Let's be serious

Broadly speaking there are two approaches to literature and drama. One view is that it’s entertainment, it should be fun, and it shouldn’t challenge you or make you feel uncomfortable. That’s a strain that’s developed in Britain and America particularly and used to be known as the Young Lady Standard. The term is particularly unfair seeing as Emily Bronte wrote one of the most uncompromising novels of all time. Nowadays we’re hopefully less sexist and young ladies get the same educational benefits as young gentlemen, so let’s instead call it the Cosy Standard. In TV broadcasting it’s the equivalent of pre-watershed content.

On the other hand, fiction can take you right into the depths of the human soul to confront both the marvellous and the terrible. It can shake you up. Read Chekhov’s short story “In the Ravine” or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Nabokov’s – oh, well almost anything by Nabokov, in fact. You’ll face some profound truths. Like all great art, these works can change you. But you’d never say of them, “Oh, it’s entertainment, it’s just a bit of fun.”

That’s even more true of games, where the very name of the medium leads people into assuming it has to be frivolous and jolly. When Profile Books published my interactive version of Frankenstein, one reviewer complained that she didn’t want to be complicit in the creature’s murder of 6-year-old William Frankenstein. Too bad. Every reader of the novel who finds themselves sympathizing with the creature is going to have to face that moment. The game version just really rubs your nose in it. There are games like Papers, Please and This War of Mine that are trying to be L'Armée des Ombres rather than a boys'-own romp like Kelly's Heroes.

This is the point Jim Desborough was making with his widely (and often deliberately) misrepresented article “In Defence of Rape”. If you’re a grown-up, you look to fiction (including games) to tell the truth, not wrap the world up in a comforting nursery blanket.

This exact point came up recently in the case of a motion capture performer who refused to act out a rape scene for a game. That is their right, no question about that. And I have no idea what the game was, so I don’t know if the performer was correctly judging it when they said, "It was just purely gratuitous in my opinion." But it wouldn’t have to be gratuitous. Suppose this is a WW2 game. You’re sneaking into a Nazi-occupied village to plant some explosives or steal the attack plans or whatever. Stealth is the watchword. But you pass a window where you see an enemy soldier raping a villager. (Or torturing a villager. Or even in the act of murdering them, since this isn’t Victorian times and we don’t buy into “the fate worse than death”.)

Now here’s the question. Do I shoot the Nazi soldier? In doing so I’ll save the villager but I’ll give away my presence in the village, jeopardising the mission. Or do I pass by, hardening my heart to the villager’s screams because many lives hinge on the success of the mission and so it’s more important than one innocent person? It’s the Trolley Problem but not presented in the dispassionate context of a philosophy lecture. The decision is brutal and I’m going to have to live with it. The choices that confront you with challenges to your most fundamental moral principles are the ones that fuel the most powerful stories, because they make us think hard about who we really are.

As I said, I don’t know if that’s what the game’s designers were trying to do. But you would expect good literature or cinema to confront you with raw and disturbing situations like that. Games are an art form no less capable than literature or drama of addressing difficult moral questions. Games can be simple uncomplicated fun, of course, and many are. But that’s not all they can be.

Credit where it's due

Originally published in 1985, Dragon Warriors returned in 2008 in a deluxe hardback edition. Here is my foreword to that volume:

As Dragon Warriors is coming up to its quarter century, it’s now almost as venerable as those classic original role-playing games—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, Traveller—in whose company it was once a cheeky whippersnapper.

Those who enjoy Dragon Warriors respond to something unique about it. Which sets us to wondering: what is the essence of Dragon Warriors? Most certainly that essence doesn’t lie in armour bypass rolls or other game mechanics. Indeed, the best Legend campaigns we’ve played in have used the GURPS system. And the rules mean nothing to those who live in the Dragon Warriors world, for whom ‘mystic’ and ‘warlock’ and ‘sorcerer’ are all interchangeable shorthand for a guy you really should steer well clear of.

So, is DW then defined by the world of Legend? We think not. Some of the great role-playing games are completely identified with an entire fantasy sub-creation. Tekumel and Glorantha spring to mind. The world of Legend, on the other hand, was always intended to be this world—only skewed.

Some parts are closer to the 10th century, others to the 14th, but the point was always to create a backdrop that would be recognizably and convincingly medieval. It was never about creating a place that was alien and strange. The familiarity of Legend is what gives players freedom to create their own stories there.

