The MUCH-ANTICIPATED Sequel to Shagduk is Now on Kickstarter

You may have missed out on Shagduk. If you did, you should feel bad! It really is the best novel to come out during the past several years. Here is my old Amazon review of the book:

Shagduk is great.

Yeah, it’s got weirdness, wonder, mystery, intrigue, and magic. Of course, it does! But all of that stuff hits the mark only because the rest of the book nails down 1977 Fort Worth, Texas musician/librarian so well. It just makes everything else pop!

We’ve all seen the repackaged versions of previous decades that are just oddly, even perilously off. We scream at televisions when our childhood soulscape is retuned for a Current Year ethos. You wonder sometimes if anyone will ever stand in the gap for you in this. Well, somebody did. My favorite bits are the music shop with the No Barney Miller sign, finding occult insights in the Mini-Pages, and flipping a calculator upside down to spell dirty words– all stuff I didn’t even know I’d forgotten. Stuff that really defined the furniture of a pre-internet world.

I think the most important thing this book captures is the sense of the time before the cocooning of America. VCR’s and microwave popcorn meant that nobody went out anymore back in the day– a soft foreshadowing of our too-recent lockdown life. 1977 wasn’t like that at all. Normal people want to go out and do things. A normal culture has things going on all the time. Not just countless regional music acts, but Scottish Tartan Thistle Dancers, too.

I miss that time. I miss those people.

If that doesn’t sell you on the book, then check out my what my pal Night Danger just said:

I didn’t think anyone after Lovecraft would ever do “Academic stumbles upon eldritch horrors” in an interesting or exciting way and yet here we are.

Holy cow! Yes! This book is so so great you will be shocked to realize that nobody could pull this off until now. It really is that mind blowing!

And now this incredible story has a sequel. Yes, this book which is better than every single new work sitting in your local big box book store has a sequel. There hasn’t been anything this exciting going since Roger Zelazny was still writing Amber novels. And you have a chance to get in on the ground floor and make this phenomenal author the success he deserves to be.

I am calling all of you out here. I have given away great gaming advice and discoveries for free right here on this blog for years. I never hawk my wares. I never hold out my rice bowl. I have done everything in my power to get you off of the endless module treadmill, to save you from tacky role-playing games that would sap your money and then never deliver any solutions to the actual problems you face at the table.

You owe me.

And the way you can pay me back is by supporting my friends Neal and JB over at Pilum books. So, get in there and back this thing today. I want this book fully funded on day one.

Now, get to it!

Falling Short of 1:1 Time and Braunstein Play in 1986

GURPS Second Edition is a game that no one wants to play with me.

It’s too bad, really. It’s an interesting game that came out at an interesting point of time. AD&D was still king of the hill. The second edition of that game wouldn’t come out for another three years. The DMG had been around for seven years then. Everyone knew they were smarter than Gary Gygax and everyone thought they had an idea so great that they could challenge the dominance of his vision.

And Steve! Steve Jackson was right there with a very big rework of his earlier rpg, The Fantasy Trip. Having been at the helm of Space Gamer magazine for many years at that point, he would have been well aware of what everyone else was up to in rpg development at the time. Just what exactly was his vision? How did it compare to Gygax’s framework laid out in AD&D? And again… how does Steve’s work compare to what the BrOSR is doing right now?

Well. It is rather intriguing. Steve Jackson did in fact describe a type of “Patron Play” which he termed Adversaries. Check it out:

Now, this is very limited compared to what we have been experimenting with in the #BrOSR, but this is still great advice. But gosh, Steve is so close to gaming greatness it hurts!

Note that his concept involves somebody that doesn’t get to commit themselves to playing a role to the hilt. Instead, they are sort of an assistant GM that is helping out by playing ALL of the NPC’s that are involved in the Adventure that encounter the players. Why would he draw the line there of all places?!

