State of the Union

"Sir, a second state-run space research organization has released a tabletop RPG."

It was inevitable.

We have seen idiosyncratic weirdos and megacorporations releasing RPGs for decades now, so it was only a matter of time before nation-states became involved in the role-playing game hobby.

A couple of bits of role-playing game-related effluvia have come to my attention over the past few days, both of which were released by national organizations focused on space research:

1. Releasing earlier this week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration released The Lost Universe, an adventure clearly designed for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons but simple enough to transfer to your analogue adventure game of choice. The adventure is designed to be educational, covering information about the Hubble Space Telescope and various cosmological phenomena.
2. Releasing sometime in the past six months (I found a tweet from September about this game despite only hearing about it yesterday), the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan released Sandcastle, a full fantasy role-playing game system that they plan to use for outreach purposes while encouraging other organizations to do the same and likewise encouraging individuals to use the system for their own enjoyment.
   

What a difference fifty years makes, huh?

Doxacon 2023 After-action Report

This past weekend (November 3 and 4, 2023) saw Doxacon X in Arlington, VA. Despite the fact that Nicole and I are still preferentially avoiding large groups in the midst of the ongoing plague, Kenneth Hite posted this three months ago and found it impossible to resist the siren's allure:

So off we went.

But first, a word about personal bias: Assuming you clicked on the above link to learn that Doxacon is sponsored by the Protection of the Holy Mother of God Orthodox Church, and assuming you have read my previous blog posts like this one, you might surmise that Nicole and I are not quite the target audience for this convention. So interpret whatever I write with that in mind.

Also, it appears that Doxacon eventually puts its lectures online, and there was definitely recording equipment present. So whenever that happens, I will endeavor to link to the lectures here.

Doxacon is a small convention: this gathering had somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 attendees, although we hardly saw that number present. Since we were coming for Tim Powers and Kenneth Hite, we missed several of the lectures and didn't participate in the gaming block around lunch on Saturday. (In hindsight, I'm curious to see the full shape of a table-top RPG at a Christian fantasy convention.) I would ultimately estimate that we saw about a third to half of what the convention has to offer.

Having skipped Friday evening, Saturday morning opened with an akathist before Tim Powers' lecture. Tim Powers spoke about writing fantasy fiction as a Catholic, and how having a belief in the supernatural makes one's fantasy writing more authentic. Whether or not you agree with that point, I can find common ground with the idea that you have to believe on some level about the subject of your writing — I have previously said that I think my Unknown Armies campaign The Rule of Beasts suffered because I never quite believed the antagonists' motivations.

In the afternoon, Kenneth Hite's lecture was about traditional morality in Lovecraft's work and in Call of Cthulhu. He argues that while most RPGs are escapist fun (and there's nothing inherently wrong with that), Call of Cthulhu reinforces traditional Christian morals because it posits that player characters are willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of their community. Hite also connected this to the Western, and deftly brought these themes into Lovecraft's work by pointing out that most of his stories with "happy endings" occur in his hometown of Providence, RI. Despite his nihilism, Lovecraft clearly also had things he cared about and an eye toward community.

While I'm not the intended audience for this lecture, I'm certainly intrigued by the assertion: he has a point that most games do not start with coalition-building as an explicit goal, and almost none of them encourage personal sacrifice in either tone or mechanics. (That stuff often appears as an emergent property of the group rather than something explicitly coded in the rules.) While noting that there aren't many games that encourage coalition-building as an explicit goal, he referenced Underground and Avery Alder's The Quiet Year as good models in this paradigm.

I idly wonder if we'll see more coalition-building mechanics in the wake of renewed collective bargaining power over the next decade, but then again, who knows what the future holds?

The final lecture was a panel discussion among all authors about their writing process and about the role of fantasy in a secular world. Regarding the latter, Ken Hite's comments resonated the strongest with me: belief never left, as we always need stories and ghosts and fairies and continue to repeat them time and again even as proponents of the Enlightenment claim we have banished them. Regarding the former, Ken Hite contrasted what game designers do with what traditional authors do, noting that RPG designers really only provide setting, leaving plot and character to the individual tables, but that comes with the added difficulty of having to provide lots of setting as one does not know how those individual tables are going to engage with the material.

He also noted that the joy of game design is that nothing is wasted: if you have a concept that seems too niche to achieve mass appeal as a setting book, you inflict it on your home game instead. (His example was Rex of the Old '97, which I know for a fact would be eagerly purchased by tens of Unknown Armies fans.)

With that, we closed the book on Doxacon X, leaving Arlington before vespers.

While there were no grand revelations from the lectures at this Doxacon, it was a fine time and very worthwhile. (I got something out of all of the lectures, and I think it is worthwhile to occasionally immerse myself into wholly alien cultures.) I cannot say that we would return any time soon, although depending on the guestlist in a future year, I would be loath to say we would never return. If you're a faithful Christian in the D.C. area with an interest in science-fiction and fantasy, you'll probably like it. Otherwise, you might feel a little like Dr. Gonzo at a narcotics convention.

Edit (11-09-2023, 11:52 AM): Chaosium's Facebook page shared an article from Catholic news site Aleteia, which posted their own (much more thorough) overview of Doxacon.

Edit (01-11-2023, 10:20 PM): The recordings from Doxacon are live. Tim Powers' lecture is here and Ken Hite's lecture is here. (If by some happenstance you're reading this in the far future, the recordings from Doxacon X should be dated Tuesday, January 9, 2024.)

RPGs as Art: On Sincerity in Art

"Don't do fashionable science." — Max Delbrück

A mantra for 2023.

Wandering around the lonely corners of the internet in this foul year of our Lord two-thousand twenty-three, there's a repeated piece of advice that feels intensely counter-intuitive to me. Whenever someone is thinking about writing something for publication — often on one of the OneBookShelf community content sites like DM's Guild, Storyteller's Vault, or Statosphere — the most common piece of feedback I see is to write something that the author thinks will be popular. Or I see people soliciting their slice of the community for ideas, putting up a poll or open thread about what sort of thing the community wants to see next.

It doesn't surprise me that lots of those projects never materialize.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say that I am way more likely to finish something if I'm passionate about it, and I'm more likely to be passionate about it if it was more-or-less my idea. My idea is a relative concept — it might be a collaboration or even someone else's skeleton that I sketched out — but the key is that it's something that lit my brain on fire and I had to put it somewhere. If I produce it for public consumption, I'd rather produce a weird piece of art beloved by ten people (and perhaps hated by a hundred more) than a milquetoast piece of art that is passively enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people and then abandoned when the media cycle changes.

(In fact, the most melancholy version of the crowdsourced art trend is seeing someone abandon a passion project because they arbitrarily decided no one was interested in it. I still dream about the guy who was thinking about doing a Statosphere supplement about archery. Archery hasn't appeared in my modern horror games, but if someone is passionate about it, I want to see what they do with it.)

On the consumption side of things, the RPG products I enjoy and get the most use out of are things I never knew I wanted in the first place. Of the Unknown Armies offerings on Statosphere, everyone talks about big, ambitious products like American Dreams or GOAD or RITE, but I've gotten the most direct use out of Three Miles of Bad Road. (I'm not even running a car-centric campaign!) I haven't had a chance to slot The Sun King's Palace into a fantasy campaign yet, but I'm definitely going to do so. I keep returning to it, tasting it in my dreams. I certainly didn't ask for a d100 horror sci-fi game, but Mothership continues to beckon me. (And there's a sentence or two in the beginning of A Pound of Flesh that features some of the best game advice I've ever read.)

All this to say: everyone has a story in them that only they can tell, in a medium of their choosing. Even if it's a lousy story, clumsily told, it will resonate with someone. Make your weird, idiosyncratic art and you will find like-minded people to play with you. Don't try to make the art you think people want to see, and don't try to make art because the topic is trendy. If you find yourself rushing to make something so you can release it while it's still topical, you've already lost.

