Time Lord: A Doctor Who RPG From the Heart of the Wilderness

Sharing a common language means that the UK RPG scene is very strongly influenced by the US RPG scene. Whereas the language barrier means that, for instance, The Dark Eye has ended up being the big beast of German-language RPGs, the Japanese translation of Call of Cthulhu is the Great Old One of that RPG industry, and Drakar & Demoner is the wellspring of the Swedish-language field, in general what happens in the US scene will make waves over here, and UK-based publishers will at least somewhat look to the US market for a ready supply of customers who can be accessed with, admittedly, some export or distribution hurdles to clear (though less in these days of PDFs and print-on-demand products) but no need to produce translated materials.

This has particularly been the case since Games Workshop stopped writing and stocking RPGs; with the loss of our largest and most home-grown producer and distributor, the hobby became dependent on distributors who were largely extensions of the US distribution chain; the rise of the Internet and social media likely accelerated this, because it means that UK gamers are likely reading about and discussing RPGs, watching Actual Plays, and otherwise interacting with the rest of the hobby community in circles in which US gamers are the most visible and prolific presences, outside of UK-specific forums and the like.

Nonetheless, there are differences, some of them stemming from our history, and to my mind the earliest foundations of that history come down to three groups of games – you can think of these as three interconnected rings, because the groups overlap a little. They don’t tell the whole story of the UK RPG scene by any means – but they do represent the major movements of its first decade or so, the era that began when Games Workshop first started importing RPGs from the US and ended when Games Workshop walked away from RPGs altogether.

First, there are the American RPGs which were imported and republished by Games Workshop. Dungeons & Dragons was famously the first one, but relations between Games Workshop and TSR got less collaborative and more competitive once TSR gave up on their plan to acquire Games Workshop and set up TSR UK and that prompted the republishing of a wider range of games under in Games Workshop editions. Traveller was along the first, Paranoia was a notable one, but perhaps their closest relationship was with Chaosium, with Games Workshop putting out their own printings of RuneQuest (2nd and 3rd Edition), Call of Cthulhu (2nd and 3rd Edition), and Stormbringer.

The next interconnected ring here are the RPGs which Games Workshop developed in-house – the most famous is WFRP, which drew heavily on all three of their Chaosium imports, but there was also Judge Dredd and Golden Heroes (the latter strictly speaking being an update of a small self-published British RPG, but it was the Games Workshop edition which most people encoutnered first). Arguably in this category is Fighting Fantasy – sure, it didn’t come out through Games Workshop, but the original gamebooks were cooked up by Workshop co-founders Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone as a gateway drug to RPGs (and, therefore, a sneaky means of boosting Games Workshop sales) and the standalone introductory RPG was likewise devised by Steve Jackson with that end in mind.

And that leads us into the third ring: the weird little subset of tabletop RPGs which were put out by mainstream UK publishers, not by games companies, in the form of standard-sized trade paperbacks. This was a phenomenon fostered and kicked off by Fighting Fantasy, and of course there were a great many attempts to hop on the gamebook bandwagon, but some of those extended to being fully-fledged RPG systems. The original version of Dragon Warriors was one of these, Corgi put out a version of Tunnels & Trolls with the art replaced with redrawn versions by Josh Kirby, and there was Maelstrom too. Many of those games don’t seem to have that much traction in the UK scene any more, and perhaps never did – but simply by virtue of being put out by major publishers and put on shelves next to regular books, they perhaps did a lot to get the word out about RPGs and put the concept before a wider range of people than the specialist game publishers may have been able to reach.

And then… there was Time Lord.

The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 12)

Time for another entry in my slow, gradual journey through the Fighting Fantasy series. In my previous article, I started to get into the era of the series which I’ve been looking forward to covering ever since I started these reviews way back in the Ferretbrain days: the era when the series started to go in a sustained darker direction, offering a compelling fantasy-horror hybrid. I also reviewed some pretty good gamebooks! After a period when the series seemed to go for quantity over quality, the priorities reversed, resulting in 1989’s Fighting Fantasy releases being a pretty good crop.

For this article, we’re going to enter the 1990s – in fact, our pace of getting through the timeline is picking up. Just as 1989 saw Puffin scaling back the pace of releases, with only 4 books released, 1990 only saw three books released in the mainline series – less than any year since 1982 (when only one book, the original Warlock of Firetop Mountain itself, came out). With a fairly extensive range by this point, it seems like a decision was made to focus on quality over quantity – which is all very well so long as quality actually gets delivered.

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, there was a span back there when Fighting Fantasy ran into a bit of a succession problem – Steve Jackson, Ian Livingstone, and other writers who’d contributed to the early series had all rather drifted away from actively writing gamebooks before they could cultivate a new generation of “regulars” who could relaibly provide decent-quality contributions to the series.

