In this second “Notes on…” article, we’ll look at another game my Friday group played for a few months on a weekly basis: Free League’s Mutant Year Zero (from now on referred to as MYZ).

I got my copy of Rosewood Abbey a couple weeks ago! This is a TTRPG based on Brindlewood Bay, in which you play Medieval European monks and other religious-adjacent figures investigating mysteries. Obviously, it’s heavily inspired, among other things, by The Name Of The Rose and Cadfael (both their literary and cinematic versions)

My friends over at the Titterpigs podcast did a recent episode on “played vs unplayed reviews”, and in a sort of interesting synchronicity, the Modern Mythos podcast just released an episode on actual plays. It’s interesting because I see all three types of content as being on the same scale of “game prep”. Let me explain.

I recently answered a question on Discord about Delta Green¹ and since I had seen that question a couple times before I figured I would post (and heavily edit and expand) my answer here for posterity². The question generally takes the following form:

Playing a character that’s a member of US Federal Agencies such as the FBI or the CIA raises many problematic aspects because of <insert reason here>. Is it possible to play Delta Green while also avoiding this?

This is a totally fair question as far as I’m concerned. There are indeed several good reasons to not want to portray a member of an American (or many other countries’) Law Enforcement organization as the hero of your story. But fear not! Well, I mean, do fear, this is Delta Green after all, but yes, I’ve got some hopefully helpful advice for you.

Travis Miller wrote this interesting article on his Grumpy Wizard blog about “genre emulation” in TTRPGs. He basically argues that games don’t “emulate” a genre as much as they are part of that genre:

To “emulate” is to imitate, simulate, or copy a thing without being the thing itself.

If you are running a game set in the 1870’s, in the western half the United States, the characters are cowboys, ride horses, and get into gun fights with outlaws; you are part of the Western genre.

Every RPG is part of a genre just as every film, novel, short story, and video game are part of a genre.

Grumpy Wizard Blog

And:

Thinking that they are “emulating” a genre puts the designer in mindset that they are trying to imitate a genre without being a participant in that genre.

A game designer with that mind set isn’t a contributor. They are copyists.

Having a mindset of contribution not imitation is a big shift.

Grumpy Wizard Blog

I found these arguments interesting, especially since frankly I never really thought of it that much before. Travis mentions in particular Vampire: The Masquerade and the broader World of Darkness setting, which took such an integral part in the genre of gothic supernatural fiction (or something) that it affected the movies and books that followed.

However, this made me realize that my understanding of “genre emulation” is different than Travis’. Maybe it’s because of my video game development background, but I interpret the term “emulation” less as “copying” and more like the way we think of a retro console emulator.

For those unfamiliar with it, a retro console emulator (or any emulator in that sense, really) is a software application that allows a modern computer to behave like another, generally older, piece of hardware. The typical use-case is being able to play old games from the SNES or Sega Megadrive or Amiga or whatever else on your PC. A very popular starting point is RetroArch. Recently, Apple even allowed emulators on their App Store.

So in that sense, to me, “genre emulation” is less about copying a genre from the outside, and more about designing a game that mechanically enables, and perhaps even enforces, the tropes of that genre. It’s about creating that “emulator software” that lets you runs one thing on top of another thing. Only it’s not about taking, say, 40-year-old video game code originally meant for an 8-bit console and making it run on a modern 64-bit computer… it’s about taking 40-year-old stories originally written for a book or a movie, and making them run on dice, character sheets, and people around a table. It’s emulation as “translation from one platform to another”, and not emulation as “imitation”.

What does “genre emulation” mean for you?

Either way you want to call it, “genre games” have been increasing in number and narrowing in scope for the past 20 years… on the one hand, I’m sad that it effectively made generic systems (like my beloved GURPS 4th edition) largely irrelevant, but I’m also happy because a lot of these games brought new mechanics and cool niche topics to my attention! Let’s keep emulating!

I didn’t really expect to be interested in this book. “Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground”, by Stu Horvath (of the Vintage RPG podcast, among other things), is a book that looks at the history of tabletop roleplaying games “from D&D to Mothership”, as it says on the cover.

It’s not that I’m uninterested in the history of roleplaying games — I’m very much interested in it, and I have at least half a dozen books on the topic. I just wasn’t necessarily interested in having one more book on that topic. But I got it as a gift a couple months ago, and… I love it. It’s been sitting proudly on my living room table since then, ready to be picked up every now and then for a few minutes of reading some pages picked at random. Let’s dive in!

It’s always fun to catch up with online TTRPG discussions because every week or so there’s a hot debate taking my feed by storm. Most of the time I don’t know where it comes from, but this week’s was on topic for which I already had an old post draft, so I figured I would finish it and publish it.

The topic is “Sandbox vs Railroad“, where my take is that “Sandbox” is a largely useless term, and “Railroad” is a symptom.

“Sandbox” is Useless

When people setup “Sandbox” and “Railroad” as opposites, they use the term “Sandbox” as meaning “you can do whatever you want”. This is largely useless because it’s both an ambiguous assessment of the agreed upon domain of play, and a basic truth of all roleplaying games.

The first point relates to what’s expected of the players for a given game. For instance, a common Cyberpunk RED campaign framework starts each adventure with the PCs meeting a fixer, or other missing-giving NPC. That NPC introduces you to a client, gives you a mission briefing, maybe a few Eurobucks as an advance, and off you go on that mission. You’re expected to accept that mission because, well, that’s the scenario the GM prepared for tonight’s game. The mission itself might be what some people describe as a “Sandbox”, but Night City itself is not. In that sort of campaign, refusing the mission and declaring that your character goes to the next bar down the street to see what other missions are available would be considered a dick move. The sandbox is only as big as the playground it’s been built into.

