Black & White RPGs vs Color RPGs

 

   The battle lines are drawn, and they are crisp black lines and dazzling swaths of color.

   It is not a question of AI or no AI. Both sides have been known to use AI art.

   It’s just color versus black and white, straight up.

   This battle is nothing new. It’s been going for some time now, and it sure ain’t confined to the narrow realm of tabletop role-playing games, either; it is being fought across the board, in multiple forms of entertainment. But our main focus on here is RPGs, so let’s talk about that.

   The 5e sun is not shining as brightly as it used to, and many gamers choose to return to or discover old-school D&D, which is great. It certainly can’t hurt to know the classics.

   But then Wizards of the Coast goes on record as saying that old-school D&D isn’t D&D anymore.

   The 5e influencers boldly staked their claim to D&D at the Wizards of the Coast Creator Summit, and now they’re not going anywhere. It’s their place. It’s not unlike a crowd taking over a bar. Every week there’s more and more of them; they keep coming and keep asking for BTS and mocktails; so the bar plays a lot of BTS and serves twenty different sorts of mocktails. It’s what any business would do. Know who your customers are.

   Your customers like bright colors and furry fairytales — give them that.

   Which means that the gritty black and white Russ Nicholson art “isn’t D&D anymore.”

   I get it. Colors can definitely be awesome.

   Look at this gorgeously decadent movie poster. It was supposed to be for Alejandro Jodorowski’s Dune. We were robbed of something truly epic. Look at the ships! Look at Orson Welles as the Baron! Look at Dalí as the Emperor!

   Fast-forward forty years and now we have Denis Villeneuve’s Dune — dreary, glum and colorless.

   Colorless has become synonymous with “serious.”

   Colors are for the furry fairytale crowd, and black and white is reserved for deep, serious stories. This is what we have come to.

   Black and white aesthetics are busy remaking classic games under their new paradigm, even when the originals were already in black and white. Shadowdark is AD&D, of course. Blades in the Dark somehow feels like Warhammer — both Fantasy and 40K. And Mothership feels like Traveller. You get the gist.

   Don’t get me wrong — I also love black and white. I love Jim Jarmusch’s early films, I love the work of Kwapisz and Chan in Savage Sword of Conan, I love the art in the 1977 Monster Manual, especially Trampier, and I love the 1981 Fiend Folio, especially Nicholson. In my opinion, the art in 5e is repetitive, and we no longer see player characters die or even take any serious beatings. It’s a real shame.

   The 5e art is also quite lazy sometimes. If Keith Parkinson had painted that Eve of Ruin cover, he wouldn’t have wasted so much space with violet rocks and boulders.

   Vecna could have been the lich in the ’77 Monster Manual, and it would have been so much better. A classic rendition for a classic lich!

   Also, Parkinson — or Caldwell, or Easley — would have filled that decor, that cave, with hundreds of tiny details: broken statuettes, forgotten phylacteries, pieces of armor, weird components, eldritch treasure, you name it. Instead, we only get this monotonous sea of mauve.

   But that’s not all. There is a weird new trend of conservative Christians getting into black and white tabletop role-playing games, and insisting that one can actually “win at RPGs.”

   I call them the Game Jesuits. They are among those who despise “tourists” the most. They demand a lifelong commitment to the hobby — like marriage. It’s very Christian indeed. If your commitment only lasts a few years, you are a tourist. Full stop.

   “For six or seven years in the early nineties I was really into grunge music!” Tourist.

   “I rode my mountain bike so much when I was in my twenties, man!” Tourist.

   If you love something, you must love it and keep engaging with it till death do you part. If not, you are a tourist.

   Yeah, those people completely freaked out in 1985 — Satanic Panic, B.A.D.D. and all — and then, forty years later and after realizing that they couldn’t have been more wrong about D&D and tabletop role-playing in general, they move in and claim these games as their own, but not the rainbow games, mind you, just the honest, straight, black and white ones. In retrospect, it appears that the demon idol on the cover of the Players Handbook and the giant horned efreeti on the cover of the Dungeon Masters Guide were not that much of a threat. But LGBTQ+ folks playing the game, that’s a big no-no.

   Satan is all right.

   Trans people are the root of all evil.

   Hypocrites.

   Plus, they seem to be saying: fuck Gygax’s “fourth category” of games, let’s make this a thing you can WIN, like any other game.

   Conservatives, am I right?

   And they sure are very suspicious about colors.