Some newcomers only provided one or two new books, but then drifted away again; in some cases this was a shame (it’s a real shame Graeme Davis didn’t write more for the series after Midnight Rogue, and Marc Gascoigne’s Battleblade Warrior showed promise), in other cases this was for the best (Martin Allen’s Sky Lord may be the worst ever Fighting Fantasy gamebook.) From the mid-20s to late-30s, it seems like Luke Sharp was being groomed as a new “regular”, having put out four entries in the series, but by my reckoning only one of them is particularly good; the other three are mediocre at best, with one – Chasms of Malice – perhaps being the only competition for Sky Lord for the title of “worst ever”.

However, new writers did emerge, and the four gamebooks I will cover this time can be argued to be the work of a generation of “new regulars”. Six authors contributed to these books (since two of them are co-authored pieces); five of the six have previous Fighting Fantasy credits, and the newcomer is paired up with one of them, so all the books are written by people for whom this is not their first rodeo. At the same time, none of the authors made their Fighting Fantasy debut prior to 1986 – and three of the four books don’t have any contributing authors who debuted prior to 1988, so they are all designers who joined the series after it was well-established, rather than being from that early crop. Three of the authors in question will make further contributions to the series before it wraps up for good.

Master of Chaos

Scenario

A legendary artifact, the Staff of Rulership, has been stolen by the dark wizard Shanzikuul – perhaps the very same one who once allied with the Dark Elves centuries ago and was believed dead since the failure of that scheme. With the Staff in hand, Shanzikuul may be able to unite myriad different bickering evil and chaotic factions under one banner and become a threat to the whole world.

You have been persuaded to venture forth to Khul, the Chaos-haunted continent, to deal with this problem. Only an experienced warrior like you can hope to get close – Shanzikuul’s magical senses would detect a fellow magician with ease – but at the same time, a well-supplied warrior travelling to Khul would also attract unwanted attention. Thus a plan has been formed – you will deliberately get yourself press-ganged as a galley slave on the Diablo, endure the Diablo‘s ocean voyage to the city of Ashkyos, and then escape the ship, find a way to secure equipment and supplies, and travel upriver into the wastes of Chaos, making for the ruined city of Kabesh. It is a desperate plan – but that is what will be needed to stop the Master of Chaos…

This is another Keith Martin gamebook – Keith Martin being the pseudonym used by veteran WFRP author Carl Sargent for his Fighting Fantasy books. As we’ve seen so far, Sargent proved an adept hand at writing gamebooks, with his previous efforts, Stealer of Souls and Vault of the Vampire, being excellent contributions to the series. He’s set a high bar for himself here – let’s see if he clears it.

From Squires To Knights: the Pendragon Starter Set

After a long and careful development period, the 6th Edition of Pendragon is beginning to emerge. First up is the Starter Set, a product in the tradition of the Starter Set boxes that Chaosium have put out for Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest; you get a slimline boxed set with a form factor similar of the Chaosium boxes of yesteryear, a solo adventure to give you a taste of the setting and rules, sufficient rules to run at least short-term games for your buds, and some meatier scenario material to play with, and perhaps a few bits and pieces of more general use even for experienced players of the games in question.

Out of the three games that Chaosium have applied this formula to, Pendragon may be the most uneasy fit. Call of Cthulhu, the game in which this approach was pioneered, lends itself to episodic play and very self-contained investigations; an adventure book with a clutch of such self-contained scenarios is comparatively straightforward to devise. Moreover, with the default setting being 1920s Earth, the Starter Set doesn’t need to spend a lot of time getting basic setting ideas across.

RuneQuest is a touch more difficult, with a somewhat crunchier system and a setting which is very different from standard fantasy fare. Nonetheless, the RuneQuest Starter Set does purchasers a favour by providing a nicely-developed little pocket setting to help inspire subsequent scenarios, and whilst the current edition of RuneQuest has somewhat more emphasis on tying adventures to the passage of seasons, it’s still viable to soft-pedal that a little for the Starter Set and still give a good idea of what RuneQuest is about, and provide a clutch of scenarios that give a nice RuneQuest-y experience.

Pendragon, however, is a game which absolutely shines in long-term campaign play; although it is absolutely viable to play a short-term Pendragon campaign or even a one-shot, the game really sings when you embrace the “generational play” aspect of it and players start founding their own knightly dynasties playing out against the grand backdrop of the Arthurian saga. It’s not really possible to convey that within the scope of a starter set, leaving the design team here the job of trying to figure out how to provide a cross-section of distinctive Pendragon stuff without leaning on generational play.

Rivers of London: Classic Chaosium Project, Modern Chaosium Attitude

Rivers of London is a novel series by Ben Aaronovitch – a former TV writer who Doctor Who fans might remember as writing some of the better-remembered Sylvester McCoy-fronted stories. The novels revolve around Peter Grant, a young Metropolitan Police officer who after an encounter with the supernatural is recruited into the Folly – a secret society which traces its roots back to the 1700s, but which normalised its relationship with the Met in the mid-20th Century and effectively became its X-Files department. Practicing “Newtonian magic” – so called because it’s derived from a lost work of Isaac Newton where he devised a classical model of magic to match his model of physics – the Folly solves mysteries and keeps the peace between regular London and the demi-monde, the subculture of those touched by magic; in keeping with the Peelian principles of community policing, the members of the Folly are arguably part of the demi-monde themselves, whether by origin or through their extensive interactions with the supernatural.