The tyranny of the spotlight is presumed to be in force here. Regular players are all assumed to be running just a single PC within the campaign. Under this model, you will not see something like you have in AD&D where a monk, druid, or assassin character advances and then has to face off against the next guy up from him in the hierarchy (run by another player no less) in order to hold that position.

Without the BrOSR concept of 1:1 time, Steve doesn’t really have a means of coordinating too much more than a single party… so the Braunstein-like elements of his conception of rpgs can only cover the most trivial implementations of patron play. He just doesn’t have a framework that can accommodate large numbers of independent actors!

Of course, Steve does weigh in on timekeeping as well. Let’s see what he says:

Steve Jackson suggests using stop-time between sessions… but then recommends having a set amount of time pass between adventures. This is a subtle distinction that a lot of #BrOSR critics would be eager to embrace. After all, this system would allow people who stop the game while the players are in a dungeon to just pick things back up the next time they get together. In fact, Steve Jackson explicitly highlights this exact type of situation– something the rpg scene has argued about almost nonstop since 2020.

There is a cost for this one design choice, however.

As we can see here, under Steve’s conception of rpgs, the GM is responsible for running all of the entities in the game outside of the players’ party. However much time the GM decides will happen between adventures, it’s entirely up to the GM to determine everything that happens in that period. People used to BrOSR style play would balk at the idea of having to be responsible for that much stuff in the game. Everyone else is liable to wax poetic about the god-like sway they hold over their campaign worlds.

Now, I am sure people can make this sort of thing work. But I have to question what the track record is for this method. Does it produce, as Gygax would have framed it, “the most interesting play possibilities to the greatest number of participants for the longest period of time possible”?

I don’t think it does.

Being able to run a campaign where “a war between players [is] going on (with battles actually fought out on the tabletop with miniature figures) one night, while on the next, characters of these two contending players [help] each other to survive somewhere in a wilderness” is just way more exciting. For one thing, players don’t really respect things in the campaign that sprang entirely from the referee’s mind alone. But if you create a list of rumors that are derived from the actions of other players that are operating against each other’s interests under a fog of war they will engage with it obsessively. (Note: this happens not just in large ongoing wargame scenarios but also in more modest campaigns where people from more than one table begin interacting as adversaries.)

GURPS, of course, eliminates all the material required to effect that sort of two-tier ongoing campaign with lots of player activity developing concurrently. I mean, you can stat up a king with status 7 or whatever and then play his role in the context of some kind of narrative game. But you can’t actually run his kingdom or immerse yourself in diplomatic nightmare he faces in juggling the interests of objectives of his neighboring monarchs.

Which means you can’t really set up the sort of model worlds that the bros like to tinker with so much. Which means you don’t get the sort of surprising emergent story phenomena that never ceases to amaze players and referees alike. Those effects only happen when your campaign reaches a certain critical mass of independent actors. And Steve’s concept of the game puts a very hard upper limit on how many characters and factions and forces that GURPS GM’s could handle.

Of course, Steve wasn’t putting together a type of wargame campaign at all. He set all that aside in order to focus entirely on creating a roleplaying game.

Was it worth it?

That depends on what you’d select given the choice between having a successful campaign and a shelf of unplayed games.

Not Nice at All

Looking over all reactions to Jeffro/BrOSR stuff, most of it from the now broken search engines is from 2022 or so. There is a lot of hate for the “one true wayism”, for the bro affect, for things that got me canceled in the previous decade which half of you don’t even know about. I get a lot of flack for my internet persona, but really… there is an amount of outrage and vitriol here that seems entirely out of place if it were the case that we all were really only talking about how to play a particularly strange vintage game.

But now you’ve got these guys [posting in the comments here]. They dismiss people outright for saying something provocative. (“Oh, that’s just trolling!”) They are bitter if someone developing a thesis punches back when people try to agree in a way that subtly negates it. They wanted something in an exchange they’ve had with us. People like this come to us all the time and praise us and want to be friends. But then they make a demand. “Please bro. Say that what I am doing in my campaign is okay, too. I said your campaign is okay. Please. Please just say that mine is okay, too.”

