Old-School, Left Coast Gaming Magic Systems

 

TL;DR. Back in the day, in Northern California, my friends and I not only viewed TSR as a corporate bully, but we gravitated towards TTRPGs with well researched magic systems. Not well balance, but well researcher. And it occurs to me that many of these games were heavily influenced by the SCA.

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how in the late 1970s and early 1980s the people I gamed with in Northern California were not too fond of D&D. We loved TTRPGs but we had already moved on. For this post, at first I was going to only focus on Animism and the early days of Runequest. But I needed to look at my old copy of Chivalry and Sorcery in reference to my current gaming WIP, and when did, II noticed something which I had long ago forgotten. Something that strengthened my point but also broadened this post.

Background. Let’s remind ourselves about Chivalry and Sorcery. This game was first published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1977. It is a remarkably complex game, with prints of hand-typed pages. Tiny type, hard to read and full of endless charts and tables. I, of course, loved it!

This is an early game that tries to catch the look-and-feel of the real Middle Ages. Knights and Fiefdoms and Castles and all that. The game is what we would now days call “simulations”. It is trying to model somewhat realistically (through a somewhat Arthurian lens) the high Middle Ages. The cover image is a knight in full plate on horseback tilting with a dragon.

And inside, on the title page, is the text, “Dedicated to the Society for Creative Anachronisms (the S.C.A.)”.

The SCA. Once upon a time, there was a very large overlap, at least in Northern California, between TTRPG players and SCA members. Founded in 1966, in Berkly California, the SCA was a constant element of my early life. Almost all my friends were members. The SCA is still around. It is a Medieval reenactment group with a twist. Most reenactment groups put on public-facing “shows” that aim to be as accurate as possible. (I had a buddy once who was big into French and Indian War reenacting who would call the American Civil War reenactors “button counters” because they were always concerned with having the exactly correct number of brass buttons for the uniform they wore.) SCA people don’t have this problem—at least not at the time when I hung out with them. Instead, each person would research a time and place over an incredibly large space – if memory serves, it was from the year 500 to 1500 and any culture in Europe or that interacted with Europe. You would pick a time and place of interest and research the heck out of it. And then you’d start teaching all your friends about it.

For the record, this was all within a certain cultural framework. There would be “events” which had a regular structure and there was “fighting” which also had a different structure. But in general, the folks I knew spent a lot of time learning about history and teaching it to others—frequently through crafts and music and the like. There is a lot more that can be said about the SCA, but the key point is the SCA was never an outward-facing performance, instead it was an inward-facing educational opportunity. And it came out of Berkley.

And where did Runequest come from? Same place. (Well, Oakland and Alameda—the next BART stop south.) Runequest combat is a very good simulation of SCA combat. 

Researched games. I was going to write this post about animism as a magic system—and I will likely write such a post soon. Runequest was written by a cultural anthropologist with a history of interest in animism. And he built that into his game. Runequest has shamans and ancestor spirits and everyday battle magic and polytheistic religions with different cults being fundamentally different.

And the reason I was looking through my 1977 edition of Chivalry and Sorcery was to reference the historically based information about Western European magical beliefs of the Middle Ages.

Back in the day, we didn’t “make up” combat systems. We thought about what human conflict is actually like and tried to capture that in our games. Likewise, we didn’t always make up magic systems, but frequently we would ask, “What do the people who believe in magic believe it can do?”

Magic Systems in SCA-influenced Games. Chivalry and Sorcery came up with one answer. In this book they did things like divide magicians into a huge number of religious traditions. And these traditions were structured. There were Natural Magic Users which included drug-trace induced casters, those who evoked magic with dances and chants, mediums, and shamen. The Minor Arcane with the alchemists, artificers (who build magic items), astrologists, diviners, wizards and witches, evil priests, and covens. And then the Major Arcane with conjurers, enchanters (who use chants and song to create magic), necromancers, thaumaturgists, mystic cabbalism with their magic symbols, those who know the words of power words, and the numerologists. 

I don’t know who came up with this classification of real-world magical beliefs (I kind of think they grabbed it from existing occult works—maybe the Golden Bough, but I will confess, it is still my default way of classifying magic to this day. When I encounter people who believe in magic, I usually find they fall into one of these groups.

And Runequest found another answer. Buried in the Natural Magic of C&S were the dance / chant and shaman traditions. Both of these (and a few others in the Minor Arcane) reflect an ancient, real-world tradition frequently called Animism. One of the key influencers of Runequest was Greg Stafford (who I never met) and his interest was cultural anthropology.