Released in 2022, the Rivers of London RPG is an officially licensed product, and represents Chaosium simultaneously breaking new ground and returning to their roots. Although Chaosium’s first RPG was RuneQuest, many more of their early RPGs represented Basic Roleplaying adaptations of pre-existing settings, with Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, Elfquest, Ringworld, and Pendragon/Paladin all falling into that category. Even Nephilim was an adaptation of a French RPG; the exceptions in their backlog are Worlds of Wonder, Superworld, Magic World, and the standalone Basic Roleplaying system (and Superworld was a spin-off from Worlds of Wonder, Magic World was a reprint of the 5th Edition Stormbringer system with the Moorcock-specific stuff filed off, and the standalone version of Basic Roleplaying is a condensation of systems from their other releases).

Critically and commercially, it’s those adaptations of pre-existing settings which have done really well for Chaosium. Sure, Elfquest and Nephilim didn’t do great, and Ringworld got snuffed out very abruptly when the licence got pulled by Niven (who’d apparently been persuaded by his agent that he could get a better movie deal if he did so… nearly 40 years later and we still don’t have a big screen Ringworld movie). But Stormbringer was well-received, Pendragon was astonishingly ahead of its time, and Call of Cthulhu is their cash cow, with the Japanese licence having kept them on life support during some of the company’s darkest hours.

Indeed, arguably RuneQuest was itself an adaptation of a pre-existing setting – Glorantha having been created by Greg Stafford back in the 1960s, and at least some aspects of the lore had gotten out to the game-buying public via boardgames before Chaosium took the plunge into RPGs. Really, the only member of the Basic Roleplaying family which established much in the way of momentum and wasn’t strongly based on a compelling pre-existing setting was Superworld.

When Chaosium suffered its existential crisis during the fulfillment of the Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Kickstarter, leading to Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen mounting a boardroom coup to install new management, the incoming new regime appears to have decided early on that games tied to vivid, eye-catching settings were simply a better gamble than those which were not. For instance, they mothballed Magic World (which had a setting, but not one which seemed to generate much excitement or widespread recognition outside of its hardcore fans) and the standalone Basic Roleplaying line (though they’re taking a punt on bringing back the latter), and when they put out their new edition of RuneQuest they returned it to being focused on Glorantha, rather than taking the more setting-agnostic approach of its third edition (and the versions put out by Mongoose and The Design Mechanism). So in this, respect, putting out a game like Rivers of London is congruent with that approach.

On the other hand, Rivers of London is also a watershed moment for the new regime at Chaosium – because it is the first time they have put out a brand-new Basic Roleplaying-derived RPG which they have developed in-house and which is not a new edition of an existing game. That’s important if Chaosium has ambitions to keep pushing forwards rather than resting on their laurels.

The Babylon Project Was a Dream Given Form…

Babylon 5‘s main series originally aired from 1993 to 1998, which meant that its peak of pop cultural relevance happened to coincide with the boom in tabletop RPGs based on licensed properties which occurred in the 1990s. When properties like Xena, Men In Black, and Tales From the Crypt were getting licenced games based on them, you could bet that a Babylon 5 RPG would have shown up sooner or later. (The major outlier at the time was The X-Files, though canny publishers realised that the paranormal yarns and conspiracy theories underpinning that show didn’t lend themselves to being copyrighted anyway, with Conspiracy X being especially shameless and the original Delta Green being somewhat more artful about riffing on the concept.)

In fact, two publishers have put out Babylon 5 RPGs over the years. In the noughties, Mongoose Publishing had the licence, and starting in 2003 put out a couple of editions of a D20-based game under the OGL before they pivoted to putting out The Universe of Babylon 5 as a new line for Mongoose Traveller beginning in 2008. The D20 version of the line got a fairly healthy supply of supplements for it, but only a trickle came out for the Traveller iteration before Mongoose lost the licence in 2009.

I don’t know whether Mongoose declined to renew the licence or the IP owners decided to pull it; what is apparent is that no new licensee has stepped up to put out a Babylon 5 RPG since. This seems like a shame; Traveller was, perhaps, a more elegant fit for Babylon 5 than the D20 system was; its psionic power system seems to lend itself better to adaptation to depict Babylon 5-style telepaths than D&D 3.X-derived magic systems were, and Traveller is designed from the ground up to support spacefaring adventure, includes starship rules and ship-to-ship combat as well as human-scale activities, and has a character creation system designed to create characters with a professional history ranging from civilian life to multiple branches of the military. It’s an obvious choice; hell, the Venn diagram of Traveller fanbase and the Babylon 5 fanbase probably resembles a smaller circle almost entirely absorbed by a larger circle to begin with. It feels like a third party using Mongoose’s Traveller OGL – or Mongoose themselves – could have made a decent go of it given more of a chance.

