Imazine 36

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ROLEGAMING MAGAZINE

ISSUE 36

SUMMER 2000

ISSN 0267-5595 Editor: Paul Mason

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This publication is freeware. It may be freely copied and distributed on condition that no money is charged. All material is copyright © 2000, original authors and may not be reproduced without their permission.

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Contributions may be sent on paper, on disk, or by email. The less formatting you insert, the better. Please don’t try to imitate the layout, especially using tabs etc. Italics used for emphasis and for product names are fine, but no more. Preferred format is Rich Text.

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Let me know if you want to be advised by email when a new issue is out, or if I should email it to you direct (all 400K–1Mb of it!) Post Imazine/Paul Mason 101 Green Heights, Shimpo-cho ¯ 4-50, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-0072 JAPAN Email [email protected] Web www.tcp-ip.or.jp/~panurge www.firedrake.org/panurge ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/panurge

a long time, but I’ve finally reached issue 36. In the Year of the Dragon, my year, the zine finally reaches my age. Sorry about the long wait, but too many things have got in the way. To be honest, they continue to get in the way—I have a huge pile of editing to do over the next couple of weeks, not to mention exam marking. But these are no more than excuses, the stockin-trade of the fanzine editor, and I’m supposed to be introducing an all-singing, all-dancing new issue. When it comes right down to it, though, this magazine costs you (virtually) nothing, and it costs me a lot, so I think I can be cut a little slack for these occasional periods of inaction.

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Reviews Puppetland & Powerkill More New Style™ Hogshead games Dragon Fist High value D&D Chinese roleplaying Bloode Island 1-page pirate RPG by Deep 7 Orbit Small-press SF gaming Raining Hammers Gamebooks meet RPGs in the Old West Two-Fisted Tales Small-press pulp play

9 Players & Pints Imazine used to have articles like this. I’d almost forgotten; now you can find out why. In case you’re worrying, ‘New Style’ is indeed a Hogshead Publishing trademark. But they say fair use allows for parody... 13 New Outlaws, New Layout The publication of Outlaws of the Water Margin is like the journey to Usenánu—an interminable and apparently pointless process. Paul Mason outlines his unrealistic demands for the next stage. 15 Colloquy More letters, from the sane to the serial killer, the demure to the drunk. Some are short and some are long. Some are heavily edited. What more could you want?

For abstruse technical reasons, I decided I had to keep this issue down to 20 pages. This means that several things that should have gone in did not, and among these was a plug for Tim Harford’s excellent Annwn fanzine on the web. Take it as read, and I’ll make up for this next issue. If you’re lucky. I would also like to remind you that you, personally have promised me an article and/or letter of comment, even if you currently don’t seem to remember making any such promise. I’ll forgive you the non-appearance of said contribution on condition you get one to me in time for the next issue (by which I mean September). I

r e v i e w s OR REVIEWS TO BE really valuable, of course, they should be recent, and here I’m afraid the erratic schedule of imazine works against me. But I do what I can. One thing I can promise, which doesn’t seem to be observed very much nowadays, if it ever was, is that imazine reviews products without fear or favour. A game supplied by a publisher, complete with PR bumf, will obtain

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no more generous treatment than something bought. If you doubt this, check out last issue’s Imagine review. If you would like to review games with the freedom to criticise, then feel free to get in touch. I would also be grateful if readers would note that I do not write all the reviews presented here!

Puppetland & Power Kill Reviewed by Daniel Flood A BSURDITY IS PAYING for a hard cover with the full knowledge it will cost you twice that in source book before you play. Suspect is a package costing a third the hard cover that claims to be two complete games. Following the success of their first New Style™ release, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Hogshead Publishing has released John Tynes’ Puppetland and Power Kill. Available free on the net for some time now, both present very strange value for money. After a decade of angst-driven role playing, the thought of a storytelling game that claims to be steeped in grim whimsy is less then inspiring. It’s a case of everyone has been there and probably done that. What makes Puppetland different though, is its originality, complete commitment to its themes and 20 heavily illustrated pages in which it accomplishes the seemingly impossible: a complete role playing game that will never see a further source book. Of course, that’s all well and good but how does it read? John Tynes has created a world of storybook gone bad, where Punch has murdered the Maker and now rules the population of Puppetland with a stuffing-stained mallet. There is no daylight or blue skies in Puppetland, only a perpetual night where Punch’s vile minions scurry to enforce Punch’s insane rule. There is hope though (isn’t there always?), a small band of brave puppets dedicated to the destruction of Punch’s evil and the resurrection of the Maker. As you can probably guess, these are the players fighting an evil against which there is seemingly little hope. Puppetland is a strange blend between Call of Cthulhu and an episode of the Smurfs. It works. The world established invokes a grim atmosphere more unsettling than the stylish gothic angst of contemporary horror, and more intriguing. Puppetland’s diceless system is simple and elegant, revolving around a list of things the character can or cannot do. Damage is equally as simple; each player has sixteen puzzle pieces (hit points) that represents their life. Each time the character takes major damage (leg being bitten off, burnt alive and all manner of nasty things) a puzzle piece is filled in and the puppet wakes up the next morning, fully healed of the damage but missing a puzzle piece. Once all pieces are filled in, the character never wakes up again. These pieces can never be taken away and this inexorable encroachment of death only helps make Puppetland that much more scary game. Puppetland’s system has been designed to drive the game, a rarity in this industry where setting is often considered secondary to system. Whereas most diceless systems are recommended for advanced gamers,

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Puppetland would probably best succeed in the hands of an experienced GM and new players. Unlike most role playing games, Puppetland has an ending, the destruction of Punch and in this way it is a disposable rolegame. And then there is the way it is played, everything being narrated in the third person, story book style. The old ‘my character picks up the rock and throws it at the baddy’ is replaced by ‘Sammie the marionette does thrust the mighty orb of granite at the foul nut crackers skull’ as the narration aims to entertain as it unfolds: a wonderful idea that new gamers will adapt to quickly while experienced gamers may take a while getting used to. Of course you could adapt the game and play it however you’d like, but I think you’d lose something in the process, probably the joy of the story books Puppetland so eloquently corrupts.

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▼ On the flip side (flip the book upside down and there it is), Power Kill is an oddity, a ‘Meta-game’ you run alongside an existing campaign. It is quite simple: the player is a psychotic delusional who creates fantasies to excuse their crimes. So while you might be running a standard loot and pillage dungeon bash, the Power Kill character is slaughtering the residents of a low income tenement. The Councillor (GM) questions the characters at the beginning and end of a session, in hope of over time curing the person’s antisocial behaviour. So much for healthy fantasy. Power Kill attempts to address violence in gaming. It’s a battle that has been waged for over a decade, across innumerable issues of magazines and public forums. Now it has its own game. You’ll either love the idea or hate it. I find rationalisation to be the opposite of fantasy, so I probably won’t use Power Kill in my campaign.

Dragon Fist Reviewed by Paul Mason CHINESE ROLEGAMES HAVE come a long way since I was underwhelmed by Mystic China and GURPS China in imazine 23. Yet even those games represented a considerable advance on Oriental Adventures, the D&D mishmashery that exhibited all the worst aspects of TSR’s disregard for culture. So what to make of Dragon Fist, the new D&D Chinese rolegame? Firstly, though D&D it is clear we can now forget TSR, as this name is disappearing. Can it be long before Wizards of the Coast, too, disappears from Hasbro’s hobby games portfolio? But does the removal of the name of the company Gygax founded also mean the eradication of his legacy? The answer, of course, is no. Before I describe how the Ghost of Gary G still hovers over this game, a few details are in order. Dragon Fist was a project by Chris Pramas from before the Hasbro takeover. In the wake of the inevitable ‘rationalisation’, it was facing cancellation, but Pramas cleverly suggested an alternative— publish it free in Acrobat format! Thus interested parties can obtain this game free from the Wizards of the Coast web site, and for this, if nothing else, Pramas and the rump Wizards are to be commended. The game comes in a set of 9 PDF files, clearly designed from print rather than screen use. There has been no attempt made to make use of any of Acrobat’s features, but given the circumstances surrounding the game’s publication this is hardly a surprise. Personally I like paper, so it was no problem for me. Layout is clean and admirably pedestrian (it actually

bargain price.

It’s a personal preference thing. Interior illustrations are excellent. They set the mood for Puppetland, managing to capture the whimsy inherent in the background. The covers do not and it’s a shame. The Power Kill cover is pedestrian and uninspiring while for Puppetland Hogshead made second use of a piece originally used in arcane magazine. It looks good but lets the package, as a whole, down. Alone, Puppetland is worth the asking price while Power Kill is a mixed bag that will appeal to some and not others. If Hogshead can keep up the standard which they have set by this product, then maybe there is a future in the New Style™ line; high quality, disposable roleplaying at a I

Puppetland & Powerkill are published by Hogshead Publishing. www.hogshead.demon.co.uk

resembles the original—unpublished—design for Outlaws). As you might expect from a professional outfit, it is free from the typographical eyesores that blight the likes of Imagine (reviewed last issue). I said at the start of the review that Dragon Fist is Chinese D&D, and here I must confess to misleading you. Dragon Fist is actually set in Tianguo, a sort of fantasy empire based on China (just like the Wulin of Swords of the Middle Kingdom). Once again, as with Swords, Legend of the Five Rings, and 7th Sea, I have to ask what is the point? Why go to such lengths to fabricate an artificial China? Why write Jianmin rather than Qianlong, Zuyang rather than Luoyang, Zu rather than Yao? John Wick, who wrote 7th Sea, has provided some reasons in his column at the interesting web site Gaming Outpost (www.gamingoutpost.com/), and I must confess to finding them rather limp. Uncharitable soul that I am, I will nevertheless propose some possibilities, not all of which John mentioned. One is to ‘lock in’ purchasers to the game world, and encourage them to buy your product rather than simply visiting a library—a purely commercial motive. Another is to save the author from being castigated for botched research—a purely cowardly motive. Yet another is to provide the ‘freedom’ to improvise in the setting—a meaningless motive, for it is perfectly possible to improvise freely in a ‘real’ setting. Thus Dragon Fist is wasteful because it deprives players of the convenience of using real world source material as is. The game could just as easily be set in Zhongguo, with a fantasy plot based on the Qing Emperor Qianlong (or, indeed, a host of other emperors). The ‘China Lite’ approach that has been taken in the game could just as easily have been based on the real China. Tianguo and its inhabitants are no more intrinsically easy to remember or deal with than any historical Chinese, and are less

