This is a report on a recent adventure I played in run by Panic Pillow, based on an empire toolkit The 2nd Age we created together. I’m calling it a “materialist session” of the dialectical sort, where social processes drive a lot of what happens in the game. I can’t vouch that Panic Pillow would label it similarly, but I can speak for having this type of thing in mind when designing The 2nd Age.
Panic Pillow ran the game on a HUDless basis, meaning players don’t have access to stats or dice rolls (you can read more about it in Panic Pillow’s write up here). The 2nd Age document is also very light on rules, mainly consisting of some institutional “classes” and qualitative abilities. I’ve not been part of a session with so few explicit mechanics, and was interested to learn from the experience.
Central to The 2nd Age is the idea of character advancement being tied up with the agendas of institutions, and ultimately that of an empire. Social processes operating through the empire, such as expansionism, come to have a direct bearing on the characters. That’s the theory anyway, but I was keen to see how it worked in practice.
My last post looked at historical materialism as an aid to campaign creation. It suggested orientating a campaign around a dominant social process, as the driver of change. Part of this is about adding a further level of depth to a generic fantasy setting, without a corresponding explosion in the mental load involved.
I’ve previously talked about imperialism as an example of such a process. Here I’ll outline how this worked in my last campaign, with a consideration of economics as a central driving force.
Tailoring the Setting
Historically, generations can go by in which social relations are comparatively stable. While there will be underlying tensions in such times, setting a campaign during a period of revolutionary upheaval can help bring this to the fore. I’ve also found that certain scenarios can facilitate social processes playing out in a more restricted location.
Jon Peterson’s book The Elusive Shift captures some of the discussions around campaign creation that took place in the early days of the hobby. This serves as interesting context to Gary Gygax’s influential 1975 article on the topic. Something that stood out to me is its account of Tim Waddell’s division of campaign creation into 4 levels, also written in 1975.
Achieving the first 3 levels of Waddell’s levels is surprisingly simple. In fact, the quick start Gygax ’75 method blasts through all of them. Level 1 is just a dungeon, level 2 consists of a few dungeons and wilderness hexes; level 3 is having at least 1 town on top of this. Level 4 though is certainly a steep jump, consisting of:
“several completely mapped towns, plenty of interesting townspeople, rumours, legends, history, etc. A total fantasy world”
In 1976, Dan Pierson in Alarms and Excursions #14 was seeking something similar (p133):
“A campaign: thousands or millions of square miles of mountain, forest, plains, and ocean; the conflict of empires, or slow attempts to put small states back together after a great war … your characters struggling in a vast setting for power, wealth, good, evil or whatever.”
Waddell describes himself as having only achieved 2/3rds of level 4, showing it to be a vastly more challenging undertaking than the first 3 levels. He acknowledged that a level 4 world would require “hours upon hours of work by a ref with a reasonably fertile imagination”.
My previous post looked at features of the Gygax ’75 method that minimise the workload of campaign creation. This is partly through a free mix of gonzo elements, with only weakly conceived “external” connections between these. In my own campaign, I’d like some of the depth that comes with a developed “4th level” world. But I also want to have my cake and eat it, avoiding the accompanying explosion in workload.
It's nearly 50 years since these issues were raised, so perhaps the task has been “solved” already. What I’m going look at specifically is how a materialist perspective can contribute to efficient campaign creation. I’m posting this as part April’s blog carnival - hosted by Codex Anathema on the topic of On creating elements for a setting.
This post is going to talk about RPG sandbox design. Sandboxes often have themes that makes them more than just a collection of disparate encounters. Some go further, in having a consistent process that effects all those within in a similar way. A module that I think does this well is The Toxic Wood by Lazy Litch. I’m going to suggest a variation on the approach in this hexcrawl, drawing on two theatrical plays as examples.
I’ve been catching up with posts on foreground growth at Bastionland.com. Foreground growth is an alternative take on character development put to work in RPGs such as Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland and Cairn. It’s a principle I'm finding dovetails nicely with a materialist approach to gaming, serving to ground character development within the gameworld.
Foreground growth seeks to subvert the abstract style of class advancement you get in D&D. Instead of a magical metamorphosis occurring in downtime, development of your character is based on events in-play. For any character ability, players should be able to relay a story from a game session that explains its origin.
There is a good illustration of this in Cairn’s FAQs, in an extended descriptive example of gameplay. An unexpected encounter with a patch of bioluminescent water leaves a character with a foot that glows in the dark. This somewhat dubious ability isn’t found in a shopping list at the back of Cairn’s rule book, but emerges in the context of an adventure.
