Pulp Title Trope?

From where does the graduated red-orange-yellow "pulp adventure" text trope originate? Is it as recent as Indiana Jones? Recent being relatively speaking - Raiders of the Lost Ark might have been released more than 40 years ago but it was itself an homage to the pulps and serials of 40 odd years earlier. Or is there an 'original' that the title presentation of Indiana Jones itself was aping? 

Extruded Fantasy Fiction

I expect others have pointed out that Dungeons & Dragons has gone from explicitly drawing on external references - from history, legend, and classic fantasy fiction - to self-reference, with decades of setting material to draw upon, including novels. Whether this is a good thing depends on whether you want your RPG to be a game for playing *fantasy adventures*, or whether you want it to be a method of playing *Dungeons & Dragons*. Of course, even the earliest, loosest editions had assumptions baked into the system, but these assumptions have accumulated to the point that "Dungeons & Dragons" is a thing of its own. Of course, as THE THING, as the incredible mass that bends the very space-time of roleplaying, there are many other 'things' that exist in close orbit.

But all that is neither here nor there, because what I wanted to talk about are a few of the novels that are published to support roleplaying games.  

For a long time the only Dungeons & Dragons novel that I had read was the Dragonlance book Test of the Twins. I would have read this in my relatively early teens, and I remember thinking that it wasn't too bad. While I'm sure my tastes have grown more discerning, I don't need all my fantasy to be - or aspire to be - *literature*, though I do increasingly ask myself why I am reading that novel when all those classics sit unread on my shelf (or on my wishlists), but I'll still choose some fun 'genre' fiction; not all reading is for self-improvement. So yes, sometimes I do simply want to read something that more or less conforms to the staples of fantasy as codified in the games that I have played.

A few years ago I did try The Legend of Huma, another Dragonlance novel, as was recommended to me on some forum or another. I didn't take to it and left it unfinished, but I didn't think it actually bad. But several months ago I spotted on a charity book stand a book the content of which I had wondered about - imagined even - for over thirty years; RA Salvatore's The Crystal Shard.

Of course I dropped a quid in the collection and picked up it. What a find! The book advertised endlessly in Dragon Magazine, and in the American comics that I bought. The book that introduced Drizzt Do'Urden to fantasy fiction, creating a cool, not-evil Dark Elf archetype that would find its way back from Salvatore's novels to being referenced in Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks. Where once you were invited to understand character classes in terms of, say, Beowulf, the new touchstones recommended to readers are the likes of Drizzt.   

I had high hopes, expecting extruded fantasy fiction of the superior kind. Surely so, given the lasting influence of-

No!

No, I am afraid that The Crystal Shard is not a good book, not a good book at all. I have got lots of by now long forgotten fantasy novels from the 1980s and 1990s that are not particularly original, that could easily be "Dungeons & Dragons" fiction with a few edits, and The Crystal Shard is bad even by those standards. It is juvenile, and by that I don't mean written for kids - as no doubt it was, despite the very rapey evil wizard - but in its construction; if you showed me an extract and told me is was by a bright GCSE pupil I would believe you.

But I haven't learned my lesson, as here is what I found on the charity book stand last week. 

By all accounts it is a bad novel even according to the judgement of those who read Dungeons & Dragons novels. I'll probably not get round to reading it - I am currently reading The Complete Lyonesse, close to finishing Suldrun's Garden - so if anyone wants Master Wolf, or The Crystal Shard, let me know.    

It seems an obvious point to make; that the best novels to read (to *consume*? ugh!) to steep your imagination in fantastical images, situations, characters, locations, plots, etc. to help you run a Dungeons & Dragons game are more often than *not* Dungeons & Dragons novels. Now, the same is true of Warhammer, even though Warhammer (Fantasy and 40k) has employed experienced authors and has published some books that can stand apart from their association with the games (and 'IP', again ugh!), but as time has gone on and Warhammer has, like Dungeons & Dragons, come to draw more on its own extruded fiction than its original influences, from Moorcock to Herbert to 2000AD. For the worse, I'd say.

