosion of new games in the last few decades has received
an immense range of new ideas and exciting possibilities. Enjoy!
David Millians is a member of the GAMA Gaming & Education Group, and
currently teaches ten- and eleven-year-olds in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Munchkin Examined
How Children Role-Play
by Nathan Gribble
I am lucky enough to work in a small and radical independent school

which is run largely by the pupils, who do the hiring and firing of the
staff, make all the rules and set the curriculum. For the last few years one
of the most enjoyable parts of my job has been to referee role-playing
games for some of my pupils. Although I am their teacher, the games
that I run are not intended to be particularly educational: I run games
purely for the fun of it—both theirs and mine.
Nevertheless, since our games are a timetabled part of the school
week, and since I get paid for running them, I feel I should begin by
justifying role-playing as a valid school activity. I can think of four good
reasons for having role-playing in school.
First, giving children time within the school curriculum to do some-
thing which they enjoy, and are therefore good at, encourages them to
value it. This gives them self-confidence. Confidence is far more valu-
able than academic qualifications, and in any case, confident students
tend to be better at learning.
Secondly, role-playing is a social activity which gives children a chance
to explore the ways in which they relate to other people, and thus to be-
come more competent at doing so.
Thirdly, the relationship between a referee and a player is very dif-
ferent to that between a teacher and a pupil. This gives me, as a teacher,
a different understanding of the children, and they in turn see me in a
different light. This can help to make our relationship more open and
successful.
Finally, role-playing is a moral forum, in which issues such as vio-
lence, prejudice and power can be explored. This is admittedly a two-
edged sword, since role-playing games often depict a lot of gratuitous
killing and other dubious activities.
However, I believe that the above justifications are ultimately irrel-
evant. Games are fun and therefore a good thing in their own right.
Children will play most games, but are turned off by three things.
They hate over-complex rules which they do not understand; they are
not interested in games which involve self-analysis; and they find that

Analysis
games set in environments which they cannot understand, or games

with restrictive rules tend to disempower them, which they hate. For this
reason they’ve never enjoyed games which involve complex politics, and
they were incensed when I tried to run Pendragon. (‘Why can’t I do any-
thing without rolling dice to see if I want to? What is the point of dancing
and rolling dice to see who I fancy?’) They seem to enjoy Star Wars, Toon,
GURPS, Middle-earth Role-Playing, Space:1889, Cyberpunk and Ars Magica.
Ars Magica was the closest I have come to actually using role-playing
as a teaching aid, since the system proved to be a good way to encourage
the children to take an interest in medieval history. Our scenario was set
in the mid-twelfth century, in the middle of the High Crusading period.
I made it clear to the children that the game would intersect with impor-
tant historical events. This meant that those children who followed up
my suggestions about suitable reading material were rewarded both with
a better chance of success and a deeper understanding of the game. It
was also in this game that I made one of my worst mistakes. At the begin-
ning of the game I deliberately depicted a prejudiced view of the Jews, to
give the players a historical perspective, and in order (I hoped) to show
how foolish such prejudice is. You can imagine how horrified I was when
one of the players asked me seriously, ‘Are Jews really this mean?’ If this
hadn’t happened, I might have unwittingly been creating prejudice and
misunderstanding in the minds of children who were too young to have
developed a full moral perspective on such things.
However, since most of my games are played purely for recreational
purposes, the rest of this article will be concerned with observations that
I have made about the ways in which children role-play.
Most adult gamers have got a pretty good idea of what young gam-
ers—or ‘munchkins’ as they traditionally call them—are like. They are
pubescent boys with little imagination, who play only the most straight-
forward dungeon-bashing, monster-zapping games. They are power-
gamers who always play their characters as self-serving, experience-
point-hunting ego-trips. We might even go so far as to say that they live
out their violent and deeply suspect fantasies through their characters.
Wrong! Go to the back of the class.
Unimaginative? Teenagers are at the most imaginative time of their
lives, although they often do not have the breadth of experience or lin-
guistic skills to express this imagination particularly well. But their im-
agination allows them to experience all types of role-playing to its fullest
extent. It is only tired adults like us who have to explore more and more
sophisticated fantasies in order to continue to get a ‘buzz’ out of role-
playing.
The very first game I ever ran at school was set in Tolkien’s Middle
-earth, and used a very basic rules system, based on two statistics and a
one-line character description. It was run completely without prepara-

The Munchkin Examined by Nathan Gribble
tion and was a very basic trip into a wight’s burrow. With ten players all
clamouring for my attention, it should have been a complete disaster,
and I would have been thrown to the lions by any adult gamers, but the
children lapped it up. They were scared about going into a dark tunnel;
they were confused and then thoughtful about a puzzle trap, and they
cheered when the wight finally went down to a lucky blow by a hobbit.
Afterwards they spent hours talking about the game, and bullied me
until I did it again. So although it is true that children often enjoy games
like this that adults have grown out of, it is we who are to be pitied, not
them.
This does not mean that children are incapable of playing anything
more sophisticated. Children can enjoy and contribute to many types of
games. Indeed, I think that they often find it easier to adapt to new styles
of play than we do, since they are not yet ‘set in their ways’. This can still
surprise me at times. I would not have expected the children to enjoy
Space: 1889, but they did. They all took the roles of Victorian English
gentleman, except for one who played a deranged Scottish cook. With
a little help, they took to Colonial Imperialism like Ironclads to water.
Although superficially the game consisted of little more than bad accents
and worse moral attitudes, it often managed to be quite satirical. The
jokes were always at the expense of the bigoted player characters, and
the children seem to enjoy and understand this: ‘Trust those damned
greenies to pull a trick like that: now who’s going to carry the bally lug-
gage?’ It was also, incidentally, quite educational: the children have been
ransacking libraries for Victorian photos with which to flesh out their
characters.
I was also pleasantly surprised by a Toon game in which one of the
players played the county of Cornwall, and another played the sentence
‘Oh no, look behind you’. ‘Cornwall’ confessed that when it was cold he
could barely feel the Scilly Isles, and ‘Sentence’ had the special ability
to leap out of a PC, NPC or object at any moment. If I had run such
a game with adult players, people would have said that it was radical,
experimental and surreal.
That said, unless someone shows them that there is a better ap-
proach, children do sometimes fall into the trap of playing role-playing
games to win. But this ‘winning’ does not involve creating a more power-
ful version of themselves. Teenagers in particular are often very unsure
of who they are in real life, which makes them very reluctant to create
a character who in any way resembles them. You might expect that this
would mean that they would create a sort of fantasy role-model: a player
character who represents the sort of person they would like to be. I tend
to find that the opposite is the case.
Children are happy to play characters who have the same good
points that they do, but shy away from creating ones who share their bad

Analysis
points, or with compensatory good ones. A child who thinks they are
tough might create a tough player character, but they would be equally
happy to create a weak one. A child who feels weak and vulnerable, on
the other hand, will certainly not choose a weak character, and would be
fairly unlikely to choose a tough one since that would also draw attention
to their vulnerability. When children start to come to terms with their
own failings, it is sometimes reflected in their choice of player character.
At one time, a fairly fat and un-academic child used to create care-
fully designed killer characters. At first I thought that this was because
they were easy to play, but I am now sure that he would have felt unsafe
playing a realistic person, in case he showed up his own weaknesses. A
short time ago he produced a character who was a hugely fat engineer-
ing genius. This highlighted both his fatness—he did a lot of humorous
belly-wobbling acting for the part—and his inability to do brain work.
He asked me to be aware that he would need help to play the character’s
scientific expertise. I was very pleased with this because it meant that he
was comfortable enough with himself and the other players to let down
his guard.
Among adult gamers it is often the players’ acting ability that creates
a ‘good game’. Children are rarely such good actors as adults, and they
are certainly not interested in introspection or ‘method acting’. Children
do not seem to identify with their PCs in the same way that adults do.
They regard them with affection, but as external constructs; puppets to
be manipulated. What happens to their character does not affect them
in the way that it would an adult. When Steve McQueen drives his mo-
tor bike into the barbed wire at the end of The Great Escape we are des-
perately disappointed, but we do not remotely feel as if we ourselves
have been trapped. This is how it is for children in role-playing games,
although possibly with even more distress because they are responsible
for the PC’s problems.
This doesn’t mean that they talk about their characters in the third
person. The detachment shows itself in less obvious ways. I’ve seen a
child playing a Jedi Knight in Star Wars who, while trying to save the
lives of his friends, fell foul of his anger and was taken over by the Dark
Side of the Force. Although the child represented the character as be-
ing distraught and repentant, he himself was gleeful at the power his
character had gained, and confessed to looking forward to the next time
he could use it. The children’s detachment from their characters means
that they can swap perspectives from one character to another quickly.
This shows itself in their willingness to change characters when they
have ‘had enough’ of one, and in conversations about what their next
character will be should their current one die.
Adults often make decisions about their characters’ actions based on
what they would do themselves in the real world. Children simply do not

have the breadth of experience to ‘put themselves in their character’s

place’ in this way, and often take ill-advised actions because they do not
know better. This naïvity does not detract from the games: indeed, it of-
ten produces very interesting situations. In one Star Wars game, a group
of smugglers managed to capture a customs frigate that had tried to
board their spacecraft.
‘This is worth a lot of money,’ say they. ‘But it is strictly hot goods.
How can we sell it?’
‘How about selling it to The Great Tree?’
‘That sounds like a good plan.’
So off they trundle, right into the lair of The Great Tree, an old en-
emy from a previous scenario. They are very surprised when, right af-
ter they have obligingly disarmed all their ship’s weaponry, The Great
Tree’s minions rush onto the ship and imprison them.
The interesting thing about this was that after the initial surprise, the
players weren’t resentful towards the referee or the game: they got into a
forehead-slapping routine: ‘Of course! How stupid of us!’
Most adult games are played by groups of friends and colleagues. A
school gaming group, on the other hand, may consist of children whose
ages range from ten to eighteen, and which cuts across many different
friendship groups. The older children would normally have nothing to
do with the younger ones, so it is a strange social group, and that can
cause difficulties.
The oldest children seem tolerant of the young ones, but those who
are half-way up find it mortifyingly difficult to play with anyone younger
than themselves. This has, on occasion, become quite unpleasant: the
middle-aged group started to use their superior wit to cut the young
children down at any excuse. It became so bad at one point that I had to
split the group into two separate games, one for the young children and
one for the middle ones. The calm and easy-going older children played
happily with both age groups. One positive thing came out of this, how-
ever: now that the younger group is a little older, they are very careful
not to treat the younger children in the way that they were treated, and
have bent over backwards to help the inexperienced.
Most of the interaction that goes on in the group is between the play-
ers and the referee, rather than between the players themselves. This
means that running children’s games can be very work-intensive for the
referee. As the most experienced person in the game, the children are
looking to me for signals about what they should do. If they joined a
group already used to complex inter-player conversations, they would
quickly pick it up and learn that they did not need the referee to quite
the same extent.
As it is, there is a risk that the game will either turn into a shouting
contest, or else that the most dominant players will hog all of my time. It

Analysis
is important, therefore, for me to give each player a roughly equal share

of my time. This means that each player’s ‘turn’ has to be interesting
to the other players so that they listen and are entertained, rather than
waiting, passive and bored, for their turn. (This is a skill that would be
useful to many referees in adult games, too!) I have to think on my feet
so that one child’s irrelevant digression can be connected back to the
main plot. The Dark Jedi has just leapt from his hiding place and the
dramatic showdown is about to happen: but when it comes around to his
‘turn’ one of the players decides that all he wants to do is pick someone’s
pocket. I have to drag him back to the point: if he had succeeded then
he would have stolen something that would have been essential to defeat
the Dark Jedi. In fact he fails, and the ensuing fight gets mixed up with
the main action. Sure enough, in the hue-and-cry, someone points at
the Dark Jedi and shouts, ‘There’s his accomplice, get him!’ The pick-
pocket’s ‘digression’ was thus kept interesting for the players who were
fighting the evil Jedi Knight. I can never assume, as I would with an
adult group, that the players will help me advance the plot: they have to
be nudged.
The freedom to say and do whatever they like is sometimes abused by
children. I have seen a child kill another player’s character, or simply be-
have unpleasantly to that character, because of some quarrel that is go-
ing on outside the game. A child playing a Beorning in a Middle-earth
game handed me a message saying that when he was standing next to
the Elf—a much older boy—he would deliberately cut his own hand,
causing him to turn into a bear and go berserk. Unbeknown to me, the
young child had been involved in a very heated argument about using
his computer earlier that day, and felt that the game was a good way to
get his own back without his enemy finding out it was him. ‘Oh, sorry,’ he
said. ‘I can’t help it when I go berserk. I wonder what could have caused
that in the first place?’
This openness also seems to affect what the children say to each oth-
er out of character. This is actually a reflection of the sort of interaction
that goes on in their own time but which, as an adult, I would not nor-
mally see. (Even with the openness of the relationship between staff and
children that pervades our school, the children tend to avoid overtly an-
tisocial behaviour in front of the staff, so as not to embarrass us.) But in
a gaming situation they become totally frank and say exactly what they
feel without the filters that they would normally have in place. Being
able to observe this behaviour and make gentle suggestions is perhaps
another advantage of gaming with kids. It is harder for me to prevent
in-character bullying because, in the spirit of the game, it is difficult to
prevent a character taking some action that they would logically be able
to take. But as the children play more games, they often see for them-
selves that it is inappropriate to use a game as a medium for pursuing

real-life grievances, and sometimes stop doing so without pressure from

me—a possible learning experience for life?
One child really hated having his younger brother role-playing with
him, and made it as hard as possible for him. After a year of being ir-
ritated by each other, both brothers were playing crusader knights who
were the only player characters left alive after an attack by monsters in
the desert. This coincided nicely with a football game elsewhere in the
school, so we three were left to find out if they could get out of the desert
with no camels and little water. An hour later they had survived and
were very pleased with themselves. So pleased, in fact, that the older
brother never again gave his sibling a hard time when they played those
two knights. But when they played any other character, it was badness as
usual!
These age differences can cause more mundane problems for the
referee. A ten-year-old is more likely to want everything explained in
black and white than an eighteen-year-old. When both are playing in the
same game, their characters behave in very different ways. But it is sur-
prisingly easy to run a game in which some of the players just thug every
evil-looking monster while others work on complex goals and character
development. In fact, the two sides can often complement each other.
This can make even the most superficial scenes quite interesting:
Young Player: I shoot it.
Referee: You hit it, but just wound it. It lunges at you, revealing in the
back of the cave a nest of little ones.
Older Player: (Suddenly interested) It’s a mother! (To young player)
Quick, back off before you really work it up. (To referee) I’ll shoot and
shout a lot, trying to distract it so that Thrangg can get away.
Young Player: I’ll try to run to the entrance.
Referee: (Quietly, to young player) As you scrabble for the exit, you hear
something big coming through the bushes.
Young Player: It must be the dad! Shanth, look out! We’re in real
trouble now.
The above may seem very mundane, but it has achieved two interest-
ing things. First, it has made the mature gamer and the inexperienced
one work together, and more importantly it has caused the young one to
make a deduction rather than react by habit.
All this can certainly cause some problems in a school. Children can
get obsessed with role-playing to the exclusion of all else, just as they
sometimes do with computer games. I had nearly a year of A-Level Me-
chanics disrupted because the students were more interested in talking
about gaming than about geometry. (Strange, that.) As a teacher I also
get all the grief when a child doesn’t turn up to English because they
have been off shooting Imperial Stormtroopers. Still, as with all obses-
sions, after the first burst things seem to settle down into a better per-

Analysis
spective, and other things return to their appropriate importance.

Today I was trying to teach Maths to a class of quiet 14-year-olds
when four loonies burst in and demanded to know how to generate al-
iens as Star Wars characters. This is not an uncommon type of event at
our kind of school, and the other pupils just give me one of those ‘every-
thing will be fine’ looks that psychiatric nurses give you as they reach for
the strait-jacket.
In the end, one should not take anything too seriously. None of the
children who I have played with have had their lives transformed by
role-playing. Some have learned a few life lessons. Some have had their
imaginations fired a bit hotter so that their insight into life is a little
deeper and their thirst for knowledge a touch greater. Some have used
it as a means to make friends, which they otherwise found difficult. They
have all learnt some unsavoury ways to maim and kill. They have all
joined a hobby which can give them hours of satisfaction for little ex-
penditure. (Learning to use your leisure time will surely be an exam
subject in the future!) As I said at the beginning, it is just for fun, but if
people learn to value what they enjoy, then that is good for them.
Nathan Gribble teaches, if that is the right word, maths, outdoor pursuits and
role-playing at Sands School in Devon.

