New on Desk #25 — Priming the Pump

Aside from the Midsummer celebrations, the week’s main event for me was a short overnight hike at the national park of Isojärvi with a few friends. The associated car trip left plenty of time for further honing my primer idea from last week’s forest meditations.

OSR primer tradition

Old school D&D is (or can be) a genuinely different game compared to the traditional rpg as the form developed in the ’80s. The game’s player-driven, has a neutral referee, favours rulings over rules, and so on and so forth. One pleasantly different aspect in the old school renaissance is the existence of the “primer” as a type of game text, something that doesn’t really exist in the mainstream rpg culture.

A “primer” in this context means a book of philosophical and methodological advice for GMing and playing D&D. A primer is generally intended for roleplayers coming from a traditional background, yet unfamiliar with the culture and assumptions of the old school game. The primer is usually not very mechanically specific, as befits the nature of the game; the content concerns procedures, not mechanics. You would presumably read the primer as accompaniment to your rules text of choice.

Here are a few good examples of old school primers:

Quick Primer for Old School Gaming by Matt Finch is among the most well-known. It is stark and orthodox, compact and clear. While I may not agree with everything in there, it nevertheless tackles the foundational theory in a clear way. It’s where I encountered e.g. “rulings, not rules”.

Principia Apocrypha by David Perry is something I was directed to at Agora when I started discussing the primer idea. It’s a solid treatment, though slightly too dramatist for me, choosing to express itself in a way that encourages teleological thinking; very fitting for its Apocalypse World influences. A thorough and friendly text, nevertheless.

Philotomy’s Musings is a classic of the primer genre; while it’s not comprehensive, and is more of a collection of thoughts than a full treatment, it’s nevertheless a personal favourite. The Musings are firmly oriented towards the best official edition of D&D (the ’74 original), and demonstrate a deep mastery of the game.

I’ve often said that the rpg scene tends to publish too many new games and too few guidebooks to playing the ones that already exist, so I obviously like the primer as a phenomenon. They accompany the often very practically oriented old school rulebooks particularly well, providing the advice and philosophical underpinnings that are usually left out of rules texts.

Crowdfunding a primer

So the idea I had last week during my forest meditations was that I should try to crowdfund a primer instead of a dungeon master’s guide. The difference is that a primer is ~50 pages long if that instead of 250, and it’s intended for newcomers to the form, both players and GMs. The project budget would be a manageable 2–3k € instead of 10k+ € and it wouldn’t take that long to finish, either. I also consider a primer more useful than a DMG, all in all, so that works out well assuming the scene agrees.

After massaging the concept on our camping trip, the latest and bestest name for the book is “Muster: A Friendly Primer to Challenging Dungeoneering”. I’m envisioning it as being suitable for both players and GMs, and as something you can give to new players for home reading. The text would be clear and consistent about representing my own playstyle and philosophy, but I’m thinking of producing the booklet in formats that make it easy for users to modify it for their own needs; it should make the booklet more usable as a pedagogical tool if you can make minor revisions in places where you disagree with me.

I guess that the next thing to do would be to work out a more detailed crowdfunding pitch with some marketing graphics, familiarize myself with IndieGoGo, figure out what little marketing I can do, and see what the audiences think of the idea. I’ve been thinking that we might try for a launch in mid-July or so, but that depends a lot on how the forestry thing develops next week; I think that I’m going to be doing extra-long days on that front until the end of the month.

If you know somebody who’d be interested in consulting here — helping to market the crowdfunding campaign in particular — do tell. I don’t know if it’s really practical, but my ideal marketing aide would be somebody who can get behind the product, knows where OSR-interested roleplayers hang out nowadays, and wants to take up the task of visiting these places to make sure the people find out. We could add an agreeable commission fee to the crowdfunding goal to pay a bit for the service. I imagine it’d be e.g. ~20 hours of social media related work, mainly in late July, depending on how plans shake out.