   Now that every single color means something extremely precise, they refuse to put on a shirt that isn’t plain black or plain white because they certainly don’t want someone on the street to approach them and say, “Aegosexual?” — as if something like that would ever happen.

   So black and white it is. They eagerly barricade themselves into OD&D with their three little black and white booklets, and refuse to allow anything else in that sanctum. It’s almost Waco-esque.

   I’m not asserting that the anti-color people are all conservative Christians, of course not. A diverse (pun intended) variety of folks hate colors these days.

   One Xwitter user caused quite a stir when they posted a beautiful Dragonlance piece by Larry Elmore and wrote: “Imagine thinking this is D&D.”

   That was really something.

   They want you to know that D&D is just three little brown books, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes and fuck all else. It’s terribly reductive, but those are the battle lines now. It’s even getting into 40K. I recently saw a guy post some old black and white illustrations and say that “40K art peaked at Rogue Trader.”

   I won’t pick a side today, sorry to disappoint. Dune in shades of grey is bad, and Vecna in riotous lavender indigo and heather mauve is equally bad. Artistic directors need to learn when to make use of colors, and when to stick with black and white.

   Both sides have their flaws, but why do they hate each other so much? That’s a societal issue that thoroughly transcends tabletop role-playing games, and I’m not insane enough to try and answer it here. Smart people are doing friggin’ PhDs on that subject…

   Color me impressed.

Cozy Low-Fantasy Cinematic Sandroad Storygame

   Last July on Xwitter someone asked the question, what is a storygame?

   Among all the replies, I found two people who gave diametrically opposed definitions, and it was a real eye-opener. I took screenshots of those two answers of course. Here they are.

   One says that in a storygame, the players have narrative control — they create the world during play. The other says that in a storygame, the players can make minor changes to the plot, but what happens, happens.

   That’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks: we invent so many new names and tags and genres and categories in this hobby that we no longer know which is which. Nobody knows what a storygame really is, and perhaps nobody knows what the other categories really are, either.

   Someone talks about a sandbox game as being an “open world” kind of setting, but then somebody else says, “You are using the wrong terms, and don’t understand what a sandbox is. By definition, if you are making the world up in relation to player decisions it is NOT a sandbox. A sandbox is a pre-built, walled location to play in. Hence it’s called a sandbox.”

   This person focuses on the word “box” when they really should focus on the word “sand.” The sandbox in their definition is not an open world but rather a demiplane or a Flat Earth: one cannot venture past the edge.

   Sooner or later you’re gonna have to face Strahd. It’s the only way out.

   There is no consensus on what a sandbox is, and there is no consensus on what a storygame is. Semantics reign supreme.

   If you are making the world up in relation to player decisions, like the guy said, what is it called? Not a storygame? Not a sandbox?

   Do we need to make up yet another confusing name here?

   On the back cover of Blades in the Dark it says “all the maps, factions, NPCs, and opportunities you need to run an exciting sandbox game.” But then on page 6 the book clearly states: “No one is in charge of the story. The story is what happens as a result of the situation presented by the GM, the actions the characters take, the outcomes of the mechanics, and the consequences that result. […] You play to find out what the story will be.” (The parts in boldface are in the book as-is.)

   So Blades in the Dark is a storygame and a sandbox? Isn’t that like, heresy?

   Plus, the city of Doskvol and all the other cities in the game are linked together by mighty armored trains — a literal railroad. So it’s a storygame and a series of sandboxes on a massive railroad? What the hell?

   I’m trying to make it sound very confusing. As a joke.

   When role-playing games first started in 1971 the folks playing those games didn’t know what to call them. Fantasy wargaming? Medieval fantasy?

   The answer is that you don’t need to label it — just play whatever you want, and shift from one thing to the other whenever you feel the need to. It can be theater of the mind until the bandits attack the village, and then you bust out the miniatures. You can interrupt the session and play a real, live game of poker or chess, because one of the player characters is being challenged to a game of chess or a hand of poker by an important NPC that they absolutely need to impress.

   Hell, you can even incorporate a game of friggin’ Monopoly if you want. Clan Ventrue has moved into your city and start buying real estate en masse, so the other clans have no choice but to start buying property as well. Lucy shall play her clan Toreador, James plays clan Tremere, and Billy plays clan Malkavian. Just replace the names of the streets on the board with the names of important avenues in your campaign city, and go!

   Speaking of vampires…

   “Bleed” is another term that we can add to the already tall pile. As I understand it, bleed is the flip side of cozy: it’s when you feel something. But if I asked that question on Xwitter, of course someone would say the exact opposite.