Not rules nor setting details, then. From a personal perspective, the important thing for us has always been the flavour. That, for us, is the essence of Dragon Warriors. Our aim was to put something dark, spooky and magical back into fantasy role-playing. Loathing the medieval Disneyland of Dungeons & Dragons, with its theme-park taverns, comedy dwarves and cannon-fodder profusion of monsters, we made Legend as vividly dreamlike as the Middle Ages seem in stories, a place dripping with a European folktale sensibility. The flavour of what fantasy ought to be.

In Legend, faerie creatures are as amoral as cats and as heartless as children. A goblin in the rafters can spoil a whole night’s sleep, while a troll under the bridge ahead is reason to change your travel plans. And these creatures are rare. Walking into a tavern in Legend and finding an elf at the bar would be like strolling into your real-life local and seeing a polar bear.

This is a world in which human emotion is just as strong as magic. The scenario ‘A Box of Old Bones’, which originally appeared in White Dwarf magazine in 1985 and which is bound to re-emerge before long, makes it clear that the miracles associated with holy relics are sufficiently rare and vaguely manifested that a fake relic can go unnoticed for years, getting by on the strength of its placebo effect and the willingness of clergy and believers to collude in seeing evidence where they want to see it. Our rule was never to evoke magic if a non-supernatural plot point would do.

Fantasy games like D&D—or, these days, World of Warcraft—belong to the George Lucas or Chris Columbus branch of role-playing. Dragon Warriors would be a movie by Guillermo del Toro or Tim Burton. In literary terms, if D&D is Eragon, then DW is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Now that the righteous passion of youth is mellowed somewhat, we see that neither approach is right or wrong. Fantasy has room for all flavours. Take your pick.

Turning now to thanks, regrets, and reminiscences… Dragon Warriors owes its existence to Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, whose brainwave was to see that role-playing could be smuggled into bookshops. We were never that interested in solo gamebooks, but as soon as we saw the first Fighting Fantasy book we started planning the pitch for Dragon Warriors.

The game system too owes a debt to Livingstone and Jackson, interestingly enough. We had self-published a little RPG called Mortal Combat in the late 1970s. This came to the attention of Games Workshop, with whom we discussed a UK rival to D&D. Workshop’s working title for this was ‘Adventure’. The deal never happened, but it gave us an excuse to focus our role-playing sessions towards creating a set of rules and a world (in fact, several worlds) that ultimately evolved into Dragon Warriors.

With hindsight, there are things we would do differently. Oliver always argued strenuously against polyhedral dice, but Dave resisted a pure d6-based system—wrongly, as he now admits. As the whole point of Dragon Warriors was to be accessible to everybody, the low price-point of the books was pretty much invalidated when you had to go searching for twelve-sided dice. Democratization of the dice supply would also have helped to break the authority of the GamesMaster—a term we abhor, preferring ‘umpire’ or ‘referee’ as more indicative of the group story-creation that we feel good roleplaying should be.

Philippa Dickinson, our editor at Transworld, recognized that role-playing broke the normal publishing rules about age groups. That’s why the original DW books showed no sign of being targeted at 11-15 year olds, even though those were almost certainly our main market. We played it ourselves, after all, and our friends—and we were twentysomethings, as I hope were many of those who bought the books first time round.

Completists may wonder what other DW books are out there. We used Legend as the setting for our Blood Sword series of gamebooks (Knight Books, 1987-88), where we elaborated the end-of-time storyline that hangs over the world as the year 1000 approaches. Later, some of the story threads in Blood Sword were used for three novellas called The Chronicles of the Magi (Hodder, 1997). We’re still not sure if we consider Blood Sword to be canonical— or whether the year 1000 would really pass in Legend with much hysteria, and not a little magical mischief, but maybe sans the direct intervention of God Almighty. The flavour of DW can be grim and horrific as well as whimsical, but such grimness is usually on a personal level. A character’s soul can be in peril, lives can be threatened by treachery, individuals can be torn by loyalties and inner conflicts. And yet, in a Legend campaign, it is not usually the fate of the world that hangs in the balance. Not merely the fate of the world, at any rate.

At the risk of evoking comparison with Robert E Howard’s estate, whose discovery of new stories seems almost to have dwarfed Howard’s output while alive, there was also an entire world of DW rules and adventures, much more extensive than in the original six books. This is the Invaders & Ancients book, which was to have been incorporated into Chaosium’s Questworld project. When that deal failed to come about, we reworked the material into a massive sourcebook, called Ophis, that would have comprised some of DW books 7-12.