So when you're staring down the gun barrel of your next RPG project and you don't quite know what to do, don't turn to focus-testing to tell you what to do. Brainstorm, try stuff, put your weird art out into the world. Consider this your permission to get real fuckin' weird with it.

(And astute observers will note that this applies to all art, not just role-playing games. I've watched a lot of mediocre film and television over the past month, things that were clearly focus-tested to death or tried to have Important Things To Say™ rather than honest things to say. Tell a story only you can tell.)

The Obligatory Addendum

Since the above screed largely talks about the individual (-ish) process of making art, let's talk about the uniquely collaborative activity of role-playing games themselves. (As I say repeatedly, RPGs are what happen at the table, and the rest is but smoke.) Even though the above post addresses the individual artist, it also applies to the group as a whole. If you're a Game Master, don't ignore your group's good ideas because they don't jibe with The Very Important Story You Have To Tell™. If you're a fellow player, don't ignore your other players' ideas because they don't fit your conception of this collaborative exercise.

The RPG table is going to be weird, messy, and collaborative. Your job is to enable that collaboration and have fun. (Please don't forget that games are supposed to be fun.) Everyone's favorite moments in a role-playing game are invariably when everything is chaotic and in total freefall. Lean into that, otherwise you could be writing a novel.

The Obligatory Dungeon23 Post

In case you haven't heard the good word, there's a community project this year. (Already in progress!)

Sean McCoy posted about this on Twitter and his Substack, but the gist is that you make a megadungeon by writing one dungeon room per day. At the end of the year, you'll have a twelve-level megadungeon with 365 rooms.

I've seen a lot of folks doing a bunch of pre-planning for this project, but as Sean himself says in another post, keep it simple. Divine your megadungeon via random tables and free association. (And in my personal experience, front-loading too much of the work makes it seem unattainable.) This is a brainstorming exercise more than anything else, so get ready to get weird with it.

Personally, I'm excited to see what develops. Hopefully everybody takes this opportunity to figure out how a megadungeon is put together and what they like to see in dungeons.

I don't plan on writing about my own #dungeon23 project too much on the ol' hobby blog, but I plan on keeping up with it. My dungeon is tentatively called The Crucible, although I don't know what it will become with the fullness of time. For starters, I don't think "The Crucible" is what the locals call it; they don't know that the nearby cave systems are actually connected into a megadungeon complex. (In fact, I'm not even sure anyone — including the inhabitants — has ever discovered the main entrance!)

In the meantime, here are a handful of additional community discussions around dungeon23:

Ben L.'s dungeon23 tag on the Mazirian's Garden blog

Better Legends' #dungeon23 tag on Tumblr

Zedeck Siew's #dungeon23 tag on Tumblr

Don't Punish the Players

A couple of months ago, The Alexandrian made a post about OneD&D in which he took issue with "bounded accuracy," the idea in 5e and some older D&D and OSR variants that the character's statistics for attacking, skills, and the like are going to remain within a narrow range throughout a character's development. (Contrast with a game like 3e, where a character's statistics can theoretically scale infinitely such that lower-level threats do not meaningfully concern higher-level characters.)

Among his other points, Justin Alexander argues that bounded accuracy is a myth, that certain abilities in the game break it by making characters too good at certain activities. I'll let him explain:

"The more fundamental problem is mechanical: There are a handful of class abilities which trivially — but hilariously! — break bounded accuracy.

"The rogue, of course, makes an easy example here. Expertise doubles proficiency bonuses, changing a range of +2 to +6 into a range of +4 to +12. Combined with ability score modifiers, this almost immediately turns most reasonable DCs within the system’s bounded accuracy into an automatic success for the rogue, and it gets worse from there.

"Reliable Talent then comes in for mop-up, making the rogue’s minimum die roll 10. The rogue is now auto-succeeding on every proficient check, and in their chosen Expertise any DC that could challenge them is probably impossible for every other PC.

"Of course, those are exactly the DCs these hilariously broken abilities pressure the DM to assign. Partly because they want to challenge the PCs. Partly because it just makes sense that these PCs should be able to achieve things the PCs without the hilariously broken abilities can’t do."

This, in turn, reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend years ago, in which he was talking about running D&D and worrying about the fighter's armor class and hit points. He posited that one has to ensure the monsters are tough enough to routinely hit said character's high armor class so that they deduct hit points, otherwise the players are not properly engaging with the rules system.

But I don't think those approaches are the right way of looking at things. It's perfectly acceptable — and likely even good — for player characters to be good at certain things. If the rogue can pick almost any lock with a single action, or if the fighter routinely doesn't have to worry about being significantly challenged in melees, that's fine. As a Game Master, if you seek to "challenge" your players (whatever that means to you), making the numbers scale infinitely is the laziest way to do it.

You can only begin to challenge the players when you establish real stakes for success and failure. My oft-mentioned high-level D&D game could defeat any fair challenge I throw at them (and quite a few unfair ones!), but they could still be challenged with stakes: retrieve an item, save the prisoners, delve the dungeon on a time limit. Your rogue can pick any lock and disarm any trap, but can she disarm the traps and pick the locks before the room fills with water? The fighter can stand tall against any challenger, but what about a distant wizard lobbing fireballs and mind control sorcery? Your diplomat can talk his way out of any situation, but can he stall the unfriendly cultists long enough for your allies to arrive before the cult starts executing hostages?

What if one of the hostages is a beloved and trusted hireling?

I have had plenty of Game Masters in the past who seem to like to punish players for their choices: they invalidate your character abilities, steal your resources, threaten every ally you have, and turn every victory into ash in your mouth. And while that sort of game can be fun with appropriate buy-in — Black Sun Deathcrawl, Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, and Ten Candles all come to mind as fun games when you learn to embrace the catharsis inherent in nihilism — that often turns a fun, engaging game into a grimy slog. (Incidentally, that's usually about the time when I lose interest. Always winning is just as much a bland and uninteresting railroad as always losing.)

Don't punish your players for smart choices they made, and don't make a hard game harder for everyone. If a character is good at something, you know you're only going to target that thing with luck or by making the game unfair. Instead, challenge something else. Employ distractions, challenge multiple abilities simultaneously, play foes as intelligent and reactive forces who adapt to changing circumstances.

Establish real stakes, then build on what you've established. Character stats don't make mistakes, but players certainly do when the clock starts ticking.

You might be able to support yourself and maybe even your allies, but can you accomplish your goals?

Can you save everyone?

Review: Spelljammer: Adventures in Space (and D&D 5e)

I wasn't going to write this review.

Despite recently running a lot of fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, I don't have an overwhelming urge to talk about it much here on the ol' hobby blog. I may publish the occasional piece of 5e content here, but the actual rules and the culture around the game has been analyzed to death elsewhere. The scene certainly doesn't need another voice muddying the waters and Wizards of the Coast has no need to benefit from either my praise or scorn, so I keep doing the stuff I like with or without them.

However, two things spurred me to write this review:

1. I love the Spelljammer setting, as the tags Spelljammer and SPELLS WILL BE JAMMED might suggest.
2. Most of The Dreaded Discourse™ surrounding the new Spelljammer release has been of even worse quality than usual.

So, this is perhaps less a review than a rebuttal. If you happen upon this review, consider this a message in a bottle: if someone on social media told you how horrible the new Spelljammer box set was and how you need a bunch of third-party content to make it playable, I'm here to more appropriately calibrate your expectations. (In short: the rules are perfectly acceptable, being neither excellent nor terrible, and you don't need anybody's homebrew to "fix" the new rules.)

However, this review will be a bit long, because it is (in my mind) impossible to discuss an official fifth edition D&D release without talking about WotC's design goals in making D&D 5e. (And you can't talk about those design goals without discussing what came before.) As such, this is a partial review of fifth edition itself. These reviews won't be especially in-depth, but they will hopefully be helpful.

If you're only here for a specific section, refer to the table of contents below.

