Character creation is simplicity itself: you have two stats (Fighting Ability and Non-Fighting Ability), which drive your Rank, which sets your basic loadout. Given that 3:16 is a game of interplanetary amphibious infantry warfare (there’s that Starship Troopers reference), the speed of chargen comes in handy when you have to build replacements. Because it’s brutal, tactical, and not a little bit cynical all at once (there’s that genre evocation), your characters may die through no fault of their own, through their own stupid fault, or thanks to their officers’ incompetence. You feel it when they do, though; each character has Strengths and Weaknesses revealed in flashbacks, aimed to reduce the GM’s threat pool for each planetary invasion. (Note how all of this is tying together.) That’s right; as in Agon, the GM has a “pain budget,” and if the troopers of the 3:16th can dish out more pain than they absorb, they win!

A clever, old-school style planet generation system helps the GM build worlds, vicious aliens, and missions in a hurry, varying the rules just enough to keep everything tactically interesting, but never slowing down the game or hampering the players. The characters are plenty hampered, but if they can just rack up more kills than the next squaddie, they’ll get promoted … just in time for the next mission. The rules hit a perfect sweet spot, where there are just enough tactical options to keep everyone guessing and surprised (happily or not), but not enough to drown players in options or soak up game time. (And lots and lots of play examples cut the learning curve down still farther.) Extended play can aim toward satire, as the 3:16th uses ever more comically vast weaponry on their missions of pre-emptive genocide, or simply provide a soap-operatic extension of adrenaline and exploding aliens.

This simplicity and speed make 3:16 an ideal “not everyone can show up tonight” game, while the themes and mechanics allow a surprising amount of meat and depth to come off the bone. It can be as dark, or as simple, as you’d like to make it — and if you want to play out Starship Troopers (either version), you can do it as fast and fatal as the M.I. themselves.

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A similar criticism could obtain in Gareth Hanrahan’s straight-shooting Traveller adaptation of David Drake’s mercenary-fic Hammer’s Slammers (206-page full-color hardback, $40; $28 PDF) from Mongoose. It, too, devotes 150-odd pages to its source material, with Trav stats for AFVs, planets, and NPC mercenaries from Drake’s books. (And it has its own setting-specific combat sub-system, this one for tank battles.) And again, this is pretty much de rigeur, and indeed downright essential, in a licensed property, and doubly so in an F/SF property where the basic assumptions have to be literally spelled out in game-mechanical terms. Like Cogman, Hanrahan knows his material cold, but presents it piping hot. But Hanrahan is able to use Traveller’s old-school “random encounter table” feel to get much closer to “what do I do now?” in a packed 15-page “Conflict” chapter. You get, essentially, the Not-Quite-Random War Table  – which is, Drake would doubtless say, true to life. Unlike life, and like a good RPG, Hanrahan provides plenty of explanatory support with these tables: the consequences of “no orbital support” are spelled out both in rules and table modifiers, and in suitably grim prose. Add in an excellent “grunt’s eye view” diary-style treatment of a campaign (RPG or mercenary?), a sample war, and an introductory scenario, and you’re on your way to slamming with and for tools of all descriptions.

The “I already know what I want” GM will perhaps find this all too much of a muchness, but I have come around to thinking that the original Dungeon Master’s Guide knew what it was doing with all those random tables and lists. “You can tell mercenary stories of duty and honor in conflict” is all well and good, but Col. Hammer might add that to his list of pieties that’s trumped by laser-firing tanks, and by tables telling you how many of them are just over the ridge. Hanrahan doesn’t quite get that far: his admirably complete mission breakdown is a checklist, not a table (random or otherwise) — and it’s only a page long. (Followed by four pages of examples.) Something like it would have greatly stiffened the spine of GURPS Vorkosigan, while allowing the novelistic impulses of freer-form GMs plenty of room.