If you’re interested, a little glimpse of that continent of Ophis features in Shadowline: The Art of Iain McCaig (Insight, 2008). But that is all there is, alas, as in those days we did our work in nonelectronic form. The manuscript may have taken the train to Dumfries or been used to lay the cornerstone of a church or used to light a fire on an especially cold winter’s night—all those fates that the one and only copies of things are wont to suffer. But, like life, the loss is what makes the rest of it so precious.

For the resurrection of Dragon Warriors we particularly want to thank James Wallis, who needs no introduction as one of the great luminaries of gaming. We are honoured that Dragon Warriors is appearing as one of the first publications of Magnum Opus Press, and grateful to James for lavishing such attention to make it a truly mouth-watering edition. We also must thank Ian Sturrock for editing, revising and improving our original material into a new edition for a new era of gaming.

And we are most grateful to have such excellent companions in our ongoing exploration of Legend— in particular Steve Foster and Tim Harford. Steve has been with us from the very beginning, designed Mortal Combat and in fact originated several of the most colourful characters of the Dragon Warriors world including Tobias of the Knights Capellar and arch-wizard Cynewulf Magister. Tim has woven some of the eeriest, most exciting and most affecting campaigns of Ellesland and enhanced it immeasurably with his ideas. Along with them, we are privileged to have adventured with Aaron Fortune, Paul Gilham, Frazer Payne and Tim Savin—heroes of Legend, dear friends, stalwarts all.

Returning to it another seventeen years on, what would I add? First I'd have to reiterate my thanks to James Wallis. He had the idea of bringing Dragon Warriors back, assembled the very best team of writers, artists and editors for the job, and produced a stunningly beautiful series of books. Without him, DW would probably still be languishing in semi-oblivion.

I'm grateful to Lee Barklam for keeping the flame alight with his Cobwebbed Forest site, where you can find maps, scenarios, source material and links to other DW resources. Likewise profound and profuse thanks to Shaun Hately not only for The Library of Hiabuor but also for his contributions to DW lore as a writer. Along those lines, Red Ruin Publishing have continued James Wallis's work as a labour of love, producing Casket of Fays (not fey, please note; one is a noun, the other an adjective) and a number of fine scenarios and solo books (of which The Horned Ram by Paul Partington is the latest).

And I mustn't miss out the folks at Alkonost, who are not only bringing Dragon Warriors back in a French edition (Les Terres de Légende, that is) but are also publishing two all-new volumes. With more focus on the social and political aspects of the game than on old-style dungeon bashes, we can really say Alkonost are ushering DW into the 21st century.

Published game sessions, both audio and video, have helped spread awareness of Dragon Warriors, and I'm particularly indebted to Grim Jim Desborough and Roger Bell-West for making their games available online.

It would be remiss of me not to thank the artists who have brought Legend to life. I'm convinced that Jon Hodgson has visited Legend often; his illustrations seem to have come direct from my and Oliver's dreams. In the early days we benefited from the work of Bob Harvey, Leo Hartas, Russ Nicholson and Alan Craddock. And here is an especially beautiful map of Legend by Patrick Crusiau. There are many others, and we salute them all.

Reality "in here" vs reality "out there"

"Many people think that there must be something more to the fabric of reality than what science can explain," said The Economist in a recent review of a book about the philosopher Henri Bergson, who once said of Einstein's theory of relativity that "it is not science, it is a metaphysics grafted upon science."

Bergson obviously understood nothing about relativity, and The Economist is often surprisingly prone to magical thinking for a paper devoted to the dismal science, but the comment happened to coincide with this interesting post by "A Motley Fool" on Substack and the above video by Grim Jim Desborough, both dealing with the question of the mystical vs the material.

It isn't a contest, and only non-scientists imagine that faith in science puts the two in conflict. (A point that Grim makes in his video.) I am a rationalist. I believe that the universe is simply a set of processes, "mechanical" if you like. But I also believe that we live in a mental model of the universe, and our mental model includes mystical phenomena. Those things are not real outside the world of ideas, as Alan Moore puts it, but in that that world they matter.