Table of Contents

I. The History of D&D (and Table-Top RPGs)
II. Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition
III. Spelljammer: Adventures in Space

I. The History of D&D (and Table-Top RPGs)

If you remember your history pretty well, you can safely skip down to section II. Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Conversely, if you really want to delve into the thick of RPG history, authors like James Maliszewski, Ben Riggs, Jon Peterson, and Shannon Appelcline do great work in this sphere. (Although as with so many things in the hobby, their focus is often on Dungeons & Dragons specifically, leaving some of the less-renowned-but-still-influential aspects of the hobby unexamined.)

But the short version is that D&D starts in 1974 as a game exploring site-based and event-based adventures — pulp heroes wandering into the wilderness, facing danger in dungeons, and gathering the treasures therein (typically to fund their own personal projects).

Within a decade, more narrative structure emerges in game scenarios, exemplified by the investigation- and skill-heavy Call of Cthulhu in 1981 and the Hickman revolution starting with 1982's I3: Pharaoh. Money stops becoming a vital resource and starts becoming a supplement: 1989's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2e does away with XP-for-gold (although it remains as an optional rule), instead focusing primarily on fighting monsters, while 1991's Vampire: The Masquerade completely abstracts character wealth as part of the Backgrounds system and assumes it is not a primary goal.

By the end of the 1990s, the transition from site-based or event-based adventures into plot-based ones culminates in the ascendance of the metaplot: an overarching story that runs in the background of published game materials, such that collectors can read the books to put together the puzzle and players can interact with big events in the background of the setting. Many of the big games of the era have a metaplot revealed during the line's development (Cyberpunk, Deadlands, Delta Green, Unknown Armies, and World of Darkness all come to mind), and while D&D as a whole avoids a metaplot, most of its campaign settings have them. (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Planescape, and Ravenloft certainly all had metaplots.) The metaplot is simultaneously remembered fondly by fans as an interesting serialized story in its own right, while also being reviled as a bloated gimmick to sell books.

When TSR collapses and Wizards of the Coast takes over the game, they put their own stamp on the game by combining the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line with the BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia era-D&D line into simply Dungeons & Dragons. A few of the popular games at the time followed suit, relaunching in the early 2000s with slick new editions and largely abandoning the metaplot structure in favor of increased accessibility. However, this is an era in which a lot of games design more explicit rulesets (relying less on GM rulings), and also replace the metaplot subscription structure with a emphasis on "character builds" — the game line is now a vehicle by which to build an optimized character. While D&D 3e exemplifies this with its so-called ivory tower design, you see it in lines like Exalted and new World of Darkness.

While game lines become more bloated, desktop publishing and forums like The Forge and RPG.net allow for the creation and proliferation of smaller, more focused indie RPGs. While some of these games are short-lived, as befits a smaller and more narrow play experience, a lot of them are read by other game designers and introduce more mechanical concepts into the RPG ideaspace.

After an eight-year development cycle, Wizards of the Coast finally takes what it learned and rebrands D&D again into the wildly-polarizing fourth edition. This continues a lot of the game design trends of third edition, taking them to their logical conclusion by further emphasizing combat as the focus of the game. Combat procedures are explicit, repeatable, and largely in the players' hands. (Instead of GMs making rulings on things the players want to try, most of what a character can do is located on the character sheet.) The game's encounter design also lends itself to largely linear adventure paths of straightforward plots broken only by the game's setpiece battles.

While the game still sold well, the backlash online was fairly intense, taking two interesting forms:

1. The grognard bloggers who stuck with BECMI or AD&D during the third edition era start swapping design notes with the arthaus punk bloggers, forming the OSR largely by accident.
2. WotC ends their contract with Paizo Publishing, the contractor who published Dragon and Dungeon during the third-edition era. Since they now have a lot of experience writing third-edition content, they make their own third-edition retroclone called Pathfinder.

The backlash and increased competition for dungeon-y, dragon-y adventure game design space results in fourth edition D&D having one of the shortest development cycles of any D&D edition. After only four to six years depending on how you count it, WotC takes these disparate pieces of information — the stuff happening in the storygames sphere, the stuff happening in the OSR sphere, and the fan response to Pathfinder — and returns to the drawing board to release "D&D Next" for the game's fortieth anniversary.

II. Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition

While I read some D&D books and played a single, hazily-recalled game around 2006, fourth edition was my first edition of the game I ran and played beyond one session, starting in 2011. (As noted elsewhere, I mostly ran World of Darkness before coming to D&D.) As such, fifth edition is the first version of the game that I have followed largely as it released, instead of piecing it together in hindsight. I don't know if that makes me especially qualified to write what follows, but now you understand my background on the subject.

Forty years of game design brings us to this. During the mid-2010s, I recall someone calling fifth edition, "everyone's second-favorite edition of D&D," and that sounds about right. I recently described most of the fifth edition releases as "a C+ essay." (As with most things in the universe, I often describe it as, "Not as good as the fans say it is, but better than the haters say it is.")

If you play Super Smash Bros., D&D 5e is Mario, excelling in no particular area but robust in all of them. In the immortal words of George Costanza, 5e is "right in that meaty part of the curve: not showing off, not falling behind."

In short: it's good. (But not great.)

A lot of the things that drive its popularity include its prevalence (as it acts as a sort of lingua franca in the RPG hobby), its thriving play culture, its dominance on livestreaming RPG shows, and the fact that it more-or-less does what it advertises. If you want an adventure game that lets you go on adventures about exploring strange locations, interacting with interesting NPCs, fighting monsters, recovering treasure, and becoming more powerful while doing so, it handles all these things.

If you want a flatter power curve; a less number-heavy experience; something that focuses less on resource management; an experience that more consistently reflects a specific genre rather than "whatever breed of fantasy happens at the table tonight;" something that takes place in a more modern setting; an experience that actively dissuades combat; or a setting with no magic or different magic other than the pseudo-Vancian model, you probably want to look elsewhere.

As noted on this blog, I operate in a lot of indie spaces, and they tend to complain about Dungeons & Dragons at length. (So much so that allegedly anti-D&D places are where I sometimes get significant news about official D&D releases.) But those complaints are often incoherent, and clearly represent some personal issue with the game. In my mind, there are only three legitimate complaints about fifth edition D&D, and they're unlikely to change any time soon:

1. It's corporate art. And like a lot of corporate art, it's designed to be as inoffensive as possible. It's bland and it doesn't really do anything innovative.
2. The rules are complicated. It's very number-heavy and worries about fine details like positioning and resource management. If you have difficulty tracking a lot of variables, if you have a disability that makes it difficult to keep numbers in your head, or if tedious note-taking doesn't sound like your idea of fun, this might not be the game for you.
3. The culture overshadows the game at the table. Strictly speaking, this isn't the fault of the rules, but it does lead to a lot of trouble online. D&D is incredibly widespread, and people are overwhelmingly likely to learn the game from a mentor. As such, everyone thinks they know what the rules are, but almost no one actually reads the books cover-to-cover. (And even if you do, the rules are complicated. Nobody can keep all of the rules in their head at once.)
4. A phantom fourth argument that is partially true is that the game is pretty expensive. That isn't totally true: while there might be marketing pressure and peer pressure to spend money on it, the basic game is technically free. You can download the Basic Rules for free (or use the Basic Rules on D&D Beyond), use an online dice roller, and find enough free content online to run the game for the rest of your life without doing any work. I suspect the thriving community around the game and the free rules are two of the many factors that maintain the game's popularity.

But to understand why WotC has made the design decisions it made, one must understand that this represents forty years of game design and fifteen years of Wizards of the Coast corporate analysis. Fifth edition is a fundamentally reactionary edition, responding to all that came before and combining aspects from the previous eight or so editions of the game into something that tries to please everyone. The overall trend is one of retaining some of the most popular rules and incorporating bits of design from other games while also simplifying concepts from previous editions: multiple spells are condensed into aspects of a single spell, floating modifiers are condensed into advantage/disadvantage, monster stats are simplified from their third edition counterparts and all relevant information is found reliably in the stat block. (Recall that, during the BECMI and AD&D era, valuable statistical information like special abilities and spells were often hidden in the monster descriptions, usually-but-not-always in the same place.)