Before Mongoose ever got their hands on Babylon 5, a different publisher had a crack at the setting. Chameleon Eclectic was a small publisher punching about their weight at the time. They were part of a clutch of like-minded game publishers based out of Blacksburg, Virginia; Shannon Appelcline in Designers & Dragons notes that this is home to Virginia Tech, so it seems plausible that they may have had connections via the RPG scene on campus. Other publishers from this neck of the woods included BTRC, publishers of CORPS, and Pinnacle Entertainment Group, publishers of Deadlands (the latter of whom were early collaborators with Chameleon Eclectic on projects like the wargame Fields of Honor and the CCG The Last Crusade); it seems plausible that they were all part of the same local roleplaying subculture with compatible tastes and preferences.

Chameleon Eclectic made some small waves when they emerged in the early 1990s with Millennium’s End, a game tailored towards the technothriller subgenre as popularised by the likes of Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton. The game’s default setting cast the PCs as agents of BlackEagle, a mercenary outfit fighting terrorists, organised crime, and other ne’er-do-wells in the unravelling society of the not-too-distant future, but from what I hear it did a pretty good job of providing a system which could be adapted to a broader range of concepts in the overall genre.

Charles Ryan, the game’s designer and a key player in Chameleon Eclectic, would eventually go on to supervise the D20 Modern like at Wizards and co-designed its rulebook in 2002, and D20 Modern is “fantasy technothrillers”, so a case could be made that Millennium’s End kind of acted as his “audition tape” for that gig. Certainly, it seemed to get people to sit up and take notice; the game came in at #31 in Arcane magazine’s 1996 “best RPG” poll, and for a little game from a first-time publishing house to beat out Werewolf: The Apocalypse at the height of White Wolf’s popularity in such a poll is damn good going.

The second RPG from Chameleon Eclectic was Psychosis, a step into a more arthouse realm of gaming; the Psychosis system used tarot cards for resolution, and rather than being sold as a conventional rulebook and setting, instead it was sold as a series of rules-plus-scenario packs, such as Psychosis: Ship of Fools and Psychosis: Solitary Confinement, the concept being that in each scenario the PCs would begin with amnesia and through the process of play figure out the weird scenario they find themselves in, with each scenario pack offering a distinct campaign running some 6-8 sessions.

Now, note the following:

• Tarot card-based resolution.
• A common rules system shared between different scenario packs.
• Each scenario pack offers a limited-scope, short-term campaign.
• The only thing the scenario packs necessarily have in common, other than the rules system, is that the PCs begin with amnesia.

This is more or less exactly what James Wallis was going for with Alas Vegas and the Fugue system, and in the 1990s Wallis was very much interested in arthouse-style takes on RPGs, with his New Style line of games published via Hogshead providing perhaps an early model for what we’d later think of as “indie RPGs”, even though they weren’t released via an indie route. It feels likely that Wallis would have become at least faintly aware of Psychosis, so there’s a very real chance that Charles Ryan’s little diversion into high-concept games ended up influencing Wallis’s later misguided boondoggle.

And the third distinct line from Chameleon Eclectic was The Babylon Project – the first Babylon 5 RPG…

On Ending a LARP II: When It’s Out of Your Control

A while back I wrote an article mulling over the various ways one can conclude a LARP – both in terms of bringing an individual event to a close, and rounding off a campaign. Specifically, though, I was talking about planned endings – endings intended to be exactly that – because as a game runner that’s the type of game you want to design.

Just recently, though, a LARP game I had been playing has experienced a different type of ending – an unplanned one. Crucible was a Vampire: the Requiem LARP run by the Badgers and Jam referee team. It was designed to be a low-budget, low-cost, long-running monthly campaign. The format was structured around sessions taking place once a month in a hired pub function room, and lasting for a few hours of a Saturday afternoon – allowing for a much lesser time commitment than many of the weekend-long LARPs I’ve written about on here previously.

The “ageless creatures in the modern day” concept meant that anyone could come kitted in normal clothes or push the boat out on costuming to the extent that they saw fit, and also meant that it wasn’t incongruous for characters to use smartphones; the latter point meant that the referees could deploy a handy little web portal to manage the use of vampiric Disciplines mid-session, freeing them up from having to referee such things. All of this was supported by a much more simple system than Mind’s Eye Theatre – partially to enable the phone-based resolution in the first place, but also to scale back the barrier to entry and to declutter gameplay (since Mind’s Eye Theatre tends to import a lot of tabletop game mechanics and complications without really thinking about how social LARP games actually play out in practice).