I'll get around to highlighting some of my favourite Warhammer fantasy novels that are not Warhammer fantasy novels soon. 

Product of Your Imagination

I was reminded, when digging out the D&D Expert rulebook, that TSR had possibly the best slogan of any RPG company.

Products of YOUR Imagination. It follows on from something Gygax (presumably) wrote in OD&D: "why have us do any more of your imagining for you?" Well, as Gygax would learn, for one thing if the people who buy your rules have sufficient imaginative powers (and energy, and time), you only need to sell them one book. Ever. 

(There was a few threads on various fora about 'dead' RPGs - but a game is not dead that which can eternal be played.)

The Adventure Starts Here

As the chaos of the summer draws to a close and we come closer to the structured time of the school year (not only am I an academic, but I am married to a teacher and we two teenagers!) and rugby season (still going even as I dash towards fifty), I started thinking about planning for an autumn game for the family, and in doing so thinking about the bits and pieces of my own gaming history that revealed the promises and possibilities of roleplaying games. And this image here is pretty central.

So, sure, I had explored the Forest of Doom, the Island of the Lizard King, and had trekked across Sommerlund, but when it came down to sitting at a table and adventuring the vast majority of my time had been spent in funhouses full of straight lines; a universe in two dimensions, constrained by graph paper. We did not own any adventures, so that was how we played the Basic set. But then we got the Expert set - was Expert better than Advanced? I wondered at the time. 

And there was an adventure and it was classic. As with mapping the The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, I would hazard that exploring the wilderness of the Isle of Dread is an almost universal experience for gamers around my age. Pirates! Dinosaurs! Zombies! Kopru? Phanatons? Perhaps if we had had access to a Basic level such as The Lost City we would have already advanced our game to something that involved more than kicking in a door and killing everything inside, an analogue version of the arcade classic Gauntlet. But we did not, so the Expert Set was a revelation and totally transformed how we played D&D.

And a MAP! Every young fantasy reader's favourite part of a novel was the map, which promised the reader a bigger world that whatever sub-Tolkien quest they would read over the next 300 pages. You could look at the map and imagine what better stories were going on in those curiously named places. Well, now you could imagine them together!

And that is the sort of feeling I want to relive, and recreate for my players.

(Seriously, I got quite a thrill digging these out of my BECMI box in the cupboard. Kinda makes me regret that I have discovered better games...)

The Court is in Session

Have you ever run a trial in an RPG? Have your PCs ever stood before a magistrate, a judge, or a jury?

Despite how often PCs commit crimes, end up on the run, even imprisoned, I cannot say that I ever have. Nevertheless, these tables from the original version of Blacksand! for Advanced Fighting Fantasy had an outsized influence over what I understood to be the scope of a fantasy adventure game.

Viscera!

The particular proximate 'prod' that prompted me to resurrect this blog was - having temporarily stepped away from Twitter and reactivated my account at RPGnet for a less unhealthy social media experience - being asked by Andrew Wright (who blogs at Fantasy Game Book and has written several supplements for Advanced Fighting Fantasy) whether there was a working link to Viscera!, a little booklet of critical hits and other stuff that I wrote for Fighting Fantasy-based games nearly a decade ago. Ooof. 

And so, while you can access it (now) by clicking on the little link on the left hand side of blog, here it is again; just click on the image above. It *should* work. 

Andrew Wright has covered Viscera! in his thread "Exploring combat and other rule systems in Troika! and its relatives". In fact, if you want to keep track of when people are saying something interesting about Fighting Fantasy-based systems on RPGnet, do follow Andrew (greyarea13).

While I would likely revisit some of the stuff in Viscera! were I to produce a new version, or a "MyAFF3e", the thing I like about what I did produce is that there really is very little there, in terms of "crunch" at least. YOU are the Hero, and YOU can make this game, on the fly, at your table. If I were to produce a "MyAFF3e", that would be the principle by which I would try to check any instincts I might have towards the baroque.

My Monster Manual

Not quite, but here is a rare occasion where my professional life has *some* connection with fantastical, gameable content.

Later this year - just in time for your Christmas lists, hopefully - Routledge will publish a book I have written with Jamie Lewis on the sociology of Bigfooting.

