Nichelle Nichols, Futurama, "Where No Fan Has Gone Before"
This week, someone on an internet discussion board replied to a thread I started, and finished, in 2008. The board is RPG.net, and the thread is titled "[Let's Read] Fantasy Wargaming (seriously)". For those not familiar with RPG.net, it's one of the largest boards on this series of tubes for discussing pen and paper games (like Dungeons and Dragons, as opposed to computer games like World of Warcraft). "Let's read" threads are ones where a poster reads a book and comments on it along the way. (And my name on the board, obviously, is Felix.)
If you read the first post, you can get an idea why I started the thread. It was sort of like the "I Watched This On Purpose" section of the Onion A.V. Club. In the obscure world of RPGs, Fantasy Wargaming has some notoriety. It was offered as a book club choice, so it was a widely distributed game seen by people who didn't go to hobby stores. Unfortunately, it's not well written, and has so-so production values. For thousands of people in the club, this was probably their first, and only, exposure to an RPG. Lots of copies wound up in used book stores or the garbage can. (It came out before paper was commonly recycled.)
If the game had come out today, it would be called a "fantasy heartbreaker." That is the term, among the pseudo-intellectual RPG theory movement, for a game which has some interesting aspects, but ruins them by aping too many elements of more popular games like D&D, and leaving itself destined for failure. (Yes, there is an RPG theory movement. Do all hobbies have them? Do, say, Strawberry Shortcake doll collectors go around inventing elaborate theories as to why the designers matched certain nationalities with certain scents, or come up with obscure labels to differentiate the way different little girls played with the toys?)
For example, Fantasy Wargaming had a rather clever idea for a setting: medieval Europe. Not the historic Europe, but the world as people believed it at the time. Angels looked out for you; the fair folk held sway in Celtic lands; if you sneezed, your soul might be taken by an evil spirit; and most villages had a wise woman who could cast charms. You might play a soldier during the battle of Hastings, or a priest coping with the evil spirits causing the black death. But despite this setting, it devoted a lot of space to describing how to build a classic RPG dungeon, with dozens of descending levels, each deadlier than the last. When was the last time you heard about something like that in an Arthurian legend, or folktale from the Middle Ages?
As I said in my first post on that thread, it also had a nice, simple system. Essentially, you figured out how difficult a task was for you (normally on a scale that went roughly from 1 to 10) then rolled on the appropriate column of a chart. The higher you were on the scale, the more likely you were to succeed. However, the game never put it that clearly. I think that, like many role playing games, the designers never intended for you to learn by reading the book. They just had it printed up for use as a reference guide. You were supposed to learn the rules by playing the game with people who already knew the game. For someone like me, who picked the book up more than 20 years after it went out of print, that wasn't an option.
The game also had some other interesting ideas, probably worth stealing for a better game system. The astrology rules were pretty interesting, and a great way to apply flavor. Once you got past the poor presentation, the combat system actually seemed pretty elegant (on paper, at least). The magic system was also pretty easy to handle; you built spells by with a sort of "recipe" system, adding up the cost of the effects and savings to see how difficult it was to cast. The player could try anything from getting a little luck during difficult times to turning a foe into a sheep.
On the other hand, there were some real off-putting parts of the book. It may be the most misogynistic game book I've read. Also, since my last post was about observing Passover, I'm not thrilled with the idea of categorizing being a Jew as something that's appropriate for the "Bogey Table," even if it was a bit of a drawback in the middle ages (Other bogeys included winding up with a fetish, or fear of water.)
My last post on the thread, after having read the whole book, was about the idea it would be interesting to try a play session one of these days. Unfortunately, I am easily distracted. To hold a session, I'd need to figure out when and where the action would take place, and might even need to do some research (e.g., look up Italy in the 1300s on Wikipedia).
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