Interactive Fantasy 3 - Web (14262881)

interactive fantasy 1.
3 1
2 interactive fantasy 1.3
interactive
fantasy
issue 3
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim
Rudyard Kipling
CONTENTS
4 Editorial by Andrew Rilstone
OVERVIEWS
9 Narrative and Atmosphere in Boardgames by Mike Siggins
RECREATION
24 In Defence of Computer Story Games by Ray Winninger
28 Culture Club by Paul Mason
41 Dancing Fictions by David A. Lambert
47 When a Touch Becomes a Bruise by Stephanie Itchkawich
ANALYSIS
62 Leaping into Cross-Gender Role-Play by Sandy Antunes
68 The Blind Gamesmaster by Peter Tamlyn
74 The Nihilist Role-Player by Simon Beaver
78 Through a Mask, Darkly by James Wallis
96 Foriegn Language Education and Role-Playing Games
by Brian David Phillips
104 I Know What I like! by Brian Duguid
REVIEWS
112 Wraith: the Oblivion; Immortal: the Invisible War; Into the Dark Continent; Nexus:
the Infinite City; Tales of Gargentihr; First Quest; Raflan; Macho Women With
Guns; STOCS Lite; Lost Souls; Walker in the Wastes.
152 Letters
160 Subscription information
interactive fantasy 1.3 1

interactive fantasy Address all correspondence to:
Interactive Fantasy
ISSN 1356-6520 Hogshead Publishing Ltd
issue 3 29a Abbeville Road
London SW4 9LA
Great Britain
fax/phone +44/0 181 673 6340
Editor:
Andrew Rilstone email: journal@aslan.demon.co.uk
(editorial)
Writers: if@hogshead.demon.co.uk
Sandy Antunes (other matters)
Simon Beaver
Interactive Fantasy (IF) is a quarterly, peer- reviewed,
Patrick Brady quasi-academic journal concerned with all aspects
Sam Dodsworth of interactive narratives. It is intended as a forum for
Brian Duguid the informed discussion of role-playing and story-
Mark Frein making systems. The opinions expressed by its writ-
J. P. Hunter ers are not necessarily those of the publishers, and
Stephanie Itchkawich should not be taken as such.
Hogshead Publishing recognizes the status of
Richard Lambert
all copyrights, product names and registered trade-
David A. Lambert marks, and the use of the aforementioned within
Paul Mason the publication should not be construed as a chal-
Phil Masters lenge to such status.
Samantha Mullaney Interactive Fantasy is interested in receiving pro-
Brian David Phillips posals for articles. Prospective writers and reviewers
Marcus L. Rowland must send a SAE, International Reply Coupon or
email request for more detailed information on re-
Andrew Rilstone quirements, standards and formats.
Leah Robin There is information on subscribing to Inter-
Mike Siggins active Fantasy on page 160. For information on dis-
Peter Tamlyn tributing, stocking or advertising in the magazine,
James Wallis please contact James Wallis or Jane Mitton at the
Brian Williams address, phone number or email address above.
Ray Winninger
Cover by Jim Woodring Deadlines:

Issue 4
All contents are copyright Abstracts: 1 April 1995
©1995 by their original crea- Manuscripts: 15 April 1995
tors. Short excerpts are permit- Advertising: 22 April 1995
Issue out: 1 June 1995
ted for the purposes of review
or reference. Issue 5
Abstracts: 1 July 1995
Printed by McNaughton and Manuscripts: 15 July 1995
Gunn Inc., Ann Arbor, Michi- Advertising 22 July 1996
gan, USA. Issue out: 1 August 1995

Editorial
‘In a world without women, what would men become?’
‘Scarce, ma’am. Mighty scarce.’
Mark Twain
The imagery sometimes associated with role-playing games cannot be

very encouraging to women who are considering becoming involved in
the hobby. I have just taken four games, more or less at random, down
from my shelf. The cover of one (Shattered Dreams) depicts a female in a
very low-cut dress, being touched below the breast by a sinister shadow-
creature. Another (TORG) depicts a woman wielding a very large gun.
‘Nothing wrong with that’, you may say—but she evidently thought that
it would be sensible to go into combat wearing her bathing costume.
She has another gun strapped to her naked thigh, which also sports a
tattoo. The bearded clergyman she is standing next to is fully clothed.
Freud would have had a field day.
Pictures of this kind are probably symptoms, rather than causes, of
the male-ness of the role-playing hobby. Since most gamers are young
males it is not surprising that games companies decorate their games
with pictures that they think young males will like to look at. Such art-
work is more often the result of thoughtlessness rather than any desire
to smuggle pornography in by the back door. Fantasy artists put their
women in silly clothes because that is what women in fantasy artwork
have always looked like. The two games that I have so unfairly picked
on are not particularly sexist in their content or themes; it’s only the
artwork that is at fault. I’ve never met a man who would admit to liking
this sort of thing, and most women in the hobby tend to regard it as sad
and silly rather than sexist and offensive.
The other two books in my very un-scientific survey were GURPS
supplements—Robin Hood and Arabian Nights. One shows a male wizard
and his male apprentice calling up a male efreet; the other, a group of
merry men ambushing a much less merry but equally male group of
Norman soldiers. No women were in evidence in either case. Here, one
cannot blame either the writers or the artists, since it is obviously the
fault of the subject matter. The yarns of Robin Hood and the Arabian
Nights are the stories of a man’s world.
That, of course, is the problem.

Most role-playing games still address themselves to what have
generally been regarded as ‘male’ themes: combat and the military.
Characters spend their army severance pay on space-craft to become
mercenaries and bounty hunters; they are approached in bars by grey-
beards who want them to rescue their daughters from wizards’ towers;
they aspire to become Knights of the Round Table or Imperial Space
Marines. Whole role-playing supplements have been given over to pic-
tures of military uniforms; whole books have been written containing
nothing but game-statistics for guns, or lovingly developed rule systems
for dealing with cars, tanks, space-craft and giant, weapons-laden ro-
bots. When has a role-playing game ever primarily addressed the art,
music or agriculture of an imaginary world, let alone that world’s fash-
ions or child-rearing practices? Someone will say, ‘Those subjects have
no application to role-playing games: they are dull and un-exciting.’
I repeat; that is the problem. Why did role-playing games become
obsessed with the warrior to the exclusion of the nurturer?
Furthermore, many role-playing games are set in archaic cultures
in which politically incorrect values are the norm: not only the roman-
ticized Middle Ages, but also Victorian England or the 1930s. In such
societies, the roles of women and men were more sharply differenti-
ated than they are today. Could it be that, for male gamers, this is part
of the appeal? Perhaps it appeals to the same ethos as the Wild Man
culture: that some men—particularly, perhaps, rather studious, un-
athletic ‘nerds’—yearn for a world of heterosexual male friendships;
of hunting, honour and warfare. Cinematic science fiction, much more
obviously, calls up the male world of the barrack-room. (Ursula Le
Guin commented that Star Wars ceased to be interesting at the half-way
point, when everyone got into uniform.) At one level, there is probably
nothing very wrong with this. If men really do have an inborn urge to
kill animals and each other, then role-playing games are probably a
very harmless way of getting it out of their systems. But some of us hope
that there is rather more to it than that.
This is not to say that it is impossible to play women in role-playing
games, nor that women never role-play. I can only think of one game
that explicitly rules out female PCs. Most games fall over themselves to
admit them. The science fiction militaries envisaged by Traveller and
Prime Directive recruit women and men as equals. The Order of Hermes
allows female wizards. Warhammer FRPG lets women take up any career.
Castle Falkenstein emancipates Victorian women so they can join in the
swashbuckling. Space: 1889 leaves the ladies un-liberated and patron-
ized, but invites them to play missionaries and explorers, or dress up as
boys. Perhaps this latter suggestion is the most honest: how many RPG
females are in fact little more than women in men’s clothes?
The one game that assumes that most PCs will be males is Pendrag-

on. Since it specifically sets out to tell the stories of knights in a roman-
tic medieval world, there is little point in censuring the game for this.
If you are going to go off to war, or on the quest for the Holy Grail, you
are likely to leave the women-folk at home. A supplementary volume
makes some interesting suggestions about incorporating women PCs
into the game. There is a small precedent for female knights in medi-
eval literature, and since this is fantasy there is no reason why Arthur
should not operate an equal opportunities policy at the Round Table.
It is not too difficult to imagine Valkyrie-like warrior-women among the
Saxons. If that fails, you could always generate a lady wizard to join the
lads on their adventures. Given the type of thing that Pendragon is try-
ing to do, this is a valid approach. But it makes a massive assumption:
that the way to admit female characters into an RPG is to come up with
a reason why they should be joining in the murdering and pillaging
with the blokes. We admit women into our games, but they have to be
macho women, preferably with guns.
It may work for Pendragon, but as a general rule it seems terribly
restrictive. Rather than giving swords to the women, why not try to per-
suade the men to put them down? Why not write scenarios about the
things that the other fifty per cent of the population were doing while
the men were engaged in mass slaughter? Things like raising children,
learning and teaching, making things, wielding subtle political power,
creating and telling stories, or (in the mythic versions) practising magic.
We will, of course, be told that a game of ‘women’s pursuits’ in a
fantasy society would be boring: and, doubtless, a game about embroi-
dery or bathing the children would be dull—every bit as dull as a game
about a polishing armour, digging a latrine or repairing a tank. But
would role-playing games really become less interesting if their focus
was broadened; away from combat and power, and into the issues of
real human relationships, in which, throughout history, both men and
women have been involved? Are the stories of Florence Nightingale,
Tess Durbeyfield or Moll Flanders less interesting because those wom-
en rarely took up weapons or engaged in physical action?
Some people will say yes. Some gamers find it impossible to imag-
ine a role-playing game that does not take combat as its primary focus.
A recent review in a British games magazine made the mind-boggling
assertion that ‘a role-playing game is only as good as its combat system’.
If that is the view taken by the majority of gamers, and by the games
industry, then we have answered a question that role-players have of-
ten been concerned about. Perhaps they should not have been asking
why so few women play role-playing games, but why so few people play
them.

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.

Narrative and Atmosphere
in Boardgame Systems
By Mike Siggins
Boardgames are almost as old as civilization. Since the days of ancient

Sumer people have been playing games, presumably for enjoyment.
However, with very few exceptions, it has only been in the last twenty-
five years or so that games have grown beyond the classic abstract and
Monopoly ‘roll two dice and move round the board’ systems. Initially as a
by-product and subsequently by design, the narrative element has risen
inexorably, culminating in the almost pure-strain story-telling systems
such as Once Upon a Time (Atlas).
I believe that the narrative trend began in the late 1960s and early
’70s through the growth of decent adult boardgames, miniatures gam-
ing, historical simulations and, of course, their prodigal son, role-play-
ing games. There is no doubt in my mind that the role-playing genre
has had a marked effect on the attitudes and expectations of board-
gamers, both directly and indirectly.
It is my contention that all non-abstract games tell a story. Who
they tell it to, how they tell it and who gets a say in the outcome are
different matters entirely. These narratives are a prime source of at-
mosphere—and for me, atmosphere is the main attraction of all types
of games, be they historical or fantasy, sports or combat simulations,
computer-based or card games. Whatever the subject, if you feel that
you are there, living the role, then the game system works well. Pre-
dictably then, I obtain nothing from Chess or Draughts and only trace
levels from Trivial Pursuit. Only when we reach Mah-Jong and Go are
there any stirrings in the emotional department and it is this area that
defines for me a strong or a weak game.
Narrative Mechanisms
What is a boardgame narrative? This will be, of necessity, a wide-rang-
ing definition because of the many types of game system. ‘Narrative’
can mean players inventing a storyline and saying it out loud; it can
be a series of events generated by the system that creates a story in the
players’ minds; it can be a pre-set plot that the players discover section
by section, or it can be as simple as a description of a sports event which

the players follow with interest. Like all stories, it helps if it is interesting
and not over-long.
A boardgame system can generate these narratives in a number of
ways. At one extreme, there is the ‘minimal prompt’ of cards and ba-
sic rules encouraging flexible story-telling by the players—as exempli-
fied by Once Upon a Time and Dark Cults—and at the other there is the
simple discovery of a preset storyline, as in Sherlock Holmes: Consulting
Detective. The net result here is effectively the same as reading a book,
albeit usually with the chance to explore several different plot routes.
Between these two poles are a range of factors affecting the level of
creative input. Some games feature deduction, some action cards or
simply dice rolls, while others allow a group vote to determine the way
forward. In most cases there are a massive number of permutations as
to how a given game will develop. Either way, the story unfolds as the
game progresses.
Most systems will, like adventure gamebooks, rely on rudimentary
decision-making to create a varying storyline. A player ready to ad-
vance their squad of infantrymen, or perhaps their Ali Baba character,
might be able to decide whether to progress across the wadi, into the
mountains or to stay put. Each action might reveal a further develop-
ment in the mutable plotline or, with more than one player, influence
a multiple-outcome scenario. All the while, the mind fills in the gaps,
perhaps drawing on graphical or textual atmosphere, creating a virtual
narrative experience. The player says ‘Okay, let’s cross the wadi. If we
can make the oasis we won’t be so exposed to the tanks/roc’. Their mind
sees the desert, the cowering characters, the blazing sun and even the
palm trees. This is the mark of a good game.
The underlying concept of narrative is also largely dependent on
the individuals actually playing the game. In the same way there are
people in the world who cannot (or will not) tackle role-playing games,
there are gamers who discern little in the way of narrative in a board-
game. Some see a boardgame purely as an abstract exercise, even when
it isn’t specifically designed that way, and don’t ‘imagine’ the develop-
ing plot presented to them. In fairness, as we shall see, some games
encourage visualization better than others, but it is a rare game that
offers nothing at all. Other gamers seem to be overwhelmed by the
competitive nature of play (a concept relatively rare in role-play except
in tournaments, in my experience) and any wider benefits are lost in
the pursuit of glory.
Broadly speaking then, boardgame narratives can be experienced
in two ways: passively or actively. In both cases, the player will rational-
ize the outcomes and, depending on the nature and quality of the sys-
tem, this will create the atmosphere and long-term attraction. In fact,
these correspond almost exactly with the varying styles of gamemas-

tering in role-playing games (e.g. referee as story-teller, against active
player participation) except that a collective knowledge of the rulebook
and system replaces a human referee.
The passive reaction is where the player responds to the system,
which in turn is generating the story. This is best typified by sports sim-
ulations, for instance a baseball or soccer game, wherein the resulting
constructs are absorbed and enhanced in the mind, hopefully forming
a satisfactory course of the game. The key component here is ration-
alization—if the outcome can be checked against ‘reality’, the players
will be able to suspend disbelief. In this role then, the game system is
the prompter and the player is reactive, sometimes even completely
dormant.
In the active capacity, the player creates or at least affects the story
in tandem with the game system. In multi-player games, several players
will influence the unfolding action, for instance by financial decisions
in the building of a railway or perhaps simply by playing sequential
event cards, and the system must be able to assimilate and manage
these multiple inputs. Again, the ability to rationalize is crucial. In this
case, the players are the prompters and assume proactive roles, while
the system, in varying degrees, becomes more reactive.
I don’t think there is any better enhancement to a decent narra-
tive mechanism than a convincing theme and inspirational graphics.
In the same way that a well crafted role-playing campaign and superbly
painted figurines add to the aesthetic quality of play, a game with close
links to its theme and a production job that prompts trouser wetting
is definitely the one to have. Although it is perfectly possible to enjoy,
and visualize, from a textual game, graphics are undoubtedly of help in
creating the whole picture. This can be as straightforward as a graphic
of a tank on a counter or as impressive as a beautifully rendered period
map of the world.
As for narrative scope, the typical board or card game is certainly
limited in comparison with RPGs, freeform games or anything sim-
ilar. Because of the closed nature of the system, rigidly defined and
purposefully restricted by the ruleset, a boardgame cannot deliver the
open- ended flexibility of its cousins. Nevertheless, boardgame systems
have their advantages. They can be designed to offer punchy, time-
limited experiences that are self-contained. They allow a player to ex-
perience numerous vastly different subjects and situations in the same
time as, say, a role-playing campaign. They can permit a player to ex-
plore a situation from several levels or viewpoints. They tend to allow
easier absorption of ‘sound bites’ of systems and experiences. They also
tend to demand far less in the way of preparation for a typical game
session—the system and story are there waiting to be discovered and
require no planning or reading of modules.

A closed system’s parameters may be expanded by developing a ge-
neric system such as Squad Leader (Avalon Hill) which, through numer-
ous scenarios and expansion kits, permits wide ranging and in depth
treatment of WWII tactical combat that could conceivably keep one oc-
cupied for many years of gaming.
Interaction and Narrative
Boardgames, when properly designed and structured, can offer two
main forms of interaction: between the players themselves and between
the players and the game system. Some games, often regarded as the
classics, provide both elements—1830 and Civilization (Avalon Hill) be-
ing prime examples. In the same way that some players will not tolerate
fantasy themes or games of pure chance, there are those who consider a
game without player interaction as worthless. In most cases they have a
point; few are the games that place one in the position of a multi-player
but nevertheless solitaire session while also encouraging repeated play.
Those which do are usually those with a high narrative or atmospheric
content or fundamental system appeal. They must compensate for the
lack of interaction by enhancing other game aspects, effectively replac-
ing a human opponent with an acceptable system counterpart.
The strongest test of a game’s appeal is whether it can survive soli-
taire play—an unusual concept in most role-playing systems beyond
paragraph books and solo adventures. Here, player interaction is una-
vailable out of necessity (or choice) and the system becomes the oppo-
nent or fellow player. Like the best computer games, boardgames can
provide solitary gamers with both a foil for their creative muse and a
willing opponent. Some games fail to engage creativity and tend more
toward analysis—these are the solitaire puzzles typified by many ad-
venture games and abstract systems. Others manage to captivate and
enthral from the moment the box is opened or the pieces laid out. To
my mind, a solitaire system stands or falls on its narrative strength and
the very best ones will be played again and again. Personally, I find that
only the very best solitaire games pass this test, and they can be counted
on the fingers of one hand.
However, as easy as it is to overstress the importance of interac-
tion between players, it is a vital ingredient in a successful game. The
bottomless pits of Game Theory, psychology and social adequacy all
open up but need, for this exercise, to be deftly side-stepped. Each has
their influence on a group of gamers enjoying a session, but bereft of
the character cloak provided by role-play systems, it is you against the
other people. Not surprisingly, then (and more markedly in older play-
ers), games-playing often becomes a social vehicle. The boardgame is
the central focus but allows discussion and chat as well as the gaming
experience. The turn structure of a boardgame is also relevant here. In
a role-playing game, players and referee are active most of the time. In

many boardgames, the turn structure means you might be waiting for
your turn and therefore possibly becoming bored or distracted. Mod-
ern games have tried to avoid this by utilizing more interactive systems,
but it is still a problem.
At its best though, there is a wonderful mélange of interaction based
partly on what is going on in the game, partly from running in-jokes
and partly through general conversation. All of this goes to make the
narrative strength all the more important. A game with a weak storyline
or a system that forces inaction can easily lose its appeal and interest
wanders, usually to the next game on the pile or the Sunday papers.
It can be argued, then, that game groups are primarily social. They
remain together not only because they like the same games but because
they get on with their opponents—they work as a unit. Winning be-
comes of secondary importance to having a good time.
The rest of this article will concentrate on the many types of board-
games, using examples of notable mechanics within each class and
hopefully indicating how narrative systems work. The only category
excluded is historical games, which I hope to cover in depth in a later
article.
Party Games
There will be few readers unfamiliar with Pictionary, Charades, Trivial
Pursuit and their many offshoots. There are however a surprising num-
ber of narrative games that can be played in the ‘party’ environment
and enjoyed by an adult audience.
The most childish, and probably therefore the most enjoyable, is
Smuggle (MB), a game in which you must convince one other player
that you are not smuggling and have paid the correct duties. Remi-
niscent of Cheat or Spoof in its requirement for straight faces, bluff
and the ability to read other people, it remains an all-time favourite if
somewhat limited in its scope for narrative ploys.
Going one better than this is the group of literary games that call
on one’s creative writing powers. These come in three flavours: Fic-
tionary Dictionary (Generic), Ex Libris (Oxford Games) and Poesiemeister
(Generic). In the former, an obscure word is selected at random from a
dictionary. Each player then writes down a believable definition of the
word and the results are voted on as to which is the best. In some vari-
ants, bonus points can be earned for identifying the real answer, in Call
My Bluff fashion. The same idea is extended in Ex Libris wherein you
compile the closing lines of a book in the style of the author, having had
the first line read out, and in Poesiemeister the same is applied to poetry.
All good fun, in the right company, and often surprising to find your
demure friend possesses a Gothic Horror streak.
Probably the best of all the party games, and in fact good enough

to pass muster for game-group play, is Doolittle & Waite (Inward). This
is a game in which players take it in turn to be the plaintiff and de-
fendant in a fictitious court case. Each player is assigned cards showing
the strength of their case should it progress to court, but the idea is
to extract the largest possible pre-trial settlement. The most money
wins, rather than the most cases. Shades of ‘L.A. Law’ here. Players are
encouraged to negotiate, cajole or appease, and get away with paying
out as little, or gaining as much, as they can. The game is excellent as
it stands but unfortunately, as far as narrative goes, it represents an op-
portunity lost. This is because the cases are generic and without textual
substance—the trial strength is a numerical rating with modifiers for
evidence and so on. Imagine the same game with basic descriptions of
your case, hidden information and free rein on your tactics.
General Games
This is a category of games in search of an appropriate title, which
is odd since most of my writing concerns them. The French, rather
grandiosely, call them Jeux de Société; the best we have come up with
is ‘Fluffy Games’, which nomenclature is either contemptuous or apt,
depending on your viewpoint. Where do these games fit? Above party
games and mass-market titles such as Monopoly and Cluedo, somewhat
below complex simulations and war-games, but sometimes overlapping
at either end.
They are characterized by strong, appealing game systems (with
great importance attached to novelty), usually simple rules and me-
chanics, and often sumptuous production (the phrase ‘Nice Bits’ is of-
ten bandied). The theming of these games can vary from near-perfect
to tenuous while the depth of play ranges from the ultra-simple to the
involved, with commensurate play length implications—eight hours or
more to complete Civilization is not uncommon. However, the main
draw of the recent designs is that they manage to squeeze an awful lot
of play into perhaps sixty or ninety minutes, sometimes at a surprising-
ly challenging level. The subject matter ranges from collecting modern
art to potato farming, through ecological, crime, business, political,
historical and railway themes, from flying-carpet racing to Formula 1.
It is probably easiest to start with the direct offshoots of role-playing
games, usually produced either as an attempt to spread the role-play-
ing genre to the mass market or as an introductory vehicle. None of
these bears much resemblance to role-playing, and often precious lit-
tle in the way of formal narrative generation, but all are strong on the
adventure and hack’n’slay elements. Two of the first games out of the
blocks, following TSR’s Dungeon, were Sorceror’s Cave and Mystic Wood
(both Gibsons). The idea here was to progress your character, extreme-
ly rudimentary by role-playing game standards (plain old ‘Fighter’ or

‘Wizard’ is about par for the course), through an ever-expanding series
of dungeon tunnels, meeting monsters and grabbing treasure. As the
dungeon complex was explored, extra cards would be added to the
map—long games, if your character managed to survive, could cover
the dining table with ease. That aside, depth of play and encourage-
ment to return was minimal.
The second generation of pseudo-role-playing games, which have
been extremely successful, are typified by HeroQuest and Space Crusade
(MB/Games Workshop). The developments have been a move from
largely aimless wandering to specific missions and scenarios, there are
some enhancements to the characters (though still very basic) and they
are blessed with some excellent components. The underlying game is
much the same as Dungeon—move around, don’t get hurt and kill as
much as you can. Only in their advanced forms, with the appearance of
embryonic character development systems (and yet more nice bits), is
there any progress towards role-playing proper.
There is a large group of games that are effectively solitaire but
can be played multi-player, with their narrative merits carrying them
through. Some of the best ones are covered later under paragraph sys-
tems but there is a clutch of games, each outstanding in its own way,
that are worth mentioning. The most applicable theme for this type
of game seems to be exploration. In Source of the Nile (Avalon Hill),
Oregon Trail (FGU) and Age of Exploration (Timjim) the player is put in
the shoes of an adventurer who must organize an expedition to deepest
Africa, the American West and the New World respectively. The ad-
ministration of buying ships and supplies complete, each game allows
for incremental progress across a map with detail being explained as
progress is made. The major appeal is the inherent event systems that
allow for discoveries to be made en route. Whether it is a source of fresh
water, a tribe of Indians or the entire Inca civilization, it hardly matters.
The excitement is there as your exhausted bearers head on into the
jungle in the hope of finding riches, fame or the source of the Nile.
The interesting factor is that all three mechanics permit an acceptable
level of decision making. While the system will throw up hostile natives,
scurvy, storms or fervent missionaries, it is usually your choice to have
gone that route and you often have some chance of extricating yourself.
The events themselves may be unavoidable, but then that is life and you
react accordingly.
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (Sleuth) and its successor Gum-
shoe are unique in the boardgames world. They provide a series of cases
for the players to solve by use of a wide array of game aids—period
newspapers, street maps, libraries and so on. Although the crimes and
perpetrators are predetermined, the uncovering of the means and mo-
tive creates a fascinating tale as you move around London, trying to

deduce the answers in the shortest possible time. Frankly, if you are as
good at sleuthing as I am (terrible), it is sufficiently interesting to just
mosey around absorbing the atmosphere, look up the clues and make
a wild guess before checking the answer at the end. For period flavour,
strength of plot and general milieu, these are the best around. The sole
drawback is that once you’ve played the cases and looked at the an-
swers, they can’t be played again until you’ve forgotten all about them.
A small price to pay for excellence.
Another superbly themed game is Liftoff (Task Force), effectively a
solitaire challenge to take control of the American (or Russian) space
programme, undertaking R&D, training of astronauts and develop-
ing new systems to try and be the first to put a man on the moon.
The build-up to the One Small Step is long, occasionally frustrating
yet thoroughly absorbing—you get to build satellites, rocket systems,
capsules and eventually lunar landers, all of which need to be tested
and sent on hazardous missions. Each of these missions is graphically
displayed and at each stage problems can occur, tests have to be made
and equipment checked. The narrative builds steadily, both on mis-
sions and overall, and the feelings engendered are quite remarkable—
the loss of a Saturn V on launch is surprisingly powerful.
At the opposite end of the spectrum to the solitaires are the ne-
gotiation games which, by definition, require several people (and the
more the better). It is in these games where your story-telling, lying (or
honest), overbearing (or timid) personality comes completely to the
fore. Or then again you can just act right out of character. Anything
goes, in some cases quite literally (see the antics in Sharp’s The Game of
Diplomacy). The games themselves are characterized by extremely sim-
ple systems that serve to spark or implement the extended negotiations
between players. Sometimes there are concrete, if subjectively pliable,
facts in the game to base one’s negotiations upon; in others there is
nothing at all beyond the survival instinct (and all the classic Balloon
Game strategies are evident here).
The grandfather of all negotiation games is Diplomacy (Avalon
Hill). In this, you play one of seven major European powers in the
run-up to World War One. Your aim is to conquer half of Europe by
using the basic combat system (just a few fleets and armies) to occupy
supply centres. The problem arises in that it is extremely difficult to do
this alone and therefore alliances are the order of the day. Russia and
Turkey might agree to steamroll west rather than attacking each other,
Britain and France will probably go for the throat (as usual) and Ger-
many, Austria-Hungary and Italy might form a defensive pact until one
of them decides they can benefit from a timely ‘stab’. It is this foul act
(the breaking of an agreement for selfish benefit) that characterizes Di-
plomacy and most other negotiation games. My word is most definitely

not my bond and, understandably, many players dislike the bitter feel-
ings generated, even though it is just a game.
In Junta (Creative), the mechanics are more important than in Di-
plomacy and the sides are rather less equal throughout the game. Play-
ers take the roles of senior military personalities in a banana republic.
Using a clever, ever-changing voting system, one of them will become
El Presidente, the others clamour for the vacant commands of air force,
armies and so on. The negotiation comes in when the positions are al-
located and the budget needs to be agreed, as the main aim is to line
your Swiss bank account with dollars.
Three recent additions to the negotiation field are Intrige (FX
Schmid), Quo Vadis (Hans im Gluck) and Rette Sich Wer Kann (Walter
Muller). All emanating from Germany, these represent the crowning
form of the genre. In Intrige you are trying to place your family in lucra-
tive job positions, in Quo Vadis you are trying to raise your politicians
through the ranks to become Roman Senators and in Rette, one of the
best games of all types to appear for some time, you are trying to land
your shipwrecked (and sinking) sailors on a desert island at the expense
of all the other players.
Fans of comic art will be familiar with the flexibility afforded by the
linked frame format to convey a story. One of the most original games
currently on the market is Dinosaurs of the Lost World (Avalon Hill). This
uses a standard board to regulate strategic movement and a comic-style
storyboard system to determine what happens when you meet the in-
evitable dinosaurs, volcanos, lost tribes and all the usual Doug McClure
fare. The system was never used again to my knowledge, which is sur-
prising.
In a similar vein, though taking a completely different approach,
we have Sherlock Holmes: The Card Game (Gibsons). This is, to my knowl-
edge, a unique system of linked playing cards which not only builds
up a reasonably coherent storyline but also allows for a deduction sub-
system. The game works on the traditional basis of each player taking a
turn to play a card. Each one describes what Mr Holmes is up to, such
as taking a hansom to the country or experiencing a pea souper, but the
next card laid must follow the previous card’s colour code or you miss a
turn. As Sherlock moves around London and its surrounds, more char-
acters, such as Mycroft, can become involved, the net closes as clues ap-
pear and a culprit gradually comes to light. This is a fascinating system
and one that could have many applications elsewhere.
The final grouping to fit under the general games banner are the
true story-telling systems. Dark Cults, Once Upon a Time and Into the Dark
Continent are the three main examples of the form. All the systems work
in a similar fashion: players are dealt a hand of cards with textual and/
or graphical prompts and use these as a basis which is embellished,

often considerably, by story-telling. The theming is good, especially in
Once Upon a Time, since almost everyone has experienced fairy tales at
some time in their life. In most respects these are the ultimate narrative
games—it is hard to imagine a more sparse mechanic than cards and
there is little to impede freedom of expression.
Paragraph Systems
There is little I can add to the comprehensive piece on paragraph books
in Inter*action #1, except to say that the genre has both been adopted
and expanded upon in the boardgame field. To my knowledge, one of
the first paragraph books was State of Emergency (Heinemann, 1969) in
which it was your task to govern the emerging state of Lakoto as adviser
to its prime minister. The text is longer than the norm (with a com-
mensurate reduction in the decision tree branches), and reads more
like a novel than most, but for its time it is an impressive work and still
stands scrutiny today.
In the early 1980s, SPI injected some life into the form in the shape
of Ares magazine. Three of the better games to appear in this distinctly
patchy publication were The Stainless Steel Rat, The Voyage of the Pandora
and The Wreck of the Pandora. Each of these systems used paragraphs to
create superbly themed, if short, games. A long fallow period followed,
rejuvenated I assume by the success of Fighting Fantasy. For some reason
many of the games that followed had a sporting theme. Vic Marks tried
his hand with the Ultimate One Day Cricket Match where you made the
tactical decisions, there was a quite passable strategic soccer equivalent
in the shape of Tactics and the Americans joined in with the baseball-
rooted Can You Win the Pennant?
It was, however, the advent of paragraph games that really moved
the genre along. There are two seminal designs in this field: Ambush
(Victory) and Tales of the Arabian Nights (West End). Both are rich in at-
mosphere but to all intents and purposes solitaire: Ambush is designed
that way and the two-player follow-up, Open Fire, proved to be very dis-
appointing. Arabian Nights can accommodate several players but they
all do their own thing independently; a healthy dose of schadenfreude as
your rival Aladdin is locked up by a genie is about as interactive as it
gets.
Ambush was a ground-breaking system when it appeared and was
followed by a series of successful modules—one failing was that once
played, the scenarios would become stale. The system was entirely
driven from a screened paragraph sheet with windows that would be
referred to as an indicator of events in the set scenario. The player, in
control of a squad of men, would make appropriate decisions and read
off the results. In response, the enemy moved and attacked, tanks ap-
peared in ambushes, unusual events occurred, casualties were inflicted
and the scenario progressed to a realistic (if occasionally Hollywood)

conclusion. In effect, it was as if an opponent was running those troops,
which is what most solitaire gamers were, and are, after.
Arabian Nights has an even better paragraph system, although ad-
mittedly not as applicable to the task in hand as for Ambush. Each play-
er takes a character with basic attributes that change throughout the
game. In much the same way as the classic Careers, the aim is to gather
fame, wisdom and money in large quantities. All these are achieved
through adventuring on the map which depicts the world of the Arabi-
an Nights. The characters move around by land and sea, and on arrival
in a new location on the map a paragraph book is consulted. A situation
is read out and the response is requested. If the decision is correct, with
help from relevant attributes, the resulting outcome should be relative-
ly successful. If not, untold problems beset your character. I usually end
up crippled and lovelorn, for some reason. The twist in what sounds
like an uninspiring system is that the situations are determined by the
terrain and a random modifier, there are a large number of responses
and there are also special locations to add even more variety. The net
result is that the paragraphs seldom repeat, allowing continued play
with a small chance of experiencing the same situation for some while.
In flavour, humour and in recreating the stories of the Arabian Nights,
it is first rate.
For those addicted to the Arabian Nights system, I should also men-
tion Star Trek: The Adventure Game (West End). Much the same mechan-
ics apply, but this time there is a little more competition and the chance
to relive some of the old Star Trek episodes in a similar fashion.
Sports Games
Perhaps because we can all imagine the real thing and profess to be ex-
perts, whether it be the World Cup or Walthamstow Dogs, sports games
have some of the most inspirational, and occasionally clever, narrative
systems in existence. The link is helped by the fact that there seem to
be few games that try to be anything less than a full-blown simulation
of the sports they cover. I’d imagine this is mainly due to the fanaticism
of the designers.
There are a number of games, primarily designed by Lambourne
Games, Avalon Hill and Strat O Matic, that aim to recreate a sporting
event in amazing detail. The drawback to this approach is that some-
times the games take longer than the real thing but the advantages are
huge: virtually every major sport you can imagine has been covered,
from rugby league to baseball, from skiing to cycle racing. Many recre-
ate every nuance of play and in most cases, full statistics (if that is your
interest).
One of the best games, from which one would logically expect little
narrative, is Metric Mile (Lambourne). This is a simulation of a 1500

metres race and includes all of the great runners of the past. I can think
of few better games for putting you in the shoes of the commentator
as ten or more milers come round the last bend, Ovett elbowing his
way out of a corner, Coe prancing along in third, Walker preparing his
traditional sprint for second and Cram ready to cruise calmly past and
win it all. This is all prompted by a game boasting little more than black
and white cards with a few numbers on them—it is testament to the
underlying system that it does this so well and it is hard to avoid being
carried away. Very few gamers actually recount the unfolding race out
loud (this would be regarded as unusual behaviour by all but the oddest
of gamers) but some players will describe what they see going on, often
by lapsing into ‘commentator’s voice’ and you can often catch snippets
of Colemanesque crescendos.
One last game worth singling out because of its unique design is
Fastcard Soccer (Select Games). This is a replay system, using special
cards, that allows you to play a full game of soccer in a few minutes yet
actually generates realistic commentary on which you can base your vis-
ualizations. For instance, as an attack builds up, you read a comment off
the card that may go something like ‘A flurry of passes wins a corner: a
dipping cross into the box . . .’ The next card is flipped to reveal, say, ‘A
header from the back of the six yard box’. The header may go towards
the corner of the goal, only to be saved spectacularly, or any number of
other possibilities. I may be a sucker for atmosphere, but at the speed
this all runs, it really conjures up the images for me. It is very much like
watching the goal highlights on Match of the Day and once you are there,
the narrative has worked.