Also recall that, while a lot of the design of previous editions has proven quite popular, analysis suggests it maybe wasn't sustainable. Ahead of his recent book, Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons, Ben Riggs made a handful of posts on Twitter and elsewhere about TSR sales figures, and they paint a bleak picture. The classic AD&D 2e box sets are fondly recalled but apparently didn't sell terribly well. Likewise, we know that third edition was popular and is well-regarded by the fans, but that edition had a punishing release schedule with an enormous game line. We don't know much about WotC sales figures, but it seems reasonable to surmise that they developed fourth edition because sales were flagging.

(I would also be remiss if I ignored the fact that fifth edition is also designed around the Adventurers League organized play program and the community content on DM's Guild, which is part of the complex mélange of factors that drives the game's popularity. The game can only be but so outlandish, otherwise it would interfere with the open table policy of the Adventurers League. Likewise, any content that fans really want to see can easily be made by the community and posted on DM's Guild for pay — which per DM's Guild policy, still monetarily benefits Wizards of the Coast. That's pure passive income for them.)

In short, the unified design and staggered release schedule for fifth edition indicate that Wizards of the Coast has learned from its business mistakes. They're not constantly churning out content every month, they're not establishing expansive metaplots, they're not trying to innovate while also risking failure. (The streaming space also provides a constant stream of free advertising for the game without WotC having to put out anything new. At this point, they don't need to churn out new content every month, and it's easier to catch press for the new release when it's a big one every quarter or so.) It's all very safe, focus-tested, and conservatively-designed. Whatever else someone's opinion of D&D 5e, these trends all suggest that this was a very conscientiously-designed edition of the game. (The feedback from the ongoing open playtest of the game no doubt guides some of its development and contributes to the smooth, inoffensive nature of it.)

III. Spelljammer: Adventures in Space

Which brings us to the actual point of this post.

You have a new edition of the game that also tries to be a legacy edition, supported by a continuous open playtest of the rules and a burgeoning fan community. While the original fifth edition release in 2014 focused on the popular Forgotten Realms as the game's implied setting, fans have been clamoring for old content like adventures and campaign settings to be re-released under fifth edition. Wizards of the Coast started releasing legacy content fairly quickly, beginning with an Eberron playtest in 2015 and an official release of an expanded version of I6: Ravenloft (entitled Curse of Strahd) in 2016. Fan requests for additional updates continue across social media, and WotC continues to publish it.

Hearkening back to the Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space box set, Wizards of the Coast releases Spelljammer: Adventures in Space in 2022. As with most of their other products, the production values are decent, the art is lovely, and the organization is as expected. It's a C+ essay — it promises rules for spelljammers, space-themed monsters, and an adventure, and it delivers exactly what it promised.

Interesting tidbits from the new setting include:

• In contrast to the original 2e setting, there is only one kind of spelljammer helm, and it no longer requires your spell power to use it. (This last fact is even a change from the helm of the scavenger published in 2018's Dungeon of the Mad Mage.) Every spelljammer is roughly as maneuverable as any other, and there is no longer an upper limit to the tonnage of a ship.
• Spelljammer helms can still only be used by spellcasters, though. You just don't have to turn spell energy into motive force anymore.
• They don't include all the ships from the old material, but again, it's pretty easy to convert old material to the new system. As it stands, the new set includes a lot of old designs and adds a few new ones.
• Spelljammers are very accessible in this edition. You can probably get one, helm and all, for about 25,000gp or so. (In 2e, spelljammers were expensive, especially the helms. While a spelljammer is a good place to invest one's loot after many expeditions, it's also fun for players to be able to buy one relatively early in the game.)
• The phlogiston from 2e is gone, replaced with the Astral Plane. I actually like this change, as it means that even low-level characters might have the resources to voyage into other worlds: journeys are now unlikely to take more than two months' worth of supplies, as the Astral Plane doesn't require rations or air. Of course, the trade-off is that the Astral Plane is way more dangerous than the phlogiston. (Not counting the inherent risk of setting your whole ship on fire in the phlogiston, of course.)
• Also in keeping with the Astral Plane, there are no space lanes, star systems have a tendency to move like bubbles in a sea, and you automatically orienteer in the direction of something by thinking about it. In short, they've made it easy to get around by leaving those details up to the Game Master — you don't need a map to get from Krynnspace to Realmspace, and the trip is as long or short as the GM decides it is.
• You can never go wrong with more monsters, and the included Boo's Astral Menagerie has plenty:
• A lot of Dark Sun monsters appear in this version, such as braxat, b'rohg, gaj, psurlons, and ssurrans. (The thri-kreen also appear as a playable race in the Astral Adventurer's Guide.) A leaked map even indicates that "Doomspace" in the included adventure Light of Xaryxis was originally going to be called "Athasspace." As it stands, Fyreen in Doomspace certainly sounds like a post-post-apocalyptic Athas. WotC also has a habit of teasing future products in current ones, although such references are just as likely to be fanservice. (But they've previously suggested that they'll do Dark Sun... sooner or later. Maybe.)
• A couple of BECMI-era monsters from Mystara also appear, like the brain collector/neh-thalggu and the feyr.
• In addition to some classic Spelljammer setting monsters, like arcane/mercane, dohwar, space swine, and zodar, there are also a handful of unique monsters in this edition, like space clowns and vampirates.
• The included adventure, Light of Xaryxis, is typical Wizards of the Coast fare: a linear plot crystallized around a couple of good ideas. It's looks fun to play and easy to run, but there isn't much in it that makes me excited to run it.
• Compare and contrast: John Battle's recent offering The Sun King's Palace is a little messier than Light of Xaryxis and looks like it might take a not-insignificant amount of preparation to run without messing up the presentation, but The Sun King's Palace is so much more evocative than Light of Xaryxis that I'm way more excited at the prospect of preparing it and running it.
• However, in the defense of Light of Xaryxis, I thought the hook was clever: it is a deliberate homage to the Flash Gordon serials of the late 1930s as well as the 1980 movie. It even has genre-appropriate cliffhangers between chapters!

Apart from the proliferation of Dark Sun monsters and the clever design to the included adventure, there aren't any surprises here. What you see is what you get.

However, as noted at the start of this review, the impetus for this review is to clarify some of the criticism online. Most of it is misleading and represents a different product from the one I read. We'll go through a few of the recurring criticisms I have seen:

1. "They didn't include [insert my favorite spelljammer monster or ship type here]!" This one's easy: if you're an old fan, you probably still have your books, or you bought pdfs from DM's Guild. Adapting old material is easy; Wizards of the Coast even gives you conversion guidelines. Specifically in the case of monsters, D&D 5e doesn't often publish fifteen variations of a single monster anymore. The guidelines in the Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual, and Boo's Astral Menagerie are pretty clear: if you want a weird version of a monster, take an existing one and give it different traits. Boo's Astral Menagerie gives guidelines for this process to make wildspace-dwelling versions of normal creatures.
2. "They didn't include the tables for making solar systems, or the subsystems for determining orbits!" They weren't going to. Remember, a major idea behind 5e is simplification. For determining orbits, they just tell you to calculate the distance between planets mathematically. They assume that you're going to use the included adventure as inspiration for other star systems you make, rather than relying on random tables. If you want the old subsystems, they're still in the 2e books, waiting to be used. (Also, those subsystems were all optional rules anyway.)
3. "They didn't tell you how to determine how far away you have to get from a planet to reach spelljamming speed!" In keeping with the (comparatively) more narrative focus of fifth edtion, they probably figure that's "however long the GM wants it to take." According to the old box set, on average it takes forty minutes to an hour to escape a planet's gravity well, more if it's windy, so I would use that as a guideline. I usually go with an hour; an hour is enough time for a single random encounter check, so that sounds good to me.
• If you want a more official ruling on this, the Astral Adventurer's Guide defines the air envelope of a planet extending out to a distance the same as the planet's diameter. That's... actually about right for Earth, but that distance describes the outer edge of the exosphere, which is too thin and too exposed to space to support actual life. Chapter five of the Dungeon Master's Guide describes terrestrial life typically ending above 20,000 which is also reasonably accurate; Earth's troposphere ends at about 40,000 feet, beyond which the atmospheric density is only one-thousandth of its value at sea level. While the gravitational pull at that altitude is about the same as at sea level, "the place where breathable air ends" is probably good enough for RPG games and occult symbolism. Twenty thousand feet is just under four miles, which most spelljammers can reach in a half-hour to an hour.
4. "The Astral Plane makes travel between systems too easy! Characters can't get lost in the Astral Sea!" I suspect that's part of the point. (But as noted above, the Astral Plane is often scarier than the phlogiston. I don't think there were astral dreadnoughts in the phlogiston...) Once you get to the Astral Plane, the GM decides how long the journey takes and what you encounter along the way, and all of this is in keeping with the procedures for GMing a game these days. If you want to make it more complicated and less certain, then do so.
• I would also remind anyone who thinks that you can't discover something by accident that the star systems move. You can take a five-month-long return journey to Realmspace only to find that another star system has bobbed into your path along the way. Likewise, since you can only travel to places that you know exist, learning that a specific star system exists so you can fly to it sounds like a pretty good adventure hook to me.
5. "They left out the rules for ship combat!" This is actually the critique that spurred me to write this review. Whenever I see this complaint, I re-read the "Ship-to-Ship Combat" section in the Astral Adventurer's Guide to make sure I didn't imagine it, and every time the rules are still there. They give guidelines for ship-to-ship combat, but they assume that you will remember the rules for combat, objects, and vehicles from chapters eight and nine of the Player's Handbook, and chapters five and eight of the Dungeon Master's Guide.
• A much more valid critique is that they ought to have provided a reference reminding you of where to find the relevant rules, or have provided a summary. For example, I had forgotten the rules for object saving throws until I went looking for them. (In D&D 5e, objects automatically fail all Strength and Dexterity saving throws, but succeed on all other saves.) That's why you need to read chapter eight of the Player's Handbook for spelljammer purposes; heaven forbid they would be in the "Object" section of chapter eight of the Dungeon Master's Guide.
• "Why are the rules for ship combat spread across five chapters in three books?" is an exceedingly valid critique. Does your game need hundreds of rules spread across several rulebooks in 2022? (Into the Odd, Mothership, and World of Dungeons all come to mind as short RPGs that could support years of play, not to mention the hundreds of one-page RPGs floating in the digital aethers.)
• "You need to get this fan supplement to make the rules playable!" is not a valid critique in this case (and really just sounds like someone's gimmick to sell more DM's Guild content or to bring you to their blog).
• As always, I would recommend using the procedures as defined in the core books before deciding it doesn't work for your group and adding third-party rules into the mix.
6. "They didn't use the expanded vehicle rules from Ghosts of Saltmarsh or Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus!" Remember, those are optional rules, and the developers have a lot of ground to cover in this book. (And again, the keyword of this edition is simplification. I suspect that they're moving away from optional vehicle rules because they weren't as popular as people on the internet suggested, or they're trying to streamline things for One D&D in 2024.) The basic vehicle and object rules are in the Dungeon Master's Guide, and they're perfectly serviceable.
• If you want to use the more detailed vehicle statistics from Ghosts of Saltmarsh or Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus, nothing is stopping you from doing a conversion, although converting sixteen ships to the more complex Ghosts of Saltmarsh system and running spaceship combat in it with multiple ships sounds like a nightmare.
7. "The adventure sucks!" As noted above, Light of Xaryxis has problems, but they're pretty consistent with the problems of other fifth edition adventures. (Too plot-focused, too linear, stakes are so high as to be totally abstract.) I suspect, however, that most people are reacting to the structure of the adventure, and they completely ignored the part where the authors say that it's a love letter to pulp adventure movie serials of the early 20th century. If you've seen the hokey plots and shocking swerves of a Flash Gordon or Commando Cody serial, you'll understand what the authors were trying to accomplish. (And despite the adventure's flaws, I feel like they succeeded.)

So, if you happened to find this after hearing that the new rules are unplayable, I'm here to tell you that they're perfectly serviceable. They may lack a lot of the flavor that made Spelljammer so beloved in the 2e era, but they're a good starting point. If you're looking for a rehash of the Unhuman Wars; the complicated subsystems for celestial mechanics; the granular ship mechanics; and a setting line comprising over two dozen products spread across box sets, books, Monstrous Compendium binder pages, and magazine articles, you won't find it here. (And Wizards of the Coast didn't take your old books away. Use them!)

However, if you want a stripped-down, back-to-basics version of the setting for fifth edition, you get exactly what you are expecting here and not a jot more. Honestly, if you read what they did with Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, you shouldn't be surprised here: in that book, they reset the metaplot such that you don't have to follow the old books to use the Domains of Dread in fifth edition, but you can absolutely include stuff from the old books if you like. It may not be innovative game design or provocative art, but it makes good business sense: include something interesting enough to draw in new fans while leaving enough gaps and references to legacy materials to avoid alienating old fans.

Edit (September 3, 2022):

After all that talk of Wizards of the Coast attempting to make their new edition as inoffensive as possible, The Dreaded Discourse™ continues apace. In the fifth edition Spelljammer adaptation, the hadozee were given a backstory wherein they were small, lemur-like creatures who were uplifted by a wizard to be used as workers and slaves before the wizard's apprentices helped liberate them.

If you know anything about Western history in the past five hundred years or so, you probably already see the problem. (A relatively comprehensive account of the scandal appears on this TechRaptor post.) For the record, I thought the backstory was a little weird, especially given how much of The Dreaded Discourse™ revolves around the long arm of the transatlantic slave trade, but I casually assume every big company hires a sensitivity reader these days and so promptly forgot about it.

After this fact was discovered and discussed on Twitter, Wizards of the Coast has issued a statement and errata and has already altered the race's description on D&D Beyond, removing the offending sections and slightly altering the hadozee's gliding ability. (However, some users have taken umbrage with the "Hadozee Resilience" trait, suggesting that it also reflects negative stereotypes against real-world ethnicities. As of yet, WotC has not issued a change for that.)

Edit (September 4, 2022):

Current WotC drama validates my boring opinion that mythological fantasy is simply too foundationed on ancient regressive philosophy (things like inherent evildom, platonic purity vs corruption, cruelty manifesting as physicality) to satisfy modern moralities. 1/4

— kirin (@koboldstyle) September 3, 2022

Edit (December 12, 2022):

After grousing about how players can't read, it is with a heavy heart that I must admit that I can't read, either.

In my refutation of point #3, "They didn't tell you how to determine how far away you have to get from a planet to reach spelljamming speed!" I made an error. A recent re-read of the Astral Adventurer's Guide reveals, "A spelljamming ship automatically slows to its flying speed (discussed later in this chapter) when it comes within 1 mile of something weighing 1 ton or more, such as another ship, a kindori (see Boo's Astral Menagerie), an asteroid, or a planet."

For some reason, I (like every other loudmouth on the internet, apparently) thought the "1 mile" rule didn't cover planets for some reason.

So by that math, escape velocity is much easier in 5e than it was in the 2e days; rather than an average of 40 minutes, most ships reach spelljamming altitude in 15-20 minutes. (The fastest ships like damselflies and shrikes reach spelljamming speed after a seven-and-a-half minute ascent.)

Remember, kids: reading is fundamental.

The Orc Problem, redux-upon-redux

Not to beat a dead horse too severely, but Dwiz at A Knight at the Opera wrote a post about The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ a little bit ago, and it's a far more salient examination of the issue than I can muster.