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But the most important piece of GenCon news is just this — there was a GenCon! With GenCon LLC (the company that owns and runs the show) in bankruptcy last year, a lot of folks wondered if there would be a show at all. Then a hostile buyout surfaced, and we wondered who would run the show, if show there was to be run. But GenCon LLC shot those rapids and bobbed to the surface, unsinkable and back in business in time for the show. And business was — well, not necessarily booming, but way better than anyone would have hoped to predict in these times of economic foofaraw. Attendance was almost 28,000, not very much less (2 or 3 percent down) than last year. Some of that might be the economy, and some of it might just be the difference between Big Yu-Gi-Oh Year and Normal Yu-Gi-Oh Year. The dealers almost all reported great sales and good crowds; the games I heard about were packed; the streets of Indianapolis held even more fat guys than usual. And it wasn’t business as usual for GenCon, either — they unrolled a new registration system and a GenCon app for the iPhone. Both had their bugs and flaws (the registration system kept gamers lined up for two hours in some cases), but both are symptomatic not of a desperate, play-it-safe GenCon barely out of the weeds, but of a GenCon intending to grow and evolve into the next decade and beyond. This is a good sign beyond the telling of it.

Three For Flinching

The continued existence of GenCon established, there are three perhaps bigger stories yet that broached at the show, at least as relates to the craft and future of RPG design. Firstly, Catalyst Game Labs took the bold step of releasing their new transhuman SF-horror game Eclipse Phase under the Creative Commons license (non-commercial, share-alike). This means not only can you download it for free (from, say, here), you can also chop out stuff you don’t like, put in your own house rules or weird setting variants (Eclipse Phase: 10,000 B.C. as the fall of the ancient astronauts! Eclipse Phase with biological hive-mind vampires! Eclipse Phase with the OGL Traveller engine!) and post it on your own website (for free, of course) without getting a nasty email. While The Shadow of Yesterday did Creative Commons first, and the CC non-commercial restriction is less open than the OGL, Catalyst is still the first major RPG company to allow gamers to mashup and remix their intellectual property as well as their rules. (Which I should point out are also available at DriveThruRPG for $15, if “free” is too little for you to pay.) This would seem to be one way to connect with one’s fans — from a position of trust and fun. Almost like an RPG.

And along those same lines comes another course in “How To Build An RPG, 21st Century Version,” as Paizo’s years-long gamble with Pathfinder has paid off massively well. For those who weren’t paying attention, Paizo’s developers announced their “D&D 3.5, Only Better” RPG back in March of 2008 and opened up the whole alpha version of the Pathfinder ruleset for free download. 25,000 people did so. Last GenCon, the results of 25,000 pieces of persnickety feedback (sight unseen, I would estimate that 24,500 of them at one point or other mentioned attacks of opportunity) and six months of backbreaking work by Jason Bulmahn and others became the beta version of Pathfinder — which Paizo sold out of in nine hours, despite giving the whole thing away again for free, simultaneously, in PDF form. For another six to eight months, Paizo ran a ginormous Web-based playtest of the beta version on their forums, which finally resulted in the actual 576-page RPG Pathfinder — which sold out its entire print run in pre-orders. In a week. And I am reliably informed that said print run would have been very respectable even last century, which means it was epochal for this one. At the show, the Paizo booth was slammed; lines around the booth eight times like a proverbial Midgard Conga Line of gamers. Pathfinder was the unmistakable Hot Buzz Thing of the show. “If you offer to let them help build it, they will come.” The kicker? The Pathfinder PDF is $10. D&D is building a brand. Pathfinder is building a religion.

The third big thing surfacing at the show was the word of a Third Edition for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, visible under glass at the Fantasy Flight Games booth. (Booths. Boothoplex. FFG had something like five or eight booths — which is to say, almost enough room to set up a game of Arkham Horror with all the expansions.) This edition promises specialized dice (like Descent or Memoir ‘44), heroic power cards (like D&D 4e inexplicably didn’t come with), a “plot stress” mechanic straight outta FATE, “character stance” mechanics straight outta the Indie Narrativist Playbook, and other attempts to build a 21st century RPG like a boardgame — which is to say, with interesting physical components and a larger sense of kinesthetic play. I can’t speak to the actual rules, although I suspect we’re in for the edition war to end all edition wars when the $100 boxed set drops (with an echoing crash, if it’s like most FFG boxes) this fall.