Role-Playing
and Dyslexia
by Andrew P. Malcolm
The word ‘Dyslexia’ is a combination of two Greek words: ‘Dys’ (difficul-

ty) and ‘Lexis’ (words). Dyslexia is often confused with illiteracy, but this
is not strictly correct. Illiteracy is frequently part of a dyslexic’s problem,
but it is rarely the only symptom.
The British Dyslexia Association defines dyslexia as:
‘A specific learning difficulty, constitutional in origin, in one or more of
reading, spelling and written language, which may be accompanied by
difficulty in number work … ’
Dyslexia constitutes a Special Educational Need as defined by the
1993 Education Act, but was first recognized by Parliament in the
Chronically Sick and Disabled Peoples Act, 1970. Approximately 10% of
all British children are thought to be dyslexic, of which 4% are believed
to be severely affected. Current theory suggest that boys are as likely to
be dyslexic as girls—although the latter seem to be less seriously affected
by the condition—and that it is hereditary.
Dyslexia doesn’t only affect the sufferers’ academic ability. It can also
have severe and debilitating social and psychological implications, and
these can be the most difficult factor to live with. Many dyslexics have
been subjected to appalling treatment during their school years, with
their peers often using their handicap as a reason for bullying them.
Unfortunately, in all too many cases, mental and emotional abuse can
also come from teachers and family members who, through ignorance
or stubbornness, refuse to acknowledge the existence of the ‘specific
learning difficulty’. This often leads to a vast amount of suffering and
emotional misery on the part of the dyslexic.
These factors can create psychological and social problems, such as
lack of confidence, loneliness, frustration or stress. The dyslexic can also
become depressed because of their inability to achieve the standards ex-
pected of them by their peer group. This in turn can create a false air
of seclusion around the dyslexic, simply because they are not able to
perform well in written language, mathematics, memory tests or sports
activities requiring physical co-ordination.

Analysis
In short, dyslexics don’t just suffer from learning difficulties, but also
from their inability to be what society unfairly classifies as ‘normal’.
Role-playing games have several things to offer the dyslexic. Firstly,
the relaxation and escapism of playing characters in foreign settings can
have great therapeutic qualities. Secondly, they can be used as a multi-
sensory learning technique, to relieve and improve symptoms such as
reading and writing difficulties. Thirdly, they are entertaining to par-
ticipate in, and therefore encourage the dyslexic to practise skills that
they might normally be reluctant to use. And finally, they provide an
unbiased medium for dyslexics to interact with non-dyslexics through
the use of imagination and speech.
Therapeutic role-playing is a subject that has already been covered
by many writers, so I’ll only briefly mention it here. Most people play
games for the purpose of relaxation and leisure; dyslexics are no differ-
ent from anyone else in this respect. Role-playing can be an excellent
tool for stress management. All the day’s tension can be so easily thrown
into knocking the living daylights out of some NPC baddie! Because
dyslexics are permanently at an academic disadvantage, they naturally
have to work harder than most people at many ‘ordinary’ tasks. Often
frustration and anger are increased by the sense that they are in an ‘un-
fair’ situation. When this happens, role-playing a character in a fantasy
environment where magic and swordsmanship are more important than
literacy and calculation can be a marvellous emotional tonic.
Multi-sensory teaching practices have been used for many years
in cases where a person is discovered to be suffering from dyslexia
by primary school age. The use of puzzles, games and more ordinary
forms of teaching, combined with the use of shapes, sounds, colours
and textures can have a dramatic effect upon the learning speed of the
individual. Regular school lessons are usually multi-sensory in nature,
with audio, visual and practical components. But dyslexics are dyslex-
ic because they have problems with the standard approach, and new
techniques can often have near-miraculous results. Basic multi-sensory
practices would include teaching the alphabet by speech, by writing
the letters, by repeating the sounds of upper and lower case letters, by
touching wooden templates, by colouring in pictures of the letters, by
drawing pictures of objects beginning with the initial, and so on. There
is nothing especially new about these approaches, but rarely are they
all combined together to comprehensively make the dyslexic familiar
with the subject matter.
Most role-playing game use some form of character sheet, which re-
quires a small amount of literacy to fill out. Reading a character’s sheet
might not be a demanding task for some dyslexics, but the repeated
use of the familiar tool can help to ease the individual away from the
habit of deliberately avoiding all written material, which many dyslexics

Role-Playing and Dyslexia by Andrew P. Malcolm
develop. Most rulebooks have illustrations and colour pictures which are
sure to stimulate the imagination. These can also help to bridge the gaps
between dyslexics and non-dyslexics. Additionally, the use of speech and
live role-playing help to broaden the multi-sensory content of RPGs,
and possibly assist the natural learning process of written and spoken
language and grammar.
Some hobby-related material (solo game books, for example) are
especially designed to encourage young readers to become interest-
ed in reading or role-playing. Because of their more simplistic use of
language, they can be used as a stepping stone to reading the massive
rulebooks of the popular adult role-playing systems. Presenting written
information as part of a mostly spoken activity is a useful and entertain-
ing way of encouraging dyslexics to read. This point is supported by
the progressive nature of many RPGs: characters gain experience points
and go up levels, and the player has to increase their knowledge of the
rules. Players thus have a sense that they are achieving something. Most
companies produce vast numbers of game supplements: players need to
read them in order to develop both game world and character, and thus
they can encourage literacy.
Because of the stress placed upon literacy within our culture, many
dyslexics develop reclusive personalities. This appears to be a defence
mechanism to avoid embarrassment, or to make life easier for them.
Many dyslexics suffer as a result of such behaviour, and psychologically
add to the barriers that separate them from non-dyslexic people.
However, since role-playing has a largely verbal content, most dys-
lexics can use it as an unbiased medium for interaction with the non-
dyslexic world. True, it is necessary to do a lot of reading of rules in order
to play most game systems, but this is something that can be laboured
over in privacy if need be. Most role-playing groups seem to abandon
rulebooks during actual gaming sessions in order to avoid unnecessary
delays in play, which leaves more time for spoken role-playing. As a re-
sult role-playing can be a useful socializing tool for people who would
normally feel uncomfortable in public because of their invisible handi-
cap.
Speaking for myself, my interest in role-playing games motivated my
desire to read, and has also created a desire to write within the role-
playing field. I believe that my experience could be of benefit to other
dyslexics, and I hope that in the future I will be able to continue working
on the development of role-playing as an alternative means of educa-
tion. One immediate idea I have is to see if a hobby-related card game—
Magic: the Gathering or Once Upon a Time—can be used to encourage
and practise reading skills. I am working on a small project to create an
RPG which stresses the importance of communication and learning, and
which contains easy-to-read rules, thus making it accessible to dyslexics.

Analysis
It will aim to both be useful as a teaching device, and to deliver a blatant

message to its players about the importance of reading.
Andrew Malcolm is a member of the Stockport Dyslexia Association and has been
role-playing for more years than he cares to remember. He became interested in
writing for role-playing publications as an exercise in overcoming his own specific
learning difficulties.
Bibliography
The Dyslexia Handbook 1993/4, edited by Julia Crisfield, published by the
B.D.A.
Information on Dyslexia in Schools, Jean Auger, published by the B.D.A.
Overcoming Dyslexia, Dr B. Hornsby, published by Macdonald.
For more information about dyslexia, contact The British Dyslexia As-
sociation, 98 London Road, Reading, RG1 5AU.

Chautauqua and the Art
of Interactive Education
by Nicole Frein
The United States National Endowment for the Humanities is a ma-

jor sponsor of an interactive narrative programme known as The Great
Plains Chautauqua Society. This is based on a programme of educa-
tional seminars of the kind that were popular towards the end of the
nineteenth century. I had the pleasure of working for the Chautauqua
Society as its road manager in 1993 and seeing first-hand the results of
its interactive approach.
The Chautauqua gets its name from the area in New York State
where the programme was originally started. The intention of the origi-
nal programme was to better educate Sunday School teachers, and the
huge striped tents were the ‘classrooms’ for educational seminars. These
seminars were undertaken with serious intent, allowing people to be-
come educated in a subject and in some cases, upon completion of a
comprehensive examination, certified as teachers or laymen.
As the Chautauqua programme gained in popularity, it began to
reach out into the Wild West, reaching people in the wilds of Illinois and
onward towards the homesteaders in Kansas and the Great Plains re-
gion. Many people striking out into the frontier of the unsettled western
territories of the United States originally came from ‘civilized’ eastern
cities such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia, and longed for the
kinds of stimulating educational endeavours that they had been used to
before striking out for a new life. In the heyday of this programme, peo-
ple would wait at the tents through the night, hoping to hear speakers
who had been delayed on the long journey. Thousands of people would
press together around the tent site to hear the unamplified orators for
hours and even days. These people were serious.
With the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s, combined with
the wide-reaching effects of radio (and later television) the popularity of
the Chautauquas began to drop off. Eventually the programme was all
but abandoned. Some forty years later, with the financial assistance of
state humanities councils, the National Endowment for the Humanities
and private contributions, a new travelling programme was set up and
has been steadily gaining in popularity ever since. In this latest incarna-

Analysis
tion the Chautauqua became not only an educational tool but also an
interactive and imaginative form of entertainment.
As the programme took on more interactive aspects, popularity and
public support began to grow as well. 1993 was the final year in a three-
year grant which included the largest block of funds ever allotted to a
single organization by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In 1994 another grant was issued for the continuation of the project.
People in otherwise isolated areas of the country have enjoyed both the
excitement of a ‘tent show’ coming to town and the educational enlight-
enment which occurs as well. The locations of the programme change
each year, but it’s not uncommon for people whose town hosted it in one
year to drive a hundred miles or more to attend again the next.
The current format for the show is interactive from the very begin-
ning. The Chautauqua travels to towns in which the programme will be
focused for a week at a time. Rather than having a truck pull up in the
town and deliver a fully formed show, the townsfolk play an important
role in the formation of show from beginning to end. They help with the
preparation of the tent, pounding stakes, setting up the chairs and the
stage. This initial stage provides the members of the town with a sense of
ownership or relationship to the programme.
Over the course of the week, the town is involved in nightly stage
shows during which scholars educate them about historical figures
through in-character monologues, dialogues with other characters, and
audience-based question-and-answer sessions. The scholars are also in-
volved in several in-character and out-of-character workshops, some-
times with adults and sometimes with children, in which they entertain
and educate the participants. Last year’s show included a nature walk led
by Henry David Thoreau; the re-enactment of an 1850s school-day with
Margaret Fuller, and a poetry writing workshop taught by Walt Whit-
man.
A typical day on the programme begins with a breakfast meeting with
the performer of the previous night, who gives a little out-of-character
insight into the writings or life of the person they portrayed in the show.
During the rest of the day several workshops are held, and they em-
ploy varying degrees of role-playing. Some of the workshops are not
suited for any role-playing at all; they are seminars in which the scholar
and the participants discuss the character in the third person. Others
are pure role-playing, usually involving children who seem less insecure
about joining in games of ‘let’s pretend’. The scholars appear in full
costume, often with props, and the entire workshop is in-character, with
the scholar and the participants all imagining themselves in the setting
of the character and interacting with that setting. When possible, these
workshops are held in historic houses, libraries, schools or woods. Each
evening is spent under the tent, much like it was in the 1860s; the schol-

Chautauqua and Interactive Education by Nicole Frein
ars perform in character for an hour or so and move on to answer ques-

tions about ‘themselves’ while in character. Afterwards, they step out of
character in order to talk about issues that the character wouldn’t be able
to address, such as their own death.
One of the strengths of the programme is that it works on many dif-
ferent levels. It does not rely only on the participation of the audience in
order to succeed, yet it is clearly more than a play or performance. It is
an educational endeavour, but it is not a lecture or a scholarly address.
In some cases it is the culmination of a year-long, town-wide educational
preparation. In getting ready to host the programme, the residents of
the town (or those planning to become active participants in the Chau-
tauqua) might have weekly meetings during which they read the works
of the authors who will be studied during the show. In some cases they
read the entire work, in other cases they read excerpts so that everyone
has a basic knowledge. In still other circumstances small-town publish-
ers, politicians, academics and philosophers will meet in bars and coffee-
houses in order to discuss and philosophize about the characters, often
trying to hone their knowledge in order to think up challenging and es-
oteric questions to pose to the characters and scholars. While sometimes
the scholars are taken off-guard by such preparedness, such questions
almost always elicit lively in-character and out-of-character responses,
to the delight of the crowd. And yet the programme works just as well
for the children who are not yet old enough to understand the deeper
symbolic meanings embedded in Moby Dick, or for the stoic old farmer
who has spent many cold winter nights snowed in on his farm with a
good novel before the luxury of the satellite dish dulled the minds of his
younger counterparts. The programme will draw thoughtful responses
from all corners of the community.
The key to Chautauqua-style performances is the mind-set and
preparation involved in being flexible in another persona; an expe-
rience familiar to good role-players. The performer must answer the
difficult question: ‘Given what I know about this famous person, how
would I build from that knowledge to extrapolate answers to questions
that person may never have even considered?’ Preparation for this kind
of presentation requires that the performer be familiar with not only
the works of the character, but their lives, their friends and family, their
movements, when and where they travelled, and any popular quotations
the audience might know and expect the character to repeat.
The actor has to portray the character as the audience imagines them
to be, but they must also provide them with more information about the
character than they ever guessed at. The presenter may also be obliged
to make a case for ideals that the audience will find outmoded or even
offensive: their character might hold beliefs about slavery, gender, race
or politics that are currently unacceptable to the general public.

Analysis
One of the subjects of the 1993 Chautauqua was Louisa May Alcott.
It is likely that the audience already knew that Miss Alcott was the author
of Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys and other romantic books for young
people. The Alcott presenter had to touch on that aspect of the character
in order to engage the audience and meet their expectations. Some of
the audience members with a particular interest in the character might
know a bit about her family or her activities during the American Civil
War. The presenter could easily work those aspects into her presenta-
tion, and still entertain the audience. It was more challenging for her to
convey several less well-known titbits about the character: that she also
wrote ‘blood and thunder’ tales with provocative names like Pauline’s Pas-
sion and Punishment under various pen-names; that she taught herself to
write with her left hand so she could produce twice as much, or that she
spent her early years in an experimental commune called Fruitlands,
started by her father.
Shaping the background of the character into a dynamic presenta-
tion by telling entertaining stories is one way to educate the audience,
but it is also important that the presenter hint at underlying difficulties
that the character might never have spoken about directly. Why did Al-
cott feel responsible for her family? Did she resent her father’s absentee
role, as he travelled the country giving esoteric talks as a professional
philosopher? By giving the audience interesting bits of biographical in-
formation in between entertaining quotes and witty stories, the present-
er leaves many aspects of the character open for the audience to discover
during the question and answer session.
The presenter needs to have a general idea of what questions are
likely to be asked during the question-and-answer period if it is to go
off without too much trouble. If the audience is likely to ask how Alcott
produced so many works during her life, the presenter might have a
funny quote from the character in the back of her mind ready to spring
out. An answer such as, ‘Well, I worked very hard,’ is likely to deflate
the enthusiasm of the audience whereas an entertaining or inspirational
quote (‘When writing it seemed that I was sucked into a vortex and felt
no hunger nor fatigue. I was perfectly happy and seemed to have no
wants as long as I was scribbling,’) will encourage and engage the audi-
ence. Of course, this form of presentation is time-consuming, and while
it is easy to discuss what should be done, it is not always so easily done.
Much practice and preparation are necessary.
Having seen the success of the Chautauqua programme myself,
the first question that springs to mind is, ‘Why aren’t there more pro-
grammes like this one?’ That is a difficult question. Despite the success of
the programme in some areas and the renown it has gathered in certain
circles, it is still generally unnoticed by the public. Even after a decade
of ever-increasing success and public support the programme, and by