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▼ amenable to reinforcement from source material or entertainment—including the Hong Kong movies so frequently referenced throughout the game. Digging deeper into the background makes it clear, furthermore, that the second excuse for fantasising the country is not justified here—Pramas demonstrates ample research and gut feel for the background, far exceeding that of Erick ‘Diceless’ Wujcik, the irritable author of Mystic China. I might quibble introductory fiction, which seems to suggest a Western take on hell and demonology, but later sections make it clear that this is not, after all, a misinterpretation, but a deliberate upsetting of the cosmic balance to create an established conflict in the game background. The ‘pronunciation guides’ provided for Chinese names in the game are execrable, and here Pramas has fallen victim to that most dreaded of writers’ foes—the inept editor. Sadly, the editor cannot be blamed for the game’s greatest linguistic blunder: the claim that wuxia (‘martial chivalry’) means ‘flying people’. Sadly this booboo is partly integrated into the rules (in the name of a manœuvre), so it is even more prominent than it might be.

Operating Systems So far I’ve said little about the systems, and I’m sure you can imagine why. To me, D&D has a lot in common with CP/M. I don’t deny its place in history, but the thought of using it in this day and age gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies (notwithstanding the fact that Jonathan Tweet is designing D&D 3rd edition). It is evident that Chris Pramas has made a tremendous effort to overcome this problem, and in some areas he has been remarkably successful. Nevertheless, D&D weights this game down even more than MS-DOS shackles Windows. My heart sank first at the Gygaxisms. I grant you, I have been blissfully underexposed to D&D products for many years, but I had somehow imagined that at least some of his crimes against the English language, and good sense in general, might have been rectified after he left TSR. But no: we still have ‘save vs paralyzation’, alignment, and sundry others. It’s what Microsoft call a ‘legacy’. As I’ve written elsewhere, in some ways Chinese society was rather Gygaxian. Its thinkers often took the same sort of taxonomic approach to humanity. While in some ways this might justify the use of character classes, the use of the ‘classic’ four—Fighter, Magic User (here translated from Gygaxian into ‘Wizard’—hooray!), Shaman (a more problematic translation) and Thief—reflects no reality of Chinese society and culture, and is thus just the same arbitrary nonsense it always was. Pramas even manages to pointedly demonstrate this with his reference to A Chinese Ghost Story’s Swordsman Yen, whom he refers to as ‘a

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good example’ of a Chinese-style Wizard (how is that different to a ‘Chinese Wizard’, I wonder?). Maybe the film has been cut differently in the US, but to me ‘They are not skilled in hand-to-hand combat but can use the following simple weapons: light or repeating crossbow, dagger, staff, three-section staff, and war fan’ bears no relation to Swordsman (or was that War Fan Man?) Yen. ‘Shaman’ I mentioned earlier as a problematic term for Cleric. One can argue that Tianguo is not Zhongguo, and thus it is acceptable, but following this argument suggests a world designed to fit the game rules, not really something for anyone to be proud of. Perhaps to try to alleviate the silliness of the D&D character class system, Dragon Fist attempts to plug characters into the background with ‘kits’, corresponding to a set of secret societies. The problem is that this taxonomy gone mad just emphasises the feeling that a background has been shoehorned into a rule-shaped mould, while simultaneously echoing the approach pioneered by White Wolf. Both Feng Shui and L5R, which recognise the commercial potential of exploiting this particular anal retentive tendency of rolegamers, do so in a freer, more natural manner than this.

Sichuan Duck If D&D stands for one thing in roleplaying it is for arbitrary limitation, and Dragon Fist is thus no exception. All of the foregoing, though it has to be said, is in a way inevitable. One doesn’t expect lean, efficient, intuitive software from Microsoft, so it is perhaps foolish to expect its equivalent from the heirs of TSR. So having established the foundations upon which Dragon Fist rests, I’ll turn my attention to the details that militate against the legacy of Oriental Adventures. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no doubt that Chris Pramas has a good feel for his material. He obviously loves Hong Kong movies, and has bust a gut to represent their fluid action within the laced-up lamellar that is the D&D combat system. So we still have the one minute melee round and the ‘roll d20 to hit AC’ mechanic, but on top of that we have (more taxonomy!) manœuvres, stunts and feats. I don’t know if this is a standard D&D redefinition, but AC has been sensibly changed to become the number you need to roll to hit a person. At a stroke we eliminate swathes of stripy tables! The key to Hong Kong combat is speed, and Dragon Fist features a stunt-derived initiative score that must be determined for each melee round. After that, combat works in the old way—roll to hit and if successful roll for damage. The stunts system lifts Dragon Fist out of D&D mediocrity, however. Each round players describe what their characters are doing, and say what sort of stunt they are using. There are six stunt types, one for each attribute, and

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▼ characters’ bonuses in each stunt are determined by the appropriate stunt, and increase with level. The neat thing is that stunt bonuses can be used for different tactics, and the choice of six offers a small but interesting range of tactical options, which also provide story interest. For example, a Fortitude (based on constitution) stunt bonus can be used to temporarily increase hit points, for that round only, while Savvy (intelligence) can be applied to any one roll, so long as it can be justified. This system is, I feel, the most significant contribution of the game, and is well worth a look. It has the advantage that it can fold back into very simple form for speedy resolution, while it also supports and encourages highly descriptive combats.

Rice Meal Dragon Fist is a victim of piecemeal systems, which manifests in such areas as non-lethal damage. This has always been a weakness of D&D combat and is particularly noticeable in a game featuring unarmed combat. Dragon Fist has to fudge with an arbitrary rule, and it undermines fidelity to the sources. Much more successfully, the ‘contests’ mechanic extends combat to a variety of realms—drinking contests, humiliation etc. It also encourages description and uses the ‘stunt roll’ mechanic as an accumulated bonus to a single resolution roll. Again, this is a classic D&D piecemeal solution, but it is worth a look for the way it extends combat beyond the narrow boundaries of swordplay and fisticuffs. Magic is basically D&D magic, but with interesting spells: you know, fancy names like ‘Scales of the Lizard’, Five Elements, Yin-Yang, that sort of stuff. The resemblance confirmed what had been irking me for a while: the rigidity and inadequacy of the Outlaws magic system.

Bloode Island Reviewed by Paul Mason A ROUND THE TIME my Outlaws game was winding down, I started thinking that a pirate game might be interesting. Some of my players agreed, but unfortunately they were the ones who were leaving Japan, and they didn’t include the new referee, so nothing came of it. Around that time, 7th Sea had been released, with more of the ersatz approach of Legend of the 5 Rings, and which therefore didn’t tempt me. So how about Bloode Island? First of all, it’s a game which is very much closer to the James Wallis way of making a game than to the

We then get experience points and monsters, which are adequately done, especially if you like that sort of thing (though I blanched at the old one about bonus eeps for ‘contributing to the story’). Much more interesting is the chapter on the campaign, in which we find advice about how to build a ‘Villain Tree’ a feature that closely matches what you see in the films that provide the source material. Unfortunately, the section that details the rest of the background: any information about the society and the culture, was inexplicably missing from my copy, and didn’t appear in the Table of Contents either. Odd, that. On the other hand, Chapter 7 does refer readers to a wonderful book called Outlaws of the Water Margin… On a personal level, my litmus test for any ‘oriental’ roleplaying game is how often it makes me think about changing my own rules. Sengoku, favourably reviewed last issue, made me think about presentation and organisation, but I didn’t once feel that it had anything to contribute to my mechanics. Dragon Fist on the other hand, despite the enormous disadvantage of D&D, has enough flair and inventiveness to set me thinking at various points. In particular, I was interested by the resemblance between the stunt and contest mechanics and the fractal/critical incident systems I noted that I was after last issue. Given the price (free once you’re connected to the Internet) I can recommend the game unreservedly to anyone interested in Chinese roleplaying and in search of inspiration. And if you are unfortunate/fortunate enough to like D&D, you may even want to play the game! I Dragon Fist is nominally published by TSR/Wizards of the Coast, and may be downloaded for free. Go to www.wizards.com/dnd/DF_Downloads.asp. Also available for the game from the same address is a short adventure called Dragon & Phoenix, in which you are a hero of the martial world, improbably allying with other martial arts organisations to rescue the Empress.