Mike Siggins has been playing all sorts of games for twenty-odd years and writ-
ing about them for the last ten. He is the publisher and editor of Sumo’s Karaoke
Club, the boardgame review quarterly, and is a member of the edit-orial board
of Games & Puzzles magazine. His main gaming interests are innovative sys-
tems, design, sports games, historical simulations and atmosphere. He has so far
published two boardgames as well as numerous reviews and is currently working
on several new game designs. He earns his daily crust as a corporate treasurer.
Bibliography
A Gamut of Games, Sackson (Hutchinson)
Can You Win the Pennant?, Gelman (Archway)
Chaos Gaming (article), Vasey

Games & Puzzles (magazine), Pritchard/Lamford
Games in Geography,Walford (Longman)
Games International (magazine), Walker (Foxray)
Inter*action # 1 (magazine), Rilstone/Wallis (Crashing Boar/Hogshead)
Matrix Games (Experimental Game Group)
Modern Board Games, Pritchard (William Luscombe)
Perfidious Albion (magazine), Vasey (Editions Foppington)
State of Emergency, Guerrier (Penguin)
Sumo’s Karaoke Club (magazine), Siggins
The Best Games People Play, Sharp (Ward Lock)
The Game of Diplomacy, Sharp (Arthur Barker)
The General (magazine), Greenwood et al, (Avalon Hill)
The Greatest Games of All Time, Costello (Wiley)
The Oxford Guide to Card Games, Parlett (Oxford)
The Ultimate One Day Cricket Match, Marks (Heinemann)
What’s Your Game?, Parr & Cornelius (Cambridge)
Winning Ways, Conway (Academic Press)

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 they raise.
In Defence Of
Computer Story Games
By Ray Winninger
One of the fallacies most often repeated by the designers and aficionados of paper-
and-pencil role-playing games is that RPGs live and die on the strength of their
characters. According to the pundits, players want to ‘role-play’. They
want to ‘interact’. They want ‘open-ended’ games and game systems
that give them plenty of choices. They want ‘realistic’ rules that allow
them to develop credible alter-egos.
I submit that such concerns are strictly secondary for the vast ma-
jority of the paper-and-pencil audience. For those who care to dispute
my thesis, I invite you to tour the tables at any large gathering of gam-
ers (as I do at the Gen Con Game Fair each year) and spend a few
moments watching each game in progress. You won’t find the ‘subtle
characterization’ that gamers are said to crave. Likewise, you’ll find few
players taking advantage of all the ‘open-endedness’ and ‘realism’ the
poor, beleaguered designers have laboured so hard to incorporate into
their output.
The fact is that the average ‘player character’ created for use
with the average paper-and-pencil RPG is a cardboard cut-out who is
damned fortunate to have two dimensions, much less three. Now, be-
fore you clog my various mailboxes with the inevitable anecdotal evi-
dence to the contrary, I’d like to call your attention to all the ‘averages’
and ‘majorities’ that litter my remarks. There is certainly a handful of
players who go to great lengths to ‘bring their characters to life’ and to
devise adventures that revolve around ‘interesting possibilities for in-
teraction’. Many of these players become game designers, which is why,
as a whole, game designers themselves are the myth’s biggest perpetu-
ators.
The average player doesn’t exploit the so-called ‘strengths’ of role-
playing games for two simple reasons: they can’t, and they don’t want
to. The sort of role-play generally regarded as ‘expert’ (the same sort
of experience that most veteran RPG designers are sure their play-
ers desire) requires a bizarre combination of skills rarely collected in
a single individual: writer, actor, improviser, strategist, game designer,
director, historian, sociologist, psychologist and several dozen others
more germane to the game at hand. Clearly, the number of people ca-

pable of playing such games is quite small—certainly several orders of
magnitude smaller than even the existing paper-and-pencil audience.
More importantly, the average role-player isn’t interested in this sort of
experience anyway. Oh, sure, most players find the illusions of ‘subtle
characterization’, ‘interesting opportunities for interaction’, and ‘open-
ended rules systems’ desirable, but only as means to an end, not as ends
in and of themselves.
The real factor that keeps the bulk of gamers firmly entrenched
in the hobby is simple escapism. Gamers don’t care about subtle char-
acterization or open-ended rules—they want an impression, however
fleeting, that they are there. It’s the ‘reality’ of the experience that’s truly
important. Gamers want the brief adrenalin rush (or the intellectual
equivalent of an adrenalin rush) that accompanies a jaunt to an alto-
gether more interesting world. Note that the use of Nabokov’s manda-
tory quotation marks around the word ‘reality’ is particularly appropri-
ate here. Every good referee knows that those things which serve to
make a game milieu more ‘realistic’ are hardly realistic in an absolute
sense. Clever use of the absurd is a powerful weapon in the struggle to
shore up an illusion of realism. So are the ‘open-ended rules systems’,
‘subtle characterizations’ and ‘interesting opportunities for interaction’
that collectively serve as the game designers’ holy grail—to the vast
majority of players, these things are nothing more and nothing less
than means to an end. None of this should come as any surprise to the
observant; after all, escapism is the fuel that propels the film indus-
try, genre fiction, and most of the other popular entertainments of the
twentieth century.
Consider White Wolf ’s Vampire: the Masquerade—a game that built
its reputation upon the unprecedented depth and sophistication of its
characters. The Vampire rules describe complex, brooding creatures of
the night who are steeped not only in an unusually rich world back-
ground, but in mythological and allegorical subtexts as well. Since its
debut, I’ve been particularly interested in observing Vampire games and
I’ve found that most players don’t play the game any differently than
any other RPG, though almost all of them swear that they do. What’s
really happening is a clever and effective bait-and-switch. The players
absorb enough of the Vampire world background while reading the rules
and support products for it to serve as an un-stated backdrop to every-
thing that happens in the game. Although the average Vampire player
character isn’t any more ‘subtly realized’ than the average character in
almost any other RPG, the players imagine their characters as subtle
brooders because the rules present them with such a well-developed
illusion of reality that they buy into it before they even participate in it.
Although I’ve never seen a Vampire player attempt to role-play ‘angst’,
they all imagine their characters as experiencing it just the same, chief-

ly because the rules build such a vivid portrait of the imaginary reality
in their minds.
All of which finally brings me to computer games. Before I go any
further, I must state a few things ‘for the record’. My intention is not to
slight paper-and-pencil RPGs or their designers. There are many such
games and designers that I hold in high esteem (Vampire among them).
Likewise, I am not trying to argue that computer story-games (my pre-
ferred epithet; most of the world calls them computer role-playing
games) are somehow superior to their paper-and-pencil cousins. That
said, I must point out that the converse—paper-and-pencil games are
automatically superior to their computer cousins—is equally fallacious.
Computer games come equipped with their own tool chest of power-
ful techniques for enhancing the ‘realism’ of an artificial experience.
While paper-and-pencil games can provide you with ‘complex inter-
action’ and ‘open-ended environments’, they also ask you to imagine
what the imaginary reality looks like and sounds like. More importantly,
they ask you to imagine the adrenalin rush that accompanies an aerial
dogfight or the thrilling confusion of a pitched gun battle. Computer
story games, on the other hand, have an inverse set of strengths and
weaknesses: they can show you the imaginary milieu and thrust you
into a pitched gun battle, but they ask your imagination to supply the
‘interaction’ and ‘open-endedness’ that complete the escapist milieu.
Various techniques allow talented designers in both fields to emphasize
the strengths of their chosen media and downplay the weaknesses.
The average computer game aficionado receives the same sort of
experience from his chosen diversion as does the average role-player.
Very soon, the paradigm in computer story-games is going to shift in
ways that will bring the two experiences even closer together, as com-
puter game designers abandon the ‘branching plot trees’ and ‘flow-
charts’ that Mr Goetz examined in the first issue of this magazine. Over
the next decade, we are likely to see tremendous cross-pollination be-
tween the two industries that will ultimately lead to strange hybrids of
the experiences each has to offer. Imagine, for instance, a computer
program enabling a human referee to punch up scenery and efficiently
handle game rules, or a monstrous ‘on-line’ RPG that enables thou-
sands of players to assume alter egos in a fictional world and interact in
real time. In various corners of the world, some of these things are al-
ready happening. In Japan, for instance, a crude on-line milieu known
as Habitat is enjoyed by tens of thousands of players who take their
role-playing so seriously that marriages between alter-egos, fictional
court systems that handle disputes between personae and ‘role-played’
elections and legislatures are long-established traditions on the system.
This is both good news and bad news for most of us. The good
news, of course, is that a whole crop of interesting and novel

‘role-playing’ games are on their way. The bad news is that these games
are likely to prove more digestible to mass audiences and the more
fickle members of the paper-and-pencil audience than their more tra-
ditional cousins, perhaps robbing the paper-and-pencil industry of its
economic well-being. To avoid this fate, the designers of paper-and-
pencil experiences must evolve with the technology, look for ways to
build bridges out to their computerized cousins, and search harder for
new techniques with which to bolster the ‘reality’ of their imaginary
settings.
Over the last ten years, Ray Winninger has designed products for most of the ma-
jor publishers in the RPG industry. Most recently, he designed the Underground
RPG for Mayfair Games, which he briefly managed. Recently, Ray formed his
own company, Pompeii Studios, to design multimedia games and resources.
Sony is scheduled to release Pompeii’s first effort, Sentient, in September. Ray
invites questions, concerns, comments, and discourse. On the Internet, he can be
reached at WinningerR@aol.com


Culture Club
Role-playing as a means of experiencing
different modes of thought
By Paul Mason

Ask the average role-player why he (I’m being statistical here, not sex-
ist) plays, and his answer may well include a reference to the appeal of
being someone else, in another time, another place. One of the distinc-
tive characteristics of the games published so far has been the dazzling
profusion of different settings and backgrounds, mostly drawn from the
wilder ends of adventure fiction. In this context, I felt it would be inter-
esting to examine the issue of role-playing as a form of cultural experi-
ment; a means of experiencing different social norms and expected
modes of behaviour. This has particular relevance for me, as I have
spent the last three years going through the real cross-cultural experi-
ence of adapting to life in Japan. I want to examine the ways in which
games approach the idea of different cultures. I will be focusing on
three specific areas. First, I’ll look at games dealing with Japan, as this
is of direct relevance to my current situation. Secondly, I’ll examine Em-
pire of the Petal Throne, as it explicitly deals with encountering an alien
culture. Finally, I’ll talk about the Water Margin, an RPG set in China,
which I have been working on (on and off) for the past five years.
Terminology
I describe a role-playing game which focuses on an alternative culture
as a ‘culture game’. I should stress that a culture game and a genre
game are not the same thing. ‘Genre’ is a classification derived from
fiction, referring to certain fictional templates with their own props and
usual backgrounds. To set a game in a particular genre does not neces-
sarily make it a culture game. Although detective stories are a genre,
a game based on the television programme Inspector Morse would not
be a culture game (unless played by, say, a Japanese gaming group); a
1
game based on the tenth-century Chinese detective Judge Dee would
be. A Sherlock Holmes game might or might not be, depending on the
extent to which the referee stressed Victorian society.
Of course, it is perfectly possible to play a culture game without
actually adopting the alternative culture. You can play a campaign os-
tensibly set in the Papua New Guinea of the seventh century B.C., but if

you don’t try to adapt your characters to the culture you might as well
set it in Camberwell, 1995.
Given that role-playing is an opportunity to experience different
cultures, the most remarkable thing about most published games is
how little they actually deal with this. Recently, it seems to me, the focus
of role-playing games has moved away from culture games. Even Dun-
geons & Dragons used to pay lip-service to the idea of being set in a fan-
tasy culture, even though it was actually a fantasy version of America.
Now an increasing number of games, spearheaded by the cyberpunk
and horror genres, are abandoning this idea wholesale. Players concen-
trate on being a different person. The background, while containing
different elements, is culturally pretty much the same as that of the
players.
I feel this is a shame. I’m not demeaning those who like to stress the
acting element of role-playing. Exploring the personality of a character
is certainly easier in a familiar culture, even if that culture has a ‘twist’,
such as the existence of hi-tech, vampires or werewolves. It’s just that I
consider the opportunity to explore different cultural and social expec-
tations to be one of the greatest gifts that role-playing games have to
offer. As I explain below, it has had a practical benefit for me.
One possible reason for the apparent demise of the culture game
is the level of cultural ignorance. This is particularly noticeable among
those players who play in fantasy backgrounds replete with twentieth-
century cultural fixtures, yet who persist in believing that there is some
justification for describing the background as ‘medieval’. I have noticed
some extreme cases of cultural ignorance. When I first mentioned in
print that I was working on a Chinese role-playing game, the editor
of one prominent fanzine reacted by asking why another such game
was needed when we already had Bushido and Land of Ninja. There are
many people who percieve the cultures of Japan and China as being
identical, just as there are Japanese people who perceive the cultures of
Britain and France as identical.
One of the worst offenders in this area was TSR’s Oriental Adventures
which created an unholy blend of oriental culture in much the same
way that the original Dungeons & Dragons game had created an un-
holy blend of (mainly) European mythology plus Disney-esque movie
trappings. Although certain elements of Oriental Adventures were well
executed, the basic concept was fatally flawed. To write about ‘oriental’
society using Edo-period Japan as a model is akin to writing a Europe
sourcepack and modelling the political structure on Garibaldi’s Italy.
One of the most interesting features of medieval oriental culture is the
contrast between the military dictatorship of Japan and the merito-
cratic bureaucracy of China, which were both based on the same philo-
sophical structure, Confucianism!

What’s more, Japan, like most countries, went through an ever-
changing sequence of political and social structures, from ancient Sha-
man-Queen domination, through the Chinese-influenced courtly Im-
perialism of the Heian period, to the constant strife of the domination
by warlords which preceded the relatively settled Tokugawa Shôgunate
(the Edo period). With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at Japan as
a means of examining how a role-playing game can deal with a foreign
culture successfully.
Japan
The quintessential culture games are set in Japan. No other setting
generates such devotion to culture in its adherents (the nearest rivals
are probably the fantasy creations Tékumel (Empire of the Petal Throne)
and Glorantha (RuneQuest). Why should this be? In fact it parallels a
general fascination which is often felt for the ‘unique’ culture of these
isles, by the Japanese no less than by anyone else. There is a sizeable
corpus of published material aimed at explaining the remarkable phe-
nomenon that is Japaneseness. I can’t help feeling that a self-fulfilling
prophecy is at work here. The various writers, both inside and out-
side Japan, strive so hard to argue that Japan is in some way uniquely
unique that they make it so; no other country in the world is so subject
to the self-examination and external analysis of its culture.
Most role-players’ encounters with Japan started with Shôgun, the
book by James Clavell, made into a TV mini-series, which was subse-
quently lacerated into a barely comprehensible movie. Clavell is un-
questionably a talented page-turner. His characterization is intriguing,
and he adeptly handles a complex plot. Millions of viewers were en-
tranced by the TV series and the exotic picture it painted of Japan.
Sadly, they were the victims of a fraud. Clavell’s story is lifted from his-
tory, without acknowledgement. In the process of fictionalizing history,
names of characters are changed (in many cases the Japanese names
in Shôgun are risible). Historical errors and anachronisms abound. But
perhaps the worst crime of all is the subtext of the book: Clavell’s ‘in-
sight into the Japanese soul’, for which he was widely praised in the
West.
James Clavell’s encounter with Japan started in a prisoner-of-war
camp during the Second World War. It shows. Throughout Shôgun we
are presented with a picture of a people who combine extraordinary
refinement and sophistication with an utterly amoral, sadistic streak.
Possibly the most obvious example is when Lord Yabu experiences oth-
erworldly ecstasy listening to the screams of the Dutchman he is boiling
alive. The book is permeated with this sense of apparent aesthetic con-
tradiction. It is this portrayal of the Japanese which seemed to seize the
imaginations of so many people. A fascination with such a paradoxical

nature is entirely understandable. The paradoxes multiply; in the study
of Japan barely a book is published which doesn’t make reference to
the paradoxes of Japanese society. But this is all drivel; a scene beheld
through a veil of rain fine as mist. If we wait for the rain to stop and take
a clear, honest, long look at Japan we find a country no less fascinating,
but no longer steeped in such superficial, romantic twaddle; less para-
doxical but more complex. In other words, a country of human beings.
How can we see this Japan? The first thing to do is to assume that
everything James Clavell ever wrote about Japan is lies. It’s not true,
but making this assumption is still the best way of getting a clear pic-
ture. Similarly, the TV series should be forgotten. Even though it cor-
rected many of Clavell’s more glaring errors, it retains his so-called
insight into the Japanese character and should therefore be ignored
for the moment. Instead, apply yourself to some real Japan artefacts.
2
Shôgun is based on the true story of William Adams , who became a
hatamoto to the first Tokugawa Shôgun, Ieyasu, married a Japanese
woman and never returned to England. The book The Needle-Watcher
3
(Blaker, 1932) tells the story of Adams’ life. It’s not quite such a rol-
licking romance as Shôgun, but it has the compensation of being true
(and, coincidentally, he does get the girl). This book gets far closer to a
picture of the Japanese people in the turbulent years of the foundation
of the Tokugawa Shôgunate than Clavell. For starters, there’s no judo
(a twentieth-century fixture), bad Japanese, or nonsense about foreign-
ers being tall (they weren’t drastically taller than the Japanese in that
period). Certainly, the honour system of the Japanese is different to
Adams’, but then neither is particularly familiar to us. However, both
can be easily understood as paths that human beings might follow. The
Needle-Watcher doesn’t get inside the minds of its characters quite as
much as does Shôgun; perhaps because of this they are more human,
more comprehensible.
4
The Maker of Modern Japan (Sadler, 1937) tells the story of the same
period of history, but through the life of Adams’ sponsor, Tokugawa
Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shôgunate. Although a historical
biography rather than a novel, it clearly reveals the character of the
times, and should complete your recovery from the ill-effects of Shôgun.
What else? Once you have started to get the drift, turn to movies
—but have a care! The danger of watching subtitled or dubbed mov-
ies is that you are at the mercy of the translator. If a character’s speech
patterns seem peculiar you have no way of knowing whether this is an
unusual cultural trait, or an unnatural translation.
For example, in English, we don’t consider the word ‘good-bye’ to
have any religious connotation. But if an inept translator rendered it
over-literally into Japanese as ‘kami no go-kago ga arimasu yô ni’ (‘God
be with you’), a Japanese viewer would get a very strange picture of the

English-speaking world indeed. This kind of thing happens in movie
translations all the time. The same problem occurs in books; the not-
ed Japanologist Edward Seidensticker once translated a scene from a
Japanese novel in which a woman shows her neck, by referring to her
slowly putting on a pair of gloves. This translated the sexually charged
significance of the gesture, while failing to communicate the cultural
erotic significance of the neck to the Japanese. In short, when con-
cerned with Japan, either learn the language or take everything with a
pinch of salt.
So what about the Japanese role-playing games? It’s obvious that
the designers of most commercial role-playing games were not inter-
ested in accuracy, or had relatively little ability at Japanese. For exam-
ple, many games describe commoners as Heimin. This term was coined
after the Meiji revolution of the late nineteenth century to refer to the
new class of equals comprising former samurai, farmers and merchants
(the nobles were still regarded as superior). Similarly, games tend to
mix up features from a variety of historical periods to suit themselves.
Is all this nit-picking important in creating a Japanese culture in a
role-playing game? No, not especially. However if the authors of the
role-playing games are this lax in presenting simple facts and terminol-
ogy, how can you trust them to convey the subtleties of culture?
So we arrive at the big question: if there are so many problems, how
do we create a Japanese culture in our role-playing game? My answer
is: don’t put so much effort into prescribing how people think. Too of-
ten, culture is presented in terms of pronouncements about how ‘Japa-
nese people’ or ‘samurai’ or whoever thinks about things. This can’t
work. For the reasons given above, we can’t trust most sources to give
us a genuine insight into the way people think. Furthermore, surely the
whole point of the game should be for players (and referee) to find out
how their characters think? Role-playing is a thought experiment, after
all. The referee’s job, therefore, should be to create a Japanese society
that is as real as possible. If the players are told what their characters
should think, it must be by a character in the game, not by the referee
as an external agency. Such pronouncements can then be taken for
what they are: opinions. Most players of Japanese role-playing games
take certain ideas about honour to be sacrosanct. They aren’t, of course;
they’re just opinions that happened to be so widely held that they got
written down.
A key element in Japanese culture is that of obligation. Players can
learn about this by observing how the culture around them works. A
samurai who makes no effort to discharge the obligations he incurs
soon loses face, with concrete social consequences. Equally, the idea of
bushidô looms large in many players’ minds, and is commonly felt to be
a rather exotic code of honour. Of course, the code as understood by

most Japan pundits was only formulated in the relatively late, settled
times of the Tokugawa shôgunate, and then mostly by men of letters,
often Buddhists, who considered it important to generate a metaphysi-
cal justification for the way ordinary warriors had been behaving for
centuries. I don’t think the average samurai during more turbulent
times would have had such a high-flown theoretical explanation for
his honour system, which would probably have been expressed more in
terms of his obligations to family, clan and daimyô. However, such peo-
ple must have existed, otherwise no one would have bothered to write
about the importance of honouring obligation!
Players who need guidance in deciding how their character might
feel would be better off with Japanese-authored historical novels (such
5
as Musashi or Taiko ) or straight historical material, rather than Shôgun.
Or maybe they should watch the Seven Samurai again? Are the charac-
ters in that movie really so hard to understand, once you see what kind
of a world they live in?
Tsolyánu . . . and back to Japan

In Empire of the Petal Throne, players start the game in the roles of bar-
barians, arriving in the Glorious Empire of Tsolyánu with precious little
knowledge of that society. The early part of the game will inevitably be
a process of learning and familiarization, as the player character (and
thereby the player) learns to deal with the unusual aspects of the soci-
ety. For many players, this is one of the greatest appeals of the game.
By casting the first-time player character as an outsider, the ignorance
of the players is mirrored in their characters, easing the culture shock.
Nevertheless, learning how to behave in Tsolyáni society is a challenge,
and requires the players to stretch their imaginations and tolerance.
For me, starting as a new player in an established EPT game be-
came more than merely a game experience. As a result of my decision
to move to Japan in 1991, it turned out to be something of a dress
rehearsal, a dry run for the process of cultural acclimatization which,
three years later, is still going on. As I stepped off the 747 at Narita
airport in July 1991 I couldn’t help but think of the raw foreigner who
had turned up in Jakalla harbour with nothing but a scant few coins,
a sword and a willingness to put his skills to the test in his new home.
As that character, Karunaz, I had spent the first few weeks in Tsolyánu
rather taciturn, carefully observing everything I saw around me, secret-
ly awed but unwilling to show it. My own reaction in Japan was very
similar. But I did feel that I derived practical benefit from having been
through a role-played experience which prepared me for the necessity
of accepting unusual customs.
In order to live in a foreign country it is essential to develop a real
tolerance for doing things in different ways. Many of the burn-out cases

of culture shock I have met in Japan are people who, when it came
right down to it, couldn’t bear to see things done differently to the way
they were used to. Playing a role-playing game provides an opportunity
to stretch your tolerance, and accept that there is more than one way to
order society.
That doesn’t mean you have to like alternative cultures: there are
certain aspects of Japanese culture (such as the necessity of personal
contacts in finding employment, or the ubiquity of cigarette smoke)
that I dislike, just as I do the human sacrifice which is routinely prac-
tised in Tsolyánu. Indeed, there are Japanese people who don’t like
aspects of their own society. There are even Britons who develop an
aversion to British cultural fixtures and characteristics. Only American
6
society is perfect, after all . This leads me to the likely possibility that
there are Tsolyáni who don’t like human sacrifice, but who are forced to
accept it because it is, after all, a part of their culture. Diversity of opin-
ion is often not reflected in role-playing games, where the assumption
is that every member of a culture approves every aspect of that culture.
I have put a little thought into identifying the similarities in society
between Tsolyánu and Japan, to come closer to identifying how I was
assisted by the game, and how that knowledge can assist in playing a
character from a different culture. Probably the first aspect to strike me
was language. Many of the features of a culture can be inferred from its
language. For example, Tsolyánu is a highly stratified society. Express-
ing difference in status is very important: hence the Tsolyáni language
includes a wide variety of pronouns enabling Tsolyáni citizens to clearly
indicate their status relative to the person they are talking to. Many
newcomers to Empire of the Petal Throne find this a weird and exotic
situation, almost unbelievable. But it has a direct counterpart in Japa-
nese. In the modern language, there are several first-person pronouns,
expressing different levels of humility and familiarity. For example: ses-
sha (expressing deep humility and politeness), watakushi (expressing
politeness and distance), watashi (slightly less formal than watakushi),
atashi (used by women), boku (used by men), ore/ora (familiar). Similarly,
there are a variety of second-person pronouns. On top of this, verb and
noun forms change in order to express the concepts of respect/humil-
ity and formality. So the simple sentence ‘Is Mr Tanaka here?’ can be
translated as: ‘Tanaka-sama wa irasshaimasu ka?’; ‘Tanaka-san wa o-mie ni
narimasu ka?’; ‘Tanaka-san wa imasu ka?’; ‘Tanaka-kun iru no?’ or ‘Tanaka
oru?’ These sentences work, roughly speaking, in descending order of
politeness.
So, the language clearly indicates an important feature of the cul-
ture. I have already pointed out some features of the Japanese language,
and about the importance of obligation. Although the first experience
of the importance of obligation is usually through actions (specifically

the continual round of reciprocal gift-giving), it is soon made absolutely
explicit in the language. Not only actual gifts, but any action performed
for the benefit of another uses the vocabulary concerned with express-
ing obligation. To crudely render this in English: the Japanese do not
say, ‘Mr Tanaka lent me that book,’ but ‘Mr Tanaka did me the favour
of lending me that book.’ I don’t teach students here, I ‘offer them my
teaching’!
I hope some day to be able to run a game of Empire of the Petal Throne
in Japanese, as I feel that the availability of respect levels as a natural,
everyday part of the language will add immensely to the atmosphere.
However, for the moment I, like most of you, am stuck with playing in
English. But given the importance attached to language in Japan (and
this is despite America’s attempts at erasing the remaining class dis-
tinctions after the Second World War), I am led to the conclusion that
attention to language is the most important element in establishing an
authentic culture.
How do you modify your language to express the culture? English is
an extremely varied language, and it is possible to achieve this in many
ways, but the key is keep it natural. Increasing the level of self-conscious-
ness in the game would be disastrous, as the kind of self-consciousness
we are trying to cultivate is that of the characters we are playing. How-
ever, within the limits of natural English it should be possible to use po-
lite and impolite language effectively. For example, to express both the
sense of obligation, and the respect levels in Japanese (or in Tsolyáni),
requests should be phrased using such language as ‘Would you do me
the honour of . . . ’ or ‘Would you do me the favour of . . . ’ Similarly,
care should be taken with pronouns. Referring to someone with a plain
‘you’ implies a sense of familiarity that will be taken as rude by many
people in both Japan and Tsolyánu. Various formulations can be found
to avoid using this: in Japanese, for example, it is common to use the
person’s name and an honorific suffix such as -san or -sama in place of
a second-person pronoun. Or ‘the honourable gentleman/lady’ can be
used if it doesn’t feel too stiff and creaky.
The important thing is that player characters (and therefore play-
ers) feel the consequences of social mistakes, and soon learn to avoid
them. The first few times a samurai is rude to his daimyô, or a kuruthuni
fails to show proper deference to his kasi, it’s only fair to have a non-
player character on hand to point out why the poor warrior is spending
the next couple of weeks on the worst guard duty.
China
The Water Margin is a game I have been working on for over five years.
Playing the game has shed some light on ways of conveying Chinese
culture to my players.

The problems associated with using China as the basis for a game
setting are different from those associated with Japan. There has been
no Shôgun to provide a wide sense of knowledge. Indeed, the prob-
lem usually is that players are unable to distinguish China from Japan.
I was first inspired to create the game by the eponymous (Japanese)
TV series I watched many years ago. This series languishes unremem-
bered in Japan, and to my knowledge has not been broadcast in the
US, but many Britons of my generation remember with great affection
the adventures of Lin Ch’ung, Wu Sung and their comrades against the
7
machinations of the wily Kao Ch’iu .
Although the Water Margin is a game about China, and could be
used for any set of generalized adventures in China, I decided that to
convey the culture it was essential that it have a focus. As mentioned
above, too many of the Japanese-setting role-playing games had
mixed-and-matched from various eras, producing an unfocused mess.
I resolved that my game would concentrate on The Water Margin as a
work of fiction, and the China in which it is set. Intelligent players can
easily take the game and play a modified setting (such as the Judge Dee
8 9
books, or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or A Chinese Ghost Story).
However, by pinning the game so closely to a single source I am able to
give quite specific details about culture, and also to point players clearly
to one obvious source of background information for the game: the
Water Margin story itself.
Shuihuzhuan (variously named The Water Margin, Outlaws of the
Marsh, All Men Are Brothers and Bandit Kings of Ancient China in trans-
lation) is based on a historically recorded rebellion in twelfth-century
China. It started as a folk-tale, and has subsequently been written in
diverse forms, in much the same way as the Robin Hood legend de-
veloped. For English speakers, the most accessible source is the book
Outlaws of the Marsh by Sidney Shapiro (and the TV show if you’re lucky
enough to be able to get hold of videos of it). There are many advan-
tages of using the setting as the basis for a role-playing game. It is full
of combat, thus indulging role-players’ craving for mayhem. It features
a band of outlaws; a ready-made group of player characters. There is
an ultimate goal: the most popular version of the story ends with a
Heavenly Tablet being uncovered on which are written the names of
10
the 108 reborn spirits, the heroes of the Water Margin. There is diver-
sity in the outlaw band, providing a wide variety of possible character
types for the players. There is a relatively simple moral code running
through the story, a Chinese form of chivalry or bushidô observed by
what Shapiro translates as the ‘gallant fraternity’ (I’d probably call it the
‘brotherhood of heroes’).
Thus, in preparing players for the game, the first stage is to per-
suade them to read the book, or to ascertain that they have seen and

at least vaguely remember the TV show. If the recently made Hong
11
Kong movie of the story is released with English subtitles, that should
provide a handy alternative. Once the players can picture the world in
which their characters are living, you’ve won half the battle. For players
who want more, a source list can be provided easily, comprising books
and movies with an appropriate atmosphere.
The next stage is the creation of the player characters. In a culture
game, the most important thing about a player character is their place
in society. If they happen to be a superb swordsman, then that is im-
portant because of the reputation they may or may not acquire, and
the social position they may achieve. Thus, while the rules concentrate
on defining the abilities of the character as an individual, the player
and referee’s creative contribution is in explaining how such an indi-
vidual functions in society. This is why I opted for a traditional ‘roll the
dice’ approach to character creation: players still have much freedom
to choose, and can exert limited control over their character’s primary
attributes. However the dice provide limits which help to guide the
player’s choices.
The subtext of the game is that no man is an island, and conveni-
ently this applies to the game environment as much as to the back-
ground. While it is perfectly possible for a player to create a character
who is a lone Daoist hermit, intent on self-cultivation and the quest for
immortality, it would be pointless. A role-playing game is a co-operative
exercise. There is little room for prima donnas in a genuine piece of
interactive narrative. A lone Daoist hermit who is intent on self-cultiva-
tion and the quest for immortality, but who has a habit of being sucked
into events in the mundane world? Now that’s a different matter. This is
why the narrow background is convenient. If the players know from the
start that they are expected to be (or at least to end up as) outlaws, then
co-operation becomes easier. Episodes from the early life of a character
can be joint-created by the player and referee (whether through simple
discussion, or by being played). The player should end up knowing in
some detail the relationship between their character and that charac-
ter’s family. Each character should also have at least two good friends
or contacts established within the game background.
The family connection sneaks into the language as well. Once the
game is under way, the referee has to maintain the feel by using char-
acteristic language in as natural a way as possible. In China, the fam-
ily was so important that social relationships were expressed in family
terms. Thus if two men became friends, and they were relatively close
in age and status, one would become ‘elder brother’ while the other
would be ‘younger brother’. If there was a greater difference in age the
relationship would be expressed using the terms ‘uncle’ and ‘nephew’.
Use of these terms of address in the game expresses the culture in con-

crete form.
Customs can also start to play a major part in the game. When
players realize how fundamental the family is to the culture, they can
start to see that it might be natural for a character to leave the outlaw
stronghold to pay respects to their father. Thus adventure ideas can be
created by the players making use of the culture. Even in a more mi-
nor sense, customs create action. Throughout the Water Margin, when a
group of heroes assemble for a meal they spend some time haggling as
to who deserves the seat of honour. All this must be done by exhibiting
modesty and insisting on the other person being placed higher. This
situation is ideally suited to most role-players. The cultural elements
(the importance of establishing an order of status; modesty) are easily
understandable: they are not exotic, obscure, or dare I say, inscrutable.
But they do need to be consistently reinforced within the game back-
ground.
Reinforcement is a useful tool in any game, and I take the view that
it is almost always a good thing. For players to feel that they are part of
a different culture, an appropriate mood must be created. Apparently
minor things make a difference. I try to use Chinese music fairly often,
especially at the start of the game. At one time I even used the TV se-
ries theme tune at the beginning and end of every session! Similarly, I
think it’s important that the character sheets (and the rules) are deco-
rated with Chinese writing. Players may not be able to read this, but it
provides immediate visual reinforcement of the background. Even such
things as posters, wall hangings, table ornaments and so on can be used
to reinforce the effect. Obviously, you have to exercise some discretion.
An Enter The Dragon poster is not necessarily going to have a positive
effect. But I think it is better to err on the side of excess rather than be
overly cautious.
Implications
Both China and Japan are historical backgrounds, with real languages
and a wealth of culture and legend, much available in the West. Empire
of the Petal Throne, though probably not a real background, neverthe-
less features a wealth of history and legend, culture and detail. It even
has useable languages. Thus for the purposes of the discussion in this
article, EPT is effectively a real culture. The advice I presented for en-
hancing the cultural content applies almost as much to EPT as it does
to China and Japan. Prospective players can be directed to the novels
Man of Gold and Flamesong (if you can get hold of them) and to the Ad-
12
ventures in Tékumel solo scenarios to provide them with some experi-
ence of how Tsolyáni culture functions. The Tsolyáni language can be
examined, and the source material scanned, for ways in which the ref-
eree’s and players’ language can be modified to reflect the background

better. Every EPT player knows of the importance of shámtlakh (a pay-
ment made for any slight, insult or damage), and they should take care
to amend their usual fast-and-loose western manner of speech, or pay
the consequences. The referee should make sure the player characters
are integrated into society: they have clans which make demands of
them, obligations, dependants and so on. The atmosphere can be re-
inforced by scanning the background material for clues and selecting
ethnic items or music from our Earth which resemble that of Tsolyánu.
Most role-playing, however, takes place in fantasy worlds, and these
have rarely benefited from the depth of creative investment that Pro-
fessor Barker has put into Tékumel. Making your own fantasy world is
one of the most appealing side interests among role-players, and it is
clearly very difficult. If it is difficult to reflect the culture of a historical
civilization from earth, how much more difficult it is to create a brand
new culture! Hence the large number of role-playing game settings in
which culture is a one-liner such as ‘The Nikhcnum people prize mod-
esty above all other traits and consider it rude to remove their head-
coverings in mixed company.’ Hence also the number of games set in
Glorantha (a detailed setting in which Greg Stafford and others have
invested considerable effort) which are virtually indistinguishable from
Dungeons & Dragons.
Thus I have ended up with an explanation for my observation that
culture games are on the decline. As role-players have matured, they
have come to understand, maybe unconsciously, how difficult it is to
simulate a different culture. And as they have realized this, they have
tended to shy away from culture games. Home-created culture games
can be done, but the level of knowledge, understanding and creativity
required is extremely high. For mere mortals such as myself, the best
option lies in either a historical culture or the creative effort of some
luminary who truly understands how human societies work.
By immersing ourselves in such an environment we can train our-
selves in new methods of thought, above all developing the ability to
understand and empathize with foreign cultures. In a world that in-
cludes Bosnia, Rwanda, North Korea and Haiti, that can’t be a bad
thing, can it?
Paul Mason is an ex-pat (he has ceased to be, bereft of life he rests in peace, etc.)
and Python-bore. Having been employed in various parts of the British games
industry, he is now resident in Nagoya, Japan.
Notes
1
Whose exploits are described in books by Robert Van Gulik such as The Chinese

Gold Murders.
2
Known as Miura Anjin in Japan.
3
Richard Blaker, The Needle-Watcher, London: Heinemann, 1932. More recently
published by the Tokyo branch of Tuttle.
4
A. L. Sadler, The Maker of Modern Japan: The Life of Tokugawa Ieyasu, London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1937. Also republished by Tuttle.
5
Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi, Tokyo: Kodansha, 1981. Taiko, Tokyo: Kodansha,
1992. The latter covers the same period as Shôgun, but focuses on Hideyoshi
rather than Ieyasu.
6
So I’m frequently told.
7
I’ve here used the Wade-Giles romanization system, as it was the one used in
the TV show. For the game, and in the rest of the article, I employ the more
modern, and accurate pinyin system, in which ‘Peking’ is rendered as ‘Beijing’.
8
The other classic Chinese novel; an epic covering the military campaigns
which followed the collapse of the Han dynasty. More popular in Japan than
the Water Margin.
9
A rather excellent movie which has spawned a flood of slick Hong Kong pro-
ductions combining spectacular martial-arts action with Hollywood-standard
special effects.
10
Ambitious players can aim for the overthrow of the corrupt bureaucracy, or
an imperial pardon.
11
All Men Are Brothers: Blood of the Leopard. Released in 1992, starring Joey Wong,
who previously appeared in A Chinese Ghost Story.
12
Published by Theatre of the Mind Enterprises.

Dancing Fictions
by David A. Lambert
This article has grown from the soil of two fields, table-top role-play
and an adult education course in creative writing. Both are non-aca-
demic endeavours and both are ultimately concerned with the creation
of stories. Both bring people around a table covered with paper and
pencils, but the former uses dice and is a group performance, while the
latter aims to help each individual member produce material which
they hope will find an audience beyond the group. Table-top role-play
is a dramatic activity for the participants only. Adult education creative
writing is a learning environment in which to explore and share one’s
personal stories. Both are more important and serious than one might
think if one looked only at the resources and attention they attract, and
it is here that they are kindred. Both resonate with myth.
From these twin hearts of myth unfolds a bridge built from the met-
aphor of abstract dances interwoven with the basic elements of drama.
The ‘dances’ are Mickey Hart’s (one of the drummers for the Grateful
Dead) from his book Drumming on the Edge of Magic, and concern the
rhythms that create a sense of the sacred. The drama elements occurred
to me while reading Diana Devlin’s Mask and Scene: An Introduction to
a World View of Theatre. When these dances and dramatic elements are
paralleled they become a key to the core of both role-play and creative
writing, and become a tool for the fashioning of myth.
We move amidst rhythms constantly. The personal rhythms of our
own thoughts and feelings and history, our hunger and our dreams
and health. The cosmos too has intricate and layered rhythms which
affect our lives from the movement of the wind and sea to the sun’s
changes and the position of the planets and stars. Between them are
the immensely diverse spectrum of cultural rhythms, East and West,
Jewish and Gentile, European, British, or English. Cultural rhythms
are sandwiched between the individual and the cosmos. And some-
times all three converge, the rhythms come together and weave into
a fourth, the sacred. It takes a complex ritual to involve all three and
bring them close enough for each to dissolve into a new whole. Such
a juxtapositioning is difficult to maintain, and the result is fleeting. It
happens in jazz when all the musicians ‘hit the groove’, just for those
sweet moments; or in church when the spirit enters and touches the

congregation, everyone awake and riveted; or when we read something
that is so eternal and alive, the words just sing; or when the characters
are more real than the players, the dice are awake and suddenly the
pizza boxes and the pint glasses get hard to see from behind the blind-
ing images of a fictional world. Then we dance a sacred dance, sacred
because we are touched by creation, by the magic that makes life awake.
Role-play and creative writing courses are both group rituals for a
particular type of creation: stories. Role-play strives to bring a story
alive by enacting its birth through dramatic play. Writers’ workshops
set out to explore what makes a story strong in the hope of fashioning
one’s own stories well enough that they may survive beyond oneself.
Both are built from language and wander in words. If role-play is the
delivery room of the story, then creative writing is the struggle to be
a good parent and raise healthy children. And contained in this con-
tinual rebirth of stories are the dramatic elements of mask, scene and
conflict. Every story has at least one voice, usually many, and that voice
comes most often from the mouth of a character. These characters,
these masks, dwell and move in worlds of detail, in scenes. And the
story is told because something needs to be told, there is a conflict driv-
ing the masks through the scenes towards a change, a resolution of
the story. If the masks and scenes and conflicts in a story balance, we
ignore the elements that create the story and ‘suspend our disbelief ’,
the doorway to another world opens. Harmonize these three (mask,
scene and conflict) and the story will be—as Aristotle said—‘an organic
whole’: it will resonate with myth.
And why myth? Why should this article be striving to create a tool
to bring two activities closer together to explore and play with myth?
Joseph Campbell says in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circum-
stance, the myths of humanity have flourished; and they have been the
living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities
of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth
is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the
cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies,
arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in
science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from
the basic, magic ring of myth.
Because myth is the source from which both role-play and creative writ-
ing receive their power to entertain and inspire and delight, to use
this power unaware is to waste the essence of the gift. The creation of
stories is important, even vital, to the life of the human imagination.
The call is to explore the four elements and rhythms that create danc-
ing fictions.
The Personal Dance of the Mask
The most powerful aspect of recreational role-play is that each charac-

ter has a single player dwelling inside their skin and the play allows the
vicarious experience of another entity’s mindset. When used in creative
writing, such role-play offers a literal example of narrator point of view
and of the need to get inside the character’s head before one begins to
write. Also, because the play takes place in real time and the dice are
under no one’s control the player has to let go and move the character
into scenes they have not created. If the death of the character is a
risk, this adds another layer of excitement for the player: unless well
played the window to this fiction may close. Finally, role-play systems
offer detailed processes for the creation of characters, a strength if not
too restricting.
Writers’ groups have to continually remind participants about
which stories are important, the stories from the heart. When a story
comes from the depth of a person’s experiences and they manage to
stay out of the way of the narrative and trust the fiction, well, we all
know it. For role-play, creative writing offers a reminder that the stories
that come out of the lives of the characters will be the stories that sing.
This does not preclude violence and dark conflicts and lots of technol-
ogy and all the genre trappings that most games are built upon, but
these aspects should be lived by the character, not the other way round.
To get the mask to dance, the personal rhythms of a character must
be known and active in the story. Why do so few characters have sex? (At
least this explains why so few have children!) Imagine the true power of
a gun in the hands of a woman with an intruder in her house. What if
it’s her boyfriend playing a prank? What if her son knows it’s the bogey-
man and that the gun is useless? What pulls us into this scenario is the
potential destruction of intimate affections. How many hit points the
woman and the child have is not the important factor. How they live,
and the life that is threatened, the security at risk, is what sharpens our
attention. It is not enough to know what a character can do, that char-
acter’s creator must also discover what that character feels and then
present these emotions in the narrative, even if only as whispers. The
mask will dance if the story being told is important to the characters
living it.
The Cosmic Dance of the Scene
There are worlds without end and all that matters is what the characters
can sense. Practitioners of adult education creative writing know this,
and usually opt to set their stories in the most ready-made setting, the
present. Thus everything is here and now, nothing need be researched
or invented, only described and included when essential to the story.
But we humans do not only live in the present, and myth is eternally
young. The shifts of time and place that are so pervasive in table-top
role-play offer a range of symbols and metaphors that we use in our
language to be explored and experienced through play. Systems are

offered for the creation of entire worlds, and the rules are an attempt
to imbed an internal consistency in such worlds. Such settings allow for
the narrative to go anywhere, to open any door. What power! In crea-
tive writing such detail is often never considered, and yet the stories
still come alive. Why? Again, as with the mask, the essential rhythms
are implied through familiarity so that the unopened door need not
be considered. But so often the worlds created for role-play, despite
all their the maps and background and sourcebooks, still feel lifeless.
What is the weather like from street level? What is the taste of the wind
in the market of the fantasy game, where we always go to buy our iron
rations? Can a fictional world be brought as vividly alive as the world
we know? Yes, if the cosmic rhythms are considered and brought into
contact with the characters. Weather, season, stars, moons, suns, tides,
radiation, flora and fauna, the smells and the feels of what the world
is like to live in. What makes the world unique? What is the music of
the place? How to create scenes which feel woven into the tapestry of
an entire cosmos requires an understanding of the cosmic rhythms to
which the world of play would be required to dance.
Contrast this with the mask above—for the character to dance, the
deepest rhythms of that character’s life must be the core of the charac-
ter’s creation. So for the scene to dance the largest rhythms of the world
where the scene lives must be known and brought to life, set in motion
from without as the character is moved from within.
The Cultural Dance of Conflict
An actress friend of mine says that ‘drama is conflict’. The interaction
of masks and scenes to explore a conflict creates drama. The interac-
tion of persons and the cosmos is culture. Role-playing game rules can
be seen as the culture of a fictional environment, a system of balances
between the characters and the world they inhabit. In fiction, the con-
flict is what motivates the narrative towards some sort of resolution.
Players play characters and a referee plays a world, and between them
they create a mountain of casualties and call it fun. Boy meets girl, boy
loses girl (conflict), boy finds girl (resolution). Conflict is essential to
generating stories, and culture is the arena for the conflicts of life to be
lived out.
Creative writing is concerned with language. Language is an inti-
mate part of culture, almost its definition. The conflicts that permeate
the stories in the classes I have participated in are almost always ren-
dered in cultural terms, and the stories where the personal conflict of
the protagonist has some cultural ramification makes for exciting and
challenging, even political writing. Here, in culture, is the stage for the
interplay of the personal rhythms of each character to buffet against
others, and for the desires of the protagonist to be tempered by the
cosmic rhythms of the world they inhabit. The brilliant gift of creative

writing courses for story creation is the range of conflict that can be
explored. Conflict does not equal violence. In writing fiction the culture
of the story offers many different avenues to explore conflict, especially
if the writing is in any way politically aware. Through choice of conflict
the author usually determines the most effective path to make a state-
ment about their culture.
Where creative writing often fails and where table-top role-play
succeeds admirably is in the tension of the resolution of conflict. Why
would the players and the guide create a mountain of casualties time
and time again? Because with the dice one never can tell. The dramatic
tension of conflict resolution being a thing of chance is one of the most
compelling aspects of role-play. But so much of the conflict that makes
up role-play has little or no internal cultural bearing, means little or
nothing to the fictional world’s cultural rhythms. So much violence
would warp the values of life. Cities involved in war become mirrors of
hell. Table-top role-play must look at other aspects of conflict if it is to
evolve. Those who attend creative writing classes could learn a lot from
the dice. Stories written as if the author does not know how the conflict
will resolve are exciting because the questions are kept active, the atten-
tion does not relax.
A greater exploration of the cultural dances when creating fictional
worlds would offer a broader range of narrative conflicts. This would
allow the subject matter of the stories being created to break free from
the stagnation bounds of genre.
The Story as Sacred Dance
When the personal dance, the cosmic dance, and the cultural dance
harmonize, they become a sacred dance which brings myth to life.
When mask and scene and conflict balance dramatic stories are told.
Dancing fictions are stories greater than their creation. The writer
speaks of the muse—‘something moved through me on this one’. What
spirits do gamers speak of? There were nine muses and drama was one
of their intimate concerns. Who are the muses of role-playing games?
Is it possible that the dramas so far enacted have not yet been worthy
of angelic attention? I think such spirits are hovering. Let us coax them
closer.
Role-play that has no sense of strong narrative elements will tend
to get lost in detail which actually detracts from the enjoyment of play.
Creative writing that forgets the power of letting go, of losing control,
will drown in the fear of expressing the unconventional, and will churn
out stories that feel contrived. Use of table-top role-play in creative
writing is a release from the constraints of the page. Writing stories that
come out from sessions of role-play can give gamers a means to evalu-
ate the strength of the stories and would be a start towards fashioning
enduring records of play. Why tell stories that mean nothing, that do

not evolve? Let us dance sacred fictions.
David A. Lambert has been questing and questioning role-play since he first
played D&D, fourteen years ago. The quest has lead from America, through
Northern Ireland, all the way to safe and reliable Norwich where he now lives
with his wife and two sons. At present, David teaches adults creative writing,
writes short fiction and poetry, and is deeply committed to the Borderlands’ Co-
operative design efforts on a new RPG provisionally titled Novel Sinners.

