One of the hardest wires to walk in RPG writing is designing a “genre setting.” Pure genre books (GURPS Horror, Fantasy Hero) are relatively easy; pure setting books (Ptolus, Delta Green) somewhat harder. But hardest of all are setting books intended to enforce a specific genre, be it four-color comics, Gothic horror, or post-holocaust robot-fighting. Sometimes (Champions, Ravenloft, GURPS Reign of Steel), it works. Sometimes (as in Forgotten Realms or the World of Darkness), you create a setting that accidentally creates a whole subgenre on its own. But often, you fall between the chairs; the setting is incomplete, and the genre is imperfectly modeled. We ran into this problem at Last Unicorn with the Star Trek roleplaying games: Our vision was that the Original Series books would cover swashbuckling adventure, the DS9 books would cover grim espionage-military stories, and the TNG books would give us scientifictional sense-of-wonder adventures. I think the end result, whatever its other virtues as Star Trek roleplaying, got about two-thirds of the way to genre emulation.

With the original Freedom City setting in Mutants & Masterminds, Steve Kenson built a respectable four-color universe. With Paragons (255-page full-color hardback, $39.95), Kenson and 13 other writers attempt the harder task of modeling the “superheroes in a ‘realistic’ world” subgenre. Often, this subgenre simply becomes another genre with superheroes: Heroes is family soap opera, The Authority is agitprop, Godlike is war story. Kenson’s approach is to offer all of those as possibilities; to create a book of options, a smorgasbord rather than a fixed menu. As with any smorgasbord, you’ll love some things, and like others rather less. The trouble, of course, is that if you pick all the options on offer – from geopolitics to postmodern fairy tales to extreme sports – you wind up back in a four-color universe again, but without the nobility and mythic resonance. Thus, to use the book “correctly” requires ignoring about 85% of it, which may seem wasteful to thrifty gamers. That said, some or all of the material on offer would work pretty well in a four-color campaign, especially a “muted” four-color world like Checkmate or the Ultimates. (Especially the Mass Combat rules, for single supers vs. battalions of normals.) Another possibility would be using Paragons for a series of short three- or four-session mini-campaigns, each in a different “real world with superheroes” variant. This, actually, could be a lot of fun, and the book offers ten such “series frameworks” to support you, one of which (“The Imaginauts”) could serve as the over-arching frame story for just such a serial reality exploration meta-campaign. In the final analysis, Paragons isn’t a genre setting book, or a subgenre setting book; it’s a subgenre setting cookbook, complete with ingredients. Bring your own fire.

In the Afterword to his masterwork Hot War (202 digest-sized pages, black-and-white softcover, $28), designer Malcolm Craig says that the game is “centred around things that fascinate me.” I could embroider that on a sampler and put it on my wall; I would go so far as to say that any game designer had damn well better find something that fascinates her if she’s going to go through all the mishigoss of writing a game. Not just to keep her plugging away at it, but to sell it to the readers: fascination is contagious. But un-fascination is freaking viral – if you aren’t interested in your game world, or elves, or combat rules, the readers can tell, and they won’t bother to be players. Or to keep reading. Malcolm Craig, on the evidence of this game, is fascinated by monstrosity, betrayal, dystopia, underground structures, and politics. (But I repeat myself, he laughed hollowly.) And you the reader will be, too.

The British, from Wells to Wyndham, have a genius for dystopia; with Hot War, Malcolm Craig stakes his claim to that noble tradition. Presenting a semi-sequel to his previous game of monster-hunter infighting in postwar Berlin, Cold City, Craig lays out the world of Hot War in a very few bold strokes. (Paul Bourne’s illustrations — mostly propaganda posters and photos of monstrous “test subjects” – provide the ideal atmospheric assistance in this project.) The Cuban Missile Crisis became World War III. All sides used “twisted technology” stolen from the Nazis: building and summoning monsters. The War has wrecked Britain, and civilization (as far as the PCs know) is pretty much restricted to London and the Home Counties, and is likewise pretty much disintegrating. You are part of a secret inter-agency task force ordered to hunt down Soviet monsters leftover from the invasion, and anything else the Government needs hunted. (Terrorists, mouthy refugees, fascists. You know.) Your true agenda depends on which agency you really work for: The jealous Royal Navy? An experimental monster-research lab? The increasingly desperate Americans? Your true agenda will also differ from your orders, perhaps fatally. Conflicts are dice pool battles; you get more dice by pulling in those secret agendas, your relationships, and anything else you want to risk. (There’s a beautiful negative-feedback system by which you can sabotage your own secret agenda by using it in doomed battles.) The winner of the conflict narrates how he won and assigns any fallout, the characters change, and the game propels itself punchily on. It strikes me as a nigh-perfect game for shorter campaigns of six to thirteen sessions; about the length of a British TV season. It strikes me as a nigh-perfect marriage of rules engine with game feel. It strikes me as fascinating.