In other words, both gravity and love are real and important, but they are not real and important in the same way. To think so, and to try to insist that mystical ideas are also important to the universe -- that they're part of the fabric of reality, as The Economist insists -- is a category error. We're apes, and apes with clever little brains that imagine all sorts of art and feelings, but the universe doesn't give a stuff about that -- unless you can believe in an immanent deity that thinks like an ape. Einstein would have had no need to refute Andrew Marvell's statement of time

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

because, unlike Bergson, Marvell wasn't Dunning-Kruger (or even Donneing-Kruger) in thinking he was saying something fundamental about the objective nature of time.

It's the 21st century. We should have got past human exceptionalism by now, and also past the clomping kind of philosophy that still thinks science and intuition are describing the same kind of reality. For us they exist as a superposition, but that only matters on this tiny blip of matter in this tiny sliver of time to this one primate species. When humans are gone, the universe will still have red shift and black holes and gravitational waves but the notions of Bergson will be gone forever in the abyss of time.

Here come the machines

Now this is interesting. The Last Screenwriter is a movie made from a script written by ChatGPT-4. I'd like to tell you more, but knee-jerk hysteria (or so we're told) meant that the planned screening in London was cancelled. Too bad, as the filmmakers explain on their website that it was made as a non-profit experiment.

I'm curious about the use of generative AI in writing, art, and other fields. I suspect it won't lead to mass unemployment but instead will be a useful tool that creatives will collaborate with to improve their work -- much as desktop publishing has led to an explosion in the number of books. Hmm, given the quality of books these days maybe that's not such a great example.

Some people gripe (well, scream) that AI is stealing from existing authors and artists. Mostly that's a misunderstanding of how the models are trained. Yes, they look at millions of images to learn the way a picture is put together. Contrary to the belief of the pitchfork-bearers heading up to the baron's castle, the generative AI models don't record each individual image and reproduce it. It's more like how human artists and writers learn their craft.

For example, when I was a kid I'd often notice that my favourite comic book artists were having their panels "borrowed" by less well-known artists. The character poses you'd see in British comics in the early '70s (strips such as The Steel Claw in Valiant) had appeared in US comic books a few months earlier. But even among those Marvel & DC artists there was cross-pollination. Barry Windsor Smith famously started out drawing Jack Kirby pastiches and later went Pre-Raphaelite. Dan Adkins was famous for lifting poses from other artists. Writers too: H.P. Lovecraft began by imitating the style of Lord Dunsany. Dunsany was influenced by the King James Bible. Robert Bloch started out copying Lovecraft, and so the cycle continued. 

In the comics I made at school I emulated the art styles of Bernie Wrightson and Barry Windsor Smith; when I wrote my early stories I was following patterns picked up from Robert E Howard, Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, August Derleth, and others. This is how we've always learned -- and it's a much more targeted kind of swiping than the generative AI is doing. The AIs don't play favourites, which is why (now that you can no longer specify "in the style of" in the prompts) their art output tends to look like the soulless photorealistic fantasy paintings you see on DeviantArt.

I've talked before about using AI for artwork in gamebooks and RPGs. It's a good fallback for game designers who have no art budget. The snag is, people lose their shit when you so much as mention it. I've hired human artists whenever possible -- most recently Inigo Hartas for my Jewelspider roleplaying game. Of course you get a better result that way, but most independently published books don't even make enough to pay the author's phone bill. The option is often either AI art or no art -- or else public domain art like the William Harvey illustrations I used in the new print edition of Once Upon A Time In Arabia. Nobody was happy with those. (You can get a copy with Russ Nicholson's artwork on DriveThruRPG.) Another option is to use AI to enhance the writer's own sketches, which may be the best way to get the authentic imagery that the writer had in mind.

In any case, I'd like to see The Last Screenwriter because this is the future and we may as well start getting to grips with it. Smashing the looms never works.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 4

We've got another set of stat blocks from the Blood Sword gamebooks, as converted to Dragon Warriors rules by Oliver Whawell. This time it's the turn of Doomwalk (the one where they go to the land of the dead) and you can get the PDF here.

The original 1980s covers were always an oddity, as they were completely different in tone from the books themselves. Blood Sword was verging on grimdark (well, the nearest you could get in a book sold to 10-12 year-olds) before the term was even invented. The covers on the other hand were cute and funny. I'm not sure what the art director at a publishing house actually did in those days. Took long lunches, I suppose.

Thanks to Wombo I've been having a ball rejigging the cover art to suit the interiors. Use of AI art infuriates some people to the point of hysteria, but you can see that (a) it's not going to replace human artists just yet and (b) these aren't for commercial use, so it's not taking away a job that I'd have otherwise hired anyone to do. However, let me just assure General Ludd's followers that I'm doing my bit as the forlorn hope against the forces of AI art by engaging real-life illustrator Inigo Hartas for the Jewelspider project.