When a Touch
Becomes A Bruise
Avoiding Abusive Interactions
By Stephanie Itchkawich
When is a scenario an artistic depiction of complex situations and char-

acter relationships and when is it an abusive caricature, a failed repre-
sentation too loaded with painful emotional flash-points to be enjoyed
by the participants?
This article will offer a framework for the practical analysis of abu-
sive interactions and provide practical suggestions about how to mini-
mize them in play. The goal is to encourage referees to create scenarios
which elicit a full spectrum of emotional reactions from participants
without generating a hurtful situation.
It is the powerful intellectual and emotional impact of interactive
scenarios which captivates participants. Drawn in by the challenge to
our intellect, we find our emotions, our selves, similarly challenged.
As a result, the interaction changes its nature. As our emotional invest-
ment grows, we elevate the scenario to a sphere in which it has the
potential to become damaging.
Up to now, definitions of abusive interactions have tended to be
anecdotal. Most players who have been involved in the hobby for any
length of time can cite one or more instances of a scenario they par-
ticipated in provoking an unexpected and violently negative response
from one of the players. These are not instances of sour grapes, per-
sonal dissatisfaction with the performance of their character in play, or
criticisms of a referee’s capacity for managing the flow of play. Rather,
they are reactions stemming from events in character which trigger in-
tense personal reactions on the part of the player.
For our purposes, an interaction will be labelled as abusive if it in-
tentionally or unintentionally provokes a severely negative emotional
reaction on the part of a player due to the content of the scenario or the
circumstance under which the scenario is evolved. The term ‘abusive’
is not intended to mean a deliberate mistreatment, but to describe the
change from a recreational experience to a hurtful event.
The topics that most often cause problems are, of course, the con-
troversial or emotionally laden ones: sexual interactions, confinement,

death, religious issues, sexual violence, prejudice, abortion and exploi-
tation to name a few. But seemingly innocuous events can also trig-
ger reactions due to an unknown predisposition of the player. Deeply
personal fears and unpleasant memories may make it impossible for
certain players to tolerate a particular scenario. For example a claus-
trophobe might be severely uncomfortable role-playing a character
through an episode of close confinement. An accurately described rape
scenario is likely to make all of the participants uncomfortable but even
if the detail is more sketchy, it may provoke a severe reaction if one of
the players has been unfortunate enough to have been the victim of
such an assault in real life.
The impact on the player, and occasionally the group, can be in-
tense and fairly immediate. Players may suddenly withdraw, burst into
tears, storm out of a room or resign from a campaign group. Because
these responses may be the result of personal experiences, the referee
and the group at large are often surprised by the reaction and its in-
tensity. The reaction becomes an issue for the whole group, not just the
referee, and the repercussions may last for some time.
Despite the rather virulent nature of the criticisms levelled at the
role-playing community from some quarters, we have delayed too long
in engaging in productive discussion or critical thinking regarding the
dynamics of role-playing. While a great deal of energy has been ex-
pended in violent contradiction of the more extreme criticisms, less has
been directed towards examining the issues central to role-playing. Of
these, the question of abusive interactions seems to be most seriously
deserving of attention since it can undermine some of the most valu-
able returns that role-playing has to offer us.
Many role-players are inclined to dismiss these anecdotal descrip-
tions of abusive interactions off-hand. It is easy and more comfortable
for many to minimize the frequency of such occurrences; or to simply
blame the referee for poor judgement or poor taste. Such responses
tend to close down the discussion before the subject has been prop-
erly aired or the problem addressed. They also effectively close down
the channels of communication for players and referees who become
caught up in abusive situations. This makes it unlikely that the situa-
tions will be resolved or improved.
It would seem impossible or impractical to selectively screen partici-
pants before running a scenario to avoid inadvertently painful refer-
ences. In any case, the questions that would be required would be far
too intrusive. It seems equally impossible for players to accurately as-
sess, in advance, the level of judgement and taste likely to be displayed
by any given referee. It is a matter of some speculation if, were a reliable
measurement to exist, referees would post any appreciable score what-
ever!

Another frequent response is to dismiss the player’s concern. Play-
ers who react negatively to a scenario are often seen as being over-sensi-
tive, over-reactive or attention-seeking. The problem with this response
is that it diverts attention away from the scenario event as an issue, to
the relative personal strengths and motivations of an individual player.
It precludes discussion of abusive interactions as an issue of concern to
the role-playing community. The characterization itself can be destruc-
tive both to the individual and to the group, and will be discussed in
detail below.
Some have suggested that we can cope with mature or controver-
sial themes either by limiting the content of a scenario, or limiting the
selection of participants (usually by age), or both. This is usually pro-
posed as a result of moralists’ concerns about the nature of the subject
matter rather than strictly as a response to a player’s problem with an
abusive interaction. On the face of it, this would seem a practical, sen-
sible suggestion. In practice, it is at best a flawed solution.
The first problem with this suggestion is that the list of limitations
would have to be comprehensive in order to make this work. It would
still be impossible to control for various innocent and unintentionally
painful references. How could you possibly account for every traumatic
trigger in the range of human experience? More practically, even the
list of subjects with a high likelihood of eliciting distress would be long.
This suggestion also invariably leads to a series of value judgements.
Some might see it as a variety of censorship, voluntary or not. The idea
of limiting the role-playing experience on this basis provokes sincere
concern.
The third and most serious difficulty originates in considering the
art of role-playing itself. One of the primary objectives in designing
a scenario is to produce an experience for the players which is rich
in meaning. Scenarios of this type are generally internally consistent,
three-dimensional and high in correlative realism. Three-dimensional
characters develop feelings, responses, motivations and an ethos of
their own. Good referees labour intensively to produce interactions
which will provoke characters to make personality-defining decisions.
Correlative realism means the feeling that, however alien and unfa-
miliar the environment and entities, there is an understandable com-
monality or analogous reasoning between the reality we experience in
daily life and the scenario being evolved: in a word, verisimilitude. In
some sense, the pertinent themes of our lives must be mirrored in the
scenario. Without a high degree of correlative realism, a player has a
difficult time identifying with their character. Where the degree of cor-
relation is high, players rapidly become attached to their characters.
Consider characters you may have created for a variety of game sys-
tems. Which did you identify with most strongly? What design was used

to generate them? What scenario did they grow up in? It is likely that
characters generated in designs and scenarios that were both three-
dimensional and displayed a high degree of correlative realism were
more satisfying and more complex.
Correlative realism is the connecting thread between ourselves and
our characters. It is the vehicle through which fictitious events occur-
ring to fictitious characters have the capacity to touch real people. This
quality raises role-playing from an intellectual diversion, to the realm
of artistic endeavour. Role-play, as an art, has the capacity to emotion-
ally touch the participants. It can be euphoric, inspiring, frustrating,
sorrowful: the whole range of human emotional experience.
Which leaves us to wonder, what about pain?
If, returning to the suggestion under debate, we limit the themes
in a scenario and eliminate painful consequences from our repertoire,
what will we have left? Certainly there will be a lower degree of correla-
tive realism for the scenario; after all, painful consequences are a fairly
consistent theme in human experience. Character reactions will skew as
a result, as the level of avoidance behaviour drops for characters. Walk
down a dark alley, unarmed, with a pile of treasure? Why not?
The texture of violence in our everyday lives; its shades, graphic
and stark contrasts, subtle blendings, the abrasion of casual evil and
incidental violence, the sense of causality and immediacy which defines
much of our lives will be absent. Sooner or later, the attitudes of the
characters will change to something too removed from common hu-
man experience to be of interest: a sad commentary.
Sanitizing a scenario is neither an effective solution, nor can it be
an acceptable trade in terms of a meaningful role-playing experience.
The suggestion’s applicability to the preservation of conservative mor-
alist views would be equally ineffectual and, quite likely, assailable on a
variety of ethical grounds. Whether as an artistic or as a communicative
medium, role-play cannot be arbitrarily restricted in such a way without
losing its raison d’être.
If the problem cannot be ignored, dismissed or dealt with through
the application of thematic censorship, how can it be approached?
One cannot isolate oneself from all manner of risk. Certainly, if one
chose not to play at all, there would be no chance that an abusive epi-
sode would occur. Equally, you’d miss out on a lot of cool stuff. There
are few of us who, having experienced the excitement of good role-play,
would be willing to give up entirely. As with any art-form, there is always
the risk that you will be displeased, disappointed, offended, even nau-
seated. Artists remain undeterred.
Scenario designers can employ strategies which minimize the prob-
ability of an abusive interaction in three main ways: through improv-
ing group communication skills; through observation skills; and by the

sensitive application of stressors within a scenario. All participants can
assume responsibility for generating a higher level of communication
within the group and for processing situations where the scenario nega-
tively impacts the player. These techniques will also result in an increase
in overall enjoyment of the experience. This is a rare case where the ef-
fort to avoid an infrequent occurrence actually pays off in the majority
of situations as well.
Although it may seem strange to discuss improving communication
within a gaming group, it is a key to avoiding abusive interactions. The
majority of gamers are highly verbal and articulate. Few seem ham-
pered by any form of disability when it comes to expressing an opinion,
at length. Still, when it comes to the type of emotionally volatile situa-
tions which result from abusive conditions, these same gamers can lack
the skills to deal effectively with the situation.
In order to deal with the question of abusive scenario events, both
referees and players will need to become more active participants. Ref-
erees face a number of challenges in dealing with this issue. Most of
the difficulty comes from their role as group facilitators, a role few have
consciously developed for themselves.
Historically, it has been difficult enough to find individuals willing
to invest the time and intellectual resources necessary to become con-
versant in a game design, generate a relevant scenario, research tech-
nological and historical details, adapt their design to the characters
in the scenario, become adept at adjudicating events within a system,
continually update the scenario to reflect character actions, produce
and distribute scenario-specific game aids, meet with the group on a
reliable schedule, play three-dimensional non-player characters and
provide interesting verbal feedback during sessions. Referees already
seem to have their hands full. Before the inevitable protests are voiced,
it should be recognized that most referees already possess the rudi-
ments of this skill. For those who do not, it is not so difficult to acquire.
Group facilitation and process skills are simply an expansion of the
observational and communication skills already used by most referees.
The process should begin before any scenario design affects a play-
er. The referee should evaluate what objectives are to be presented to
the players. In conjunction with this, referees should ask themselves
what the relevance of those objectives are, both to the scenario and
to the characters. How important are they? Could they conceivably be
passed by? What consequences should legitimately be owing in the case
of failure? How meaningful are these consequences to a character?
The first set of evaluations should be based on the integrity of the
scenario and should focus on maintaining internal consistency and cor-
relative realism. The referee should be concerned here with artistic rel-
evance, even in purveying apparently random events.

The next step is more difficult, but crucial to what will follow later in
regard to potentially abusive situations. The referee must decide to what
degree they have personally invested in the scenario objectives. This re-
quires objectivity on a point in which most referees have a high level of
emotional investment. The reason this is so crucial is that many abusive
situations either arise, or are made more severe, because a referee is so
committed to the objectionable event as part of the overall design that
they miss the cues that would otherwise alert them to a player’s distress.
A referee may spend a lot of time or thought in producing an interac-
tion or situation, investing in it, becoming preoccupied by it, and in the
end is unwilling to alter or delete it as a result. Many good referees take
considerable ‘professional’ pride in their scenarios. It is not a matter of
deliberate cruelty; they are simply caught up in their own design.
In evaluating the degree of personal investment, the referee focuses
on portions of the scenario where they may need to expend extra at-
tention on the participants. The referee needs to become conscious of
points where a decision to alter events may be required. This is a point
of controversy for many referees. Scenario designers generally object to
altering the course of a scenario to avoid problem events. It is certainly
not suggested that such a choice be made routinely, or the earlier sug-
gestion to censor subject matter would have been more palatable.
A referee should be alert to decision points within the design as
a matter of course. Experienced referees often ask themselves during
the course of play, is this effective? Is this communicating the sense
intended for this stage of the scenario? An accomplished referee is al-
ways ready to recognize points where the course of events falls short of
the intended goal or where the impact is less than optimal. Generally,
a scenario designer will incorporate contingencies for such occasions
and will implement them as necessary during play. These designers
recognize that, however inspired a design may have seemed when they
created it, it doesn’t always survive contact with the players.
Referees often alter their scenario in mid-play in order to preserve
the overall effectiveness of the session and ultimately to enhance the
players’ enjoyment of the scenario. Such changes on the fly are often
required to preserve the artistic impact of the design. In avoiding abu-
sive situations, referees ought to incorporate additional fall-backs in
their designs in recognition that negative emotional associations on the
part of players are a valid impediment to the success of the scenario.
Because player reactions are often missed or dismissed in favour of
preserving the integrity of the design, events often proceed which ulti-
mately result in the failure of a scenario due to the resulting emotional
reaction.
The mechanism for this is not as difficult as recognizing the points
at which it needs to be employed. It is also important to note that the

overall difficulty of the scenario does not need to be decreased in order
to avoid an abusive interaction. The scenarios do not have to be gentle
Wonderlands where characters are widely indulged.
The scenario should be written so that there will be consequences
of varying severity depending on how successful a character’s decisions
are, and so that each result can be handled in more than one way. So,
if a character chooses the worst possible response in a scenario, the
designer should be prepared with at least two really horrific possible
results.
How can this work? Do you shift in mid-stream? Ideally the results
should be planned with some variety of transition in mind. This re-
quires additional planning, but it pays off in both directions. There are
occasions when a negative consequence is enacted and, quite unexpect-
edly, the character and the player yawns. Highly frustrating. Somehow
the consequence failed to register at all. Referees don’t usually take this
lying down. Having a pre-planned variant to hand can avoid the worst
of referee over-reactions which, incidentally, are another source of risk
for abusive interactions.
If, in the other extreme, the referee begins introducing a negative
consequence and the player begins to show signs that something is
amiss, having a way out gives the referee options for how to deal with
the situation without suspending the scenario. If the referee got the
signals wrong, no harm done.
The other necessary element in pre-planning is a cut-out. A cut-out
is a character’s back door, time-out, a way to at least temporarily gain
respite in a situation. This is valuable in preventing scenario events
from becoming abusive. Pivotal, high-consequence player choices
should always be accompanied by at least three obvious choices of ac-
tion and a cut-out. This prevents railroading, a negative element in any
campaign, and allows the player to exercise limited control over the
subject matter.
The value of the cut-outs are seen in cases where the scenario is well
run and intense, and players are very in-character. Players can often
ignore their own comfort level in a situation because they are so in-
character and the choice they dictate is so logical to the scenario and
the character, that they embark upon an event without giving any sig-
nals of discomfort. At some point, the player begins to react to the issue
involved on an emotional level and a problem results. This is where a
cut-out works wonders.
Let’s say a typically heroic character rushes into a burning building
to rescue another character. The rescuer had every in-character reason
to choose the action and would have shown no hesitation. The player
knows this and so chose the course. The referee begins detailing the
events of the rescue. Pretty routine. Except this player has a very serious

and sincere fear of fire. As the referee describes the course of events,
working very hard to make the scene as realistic and suspenseful as pos-
sible, the player becomes more and more uncomfortable.
This is a perfect example of a case where the referee could not rea-
sonably be expected to have foreseen a problem, nor could an accusa-
tion be made that the referee’s choice of material was questionable. A
referee may not have even considered inserting extra decision points
for such an apparently straightforward situation. This is where a cut-
out is particularly effective. Cut-outs should be built in at the planning
stage, but can be very simple to devise even on the spot. In the above
example, it might be as simple as an unexpected avenue of retreat to
an unaffected, but threatened, portion of the building. This small res-
pite can give the player time to collect their thoughts, or even call the
referee aside for a private chat. As a matter of management, shifting to
another player for a time can be enough to act as a cut-out if all else
fails.
Deciding which elements of a scenario to question, or what events
to plan alternatives for, might seem cumbersome. Making evaluations
based on discrete elements of a scenario, episode by episode, would in-
deed be tedious and time-consuming. The most effective way to evalu-
ate is on the basis of potential stress.
Stressors are an important element for referees to review, not just
due to the potential for an abusive encounter but also in adjusting sce-
nario balance. Analysing by stressors avoids the necessity of evaluating
independent issues. Stressors are categories of events. An event which
is likely to, or intended to, produce tension within the scenario is a
stressor. Events which represent some threat to the character, real or
imagined, are also stressors.
Stressors should produce movement or growth within a scenario.
If they are gratuitous or have no relevance to the story, they should
probably be eliminated—the reason being that they detract from the
essential themes of the story and are little more than muscle-flexing on
the part of the referee. If designers must resort to non sequitur threats,
violent encounters or artificial obstacles for the players, they need to
re-evaluate their scenario.
Designers should consider the pacing of stressors to characters
within the scenario, the relevance of the stressful event, the potential
developmental benefits of the stress to the character, and whether the
stressor is beyond the capacity of the intended character or charac-
ters. A poorly balanced scenario has a greater potential for abusive en-
counters, partially due to the higher general level of frustration on the
part of the players. The designer should also consider the setting in
which the stressor is presented. Even a low-intensity stressor can have a
greater impact on character and player when the overall tension in the

situation is high.
When devising a scenario, referees need to ask themselves not only
how valuable and relevant a planned event is to the overall meaning of
the scenario, but also whether it is crucial. Then, a step further, whether
any individual event is so pivotal that it justifies an unacceptable level of
discomfort for the participant. The answer for well designed scenarios
is an overwhelming no. A good design is, by definition, flexible; a good
designer, imaginative. Given this, creating equivalently challenging
events should be possible.
It should be remembered that abusive situations arise not just as a
product of subject matter, but from the overall playing atmosphere. A
player with a low tolerance for criticism may become very reactive to
low-level stressors in a scenario that they have dealt with unsuccessfully
in character. This is not so much due to poor sportsmanship on the
part of a player but more often to the inevitable kibitzing on the part
of the other players. It can be exacerbated when the referee joins the
chorus.
These are surprisingly common situations. It is easy to fall into the
trap. Participants often make jokes in session, often at other players’
expense. Part of the referee’s responsibility as a group facilitator is to
watch for occasions when the humour gets out of hand, becomes un-
duly critical, or singles out one player for exclusive treatment. Referees
should attempt to redirect the humour on these occasions, adding a
reminder of some other character’s previous folly or re-focusing the
group on the scenario. Occasionally it may be desirable to discuss the
effect of the joking as a group or to air the concern that the joking is
no longer quite so friendly. When one player seems particularly ag-
gressive, a referee may want to speak privately with them about the way
their comments are coming across.
Character play benefits from these interventions directly. Even the
best character player may be subtly influenced by out-of-character ani-
mosities, skewing the scenario. Players also tend to be more creative
and daring in their approaches to scenarios where there is greater con-
fidence in the supportiveness of the group. Players will tend to be timid
and conservative in their play if they feel they will be the butt of out-of-
character criticism.
This confidence is important in dealing with those occasions when
abusive interactions do occur. A player is more likely to speak up early
on about their reaction to a scenario if there is a high trust level in the
group. This communication is crucial to situations where unintention-
ally painful interactions arise in a scenario. If the player communicates
their difficulty, or at least that they are having a problem, the referee
can try to work out the issue with the player. Occasionally the player
will even deliberately opt to work through the scenario with the under-

standing of the group.
Players generally give a number of cues that there is something amiss
in a scenario. For established groups it is usually pretty obvious. Players
will tend to slip out of character more frequently as they become un-
focused or uncomfortable. Reactions may become overblown, or at the
other extreme, turgid. Some players adopt a bored tone. Players some-
times come out with statements that are negative about the scenario or
the referee; most frequently they will state that the scenario is no longer
important to them. A real danger sign is when a player begins speaking
as though the scenario were an endurance contest: ‘Whatever is thrown
at me, I’ll handle it.’ Referees should look for changes in vocal tone.
Some players’ voices will become more emotional, flat or monotone.
Players may pace or show other signs of nervous agitation.
Observing for verbal and non-verbal cues is important but not con-
clusive. Some of these same cues might be given by a very involved
player. This is where good communication comes into play. Referees
may wish to follow up on their observations, either privately or directly.
One method is to ask if a player would like an extra moment to reflect
on the situation or would like to pass. Then, when you come back to
them, ask if it is all right to continue. It is acceptable to ask directly if
the player is uncomfortable. Offer the player an opportunity to discuss
the matter with you privately.
The referee must then decide how to proceed, based on the player’s
response. If the player communicates clearly, the matter is simple. If
the player still appears uncomfortable, or reluctant to discuss the mat-
ter, the referee needs to decide whether to proceed, and their individ-
ual feelings about the situation may suggest a transition to a planned
alternative in the design.
There may be cases where the player asks to exit the scenario and
flatly refuses to explain. Referees should respect this. Pressing further
is really not necessary. Players should be able to maintain a sense of
privacy. If there is some overriding suspicion that an individual is at-
tempting to manipulate a scenario through this practice, it is far more
responsible to ask them to leave the group than to press them through
a possibly abusive scenario.
When assessing the overall circumstances under which a scenario
is presented, the referee needs to consider some personal limitations.
Group facilitation cannot occur when the referee is stretched beyond
their capacity. A referee should carefully consider the number of par-
ticipants allowed in a scenario. It becomes impossible to adequately
attend to players’ responses when the ratio of players to referees be-
comes too high. Time also becomes a factor, consequently the risk of an
abusive situation increases.
Personal factors can also increase the risk. If a referee is too tired

or is functioning under some other type of stress then their ability to
respond to the needs of the players will be affected. Judgement is also
altered. The ability to resolve situations that have gone awry will simi-
larly be impaired.
During the course of play, it is primarily the referee’s responsibility
to use careful listening and observation skills as the scenario progresses.
This is part of the facilitation process. In freeform scenarios or game
systems where characters may be allowed to play out conversations in
small groups while the referee attends to other players, this can become
more difficult. Listening and observation are crucial to a well run de-
sign, not just to avoidance of abusive encounters.
Referees should avoid the temptation to engage in social engineer-
ing with their players. Recreational role-play is not a forum for thera-
peutic exercises in facing hidden fears and personal weaknesses. Refer-
ees are not equipped and participants generally haven’t signed up for
therapy. If you identify an instance where the scenario is more about
your perception of the player than the development of the character,
you have a problem. Abort the scenario.
If, after all this, you are in the planning stage or in the middle of an
interaction and you are tempted to proceed despite having identified
stressors and danger signs, ask yourself: ‘Who am I satisfying? What is
the cost? What will it achieve?’ Group discussion and periodic reviews
are also a good group maintenance habit. These may be fairly brief, but
presenting a regular opportunity to clear the air can be a valuable tool.
Ask the players to present concerns about the scenario and how it is
running. Solicit information about your facilitation style. This requires
a referee secure enough to listen effectively to criticism, but the ben-
efits are enormous. The group can help you maintain balance, identify
when you are stuck in a rut and help iron out time management skills;
and they are certain to let you know if one of their number is monopo-
lizing your time.
The key to making these work is to not go on the defensive. Take
notes of group criticisms to review later. Over time, the points may
seem more valid. You at least gain some topics to experiment with
or focus on over time. If the critiques change from session to session,
you are probably growing. If they remain the same, it’s time to figure
out what’s going on. Your skills as a referee are sure to improve. The
group’s skills as role-players are also likely to benefit. The great value of
these sessions is that they show that you value and respect group com-
munication. This makes it far more likely that your group members will
speak up for themselves before an abusive interaction progresses too
far. End-of-session critiques are the best tool in this regard. They have
an advantage in working even for one-off occasions such as tourna-
ments and play-tests.

What if, despite the best efforts at planning, communication and
observation, the scenario suddenly provokes a severe reaction from a
player? How should abusive interactions be handled once they arise?
The best response will depend upon the exact nature of what has
occurred and the severity of the response. The first priority is in giv-
ing the individual an opportunity to recover from the situation. It may
be appropriate to offer reassurance, other players may need a short
time to compose themselves privately. In either case, it is the group’s
responsibility to make it clear that the individual’s response is going to
be respected by the group.
An effort should be made to discuss the situation with the affected
person. In some cases it may be useful to talk about the problem as a
group. Often members who were not directly involved can provide less
biased observations.
When discussing what went wrong, it is important to allow the af-
fected member their privacy. If the member gives an explanation of
why they reacted, it is not generally appropriate to ask detailed ques-
tions about their experience. Questions like: ‘How did you get to be
a pyrophobe?’ and ‘How old was your wife when she was raped?’ are
intrusive. The key is to listen respectfully and non-judgementally.
Accept responsibility for your individual role in the situation as ap-
propriate. Avoid placing or shifting blame. The focus should instead
be on how to avoid future incidents and on anything the group learned
from the experience.
Avoid attempts to seek consensus approval. This is when a member
of a group, typically one who feels guilty or responsible, seeks to cast
events in a more flattering light and to have their version ratified by as
many other members of the group as possible. This is a negative and
divisive technique which will add to bad feeling and eventually split a
group. It also places a burden on the affected person to justify their
reaction, which is unfair.
This type of guilt can often be avoided if the group focuses con-
structively on the objectionable effect of the scenario event rather on
the person who enacted the event. It seems a subtle difference, but it is
easier to create positive change if the event is depersonalized. Discuss
what, if anything, could have been done differently. Talk about possi-
ble alternatives. Allow the other members of the group to talk through
their responses. Many of the members may be somewhat concerned
about whether they might inadvertently provoke a similar reaction.
Then, discuss whether the affected person wishes to continue in the
group and how the scenario ought to be handled. Offer alternatives.
Do not allow the person to be pushed into toughing out the scenario.
Ask them to be realistic about their ability to do so and the conditions
under which they can continue.

Finally, implement the group’s decisions and follow through on rea-
sonable recommendations that the group proposed. This is a way to
establish group norms. Specific groups will develop their own character
in this fashion.
Reactions to abusive interactions can be managed effectively by a
group, and even used to develop closer and more informed relation-
ships within the group. Effective management does not mean caving
in or catering to every vagary of the individual members; it does mean
dealing sensitively and reasonably with all present.
In discussions of this issue, role-players frequently debate the qual-
ity of the games where abusive situations are likely to occur. From obser-
vation, it seems that the highest risk falls at the two extreme ends of the
scale, with inexperienced or poor scenario designers and with highly
competent, creative designers.
The reasoning in the first case is rather straightforward. Abusive
situations stem from some obvious mistakes in game balance and often
are the result of unnaturally inflating the difficulty level of a scenario
by injecting cataclysmic and extreme events. The impact on the players
in these cases tends to be low, as the correlative reality of the scenarios
is too low to allow significant player investment. The scenarios are so
distorted that it becomes easier for the players to emotionally detach.
More often than not, the players simply seek out another referee.
In the instance of very creative referees, the effect is most often due
to the high degree of correlative reality in their campaigns. These ref-
erees are adept at the nuances of representational reality, they paint
with a fine brush. Their descriptions tend to be complete, well re-
searched and compelling. These referees are also quite likely to become
enmeshed in their own descriptions, accept too many gaming obliga-
tions and exceed their own limitations, increasing the probability that
they will miss their players’ early signs of distress. These referees attract
players who exhibit a high degree of emotional involvement with their
characters. While the players find these scenarios intense and excit-
ing, the occasions where the interaction becomes abusive are equally
intense and can be quite hurtful. It is an unfortunate observation that
players in these campaigns are much more significantly impacted in
the event of abusive play. The corollary is that these players run a con-
tinued risk, as the intensity of a role-playing experience is not widely
available through other sources. Fortunately, the referees in this cat-
egory generally are more approachable and make efforts to minimize
these occasions.
Role-play has an enormous potential for exciting and challenging
its participants. As an art, it has the capacity to touch us profoundly.
The risk in the art resides in the depiction of the unpleasant and often
violent aspects of the human experience. It is possible to enact nega-

tive consequences to a character within a scenario without concomitant
devastation to the player. It is the difference between being touched
and being bruised.
Stephanie Itchkawich is a 17-year veteran of role-play and strategic gaming.

Her most current fixation is with Amber Diceless Roleplaying although her in-
terests are varied. Mundanely, she is pursuing state and national certification
for substance-abuse counselling and is preparing to embark on graduate stud-
ies in psychology. She is also a twelve-year veteran of the U. S. Air Force and
is currently serving as a Reserve substance abuse and equal opportunity and
treatment officer for the 913 AW WGARS. Stephanie says her most difficult
challenge by far has been raising her three-year-old daughter, Mariko, a job for
which she is hopelessly underqualified.

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.

Leaping Into
Cross-Gender Role-Play
By Sandy Antunes
At its best, role-playing allows one to take a new perspective on life

and on other people. In role-playing games people can be fighters and
lovers, saints and sinners. On the computer nets, people can join in
multi-person interactive worlds (MOOs, MUDs and MUSHes) to play
and talk under a variety of personae. Even business training makes use
of the possibilities of role-play to engage in crisis-testing and problem-
solving. In all of these situations, the role-player is playing a character.
Despite the vast array of occupations and archetypes to choose from,
crossing the gender boundary is a possibility that is often poorly han-
dled or ignored entirely. Gaming circles routinely decry geekish at-
tempts by males to play females; magazines write about gender posers
lurking on the Internet and business often avoids the issue entirely.
1
However, both scholarly and anecdotal evidence suggests there can
also be great depth in crossing the gender boundaries.
Like many phenomena, good cross-gender role-play rarely elicits
attention or report. The failed attempts and the spectacularly crass dis-
plays of erroneous stereotyping are more noticeable. Thus in part the
lack of information on cross-gender role-playing is because good role-
playing is transparent. A good role-player doesn’t bowl you over with
a single characteristic but comes across as a real, well-rounded person.
There are some broad characteristics of all cross-gender role-playing
that can be investigated, however. These can be broken down rough-
ly into motive and environment. ‘Motive’ is both why the individual
chooses to play a member of the opposite gender and how they inte-
grate the character’s gender into the character concept as a whole. The
role-play environment (especially game and computer net settings)
then provide feedback to the role-player which helps determine the
success of the experience, whether the character is viable, and whether
it is worth repeating.
A first stumbling point involves whether accurate cross-gender role-
play is possible. Do the sexes truly think differently? Gilligan (1982)
and others have suggested that girls seek co-operative play while boys
prefer competition. Thus girls choose to play with dolls and boys

choose machinery. In role-playing, we could extrapolate this to women
choosing co-operative or nurturing roles and men choosing aggressive
or antagonistic ones. But most role-playing is among fringe societies,
for example gamers, MOOers and MUSHers, and (to pick a socially ex-
treme example) people enacting scenarios at bondage-and-discipline
gatherings. As Kaplan and Farrell (1994) put it, role-playing gamers
2
and electronic networkers are often, well, ‘shy and nerdy’. Given their
disinclination to follow many other ‘common’ social trends, analyzing
whether the role-player’s gender is significant in performing a cross-
gender role is a debate which, without further statistics, can only lead to
argument. Further, there are the fields of involuntary role-choice, such
as business interviews and training seminars, where the participants
may be forced to play a role of the opposite gender. The analysis of
motive then breaks down; to be fair, one must assume that a role-player
has the potential to resist social conditioning and enact a cross-gender
role, otherwise the entire debate is moot.
A character can be defined by its gender or the gender can be just
one piece of an overall character concept. Tannen (1990) suggests
there are fundamental differences in the style of speech adopted by
men and women: females tend to talk in a ‘rapport’ style, while males
3
prefer a ‘report’ style. This suggests that playing a cross-gender role
requires, at the very least, the assumption of a completely different style
of conversation. To add to the complication of playing such a role, sev-
eral female gamers on the Strange Aeons mailing list asked ‘how does
one role-play having a penis?’, expressing their doubts about the abil-
ity to accurately ‘be’ the other sex. One might as soon ask ‘how does
one role-play having eight tentacles?’ (for an alien game) or ‘how does
one role-play having over ten million dollars?’ (for an investment tuto-
rial). Rather than being a contentious point, this is the inherent value
of role-play, and the answer is ‘imagination’. Indeed, one could just
as easily ask ‘how does one role-play anything other than yourself, in
the real world?’ As one’s persona gets further removed from oneself,
the possibility of errors in interpretation do increase, but the nature of
role-play is to speculate and we must presume a good role-player has
the potential to do a role justice.
Despite the fact that players are offered the infinite possibilities of
playing any role at all, a surprising number of personae share the same
gender as the player. One common motive for changing a character’s
sex is novelty. This is a strong temptation, especially for males who play
female characters. Emma Kolstad, a woman role-player on the Strange
Aeons list, suggests that since western society has conditioned us to find
women’s bodies attractive (hence their use in advertising), but does not
glorify men’s bodies in the same manner, men experience more of a
thrill or mystique when they play women than women do when they

play men. This erotic thrill is one possible motivator.
When you role-play for entertainment, you are offered the chance
either to play an aspect of yourself that you do not play in the real
world, or to play someone you could never be. This raises a larger ques-
tion: does a player play a role because it is an inner part of them that
they wish to express, or because it is an aspect they cannot possess in
real life? Is it the real soul inside of you or the soul you could never be?
This is a question about the player’s internal state. In the gender de-
bate an important (and less opinion-ladened) area to study is how this
motive, invisible as it is, fits in with the character concept as presented
to the world.
One possibility is that the gender of the character is a required part
of the character’s identity. A real-world role-play has a few roles which
require gender as part of their identity—a Mother, a Witch, the First
Lady of the US. Role-play for entertainment, on the other hand, often
takes place in unreal worlds which allow fantastic or alien possibilities.
One way of checking the importance of a role’s gender would be to ask
whether that role could be filled by a character of either gender and
whether the experience would be different because of it.
Gilligan (1982) states that ‘female identity revolves around inter-
connectedness and relationship’ while male identity hinges on ‘separa-
tion and independence.’ This would suggest that a female character is
inherently different from a male character and good role-play would
require considering this in the execution of the role.
However, good role-play is dependent on other factors besides gen-
der and the full character concept should include whether the charac-
ter follows the stereotypical male or female model; whether they are a
character of social conventions or an independent who laughs at such
constraints. So a complete character can be of any gender and can be
defined as either following the dogma of that gender or diverging from
the social expectations of it. For any role-play, there is one point worth
considering when creating a persona: whether any of the characteris-
tics (including gender, race and religion) exist simply as a short-cut to
providing an identity for the character. Is the character their sex, or is
their sex part of the character?
Sexual identity includes sexual inclination and a worthwhile digres-
sion is the use of homosexual and bisexual characters. In the gaming
community, many people state that they have never known someone
to play a homosexual character. However many games do not involve
sexual issues and, unlike gender, sexual inclination can be invisible un-
less a romantic or sexual situation arises. Thus sexual inclination, as
a subset of gender study, is complicated by not only the player mo-
tives and character concepts, but by the actual role-playing situation
involved. Likewise, in business role-playing, a scenario of a Bank Man-

ager during an interview will not raise the issue of homosexuality unless
it is part of the test. So the present debate of cross-gender role-playing
can include the topic of sexual inclination, with the added caveat that in
many cases, one’s inclination may be moot and not manifest within the
role-play. When it manifests, as with any character trait, it should be ex-
amined both for accuracy in presentation and use within the scenario.
This returns us to the main theme and leads to an optimal expla-
nation. The approach of cross-gender role-playing should require an
internally consistent character concept in order to avoid inaccurate
presentation and stereotyping from the onset. It then requires good
role-playing skills to present this internal view (the character concept)
to the other participants of the role-play, who only have the role-play-
er’s verbal, written and/or visual cues to read from. Role-play exempli-
fies communication theories such as those mentioned by Porter and
Samovar (1985), that:
Objects, events, experiences and feelings have a particular label or name
solely because a community of people have arbitrarily decided to so
name them. Language serves both as a mechanism for communication
and as a guide to social reality.
So the role is not only rooted in the character concept and how it is en-
acted, but also in the societal setting within which the role-play occurs.
In short, the environment also determines the accuracy and success of
the role.
Environment includes the person (if any) refereeing the scenario
and the other participants. Through this group interaction, the con-
ventional elements of setting, plot and conflict are created. Clearly a
first stumbling block when dealing with gender issues in a group is the
maturity of the individuals. This helps determine how willing they are
to look at character concepts rather than dwelling on superficial details
(such as gender) and also how free the setting is for exploration of is-
sues that may be only tangentially related to the scenario. Also, strong
bias by the other participants will result in negative feedback for any
role so unlucky as to go against their views. These factors determine the
hostility (or threat rating) of the setting and are generally present from
the onset of the scenario. A good example was related by two female
role-play gamers on the Strange Aeons list, Eve and Deb, who wrote
The DM [referee] had never played with women before. He expected
that we would run from combat, avoid conflict and pick up all the male
characters . . . there was definitely pressure regarding expectations versus
reality.
Thus even without malice, a gender-biased referee (or co-players) can
transmit that bias to the setting and make gender roles (and gender
exploration) unsatisfying.
To a lesser degree, the actual role-playing system also has an ef-
fect on the success of the endeavour: this again raises the issue of the

relevance of the persona’s gender to the overall concept of the persona
and, we add, to the scenario and group as a whole. The worst excess
would be an individual interested in exploring the nature of gender
identity amid a group gathered for an entirely different purpose (for
example, practising interviews, or solving a mystery). In this case, the
dominating player is in a hostile environment, not for gender reasons,
but for egotistical reasons. We can safely ignore this aspect, by assum-
ing that anyone reading this article has a good sense of judgement on
4
the time and place to develop character. For a scenario focused on a
single time-constrained goal, for example, explorations into character
may not be welcomed by the group. Such ‘goal-playing’ situations arise
within otherwise open group scenarios, being moments when the indi-
vidual must submerge their own goals to better work with the team.
Beyond the initial threat rating of the scenario, irrevocable biases
by the other participants and inappropriate timing in exploring these
details, one last, subtle factor is the possibility of no feedback at all.
Even in a friendly setting with good character concepts, positive and
negative feedback might not appear due either to lack of perception by
the other role-players, or irrelevancy of gender to the group’s interac-
tions. An example of such a situation would be in LambdaMOO, where
the interaction takes place in a variety of self-created environments and
gender is an arbitrary label that can be set for the character, considered
more a part of the scenery than a defining characteristic. Ultimately,
feedback is necessary in the role-play process and for gender issues,
determines the success of any gender identity exploration.
It is such explorations that are one of the fundamental reasons for
engaging in role-play. Cross-gender role-playing is a study which in-
volves communications theory, social preconceptions, gender biases
and group dynamics. For all these complicated issues, however, it is
still ‘play’. Thus it offers a dynamic forum for exploring identity issues
where mistakes are not terminal and new ideas can always be tried.
It encourages serious study into the issues as well as allowing casual
exploration. The potential for crossing (and resolving) gender roles
within role-play exceeds that in the real world and opens new vistas for
personal interactions of all sorts.
Sandy Antunes is an astronomer by day (ironically enough) and a freelance

writer by night. Sandy’s most recent work is “Miskatonic University” for Chao-
sium. Net denizens are free to send email to ‘sandy@clark.net’ or visit ‘http://
ftp.clark.net/pub/sandy/’
Notes

1
For this article, the anecdotal evidence was largely collected from a role-playing
mailing list on the Internet, named ‘Strange Aeons’, a mixed-gender list discuss-
ing role-playing games, refereeing, gender issues and Call of Cthulhu.
2
To be precise, they talk of ‘the related subcultures of role-playing games and
electronic boarding’ and discuss the ‘GeekFests’ held by their survey sample of
young adolescents.
3
Yet rapport is required for good role-play, which could lead to a debate on
whether good role-playing is inherently a ‘feminine’ process!
4
This is appropriated from Miss Manners, to wit, that it is always better to assume
the reader is knowledgeable, and then remind them of the details anyway.
Bibliography
Gilligan, C., In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development,
1982, Harvard Univ. Press.
Kaplan, N. and Farrell, E., Weavers of Webs: A Portrait of Young Women on the Net,
1994, V2, 3.
Porter, R.E. and Samovar, L. A., ‘Approaching Intercultural Communication’,
1985, in Intercultural Communication: A Reader, Wadsworth.
Tannen, D., You Just Don’t Understand: Women and men in conversation, 1990, Wil-
liam Morrow.

