The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge) isn’t the oldest German RPG, but by far the commercially most successful and most widely played one that had dominated the market for decades. Covering the entire publication history and design development here would be far out of scope, but I still need to establish some context for those unfamiliar:
The Dark Eye as published
1988 and 1993 saw the publication of the 2nd and 3rd edition of the game. Rather than a loosely defined system and setting that was added to piecemeal through modules (as the 1st edition had been), the new main rule books already came with a complete system and an established canon campaign setting. (Unlike D&D, TDE never had multiple campaign settings or tools for inventing your own – the game was strictly married to its setting Aventuria.)
There was of course a supplement tread mill, some of it covering the mechanical side. But most of the supplements were devoted to the setting, describing Aventuria’s regions or areas of special interest like seafaring in exhausting detail.
From very early on, Aventuria was also a “living world”, with a metaplot where important NPCs were canonically killed, others added and the map reshaped through war, plague, throne succession struggles and other major events.
Parts of this metaplot were developed through published modules, but TDE also had two other venues:
- Aventurischer Bote (Aventurian Herald), a bi-monthly magazine. While superficially similar in concept to other in-house RPG mags like Dragon or White Dwarf, AB appeared in the form of an in-game newspaper mainly covering developments within the setting of Aventuria. Modules, classifieds, letters to the editor and other out-of-game texts only played a minor role and took up a minor part of the AB.
- Baroniespiel (Barony Game), a centrally organized play-by-mail game in which players assume the roles of landed nobility in Aventuria’s central realm. The results of the Baroniespiel actually informed and influenced the official canon metaplot.
Left: Cover of Aventurischer Bote. Right: Cover of the PBM zine for the region of Weiden.
The year 1997 brought two big changes to TDE:
- Ulrich Kiesow, co-founder and lead designer of TDE, died. As the metaplot hinged in no small part on his personal input (and a lot of ideas of where it should going were still in his head and buried with him), this slowed down its advancement.
- Schmidt Spiele, the publisher of TDE, entered bankruptcy.
Those two events brought planned developments and publications to a screeching halt, and also played havoc with the distribution channels (as a major boardgame publisher, Schmidt Spiele could place TDE products into regular department stores and wasn’t limited to dedicated hobby game stores.)
The Dark Eye as personally experienced
I’ve started playing in 1998 – and we didn’t actually follow the metaplot, nor were we up-to-date with our setting materials. Our foundation were the main rule-box, advanced main rule-box (“Mit Mantel, Schwert und Zauberstab”), magic box and armoury book for 3rd edition, along with the setting box and bestiary box for 2nd edition. (Updates for the last two products were scheduled, but fell through with the Schmidt Spiele bankruptcy.)
A few ABs were bought here and there, but read in isolation they were more items of amusement than something that actually informed the setting as actually played by us.
As students, we didn’t have the money to regularly buy published modules and had to rely on coming up with our own.
The 3rd edition MRB came with its own introductory module, “Der Schwarze Turm” (The Black Tower), which greatly informed how to structure such a thing for us:
There is a detailed blow-by-blow review in German, but I’ve got the Cliff’s Notes in English:
The PCs get hired by a merchant patron to escort his caravan. They get drawn into an introductory combat with brigands, with the predestined conclusion that the brigand leaders manage to abduct the merchant’s son. The mission changes to finding the bandit lair and rescueing the son.
A small bit of very linear wilderness exploration follows (with another scripted encounter) follows, with the advice to scare and weaken the PCs through the illusion of possibly fatal failure, but to make them ultimately succeed.
Next up is a mini dungeon-crawl in the titular Black Tower, which is the best part of the module: It actually offers multiple approaches and means of exploration, open-ended fights and social interaction with the brigand’s other prisoners. (Even to me back then, it is was obvious that you should have more of that in your modules, and less of the railroading BS above and below this section.)
Which leads us to the finale, which is a big let-down. The PCs explore the semi-hidden basement of the tower – exept that there isn’t much to explore, just a linear corridor with a scripted ambush by skeletons who will “mysteriously” stop to receive reinforcements when the party is too battered, and a combat with an unkillable boss monster that gets struck down with an obvious deus ex machina. What a great victory, wasn’t that fun?
My memory of the modules of our own creation is hazy, but there is still a free source around we had made heavy use of:
DSA-Schatztruhe, a personal homepage about TDE from 1996, with a large number of modules that were created and played for the gaming group of the webmaster.
One module that is very typical is “Die Mumie im Nebelmoor” (The Mummy of Fogswamp):
The PCs get an NPC companion forced onto them, go through a very linear wilderness section to get to the dungeon of the week – and then possess a surprising amount of freedom in a surprisingly well-prepared section, including a map with very precise individual enemy placements:
This is contradicted by a forced “cool scene” on the penultimate dungeon level, where the NPC companion gets sucked into the ground by grasping hands without the PCs being able to do anything – just to create a sense of urgency, and to set the scene for the final boss battle with the NPC companion tied to an altar ready to be sacrificed by the big bad of the week.
