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.