In the video below, Grim expresses pretty much how I feel regarding the use of AI art. But I'm open to debate on this, so let me know what you think.

Bring me pine logs hither

If you're going to have a seasonal roleplaying game there's not a lot of time left. No time to plan? For that last-minute gaming session, what could be more useful than this list of Legend adventures compiled by Lee Barklam on the Cobwebbed Forest website?

If gaming is off the table, you can read write-ups of our roleplaying campaigns in two books available exclusively to Patreon backers until Twelfth Night. I talked about these books in a post a while back, and here's your chance to get hold of them. I realize it might seem a little mercenary to mention Patreon in the season of giving, but you only need to subscribe for one month and you'll not only get the two RPG write-up books but the noughth draft of the Jewelspider rules as well as my Knightmare novels and a bunch of articles and adventure scenarios set in the world of Legend.

And to go with all that, Grim Jim Desborough has the Dragon Warriors stats for a number of weird and wonderful Yule monsters on the Postmortem Games site. (While you're there, why not buy a copy of Wightchester -- the very thing M R James would have been playing on Christmas Eve if he'd known about RPGs.)

Talking of Christmas Eve, I'll see you then...

Problematic pomegranates

In case you missed this in the sidebar, here are Jamie and I talking to Grim and the T-Shirted Historian on Dungeons & Discussions.

Right at the end Grim asks about the difference between British and American fantasy gaming styles, so here and here are some earlier thoughts on that. When writing Dragon Warriors I never thought of it as particularly British or European -- well, the setting obviously is European to the core, but is the tone of the game distinctly non-American too? People say it is, but as I grew up reading Stan Lee and a host of mostly US-based science fiction authors, it's not something I'm aware of myself.

And while we're about it, don't forget to back Grim's Wightchester: Prison City of the Damned campaign book, which still has a month to run on Indiegogo.

Dawn of the plague-ridden undead

I'm not usually a big fan of zombies (except in a Voodoo context) but I could revise that opinion for 17th century plague-ridden zombies. James Desborough's Wightchester: Prison City of the Damned starts with the closed-up streets of the Great Plague and runs with that to its sanity-rending beyond-all-logic conclusion. 

Wightchester is a low-fantasy horror campaign that sounds perfect for gamers who play to discover the story. As the Indiegogo description explains, this is "a setting where blades and gunpowder are more important than magic, and where the magic that does exist demands a price. Not a hex crawl, or a conventional adventure, but a free-roaming setting where you can decide what you want to do. Do you want to try and escape? Do you want to create a fortified place to live within the prison? Do you want to clear the entire city of the undead and earn your release? Good luck with any of those." 

You've got till the end of September to back it. And after the last eighteen months of real life, what could be more cathartic?

Cold and gold

While we're on the subject of top-notch stories and freeform roleplaying (which are kind of themes of the month, in case you hadn't noticed) Jim "Grim" Desborough's Dragon Warriors sessions on YouTube are still going strong. He and his group are now onto the adventures from the Cold Fury scenario book, which I gather was the title of the reissued In From The Cold. 

Grim shows how to keep a game focussed, fun, exciting, inspired, and packed with atmosphere. The best sessions are the ones where he goes off piste from the published adventure and wings it. Also he's got a first-rate group of players. I do miss Bekka (one of the founder PCs), though; there was a great character dynamic there with Sir Alain. Still, the rest of the band are all fine fellows and watching them swashbuckle their way through Ellesland is as good as a TV show any day.

Sayings of the High One

Grim Jim Desborough gave Dragon Warriors a nice video review the other week. I'm not sharing it here out of immodesty (of course not) but because Jim accepted the geas of wearing the eyepatch of Bolverk Bor's-son, who is one of his household gods. (Mine too, actually, and that sort of thing is rare among atheist lefties like us.)

I've been finding Jim's YouTube games pretty useful while writing Jewelspider, as they're reminding me of staples of DW gaming that don't feature in our games much (the mystics' sense of premonition, for example - or indeed mystics themselves) but that the new rules should at least include nods to.