   Bleed is cozy.

   Bleed is when you feel nothing.

   Bleed is railroady.

   Bleed ain’t at all railroady.

   Storygames don’t have bleed.

   Storygames are bleed.

   Wait — what is bleed?

   And the Great TTRPG Word Salad continues.

   This level of unfair scrutiny borders on hypocrisy. I sincerely don’t think anyone can watch Mike Krahulik, Jerry Holkins, Jasmine Bhullar and Luis Carazo play Vampire: The Masquerade and think that the game is about slavery and sexual assault.

   Vampirism has been a standing metaphor for sex literally since Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. What was dubbed “Now YOU Are The Monster” is a craze that began in ’91 with tens of millions of aficionados, a very, very low percentage of whom were pro-slavery and / or sexual predators. Don’t be absurd.

   You want to play as a monster, but you don’t want them to be a monster?

   Have you read the definition of the word?

   You want cozy monsters, right.

   Are we going to see people play Call of Cthulhu and be a party of friendly Shoggoths and smooth-talking Moon-Beasts and funky Fungi from Yuggoth?

   Bending over backwards to play “cozy Ghibli D&D” seems almost ludicrous. At this point, why not just play TOON? I mean, that awesome game is sitting right there, super easy to learn.

   This is like insisting on playing high-speed roaming hide-and-seek instead of plain old tag. Again, semantics, pure and simple.

   High-Fantasy vs Low-Fantasy is another worthless debate. Someone says that High-Fantasy means wizards and magic items everywhere, and someone else comes to the contrary conclusion.

   What’s the use of having this branding debate? If every character owns two longswords +3, that’s a game, and if there are only two magic swords in the entire world, that’s another game. Choose your table. Some play poker with thousand-dollar chips and some play poker with Monopoly money or Lego bricks.

   Take a pill. It’s a hobby, not a religion.

   Modern tabletop role-playing games are too preachy and try too hard to explain themselves. MCDM’s intro reads like an essay. What does Tactical even mean? What does Cinematic even mean? Tactical is just another word for crunch — and Cinematic is just another word for fluff. Get over yourself; you’re crafting a toybox, not establishing a sacrosanct doctrine.

   “Tactical Heroic Cinematic Fantasy RPG” reeks of desperation. There is such a thing as too many adjectives. It’s like Chartered Professional Accountants: these people need two adjectives in order to feel secure and recognized. Master electricians only need one. Lawyers are so cocky that they don’t need any.

   You are selling a game, not a table culture. Some folks play Call of Cthulhu like it is a first-person shooter game, rolling dice and dropping monsters non-stop. Some folks only play Cthulhu for the stories; their investigators run like hell when the Shoggoths appear. Sell your game, and people will play it in many different ways — tactical or foolish, heroic or murder hobo, cinematic or just old-fashioned verbose. Whatever. It ain’t your call.

   Don’t pontificate.

   Yes, Gygax did pontificate a little. But don’t do it.

   Spenser Starkes, the creator of Candela Obscura, also fell headfirst into the preachy trap. He said, “We wanted to ensure that we’ve made a place that, although it was scary, although it had many elements of horror, had powers that were scary… we also never wanted to create a space where people felt unwelcome for who they were in playing the game and the GM never had to make that decision either to whitewash the world or to play the world as it was and put themselves in a place that would make them and the table not feel welcome and happy.”

   Why not produce a game and leave the social engineering and exegesis to sociologists and historians? The designers of Settlers of Catan and Mortal Kombat and Yu-Gi-Oh! didn’t write complete doctoral theses to frame their work.

   Here’s an idea. Since nobody really knows what those labels mean, why not just stop using storygame, sandbox, railroad, point-crawl, bleed, low-fantasy, sweetweird, nobledark, grimbright, narrative and other such terms? You might as well run a grungeblend proseflux halflegacy — it’s gibberish.

   You and your group play a game.

   My group and I play a game.

   Joe Manganiello and his group play a game.

   Those games are all different.

   No need for seventy-eight meaningless name tags.

   Byzantium a.k.a. Constantinople argued for over a hundred years about whether the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were one and the same, or three separate beings linked together.

   Don’t be like that.

TTRPG publishing: Everybody Does It

 

   Lots of people have been very busy bees since what we might call The Great Open Gaming License Debacle of 2023.

   Paizo have been working on their ORC License and are trying to remove the OGL from Pathfinder entirely — no Drows and all. They call it the Remaster Project. It’s gotta be a tedious endeavor.