Chautauqua and Interactive Education by Nicole Frein
association the method, is relatively unknown. Even where the approach

is known and respected by educators, it is a difficult and time-intensive
method of teaching. Given the choice between researching and present-
ing first-person characters or showing kids a movie, or having the stu-
dents simply read a book, harried and already over-burdened United
States teachers rarely choose the labour-intensive and time-consuming
option of first-person portrayals.
The Chautauqua presentation style has sometimes been tried in
traditional educational settings when the school has the opportunity to
address multi-cultural issues, something that has only been undertaken
seriously in the last ten to fifteen years. With the declaration of gov-
ernment holidays in the USA such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and
Indigenous People’s Day, schools have taken the opportunity to invite
a speaker into the classrooms to portray indigenous people or to read
from Dr King’s speeches and writings. Still, this application usually falls
short of true interactive education. At best the students are allowed to
ask questions of the presenter, and at worst they shuffle into a gymna-
sium or auditorium, listen quietly and then return to their classrooms.
Rarely does the presenter actually attempt to take on the persona of
another character.
There have been a few scattered and successful applications of this
interactive teaching method. In one school in Minnesota, for one semes-
ter the Chautauqua experience was tried in two Grade 11 English class-
es, with successful results. All the pupils were given the option of taking
on an in-character Chautauqua-style presentation or simply researching
a term paper. The added difficulty of making the presentation would be
taken into account when grading the final projects. About one-third of
the students decided to tackle the in-character presentations, which were
organized in the same way as the travelling Chautauqua presentations:
in-character questions and answers followed by out-of-character ques-
tions and answers. The students were surprisingly comfortable stepping
in and out of character, and occasionally even bantered, in-character,
with the audience.
It is the nature of the Chautauqua-style programme that it must be
a co-operative effort. It is too burdensome to expect a single teacher to
be able to engage several classes of students on all the figures in history,
literature and science. Aside from a presentation in a single class, such as
the Minnesota programme, or as a voluntary supplemental programme
like the travelling Chautauquas, it is unlikely that the Chautauqua-style
presentation will ever have broad application. The unfortunate fact that
fewer and fewer people even take the time to read a book in today’s
society makes the effort of presenting a Chautauqua programme more
than many would be willing to tackle. On the other hand, more and
more people are willing to participate in the event once it is planned and

Analysis
undertaken. By appealing to a generation used to having everything on

hand at the flip of a switch the Chautauqua threatens to actually engage
them beyond their expectations.
Nicole Lindroos Frein has been involved in the role-playing industry since 1987
in one capacity or another. She is currently working as a freelance writer and edi-
tor in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her most recent efforts have been for FASA’s
Shadowrun and Earthdawn games, layout for Atlas Games’ Champions li-
cence, and various contributions to the start-up of Bootstrap Press’s new maga-
zine, Adventures Unlimited.

reviews
Interactive Fantasy will review

any product which it considers
to relate to role-playing, story-
telling or any associated field.
Products are examined with
a critical eye and particular
attention is paid to innovative
approaches, with a view to the
future development of the form.
Reviews
Castle Falkenstein after a while, and my copy has a

By Michael Alyn Pondsmith couple of printing problems. Even
R. Talsorian Games, Inc. so I think that Talsorian’s produc-
ISBN 0-937279-44-7; 224pp tion department deserves kudos
$32 hardback, $27 softback for this job.
Reviewed by Phil Masters Of course, the clear dividing
line in the book (between water-
Castle Falkenstein is one of those colours and parchment) rather
long-awaited games, chiefly be- implies a strong divorce between
cause R. Talsorian started advertis- setting and mechanics, which is
ing it and placing teaser articles in in fact the case with Falkenstein. In
magazines a good year before they fact, once one starts reading, one
got around to publishing it. I must starts finding certain problems.
admit that they hooked me. The The index is so sparse it’s a joke,
idea of a mixture of steam punk and when the game-mechanics
and fantasy in a Victorian setting and setting do interact—as, in-
sounded, if not subtle or sophisti- evitably, in the magic system—the
cated, then at least a little bit dif- amount of frantic flipping back
ferent. and forth becomes annoying. The
The game certainly is nice to structure of the game-world sec-
look at. It falls into two halves; the tion is basically that of a first-per-
first section, covering the game- son story, told by a character from
world, is printed in full-colour — our world who is abducted into
including a lot of brisk but pleas- that of the game, rapidly (if curi-
ant water-colours (by William C. ously) decides to assist his kidnap-
Eaken) and some effective use of pers, eventually becomes a hero,
computer-generated graphics (by and goes on to invent the game.
Mark Schumann). The second This might be called ‘clever’ or
part, dealing with game mechan- ‘forced’, depending how you look
ics, uses plain ‘parchment style’ at it. The need to use the story to
paper and line art, but is perfectly describe the world hamstrings it as
readable. It’s beautifully done— a story, while the personality of the
the standard of physical design in teller sometimes becomes merely
games has taken some vast jumps irritating, intrusive or implausible.
in recent years. Unfortunately, Come to that, the idea of a game
rumour has it that some softback played within its own world really
copies literally fall into two halves doesn’t hold up to close examina-

Reviews
tion. This model of game presen- The third system, for spell-
tation has some amusement value, casting, is actually rather nice.
but it doesn’t quite work for me. Characters must first research
Let’s take the two major ele- spells that they wish to use from
ments in reverse order. The game books belonging to the secret so-
mechanisms are based on the cieties which train all spell-casters.
use of a deck of standard playing There’s a small question as to how
cards—or rather, two decks. This flexible any given piece of research
idea was mentioned frequently in can be, and how long it takes, but
the pre-publicity. It might have ‘GM’s option’ is a catch-phrase
been silly if the game had merely Falkenstein players will often find
employed the cards as a random themselves using. To cast the
number generator instead of spell, the PC must calculate the
dice, but things are actually a little net ‘mana cost’ and start drawing
more cunning than that. There cards from the second deck, one
are three different mechanisms every two game minutes, until they
used; the primary one involves have enough energy in hand. The
the players each holding a hand system also allows for runaways
of four cards which can be played and side-effects, but puts few up-
whenever a skill resolution check per limits on power. As a system,
is required. The referee also holds it is perhaps more colourful than
four cards, to play on behalf of balanced.
NPCs or blind chance. Thus the Wizards can also fight magical
system embodies a system of ref- battles using the duelling system;
eree fudging, but with limits, and why they can’t make similar quick
enables players to anticipate in attacks on non-wizards isn’t clear,
which areas their characters will but I can think of one or two dou-
be especially effective in the near ble-talk justifications. GM’s op-
future, possibly leading to some tion, GM’s option … The sample
interesting tactical play. I’m not scenarios are full of NPC wizards
sure whether it’s the future of throwing the kind of quick-fire
role-playing, but it has its interest spells that PCs will hardly ever
value. manage. Some gamers can take
There’s also a fairly simple sys- this sort of stuff; some, I know, will
tem to handle duels and other one- get very annoyed.
on-one conflicts, using cards—but Evidently, the game designers
only as concealable indicators of want to lose the old RPG eccentric-
intent. Although this system allows ity of describing a character with a
for a certain amount of ingenuity piece of paper covered with more
and bluff, it almost invariably gives numbers than words. Falkenstein
victory to the more skilled partici- characters are defined by a fairly
pant, but with enough descriptive short list of abilities, rated from
detail to enable the duellists to ‘Poor’ to ‘Extraordinary’. Each abil-
pull tricks at effective moments. ity is defined broadly, and the list

Reviews
looks workable to me—although adjectives that are attached to its

there might be a case, given this products than in their capacity or
setting, for separating Horseman- performance. I find this as refresh-
ship from Athletics. However, this ing as it’s no doubt intended to be,
is still at heart a number-driven but sometimes the wargamer in
system; each Ability has a numeric my soul asks how one is supposed
equivalent which is frequently in- to determine whether or not the
voked. Most character sheets will heroes’ ornithopter can catch up
probably have numbers jotted on with the villain’s gyro-clipper in a
them after all. chase—and if not, how easily the
In fact, one isn’t supposed to PC dwarf can upgrade it to meet
view the list of Abilities as a defini- this basic requirement. (The an-
tive ‘character sheet’. Rather, the swer, of course, is that the plot is
first stage of the character creation paramount. Fine, but some people
system is to start writing a diary, should be warned that they can’t
opening with the character’s name, play their usual games with Falken-
appearance, personality, likes stein.)
and dislikes, and so on; only then The game design is utterly un-
should one select Abilities. This interested in character ‘balance’—
sounds admirable from the point or rather, it allows non-human
of view of a Real Role-Player, but I PCs of considerable power. Drag-
foresee problems. In the bundle of ons are both ostentatious and not
practical compromises that charac- as powerful as they look at first
terizes most playing groups, many glance, and Faerie are limited by
players are accustomed to thinking iron to an extent that, if properly
in terms of abilities first and char- enforced, could make them un-
acter second. I suspect that, very playable. By contrast, dwarfs have
often, groups will begin by defining a bundle of assets, whereas their
the game-mechanics for Falkenstein primary limitation—the need
PCs, and only then will the more to earn a Name—translates as a
literary types start jotting down standard PC ambition. We will
diary entries. Some referees may know power-gamer Falkenstein
reward such efforts with enhanced groups by their high non-human
character progression—something membership.
that the Falkenstein character de- The really annoying thing
velopment rules, as written, make about Falkenstein’s rules is that,
easy—which is fine if it doesn’t lead despite the long delay from an-
to intra-group friction. nouncement to publication, so
In other areas where many much is left unsaid, forcing the ref-
games become number-heavy, eree into extensive improvisation.
Falkenstein goes determinedly the To an extent, of course, that’s a de-
other way. For example, the vehi- sign feature; the writers apparently
cle design system is far more inter- despise all that nit-picking about
ested in the long list of descriptive length of combat rounds and such.

Reviews
The trouble is that sometimes you anomaly is acknowledged. There’s

need basic rules to cover game- also Victor Frankenstein (created
situations; how far can B run in 1816, published 1818, set a cen-
one round to intervene in a brawl tury earlier) and Aldous Huxley
between C and D? GM’s option, (I think they mean Thomas). Se-
GM’s option. rious scholars of Victorian history
Let’s get on to the gameworld. should keep away from this game,
‘New Europa’ is supposedly based for the sake of their blood pres-
on Europe around 1870, but its sure.
creators want more than that— Because of all this, referenc-
far too much more. They want ing is shallow; Mike Pondsmith
swashbuckling sword-play as well has been accused of extensive re-
as steampunk technology. So the search, but I don’t see it. Despite
‘steampunk’ sophistication in- the fact that the king of the good-
forms everything in this world guy kingdom is none other than
except firearms—which still run Ludwig II of Bavaria, there is no
to ‘pepper box’ pistols, whereas sign of his friend Richard Wagner
in our universe Sam Colt’s equal- (died 1883), which is pretty odd,
izer was well established. As well considering. Perhaps his presence
as all the seventeenth-century would somehow make all the Ger-
combat and twentieth-century in- manic Romanticism too politically
formation science camouflaged problematic. For what it’s worth,
beneath Victorian brassware, we the Faerie are basically late-Euro-
get every conveniently out-of-cop- pean folklore types, with a dash of
yright character and plot element post-Tolkienian fantasy. There are
that the designers could consider mentions of Marx but no Engels,
vaguely ‘Victorian’. So there’s Dracula but no Varney, Disraeli but
Sherlock Holmes (first publica- no Gladstone.
tion 1887) along with Sir Richard Oh yes, the politics. The bad
Burton (1821-90), Phineas Finn guys are a mixture of scheming
(first heard of in 1873) and a gross Unseelie and Victorian heavies—
misrepresentation of George Mac- an alliance of Bismarck and some
donald Fraser’s version of Harry totally fictional British ‘Steam
Flashman, whose copyright posi- Lords’, who are bent on the crea-
tion must surely be complex. But tion of a steampunk dystopia
wait; there’s a mention of an inva- straight out of Gibson and Ster-
sion by H. G. Wells’s Martians (so ling’s The Difference Engine. Thus
much for the first line of The War they have themselves an oppressed
of the Worlds: ‘No one would have industrial proletariat, and yet the
believed, in the last years of the ‘anarchist’ Marx seems set up as a
nineteenth century …. And early straight villain. Against them are
in the twentieth century came the set the ruralized good-guy king-
great disillusionment.’)—and also dom of Bavaria, which appears
John Carter of Mars, but yes, the to get by with nothing but a token

Reviews
rosy-cheeked rural working class. universe that blends emotional

Presumably, in this setting, all the conservatism with social liberal-
boring manufacturing work can be ism, history with romance, Tolkien
done by invisible pixies. Brits will with Sterling—but it just doesn’t
be pleased to learn that some of engage with the contradictions in
our leaders—such as Sir Richard its own aims. I’m not surprised
Burton and the Prince of Wales— that the Marx of ‘New Europa’ has
are on the side of the angels. Per- become an anarchist; this game-
sonally I’d have my doubts about world wouldn’t recognize a dialec-
both those two. tical contradiction if one hit it with
Ah, well—in the end, there’s no a plank.
point in complaining. This is how But, but, but—it’s far too easy
the game is conceived, and you to complain about this game, and
take it or leave it. Certainly, the that’s not what I want to do. I really
idea of Otto von Bismarck with a do want to praise Falkenstein, not to
clockwork metal arm and a fleet of bury it. I even like the game, and
land ironclads has its silly charm. I’ll probably be running a cam-
The usual desire to make fe- paign (quietly ignoring much of
male characters fully viable—in the excess baggage). As everyone
a Victorian world—leads to more who talks about it seems all too
problems. The game declares that painfully aware, it runs resolutely
women are largely emancipated, contrary to the two major (op-
admits that the why of it is unclear posed) fashions in RPGs of these
(there are mutterings about higher last few years; it is neither obsessed
levels of magical talent, but these with intricate numerical precision
aren’t followed through), chucks and ‘points balance’, nor—de-
in the odd trous er-clad swords spite a slightly silly epilogue—has
woman, and then stops. Except it anything to do with the ‘dark-
that it also has rules for making ness’ and ‘spiritual meaning’ that
women swoon with emotional seem to dominate too much of the
stress. A female friend commented market. Lace and Steel did most of
that any game which combines any it (including the use of cards) first,
kind of female emancipation with and Space: 1889 tried to do steam-
corsets is deeply confused. punk more sensibly, but Falkenstein
Is that last a secondary point? has the full-colour artwork and
No, because it’s symptomatic of hence, probably, the sales. Is it go-
Falkenstein’s problem. The game ing to set a new trend? Buggered if
knows what it wants—a moral I know. But I can hope.

Reviews
Nephilim Egyptian eras, witnessed the birth

by Frédéric Weil, Fabrice of Jesus Christ, or been a Cathar
Lamidey, Sam Shirley and in thirteenth-century France.
Greg Stafford This ensures that new characters
Chaosium Inc. have already built up a consider-
ISBN 1-56882-023-2; 230pp able amount of experience and
$21.95 magical knowledge, but the mod-
Reviewed by Brian Duguid ern world is likely to be a source
of amazement and confusion for
Nephilim is a major new role-play- them.
ing game from Chaosium, adding The ultimate goal of a
to their existing stable of Pendrag- Nephilim is to enter Agartha, a
on, Elric! and Call of Cthulhu. Set in state in which they no longer need
the real world and incorporating their human host and exist pri-
genuine occult ideas far more thor- marily on the spiritual plane. The
oughly than any commercial role- largest obstacle placed in their
playing game has done before, it’s path comes in the form of various
potentially the most controversial occult secret societies, such as the
role-playing game since Dungeons Templars or the Bavarian Illumi-
& Dragons. If those Christians who nati, each of which seeks magical
were upset about D&D’s refer- knowledge for humans and op-
ences to supernatural beings and poses the Nephilim.
methods have been largely forgot- The background should prove
ten, Nephilim ought to bring new extremely fertile for referees; the
intensity to old arguments. basic idea that history is a fraud
In Nephilim, players take the and human progress largely the
part of elemental spirits, the result of occult conspiracy allows
Nephilim of the title: beings who fact and fiction to be blended to
have coexisted with humanity for very entertaining effect. The game
most of history and who have ac- itself provides some ideas, rewrit-
cess to various magical powers. ing the Gospels and the history of
The Nephilim survive by taking both World Wars to suit its needs.
control of human hosts, reincar- A competent referee should easily
nating into a new body when their be able to link real historical events
existing host dies or, if no new (e.g. the Kennedy murders or the
body is available, spending centu- death of Pope John Paul) into the
ries trapped in some form of mag- game’s fictional background, and
ical object. I’d imagine there’s plenty of fun to
A typical player character will be had reinterpreting modern-day
be a Nephilim who has had two or cult-related events such as Waco.
three past incarnations before fi- Indeed, the little-known Order of
nally reincarnating in the present the Solar Temple, fifty of whose
day, when the game is set. Thus members died at Cheiry in Swit-
they may have lived in various zerland, is one of several semi-fic-