No, dude. My thesis is that it isn’t.

Wailing and gnashing of teeth then ensues. Later, people like this rendezvous and try to console each other. “Oh! So terrible! Aren’t I entitled to an opinion?!” This is all wrong. I am the person with an opinion. They are the ones that desperately want me to not have one!

This of course has nothing to do with rpgs at all. People like this have an a priori commitment to an idea that there is no such thing as objective truth. They are passive aggressively attempting to get me to bow the knee to it in every exchange. This is REALLY irritating.

When post modernists arrive in the world of rpgs, they ditch the rule books. All of this “rule zero” stuff isn’t a game design concept at all. It’s a sop for people that refuse to have ANYONE tell them what to do. After all, “what’s fun at my table is totally different.” There are varying shades of how people express this idea. Ironically, I like the weakly stated variants of it the least because they are really the most dangerous. The attitude amounts to “it’s okay to tear down the fence as long as you know why it was there first.” Such a catastrophe!

So now for me or the brosr to have any opinion at all, we have to repudiate post-modernism, explain the idea that objective truth is real and words have meanings, and then also convey the idea that we don’t really owe anyone in rpgs our blessing if we think they’re wrong. But it gets worse! Most people are dumb. We routinely uncover evidence that people are ridiculously illiterate compared to what would have been normal in the 1970s. So, we’re going to have this really nuanced discussion about these abstract ideas… with people that can’t read?

How can you communicate across this cultural gap at all? Well… I’ll tell you. You post pictures of Mike Mentzer. You come up with slogans like “you can win at rpgs.” You tell people asking for D&D advice to “go to the gym, go outside, and talk to a pretty girl.” You start speaking in off the wall parables– that sound like totally off topic digressions on social dance. And I know that sounds crazy. And I know you think I am insane. But let me tell you something. The reason these people are so mad is not because our rhetoric is so ridiculous or annoying or offensive. The reason they are mad is due to the fact they actually get the point.

So now we get to this guy Redcap. Nice dude. Runs a great show. I really appreciate him. He has done me a tremendous solid. I have always wondered what it would be like if NPR ran a segment on my ideas during Fresh Air. And he really and truly managed to pull it off. Redcap is nice. He really is. Ah! The number of times the average teenage boy today is exhorted to be “nice”! What does that even mean?

Well, I’ll tell you. It means Redcap can’t even say my name. The cult of “nice” is capable of such mean things, isn’t it? There are so many other things we could have inculcated people with besides “nice”. Virtue for starters. Things like honesty, courage, noblesse oblige. I sometimes think that “nice” is a repudiation of those things. But Redcap is nice. And he really doesn’t like having to pick a side.

I hate it, too. You know… just the other day I remember I was actually even required to put on the “jersey” of the opposing team just to go to the grocery store or sit through a Christmas eve service. Where were all the “nice” people that didn’t like having to pick a side THEN I wonder?

But we were talking about rpgs. And yeah, I am afraid that all of this high-handed philosophy talk is really just a cover for an uglier, more fundamental battle. Rule zero as it is commonly practiced amounts to little more than “do as thou wilt show be the whole of the law.” And this is probably the greatest surprise of all to emerge from this entire fight over the nature of rpgs: it really does all boil down to a weird shadow war between the forces of Law and Chaos. This. After decades of people arguing that the idea of alignment makes absolutely no sense.

I hate to break it to you, but this war between the “do as thou wilt” people and the people that oppose them isn’t just some tacky internet debate where it makes sense for everyone to just be nice and make friends. It is the outward evidence of a very real spiritual battle.

In that war, no one has the option of being exempt from picking a side.

Tunnels & Trolls is the First Rpg

It’s true.