The Blind Gamesmaster
Are role-playing games evolving?
By Peter Tamlyn
Greg Porter’s taxonomy of RPGs in Inter*Action # 1 raised a number of

interesting questions. Are role-playing games evolving? If so, what are
the forces that are shaping that process? To what different purposes are
role-playing games being put? How do the components of a role-play-
ing game differ depending on the intended purpose of the game? The
last question is worth a series of articles all by itself, subsuming within
it such interesting diversions as ‘how does one devise game mechan-
ics to promote story-telling?’ and ‘is a heroic background helpful in a
therapeutic setting?’ I won’t try to deal with that sort of thing here. The
other questions, however, are more closely circumscribed and are all in-
timately connected with the major themes of Greg’s article. Hopefully,
by addressing them, we will learn something about the nature of role-
playing games. And there is not much point in devising a taxonomy
unless you have that sort of aim in mind. Classification for its own sake
is purely the domain of librarians and museum curators.
The central thesis of Greg’s article was that there had been an evo-
lution of role-playing games throughout their admittedly short history
and that, in examining this, we could discern distinct generations of
games which had succeeded one another. The implication was that they
had done so by natural selection and that the later generations were
therefore better fitted to survive than those that came before. Before
we can assess the truth of this proposition, we should first remind our-
selves of the meaning of evolution. It is, after all, one of the most widely
misunderstood theories in the whole of science. (Try reading some of
the ‘rebuttals’ of evolution produced by extreme religious groups if you
want some examples.)
Richard Dawkins is one of the foremost modern apologists for Dar-
1
winism and his book, The Blind Watchmaker, is an excellent introduc-
tion to the theory and to the controversy surrounding it. Fortunately,
all we need to establish here is the meaning of natural selection and,
in particular, to distinguish it from simple generational change. In any
reproductive process involving two sexes there is a mixing of chromo-
somes from the parents to form the offspring and thus a variation be-

tween generations. In itself, this is not evolution. That only happens
when, over a number of generations, certain offspring find themselves
better able to cope with their environment than others and as a conse-
quence, are more likely to breed. This results in only the advantageous
traits being passed on to the next generation and a consequent overall
improvement of the gene pool.
Of course we cannot claim that role-playing games breed in the same
way that animals do, though the cross-fertilization of ideas between de-
signers resulting from their reading each other’s work could provide a
very similar process. To prove that evolution has taken place, we need
to show that external conditions have had an impact on the survival of
role-playing games and that succeeding generations have, on balance,
been born with the traits that assisted that survival. Now presumably
by survival we mean longevity. If evolution is taking place we might
therefore assume that Basic D&D had some pretty good genes, which it
passed on to its phenomenally successful child, AD&D. We might also
conclude that Call of Cthulhu had some significantly useful genes and
scratch our heads as to why they were not passed on to any subsequent
Chaosium games. It begins to sound a bit far-fetched, does it not?
One of the reasons that the metaphor doesn’t work is that the forces
acting on games and determining their success or failure are economic,
cultural and demographic. For the most part these do not encourage
the development of game quality that we, as supposedly serious role-
playing gamers, might want. Let us start with economics and see what
happens to a role-playing game when it is viewed as just another com-
mercial product.
2
In his recent book, Foundations of Corporate Success, John Kay
describes four major areas in which a company or product can gain a
significant advantage over its competitors. These are:
• Innovation;
• Reputation;
• Architecture;
• Strategic Assets.
Innovation is the easiest to understand and deploy, but also the
easiest to lose because ideas are readily imitable. Shadowrun is a good
example of a game which has had considerable success through in-
novation—the big idea being to combine the familiar fantasy elements
of D&D with the newly fashionable cyberpunk genre. The result is dif-
ferent, attractive and approachable to a large proportion of the target
audience, leading to high sales and longevity.
By reputation, Professor Kay means the sort of image enjoyed by
the likes of Rolls Royce. This tends to be more enduring although, as
we have seen with IBM, it can still be lost. The immediate reaction is
to put AD&D in this category because it is so well known but then so is

Ford; would you buy a car from them in preference to BMW? A better
candidate would be Call of Cthulhu which has, for a long time, been the
system of choice for supposedly ‘serious’ role-playing gamers. I remem-
ber in particular a panel discussion at a convention in Warwick in which
all four members of the panel, when asked to name their favourite sys-
tem, gave the tentacled one the thumbs up.
Architecture has to do with the organization of the firm and its
ability to operate effectively in a commercial environment. In role-play-
ing game terms, the most significant point here is distribution: a large
company like Lorimar has much greater access to shops than a small
one such as Chaosium. Hence AD&D turns up in chain stores, whereas
Pendragon can only be found in specialist shops. A possible advantage
for a firm in this area might be a particularly well organized and ef-
ficient network of contributors, although as most firms seem to try to
work this way anyway it makes little difference. Having a good core
system, like Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing, from which new games can
be developed quickly, is also advantageous. Unfortunately, if you use
it too much, people may start to find it boring and go with innovation
instead.
Finally there are strategic assets. The sort of thing that Kay is think-
ing of here is ownership of some advantage that is very difficult or im-
possible to copy. A natural monopoly is a good example, but a well
entrenched brand name can act in the same way. For example, it would
take a behavioural shift of significant proportions for people to stop
calling vacuum cleaners ‘hoovers’. The Hoover company gains signifi-
cant benefits from this. In exactly the same way, it will be a long time
before people outside the hobby stop referring to role-playing games
as ‘dungeons and dragons’. It has become a generic term and someone
who knows nothing about the field may well assume that there is noth-
ing else. Gary Gygax still has a lot to answer for!
The interesting thing about these categories is that very few of them
actually help to promote the quality of the product. Innovation may
arise from a good new game mechanic, but it could equally be just
catching on to a new trend. Actually I believe that the innovations in
the Shadowrun background are of value (though I don’t have space to
justify that here), but the game mechanics, although different, are an
awful mess. It is a worrying thought that designers, in continually try-
ing to be different, may have exhausted the stock of sensible mecha-
nisms and may now be left using the dross.
Reputation should be based on a quality product, but it is very much
up to the firm to maintain that high standard and a class act like CoC
is hard to follow. Architecture can contribute, but equally it can relate
purely to commercial organization. As for strategic assets, they are of-
ten unearned, unjustifiable and no guarantee of product quality at all.

Indeed, the company which has such an asset often does not need to
bother about quality.
We can see from the above that the economic forces working on
a game do not necessarily promote what we would regard as quality
products. Thus, even if role-playing games are evolving, we would not
expect them to be becoming better games as a result; they would just be
better products, or perhaps products produced by better firms.
I mentioned two other environmental influences on role-playing
games: culture and demographics. By culture I mean that the role-
playing games industry exists within the ambit of the US media circus,
a system driven primarily by Hollywood. The principal effect of this
is that games come and go with media fashions. Games like Star Wars,
Judge Dredd, Conan the Barbarian and even the recent spate of vampire
games have come into existence, not because past events had suggested
these as likely themes, but because they represent areas of media inter-
est which were currently ripe for exploitation. How we have managed
to avoid a Jurassic Park game is a mystery to me. Game mechanics may
have evolved, although good designers will tune their mechanics to fit
the background, but the choice of background was forced by a transient
external event. Only Star Wars, which seems to have enduring popular-
ity, seems to have derived long-term benefit from this.
The demographic element is to do with the nature of the target
market for the bulk of role-playing games. For some time now it has ap-
parently been a marketing axiom at Games Workshop that their prin-
cipal audience is boys between the ages of about 12 (before which they
are too young to cope with the complexity) and 14 (at which age they
3
discover girls and motorbikes). One of the effects of this is that their
entire audience turns over in the space of two years. In such an environ-
ment there is actually no need to progress the product or worry about
customer loyalty. As long as you keep pumping out the same sort of
stuff, subtly modified each year to take account of the latest teen obses-
sions, you can’t go wrong. Such circumstances would suggest that little
or no evolution will take place because there are few factors requiring
it. Only a more efficient competitor is likely to threaten such a luxuri-
ous niche. So it would seem that there are few reasons why role-playing
games should evolve and if they do, little hope that any such process
would make them better role-playing games.
But wait. We have been assuming all along that we know what we
mean by ‘better’. Better for whom, or for what? I have assumed a value
judgement that ‘better’ does not mean simple commercial success be-
cause I felt that the majority of readers would agree with me. But there
are a whole host of ways in which we could define ‘better’ because peo-
ple use role-playing in many different ways. I’m sure I won’t be able to
come up with an exhaustive list, but how about these for starters:

4
Role-playing as a game. This was espoused by Lew Pulsipher and
5
Carl Sargent and is what Gary Gygax still seems to feel in his heart de-
spite his valiant attempts to come to terms with the creative side of the
hobby. People who use role-playing games in this way are little different
from wargamers, chess players and puzzle fanatics.
Role-playing as simulation. I am going to draw a very narrow defi-
nition by restricting us to attempts to produce exact reproductions of
actual history or be as close as possible to a scientifically feasible future.
Chivalry & Sorcery and parts of Pendragon fit this category neatly, as does
Traveller, especially when played by engineering students.
Role-playing as art. I had to put this one in or the editor would be
6
upset. I suspect, however, that much of what he sees as role-playing in
the story-telling mould is in fact, role-playing as entertainment rather
than as art. The distinction I have in mind here is something like the
difference between Beethoven and the Beatles. Although Lennon, in
particular, certainly became aware of his role as an artist, I don’t think
that anyone would claim that ‘She Loves You’ or ‘Help’ were conscious-
ly intended as great art even if, in retrospect, they form ideal icons of
1960s Britain. Most story-based role-playing is of this ilk. Some of it,
like the Beatles, may one day be seen as worthy of artistic consideration,
7
but much of it is far closer to the Bay City Rollers. This is not to say
that most role-players are bad actors—it is simply that most of them do
not want to have to put in that level of effort. They want the game to
entertain them, not to have to do the entertaining themselves.
Role-playing as a learning mechanism. There is a lot of overlap
with the simulation area here, I think, although it must be possible to
use role-playing games to teach things other than history.
Role-playing as therapy. Something I know little about and which
probably has completely different requirements to all of the above.
Each one of these approaches to the use of role-playing is perfectly
valid in its own right. Each one uses different techniques and each one
places different requirements on the designer. For example, a game-
player requires a certain complexity in the mechanics to allow room
for the use of skill; a simulationist requires that the mechanics exactly
reproduce their real world counterparts; the artist probably holds that
any mechanism is a distraction from the story. To attempt to say that
one game is ‘better’ than another without considering the use or uses
for which the games were designed and the purpose to which they are
being put is woefully misleading.
Of course, one cannot criticize a taxonomy article without being
asked to produce a scheme of one’s own. As I have said, I believe that
taxonomies are futile except for the learning process that we go through
in creating them. I also believe that role-playing games are too complex
to classify under a single system. The schema outlined above for deter-

mining the purpose of a role-playing system is a perfectly valid option
for the systems as a whole. But game mechanics can still be classified
in the manner that Greg attempted (‘D6 versus D100’, ‘rolled charac-
ters versus designed characters’) and backgrounds can and always have
been classified by the fictional genre to which they relate (fantasy, hor-
ror, cyberpunk, space opera and so on). To attempt to create an overall
classification is simply to obscure the rich variation of structure and
purpose that make role-playing games so fascinating. Why bother?
Pete Tamlyn bought one of the first copies of D&D to be shipped into Britain and
has been fascinated by role-playing games ever since. He has written extensively
on the subject for magazines and has had various gaming products published.
His most recent work is the Advanced Fighting Fantasy system written in col-
laboration with Marc Gascoigne.
Notes
1
The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins, Penguin, 1986.
2
Foundations of Corporate Success, John Kay, OUP, 1993.
3
I don’t know if it is official, but you only have to talk to them for a while to real-
ize that it is the way that they think.
4
That famous article in White Dwarf #1.
5
Personal discussion having revealed that neither of us has the slightest interest
in what the other thinks of as a role-playing game.
6
The editor would like to point out that this is not entirely true.
7
For the benefit of American readers who were hopefully spared this blot on
Britain’s proud pop tradition, the Rollers were a seventies teeny-bop band who
were so awful that only the British would have (a) bought their records and (b)
remembered them.

The Nihilist Role-Player
by Simon Beaver
The question of morality is one which has dogged role-playing in re-

cent years. Gamers have found themselves asking questions such as:
‘Are role-playing games immoral?’; ‘Are some games more moral than
others?’ and so on. The aim of this article is to argue firstly that all
games can be shown to have a moral basis of one sort or another, and
secondly that these questions are essentially flawed, as they assume a
moral baseline that does not and cannot exist.
It is not my intention to go over the tired old arguments against
role-playing generally, as propounded by the Moral Majority and oth-
er groups for the close-minded. The arguments against them are well
known. What does deserve attention is the in-fighting which occurs
within the hobby, alleging that certain games or genres are immoral.
The most recent targets I have seen discussed are Twilight: 2000 and Cy-
berpunk. It has been argued, for example in Allen Varney’s article in the
first issue of this magazine, that these games are undesirable because
they contain no moral background with which players can interact and
create an atmosphere in which normally anti-social acts become an ac-
ceptable norm. The same charge has generally been levelled at most
games at some point in their existence.
All games have a moral framework, but these frameworks differ
widely and are sometimes not obvious at first glance. In certain games,
the moral framework is an essential part of the game system. Games
such as Pendragon or Bushido make character advancement dependent
on adherence to an idealized value system. Characters who do not be-
have honourably suffer the consequences. A less obvious example is
Star Wars, where characters face the sanction of Dark Side points for
transgressions against the moral value of The Force. Star Wars is ar-
guably the most strictly moral game of all, forcing players to become
‘Saints In Space’, kind to children and small furry animals, both of
which abound. There is almost no moral manoeuvring room at all.
More commonly, games will have an implied morality. This is true
of nearly all fantasy games, where there is an underlying assumption
that in a world of ‘good versus evil’, players will be on the side of light
and righteousness. Games such as AD&D may allow characters to have
a Chaotic Evil alignment, but a glance at the monster lists and charac-

ter classes makes it obvious that this is the exception to the rule. Most
published scenarios involve players clearing out nests of orcs, Broo or
evil priests, often helping a bunch of struggling villagers or rescuing a
damsel in distress, before heading home in time for tea and muffins.
There may be financial or magical inducements to dangle before the
morally recalcitrant, but these still exist alongside the ‘good vs evil’ tra-
dition of heroic fantasy.
The much maligned Twilight: 2000 also fits neatly within this cat-
egory. I am always surprised at those who claim that this game is im-
moral. In my view it has a very clear and very obvious moral basis. That
basis is the American military culture. Watch any Hollywood war film
and you will see it for yourself. It is a moral code that can be summa-
rized easily. Men stay together in the face of adversity; we never leave
our people behind; politicians are inherently untrustworthy and just
send us out to get killed, and so on. This is a very cogent and compre-
hensive moral and ethical code. You may not agree with it, you may
hate elements of it passionately, but it is still a moral code, and it is
implicit in the whole setting of Twilight: 2000.
The arguments levelled at Twilight: 2000 might, at first glance, be
more readily applied to that sadly neglected game Aftermath. Aftermath
was the definitive post-holocaust game, allowing players to take the role
of any character in a variety of post-holocaust environments. As play-
ers could be anyone they liked, there was no instant morality imposed
upon them. However, the rules themselves contained a very cogent dis-
cussion of the whole thorny problem of post-holocaust morality and
offered an impassioned plea for some form of moral standards to sur-
vive. Examples of play were offered to show how such a moral code can
enhance role-playing and help develop character. A similar discussion
penned by the same author, Edward Simbalist, can be found in Chivalry
and Sorcery, another fondly remembered game from the late Fantasy
Games Unlimited. This piece is far too long to quote but I commend it
to anyone interested in morality in role-playing. Simbalist argues that
in order for games to work, a moral order must exist. The gold the
players fought so hard for only has value if they can spend it. They can
only spend it if a society exists in which it is a tradable commodity. Such
a society can only exist if it has rules and thus a moral basis.
Without doubt, the most plausible candidates for the title of an im-
moral game are those within the science-fiction genre. Science-fiction
is traditionally the home of the morally bankrupt. Bands of hardened
gun-crazed mercenaries, flying around the universe in their almost cer-
tainly stolen spaceship, blasting everything that gets in their way with
cries of ‘Eat hot plasma, alien weirdo!’ This stereotypical view, however,
is not borne out by the actual game systems. Traveller offered, at least
until GDW decided to demolish the Imperium, a detailed and cogent

society with a range of moral orders. The material on aliens was partic-
ularly well done and offered complex moral values with which players
would have to comply if they wished to get on with the alien in ques-
tion. The background for Space Opera was much less detailed, but did
show different cultures with different ethical standards.
In moral terms, the most difficult game is undoubtedly Cyberpunk. It
presents a dark future in which casual violence is commonplace and be-
trayal and exploitation are part of the natural order. However, a deeper
examination shows complex moral issues are present. Cyberpunk has a
variety of underlying moral judgments. The big, exploitative corpora-
tions are nearly always presented as the bad guys. The whole concept of
being a ‘cyberpunk’ is based on a struggle for personal liberty, a desire
to escape the confines of an oppressive society. It is striving against
those who oppress and confine others. The heroes of the cyberpunk
genre are those who defy authority and assert their own individuality.
Whilst circumstances often require this expression to include violence,
Cyberpunk characters do not usually seek violence as an end in itself.
There is undoubtedly a strong element of greed and selfishness in Cy-
berpunk, but it is forced on characters by the circumstances, and is still
subject to moral issues. One of the quotes from characters contained
within the rules is an account of someone who is offered a fortune to
handle a drugs shipment. The character rejects the offer and shoots
the pusher. The reason is that his brother died of an overdose as a child
and the character is very touchy about drugs as a result.
The moral content of the rules to a given game are, however, only
one part of the equation. In my opinion, all games have a moral con-
tent because they are a social interaction between individuals. In order
for any social grouping to function it has to have a set of rules. This is
particularly true in role-playing where all sorts of tensions and neuroses
can be brought out, causing trouble between those who otherwise get
on well each other. Role-playing can open all sorts of psychological cans
of worms, and often needs more strict rules than other social activities.
Moral judgments are made, often unconsciously, about what is accepta-
ble behaviour. Personal beliefs impinge on most characters. Characters
have a moral code on how they deal with each other, if on nothing else.
The morality of the players is reflected in the morality of their game,
since the game is an extension of themselves. Although in some fields,
usually violence, the view of morality alters, in others it nearly always
remains the same. I have yet to see or hear of a game where one of the
characters was a child molester, for example.
The logical progression from this is to recognize that morality is
by definition subjective. When a person says, for example, ‘I think Twi-
light: 2000 is immoral because it depicts survival at any cost to others’
all this really tells us is that survival at any cost is incompatible with this

person’s personal values. Words like ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ are merely
an expression of your strength of feeling. I strongly approve this course
of action, therefore it is moral; I strongly disapprove of that behav-
iour, therefore I label it as immoral. Attempts to prove the existence of
an objective morality are frequently made, but none stand up to scru-
tiny. Religious groups claim their morality is objective on the grounds
that it is the word of God, but this is clearly only true if you believe in
the deity in question. Attempts to prove an objective morality through
logic have been made, but are convoluted and fail to convince. The
most plausible I have seen is that advanced by Derek Beyleveld and
Roger Brownsword in their book Law As A Moral Judgment. Although
designed for students of jurisprudence, it provides an excellent sum-
mary of rights-based moral philosophy. Their arguments are long and
complex, but can be summarized as being based on the idea that each
individual wishes to enjoy as much freedom as possible, and will there-
fore seek to create a moral framework based around inalienable human
freedoms and rights. Where the argument falls down is in its assump-
tion of universal application. Just because I want to enjoy freedoms,
why does that mean everyone else should? Why can’t I be selfish ?
In this light, every game is equally moral because it reflects the
views of those who designed it and those who play it. Every game or
gaming group has a moral framework within which they operate, social
rules and taboos to which they adhere. Whilst many of these moral
codes will be incompatible and thus lead to conflict, each is inherently
as valid as any other. To continue an earlier example, if someone pro-
duced a role-playing game about child molestation I would deplore
it, I would fight against it on the grounds it brought the hobby into
disrepute, but I could not call it immoral, other than to express my
outrage. Such a game would be based on the designer’s view that child
molestation was morally acceptable, which is no more or less valid than
saying that killing dragons is morally acceptable. It will arouse stronger
passions, and upset many more people, but it is no less valid as it is just
an expression of personal opinion. It would be labelled immoral only
because a great many people would disagree with it.
The question of whether objective morality exists or not is obvi-
ously very complex. Libraries of books have been written on the sub-
ject, and an article such as this can only scratch the surface. However, it
should at least show that the way in which games are branded as moral
or immoral is, in the final analysis, more revealing about an individual’s
personal prejudices than it is about the game in question.
Simon Beaver met the editor of Interactive Fantasy at Convulsion 94, where
they spent several hours arguing about the philosophy of role-playing games.

Through A Mask, Darkly
Connecting players and roles
by James Wallis
‘Role-play’ is a deceptive term. Its meaning seems immediately obvi-

ous; the playing of a role. It appears simple, but few people who use
or talk about role-playing today know that the phrase was originally
coined by J. L. Moreno in the early 1940s, as part of his system of psy-
1
chotherapy. It has since acquired currency in the fields of sociology,
social anthropology, social psychology, psychodrama and simulation
games, and it was not until 1974 and the publication of Gygax and
Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons that it was first specifically connected
with the entertainment field.
Part of the problem is that the words ‘role’ and ‘play’ are both woolly
and open to misinterpretation. Next time you see the term used, ask
yourself whether ‘role’ means an actor’s role, or an aspect of personal-
ity, or a role within a group, structure or society; and whether ‘play’
means acting, pretending, deceiving, interacting with playthings, com-
peting at a sport, or the opposite of ‘work’.
The answer, of course, is that it can mean any of them. The term
‘role-play’ has broadened to cover so many activities and fields that
there is no longer a single example which typifies or exemplifies it.
Even in the 1960s the term was becoming debased through over-gener-
al use, and today it is torn between its traditional uses, computer games
with a first-person visual perspective or some puzzle-solving, tabletop
RPGs, live-action and freeform games, and even the likes of Richard
Garfield’s Magic: the Gathering, the card-game claimed by its more zeal-
ous followers to be a role-playing game, an educational tool, and the
end to all disease, famine, war and suffering.
It is clear that there are different types and styles of role-play (or at
least that different people consider different things to be role-playing),
and these styles of role-play are not tied specifically to the fields in
which they are used. Nevertheless, the same umbrella term is used to
cover them all; they are all considered to be nothing more and nothing
less than ‘role-playing’, and are often treated as being interchangeable
rather than inter-related. The field has spread so widely that ‘role-play’
now means so many things that it means nothing.

This means that when designers come to create new ‘role-playing’
systems, they are working with general concepts rather than with spe-
cifics. There was a move in certain British gaming circles in the late
1980s to dub a style of non-commercial character-based role-play ‘role-
gaming’ but it failed to catch on, perhaps because of its lack of a hard
and fast definition. Trying to create a system for a good ‘role-playing’
experience without first having a reasonably specific definition for it
seems like trying to cook without knowing whether you are making
spitted duck or spotted dick. You cannot begin to move towards a goal
until you know what the goal is; you cannot design a vehicle until you
know what that vehicle is intended to do. Form derives from function.
To create something that is just a ‘role-playing game’ is to create a new
Edsel.
It is reasonably clear that the various forms of role-play did not
evolve from a common ancestor; the term is simply a useful catch-all
way of describing a number of essentially different ideas. Although I am
about to try to draw dividing lines between various fields, I am not try-
ing to say that certain forms of role-playing are better or more worthy
than others; they are simply different. Nevertheless, this article is bi-
ased towards the styles of role-play used in entertainment role-playing,
specifically role-playing games as typified by games like Dungeons &
Dragons and Mark Rein·Hagen’s Vampire. I make no apology for this; it
is my field of specialization. It is also because certain types of role-play
(which I am going to generalize hugely and call ‘unconscious role-play’,
such as the way people switch roles in every-day situations, usually with-
out realizing what they are doing, as described and analysed by Erving
Goffman) are not only best covered by an expert—which I’m not—but
they are also of limited relevance to this article and this journal, which
is about the conscious assumption and manipulation of roles.
Initial sketches
Role-play is a field of shifting sand. No two of its practitioners regard
it or treat it in exactly the same way, but exploring every possible facet
of role-play and giving them all names is clearly a daft idea at this early
stage. Diligent scholars from the first Faculty of Role-Playing and Other
Fatuous Studies may want to follow in my footsteps and define every
variation they can find; and good luck to them. I sincerely hope I will
be dead by that time: the thought of being pestered in my dotage by
graduate students eager to hear my views on the differences between
the Tweetist and Rein·Hagenist schools of character codification does
not bring joy to my throbbing heart. It is enough for now to break the
subject down into broad section headings.
The techniques behind conscious role-playing activities, then, can
most easily be divided into four fields. I refer to these as ‘puppet-play’,
‘type-play’, ‘personality-play’ and ‘mask-play’. None of these exactly

trip off the tongue, but then I am not egotistical enough to assume that
my definitions are instantly going to be accepted and used within the
industry.
The four fields are inter-related but not interchangeable. They can
be arranged along a single axis, depending on the depth of the role-
playing involved in each. This axis also roughly follows the develop-
ment of recreational role-playing games, and may point to what devel-
opments may lie in the future. There is a fifth field, ‘self-play’, meaning
the conscious or unconscious playing of either oneself or a character
based on oneself in a fictional environment. It’s a bit of a paradox since
it can overlap with any or all of the fields. It is the concept that many
of the early concepts of role-play revolve round, and it also intrudes
on the ‘unconscious role-play’ mentioned above. I am saving a proper
discussion of it for a future article, once I’ve read the thick books which
are currently propping my door open, but this article will refer to it oc-
casionally.
Obviously all five terms above are generalizations. Whether role-
playing is an art remains a matter for debate, but it certainly isn’t a
science, and there can be no absolutes or hard definitions. These are
opinions based on observation, nothing more.
Puppet-play
‘Puppet-play’ is the style of role-playing in which players control fic-
tional, created characters but are distanced from those characters; the
degree of interaction or control consists of ‘pulling their strings’. This
is most obvious where a single player—often a newcomer to the idea of
role-play—is trying to control two or more characters at the same time.
As a result, none of the characters have any real individuality or person-
ality; they are defined entirely by what they can do. Anyone who refers
to a character they are playing by its job or function (for example, ‘The
thief will listen at the door, the toughest fighter will stand ready with his
2
sword’) is probably a puppet-player.
Players in a ‘puppet-play’ game situation treat their characters es-
sentially as tools to solve puzzles within the environment of the role-
3
play. To use H. G. Wells’ term, they are ‘Olympians’, standing like
gods over the persons they control. This is often role-play without a
referee or moderator; children’s games involving the creation of im-
aginary societies (e.g. the games that Wells describes in Floor Games or
the kingdoms of Gondal and Angria created by the Brontë family) are
an abstracted form of puppet play. An ostensibly more ‘mature’ version
of the same thing is seen in computer games like Sim City in which the
player is superficially asked to play the role of the city’s mayor, although
this role simply justifies the level of control they have over the game.
The player is not asked to play out or believe in the role at all.
Even when puppet-play takes on a more conventional structure,

with referee, players and characters, it is still essentially about resource
management—the characters, or rather their abilities and equipment,
being treated as the primary resource. There is a clear dividing line
between player and character. If the player is playing a role, it is one
outside, not inside, the game world. The characters have no life out-
side their function, they exist only to do the player’s whim. The player
almost certainly feels little connection to them, and makes no effort to
develop them as believable, fleshed-out personalities. Because of this,
the character is never treated as more than a collection of abilities, and
remains a lifeless and essentially uninteresting protagonist. In Gary Al-
4
len Fine’s analysis of the way that role-players function, based on Erv-
ing Goffman’s theory of frame analysis, a puppet-player never leaves
the second frame—that of ‘player’—to enter the third, deeper frame
of ‘character’. They are constantly aware of the apparatus of the game,
and although they can become enwrapped in the game-play, they rare-
ly lose themselves in the game-world, as other sorts of role-players do.
There is no sense of ‘being there’.
The early editions of Dungeons & Dragons and Ken St Andre’s Tun-
nels & Trolls are examples of published puppet-playing systems, as are
most computer adventure games, particularly graphical adventures.
Goals are set at the beginning of the game, and the characters must
accomplish them or die trying. If they die, the player tries again with a
different or the same character. Although the characters are an impor-
tant part of the game, they are essentially interchangeable; only their
abilities and equipment differ.
Puppet play is generally seen as an unsophisticated form of role-
play, if it is seen as role-play at all. Nevertheless it brings its own re-
wards, usually in the form of simple catharsis: puppet-playing games
are usually equated with games that contain problem-solving and gra-
tuitous physical combat, which bring short-term catharsis, and the tra-
ditional structures of the quest or the search, which bring longer-term
fulfilment. It is an approach which can appeal to younger players not
sure enough of the boundaries of their own identity to be prepared
to take on another: it empowers them and allows them to explore the
strange new fantasy world of the role-play while keeping it at arm’s
length, and without any undue risk of damage to their emotions if the
character should fail or fall.
It is easy to say that puppet-play is the fault of inexperienced play-
ers, but more often it is the fault of the structure of the game. If a game
centres around combat and puzzle-solving, and the only way a charac-
ter develops is by gaining better abilities and equipment, then there is
no incentive to develop any kind of personality or identity for the fic-
tional role. The introduction of interaction can make enormous chang-
es. Even the best single-player computer adventure gives the player lit-