The campaign had started shortly before the COVID pandemic – the first session I attended was the last one before the game went on hiatus as a result of the virus making it dangerous to run sessions and lockdown making it illegal. Whilst many outdoor LARPs opened up again somewhat in 2021-2022, due to outdoor events being more COVID-secure and thanks to the vaccine rollout, Crucible was specifically meant to be a game played in pub function rooms, because that was key to making it widely accessible. As such, the referees decided to wait a bit longer to restart the game – not just to the point where suitable venues were starting to reopen again, but also to the point where they had at least some confidence that we wouldn’t be going back into lockdown after a brief easing, forcing the game to go into hiatus again.

It was therefore mid-2022 when the organisers started to seriously talk about reviving Crucible, canvassing the player base to see how many people were still interested, whether people wanted to keep using their old characters or start fresh with new ones, and so on and so forth. They appeared to have sufficient numbers to make a go of it, and scheduled a return session for the 1st October – but then decided to postpone the return because despite a good number of people saying they wanted to return, an insufficient number of those signed up to actually attend the first planned revival session. (Apparently just enough people signed up to cover the venue hire, but not enough to functionally run the game as envisioned.)

Unbowed and unbroken, Badgers and Jam soldiered on. Deciding that in November-January people were likely busy, they decided to run a poll and see who was still interested despite this latest setback, and which of several possible days for a return session people could say with confidence that they would be able to make. The first Saturday in March seemed to have the numbers, and so a first session was planned for then, with a “first Saturday of the month” schedule going forwards from there.

In fact, I can jot down the actual numbers here – because the referees levelled with us about them afterwards. I was at the March event and enjoyed myself, but I did notice that attendance seemed a little light, and some players I’d had the impression were among the most keen participants in the campaign weren’t there. In fact, although 22 players said they were interested in the game and could make the March date, only 13 actually showed up. The referees had accounted for something like a 25% drop-out rate, which would have left things within the range they considered viable, but 13 players wasn’t quite hacking it.

This put the organisers in a tough spot. They seriously didn’t want to put a guilt trip on people or try and make people feel that they were compelled to attend – players who aren’t specifically enthusiastic to be at your game aren’t going to get anything from it and won’t give their best contribution – and they specifically designed it as a game where it was possible to simply miss a session if you weren’t feeling it in a particular month. At the same time, a certain attendance level was needed to make the game viable in its current design. This was why they disclosed those numbers to us post-event – rather than trying to brush the issue under the mat, the refs took what I thought was a sensible move by being honest with the player base about the precarious situation the campaign was in, and explained that they wouldn’t be able to keep running if we weren’t able to get regular attendance up.

They were also clear about the criteria which they would now start to use to decide whether the campaign was still viable: at the start of each session going forwards they’d take a headcount of everyone who’d made it to the event (and anyone who’d messaged in to say they were running late) and see if they’d hit 14. If they had those numbers, fine, the campaign would keep going. If they had 13 or less, and there wasn’t some form of significant mitigating circumstance intervening, they’d put the campaign on hiatus, taking a vote of those attending on whether to play through one last session or just end it there.

As it happened, at the April event there were only 10 players. The refs had told themselves that if we came in just a little but under expectations, they’d overlook it, but they couldn’t ignore that much of a shortfall – especially when the number of people who said they planned to come, even accounting for possible train strikes on the day (which if I remember right were called off anyway), was substantially higher than that. We near-unanimously voted to play through a session (which you’d expect, because the people present were generally those who were most enthusiastic about the campaign anyway), and then we were left to console the referees and ponder what had transpired.

It is a real shame that this has happened; Crucible was a good game, and may indeed still be a good game if the refs decide to retool, reconfigure, and continue in another form, and if they get the support from the player base necessary to make a go of it. It’s certainly the case that dropouts from LARP events seems to have become a little endemic in the UK scene, and whilst it had increased post-COVID it did happen pre-COVID as well. Sally Poppenbeck did a good guest post over on the LARP Experience blog thinking more about general reasons why COVID may have led to a shift in habits in this respect, but I do want to put some consideration into factors which might or might not have affected Crucible specifically.

Firstly, I suspect games like Crucible need to plan for a higher dropout rate than is average for, say, a weekend-long LARP event (for which the 25% drop-out rate feels like a reasonable tolerance to plan for). Weekend-long events tend to involve more commitment both in terms of time and money (even if the organisers undercharge, travel costs are a thing) and in terms of sheer personal effort than events which unfold over a weekend afternoon.

On the one hand, you would expect people to find it easier to come to an afternoon event than to a weekend event – but I suspect there’s a motivational paradox here. Precisely because it takes way more effort to go to a weekend LARP, I think people tend to be more invested in them. You aren’t going to book for such an event if that weekend is not clear, and once you have booked you are going to keep that weekend clear if you can; once you’ve decided to commit a fair amount of time and money to it, you’re probably going to show unless some dire turn of events prevents you, or if you have some sort of catastrophic loss of confidence in the event, or a mental health wobble makes you not want to leave the house, or whatever.