John Wick. Deep 7 specialise in onepage role-playing games, and although Bloode Island has ten, most of that is scenarios. The actual rules are on a single page. I suspect that your reaction to the game is likely to depend, more than anything, on what you feel about this whole idea. Many people, I know, are dismissive of games this slender. ‘Knocking up a mechanic is the easy part,’ they say. ‘Anyone can do that. If I’m buying a game I want development.’ Bloode Island is billed as a ‘beer and pretzels’ game, so development is the last thing you can look for. The background is quickly described in terms of pirate movies. Anyone who gets a 1-page pirate RPG can reasonably be expected to be familiar

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▼ with this background! But this means that to succeed, it has to compete based on its mechanic, and on the efficiency with which useful scenario possibilities are crammed in. The mechanic is not spectacular (roll one die under a target number to succeed, with 1 always a success and 6 always a failure). It is explained with gusto, and there are blood and guts involved (blood is hit points, guts is what keeps your presence intact). It is all explained on a page which also functions as the character sheet. The next page is the ref’s page, which contains short and sweet advice on running the game, stressing that it is designed to be disposable. There follow five scenarios, demonstrating clearly that the game is designed to be played in single, relatively short sessions, each exploring one of the tropes of the genre. Perhaps scenarios is the wrong word: scenario seeds would be better. Each takes up only one page. All the same, the presence of phrases like ‘At this point, the party should be thinking...’ sets off off warning bells. In scenario seeds, especially, I believe it is a mistake to railroad. A common defence of the practice rests on the alleged affinities between cinema and roleplaying, affinities which are obviously being exploited here. Nevertheless, playing up those affinities too much simply draws attention to how

weak the visuals of roleplaying games are, a deficiency which is usually compensated for by the unpredicatability and freedom to affect the outcome... On the other hand, the scenarios are unequivocally set in our world, and although they don’t go to town on historical accuracy (how can you in a game this size) this makes it much easier to expand and improvise. Finally, a warning about the layout. The text is crammed in a fairly small point size on to letter size paper, in single wide columns, and with minimal margins. One can understand that this was done to save space, but it doesn’t add to the pleasure of reading the games, and perhaps more importantly the necessity of shrinking the pages to fit the width on the paper size used in the modern world (A4) will make it even less readable. On the plus side, the game is downloadable in PDF format, and will only set you back $4.95. The company offers quite a range of other games, too, not only one-page games, but longer efforts. There are few free downloads available to tempt you, and the site is quite well appointed. Worth a visit.

Orbit

(twenty-something though he may be) is being indulged by a wealthy parent. There’s no evidence of any of that here. Indeed, Jeff’s name does not appear on the title page, and is only put in small letters of the base of the next page in a copyright notice. Refreshing modesty. I’ve already mentioned the cover. Inside, Jeff is lucky that I’ve recently got on a Swiss typography kick, and am therefore inclined to be welldisposed towards relatively spartan sans serif type. The artwork is a little more problematic. I have the immediate problem that I don’t like manga-style artwork. Moreover, I’m not a fan of guns or anthopomorphosized animals, so that also alienates me to a lot of what’s on offer here. Much of the art is well executed, but there is also some very poor material indeed. But I mentioned old-fashionedness a little earlier and still haven’t offered much in the way of evidence. So let me note that although character generation is based on a points-build system, this feeds a set of tables of modifiers, % to resist poison and so on not a million miles away from the horrors of D&D (soon to be put to rest, we assume, in the third edition). We also find ourselves choosing from a set of ‘character races’ including the felines of the cover, Predator-inspired super-warriors, reptiles, dwarfs (spelled the Gygaxian way) and so on. To me, this is the sci-fi game equivalent of elves, dwarves, half-elves etc.

Reviewed by Paul Mason WHOOAR! LOOK AT the jugs on that cat! While I doubt that anyone will actually say this, and I’m loth to throw my cap into the ring as a US-style Censorious Voice™, I did feel a little sad that even the producer of a selfpublished game feels it necessary to put cleavage on the cover. Amongst other things, it gives a very strong impression of old-fashionedness about this game, an impression which is confirmed by the contents. Orbit is produced without unnecessary farting around, to what I regard as a pretty clean standard. The version I have came with one of those plastic spiral bindings and transparent plastic over the paper cover, which works well enough, though Jeff Diamond did mention something to me about a three-ring binder version: which would have been bugger-all use to me as I live in the modern world. You can often tell a lot about the author of a selfpublished game by the way they put together their title page. I’m sure you’re familiar with the sort of game on which is emblazoned in large letters the name of the designer: Hiram P Gaymdesainer Jr. A further glance down the credits makes it immediately obvious that little Hiram

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Bloode Island is published by Deep 7, who can be found at http://www.deep7.com

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▼ I skipped past a few pages of tables and rules to give the game more of a chance, alighting on ‘The Orbit Universe’. So you see, there’s a feder.. er... Alliance of starfaring civilizations, all of whom apparently accept a gold standard as the basis of their economies. The Alliance has a pretty large mixed-race military force of warships etc, to defend the Alliance from... er... not quite sure what: pirates and smugglers, it would appear, as well as some ‘pests’ like Ratmen and Slig and Vax. There’s a little bit more general stuff about the universe, but then the game gets back into its stride with lots of hardware followed by psionic powers. Before launching into the intricacies of combat and starships, there is some general role-playing pep-talking and background for the referee. Here, with such recommended adventure sites as ‘Labyrinth Worlds’, it becomes evident that Orbit really is little more than an excuse for a rubber monster combat fest (I was going to write ‘thinly disguised’, but that would be unfair as it hasn’t been disguised at all). Orbit compares favourably with Imagine, reviewed last issue. It doesn’t have the pretentions, for one thing. It is the product of enthusiasm, and despite a load of sentence fragments and the curious idea that ‘ideaology’ is a word, it is better written and perhaps even presented than the ‘professional’ effort. On the other hand it does share with

Imagine a philosophy about the purpose and practice of roleplaying with which I find myself entirely at odds. This is confirmed by the separate scenario Souls of Heroes, which shows some development in presentation (still no quotation marks or apostrophes, sadly), and some invention, but a Warhammer 40K-like concentration on violence which I confess to finding dull. Jeff was also kind enough to send along a CD by Dan Sant & Palpatine called Songs of Heroes, which was recorded to accompany the abovementioned Souls of Heroes. It’s basically thrash metal (though a pedant in the area would no doubt correct me, and point out that it is actually left-hand skull, flesh-shrivelling death metal). I’m getting a bit old, I think, as this sounds too conservative for my tastes (I’d rather pogo to Atari Teenage Riot, The Prodigy or Boom Boom Satellites). But it does appear to be an entirely appropriate accompaniment for the game. Athough I am broadly in favour of home-produced games, especially those fed by enthusiasm rather than a desire to get rich, I can’t bring myself to endorse something quite this retro.

Raining Hammers

the first to argue that there is a gulf separating roleplaying from gamebooks, if it is possible to make a roleplaying scenario from a book or film, it should also be possible to make one from a gamebook, and the multiple possibilities of the latter should work well. Indeed, when the Virtual Reality series ended abruptly, and I realised my Red Dragon Pass wasn’t going to be published, I considered finishing it as a hybrid gamebook/Outlaws scenario. I still could, I suppose. The question is, therefore, how well does Raining Hammers stack up at what it attempts to do? One for the postmodernists among you, it has several unusual features that set it apart from the dominant UK gamebook style. The use of third person is perhaps the most immediate. It’s actually quite a sound idea: there’s no less feeling of identification, and less frustration at the imperfections of the choice mechanism. Another novelty, though, and the one that really deserves the postmodernist label, is the way the narrative breaks off every now and again for a little factual commentary. It identifies locations and parts of the story that are historical or still extant. At one point, it even undermines itself by commenting that a particular plot twist is ahistorical, simply a ‘Hollywood-ism’. Other peculiarities which no doubt reveal more about contemporary American society than anything else is the way that although the book is realistically gritty in its

Reviewed by Paul Mason IN THE BEGINNING was the gamebook. The gamebook was a more important phenomenon in those countries that use metric measurements than it was in ye goode olde United States. This was mainly thanks to those two lovable rogues, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, one of whom went on to become one of the UK’s richest men, thanks to a reptilian amorality and a computer game animation with improbable breasts. But Fighting Fantasy died some while ago, much to my UK bank manager’s regret. Along with it went pretty well all the other UK gamebooks, including the Virtual Reality series, which I hoped to write for, and which I am in the process of doing a bit of a Victor Kiam on. The history of gamebooks hangs around the neck of any UK revival, but the US is different. And so we have Raining Hammers, a gamebook published in Lightning Print’s odd ‘Letter size with a ¼" sliced off the long edge’ size. It’s set in a genre little-mined by gamebooks that I’ve seen in the past—the Western—and it is designed to work as a roleplaying scenario as well. I found this last highly stimulating. Although I would be

Orbit is written by Jeff Diamond and published by his 6-0 Games. Web site www.geocities.com/~allianceprime/

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▼ depiction of the Old West, including sanitary conditions and the methods of torture preferred by the Apache, graphic violence and sexual allusion, all ‘cuss words’ are censored. I found this distracting, as for a while I couldn’t figure out why there were two hyphens after ‘stupid-a--’. I found several technical errors, including misrouted paragraphs and a missing North-arrow on the map. Moreover the handling of location seems rather fluid, and it is often difficult to keep track of where you are. There are also several timing problems; I was told that I was looking for ‘Mitchell’ before I’d ever heard of Mitchell. There was a curious instruction to ‘go in the hole’ which I couldn’t make sense of (though no doubt someone will write in to tell me how obvious this is). There were also some downright confusing narrative twists which would have been less confusing had it not been for the routing errors. Overall, however, Raining Hammers is an interesting

product. While a gamebook, it is also designed in such a way that it can be used as a role-playing scenario (something I had considered doing with my Red Dragon Pass). The structural flaws are more forgivable because the narrative style doesn’t make the pretensions towards immersion of the average Fighting Fantasy. For a lot of people the sticking point will be the price—at $17.95, over double the price of a gamebook, yet with the same number of paragraphs. Sadly, as I’ve discovered myself, such a price is a harsh economic reality, a consequence of not being able to take advantage of large print runs, having to pay high Lightning Print prices and offer huge Amazon trade discounts.