Also in the future (2010), Wizards of the Coast plans to revamp the Dark Sun setting for 4e. So that will be fun.

The Future Scares Me! What About Two Weeks Ago?

All that excitement aside, GenCon also saw more normal RPGs appear to more normal sorts of reactions. White Wolf introduced Geist: The Sin-Eaters, Hero Games sold loads of CDs of the Hero 6th Edition rules (the actual books being trapped behind the Bamboo Curtain), and Crafty Games debuted FantasyCraft, which does for fantasy about two-thirds of what SpyCraft did for modern adventure, but give it time. Mongoose repped Earthdawn 3e; Margaret Weis Productions had hard copies of a Supernatural RPG almost as pretty as Dean Winchester his own self; Studio 2 had the long-awaited (and simply glorious) upgrade of Weird War II into a Savage Worlds setting book.

There was Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor redressed for 4e, GURPS Vorkosigan (a POD of the PDF, but nice enough looking), Mysteries of the Hollow Earth (for Hollow Earth Expedition), and Rogue Trader (for the WH40K RPG). Arc Dream flooded the zone with three new Wild Talents campaign setting books: the weird-Victorian Kerberos Club by Benjamin Baugh, This Favored Land (basically GODLIKE in the Civil War), and Grim War (a taut contemporary setting featuring mutants and mages by Greg Stolze and, ahem, Kenneth Hite). Alderac dropped its delightful Compendium of GM Tables, the Ultimate Toolbox, while Green Ronin did fine with Mecha & Manga and Warriors & Warlocks and True20 Freeport: The Lost Ampersand. Rogue Games had Colonial Gothic Revised and Foundation Transmissions (a bunch of fine meta-setting stuff) for Thousand Suns. Pelgrane Press (an owner of IPR, and thus a sponsor of this column) had adventure compilations for Mutant City Blues (Hard Helix), Esoterrorists (The Esoterror Fact Book), and Trail of Cthulhu (Arkham Detective Tales), as well as a new book of magic rules for Trail of Cthulhu (Rough Magicks, by, ahem, Kenneth Hite again).

I might as well finish this section by mentioning that Atomic Overmind and Hero Games both had my new Hero 6e version of The Day After Ragnarok (the first supplement for Hero 6e, I’ll note smugly here), and Atomic Overmind and Adventure Retail both had my new introductory goof Cthulhu 101, and that Adventure Retail had my new children’s book from Atlas Games, The Antarctic Express. Honest, that’s all the plugs. I think.

ENnie, Meet Indy. And Indie. And Diana.

You will all no doubt be gratified to know that I picked precisely one Gold ENnie: Best Rules for D&D 4e. In nothing else did I and the ENnie judges see eye to eye, although worthy winners emerged in the silver categories (Mouse Guard for Interior Art, Production Values, and Product of the Year; Don’t Lose Your Mind for Writing; Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies for Setting) and for all I know in the categories I didn’t know enough to vote in. My podcaster buddies seemed very happy to see All Games Considered win Best Podcast, for example, and the D&D 4e Monster Manual is certainly a deserving candidate for Best Monster or Adversary Book for all that I didn’t know any of its competitors. WotC was the big winner (six golds, three silvers), but Paizo (four golds, two silvers) and FFG (two golds, one silver) kept it respectable.

The Indie RPG Awards were announced by ninjas at night in a snowstorm, apparently, as nobody could find anything about them at the show. But they have appeared online, and I can gladly endorse the voters’ choices for Indie Game of the Year (Mouse Guard), Supplement of the Year (Don’t Lose Your Mind), and Most Innovative (Sweet Agatha), among others. Sweet Agatha didn’t quite get the Diana Jones Award this year, which was announced by Matt Forbeck in a loud, happy bar full of free drinks. (That alone is why this is the best award in gaming.) That signal honor went to the very worthy card game Dominion, although all the nominees were powerfully strong this year: D&D 4e, the Jeepform movement, and Mouse Guard were also also-rans.