5
tle sense of ‘being there’. However, the most basic multi-user dungeons
allow player characters to interact with the other player characters and
talk in character to something whose responses are more varied than
‘I don’t understand that word’ or ‘You don’t have that item yet’, force
the player to think as the character, framing questions and replies with
their voice and thus spontaneously creating attitudes, emotions and
goals for them, and this pushes the experience into another genre of
role-play.
Type-play
‘Type-play’ is the next step on from puppet play. It is the one that comes
closest to the original term ‘role-play’, in the sense that it involves the
playing of a role, rather than manipulating a role or playing a charac-
ter. However, calling it ‘role-play’ would only confuse things. (In the
same way, ‘personality-play’ might be better called ‘character-play’, but
since ‘character’ is already a loaded word in role-playing, I’ve had to
settle for a less intuitive name.)
‘Type-play’ is based around the idea of playing a character primar-
ily defined by their role, archetype or purpose—in other words, by what
they are rather than who they are. The character may or may not have a
fleshed-out personality but their position and function within the world
of the role-play are defined, stable, and more important. Type-play is
the most common form of role-play, since it is used in simulation gam-
ing and educational/training role-plays. Many recreational role-playing
games use a system of type-play, generally the ones which use a system
of character classes or templates, or which define characters primarily
by their occupation. Sometimes this is intentional on the part of the
designer, and sometimes not.
A character in a simulation game will typically have the briefest of
descriptions, which will cover only their function within the game. Here
are three typical ‘role slips’ from a recent business meeting game, ‘I’ll
Second That’:
You are the vice president in charge of sales and advertising. You report
than you have been able to increase sales by 10% in the last year, but with
no more budget you have been unable to increase into new markets.
You think the company needs to spend more money on updating its
equipment and computerizing its operations. Speak in favour of such
motions.
You are generally an argumentative person. Argue with almost anything,
even contradicting yourself at times.6
These descriptions cover the three basic forms of type-play: a role (VP
sales/advertising), an opinion (technology is good), and a trait (argu-
mentative). They are fairly typical of their sort; this will be all the in-
formation the player has to go on. To someone with a knowledge of

entertainment role-playing games they seem almost unbelievably
one-dimensional, but in fact they reveal one of the crucial differences
between simulation gaming and entertainment role-play. The crucial
word in each description is ‘You’. Simulation games assume that the
player will not create a fictional persona to play the part—as entertain-
ment RPGs do—but that they will augment their normal behaviour
with the details of their role. While playing ‘I’ll Second That’, Jay the
player will not be acting out the part of a fictional VP sales/advertis-
ing, but instead will become ‘Jay in the role of VP sales/advertising’, or
‘Jay advocating modernization’, or ‘Jay being an argumentative twit’.
This is one of the reasons why debriefing periods are a standard part
of simulation games: it takes time to lose the traits of an assumed role,
and colleagues and friends may need to be reassured that Jay’s actual
Luddite tendencies or easy-going nature are still intact.
This is one of the critical divisions in the different forms of role-
play: whether or not the players act within the role-play as themselves or
as fictional characters. It is a far-reaching point: if we follow it properly
we slam head-on into Erving Goffman’s theories of the presentation
of self, which I referred to above and had hoped to avoid in this piece.
Can a player ever truly play themselves within a fictional environment?
Does the addition of new elements of personality or an abrupt change
of environment mean that the player has actually created and is play-
ing a role—a fictionalized version of themselves to match the fictional
setting? Will the player be aware of this role-creation, on a conscious
or unconscious level? Does the loss of personal involvement that may
come with role-creation (as opposed to role-assumption) have any ef-
fect on the way the other players will react to that player in the game,
or on the success of the role-play as an education or training aid?
These are questions which I can’t answer, and which I suspect can only
be answered on a case-by-case, player-by-player, game-by-game basis.
Recreational role-playing games are, for the most part, much more
straightforward in this respect: they assume that the players will be cre-
ating and playing fictional characters. Clear divisions are drawn be-
tween player and character; actions or sayings are made while either ‘in
character’ or ‘out of character’, and if a character does something of-
fensive within the game, only in extreme circumstances will that reflect
badly on the player. Although the players are striving to make their
roles as imaginative and immediate as possible, the division between
player and role is almost always understood.
I’m straying from the point. The point is that simulation games
are almost by their nature type-playing games. Rather than imagining
a fictional world through the senses of a fictional character, the par-
ticipants observe the world with their own senses and preconceptions.
The fact that it is the participant who is being asked to make the deci-

sions within the game, instead of the character (or rather, the player
working through the character) tends to amplify rather than disguise
the fact that the game is a game—the players are not given the chance
to immerse themselves in the experience, once again being held back
in Fine’s ‘player’ frame. It’s possible that this reinforces the learning
experience of such games, since it is the players rather than their fic-
tional role who experience the effect of their decisions. The question of
whether it is more useful to have an first-hand experience in an unreal-
istic environment or a second-hand experience in a vivid environment
is something for later discussion, probably over several cups of coffee at
the next ISAGA conference.
Back to the point, or at least a point. Type-play is the only form of
role-play that does not necessarily need a ‘character’. (Self-play does
use a character—the player’s own.) Type-play with characters generally
only exists in recreational role-play, and the character is almost always
secondary to the type.
Types, or roles, are very important within fictional environments
because they give the player a sense of position and direction. A type
cannot be regarded as a character in its own right. Just as the descrip-
tions of the three roles from ‘I’ll Second That’ tell us nothing about
how their players should behave if the setting were to change from a
business meeting, types such as D&D’s fighters and magic-users tell
us nothing about the individual within the role. Even the more mod-
ern style of RPG character, based on archetypes, templates, careers or
clans rather than job descriptions (Greg Costikyan’s Star Wars: The role-
playing game was the first to make specific use of this, carrying on from
George Lucas’s use of Joseph Campbell’s work in the creation of the
eponymous film) do not describe individuals.
Most role-playing games require a player to know not only who
their character is but also how they fit into the game-world: in other
words, their role. Certain types of game, particularly games based in
sword-and-sorcery settings (which themselves are heavily dependent
on archetypes derived from myths, folklore and fairy-tales) will put the
character’s type above its personality. This helps to give the players a
sense of the background world and how they fit within it; their role is
already defined for them. As in ‘I’ll Second That’, the roles play a major
part in defining the environment.
In RPGs where the characters are not given a particular role to fill
(e.g. Jonathan Tweet’s Over The Edge), players find it harder to enter
the background, because they must carve their own niche within it—
and at the time they create their characters, they probably do not know
what those characters will be expected to do. RPG characters all have
roles within games, whether explicitly stated in the rules or not, and
players must understand the roles their characters are going to have to

fill. In Call of Cthulhu by Sandy Peterson, for example, characters can
have almost any career, but they all have the same role: investigators
of the occult and eldritch. Defining characters by their role can also
7
be taken too far: TSR’s First Quest refers to the pre-generated player
characters not by their names but by their character classes—in effect,
their job titles—even in dialogue between them, and as a result the
characters never expand beyond the one-dimensional.
The use of types and archetypes also has a more deep-rooted effect
on the way that players relate to their characters. In traditional story-
telling an archetype is simply a recognizable figure within the genre,
but in role-playing games it must be more: a shell which the player can
not only identify with but can possess and animate. The type-play char-
acter is more than the player’s representative in the game world, it is
their senses and their limbs as well. The player is inside the character’s
head—but since the character’s personality is defined in sketchy terms,
the character often becomes the player or a facet of the player’s person-
ality, projected onto the archetype, and with the abilities and attitudes
of the role. Even when this does not happen, role-players tend to iden-
tify more strongly with type-play characters than with other role-played
characters, mostly due to the active link between player and character,
and the personal investment that the player has made in allowing part
of themselves to become part of the character.
As a result, when a type-play character ‘dies’ within the game, the
player is likely to feel the loss much more strongly than a puppet-player
(who has lost a resource) or a personality-player (who has lost a fictional
creation). This, coupled with the fact that type-play is one of the early
stages which an initiate into role-playing will pass through, can make
the loss of such a character a very traumatic experience, and one that
should not be underestimated.
Personality-play
It would seem that if type-play is a degree more sophisticated and in-
volving than puppet-play, then personality-play ought to be another
step in the same direction. In some ways it is, but in many ways it is less
involving and less intense than type-play.
‘Personality-play’ is the process of creating and playing the role of a
fully developed fictional character; the sort of character who might not
seem out of place in a novel or drama. It is the closest that role-play
comes to conventional acting: the nature and personality of the charac-
ter are often determined before gameplay starts, and the players tailor
their style of play to fit with those personalities.
This type of play is roughly where the role-playing game industry
is now. Many RPGs have rules systems which encourage the creation
of characters with well-defined personalities, advantages and disad-
vantages, quirks and habits, ambitions and goals, a history, relatives

and friends. However, the player is free to ignore these character facets
once they have been written down and most games, as written, do not
foster a style of play which encourages characters to develop and exer-
cise the potentials of such a character, even if they claim they do.
Finding the middle ground between pure type-play and pure per-
sonality-play is a hard task for game designers. On the one hand, play-
ers need to have a idea of how their character fits into the game world,
and to empathize with them, or getting into the feel of the game will
be hard; on the other, the most interesting role-playing characters are
the ones with detailed personalities and histories, yet it is only possible
to get into the role of such a character over a long period of time; it
can’t be done cold. Many games bolt personality details onto a system
which is essentially designed for type-play, but these details will often
be ignored by players and referee alike.
Which is a shame, because it is interesting characters that create
interesting games. Good fiction and good drama is not about two-di-
mensional protagonists wandering around a generic plot, it is based
around identity and personality; the interesting battles are inner ones
against preconceptions and principles, not external ones against mon-
sters. If the protagonists have no real identity, then the stories that are
built around them will never be more than scenarios which could have
happened to anybody.
Interesting, in-depth characterization cannot be created, it must
develop and evolve during play in a process which sometimes takes
years, as the player explores and develops the limits of the character’s
personality, and creates a library of experiences and references which
define their past and present—character development is an existen-
tial process. Even then, only the player may understand the character’s
motivations and desires, since only they can see inside the character’s
mind. The rest of the group may understand the character’s depth be-
cause they have seen it develop over a long period, but to external ob-
servers there may seem little difference between a type-play character
and a personality-play character. If I was to read two pages of a novel
or see five minutes of a film, I probably wouldn’t think there was much
in-depth characterization in it either. As mentioned elsewhere in this
issue, role-play is not an art-form conducive to an external audience,
and their views can cheerfully be ignored.
Personality-play flourishes best in game-worlds that have clear and
detailed backgrounds. This, to an extent, is true of all the types of role-
play so far discussed: the style of the background will encourage not
only the emergence of certain types and styles of character, but the
domination of a particular type of role-play; one will naturally want
to play a character who fits into the background. There is a general
perception that role-playing has become more in-depth and analytical

over time: the early systems had primitive rules, primitive backgrounds
and encouraged puppet-play; the early to mid-1980s saw a domination
of more detailed game environments and a thriving growth of type-
play games; and these days the industry has reached its zenith, with
great personality-playing games like . . . um . . .
This is, of course, nonsense. Dungeons & Dragons was published in
1974, and in its original form was a puppet-play game with no back-
ground setting bar a mish-mash of images from myth, folklore and
popular fantasy, and a clunky rules system. A year later TSR (as Tacti-
cal Studies Rules) published Empire of the Petal Throne by Professor M.
A. R. Barker, with similarly clunky rules but set in a game-world which
remains among the most elaborate and detailed ever published. Even
though the first edition does not contain the clans, legions, conspira-
cies and wars that give the world of Tékumel much of its flavour, and
the emphasis is still heavily on the combative aspect of the game, its
character generation and background force a new player character to
understand that they are a part of the world of Tékumel, and must
live by its rules. Once the character is settled within the background,
the additional details—clan, temple, family ties—all encourage further
development of the character.
Whether EPT is a type-play or a personality-play game is debatable.
In its current form as Adventures In Tékumel it is certainly the latter; its
original edition is probably the former, at least as written. And this is
not to say that EPT cannot be played in a simple dungeon-bashing
style, because there are elements of that as well, but the design of the
system steers players away from them. The exact style of EPT is not
important here; it is simply an example of an important principle.
Background breeds character. In a cartoon universe, it is difficult to
be anything except a cartoon. If a game-world can be made to live and
breathe, then—well, you get the idea.
This may, incidentally, serve as a possible explanation for the wave
of dark, dystopian role-playing games dominating the market at pre-
sent: a false equation between a world that is grim, and a world that is
properly developed. A dystopian background may force player charac-
ters to come to terms with the game-world faster than one that is more
up-beat because most of the game’s setting and plots will derive from
the fact that it’s a nasty place. This may give the players a greater sense
of their characters being involved but does not necessarily lead to bet-
ter role-playing or character development, merely the illusion of it.
The interaction between player and character in a personality-play
situation is an interesting one. Unlike type-play, where the character
is essentially the player in a different body, a personality-play charac-
ter will have a identity of its own, one that is essentially separate from
the player’s. The player is not manipulating the character in the way

a puppet-player would, but there is a clear distinction between player
and character, and the player’s emotional attachment to the character
tends to be lower because they can appreciate the character’s role as
an individual within the game world, rather than as their avatar. Such
characters are treated as well-loved friends, and are occasionally de-
scribed as having a life of their own—a player will have the character do
something that they (the player) know is foolish or dangerous, because
they believe it is what the character would do in that situation. The
death of a personality-based character is still an unpleasant event for
the player, but they can accept it, and are sometimes inclined to offer it
if it seems dramatically important, or within the character’s nature. For
example, a heroic personality-play character might offer to stay behind
and face certain death by holding off the enemy while the other charac-
ters make their getaway. It is conceivable that a puppet-play character
might do the same, but in that case it would be a strategic decision, not
a supreme offer of self-sacrifice. A type-play character would not make
such an offer unless its player was also of a heroic or suicidal bent; while
such characters may have few feelings of actual heroism, they do at least
have an instinct for self-preservation.
It could be argued that players grow willing to have their charac-
ters do irrational things and sacrifice themselves for the greater good
not because they’ve experienced a quantum shift in their role-playing
technique but because, having been through the trauma of losing one
or two of their favourite RPG characters, they get used to it. Basically,
that’s true. The death of a much-loved character is a tremendous kick
in the stomach, not just to the player but to the other members of the
group: there is a genuine sense of loss, real emotions are touched. It’s
hard to pin down what motivates a player to move from one style of
role-play to another, from over-personal involvement in a character to
the personality-based form described in this section, but the death of a
type-play character is likely to be high on the list. The player, wishing
to avoid another such personal injury, initiates new characters more
distant from themselves, and thus creates the space and potential for
these characters to develop independent personalities.
There is no question that there is a growth in maturity and depth of
character from puppet-play through type-play to personality-play. The
same scale also shows that as we move along from the basic principles
of role-play, not only does the intensity of the role-playing increase,
but so do the complexity and depth of the characters, the detail and
consistency of the game world, and the intricacy and subtlety of the
stories told. It seems obvious to me that all of these factors have to work
together within the environment of the game; increasing one is impos-
sible without increasing the others, and if a game system attempts to
increase depth of characterization at the expense of, say, story range,

or vice versa, then it will fail. It is only by integrating and harmonizing
all the elements within a game system that designers will begin to move
towards the next generation of games.
Mask play
And what of the future? Will personality-play systems just become more
and more refined, offering more potential for mature, well-rounded
characters in challenging, evocative stories, or is there another devel-
opment on the horizon?
There is another identifiable form of role-play, although I don’t be-
lieve it’s ever been described as such. I call it ‘mask-play’ and I have to
admit that it may not seem immediately relevant, or indeed credible.
In his excellent book Impro: Improvisation and the theatre, Keith John-
stone takes a large section to describe and discuss what he refers to
as ‘the Mask state’. Briefly stated—and please suspend your disbelief,
because it does sound very odd to the newcomer—in the Mask state
an actor wears a mask and allows the mask to possess them. It is not a
conscious piece of acting; there is no consideration of what sort of per-
sonality the mask suggests, and then an acting-out of that personality.
Instead, from Johnstone’s description, the actor seems to slip into a
light trace while a personality that seems to exist within the mask itself
takes over. A different actor wearing the same mask will assume the
same personality; a group of actors wearing similar Masks will act in a
similar way. After the Mask state is over, actors will usually but not al-
ways remember what they have done, but there is a definite feeling that
the mask was an independent entity, and that while in the Mask state
the actors were not in conscious control of their actions. Actors also
report that their senses seem heightened while in the Mask state, and
the world appears different, as if viewed by a different being—perhaps
the personality of the mask itself.
Johnstone is quick to point out that the Mask state is not unique to
actors in workshops, or actors generally; he likens it to hypnosis and
meditation, processes in which the manifestations of what we regard
as ‘self ’ can be suppressed. About the only area where it seems to have
been studied with any rigour at all is in Voodoo and other ‘possession’
religions, where the ‘gods’ manifest themselves during rituals through
members of the congregation, and it’s arguable whether the rapture
or speaking in tongues which occurs during certain Christian services
could be an equivalent but unpersonified phenomenon.
To quote selectively from Johnstone:
It’s difficult to understand the power of the Mask if you’ve only seen it
in illustrations, or in museums . . . A Mask is a device for driving the
personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take possession of it .
. . In its original culture, nothing had more power than the Mask. It was
used as an oracle, a judge, an arbitrator.8

The type of trance I am concerned with in this essay is the ‘controlled
trance’, in which permission to remain ‘entranced’ is given by other peo-
ple, either by an individual or a group. Such trances may be rare, or
may pass unrecognized in this culture, but we should consider them as a
normal part of human behaviour. Researchers who have studied posses-
sion cults report it is the better-adjusted citizens who are most likely to
become possessed.9
Masks seem exotic when you first learn about them, but to my mind
Mask acting is no stranger than any other kind: no more weird than the
fact that an actor can blush when his character is embarrassed, or turn
white with fear, or that a cold will stop for the duration of a performance,
and then start streaming again as soon as the curtain falls.10
The relevance of the Mask state to role-play may seem tangential at
best and frightening at worst, but I contend that most people who role-
play recreationally will have entered a Mask state, albeit a less intense
version than the one Johnson describes, at least once. Role-players do
not put on physical masks, they put on mental ones, and the basic effect
is the same: seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.
I am not saying that all role-play is done in the Mask state. Mask-
play only occurs in certain circumstances, but most role-players will be
familiar with it: the unusually intense game session; players in tears
or shouting in anger; a general sense of the game-world being more
important, more vivid, more real than the actual world; the feeling that
the player is the character. This, I believe, is an element of the Mask
state, and is what I call mask-play. And the reason I want to talk about
it is because when role-players describe their ‘best’ or most memorable
role-playing moments, these are the moments they will pick out.
Let me just put one thing to rest before continuing: mask-play
sounds as if it might be dangerous. Johnstone himself puts forward
three popular fears about it:
Many people express alarm about the ‘dangers of Mask work’. I think
this is an expression of the general hostility to trance and is unfounded
. . . People seem to be afraid of three things: (1) that the students will be
violent; (2) that the students will go ‘mad’; (3) that the students will refuse
to remove the Mask when instructed (a combination of the first two).
If any of those sound familiar, it’s because they’re the same four ba-
sic criticisms that are regularly levelled against orthodox role-playing
games: that they are tools of the occult (with which trance-states are
usually associated); they make their players violent; they drive people
insane; and that players will become confused about reality and fiction,
and will not come out of character. And, as with RPGs, none of these
things actually seem to happen. That sounds like more than coinci-
dence to me.
‘Mask-play’ is the most complete way that the player can enter

the game-world. Think of it as a virtual reality: when the player looks
around, they see the game-world. They look at other players and see
the characters. They look in a mirror and see their character’s face.
Only by doing this, by shutting out as much of the real world as pos-
sible, will the player be able to let their normal personality take a back
seat, and allow the personality of their fictional character to take over. I
can’t describe what that actually means because it doesn’t happen often
enough to be analysed, but personal experience makes me think it’s
worth striving for.
In a normal game, this happens very rarely, and usually only at the
culmination of a particularly intense session of play, in which the game-
situation has become so important that the real world is forced tem-
porarily into the background. In ordinary game-play, a whole range
of things keep pulling the participants back into the real world—back
from Fine’s third frame, of being a ‘character’, back to the second level
of ‘player’ or the primary framework, that of ‘person’. These include
simple visual or auditory cues (few gaming venues look or sound like
the game’s fictional setting), the intrusion of rules mechanics and dice-
throwing into the mental fantasy, out-of-character comments by play-
ers, and the necessities of life such as eating, drinking or leaving in time
to catch the last bus home.
Before we ask how these interruptions can be avoided, we need to
ask whether they really have to be. Players find role-playing games re-
warding on four levels, according to Gary Fine: social, educational, es-
12
capist and cathartic. The educational and cathartic elements of RPGs
are dependent on other factors, but the social and escapist elements
are at opposite ends of a scale: socializing between the participants as
‘people’ will not only pull them out of the frame of being ‘characters’
but will also break the spell of escapism for all participants. There will
be some groups whose enjoyment of role-play comes primarily from
socializing among the participants. Mask-play is not for them.
The role of the group is important in all styles of role-play. In pup-
pet-play, type-play and personality-play, those role-playing with greater
sophistication will tend to draw the other participants on to their level.
Characters have to be able to converse on the same level: if one is ask-
ing about ethics, morality, family ties and so on, other player characters
are encouraged to reply on the same terms, and thus develop increas-
ing sophistication.
However, in mask-play, it is the least sophisticated members of the
group who dominate, because it only takes one person to break the
concentration and imagination of everyone else. The more intense the
atmosphere, the harder it is to sustain, and a single mis-timed joke
or out-of-character remark about pizza can wreck hours of build-up.
Some players may be uncomfortable with intense situations and seek

to defuse them, consciously or unconsciously. There is no easy way to
stop this happening, except to ensure that the group understands the
importance of mood, and works together not to break it. The question
which must be asked, and which is up to individual groups to answer,
is whether the effort of creating a mask-play environment is worth the
reward. It is not for everyone.
I mentioned above that it generally takes a very long time to de-
velop an interesting character and to play it with any degree of sophisti-
13
cation. There is one exception to this: freeform games, in which play-
ers literally act out roles in an interactive drama, usually lasting three
or four hours. Establishment and embellishment of character happens
very quickly, and because players spend most if not all of their time in-
character, it is less likely that the mood will be broken. As a result of this,
and because players act out their characters’ actions rather than simply
describing them, freeform games tend to be more intense than normal
table-top role-playing games. But they are not the ideal for mask-play
games; freeform characters lack the depth of table-top RPG charac-
ters because they lack history—freeform games are almost always one-
offs, with little potential for campaign play—and intense experiences
thus have an air of artificiality about them: the characters ought to care
deeply about what is happening, but the players are still aware of the
unreality of the situation.
Nevertheless, freeform games are very good at creating a role-
playing environment which stands outside the ‘real’ world, even if
they often fail to create an alternate reality of their own. A good role-
playing experience comes largely from the game-world, and if a game
can make players as well as characters feel that they are part of that
world, the potential for mask-play is greatly increased. That means re-
ducing the intrusiveness of the real world—the distractions I described
above—and trying to create a feeling of being somewhere else. I’m not
14
necessarily talking about building sets or renting castles ; a little is a
start, and makes a lot of difference.
Props and pictures are fairly obvious aids, and have been used for
a while. They’re also conscious cues and can seem out of place. Un-
conscious, subtle cues are better: a change in lighting; the right back-
ground noise or music; subdued use of appropriate scents (better, obvi-
ously, for perfumed gardens than the Augean stables); even serving the
right kind of food and drink.
Changing visual cues is harder. If a group always meets in the same
place, it becomes a familiar and comfortable environment, and ignor-
ing it can become second nature. Likewise, players grow comfortable
with the other members of their group, and generally tend to imagine
the other players’ characters as appearing like the players themselves,
unless the character is radically different to the player (e.g. a different

sex or species) or there is a memorable sketch or image of the character.
A familiar environment will tend to blend into the background, allow-
ing the imagination to range free.
There is a counter argument to this: that strange surroundings and
strange faces, such as one might get at a convention freeform game or
at an external training session, will take the place of the game-world
and its characters. If a location is sufficiently in tune with the setting of
a game session, it will help to reinforce the game’s atmosphere. It does
not need to be an exact match, but the simple fact of being in a sympa-
thetic environment will help to bring out the flavour of the game.
I remain to be convinced by this. I think it could be great fun, but
generally I don’t think it would help to push or pull players into a state
in which the real world drops away—if anything, it will only reinforce
its presence. I think the problem is more deep-rooted than that; it lies
not with what players can see, but with the fact that players can see
at all. Their imaginations are producing mental pictures, which their
eyes are constantly undermining. Subdued lighting helps to diffuse this
problem, but the idea of role-playing while blindfolded or with closed
eyes seems like an exciting solution. Johnstone conducts many of his
improvised theatre games and exercises with blindfolded students, and
describes genuine leaps in visualization and creativity skills—and, more
15
importantly, immediacy and memorability. Combined with the other
sensory cues I described above, this could make for an all-embracing
role-play experience of unparalleled depth and intensity.
I haven’t tried it. There are logistical problems. Blindfolded play-
ers cannot move around, or eat or drink during the game without dif-
ficulty. If the game is to last more than a single session, it will need a
system of mechanics which does not need character sheets, dice or ref-
erence books, nor numbers or mental calculations which would distract
from the imaginative experience, and realistically speaking I can’t see
anyone developing a game system like that before oh, say, Gen Con this
16
year. But we’re talking about the future of role-play. Today’s impos-
sibilities are tomorrow’s hurdles.
The other problem with mask-play, and any form of play which
amputates the players from the real world and immerses them in a fic-
tional universe (such as virtual reality), is that there needs to be a period
of readjustment to reality after the game is over. In simulation gaming
this is known as debriefing, and is used mostly to discuss the lessons
learned from the game. I’ll save my thoughts on debriefing for another
time; this piece is getting dangerously long, and I don’t want it to turn
into a manifesto for the James Wallis School of Gaming Excellence, or
indeed a Faculty of Role-Playing and Other Fatuous Studies. Muse on
personality-play and mask-play for yourself, see what conclusions you
draw, and experiment with them. Like an RPG the future is made of

branching paths, and I can’t tell you which one to follow.
Conclusions
Although I’ve presented these four fields as being linear and mutually
exclusive, I don’t actually believe that they are. My definitions are clean
and clear-cut; in reality there is overlap between the fields, a thick blur-
ring of the edges.
Since I’ve been examining roles, let me ask: what makes a good
role-playing character? Must it have some resonance, something which
reflects the player’s own personality, something with which they can
identify? Or should it be based around an interesting character concept
which the player feels is worth exploring, to see how the role fits within
its world and how it feels to behave and be seen as such a person? Type-
play would suggest the former, personality-play the latter. All good
role-players know that it’s both. And there is no reason why elements of
mask-play cannot be brought into the same model. At the same time,
I feel that it’s important to understand how role-playing works if the
field is going to develop and move forward in anything other than an
incoherent, haphazard way.
It could be said that dividing role-play into sections based on how
players treat their roles is just another way of breaking down a field
which can already be classified by differences in rules, backgrounds,
styles, intentions and many other categories. It’s true. But it seems
strange that a field which is so inherently about roles that it takes its
name from them has not attempted to examine the way that they are
seen and used before.
James Wallis is director of Hogshead Publishing.
Notes
1
The earliest reference to role-playing I can find is in Moreno’s article in Sociom-
etry VI, p438: ‘Role-player is a literary translation of the German word “Rollen-
spieler” which I have used . . . It may be useful to differentiate between role-play-
ing—which permits the individual some degree of freedom—and role-creating’
(1943). It appears that Moreno is covering ground that would be useful to this
piece, and I regret that I am unable to locate the full text of his article.
2
It should be mentioned that the way that professional puppeteers work—often
spending years learning how to imbue their puppets with life, energy and per-
sonality—is probably closer to either personality-play or mask-play than to my
definition of ‘puppet play’.
3
Wells, p.27. I said last issue that Hogshead Publishing’s products wouldn’t be
plugged in IF articles. Well, so much for that.

4
Fine, p.185-187.
5
See ‘Multi-User Dungeons’ by Alan Cox and Malcolm Campbell in Interactive
Fantasy #2
6
Kramer, Michael W., ‘I’ll Second That: A parliamentary procedure role-playing
simulation’, from Simulation & Gaming vol. 25 no. 2
7
Reviewed on p.128 of this issue.
8
Johnstone, p.148
9
Ibid., p.156-157
10
Ibid., p.148
11
Ibid., p.192-193
12
Fine, p.58. See also my article ‘Realism vs Playability’ in Inter*action #1
13
See ‘Freeform Games: an overview’ by Andrew Rilstone in Inter*action #1
14
I have participated in a freeform game held at Saddell Castle, on the west coast
of Scotland. It could have been the sort of experience I’m describing, if not for
an intrusive and distracting system of game mechanics. Nevertheless, you have
no idea how much the right venue can add to a game until you’ve stood on the
battlements at midnight, trying to persuade someone not to throw you off them.
15
Johnstone, p.123-126
16
Hint hint.
Bibliography
Fine, Gary Allen, 1983, Shared Fantasy: Role-playing games as social worlds, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Goffman, E., 1959, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books.
Goffman, E., 1974, Frame Analysis, Northeastern University Press.
Johnstone, Keith, Impro: Improvisation and the theatre, Eyre Methuen, 1981, cur-
rently available from Routledge. ISBN 0-87830-117-8. I cannot recommend this
book highly enough to anyone with a serious interest in role-playing techniques
and possibilities.
Wells, H. G., 1911, Floor Games, Frank Palmer. Shortly to be reissued in the USA
by Hogshead Publishing.

Foreign-Language Education
and Role-Playing Games
By Brian David Phillips
‘It was supposed to be just another bug-hunt. Everything’s gone wrong since we
touched down on this forsaken planet. The two ’bots are disabled; a t least they
took one of those things with them. Lt. Yang, the only competent medic on the
team, is dead—she was still alive when that thing ripped her heart out and ate
it. There’s no telling where Ambrose is.
‘For now, it’s just me and it. The lights are malfunctioning and flashing all
over the place, all I can see in this damned purple mist is the occasional crate or
barrel.
‘Wait. What was that? Over by those fuel drums. Oh, god, it’s turning this
way. Look at the size of that thing. It’s so fast. Gotta get off a shot before it can
reach me. I raise my . . . Mr Phillips, how do you say chiang-liu-dan-tung in
English?’
‘Grenade launcher.’
‘Oh, right. I raise my grenade launcher . . .’
Learning a new language is never easy and so teachers are always

on the look-out for enjoyable classroom activities which encourage
students to creatively use the language in a structured way. Traditionally
many English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) teachers
have included dialogues, open-ended scenarios and role-plays as part
of their arsenal of techniques. There has recently been a movement
towards more freeform classroom activities which owe more to serious
gaming than to improvisational theatre. In my own classes at National
Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan, I have found that commercial
RPGs are readily adaptable to the language learning classroom. Since
RPGs are played through the verbal exchanges of the players, they are
ideal for language learners. Since they are co-operative, students can
concentrate more upon the communication of ideas through their new
language skills than upon competition against one another.
RPGs are distinct from Language Role-Plays, Classroom Dramas
and other exercises which teachers routinely use. Since RPGs are
interactive stories in which the referee furnishes the basic plot elements

and the players shape the narrative through their actions, teachers can
control the amount of freeform language use in the game. For instance,
in many of my own lower-level classes, I use what I call ‘box-text’ role-
playing games—the kind of published scenario which gives the referee
a short description to read out to the players at the beginning of each
encounter. For upper-level classes, I allow students to create their own
scenarios without the box-text requirement. While box-text games have
more limitations in scope of play, they can easily be used as sources
for vocabulary and listening exercises. I tape-record the box-text so
that referees can listen to a native speaker before running the games
themselves.
There are as many types of RPGs as there are stories, and teachers
are free to select which ones are most appropriate for their class. I
tend to use modern mystery or horror stories and then allow students
to branch into genres such as science fiction and fantasy if they
wish. I know that some teachers prefer to only use realistic, modern
settings, while others will not use scenarios that involve violent
situations. Although I would not create a violent scenario for a group
of elementary- school students, I might do so for a group of mature
university seniors. For the elementary students I would be more
inclined to create a scenario set on a farm, or based on a children’s
book such as Alice in Wonderland.
Gillian Porter Ladousse describes several ways in which role-playing
is helpful to those trying to learn a language; and in most cases, table-
top RPGs can help students in the same ways. For RPGs to be effective
they should be part of what Ladousse calls
that category of language-learning techniques sometimes referred to as
low input—high output . . . the teacher-centred presentation phase of
the lesson is very short. (page 9)
RPGs can be used in language work in two main ways. Either the
students manage with the language they already know, or they practise
with structures and functions that have been presented in an earlier
part of the course or lesson (see Ladousse, page 9). Either way, the
students can only benefit from the experience. William H. Bryant used
adventure games similar to RPGs in his French Conversation classes
and found them to be very effective:
One thing for certain, however, is that, used properly, these kinds of
activities are usually very effective in engendering a lot of animated
conversation and communication on the part of the students. The main
reason for this is that the hypothetical situation presented . . . is . . .
emotionally charged. (Bryant, page 348)
Rev. Paul Cardwell argues that when students become involved with
RPGs, they are likely to develop a number of skills, including: following
directions; vocabulary; research; independent and self-directed study;
planning; choice and decision-making; mental exercise; evaluation,

co-operation and interaction; creativity and imagination; leadership;
problem-solving; critical thinking; predicting consequences; figural
and spatial reasoning; taking other points of view; asking questions;
ethics; prioritizing; interrelated learning; and continuity of learning
(Cardwell, pages 4-6). There is also some evidence to suggest that role-
playing methods facilitate attitude change, increase self-concept and
produce behavioural change (Swink & Buchanan page 1179). While
I do not regard RPGs to be quite the panacea that Cardwell does, the
games have definite and inarguable benefits.
Furthermore, because RPGs are language-centred communication
games, they can have a positive effect on students’ social skills. These
skills are central to RPGs:
where much of the game depends on a common perception of the
information presented to the players by the [referee]’ (Toles Patkin, p. 5).
One of my students, who also played the games outside of school, said
that what she most enjoyed about them was the strong sense of social
belonging which the games helped foster.
Whether students are playing in scenarios created by their class-
mates or using published modules, RPGs have a strong curiosity appeal
which Patricia Mugglestone called:
the one primary motive relevant to every teaching/learning situation,
whatever the status of the target language, whatever type of course is
being followed, whatever the learner’s nationality, age and level of
language proficiency, whether he is a volunteer or conscript learner.
(page 112)
According to Mugglestone,
projects appeal to the curiosity motive if their content is interesting to
the learner and if the learner is allowed to develop the project in his own
way. (page 115)
This certainly describes most role-playing games.
Robert J. Di Pietro outlines a teaching technique for conversation
classes which is very similar to RPGs, in his insightful article, ‘The
Open-Ended Scenario: a new approach to conversation.’ RPGs are
used as a basis for class discussion around open scenarios either provid-
ed by the instructor or prepared by the students themselves. Di Pietro
says that the educational scenario in which the students are attempting
to gain information is superior to the more standard role-plays, since
the conversations are based on information that the instructors give out
themselves (page 19). This is, of course, how most RPG scenarios are
constructed.
For those who prefer not to base their classroom activities on fan-
tastic or heroic literature, RPGs can be fairly easily adapted to any situ-
ation—including real life. When Scott D. Orr was teaching Czech stu-
dents in 1990, he used a role-playing game as a teaching aid. Since it
was right after the revolution, the students were not only very interested

in American English, but in American culture as well. Orr chose not to
use a commercial RPG system and simply created a basic game for the
students, requiring them to imagine their own character types (they
played ball players, cowboys, pilots and detectives). Orr reports that the
activity was very successful not only because it was a tool for learning
English, or just a game, but because the students were able to role-play
being members of a culture they were interested in.
W. Troy Tucker, on the other hand, employed a science-fiction RPG
as a teaching aid while he taught at a science university in the People’s
Republic of China. Tucker felt that the vocabulary that the students
acquired while playing Traveller would be of direct use to them in their
professional and academic lives.
While most teachers will use RPGs as small-group exercises, it is
possible to use them to encourage class discussion. Before Ken Rolston
became a full-time game designer he was an English teacher, and used
the game Ghostbusters in his classes. He felt that this game had a num-
ber of advantages. The setting is modern day and almost universally
accessible—the Ghostbusters films were popular in the United States and
other countries. The system is very simple. It was originally designed
by Chaosium and developed by West End Games specifically for out-of-
the-box playing. It is truly one of the easiest and most versatile profes-
sional systems on the market. Rolston invented scenarios in which his
school was invaded by spooks, thereby placing the students in a con-
crete context. The introductory game divided the class into six groups
of five students, each group controlling one of the six player characters.
The groups worked co-operatively to decide on the character’s actions.
This increased the density of ideas and actions while providing protec-
tion for less verbal and less spontaneous youths.
My own primary experience with using RPGs in the classroom has
been with EFL conversation students. The first games system I used
was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which I later abandoned because
it was too complicated. In hindsight, I would recommend that teach-
ers considering using classroom RPGs use a different system: Call of
Cthulhu, Fringeworthy, Ghostbusters and Star Wars are all excellent
for the beginner. Very basic systems which may be most appropriate
for lower-level language classes include the introductory Dungeons &
Dragons game, DragonQuest and HeroQuest.
Currently at NCCU there are several English classes which use RPGs
to some degree, and the advanced French program is considering do-
ing so. The teachers involved with the project use a form of GURPS as
the common system for their classes. This is because the system is easily
adaptable to several genres and types of scenario: it is important for us
to have one common rules system so that teachers do not have to spend
too much time in the classroom explaining rules.

Once my students have been given a brief explanation of the funda-
mentals of the rules, they play a sample game with me as referee. It is
important that the teacher should use a very basic introductory scenar-
io: I find that a ‘save the princess from the dark tower’ story works well.
While an average RPG game among serious hobbyists may last four to
six hours, teachers cannot make such demands upon students. Most
teachers will use the activity only a few times in a semester, and for only
one or two class periods. This means that one has to develop simple
scenarios that can be completed in a single lesson. I do teach an upper-
level course dedicated to RPGs at my university and had the pleasant
experience of students asking to double the amount of time scheduled
for the class meetings, just so they would have more of a chance to fin-
ish their scenarios in one session. Rarely do university students make
such requests of teachers!
Once my class has been introduced to the concepts and mechanics
of role-playing games, the students are asked to run some box-text ad-
ventures for their classmates. Eventually, an upper-level class will pro-
gress to creating their own adventures. With my typical class of sixteen
students, I will usually schedule an RPG activity four times in a semes-
ter. Each time, the activity takes one hour in the scheduled two-hour
period. At each time, the students are divided into small groups of four,
each with one student acting as referee and the remaining three play-
ing PCs. The next time the activity is scheduled, the students are placed
in different groups and new students become referees. In this way, stu-
dents in the class are able to ‘play’ with all of the other students—and
all of them have the opportunity to referee their own game. Under
this system, the RPGs quickly become the students’ activity and not the
teacher’s assignment.
When I first began using RPGs in NCCU classrooms, I started work
on developing an EFL RPG: BERPS (Basic English Role-Playing Sys-
tem) but soon abandoned it in favour of adapting GURPS rules to dif-
ferent levels of language ability. Once students have understood the
concept of role-playing, it is not very important which particular system
you decide to use.
RPGs are most obviously useful in upper-level all-English conversa-
tion classes. Teachers of lower-level English conversation classes may
not find the games so useful: indeed, students may feel intimidated by
them. For upper-level classes, the teacher need only ‘get them start-
ed’—lower-level classes present more difficulties.
If the students don’t know how to describe an action in the game,
they may revert to simple language rather than exploring other pos-
sibilities of description. One of the first groups of low-level students
with whom I tried to use role-playing spent a large portion of their first
game using simple language as follows:

‘I hit the monster.’
‘Roll the dice.’
‘I roll a four.’
‘Okay. You hit. Roll again.’
‘Fine, I roll a six.’
And so on. Not very promising. However, once I explained to them
that they needed to use more description, they tried harder—making
the game more enjoyable and useful for their language development.
Once this happened, I could answer questions about language and vo-
cabulary as they arose: my teaching was in response to needs that the
students were generating themselves. This is a highly effective tech-
nique. (Di Pietro, page 19.)
For more elementary classes—the High School curriculum, for in-
stance—it would be hard to conduct long RPG sessions in English. The
teacher may find it more useful to make the sessions shorter and to
follow Patricia Mugglestone’s lead in having new language items pre-
sented as the problems to be solved in the game (Mugglestone, page
115). Any students who have seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade will
appreciate that the three challenges that Indy has to overcome to reach
the Holy Grail are essentially a vocabulary quiz.
Although RPGs are of most use in the teaching of conversation
skills, there are other areas of the curriculum where they can be useful.
I ran a successful Descriptive Writing course in which students had to
compile descriptions of monsters for a book similar to the Dungeons
& Dragons ‘Monstrous Compendium’. Teachers may wish to adopt
an RPG format for a collective writing exercise in which students take
turns writing chapters of a fantasy story—or even to run a Play-by-Mail
or Play-by-Email game.
The reading teacher may find RPGs to be useful way of checking a
student’s comprehension: it is also a good way of engendering a more
thorough appreciation of literature. For example, teachers could use
RPG scenarios as a method of reviewing reading assignments. When
my Literature & Film class studied Dracula, I had the students read the
first four chapters of the novel and then ran a first-edition Chill game,
‘Castle Dracula’, which is based upon that section of the novel. After the
students finished reading the entire novel and had seen four film ver-
sions, we played another Chill adventure, ‘Dracula’s Vengeance’, which
is set several years after the events of the narrative.
Students who start role-playing on a regular basis often start to read
more books than they would otherwise have done. Many hobby play-
ers of these games do a great deal of outside reading—in a very wide
variety of genres and subjects—in order to better play the games. (Hol-
mes, page 94). Many game players show a marked increase in both
their reading quantity and the quality of their comprehension (Card-

well, page 2). Of course, these observations on increased readings are
of native speakers and not language learners—we need to be wary of
claiming the games can do more than they can.
While role-playing games may not be appropriate for all foreign
language classes, they certainly have the potential to become a very
useful addition to many teachers’ bags of worthwhile language-learn-
ing activities for conversation (and other) classes.
Brian David Phillips is a lecturer in English at National Chengchi University,

Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China. Phillips has for the last few years been
using RPGs extensively in teaching English as a Foreign Language. He has
also published academic papers on the subject. In addition to his classroom
use of roleplaying games, Phillips is an advocate of the hobby—which is all but
unknown in Chinese-speaking countries. Phillips lives in Taipei with his Can-
tonese wife Lorraine Yuk-Lan, their baby girl Kaye Elizabeth Yi-Chi, and the
obligatory two cats, Garfield and O’Nel. He is currently pursuing his PhD at
National Taiwan University.
Bibliography
Bryant, William H. ‘Realistic Activities for the Conversation Class’, The French
Review, v59(3), Feb. 1986, 347-354.
Cardwell, Paul. ‘Role-Playing Games and the Gifted Student’.
Dayan, Daniel. ‘Review Essay: Copyrighted Subcultures’, American Journal of
Sociology, v91(5), March 1986, 121928.
DeRenard, Lisa A., and Linda Mannik Kline. ‘Alienation and the Game
Dungeons and Dragons’, Psychological Reports, v66(3, pt. 2), 1990, 1219-1222.
Diaz-Rico, Lynne. ‘Story, Skit, and Theater in Whole Language Dramatics’,
Journal of Creative Behavior, v26(3), 1992, 199-205.
Di Pietro, Robert J. ‘The Open-Ended Scenario: A New Approach to
Conversation’, TESOL Quarterly, v16(1), March 1982, 1520.
Holmes, John Eric. ‘Confessions of A Dungeon Master’, Psychology Today, Nov.
1980, 84-94.
Ladousse, Gillian Porter. Role Play. Oxford English Resource Books for
Teachers Series edited by Alan Maley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Mugglestone, Patricia. ‘The Primary Curiosity Motive’, English Language
Teaching Journal, v31(2), 111-116.
Phillips, Brian David. ‘Interactive Literature and the Teaching of English as a
Foreign Language: History, Theory, and Application’ (in Roleplaying Games in
the Language Classroom). Taipei: The Crane Publishing Company, Ltd., 1994).
‘Role-Playing Games in the English as a Foreign Language Classroom.’ Paper
presented to the Republic of China Tenth National Conference on Teaching
English as a Second Language at Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C., 15 May 1993.

