[BLOG] Year Nine: An Off Year

The Hall of Mirrors Extends, Slightly

This blog started on 5 August 2016, making August a good time to take stock and reflect. It is now November, so take this for what it’s worth. This has been kind of an off year; the last one was very productive, while this one, a lot less so. Getting lost in larger projects slowed down visible progress, while too much real-life work has taken over a lot of the time left for the hobby From the grind, good things may emerge. But to tell the truth, it has been tiring.

The State of the Fanzine & Other Projects

 

This year, EMDT has published 4 releases, two in English – a setting guide to Fomalhaut, and an Echoes issue. This isn’t much. A lot of the summer was spent moving from a sole proprietorship to an LLC, which took up a lot more time than initially anticipated. It had to be done, as the business side grew too large for a sole prop, but figuring it out and setting things up was a lot of time not spent on the actual hobby. This is the less fun side of making the sausage. It is rewarding to write, do layout, commission orders, create maps, pack orders and go to the post, while this was just drudgery, and it started feeling a lot like a badly paid job. By the time things were set up properly, I got hit by an avalanche of short-deadline tasks at my day job, so I put things aside again, and it is now three months later with little to show. This was really annoying, but you don't get ahead by staying that way. E.M.D.T. ULTRAREALITY Publishing Kft. is up and running at last.

My shop is back up, and orders are open again for most of the world. Stock is available for most releases, except Helvéczia (which will be reprinted next year – it’s a complex product); what is not available at this time will be reprinted. US shipping is not yet available: the international postal system, of which the Hungarian Post is part, has not yet figured out how to administer tariffs. To my best knowledge, the baselines have been hammered out, but they have not yet been implemented on the ground level. This means things will take a bit more time to open up for the US side; once the system is online, I will need to learn and test it. I foresee things opening up fully by early 2025. If you would like to be notified of this, please send an e-mail to beyond.fomalhaut@gmail.com, and I will put you on the list.

 

The Ape-Men Didn't Know Whom They Were Messing With

 

But this year has also involved slow background work. I have the first new adventure written and laid out, and the illustrations are rolling in. City of the Ape-Men will be zine-sized, but on the larger end of it – a tropical isle adventure with a ruined city, a wilderness section, a nearby base town, and various smaller dungeons, so a lot of stuff. Hordes of ape-men too (no false advertising in the title), and dinosaurs, and a lot more. This was great fun to run, first in a campaign, then at a convention, then as a standalone multi-session module. It feels polished enough now to release, and it will likely be available in early December. Work is less advanced on Echoes From Fomalhaut #14, but it is slowly, slowly taking shape too.

Three major projects have been on my table, which is the “behind the scenes” work whose fruits are yet to be available. The first one if Gamemaster’s Guidelines Beyond Fomalhaut. This will be a hardcover OSRIC supplement focused on providing practical advice on designing and running old-school adventures and campaigns, from basic philosophy to tested design procedures. It is something you could learn the Classic Adventure Gaming philosophy from, while for old hands, it will provide useful techniques and helpful bits and pieces. This is an area where old-school gaming has been fairly underserved; there have been good primers and lots of good writing, but to my knowledge, no systematic teaching guide to pick up this style of gaming. (To be fair, OSRIC’s new GM book will be a step in this direction.) Obviously, this is a large undertaking, with a final page count promising to be a bit below 300 pages. The book would be available around this time if the year had not been what it was, but that’s not how it worked out.

As things stand, large sections have been done, sections have been partially completed, and there are sections which have not been touched at all. The work continues. For now, here is a list of chapters to give you an idea of what it will be when it is finished:

I. Guiding principles (a primer for CAG-style play, thoughts on sword & sorcery as a distinct style of fantasy, sources of inspiration)

II. Gamemastering (basic and advanced GMing techniques, game styles, harnessing randomness for creativity)

III. Optional rules (a collection of rules from our games for combat, mass battles, experience, magic, survival, poisons and disease, and a bunch of traps)

IV. Adventures and campaigns (the book’s largest section, with a discussion of openness and player agency; guidance and procedures for dungeon, wilderness, city and situation-based adventures; and a section on sandbox campaigns)

V. Fantastic worlds (guidance on creating game-friendly settings, fantastic societies, a larger section on religion, and a shorter one on variant fantasy settings)

VI. Taxes & death (basic domain management rules with procedures for taxation, regional development, construction, and armies)