How Was GenCon Like Columbus? You Had To Go Looking For The Indies

Rather than one big happy “Indie Alley,” the various indie designers spread all across the waist of the dealer’s hall. There was the Forge, featuring Ron Edwards’ new full-on version of Trollbabe and a beta of his new game S/Lay W/Me (which I believe may be the single finest Northwest Smith RPG imaginable), along with Tony Pace and Nathan Leeson’s Venus 2141 and Tony Dowler’s new ashcan of Renaissance cinematic philosophy-fightin’, Principia. Emily Care Boss’ first-contact SF RPG Sign In Stranger headed up the “Pirate Jenny” booth of female game designers, also featuring Julia Bond Ellingboe’s wonderful Tale of the Fisherman’s Wife, Danielle Lewon’s Kagematsu, and Kat & Michael Miller’s Serial Homicide Unit. Luke Crane had a new supplement for Burning Empires (Bloodstained Stars) and Jared Sorensen had his first Parsley “parser-emulator” game, Action Castle (“get to the point. i see no point.”), in Luke’s booth. Or that’s where he was when I saw him. In their own booth, the Design Matters krewe had Gregor Hutton’s ashcan of AD 316 (3:16 in Roman times), Epidiah Ravachol’s Time & Temp, Joe McDonald’s road-movie RPG Ribbon Drive, and Nathan Paoletta’s new-to-me vampire game Annalise. And the IPR booth boasted Jeremy Keller’s medieval RPG Chronica Feudalis, Bill White’s Inuit-ish wonderment Gangakagok, and Paul Tevis’ exercise in wild amnesiac chargen-as-narrativism, A Penny For My Thoughts.

And Those Thoughts Are …

I haven’t even mentioned the wedding I attended, but I don’t think any RPGs debuted there. I can’t swear to the White Wolf party. And just like GenCon itself, we end with a party, and we’re out of time.

If you still haven’t had enough of me on GenCon, though, you can listen to my two appearances on Ryan Macklin’s podcast This Just In … From GenCon! — the Saturday 11 a.m. episode, and the Monday 1 a.m. wrap-up. Enjoy!

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The other important thing you need to know about Starblazer Adventures is that it uses the FATE engine, as seen in Spirit of the Century, and does at least as good a job laying out the “FATE Space” ruleset as SotC did the “FATE Pulp” ruleset. It introduces some new fillips: Scale (for starships and doomsday machines and sentient moons and …) and organizational rules (for star empires and secret brotherhoods of space monks and Fighting Scientists) between them give you a mechanical (and therefore story) hold on anything from a dogfight to mass combat between twin planets’ armadas. “Plot stress” is a magnificent innovation, applying “hit points” to story elements — when your space station suffers too much drama, the reactor melts down! Last, Starblazer Adventures takes SotC’s story-driven character creation to the next level for collaborative story-driven campaign creation! It’s only two pages, but it opens up, well, worlds!

Topped off with a super index, and lovingly blanketed with original Starblazer comics art (which is so iconic as to cause nostalgic fits even in people who never read the original Starblazer comics), this is one monstrously usable, magnificently story-starting game book. You could easily port it to Star Wars, the Kree-Skrull War, old-school Star Trek, or any game of fightin’ robots, fightin’ spaceships … or, of course, Fightin’ Scientists!

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As I used to do with the Origins Awards, I’m not discussing categories I don’t know anything about, as amusing as the contrary might be. (I’ve only seen the Monster Manual, for instance, so I can’t judge the Monster or Adversary category properly. Which is a shame, because I love that category.) I’m also not going to deal with the Fan Award For Best Publisher, as it’s a silly award. (Quick, what’s your favorite movie studio?)

Best Cover Art

I’m going with Paul Bourne’s magnificent cover for 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, which almost alone among the nominees conveys a sense of action instead of “standing around portentously.” The arguable exception is the swell dragon-rider on the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide, but spaceships beats dragons, and 3:16 beats FR.

Best Interior Art

In a walk, for Mouse Guard. David Petersen illustrates in the great tradition of fairy tale art with a splash of Audubon. The other nominees all convey their own style and feel, to be sure — Petersen just does it better.