To be fair, Jamie did most of the actual research, which involved well over a hundred interviews with Bigfooters - current, former, and even disillusioned - as well as a other people in the orbit of knowledge making re: Bigfoot - sceptics, academics, etc. What we have tried to do is reconstruct the rationality of Bigfooting as a knowledge making community, to treat it fairly and seriously, as Bigfooters themselves take the subject seriously.  

We published a precursor paper in Cultural Sociology last year, which is Open Access so anyone should be able to read it, should they wish.

The Magic of Familiarity

So what have I been playing over the past five years? Not a lot, at least not as regularly as I would have hoped or liked. I most recently ran OpenQuest 3e, an elegant distillation of d100 fantasy. I've run a few one-shots (even if it has taken us several short sessions) of Barbarians of Lemuria/Everywhen, one of my favourite systems. And in that time I did, of course, run a fair bit of Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e, a system to which I will inevitably keep bouncing back, despite my desire to 'fix' it - or perhaps because of that.

I will have more to say about each of those games in time, but the one thing this sporadic gaming had unfortunately reinforced has been the advantage of familiarity. Oh, yes, I am like all of you; I am constantly distracted and tempted by the new shiny thing, or even some quite old shiny things - I have recently been rereading/skimming through a lot of Fate rulebooks, keen to internalise the game logic that promises that player characters, in all their complications and diverse sources of narrative agency, power the rhythm of the game. We will see if I get there.

But this familiarity is why Advanced Fighting Fantasy really rolls at *my* table in ways that even OpenQuest and Barbarians of Lemuria do not. I can knock up an adventure more or less on the fly, or at least with half an hour of preparation. I can, roughly, anticipate how long each encounter or node will take to resolve mechanically, how likely is failure, how heavy might be the costs of success, and how much fun it will be to play out. At least at *my* table. 

So just default to published adventures, yes? Let the familiarity of another GM guide your path. But published adventures - even very good ones - are dotted with places and events where the GM using the adventure has to divine the intention of the writer, else risk a cascade of GM interpretations, undoing the advantage of relying on the crystallised familiarity[1] of the writer. Roleplaying games are a *lively* experience, and the adventure writer is 'dead'. One of the first things I do with a published adventure that I plan to run is print a copy and, with my red fineliner, go through the text (after changing the names to ones that I can pronounce) marking sections where I need to think carefully - and produce possible answers - about the ways in which the choices of the players might unravel what the writer assumed might happen next.  

I am not just talking about situations in which the PCs murder an important NPC, or set fire to an important (and flammable) adventure location. The great wonder of roleplaying games is that they are open and unconstrained; players can always do something to surprise you (murder and arson are rarely that surprising). But when it is *my* adventure, I do not need worry about how to roleplay Lord Blackstone's reaction to the PCs' diplomacy, their theological arguments, their threats, or whatever. Of course I know what Lord Blackstone is going to do, how he is going to react, because he is me! I invented him, perhaps months ago, perhaps five minutes ago. And my familiarity with the world and the system *as a way of producing an adventure game* means that even if I somehow get Lord Blackstone 'wrong' I can, as GM, unfold the world in a way that stands a chance of being satisfying to the people at the table. 

Apologies for the ramble, going over what it pretty old ground. Stuff about actual games soon, including some more stuff for AFF2e.

[1] I am using 'familiarity' here to mean something different to the way I would use 'system mastery'. It is not so much that a GM can resolve situations at the table with minimal rules reference, but that a GM has a intuitive feel for the logics and rhythms of the game - encounter, session, adventure, campaign, etc. - and player and GM *experience*. I think that you can have system mastery with a low level of familiarity, and given how often I check the rules for magic and priestly powers in Advanced Fighting Fantasy, I think you can have a high level of familiarity with imperfect system mastery. I possibly need a better term than 'familiarity', but I am wary of inventing new terms in my professional, academic writing, so I will not do so here.

Five years, my brain hurts a lot

"I cast 'Resurrection'."

<Rolls 'System Shock'.>

<Succeeds.>