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| Fear my glowing leg |
In previous posts, I have the habit of throwing in philosophical terms, some of which are overdue a better explanation. Materialism is a pretty common term in philosophy, but it comes in more than one variety. Here is what I mean by materialism in the context of an RPG.
Materialism in the Context of RPGs
Materialism in philosophy deals with the relationship between the material world and consciousness. Materialism tries to relate all consciousness to physical states, denying that there is any “realm of thought” separate to this. Materialism in an RPG obviously differs from this. Firstly, we are dealing with a game world, not our real world of experience. Secondly, we are concerned not with the denial of consciousness, but a denial of the character, conceived of as something distinct from the game world.
Annihilation is a sci-fi novel, relatable to Old School Gaming through its similarity with Roadside Picnic (it was also made into a recent film starring Natalie Portman). Annihilation is not an easy book to decipher, but I take its main concern to be the annihilation of the character. This occurs as the protagonists in the novel are progressively assimilated into their physical environment, losing their sense of identity as they eventually become one with their material surroundings.
I’m a bit more comfortable with philosophy than I am with game design. One thing I’ve found though is that having a philosophical position can be helpful in making design decisions. Working on a collaborative project with Panic Pillow, I thought of a neat example of how a philosophical position has served me as a guide.
The part of the rules I’m working on was conceived as an Into the Odd (ItO) hack, but I wanted to treat weapons a little differently. In my first ever post, I talked about ItO as a materialist game, in that physical objects in the game world play the largest part in defining your character. But in later musings, I’ve realised there is more than one way to apply materialism to an RPG.
This is the second of two posts looking at character advancement in D&D. I previously argued that D&D takes a character-centric approach to advancement, with the game-world playing little role in determining the path of this progression. I suggested this went against the tendency in “old school” D&D (OSR) to prioritise the game world over the character. Here I will suggest ways to address this, looking at attempts made to do so in 1st edition Advanced D&D (AD&D 1e).
Last time, I singled out “Oath breaker” paladins in 5e D&D as emblematic of character classes failing to impose constraints on player agency. This subclass effectively jettisons any influence the game world has on a paladin through their religious order and deity. Basically, you get to advance whether you follow the paladin code or not. In AD&D 1e though, paladins got a bit less of free ride. This was literally so in terms of their special warhorse, which develops an “immutable enmity” towards the character if their actions cause them to lose their paladinhood (p18 Dungeon Master's Guide).
This blog talks a lot about materialism in role playing games, but I’ve not covered where these ideas come from. Before I got back into RPGs, I spent a decade trying to write theatrical plays. My inspiration then was a 20th century movement that went against the dominant theatrical form of the time. I must like to go against the grain, because it is the rebellious “Old School”(OSR) strand in RPGs that has felt like home here too.
I’ve recently been taking a harder look at some enduring features of D&D that can be traced back to game’s original edition (OD&D). My goal is to run a campaign that moves its centre of gravity away from the characters, shifting it instead onto the game world. My last post looked at how such a “materialist” approach to gaming could be applied to ability scores. Here I will look at D&D’s approach to character advancement under a similar lens.
I’ve previously mentioned my goal to run a materialist RPG campaign. I’ve argued that Old School gaming (the OSR) seems aligned with materialism, in its prioritisation of the game-world over the character. Wanting to understand why this is the case has made me interested in the roots of the OSR and leads me to take a closer look at the Chainmail rule set.
My previous post looked at how a certain approach to roleplaying games, that typical of the OSR, has seemed to align itself with a philosophical position known as materialism. The “Old School” (OSR) style of gaming is often contrasted with the approach characteristic of mainstream 5e D&D. It is not surprising then that 5e D&D itself shows an alignment with a different and contrasting position, one which I am going to refer to as idealist poetics.
My aim is to keep the philosophy light. A lot of the ideas I talk about here actually come from dramatic theory. This may not be their natural ground, but I think they help explain certain trends within RPGs surprisingly well.
In my previous blog post, I talked about Into the Odd (ItO) as a basic materialist RPG. ItO emerged from a revival of interest in “Old School” gaming based on the playing style of pre and early Dungeons & Dragons. Here I will talk more generally about features of OSR gaming that align with materialist principles.
Delving a little into philosophy, a materialist RPG would be one where “being determines thought”. Put simply, the emphasis is on the game world shaping the characters, rather than the characters shaping the game world. I previously discussed how ItO fits with this principle. But elements of this are also widely seen in the OSR approach to gaming.
I’ve recently been looking through the old edition of the role playing game Into the Odd (ItO). There is a Kickstarter for a shiny new edition of the game that went live 21st September. As the rules are not really changing, this seemed a good point to reflect on one of my favourite RPG systems.