Best Writing

Don’t Lose Your Mind is not Benjamin Baugh’s best work, and while Hot War has an excellent spare harshness to it, the great thing about Malcolm Craig’s game isn’t his prose. KQ and Hunter Horror Recognition Guide are mulligatawnies; some is wonderful, some isn’t. The noble Baron Munchausen, however, is by turns florid, clear, amusing, ironic, arch, and riotous — one imagines that editor James Wallis didn’t have to touch a syllable of it. My third easy vote in a row, for The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen RPG, Suppressed 1808 Edition.

Best Production Values

Again, Mouse Guard, although HELLAS gives it a run for its money.

Best Rules

This is the first hard choice I’ve faced so far this ballot. As games, I probably prefer Hunter and Starblazer Adventures, but D&D 4e is the ruleset that arguably is pushing the boundaries of the form more than either of the other two. An exceptions-based RPG, tuned for astonishingly fast and fun monster-whacking, with GM prep time calved down to a bare minimum. Despite a broken (but ambitious) skill challenge system and a wonky item economy (both call-backs to old-school D&D?), the core of the game — kick open the door and kill it — is better than ever. (Neither Song of Ice & Fire nor Dark Heresy particularly blew me away, although they’re both good games.) That said, if I wasn’t going to get a chance to vote for both Hunter and Starblazer Adventures farther down the ballot, I might hesitate even longer. But this one I’m giving to Mike Mearls, Rob Heinsoo, and their party.

Best Setting

This is another killer. Chad Underkoffler’s Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies is a fantastic Maxfield Parrish fun-scape, carefully crafted to hold your own internal Errol Flynn. Malcolm Craig’s Hot War is pure Wyndham-Wells, with just enough Nigel Kneale to keep my antennae aquiver throughout. Benjamin Baugh’s The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor is sheer Gorey genius, with extra-lemony Snicket to bring up the flavor. At least I only have to pick from three: Slipstream is grand Flash Gordon serial fun, but S7S beats it on that metric; Pathfinder is great for what it is, but my tolerance for Big Ole Fantasy Worlds isn’t what it once was. I could easily pick any of those first three, but I’m going with Baugh on a mordant whim.

Best Supplement

I mentioned above (and elsewhere in this space) how much I like Hunter: the Vigil. I especially like that it’s technically a supplement, so I can vote for it here with no regrets.

Best Electronic Product

This column is published and paid for by IPR, which is partially owned by Fred Hicks, head of One Bad Egg. So I can’t tell you what I voted for in this category.

Best Podcast

Or in this one.

Best Game

Stay with me here. Remember all those nice things I said upstairs about the excellent rules in Dungeons & Dragons 4e? And remember what I said about how I’d actually rather run Starblazer Adventures? And then when I deprecated Big Ole Fantasy Worlds? Can you see where I’m going with this? Starblazer Adventures, which is definitely getting a fuller review in this space, takes the FATE engine and blends it with British space-opera comics for a complete-in-one-book package of adventure with a truly engaging flavor. Or should that be “flavour”? Anyhow, I’m voting for  Chris Burch and Stuart Newman’s fantastic feat; Starblazer Adventures it is.

Product of the Year

Again, the other worthy contenders (S7S, Hunter, D&D 4e, Starblazer Adventures) notwithstanding, the clear winner on all levels — story, theme, rules, world, art, production, game — is Mouse Guard. Hey, it beat my game for the Origins Award — it must be the best!

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There are two big stories out of Origins this year: First, my game Trail of Cthulhu was beaten for the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game by Luke Crane’s Mouse Guard RPG. Second, so was Dungeons & Dragons 4e. Now, I play 4e (when my DM can manage to schedule a game for a quorum of us) and enjoy it very much, and I absolutely believe observers like Joseph “Goodman Games” Goodman who say that 4e is showing strength not only in the mass market (its new corebooks reliably make, for instance, the Wall Street Journal best-seller lists) but in the hobby channel. But for it to lose Best RPG to a (brilliant, beautiful) game about talking mice is not business as usual.