If you love rpgs, then the man to whom you owe everything isn’t Dave Arneson, it isn’t Gary Gygax, and it isn’t David Wesely. It’s Ken St. Andre.

Stay with me on this. We have an iron-clad case here!

In the first place, Braunstein is not an rpg. Yes, it has a referee that is similar to what you find in rpgs. It has players playing roles like they would in an rpg. Nevertheless, it is a fundamentally different type of game from rpgs. Braunstein is explicitly competitive where rpgs tend to be cooperative. In rpg’s, the referee is much more of a mastermind and often described as being sort of a “god”. In Braunstein, the players are liable to run out of control when away from the referee– and the referee himself may not have a clear idea of what all is really going on. This is a fundamentally different type of game!

What about Blackmoor, then? Take a look at The First Fantasy Campaign and you don’t get a description of how to set up and run an rpg campaign. You get a bunch of random notes on how he set up an incredibly large multi-year Chainmail campaign. Though this campaign was initially billed as being a type of Braunstein, it is clearly such a departure from David Wesely’s game that it rapidly turned into something else.

Original Dungeons & Dragons would be the game which most people that aren’t eggheads would describe as being the first rpg. However, sit down and attempt to play the game that is actually described by the rules and you will get a game that is quite unlike anything people playing rpgs are doing. The 1:1 time rule contained within its pages turns the game into a sort of continuous, ongoing Braunstein. It also allows the referee to coordinate the activities of multiple independent parties, characters, and factions under a fog of war. When played in this manner it becomes necessary to actually use all of the wargame elements from the game that roleplayers typically omit from their campaigns. From this vantage point D&D becomes precisely what is written on the cover of its rules volumes: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Playable with Pencil and Paper and Miniature Figures.

That subtitle is not what anyone into rpgs thinks of when they attempt to define rpgs. That subtitle isn’t the result of someone reaching for words to describe the concept of rpgs before the term even existed yet. It’s a very clear indication that D&D is a unique sort of game that is unlike anything people imagine it to be.

D&D is not a role-playing game. It is a framework for creating a type of continuing campaign that is much more in line with the things you see written up in Arneson’s First Fantasy Campaign than anything really that came after. So, what is a roleplaying game? Rpgs are derivative of Original Dungeons & Dragons. But they did not evolve from it. Rpgs are what people created when they wanted to play D&D but could only understand fragments of its rules. The only way they could play it was if they created their own game out of just the parts that they could understand.

This new type of game tended to eject the 1:1 time rule of OD&D. It shifted from being a sprawling wargame campaign to focusing almost entirely on the exploits of a single party. Dungeon exploration became the primary focus in this initial phase of rpgs with nearly every other gameplay mode being relegated to handwaving and ad hoc rulings. So many needful rules got thrown out that a very early paraphrase of the idea of “rulings not rules” quickly emerged as a means of holding this new amateurish type of non-game together– typified by the phrase be reasonable. All of the premises and assumptions games like Rifts and GURPS and the B/X branch of D&D can be traced back to this point.

The first person to get aggravated that he could not understand D&D, create a variant rule set that detailed how to play the type of game that people today think of as being an rpg, and then publish it and get it into the hands of people that wanted in on this burgeoning hobby is Ken St. Andre. And the game he did it with was Tunnels & Trolls.

Everyone that loves rpgs owes him a tremendous debt. Even as late as 1979 Gary Gygax was still convinced that the thing hobby gaming needed most was a set of instructions that would recreate the awesome scope of the old Blackmoor campaign. He completely failed to anticipate that the derivative non-games of the people that had no idea what he was pointing people toward would ultimately overwhelm his own efforts and even retroactively define what people understood OD&D and AD&D to even be.

If you love rpgs, then truly… you owe Ken St. Andre a tremendous debt. And not just Ken, either really. But everyone that lacked the ability to read and follow the instructions of this odd little group of eccentrics that hailed from the Midwest.