Reviews
tional secret societies described in (a pity, given that the background

the game. isn’t too genre-bound, making it
It remains to be seen whether relatively easy to dispense with ste-
the inevitable supplements work reotypes).
to harden and define the com- The rules system adopted by
plex background, or whether they Nephilim is the same percentile
open up enough room for refer- skill system used by RuneQuest and
ees to blend in their own private Call of Cthulhu, with various mi-
obsessions and interests. For my nor modifications. Although it is
own part, I’ll be upset if the back- mechanical and uninspiring, it is
ground fails to let me tag the late straightforward enough not to de-
L. Ron Hubbard as a top-grade tract from the narrative flow very
Nephilim (now gone to Agartha, much. As with most first-edition
of course) or show how MTV is games, sloppy editing has left sev-
really a front organization for the eral inconsistencies and errors: for
Sovereign and Military Order of example, the character creation
the Temple of Heirosolim. example contradicts the rules that
It is hard to see the point of accompany it. This will confuse
some elements of the game. Why, any first-time gamers, but anyone
for example, was it necessary to in- with role-playing experience will
vent the Nephilim when an equally find few problems.
interesting background could have In terms of interactive narra-
been created solely from the activi- tive, there’s nothing very innova-
ties of human occultists? The char- tive about Nephilim. It’s completely
acter creation system, although untouched by modern innovations
mostly mechanical, does at least such as diceless gaming, group
succeed in creating characters who character creation or multiple ref-
have a sense of history. Although erees. The only obvious quality
the game attempts to create ste- that sets it apart from many other
reotyped personalities by aligning games is that players will face the
characters with certain ‘elements’ challenge of playing a character
and tarot major arcanum, charac- leading a double life; both the life
ters are likely to have a little more of a Nephilim and the life of their
depth than those in many other host human. Like most games, it
games. It’s possible to generate a fails to come up with ways to en-
character using random die rolls, sure group coherence; reasons why
but the game strongly steers the disparate characters, created by
players away from this towards players with different goals, would
creating a coherent and consist- want to interact, and the resolu-
ent individual. The rules explic- tion of this difficulty will as ever
itly ask the players to overturn the depend on the referee’s ingenuity.
pre-cooked archetypes, but the ex- Although you can read more
amples provided don’t exactly en- about the issues raised by the
courage complexity of motivation very existence of an overtly ‘ oc-

Reviews
cult’ role-playing game elsewhere the OTO) still exist, Nephilim is in

in this issue of Interactive Fan- dangerous territory here.
tasy a few comments are in order This attempt to mix history
here. Firstly, despite the claim by and fiction is at the heart of the
a ‘wiccan elder’ on the back cover game and, as I suggested earlier,
that Nephilim ‘skilfully blends real- provides much of its enjoyment.
world occult knowledge with … However, I think genuine occult-
[a] role-playing game’, the game ists will find its portrayal of their
presents a very confusing picture practices to be highly misleading.
of that ‘real-world occult knowl- The subtext of much of the game is
edge’. Many concepts fundamen- that the occult is all about gaining
tal to the game’s fictional magic— power through knowledge. The
Ka, Orichalka and the Nephilim changes a Nephilim character goes
themselves—are entirely original through to gain this knowledge
and feature in no occult tradition are much more superficial than
I’ve ever read; others, such as the the inward-looking self-searching
treatment of magical Elements, Al- that most real occult traditions
chemy and Agartha, are severe dis- concern themselves with. While
tortions of real magical traditions. Christians may feel affronted by
On one hand you’ll find a the whole concept of the game,
very accurate listing of real-world occultists ought to worry about its
magical grimoires, on the other more insidious attack on their be-
you’ll find a traditional list of liefs. The subtle and skilful decep-
role-playing spells that captures tion that the game practises does
no genuine details. Admittedly them a disservice.
this rather rigid and mechanical In conclusion, there are three
way of defining magic creates a ‘ problems with Nephilim. It is poor
feel’ not dissimilar to real ritual value for beginning gamers, failing
and ceremonial magic from the to provide enough information on
Western tradition. how role-playing games structure
The generally productive ten- themselves to get them off to a
sion between fact and fiction caus- good start. Its rules system pre-
es me real concern when I read sents nothing that wasn’t in use a
the section on real occult societies decade ago. The background pro-
such as the Thule Society and the vides a superficial and confused
Ordo Templis Orientum (OTO). account of the real-world magic
It would be possible for somebody it purports to rely on. Set against
with the relevant background to these complaints, the game pro-
separate fact from fiction here, vides plenty of inspiration for even
but anyone else is going to end moderately experienced players;
up believing historical facts to be the rules are straightforward and
false, and invented fictions to be not unduly obtrusive; and the real-
true. Given that some of the or- world background works well as an
ganizations mentioned (such as enjoyable conspiracy satire.

Reviews
Nephilim: le jeu de rôle There may well be other changes

de l’occulte contempo- that I don’t know about.
rain The games mechanics are de-
by Frédéric Weil and Fabrice rived from the Chaosium Basic
Lamidey Role-Playing System, the cut-down
Published by Multisim version of RuneQuest that under-
ISBN 2-909934-00-4 lies Elric!, Call of Cthulhu, and oth-
FF 224 er Chaosium titles. It is used under
Reviewed by Steve Gilham licence by MultiSim. The few me-
chanical additions that have been
At Convulsion 94, Greg Staf- made are involved with the magi-
ford said that when he first saw cal nature of the Nephilim.
this original French version of The attitude of the game to the
Nephilim, he wondered whether ‘modern occult’ of its subtitle can
it was the authors’ attempts to be gauged by examining the list of
write ‘Heroquest’ (the long prom- acknowledgements. Umberto Eco,
ised rules for Gloranthan mystical Tim Powers and Anne Rice are
quests.) in a modern setting. I’ve thanked as the major inspirations,
been waiting for the ‘Heroquest’ while Dead Can Dance and Fields
game since Chaosium first men- of the Nephilim are acknowledged
tioned it in 1979, so I took the op- for musical ambience. After these
portunity when I was last in Paris comes Greg Stafford, the only
to buy Nephilim. Please be aware Chaosium person on the credits
that this review is not a compari- page.
son between the two version, as I The influence of Tim Powers
have not pierced the shrink-wrap can clearly be seen later in the
on the Chaosium book. rules by the ascription of certain
Apart from the title and sub- occult works to William Ashbless, a
title, the only text on the cover of character from one of Powers’ nov-
the Nephilim book is the Biblical els. The game also refers, in con-
reference from which the word nection with the lost continent of
Nephilim comes (Genesis 6:4). Mu, to a Col. Jack Churchcraft. I
Inside the book, there is no ‘This am not sure if this is a deliberate or
game is not real: you are’; no refer- accidental confusion of the name
ence to St Paul and no use of magic of the actual person involved, Col.
points to power spells, all of which I James Churchward.
gather are present in the Chaosium Despite this use of fantasy
edition. There is also no joke about writers, the authors assert that by
the use of non-sexist pronouns, playing role-games or reading fan-
since in French the gender used is tastic literature, one has already
that of the subject noun. The set- unwittingly approached the world
ting of the game is of course mod- of the occult, even if one is not fa-
ern France, with Provence chosen miliar with the nomenclature of
as the area to be covered in depth. sorcery, alchemy or the Qabbala.

Reviews
The motivation and the context of the characters must master; while
this remark is uncertain: those of at the same time giving consid-
us used to the American Bible-belt eration to what extra vistas of play
attitudes to role-playing games would be opened up to PCs who
may well read in more than the have achieved this transition. Were
authors intended. To keep this re- it not for this, I would have con-
mark in context, one should also cluded that Agartha was never in-
bear in mind that In Nomine Sa- tended to be actually achieved by
tanis and Magna Veritas, the role- a player character, and was men-
playing games of, respectively, de- tioned in the game in order to pro-
mons and angels were also devel- vide a positive goal for the player
oped— and are well supported— characters— who would otherwise
in France. spend the whole of the game try-
The implicit long-term goal ing to avoid being captured by
of Nephilim is to act out the ‘Great various occult conspiracies for use
Work’, the transformation of the as magical fuel.
self that is at the core of many oc- I am not myself a believer in
cult traditions. To this end, the self-transformation by role-play-
characters—magical spirits pos- ing, but I nevertheless feel that it is
sessing human bodies—strive to rather incongruous to reduce the
reach the enlightened state of characters’ development to pure
Agartha, after which point they game mechanics in this way. By
can shed their human hosts and comparison, the enlightened state
act freely of the constraints of of Golconda in Vampire has few
space and time within the world game-mechanical requirements:
of myth. It should be noted that the emphasis is placed much more
in this original version of the on the role-playing of the charac-
game, the human hosts are not ter towards that end.
subsumed at this point, but in- Two other games bear com-
stead recover their freedom. parison with Nephilim. Shadowrun
A character reaches this point has a magic system written by a
of enlightenment purely by ac- practising ceremonial magician,
cumulating game-mechanical to- and Mage (which styles itself the
kens. They have to acquire high game of modern magic) has the
characteristics and skills, and mas- theme of personal and global
ter three degrees of magic, a task transcendence. Both of these use
more than comparable with that of mortal PCs. Both of them have
reaching RuneLord status in Rune- game numbers representing the
Quest. However, having defined PC’s mystical atunement (Initia-
the requirements for the Great tion grade and Arete, respectively)
Work purely in terms of game but both have guidelines for paral-
numbers, the core rulebook omits lel role-play requirements, so that
any details of the highest grades of spiritual growth is not simply de-
Alchemy and the Qabbala which pendent on game mechanics. The

Reviews
premise of Mage is similar to that tain whether it is a game of occult

of Nephilim, in that a mage is a spe- conspiracy or of personal tran-
cial person with an Awakened soul. scendence which uses the occult as
But the focus of the game is on the a convenient route.
mortal: if a mage dies, the Avatar Personally, I dislike characters
may notionally go on to reincar- that seem to be driven entirely
nate again, but that’s the end of by selfish motives. The Nephilim
the story for that PC. A Nephilim seem to be acting purely for per-
in this situation may well be able sonal enlightenment. They con-
to move on to a new adult host cern themselves with secret socie-
almost at once: the players get to ties not because the latter are on
keep their PCs, even if they have a timetable to rule the world by
been ‘killed’. the end of the century, but because
Nephilim’s main point of supe- they employ Nephilim as fuel for
riority over Mage is that it makes their rituals.
use of trappings of the Western oc- Because the rulebook focuses
cult tradition rather than attempt- heavily on the games mechan-
ing the latter’s one-size-fits-all ap- ics the authors have wasted a lot
proach to magic, with correspond- of chances to depict occult con-
ing improvements in verisimili- spiracies centred on France. I was
tude, traded off against flexibility. amazed, for example, that neither
When compared with the cur- Jacques de Molay nor Gilles de
rent fashion for games that are Rais received mention— in what
short on the mechanics and long is probably the only game that will
on ambience, Nephilim appears ever concern itself primarily with
somewhat primitive. It is uncer- the occult history of France!
HÔL: Human whole new style of gaming. Spin-

Occupied Landfill offs and imitators are put into the
By Todd Shaughnessy, works. The creators bathe in plau-
Daniel Thron and dits from the great and the good.
Chris Elliott Then the bubble bursts, most peo-
Dirt Merchant Games ple go back to playing whatever
No ISBN; probably 128pp they were playing before and the
$15? net effect on the industry is effec-
Reviewed by James Wallis tively nil. And this grand tradition
which includes Bunnies & Burrows,
Every so often a new game comes Toon and Amber now has a new
along which kicks the entire RPG member: HÔL.1
industry for a loop. For a few HÔL has been described vari-
months industry gossip is full of it. ously at Gencon and on the Inter-
A new renaissance is promised, a net as a dark slapstick SF game,

Reviews
a parody of the RPG industry, a what they were doing while they
satire on gamers and gaming, an wrote and drew the game. There
entirely successful attempt to pro- is nothing new in role-playing
duce a RPG which appears to have companies poking fun at each
been designed by a drunken col- other’s products, but this is the
lege student, and variously as the first game I can think of that con-
first post-modern, generation X, stantly pokes fun at itself. Some
Nintendo-generation or ‘slacker’ jokes get stale fast, specifically
role-playing game. Let me at- the interminable excuses for bad
tempt to describe it before I begin spellings and crossings-out—
to attempt to form any theories have these people never heard
about which of those are true and of dictionaries and correction
what HÔL is actually trying to do. fluid?—but the humour is gen-
HÔL is set on HÔL, the Hu- erally strong enough to reduce a
man-Occupied Landfill, a cross roomful of people to a giggling
between a garbage dump and a mound. I’ve seen it happen.
penal colony on the far, far rim About a fifth of the book is de-
of a far, far-future galactic em- voted to the rules. As you might
pire which is controlled entirely expect, these are mostly designed
by a religious fast-food operation. to be funny rather than usable, but
The player characters are prison- I got the strong impression that
ers trapped on HÔL. They can the creators were trying to devise
explore the place, do battle with mechanics that could be made
the other inhabitants, or attempt playable with a little tweaking and
to escape. There are two pages of the addition of a couple of missing
adventure ideas, and no advice to sections. The character generation
players or referee on how to write system comes to mind: there isn’t
their own, or run the game. One one. Instead players can choose
gets the impression that these, like a pregenerated character from a
many other sections of the rules, list of ten—including thinly dis-
have been sacrificed to make way guised versions of Clint Eastwood
for more humour; and campaign and the Silver Surfer, a gaming
play probably isn’t an option. nerd, a killer clown, a stereotyped
HÔL is about 128 pages (no bounty-hunter and Elvis. Which
page numbers), entirely hand- might be okay, except that one of
written and profusely illustrated. the reasons given for the omission
It is also genuinely and relentless- of a character-generation system
ly funny, written and illustrated in the first place is that players
in a style that’s not so much ‘in- left to their own devices inevitably
yer-face’ as ‘up-yer-nose’. Jokes come up with derivative, unorigi-
fly thick and fast: jokes about nal characters.
RPGs, about RPG players, about The mechanics suffer from an
the game system, about the back- age-old problem: it’s very hard to
ground, about the creators, and be funny within a rigid pre-defined

Reviews
structure, such as RPG rules. The Teenagers From Outer Space. I know
creators have settled for a system bad, and these are bad.
that failed when Tunnels & Trolls None of this stuff is coherent,
used it over fifteen years ago: giv- the history is irrelevant and the
ing abilities silly names. Casting a game creates no sense of what
‘Take That You Fiend’ spell (T&T) player characters should be do-
or using your ‘Making Sharp ing, or why they would want to do
Things Go Thru Soft Things That anything. In fact, about the only
Scream And Bleed’ skill (HÔL) will thing that one gets a clear sense
be funny exactly three times, and of is the level of hideous violence.
then it will get tedious. If these HÔL reads a lot like Paranoia, only
mechanics are meant to have any without the hope, optimism and
lasting usability—and it’s entirely good will to your fellow semi-sen-
possible that they’re not meant to tient beings. This is a game with a
have that at all—then this isn’t a full-page chart of ‘Anguish Factor
good way to do it. Equivelencies’ (sic), running from
Still in game terms, the back- ‘stapling your finger’ to ‘unpro-
ground suffers from the same tected re-entry into the atmos-
problem as the mechanics: things phere’, via ‘crushing your ankles
are in there because they’re funny, with a sledgehammer’ and ‘clip-
not because they add anything to ping live jumper cables to your
the game. It’s a brilliant hotch- tongue’.
potch of ideas, roughly half of You may be wondering why I
which are irrelevant, and the insist on reviewing HÔL as a real
other half of which are illegible. role-playing game rather than as a
Okay, that’s a cheap shot: most of parody of such games. It’s because
the game is readable, but the fact I suspect the designers intended
that it’s hand-written means that it to be taken that way, at least in
it could probably have fitted all its part. There are references within
contents, including the art, into the game to the way it should be
sixty typeset pages. played, and to the way it has been
Most of the background con- played in the past. There are ta-
sists of a history of the Confedera- bles and charts that take up entire
tion of Worlds, or COW (most of pages—low humour value there.
the jokes are better than that), a Most importantly, there are the
description of some of the groups references to forthcoming supple-
that hang out there, and a seven- ments, which are plentiful and bla-
page description of HÔL itself. tant.
The inevitable ‘Beastiary’ (sic), Given that HÔL is a game that
equipment list, NPCs and adven- doesn’t take anything seriously,
ture seeds follow. The latter are the least of all itself, it’s entirely pos-
weakest ideas for plots I have ever sible that when the designers say
seen, and that includes the adven- that certain areas will be covered
ture seeds in the first edition of in future releases, they’re satirizing

Reviews
the way certain games companies tion and the style of writing, not
leave holes in their system which in the setting, characters or possi-
require filling at a later date with bilities for adventure, and will not
a supplement or second edition carry through into gameplay. Al-
of the rules. Or possibly not. HÔL though the rules and background
has important chunks of its struc- have flashes of utter brilliance wor-
ture missing as well, and any jokey thy of being plagiarized by every
references to supplements around designer in the industry, HÔL fails
them sound more than a little completely as a game.
forced. HÔL is not a classic, but it’s a
Despite the statement at the first. It reminded me a lot of the
beginning of this review, the crea- Harvard Lampoon’s parody of
tors of HÔL are clearly not drunk- Tolkien, Bored Of The Rings: the
en college students. They know humour is lumped together in the
what they’re doing, and it doesn’t same way without any apparent
take an idiot to look at the RPG direction, and the only coherent
market and work out that the prof- structure is the one inherited from
its are made on supplements. HÔL the satire’s target. Nevertheless, it
as it stands is unplayable, and even is the funniest role-playing-related
if a referee were able to jones to- product I have ever read, it hits
gether a workable system, a game some of its targets with unerring
session would end up as little more and very painful accuracy, and I
than a slugfest since there is noth- recommend that everyone who
ing for the player characters to has ever thought about designing
actually do except shoot at things a RPG should read it. On the other
and get shot at. But with a little hand, if Dirt Merchant Games (or
work and a couple more 128-page White Wolf/Black Dog, which will
books, who knows? The problem be reprinting the game in the near
with that is that right now HÔL future) ever produces a single sup-
is a brilliant parody of existing plement for it, please hunt the de-
games, and much of the delight signers down and hurt them with
of reading it comes from that. The extreme prejudice. Clipping live
moment the creators start releas- jumper cables to their tongues
ing supplements for it, they will would probably do the trick.
have become the target of their
satire. Big-smelly-foot-with-uncut-
toenails-in-mouth: anguish factor
‘equivelency’ 6. 1
The ‘O’ in HÔL should have a ma-
I also do not believe that HÔL cron (‘¯’) over it, but since the ANSI
could work as a playable RPG, no character set cannot represent ma-
matter how much work is put into crons properly I have substituted a cir-
it. The humour is in the presenta- cumflex accent throughout.