Conversely, if a game is happening every month on a Saturday afternoon, showing up is easier, but brushing it off is also easier. If you bail on a weekend-long LARP event that’s an entire weekend where you are suddenly at a loose end. However, if your weekend is looking busy with lots of smaller-scale activities, it can be tempting to drop something to leave more space for the rest of the stuff you’re planning to do. And if a game is not a one-off, and happens reasonably regularly, you can expect to blow off a session and be able to come back. That’s what the refs kind of wanted Crucible to be – but it becomes unviable to run the game if the proportion of people who blow it off is so high so frequently.

In addition to all that, I do wonder if the “we’re going on hiatus if we don’t make quorum” announcement accelerated the hiatus a little. I’m not saying that making the announcement was a mistake; quite the reverse. In general, I think it is good and healthy for referees to level with your player base about this sort of thing, both because it’s the honest and transparent thing to do and because trying to put a brave face on things and pretend there’s no problem is rarely the right call when it comes to mental health and morale.

In this specific instance, I think providing clearly-understood criteria for what a viable Crucible looked like was not just honest and transparent, but also a great aid in expectation-setting, as well as a challenge to the player base – it let us all get a picture of how much of a knife-edge the game was on, and helped stimulate us to try and recruit new participants.

Equally, though, if you tell a player base your game is in a fragile state it can be a risky move. In some cases you may find the players rally behind you, re-commit to the game, and pull out the stops to help get things back on course. In other cases, you could find that the player base become more disengaged, not less – if they start expecting that the game might go away, they may become less committed, because they feel less inclined to invest time and creativity in something which might evaporate suddenly.

What’s more likely than either of those extremes is a mixture of reactions – some players become more committed, some begin emotionally disengaging, and some have a more complicated reaction. In my case, for instance, I found I was more determined to make the monthly events because I didn’t want the event to disintegrate because I happened to fancy a lie-in one month, but I also found myself wanting to adapt my approach to the game, because my initial character concept was designed with an eye to undertaking long-term projects, and since I didn’t 100% trust the rest of the player base not to flake I didn’t want to get overly invested in those projects when they might never yield any payoff.

As a result, levelling with your players like this can be a gamble – it might be the prod your player base needs to stop taking the game for granted and do their bit to keep it alive, or it could further sap their morale. Nonetheless, I think it’s a gamble which is worth it because it not only explains the problem, but opens up a basis for conversation and constructive engagement. Several times during Crucible‘s restart, from the initial seeking of expressions of interest to literally the minutes before the final session, I checked in with the referees to calibrate my expectations, explain where I was coming from, and generally make sure they had a clear idea of what level of commitment I was intending to give the game.

Some of those conversations involved saying slightly awkward things. When you’re talking to someone running a game the people-pleasing thing to say is “of course I love your game, of course it’s going great, and of course I’ll definitely make sure to make the next session”. The awkwardness comes when one or more of those things isn’t true – for my part, I thought Crucible was a solid game, and I wouldn’t deliberately want to arrange something which clashed with it, but there’s LARPs out there and other things which I am or might be more enthusiastic for, and whose scheduling isn’t under my control, and which I would probably prioritise over Crucible.

That’s not an easy thing to say, but it is an honest thing to say, and just as player bases deserve honesty from referee teams, so too do referees deserve players who are honest in turn. The whole reason the refs undertook all the labour involved in trying to revive this campaign not once but twice is because people kept telling them that they wanted to participate, but when it came time for people to make good on that… too many of us didn’t show up.

It stings badly enough when you throw an idea out there and, for whatever reason, you don’t get a critical mass of people behind it. In some ways it can sting worse if you do have an apparent critical mass, but then a chunk of the player base didn’t actually mean it when they said “yes, we’ll go out of our way to help you make this game work”.

Sure, some of the drop-outs from the March and April sessions may have been due to illness, emergency, or some other factor outside of the control of the people who dropped out – but I know for a fact that this doesn’t account for 100% of them. Some people simply opted not to show up, prioritised some other game over Crucible, or double-booked themselves with activities whose timing they absolutely did have some level of control over. No one individual is wholly at fault here; this isn’t a situation where I can point the finger and say “That asshole ruined Crucible for the rest of us!” Collectively, however, we as a player base turned out to be shockingly unreliable, and that speaks to a problem with the culture around the game.

It’s entirely legitimate to want to run a game which is easily accessible and doesn’t demand the investment of time and money a weekend LARP does – it’s a good thing to have, and London surely has enough LARPers and gamers to support many such things. At the same time, it’s hard to do that if people are going to treat your game as being utterly disposable. There is surely a middle ground between “blow my entire weekend on this game” levels of commitment and “I simply cannot be bothered to keep the day clear for this LARP” levels of detachment, and it’s frustrating to me that many of my fellow Crucible players don’t seem to have been able to find it.