   Darrington Press aka Critical Role have already released a game, Candela Obscura, and they’re working on their own fantasy role-playing game system, Daggerheart, completely independent from D&D and without any flavor of OGL.

   Cephalofair Games aka Gloomhaven is also launching their own fantasy role-playing game system AND releasing a revamped superlegacy Gloomhaven 2e.

   Kobold Press have released a fantasy role-playing game system, Tales of the Valiant, again, with no OGL.

   MCDM is also preparing to launch their own role-playing game.

   And then you have Goodman Games, Arcane Library, Troll Lord Games and countless others.

   The sheer quantity of writing that took place since last January is astounding.

   And unless you work at Paizo or Darrington Press or Kobold Press, your work has a very slim chance of being seen or read at all. There’s so much material being made — it’s like a galaxy, and your book is just one Oumuamua floating around in it.

   For most creators, TTRPG work is not profitable; even when working 70-hour weeks you are not guaranteed to be able to pay your rent.

   It’s the indie paradigm and it’s here to stay, alas. You can make stuff, but it shall remain fan art, fan fiction and fan design.

   Remember, DriveThruRPG is the biggest storefront out there, and yet 72% of all tabletop role-playing game products on DriveThruRPG sell less than 50 copies. This whole thing is not a market but basically a lottery.

   Out of every one hundred indie publishers of tabletop role-playing games, seventy-two basically do that staggering amount of work for nothing: the long hours trying to wrestle columns into place, the endless tinkering with margins, fonts and elusive image anchor points, the eight and a half different versions of the cover, the six thorough editing passes, the entire weekend spent on a single black and white drawing, all in vain.

   That is something to ponder.

   The homeless man begging for change in front of your neighborhood subway station is a better entrepreneur because he makes $1 an hour at the very least…

   In my previous post I mentioned Acererak’s Guide to Lichdom, which has now disappeared from DriveThruRPG’s listings. It went Platinum — then it vanished.

   Is that the trick then? Write Drizzt’s Guide to the Underdark or Jim Darkmagic’s Book of Big Bads, sell a lot of copies, pull it as soon as you get a cease and desist, and keep the money?

   People become indie TTRPG publishers because the technology is available to make such games and because there are webstores that can sell such games. In 1985, the technology wasn’t there — layout, PDF files, etc — and even if it had been available, where would you have sold your finished product? On the street? In front of game stores? And in what format? Zine? Floppy disk?

   Ten years from now people will be making their own video games, because the technology will be there, accessible to almost anyone. A creative person alone in their apartment will be able to make an Assassin’s Creed type of game in about six months, all by themselves, without having to commission any art; and there shall be indie video game webstores to sell those products. Steam and itch are already on it.

   Most of the talent that you see in indie TTRPS these days will migrate to indie video games by 2030. It’s inevitable.

   So, what is the solution here?

   That’s the sad part. There isn’t one.

   It’s unsolvable, even if you roll a critical 01% in Occult.

   You can shelve your TTRPG project and start working on that big video game right away, to be ahead of the curve. Or you can keep making TTRPGs, keep hustling, and perhaps you’ll get lucky, who knows? Or you can give up marketing and hustling entirely and just make the stuff you want to make—

   The tidal wave of publications on DTRPG and itch is enough to make you think that there are way more worldbuilders than there are people who buy and actually play third-party adventures and games. It reminds me of something my dad said back in 1984. My best friend and I spent literally every Saturday working together on maps, cities, taverns, sewers, traps, puzzles, religions, lists of NPCs, magic items, rumors, legends, trade routes, types of vessels, types of armor, either at my place or at my friend’s. My dad understood what a role-playing game was because he had seen us play a few times, and he understood that those innumerable Saturdays were just prepping.

   One day that he was looking at our huge world map on the kitchen table, dad said to us: “When you boys finally decide to play, it’ll be absolutely amazing.”

   And he was right. It was amazing.

   In the early eighties, everybody I knew was worldbuilding, creating their own continents, empires, fauna, flora, deadly traps, and I even knew a guy who created a langage for his world, like Tolkien or Prof. Barker.

   We’re all still exactly like that. Nothing has changed.

   You put it up for sale and earn $5 or $10? Good for you!

   But we are still doing the exact same thing we were doing in 1984.

   It may not be the booming business you wanted it to be, but it still is a damn good time, trust me.

   I say, enjoy this effervescent scene while it lasts. You’re going to have such nice memories of this period when it’s gone.

