Fwd: [New post] 2135
Imagonem
URL : http://imagonem.org/2011/07/21/2135/
Publisert : 21. juli 2011 at 19:26
Forfatter : Anders Nygaard
Stikkord : Archipelago
Kategorier : Vitskap!
Love in the Time of Seið and the Society of Dreamers are games which
deserves your attention. Therefore, I deserve it, as I am about to tell
you about them.
Both games are thin packages of instructions and play materials;
somewhat awkwardly packed, in fact, since I trust that no one here would
ever be able to contemplate damaging a book by “cutting out the
materials”. Thus, photocopies or free downloads are an essential part of
the deal. But until the global system of paper cutting, printing and
distribution realizes the importance of cheaply making and shipping
paper things that goes in boxes, in addition to paper things that come
in stacks, it seems availability and cost trumps utility and sheer
neatness. Curses.
In the world of roleplaying, most such slim affairs used to be
“sourcebooks”, which is publisherese for “milkcow”. These days, a lot of
them are complete games. Freakishly, Love and Society are both, which is
what made me all happy and excited.
One of our escaped editors, Gamemaster Holter, has been messing around
with various homebrew systems for years and years. One of his messes was
an attempt to adapt the world of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea to RPG’s.
Instead, he appears to have cobbled together a generic game system so
sleek it makes GURPS Lite look like one of those old Russian tanks made
of dead tractors and rusty railroad tracks and a feverish faith in the
Revolution. He even gave it away for free, the filthy little infosocialist.
And then he and Jason Morningstar and some other guys on an internet
forum somewhere began cooking up worlds for it. Love and Society are the
attempts you should click over and have smeared on dead tree paste for
your personal pleasure right now, but inject Last train out of Warsaw or
Subway dogs of Moscow in your search engine of choice too.
And, see, here’s the thing, the bit where I lean over too close and
breathe pure fumes of aquavite in your face and explain the genius of
these books at length: Most sourcebooks are unplayable without the core
books. So you gotta have ’em all, and you need more and more because
evil kapitalist television has trained you to be incapable of coming up
with your own material. But Matthijs’ and Jason’s little chapbooks are
not a clever weapon in the Revolution which will free you from the
tyranny of uncreativity, because, frankly, let’s admit it, you’re all
about as creative as chips with garlic mayonnaise and you bloody well
like it that way, don’t you?
But you’re onto the sourcebook racket. You can no longer justify buying
another wad of paper detailing the dining etiquette of Clan
Katana-wielding Were-beaver #3.78 to feed that deep, dark hole in your
soul. Not when you know all the cool kids these days are writing
fanfiction and coming up with way better stuff themselves. So what these
chaps’ve done, see, is make a package to help you fool yourself and
others into thinking you’re not playing purchased material at all.
The core game, Archipelago, makes you come up with a world. But if
that’s too hard for you, you can buy these custom-cut versions of the
rules, complete with embedded setting, plot and scenes. And they’re
pretty settings, oh yes; dark and seductive and full of magic, blood and
fuckery, sketched like a five-second study of a ballet dancer, in quick
turns of phrase and slashed-in lines between slow, careful lumps of
rules and advice laid down in a friendly, hypnotic drone. But they’re
also complete games - you can’t just flip trough the book in the shop,
download the core rules and wing it, because the devious little bastards
have changed the rules slightly to fit the setting, or the creative
agenda or their own strange and inscrutable design philosophies. You can
play them over and over again, and get a different story each time.
I have witnessed shelf-meter upon shelf-meter of sourcebooks;
sourcebooks piled and hoarded and stored. Sourcebooks threatening to
fall on me and seriously bruise my tender thighs and feet. I, too, have
filled some of these shelves. So why is it that I cannot have a meter or
two of these little things for myself, to make the void where my
creativity gland should be a little less empty? The core is so open
source it doesn’t even have a CC-notice; if you can survive a night of
playing Archipelago, then you can do this thing. Go forth and write that
steaming fresh little world down; feed it to the internet, feed it to
the Print-on-Demand-shop’s beautiful machines, and let there be a
million more sleek little books like these.
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