While we're talking of Legend, I should mention that there are two very tasty DW books available free on DriveThruRPG: Cadaver Draconis, which collects material that the Players Guide unfortunately didn't have room for, and The Nomad Khanates, a sourcebook for the Great Steppes. These are good hefty books written by DW authorities like Shaun Hately, Damian May, Wayne Imlach -- well, I won't list everyone here, they're on the credits page, but suffice to say you're all appreciated by me and Oliver. For anyone unfamiliar with the Khanates:

An expanse of temperate grasslands and scrub lies to the east of the New Selentine Empire. It has never been explored or mapped; its exact limits are unknown. Somewhere further east and south are the strange, tradition-steeped lands of Khitai and Yamato. More southerly are the rich countries of Zinj and Batubatan, and the Palace Under Heaven where the Emperor of the Nine Mountains holds court. In the south-west, the grasslands must abut the far fringes of Opalar. But a traveller wishing to visit any of these exotic places would take the seaward passage along the Gulf of Marazid, not travel across the grasslands. These wild plains are the home of nomad peoples as fierce and untamed as the landscape they inhabit.  

The nomads are horse and oxen herders who move continually as the seasons and the abundance of grass for the herd dictate. They obtain everything from their herd - the horses are steeds for war or hunting, cattle draw the tribe’s wagons. Both are a source of meat and clothing and bone utensils. Horn and sinew are used in the construction of the nomads’ composite bows, which in the hands of a skilled archer can rain arrows on their enemies at a range of over two hundred yards. 

The social organization of these people consists of extended tribe-alliances whose ruler is called a Khan. The balance of power shifts as tribes change allegiance and as incautious Khans are assassinated. At the time of writing, the principal power resides in Sitai Khan of the Oshkosa. Other khanates are the Katagai, the Gunguska, the Khanate of the Sweeping Vast, the Khanate of the Black Pavilion, and the Hunkunkai. 

One westerner is famous for his travels among these wild people. Niccolo of Wissenstein was sent in a party of explorers from the court of King Vorlest of Kurland, who charged them with discovering a safe land-route to Khitai. Niccolo quickly learned the nomads’ tongue and set about his task; trying to establish contact with the Khans and make a deal with them guaranteeing ‘safe conduct’ for Kurlish caravanserai. In this he was not successful, but he did produce a record of nomadic life which is quite unique. His visit to a nomad’s home occurs early in the account of his travels: 

"The clan are continually on the move, and for this purpose carry their homes with them. When the time comes to make camp, a family can set up one of these homes in under an hour. First a prepared lattice of willow hoops is raised, this being secured in the ground with heavy pegs. Large bolts of felt are wrapped onto this framework to form the walls of the home. The felt and the ropes used to lash the structure together are made from horsehair, and the clan’s herd animals provide oils to make the home proof against cold and rain. The finished home is a roughly circular tent which the steppe people call a gyur. ‘Invited into one such tent, I found the ulterior decorated with rugs and trinkets. The central part of the roof, above the fire, is left open as one also finds in the mead-halls of Mercania and Thuland. Despite this, I can attest that the home remains warm and comfortable even when the bitterest steppe wind is blowing outside. My own host, whose name was Shweymar, invited me to sit beside him on the brown rug occupying the northernmost third of the floor, opposite the entrance. This was a great honour, as the steppe people keep this area for the head of the household, his elders and guests of high status. Behind us were several idols depicting Shweymar’s household deities. In front of this area of high status, the floor is divided into two other sections. To the left of the doorway sit the women and children. The host’s sons and younger male guests sit on the right. Utensils for cooking and other household purposes are kept in the left-hand area while weapons are placed in a rack between the right-hand area and the host’s rug. I was to discover that this tradition of signifying status extends throughout the steppes, even to the homesteads of the citadels.Whether this is happenstance or real evidence that the tribes once belonged to a single unrecorded civilization – this question can never be answered."

Got any fond memories of Dragon Warriors games past or present? Share them in the comments. If we get a dozen, I'll chip in with one of my own from our DW playtesting days.

The one-eyed god wants YOU

Just going to put this out there. I'd love to join in myself, but I wrote the adventure in the first place.

#RPG - Next Dragon Warriors Session: The One-Eyed God - Tuesday at the usual time (7:30pm UK).

Reserve your places now! pic.twitter.com/idTX3pvH4m

— Grímnir Mäyrä-Parta: Master skeptomancer & skáld (@Grimasaur) April 6, 2020

If you want the "Previously on Dragon Warriors" bit, it's right here. And, by Hárr the High One, the latest installment is now online here.

Life and death are only a dice roll away!