Stafford was trying to create his own bronze-age cultures. And if the world had magic, then the magic should be a real part of the world, not just a set of random powers strapped on for a few lucky casters. So, he started from the assumption that the world worked the way that surviving religious traditions that were present in the bronze age believed it did.

Spirits were real. Shaman were people who could interact with them. Spells were gifts from the spirits (or maybe treasures wrestled away from them). Gods were powerful spirit-like entities that interacted with people. They had spirits of retribution for those that crossed them. They had gifts for those that worshiped them. And they had limits on their powers.

Limitations. The drawback to this approach is that we were frequently constrained in the types of stories we would tell. Powerful wizards were rare. Because most cultures don’t actually believe in powerful wizards.

Even when we would cut loose from the real world, we would play games like The Fantasy Trip and GURPS Fantasy. Two related games that do not have massive, Earth-shattering wizard types.

Advantages. The flipside is that you end up with a really good understanding of human cultures and religious beliefs. I live in Canada now and I am frequently near animistic rituals and enchantments. I find it easy to understand them and respectfully stay out of their way.

As a person who grew up in the shadow of the SCA and who played RPGs heavily influenced by their tradition of research, understanding, and teaching, I have a very different approach to magic in my worlds. In my worlds, if there really is magic, then the magic is real. It affects everything. If diseases are caused by spirits then they are not spread by microorganisms.

I wrote Rubble and Ruin to be a world that plays like a cannon fantasy game, but which doesn’t have real magic. Instead, I replaced it with science and technology. I’m currently working on a fantasy game that tries to capture the feeling of my old SCA-influenced RPG experience. It has real magic—and in that world it is real.

As always, thank you for reading this reflection on my early gaming experience. I always welcome comments and questions below.

p.s. A little true-confession at the end. I haven’t played Chivalry and Sorcery since forever, but I use it as a historical reference. I was looking at the current edition on Drivethrurpg and noticed that I own it. I must have gotten it in an early bundle or something—maybe I used some Rubble and Ruin money to pick it up. So, I start flipping through the pdf. Oh, they have cleaned it up. I bet they’ve fixed lots of bits and improved lots of others. But it is 583 pages long! That tells me just how much was crammed into the original work.

Remembering when Illinois was a slave state?

Trigger warning. This is a nasty piece of history that slipped into a song intended to be lighthearted and for children. It centers on American slavery.

I have a peculiar little story about a piece of mostly overlooked American history. It’s tragic, and forgotten, and I think it shouldn’t be.

Back in the day I was a direct  report to a fellow who happened to have a PhD in History – great guy—we’re still friends on social media even though we haven’t worked together since the late 1990s. So anyway, one day when we were working together somehow the conversation got around to slavery and Illinois, and I mentioned that there was some kind of exemption back in the early 1800s for two counties in Illinois, Saline and Gallatin. They had legal slavery. Well, he said “No way”, and quoted line and verse about how certain laws prohibited that, and I said, “That may be, but I’ve toured the Old Slave House.”

He didn’t believe me, but that was okay, and life went on. I knew what I had seen. The shackles and the beds the slaves would be chained to is what has stuck with me all these years.

A decade later, long after we had both moved on, I got an email from him with the subject line “Mia Coupa”. It turns out he was going through some old archives and found a document which referenced slavery in Southern Illinois. (The internet tells me it was an exemption written into the Illinois State Constitution—but I didn’t learn that until I started writing this post.)

What they said at the Old Slave House was that there had been salt mines in Saline and Gallatin Counties, along the Saline River—first clue was in the name. Apparently, the river was full of dissolved salt, which was easy to get and very valuable on the frontier, but the water needed to be boiled until the salt crystalized and this was such hard, hot, nasty work that they couldn’t pay people to do it. So, they made an exemption to allow slaves just for processing the salt.

For those with a weak understanding of US geography, the Ohio river was the boundary between free and slave states, and the Saline River is a small tributary of the Ohio, just on the wrong side. Well, wrong for the moneyed elites that needed slaves.

And Lincoln is said to have visited there before taking office. Just saying.

Fast forward to last week. My kid liked sea chanties before they were cool, and we’ve listened to a lot of them on YouTube. One of my favorite groups is The Longest Johns. Now just to be clear, I don’t think these fellows have the slightest idea about this upcoming connection. They are folk musicians from the UK, and they perform a large number of folk songs and sea chanties.

Here is a link to Shawneetown, by the Longest Johns.