Reviews
Shattered Dreams NPC dreamer, decide what sort of

by Christopher Dorn, nightmare they were infested with,
Timothy Erickson, Matthew and the rest of the scenario would
Grau and Lance Johnstone follow naturally. In practice this
Apex Publications; 144pp; turned out not to be the case.
$18.00 In the first place, although the
Reviewed by Andrew Rilstone nightmares look good on paper
they are not interesting adversar-
Shattered Dreams is a horror-ori- ies in an actual game. They are
entated role-playing game deal- too alien; too single-minded. They
ing with the theme of dreams and want to drive people mad or eat
nightmares. Player characters are their memories, full stop. A few
‘dreamwalkers’; lucid dreamers hours into my playtest, one of the
who have developed the capacity players jokingly suggested that
to slip into other people’s dreams. perhaps the creatures they were
Many of these dreams are inhab- up against Fed Off Negative Emo-
ited by nightmares; malignant, tion—and then realized that it was
alien entities who manipulate hu- true. I think it was at this point that
mans for their own ends. the game lost its credibility.
My first impressions of this Secondly, the facts about the
game were very favourable. It creatures are not at all clearly laid
seemed to be that rarest of things; out in the rulebook. Chapter 1,
an original role-playing setting, ‘Into the Essence of Nightmares’,
produced by people who cared tells me that the Vacyge—the crea-
about they were doing, and who tures who induce madness—create
communicated that enthusiasm to a Shroud when they enter some-
me. Unfortunately, after playing one’s mind. This Shroud ‘creates
the game most of that enthusiasm its own reality using the victim’s
has evaporated. mind as a template’. Sounds in-
There are four types of night- teresting; but what does it mean?
mares: the ones that try to drive I thumb through the book to
people mad; the ones who con- Chapter 5, ‘Deeper into the night-
sume people’s memories; the ones mares’, which tells me that this
who feed on human pleasure; and Shroud takes several Vacyge 50
the ones who are looking for a way points to create; but still nothing
into the real world. A bit obvious, about what it actually does. So
perhaps, but none the worse for then to Chapter 7, ‘Creating the
that. After reading the descrip- Nightmare’ which in some notes
tions of the nightmares and the on scenario design mentions that
dream world, plot ideas started to the Shroud is actually an entrance
suggest themselves to me almost to the Vacyge’s home dimension—
immediately; surely the mark of a but still nothing on how it works. I
good RPG setting. It seemed that had to make some guesses based
all I needed to do was create an on the example scenario.

Reviews
The information we are given game about dreams! Maybe there

isn’t always terribly consistent. If are monsters that infest people’s
one of these Vacyge completely de- dreams.’ The introduction rather
stroys someone’s sanity, it can pos- pathetically claims that these gaps
sess that person: a nice idea that are intentional ‘so that we can give
I wanted to use in my scenario. you the opportunity to customize
In Chapter 7 we are told that en- the rules and background if you
tering the mind of someone pos- are the Gamesmaster … this sort
sessed by a Vacyge from the dream of leeway facilitates role-playing.’
world is ‘suicide’. However, in the No, it doesn’t. What facilitates
sample scenario we are told that if role-playing is a well thought-out,
the PCs try to enter the mind of a properly explained world with a
‘grounded Vacyge’—as these pos- consistent cosmology from which
sessed characters are called—‘they the referee can extrapolate. If that
will not be able to find his dream has been done, then gaps in the
pocket. Multiple attempts will background may ‘facilitate role-
show that (he) never dreams.’ playing.’ However, this sort of
Finally, I found that there was fuzzy-headedness only facilitates
not sufficient information about confusion and irritation.
the dream world for me to deal The introduction also suggests
with it in play. The rules say that that players ought to custom-
dreamwalkers can psychically ize their characters’ powers and
home in on the dream bubble of skills. This is likely to be necessary.
anyone they know. How well do Dreamwalkers receive ‘Aspect Pow-
they have to know the person to ers’—spells, essentially—based
do this? (Can they do it to some- on one of the three aspects of the
one they met once? Can they do dreamworld: the Conscious, the
it to someone that they know a lot Subconscious and the Overcon-
about, but have never met?) Some scious. My playtest group com-
dream walkers have the power to plained about the lack of colour
make exit holes in a nightmare. in these powers; in terms of their
Can they carry someone’s dream- effect in the game it was hard to
self outside their own dream? If distinguish a Conscious Aspect
they try, what happens? Does the dreamwalker from one orientated
dreamer wake up, die, find them- towards the Subconscious.
selves dreamwalking, or what? If ever there was a game that
Granted, I could apply my own required some sort of complex
imagination to the task and create psychology system, it would be
my own version of the Vacyge, and one based on nightmares, memo-
my own picture of the nightmare ries and personal fears. Unfortu-
world, but in that case what was nately, Shattered Dreams limits itself
the point of me buying the game? to giving PCs some optionally ran-
$18.00 is a lot of money to pay to domized life events, and a sanity
hear someone say, ‘Hey! Let’s do a system lifted directly out of Call of

Reviews
Cthulhu. Indeed, Shattered Dreams’s A role-playing game is primar-

whole attitude to psychology wor- ily a reference book; this means
ried me. The example scenario that the rules should be in a logi-
(‘A Long Dream’s Journey into cal order, clearly labelled and,
Nightmare’—oh dear!) involves a above all, should have a clear in-
schoolteacher who has been sus- dex. Shattered Dreams fails in all
pended for hitting a pupil. En- these departments. The layout
tering her dream, we discover (in of the rulebook is little short of
a totally unexpected plot twist) disastrous. I can think of no pos-
that she herself was abused by her sible reason why the frequently
own mother. In the context of the used ‘Fear’ table should be in the
game, the dream sequences—in games mechanics section, whereas
which the PCs share her memories the equally frequently used ‘Sanity’
of childhood beatings and a later table should be seven pages away
sexual assault—are of secondary in the referee-only section. The
importance to the supernatural closest we come to an ‘index’ is a
theme. non-alphabetical listing of section
Some years ago the British heading in the back of the book—
fanzine Out of the Mist published so that if, in the middle of a game
a role-playing game called ‘Car- session, you want to find how many
nations and Razorblades’ based psyche points it costs a PC to grow
on the idea that player-character wings, then you have to remember
psychologists entered the dreams that the transformation table was
of insane patients and attempted called ‘Whoo-hoo, look at me!’ be-
to cure them ‘from the inside’. In fore you stand any chance at all of
Shattered Dreams, cure is achieved finding it. And the two-page sum-
by a form of exorcism. The play- mary of the rules at the back of the
er-characters, after dreamwalking book is laughable; why provide a
into the NPC’s mind, may work list of spell names if you aren’t go-
out what is bothering her. It makes ing to list casting costs and effects,
little difference; the real cause of or at least provide a page refer-
her behaviour isn’t that she was ence for looking those things up?
thrashed by her mum, but that The game is based on an over-
her mind is occupied by six-foot fussy skill system, in which you
black monsters with red eyes and have to beat both an attribute
wild hair, who are treating those score and a skill score on two dif-
memories as raw material. Killing ferent twelve- sided dice to obtain
or banishing those monsters, not a total success. If you succeed on
helping her come to terms with the attribute roll and fail the skill
her mother’s cruelty, is what counts role, you get a marginal failure; if
for ‘success’. I would be more com- you make the skill roll and miss
fortable with the implications of the attribute roll, you get a mar-
that if I believed that Apex Books ginal success. This is further modi-
had thought them through. fied by a third die roll, the ‘dream

Reviews
die’ which has an equal chance a 2 and fail on a 7. This has the ef-
of giving a result more favour- fect of … er … nothing at all, so far
able to the dreamer, the dream- as I can discern.
walker or the nightmare. (What Finally, the game contains
does a result favourable to the some of the most appalling prose
dreamer mean? ‘The dreamer’s that I have ever seen in a published
mind causes something maybe a product. In some cases I got the
little weird to happen, and then impression that the text had been
again maybe it doesn’t. You must badly translated from the Chinese.
determine exactly what happens,’ Surely a sub-editorial stage could
the rules helpfully suggest.) The remove monstrosities like:
existence of this dream dice is the ‘Shattered Dreams holds a
first mechanic mentioned in the large emphasis on the role-
referee’s section, which the players playing aspect of the game.
Some games emphasize rules
are exhorted not to read. How its and charts instead. What this
existence is to be kept secret from means is that Shattered Dreams
them, I really cannot imagine. places its emphasis on the
This already fiddly system is essence of the game rather
muddled still further by a system than in the letter of the game.’
so ludicrous that I couldn’t bring And yet; and yet. Despite it all, I
myself to playtest it. Your skills am still in love with the concept be-
are defined as a number between hind this game; and despite it all,
1 and 12; but this number is not my playtest group said that they
the number you need to role on would be interested in playing a
a twelve-sided die in order to suc- campaign set in this universe, pro-
ceed. Instead, you have to look up vided I ditched most of the rules.
your success number on a horrid I guess a lot will depend on how
little chart; a character with a skill well the world is fleshed out in the
of 8 would get seven success num- supplements, although I object
bers. This does not mean that you profoundly to there being insuffi-
succeed on a roll of 1–7; that would cient information in the game it-
be too sensible. Instead, they must self. There are good ideas in here,
define seven success numbers; concealed in amateurish produc-
any seven they like: 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, tion. The game has atmosphere
10 and 12, for example. The ref- and good ideas in abundance, and
eree is supposed to catch players ‘personal vision’ written all over it.
out from time to time by changing In an industry in quest of the Next
these numbers, so you might think Big Thing, full of products that are
that you succeed on a 7 and fail on mass-produced and superficial,
a 2, whereas in fact you succeed on that counts for a lot.

Reviews
The Whispering Vault seen world of mysterious powers

by Mike Nystul and our own mundane world.
Pariah Press; 142pp All of reality as we understand it
Reviewed by Myles Corcoran comes into being as the dreams of
great powers, known as Aesthetics.
The Whispering Vault is the first re- Sometimes, however, these beings
lease from fledgling games com- fail in their posts and descend into
pany Pariah Press. It is a perfect- the Realm of Flesh, creating havoc
bound 142-page book detailing as they do so. The Stalkers’ role is
a complete horror role-playing to repair the damage done.
game with a unique background. Dark role-playing has been
The Whispering Vault is fairly easy ‘in’ for some time now, with op-
to read, with simple layout to com- portunities existing in commercial
plement the evocative black and games to play vampires, were-
white illustrations. It does lack an wolves, revenants from beyond
index, however. the grave and spirit parasites with
Mike Nystul, the author, has cod-eastern philosophies. On the
presented the rules in ten chap- surface, The Whispering Vault is
ters dealing first with character one more opportunity to immerse
generation and conflict resolution, yourself in the role of an inhuman
then the adventure format and body with an entirely alien mind-
campaigning ideas, and finishing set. The players are expected to
up with the obligatory descriptions be strange, often monstrous, with
of bad guys and organizations. bizarre powers and a nifty line in
The basic premise of The Whis- frightening dialogue.
pering Vault is that the players take However the Stalkers are in
the roles of immortal policemen the business for more than just
(after a fashion) who hunt and playing at being terrifying and
combat powerful spirit beings, the having weird street clothes. They
Unbidden, from beyond the veil have a sworn duty, as spiritual
between the mortal and immor- guardians of the Realm of the
tal worlds. These ‘policemen’, or Flesh, to protect mortals. In their
Stalkers, fill their ranks with mor- own way the Stalkers are noble
tal folk who in life dedicated them- folk, selflessly defending the weak
selves to combating the Unbidden against the predatory powers that
and their manifestations. These attempt to usurp the proper or-
once-mortal folk have, in becom- der of things. Of course the game
ing Stalkers, an opportunity to compensates the players for hav-
continue their struggle, defending ing noble goals and martyr-like
humanity after death as they once behaviour by letting them be out-
did in life. rageously cool characters with lots
The game universe of The Whis- of keen powers. They do spend
pering Vault consists of the Realms quite a bit of their time beating
of Essence and of Flesh, the un- the crap out of the Bad Guys too,

Reviews
so action-hungry players needn’t defined in the rules in a step-by-

feel worried on that score. There step fashion. Nystul is keen that
is enough action to keep most of the players and referee stick to
the old-fashioned gamers happy his structure for at least a number
enough to not be bothered by of sessions. The Hunt starts with
the subtleties of fallen Aesthetics the Call, where some unfortunate
abandoning their posts to indulge mortal becomes aware of the nasty
the unfathomable passions in the things going on and makes some
Realm of the Flesh. kind of plea for help. This plea is
The game uses a peculiar me- picked up by one of the Stalkers
chanic for determining success or who then gathers his mates to re-
failure. The player rolls a certain spond. The group then Calls the
number of six-sided dice as appro- Navigator, a great worm-like beast
priate to their ability; the result is that will transport them from the
the highest single die or the total Realm of Essence to the Realm
of matching dice. This result is of Flesh. Upon reaching the Veil,
modified by the Stalker’s skill and a boundary between Essence and
succeeds if greater than or equal to Flesh, the Stalkers encounter the
the task’s difficulty, as set by the ref- Guardian, an imposing creature
eree. It is not easy to estimate the charged with guarding the barrier
probability of success for any given between the worlds. The Stalkers
number of dice and difficulty. must convince the Guardian of the
The whole game is written very importance of their mission and
much with the old-time gamer in of their worthiness to pass. This
mind. Nystul explicitly states in is really a ploy to encourage the
the introduction that the game players to get into character. By
is aimed at experienced gamers. suitably impressing the Guardian
There is no ‘What is role-play- with their ability and their imperi-
ing?’ section, and little enough in ous dialogue, the players also slip
the way of advice for designing into the Stalkers’ mind-set.
or sustaining a campaign. This Once in the Realm of the
is deliberate. A stated aim of The Flesh the characters put on mor-
Whispering Vault is to be a ‘pick-up’ tal frames and begin the hunt for
game— one where players and a the source of the disturbance. In-
referee can sit down with the book variably this consists of two stages:
and some character sheets, create Mending the Enigma and Binding
characters and run a complete sce- the Unbidden. The Enigma is a
nario, all in one evening of play. physical manifestation of the dis-
In fact, long-term campaigns may turbance created by the presence
be difficult given the format of the of one of the Unbidden. The very
session, or the ‘Hunt’ as it is called. fabric of earthly reality is damaged
The actual form of the Hunt, or and distorted by the arrival of the
scenario, is central to The Whisper- Unbidden. This provides a won-
ing Vault. The structure is explicitly derful opportunity for a nerve-