(I know I already said the included links ought to be the final word on the subject, but well, here we are. Despite the vaguely sensationalist title and the fact that I'm probably still allowing demihumans in my dungeon-y, dragon-y elfgames, it's very, very good.)

Read it, won't you?

I Don't Think I'm Going to Allow Elves to be Playable Anymore on A Knight at the Opera

The Orc Problem, redux

I wrote about The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ a little over a year ago, and like most of the things I write, you probably shouldn't read it.

However, vagabundork wrote a post on the same subject about seven months ago, and he said it far more eloquently than I. (To the point that it should probably be the last word on the subject, at least until the situation radically changes.)

Go read it:

Can racism be fixed? on Chaos Magick-User

Review: NEUROCITY

Several months ago, Argentinian game designer Gavriel Quiroga asked if I would take a look at his then-new RPG, NEUROCITY. Now that I have a spot of time and he has a new Kickstarter called WARPLAND (already funded with forty days remaining!), it seems like as good a time as any to dig into it.

What you get: One hundred twenty-six pages of post-cyberpunk dystopia. Gavriel clearly loves the genre, and puts loving detail into making a tech-noir mélange in the way that D&D provides components for a fantasy kitchen sink or World of Darkness makes an urban fantasy/horror kitchen sink. The best way to describe it is with the genres it emulates: you get shades of 1984, Brave New World, Dark City, Judge Dredd, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Robocop, The Prisoner, and THX 1183. In terms of the game's "feel," it has similarities to Black Sun Deathcrawl, Cell Gamma from The No Press RPG Anthology, and Paranoia. (Longtime readers will recall my love for Black Sun Deathcrawl, and so should be unsurprised to learn that I similarly enjoyed NEUROCITY.)

Gavriel's writing is terse and clinical without being overly cumbersome, and despite the lack of fancy layout, I found it easy to read. (By way of example, I read the whole book in an hour or so.) Art and white space are used as effective pacing, the art largely comprising '80s-style cyberpunk comics and collages done by Sol Olweder. The overall style looks like a mimeographed zine from the '80s, something someone would shove into your hand at a political meeting or a punk show. Whether that's a style of art you enjoy, it's a stylistic choice that works well and fits the game's tone.

The Setting: I'll let the author himself give you the gist:

In order to delineate the setting it could be said that we are in a Post-Cyberpunk era where we can find configurations that refer us to aesthetic (Tech-Noir) and functional conceptions of the 80s. This is mainly due to the technological involution society has been forced in order to maintain its functionality in a closed environment.

Due to rigidity in administration and the constant fear of reprisals for evading protocol procedures Neurocity is slowly sinking into a bureaucratic swamp. Behind an apparent efficiency that satisfied I.S.A.C's gaze we find the vicissitudes of a technocracy deprived of the freedom to act according to common sense.

He describes a world that was once ours until we developed an AI called the Intelligent Singular and Artificial Consciousness (I.S.A.C.) re-ordered the world, developing a class system and a physiological regimen to keep the population docile. (As in Brave New World, the population medicates with soma, and has been rendered sterile; sex is frowned upon, but is still a common form of recreation, especially among the lower classes.)

There is only one settlement remaining and it is Neurocity, an enclosed mega-structure with artificial sky and weather. The outside world is dangerous, the boundary of the city marked by increasingly-abandoned and dangerous districts until giving way to the wastes beyond. The city itself is a retro-futuristic dystopia, where the common folk increasingly use old-school technology while only the upper crust has access to the truly futuristic stuff. (For example: mobile phones and flying cars are practically nonexistent, as both might inspire humanity to something approaching freedom.) As with most post-cyberpunk settings, cybernetics are rare, but genetic engineering is exceedingly common. Nobody ever dies in Neurocity; clones are regrown and imprinted with the previous person's memories. The population in Neurocity is completely static.

Zero population growth.

Rounding out the setting is a collection of tables for random encounters for the city's districts. I'm a sucker for random tables, and could see culling entries from some of these for other cyberpunk or science-fiction games. Even though they are specific to Neurocity, you could still mine them for inspiration in adjacent genres.

The System: The rules are pretty straightforward. Characters determine their role in society and their motivations, and also determine five stats ranging from 5-10. To perform an action when the outcome is in doubt, the goal is to roll 2d6 under the relevant statistic. There are a handful of complications and modifiers to this base rule — situational modifiers of -3 to +3 can be applied to the base statistic, successful rolls above 8 are critical successes, double 6s are critical failures, snake eyes or single ones are successful but might cause complications — but they're relatively straightforward.

(I'm personally not a big fan of overly fiddly modifiers, although the author recommends to just make sure they feel right. I would imagine in play the modifiers are rather like the shifts in Unknown Armies, and are meant to be applied with common sense rather than a strict tally of bonuses and penalties.)

Characters also have two derived scores, Tension and Wounds, which determine their capacity for mental stress and injury, respectively. Even though this is a game where violence happens, Tension is the true meat of the system, as PCs constantly have to balance the egregious psychological harm caused by this soulless system against the need to medicate or discuss their troubles. Tension also acts as narrative currency, as characters can choose to gain tension to reroll dice. If a character goes over their maximum Tension, they have some manner of psychosis as they lash out (and will probably be disciplined in some manner for acting in an unmutual fashion).

However, characters who are currently at maximum Tension and roll snake-eyes develop psychic powers, granting them superhuman attributes and an additional use for Tension.

As noted by the author, NEUROCITY is designed for short campaigns of roughly three to four sessions in length. (Before I read that note, I was going to guess five or six.) Although you could deviate from this basic formula, the basic gameplay loop seems to involve receiving a job from a superior (probably to do something about a terrorist cell comprising unmutual elements of the underclass), and in the process, ranging farther and farther out before learning the dark secrets of Neurocity.

The secret origin of Neurocity and the nature of I.S.A.C. provide the game's replay value, as these are designed to be randomized or altered every campaign such that no two versions of the city will be alike. (So while a campaign might only last four sessions, you could easily run a couple of campaigns in sequence to see if things turn out differently.) These secret backstory options also form the meat of the game and its central philosophical tension: how does one live in an absurd, dysfunctional future society where life is mandatory? How does one find meaning when life is meaningless? And is it possible to escape this prison, or is the prison preferable to what lies beyond?

The Verdict: We'll start with the bad: I found the rules a little fiddly and there are a few glaring typos that could have used another editing pass. (I don't speak Spanish and haven't read the Spanish version, so I don't know if that one is better edited.) Likewise, the book ends with some sample characters and other notes, but I might have liked a summary of some of the charts, like the example modifiers and the wound tables.

Beyond those minor complaints, I would recommend it. It has a neat setting and poses some interesting existential questions about finding meaning amidst the absurdity and existential dread of endless drudgery. (Contrast with Black Sun Deathcrawl, that offers no such philosophical musing, only the catharsis of nihilism.) The style of the book really fits the tone, and although the concepts are dense, Gavriel handles them fairly well. Even if the post-cyberpunk tech-noir setting or the rules don't interest you, you could probably use the random encounter tables and setting bits in your own cyberpunk or science-fiction games.

Given the game's replay value, either over multiple campaigns or as a source of random encounters for other games, I'd say the pdf price of $6 is more than justified. (The print-on-demand book is $30, and while I'm usually a physical copy sort of person, I don't imagine this will hit the table often enough to justify the price. On the other hand, if you planned on playing it multiple times, using the random tables, and taking it to conventions and such to run repeatedly, it would totally be worth getting a physical copy.)

And if NEUROCITY interests you, check out Gavriel's WARPLAND if you have the chance! It looks to be roughly the same price point with similar rules and philosophical attitude, this time in a fantasy setting.

The Orc Problem

Is this a bad time to revisit this conversation?

Fuck if I know. I'm just the guy who slings the wordcount. Then again, if other people are talking about it, why am I worried?