Last week the algorithm thought I would like to listen to “Shawneetown”. Well, right away I recognized that the song is about Shawneetown Illinois—the ancient (by American standards) town in Little Egypt, near the southern tip of the state of Illinois. A region that holds a special place in my heart. If for no other reason than it is the best place in the world to set a Call of Cthulhu campaign. And, my wife is from Southern Illinois, and I’ve spent a lot of time there.

According to this fan site, the song Shawneetown is a 1970’s folk song written around some fragments of song preserved from the keelboat era of the early 1800s.

So, I’m listening to the song, for the first time, and yes, it is about Southern Illinois—or at least traveling down the Ohio River. In the song, the travelers are going to Shawneetown to sell produce and buy rock salt.

Where did the Shawneetown rock salt come from?

Remember those salt mines?  There is a route from the mines to the nearby Ohio River and Shawneetown. (Actually, now it’s Old Shawneetown. They moved the town after some flooding during the Great Depression.)

Here’s a picture of the Bank in Old Shawneetown from when I visited about ten years ago. There is not much left in town, but this building is still standing. It was built before the American Civil War and stored money associated with the salt trade.

In the early 1800s, the sale of rock salt was filling the Shawneetown Bank vaults with money. This trade was still being referenced in folk songs 150-years-later. And half-a-century on the song is sung by a popular band in Great Britain. And through all of this, people don’t mention that the rock salt was boiled out of the water of the Saline River by Illinois slaves.

I don’t think this requires any action on the part of the reader. I just feel that people should be aware of Illinois slavery. We should remember that people with money can write for themselves exceptions in just about any rule or law. This has been happening for a very long time, and unless continuous action and vigilance is taken, it will continue happening in the future.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this and your comments and questions are always welcome.

Rustic Roleplaying: Runequest before Glorantha

Tl;DR. An old guy writes a bit about playing Runequest in the late 1970s,early 1980s. He describes the game as having “organic character growth”.

 

People seem to be interested in reading about what my friends and I were doing with our RPGs “back in the day”, so I thought I would write a few words about a game we liked, and about what we played while others were in being “old school”.

Call of Cthulhu was first published in 1981 and by 1982 my mother was dying of cancer, I was a nerdy teenager, my social life and gaming world was shifting and everything in my life around then can be broken into “before mom passed” and “after she passed”. And one of the last things before mom passed was “Will’s Runequest game”.  

There were a few stores in the next town over that would have a rack or two of roleplaying books, and whenever I could I’d head over to one or the other and search out new and exciting things. This was before the advent of the information age. There was no way for me to know what games were coming, or even what games already existed, except what was on these racks. I was only occasionally able to afford gaming magazines, and it would be another few years before I discovered Berkley Games down in the Bay Area—which I might get to once a year if I was lucky. So I just discovered games on these racks.

And I still have a flash memory of discovering Runequest. There was a short-lived hobby store in Old Town (the tourist part of the city of Eureka) and it was a beautiful sunny day—so it must have been summer—it only rains once a year in Humboldt County, starting in October and ending in April—so if it was sunny, it was summer. In one of those old, rotating magazine racks, just below a sealed plastic bag containing White Bear and Red Moon, which was a military board game and therefore definitely of no interest to teenaged me, was the original, staple-bound Runequest.

I remember it took me a while to save up/acquire enough money to buy it. My memory was that it took forever, so realistically it was probable only a week or two. But I got it. Still have most of it. Here’s a picture of what is left.

An aside about my other copy. Greg Stafford is said to have bought the first copy of D&D directly from Gary Gygax, don’t know if it is true or not, but I’ve heard that. But Chaosium was definitely an early player in the RPG world and is an old and major company. But Ken St. Andre did publish the second ever RPG, Tunnels and Trolls. And when he was downsizing his life a few years ago, he sold a lot of old things. He was sharing parts of his collection of memorabilia from the origins of this hobby. And I bought Ken St. Andre’s original copy of Runequest. And I think that is a neat little piece of gaming history.

Here is a picture of the inside. I asked, and he graciously agreed to sign it for me. (Thanks again Trollfather—for everything you have done.)

Will’s Runequest Game. Chaosium has re-released this version as Runequest Classic, so if you want, you can pick up your own copy cheap. By modern standards it’s not a complete game and a lot of what it is lacking is what made Will’s game so much fun. Will Handrich was my best friend for several years there (I was basically his nerdy side kick). He was a classic working-class intellectual. Studied languages, read the classics, and played classical music on both piano and recorders. He passed too early a few years ago. Eventually he became deeply involved in the Society for Creative Anachronisms and move on from being an avid TTRPG player, but not before this one campaign.