From Salzenmund To the Sea of Claws

With their revised take on The Enemy Within campaign finished, Cubicle 7 have been freed up to offer a wider range of brand-new material for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition. Just recently I received my hard copies of Salzenmund: City of Salt and Silver and Sea of Claws, two supplements which can each be used individually but have useful synergy – Salzenmund being a major port of the Empire, and the Sea of Claws being the sea you’ll sail directly into when you go downriver from Salzenmund.

Salzenmund: City of Salt and Silver

This supplement not only provides a look at the titular city, but also offers a broader guide to Nordland, the region of the Empire it’s located in, as well as some nice details on mining and smuggling within the Empire, brief but handy guidelines on creating Nordlander player characters, all sprinkled with scenario ideas, NPCs, factions, locations, and all sorts of other material either to spice up a brief visit to Nordland or to form the background of an entire Nordland-based campaign, most likely using Salzenmund as its main base.

The book specifically depicts the region as it exists after the Turmoil – which is the in-character term for the events of the Enemy Within campaign, particularly the climactic Empire In Ruins segment. The “canonical” end to Empire In Ruins involves a shift in the political geography of the Empire, conveniently explaining how the distribution of Electoral Counts and the like changes from the overview offered at the start of The Enemy Within to the situation as it was in later iterations of the setting.

This may bug some, depending on which version of the political map you prefer, but for the purposes of running a game based in Salzenmund it’s actually helpful, because it means that Nordland has its own Elector Count and is no longer under the thumb of Middenheim – a political development which obviously gives rise to lots of possible avenues for adventure in the region, with lots of scope for the PCs to side with one faction or another. If you really want to run it pre-Enemy Within, you could either ignore the stuff about the new Elector Count entirely or simply have the political shift happen through some other means.

On the whole, then, it’s another new city supplement, in the grand tradition established by supplements like the original Middenheim book and Marienburg: Sold Up the River, and which Cubicle 7 have kept alive in this edition of the game with material like their updated Middenheim: City of the White Wolf and their brand new Altdorf: Crown of the Empire supplement. Obviously, for it to stand out it really needs to offer something distinct from the others, and in this instance I think it does.

Naturally, it’s a potentially useful gateway to seafaring adventure, and so is potentially useful for anything using Sea of Claws; in that respect, it’s perhaps a more convenient port of call to begin such things, because Marienburg can also perform that function, Marienburg is an independent city-state off in the Wasteland, which is going to be a bit trickier for Imperial PCs (which most WFRP characters will be) to reach than a city in the Empire itself.

In addition, the political situation as the newly-elevated Elector Count Gausser seeks to cement his rule and drafts ambitious plans to strike out into the Wasteland is nice and spicy – different enough from that in Marienburg to give the city’s internal politics a very different feel, but connected enough that if you have Marienburg: Sold Down the River (or if Cubicle 7 opt to put out an updated version of the supplement) those two books could very happily enrich each other, making the pairing ideal for running a campaign based around the rivalry between the two cities.

Beyond this, the smuggling and mining aspects of the town are also potentially useful and could feed into more Empire-focused campaigns – you could have the PCs come to Salzenmund to pick up some goods to smuggle, or dispatch them from there to take goods to the rest of the Empire, whenever you want to transition between a Nordland-based scenario to something taking place elsewhere in the Empire.

In short, this is the sort of supplement which could potentially enrich any WFRP campaign, unless you simply have no interest in even briefly visiting the region – and it makes a good case for Nordland being worth a visit at that.

Sea of Claws

This is constructed as the big seafaring supplement for WFRP – despite the title, it’s got system stuff to cover sailing anywhere on the Old World’s seas, with rules for ocean-going vessels and journeys, expansions of the trade system from Death On the Reik, seafaring careers, maritime monsters, and whatnot. (We also get some details on the cults of Manann and Stromfels, the accepted and illicit gods of the seas.)

That said, the title is not a complete misnomer, because it also offers a guide to the coastal regions of the Old World bordering the Sea of Claws, giving a taste of what a party may encounter if they make a stopover on the coasts of Bretonnia, the Empire, Norsca, or the Wasteland. None of these offer especially deep dives – the Marienburg writeup is perhaps the longest, but even that’s only a few pages, and I suppose other supplements may be in the pipeline to offer deeper looks at some of those subjects. Nonetheless, it gives you a fairly extensive bench of locales to work into any seafaring voyage in the region.

Although wider in geographic scope than Salzenmund, Sea of Claws is perhaps narrower in utility; I can see a way in which a clear majority of WFRP games would be able to use Salzenmund in one respect or another, but you may find that Sea of Claws is of limited utility if you intend to run a campaign which stays firmly onland, though even then some of the coastal settlements described may be of use.