Published in the proceedings, Papers from the Tenth Conference on English
Teaching and Learning in the Republic of China, edited by Leo W.P. Li, Yuen-
mei Yin, Hsun-huei Chang, Bor-ing Lin, and Chi-yee Lin (Taipei: Crane
Publishing, Ltd., 1994, 625-648).
Simon, Armando. ‘Emotional Stability Pertaining to the Game of Dungeons &
Dragons’, Psychology in the Schools, v24, Oct. 1987, 329- 332.
Stratton, Jerry (jerry@teetot.acusd.edu). ‘What Is Role Playing?’ Article
available via anonymous FTP from teetot.acusd.edu, 1991.
Swink, David F., and Dale Richard Buchanan. ‘The Effects of Sociodramatic
Goal-Oriented Role Play and Non-Goal- Oriented Role Play on Locus of
Control’, Journal of Clinical Psychology, v40(5), Sept. 1984, 1178-1183.
Toles-Patkin, Terri. ‘Rational Co-ordination in the Dungeon’, Journal of Popular
Culture, v20(1), Summer 1986, 1-14.

‘I Know What I Like!’
Should role-playing games be regarded as art?
By Brian Duguid
‘I don’t know if it’s art, but I know what I like!’, as the saying goes.
Since you’re about to read a serious discussion about the seriousness
(or otherwise) of role-playing games, I thought I’d better start by stat-
ing the obvious. Role-playing games are fun. Whatever else they may
aspire to, if they aren’t fun, they aren’t worthwhile.
One thing that they often aspire to is the status of ‘art’. In 1988,
James Wallis declared that ‘role-playing gamers must become role-
1
playing artists’. He argued that although for the most part they are
‘merely’ games, the structures of role-playing games show similarities
to other forms of entertainment that have achieved recognition as ‘art’.
For example, there are obvious analogies between a film such as The
Green Ray, where the general story‑line is predetermined but the ac-
tual detailed interaction between characters is improvised, and the way
role-playing games are played.
More recently, Robin Laws has suggested possible critical vocabular-
ies that can be applied to role-playing games, taking for granted that
2
they can be treated as art. His article, ‘The Hidden Art’, in Inter*action
#1 asserts that ‘role-playing games have existed for many years as an
art‑form without a body of criticism’ and proceeds to trawl through the
field of film criticism in search of concepts and techniques that could be
of use in a critical discussion of role-playing games.
While I don’t imagine anyone reading Interactive Fantasy would deny
that role-playing is amenable to intelligent, critical debate, I think that
too many problematic assumptions underlie Laws’ approach.
‘The Hidden Art’ takes it for granted that role-playing games are an
art‑form; goes on to assume that being an art‑form is a ‘good thing’,
and then goes on further to assume that applying certain concepts of
criticism to that ‘art‑form’ must therefore also be a ‘good thing’. None
of these assumptions is necessarily correct and I believe that role-play-
ing games have certain unique qualities that render all three untrue.
In 1988, James Wallis devoted a large portion of his article ‘Raw
Power’ to an attempt to prove that role-playing games are an art‑form.
Like Laws, he assumes that being an art‑form is a ‘good thing’ and
because he already believes that role-playing games are art, his argu-

ments read more as self-justification than anything else. My dictionary,
predictably, has trouble defining art and offers alternatives such as ‘hu-
man creativity’, ‘a making or doing of things that have form or beauty’
or ‘products of creative work’. With these vague standards it is easy to
claim that role-playing meets the criteria, but of course, this doesn’t
mean that you’ll see Amber being discussed on the television arts pro-
grammes in the near future.
This is because ‘art’ is a quality defined not by a formula but by
social agreement. We all agree that sculpture, painting and drama are
art; we mostly accept that films are art; classical music is definitely art;
jazz is probably art, and most rock music is probably not. You’re free to
agree or disagree, but the point is that ‘art’ is not a nice clean objective
word, it’s simply a collective name for endeavours to which our culture
agrees to apply it. Because we live in a fragmented society and one that
still attaches value to class distinctions, there are disagreements over
whether certain activities are ‘art’ or not; the traditional domination of
the cultural media by the upper and middle classes has ensured that
only ancient traditional forms are universally regarded as art; every-
thing else is suspect.
Adopting this kind of definition of art—looking at how the word
is used rather than what the lexicographers say—it’s clear that to the
overwhelming majority of participants in our culture, role-playing
games are not an art‑form. It remains to be seen whether propaganda
by role-players will change this situation, but I don’t think it will and I
think the reason is simple.
After listing a variety of traditional approaches to film criticism and
highlighting those aspects which are superficially applicable to role-
playing games, ‘The Hidden Art’ engineers its own downfall by explic-
itly revealing its assumptions. It accepts that there is a distinction be-
tween the role-playing literature and the role-playing experience, and
that while one of these is amenable to traditional forms of criticism, the
other resists them most strongly.
It’s not difficult to find (imperfect) analogies to the role-playing lit-
erature in other fields. Rulebooks combine two functions. They are like
an operating manual containing instructions about what to do and how
to do it; in this respect they’re similar to, say, car maintenance manu-
als. They also describe an imaginary world in which the role-playing
experience will be set, and for this there is no easy analogy. Scenario
books, meanwhile, continue the function of describing an imaginary
world, but also specify elements of plot and characters. It’s tempting,
therefore, to suggest that they have a few similarities to film or theatre
scripts, but although a script functions best where it ‘shows’ rather than
‘tells’, scenario books universally take the opposite approach.
As should be obvious, these analogies are very much flawed. Sce-

narios may be similar to scripts in one or two respects, but they are em-
phatically not the same thing and any attempt to apply the vocabulary
of the drama critic to a discussion of a role-playing game scenario will
be clumsy. By adopting an inadequate vocabulary, it will also run the
risk of glossing over or disguising qualities in the game scenario that
fall outside the usual parameters of drama criticism.
I don’t intend to explore the criticism of role-playing literature
much further, although there are a couple more observations that are
worth making. The comparison of rulebooks to mechanical manuals
is fair enough if you accept that most role-playing rulebooks are only
functional; I’ve yet to read a set of rules that aspire to the status of ‘art’,
in any sense of the word. Functional criticism is a worthwhile field on
its own, however I think there is room for it to develop beyond basic
observations that rules are too complex, too inconsistent or too sterile.
Areas such as cybernetics and organizational theory seem to offer a
more developed vocabulary that encompasses these observations while
encouraging a more fundamental overview.
The other notable point is that unlike a car maintenance manual,
a rulebook is describing an imaginary situation; rules do not just de-
termine the success or failure of a character’s actions, they may also
determine less tangible aspects of the imaginary world. The rules of
Dungeons & Dragons state that characters can be described as Fighters,
Thieves, Magic-Users, or whatever. This has extensive implications for
both the imaginary society being created and the stylistic parameters of
characterization. In the first case, they suggest a rigid, hierarchical soci-
ety and in the second they suggest that characters fit into certain broad
heroic archetypes. It is possible to play a character whose actions and
emotions aren’t archetypal but you would be working at cross-purposes
to the rule system.
This is only a digression. As mentioned above, the role-playing ex-
perience itself resists any form of art criticism. ‘The Hidden Art’ rec-
ognizes more than one reason why this is so. First, unlike many other
forms of art, there is no fixed object to observe; there is no sculpture, no
finished novel, no finished film. More importantly, the role-playing ex-
perience or process is simply not observable; it takes place primarily in
the imagination. If you sit and watch a role-playing game session, you
can enjoy the interaction between the characters and the development
of the plot, but no more than that. The actual experience in which you
witness the characters as if they are real, in their imaginary environ-
ment, only takes place in one’s mind. So what does all this mean? For
one thing, given that the actual game experience itself is the only ele-
ment of a role-playing game that is important and given that there is no
obvious way to subject it to traditional methods of art criticism, I believe
the activity will never gain recognition as art, because the only people

with the ability to define it as such, the art critics, will continue to find it
unapproachable. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the game-play is,
it doesn’t matter whether the players are all seasoned method actors or
not, because as long as role-playing games refuse the possibility of an
external audience, they are safe from being considered ‘art’.
Some people, looking perhaps for a veneer of respectability or for
some form of validation to prove that role-playing games are more
than just co-operative entertainment or recreation, might find this an
unduly negative conclusion. I don’t think they need be concerned. One
can accept that role-playing games are capable of enormous sophistica-
tion and intelligence without the desire to have Melvyn Bragg peering
over one’s shoulder.
You see, there is an alternate definition of art, although it is usually
only recognized on the fringes of political, artistic and philosophical
debate. This alternate view suggests that everything we currently call
art is flawed, because all art is mediated creativity. Because it relies on
mediation, art can be considered an inevitably alienated activity. For
the majority, enjoyment of art is enjoyment of other people’s creativity:
it involves accepting that others have superior and privileged access
to beauty and ‘truth’. It promotes the enjoyment of image rather than
reality and of the abstract rather than the concrete.
‘Alienation’ of course is a major plank of Marxist theory, as well as
other more recent political analyses such as post-modern philosophy
and Situationist theory. It’s not a particularly complex concept; as it is
applied to art it refers to the separation of producer from consumer
and the assumption that the specialization of the occupation of ‘artist’
renders the audience’s relationship to art unsatisfactory and partial.
More plainly, art encourages people to be passive rather than active so
they become alienated from creativity.
According to Clive Bell, the purpose of art is to transport us from
3
the plane of daily struggle ‘to a world of aesthetic exaltation’. The par-
allel with the aim of religion is obvious: both distract people from the
need to make everyday reality better by encouraging them to passively
observe a ‘better’ reality. In short, escapism. The critic John Zerzan is
blunt:
‘All art, as symbolization, is rooted in the creation of substitutes, surro-
gates for something else; by its very nature therefore, it is falsification .
. . Why then would one respond positively to art? As compensation and
palliative, because our relationship to life and nature is so deficient and
disallows an authentic one. It is true for artist and audience alike; art, like
religion, arises from unsatisfied desire.’4
If you accept that this is what art is really about, or even if you disa-
gree but accept that there is some truth in it, then you could hardly be
anxious for role-playing games to attain the status of art. Of course,
‘role-playing’ and ‘escapism’ are terms that sit happily together and

it’s undeniably true that escapism is inevitably politically reactionary; it
shows that rather than deal with the problems of the real world, which
involves work and struggle, we would prefer to visualize a preferable al-
ternative. In its favour, the visualization of alternatives and the creation
of dreams could of course be considered fundamental to progressive
political endeavour.
I think there are several peculiarities of role-playing games that
deserve our attention and even celebration, and which for me make the
quest to treat them as art entirely irrelevant and misguided.
First, as a form of entertainment, they share with other games a
communal, social basis, quite unlike the passivity which novels, paint-
ings or films engender. More than any other type of game they involve
conversation, dialogue and co-operative creativity. Even if some par-
ticipants participate more than others every player has an opportunity
to contribute to the narrative. The interaction and intercourse between
different imaginations represent a refreshing alternative to the one-way
performer-audience relationship of recognized art-forms.
More than this, role-playing games are a rare form of creativity
that values the activity of play as something other than just a childish
impulse. Inasmuch as it is spontaneous and the polar opposite of that
horrible word ‘work’, play is increasingly a respite from and a challenge
to an alienated society.
Role-playing games help to demolish the myth of the ‘creative ge-
nius’ that lies at the heart of ‘art’ and which feminist theory (opposed
primarily to ‘male genius’) has consistently attacked in recent decades.
While all the participants do not contribute equally, role-playing games
represent a rare example of an environment in which everyone does
have some creativity to contribute. At a time when post-modernist theory
talks about the ‘death of the author’ in favour of an environment where
the audience’s creative interpretation of art is more important, role-
playing games stand out as an example where there is no dichotomy to
be resolved, where creator and spectator are the same and where there
is no need for interpreters or critics to mediate the creative experience.
I think that to seek to position role-playing games as just another
art-form, to look towards art for our critical vocabulary, is a mistake that
risks drawing attention away from what is really important about role-
playing. It seems to stem from insecurity, from the fear that what we are
doing is somehow immature and from a desire to have our ‘seriousness’
validated by the cultural arbiters of the bourgeoisie. I don’t think role-
playing needs any of that and I think it’s far better off without it.
Brian Duguid is the editor of the acclaimed avant-garde music magazine Elec-
tric Shock Treatment and the former editor of the role-playing fanzine The Blue
Shaboo. He helped found the role-playing magazine Tales of the Reaching

Moon.
Notes
1
James Wallis, ‘Raw Power: Can role-playing ever be justified as a legitimate art-
form?’ Article in Sound & Fury 7. Sound & Fury Enterprises. 1988.
2
Robin D. Laws, ‘The Hidden Art’. Article in Inter*Action #1. Crashing Boar
Books. 1994.
3
Clive Bell, quoted in John Zerzan, ‘The Case Against Art’. Article in Elements of
Refusal. Left Bank Books. 1988.
4
John Zerzan, op cit.

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.

Wraith: The Oblivion into account the self-important
by Mark Rein•Hagen, editorial comments and style-
Sam Chupp and Jennifer over-substance suggestions about
Hartshorn ‘themes’ and ‘moods’ that litter
White Wolf Games Studio the text. This is not necessarily a
ISBN 1-56504-133-X; bad thing: most RPGs never rise
272pp; $25.00 to the dizzy heights of ‘theme’ and
Reviewed by Sam Dodsworth ‘mood’ in the first place, much
less the sort of focus on character
White Wolf ’s ‘gothic-punk’ games and story that White Wolf games
are often called pretentious, not provide. It is also typical of White
least by myself, but ‘self-impor- Wolf that they announce this ap-
tant’ would probably be a more proach is designed to liberate us
accurate term. Vampire: the Mas- from our ‘slavery’ to ‘an oligarchy
querade (politics among super- of artists’. (Workers of the world
powered immortals) was about unite! You have nothing to lose
‘facing the madness within you’; but your Tarkovsky!)
Werewolf: the Apocalypse (Dungeons Wraith, then, is a game of self-
& Dragons for eco-terrorists) was pity that bills itself as about ‘the
apparently about the ‘power and irrational terror of death’. This is
relevance of the spiritual path’; based, I think, on a radical mis-
and Mage: the Ascension (an ex- understanding of the fashionable
cellent system searching desper- lament that we’re not as good at
ately for a background) focused dealing with the death of other
on the ‘alienation of the saviour’. people as the Victorians were. This
All quotations are genuine, by the theme would, incidentally, seem
way. The distinction is significant to contradict the injunction not
because self-importance is yet an- to ‘go gentle into that good night’
other aspect of the games’ real that seems to adorn every third
unifying theme: adolescence and page of the book, as well as the
the adolescent world-view. omnipresent fear of ‘Oblivion’
A typical White Wolf game in- that is a major component of the
volves protagonists who have been game’s setting.
ripped unwillingly from their for- The player characters are new-
mer cosy existence, gifted with ly dead, having been ripped from
power and new, barely controlled their former cosy existence and
drives, and thrust into a world thrust into a grim, hostile world
hopelessly corrupted by easily run by feuding factions of unim-
recognized evil and controlled by aginable age and.... You can prob-
unimaginably old and power- ably work the rest out for yourself.
ful elites who act to suppress any However, Wraith differs from oth-
innovation. This is about as un- er White Wolf games in one im-
equivocally adolescent as you can portant respect: it is, at core, very
get, particularly when you take good indeed.

The first pleasant surprise is world is a grim place, dominated
that Mark Rein•Hagen has man- by the Hierarchy, a sort of corrupt
aged to avoid the obvious pitfalls feudal bureaucracy whose officials
of a game set in the afterlife. For a always go masked, and the Ren-
start, the Underworld is not actu- egades, a loose organization of
ally the afterlife. Most dead souls revolutionaries who are often no
go on immediately to Oblivion better than bandits. In a particu-
or to the mysterious Transcend- larly nice touch, souls are the only
ence (the text is unfortunately lit- raw material and commodity, so
tered with too many Unnecessary that mortal armies are followed
Capital Letters). This means that by caravans of slavers eager for
only souls with a sufficient karmic the harvest, citadels are marked
burden, in the form of regrets by chained wraiths transformed
or unfinished business, linger in into flaming torches, and the rare
the Shadowlands that border the coins of the Underworld some-
realm of the living. times cry out in thin, high voices.
Better yet, the myriad heavens Even the ‘dogs’ that the Hierarchy
and hells that inevitably lurk off- uses to hunt down fugitives are
stage are not (as I had expected) mutilated slaves, with lowered in-
the usual James Branch Cabell- telligence and senses augmented
via-Neil Gaiman products of their by the beast-masks they wear.
occupants’ expectations, but the The background is introduced
creations of powerful wraiths who by Lord Byron, in the manner
attempt to stave off Oblivion by of Vampire’s introduction by Vlad
setting themselves up as gods or Tepes. This works reasonably
demons. The only problem not well, which is more than can be
adequately addressed is (as in said for the history of the Under-
all the other White Wolf games) world, supposedly narrated by
that of non-European cultures. Herod-otus. Herodotus, if I might
The style of the Underworld is be allowed to ride my classicist’s
heavily neo-classical but instead hobby-horse for a little while,
of either ignoring non-western wrote his History of the Persian War
views of death or providing some as a moral tale of the triumph
kind of vague handwave about of free men over despotism and
‘paradigms’, we have rather half- enlivened it with anecdotes and
hearted references to territorial learned digression. Even after two
disputes with other ‘Dark King- thousand years of death, I find
doms’, in a manner that serves it hard to believe that he would
only to draw attention to the produce anything with such little
problem. apparent use or interest as the his-
The second pleasant sur- tory in the Wraith rulebook, much
prise is that, for the first time in less do so in the tones of a servile
a ‘gothic-punk’ game, the setting underling. No Athenian would
is genuinely gothic. The Under- ever write ‘With utmost humility,

I proffer my deepest gratitude’. tant to the character when they
Come on, people—if you can were alive, and which keep them
quote Euripedes in the introduc- tied to the world of the living—
tion, you could get that right. an actor might have a prop from
The third and most pleasant their greatest (or worst) perfor-
surprise is in the rules, which con- mance as a Fetter, for example.
tain some excellent ideas—in the- In game terms they have two
ory if not always in execution. The functions. Firstly, it is easier to af-
core system is of course the White fect the mortal world near one of
Wolf house system, whose advan- your Fetters; providing a mecha-
tages—the easy creation of round- nism for the traditional haunted
ed characters and its relative sim- skull, painting or car. Secondly, in
plicity—on the whole outweigh order to achieve Transcendence
its disadvantages—that it’s al- (very properly not covered by the
most impossible to work out your rules) a wraith must ‘resolve’ their
chances of success when you make Fetters by coming to terms with
a skill roll. Besides the usual range whatever feelings or events are
of skills and attributes which are associated with them. This can be
based on what your character was viewed as a golden opportunity
like when they were alive, wraiths to encourage role-playing or as
have a range of special abilities maddeningly vague.
with names like ‘Argos’, ‘Moliate’ Passions are the driving goals
and ‘Usury’ which cover just about that sustain a wraith’s existence.
everything ghosts can do in books In game terms they are the means
and films; from spectral manifes- by which wraiths regain Pathos
tations to causing rains of blood which is a sort of combination of
or ‘possessing’ machinery. hit points and magic points. A
Although most of these abili- Passion is defined by a goal, an as-
ties allow wraiths to affect the sociated emotion, and a number.
mortal world, mortals’ own fear of A simple example of a passion
death often causes them to forget might be ‘Protect my sister (love):
or rationalize away their experi- 4’. A wraith regains Pathos easily
ences of wraiths, making com- by achieving their goal, and less
munication with the living appro- easily by empathizing with the as-
priately difficult and frustrating. sociated emotion. The wraith in
Werewolf employed a similar rule the example would regain a lot
to explain mortal indifference to of Pathos for protecting her sister,
nine-foot hairy wolfmen walking and rather less for being around
among them, but the rationale a living person who loved their
makes more sense in Wraith. The own sister. In practice, this is both
two central concepts, however, are more flexible and more compli-
Passions and Fetters. cated than it looks; creating mar-
Fetters are objects, places, or velously well-rounded characters
(rarely) people that were impor- while leaving players desperately

trying to find space on the char- possible choice to avoid further
acter sheet for Passions like (to damage or even Oblivion. The
choose an example from the play- examples of Harrowings given in
test) ‘Stop struggling actors from the rulebook are both useful and
having fun because they should genuinely disturbing, but I can’t
suffer for their art (envy): 1’. help feeling that improvising one
All this is perfectly good, but on the spur of the moment would
not really groundbreaking. What be a real headache for the referee.
makes Wraith genuinely interest- The whole ‘Shadow player’
ing, and very nearly justifies the concept requires a certain amount
excesses of every other White Wolf of maturity and responsibility
product is the idea of the Shadow. from the entire group. Since char-
Your Shadow is the voice that whis- acters in Wraith were once ordi-
pers in your ear and tries to trick nary twentieth-century people,
you into Oblivion. It’s the dark most players are going to end up
side of your personality given a more closely identified with their
separate existence as a passenger characters than they would in a
in your head, with its own powers more fantastic setting, particularly
and Dark Passions that are twisted since role-playing Passions well re-
reflections of your own. The really quires an ability to empathize with
nice idea is that your Shadow is the goals you choose. When you
played by one of the other play- consider that the job of a Shadow
ers. The idea is that, over time, a player is to find the weak spots in
complex relationship can develop their host character’s psyche, even
between a player character and a die-hard opponent of psycho-
their Shadow since the Shadow babble like myself can begin to see
can offer aid in the form of advice potential dangers. Greatly to the
or even extra dice when making credit of the designers, there’s a
skill rolls. What these dice repre- paragraph of advice on ‘knowing
sent is unclear but the mechanism when to stop’ and a sidebar on the
works quite well in practice. All responsible use of fear and horror,
the time, however, it is attempt- but for the first time ever I won-
ing to manipulate the player into der if that’s enough.
fulfilling its own Dark Passions. The combination of Passions
If the Shadow ever gets powerful and the Shadow place some fairly
enough, it can temporarily pos- tight restrictions on the style of
sess the character. If this happens play. For a start, every player is go-
then, confusingly, the Shadow will ing to have to turn up to every ses-
be played by whoever owns the sion, since all details of a player’s
character, not by the Shadow play- Shadow have to be kept secret as
er. It can also perform a psychic far as possible. Moreover, Passions
attack called the Harrowing; a sort mean that player characters tend
of mini-Visionquest that confronts to have divergent goals, making
the player-character with an im- the party a bunch of friends who

hang out together, rather than a clothes are just part of your ‘self-
group of specialists looking for a image’, then what about jewellery
mission. The best approach when and watches? Does an ectoplasmic
running a campaign would prob- watch still tell the time? These
ably be to centre each story on are all trivia, but it’s precisely be-
one particular character, with the cause they’re trivial points that I
other players as ‘supporting cast’. would rather see them settled in
This would have the added ad- the rules than have continually
vantage of putting less pressure to waste time making rulings and
on the supporting players, mak- (worse yet) trying to keep the rul-
ing it easier to play a Shadow at ings consistent.
the same time as a character. This The presentation of the game
became clear in the single play- makes one source of these prob-
test session that I ran, where the lems painfully clear: the whole
rather unsubtle plot that I was thing was put together in an amaz-
forced to concoct so that the playing rush. One page shows lines
ers had something to do rapidly from having been scanned in at
became a hindrance. the last minute. Most of the book
The play-test also revealed is packed with spelling mistakes,
a number of weaknesses in the typos and the references to ‘page
game. For a start, a number of XX’ that players of White Wolf
important points in the rules and games have come to know well.
the background are maddeningly It took me less than two hours to
unclear. This includes the precise read the rules, and in that time
relationship between the Shad- I found over twenty obvious er-
owlands and the world of the liv- rors. If I had been reading at a
ing. This is in no sense a minor computer running a DTP pack-
point—sometimes the rules imply age, I could have corrected those
that wraiths live among mortals errors almost as quickly as I read.
all the time and sometimes that No one is so short of time that they
the Shadowlands are entirely dis- can’t take two hours to proof-read
tinct, with their own buildings something they expect people to
and even geographical features. pay money for. Or at least run an
Similarly, there is a problem with automatic search for ‘page XX’.
grave-goods. Wraiths can some- The artwork, on the other hand,
times bring items of personal is uniformly excellent, achieving
significance with them into the a consistency of style that none
Underworld, and have to pay of the previous games in the se-
background points for them in ries ever quite managed—and
the example of character creation the quotient of young women who
but not in the rules themselves. prefer loose, unrestrictive cloth-
Wraiths are represented as wearing is mercifully low, for a change.
ing clothes. What happens if a The typeface and layout are also
character takes their shirt off? If well-chosen, when not marred by

typos and misplaced drop capi- form a backdrop to the main ac-
tals. Even the cover design—a tion. Suggested ‘story concepts’
photographed mass of chains— involve mainly espionage, in-
must have seemed like a good idea trigue and running missions for
at the time (‘sort of like the cover the political factions. In other
of the Sandman comic’, I can hear words, as has already happened
the designer saying), although in with Vampire, White Wolf are set to
practice it looks from a distance as take a genuinely interesting idea
if the book has been smeared with and turn it into yet another game
Tipp-Ex. about politics among super-pow-
Besides the sloppy pres-enta- ered immortals.
tion and the maddening ambigui- This, if allowed to happen,
ties in the rules, I am concerned will be a tragedy. The only way to
about the future of Wraith. Sup- avoid this is not to buy the supple-
plements are inevitable (there ments—except, of course, for the
are three out already, at the time ‘Players’ Guide’ which tradition-
of writing), but even in the rules ally contains all the rules miss-
the designers show a sur-prising ing from the game itself—but if
lack of understanding of how the nobody buys supplements then
game should be played. White Wolf will decide that the
As I have already suggested, game is unpopular and take it out
the game seems best suited to of print. I find myself wishing that
a character-centered approach Wraith had been produced by a
where plots develop slowly and small, unknown company.
Immortal: fer something for everyone but it

wants to be their ultimate and ar-
The Invisible War chetypal something. It also wants
by Ran Ackels you to shell out the guts of $25
Precedence; 282pp; $24.95 and buy the T-shirt too please. To
Reviewed by this end Precedence has put to-
Samantha Mullaney gether an eye-catchingly fat and
glossy package stiff with weird and
‘We burnish our hearts with
the cold gleam of ancient fu-
colourful artwork. The text throws
ries or melt them in an alem- excitement and challenge at the
bic of hot lust. And you are one reader. There is a new system for
of us. Let your mind consume the hard-core gamer to mull over.
these words, as a flame digests There are bikini babes and Ama-
the soul of wood.’ zons to allow for all philosophies.
Gosh! Immortal offers mindless violence,
Immortal is a game with strong political intrigue, vision-questing
ambitions. It not only wants to of- and serious angst; whatever your

taste. This is ‘more than a role- within; unless you want to be very
play game!’ This game wants to young, relatively, or be a member
be played, oh! so desperately and of the primate-snobs ‘pride’ who
sells itself hard at every opportu- is a Cro-Magnon. The game dis-
nity. courages you from playing an ele-
On the face of it this could be ment, a tree or a dinosaur (‘Poo!’
an interesting game (that is, once says the munchkin) but aside from
you get through the adolescent that the choice is yours. Plus any
poetry, pseudo-profundities and PC is supposed to have at least one
the woefully pedantic disclaimer), alternative personality knocking
especially for the power gamer. Its around inside their skull. These
basic premise is no more ridicu- are relics from earlier times. See-
lous than many. A player (‘actor’) ing as living forever is generally
assumes the character (‘persona’) grim stuff, immortals can resign
of an immortal entity, who is re- their awareness of their nature
ally much harder to kill than most and play at being mortal for a bit.
PCs you have ever played before. (They tend to become role-play-
Even if you die you still hang ers, what a surprise!) When they
around in an astral sort of way. wake up they have a whole new
Your Immortal has a group affili- personality and the old ones tend
ation (‘pride’) and a job to do in not to be too happy about this. For
that group (‘calling’) as well as a players who like complex charac-
bunch of friends from wherever ter play this game would seem to
(‘cadre’). To keep busy there is an be a gift.
elaborate inter-pride system of That is pretty much the raw
‘counting coup’ and if that gets material of Immortal but it is just
dull there are worlds to explore. not possible to summarize it in a
You can bend the fabric of reality nutshell. Precedence devotes 282
to your every whim so long as you pages to the job and still many
do it quietly so the big boys can’t things are left only half explained.
hear. Thus we have lots of plot (Lots of things mentioned in the
hooks, ready-made backgrounds, highly entertaining timeline are
intrigue and ass-kicking provided never referred to again.) There
for. are several reasons for this appar-
To give added interest the im- ent chaos and all contribute to the
mortals originated in a cosmic game’s sad failure to be what its
accident. A huge, alien creature creator was aiming for. One is the
(‘Sanguinary’!) was shattered sheer confusion of ideas. No game
against the Earth into millions can be all things to all players but
of shards. Whatever these lodged they can die in the attempt. In
in became immortal; rocks, trees, this case multi-cultural myths are
animals or birds. Most now look lumped together with urban le-
human for convenience but your gends and general apocrypha.
PC is likely to be utterly inhuman The result is a really weird mix-up

where Kali and Marilyn Monroe man civilization, which it cannot
rub shoulders with Cu Chullain remember. It is an all-powerful
and Joan of Arc. Of major his- being with puny beginner’s stats.
torical figures only Nostradamus It may have been Zeus, Gilgamesh
and JFK appear to actually have or even Excalibur in the past but
been mortal. The oriental, mystic for now it is a geeky gamer who
bunch of immortals are led by a has those weird flashbacks. It must
dragon but are called the Dracul embody contradictory concepts of
to get in the Vampire Vlad con- naïvety, omnipotence, chivalry,
nection. The scholars are called selfishness, machiavellianism and
the Magdalen, (find me a reason derring-do. It is over-stuffed and
why), and they founded the Me- half-baked at one and the same
dieval Catholic Church to foster time.
learning. Historians run for cov- It takes the reader a while to
er! My personal favourite hodge- notice these problems, though,
podge is the warrior ‘pride’, which because they are carefully hidden
is called the ‘Banjax’ because it in a forest of jargon. All familiar
sounds butch. The word is in fact role-playing terms are junked as
the polite Irishese for f**ked up. if Precedence was scared of a law-
Immortal takes the shallowest view suit, which may be the case. I was
of every myth, historical event horrified at the notion of a com-
and simple word, working on the pany selling referee’s ‘scripts’ for
‘sounds cool’ principle. At the an adventure before I realized
same time all religions with major that they meant ‘supplements’.
standing in the USA are avoided As for the game system and back-
carefully. There aren’t even any ground, any word that sounds
references to Elvis! Not only must half interesting is stuffed in some-
this game attract everyone, but where. If you think you know what
equally it tries not to offend any a motif is, or a crèche, palladium,
single large group. Blitzkrieg or a conundrum, you
Immortal does not want to limit will have trouble. Worse, there
you to any single genre of gaming: are no less than three glossaries,
you can emphasize any facet you all mutually contradictory. One is
like. However, it tries to codify all organized alphabetically on the
those facets which means that the foot of each page but so much was
‘Perpetual Society’ winds up be- shoved aside to make room for
ing a very crowded rigid structure. artwork or the glossy section that
Every character is a mass of con- there are two full pages of glossary
tradictions beyond the capacity at the back to take up the slack.
of the mortal player to reconcile. Another is done in the familiar
The ‘persona’ has limitless pow- highlight-in-the-text-explain-in-
ers, which it is not allowed to use. the-sidebars style except that jar-
It has skills beyond mortal capac- gon is so thick that a word high-
ity and has lived in all ages of hu- lighted on page 29 (‘jury’) is ex-

plained on page 64. If you get lost sell you some suitable dice does
then bad luck; there is no index. not sweeten this. What with this
This game is not half so origi- mess, the glossaries fiasco and the
nal as it wants people to believe. It woeful lack of an index, any ref-
borrows heavily from at least two eree (‘narrator’) will have an awful
other systems: you can recognize a time of it.
fusion of the Storyteller system and There are good things in Im-
Amber. The debt to White Wolf is mortal but they are swamped un-
the biggest. The ‘beast within’ and der the bad editing and the hard
the vague goals of Agartha, Gol- sell. They may be a reason for this.
conda or, as the Immortals have Take a look at the credits page:
it, Eidos, are familiar enough. Game concept and design: Ran
Plus you can play vampires, you Ackels; Written by: Ran Ackels;
have werewolf characteristics, you Cover art and colour illustration:
act like a mage, and wraiths and Ran Ackels; Book design: Ran
fairies are in there too. Ackels; Editing: Ran Ackels (and
There is a new system me- friends).
chanic in Immortal but you get the Burnish your smoking alem-
impression that the designer has bics, and do not forget:
not quite finished it. There are The exploration of the self
more tables than I could be both- within this fantasy is intended
ered to count and no quick way to be a positive, enhancing ex-
perience. It should not be mis-
to find them. It is claimed that
construed as reality. Persons
one die roll decides everything in having difficulty distinguish-
each combat round, which is true: ing between fantasy and real-
provided that you do not count ity are expressly discouraged
the damage rolls, initiative rolls, from reading or participating
dodge rolls and the extra rolls. in Immortal.
The fact that Precedence offer to You have been warned.
Nexus: The Infinite City ant. Robin’s article ‘The Hidden

by Jose Garcia Art’ in issue #1 of Inter*Action
and Robin Laws quotes Goethe to say that a re-
Daedelus Games viewer should ask three questions:
208pp; $19.95 ‘What is this product trying to
Reviewed by Patrick Brady do?’, ‘How well does it do it?’ and
‘Was it worth doing?’ With that in
Nexus is a new game by some old mind, let’s take a trip to Nexus.
names, and most of them are Rob- Nexus itself is the intersection
in Laws, who gets credit for writ- of numerous realities which forms
ing, editing, proof-reading, play- an urban backcloth for the un-
testing and as a design consult- folding adventures of our heroes.