The first edition of Runequest missed one thing. One important thing. There was no pre-game character development. It had a great combat system, very nicely reflecting SCA combat—the Society for Creative Anachronisms was developing just walking distance from Chaosium down in Berkley and Oakland. It had a metaphysics based on “real world” animism. Characters could become priests or priestesses, shaman, Runelords, all sorts of wonderful things. But characters started as, what we would today call, “new adults”. You had your attributes, your base skills, but nothing more.

Further, although it was implied, Staford’s famous world of Glorantha wasn’t explicitly in the book. It was generic. As a GM you were to create your own Bronze Age world. Later, I would run mine, Telemeta, for several years. If Will named his, I don’t remember.

Organic Character Progression. Runequest is a skills-based game. No classes. No races. Just roll up a person, note their starting skill percentages and drop into the world.

“Hey, there are bandits camped down by the river. We’re going to attack their camp and drive them off before then rob the town.” And off your characters go.

The skills you used in play were the skills that you rolled to improve at the end of the session. And as they improved, you were more likely to use them in the next session. Characters didn’t start as fighters or thieves; they evolved into them. I wanted a sneaky thief but just couldn’t get one. I would miss my sneaking rolls and get into fights. My characters became pretty competent fighters, but never sneaky.

In D&D I always tried to play Magic Users (the old name for wizards). In Runequest I could never get there. My best character eventually learned a little Battle Magic from a spirit, but never any deep magical secrets, but she got wicked-good with a staff.

Characters over Roles. For me, this was where characters started taking over from roles. (A wrote about roles before characters here.) This character wants to become a magic user, so whenever there is anything happening that might help me down that path, the character is up in front leading the way.

“Let’s try and figure out what these old scrolls say.”

“Let’s investigate this ancient magical site.”

If you had a role you wanted your character to develop into, and since skills mostly only improved by using them, you had to drive your character’s story towards doing things that would allow your character to become the person you want them to be.

It was great fun in-play. Given that we were all “new adults” at the time, it was easy for us to accept untrained characters. And I think “driving your story towards doing things that allow you to improve the skills you want to become good at” is actually solid life advice here in the real world.

As always thank you for taking the time to read this, and I always invite you to leave any comments or questions below.

 

 

Enigma Scout is on its way

The Sphere is made of five million domains completely enclosing the sun — each with the area of a planet and ringed by a microgravity void. A millennium ago, something destroyed its internal communication and conditions are deteriorating.

And now there is a war with battle lines over thirty million kilometers long.

A young woman, Rebbic, was created to help the war effort and is thrown into the conflict. Trained as both a trauma physician and an Enigma Healer, she is taken from the comfort of her unorthodox community of sisters and conscripted into the landnavy -- but soon her skills and compassion take her farther than she ever imagined…

…into the infrastructure of the sphere,

…and the mysterious eri that control it.

Enigma Scout, my debut novel, will be published mid-next year by Nova. It was a winner of the defunct SciFidea contest and is set in my idea for a Dyson Sphere, which I outlined over three earlier posts.

1. Let’s Talk about Niven’s Ringworld

2. From Stapledon to Dyson

3. My Dyson Sphere Conjecture: This one is how my Dyson Sphere would put gravity on the inner surface of a sphere.

I'll be putting out more information as it becomes available. As always, questions or comments are welcome below.

Old-school, Left Coast Gaming

 

TL;DR: My lived-experience as a young, Northern California gamer in the late 1970s and early 1980s did not venerate TSR and their licensees but rather vilified their corporate practices while still playing a few of their products.

 

What now? I was doom scrolling the other day when I saw images of long, rantie posts by someone claiming to have been a mover-and-shaker in the early days of gaming. The individual was going on espousing how he hated modern, politically Left, “woke” game publishing and that in the “old days” gamers of all backgrounds got along fine working for “Christian” corporations. This was not my experience, so I thought I should document my relationship with published modules and publishing companies.

Backstory.  I started playing D&D in the 1970s and moved on to other TTRPGs by the early 1980s and have been a life-long gamer, and more recently even producing some small content. Here, I will jot a few paragraphs of my lived-experience just because it was different from that of this other person.

Left-coast boy. I self-identify as being from the Left Coast. That is, from a rural, coastal California town with strong ties to the political Left. (After I left my home town, I believe they were the first city in the US to have a Green Party majority on the city council.) I am definitely what the political Right would call “woke”. Have been all my life. Never regretted it. And I’ve been playing table-top Roleplaying games for the last half century.