The Lich Convention

 

   That’s right: I published an adventure on DriveThruRPG.

   It’s been a rollercoaster. A big one.

   The writing part was fun, but the art part and the layout and the legal stuff, that was quite an ordeal.

 

   I’m not going to talk about the adventure in and of itself here, but rather look at the process of creating something worthy of being put up for sale online. I might post about Lich Con III, the adventure proper, at a later time.

   So here we go.

   Like I said, getting the idea and writing a first draft — that is where most of the fun is. You write the whole thing down. Thirty-seven pages? Bravo, well done! Then you click Select All, and put it in two columns with a nice gutter down the middle. But nobody has made a word processing application that can handle columns. We’re getting ready to go to Mars but we’re still unable to fix columns; and I’m not the only one complaining about this: the Internet is full of articles and tutorials on how to make columns behave.

   Another headache is learning to put a different watermark on every page of your document. Not as simple as you might think. That is not a good memory for me. And page numbers, Christ; it completely scrambles the entire layout that you just spent seventeen hours creating.

   You also need to consider your PDF options right from the get-go, it’s crucial.

   If you’re only going to make $100 with the finished thing, why would you spend $100 up front for PDF software that you’re never gonna use again after that? Do it for free in Word 2007 or 2010 or LibreOffice. Why did the “publish as PDF” function disappear from Word? Isn’t that one of the main uses for a word processor? It’s like having a garage where they can fix your entire car — except for the breaks; to fix the breaks you need to go to the other place where they specialize in brakes and nothing else.

   It makes no sense.

   Cassi Mothwin said that she needed to add one page in her game, which she made in Affinity Designer if I remember correctly, and that the “new” page completely fucked the formatting of every page that came after that until the end of the document.

   The exact same thing happened to me… in Word 2007.

   My question to you is this. Why pay $69.99 for Affinity Designer if I’m just going to have the same annoying problems that I already have in a free, sixteen-year-old word processor?

   You want us to buy a design program? Make a design program that works.

   But let us move on to a different kind of ballache.

   Can you use proper names, or can’t you?

   Someone said that nobody can copyright the names of a Roman god (Orcus) or a Mesopotamian deity (Tiamat). This is great, but are you absolutely sure about it? Because everybody who says anything about trademarks or copyrights or fair use also says, “I am not a lawyer, by the way—”

   Getting a clear answer is very difficult indeed.

   Lawyers are not on social media. They don’t interact. They don’t share.

   Go fuck yourself with your nulla culpa, brother. You suck.

   It’s a sharing economy, but only for the poor and the middle class. Don’t expect the rich to share anything, ever.

   There is a game called Dark Places & Demogorgons, and a supplement (not for the same game) titled Acererak’s Guide to Lichdom…

   So you CAN use proper names.

   Or maybe you can’t. Acererak’s Guide to Lichdom is nowhere to be found on DTRPG now. It’s been removed. What happened? Cease-and-desist? I don’t know.

   Perhaps it was taken off the site for reasons completely unrelated to the name Acererak.

   And then there is Sly Flourish. He uses the words “Dungeon Master.” Those words are forbidden, aren’t they?

   Again, never a clear answer.

   That’s what the lawyers want. Keep everything in constant flux, and keep the people guessing.

   That’s why I chose to use Orcus’ Greek name, Horkos, and Tiamat’s Akkadian name, Ti’amtu. I’m okay with that — more flavor, actually. Gandalf famously said that he was called by many names throughout Middle-earth. I’m pretty damn sure Tiamat and Orcus experience the same phenomenon on a whole other multiplanar level.

   Someone told me that WotC keep using the names Acererak and Bigby and Strahd to prevent them from falling into the public domain. How can a character (Acererak) fall into the public domain a mere 15 years after the death of its author? And how can Strahd become public domain when Tracy and Laura Hickman are still alive and kicking? And how come the name Boccob, which WotC hasn’t used since they bought TSR, hasn’t fallen into the public domain? It’s hard to separate the nonsense from the facts.

   This is another sneak peek from Lich Con III. It’s a cool handout.

   Now here’s something crazy. One indie game designer on Twitter said that they invest six hours of work per product they put up for sale on DriveThruRPG.

   To me, six hours is a blog post. Lich Con III is in the hundreds of hours of work, perhaps even a thousand. I didn’t count. I mean, it was at least fifty hours just grappling with those goddamn columns in Word and LibreOffice and WordPerfect X6 and watching YouTube tutorials on How To Make Columns Behave in Word.