Two Fisted Tales

(hmm…). An alternative, dice-based mechanic is offered, but not recommended. Despite the hesitation I expressed above, a card-based system could easily fit with the atmosphere of the pulps, though to be honest a standard card deck would seem to me a better choice. You can even imagine this fitting the pulp style: ‘I tried to get the jump on Lefty, but I guess I drew a deuce: he was ready for me.’ Overall I think the deterministic system, with Hero Points and an occasional element of chance, is appropriate to the simulation of the pulp genre, and your attitude to it will really depend on your general attitude to ‘genre’ games (games that concentrate more on trying to simulate a set of genre conventions, rather than a ‘background’). Two-Fisted Tales is better thought out (and explained) in this regard than some others. Where Indiana Jones allowed Indy to stick a piece of dynamite in his mouth, ignite it, and survive, in TFT combat can be quite deadly. This is because, as Matt Stevens notes, in the pulps the heroes were not actual superheroes. The threat of death was real. Rather, they found ways to cheat death. This is what the rules encourage, instead of sledgehammer tactics. Talking of sledgehammers, though, one amusing touch is that you acquire 3 Hero Points from getting your end away… As I mentioned before, the book is quite long, and most of the remainder is made up of templates, examples, and explanations of how to deal with various pulp situations. Overall, it’s well worth a look if you have any interest in the pulps.

Reviewed by Paul Mason ANOTHER HOMEGROWN, HOME-published effort, this time available in the more accessible ebook formats (namely HTML and PDF). I’m going by the PDF version, but I have also seen the HTML version which not only contains a little more than the PDF but is, of course, more configurable if you don’t happen to like the layout. Talking of which, it’s clean and simple. It has some illustrations which, to me, don’t really evoke the atmosphere of the pulps that well, but apart from them it’s fine. Oh, sorry, didn’t I tell you? This is a game based on the pulps. It has been a much-revisited genre, but it’s interesting to note that there have been no great successes in the field, with the possible exception of Call of Cthulhu, which does not attempt to be a general pulp game. Moreover there have been some notable disasters (the old TSR Indiana Jones game, for example), so how does Two-Fisted Tales stack up? I’ve often suggested that a good idea of a game designer’s priorities can be gained by observing the order in which a game is presented. TFT gets to page 71 (out of 127) before it explains the basic game mechanic. It’s a brave move, but it does seem to reflect the philosophy of the game, in which mechanical resolution is of less interest than description. This is perhaps because mechanical resolution itself is highly deterministic. In many cases, you simply compare a character’s ability to a target value, and if it’s higher, they succeed. What could be easier? To add a bit of suspense (though you are warned not to overuse it) you can introduce resolution for ‘chancy’ actions by drawing a card from a specially-prepared deck of cards

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Raining Hammers is written by Forrest Harris and published by Knuckleduster. More details at: www.knuckleduster.com

Two-Fisted Tales is written by Matt Stevens. More details at www.columbia.edu/~mfs10/twofistedtales.html

Players & Pints A role-playing game in the ‘New Style’ Introduction This is a game so simple, it doesn’t have any rules at all. Thus it’s diceless and ruleless. Even better, it dispenses with all that nonsense about settings. It’s the most wonderful postmodern game in the world.

should distribute each ordered pint to the person who ordered it. Once all the players have pints, they may start to talk. Some examples are provided in the appendix of things to talk about, but this isn’t one of those games which limits your actions, so in fact you can talk about anything!

Starting the Game

The Next Round

In this game, the two most important things are players and pints. There can be any number of players, so long as they can all fit in a pub. You can even play it solo, though you should beware of being thrown out of the pub or beaten up for being a ‘nutter’. Once the players are all assembled in the pub, one of the players—say, the one who bought this game—starts everyone off with the opening play. He (or she, as this game isn’t sexist at all, oh no) stands up and says: ‘Right, what’s everyone drinking then?’ The other players can then, in any order, specify their pints. The player making the opening play may use paper to write down the pints if necessary. Note: although they are called pints, players are allowed to order halves, shorts or even glasses of wine if necessary. This isn’t one of those old role-playing games that limits your options. Once the player making the opening play knows what everybody’s pint is, he (or she, as we’re sure that this game’s simple rules will appeal to females) should go to the bar, order, and pay for all the pints. The method used to buy the pints will be to give money to the barman (or woman, as lots of pubs have pretty ladies behind the bar nowadays). When the opening player has paid for all the pints, he (or she, though ladies may need a little help with this bit)

As players talk and drink, their pints will start to empty. Soon most people will have finished or nearly finished their pint. At this point, someone should volunteer to buy the next round. Anyone can volunteer, but in general, a player should not have to buy a second round until everyone else has bought one. Sometimes, players may need to be encouraged to buy a round. In such cases you should say: ‘Come on, it’s your round, you stingy bugger!’ The next round is conducted just like the first round. You can continue talking about the same things, or you can switch to a new subject.

Ending the Game The game ends when everyone has had enough or the pub closes (though look out for our upcoming sequel The pub’s closing, so let’s go for a curry!). The winner (or winness, unlikely though it seems that any female could be any good at all at this) is the one who ends the game most popular. Ha! Ha! I’m only kidding, of course, as actually this isn’t one of those fascistic games with a winner or a loser. In fact everyone’s a winner, and it is traditional to slur this phrase to each other as you stagger on home to whatever fleapits you reside in.

Appendix Here are some sample quotations which will give you an idea of things you can talk about in the pub: ‘Aren’t traditional role-playing games passé?’ ‘Except for Warhammer of course.’ ‘Why do people bother, nowadays, honestly?’ ‘Oh no, of course I don’t actually play games!’ ‘I just can’t bear all the geeks.’ Etc, etc. I Note: the words ‘New Style’ are a jealously guarded trademark of Hogshead Publishing, and their use here for purposes of parody should in no way be construed as any threat to the company’s God-given right to own them.

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N E W outlaws N E W layout

a writer’s block on Outlaws. But this block hasn’t been an inability to write the game. It has been a dissatisfaction with the method of presenting the material. I suppose I’ve just seen too many rolegames organised in a way I just can’t get to grips with. As James Wallis pointed out a while ago, games follow a pattern based on rules, starting with character generation, and proceeding on through skills, combat etc. This was what I had unthinkingly done with Outlaws and as I faced the prospect of writing the background, it has slowly dawned on me how unsatisfactory it is. Two games, both reviewed last issue, have also helped me in this. One was IMAGINE, which in its awful, slavish adherence to the pattern made it all too clear how dead it is. The other was Sengoku. As I pointed out, Sengoku made a radical attempt to break the pattern by presenting a huge quantity of background information before giving the rules. Unfortunately, I find this, too, to be inadequate. I am now playing in a Sengoku game, and I have to say that using the rules for a while reveals that the organisation of the book leaves a lot to be desired. It’s just not an easy book to find things in. Moreover, even though the reordering of information does a lot to counteract the traditional ‘Wallis’ paradigm, there is still a fairly clear division between ‘rules’ paragraphs and ‘background’ paragraphs. The problem with this is, if you are going to separate the rules and the background how do you do it? That’s what I’ve been considering.

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OR QUITE SOME WHILE I’VE HAD WHAT AMOUNTS TO

The New Typography

More thoughts on how a rolegame should be done, this time concentrating on what information should be included, and how it should be presented. 10

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In the last few months I’ve had a wonderful, liberating experience. You see, after 16 years of producing magazines, I’ve finally begun to learn about design and typography. I have that freedom and exhilaration that comes from knowing myself to be a beginner. One of the things about being a beginner is that you tend to grasp at principles and hold to them as if they were life belts, the only things keeping you from drowning in an icy sea. That’s what I’m doing. But at the same time I’ve been freed by the realisation, albeit late in the day, that no one (apart from designers) cares about design. Did you ever ponder that books are designed? Probably not. The whole point of book design seems to be to create a transparent receptable, what Beatrice Warde famously referred to as a ‘crystal goblet’. Those who are egotistical, or lacking in confidence, or both, produce designs that draw attention to themselves—and thus, almost by definition, away from the content. You can see this most clearly on the World Wide Web. The sites that have no content to speak of are most likely to have the fanciest (and I don’t mean the most attractive) design, the shockwave effects, and animated dancing wombats and so on. But it is also clear in rolegame design. Let’s face it, rolegames are books. In the imazine letters page they have been likened to training manuals. So why are they tarted up like adverts in glossy magazines, smothered with overlays even when they’re in black and white? The nadir of this particular approach came with first edition Feng Shui. What a beautiful game that was, eh?

Every page full colour (never mind the increased difficulty of reading text on coloured, patterned pages). Nearly 300 pages of full colour. Is it any wonder that Daedalus, the publisher, suffered the fate of Icarus? When Andrew Rilstone told me several years that my graphic design for Outlaws was ‘pedestrian’, I didn’t realise that I was mistaken to take it the way he intended. I should have taken his comment as a compliment. After all, Hogshead’s Baron Munchausen is an (attractive) game with extremely pedestrian design, and Andrew is no longer with Hogshead. The message has been rubbed home to me by the set of rules Andy McBrien produced for his game (referred to in the last issue: now available on the Web if you drop me a line), and Robert Rees’s first book for Tetsubo ¯ , the Warhammer Japanese supplement that went the way of so many GW good ideas. Both are simple, clean and efficient; they look like books, not like magazines. They inspired me to try to do the same with Outlaws, eventually. In the meanwhile, I’ve been practising a little with design specifications for supplements for the game Sorcerer, reviewed in imazine 33. Being freed from the necessity to tart the game up provides an opportunity to concentrate instead on how the layout can be used to present the information most effectively. And here we return to the problem mentioned earlier, about rules and background.