By which I mean that the clever and humanistic game writer under discussion today isn’t Bruce (“Adventure!”) Baugh, but Benjamin (“not Bruce”) Baugh. What’s next? Jensen Achilli? Mike Forbeck? Dare I hint it, Kevin Hite? Is nothing sacred? And as if to further jangle my over-tired nerves, Benjamin Baugh’s Monsters and Other Childish Things (182-page black-and-white hardback, $29.99) from Arc Dream Publishing seems to believe that what Veronica Mars needed most was a crossover with Stanley And His Monster. Seriously. This is a game about youthful trauma (high school, middle school, or grade school) in which the youths have horrible monster companions who eat people. If you buy the premise – which I’m still not sure I do – the bit is terrific. The game runs on Greg Stolze’s One Roll Engine, as seen in Wild Talents, Reign, and NEMESIS, and when I say “runs,” I mean “runs.” There are ORE rules for making up monsters and story conflicts, along with the rules for putting dice into (and taking them out of) Relationships, dealing (and dealing with) Shocks or Scars (physical or emotional), and lots of monster abilities. If you like ORE, you’ll love this. There is simultaneously more and less GM material than I’d look for if I were running: there’s a ton of NPCs (child, monster, adult, and Other) that are either iconic or clichéd depending on your perspective, and a pretty good intro adventure, and two of the three other campaigns on offer provide strange variations on the theme. But the book doesn’t ever just come out and explain how to decide, most importantly, if your campaign setting should have secret monsters or public monsters. Calvin and Hobbes is a different story from Pokémon; Monsters seems to want to split the difference, and I still don’t know how.

Arc Dream goes out of its way to provide me some answers, though, in Ross Payton’s Curriculum of Conspiracy (55-page black-and-white softcover, $9.99) and Baugh’s own Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor (160-page black-and-white softcover, $24.99). The first is a perfectly sound “evil high school” setting that all fans of Buffy will recognize and love. It could use some more NPC students (but the ones from the corebook will do to get started), and it still tries to split the difference a bit, but the rest of the setting is supernatural enough that the thematic hiccups level out. (It forbids monsters on campus, which also helps.) Where Curriculum is good, however, Candlewick is magnificent. The monsters here are internal; the PCs (“Pathetic Children”) have Creepy Skills that leave them shunned and hated. Perhaps that’s why they’re orphans. Perhaps that’s why they’re at the Candlewick Orphanarium. The players don’t know; with Echoes instead of Relationships, the orphans remember their own pasts in play. The theme, mood, and rules of this setting hit all the targets head-on. By adding the surreal Lemony Snicket sensibility and dialing down the monsters, Baugh reaches an ideal sweet spot of campaign design. And the rules – such rules! We get a jaw-dropping set of mystery rules for battling the mystery as though it were a big, amorphous monster – and better yet, for writing it collaboratively in play! Too weird for you? Well, the “normal” mystery creation system is also quite nice (reminiscent of the town creation subsystem from Dogs in the Vineyard) and involves plenty of One-Rolls to rule the story neatly. The setting material is sheerly wonderful, borne along by Baugh’s pitch-perfect tone. Baugh’s writing in both books is pretty great, verging on brilliant with only the occasional sidestep to too-clever. Robert Mansperger’s art throughout is only a touch less good than that, and it’s nestled in Daniel Solis’ predictably excellent page designs in Candlewick and the Monsters corebook. Those two books are worth getting for Candlewick alone, if you have any interest in playing a game of country-house mystery, boarding-school strangeness, even small-town skullduggery.