Thank you, Ken!

And thank you to everyone who just didn’t get it!

Braunstein Was the First Braunstein

They keep saying that David Wesely’s 1968 Braunstein was the first rpg.

Questing Plagiarist: “By fusing the tactical infinity of wargames with the concept of each player playing a single character, Wesely had inadvertently created a new type of game: the rpg.”

Mr, Professor: “Dave Arneson, the co-creator of D&D, was the first player to ever die in a roleplaying game.”

That’s a nice bit of rhetorical sleight of hand, isn’t it? By virtue of the fact that they never define their terms, they are able to insinuate all manner of things that just aren’t true. Pretty tacky! People like this are not precisely dumb. They are primarily malicious. They will happily undercut their own credibility as sages of rpg lore just to prevent people from learning how to win at rpgs.

So, let’s not be like these losers. Let’s define our terms now so that we can all know what we are talking about.

Braunstein: A Diplomacy-like game where players take on individual roles either cooperating or else working against each other’s interests under a fog of war. The referee meets with them in succession and while the referee adjudicates interactions between players as they come up, the other players are free to engage in negotiations and diplomacy in the next room

Rpg: Conventionally, an rpg is a cooperative game where the players take on individual roles within an adventuring party and work together to overcome a range of challenges in a sequence of encounters adjudicated by a referee. This type of game can run from relatively procedural dungeon crawling type games all the way up to more freeform narratives that only retain an illusion of being a game.

It is natural to ask how something like a Braunstein could evolve into what we today think of as an Rpg, and the answer to that is that… it didn’t. Conventional rpg play is derived from a weird and broken folk game that was collectively improvised by entire generations of people that lacked the virtues required to either read or implement that rules that are outlined in the OD&D and AD&D rules manuals. Astonishing but true!

Those of us that do not pronounce the word “Braunstein” with a ridiculous impression of a German accent can all see it clearly, however. Braunstein was its own type of game distinct from all others both before and since. It was a highly volatile form of game and to this day it is extraordinarily compelling to anyone that experiments with them. Just as with Diplomacy, there are many variants of the original Braunstein game. Colloquially, we call these variants “Braunsteins”. If you devised one yourself and adjudicated it, you would naturally tell people that you “ran a Braunstein”. Everyone would understand what you meant by this… unless they were simultaneously stupid, ugly, malicious, and dumb.

Now… there is a question of why Dave Arneson would bill his Blackmoor game as a “Braunstein” when it was first announced. Was it originally intended to be a single session event like Wesely’s? Did it subsequently rage out of control and turn into something else? There are quite a few people alive today that might know a few things about this matter, but at this point I have no doubt that they would outright set fire to any primary documents still extant that might corroborate anything I have to say about it. No matter. There are actually many more intriguing questions. And the best thing about it is you don’t have to wait for old boomer to let you in on the game.

• Why does Braunstein play fit so well with the older D&D rule sets?
• Why does Braunstein play seem to solve so many problems that would kill off so many other continuing campaigns?
• Why is it that people that have been bred on conventional approaches to rpgs become so thrilled and engaged and elated with they participate in continuing campaigns that consciously leverage David Wesely’s ideas?

It’s a mystery! And strangely enough, sinister forces in the real world are arrayed against you, dead set on preventing you from solving it!

Honestly, though, they can’t stop us. Even better they can’t stop you! Because someone has taken the time to show you how to get the best possible results of integrating Braunstein events with ongoing continuing D&D campaigns. And that guy is Night Danger.

Check out his recent session report detailing his phenomenal game session here. Also, check out the video below where he shares his thoughts on the finer points of how to get the best results when running this type of game. They are cogent, lucid, and of great utility to anyone looking to try this in their own campaigns. Speaking of which, why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win? There has never been a better time! It has never been easier to do this than right now.

Night Danger has demonstrated that you really can win at rpgs. And more than that… he has explained how you can, too.