The Two Cultures Looking back on past rolegames, I now see this problem very clearly: how do you deal with the provision of both rules and background? Dungeons & Dragons got the ball rolling in an interesting way by ignoring background. Not the way I want to go myself... Chivalry & Sorcery opened the debate, in a way, by providing a game that was clearly rooted in a particular background. The tack taken by C&S set the style for most subsequent games. The background was presented in chunks of text, intermixed with the rules. There was no clear logic separating the presentation of the two. This had the advantage of demonstrating that the background was clearly integrated with the rules. More or less the same approach was taken with Pendragon (Greg Stafford openly acknowledges the debt he owes C&S). GURPS, of course, in principle adopted a different approach. The rules were independent of background, and appeared in the core set. Books were then theoretically free to concentrate on the background. The problem with this was that it made all too clear what a nonsense the idea of separating large chunks of the rules from the background was. ‘Dollars’, in a magnificent feat of US Imperialism, became the currency of every universe, throughout the whole of time! And I had the cheek to moan about Over The Edge! But no, of course, because the ‘background’ books in fact contained rules, and it became evident that the whole project of a background-independent set of rules was just as much a fudge and compromise as every other set of rules (at least FUDGE, as its name demonstrated, was honest). Fans of Basic Role-playing could feel superior, and point out that their preferred game did the same as GURPS, without making such a hypocritical song and dance about being ‘universal’ and ‘generic’.

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More modern games like Feng Shui and Over The Edge have made several advances in presenting background, but they have still, as a rule, followed the same arbitrary approach introduced by C&S; they also follow the Wallis Paradigm in terms of structure. Moreover, both of these games follow a trend of shying away from difficult background, mainly by focusing instead on genre convention. Perfect for gamers who prefer to get all their information from the movie or TV screen, but not much use to those of us who still relish the capacity of rolegames for providing estrangement, and insight into other cultures. So we have a number of problems to solve. How do we order the material we wish to present? And how do we deal with the issue of background vs rules? How, if at all, should these two elements of a game be integrated? The first question is one to which I’ve had an answer for quite a while. The current order is based, it would seem, on a sequential order observed by those who acquire a rolegame. What’s the first thing you do when you get a rolegame? Roll up a character! Thus the character generation section comes at the front. Exceptions to this are quite conspicuous—such was the case with Sengoku, reviewed last issue, in which character creation is spread higgledy piggledy through the rules (a mistake I also make to some extent with the current Outlaws PDF files). The problem is that in order to understand character generation you generally need to understand the basic rules. Many games try to deal with this by having a token section at the start of the book explaining the rules, and then more detail in the later skills/action chapter. While there is something to be said for adopting the ordering that readers will expect, I decided to start from first principles in planning a game, and this leads to a different approach. Why do we generate a character when we first start reading a game? I think it’s because we want some contact with the game as quickly as possible. We want to get stuck in, and generating a character is pretty well the only way to do that, to see how things fit together (the second thing is of course to fight a combat). Rather than simply aping the result here, I want to try to better satisfy the underlying urge. In doing so, I also want to tackle one of the more annoying features of published rolegames: why does it have to take so damn long between buying the game and getting started? Why can’t you get started straight away? That’s exactly what I think rolegames should do in their first chapter. Rather than a lot of waffly background, rather than a load of character creation rules, and most especially rather than several pages of fiction to demonstrate that the game’s designer is a writer and you aren’t, the beginning of a game should set you up straight away with a short scenario that can be played out. Simply defined pregenerated characters for the players, and a situation that is easily graspable by the referee. In the course of this, key rules points will be explained, but not detailed at great length. The goal is to get people started. This is an approach that has been around for a long time, and was championed by Jonathan Tweet and Ars Magica in particular, but it still doesn’t seem to have

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Library of Babel The second important element is the rules, and here it occurs to me that the primary function of rules is that of reference. If the basic rules are reasonably simple (as they must be in order that the ‘get people started’ approach above can be followed) then they don’t need to be ‘taught’. They simply have to be presented clearly, and in such a way that someone looking up how to deal with a certain situation can do so quickly. Once again, my experience with Sengoku has been of use. In the game, we occasionally look things up. Frequently we don’t find them, and so give up and make a spot adjudication. Our game ends up using very little of the Sengoku rules. A good thing, you say? Not really. Why did we bother buying the thing if we can’t find what we’re looking for? What’s the point of all the scholarship and thought that the authors have put into the game if it isn’t made available to us? When I’ve proposed these ideas in other forums, I’ve been interested by the response they attract. By far the most common response, even from people who elsewhere comment about the importance of attracting new people to the hobby, is that we should stick with the current way of organising games, because it’s what everyone is used to. It’s an interesting argument, and it has some validity if applied to, say, books. Most of the conventions of book design are followed because people are used to them. However books are artefacts which are already widely accepted in society; role-playing games are not widely accepted, and I believe that one reason they are not as widely accepted as they might be is that published games reinforce most of the negative stereotypes people have. By negative stereotypes I don’t just mean the whole geek argument, which exercises so many of my correspondents. What I’m talking about is something that comes up repeatedly among my acquaintances who are interested in the idea of gaming. Role-playing games look imposing because they fling a load of rules and jargon at you. I believe one factor in the success of White Wolf games (other than the identification of a clear market segment that already perceived itself as outsiders, and which could be relatively easily targeted with a few goth trappings) is that they produced games which stress the act of playing, and the imaginative possibilities thereof, more than the rules. The whole pretentious ‘storyteller’ branding is a part of this. It’s a more accessible way of labelling games than ‘role-playing’. I’ve had a fair amount of experience here in Japan with players new to role-playing. My experience has been that those without prior exposure to role-playing (specifically D&D and its tropes) nevertheless adapt with remarkable rapidity to the whole business. The idea of playing a character is very easy to grasp. We simply give a player a character, and let them watch a little of the game to get

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the idea, before easing their character in. Moreover, we use very few distracting rules or tables, so that the player appreciates the core activity of gaming. This has always worked in one session. There have been cases where a player has not come again, but those have always been matters of taste rather than inability to understand what is meant by roleplaying. Now, it may be that the raw material we’re working with here—mostly language teachers in Japan—are more likely to be able to pick up the important concepts. Nevertheless, I still think that we confirm the old idea that roleplaying can be easily taught in practice. However, word-of-mouth is not sufficient, so we need to turn our attention to how this method can be transferred to paper. The obvious characteristics of it are: rapid generation of character, rapid exposure to a setting and roleplaying choices, minimal exposure to rules. It occurs to me that there may be room here for combining two problematic aspects of role-playing into one: the introduction to role-playing and character generation. For the latter, rather than the historical ‘birth’ metaphor that tends to drive most character generation, perhaps a literary ‘discovery’ metaphor might be more appropriate, and make it easier to get people into games very rapidly.

Setting Sons Even if we solve the problem of providing a good introduction to gaming, we still face the difficulty of including background details. Traditionally, this has been a little haphazard, but I’m coming to the conclusion that rather than quantity, the most important characteristic of this part of a game is organisation. Better to have four sentences on a topic, which can be found very rapidly, than two pages which take time to find. This may seem to be a very superficial approach—one more suited to the ‘disposable’ games I’m always berating than highly detailed culture games. But level of detail is not the most important feature of a culture game. That is only true of a pure simulationist game. What a culture game requires is as much detail as is necessary for what’s happening, and no more. Sure it can be nice to have a little extra, if that suggests additional atmospheres, but if it starts turning the game into an act of memory, distracting players from immersion and referee from the portrayal of a living imaginative world, then it is counterproductive and should be resisted. A certain aesthetic part of me resists this, but I am coming to the conclusion that a tightly organised, heavily indexed set of brief notes on background is preferable the sort of sprawling, essay-like material that has appeared in many games (including the current version of Outlaws). The ideas explored in this article are very far from being set, and I’d be happy for a few of you to stir the concrete a little. Next issue I hope to present some more specific details on how to go about presenting the introduction to a game/character generation system. I

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bunch of comments exploring the full spectrum from outrage to irascibility. Bear in mind that, thanks to my outrageous delay in getting this issue published, many of these comments are very old, and contributors may now have opinions diametrically opposed to the ones expressed here. Or not.

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Matthew Pook One has to wonder, given their comments in issue #35, why it is, that Roberts Irwin and Rees actually read Imazine? Any suggestions?

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NCE AGAIN ANOTHER

Moaning minnies Ian Marsh This is the trouble about reading imazine as an Acrobat file. Hard enough, indeed, to navigate three columns on one page, but to take it all in at one go, well... And no I don’t print it out – it’s not as if I want to take it to the lavatory with me (to read, that is). Despite the excellence of my colour printer, I’m not actually going to wait for it to churn out imazine, and I can’t appreciate the colour if I use my laser printer. So I choose to read it on screen.

Rob Alexander

I can think of plenty, and I’m reluctant to turn this into another Imagine-like competition. What could I offer as a prize? A specially printed issue of imazine with all comments by the Roberts removed?

Fancy that Tim Harford ‘I think Imagine is probably Kewl because the swords go to up to +11. ‘Why not just make +10 more powerful?’ [pause] ‘This sword is +11.’

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Which might have won, had it not been such a popular answer...

Simon Rogers ‘I think Imagine is probably kewl because skills go above 100%—that’s like the volume going all the way up to 11.’

Robert Rees

Actually I thought your review of Imagine to be rather tedious; I toyed with using the same approach for Dark Realms, but discarded it. I enjoy reviews of rolegames (particularly yours) for the content that is interesting of itself. I’m not usually that bothered about the alleged subject of the review.

‘I think Imagine is probably kewl because that bitch Mason wouldn’t know a kick-ass game if it bit him on his ass. And anyway it’s like AD&D but it’s, like, better and only dicks play AD&D now. We, like, switched to something kewler months ago. And besides you get to play Saurians who are like lizard-type dudes and AD&D doesn’t have that does it; so Imagine must be the kewlest. 3leet3 man.’