Cross-genre games have an obvi- work, especially for stories of high
ous appeal: if you are in a genre adventure. The Nexus background
you don’t like then don’t worry provides numerous adventure
because there will be another one seeds but little in terms of a cen-
along in a moment. The best ex- tral conflict. This makes character
ample of this is probably TORG motivation similar to that of char-
but it is an approach which dates acters in a cyberpunk campaign:
back to Lords of Creation and even there is money to be made and
to some D&D-variant games like plenty of bad people you can feel
Hargrave’s Arduin Gimoire. Al- justified in hurting. Whether that
though the idea behind Nexus is is good or bad is a matter of per-
not new it is still quite a good one sonal preference.
if what you want is rollicking ad- This brings us to the mechan-
ventures with big guns. ics of the game. My overall re-
The game uses the fairly com- sponse to the rules is that they
mon RPG format of rules at the are surprisingly reminiscent of
front and background at the back. the background, in that they are
The backgrounds are nicely modu- a patchwork of things, the like of
lar and cover the range of settings which we have seen before. The
from a modern Los Angeles to the rules section is reminiscent of the
Duchy of New Normandy with Hero system or GURPS crossed
plenty of weirdness in between. with TORG, with some added
There is also a decent number of extras. There is a points-based
NPC’s and ready-made enemies character-building system mar-
in the appropriate neighbour- ried to a difficulty level system of
hoods. Nexus is a universe where task resolution. If the guys at Hero
Sam Spade could meet Batman or Steve Jackson Games ever plan
while out for a drink with Frodo. a Version 4.0 of their games, they
But Daedalus Games doesn’t have might profit from a look at the
the licenses for these trademarks, chrome on Nexus. The innova-
so all these characters are living tions are mainly developments of
under false identities. the GURPS/Hero rules rather than
Nexus is very obviously influ- anything revolutionary, but they
enced by the Grimjack comics, include a nice initiative/action
without quite being an adaptation point system which is a distinct
of that background. Cynosure, the improvement on that in GURPS.
world of Grimjack, is in the multi- The combat system is generally
verse next door, just waiting for an similar to that used in Danger
enterprising gamesmaster to do International, Hero’s modern era
the necessary homework. RPG.
Nexus is a patchwork world. Character creation is always
The patchwork is explicitly in- a problem for a multi-genre
tended and is done well. As a game, and Nexus uses a smooth
campaign setting patchworks but conventional approach. The

primary attributes are like those butter, which is a lot more fun for
in GURPS, but they cascade into their player than it is for anyone
some Hero-like secondary attrib- else. I know because I was that ref-
utes. The manner in which this is eree.
achieved is probably state of the Then there are certain concep-
art for games using required char- tions which are difficult or impos-
acter attributes. There are skills, sible to realize within the Nexus
abilities and powers which can system. For example, creating the
be bought with points. The lack character Spook from the Grim-
of a cost ramp on skills requires a jack comics would require some
rather artificial limit on the num- rejigging of the abilities list. The
ber of levels a character should be Nexus character creation system
allowed to take, giving effectively is fine for variations on a theme
only five possible levels of skill. of human, but is much less able
Ignoring this limit allows very to deal with the wilder shores of a
unbalanced characters, of which player’s imagination.
more later. The costings empha- The powers section allows the
size combat advantages, and pow- building of custom magic systems
ers are like a cut-down version of which is nice, but should be treated
the Champions super-powers. with caution. Again, if you move
None of this is necessarily a off the marked path you can run
bad thing, but cramming all of it into trouble and the Alteration
into 35 pages obviously required Powers can be especially problem-
a lot of pruning. The Nexus char- atic. These sections require a great
acter creation system seems to deal of interpretation if you don’t
be tuned to producing guys with just want a variant spell list. There
guns (the combat system is 24 is a definite referee learning curve
pages long), although it is pos- when it comes to the judgement
sible to have a fair bit of chrome of power definitions.
on your character. So cyberclaws The two supplied scenarios
and infra-red vision are easily have a cyberpunk feel to them, and
acquired, as is a bit of street-sor- are explicitly an extraction and a
cery (you could probably convert gang-war. In playtest the use of in-
a Shadowrun character straight ter-reality travel and McGuffins to
across). However, the system starts deprive players of their favourite
giving anomalous results if you try toys/abilities was unpopular, and
to produce anything a little more if it was a feature of a campaign
strange. For example, it is possible it would make it difficult for the
to produce a starting level charac- players to develop distinctive tags
ter who is completely invulner- for their characters. This brings
able to injury and is also compe- us to the one thing that makes a
tent with all forms of gun combat. multi-genre game different from
Such a character cuts through the any other, the transition from one
scenarios like a hot knife through genre to another. Nexus provides

several options, all of which give a side-stepped by having the player
temporary translation of the trav- characters as constants in a chang-
ellers such that they are appropri- ing environment. The process of
ate to the new environment. So a translation is one area where Nex-
cyberwarrior with a smartgun who us could have developed some re-
goes to a lowtech neighbourhood ally innovative rules, but it doesn’t
will be translated into a guy with a take up that challenge and this
sword. Nexus is an infinitely large central concept is handled in fair-
city and translation is a fact of life ly broad terms. Further guidelines
for anyone moving across town. on this central concept would
However this is one area which have been more helpful than, say,
is left very much to the judgement the addition of the fatigue rules.
of the referee, and it is also ripe In conclusion, Nexus presents
for debate. So, while the combat an interesting adventuring envi-
system is very mechanistic, the ronment in a very professional
translation mechanics are much way. It is easy to access from an
fuzzier. This may be the only way existing campaign, because it is
to handle it, but I found transla- so completely open and because
tion more difficult to referee than comprehensive conversion notes
I would a firefight, which after all are supplied. Nexus may well be
is handled competently in any a feature of convention events
number of systems. Since the en- for this very reason. However,
tire player character group will although Nexus is done well it is
translate every time they enter not a highly innovative game. Its
a new neighbourhood, a referee background contains elements
could be periodically deluged from innumerable movies, comics
with questions by inquisitive play- and books, and its rules are remi-
ers. Such questioning is actually niscent of several popular game
one of the main tactical consid- systems presently available. Nexus
erations for combat, because what will not surprise you, and you may
works is dependent on the neigh- recognize several of the bits from
bourhood you are in. which it was built, but at least they
This is the problem that TORG picked the good bits.
Tales of Gargentihr The fantasy genre is, of course, an

by Richard Cooper, accident.
Alastair Cowan, and others There is no reason why a para-
Sanctuary Games Ltd phernalia of magic, heroes, and
ISBN 1-898301-00-X supernatural beings should be
344pp; £19.99 bound to bastardized Dark Ages,
Reviewed by Phil Masters Medieval or Renaissance worlds,

except that readers and writ- we have a selection of games re-
ers alike have developed a habit. flecting this range of possibilities.
The fairy-tale collectors of the Unfortunately, it is hard to dis-
early nineteenth century, for all tinguish between genuine themat-
their dreams of feudal hierarchy, ic adventurousness and a mere
worked with the muskets and mir- greedy desire to mix as many sale-
rored ballrooms of their age or a able motifs as possible into one
little before. When the tales of the product. Forced matings are nasty
Arabian Nights were first translat- things and Shadowrun, for exam-
ed into European languages, the ple, doesn’t strike this reviewer
demand for them was inspired far as a pretty or progressive sight.
more by their exoticism than by Perhaps the first aesthetically suc-
their antiquity. It was only as these cessful attempt to lift RPG fantasy
classics acquired the patina of age out of its medieval rut was Lace
that fantasy and medievalism be- and Steel, but that suffered from
came entangled—and then along distribution problems and over-
came William Morris and his crew, expensive physical design. One
with their thick rose-tinted lenses, can only hope that the forthcom-
to complete the process. Robert ing American edition does the
E. Howard and J. R. R. Tolkien, game justice, as its blend of classi-
whatever their respective talents cal and post-Renaissance imagery
and motivations, perpetuated the and fairy-tale grace deserves to
phenomenon. Ironists, from Ca- be better known. Recently, Castle
bell through Leiber to Pratchett, Falkenstein has made an attempt
have merely responded. to mix historical (predominantly
Umberto Eco would have us nineteenth-century) and fantastic
believe that this nostalgic view of themes, with moderate success.
the unreal is bound up with a cul- Other efforts in the same di-
tural awareness of the importance rection are emerging or promised
of the Medieval era in the forma- and it is patriotically pleasant to
tion of our modern world-view. be able to say that one strong con-
He would probably be right. But tender, the subject of this review, is
writers need not be slaves to tradi- British.
tion, whatever its roots and many Not that Tales of Gargentihr
of the wisest are not. From the in- (confidently subtitled ‘Real
tellectual whimsy of the Magic Re- Fantasy’) ties itself down in
alists, through to the paranormal history or geography. Its world
brutalities of modern ‘Dark Fan- is not our own; Gargentihr has,
tasy’ horror, there are plenty of in- among other features, silt seas on
stances of fantasy moving beyond which continents float, crackling
sword-and-sorcery medievalism. storms of mystical energy, and
Well, role-playing games are rare- variously shelled, rocky or bat-
ly more than a few decades be- winged non-human races. The
hind the literary world, and now book’s illustrations and motifs

wander happily across centuries of inventing decent names. Too
and continents, including much in here looks like random
oriental-looking sword-experts, collections of syllables; charac-
burnoose-clad desert tribes, ters will all have to worry about
ruffians in stove-pipe hats and their Shevin (within the Clondis),
policemen in helmets courtesy of their Kai, and their dealings with
Sir Robert Peel, while the black- Chinte’ F’har and Mujo.
clad, angst-prone ‘Kyro-mancers’, Familiarity may help, I sup-
who transmute a wasting disease pose. Unfortunately, neologisms
into a pragmatic style of magic, are often used in place of perfectly
are unmistakably cyberpunks. good ‘real’ words. Many charac-
However, I’d place the game’s ters will wield ‘davins’, which are
stylistic epicentre in or around the recognizable as rapiers, or ‘ghur-
West, circa 1750 A.D.; there are tis’, which are simply machetes.
rapiers, colonialism, crude (quasi- I’m not sure that this adds as
magical) pseudo-firearms and a much in atmospheric strangeness
slew of learned societies wielding as it takes away in clarity and ease
a still somewhat hermetic sort of of reading. Just to compound the
science—which is beginning to problem, there is no general glos-
worry a monotheistic church. sary; that index doesn’t really sub-
On the other hand, the local stitute.
date is 1585 on an arbitrary calen- The game is (as far as I know)
dar. So what? Well, the scene set by the company’s first product, and
this book is a continent which was I do get a sense of creators still
‘discovered’ by the most brashly learning their trade. 344-page
expansionist human group in books don’t always imply profes-
1492 of that same calendar. Why sionalism; professionals know
1492? Why not? It’s as good a year when to stop, and I’ve had some
as any to go discovering. bad experiences with disorgan-
So like most games designers ized, everything-we-thought-of,
creating new worlds, Sanctuary heavyweight game books. But
Games has plucked what it likes Tales isn’t that bad. Its physical ap-
out of our own history—includ- pearance is a little ‘muddy’, with
ing a little bit that’s arbitrary. This blurred page headings and mostly
may be highly necessary in this competent but sometimes stiff or
case, to ease players into a sub- murky artwork. The writing suf-
stantially alien and sometimes fers from occasional amateurish
off-beat sort of setting. Tales runs shifts of person or tense and that
to 344 pages and a lot of that is bizarre but commonplace con-
protein. There’s a decent index, fusion of ‘viscous’ with ‘vicious’;
which is admirable—and neces- worse, the authors have no idea
sary. Unfortunately, the design- of the traditionally correct use of
ers haven’t entirely mastered the apostrophes, and so scatter them
tricky but crucial fantasists’ art at random.

Still, it’s all quite usable. And ships and crafts, earning points to
Sanctuary certainly show signs of spend on skills. For each term, the
the will to success; putting phone, Narrator rolls dice to identify one
fax, and bulletin board numbers interesting incident that helps
and email addresses on your title form the character’s personality
pages implies confidence, as well and social ties. Such table-driven
as a certain trendiness. Internet systems like can seem highly con-
aficionados will find that they even stricting, arbitrary, or repetitive,
have their own World Wide Web but these tables are reasonably
page. long and flexible, and the Narra-
As a game, Tales shows a will- tor is encouraged to apply some
ingness to learn from the hobby’s creativity to the results; on this
past, and to adopt and refine basis, it looks like a good system.
good ideas—albeit linked at times It produces decently skilled char-
with a certain excessive tradition- acters aged in their twenties or so,
alism. Player characters (here with friends, enemies, and per-
re-labelled ‘ACs’—‘Adventuring sonal concerns—viable adventur-
Characters’—for no clear reason) ers rather than promising adoles-
are assumed to begin play when cents. Furthermore, players have
they sign up with the ‘Clondis’, considerable control over the
a high-minded secret society of outline of their character’s career;
skilled adventurers, which assigns this is at heart a ‘design’ system,
them to a small team which is re- for all its random elements. The
quired to display strong internal skill list is reasonably extensive,
loyalty—their fellow ACs. The and contains some entertainingly
game is shamelessly honest about offbeat touches that reflect the
the pragmatic purpose of this ‘ad- particularities of the setting.
venturers’ club’ in equipping the The game’s mechanisms are
referee (sorry, ‘Narrator’) with a mostly conventional, although
plot structure. Unfortunately, it counting ‘0’ as zero (not ten) on
may be too manipulative for some ten-sided dice seems perverse.
tastes, especially as the Clondis The skill system cross-references
seems to take a rather paternal- character attributes and task dif-
istic attitude to its members. The ficulty to find a target number on
only thing to be said for it is that it a table, which is then modified by
should usually work, but that’s not appropriate skill levels. This looks
a trivial point. manageable, although things get
But first, ACs must be creat- a little more complicated when
ed. This involves a ‘prior career’ it comes to resolving contests of
system of the type pioneered by skill—say, in combat. Referees
Traveller and refined by the likes are also required to improvise
of Cyberpunk; the nascent adven- a certain amount of descriptive
turer spends six ‘terms’ of vari- detail in fights or complex activi-
able length in various apprentice- ties. Combat is explicitly designed

to be reasonably dangerous and peasant farmers. It’s not totally
chancy; the rules are linked to a clear how this society feeds itself.
fairly clean and sensible encum- But there’s also a lot of intri-
brance and fatigue system. This cate and eccentric detail, with
is not a minimalist rules set, al- highly varied societies and off-
though it’s probably perfectly beat (if largely humanoid) non-
manageable once one gets the humans, not to mention maggots
hang of it. and violent team games. At its
One example of the game’s best, Gargentihr is (I suspect de-
determined oddness is that the liberately) reminiscent of the best
list of ten character attributes in- work of Jack Vance. At its worst,
cludes two neologisms. ‘Dalshra’ it’s silly or self-indulgent—but
is magical aptitude, while ‘Kai’ is then, the same is true of Vance.
a mixture of honour, reputation, The magic, incidentally, is a
self-confidence, willpower, and mixed bag, involving a shadowy
general player-character-ishness. spirit world and a lot of power-of-
This latter ties up to a full-scale faith. AC magic-wielders will ei-
set of rules for handling person- ther be ‘Kyromancers’ (essentially
al honour and reputation, which sickly cyborgs whose implants
perhaps helps to reflect an hon- give them access to the spirit
our-obsessed game society. The plane), experts in a kind of faith-
only thing that I disliked was the enhanced herbalism (which runs
way that rules for handling in- to explosives and tangle-webs as
sanity are mixed in with the Kai well as medicine), or monothe-
system; they look arbitrary and ist priests who can manage the
tacked on. odd exorcism as well as wield-
The presence of insanity ing a short-range force-weapon
rules should hint at the nature that they think is God-given (but
of the game setting, which is all which probably isn’t).
quite gothic, with some touches So there’s a lot for players to
of horror. For all the magically internalize in those 344 pages, be-
enhanced clockwork technology, fore a game can really get under-
there’s a lot of fog and shadow in way. This looks to me like a high-
the picture of Gargentihr. It is also risk marketing strategy; game-
depicted very much as a collection buyers will have to get pretty in-
of cities, so the game has a strong- terested in the setting to find the
ly ‘urbanized’ feel, although the book comprehensible, let alone
continent described also has a lot enjoyably playable. Of course,
of semi-explored frontier. Most once such converts are made,
of the descriptions of non-urban they should be good customers,
areas seem to mention swamps, but they are likely to take a cer-
swampy forests or mountains, and tain amount of convincing before-
the character generation system hand. The main sample scenario,
doesn’t produce any offspring of incidentally, is a straightforward

crime-busting exercise, designed and the game rules look compe-
to demonstrate a variety of skill tent and playable enough to sup-
applications and player actions, port the background.
but probably too inflexibly written But a review should be more
to allow for players who produce than a thumbs up or down; it
any but the anticipated responses. should look at the game’s place in
There’s much to like here and the wider world. And, despite the
if a review had to be boiled down occasional game-oriented distor-
to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, this one would be tions—the adventurers’ clubs and
a ‘yes’. I really wish Tales well (al- enhanced healing rates—Gargen-
though I also wish that the authors tihr strikes me as perhaps a touch
had learned to write or edit a little too ambitiously strange, as need-
better). Gargentihr’s Vancean rich- ing to make converts faster than
ness, its blend of gothic imagery its density of imagination will al-
and a kind of steampunk audacity low. But I hope that I’m wrong,
and the ambition of the project, and I’d encourage anyone to buy
all deserve some kind of reward, a copy and decide for themselves.
First Quest
By Bruce Nesmith, forthcoming Warhammer Quest,
L. Richard Baker III TSR’s Dragonstrike or even the
and David ‘Zeb’ Cook introductory Dungeons & Dragons
TSR Inc., 1994 set market themselves as board-
Boxed set; $30/£21.50 games or adventure games, and
Reviewed by James Wallis let the role-playing elements
It is a truth universally acknowl- sneak in as the game progresses.
edged that explaining the idea of First Quest, on the other hand,
recreational role-play to people grasps the minotaur by the horns,
outside the field is extremely dif- sub-titling itself ‘the introduction
ficult. Several of my relatives are to role-playing games’ and ‘the
convinced that I either design first interactive audio CD role-
computer games or participate in playing game ever created’.
a historical re-enactment group, TSR is, of course, ideally
and one believes I am a stage placed to produce introductory
magician. This problem is com- RPGs for the general market. It
pounded when it comes to mar- has the huge name-recognition
keting RPGs to the general pub- of the Dungeons & Dragons trade-
lic: if it’s hard to explain role-play mark, and the marketing muscle
when face-to-face, doing it with to back it up. D&D remains the
the blurb on a box-back has even point of entry for the vast majority
less of a chance. of role-players. But to produce an
As a result, several products introductory game based on the
such as MB’s HeroQuest, Games massively complex Advanced Dun-
nd
Workshop’s Talisman and their geons & Dragons 2 Edition rules,

as First Quest is, seems a strange The book is split into two sec-
decision. tions. The first eight pages cover
The claim to be the first ‘in- the basics of this sort of role-
teractive audio CD role-playing playing game: what role-play is;
game’ is correct only so far as movement; combat; magic; treas-
the letters ‘CD’ are concerned. ure and so on. It also contains a
Dragonroar (Standard Games) superb introduction to refereeing
contained a cassette which in- (or ‘DMing’), not only explain-
troduced the game and played a ing what a referee has to do, but
solo adventure; and in 1986 the how to do it well. This two-page
UK arm of TSR produced a dou- section includes advice on impar-
ble record album containing a tiality, improvisation, impromptu
very short and very basic AD&D rules and even the use of props;
adventure. It too was called First I’ve rarely read a better one. The
Quest, and contained synthesized expanded rules which fill the rest
background music with narra- of the book go into more detail
tion by the late Valentine Dyall. It about particular characters’ abili-
wasn’t interactive, but it did have ties and game mechanics such
distinct similarities to the current as Alignment. Naturally, a great
name-holder. many sections have been hived off
The First Quest box contains or left out, but nothing has gone
five books (Rules, 16pp; which a novice player will need.
Adventures, 64pp; Monsters While the feat of condensa-
and Treasure, 32pp; Wizard’s tion that has gone into the Rules
Spell Book, 8pp; Cleric’s Spell Book is impressive, one is forced
Book, 8pp), a referee’s screen, a to ask what the point is. The rules
map of the locations of the first are still a synopsis of the existing
four adventures, six miniature AD&D2 rules, and no matter how
figures, pre-generated character well defined they may be, they re-
cards and polyhedral dice. It also main stuck in the over-complex
contains an audio CD in pleasant and illogical first generation of
if uninspired packaging. Nothing RPG systems. The structure re-
tells the novice which component mains unaltered, and everything
to look at first, which is not an is tied specifically to the environ-
auspicious start. ment in which AD&D2 games
The Rules Book—which turns are played: First Quest makes no
out to be the starting point—at- attempt to be anything except
tempts the seemingly impossible an introduction to that game,
task of squeezing the 384 pages and that world. This is the first
normally needed to play AD&D2 point at which First Quest’s claim
into 16 pages, explained for new- of being ‘the introduction to role-
comers to the game. Not only playing games’ is contradicted:
does it succeed, it succeeds mag- it is not an introduction to role-
nificently. Frankly, I was stunned. playing games generally, it is an

introduction to AD&D2. It might thief, elf and dwarf—and playing
seem churlish to chide TSR for the adventure’s introduction from
producing an introduction to its the CD. At first glance it would
own best-selling game and game- appear that all the characters are
worlds, but a truly introductory men but the CD reveals that the
RPG should take the emphasis off magic-user is apparently female,
the mechanics and place it where although the illustration on the
it belongs: on the players’ imagi- character card shows ‘her’ with full
nations. No matter how well writ- beard and sensible clothes. Wom-
ten this Rule Book, that task is im- en in the AD&D2 universe, as the
possible with AD&D2 rules. They rest of the art in First Quest reveals,
are simply too complex. never wear sensible clothes.
The Rules Book encourages The character cards, it should
the reader to listen to the first two be mentioned, carry a character’s
tracks on the CD, which serve as name, picture and game ratings,
an example of an RPG in play: which are almost entirely numeri-
a game session with the players’ cal, and a brief synopsis of a few
voices and actions, followed by rules. There is no character back-
the same session with the voices ground or details of what that
and actions of the characters—re- character is actually like. AD&D2
ferred to as ‘heroes’ throughout. has never had any rules for de-
It works, but not well. The rest of scribing a character’s personality,
the CD is keyed to sections in the but having said in the Rules Book
Adventure Book, which is where that ‘pretending to be a character
things begin to fall apart. means talking and acting like him
The Adventure Book contains or her’, this idea is not referred
four adventures, each succes- to again. Characters are known
sively harder and with less and throughout the text and CD by
less hand-holding for the nov- their character class, not their
ice referee and players. The first names. First Quest is a role-playing
two use the CD to provide atmos- game in the sense that players
phere and assistance, the third is take on a role, not a fleshed-out
short but fairly simple, the fourth character or a personality. The
encourages the referee to make characters are utterly one-dimen-
up parts of it, and the book ends sional.
with some brief notes on creating Onwards to adventure. The
original adventures. This struc- adventure opening ‘You are sit-
ture is fine, but there are substan- ting in an inn, telling tales of your
tial problems with the adventures adventures, when . . .’ is the RPG
themselves. hobby’s only great cliché. The first
The referee is supposed to First Quest adventure, ‘The Tomb
start the game by handing out Of Demara’, begins with the char-
the character cards—the usual acters sitting in an inn, telling
mix of fighter, cleric, magic-user, tales of their adventures. The new

players are not told where this inn may not be their most technically
is (‘the town’, which is ‘an ordinary proficient, but is rarely equalled
little medieval town in the land of for excitement and memories.
Karameikos, which is a country is Taking that as given, First
the world of Mystara’ is the only Quest’s adventures are not what I
background given to them), or would consider a good primer for
anything about the setting. They novice gamers, whether players or
are not told what they are doing referee. They are basic, rigid and
there, how they know each other, repetitive. All four are essentially
or any other background details. dungeon-bashes. What is worse,
However, it’s arguable whether several fundamental mistakes are
the game needs it. The lack of made within the first few pages.
concrete placing within a prede- The first adventure, ‘The
termined universe shifts the game Tomb Of Demara’, starts with the
from fantasy to myth, the generic, player characters being railroaded
archetypal landscape of folklore through their first three or four
and fairy-tales, an environment ‘decisions’; they either make the
that is arguably more familiar and decision the adventure demands,
holds resonance for the uncon- or they have failed. The adventure
scious mind. It’s a world almost begins with a town crier appealing
everyone can immediately iden- for bold adventurers, and unless
tify with, unlike the detailed post- the player characters follow the
Tolkien worlds of most fantasy town crier they will sit in the inn
RPGs. until doomsday. I grant that First
Although throwing novices in Quest is an adventure game; even
at the deep end may not seem like novice players are likely to be
the gentlest introduction to role- able to take a hint like that and
play, it is a system that is tried and perhaps wouldn’t think of doing
tested, and which works well. The anything else but the adventure
concept of role-play is very hard gives absolutely no guidance for
to explain, as mentioned above, dealing with characters who want
but it is easily demonstrated: the to go and explore the town, or
best way to show players how chat to the other patrons of the
to role-play is to let them do it. inn, or question the town crier.
They quickly learn the basic prin- They either follow the town crier
ciples and begin to build on the to the wizard’s tower, or they rot.
scanty details they’ve been given, Once at the wizard’s tower, they
exploring the game-world and either agree to help him on his
their character at the same time, terms, or they get thrown out and
without sacrificing their sense of the game is effectively over unless
wonder for this strange new world they go back and accept. And
they are seeing through their having accepted, they must go
characters’ eyes. Like sex, a play- straight to the ruined castle: the
er’s first role-playing experience game does not allow anything else

to happen. Any illusion of choice for them. The sound effects are
is effectively wrecked. muddy and unclear, the dialogue
Changing this and giving the is generally uninspired and does
characters free rein would be sec- not add much to the atmosphere,
ond nature to a more experienced and the music is intrusive. Mem-
referee, but First Quest is designed bers of my play-test group were
for people who have never seen unanimous in their dislike for it.
an RPG played before. It’s pos- The fact that the CD tracks are
sible that a novice referee might unchangeable leads to inconsist-
be able to improvise if the players encies. Only if the characters ask
asked to do something other than the wizard a particular question
follow the adventure’s line, but in the tower, will he give them a
the plotted course is programmed scroll. When they reach the ru-
into the CD’s tracks and those ined castle, the referee plays Track
cannot be changed. 6, in which the magic-user reads
The CD, I believe, is First the information on the scroll,
Quest’s main problem. TSR’s ear- even though the heroes may not
lier board-game Dragonstrike con- have acquired it. This is on the
tained a video which served only to third page of the adventure; it’s
preface the game, but First Quest’s another far from auspicious sign.
CD is integral to the game’s first Moreover, the way the CD’s
two adventures: they could pos- dialogue is phrased can only serve
sibly be played without it, but I to diffuse any of sense of wonder
wouldn’t want to try. The tracks that the players may have built up
on the CD are keyed to particular so far. ‘Look out, they’re gnolls!’
locations or actions: as the charac- ‘I hate gnolls!’ Clearly the char-
ters enter or perform, the track is acters have faced gnolls before
played and then the referee reads and sound as if they know how to
a brief description, which should deal with them, but the players
further illustrate what’s going on. don’t have a clue what a gnoll is.
Each track contains background The referee is told to show them
music, sound effects, and voices of the illustration from the Monsters
monsters and characters, includ- and Treasure book, which is not
ing the player characters. terribly useful or intimidating; no
This sounds great on paper, further information on gnolls is
but less good on the CD. Hearing provided for them. I believe that
the voices of the character that the words ‘You can see two hide-
you are supposed to be playing ous creatures: they look like men
is off-putting, and only serves to but they stand eight feet high,
add another layer to the divide have the heads of hyenas and
between player and character, speak in guttural snarls as they
particularly for the one playing demand your surrender’, coupled
the magic-user. It feels as if parts with the players’ imaginations,
of the game are being played out will conjure more frightening vi-

sions of gnolls than any effect pro- around on a map, almost as if
duced by a small picture and a vo- this were a board-game, although
cal track which makes them sound the map serves little real purpose
like Klingons. and can be actively misleading, as
However the players imagine some items illustrated on it do not
the gnolls, they will fight them. exist in the scenario.
Having been railroaded to the The second adventure is a lit-
castle, they are effectively rail- tle better. Set in a haunted house,
roaded into combat. They can sur- it uses the CD in the same way,
render or retreat, but the game is to explain rather than illustrate.
effectively over; if they try to talk, One can forgive the minor anach-
the gnolls will only demand that ronisms—wallpaper, grandfather
they surrender. In this—the first clocks—in the scenario’s attempt
real encounter within the game to create atmosphere and instil a
itself—combat is the only option sense of urgency in the players:
that leads anywhere, and this they must escape by midnight, or
theme persists throughout the they are doomed. Unfortunately,
Adventures Book; if something is ‘doomed’ is the key phrase: al-
not friendly, kill it. This is faith- though ‘The Ghost Of Harrow
ful to the style of AD&D2, and to Hill’ does give the players more
hope that First Quest might buck real choices to make, the chance
its parent’s trend is unrealistic, but that they will fail utterly is much
the values and expectations of the too high.
AD&D2 world are asserted with As they enter the house, the
unseemly haste. Perhaps the de- ‘heroes’ are confronted by a ghost,
signers believe that novice players who says that if they surrender
are only looking for immediate one of their number, the others
catharsis and little else, and they can go free. I would have thought
may have their reasons for that. that the average ‘hero’ worthy
But I can’t see it myself. of the name would jump at the
The adventure continues as chance of a little self-sacrifice, but
the characters explore the ru- apparently not: if any character is
ined castle. Monsters are placed allowed to surrender, the others
in rooms apparently by random can escape but are cursed by the
(the ogre Bonegnasher is appar- gods for their cowardice. There’s
ently happy to let carrion crawlers more. A few encounters later the
and gelatinous cubes live in his party are attacked by the ghost,
stronghold), and have treasure to and if one of them makes some
be looted from their slaughtered bad rolls and is pulled under the
bodies. All this is AD&D as I re- floor by it, the others can escape
member it from the early 1980s. but are cursed by the gods for
The adventure is completely their cowardice. And if they fail
location-based, and players are to meet the midnight deadline
expected to move plastic figures they are faced with an almost un-

beatable monster, and no instruc- has been blurred by games like
tions are given on what happens HeroQuest and Dragonstrike. The
if they defeat it. This raises a lot only major difference between
of worrying implications: a ‘hero’ these two and First Quest, a RPG
in First Quest is not the same thing which centres almost entirely on
as a hero anywhere else; the gods moving pieces around a board,
of the AD&D2 world are quick to fighting monsters by rolling dice
punish and slow to forgive; and and solving a rudimentary plot,
the designers of First Quest are is that First Quest’s rules are much
likewise. More importantly, faced more complicated. Sixteen pages
with unbeatable foes and implac- of rules may be very little for a
able gods, a novice player may RPG, but are a large amount for
never return—either to Harrow a boardgame. And, of course, the
Hill, or to role-playing games. misconceived CD, which at least
The third adventure is less lo- gives the game a gimmick.
cation-driven than the others, but Commercial role-playing
still uses the map and counters, games have a number of strengths
and the fourth is an even more over the traditional games and the
traditional dungeon-bash than video games with which they must
‘The Tomb Of Demara’, forsaking increasingly compete. First Quest,
even the vestiges of a plot. What- with its rigid structure, its lack of
ever else First Quest might be, state characterization, its over-complex
of the art isn’t it; there seems to mechanics (which, despite their
be an almost deliberate attempt brilliant explanation and the fact
to present role-playing as it was that the designers were effectively
fifteen years ago. Maybe people forced to use them, are as much
buying a game called Dungeons & to blame as anything else) and its
Dragons have a right to expect at failure to evoke any kind of sense
least one dungeon and one drag- of wonder, does not capitalize on
on, but First Quest delivers only the any of them.
former; its concerns are mundane First Quest is not inherently
and mechanical, with a distinct bad, it’s just poor. The actual
lack of flights of imagination or a product is a curate’s egg; it func-
soaring sense of wonder. tions adequately although using
There is no question that First it as an ‘introduction to role-play-
Quest will introduce new people to ing’ is like asking someone to take
the idea of role-playing, but the driving lessons in a Model T. I
question must be asked whether do not know whether this retro-
they will stick around after play- feel to the game was an accident,
ing it. The game is simplistic in a deliberate policy decision or an
its approach: ten years ago that attempt by the designers to recre-
might have been a good thing ate what they enjoyed about role-
but today the gap between tradi- playing when they started in the
tional board-games and AD&D2 hobby; but either way it demon-

strates TSR’s reluctance to admit introductory game. It’s possible
that role-play is moving on and that First Quest is not only bring-
developing as a form. The inclu- ing new blood to the role-playing
sion of a CD in the package seems hobby, but also encouraging it to
to imply to punters that this will stay around and explore the po-
be a cutting-edge product, but the tentials of the form. I wish it was
structure it forms part of is very true, but I strongly doubt it. When
traditional, and not a little disap- relatives next ask me to explain
pointing. what role-playing is, I will not be
As a disclaimer, I will say that pulling this box from the shelf
my years of experience and cyni- and encouraging them to try it
cism may have blinded me to what themselves. First Quest is a sadly
novice role-players want from an missed opportunity.
Into the Dragon’s Cave take turns to tell a part of a story.

Into the Dark Each player picks up the narrative
Continent from the player before, has to
by Ken and Jo Walton narrate a sentence or two, and
The Magellanica Company must include the subject of one
Card games; £4.50 each of their cards in their segment.
Reviewed by The player discards that card
Richard Lambert and replaces it with one from the
pick-up pile to maintain five cards
Into the Dragon’s Cave and Into the in their hand. Players are not
Dark Continent are two card-based supposed to ramble on at length
story-telling games sharing the about their card—if they do, the
same system. The players of the other players have to wait forever
former are intended to tell tales for their turn.
of epic fantasy, while the latter is If a player can’t think of a way
about Victorian ‘Boys’ Own Paper’ to continue the story when their
adventure yarns. turn comes around, they can
At the beginning of the game, ‘pass’. In this case, they discard
the players are dealt a hand of one of their cards face up, and
six cards, each of which carries pick a new-one. Another player
a short line of text which fits in can choose, in their turn, to play
with the genre of the game and the top card in the discard pile
which the player will have to build rather than one from their hand.
into the story. They each set one When all the cards in the pile
of these cards aside: this is their are used up the players can at-
‘ending card’. The cards that have tempt to play their ending cards.
not been dealt are placed in a After an ending card has been
pick-up deck. The players then played, the rest of the group are

supposed to play whatever cards well-chosen, but there are one or
are left in their hands in such a two in each pack that are a little
way as to bring the game to a sat- too similar to each other. There
isfying conclusion. This feels a lit- is a nice mix of items, objects
tle pointless and strange until you and places with a good number
get used to the fact that ‘ending’ of cards (for example ‘On Fire
cards are really ‘winning’ cards. Within’, ‘Maelstrom of Passion’
A game should take between and ‘Thou Too?’) which take a bit
half an hour and forty-five min- more thought to fit into the plot.
utes for each 50 cards used. The I must admit that I can’t wait to
designers recommend everything get a chance to play the ‘An Un-
from a version in which there expected Consummation’ or ‘A
are only six cards per player to a Trouble With Intercourse’ cards.
three-hour game featuring all the We found that shorter games
cards—which doesn’t sound as using fewer cards were more en-
though it’s for the faint-hearted! joyable and generally produced
The rules cover half a side of stories that the players were more
A4 paper and are fairly clear. It pleased with. Story-telling games
took us a little while to work out are mainly played for fun or as
how you finished the game: an time-passing exercises and most
example of the use of ‘ending people I know would prefer to
cards’ would have made life eas- play six short games to one that
ier. The Ending system isn’t very lasts three hours. In the first play-
well thought out, and feels rather test we played with five players
as if it was tacked on as an after- and a hundred cards in a game
thought. The Endings can be too which lasted about an hour and a
easy to get to, since you can chose half, but the story started flagging
something as simple as ‘orcs’ or after about seventy-five cards.
‘wounded’, which are easy to in- We also found that there was
troduce into the story at the ap- a tendency for players to lose in-
propriate moment. It might work terest in the story of all players
better if you had to pick an end- except the one whose turn it was
ing at random, rather than being before them. You sort of skim-lis-
allowed to choose it. ten to the others, but since each
The cards are printed on one player tends not to advance the
side of thin, but not flimsy, card story very far, you only need to lis-
and need to be cut out. They need ten out for major plot twists. Mi-
slightly better layout—and look a nor cliff-hangers can be ignored
bit as though they are waiting for as the characters will be out of that
the artwork to be added. Even particular danger by the time play
with only graphics and wording passes round to you. This prob-
on them, the cards could have lem is less serious in short games.
been better laid out. I didn’t think that either Dark
The subjects on the cards are Continent or Dragon’s Cave made

for a very good game: there was do succeed in generating good
no strong sense of the players stories: it’s just that the system
competing with each other and doesn’t help the process along
the turn sequence is rather repeti- very much. If you want a story-
tive, particularly for the longer generating activity, in which the
games. A system like this ought to enjoyment comes simply from the
push the story along and encour- development of the plot, you will
age plot twists or development. like these games. If what you are
On the other hand, both games after is a good game, you won’t.
Raflan
by Tom Rogan and this into its game-world, Disen-
Chris Lampard chanted Games fails.
Disenchanted Games Raflan is a large country, ly-
134pp plus map; £8.00 ing on the southern coast of the
Reviewed by Brian Williams continent of Kar-Merin and bor-
dered to the North by an almost
Raflan is the second of Disen- impassable range of mountains
chanted Games’ Kar-Merin sour- and to the East and West by for-
cebooks. Like its predecessor eign states. Off the coast to the
Casalana, it sets out to produce south lies the island of Casalana.
a comprehensive fantasy setting The geography, flora, fauna and
that has no magic or non-human politics of Raflan are described in
races. some detail.
Raflan promises much but fails These sections give Raflan a
to deliver. This saddens me, as solid feel. Any referee worth their
Disenchanted Games clearly has a salt should be able to use this in-
lot to offer. The designers think in formation to paint a convincing
the same way I do, and emphasize picture of the towns of Raflan.
the things in a game that I would The major towns and castles
emphasize. For a long time I have all have their own entries in the
been a proponent of Low Fantasy book, including a sketch map of
(as opposed to High Fantasy); a each town. I found these entries
gaming style in which the details to be disappointing as they did
of everyday life are of utmost im- little to add to the brief descrip-
portance and where characters tions that had already been given.
need to pay attention to the task Too much time was spent detail-
of surviving on a day-to-day basis. ing one or two individuals and the
To run this sort of game you need odd specific building. I felt the
a wealth of background material: space would have been much bet-
the sort of material promised in ter used to give an overview of the
Raflan. When it comes to putting character and atmosphere of the

town, perhaps by giving very brief ers have to have confidence in
descriptions of a lot of places. As it that world’s logic. If you say that
is, there is no real framework for a your world is historically based
referee to build on when fleshing and then introduce radical differ-
out these towns and cities. This ences from real history, you have
would not be a problem if the to explain what they are and how
player characters were ‘just pass- they affect that world, otherwise
ing thorough’, but a prospective logic crumbles and you lose that
referee would have a lot of work consistency. In this sort of game,
to do if the characters were to stay a referee is asking their players
in a particular town for any length to explore and to believe in the
of time. world and its culture. The referee
Raflanish culture is a curious too has to believe in it, otherwise
thing. Although it is supposedly they cannot make their players do
based on Western Europe in the so. It’s not enough to answer the
late medieval and early renaissance players’ queries by saying ‘because
period, there are a lot of distinctly it says so in the book’. As referee,
nineteenth and twentieth-century I have to convince myself and I
ideas: universal education and have to convince the players, and
medicine, for example. Quite how unfortunately, there’s too much in
this fits in with what is otherwise Raflan that I find unconvincing.
a feudal land-owning system with Despite these misgivings, the
the majority of the population Raflan guidebook paints a very
working the land isn’t really thorough picture of the country,
explained. The worst example and in other respects does a fairly
of this is the absolute, implicit good job of presenting a consist-
equality of women. Nothing in ent and logical culture. This is the
Raflanish culture or religion canvas upon which the referee
(which is described in great can unfold their game. This is the
detail) gives any hint as to how canvas upon which Disenchanted
its society developed with such Games can unfold its world. This
equality. What is worse, this seems is where the game can get really
to have had absolutely no impact exciting.
on the society. I can detect no Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
difference from the way Raflenish ‘Greed, Deceit, Lust, Treachery,
society would be if it were male- Ambition’ boasts the advertising.
dominated. All of these things are missing
This worries me greatly. It from Raflan. A great deal of time
makes me wonder what other is spent describing the country’s
changes the writers have made history and politics, and in detail-
without thinking them through. ing the major political figures in
If one is trying to produce a logi- the realm—the King, his Lords
cal, reasoned world in which peo- and the like. Here Disenchanted
ple can game, then those play- Games had the chance to produce

a vivid game, full of intrigue and necessary to go into such intricate
excitement. Instead, we get a bor- detail? I’m perfectly capable
ing world, full of perfect people. of coming up with run-of-the-
Take, for example, the King. mill NPCs myself. I don’t need
King Wilfred is an excellent King. half a page telling me their life
He is popular, wise, a skilled poli- history. A few lines to sketch their
tician with a deep understand- character would suffice. I could
ing of the situation at home and understand the reasoning behind
abroad, a strategic genius, tacti- giving this level of detail if these
cal wizard, brilliant general and were major characters or villains,
superb warrior. He has no flaws likely to play an important part
or weaknesses, no vices or bad in the player characters’ lives, but
habits. In short, he is perfect, as mostly they’re not. Unless you’re
are his wife, his children and all trying to run Neighbours: the game
his major Lords. While this may of everyday life in Raflan, these
explain Raflan’s stability and are not the sort of NPCs that are
pre-eminence on the battlefield, going to be of any use or interest
it makes for a very boring game. to you.
Where are the schemers? Where Raflan almost succeeds in what
are the greedy, the treacherous, it tries to do, but falls tantaliz-
the ambitious? Is there no one ingly short in the process. If only
who is jealous of the King’s power there had been three or four ba-
and wants it for themselves? Is no sic plot outlines running through
one plotting to curry the King’s the book which linked the many
favour by discrediting a rival? Can NPCs together, this would have
they all really be that nice? given the referee something to
Similarly in the Church, Sam- work with and breathed some life
uel Russell, the present Guardian, into the whole thing, giving it the
is a liberal, promoting greater spark that it so desperately needs.
contact with other religions, up- It may be argued that pro-
setting the ways of the tradition- spective referees can do this
alists. Where are his rivals? Where themselves, but when I think of
are the fundamentalists, inspired running a game in Raflan, I find
by the word of Keron to oppose myself asking why? Having read
these false teachings? Nowhere to Raflan cover-to-cover, I find noth-
be seen in Raflan, I’m afraid. ing it in to inspire me, nothing to
Throughout the book, there excite me, nothing to tempt me to
are descriptions of various non- do that work and to abandon the
player characters. With the odd backgrounds that I’ve created my-
honourable exception, they are self or shaped to fit my desires.
all terribly nice, boring people. In short, Raflan is a compe-
While they may add to the local tently done but uninspiring set-
character of their particular ting. What disappoints me is that
town, village or castle, is it really with a little more imagination, it

could have been so much more forthcoming Dardere in the hope
and indeed still can. I look for- that it will be everything Raflan
ward to Disenchanted Games’ isn’t.
Macho Women number of specialized attributes,