   Six hours per product? This person is simply putting blog posts up on DTRPG, there is no other explanation. This week, two new monsters. Next week, three new adventure hooks. Next week, a new relic.

   It’s a paying blog.

   Good for them.

   Maybe we’re the dumb ones over here, blogging for free.

   The original OSR blogs were all free. I discovered them back in 2013 and that’s why I started to write my own — on Blogger, where most of the OSR blogs were hosted. I jumped on that bandwagon. I do not regret it. It was nice. I made new friends. I learned tons of stuff.

   When Covid hit, I knew I would not be able to run games for a long while, and so I decided to jump on an entirely new bandwagon. Indie TTRPG writing. That scene really blew up during the lockdown.

   Then they announced “One D&D” for 2024.

   Then Musk bought Twitter, and a sizable chunk of the TTRPG community went away.

   Then they announced a new OGL.

   It wasn’t ideal, and my timing appeared to be exceptionally bad — but what is done is done. I probably won’t be jumping on the next bandwagon, whatever that may be, but perhaps the next one after?

   So what now?

   I have more articles lined up for this blog, including another post about tabletop role-playing game publishing that’s coming. I also have a few new ideas for adventures, but I won’t invest too much time and energy into it; first, let’s see if Lich Con III can reach Copper best seller status, right?

   This means that for the first time in nine years, you, the reader of this blog, have a way to financially support it if you want. You’ve been reading for a long time and like this stuff? Consider “donating” $3.99 so I can keep rambling about old-school role-playing games for the foreseeable future.

   Even if you don’t intend to actually run Lich Con III at a table — you’d still have it in your PDF library and can read it sometime and have a good laugh.

   I got you, Sam.

   https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/402239/Lich-Con-III?affiliate_id=2234827

Merlin, Jesus, Tékumel & the Public Domain

 

   Way back in ’95 we had Mr. Tuvok, a Black Vulcan — and I’m sure Gene Roddenberry would have had no problem with it.

   We had a Black Inspector Javert in BBC’s Les Miserables — and I’m sure Victor Hugo would have had no issue with it.

   We had dashing musketeer Cyrano de Bergerac played by Peter Dinklage — I’m sure Edmond Rostand would have agreed.

   Heroes and saints are remade, all the time, to fit changing tastes and sensibilities.

 

   When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, all of a sudden Jesus was depicted with short hair, no beard, and Roman clothes. Old-school Christians probably thought it was an outrage—

   “Jesus Wasn’t Roman!!!”

   I’m not going to pretend to be an authority on comparative religion, but the “How Dare You Depict [God / Demigod / Hero] Dressed In [Ethnic Group / Tribe] Garb!” thing must have happened thousands of times since the Stone Age.

   Why are there so many different versions of Merlin’s life? Sometimes he is the Lady of the Lake’s apprentice, and sometimes not. Sometimes he has a wife, and sometimes not. Sometimes the Lady of the Lake is named Viviane, and sometimes she is named Nyneve. Sometimes Nyneve is the equivalent of Morgan, and sometimes she isn’t…

   That’s because somebody, over a thousand years ago, did not stay true to the “source material” of Merlin — whatever that was. Believe it or not, one individual had to invent Merlin at some point, in spoken or written form, but the character really took a life of its own; then the original author / creator passed away, and other storytellers wrote about that increasingly popular character.

   But what is Merlin’s real backstory?

   Well… what is the Joker’s real backstory?

   Think about it. A thousand years from now they’ll ask, “Did the Joker become the Joker after falling into a chemical mixing vat, like Nicholson, or because of relentless mocking and bullying, like Phoenix?”

   Indeed, which is it?

   That character became enormously popular, and many authors wanted to tell stories about him. And they did. And so the character changed.

   Cesar Julio Romero Jr. is not Joaquin Phoenix.

   And this whole “respecting the source material” debate. Let’s talk about that.

   Name one thing that was adapted into another media without changing a single detail of the original story.

   The Lord of the Rings? — No.

   The Watchmen? — No.

   Batman v Superman? — No.

   American Gods? — No.

   Game of Thrones? — No.

   The Name of the Rose? — No.

   The Walking Dead? — No.

   Dune? — No.

   The Whisperer in Darkness (2011) is an excellent Cthulhu movie, but the whole ending — the part with the airplane — is made up, and not at all from Lovecraft’s story.