Early D&D. I had an Eric Holmes Basic D&D set that did not come with a gaming module, instead I had what Google tells me where Dungeon Geomorphs. It was a set of tiles you could mix-and-match to create mega dungeons. I don’t think I ever used them but played around with them when I was bored.

We had the idea that you were supposed to come up with your own adventures. At that time, I looked down on pre-written adventures. The idea was that you were supposed to create your own adventures. (And I was the worst of snobby nerds as a teenager.)

We played a lot of D&D until about 1981 or 82, when we switched over to other games, but TSR sanctioned adventures were never a big thing for us. I am just now running B2 Keep on the Borderlands for the first time in my life. I bought a pdf a few months ago and have converted it to Mongoose Legend. I have set up a world with B2, B5 Horror on the Hill, and U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh (Here is an overview of what I’m running, for those who care). My current group has just finished exploring the haunted house in Saltmarsh and are heading off to rescue a missing NPC from the Caves of Chaos in B2. This is –almost – the first time I’ve ever touched the modules. We didn’t play “corporate made” adventures. We made our own.

Almost.

Early Module Experiences. My brother James would buy some Judges Guild modules and start them, but we never got very far. He had Judges Guild’s Tegel Manor and we started it. We maybe got two or three adventures in. The problem was the architecture. It came with a large, fold-out map that was really cool, but there was no rhythm or reason for the layout of the building. It was a dungeon that was supposed to be a building. We loved the big map, but we couldn’t get over the implausibility of the building. Anyway, we drifted away from that.

And then there was the time we started U1, Saltmarsh. I think Will Handrich was running it. I know we were using AD&D. We had a largish group and we encountered kobolds setting traps on the way to the haunted house. We played one or two sessions but never got in the building.

There were two modules that we did like. T1 The Village of Hommlet and Apple Lane. Both of these modules provided a base for your adventures that you could drop into whatever dungeon you were planning.  They each did get a little bit of play in my early days. Of course, Apple Lane is for Runequest.

Somewhere along in here—and I forget exactly when—news reached us that TSR had sued our beloved Arduin Grimoire.  The word was that Hargrave had to go through and remove the words “Dungeons and Dragons” from the text of his books. So he did and replaced it with “Other Games”. I have a memory of seeing one of these later versions and—this was before computer typesetting—there was white space on either side of the words. I’ve tried to find this to check that the memory is true, but I don’t have my old Hargrave books, and I don’t know what happened to my brother’s copies when he passed. (So, it might not be true.)

But true or not, that did change my view of TSR. From then on, they were the evil corporation—just like in the emerging cyberpunk stories of the time. Myself, and many of my friends, viewed them as corporate bad guys out to make a quick buck. The fact that they ended up being gutted by a multinational toy company matches my expectations.

Mid-1980s. By the time we got to the mid-1980s I was active in a gaming club at the local university (which, last time I looked, it is still running). We would meet on Friday night in a university building and there would frequently be around six different games running. We would write on a blackboard whose games were running that night, what room each game was in, and if it was accepting new players.

I only have two memories of anyone ever running a published module. I could be wrong, I was deep into Aftermath at the time, and not attending too closely, but there was one time when a fellow ran Snakepipe Hollow over the summer—I didn’t get to play, but I heard it was fun. And one night we played a Top Secret one-shot.

Late 1980s. In the late 1980s I moved to Carbondale Illinois for graduate school. I might as well have been moving to a different world. Gaming here was very different. We also had a gaming club—it met on Saturdays—and you could float between a multitude of different games. But Judges Guild, which had been headquartered just a few hours away, had (apparently) just gone out of business and every used bookstore in town had three or four boxes of various Judges Guild products, still wrapped, at massively reduced prices. One of the shop owners told me that someone had traveled all over the region selling full boxes of books, and he had bought three.

It was here that I got a copy of Ravenscrag. Can not recommend this module enough! If I had had it back in my D&D days, it would have totally changed my relationship with pre-made adventures… but I didn’t. I still haven’t had a chance to play it.   

In summery. Myself, and I think many of my West Coast friends, did not have our gaming experiences driven by the products coming out of the Midwest publishing houses. We would occasionally shift through published adventures for good ideas we could add to our own works, but in general we created our own adventures and, for the most part, our own worlds.

Thank you for reading this far. If you found this interesting, I have a few other posts related to my early gaming experiences you might enjoy. As always, please feel free to leave questions or comments below.

Roleplaying before Character Playing

Same Revisited

Why is combat in my games is so boring! And how do I fix it.