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I wonder whether imazine has the most demanding readers of any roleplaying fanzine?

Robert claimed he was only entering the competition ‘because no one else will’. How wrong you were, Robert.

Jose Ramos

Jose Ramos

I was so shocked of how bad my English is (when edited by an inmoral butcher, I must say) that I could not say nothing about issue 34. And that is criticism enough, I suppose. So restricting myself to ten word sentences, max, here I go.

‘I think Imagine is probably kewl because you need the mind of a twelve year old to warm to it.’

Robert Irwin The rest of the issue bored me to tears.

Robert Rees ‘Bitchin’ unclefucker’? Luck uph myah arse Mayhson. Uh whell respec mah authoritah!

Richard Irvine ‘I think Imagine is probably kewl because I was brought up in the collective hive mind of the great mother-company Games Workshop, so if a company says their game is kewl, then they must be correct, and we are powerless to resist the urge to plague our family to buy the overpriced game and all its related supplements, official magazine, fiction and merchandise, then deny all knowledge of the product ever having existed when they decide to drop the line after only 7 months.’

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Tom Zunder

‘I think Imagine is probably kewl because it is simultaneously both retro and postmodern.’ NB I also offer a small bag of acorns as a bribe.

Oh goodness me, I read your review of Imagine with bated breath. Would this new tome bring new and radical approaches to gaming or would it be even better? Actually that's bollocks. I read with bated breath so as to stop myself creasing up with laughter. How could? Don’t they know? Oh deary deary me. I even checked the zine date in case it was an April Fool. Your review was the best you could have done and I am sure the publishers will realise how perceptive and accurate you were. (Morons.)

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While I would normally have responded to this by pointing out that a very large proportion of postmodernism is retro because that’s the whole idea, the bag of acorns tipped it, and I have to declare Rob the winner. If only so that I can dump on him a book that, given his moaning, he clearly so richly deserves.

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Imagine

Since they were kind enough to send it to me, I felt a little guilty giving it the drubbing it deserved, but then when it comes to obligations I feel the readers, and my own conscience, such as it is, rate higher.

Tim Harford Wake up Mason! You don’t expect us to believe that Imagine actually exists, do you? A great spoof review of AD&D, I grant you—but shouldn’t you be devoting time to all that’s best in gaming, too? Imazine is at risk of becoming the Watchdog of fanzines: ‘This boxed set of RuneQuest looks innocent enough, but with these funny little dice it could be a potential death trap...’ Surely the label ‘fanzine’ carries with it the notion of enthusiasm about something? Had I not been crying with disbelieving laughter at your review, I’d have felt very sorry for Imagine’s publishers. I am beginning to suspect that game companies are buying weak examples of their rivals’ product lines and sending them to you for a savaging...

Rob Alexander Looking at the cover picture, format and the excerpts you gave Imagine reminds me of nothing more than Gygax’s AD&D stuff. Presumably this was their intention?

Adrian Bolt Your review of Imagine brought back the gosh! wow! sense of wonder of the early days.

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Sense of wonder as in ‘I wonder how they can get away with selling this?’

Simon Rogers I’ve just taken a look at Imagine’s web site (http://www.role-playing.com). Interesting. I still can’t believe that their world is called Thyrgwlaine. Matthew [Pook] has just shown me a copy of the rules. It’s heartbreaking to see how much work and expense has gone into this.

Rob Alexander I suspect inherited wealth.

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Other Reviews Matt Goodman I’m the President of Heliograph, Inc. and the Publisher of Transactions of the Royal Martian Geographical Society, reviewed in imazine 35. David, the reviewer, assumes that when TRMGS 3 is published, we’ll remove the online articles that we’ve been posting weekly to the web site (http://www.heliograph.com/ trmgs). This is not the case. The material will remain available online after print publication. All of Heliograph’s books will be 6" × 9", partially due to the way it’s printed (by Lightning Print), and partially because I like the size better. I’ve never understood why game books are printed in magazine size... but I don’t think it’s particularly handy for something with a stiff cover. TRMGS 1 is 90,000 words in length (a little longer than a typical GURPS book), so I think the pricing is fair. I can understand the confusion over the format... as more people use it, that should change. The cover picture was chosen because it was conceptual art for the Space: 1889 movie. Ditto for the TRMGS 2 cover. The Robert Prior floor plans were an experiment that didn’t work out, and I heartily agree with David that they didn’t come out very well. They are available as color files on our website, and the color versions are much more useful. David suggests that reprinting TRMGS wasn’t the best first product for Heliograph to produce. We reprinted the books 1) because I really liked the material and 2) we needed practice books to work out the kinks of publishing with Lightning Print. David’s dread that we’ll carry a ‘slew of material for one of the most popular faux-Victorian backgrounds on the web’ is unfounded... we’ve only received one Falkenstein article, and I still haven’t gotten clearance from Talsorian to print it. However, we’ll cheerfully print good stuff that we can shoehorn under ‘Historical Science Fiction Roleplaying’. Finally, the name of our company is not Heliograph Publications. It’s just Heliograph Incorporated. I’d be happy

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Matt made a number of other points, but I’m afraid I’ve edited for space.

Phil Nicholls I have to agree with you regarding the artwork on the TRMGS supplement; it was not so bad. Admittedly it was not the most inspiring piece of cover art that I have seen, but there have been far worse things. At least it did not subscribe to the ‘chainmail bikini’ school of RPG covers. I had thought that this genre had died a death, but it seems that the latest volume of Immortal still believes in the ability of cleavage to sell books. Then we had the Imagine Players Guide so perhaps this is just a Seventies retro trend within the hobby. Next stop Vampire: Burn Baby Burn, The Disco Years?

Matthew Pook The reviews in issue #35 were something of a revelation and a time trip for me. Having read the Imagine Player’s Guide and the Transactions of the Royal Martian Geographical Society, they both provoked feelings of nostalgia in me. The Imagine Player’s Guide for its strong similarities to AD&D—in today’s gaming market, it is a rare thing for someone to publish what is essentially their take upon that game! I agree with David Platt’s assertion that the Transactions of the Royal Martian Geographical Society is something of an oddity, but I rather welcome it for all that. I certainly enjoyed reading it, as I liked Space 1889 as a setting if not as set of rules. Indeed, I am planning to run the setting for one of my gaming groups. I shall further dismay you by telling you that I shall be using GURPS for the rules! And whilst I did not find the cover to the Transactions of the Royal Martian Geographical Society to be stunning, I did not think it that bad and would suggest that it has a certain charm. The revelation comes in your own review of Sengoku. You were almost positive! Does this mean that the game is worth taking a look at, since it is not by any means a ‘glowing’ review? Quite possibly. Time to get out the Christmas lists I think.

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Yes: well worth taking a look at if you have any interest in Japanese rolegames. I have to say that—I’m playing in a regular Sengoku game at the moment .

Robert Irwin To be fair, the Impro bit showed some promise. My gripe with it, and the second ‘But is it art?’ article, lies is in that they rather clumsily strap pseudo-academia onto roleplaying in a rather ham-fisted manner. At least the ‘play to win’ article I slated so much a few issues back tried to do something new, rather than disappear up roleplaying’s arse in the protective condom of academic repectability. At least that is where I like the ‘New Outlaws’ articles: they show a glimmer of creating a new gaming paradigm. I think if people are going to plunge into their local library’s humanities section for material, they would be better to get down to something a bit more useful. For example, I have found Adam Phillips’ Neo-Freudian writings to be much more inspiring for gaming than any of the ‘art’ article in imazine recently. Freudian psychology applied to the family interactions of the Roman emperors and gods has given me the basis for my second main theme in the game.

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Sadly my invitation to Robert to turn this investigation into an article has not yet borne fruit. Perhaps the condom won’t fit?

Phil Nicholls Thank you for the Impro review; it made fascinating reading. Will there be a second piece on Masks and Trance?

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I hope so. But not in this issue, obviously.

Phil Nicholls I am now determined to read a copy, which must be the goal of any book review.

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Not at all. Many book reviews have a goal of pointing out that you’re better off without the book (certainly that was my goal with the review of Impro for Storytellers, and another that I’m sure you can imagine).

Tom Zunder Actually I have seen many master-servant PC relations in games and yes, they are incredibly funny and make for great counterpoint to any grand tales ongoing. The classic in Glorantha is to play both a troll and anther player’s trollkin. Since all are both master and servant to each other the opportunities for fun are cruelly endless. Well not endless, more myriad. But that’s the author in me speaking I guess.

Robert Rees Good reviews in 35, nice spread of coverage too. Dave’s review of Impro was something of a masterpiece of writing technique. I’m not sure how much I know of the book now but it was a very good read. Writer as protagonist, fictionalised conversation—brilliant!

Phil Nicholls This was also a fine article about the nature of refereeing, or at least some of the possible methods of doing so. I only wish I was more able to create sections of a scenario in the type of impromptu manner required for the sort of free-

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▼ form scenario that Dave advocates. Perhaps reading this book may help.

Tom Zunder I fully support immersive playing (all praise the imazine creed), although I am heretical in having authorial tendencies both as player and ref. I think that makes me an imazist of the LittleStory heresy. Now I think that Dave Morris is of the imazist of the Improv wing, altho he may tell me to fuck off. What concerns me about this is that it runs counter to the One Truth of Mazon, that immersion is good.

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The one truth of Mazon is that there is no One Truth...