Only a dice roll away? That's never been truer than now for most of us, but while you're battening down the hatches there's no need to lose all contact with the outside world. My gaming group have been looking at Discord, Roll20 and Zoom for roleplaying and Vassal Engine for boardgames.

James Desborough ran a Dragon Warriors game the other night, and as you can see it's almost as good as playing face to face. Even better than face to face, perhaps, if your friends are scattered all over the country and find it hard to get along to an in-person session.

If you've been waiting for the right time to snap up all the Dragon Warriors books, Serpent King Games have them in a Bundle of Holding for the next couple of weeks. And I'm now talking to SKG about them publishing Jewelspider, which would mean wider distribution and more artwork -- which the proceeds of the Bundle of Holding sale will help pay for. See, there's always a silver lining.

Different strokes

Games designer, critic and journalist James Desborough put up this video in response to a furore at UK Games Expo back in June. James's points are pretty much what I think myself about all the fuss, but that's not why I'm linking to it here. What I am particularly interested in is his succinct definition of "indie" vs "traditional" roleplaying from 9m 55s on.

In the former, the players get together to tell a story (if you've worked in a writers' room or collaborated on a novel you'll know how that goes) whereas in the traditional form of roleplaying it's not authorial. You play a character. The umpire (or GM, or referee, or MC, or whatever) creates situations. Your characters do things in response to those situations. In retrospect, that can be seen as a story (or a plot, as in, "The king died, and then the queen died of grief") but nobody knew what was going to happen in advance. There was no author. The story emerged from what the player-characters said and did.

Personally I prefer that because my day job (one of my day jobs) is being a writer. I don't want to repeat that in my downtime. Also, I play RPGs to discover and be surprised. The stories that are generated spontaneously from players' in-character words and deeds are more unexpected and more interesting than the ones we'd get if we sat around applying the cookie-cutter of Campbellian story paradigms to the pastry of a story set-up.

That's a personal preference, of course. I bristle if I hear players talking about their story arc and whether it's time for another player to move their relationship on in order to incite a plot point. But then, I'm not much of a fan of genre drama or fiction, and much of that "indie" take seems to derive from genre shapes for stories. As Roger Bell-West says here (at 1:26:20) in such games the goal is not to simulate any physical reality, but to simulate a genre.

In any case, every gaming group is entitled to play in whatever way they most enjoy. There's no One True Roleplaying religion. It gets interesting (and matters) when proponents of one style run up against and misunderstand the playing style and intentions of the other -- as seems to have happened in the Things From The Flood game at UKGE. But if you want to know more about that, continue watching James's video from 12m 12s onwards. I have to say, though, that I ran a Powered by the Apocalypse game (Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders) and my players enjoyed it in a thoroughly traditional, in-the-moment, inhabit-the-character style, with absolutely no authorial discussion or narrative analysis. Maybe we were getting PbtA "wrong", but it worked, and I might post some of the scenarios now that the nights are drawing in.

"Yes, I include roleplaying games in art!"

These days, if you want to get your work out there, you have to plunge into the world of social media. Recently I remarked how polluting and disappointing that experience often feels, and somebody said, "Hell is other people." But that's not it. I like people -- that is, in real life I like them. Some of my friends (OK, not many, but a few) support Trump and deny climate change, and I even like them, because in real life they're also warm, funny, provocative, caring, interesting, infuriating. All the things people are supposed to be.

But humans in other situations don't always come across so well. Driving on the motorway, for example. And you might say the arseholes who tailgate and make V-signs are just the vile minority, and I'm sure that's true of many of them. But I'm just as sure that many dangerously zig-zagging road ragers get out of the car at the end of the journey and promptly turn into perfectly nice people.

I used to commute out to Woking. At Waterloo, at the end of a long week, passengers would be scowling, snarling, barging past others in their haste to get on. Manners were in short supply. But those same people, getting off the train half an hour later, would be smiling, holding doors for each other, saying sorry if they bumped into you. Circumstances change us.

Somebody with a beer or a book in his or her hand can be pleasant company. Give them a pitchfork and a burning torch and you've got the makings of an angry mob. Social media too often works as the latter. So I liked this video by James "Grim Jim" Desborough because he absolutely nails what I think about all the intolerance, cult-justice and groupthink that sloshes around the internet. Or maybe it's just because I've always had a soft spot for a blistering full-on rant.

And for another take on games (computer games this time) as an art form, here's Ernest W Adams.