   “Canon” is an institutional hoax that comes straight from the Church Fathers. In A.D. 363, they had a whole bunch of texts about Jesus — and they all sat down together to decide which texts were true and which were false. It was basically guesswork.

   Which of James Bond’s countless missions are canon? All of them since 1953?

   Agent 007 must be at least 95 years old by now, right?

   And then there is something else.

   Sooner or later, cultural material fall into the public domain.

   This is the biggest thing, actually.

   ANYONE can write a Frankenstein story, a Merlin story, a Lancelot story, a Dorian Gray story, a Captain Ahab story or a Dr. Faust story. Anyone can take those characters (and countless others) and gender swap them at will, make them Philipino or Innu, and decide that they have an identical twin, evil or otherwise. You can even decide that Lancelot is Captain Ahab’s father, and that they’re both cyborgs from planet Yuggoth.

   We had a slew of Sherlock Holmes shows because the earlier works of Arthur Conan Doyle entered the public domain in 2010. Benedict Cumberbatch played a modern-day Sherlock, with text messages and all. Elementary had an Asian female Dr. Watson.

   One day that’ll happen to Gandalf and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Harry Potter, too.

   Like it or not, Tolkien will enter the public domain in 2043. Anyone will be able to make a TV show, a graphic novel, a musical, a cooking show or whatever, and not follow the source material if they don’t want to.

   Chinese Gandalf will happen. Latina Galadriel will happen. Moroccan Han Solo will happen. It’s not a question of if, only a question of when. Turkish Han Solo and Chewbacca already happened, a very long time ago — but that’s a whole other story.

   Until 2043 the Tolkien estate will keep micromanaging J.R.R.’s writings, and it will lead to ludicrous situations.

   Get this. Someone develops a TV show about Moses and the Israelites escaping from Egypt, but they don’t have the rights to the Book of Exodus; all they can use is what Mark, Matthew, Luke and John said about Moses in their books.

   Absurd, isn’t it?

   You want to be mad?

   Be mad at the Tolkien estate ALSO.

   The Amazon show can’t touch what is in The Silmarillion — it has to invent a whole bunch of material. The Tolkien estate is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. They should just relinquish the whole thing — it’s going to happen in twenty-one years anyway. Might as well do it now. Pull the Band-Aid. There — done!

   But what about our money!!!

   Yes of course.

   I read on a forum that Amazon could have easily made a Second Age show set in the East / Rhûn, with the Haradrim (Black), the Easterling (Asian), the four Dwarven clans of the Red Mountains, and a few remaining Elves (Avari). That’s diverse.

   But there’s something much, much better—

   Take Professor M.A.R. Barker’s 5 Tékumel novels, and make a 5-season TV show about that.

   There are no White people on planet Tékumel. Zero.

   Perhaps you could add just one White Tsolyáni princess, or just one White Yán Koryáni archer… and… it’ll spark a loud, angry, nasty fan outrage.

   Chí, I say.

   By Lord Vimúhla, that’s a show I’d certainly watch.

Fall of the Dungeon Master

 

   So you’re a Dungeon Master? Okay, listen, I gazed into my crystal ball, and your future looks pretty grim. Let me tell you all about it. Free of charge.

   More and more now, Dungeon Masters find themselves standing between Wizards of the Coast and the millions of players who enjoy the world of Dungeons & Dragons. Those players want total, absolute freedom, and their Dungeon Masters are a “necessary evil” — or at least it’s starting to feel like it.

   The game’s marketing is directed towards players, not Dungeon Masters. If every D&D player buys a book, that is a lot of money, but if every Dungeon Master buys a book, the sales remain quite low. Players make up the bulk of the customer base, and that’s nothing new: it’s been that way since 1974. So, every six months, Wizards gives out “player candy” and introduces a new, overpowered subclass. The DMs have to adjust. Constantly.

   These days, it’s a perpetual tug-of-war between players and Dungeon Masters — and not just with official material, mind you. KibblesTasty published a fan-made artificer class that soon became a contentious issue. DMs didn’t want it. Players really wanted it. Some players even hoped Wizards would copy it and make the stuff official, so that DMs would have to accept it.

   But that’s only the beginning. Ha ha.

   Dungeon Masters are also being challenged by a drastic shift in the playstyle. You see, Dungeons & Dragons is a shared story. Dungeons & Dragons is a live, freeform experience. Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t need an all-powerful, dictatorial arbiter, and perhaps it doesn’t even need a written plot with predetermined encounters.