Note: I originally credited Curriculum of Conspiracy to Benjamin Baugh, when, as Shane Ivey notes with remarkable politesse in comments below, it was written by Ross Payton. My apologies to Ross, although I’m not sure it’s an insult for someone to think you write like Benjamin Baugh. In short, publishers should put authors’ names on book covers.

At the risk of giving away the surprise ending of this review, I have a new favorite World of Darkness game. I whined like a stuck pig about Hunter: the Reckoning back in 1999:

It’s not about badass Green Beret gunslingers puttin’ down the dead and smokin’ cheroots, despite the promotional art. Which is a shame. I wanted it to be; I like humans, even Dirty-Harry-humans, Navy-SEAL-humans, Batman-humans maybe, but humans nonetheless who kick monster butt. … Personal prejudice; I am, after all, a human.

Maybe a young Chuck Wendig read those words nine years ago, and said “When I become the Hunter developer, I’m going to give Ken Hite the game he wants.” Well, along with Justin Achilli, Richard Thomas, and a dozen writers, he did. The badass Green Beret gunslingers are on pages 147-149 of Hunter: the Vigil (372-page two-color hardback, $34.99). And their awesome ghost-killing “Etheric Rounds” lead off 8 more pages of the monster-killing arsenal available to Task Force VALKYRIE, the U.S. government’s interagency monster squad. (There’s even a shout-out for Very Old-School Hunters: Hunted fans — Project TWILIGHT is a VALKYRIE sub-agency.) That monster-killing arsenal is one sort of Endowment that your high-end hunters get as a benefit of membership in a high-end hunting conspiracy. Each conspiracy gets a different sort of Endowment; my least favorite by far is the devil-spawn conspiracy with demon powers, but I have to say I love the weird syncretic Egyptian guys who drink poison Elixirs almost as much as I love the multinational European medical conglomerate that vivisects monsters for biotech Endowments. Plus a magical relic-hunter conspiracy, and of course the Catholic Church, which gets its Endowment mojo from Upstairs. All of which supernaturalism sets up a nice Nietzschean abyss-staring type vibe.

But if you don’t want even that much inhumanity on the scale, you can just drop down a level and play a member of a “Compact,” which has nothing but human ingenuity and cussedness going for it: from the Wobblies’ Supernatural of “the Union,” to the Eurotrash John Constantines of “Ashwood Abbey,” there’s a great spread here, too. Or just play a gang of hunters with no friends but their shotguns at “cell level.” The game world is modular; any piece can come out or get slotted in sideways. Mechanically, there are superb uses of the Status Merit, a glorious tie between Willpower and Morality, a sweet “R&D” system to get new Endowments, a surprisingly comprehensive “build your own monster” section in the back, and best of all, Tactics rotes for player teams to smash up monsters big-time. It all adds up nicely to the sweet spot: humans are still horrifyingly fragile unless they hit monsters hard and hit together.

More mundanely, the cyan-tone color scheme is quite effective, although none of the art really jumped out at me; the editing has a few gaffes (including, ironically, a missing Editor credit); the main text hits the high Fortean note of the core World of Darkness book better than the Antagonists chapter does, although that chapter has to carry a lot as it is. And there’s no map of Philadelphia in the provided city setting, which in the world of Google Maps is probably no great crisis. The big picture, though, builds exactly the sort of multivalent-modular setting/game that White Wolf does better than anyone when they do it right. And Hunter: the Vigil does it so very, very right.

I got a demo of carry (76-page black-and-white digest, $15) from its designer, Nathan Paoletta, at a convention last year: Origins, I think. At the time, I thought this column was coming back sooner than it did, and I promised him a review, because the demo sold me on the game. It took awhile, but here it is.