Monday: Coup de Main #2

We played our second session of the old school Greyhawk campaign, “Coup de Main”, last Monday. The adventurers had figured out what they wanted to do in the first session, and I’d prepared a bit more in terms of hexcrawl readiness, so it wasn’t too long before we were on the road to the Ygrame Chateau. The party has a variety of interests there, mostly related to this series of quests they established for themselves:

Discovering Zagig’s Estate: Some of the PCs are enchanted with the legend of the Mad Archmage. XP is gained for discovering pieces of the estate; items, secrets and whatnot left behind by the Archmage.

Librarian Quest: The bibliophile character imagines that there could be books in the chateau. Extra XP is gained for preserving books, particularly rare and valuable ones.

Repurposing the Manor: The party is in the understanding that there are goblins in the manor. Apparently some of the party members are goblin-haters, as they wanted a quest for freeing the house from the green-skin infestation. Extra XP for getting rid of any goblins on the premises.

Clear up Ownership: Some of the PCs are intrigued by the notion of a seemingly abandoned manor house so close to civilization; they want to figure out who the place belongs to, and have it renovated. Maybe they can possess it themselves?

The campaign has a pretty robust set of quest rules, so the players just piled these on. I might require a bit more ground-work to establish quests in the future, but I’m not one to gainsay motivation, so by all means do take up some quests. I think that it’s important for the challenge-based, goal-oriented style of the game that it’s possible to be questing for other things than treasure if you want to. (The quests reduce treasure XP a bit each, so they’re not entirely an unmitigated good.)

What happened in practice was that we journeyed to the chateau (an epic journey through two whole 6-mile hexes) and started exploring the environs by mapping out the exteriors of the mansion. There was a fight with some goblins and orcs, with some PCs ending up in critical condition (they’ll recover, but it’s going to take like several weeks of in-game time). The adventurers retreated back to town, now better apprised of the situation at the chateau.

I enjoyed the session immensely myself, but objectively speaking it was pretty clumsy; no discrete problems per se, just the fact that we have a new group, new online medium, new play tools for that medium, and a new campaign — everything’s at least somewhat new! We will improve on everything with some practice, and then things like mapping or running fights will become quicker. I’ll also be writing up more of the necessary system infrastructure over time, which’ll make resolution processes and such more transparent.

D&D Conquistadorialism

Remotely related to playing D&D, we’ve had long discussions about the cultural politics of D&D at Club Hannilus and related Discord servers. It started with the orc racism thing that’s apparently been making rounds in the Internet. As part of generally voicing our opinions I stated my regular position, namely that D&D is a thoroughly conquistadorial modern-age game where removing those themes would actually require a deep redesign of the game’s structures. As is often the case when I open my mouth on this, we found something to argue about with various other contributors.

For general interest, here’s the conquistadorial reading on D&D. The following is intended as a big-picture historical overview, it’s not about some specific edition of the game — or rather, it’s about all of them. It is also very, very basic, as I have some reason to believe that this is not as obvious as it may seem to me.

D&D is about battling Evil Humanoids: Among other things, a recurring theme in the game is that such a thing as Evil Humanoids exists, and they are battled for various reasons. This is really common in D&D, and has always been; it may be the single most common adventuring activity that the game features. There are other types of enemies, but the Humanoids are certainly one of the most popular.

D&D is about attaining treasures: Again, it’s really common. The treasures are generally guarded by Evil Humanoids, who you need to battle to attain the treasures. I don’t really feel that I need to exposit on this, but I might well be mistaken on that. Still, the premise should be familiar from video games if nowhere else.

D&D is a thoroughly racial fantasy: In the vast scope of what fantasy fiction can be, D&D is remarkably racialist; it’s much more so than any other popular fantasy franchise (unrelated to it) I can think of. (“Racialist” here means ‘considers race significant, revolves around race.’) The first thing you do when creating a character is picking a race, which then provides the character with a variety of strengths and weaknesses. The various creatures in the world are categorized into allies and enemies on the basis of their race; race also determines their religions, economic activities and most everything else for most creatures in the D&D world. Many creatures are entirely mechanized on the basis of their race, lacking any other distinction. The Monster Manual consists of racial profiles. The setting histories of most settings are histories of race (species) narratives. There’s a lot of race in there, all around, even if some of it is species and some are other types of in-born categorizations of various creatures.