I already know the answer. Once upon a time, a long time ago I would run Aftermath games and I would, easily, have a dozen people at the table, all of them paying close attention during fight sequences. Everyone would be fully engaged, and a good time was had by most--at least they would come back next week for more.

That was back in the 1980s and maybe I was just a better GM back then, but considering I was primarily an anti-social nerd, that seems unlikely. So, after careful consideration I've determined that I must have run a game that was more fun to play. I've looked back and given this a lot of thought, and I think I know what's missing.

Simultaneous or interfaced action. Modern games (at least the ones I play) tend to model cinematic action.  Take a DnD 5e game. Combat runs like a MCU movie. 

Now it is the Barbarian's turn. All attention is focused on that character. They take an action, and a bonus action, and this triggers a response from their opponent which has another action… then they have a magic effect which triggers that other thing. Then attention shifts to the next superhero--sorry, I mean the next character. 

And we cycle through everyone in the fight in a given order, Each character getting the attention for an amount of time based on their attributes/class features/magic powers. It's cinematic. Literally, it is just like a movie. But when my character isn't the center of attention, it can be a little boring. And it’s not particularly realistic. Combat should be a chaotic mess with people's plans constantly shifting and everyone constantly in motion.

And Aftermath did that very well.

Aftermath! During the 1980s, I was the Aftermath guy. We had a university gaming club with several dozen members. People coming and going. Games starting and ending. And one of the constants was Rich's Aftermath game. It was basically Rubble and Ruin but with very complex game mechanics.

I mean really complex, simulationist mechanics with lots of number that feed into other numbers, and everything had a three letter abbreviation. MNA was maximum number of actions and BDG was bullet damage group and PCA was phases consumed in action. And more and more…

And there was a core group of players who enjoyed it. They came back week after week for years. But most of these players were not math nerds. I was. As the GM I would handle all the math in my head. There was one or two other regular players who would follow along and point out when I made a mistake. But most of the regular players did need to know all the intricacies of the mechanics—they could just follow the action of the story and figure out what they wanted their character to do.  

And there were many other people who would play if something happened and their favorite game was canceled, and there were others who just dropped by. Now I have never been a great GM, but I did have fun people in the game, so maybe that was why people kept coming back. But I also think it is because when combat broke out, and it almost always did, it was interesting and fun to play. Because action happened simultaneously. 

Phases and Phases Consumed in Action. In an Aftermath Combat Round, characters had three numbers, Base Action Phase, Maximum Number of Actions, and Phases Consumed per Action. When a group of people are fighting, you would start with the highest Base Action Phase and count down. Each character had a number of actions they can perform in a round, and each of their actions were interlaced with the other combatants. 

Consider Albert who starts at Phase 15 and get three Actions. Each of his actions take 5 Phases. (That’s BAP /MNA, round down, or 15/3=5.)  Likewise, Bob starts at Phase12, but he gets 4 Actions. Say they are Each using melee weapons which get one attack per Action. Albert will declare his first action on Phase 15, and resolve it on Phase 13 (halfway through the action). He'll make his first attack roll before Bob even starts. But Bob starts on 12 and his actions only take 3 phases (12/4=3). His attacks will be resolved the phase after he declares them. So on phase 11 Bob resolves his first attack and the following phase Albert declares his second action. Bob gets more actions but he starts slower. Albert gets an initial edge, but once Bob starts going, he’ll grind out attacks. Now scale this to a table full of players fighting a large number of bad guys and you get an exciting evening of play.

Lots of Numbers. One of the reasons this worked is that Aftermath had two primary statistics that related to a character’s swiftness. The first was Speed. Literally, just how fast the character could move their body. Speed was on a scale of (roughly) 1 to 40, divide it by two (rounding up) and that’s your Base Action Phase. Characters also had a “Dexterity” attribute which determined their hand-eye coordination and the like. This stat would generate the maximum number of actions they could take in a round. This would typically yield a value from 2 to 5 with 2 or 3 being the most common.

The games I play these days don’t have as many numbers kicking around, and for the Aftermath approach to be interesting, there needs to be an offset. Sometimes two characters will be going on the same phase, but not often, and certainly not all the time.

Solution. Most modern D100 games, Mythras, Mongoose Legend, OpenQuest , Classic Fantasy, and it’s likely even buried in Basic Roleplaying, there is a mechanic for the maximum number of actions a character gets in a combat round. This is a simple look-up based on the character’s DEX and (interestingly) it runs from 1 to 5 with 2 or 3 as the most common. We don’t have a second number for Speed, but we don’t really need it. Let’s just say there are 12 phases per round. (There is a neat history going back thousands of years as to why we would pick 12—basically it divides by whole numbers into whole numbers.)