VII. Monsters (a large section on monsters, some familiar, and quite a lot new; human NPC types; monster variants; and a large set of encounter tables for various purposes – in a sense, the “implied setting” of the campaign)

VIII. Treasure (a whole bunch of magic items, again mixing old and new; technological devices; my system of random treasure tables)

IX. The omniscient oracle (a selection of random inspiration tables: adventure locations, dungeon and wilderness sites, ruins, islands, weird civilisations, magical curiosities, curses, and downtime complication tables)

Still Pretty Doomed

The second project is The Four Dooms of Thisium, a low-level sandbox campaign  centred on the doomed City of Thisium. Thisium first took shape in the time of the Bat Plague, when everyone was locked up and nobody had better things to do than play; developed with maniacal speed and played with relish, a D-Day style campaign with a time limit and massive casualties. It was followed by another campaign with a different group, a bit more leisurely, and we are now playing it for the third time as an open table campaign on the CAG discord, where it is racking up the body count just as fine. (Positions still available.) The campaign has a bit of everything: city, Underworld, countryside, sea and dungeon adventures. It is a high-pressure, “git gud” kind of thing that’s deliberately challenging, but would work just as well for relatively new people. As it stands, the Hungarian version is well along: the manuscript is around 90% complete at around 150 pages of raw text (barring an intro chapter and final post-playtesting editing), all but two of the maps are done, and once playtesting wraps up, it can move into the layout, illustration and production phase. What this will first result in is going to be a book for the local gamers, but from there, I would like to move on to translating it.

The third project is also Hungarian for now. Last year, LFG.HU, our main RPG portal, ran an Adventure Site Contest, with yours truly judging the entries. There were three winning entries and three runners-up, which will fill up a large anthology (or two full-sized pamphlets; we will see). These are module-sized, location-based scenarios which turned out very nicely. I am hoping to publish English versions of the three winners in some way, either as zine articles or standalone booklets (they are kind of on the borderline). The local versions come first, but these, I feel, is something the Hungarian old-school community deserves to be proud of, and which the rest of you should enjoy to see.

Other projects which have seen little progress: Erillion, Land of Adventure (although the Hungarian edition of Baklin came out quite well, and shall be part of the eventual hardcover), the Fomalhaut Boxed Set. Them’s the breaks.

Invincible.

The State of Gaming: Borderlands and Empire (Politisperging Edition)

If we are to discuss the state of old-school gaming this year, we must do so in the context of where D&D and the broader hobby are going. This year’s musings will be less directly concerned with old-school than usual. There are two basic reasons for this. First, the internal trends have barely changed from last year, and need not be repeated in detail: there has been a process of rediscovery, community-building, and new consolidation; returning to old-school gaming’s basic principles. All that was old was new again in 2004–2008, and al that was new in 2004–2008 is newly new again. Solid things are being created – modules like Brink of Calamity and Pestilence at Halith Vorn; fanzines like the renewed Fight On! magazine; the new edition of OSRIC; and the likes of Cauldron Con. That’s jolly good. But second, there seems to be a transformation outside our thing that will have important consequences for us in the next years. Be warned, this will get very political, very fast.

For a long time, the old-school has been kind of an island, existing not quite in splendid isolation, but at least partially insulated from a lot of the trends transforming gaming business-wise and culturally. Which is not to say it was all a bed of roses: the dangerhair takeover attempt of the late 2010s was a shameful episode that destroyed a lot of the accumulated trust and goodwill in what had previously been a very positive community; and the sheer sadism exhibited against James Raggi in particular an event which should make decent people recoil with shame. I believe this is mostly solved. The worst characters have fucked off to be a nuisance elsewhere, and the rest have sorted themselves into sufficiently separated sub-communities where there is little space or reason for conflict, increasingly for a lack of interaction. On the political side, there is correlation between personal politics and hobbyist niches, but no clear correspondence. If things didn’t become so utterly poisonous as they did for a while, this would be unremarkable. As is, armed vigilance is warranted, and lets people focus on creative growth. For now, this works better than pushing everyone together into a single room. It is easier to be on decent terms with a little space between us.

 

A Working Model

Now the thornier hobby context. If old-school gaming’s communities are keeps on the Borderlands, then the Borderlands are on the fringes of the Empire, modern Dungeons & Dragons. For over two decades, there was little reason to be involved with the affairs of the imperial core: the OGL served as a good basis to build our own thing, and the hobby’s good general health has had benefits for this far-flung corner. For all its merits and flaws, 5e’s success was the rising tide that lifted all ships. But that has changed. My thesis is that the Empire has entered a phase of stark decline, which will eventually impact it as a business, and as a hobby. This, in turn, will spill over into the periphery we inhabit.