Tom Zunder No, no, hear me out. Improv is inherently subversive (all hail the Holy Strictures of Subversion) and takes structures and routines and breaks them down to rebuild an interactive world. As Dave’s article made clear, it is the very ability to act differently, to subvert the structure, that appeals to him and his wing of the Church of Imaz. Is this not the root of his error? If we are to immerse ourselves in a culture then should we not be as most people are? Should we not be conservative and act as a true member of that culture would? In other words it is appropriate to improv and subvert if you are playing a roleplaying game set in a hippy commune or Greenwich Village, but not in a society more akin to the traditional hierarchies that make such gaming fun. A samurai doesn’t improv, that's the whole point of his culture. Did I miss the point?

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Of course a samurai does improv, if he happens (like many of his type) to follow Zen. Musashi famously won one of his duels with a stick.

Matthew Pook I must take issue with Allister Huggins’ comments about Ray Gillham’s review of Alternity. Since Ray is a friend, and I was the one who sent him what he was reviewing, I should put the record straight, should Ray not do so himself. What was being reviewed was the Alternity FastPlay rules that TSR put out to drum up interest in the game. Since almost every Science Fiction game released by TSR (and I discount the Amazing Engine source books) has been in some way a variation upon D&D, one cannot escape making comparisons between that game and Alternity. From the Fast-Play rules, Alternity does come over as a D&D clone with its class and levels, and the included adventure is a dungeon-bash, albeit a dungeonbash in space. Not having examined the game in any depth, if only due to apathy (not even the imminent release of a Gamma World supplement will negate that and I’m quite fond of Gamma World), but certainly the way in which the rulebooks have been published follows the AD&D model. As to anyone on rec.games.frp.misc laughing at anyone

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who asked if Alternity were an AD&D clone, no. No, that is not true. In a recent discussion raised by the exact same question, the comments were generally supportive of both yes and no answers, and of a good nature. You wouldn’t be showing your pro-Alternity/anti-Ray Gillham bias, would you, Allister Huggins? If so, then I think I will stick to my pro-Gillham bias.

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And I’ll stick to my anti-rec.games.frp.misc bias.

Ray Gillham I don’t know how to respond to that [Huggins’ suggestion that Alternity is not D&D in space] exactly, except to say that it is (cue pantomime toing and froing). If I were charitable I’d say it was written by two guys who had been out of the hobby for a long time—or remained in a Gygaxian campaign for 15 years somewhere in Oakland— who were then comissioned to write an RPG. So they went straight to source (ie the only one they knew) and got stuck in. Alternity was the last TSR project before WotC stepped in, which shows (a) it is a TSR game through and through, and (b) TSR’s legendary business acumen. Oh, I guess I did reply after all.

Incanus One question: Is the system by Andy McBrien, mentioned on page 20 of issue 35, available somewhere on the Net? It seems interesting and I’d like to check it out.

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In those immortal words: ‘It is now...’. Andy has very kindly given me permission to put it up on my site, so check out http://www.tcp-ip.or.jp/~panurge/AdMidAg.pdf

Robert Rees I’ve always like Jonathan Tweet’s game designs and felt he has a good grasp of writing games that are to be played rather than ones that spend years trying to fulfill a design brief [cough]. I was therefore enjoying his rebuttal of your criticism up of Over The Edge until the last couple of paragraphs when he said ‘the game’s background is intentionally shallow’. It struck me as a very weak thing to say ‘my game is intentionally shit—therefore you cannot criticise it’. I would respect him more for saying ‘this game is about glamourous, wealthy, English-speaking white people living on a fabulous island paradise hidden away from the rest of the world—so what?’

Praguematics Matthew Pook Art. No, I do believe that it can be consumed. Nor did I say otherwise in issue #35. What I did say was that I had difficulty equating role-playing as art, because it did not produce anything that could easily be consumed by anyone

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▼ other than the participants, that is, an audience. Which is why I brought up the subject of the Dreampark books. I was a little put off by your comment, as it seemed to say that you had not read what I had written. Now I found that unlikely or hoped that this is not the case.

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You’re so used to me making snide comments here that it didn’t occur to you that I might have been asking the question out of curiosity?

Bill Hoad Several people have made the point that art requires an audience. It is true that art needs audience and/or critics. I disagree with those that say gaming can never have an audience. I can think of games that have attracted audiences. In particular I think of a game of Paranoia at a games convention which attracted spectators because of its whackiness. Then there was a game of Star Trek which somehow became a live role-play event and attracted bystanders to this impromptu play. So it can happen. But once again, I say that is not what roleplaying is about.

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Isn’t it obvious that participants in a role-playing game are constantly varying in the extent to which they are in ‘creator’ mode, and ‘audience’ mode?

Bill Hoad I will admit, until very recently—up until reading Robert’s article—I was keen on seeing gaming as a potential art form. The actual point when I rejected this view was while reading a trilogy of books that I have been thinking of turning into a campaign. Towards the end, the hero’s wife is suffering all sorts of agony. First of all the hero can do nothing but see his wife suffer, it hardly gets better when he discovers he can save his wife but at the cost of giving up all he believes in, betray his friends and sacrificing his best friend’s son. Most of my potential players are married. If I made them think about what it would be like to be responsible for their spouse’s suffering it would make the game very dramatic and powerful. Initially I thought this could be a great climax to the game. If I could provoke a strong emotional response, that would be art. The emotion, the reality, the verity.... the god-awfulness of the situation. Then I realised how inappropriate this would be. I have no right to bring so much raw emotion to the players. That’s fine for books, theatre, cinema, etc. But not for gaming. Firstly because gaming is so personal. Art forms are at least one step removed.

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Not true, by any means. There are art forms which strive to be as raw and personal as they can, and there are games which, deliberately or otherwise, induce distance (indeed, it has been quite fashionable at times). Moreover, I dispute the assertion that art is necessarily about raw emotion. Are you saying that the Mona Lisa is not art? Most artists would consider that the appropriateness of form to the effect they desire is an

important artistic consideration. To attempt to inflict the deepest human agony on a bunch of players would be akin to concealing razor blades in the pages of a book— one might consider the latter art, a statement about the dangers of knowledge or something, but we would certainly consider it a pretty naff use of that form.

Bill Hoad The audience views or reads the media, they don’t attempt to become the characters.

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Most narrative art works on the principle that the audience or reader does associate to a greater or lesser extent with the protagonist.

Bill Hoad So is equating gaming with art a waste of time? Not necessarily, but it should be looked at from the other way around. What is it from art that we wish to adopt into our games? Emotion, intellectual concepts, dedication to high standards, completeness of the experience? Is it in fact craftsmanship rather than artistry that we want?

Jose Ramos Like many articles in Imazine, this left me a feeling of ‘Yes, I agree, but why does he write two pages for that simple concept?’ The idea that aesthetics will be enhanced at the game level when we renovate and evolve our repertory is something that all long-lasting groups know, if only instinctively.

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It’s nice to see that someone understood what the article was about: not just another ‘Is roleplaying Art?’ piece, but a discussion of how we can learn from art to improve our games.

Bill Hoad Robert Meier evidently knows nothing about roleplaying. Does he really think that it has much to do with finding new ways to show his character’s dislike of mystics? It is this sort of two dimensional characterisation that makes poor players easy meat for a ref and drive them to thatching to put some depth into a game. In short his whole article is navel gazing.

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I felt that he deliberately chose extremely simple examples of behaviour to make his point clear. However complex the actions you take in a game, the structuralists suggest, those actions derive their meaning from the structure in which the communication takes place, a structure governed by linguistic convention and, most importantly for the article, previous interactions. Not reducing things to the simplest level would have muddied the point, which was a basic point about narrative, and which you may have noticed was echoed

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▼ in the review of Impro. In that book, Keith Johnstone demonstrates that one of the most basic narrative techniques is to establish a routine, and then interrupt it. Robert came upon the same principle, but from a theoretical, rather than practical direction. I wish I could coordinate more of the zine’s articles like that!

Bill Hoad At this point I can’t resist a few quotes. ‘We must remember that art is art and water is water. On the other hand North is North, West is West and if you boil up cranberries they taste more like prunes than plums do.’ —Groucho Marx, Animal Crackers ‘When you come to a town they think you are going to do something like the Ringling Brothers... and you find people becoming disillusioned because it turns out to be just the same old thing—Art.’ —Oldenberg in a radio interview about his shows and happenings ‘All art is quite useless.’ —Oscar Wilde

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‘It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.’ —Winston Churchill

Bill Hoad Anyway Paul, my hat’s off to you. You are prepared to admit you run an evening’s game where nothing happens and some players go home. That’s a game badly in need of a strong ref.

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I never wrote anything of the kind. That’s a reader badly in need of some spectacles. But yes, my players do tend to go home after games. I don’t have the floorspace I used to...

Great, so the physical objects of roleplay are art. But only become high art if they are used in a way that obeys the conventions of high art. Now consider those three rulebooks again. If I add a scenario and a small typed note that the owner of this art installation should read the three rulebooks and use them with the scenario to create the actual artwork. This is again actually art because it obeys the conventions of existing artwork. It is ‘affirmative’ in the context of Praguematics. Not only this but because I have said that the result of following the instructions will be my artwork then the roleplaying session is art. Again this is simple the result of following existing art conventions. So roleplaying is definitely art. But to revisit the example it is not necessary for the books to be in a gallery. They may be in private ownership. They need not be unique or even sold via a gallery. In short then if you buy the AD&D rulebooks and a scenario then your roleplaying will be art. Simply because I declare it to be so. I’m glad I was finally able to resolve that debate for all of you. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to prove that in fact all RPGs result in the creation of art.

Outlaws Robert Rees The design brief in 35 was interesting and I would agree with most of it. I definitely agree that the mechanism has to be central and simple. Players should definitely only be thinking in terms of ‘what do I need to roll’ and ‘how can I make this action more likely’. Introducing modifiers for preparation, speed of execution and simplicity should also be easily memorable and consistent.