With Guns skills, special advantages and dis-
By Greg Porter advantages.
Blacksburg Tactical The second edition of MWWG
Research Centre changes emphases from the previ-
63pp; ISBN 0-943891-27-2 ous edition in a few ways. First,
Reviewed by Leah Robin Porter puts more emphasis on the
playability of the system. In the
In this, the second edition of the original MWWG he says, ‘While
satirical Macho Women with Guns a playable game, it is intended
(MWWG), Greg Porter promises more as satire and humour.’ In
us a game ‘. . . so biased and con- the second edition he mentions
tradictory that no one in their repeatedly that the system is not
right minds would think to take only playable, but a good sys-
us seriously.’ He delivers on that tem too. The system is standard,
promise. point-based and not particularly
This version of MWWG is complex, and it is indeed playa-
largely a compilation in one vol- ble, although not a breakthrough
ume of the original four booklets in game design. Secondly, the
published by Blacksburg Tactical satire of the game is broadened to
Research Centre between 1988 more RPG-related themes includ-
and 1990. I have (multiple) copies ing diceless role-playing and ‘dark
of the original booklets because future’ games. For those familiar
many of my friends thought of me with the first edition, the second
when they saw them and bought edition’s humour is up-dated and
them for me. I even played in a quite entertaining. Thirdly, there
MWWG campaign over a period are a few additions to the first edi-
of several months. When I saw tion material, but not many. This
the second edition of MWWG I edition is mainly a compilation of
happily bought it. the first booklets with little new
MWWG focuses on scantily material added.
clad female characters who fight I have heard MWWG both
the forces of evil and chauvin- praised as a ‘woman-centred’
ism in a post-apocalyptic society. game and vilified as a ‘celebration
Players can choose among three of the objectification of women.’
character classes: Macho Women Both of these positions are over-
with Guns, Bat-Winged Bimbos stated, since they assume that Por-
from Hell, and Renegade Nuns ter actually takes a satirical stance
on Wheels. Characters may have a on the portrayal of women in

gaming. But in fact MWWG is sat- paign I was in remains the only
ire without a cutting edge. While one I’ve played in that included
it teeters on the edge of both exclusively female player charac-
thoughtfulness and offensiveness ters. I’ve played in many cam-
at times, it manages to achieve paigns with exclusively male play-
neither. As Porter says, he in- er characters, and it was strangely
tends to be contradictory, which is exhilarating to play in a game re-
presumably why he describes the volving around women.
game (in successive paragraphs) Companies such as TSR claim
as a satire aimed at the neglect that they have dealt with gender
of women in RPGs and also as an differences by creating gender-
excuse for sexist, chauvinist gam- neutral systems, essentially mak-
ing. As quickly as Porter raises is- ing gender a non-issue. This strat-
sues through satire, he backs off egy is of limited success because
from going anywhere with them. gender (along with other factors,
Perhaps he is less ready to offend such as social class, ethnicity and
than he claims. sexual orientation) affects the op-
One nice point that Porter portunities, resources and skills
raises about the portrayal of wom- that individuals have. Other sys-
en in RPGs is that they must in- tems, such as Rolemaster have very
vest in ‘feminine’ skills—they are limited discussion of practical is-
not born with the skills that allow sues such as birth control, moth-
them to function as femmes fatales. erhood, sex-differentiated inher-
‘Run in High Heels’, for example, itance or women’s opportunities
is a skill that allows the characters to hold powerful social positions.
to move without falling on their On the whole, I have not seen sat-
faces or snapping off heels in isfactory in-depth discussions of
grates. Though the skill system issues like these which have been
includes the standard ‘Seduction’ of historic concern to women. In
skill (and not-so standard skills, gender-neutral systems, the ab-
such as ‘Perform Anatomically Im- sence of these kinds of issues sug-
possible Feat’, or ‘Demonic Gig- gests that gender-neutrality has
gle’), this acknowledgment that been approached from a distinctly
femininity is learned is one that I, masculine slant. MWWG raises
and other female role-players to the issue of gender-specificity in
whom I’ve talked, appreciate. All RPGs, and in a limited market that
too often, the only skill in which could well be expanded, it is worth
female characters must invest to asking how gender might be bet-
be feminine in RPGs is ‘Seduction’ ter incorporated into RPG systems
(which, like ‘Run in High Heels’, rather than ignored altogether.
can be learned by either sex). On the other hand, Porter
Additionally, MWWG does fo- raises some issues that he appears
cus on women, even if it’s done to regret later in the same para-
in campy fun. The MWWG cam- graph. In his description of one

of the character disadvantages, the illustrations of those busty, lin-
‘Hardwired’, Porter coyly raises gerie-clad macho women account
the issue of lesbianism without for a good portion of MWWG’s
ever mentioning the ‘L’ word. sales.
The construction of the player MWWG is an entertaining and
characters never deviates from the fluffy RPG satire. While it raises
‘deadly but beautiful’ stereotype some interesting issues about gen-
in which female player characters der and gaming, the satire itself is
are too often mired. Porter nev- not sharp-edged nor does it pro-
er suggests alternatives, or even voke much critical thought about
variations, to this character-type women and RPGs. This non-
although MWWG takes it to ludi- threatening aspect of MWWG may
crous extremes. also account for its popularity.
Another ambiguous feature of Those who have the original
MWWG is the art, which is exag- booklets may not want to rush out
gerated T&A and fun to look at. to purchase the second edition,
In the end, however, it probably since the new material is mini-
acts as more of a celebration than mal. For those who do not have
a critique of fantasy art, in which the first edition booklets, MWWG
women seem to live in thongs and provides a fun read, and campy,
fishnet stockings. I suspect that mindless role-playing.
Stocs Lite designed and clearly explained,

Eoin Connolly and others perhaps suffer from being overly
Wasteland Games traditional, offering little in the
36pp; £3.99 way of new ideas.
Reviewed by J. Paul Hunter I gather that the full STOCS
system (which I haven’t yet seen)
As soon as it asked, ‘How many provides rules and detail for a
times have you bought a game broad range of genres, presumably
with a good background but a adopting a rather GURPS-ish ‘all
system that sucked?’ I knew that things to all people’ approach.
STOCS Lite would strike some Generic systems, on the whole,
sort of chord with me. Aiming to hold little interest for me, as they
provide a reasonably simple and always seem both cumbersome
concise set of rules for games set and ultimately imperfect for
in the modern day, the designers whatever genre one is trying to
suggest that they could be used simulate—I’m a fan of games
either as an alternative system for where the mechanics have been
your favourite published back- tailored to the background. On
ground, or as the foundation for a the other hand, several popular
game of your own imagining. The games are set in similarly dark
rules themselves, whilst sensibly versions of the modern day, so

it may be possible to produce a pionage, conspiracy or general
system that’s well-suited to at least weirdness, but it appears that ma-
these backgrounds. jor assumptions were made about
The mechanics, which remind even those genres.
me of Greg Porter’s CORPS The combat system is too long.
(though far simpler and arguably And it’s too complicated. That
more usable), seem competently doesn’t mean that I can’t imagine
written and well thought out. The games where it would work well,
two-tiered skill system does a good but it does mean that I play a lot
job of encouraging characters with of games where it would simply ir-
a mix of (expensive) general skills ritate me.
and (cheaper) specializations, and I’m not sure that I agree with
the referee is urged to modify the the comment that ‘being injured is
skill list to suit their games. one of the most important things
The dry business of attributes likely to happen to your character,’
and skills is somewhat fleshed out but even if I did, I doubt I’d want
by the addition of a key person- to celebrate such an event by fig-
ality aspect (loyal, embittered, uring out all those extra dice rolls.
whatever—the idea is to start with Characters rarely get shot in my
something general, and then to games (it’s something for them to
develop the concept during play), live in fear of), so I wouldn’t ex-
a secret (a useful hook for the ref- pect my players to recall wound-
eree; one that I first saw in Over the ing rules that are very detailed,
Edge), two quirks and a flaw (more presumably quite realistic, but ul-
OTE-ness here). To the designers’ timately rather involved (the de-
credit, they stress that this is the signers’ own word for it).
most important part of character The designers explain that
creation. they retained these mechanics
The nature of quirks, and per- from the (more detailed) par-
haps the specifics of the skill list, ent system, simply because they
will be largely determined by the liked the way they worked. This
sort of game you’re running—it is a mistake that James Wallis de-
might be appropriate for all your scribes very well in his article in
occult investigators to have para- Inter*Action #1—game mechanics
normal talents, but ‘lost at sea, should be chosen because they do
raised by plankton’ might seem what you need them to do, not be-
out of place in a gritty detective cause you like them for their own
story. These sorts of choices allow sake.
some flexibility, but it seems to me A page or so of notes on cus-
that other aspects of the system tomizing the system doesn’t go
may prove harder to bend to your far enough—many people will
tastes. The introduction indicates want to do more than rescale the
that the system was designed pri- damage numbers or rewrite the
marily for settings involving es- skill list. Without guidelines for

streamlining the combat system, interesting to see what it does with
STOCS Lite restricts itself to set- the system. It’s worth noting that
tings where combat is relatively this approach worked well with
important. Chaosium’s line of products shar-
That said, the rules are well ing the Basic Role-Playing system.
designed, and could be perfect for For the time being, I doubt I’ll be
many games. Wasteland intends using STOCS Lite for many of my
to release a number of games, modern-day games, but I’ll prob-
each complete with background ably give it a try the next time I
and tailored mechanics—it will be pick up SLA Industries.
Lost Souls alive, except that it conferred on

by Joe and Kathleen Williams you the power to walk through
Marquee Press walls, teleport, and crack abysmal
195pp; $19.95 puns at the slightest provocation.
Reviewed by Andrew Rilstone Although Lost Souls describes itself
as ‘combining horror with black
Lost Souls is a role-playing game— humour’ it doesn’t want to de-
a thickish rule-book full of charts, scend into this sort of farce. But it
tables, advice directed at prospec- isn’t about straight horror, either.
tive players and referees and me- Its cover depicts a classic gothic
diocre artwork. The game invites ghost: a skull faced figure in a
the players to take on the role of cowl towering over a woman in
a group of ghosts—newly dead a Victorian dress. The title page,
spirits who have returned from on the other hand, is decorated
limbo in order to complete their with two tiny line drawings of the
business on earth. typical cartoon ghost—the sort of
The ghost-story has a long thing that the Ghostbusters sym-
and respectable literary pedigree, bol says ‘no entry’ to. Are ghosts
but is almost by definition the frightening, or merely silly? Un-
story of a living person who sees canny, or rather cute? The game
a ghost. We imagine that it would never quite makes up its mind.
be frightening to see a ghost, but Once you have included the
there is no reason to suppose lists of skills, special powers, types
that it would be frightening to be of ghost, careers and what-not,
one. The only stories that I am the character generation system
aware of that take ghosts as their takes up about half the book. It’s
protagonists are lampoons of the one of those systems where there
genre—often pretty childish ones. is a random chart for every facet
There was a long-running British of your character, from colour
children’s TV show called Rent- of eyes to cause of death. We get
aghost which took the view that the usual advice about re-rolling
being dead was much like being results you aren’t comfortable

with and making things up if you he had accidentally killed both
prefer, but in fact the purely ran- his father and his lover and that
dom approach works pretty well. he wanted to tell his lover that
I tossed some dice around for a he loved her, one last time. (This
few minutes and came up with a shows, incidentally, what random
red-haired, blue-eyed man of sixty tables of this sort do well: the
who had been an athlete and died ‘accidentally killed lover’ result,
in a pole-vaulting accident. Not and the ‘wants to tell lover you
quite a fully rounded persona, but love her, one last time’ result are
more interesting than the list of rolled separately and at random,
figures and skills that some games and suggest (to me) the appeal-
give you as a starting character. ing image of one ghost searching
The most important thing for another ghost whose death he
that this randomization process accidentally caused.) But death,
tells you is what your character’s guilt, love, revenge, and bereave-
career was while they were alive. ment are heavy stuff for a game
There are fifteen of these in the of mad scientists and incompe-
rulebook. Cemetery Plots—a sort tent explorers. Is this a cartoon
of grab-bag compendium of new world or one with enough angst
stuff for the game—adds ten to keep White Wolf in business for
more. There’s a separate page for months?
each of these careers, since each Another criticism of the char-
profession has a different range acter generation system is that
of attributes, skills, equipment while it produces interesting char-
and—crucially—a different table acters, it also tends to pile up too
for determining cause of death. much information about them.
The professions have a distinctly The rules are not always clear
cartoonish feel about them; you about how this information is
might turn out to have been a spy, meant to interrelate. If your ‘ap-
an inventor, or an explorer. This pearance’ is ‘red-haired with sun
is reinforced by the jokey ‘cause of glasses’; your ‘ghostly visage’ is
death’ table. The explorer might ‘skeletal’, and your ‘lost soul type’
have died by being run over by is a ‘phantom’ with ‘dark, good
a bus while looking for a post of- looks’ then what exactly does your
fice, and the spy could have been character look like?
stabbed in the eye while looking It is also an oddity of the game
through a key-hole. that your cause of death confers
You also get to role six life-and- special powers and equipment on
death events, and one piece of you, so that my pole-vaulter was
unfinished business—your main given two pieces of pole which do
motivation for being on earth. My ‘+4 brawling’ damage. Had he
incompetent, elderly pole-vaulter died of cramps while swimming
found that he had been acquit- the Channel, he would have had
ted of murdering an enemy, that ‘+1 defence’ swimming cap. The

idea of a ghost in a swim-suit is In fact, if the tone of the char-
admittedly funny, but I’m dubious acter generation system is ambig-
about it being a source of special uous, then the suggestions about
powers. This reasoning carries what ghostly characters are actu-
over into some of the monster and ally meant to do are doubly so. As
NPC sections. In Cemetery Plots premises for role-playing games
there is an amusing section about go, Lost Souls has a good one.
the ghosts of the famous dead. The reason that PC s are walk-
Elvis Presley, for example throws ing abroad as ghosts is that they
gold discs around with great accu- died prematurely, and therefore
racy. There are better jokes than still have some Will to Live. When
this to be made about the dead their Will to Live runs out, they
Elvis. The writers of Lost Souls, for will be reincarnated. However, if
all their good ideas, can’t get away they do not build up some Karma
from the theory that since role- (by doing good deeds, finish-
playing games are really about ing their business and fulfilling
combat, the most important thing Ghostly Vows) they will be reborn
to know about NPCs is their com- as pondscum or intestinal para-
bat statistics. sites. To no one’s great surprise,
One reason that so much Will to Live equates to Hit Points,
space is spent on character gen- and Karma to Experience Points.
eration is that the rulebook sug- However, it is much to the design-
gests that Lost Souls is suited to ers’ credit that these game devices
‘spontaneous’ role-playing, with are rationalized within the game’s
relatively little preparation from background. Karma, it seems, is
the referee. Given that the player the amount of potential energy
characters are reasonably power- that your life-force has. At the
ful free agents with their own aims moment of death, your life-force
and objectives, I think that this is makes a replica of you out of ecto-
probably true. It is this that ap- plasm. Ectoplasm is rarefied, sub-
peals to me about Lost Souls: I like atomic matter, which is why it can
the idea of generating a group of pass through solid objects. The
ghosts and then seeing what hav- more Karma you have, the more
oc they wreak in the world of mor- things you can do with your ecto-
tals. If this was the intention of the plasm; in game terms, the more
designers, it is a pity that the rest ghostly powers you have. I was
of the rulebook is taken up with particularly pleased that the game
notes on monsters, magic items provided a detailed question and
and fairly traditional scenario ide- answer section explaining, in
as, rather than suggestions about some depth, the way in which ec-
what sort of difficulties can ensue toplasm is imagined to work, and
when the dead people try to com- answering questions like ‘what if
plete their business in the world of an ectoplasmic car hits a flying in-
mortals. sect?’ Given the complaints made

about Shattered Dreams (last issue) cousin, Baron Fothring-ham.’
and Wraith (this time around)— This is actually the sort of thing I
that both games leave referees could imagine spinning a fun sce-
with too many questions about nario around—but it is very much
the background—such a section is in the realm of spoof gothic. Not
a very good idea. much breaking down of taboos or
Now, this is all based on a very violating conceptual categories!
rational conception of ghosts: The game’s stated aims about
Karma and life-force are imagined combing horror with humour is
as being sensible, para-scientific submerged in the silliness of the
phenomena. However, the game rulebook.
designers still conceive the game Cemetery Plots takes this ten-
as being, at least partly, about hor- dency towards wackiness to an ex-
ror. The referee’s chapter of the treme. The spirit world turns out
book contains some rather good to not only be the home of famous
advice about role-playing fear. dead people and mystical mon-
Practical and sensible, this section sters, but also of mythical entities
should be waved under the noses like Santa Claus and the Tooth
of everyone who has ever tried to Fairy who only exist because peo-
write or run a horror-based RPG. ple believe in them. We are also
Too many games of this type tell offered a collection of ‘haunted
referees to put a black tablecloth places’ like ‘The School of the
down and light some candles, as if Damned’, which is populated by
gothic ambience automatically led the likes of Miss Templeton (‘she
to a frightening game. Here, we can wrestle even minor demons
are told that horror is created by to the floor and give them a thor-
feelings of revulsion, by the creat- ough spanking’) and the satanic
ing of things which don’t fit into Hall Monitor—pure Teenagers
our conceptual categories, and by from Outer Space. And yet the idea
the breaking of taboos. But the of an environment in which you
advice remains pragmatic: don’t get younger and younger until
break too many taboos or your you are trapped in the kindergar-
players will see you as a sick per- ten for eternity could be played
vert. Don’t think you can actually for real horror.
terrify them. A good role-player Cemetery Plots also contains a
will role-play being afraid, but surreal adventure set inside the
that doesn’t necessarily mean that skull of a dead demi-god, where
they are frightened. This is all you can interact with strange,
good advice. Alongside is a list of ghostly monks—or wander the
single-paragraph scenario ideas. tunnels fighting monsters; and
One runs: ‘The players find out some new types of ghost taken
that they are all heirs to the Fo- from movies such as A Chinese
thringham fortune and have been Ghost Story. What type of game
killed one by one by their twelfth are we meant to be playing here:

tongue-in-cheek horror, black wonder. Might Lost Souls’ open-
comedy, or cartoon farce? If I ran ended strangeness be more suit-
a game that contained both headed to what most gaming groups
less bikers and the tooth fairy, I do with their time? Might we get
don’t think my players would be- more fun from randomly generat-
lieve in it for very long. ing a broadly drawn, stereotypical
Comparisons with Wraith are character and then seeing how
inevitable. Lost Souls cannot com- he copes as a ghost? And might
pete with the White Wolf prod- a game that aims to be humor-
uct in terms of depth, setting or ous but occasionally manages to
atmosphere. Where Wraith has a be spooky be a better bet for an
detailed depiction of the shadow- evening’s entertainment than one
lands and their inhabitants, Lost which sets out to be horrifying
Souls can only mutter a bit about and is ruined the moment anyone
Limbo. Where Wraith provides cracks an inappropriate joke? I
systems for dealing with your dark admire Wraith a good deal more,
side, Lost Souls has a joke about but I am a lot more likely to actu-
lawyers having only slightly more ally play Lost Souls. You can take
karma than chimpanzees. But I that as a recommendation.
Walker in the Wastes all essentially one long Call of

By Crowe, Detweiler
Cthulhu adventure set in the late
and Reynolds
twenties and early thirties. Unlike
Pagan Publishing
Chaosium’s long campaigns
225pp; $19.95
(which rarely exceed 150 pages),
there is very little subdivision into
Walker in the Wastes smaller scenarios; there’s a very
Player Aid Kit short prologue, the main scenario
Pagan Publishing and a more or less inevitable
$6.00 (U.S.); sequel, but they are so interlocked
$8.00 (elsewhere) that they can’t really be run as
Reviewed by separate adventures. Three ‘red
Marcus L. Rowland herring’ side-adventures might
possibly be run on their own, and
Pagan Publishing have been pro- the main plot is subdivided into
ducing licensed modules for Call sections with different settings
of Cthulhu for some time. Walker in and goals, but the clues that lead
the Wastes is by far their most am- from one part to the next would
bitious project. be hard to use outside the context
The first thing to strike me of this campaign.
when I picked up this module It’s an extremely high-powered
was its sheer size; 225 pages, globe-trotting campaign, with

numerous chances for characters also likely to be an expensive
to die or go insane (even in the victory; there are some extremely
side-adventures), and the body nasty things out there in the
count is likely to be high. Players cold (think of an Arctic version
will probably need multiple of the Predator), and nastier
characters if they are to continue possibilities if the adventurers
to the conclusion. aren’t careful, including an
The authors claim (repeatedly) opportunity to interrupt a
that this isn’t for inexperienced ceremony and have Ithaqua
referees or players, and they materialize while the characters
aren’t lying. The plot is complex, are at ground zero.
and there are 37 pages of When survivors return to more
background information before civilized climes the following year,
the adventure begins, with more they are contacted by a scientist
at various points in the text, and who has evidence of similar ac-
a long bibliography and index at tivities in Alaska. Meeting at the
the end. How much of this work Toronto Hilton (I think this is an
will be useful is open to question; anachronism; to the best of my
a lot depends on the referee and knowledge it’s the only one in the
players, and their attitude to an book), they set out to learn more,
extraordinarily well-researched and end up trying to stop a mass
campaign. ‘Rambo’ clones may aerial pilgrimage (by airship and
not be entirely happy at first, plane) to bring about the end of
although there’s plenty of action the world. In a nice plot twist, suc-
in each section. Referees who cessful investigators then learn
like to set the scene in detail, and that they’ll have to do it again
players who prefer to take their every year for the foreseeable fu-
time getting the feel of a situation, ture, if they can’t find a better so-
will have a wonderful time. lution to the problem. There is an
The plot begins in the answer, but finding and applying
Canadian Arctic, where it will be extraordinarily difficult.
followers of the god Ithaqua are This brief description may
perpetuating various nastiness. make Walker in the Wastes sound
The adventurers are explorers, like many other adventures, but it
studying various problems has a realistic feel and atmosphere
including the fate of the 1846 that is singularly lacking from
Franklin expedition, which most of its rivals. Its cultists aren’t
turns out to be linked to modern just cardboard targets; they live
Eskimo cult activity. They have in happy religious communities,
a chance to intervene, but all have family lives, celebrate their
that they can really accomplish dark festivals, and are totally
is a local victory, which has the committed to their faith in a way
side effect of alerting Ithaqua’s that most real-world priests would
followers to their existence. It’s envy.

Despite the size it’s fast-mov- tion of fake photographs, newspa-
ing, with very little unnecessary per cuttings, and letters, the play-
material. This sparseness can oc- er hand-outs from the adventure
casionally be a disadvantage; at plus some extra material. Most
a couple of points situations are of these items are included in the
summarized a little too briefly, book; the pack simply separates
leaving a lot of detail work for the them, prints them on appropri-
referee. ate paper (such as card, newsprint
I probably won’t run this be- with irrelevant stories on the back,
cause I can’t commit myself to the or photographic stock), and adds
time it needs, but anyone run- extra ‘photographs’, some blank
ning a regular campaign will have headed paper, a bookmark, and
enough material for several hun- a special character record sheet.
dred hours of play. It’s also worth None of this material is really
reading as a sourcebook for Ithaq- necessary, and there’s very little to
ua (especially as described by Der- be done with it outside this cam-
leth and Lumley), and as an excel- paign, but it’s a nice add-on if
lent example of how to organize you can afford it. Unlike the cam-
an extremely long campaign. paign, it is only available by mail
The Accessory Pack is a collec- order from the publisher.

LETTERS
Crossing the Line
Tim Ellis Robert Irwin

West Midlands, UK Cheltenham, UK
An interesting theory with regard I felt that Andrew Rilstone’s re-
to Nephilim is that the game has ligious bit in the second issue of
been published by Chaosium Interactive Fantasy (‘Crossing the
and promoted as ‘occult’ role- Line’) was rather pointless. Try-
playing entirely in order to ing to make the whole of the role-
generate controversy (and thus playing hobby as squeaky clean as
publicity). Their right to publish an episode of He-Man is a point-
it is enshrined in the American less task.
constitution which allows The simplest argument that
them free speech and religious one could use to defend role-play-
freedom. In any attempt to censor ing games would be to say that
Nephilim, Chaosium will have the some games are loosely occult-
support of ‘new age’ types who related and others are not. Damn-
perhaps don’t see a connection ing the whole hobby because of
between themselves and role- material like Nephilim is much the
playing, but would be worried same as condemning all videos
by any attack on ‘the Occult’. because of hard porn.
(In much the same way, Bruce A large proportion of people
Sterling became interested in the with an interest in role-playing
Hacker Crackdown when Steve also have an interest in the
Jackson was raided because it occult. This has always been
seemed to demonstrate that the so and probably always will be.
American Secret Service could This is probably because role-
not distinguish between fictional playing tends to attract social
cyberpunk and genuine hackers.) incompetents. While it continues
In any final showdown, Chao- to do so, it will also pick up other
sium can turn around and say ‘But assorted social undesirables such
we made most of it up, so where is as occultists, heavy metal fans,
your problem?’ Goths and computer nerds.
Role-playing and the Theatre
Simon Taylor
Manchester, UK
I recently saw a production of Factory. Chairs is an unusual play
Ionesco’s Chairs at the Liverpool at the best of times. It involves
Unity by a group called Theatre an old couple who know that

they are about to die and who dience. Upon entering the theatre
decide to invite scores of people, there were no seats for the audi-
dignitaries and commoners alike, ence. I suppose you can guess: the
to listen to their final declaration audience became the ‘guests’. The
to the world. The play is usually actors continued the dialogue as
presented on a stage that slowly normal but they had a body to
fills with empty chairs. Large direct it at. They dragged people
chunks of dialogue are presented around, grovelled before them,
to imaginary guests and much of kissed their hands, sat on their
the irony of the play hinges on knees and treated them as props
this. in the play. It was fascinating.
The production I witnessed The audience’s first reaction
was different; it was almost an was one of embarrassment, fol-
experiment in role-playing. The lowed by a magical captivation
play was presented in promenade; with what was going on. Never
that is, the audience and stage before have I felt so much part of
space shared the same area. The a play—not whilst being part of
actors wove in and out of the au- the audience, anyway.
Interactive Fiction and Computers
Marcus L. Rowland
London, UK
In his article in Inter*Action #1, duces an informant and finds out
Phil Goetz cites the 1971 comic several important facts. There’s
strip Norman Versus America as the a penalty for reading this section
earliest printed example of inter- first because Roger is going to re-
active fiction. In fact, Sleep, and port back to the heroine anyway.
the City Trembles, by John Garforth There are some nice touches that
and Dennis Guerrier, was pub- I haven’t seen used elsewhere,
lished by Panther in 1969. It’s a such as a flow-chart exercise which
spy novel that uses programmed checks reasoning ability by analys-
learning techniques; the first for- ing the motives behind a murder.
ty pages set the scene, then sub- Unfortunately the plot is a little
sequent chapters end in two or thin, gaining most of its novelty
more choices, which determine from the (then) unusual presenta-
the order in which the remainder tion.
of the book is read. Each choice EDITOR’S NOTE: The short piece
is rewarded or penalized, depend- ‘Un conte à votre façon’ by Raymond
ing on whether or not it helps Queneau was first published in 1967
the heroine solve the case. For and is thought to be the first use of the
example, one chapter features a gamebook format—although it only
secondary character called Roger runs to 21 paragraphs, and is only
who is involved in a bar fight, se- available in French.

The Hidden Art
Jason Saunders
Coventry, UK
Considering role-play as an art- We are all performance artists.
form is irrelevant because post- Every time we role-play we act
modernism says that everything out our little scene in our little
can be considered art. From a world. This is a performance—
Monet to a footballer, art is viewed but should we now call it art? We
and appreciated by each person have gained so much enjoyment
in their own minds. from role-playing; to start calling
If this is the case then role- it art opens ourselves up to hours
playing has it been Art all along of intellectual angst that I for one
and we’ve only just recognized it. do not care for.
Francis Hwang
Minneapolis, USA
Greg Costikyan’s comment down. We can decry the tyranny
about the passivity of traditional of the creator, but that very tyr-
art piqued my interest. I had anny, the meticulous control over
just finished a review of The every detail, is currently the rea-
Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of son we read or look at art in the
Reading in An Electronic Age, a first place.
wonderful collection of essays by Birkerts’ focus is on the elec-
Sven Birkerts. So the concept of tronic media, and accordingly he
interactivity has been prominent couldn’t care less about role-play-
in my mind of late. ing games. His concerns intersect
Costikyan decries the hier- with interactivity in the realm of
archical structure of artist and au- hypertext—computer-based envi-
dience as ‘autocratic’, but I’m not ronments of text pieces connected
sure if he understands the impli- with multiple navigational links
cations of what he is saying. With for the reader to choose from.
the occasional exception—avant- He correctly notes that once the
garde theatre here, ‘exquisite reader is empowered to choose an
corpse’ fiction there—every single arrangement of what is read and
piece of art in the Western tradi- when, the author is devalued to
tion has been autocratic. Birkerts a massive extent, and to him this
argues that the author only exists destroys the whole point of read-
because the audience trusts him ing. To a large extent, the same
to transmit his piece of wisdom, can be said about the role-playing
and I would agree. When I find experience.
myself in the thrall of well-done I would agree with Birkerts,
art, I feel seduced, I find that my but I’m not sure I share his pessi-
emotional defences have come mism. I agree that once you intro-

duce the element of interactivity, volved and thematic significance
you have effectively destroyed the threatened to show its ugly face at
old position of the author, and a the gaming table.
chaotic meaninglessness threatens I believe this to be the big-
to take control instead. I would gest concern for those who’ve
also agree that the complete sub- long had a nagging feeling that
stitution of hypertext for novel, role-playing is art. I believe it is
much less role-playing games for art, because at the best moments,
theatre, would be a tragic loss of the enjoyment the players feel can
the concept of the author. only be appropriately understood
Even if the concept should be as the aesthetic experience. But
preserved, however, I am not sure understanding of this experience
that, as Birkerts implies, it need can hardly rely on the history of
exist as the only paradigm for art. what used to be thought of as art.
Despite the embarrassing infan- For if it is possible to enjoy the
tility of most of today’s interactive aesthetic experience without an
fare, I must admit being fascinat- author to lead us to it, the ques-
ed by the possibilities. And I have tion we may ask first is, ‘What is
seen interactive narrative work an author good for?’ But the ques-
first hand in some of my best role- tion that will remain is, ‘Where
playing sessions—when for a brief did that experience come from if
moment all were emotionally in- nobody wrote it?’
Do The Right Thing
Nathan Gribble
Devon, UK
To my mind there are two prob- educate them, but in the case of
lems with bad taste in all form gaming it is probably better to be
of media, including games. First, as inoffensive to outsiders as pos-
you may offend outside observers; sible. Why let real life confronta-
and second, you might subvert tions interfere with your fun?
the gamers themselves. The second problem is much
The first of these problems is more contentious. Like all sane
analogous to not swearing in front gamers, I am sure that playing
of your grandparents. It is as much games does not turn people into
an infringement of the rights of a psychotic killers, but I do think
person to hear something that of- that games can more subtly alter
fends them as it is to restrict their your views. For example, many
freedom of expression. Obviously, games are rife with sexism. If
with more important issues you you are unaware that what you
can argue that it might be neces- are playing is sexist you may take
sary to offend people in order to some of the sexist ideas on board.

After long hours of playing A game which pretends to be
the role of an anarchic thief, I have moral by disallowing evil charac-
caught myself wondering serious- ters is far more likely to impart
ly about shoplifting—all property prejudice to its players because
is theft, after all. Would computer they are made to feel that what
hacking be fun? Is a person who they are doing is somehow ac-
speaks with a West Country accent ceptable. If you play a paladin in
necessarily stupid? Can you in all Dungeons & Dragons it is all right
honesty not think of an occasion to kill orcs. Does it follow that if
when your gaming has given you you are good person it is all right
inappropriate ideas? to shoot criminals, or that if you
If a game contains unsavoury are sanctioned by the UN it is all
bits, the players should be aware right to bomb civilian targets in
of it. This should be more than Baghdad?
just knowing it is only make be- If I may conclude with a
lieve: it should also be an aware- cautionary tale: I once saw a TV
ness of its immorality. documentary about native mysti-
Bad taste can be fun and very cism in South Africa and thought
funny. Hollywood has given us it would make a good setting for a
many good examples such as the Call of Cthulhu scenario. The next
Evil Dead movies. If you are aware bad move was to allow one of the
that what you are doing is in poor players to play the role of a South
taste, the dubious content can add African policeman. Thus we soon
spice. I have played in some ap- sank into a slime-pit of bigotry.
palling games, full of sick-minded I make no apology for this as it
perversion and political incorrect- was quite refreshing, as a hand-
ness and enjoyed them because wringing Liberal, to be allowed to
of, not despite, the bile. Like Al- use the ‘N’ word. We chose to do
len Varney, I found Twilight: 2000 something in bad taste, and the
offensively right-wing, until our real joke was on the racist.
gaming group subverted it by Unfortunately the game took
playing red-neck commie-bash- place in a small university bed-
ers who tortured children in the room with very thin walls and un-
name of Truth, Justice and the beknown to us, in the next room
American Way. What worries me a young coloured woman was try-
is there may be people who do ing to write her final dissertation.
not see the irony in such a game Eventually she felt it necessary
and who play it straight. For this to make her presence known by
reason, I think that Vampire is less knocking on the door and asking
likely to be harmful than many for a cigarette. At that moment,
games, since White Wolf do just death would have been sweeter
what I advocate—highlight the and we fled in the abject horror
immorality of the setting so that that only a right-on young social-
you are always aware of the horror. ist can possibly feel.

Paul Mason
Nagoya, Japan
Allen Varney’s point (‘Do the ing of death and destruction as if
Right Thing’, Inter*Action #1) that were the most natural and
about the morality of games is praiseworthy action possible.
partly right, though it seems I might find a lot of inter-
rather overstated. Would he at- est in a role-playing game about
tack Empire of the Petal Throne for high-ranking Nazis. I’ve played
glorifying human sacrifice? From Tsolyáni characters who had that
reading his article it almost seems mentality. The value of playing
that he might. that kind of game is that it enables
The issue is not that games you to understand the mindset of
should present a moral frame- the character. Many people react
work acceptable to the average PC to the Holocaust by saying, ‘I can’t
American. The issue is surely that understand how anyone could do
games should not present a sick such a thing.’ Such people are
morality masquerading as realism. fools and liars and their attitude is
That’s the objection to Twilight: extremely dangerous, as it means
2000, a game which displays open they are unable to recognize their
contempt for all humanity, who own latent fascist urges (and
become objects: either resources therefore guard against them). It’s
to be used, or targets to be shot, only by understanding something
and which also glorifies the inflict- that we can defend against it.
Reviews
Jonathan Tweet
Seattle, USA
While I greatly respect Interactive games that one reviews. The time
Fantasy’s mission, and I’m happy it takes to play a game is out of
to see serious reviews, I would like proportion to the pay that maga-
to bluster on a bit about Myles zines offer for reviews. The first
Corcoran’s review of Whispering games that I reviewed profession-
Vault in IF #2. I’m not entirely ally I did not play. Still, I expect a
comfortable making Myles an ex- lot from Interactive Fantasy, and I
ample, but bear in mind that that’s would have liked to see a review
all he is, an example—not the sole based on play, not just on a read-
perpetrator nor the worst. And through.
the crime? The reviewer of Whis- Why? As Myles points out,
pering Vault should have played Whispering Vault is a pick-up-and-
the game, and it’s a shame that he play game. That’s the aim of the
didn’t. That’s my point. game. As a reviewer, Myles ought
Now I’ll be the first to admit to answer the question ‘Does this
that it doesn’t pay to playtest thing do what it tries to do?’ and

in this case, ‘How easy is it to tain experience they could never
play Whispering Vault as a pick-up have in a less linear plot. I’d like
game?’ He can make an educated to know what plot ideas a gam-
guess as to the answer, stating that emaster might come up with for a
Nystul ‘has succeeded’. But what first Nephilim game, and how play-
I’d really like to read is an account ers take to it. I’d like to know how
of Myles’s first pick-up game to Karma is received by people who
confirm or discount this educated play SLA Industries, since they are
guess. its target audience.
I’m picking on Myles because Perhaps this is a lost cause. To
the game he reviewed has a spe- expect reviewers to play the games
cial purpose, one that can be they review is unrealistic. Would
tested in a session of play. A role- IF pay them three times the going
playing game whose emphasis is rate? Or would the reviewers ac-
more on campaigns, such as Kha- cept an ordinary rate for extraor-
otic, might require months of play- dinary effort? Or would IF get re-
testing to explore thoroughly, and views only from fans of the games,
that’s far too much to ask. Still, I’d people who will play them regard-
have liked to know whether play- less of compensation? It’s a quan-
ers really balk at being fed lines dry, and reviews based on reading
in the Call of Cthulhu scenario, alone are standard in the industry,
Devil’s Children, or whether the ad- so it’s not a big black mark on IF’s
venture’s more literary approach record to have such. Still, I hoped
succeeds in giving players a cer- for more.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
I tend to agree with Jonathan: in an view of an un-playtested card-game,
ideal world, Interactive Fantasy board-game or computer game. Table-
would only print reviews by leading top role-playing games and supple-
authorities who had extensively play- ments are a rather more difficult issue.
tested every game or supplement that Marcus Rowland commented in a
they wrote about. Since the fall of the letter that: ‘I haven’t run Walker in
Old Republic/shattering of the Dark the Wastes—if I did, you’d be get-
Crystal, the world has not been an ide- ting this review sometime in 1996.’
al place, but I’ve still been very pleased So although I’d prefer that reviewers
with the reviews we’ve printed in our ran at least a one-session try-out of a
first three issues. new RPG or supplement, I recognize
Our review guidelines ask review- that this isn’t always feasible and am
ers to playtest new products if at all prepared to print reviews based on a
possible. We wouldn’t print any re- careful reading of the rulebook.

Submission Guidelines
Interactive Fantasy is interested in seeing proposals for articles which

cover any and all aspects of role-playing and interactive narratives,
be they cultural, historical, anthropological, social, sociological,
psychological, therapeutic, political, theoretical, technical, tech-
nological, critical, ethical, moral, philosophical, educational, dra-
matic or entertainment-related.
We are dealing with a huge field in which so far there has been
almost no informed critical debate, and while we have to keep some
focus to the magazine, we also want to appeal to as wide a reader-
ship as possible and explore the diversity and potential of interac-
tive narratives.
A typical article for IF will be 2–8000 words in length, with a
strong focus and a clear flow of themes and ideas from first para-
graph to last. Before you submit an article to us, you must send us
an abstract or synopsis (not more than five hundred words) first, for
approval and editorial suggestions, and to check that nobody else is
writing a piece on the same topic.
Pieces intended for the Overview section should be 1–2000
words in length and should not have a central argument or an axe
to grind; they are topic summaries. Overviews are more likely to be
commissioned than accepted from freelancer writers.
The style of articles and reviews should be clear and under-
standable, even to a newcomer to the subject. Try to avoid dryness
and the use of academic language or terms whenever possible. We
value the clear expression of good ideas and concepts.
IF accepts articles as paper manuscripts (typed, single-sided
and double-spaced), or on an IBM-compatible 3.5” disk (all usual
text formats), or sent by email to the editorial email address. We
prefer the latter two if possible: they make our lives a lot easier.
The editors reserve the right to edit and amend any article sub-
mitted to them for publication. Copyright of all published material
will remain with the author. We prefer you to use your real name
rather than a pseudonym.
We pay a standard rate of 1 pence (approx. 1.5 cents (US)) per
word. We know that this is low, but once the magazine finds its feet
and an audience, we hope to be able to raise the figure further.
Authors and reviewers will also receive one copy of the issue in
which their work appears. Reviewers may, of course, keep any ma-
terial sent to them for review. Payment will be made on publication.
We don’t pay for published letters.
More detailed writers’ guidelines are available friom the edito-
rial address.

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

Institutional: UK/Europe: £35 US/World: $60
Copies of Interactive Fantasy #2 are still available, at a price of

(UK/Europe) £5 or (US/World) $8, including airmail shipping.
Please send cheques or international money orders in UK sterling
or US dollars (made payable to ‘Hogshead Publishing Ltd’) to:
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Erratum
On page 120 of issue 2, the line ‘ . . . implies a strong divorce between
setting and mechanics, which is in fact the case with Falkenstein’ should
have read ‘which is not in fact the case with Falkenstein’.
We apologize for this error.
In Interactive Fantasy #4
v Jonathan Tweet describes the design process behind EverwayTM,
the role-playing game to be released by the Alter Ego design
group of Wizards of the Coast this summer.
v Nathan Cubitt looks at interactive television.
v Sean Harnett examines the philosophical underpinnings of
White Wolf ’s World of Darkness.


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interactive fantasy 1.

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Cover by Jim Woodring Deadlines:

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The imagery sometimes associated with role-playing games cannot be

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There are many forms of

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Boardgames are almost as old as civilization. Since the days of ancient

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This section looks at role-playing

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Tsolyánu . . . and back to Japan

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When is a scenario an artistic depiction of complex situations and char-

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