Possible explanations include, in no particular order: 1) Since every attendee at Origins could vote for any award, the card-floppers and lead-pushers and chit-flippers voted against D&D for the same reason that I (had I not lost my ballot between bars) would probably have voted against Magic: Version Whatever for Best CCG: sheer cussedness. That said, Magic won for Best CCG this year, so obviously that explanation only goes so far. 2) Same set-up as #1, but the voters were seduced by a beautiful cover full of cute li’l mice. Seems shallow, although there are (Origins-Award-winning) publishers who claim to believe it. Of their own products, even. 3) My columns are amazingly powerful, and my love for Mouse Guard (strategically unveiled right before Origins) hoist me (and 4e) with my own petard. Let’s just say that the science on this question is not settled. 4) Mouse Guard had huge buzz, because it’s an awesome game with a better network of mavens and connectors in today’s wired con-attendee community. Possible, but — beating D&D? Really? 5) It was just the best game up for the award, so of course it won. This has the advantage of being true, but not of explaining very many other Origins Awards.

Really, the best possible news out of this contretemps is that there were three nominees (two were withdrawn after the nomination process as ineligible) that all could be said to deserve the Origins Award that year, and that I and Wizards of the Coast just got caught in a perfect storm of design excellence.

Don’t worry about me too much, though: I did win an Origins Award, for Best Non-Fiction Product, for Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales. Other, non Hite-related results can be seen here: Wizards wound up winning three all around, and my minis friends were generally pretty stoked about the quality of those awards, too. The “deck building as game” card game Dominion won the Spiel des Jahres and the Origins Award, so that’s hard to argue; Pandemic was an SdJ nominee, and won for Best Boardgame. In short, a really good run for the Origins Awards.

Not such a great run for the Origins convention: it was smaller and bereft of some major players in the dealer’s hall: Wizards, White Wolf, Paizo, Games Workshop, AEG, Green Ronin, and Fantasy Flight all skipped the show (though Wizards and, I believe, Paizo, ran some events), which can’t be where the organizers wanted to be even in these times of global economic brouhaha. It’s still considerably bigger than a regional con, and the game rooms were still pretty full, so there’s a foundation to build on — but there’s some load-bearing beams that could use a look-see first, methinks. That said, the new GAMA Executive Director has run a juvenile detention system and a Gulf War POW camp, which is pretty much the minimum requirement for running a game convention as I understand it.

So what was at the show that was any good? The games, of course. For my money, the single best new game at the show was Darren Watts and Jason Walters’ Lucha Libre Hero, which is even better than it sounds. Other standouts were Mike Fiegel and Jerry Grayson’s Hellas (literally a “space Odyssey”), Z-Man’s remake of Eric Goldberg’s “choose your own adventure boardgame” Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Gareth Hanrahan’s Hammer’s Slammers mod for Traveller. So there was good games to be bought, and even more good gaming to be had, at Origins on Not Independence Day.

Just stay away from the mice.

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The game uses a focused, robust version of Crane’s excellent Burning Wheel engine, streamlined for quicker play and more brightly-colored characters. It keeps BW’s scripted combat, which can encompass everything from a desperate fight with talking weasels to a debate about how to ration grain during a hard winter. There is a particularly nice balance between a mouse’s Nature (you know, skittering around finding grain) and his Persona (his store of experience), and another poised on your Traits (from Longtail to Open-Minded): use them favorably and get extra dice; use them to trip yourself up and get more checks during the Players’ Turn.

The game is admirably complete in one book. It’s structured very much as “the only book you’ll ever need,” not just to play Mouse Guard, but for any roleplaying game, leading the reader from an introduction of the RPG concept, through a summary of the comic background, through setting up a Mouse Guard mission, and only at the very end creating a character. It’s gamebook as storybook, driving game as story, while keeping the fierce adversarial edge that makes such fun from old-school D&D to Agon. This edge suits the story: bravery when the whole world is against you. (Special kudos for recognizing that “the whole world” definitely includes the weather; the natural world is foregrounded amazingly well in art, rules, and flavor throughout. I would use this game to play in Middle-Earth, it’s so good at this.) The result is an optimistic, bold, metal-working game that talks clearly and knows what it wants — just like the Mouse Guard itself.