In most RPGs, the dice constrain the story; in carry, perhaps appropriately for a game about futility and the Vietnam War, they do so more overtly than normal. The size of the dice you roll depends on your character’s Profile and the Approach he takes (an “Accuser” gets a d12 for Subversive actions and a d6 for Honorable ones; the “Brawler” would get a d8 and d10 for the same choices). Your Profile changes as you burn out; an Accuser can become a Brawler (“fight back”) or a Soldier (“man up”). The GM, also, has a dice pool, which she must expend; the combination of a GM budget and the Vietnam genre points toward very adversarial play. Players pass dice around to each other, driving the story with those actions, as the GM frames conflicts and the players set the stakes. As the action scenes mount up, even “successful” actions cost fallout: wounds and death for PC Grunts and NPC Fodder alike. Your dice pool includes a “Burden,” a die that represents your “major malfunction,” in the words of F. Lee Ermey. Your Burden stays the same, or gets bigger, but it’s the only die you can always roll. Even if you resolve your issue, you just get another one the same size. Eventually, everyone’s Burden is too big, all the Fodder are dead, and there’s nothing left but the final conflict in a last-scene endgame.

This isn’t Recon, in other words. It’s a tragedy of inevitable human failure set not even in the Vietnam War but in our hazy cultural recollections of it. I could see the same engine powering stories of the Civil War or, hell, the Trojan War. But in all cases, the engine drives the story, not the other way around. But it drives it directly, interestingly, and well from a base of recognizable, genuine human concerns. If that sounds like your kind of Approach, carry won’t be a Burden you can easily put down.

The potential for irony abounds in any discussion of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the first installment of which Steve Jackson Games released around Christmas of last year as a PDF original supplement on their e-store e23. To begin with, there’s the irony that after thirty years, we’re three-quarters of the way back around to The Fantasy Trip, Steve Jackson’s first multi-book simplification of Dungeons & Dragons. In fine epicyclic fashion, though, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is a multi-book simplification of GURPS for the purposes of playing games very much like Dungeons & Dragons. (Dungeons & Dragons, meanwhile, is moving around that same wheel, with its multi-book new edition a beautifully elegant, souped-up version of Blue-Book-era D&D “kick in the door and go” dungeon fantasy, likewise of thirty years ago.) But rather than reinvent GURPS for graph-paper delving, in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, GURPS Line Editor Sean “Dr. Kromm” Punch presents, rather, a set of comprehensive “house rules” for a GURPS game with the same goals that Tom Moldvay had in 1980. Which, it bears repeating, are the same goals possessed by an overwhelming proportion of the RPG player base – including me, one Sunday a month, given that I’m playing in a D&D 4e campaign.

Having addressed Genre, we move from the Universal to the RPSpecifics: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy comes in four books (so far). GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers (31 pages, PDF, $7.95) is the basic “Player’s Handbook,” featuring GURPS templates for 11 “classes” (barbarian to wizard, although if you play a wizard, you’ll need GURPS Magic, too), a few rules fillips, and a bunch of delving gear in GURPS terms. Even the streamlined list of dungeon-focused skills holds 100-odd entries; the suggestion of further collapsing them into single-descriptor class skills (Over the Edge- or Risus-style) is welcome. (Had it been me, I might have tried doing the book with just the skills in GURPS Lite; as it is, players will still need access to the main GURPS Basic Set.) GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons (31 pages, PDF, $7.95) is the real winner, a “Dungeon Master’s Guide” to quick decision-making and sound rules calls in GURPS for most anything you want to do in a dungeon. Comprehensive, fair-minded, and clever, it’s the equal of the best GURPS genre books, but with a lot more crunch than most. It doesn’t quite achieve the plug-n-play utility of the original DMG, but then the current DMG doesn’t quite achieve that either. It doubles as an abbreviated “Monster Manual,” with 19 monsters from the standard (dire wolf) to the weird (ambulatory mushroom-men). No dragons, though. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 3: The Next Level (44 pages, PDF, $7.95) adds templates for 37 races optimized (like the “classes”) for dungeon-bashing, and some excellently focused rules and guidelines for character advancement and experience awards. It also adds 20 pages of lenses for “multi-class” characters, which seems a bit much of a muchness, although we get templates for Evil Clerics and Anti-Paladins (or “Unholy Warriors”), so that’s pretty good. Finally, GURPS Fantasy 4: Sages (17 pages, PDF, 4.95) adds two classes: Artificer and Sage, plus yet more multi-class lenses, plus some excellent rules for tomes and books. Again, had it been me, I would probably have released a “Dungeon Bestiary” instead, but it’s good for what it is.