Bill Hoad Sorry if I Zundered in my response to Imazine, ie flailing around with criticisms.

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Simply for coining that term you are forgiven... though possibly not by Tom.

Robert Rees As a final attempt to offer something new into this very tired debate I have had a few thoughts on using existing art theory to ‘prove’ RPGs are art. If I stick the three core AD&D rulebooks on a gallery wall and title the resulting triptych ‘Monolith’, then the result is art. Ever since Mondrian called a urinal ‘Fountain’ any object in a gallery that obeys the conventions of an exhibition (titled, labelled, attributed, present in the catalogue) is art. The fact that the title has a relationship to the object that is not merely descriptive but has an attributive, ironic, juxtaposing relation to it means my artwork follows Mondrian’s convention and thus must be art.

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Jose Ramos I usually take a very light approach to rules, except for combat rules. As the part of the game were people get hurt and die, players should know the odds, to alleviate the guilt in case of a fatality. So a few general rolls with impromptu modifiers affect general play, guided mostly by the flow and ebb of PC and NPC interaction. And in the few moments when things get violent, dice rule. It helps minimize gratuitous violence, as they know where they are getting into. I suppose this means I agree with Andy McBrien’s list.

Robert Rees Fractal rules? Jesus Christ! Who’s been adding more useless games designer jargon while I was looking elsewhere? I think fractal rules is an extension of the central mechanic. The mechanic should apply everywhere and be consistent everywhere. Critical Incidents are a good idea and very natural when you think of when the average GM (who is not wedded to his rule book) rolls dice. I think this implies

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▼ that the central mechanic should be proportional rather than absolute. Perhaps this is not what you are thinking of but in the combat examples you are saying what is the proportional chance of Guan defeating Hua and what is the proportional chance that Guan will see off the bandits without getting injured?

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Fractal rules can be viewed purely in statistical terms, I suppose. It has long been a problem in many systems that the overall chance in a contest decided by a single roll differed from that of an extended contest decided by a series of rolls. This needs to be addressed, but I was thinking more of avoiding time-wasting dice rolling by making sure the mechanical detail suits the event being resolved.

Robert Irwin ‘The rules should provide interesting results.’ This one I disagree with. It harks back to the MERP critical hit table days, which I hated. I suspect that the answer is that the results of dice rolls are never, ever looked up on a table. I can only say that if the rules are required to produce interesting results, you are letting the players be lazy. I think if people describe what they are doing properly there should be plenty of detail to interpret into interesting results. If the activity is so mundane it doesn’t need described, it sn’t really worth bothering about the detail of the outcome either.

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Robert Irwin ‘The rules should be fractal’ I’m in the final stages of develping my own system for a dice-based game and have encountered this problem. As someone who normally wouldn’t touch rules with Gygax’s 10 foot pole, I’m in the odd situation of having to run a game for a bunch of hardened must-have-dice nuts. Anyway, my solution is this. Characters have a simple stats and skills based character sheet. Reolution is based on me asking what the character’s most relevant skill is and any stat that might be relevant. They then chuck two dice and have to get lower than a number I arbitrarily decide based on this and what they are tryng to do.

Nick Bogan While reading ‘New Outlaws’ in imazine 35, I was struck by the irony that ‘desperately bad’ Gardasiyal is the only system I know of (although my knowledge is quite limited, I admit) that tries to implement fractal rules. It has a three level combat system, if you count the one-roll method from the Adventures on Tekumel solo rulebooks. Gardasiyal's combat rules have too many tables to be elegant, and they account for the same modifiers in too many places, but they seem to be following the path you advocate.

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It is, indeed, a marvellous irony. I think where Gardasiyal departs from the path is that it does not employ the same mechanic in the three systems, and is, as you note, rather smothered in modifiers. Moreover, it also suffers from the statistical problem that Robert Rees alluded to above.

Robert Rees ‘Interesting results’ is a useful addition to terminology, unlike ‘fractal rules’. Put simply I take it to mean that if we are reaching for the dice then we are uncertain as to what is going to happen next and there should be the potential for the game to take a very different direction as a result of the resolution: one that neither players or GM might have forseen.

When I said the rules produce interesting results I was a long way from wanting critical hit tables. What I was saying was, there’s little point in having a finer detail of resolution if that finer detail of resolution adds no more interest than a single roll. In other words, a blow-byblow combat should feel exciting (and this can come from peoples’ description, as you point out above, but some mechanics lend themselves to this better than others). My experience with Outlaws so far is that when it is working well, it actually helps players interpret results in interesting ways. A bald ‘roll to hit, roll for damage’ system is less likely to do that.

Robert Rees I do think that you’re right to point out that players don’t think in hexes and so on. I often find it difficult to understand American Imperial measurements being used to Metric myself. How big is a 10' pole really? Unless you’re using some kind of tabletop skirmish wargame then the only relevant units in the game should be ones that players use themselves to measure the ‘real’ world. There might be an argument for an ‘in-character’ measurement for an immersive style of game but in all honesty I think it’s asking too much of the players. They after all work in some set of measures they are comfortable with as do their characters. For convenience it’s better to translate to the player’s terms of reference rather than risking the disassociation of the player and character’s experience.

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I compromise on this. I use feet and yards in Outlaws because they are close to the Chinese measures, and they have mechanical advantages. I also provide details of the Chinese measures so that players can slip them into character conversation, if they want to, for atmosphere. There are some rather obvious dangers involved in unthinkingly translating into the player’s terms of reference—at least if you have any ambitions to produce a game with the level of estrangement that I aim at. Too much of this sort of thing is, for me, what has happened to the genre of ‘fantasy’ fiction, which is now almost entirely unfantastical. Oddly enough, I believe rolegames are to blame for this state of affairs.

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▼ more well-known, and while it isn’t available on the Web, it is delivered to your door regular as clockwork every month.

GURPS and Others Matthew Pook What is it about GURPS? It seems as if every contributor to issue #35 is biased against it. Do you have a problem with the game/rules or with your players and the way they play it? I play a fair number of games using these rules and do not have these problems. Certainly I am far more interested in creating an interesting character for the game, than I am for ‘min/max’ing it into an übermensch. Nor do I have this problem when playing GURPS, that whatever setting or genre the game may be, you are still playing GURPS. Cannot anyone else divorce the rules from the setting, and just play the game? The comments made in issue #35 against GURPS, raises the question of whether rules should be specific to a particular game, rather than derived from some generic set. Is this what you are advocating?

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Yes. GURPS has its place, and I’ve played in GURPS games and enjoyed them. But it was always despite the rules rather than because of them. GURPS suits a certain, highly mechanical style of gaming. But it is not universal or generic. ‘Cannot anyone else divorce the rules from the setting, and just play the game?’ Frequently not when playing GURPS, because if you actually use the rules it doesn’t let you. The game imposes a hidden agenda through its whole character generation system, and with its approach to combat. There is no such thing as a setting-independent system, any more than there is such a thing as presentation-independent content.

Robert Rees There were a few suggestions that Imazine was not the place to discuss the mechanics of roleplaying. This seems a crazy idea to me, if not in Imazine then where? All commercial magazines are linked openly or subtlely to the big games companies. How can you be expected to have a serious debate about systems of roleplaying when the companies have too much at stake to admit that perhaps AD&D or Vampire actually sucks. The only places where a vaguely rational and independent debate can be held is in a fanzine. Not only that but if you want a debate with people who are normally intelligent, insightful and unwedded to any particular gaming ideology then really Imazine is the only place to do it. You only have to look at the Usenet groups to realise that. There are few avenues for intelligent (if often bruising) debate about RPG and Imazine is definitely the most wellknown and most accessible.

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Hate to disagree when you’re being so free with the compliments, but Alarums & Excursions (http:// theStarport.com/xeno/aande.html for details) is certainly

imazine

The Last Geeks Matthew Pook I role-play. I like science fiction. So in the eyes of some this makes me a geek, but to be honest, I don’t give a damn. It is just a label. The people that matter to me, my partner and my family accept that I game and don’t label me a geek. Were I to throw myself into the so-called acceptable pursuits of football, cars and drinking, they would probably refer me to a doctor. Reading through Robert Irwin’s moans, I am at a loss as to what it is he wants. If he has been gaming for as long as is apparent from his letter, then he should know that he should game and deal with the ‘geek’ label as much as he sees fit, or just become acceptable and give up the game. More common I think, is the time constraints upon older players as they acquire a family of their own. Methinks Robert is self-flagellating to no good effect!

Robert Rees I feel privileged to finally be a member of the hobby elite. I’m looking forward to the initiation kit with anticipation. I think ‘the hobby elite’ are probably those mostly needy people who tend to contribute excessively to various RPG forums and end up with their names plastered over everything leading people to think there is some conspiracy going on. I think in-jokes such as ‘adequate’ makes this paranoia even worse. But hell it’s funny at the end of the day! I think if you are writing a letter to Imazine or whatever and you start thinking ‘Shit, this is going to sound really cliquey’ and then change things around then the whole thing ends up being a stilted attempt to not reference anything. A sort of hobby anti-elite. I’ll volunteer to hold the membership on that group.

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You may find you have some stiff competition there. People always seem to feel that it’s ‘cooler’ to have themselves perceived as being anti-clique and anti-elitist, and will therefore go to great lengths to invent cliques and elites they can oppose...

Final Word The extreme lateness of this issue may have caused some of you to wonder whether imazine had folded again (it certainly had me wondering). Well, obviously not. Though this issue has made it plain to me that I will have to stop delaying the zine because there’s stuff I don’t really want to do. In future I just won’t do it. Because of the delay there’s stuff I probably promised to put in the zine which got left out. Sorry about that.