James Nicoll Reviews

Peter Adkinson’s 1992 The Primal Order, was Adkinson’s basement publishing company Wizards of the Coast debut product. The supplement was a fairly comprehensive take on integrating god-level entities into roleplaying campaigns. In fact, it was a bit too comprehensive.

To ensure utility to as broad a swath of gaming as possible, the product included conversion stats for the following systems.

• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (both 1^st and 2^nd edition)
• Arduin Grimoire
• Ars Magica
• Chivalry & Sorcery
• Dungeons & Dragons
• GURPS
• HârnMaster
• Hero System
• Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game
• Pendragon RPG
• RoleMaster
• RuneQuest
• Shadowrun
• Synnibarr
• Talislanta
• Torg
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
• WarpWorld

The process by which WOTC consulted with the IP owners was somewhat flawed. To quote Adkinson:

We never specifically excluded Palladium from such discussions, it’s
just that we only *included* game companies in such discussions if a
gaming rep was online, the company was local, or some other
convenience arose.

Palladium Games was and is famously protective of their IP, even in circumstances where one might not expect extraordinary diligence to come into play. Silence is consent is not the way to bet with Palladium Games. In fact, Palladium objected quite strongly to WOTC’s use of their IP and sued the infant game company. 

It could have been the end of WOTC! Although it wasn’t, thanks in part to a collectable card game they’ve had some success with. 

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Frank Chadwick’s 1988 Space 1889 was GDW’s foray into Steampunk roleplaying, although as I recall Jeter had just coined the term ​“steampunk” and it wasn’t applied to Space 1889. Instead, this planetary adventure RPG, set in a Victorian era where implausible physics handed spaceflight to 19^th century humans, got the tag line ​“Science Fiction Role Playing in a More Civilized Time.“

Since this was a time when, for example, women in most nations barely had rights, sixty million or so Indians starved to death under the British, the Belgians were busily converting the Congo over to a severed-hand based currency, and the North American settler nations were enthusiastically genociding their way to the West Coast, it does raise the question of from whose perspective the 19^th century could be said to be more civilized, and what precisely there was to be nostalgic about. 

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The first in a gripping fantasy duology inspired by West African folklore in which a grieving crown princess and a desperate refugee find themselves on a collision course to murder each other despite their growing attraction — from debut author Roseanne A. Brown. Perfect for fans of Tomi Adeyemi, Renée Ahdieh, and Sabaa Tahir. For Malik, the Solstasia festival is a chance to escape his war-stricken home and start a new life with his sisters in the prosperous desert city of Ziran. But when a vengeful spirit abducts his younger sister, Nadia, as payment to enter the city, Malik strikes a fatal deal — kill Karina, Crown Princess of Ziran, for Nadia’s freedom. But Karina has deadly aspirations of her own. Her mother, the Sultana, has been assassinated; her court threatens mutiny; and Solstasia looms like a knife over her neck. Grief-stricken, Karina decides to resurrect her mother through ancient magic … requiring the beating heart of a king. And she knows just how to obtain one: by offering her hand in marriage to the victor of the Solstasia competition. When Malik rigs his way into the contest, they are set on a heart-pounding course to destroy each other. But as attraction flares between them and ancient evils stir, will they be able to see their tasks to the death? 

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Steve Jackson Games’ GURPS RPG itself was never to my taste but their supplements were generally top drawer. Designer Loyd Blankenship’s Cyberpunk proved a bit too convincing. The American Secret Service, demonstrating a level of discernment not seen since the heyday of Dark Dungeons, convinced themselves the game supplement was a blueprint for computer crime. An astounded Steve Jackson Games found itself the subject of a Secret Service raid. It’s all part of the glorious American tradition of handing firearms and sweeping legal powers to people who literally cannot tell fact from fiction.

Although publication was delayed several months, GURPS Cyberpunk did see print. SJG did reasonably well in Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service. The affair was part of a series of events leading to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

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Sandy Peterson’s 1981 Call of Cthulhu introduced legions of gamers to Cosmic Horror. Despite the tendency of campaigns to end with madness and total party kills, the game was for a long time Chaosium’s most popular product. It has had seven editions and was always well supported, even in its publisher’s most dire moments. As well, a number of top-notch products are available from third parties. If you’ve ever want to play a character who learns too much for comfort before dying horribly – or worse – this is the game for you! 

The small fly in the ointment is that the rich game setting has as its foundation H. P. Lovecraft’s deep-seated horror at discovering Italians exist. In fact, the list of races of whose existence Lovecraft approved is very very short, and the list of races he despised was very very long, almost all inclusive. He managed the remarkable trick of being incredibly racist by the standards of America in the early 20^th century, when lynching was frequent, as were anti-Asian immigration laws, and the forced deportation of millions of American citizens for being of the wrong race.

Of course, Lovecraft’s almost universal xenophobia is only obvious if one actually reads his fiction. Or poetry.

There are a number of ways one can deal with problematic source material. One can simply ignore it and hope one’s patrons never read the source material. Vigorous denial is quite popular in some Cosmic Horror critical circles. Game companies lean a different way, which is why one sees tweets like 

Let me get this straight. In Fate of Cthulhu we specifically pointed out the racism of HP Lovecraft because well, he was a racist motherfucker, and we couldn’t in good conscience ignore that.
https://twitter.com/sblackmoor…

and products like Harlem Unbound, which acknowledge that particular elephant in the room. 