The second point is the simple fact that roleplaying games have this advantage over board games and video games that the players’ and GM’s imagination are infinitely more vast. Even in a fairly constrained environment such as “steal the package from this train” or “find the magic sword at the end of this dungeon”, roleplaying games offer a near limitless array of options. You can approach the train on dirt bikes and jump on it, infiltrate or bribe the crew defending the package, or setup explosives down the tracks. You can fight your way through all 13 levels of the dungeon, use cunning political manipulation to set the dungeon’s factions to destroy each other, or infiltrate the last level through the astral planes. You don’t need to run a “Sandbox” game for this: that’s just a roleplaying game by definition to me… but remember the previous point: if the current game is all about knights delving into dungeons to smite evil, maybe don’t try to leave that sandbox, and just enjoy the toys in it.

In some cases, some people alternatively use the term “Sandbox” to describe a campaign framework where the players can follow different leads, pick their own missions, and so on. I personally find that a bit too vague, and often ask follow-up questions to figure out if, say, they’re playing a Hexcrawl or Pointcrawl or Plot Points Campaign or whatever else.

“Railroad” is a Symptom

The term “Railroad” is useful to help diagnose what went wrong with a game.

There are many ways a game session can go wrong: bad player or GM behaviour, bad pairing of rules and setting/genre, bad pairing of PCs and scenario, lack of dramatic tension, and so on. Two other ways that it can go wrong are “Railroading” and “Puppeteering”:

• “Puppeteering” is effectively loss of player agency. It happens when the players cannot do, or attempt to do, what they want. Either the GM takes control of their character, or they just hit a wall that can’t be climbed — or, in fact, that can’t even be attempted to climb.
• “Railroading” happens when the players can attempt to do whatever they want, but nothing works except the one sequence of events that the GM has prepared.

A simple example of the difference between the two is a situation where the players want to speak to the Captain of the City Guard to see if she knows anything about the Secret Order of the Crimson Scythe:

• With Puppeteering, the GM simply says “no, the Captain is too busy, she won’t see you…. what else do you do?” The players cannot even attempt to get access to the NPC.
• With Railroading, you do meet the Captain but she doesn’t know anything… which isn’t a problem per se (it might even lead to a great scene!), but in this case this is the tenth thing that the players have tried doing to advance the story, and none of them have led to anything because somehow the only thing that will achieve anything is to talk to the priest at the Temple of Angmar outside town. Worse, whatever the Captain does say could be taken as some sort of clue by the players, and they may end up on a wild goose chase for the rest of the session.

Of the two, Railroading is not just a flaw of a game session, but can also be a flaw of an adventure module. It does happen that a published scenario just assumes that the players will make specific decisions at specific points.

So there, “Sandbox” is useless, and “Railroad” is a symptom. I’m sure some of you will have different opinions about all this, but that’s mine for now!

In my recent post about the passing of Jennell Jaquays, I mentioned how “Jaquaying the dungeon” had become fairly common parlance to refer to Jennell’s innovative dungeon design from the early 1980s. While researching/fact-checking that, I had found that Justin Alexander (who coined the term) had recently changed the term to “Xandering”. That new term sounded a bit weird and self-aggrandizing to me but the accompanying note seemed OK, if a bit vague about what Jennell actually wanted.

Now a pretty detailed essay called “Xandering is Slandering” has been making the rounds. It gathers a lot of evidence that doesn’t give Justin Alexander a good look (his response so far has been underwhelming). I’m not going to go into that whole thing, but I want to note that in the future I’ll be at least careful to keep the “S” in “Jaquaysing the dungeon”.

It was sad to wake up this morning with an update from Rebecca Heineman, Jennell Jaquays’ spouse and organizer of the GoFundMe campaign to finance her latest medical treatments, announcing that Jennell had passed away.

Jennell is of course a legendary roleplaying games designer and artist, whom various people will associate with various famous adventure modules such as Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia. Not being much of a D&D player, I mostly associate her with RuneQuest’s Griffin Mountain and Legendary Duck Tower & Other Tales. I was also looking forward to her current work revamping her old Central Casting books.

A few years ago I was also made aware of the term “Jaquaying the Dungeon“, which referred to emulating the non-linear aspects of the dungeons Jennell became famous for at the turn of the 1980s. I realized today that Justin Alexander went back and changed the term to “Xandering the Dungeon” a couple months ago, at Jennell’s request. The article that introduced this term has now been edited and renamed, and you can find the details and reasons of this renaming here… so, well, something to keep in mind.

ENWorld and DiceBreaker have some good eulogies, and we are already seeing a few new things pop up around the web, such as this interview with VintageRPG’s Stu Horvath (whose latest bit was included in Stu’s excellent RPG history encyclopedia book), or this transcript of a 2014 interview (“You may have been the first people to get Gregged” made me chuckle) on The Penultimate HârnPage blog.

Farewell Jennell.

Edit: a few more good eulogies have surfaced from Chaosium, of course, Steve Jackson Games, Gnome Stew, and Shannon Appelcline. Also note this important update, and check out the Jennell Jaquays Memorial Game Jam.

It’s that time of the year when we reflect on our twelve months of TTRPG’ing! You might know that I love stats and spreadsheets and graphs, but once again you won’t see any here: I find that social gaming circles get a bit too much into a contest about who played more sessions and systems. But compared to previous years, I want to get into a more detailed reflection this year.