Also, you don't have to read the previous ramble on The Danger Zone, but these two are companion pieces of a sort. I'm hoping this one will be a little more refined than the last one, but we'll see.

Sometimes I just vomit words onto a page so I can be free of them.

The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ (discorcs?) has reared its ugly head again, this time riding the cultural wave of the Black Lives Matter protests. (I seem to remember The Dreaded Orc Discourse™ appearing earlier in the year, but I can't recall the context.)

For those of you who are reading this in the future or are unaware: the BLM protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder have prompted a re-evaluation of our culture, which is always a good thing to do. However, the fact that we revisit cultural sensitivity every few years or decades and then invariably just make a handful of token changes, throw up a couple of censor bars, and call the problem SOLVED invariably leaves me rather cynical with regard to all this. (Make no mistake: things are getting better, but the increments tend to be small, and the pundits who declare problems fixed invariably do so prematurely. The work of making a better world never ends.)

If you don't believe me, here's a Richard Pryor bit from forty years ago, wherein he describes George Floyd's murder. The murder might be shocking, but the problems of class imbalance and racial injustice that have been highlighted in the aftermath aren't new:

(An aside, so you understand my biases: Censorship and rethinking cultural taboos are all well and good, but these tend to be nice, safe, symbolic actions rather than any sort of praxis. They make us feel good, and give the sense that things are changing without actually changing anything. Outlawing racial slurs doesn't make racism go away any more than outlawing sex work makes misogyny disappear. If you want to change how people think, you have to put in the long, hard work to reform society and show people how things are wrong rather than sweeping the ugly parts of civilization under the rug. Also, censorship is usually evil, but occasionally a necessary evil: parents must do it for their children, for example. I know people are arguing for greater censorship — both in artistic collectives as well as from private corporations — in light of the current culture war, which begs the chemotherapy question. Will you kill the cancer before you kill the patient? Will you save the culture before you permanently poison it?)

(A second aside: Always do the work to understand the biases of the people you're reading. It will help you live longer, and help you avoid the predations of personalities.)

Enough ramble. The re-examination has brought the fantasy RPG community to revisit a question that I've heard bouncing around for decades: should we rethink fantasy races?

The basic argument is that bad thoughts and actions regarding fantasy races reinforce bad thoughts and actions about real races — that Othering in fantasy is a stepping stone to Othering in real life (or that Othering in fantasy will act as a speedbump if you are trying to avoid Othering in your personal life). That's a vast oversimplification, but we'll still be having this argument (or a variation of it) in 2025, so you can Google it to get a more nuanced take.

As you should always understand the biases of someone writing, you should never take persuasive anecdotes as reasons to change your thinking, but I want to provide a handful of reactions to the above thesis. Most of these will draw from my own experience, so again, make of them what you will.

1) The old "change the term 'race' to 'species'" argument. This argument usually emerges in any fantasy-race-is-a-backwards-idea conversation, but I always think this argument is backwards. Race is a synonym for species; that's why they called different lineages and ethnicities different races, so as to reinforce the idea that they were different creatures (and to reinforce the idea that some classes of people could be superior to others, given the whole Western obsession with the fallacy of Progress — another rant for another time). But words mean things outside their textbook definitions, so if "race" has become the preferred nomenclature for "ethnicity," then fine. Change it to species, but don't forget that the word "race" was originally there to control you anyway.

2) Context is key. This is one of those top-down societal things, and I know this is the reason why people think censorship is good, actually, in light of the current culture war. But as I said in The Danger Zone, art isn't bad or evil or dangerous — it's only dangerous when devoid of any other context. THOUGHTCRIME isn't a problem, but the lack of greater societal context is. We throw everyone into a culture saturated with information but give them no instructions on how to parse this flood. We have the ability to teach people critical thinking skills and media literacy, but we have yet to institute these as programs on any grand scale. You can argue about why that is, but regardless of the wherefores, the simple fact is that even the nastiest, most transgressive art ceases to be dangerous if people have a broader context in which to absorb it. (We can also get into the whole method by which people isolate and radicalize, but that's well outside the scope of this humble blog post. Still, our lack of cohesion as a culture provides a breeding ground for predators, and that's a conversation we'll need to have. One of these days. Along with all the other conversations we'll need to have about the various civilizations around the globe.)

3) Look at the intent. This is also another discussion for another day, but a lot of the discourse about "evil races" reflects the evolution of D&D and fantasy gaming over time. The game's fundamentals describe a world where the various races are on different cosmological teams, and although Law and Chaos don't get along, it doesn't matter to your warband, because you're just trying to get paid. (And don't forget that early adventuring parties often had members of radically different alignments, and it didn't matter because they were all looking to score the same treasure. Law and Chaos don't play well together unless they have a common goal. I severely doubt that Arneson and Gygax had any grand plans of promoting cultural egalitarianism in their work, but you can absolutely get a multicultural read on early D&D if you squint.) When you look at the AD&D Monster Manual and see orcs list Number Appearing as 30-300, you realize they're not there as dudes you're supposed to kill, but problems to solve. If you're hiking through the mountains and come across a warband of 165 orcs, you won't have the resources to fight them until high level, so you're going to have to figure out some other way of dealing with them, probably either involving fleeing or negotiating. (And if you have a skilled negotiator with high Charisma, they probably won't even be hostile, assuming you roll well on the reaction roll.) It's only somewhere in the 2e/3e era that violence becomes the assumed way you're going to solve your problems, and while 5e has done a little to scale that back from the 3e/4e era, it still isn't a common playstyle.

4) Art is subjective. Here's where we get into the personal examples. I still list H.P. Lovecraft among my favorite authors despite the rather exhaustive examination of his racism. Why? Because that's not my connection to the source literature. Lovecraft might have written through his racial anxieties with such hits as tribal cultures worship the Great Old Ones because they're stupid degenerates and the alien DNA in your lineage is a metaphor for mixed-race heritage disrupting your superior Anglo-Saxon ancestry, but when I was reading these stories as a kid, that sort of interpretation wasn't in my wheelhouse. I had the cultural context to know that so-called "primitive" cultures were just cultures with a different set of priorities than our own, so the sinister backwoodsmen and degenerate Bantu tribesmen of pulp literature were a metaphor for the frightening, hungry wilderness rather than people I actually thought I was supposed to hate or fear. (I admittedly thought it was weird that Robert E. Howard's N'Longa was treated as being sinister when he was both one of the heroes and more powerful than Solomon Kane himself, so it's not like it all went over my head.) As for the alien heritage that Lovecraft's protagonists constantly feared, that jibed with my understanding of Lovecraft himself — like Poe, Lovecraft had a lot of tragedy in his past, so the idea that one's family was a millstone around one's neck seemed a perfectly logical conclusion — as well as my interest in biology. It was a body horror thing for me: we do have alien ghosts in our genome, the hungry fragments of our ancestors, of proviral DNA, of faulty transcription that can result in cancer. That resonated, and even though the art may have been made with bad intent, my enjoyment of it reinforced a very different worldview. In the case of evil fantasy races, I never took it as people different from us are evil, instead interpreting the message as if we're extremely lucky, we'll be able to see evil intent before it arrives. It wasn't a warning or a fear, but a hope.

5) Sometimes you just gotta kill an orc. I understand why dark-skinned races that are dumber or more duplicitous than the "standard," European-style folk is intensely problematic, but I never saw those as stand-ins for real-world cultures. As mentioned in other places, I got my start with World of Darkness and other sorts of horror conspiracy games, and those games are all about moral relativism — asking hard questions, and realizing that every faction tends to think it's the "right" one while they all have good and bad aspects in them. That's what RPGs were for me. So I came to see D&D and its related games as a welcome change of pace: sometimes you can identify the evil thing by looking at it, and sometimes you can solve your problems just by punching them. It's a sometimes food for me, but not one that I begrudge anyone from enjoying: the real world is infinitely complex, and the more you delve into an issue, the more likely you are to find common ground with your enemy, or that the issue is more complicated than you first thought. But being able to play a game that paints in broad strokes, and that makes its villains obvious, is a nice change of pace sometimes, and one that tends to get rejected. (Full disclosure: I'm absolutely a hypocrite in this regard. Despite the fact that I think you should just be able to punch an orc if you want, I'm not sure I've ever run a straight-up orc punching plot. The drow invasion of Scandshar comes the closest, but even then, that course of action might seem perfectly reasonable if your former elf clans drove you underground and into the arms of a demon-goddess — sometimes the real enemy is the imperialism we met along the way. Evil races usually have reasons for doing what they do, and devoid of that imposed cultural context, they usually turn towards good if given the opportunity. Even my standard fantasy plots that lean on "evil races" tropes tend to be subversions rather than straight adaptations.)