Here is a table of when each character gets an action based on their Maximum Number of Actions.

"But Richard", he screams in his best Jenna Moreci voice. The problem of always starting on the same phase is that now all the characters with 3 actions will be declaring their actions at the same time and then resolving them at the same time. But! We have a lot of characters—at least at my table—who like to use two weapons while others go sword and shield. So now you have characters that get one attack per action versus others that get two attacks.

Why wouldn’t I always take two weapons and get the most attack rolls? Because now there are Free Phase Actions. These are little shifts—moving towards or away from your opponent. Small, tactical actions that keep you engaged with the game. On every phase, every character can potentially do something.

Couple this with restoring to polearms the ability to attack between the front-line fighters and suddenly you have a team-based, tactical combat where every player is constantly thinking about what is happening and what they should be doing. Large changes in the way the characters are arrayed take place slowly, incrementally, with each player trying to do their part.

I’m writing a game with the working title of Rustic Fantasy which is a modified form of Mythras Imperative (coupled with some elements from several other Open D100 games, notably OpenQuest and BRP).

Here is a link to the draft Combat Chapter which details how to use the fancy table above and lists all the different combat options. I think Mythras or Runequest GMs could easily use it as is – with a few little tweaks. And if nothing else, it might inspire you to develop your own interlaced combat system.

As always, thanks for reading this and feel free to leave any questions or comments below.

(All artwork here is in the Public Domain) 

Is it time to go back to coding orcs as fascists?

 

TL;DR. When I gamed in California in the late 1970s, orcs were coded as fascists. It wasn’t until later that I encountered them being coded as people of color. Maybe it’s time to explicitly add minority representation to humans and go back to orcs being fascists.

 

Back in the day orcs were evil, and they were fascists.

I think my TL;DR at the top pretty much catches what I’m going to say. When I started in what we now call “fantasy” in the mid-to-late 1970s, orcs were a timeless evil creature that helped some big-bad destroy all that was nice. They were sort of a rot that was destroying the world. Over time, TTRPGs recoded them to be various minority or – I think, more commonly – as a generic “visible minority”. Of course, once you do that, you need to stop making them inherently evil, and they should have normal intelligence, and all that. But you lose the central conflict of the world, the idea that some powerful people are manipulating the masses for their own gain and building armies of thoughtless people to enact their villainy.

Of course we have to separate these two things. We need visible minorities in games—but they should just be humans. Because… well, do I even have to say it? But we also need a cancerous evil that creeps through humanity—of all types—which needs to be fought and defeated.

I’m going to argue that we should just make sure TTRPG worlds recognize different ethnic and minority groups and then return orcs to being pig-head, low intelligence bad guys that need to be defeated before they destroy all that is good in the world.

History of the word, orc. I’m not the best person to do a deep dive on the origin of the word orc. But Tolkien did not invent it, instead he grabbed an Old English word that meant something like demon-spirit or specter or goblin and also sounded cool (he picked it for “phonetic reasons”) and used that for the servants of various evil Dark Lords. Tolkien scholars say that he was inconsistent in his notes about where they came from. Sometimes they were bred by the Dark Lord, other times they were elves corrupted by one or another Dark Lord, and even occasionally they were elves who were corrupted “in the wild”. Wikipedia covers this.

However they came to be, they were creatures of good who became evil. Now Tolkien definitely implied that modern human minorities are in some way associated with the orcs—and he wasn’t very charitable towards women either. But I still feel that he portrayed the orcs of the Third Age to be cruel, obedient followers of a powerful and evil individual.

Tolkien Apologist? It is easy for me to not get stressed over Tolkien modelling his orcs on minorities. I am certain that he did. We all have limitations. My father hated Germans, but he was very fond of African Americans. He was a working-class guy from downtown Detroit. He appeared to get along swell with American minorities, but he hated Germans. Of course, there was that time that a German fighter pilot strafed the bridge he was working on and left him with two holes in his legs which never healed. My father, like Tolkien, was an imperfect person who suffered through the trauma of war. Tolkien is an imperfect person, like myself, my father, and everyone else I know, but with his fiction he was trying to make comments about the nature of human conflict. It is the positive elements of that message I would like to focus on, well recognizing that there are negatives that should be addressed.