Reviews
wracking and evocative environ- to heighten the feeling of being

ment. The Enigma is really a focus an other-worldly entity during
for the clinging fog, corpse-littered play, one bound by certain rules
fields and inexplicable events that and duties. This is no bad thing
every horror tale needs. Some- in itself, but I fear that with repeti-
where in this distorted landscape tion, strict adherence to the Hunt
the Stalkers must find the focus of structure will lessen the impact of
the Enigma: that object, person or the horror rather than accentuate
event that symbolizes all that has it. If the players end up thinking
gone wrong with the Realm. Deal- of the Hunt as just horror by the
ing with the cause of this Enigma numbers it can only weaken the
can be as straightforward as shut- strength of the game. Obviously
ting down the evil mastermind’s gamers wanting to play The Whis-
machine or as difficult as curing pering Vault over longer campaigns
the hurt of an abused individual. will adapt the rules and the struc-
The second task is dealing with ture of the Hunt to suit their needs
the Unbidden being itself. The and styles of play.
chase and defeat of this creature Nystul does describe one op-
can be as simple or involved as the tion for a campaign with a differ-
referee desires. Three stages of Un- ent focus; the Watchers, where the
bidden are presented, from bestial Stalkers guard a particular place
monsters to insane geniuses, each in time and space that represents
with differing goals and methods. a weak spot in the veil between
Several lesser creatures are also Flesh and Essence. By being tied
presented to fill the roles of servi- to a particular location the PCs
tors to the Unbidden and cannon- have greater opportunities to form
fodder for the players. The final relationships with mortal charac-
confrontation with the Unbidden ters, to develop distinct allies and
creature, if successful, ends with enemies and to foster a sense of
it being Bound and Cast into the continuity between the episodes of
Vault. The Stalkers can then all go the campaign.
home for a nice cup of tea. An apparent contradiction in
This all amounts to a pretty the game is the actual definition
tightly scripted structure for ad- of the player characters as Stalk-
ventures. It seems probable that ers. Although once human, the
this ordered format might work Stalkers in play are powerful and
admirably at first, giving both the immortal. The vessels they work
players and the referee the oppor- with in the mortal world are made
tunity to organize the Stalkers into of flesh and can consequently
a team and providing easily fol- be damaged in the course of a
lowed guidelines for creating sto- Hunt. The Stalker itself does not
ries. The long-term value of such die, however, and that’s where my
a rigid format is less obvious. The problem with the concept lies. The
structure of the Hunt is designed player is less likely to feel the fear

Reviews
of defeat if it is only temporary, less prevalent throughout the book is

likely to feel terror when wielding one of psychological and symbolic
mighty powers and commanding horror, yet the characters are de-
great resources. signed to be powerful and aloof,
The Whispering Vault does have without a realistic fear of death.
a page devoted to the Five Keys, Mike Nystul wrote The Whisper-
characteristics defining human ing Vault hoping to create a ‘pick-
emotions that still have power for up’ role-playing game, and has
the now-inhuman Stalker. These succeeded. Character creation is
emotions are a necessary anchor simple and quick, and the Hunt
to the human experience, without can be as long or as brief as the
which The Whispering Vault would referee desires. The book lacks an
be little more than a superhero introductory scenario, however, so
role-playing game with flourishes. the referee will have to pick up the
In their roles as ‘spiritual police- game a few times before the first
men’ the Stalkers remain at a dis- session even if things should pro-
tance from the terrible situations ceed quickly once the Hunt is un-
they may encounter, having seen it der way.
all before. The game is structured In brief, then, this is a good
so that the threats they face are not game for experienced gamers
directed at them specifically. Duty willing to put some work into
or responsibility make the charac- producing a logical framework if
ters deal with situations, not fear they want a campaign. As a game
or a survival urge. for one-off play The Whispering
The Whispering Vault is a good Vault offers an unusual and well
game with a few contradictory el- described environment, allowing
ements. The game is written with the players to create characters to
the experienced gamer in mind suit the most bizarre turn of mind
but the format of the Hunt is per- and the referee to go to town with
haps better suited to new gamers, moody evocative descriptions and
to whom the rigid structure might monsters to unnerve the most
be less constraining. The mood hardened of Cthulhu veterans.
Khaotic
by Joe Williams and Kathleen Xenos. As a member of ISES, your
Williams mission is twofold. First, there are
Marquee Press; 192pp marauding critters on Earth to be
$24.95 dealt with. Second, you must use
Reviewed by Steve Hatherley the TransEgo Device and leap
mentally to Xenos to find a solu-
It is 2030 and the Earth is under tion to the problem at its source.
attack from ugly monsters with And that pretty much sums up
awesome weapons from the planet what players do in Khaotic.

Reviews
My initial impressions were The character generation in-

not entirely positive. Between the troduces one of Khaotic’s strongest
lurid cover art and the game’s features—an attempt to reduce the
premise, I took Khaotic for a shal- numbers so prevalent in gaming.
low, shoot-the-monster game Everything has a numeric value,
aimed at young, dewy-eyed gam- but it is all shrouded in descriptive
ers fresh from Monopoly, HeroQuest terms. A Strength of 5 is described
or wherever it is that new gam- as ‘Passable’. 8 is ‘Superior’, 3 ‘In-
ers spring from. However, once ferior’ and so on. The referee and
I started scratching the surface I players are encouraged to think
found a few surprises. in these terms. Unfortunately, the
Physically, Khaotic is a softback character sheet is designed so that
book burdened with a cover about there is no room to write the values
which I cannot find anything down: it is full of numbers instead.
pleasant to say—a messy mon- This may be a minor point, but
tage of monsters, cybernetics and a well-designed character sheet
weaponry. Things improve inside would have forced the players to
where the interior layout is clean write ‘Superior’ and ‘Inferior’ in-
and easy to read. Artwork is con- stead of ‘8’ and ‘3’, thus encourag-
fined to a short graphic novel scat- ing their use in play.
tered through the book. This is From characters we arrive at
hardly Frank Miller’s standard, but background. The world in 2030
it is competent and sets the scene. is sketchily detailed; the text skips
After a short introduction that through an eclectic range of sub-
explains the game’s premise and jects from history through fashion
introducing the concept of role- to slang. As a result I do not have
playing, Khaotic begins with the a clear idea of the world in 2030. I
business of generating characters. cannot imagine my home town in
Somewhat strangely, your career 2030, and if the background can-
choice determines your attributes. not do that, it doesn’t work.
I assume the logic is that certain There is much more informa-
jobs attract a certain type of per- tion on ISES, the International
son, but this breaks down on close Society of Enlightened Scientists, a
analysis. Why should Engineers be global scientific superpower striv-
less agile than Politicians? Why are ing to conquer fear, alleviate suf-
Medics more cunning than Gov- fering and raise living standards.
ernment Agents? There is a mech- It is for this unlikely organization
anism for redistributing points, that the player characters work.
but why shouldn’t players choose ISES is a lovely idea, but is so far-
attributes before picking a career? fetched I cannot take it seriously.
Skills are followed by background Still, it gives characters some form
details, including attitudes and of identity, and if you are asking
motives, and finally psionic abili- deeper questions you are probably
ties. not this game’s target audience.

Reviews
I wonder why Khaotic is set in just one—shared between the char-

2030 at all. The TransEgo Device acters. This is weird, and I don’t re-
(the thing that sends you to Xenos) ally know how it works in play, but
was developed in 1944, so a 1990s it is a great way to ensure that the
setting is feasible. A modern-day players stick together and is ideal
campaign would not need any for novice referees. Only one play-
background details and the player has control of the host at any one
ers could work for a more dubi- time, but the others have boosted
ous government. As it is, ISES are psionic powers, so that they will
squeaky clean and the characters have something to do.
are the Good Guys. The rules are Khaotic’s finest
There is even less information point. The game describes itself as
on Xenos, with its odd mix of na- semi-diceless, meaning that it uses
tive monsters and humans. The fewer dice than other games. This
monsters are there for the players primarily means that the referee
to shoot at, the humans for them never rolls dice for NPCs. If the
to identify with. At least, I think players are trying something that
that’s the theory—I cannot quite affects an NPC, the outcome is de-
work out why there should be hu- termined by the player’s roll only.
mans on the planet at all. Xenos is The object of most die rolls is to
also the home of Isabella Bayne, find out whether the player char-
inventor of the TransEgo Device. acter succeeds or fails: a referee’s
Now immortal, she flits mentally roll for an NPC is only making
from one host to another. Bayne, the PC’s success/failure roll more
for no obvious reason, hates the complex. Khaotic does away with
Earth and sends her monsters this—and it takes some getting
back to give it some grief. After used to. I tried modelling a situ-
eighty-odd years of ruling Xenos I ation from a recent game, and it
would have expected her to have took me a while to decide how I
forgotten about Earth completely. would do it. Not because Khaotic’s
Clearly, the background does system is in any way inferior, but
not stand up to close analysis. But because rolling for NPCs is so in-
then it does not have to: it serves grained.
for the adventures (or ‘missions’ More importantly, the dice roll
as Khaotic revealingly calls them) is converted back into the same
that referees are expected to run. system used by the characters. So,
As mentioned above, the PCs ei- instead of ending up with a roll of
ther go to Xenos with specific ob- ‘5’, you end up with a Passable roll.
jectives, or they chase aliens on This coherence is wonderful—I
Earth. Earthbound missions are lit- was pleasantly surprised.
tle more than bug-hunts, but trips The surprises do not stop
to Xenos have a few twists. The there. The section about automatic
characters can only travel to Xenos successes includes a statement that
mentally. There, they take a host— should be part of every rules sys-

Reviews
tem: a roll automatically succeeds termines the damage they take.

if ‘a die roll would cause more of a This coherence and simplicity
break in the game than it is worth.’ is Khaotic’s strongest point. Eve-
In most role-playing games rything is designed to make the
the combat system is complex and referee’s task easier. An elegant
bears little resemblance to the rest system, fine advice about when to
of the game. In Khaotic, it takes roll dice and even a background
up two pages (four if you include forcing players to stick together
the wounding rules), and works and giving them strict goals—this
exactly the same way as the rest is ideal for inexperienced gamers.
of the game. One roll determines For myself, I would like to see
not only whether a character has changes in character generation
hit their target, but also how severe and the system applied to a back-
the wound was. And again, the ref- ground I can work with. I shall not
eree does not roll for the NPC, the be playing Khaotic, but I can imag-
players must merely dodge the ine pinching the rules and using
blow. How poorly they dodge de- them for something else.
Theatrix Core Rules geared towards heroic characters,

by David Berkman et al and the list of suggested settings
Backstage Press for the game sticks to bog-stand-
Pre-release copy ard SF and fantasy settings: Ars
Reviewed by Andrew Rilstone Magica, Star Trek, Quantum Leap,
Twilight 2000, wild west, James
Theatrix is the core rulebook of a Bond and superhero teams.
projected generic role-playing sys- The authors use cinema and
tem. This ‘core’ consists of gener- theatre as a metaphor for their
alized rules for character genera- style of role-playing, to the ex-
tion, task-resolution and combat, tent that they call the chapter on
and suggestions about refereeing, character generation ‘Costuming
plotting and improvisation. Spe- and Makeup’ and the section on
cific world books will follow at task resolution ‘Lights, Cameras,
some point in the future. Action’. They also use the terms
I found Theatrix to be a rather ‘Director’ and ‘Actor’ to refer to
schizophrenic product; trying to the referee and players, an affec-
be two things at once, it inevitably tation made all the more irritat-
fails at both. On the one hand, we ing because the latter is not used
have a manifesto for the authors’ consistently. In the character gen-
personal playing style; on the eration system we read that: ‘the
other, a generic rules system for Actor possesses a sword of ancient
use with any genre you can think eldritch power’ (p. 42); but in the
of. ‘Any genre’ is, of course, mis- task resolution chapter, we are
leading; the rules are specifically asked: ‘What if an Actor wishes her

Reviews
role to jump back and forth be- In any event, players who
tween (two moving cars)?’ (p. 90). have participated in one of these
What the theatrical metaphor is subplots are rewarded with Plot
trying to communicate is the idea Points; a dangerous, complex sub-
of an all-but-ruleless, semi-live ac- plot yielding more points than a
tion game with a referee; a game simple one. This means that it is
where talking out of character is to the players’ advantage to create
discouraged but theatrical devices dangerous, interesting plotlines
like soliloquy and voice-over are for their characters; an approach
encouraged; a game in which the to player creativity that I find a lit-
players act out quite a lot of ac- tle cold blooded, but which would
tions physically, but where actions probably work in practice. These
like combat are handled verbally. Plot Points are described as the
Alongside the standard exhorta- ‘currency’ of the game; they are
tions to use music and lighting to a central concept of Theatrix and
set the tone for the game, the au- (fortunately) the one really good
thors suggest interestingly that: idea in the product.
Your Actors will gain an ap- The authors argue that a game
preciation for this texture world is a malleable environment,
when during your battle full of ‘packets of information’
Scenes, they’re separated by that are incomplete and which
some distance, ducked down
are ‘waiting for research or action
behind your living room
chairs, and are attempting
to discover their meaning’. The
to communicate across loud screaming you hear in the cellar
gunfire. might be some dreadful mon-
None of this is as new or original ster, but until you go down there
as Backstage Press seems to think, it might just as well be a trapped
but it is an approach which ap- child. Hence:
With a fair sense of timing,
peals to me, and reading about
anyone may complete these
other people’s playing styles is al- moments appropriately, ma-
ways interesting, even if you end nipulating the reality behind
up rejecting their advice. The them in an improvisational
authors advocate using multiple way.
referees within a single session It is within a player’s power to de-
(‘distributed direction’) and, more cide whether the screaming comes
interestingly, giving the players from a child, a monster, or some-
control over major plot elements. thing else. At a simple level this
Crucially, they tell referees to allow means that the game encourages
players to introduce new sub-plots a sort of co-operative, improvisa-
into the game; although they are tional approach to trivial detail.
annoyingly vague about how this If you are a private eye, you don’t
works in practice. Is a player sup- have to say to the referee, ‘Er …
posed to call ‘time out’ and suggest would there be a gun in my desk
a plot to the referee, or what? drawer?’ Since there might be, and

Reviews
assuming that nothing that has would be an interesting technique

gone before says that there isn’t, to try. It would probably work well
you are empowered to say, ‘I open in a superhero or swashbuckling
the drawer and take out my gun.’ setting—where maintaining a
More radically, players can dramatic flow of events is usually
spend their Plot Points to affect more important than keeping a
the game-world in more funda- specific plot intact—but would be
mental ways. This process is called catastrophic if applied to a po-
‘activation’. If a player ‘activates’ litical storyline, and absurd for a
one of the character traits writ- murder mystery.
ten on their character sheet, they Agree with it or not, this is all
can infallibly perform an action interesting stuff; the sort of ideas
related to that trait. They can also that I would like role-playing sys-
activate a ‘statement’ (literally any- tems to contain a lot more of. But
thing a character says) in which superimposed over it are a large
case that statement automatically number of rules, which vary from
becomes the truth. In both cases, the banal to the incomprehensi-
the player’s decisions cannot con- ble. The idea is that these are op-
tradict anything that has gone be- tional rules that can be ‘peeled off ’
fore; and the referee has a theoret- as the playing group stops finding
ical right of veto. So, if the Primary them useful. But this is not how
Descriptor (sort of gobbledygook the book is constructed. Over and
for ‘Advantage’) on my character over again, the authors give us a
sheet was Veteran Warrior, I could perfectly sensible, one-sentence
activate that Descriptor and say, summary of how systemless role-
‘The Green Men of Barsoom al- playing works, and then proceed
ways travel three abreast, to hide to complicate the issue beyond
their numbers’, and that would be- recognition.
come true, even if the referee had The task resolution system is a
intended them to appear in single case in point. To begin with, we are
file. The rules add: told that:
You’ll have the ultimate veto The Director decides wheth-
power on all subjects but try er the result of any action is
to use it only to keep your to be treated as a Success or
genre and story intact. The Failure, based solely upon the
Actors will twist your plot role-play of the Actors and
in ways that will make you the requirements of the plot.
cringe … this is going to be That’s it.
a lot like handing you the Excellent advice, if you are aiming
reins to a team of wild horses. at the story-telling (as opposed to
You’ll love it. Really. simulation) approach to role-play-
Well, maybe. If you want a game ing. The writers suggest that the
that is closer to competitive sto- needs of the Plot should determine
ry- telling than what is normally whether a character succeeds, and
meant by role-playing then this the character’s skill and the play-