In particular, Sea of Claws seems to be a supplement that exists in part to provide a mechanism to help get characters to other areas of the Old World, which Cubicle 7 can then outline; a Lustria supplement is already out in PDF. This sails into dangerous waters. The Old World setting, set as it is in a fantasy funhouse mirror version of historical Earth with quasi-Europe getting by far the most attention and development and having been largely developed in the 1980s and 1990s, is the sort of setting where if you set your game in the Empire and its immediate environs you can at least gloss over some of the dodgier and more problematic bits of worldbuilding, whereas if you go roving around the globe you’re in the position of either rehashing material which hasn’t aged so well or needing to develop a whole new take on it.

I suppose this is the challenge which Cubicle 7 have set for themselves in trying to go for a more globe-trotting range of supplements for the line; once I get my hard copy of Lustria, I’ll take a looksee and think about whether they’ve succeeded or not.

Conflict and Flavour

This is a little thought which struck me when filling out the casting form for Reginae Regis. That game’s a LARP in which all the player characters are prewritten, with briefings designed by the referee team; I think the concepts that I’ve hit on here have somewhat wider application than that, though they will land differently in different contexts. In particular, I think the factors I’m looking at will function quite differently in tabletop games and in LARP, and in games where you have prewritten characters vs. games where players generate their own.

The Reginae Regis casting form includes a bit where it asks “What are you most interested in getting to do at the event?“, and points you to the very useful “Where Is My Fun?” page on the game’s website. Under the question on the form there’s a series of categories like “High-stakes politics”, “Rivalries and grudges”, “Family drama”, “Romantic drama” and so on, and people booking are asked to express how interested they are in each of those axes.

Guess who didn’t read the costume brief?

The issue I ran into was that the general slant of all of these categories was largely directed towards the major axes of conflict – and therefore gameplay – at the game. At the same time, I realised I needed to reach out and clarify with the refs that my casting preferences were a bit more complicated than that – namely, that I was interested in some of the categories less as sources of gameplay and conflict and more as sources of background flavour, something I could do low-stakes roleplay around in quiet moments during the game but weren’t necessarily a source of major drama.

Think, say, of the distinction between a character whose briefing involves a lot of the “Family drama” and “Romantic drama” category, and a character who happens to have family and romantic relationships which inform their background and personality (and so may appear in a briefing), but who are experiencing relatively plain sailing as far as those portions of their lives are concerned. One player might prefer playing the former character and would be disappointed with the latter, another player might be very keen for family and romance as low-key flavour aspects of their brief but not be especially keen on them being major sources of conflict. Both of those participants would probably appreciate having some content in their character briefs relating to family or romantic relationships, but they’d need those aspects of the brief to have a decidedly different tone – and a hypothetical third person who actively doesn’t want such content full stop would want a brief that has neither.

Supplement Supplemental! (WFRP Warfare, a Wrathfully Glorious Screen, and a Bestiary of the Rising Sun)

Time for another instalment in my occasional reviews of RPG supplements I had enough thoughts about to offer a review here, but not enough thought abouts to devote a full article to.

Up In Arms (WFRP)

WFRP 4th Edition is by and large my favourite edition of the game when considered as a whole package, and seems to have been reasonably well-received, though one bit of feedback I often hear other fans raising is a dislike of the combat system, and how wounds and Advantage work in particular. Up In Arms is a patch for that – kind of. It bills itself as a supplement focusing on the interests of warriors in general, so, yes, there’s combat in here – but combat is only one part of that.

There’s patches to more or less all the areas of the game I have heard complaints about, very much presented as being optional variants – if WFRP combat is working just fine for you and your table in 4th Edition, nobody expects you to update (though it feels likely that if Cubicle 7 ever do a 5th Edition – or just a revised update to 4th – some of these options will be folded into the core to provide the features there).

The Good, the Bad, and the OGL-y, Part 3: Repairing the Pax Arcana

The story so far: two decades of the OGL 1.0a established a broadly understood regime for third party D&D support which, whilst perhaps unnecessary from a strict reading of IP law (in some interpretations), nonetheless represented at least a sense of legal certainty and confidence necessary to cajole third parties to attempt such products after the much harsher and more aggressive stance taken by TSR.

Then the leak of OGL 1.1 established that Wizards of the Coast were not only contemplating changing the OGL, but doing so in a way which simultaneously greatly contracted the range of material licensed under it (and the range of products that could be made under it), increased Wizards’ ability to monitor and control the market, and generally dented the interests of third parties. Moreover, it included a clause explicitly deauthorising OGL 1.0a – something which their own FAQ from 2004 implied was not actually possible.

The gamers outside looked from Wizards to TSR, and from TSR to Wizards, and from Wizards to TSR again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Kyle Brink, in interviews with podcasts, has claimed that Wizards were already planning to move away from OGL 1.1 when the leak happened because of feedback they had already received from those who’d had sight of it. That may well be true! The leak, however, did mean that a PR exercise around this was necessary. For this article, I’m going to cover their responses, do a deep dive into OGL 1.2, and then discuss Wizards’ total, humiliating, wretched capitulation to the outrage of the community.