Don’t forget half-elves. In Tolkien’s world elves and humans lived mostly apart, except (I think) there were two cases where an elf and human got together and created half-elves. I have already written about how all this is driven by the idea of biological determinism (it is here), and how creating these fanciful different “races” with their separate origins is not doing anything good for gaming. But it starts with in D&D, with half-elves. They are an early entry. The first appear (as I understand it) in Greyhawk in 1974. By 1978 they are a standard feature of TTRPGs. This is when the half-orc enters the gaming world. So, by 1978 we are already seeing some gamers switching to “race” as ethic minority.

My Lived-Experience. I started war gaming around 1977 (about age 12) and by 1978 I was deep into TTRPGs. I was in a remote, university town and spent far more time playing in ancient redwood forests and along rock seashores that I ever spent in cities—and I had no idea of the breadth or scoop of the gaming community. But I had access to Runequest, Original D&D, Basic D&D, lots of Metagaming MicroGames including Melee and Wizards, and the AD&D Monster Manual.

How were orcs portrayed? And I don’t remember orcs ever being “stand ins” for people of color or any recognizable minority. Instead, they were fascists. I grew up in a house with multiple disabled veterans who had all been involved in fighting fascists—we all knew what and who they were. At least in my childhood home, the fascists were low intelligence, mean people who loved law and order, as long as they got to make the law and bully other people around.

How were orcs coded? For me, the orcs of D&D were always, basically, the same as the “mutants” of Ralph Bakshi’s movie, Wizards who were definitely fascists.

But let’s look at the early works. In The Arduin Grimoire, we are told that orcs have Intelligence and Wisdom limited to 4-11 (p.6, on the same 3-18 scale of D&D), so lower than human, but we are also told (p.11) that they, like elves, are immortal, they are savage and treacherous, as well as warlike, quarrelsome, and love to kill. And, interestingly, they are listed as chaotic evil.

In the MicroGame The Fantasy Trip, Melee, Steve Jackson says it most succinctly, “An orc is just like a human figure—except evil”

In the early Monster Manual, orcs (p.76) were common, pig-headed people with pinkish snouts who are brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen. They are bullies and the stronger will always intimidate and dominate the weaker. They are lawful evil and only live for 40 years.

I would argue that for TSR, even by 1978 (the year they released the Monster Manual) they are already starting the shift of orcs being coded as minorities and not immortal evil. We are told they have “unpleasant” brown or brownish green skin, and they have a short life span. But even for TSR in 1978, they were still lawful and evil. They were some hybrid of the outsider and the fascist. They were low to average intelligence pig-headed people who kept slaves and loved torture, but they are brown skinned and prolific (which I would argue are stereotypes held of by many whites of the African American community, and thus consistent with coding orcs as minorities).

Let’s make fascism evil again. Whatever their history, at least for a while in at least one place, orcs were fascists. They were low intelligence individuals who hated outsiders, who followed their leader unquestioningly, who opposed those that were not of their tribe. They were mean bullies and slavers. They were an ageless evil threatening our peace and security.

Let’s bring that back!

What I am Doing. In my current fantasy game, mean and evil people are transformed into orcs and goblins. Through the magic of the Evil powers, the worst humans give themselves over to evil. As they do, they transform physically and gain certain advantages which they covet. In this setting, orcs are not an ethnic group, they are people with similar moral convictions. They are people who give up elements of themselves for various reasons, in order to be free of needing to respect the rights of others.

Additionally, since the early 1980s, I have always tended to play d100 games which—mechanically—replace the D&D idea of “race” with cultures and ethnicities. Instead of different fantasy races or species or whatever they are, there are ethnic groups that reflect more accurately the variation in human backgrounds.

Here is one of my old Runequest worlds that I ran through much of the 1990s. There are three ethnic groups mentioned on the map, the Lomaran, Mnar, and the Loskalm. None of them exactly map to any modern groups, they are just the groups of humans in this world. In this world there were never any playable non-human races. These groups created the variation available to the players.

Racial and ethnic mixing in modern communities is for most of us a common element of our life. Historically, such mixing occurred, but there were also large homogeneous areas. Personally, since it is a fantasy world with dragons and wizards and magic and all that other stuff. I’m happy to just have all my humans be of a heterogeneous mixture of humans and not even worry about why or how. Half the town are black skinned, others are different skin tones, and others are white. I’m not worrying about why there are dragons, why the F should I care about why there are black skinned people in a medieval European-themed setting.

But what I do care about are the fascists. And yes, the Evil Overlord is raising an army. And yes, he (or she) is a threat to all that is free and good. And his pig-headed followers are a threat. They have and will continue to kill and enslave those weaker than themselves, and yes, your heroes are free to attack them on sight.

As always, think you for reading this and please feel free to leave any comments below.