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So what was the convention like? It was mostly a boardgame show held in one giant dealer’s hall. (I was informed there is a more RPG-focused convention in September. My calendar is open …) Asmodee, the main sponsor, used to publish RPGs but now mostly produces boardgames — plus ca change. Gaming happened primarily at company demo booths, but there were a dozen or so RPG tables set up in one section under the benevolent gaze of Grog. French gamers (based on my random sampling from the thousand or so attendees) are pretty much just like American gamers, although they smoke more — the only barrier was linguistic. The ’satiably curious can see photos of the festivities at the Sci-Fi Universe site, or watch a riveting video shot at the event.

French games, from what I could tell within my Anglophone box, are primarily concerned with world and feel (consider Nephilim, In Nomine, and Qin, to name three French games with English-language versions), which may be part of the reason why they are (as a rule) far prettier than American ones. Given the relative sizes of the Anglophone and Francophone RPG markets, I haven’t the faintest idea how French publishers (very much including mine) support such gorgeous art and production quality. France also has an “indie” scene, if Johan Scipion’s Sombre is any guide — a stripped-down horror game with a number of similarly minimalist sub-games in planning or complete, among them Cthulhu DDR (“No Nazis, No Stasis” says designer Thierry Salaün).

I shan’t mention every game I saw there, but I will single out the upcoming 7eme Cercle game Devastra, which takes the long overdue step of “game-ifying” the legendary history of India, and Jean-Philippe Jaworski’s extraordinarily recondite game Te Deum pour un Massacre, a game about noble machinations surrounding the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, and the French Wars of Religion generally. (It has five supplements, I think.) Both are extraordinarily beautiful. Both assume a level of comfort with history and pseudo-history that American games mostly don’t.

Which leads me as if by predetermined column outline to the book Jouer avec l’Histoire, or Playing Games With History, which debuted at the show. Edited by Olivier Caïra and Jérôme Larré, this anthology presents essays by game designers and critics discussing the intersection of RPGs with history. Ranging from designer’s notes to “does making Nazis into orcs trivialize the Holocaust?” the book is probably years ahead of the state of the art in English-language RPG criticism. I say “probably,” because it’s not impossible to imagine someone putting together a similarly thoughtful, wide-ranging anthology for American games. (An arguable exception is Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan’s “… Person” series from MIT Press, but that takes a primarily narratological approach.) Caïra is a leading ludological scholar in France, having published a broad sociological study of RPGs, Jeux de Role, with the prestigious CNRS (the equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the U.S.). He is also very generous with his champagne, which has no bearing on my appreciation of his scholarship.

Which, as I may have pointed out, I can’t actually read. But the typography is very nice.

Which is French gaming in a nutshell. Next, the State of American Gaming, such as it is, and such as I can suss it out.

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Sadly, they had many fewer publishers in Vegas to sell them things — publisher attendance was more drastically down than usual. Fantasy Flight Games, Paizo Publishing, AEG, and Avalanche Press were only four of the big names missing from the show floor; White Wolf appeared only in the guise of its distributor, Wizards of the Coast brought its Book Expo cottage rather than its normal imperial palace, and Games Workshop had, if recollection serves me, a single banner and a card table. Your humble correspondent was the only representative of IPR at the show, which led to any number of amusing misapprehensions from retailers.

Was it merely the effect of the Current Economic Unpleasantness (Global Edition) or a new round of the Recurrent Economic Unpleasantness (Hobby Games Edition)? Hard to say — there were some new publishers there in fine fettle, such as boardgame supernova Bucephalus Games (23 games in 11 months!) and Bastion Studio, which had the first bubblings of what may well be the New Heat, namely Exillis, a skirmish miniatures game played with neat winged monster minis, an elegant map board — and an iPhone. Yes, the iPhone becomes your ruler, your rule-book, your dice, and your minis inventory all in one. While this specific game — fantasy monsters battling it out in medieval Europe — may not be the Next Big Thing, something very much like it very much will be. And only 150 retailers, at most, got to see it.

Your humble correspondent will be reporting next from medieval Europe — specifically from the Salon du Jeu de Société, aka GenCon France — next weekend. And then, from the Dark Ages known as the State of the Gaming Industry.

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©2009 Hite for Out of the Box with Ken Hite | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us

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