What it is, or rather what all four are, is also an interesting sign-post on the road. To begin with, it’s a high-profile electronic product from a company that was among the first to embrace the Net (an argument can be made that the Daily Illuminator is the world’s oldest blog) but that has done relatively little electronic publishing (compared to other companies) until recently (e23 only started in 2005). More specifically, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is an emulator, a filter to put over GURPS to get a specific feel, one most typical of another game. Given GURPS’ origins as a gladiatorial combat game – and the overwhelming popularity of that play mode — it’s odd that such a filter has taken so long. According to the e23 “What’s Hot” page, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers has sold 830 copies in a little over eight months: not bad for an e-book (it’s the third-best selling book ever at e23), but nonetheless perhaps indicative of: the way that assumptions about play style can shape marketing (“We don’t sell to people who play dungeon games”), the power (positive and negative) of branding (“GURPS isn’t for me and my dungeon game, it’s for Something Else”), and hopefully, the eventual erosion of such artificial distinctions in the more fluid world of the Web, where decisions to cross brand lines impose a lower cost on both the publisher and consumer.

I’m back! He exclaimed, knowing full well there were readers who didn’t know he was ever gone, and other readers who had no idea he had been there in the first place. It is for you latter, gentle souls, that I provide this introductory moment.

Box Described, Outitude Explained

For those of you new to “Out of the Box,” perhaps a bit of head-shaking is going on. Who is this guy, you ask, and what is he talking about, and why should I listen? Good questions, all — bear with me, O querulous one, and all shall be made plain. I’m Kenneth Hite, and I’m currently a freelance roleplaying game writer and designer. I’ve been a professional RPG writer and editor full time for about a dozen years (after a couple of freelancing years) and I’ve played RPGs pretty much continuously since about 1979, to the occasional dismay and continued chagrin of my nearest and dearest. Ever since February of 1997, I’ve written this roleplaying news-and-reviews column, jauntily titled “Out of the Box” in blithe disregard for the fact that the vast majority of RPGs were never in boxes to begin with. And ever since about March of 2007, I haven’t written it. Until now.

Over the last decade-and-a-bit, then, I’ve written this column for a webzine, for another webzine that bought the first webzine, for a game store, and for a would-be portal site that got bought by a different not-webzine. Now, after a decorous interval, I write this for IPR, which is to say, for a game store that is also a distributor-slash-fulfillment-house, or vice versa. Over the years, I have given a lot of good reviews to a lot of games available from IPR. I have likewise given a lot of good reviews to games that IPR does not carry. I imagine both will continue to be the case. I almost never bother to write a review of a bad or even a mediocre game; although pixels are infinite, our time is not, and I’d rather spend it talking about good games.

In both reviews and commentary, I make every effort to foreground my biases so that should you, the reader, be of a rigorously epistemological bent, you can extract the Truth from my subjective viewpoint. Speaking of my biases, then — forward. I love roleplaying games, most of all horror RPGs, and most especially Sandy Petersen’s Call of Cthulhu, which I and all right-thinking folk consider the pinnacle of RPG design and execution. I prefer worlds to systems, and straightforward, elegant systems to clever, intricate ones. That said, I’m a sucker for a neat mechanic. I am currently not only in the pay of IPR (which is to say, of Pelgrane Press, Evil Hat Games, Galileo Games, and a different game store), but also of Pelgrane Press in its own right, when I can get around to it. I’ve also written for Pinnacle, Iron Crown, Mongoose, Green Ronin, Grey Ghost, White Wolf, Pagan, Atlas, and Arc Dream, and have collected regular paychecks from Steve Jackson Games, Decipher, Last Unicorn Games, Chaosium, and Wizards of the Coast. You shall have to determine for yourself whether these fine people have purchased my good opinion, or merely my good writing — but, of course, much of the reason I write for them in the first place is my good opinion of their games. And as one final fillip, I also write PDFs for Ronin Arts and Atomic Overmind, which PDFs are not available on IPR at this writing, but are sold by many (even 23) Other Binary Sites. So I’m in competition with myself here. Mull that over on your tintype, then, as we go forth.

Ken Hite’s celebrated gaming reviews and discussion column Out of the Box returns, Monday September 8th at a time to be determined by Ken’s whim.  Stay tuned!