D&D is about colonial power relationships: The Evil Humanoids are primitive, the Good Humans (and “their demi-human allies”) are civilized. The Evil Humanoids do not generally have any legal rights, such as the right to their possessions or their lives. The Evil Humanoids live out in the uncivilized parts, away from the Good Humans. The shape of adventure is for the adventurers to leave civilization behind and journey to the realm of monsters, there to interact with the monster world. You could call them explorers, maybe, or archaeologists, but what most naturally fits is conquistadors: the adventurers are there to seek treasure and to take it (often from the Evil Humanoids, but not always). Sometimes it’s just a home invasion, in fact.

D&D is thoroughly modernist: “Modern era” in cultural history is generally understood as basically the era of Enlightenment, starting a few centuries ago and being slowly replaced by whatever this thing is we have now, after the world wars. (“Post-modern era”, cleverly named.) D&D is a good example of a relatively late modernist work in that its attitudes and values are pretty retro for its time — I might posit culturally conservative, but that’s a distinct discussion. The important thing for us is that D&D and its creators share their themes and worldview with modernist pulp adventure fiction (early 20th century), which shows in everything it is. The binary worldview that emphasizes the ideas of Good and Evil, the racialism, the triumph of civilization over the primitive, the celebration of strength are all very Modern ideas. We do not live in a world that outright repudiates these ideas, but maybe we do have enough historical distance by now to perceive D&D in its historical context?

(Isn’t it interesting, by the way, how D&D jumped from Gygax’s earnest pulp fiction with cynical adventure seekers into pseudo-Christian moral majority stuff during the ’80s? The shift was from one kind of modernist thought to another sort, rather than going into some kind of postmodern deconstruction phase like e.g. superhero comics did at the time. The Evil Humanoids were still Evil, and the game was still about defeating them; it just wasn’t necessarily for greed anymore, but rather for God and Crown.)

Now, I feel that everything I wrote above is rather blindingly obvious — it’s text analysis on the level of stating that Star Wars has spaceships in it. It’s interesting, though, how different people’s viewpoints can be. One of the contributors in this week’s discussions even presented me with the intricate epistemological idea that statements like “D&D is about conquistadorialism” are impossible to make because as a roleplaying game toolset D&D is not “about” anything. It’s just a set of tools, and therefore cannot hold thematic meaning in the way I posit above. We literally cannot say that D&D has spaceships in it, because what if it doesn’t? It doesn’t have to, you could choose to not have the spaceships, unlike in Star Wars which is a movie and therefore a fixed entity.

What do you think? The topic is interesting, and people seem to have surprisingly different viewpoints on this stuff. I think it’s worth giving it a thought, even if it’s just “duh, yeah.” I don’t think myself that the above is news to anybody who’s ever cracked open a D&D book, but then I didn’t think that we would manage to have a long discussion about it this week, either.

Club Hannilus Minutes

We’ve managed to talk about other stuff aside from conquistadorial themes in D&D, although it has been popular. Let’s review:

• The club host himself went ballooning on a hot air balloon. I understand he even came down more or less in one piece. He even had photographical proof of the feat of flying. The fellow is apparently a half-ballooner, a sort of multiclass dabbler situation: works in the ground crew on occasion, but doesn’t fly himself, except now he did.
• One of the contributors is playing in a Forgotten Realms D&D 5e campaign, and graces us occasionally with reports on how it’s going. It’s interesting stuff, as it’s basically his first D&D campaign ever. The latest twist is that while we could sense some skepticism over the game’s premise initially, it’s apparently starting to grow on him: describing combat maneuvers has been growing more entertaining, and it’s fun to act out characters with the other players. (Or one other player who’s into that as well. We’ll see how that develops.) In a word, we’re witnessing the theory of “princess play” act out here!
• Speaking of princess play, we had some very nice discussions about it, directly inspired by said D&D campaign. The princess play theory is a bit of a personal pet theory of mine, so I don’t get to talk a lot about it with people who actually like princess play and get how to do it. Fun times!
• How come D&D doesn’t have much sense of wonder? Things are often quite boring in D&D, is what that means. Even fantastic things don’t seem very fantastic, which is particularly noticeable in a modern D&D campaign full of weird player characters. You’re adventuring around with a robot, a cat girl and a token dwarf, and it’s sort of surprising how little narrative weight the fantastical elements have.
• Related to the conquistadorialism discussion, what would D&D be like if you outright removed the Evil Humanoids and other intelligent enemies from the game? Just in case you thought that the game would be nicer if it wasn’t about race war all day long. That seems doable for the modern game, you could have the setting revolve around e.g. exploring and cleaning out ancient civilization sites with still-functioning robotic guardians and whatnot. Maybe swap the Thief out for a Hacker for a bit of techno-fantasy feel. The game would lose a lot of social content if you just didn’t have people-on-people conflict in it, but if you’re mostly into it for the setpiece combats anyway, then that might not be such a big deal. (The setpieces would benefit from the robot theme, as it’s easier to justify why the monsters sit around in their own cubicles waiting for their turn to be hacked apart.)
• Continuing on the conquistadorial theme, I learned something hilarious about the Sunless Citadel, which I know is a very well-known 3e era adventure module that I’ve never read myself. One the contributors dragged it up when we were wondering about what race relations are like in D&D products, and apparently this one’s, well, check this out: the adventure tells about a bunch of goblins who’ve gotten their paws on a magical tree with healing properties. They sell the magical cure for money. This is, as per the adventure, a terrible thing to do, and provides the hook for the adventurers to go delve the Sunless Citadel so as to put those goblins in their place. Can’t have goblins owning property or engaging in commerce, after all.
• We hashed out the gaming plans for the Club Hannilus for next quarter! We’re going to start by clearing a few sessions for a story game we’ve been intending to try out, but after that it’s going to be Flame/Star/Night and Varangian Way (the two games in development that we played a bit in the spring) in turns for who knows how many months. Lots of playtest, plenty of game development.
• One of the contributors who’ve been attracted to join us on Discord is an old gaming pal of mine from say half a decade back. They were a somewhat quiet middle-pack player back then, participating in our long-running old school D&D campaign. I hadn’t heard of the fellow more than in passing for several years, so it’s been nice to exchange news online now. What’s more, I very much like what moving to Helsinki has done with him: he drops smart stuff on Discord, very cogent and articulate, and I hear he’s GMing himself, which I can totally believe based on the quality of his rules cruft. (Old school GMs compare rules cruft a lot.) All in all a very nice development!
• We had a long and convoluted discussions of one of my more radical and recent old school D&D rules innovations, something that I like to call “hit point cancel”. The rules innovation itself is simple but provocative: I think that characters should have the subjective option to shrug status effects by expending HP commensurate with the “level” (spell level maybe, not important) of the effect. The reasoning behind the HP cancel is pretty advanced, and some like it while others don’t, so it’s taken some chewing.

Quest for Lucre

There hasn’t been massive amounts of progress on the Quest since I published the World of Near pdf at Drivethrurpg last month, but recently a few delightfully active tree-pulp-purchasers — people who buy physical books are apparently still a thing — made some investments in their rpg collection at our webstores, resulting in a 4% bump to the progress bar. A copy of Zombie Cinema was sold, even, which I always favour; I don’t have many copies of that left, but the sales have also slowed down to a trickle over the last decade, so it’s always nostalgic to pick one out of the box in the closet to send out to the world.

While there is a little bit of this on-going background activity, it’s pretty clear that the Quest isn’t going to fulfill itself without further strategic steps. My best bet of the moment is the crowdfunding thing, so let’s hope that pans out.

State of the Productive Facilities

Eh. No productive writing this week either, unless you count this newsletter. Life-living is getting in the way, what with the camping trips and Midsummers and such. And next week’s definitely going to be even more ambitious, as the forestry operation pushes towards a ruthless deadline at the end of June. Long nights in the forest (it’s cooler at night, and the midnight sun is in full force here) will probably not make for an environment conducive to ambitious writing.

Polling-wise the theory articles are all winning ruthlessly. I guess they do have one good point to them: they’re not, on average, as much work to write as game design stuff is.