So, is the concept of "evil races" bad? As with most art questions, it depends. Are you using it as a dumb escapist fantasy thing to be used as a counterpoint to the complexities of modern life? You're probably fine. Are you doing something interesting with the source material, or using them as some elaborate metaphor for a real-world issue? Again, that's probably okay as long as your motives are well-considered. Are you using them as a metaphor for real-world cultures, or to desensitize your players to real-world racism? Well, now you might want to take a step back from the fantasy RPGs for a while, because you're getting into that danger zone where the line between fantasy and reality becomes exceedingly porous, and that's frequently a bad trip no matter what your motives are.

As with most of these posts, the dirty secret is that there's no good answer, no hundred-question quiz that will definitively identify whether or not you're using fantasy races responsibly. As long as your actions in a game don't make you more of a jerk in real-life — something to remember in the midst of your next Twitter argument — you're probably still doing okay.

RPGs as Art: The Danger Zone

I've had this post brewing in my brainmeats for a couple of days, and then Cavegirl posted a thing yesterday about this topic, so I guess it's time.

With SARS-CoV-2 and the Black Lives Matter protests and Trump being homophobic, I've seen The Dreaded Discourse™ raise its ugly head again, this time regarding what content belongs in games. Is it appropriate to set a game during the coronavirus pandemic, or to set a fantasy game during a plague pandemic, or to have some plot dealing with the current anti-police brutality protests and rioting?

As is often the case, the answer is, "it depends."

The other day I found myself in a Facebook comments section (my first mistake, I know) reading a series of comments answering someone who asked if it was appropriate to set a World of Darkness game amidst the coronavirus pandemic, and to make the pandemic the result of some supernatural agency, or to have them otherwise profit from it.

The overwhelming answer was, "No!" The reasoning being that these events are too close and too raw, and to include them in a game is inappropriate to those who have lost a loved one, suffered, or died from these events.

(Contrast this with an answer that mercifully didn't occur in this particular comments section, but which you occasionally see: edgelords saying that SJWs are ruining games, and that you should run whatever content you want, that the World of Darkness should be dark, and that anyone who objects is a whiny little pissbaby.)

But both of these answers ignore the purpose of art and the social contract that goes along with it. (And RPGs are an artform, remember?)

The purpose of art is to express an idea or emotion and to hopefully convey something of that to the viewer. (Sometimes, you just make art for yourself to try to exorcise something from your head, or to remember something, or to try to grapple with an event you experienced. The definition still applies, but it just so happens that you're the only intended viewer; the artist observing itself.) People make art for all kinds of reasons, and people consume art for similarly diverse reasons, but the core concept is one of catharsis. You make and experience art to think and feel about things, and to avoid feeling alone — the fact that someone out there is grappling with the same emotions as you means that you're connected to the rest of the species, no matter how distant in time or space.

We make art to understand the world and our place in it.

That's the first half of the social contract with art. We make art to understand. And because of that, people make all kinds of art. There are seven billion living perspectives on this planet, all of them searching for the same measure of understanding. Some art is pleasant and mindless, while other art is savage and bleak and potentially offensive to you. But the key part of this is that you don't get to dictate what art gets made.

The trade-off is that you do get to dictate which art you consume.

(And I absolutely know the long list of caveats here: the capitalist system favors art that can draw investors and generate revenue; social media lets someone thrust art at you in a way that might be disingenuous and you may end up consuming art that you did not want; the long debate as to whether or not art is harmful, particularly in the context of the modern culture war. In a broad sense, though, you still get to choose what art you consume, even if the permutations are a little more complicated.*)

Out in the world, if you dislike a piece of art, you can walk away from it. What's more: the modern world has enough resources to give you context before you consume a piece of art. You can ask about the content of art on message boards, or browse Wikipedia summaries, or even check out doesthedogdie.com for comprehensive coverage of triggers across multiple kinds of media.

You cannot prevent art from being created, but you can curate your own interaction with art. This is the second half of the social contract. Some people might make art for malicious reasons, or they might make art that deals with taboos to better help them grapple with the state of the world, but if you find these things offensive, you can walk away.

(We can get into the morality of whether or not art that is designed to be actively harmful should be allowed, but in many cases, you won't have that kind of clarity. Somebody might find understanding and empathy from making something horrible, and they might be doing it without malice. You don't have to watch it.)

All this rambling is to return to the main point: what content belongs in role-playing games?

And the answer is: whatever you and your group are comfortable exploring.

Coronavirus is real and scary, and a lot of people probably don't want to deal with it. But if your gaming group thinks it would be cathartic or interesting or "fun" (for certain values thereof) to include it, then you should. Some groups will even find a heavy catharsis in the idea that they can solve the crisis, or that some supernatural agency is behind it. (Using the World of Darkness as an example, however, most players and GMs will advise against this — as will I, frankly — and the books themselves tend to recommend against turning real-world tragedies into grist for the supernatural mill. But if your player group is on board, sometimes it can be cathartic to think that our problems aren't fully our fault or our responsibility. Just don't go throwing your ideas around where they will offend people.)

Likewise, there's a lot of question about whether it's right or proper to play people of other cultures, genders, sexual orientations, or what-have-you. This, again, depends on the individual group: everyone needs to be okay with it, and ideally, you're doing it with an eye towards empathy and understanding. But it's ultimately your group with your friends in it.

While you're only beholden to your small group of friends at the table, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• If you talk about your game outside your circle of players, you might get pushback — remember, those people didn't agree to the same social contract, so they're going to have different ideas about what is appropriate in a game. Related: if you add a new player, you have to go through this rigmarole again to ensure they're on board.
• Absolutely make sure everyone is on board without exception. The dirty secret is that, even with safety tools, you might have a player who feels uncomfortable drawing attention to themselves by using safety tools. You might want to have some conversations one-on-one to avoid peer pressure, or solicit feedback through Google Forms so the data is anonymous.
• If you're a publisher or a streamer, though, you have to think about your wider audience. That's the third part of the social contract implied by the other two parts: once you have an audience, you have to decide how much of a duty you have to them. As with your home group, you don't just want to drop potentially upsetting or offensive on them without warning.

A lot of wordcount to say: make the art you want, but make sure the people involved all consent to the experience. Even if someone on the outside would look inside and be horrified, it's okay as long as it works for your group.



* Important permutations for generating and consuming ideas:

• Every author has an agenda. Make sure you have a good grasp of the author's biases as you consume their content. You might only learn their background as you go along, but they'll probably let you know in some fashion.
• We're a species that deals poorly in abstract concepts but very well in concrete certainties. As such, most models — metaphors and frameworks for understanding a complicated series of concepts — tend to simplify the enormous complexities of life to a few key components, and that means that any given model or explanation will have a whole host of exceptions or edge cases that don't fit the theory. (For that matter, the pointillistic structure of humanity means that some perspectives might be totally unique, found only in a single individual or a small group. Not every idea is equally applicable.)
• Just because you disagree with an idea or are offended by it does not mean that it's invalid. Even an abhorrent idea might just be the author's way of grappling with something alien to their background. Don't assume malice where carelessness is more likely.
• The caveat is that you shouldn't feel the need to engage with an idea that offends you, even if it has merit. Life is too short, you know?