Reviews
er’s role-playing ability should traordinary difficulty. They further

determine in what way they do so. reckon that this is an Additive (as
This is clarified by an example that opposed to Subtractive or Substi-
illustrates the concept of ‘unskilled tutive) skill use, which is to say, we
success’ and ‘skilled failure’: the increase the higher relevant skill
crack-shot shoots the bad guy be- by ‘half again’, so my overall skill
tween the eyes, but the useless shot comes out at 7.00.
manages to bring him down by a 4. Checking the Action Capabil-
fluke. In both cases, the bad guy is ity Chart, we discover that a skill
dead, as the plot demanded. 7 character is About Capable of
This simple idea is then codi- achieving an Extraordinary task.
fied into a rules mechanic that 5. Going back to the Athletic Res-
consists of something like seven olution Flowchart, the referee has
different charts. If my character to decide whether it was my Tech-
were trying to swing on a rope over nique, Endurance, or Environ-
a pit of crocodiles, we would go ment that allowed me to succeed
through the following procedure They decide it was my technique.
to resolve the action: This gets them, finally, to a results
1. The referee consults the Basic box which gives a description of
Resolution Flowchart, asks a num- someone succeeding in a completely
ber of questions and follows the different task.
arrows according to the answers. Quite what the purpose of this
‘Does the plotline require some exercise was, I don’t know. Each
particular outcome?’ Yes. ‘Success of the four Advanced Resolution
or failure?’ Success. Does the ref- Flowcharts contains thirty different
eree want to ‘Release the tension possible results, but each pertain
and tell them now?’ No, they want to a different action, and some of
to build the tension up. This takes them are quite incomprehensible
them to a final box, one of six end- (‘Ickety ackety … ooop. Ah. Ah. It’s
points, which in this instance says, yours. Now it’s time to run’) so it
‘Give them reason to doubt, let vic- is hard to get any sense of the dif-
tory be uncertain.’ ference between a ‘give them false
2. The referee goes to the Ad- hope’ when the characters were
vanced Athletic Resolution Flow- ‘not capable’ result, and a ‘give
chart (one of four) and looks at the them reason to doubt’ result when
‘Give them reason to doubt’ sec- the characters were ‘about capable’.
tion. They must now decide if my I found this book frustrating.
character is About Capable, Not Most readers of Interactive Fantasy
Capable or Very Capable of swing- will already be well aware that a
ing across the chasm. mechanics-free approach to gam-
3. They reckon that both my ing can work perfectly well; and
Swinging skill, 5.00, and my Dodg- they will not find much new advice
ing skill, 4.00, are relevant to the in this book. The idea of multi-
action; and that the task is of Ex- ple refereeing is probably an idea

Reviews
whose time has come; I can only am concerned, so much wasted

wish that the authors had gone space. There are excellent ideas
to greater lengths to explain how here, obscured by bad explana-
they see it working in practice. tions and a banal system. I sincere-
The concepts of Plot Points and ly wish that the authors had pre-
the malleability of the game world sented Theatrix as a general book
are good ones, and I look forward on gaming style. There are far too
to trying them out in a suitable set- many systems on the market, and
ting. But the rules are, so far as I new ideas are hard to come by.
Karma What I found most interest-

By Dave Allsop and others ing about Karma was its omis-
Nightfall Games sions. SLA Industries is a game with
ISBN 0-9522176-5-1; 156pp faults: it has a very two-dimension-
$16/£14.99 al background and the role of the
Reviewed by James Wallis player characters is similarly two-
dimensional. There were also sec-
Karma is the first sourcebook for tions notable by their absence: no
the extremely violent dark-future advice to the referee on running
game SLA Industries (reviewed in the game; nothing on designing
#1) and, like its parent product, it adventures or campaigns; no ad-
is an entirely competent piece of ventures either. There were also
work with some nice touches, but curious and unexplained anach-
which fails to inspire. ronisms in the background, and
Karma is an add-on supple- a few errors. Nightfall has, to its
ment: it introduces new elements credit, printed all the actual errata
to the game’s background without for SLA in Karma, but everything
changing what has gone before. It else is still absent. There’s still not
is presented in the form of a fash- a single sign of a scenario or ad-
ion magazine—the design and venture for the game.
writing almost live up to this con- And try as I might, despite
cept—and contains those staples of all the additions in Karma, I still
RPG supplements: new character can’t get a handle on the game’s
classes, new equipment, kool new background. It feels completely
ways to modify player characters, artificial: it’s not a society that lives
and some new background. The and breathes, nor even a society
game stats are presented at the that lies in the street spurting ar-
back of the book, leaving the text terial blood into the gutter. It’s
descriptions to speak for them- not a society at all; it’s an excuse
selves. This is a nice idea but really to look good, shoot at things and
requires a good index. There is no spend money on cool new equip-
index. ment. There’s nothing intrinsical-

Reviews
ly wrong with that, and it doesn’t Karma’s production values are

necessarily mean that a game is very high, and its artwork rates
unplayable—TSR made a fortune among some of the best I’ve ever
in the 1970s from almost exactly seen in a role-playing game prod-
the same approach—but it makes uct. Nevertheless, SLA Industries
the whole thing feel curiously dat- is beginning to look like a game
ed. This isn’t helped by the 1980s that’s all flash and no substance.
feel that the emphasis on fashion It’s all very well having bio-en-
and particularly footwear gives the gineered foot-long razor-sharp
book. Karma’s background could teeth, but it would be nice to have
only belong to a RPG. something to get them into as well.
The Unspeakable Oath Just over two-thirds of the mag-

Edited by John Tynes azine consists of articles, news and
Pagan Publishing reviews. The articles are a mixed
Issue 10; 64pp; subscription bunch, covering the origin of NPCs
(4 issues) $16 USA, $24 else- (why does every investigator have
where. six cousins who are only heard of
when they die?), historical Green-
Grace Under Pressure land and its links to the Cthulhu
By Jeff Barber and Mythos, a direly unfortunate at-
John Tynes tempt to combine Christianity with
Pagan Publishing; 40pp the Mythos (lots of data on de-
$5.95/£4.99 mons, but little on the good guys,
and a wishy-washy and extremely
Devil’s Children unconvincing explanation as to
By David Conyers, David why God allows Cthulhu and co.
Godley and David Witteveen to exist), two one-page adventure
Pagan Publishing; 52pp outlines, material on some Mythos
$7.95/£6.99 books and deities, and a medio-
Reviewed by Marcus Rowland cre poem. There is one other total
clunker, a (possibly humorous) ta-
The Unspeakable Oath is a magazine ble of ‘random quirks’ for adven-
covering Call of Cthulhu (CoC), the turers, which vies with the Chris-
first (and in my view best) horror tianity article for tree-wastage but
RPG. It was formerly little more has the advantage of comparative
than a fanzine, but now looks very brevity. These exceptions aside, the
professional. Art and presentation articles are readable but of no more
are good; the typeface is small but than average quality; most of the
readable, mostly three columns themes have been covered before,
per page, and there are none of and they add little that’s new.
the typographical tricks that blight News coverage is dominated
so many other games magazines. by the departure of Keith Herber

Reviews
from Chaosium, and includes a (including incestuous rape, mur-

five-page interview by Kevin Ross. der and childhood abuse), several
Herber is an important CoC writer more killings, and the gradual re-
and editor, his work including The alization that the characters can
Fungi From Yuggoth and Arkham only ‘escape’ by confronting their
Unveiled, but the interview left me pasts in an extremely literal way.
a little disappointed; most of the It’s undoubtedly the best work in
questions seemed shallow and the the magazine, short on plot but ex-
reasons for his departure from tremely long on role-playing and
Chaosium were barely mentioned. atmosphere, but it requires mature
Hastily avoiding a review of players and a referee who will be
the reviews, I move on to the ad- able to cope with these themes.
ventures. Both assume a modern Since everyone begins the adven-
background, but could easily be set ture homicidally insane, there’s no
in other eras. chance of a happy ending.
‘All Good Children’, by Chris In all it’s a good magazine for
Klepac, uses an idea I haven’t seen the committed Call Of Cthulhu
before; characters are all patients player, especially for anyone run-
of the same therapist (an appeal- ning a modern campaign. ‘In
ing idea in a game which routinely Media Res’ might be adaptable
generates insane investigators), to other horror systems, the rest
and receive some of the clues in is too system-specific. The adven-
dreams. The actual plot is a com- tures are far more impressive than
petent variant on the ‘Stop the the articles, but most of the writing
cultists from summoning the ma- is competent; editing and proof-
jor Mythos deity’ theme, and has reading are excellent, a singularly
some nicely creepy touches. As rare event in the wonderful world
usual, the adventurers find various of games magazines.
plot coupons, which lead them to a Grace Under Pressure expands
town apparently occupied by zom- a near-future Call of Cthulhu ad-
bies, and fight cultists when they venture that originally appeared
get there. The body count is likely in The Unspeakable Oath #2. It’s de-
to be high, and SAN will probably signed as a demonstration game
end up extremely low. for use at conventions, preferably
‘In Media Res’, by John Tynes, with two referees and a modest in-
is an ambitious psychodrama for vestment in props, sound effects
four escaped murderers, fugitives and communications equipment.
from the Liberty Center For The Half the book consists of eight
Criminally Insane. As it opens all pregener-ated character records,
are suffering temporary amnesia, 25mm deck plans for a research
although there is ample evidence submarine and two auxiliary craft,
of their peculiar tastes. As they and some reasonably good card-
recover their memories there are board cut-out figures; the rest is
flashbacks to formative events the adventure itself.

Reviews
Like most demonstration for later adventures; although the

games, the plot is essentially lin- submarine plans might be useful
ear. The crew of an experimental elsewhere, the characters and set-
research sub find something ex- ting are too restricted for normal
tremely strange on the ocean floor, play. These quibbles aside, it’s well
are attacked, and escape or die worth a look.
horribly. Put so barely, it sounds I’m at a disadvantage in re-
too simple to be enjoyable, but the viewing Devil’s Children, because
excellent staging hints (play a con- it has some features I particularly
tinuous tape of whale and SONAR dislike; it’s designed for tourna-
noises, use green ‘glow sticks’ as the ment play, allows little freedom of
only lighting in darkened rooms, choice, and is in two parts which
use walkie-talkies for communica- both have programmed endings.
tion, and separate groups of play- All characters are pre-generated,
ers when anyone enters the mini- and whatever the players do, the
subs or swims outside) add a lot of plot must be wrenched back to-
atmosphere. The final sequences, wards these predestined climaxes.
with the submarine invaded and To make matters worse, players
its crew trying to escape, should often have no choice of actions
play like an underwater version of (or even of speech) as the adven-
Alien. Claustrophobes may wish to ture unfolds, because much of it
avoid the experience. consists of dream sequences and
Unfortunately the mood is memories of past events.
often disrupted by dice rolls; the The settings for the adven-
‘routine’ running of the subma- ture are Salem at the time of the
rine seems to require an enor- witch trials, and modern Arkham.
mous number, despite the fact that Both are covered moderately well,
everyone aboard is supposed to although even my limited knowl-
be extremely competent. If I were edge of period America spotted a
the referee I’d consider discarding couple of errors, but the focus is so
most of the number-crunching al- tight that it’s difficult to think of
together, concentrate on the psy- ways to use this as source material
chological aspects of the situation, for other adventures. I’ll add that
and possibly run it without rules. to me the most frightening aspect
With modifications it might make of 17th-century witchcraft hysteria
an interesting freeform. Having was the fanaticism with which hun-
said this, players may feel that the dreds of innocents were persecut-
use of skill rolls adds a feeling of ed. The plot assumes the existence
realism, the idea that things can go of witchcraft as a black force of
horribly wrong if anyone screws up evil, which gives this persecution
too badly. It’s a matter of personal some justification. A much better
preference. Like most conven- adventure might be based on the
tion and tournament modules, it motivations of the witch-hunters,
doesn’t present many possibilities not the so-called witches.

Reviews
The players are presumably to run this without a good deal of

supposed to earn points by playing preparation; in fact, I just wouldn’t
their characters effectively. Unfor- like to run it.
tunately the format is simply too I can’t honestly recommend
rigid for this to work well; often Devil’s Children, but it’s possible
the referee must dictate actions, that others will find virtues that
speeches and even thoughts to I’ve missed. Since this costs Brit-
the players, and there are no fall- ish readers half the price of one of
back positions for the referee if the Chaosium’s full-length modules,
players decide to do something it’s a purchase to be approached
totally unexpected. I wouldn’t like with some caution.
Weather the poorly reproduced photocopies

Cuckoo Likes of words and letters cut up from
by Robin D. Laws newspapers, like a ransom note.
Atlas Games; 96pp; $12.95 Perhaps it’s only the control freak
Reviewed by Myles Corcoran in me talking.
Weather the Cuckoo Likes is or-
Weather the Cuckoo Likes, a supple- ganized into five chapters. The
ment for Over the Edge, is the only first, ‘Meet the Cut-Ups’, intro-
role-playing supplement I know of duces the heroes of the piece, the
with a noted RPG freelancer on the members of the Cut-Ups. Here we
cover. There’s more to it than ‘Doc’ meet visionary artists, famous film
Cross of course, but it is indicative directors, sentient TV cartoons
of the eclectic crowd that forms the and a Talking Dog. As usual with
Cut-Ups Project. This book deals Robin Laws’s characters for Over
with the Al Amarjan wing of the the Edge, the Cut-Ups are strange,
Chaos Boys, an international (and engaging and distinctly different
interdimensional) group devoted from the bland thugs and master-
to thwarting the plans of Control minds that might form a less im-
Addicts everywhere. It may be an aginative conspiracy. Where there
impossible task, producing an or- are good guys, bad guys naturally
ganization book for a group that follow, so the second chapter, ‘Foes
defies classification, but Robin of the Cut- Ups’, presents the in-
Laws, the author, gives it a try. evitable opponents of Chaos, free-
At 96 pages, Weather the Cuckoo dom and James Brown, taken from
Likes ranks among the largest of various control-addicted conspira-
supplements for Over the Edge. It is cies around the island. Again, the
nicely laid out, its style similar to characters are amusing and varied.
other recent supplements for the Chapter Three, ‘The Chaos
game. The only problem with the Boys’, describes the goals and
layout is that the chapter titles are methods of the inter-dimensional
unreadable in some cases, being co-operative known by the same

Reviews
name. It turns out that the bi- breakdown of reality. Neither ad-
zarre Cut-Ups from Al Amarja are venture particularly requires the
just the tip of the iceberg when players to be either Cut-Ups or
it comes to people out to put a Control Freaks. Innocent bystand-
brightly coloured machine tool in ers will do, though anyone familiar
the spokes of Control everywhere. with Al Amarja will instantly sus-
Presented in full is the Coatless pect anyone who claims to be just
Code, the Chaos Boys’ creed, an innocent bystander.
which fits nicely on a placemat. Back to the Cut-Ups rules. Rob-
Fans of James Brown will thrill to in Laws has come up with an in-
know that his music forms a vital triguing alternative to dice rolling
part of the Chaos Boys’ approach to resolve game situations involving
to life, liberty and music theory. uncertain outcomes. Start by cut-
Cut-Ups technology also gets a few ting the hell out of a dozen or so
pages, revealing such wonders as magazines and newspapers. Put all
the actual Cut-Ups Device, which the interesting words in a hat, the
turns random words into reality, or more the merrier, omitting short
the CUSS (Collective Unconscious words like conjunctions and spe-
Swizzle Stick) which broadcasts cific words like proper nouns. Draw
thoughts and ideas all over the a number of words at random from
place, converting random words the hat, one word for every die that
(again) into a zeitgeist of uncon- would otherwise be rolled. With
sciously held beliefs. Great fun for your handful of interesting words,
starting rumours that just run and you then attempt to come up with
run. a description of the action you take,
The star of this chapter, and in- in one sentence, using all the ‘cut-
deed the whole book is the section ups’ you drew. The more colourful,
in this chapter of optional Cut-Up descriptive and appropriate the
rules. You might think that the phrase is to the situation at hand,
Chaos Boys don’t need no steenk- the better the result. The referee as-
ing rules but that just shows how signs a value of five points to each
wrong you can be. These rules are cut-up that fits with the scene and
designed to supplement or replace the action in an acceptable manner,
those in the Over the Edge rule- one point for each inappropriate
book. They’re so good they get a cut-up and two points for any cut-
few paragraphs all to themselves up that they cannot decide on. The
down below. sum of the cut-ups is used exactly
The final two chapters of as the sum of the dice would be in
Weather the Cuckoo Likes are two regular play.
unrelated adventures. The first, For example, Claus Brinker,
‘Meaningless Tissues’, deals with Cut-Up and combat monster, has
a control conspirator with a twist, drawn four cut-ups for his attack
and the second, ‘Last Chance on an opponent; ‘lyrical’, ‘char-
Brains’ presents the complete acters’, ‘north’ and ‘going’. He

Reviews
comes up with this justification: Robin Laws cites William S.