   No written adventure, no fixed story, just peers sitting together and riffing off of each other’s in-character improvisations. No spotlight hogs, either, as everyone gets the same amount of time to talk.

   Dungeon Masters have always been the worst kind of spotlight hogs, haven’t they? Wink wink.

   John only wants to tell the rest of the party about his Aasimar rhapsodist’s dark musings, and Jane only wants to be allowed to play her super optimized Tortle dragon tamer pirate ranger. You happen to be their DM. What do you do?

   Some want to quit.

   Some DMs really don’t like this ‘improv’ reframing of the game that is obviously being brought about by Critical Role.

 

   So, let’s recap:

   Storygamers don’t want a classic Dungeon Master who occupies way too much narrative real estate.

   Powergamers don’t want somebody who can decide if this feat or that subclass is legal at the table.

   DMs are being questioned on both sides of the role-playing spectrum.

   On the far left, they think a DM is just like any other player, no more, no less; they all tell their part of that shared story, and the DM’s own contribution isn’t bigger or more relevant than any other part.

   On the far right, tactical wargamers don’t really need DMs anymore, except maybe to roll for the monsters; but if they only need the DM to roll some dice, isn’t that the waste of a player? Let the monsters run themselves with an attack deck, Gloomhaven style, and get an extra player character in your party.

   Here we should take a timeout from discussing the Fall of the Dungeon Master, and look at the possibility, however remote or preposterous, of getting rid of other fundamental D&D components.

   There were folks who criticized the fact that most treasures are “questionably sourced” in Pathfinder and, by extension, D&D; I’ve broached that subject in a previous post (“Bad” Treasure, April 2021).

   Let’s recap again:

   No predetermined story or plot, no omnipotent referee, no dungeons, no monsters, no treasure, and no violence. The player characters sit in a tavern, drinking, talking, laughing.

   It’s a creative drama workshop.

   I get it, though. When I was 17 and 18, I too questioned everything. “Fuck The World” was my motto. You know: the golden age of punk. Society sucked, and I wanted none of it.

   Today, it’s the same phenomenon, expressed differently. Why should we pay rent? Why should we have student debt?

   What are monsters even for?

   What are spells even for? What is armor even for? What is experience even for?

   If we go the nihilist road, we’ll end up playing nothing and caring for nothing and doing nothing, like in Withnail & I.

 

   Everything D&D (apart from movies and board games) requires a Dungeon Master. It is an unpredictable situation that might make business-savvy investors nervous, and they have addressed it before — you can bet your entire game collection on it. “Do we have a contingency plan in case we experience a catastrophic drop in the number of individuals who are willing to enable this product without compensation?”

   Is Robert going to feel confident enough to take on the duties of Dungeon Master? Is Myriam going to have enough time to DM on top of studying for her master’s degree? Dan had a stroke last year; is he going to resume his campaign? Jenna did not do any DMing since before the pandemic — is she going to come back to it eventually? Case-by-case uncertainty.

   They’ve already had a few meetings about this. Trust me.

   Gary and Dave envisioned the Dungeon Master as a sort of deity, sometimes malevolent, sometimes benevolent, and sometimes completely indifferent. Many things have changed since those early days. Increasingly now, the DM is but a proxy for the mechanics and rules; they are more or less expected to run what Perkins, Winter or Crawford have written, as is.

   But DMs do not work for Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast. They never have.

   With the advent of One D&D, the Dungeon Master is about to be reduced to a simple role of software manager. Indeed, they won’t need a DM to describe the guttering candles and spooky cobwebs: it’s all been rendered in 3D; and they won’t even need a DM to track initiative: it’s all been programmed right into that VTT.

   The same isn’t happening in Call of Cthulhu, for instance, because that game still needs its DMs, a.k.a. Keepers. There are still innumerable locations to flesh out and describe, from creepy mansions in Poughkeepsie, NY, to abandoned mausoleums in Chepachet, RI, to haunted lighthouses off Pollock Rip, MA. Nobody in Call of Cthulhu is asking What Are Monsters Even For? (they’d lose 2d10 SAN if they did.) There’s a lot of storytelling left to be done in this genre.

   And what about little indie gems such as Nibiru or Moriah? For sure, they need a GM to work their awesome, heartbreaking magic.

   I chose the title “The Fall of the Dungeon Master” and not “The Fall of the Game Master” for a reason.

   If and when D&D doesn’t want you — or need you — anymore, don’t worry, there is a plethora of exciting worlds out there that await and value your energy and dedication to run amazing adventures.