The matter is not simply political – creative exhaustion and predatory business models play a large role – but politics is a big part of it. In the 2010s, fringe leftist politics would infiltrate every facet of society. If you are asking why your crocheting circle, aquarist Facebook group, or niche retrogaming community started to be about the New Thing all of a sudden, it is because everything started to be about the New Thing. This is the problem of the German Cat (many such cases!). Tabletop gaming was just one of the many hobbies downstream of this trend, although probably more vulnerable than others due to its general leftist slant and emphasis on inclusion. Even so, it took a while for things to change substantially, since “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. But the deal is done: hilariously obnoxious activism has utterly consumed D&D, and turned it into a weird “slice of life” fantasy game with twee Starbucks aesthetics, HR-approved messaging, and an inexplicable baking fetish. Credit where credit’s due, the activists’ victory has been complete, since they have, indeed, successfully redefined what D&D is in the public eye. As a minor side-effect, D&D 2024 is pretty much dead in the water, and nobody really cares for it. It sold well, but has no buzz, and does not seem to be played at all in the same circles where 5e had made an enormous splash.

 

A D&D

The activist victory came at the precise cultural moment when people have just had enough of this shit. D&D’s core audience is young men, and it was always a game focused on their interests. “Norman wants to be a warrior-hero, using complex mathematical equations to blast big-breasted monsters into oblivion” as the late, great Jeff Freeman put it in the prophetic Chicks in Gaming, all the way back in 1997. It is fair to say that D&D 2024 is not a game for Norman, and has made this very clear in its messaging – it is for a new, modern, enlightened, diverse (etc.) audience that doesn’t really exist in large numbers outside girlboss-friendly Powerpoint presentations. As young men are departing the plantation en masse in the most hilarious outcome of modern politics, they are abandoning modern D&D as well, along with the rest of the popular culture which has tried, and in its largest self-own, finally succeed at exiling them into the wilderness.

It would be fun to think of them suddenly developing a range of incredibly right-wing games – Bronze Age Mindset has always called for an RPG adaptation ("Steppe barbarian. Nationalist, Fascist, Nudist Bodybuilder! Purification of world. Revolt of the damned. Destruction of the cities!") – but there are no signs they will do so. Adventurer, Conqueror, King comes closest to a moderate centrist idea of the concept of “slightly right-coded D&D” with its Roman Empire callbacks, historically solid sense of cultural colour (it is actually cool to play a badass Persian warrior when it is not accompanied by endless HR lady nagging), solid focus on conflict and warfare, and even its baseline mechanical complexity that appeals to slightly autistic young men, but ACKS cannot do the kind of heavy lifting only D&D is capable of. And D&D is incapable of course correction, in the same way fantasy publishing, or the movies, or computer gaming are incapable of course correction due to the tremendous inertia these systems have accumulated, and the institutional death-grip that holds them hostage. And so it goes. Gaming will not be more right-wing, it will most likely become irrelevant, abandoned by a generation of potential hobbyists. There is no greater sin in culture than being cringe, and role-playing has become really, really cringe. Nobody wants to play the pumpkin spice latte gay wedding game, sorry, HR ladies, none of us do. People put up with it for a time, but you were just far too obnoxious. A generation of angry young men will create a new culture of their own, but signs indicate tabletop gaming will not be a part of it.

These are the affairs of the Empire. What does this hold for the Borderlands? Imperial decline will mean what these things always mean: fewer resources flowing outwards, shrinking populations, and all that comes with being cut off. Shrinkage and decline will spill over to this corner of the hobby as well. Luxury edition Kickstarters are not going to be sustainable beyond the next few years. But it can also mean that the freedom of the frontiers can be preserved and formalised. Old-school communities, of which there are now multiple (separated by preferences which are not merely political), are well positioned to exist independently, as this has been the way they have grown up, and it was the brief period of rubbing shoulders with “industry professionals” and winning trophies at award shows that was the ill-fitting exception. These were never our core values. Old-school gaming will work well if it retains a cohesive creative focus, and cultivates excellence in its own framework. This will enable it to attract and retain new people on fair terms. When we look at successful releases, communities or events, this is the principle that animates them: they do a specific thing well. And this can let us survive and flourish, against the backdrop of a burning Empire.

 

Promising Signs for the Season Ahead