‘With lyrical grace, like the char- Burroughs as an influence on the
acters in a Hong Kong sci-fi flick, development of this cut-ups me-
I am going to kick this guy north chanic. Burroughs, too, cut news-
of unconsciousness.’ The referee, papers into piles of single words,
suitably impressed, grants 5 points drew them at random from a
for all four words, making a total container and read them out into
of 20 points, and Claus’s opponent a tape recorder. The resulting
is kicked senseless. The Cut-Ups stream of words, when played back,
Rules cover the use of cut-ups in formed the basis for the strings of
all kinds of situations, including sentences and phrases from which
the effect of character flaws during he wrote novels: novels which read
play. These random words can also as relentless torrents of images,
serve as impromptu scenario out- incoherent and shocking. Taking
lines or NPC reaction gauges. The his queue from Burroughs’s ran-
key here is to think laterally. dom and chaotic forms, Laws has
Obviously what is acceptable or created a means of capturing the
not is dependent on the particu- intrinsic chaos of the Cut-Ups and
lar referee, but generally anything Chaos Boys in a role-playing game.
which moves things along, adds Playing a Cut-Up character us-
colour and variety to the scene or ing cut-ups instead of dice makes
gets impromptu declarations of sense. The headstands and logic
admiration and respect is deemed flips that each Cut-Up member
appropriate and, indeed, encour- goes through day to day is magi-
aged. There is perhaps a tendency cally reproduced with a fistful of
to penalize players not used to im- words. Capitalizing on the creative
provisation or thinking on their impetus of randomly drawn words,
feet but the normal flow of play in the random-word method gives
an Over the Edge game tends that players a sense of the chaos that
way to begin with. For players good goes on in the heads of the Cut-
at tripping plausible-sounding ex- Ups while encouraging inventive-
planations off their tongues the ness and originality in the course
cut-ups provide a beneficial outlet of play. Sometimes the improvised
for their talents that adds to the ideas sparked by the cut-ups will
play and rewards ingenuity. By em- fail to suggest clever or appropri-
phasizing the inventiveness of the ate sentences. Not every roll is a
players and rewarding originality, good one with the dice either, so
the mechanic helps avoid the re- the cut-ups don’t come out badly
petitiveness that can occasionally in that respect. Failure is perhaps
crop up in some game situations. more immediate and more per-
Specifically, combat situations can sonal with cut-ups; a lack of suit-
avoid the ‘I hit it, I hit it again’ syn- able ideas being your own fault
drome that have dogged all refer- and not that of the dice. Some
ees of any experience whatsoever. people will find the impartiality of

Reviews
the dice to be more acceptable. For extra. Without the cut-ups rules
those gamers who like to think lat- Weather the Cuckoo Likes would be
erally, however, let me assure you a solid work with useful characters
that the cut-ups can be a powerful and a couple of reasonable adven-
stimulus to the imagination. There tures. What lifts it into the realm of
is a box in my room full of savaged a potential classic is the quality of
newspapers and magazines which the writing and the genius of the
can be used to substitute for dice, cut-ups rules.
to suggest NPC reactions, to create Robin Laws writes clearly and
little stories and many other ideas fluently, with a sense of humour.
besides. Cut-ups are an imagina- His politics may come through in
tive and useful addition to any his discussion of Control Addic-
gamer’s repertoire of tricks and tion and its consequences, but he
props. doesn’t preach, just gently asks
In general, then, Weather the questions that you can think about
Cuckoo Likes can be recommended or ignore as you desire. The cut-
purely on the strength of the qual- ups rules have an obvious and
ity of the writing and the genius immediate application to anyone
of the Cut-Ups Optional Rules using the Cut-Ups Project and as-
section. The rest of the book is sociated loons in their Over the
good but more mundane in com- Edge campaigns and are readily
parison. The characters described adaptable to a multitude of other
are varied and may potentially fill game situations and systems. Let
many referees’ campaigns admira- randomness in to your head and
bly. Over the Edge lends itself to the you won’t regret it. Robin Laws
creation of weird and interesting may have taken fewer drugs than
characters, both PCs and NPCs, so the man whose work inspired the
perhaps character descriptions of Cut-Ups, but when was the last
NPCs not directly related to a story time William S. Burroughs wrote a
plot are something of an optional good game supplement?
Simulation & Gaming and similar activities unless we did

vol. 25, no. 2 it ourselves. It was only after the
Edited by David Crookall first issue of the-magazine-former-
Sage Publications, Inc. ly-known-as-Inter*action had re-
ISSN 1046-8781; 160pp; $16 turned from the printer that I was
Reviewed by James Wallis informed of the existence of Simu-
lation & Gaming. We could have
When Andrew and I decided to cre- saved ourselves a lot of trouble.
ate Interactive Fantasy last year, we Simulation & Gaming: an inter-
did so partly because we believed national journal of theory, practice,
nobody would publish an intelli- and research is an academic journal
gent magazine about role-playing and the official organ of several or-

Reviews
ganizations including ABSEL (As- (see Inter*action #1) will be struck

sociation for Business Simulation initially by the many similarities
and Experiential Learning) and between simulation games and
ISAGA (International Simulation role-playing games—a few mem-
and Gaming Association). I was bers of ISAGA are also role-players
elected to the steering commit- or wargamers—but the differences
tee of the latter in July, although are more revealing. The worlds
whether that says more about ISA- that simulation games recreate are
GA or me, I have no idea. smaller and more tightly defined.
Simulation & Gaming celebrates Players’ roles are simultaneously
its silver anniversary with this is- much looser (from a lack of char-
sue, and has taken time out from acter description) and more re-
its normal schedule of academic strictive: a player role will typically
articles about simulation gaming have a number of pre-set tasks
to print a selection of pieces on to complete, and the games are
the history and development of played generally to see how those
the field. This makes it a fascinat- tasks are tackled, not whether play-
ing overview of the subject, and an ers succeed or fail in their mission.
ideal starting point for people who To many role-players, this ap-
do not know about simgames. proach may appear pointless and
Simulation gaming is much simplistic. Likewise, most simula-
like the role-playing game indus- tion gamers do not understand
try, but with one major difference: RPGs. The two fields have dif-
both are about having fun, but ferent approaches and goals, dif-
whereas in role-playing the fun is ferent strengths and weaknesses.
primary, in simulation gaming it is The RPG industry could, for ex-
secondary. Simulation games are ample, teach simulation gamers
primarily about learning through much about achieving catharsis
experience, and they flourish in a game; yet the idea of debrief-
mainly in the fields of education ing—a basic tenet of the simula-
and training. They can teach di- tion games field—is completely
rectly, such as a game in which unknown to most RPG designers.
students play the roles of corpo- Part of the reason I was made a
rate executives to learn how busi- member of ISAGA’s steering com-
ness operates, or indirectly, as in a mittee was to try to create more
game which encourages teamwork links between the two industries
or, in the case of the classic Star- and to promote a greater cross-
power (1974), demonstrates what fertilization of ideas and research.
it is like to be part of an underclass The fields have developed in par-
through mechanics supposed to allel, but with almost no commu-
be impartial but in fact are subtly nication. There is a great deal that
biased towards one group. we can learn from each other, and
Role-players, particularly those Simulation & Gaming is an excel-
who play live or freeform games lent place to start.

Reviews
Sexy Hieroglyphics This isn’t an original idea. Ray-

By Laurie Fox mond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milli-
Chronicle Books ards de poèmes (One Hundred Billion
ISBN 0-8118-0456-9; 45pp Poems) did the same thing with
$6.95 sonnets in 1961, but Laurie Fox
has put a lot of thought into what
Magnetic Poetry Kit she is trying to achieve with Sexy
By Dave Kapell Hieroglyphics, and it shows. While
Magnetic Poetry, P. O. Box some of the combinations are duff
14862, Minneapolis, MN and the total selection is not huge,
55414, USA; $19.95 many of the randomly produced
poems are genuinely evocative.
Story Blocks Fox has kept her focus on the tra-
By Mary Sinker and Robert ditional themes of haiku, nature
Venditto and earth-nature, but has tied
Rhyme & Reason Toys; $20 that even more closely to human
Reviewed by James Wallis nature and body nature. The com-
bination of the two produces some
At first sight, none of the three sub- results that are not exactly erotic,
jects of this review are immediately but certainly sensual and sexual.
relevant to interactive fiction (two All the haiku are slightly differ-
of them deal with poetry and the ent, yet they all operate within the
third is a toy for children aged 2+) same arena of meaning.
but while their subjects are very dif- Magnetic Poetry Kit takes the
ferent, they all share a similar ap- same idea but with a much wider
proach to it which can give an inter- and more ambitious brief. It con-
esting insight into the mechanics of sists of four hundred magnets,
story- and genre-creation. each about a centimetre long and
Sexy Hieroglyphics is a wire- with a word, prefix or suffix print-
bound book. Each page is cut into ed on it. These, like the compo-
three horizontal strips, like the nents of Sexy Hieroglyphics, can be
children’s’ books in which you mix arranged to form sentences, po-
and match heads, torsos and legs, ems or even short stories. A typical
except in this book one mixes and short poem, created by an recent
matches lines from haiku, tradi- anonymous visitor to my flat, is:
tional three-line 5-7-5 Japanese I
poems, to produce results like: mother mad
She weeps on all fours drunk & winter
The poem left in her hand sing
Temporary heat a language
or: of bitter honey
Polluted kisses to my summer dreams
The wave caught in her dry throat of love
Drenched with memory & bare behinds

Reviews
According to Jon Gordon at Mag- with, even for those who have nev-
netic Poetry, Dave Kapell chose the er read any e. e. cummings.
Kit’s words ‘instinctively, looking Which brings me, in a rounda-
for versatility and the potential for bout way, to Story Blocks, which
imagery. He also had friends and is meant to be fun and which re-
housemates play with it and took minds me more than a little of
suggestions from them.’ There Once Upon A Time. It is twenty
seems to be a slight tendency to- chunky wooden blocks, each with
wards words with sensual or sexual two colourful illustrations, de-
connotations, although that could signed in such a way that however
just be the interpretation that I or you lay them down (starting with
my visitors have chosen to put on ‘This is a story about Sam/Sarah’
many of them—there is nothing and finishing ‘The End’), they will
implicitly sexual about words like form a story. The typical example
‘smooth’, ‘pant’ or ‘sausage’, only in front of me runs as follows:
in their context. The potential for This is a story about Sam / near
rhyming and scanning is pretty the magic monster / beside the
low, but then you’re not meant to park playground / and a crawling
be creating those kind of poems. caterpillar / walking with a white
wolf / grinning grandly / and a
Besides, if you want Paradise Lost,
goofy gorilla / trying to touch a
you’re going to need a lot more turtle / beneath the blue moon /
than four hundred words. The End.
What I found remarkable about It’s grammatically coherent and
the Magnetic Poetry Kit is the ease I suppose it makes some sort of
with which really quite good po- sense, but it’s not what I would con-
ems suggest themselves from the sider a story. Nor, I suspect, would
random jumble of words. People its target audience of children aged
wanted to play with it: every soirée two and up. The books of Vivian
would end with at least one new Gussin Paley, with their transcrip-
creation. Even with a vocabulary of tions of the stories told by three
only four hundred words, one can to five year olds show that while
create free verse, love poems—or young children may tell stories that
even haiku. The creator has cho- seem to be as illogical and random
sen words onto which anyone can as the one above, they do have a
project their own meanings, and strong sense of cause and effect, of
combining them to make inter- events happening in a sequence.
esting improvisations is very easy. A very young child may consider
What I and my co-designers tried ‘There was a dog and a bear and
to do with the archetypes of the a house’ a satisfactory story but
fairy-tale in our game Once Upon A very soon they demand more; not
Time, Dave Kapell has succeeded necessarily a plot, but a series of
in doing with the building blocks events. Story Blocks, being subjects
of modern poetry. And I have to and descriptions linked only by
say it’s tremendous fun to play conjunctions, gerunds and prepo-

Reviews
sitions, does not provide this. It’s a D&D because the lack of a refer-
clever idea but it doesn’t work. ence to it in the rulebook implies
More importantly, there is that such acts are acceptable in
nothing here for a child to base the game-world. Specific words,
a story on. There are colourful il- or their lack, define the environ-
lustrations of colourful characters ment.
and places, but not enough effort There are other games which
has been made to link them; allit- use a similar effect: Dark Cults
eration seems to have been more (Dark House, 1983) and Once Upon
important to the writer than giv- A Time (Atlas Games, 1993) are
ing the characters in the story both story-telling games which use
anything interesting to do. The around a hundred cards to define
characters and descriptions may their respective genres, and there
be ones that children recognize, are other card-based products such
but they are not ones that lend as Destiny Deck (Stellar Games,
themselves to story-telling. There 1993) and Oblique Strategies (Brian
is no attempt to create a unified Eno/Peter Schmidt, 1975) which
genre for these stories, other than are designed to be ambivalent aids
that many of the pictures on the to creativity, but which end up im-
blocks are the sort of things one plicitly imposing their own genres
might expect to find in children’s and agendas on the act of creation.
books. The difference is that the three
What these three products products reviewed here make the
have in common is an attempt to process explicit: what they are do-
allow someone to create stories or ing and how they are doing it are
poems from a limited range of op- effectively the same thing. None
tions, a limited vocabulary. When of the genres they create can be
a person’s vocabulary is reduced, easily described; one has to expe-
the number of ideas that they rience them: Sexy Hieroglyphics (45
can express is also reduced. If it elements; 3375 possible combina-
is reduced massively then they are tions) hatches sensuous worlds of
forced into a particular style of ex- embodiment, Magnetic Poetry Kit
pression: a genre has been creat- (400 elements) produces a wonder-
ed. It may not be an existing, rec- fully poetic outpourings, and Story
ognizable genre, but it’s a genre Blocks (40 elements) creates an un-
all the same. Role-playing games, satisfying mish-mash, because the
which are entirely dependent on designer seems to have been more
language and vocabulary, do this interested in the individual ele-
all the time: their environments ments than in the overall result. All
are defined by limiting the ex- three are clever ideas; two of them
tent of the setting. As an example, make fascinating experiences. If
we assume there are no criminal there’s a lesson to be learned from
penalties for killing monsters in these reviews, it’s in that.

Subscription Rates
Five-issue subscriptions to Interactive Fantasy
are available at the following rates:
Individual: UK/Europe: £20 US/World: $32

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Limited numbers of the first issue are still available at a price of (UK/
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Please send cheques or international money orders in sterling or
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Errata
On page 86 of the first issue, in the article on CAR-PGa, the word ‘ration’
should have read ‘ratio’, and the ratio in question should have read 4:1,
not 5:1. We apologize for this error.
A Taste Of Interactive Fantasy 3

Cultural exploration in role-playing games by Paul Mason
Narrative board games by Mike Siggins
Using RPGs in TEFL classes by Brian Phillips
Overviews of ISAGA and the Order of the Triangle
Why role-playing isn’t art by Brian Duguid
Reviews of Wraith, Immortal, Masterbook,
Nexus, Tales of Gargentihr and FirstQuest.
The delayed ‘Sex and Gender in Role-Playing’ special feature


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interactive fantasy 1.

160 Next issue; subscription information

interactive fantasy 1.2 1

All contents are copyright

2 interactive fantasy 1.2

interactive fantasy 1.2 3

issue, is a democratic form of entertainment, placing the audience and

4 interactive fantasy 1.2

interactive fantasy 1.2 5

6 interactive fantasy 1.2

interactive fantasy 1.2 7

There are many forms of

GAMA, the Game Manufacturer’s Association, is an umbrella group for

10 interactive fantasy 1.2

ing and education. It is free and available to anyone who is interested.

interactive fantasy 1.2 11

Play-by-Mail (PBM) games existed long before anyone had thought of

12 interactive fantasy 1.2

interactive fantasy 1.2 13

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What are MUDs?

The history of multi-user dungeons

interactive fantasy 1.2 15

The earliest computer-based games that could be said to have a real

16 interactive fantasy 1.2

Conventional role-playing and MUDs

interactive fantasy 1.2 17

role-playing MUD suffers very badly in comparison with a human ref-

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interactive fantasy 1.2 19

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This section looks at role-playing

What Is a Game, Anyhow?

22 interactive fantasy 1.2

with action. We must think of a continuum, rather than a dichotomy; if

It’s not a toy

It’s not a story

interactive fantasy 1.2 23

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interactive fantasy 1.2 25

26 interactive fantasy 1.2

The most important word in that sentence is: struggling.

interactive fantasy 1.2 27

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Why is this important? Because without game tokens, you wind up

interactive fantasy 1.2 29

it would take me five minutes to find all the relevant information by

Other Ways To Strengthen Games

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Colour counts for a lot. As a simulation of World War II, Lawrence

32 interactive fantasy 1.2

It can allow insight into a situation that mere narrative cannot. It

interactive fantasy 1.2 33

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interactive fantasy 1.2 35

36 interactive fantasy 1.2

They’re All Alike Under the Dice

interactive fantasy 1.2 37

it will create merely another mediocrity of the TV age, another form

Greg Costikyan has designed twenty-three commercially published games, includ-

38 interactive fantasy 1.2

interactive fantasy 1.2 39