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Bob Charette, Paul Hume, and Tom Dowd’s 1989 Shadowrun provided FASA with its entry into the flourishing cyberpunk genre. Shadowrun​’s twist was to add magic to the setting, much to the irritation of the original cadre of cyberpunk authors, who saw the development as puerile. Of course, magic is only part of the traditional box of world-building props tabletop rpgs use. Another is entrenched racial hatred, which Shadowrun provided in spades: just prior to the return of magic, the US had been pursuing a bitter attempt to find a final solution to the Indian Question, which is why once the Native Americans had access to magic, they carved out an ethnostate for themselves.

Curiously, the idea the US might occasionally go batshit crazy towards one visible minority or another doesn’t seem all that outrageous. The bit where the Native Americans turn out to be magical… Oh, well. In this case they were just ahead of the curve but it is another example of the magical Native American in fiction and part of a greater pattern where colonized people are seen as closer to (super) natural forces¹.

What did make my eyebrows go up a bit more was how FASA introduced the traditional fantasy races. One in ten people were suddenly transformed into orks, trolls, elves, dwarves, in a process called ​“goblinization.” They were immediate social outcasts and when the violence ended, society was divided along traditional rpg lines, with each new variety of human distrusting the others.

The speed and degree to which people who had been until recently unremarkable humans sorted themselves into the traditional fantasy ethnic factions seemed unlikely. After all, why would family members turn on each other just because one of them now had tusks? Granted the existence of anti-vaxxers proves there’s a minority of parents who would rather see their kids dead than unusual.

It belatedly occurs to me the authors might have intended some parallel between how normies react to goblinization and how Americans reacted to AIDS, which was definitely not a mass resolve to cue the disease, at least not until it turned out celebrities could get it.

Note that one in ten people goblinize, which is the same fraction tossed around for the percentage of gay and lesbian people in the general population. Maybe the authors were trying to make a point! That point apparently being ​“people are dicks.”

1: Don’t get me started on psychic Celts. 

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Next on my hit list of ​“what were they thinking” RPGs; White Wolf¹​’s Wraith: the Oblivion, in which players played dead people in the afterlife. Not inherently a bad idea, although the first edition was plagued with proof-reading and play-testing issues (1^st ed WW games tended to be beta versions). But that isn’t why I want to discuss Wraith. Take a close look at the cover.

Do you see a title?

For reasons that I am sure seemed compelling at 3 AM, White Wolf decided to lean into the whole spectre angle of their game. The title (which you can see if you look very closely) is in glow-in-the-dark ink. If the ink has had time to get charged up, it’s somewhat visible in the dark. A cool effect and just too bad most game stores strongly discourage customers from coming in in the middle of the night when all the lights are out. When the lights are on, the title is essentially invisible.

It happened that the cover matched the colour of the slat wall in my store. Customers who came in looking for Wraith could only find it if I helped them, and I cannot image there were many impulse buys.

1: You might expect a follow-up piece on the White Wolf Magazine/Inphobia transition. I am trying to do only one of these per company and anyway, I can understand why a general interest gaming magazine might want to find a better defined niche, even if the one WW found was ​“failed experiment.” There have been a lot of good, general interest gaming magazines and very few of them are still around.

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number ten: Chaosium’s Worlds of Wonder. The Worlds of Wonder boxset contained the Basic Roleplaying rules (a streamlined Runequest), plus three settings: Super World (A superhero RPG), Future World (a SF RPG), and Magic World (a fantasy RPG). The setting books were by modern standards rather lean (16 pages), so the designers had to be judicious about how to cram enough information in so the result was playable; in Future World, for example, they used interstellar gates that could only link worlds of similar mass and spin, removing the need for ship or detailed world design.

It was a perfectly functional set of rules. Why it didn’t become the core of a GURPS-like range of world books I can’t say. It didn’t, and GURPS took that niche instead.

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number eight is FGU's Space Opera, an ambitious science fiction RPG. Upside: tons of support material. Downsides: convoluted game mechanics, bold organizational choices, counter-intuitive editing, and maybe a smidgen of not enough play-testing. Which is to say, it was an FGU game.

The two things I remember about it was our min/maxer getting frustrated over seeming skill prereq contraditions, and that time someone fired a fusion pistol in an enclosed space, unaware that fusion pistols set everything in the vicinity of the target on fire, or that "Fusion weapons produce hard radiation (Rad Level) at the surface of the target hit by the main bolt, but not the splatter." It was a bit like using fireball as a melee weapon in D&D. If fireballs were radioactive.

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Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number nine: SPI’s Universe, their attempt to do for the SFRPGs market what DragonQuest did for FRPGs.

Universe had some legitimately cool aspects, starting with a 3‑D map of the local stars out to 30 LY (as known in 1980). It offered a wider range of occupations than Traveller, without GDW’s military emphasis. For that matter, the Federation appeared to be democratic. It also had an innovative method of dealing with environments; what a character was acclimated to affected how they handled various climates (Cue arguments over the ship’s thermostat). A modular ship creation system was intended to make ship creation faster, and they included a game called Delta Vee in the box.

Alas. The game seemed to be poorly play tested. It was definitely unbalanced: because they were key components to both the interstellar communications network and FTL drives, psionic characters could easily end up as the pampered members of the ensemble (and we won’t even touch the fact many of them had mind-control, useful for streamlining democracy). And while it was in no way the fault of the designers, SPI’s financial situation – picture Mount Doom after the One Ring was thrown in – meant essentially no support for the game.

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