That module is like the quintessence of TDE as we’ve played in the late 90s and early 00s – not caring a lot for the living world and its metaplot, linear adventure introductions that lead straight to the mission or dungeon or monster of the week, a relatively large degree of freedom when it comes to exploration and combat, interspersed with “cool ideas” by the GM that get forced through to be made true. (The 2006 Forge actual play report [D&D 3.5] (Dexcon) Final Fantasy and the Art of Railroad Maintenance had resonated a lot with me when I had originally read it. I could recognize a lot of similar forced “cool ideas” in adventures I had run, played and read.) A lot of German fantasy gaming of that era that I have experienced and read was very similar to that, not only in TDE, but also in Midgard, Erps, German AD&D fan modules, generic Drachenland modules and many others.
It was still very fun at that time, mostly carried by the sheer joy of entering this new and exciting hobby, and a naivity and certain obtuseness when it came to the formulaic module structure and its glaring weakspots. But like so many things, it only worked when you were there at the time, young and dumb – not something you can revisit years later without cringing.
5 responses to “Fantasy Role-Playing in 1998 Germany”
I really appreciate the post. It strikes me that the “play” structure you mention, of starting by roping the characters into some activity or mission they cannot avoid, then some open-feeling middle, then finally a scripted end, is really no different than, say, the majority of 5e D&D play that I see discussed–although the forcing has gotten more sophisticated in intervening years such that people may not see it as nakedly and/or just participate in it willingly. That is, this clearly isn’t special to DSA or its play culture.
What’s interesting to me here is how and whether the textual procedures themselves lead to this, or don’t. Is it all on the adventures? I’ve begun reading DSA 1st edition, and there’s certainly nothing in the rules themselves about this, although even then the adventure book (“Das Buch der Abenteuer”) seems to see strong-arming the players into the GM’s conclusion as the only way for play to function.
Given that that book and the first Dragonlance module for AD&D (commonly accepted as an inflection point for the railroaded “Steve the GM tells us the cool story” way of “playing”) were published a month apart (with DSA being first), it seems the roots of this were international from the start and began to sprout their wicked fruit all over at the same time.
For a while, I’ve been trying to nail down the source of GMing as this weird central figure but not participant. It’s clearly not taken as a given in the 1970s texts, which are all over the place.
Footnote: I would love to contrast the Gary who played-and-wrote the 2nd edition of Boot Hill with the Gary who wrote certain sections of the original AD&D, because they are cobra vs. mongoose opposed, despite being the same biological human’s works published at the same time.
For a while I was tagging the 1989 AD&D 2nd edition text “Adventuring and Catacomb Guide,” and it’s definitely important and serves as the codifier for almost all 1990s RPG texts. I was thinking that influences until then were diffuse, as I could lived through and have retrospectively observed a wide variety, meaning varying, across the 1980s superhero games. Also, the 1984 Avalon Hill RuneQuest provides, as commented upon, a weird precursor to it that’s not quite there and has a schizophrenic “contrasting opinon” inside it.
But you’re right – right here in Das Schwarze Auge, 1984, and obviously simultaneously (thus not imitated) in Dragonlance, 1984, it seems fully formed. Both of those are highly derived texts, meaning, responsive to existing discourse. I am inclined to go back to my earlier thinking that something specific was said, either in a capsule or as a confluence, in the “chatter” of magazines like Strategic Review, or the letters to magazines, or especially in the apas like Alarums & Excursions. Whatever it was, and whoever said it, and in whatever context it was said; and especially through what means it promulgated so rapidly … I don’t know if we’ll ever chase it down. But I think it must have been a thing, a moment and an artifact however plural, and not some emergent practical knowledge which reflected intrinsic features of play.
Historically, then, we have the phase beginning unseen probably in the very late 1970s, expressed in a few cases of startling clarity but also varying a lot, and not absent contrasting viewpoints. That is, throughout the 1980s, one can find very different examples of GMing-as-play or confusions about it. I also attest to the association of the “central but above play” GM with a certain sadism and flaunting; i.e., it was not widely loved, although its practitioners insisted that players were horrible non-participants, which is what “munchkin” meant back then, and they were the only ones who cared about “the story.”
I suggest that the 1989 transition is real, in establishing that particular viewpoint as hegemonic, and also dressing it up as benevolence, guidance, making sure everything is OK, and ramping up the entertainer aspect. All of this has roots which go directly back to B/X as I see it, so it’s not new, but it is a deliberate shift – no one talked about “killer DMs” any more except as a retro joke, and White Wolf especially milked the idea that visionary saga directed play was virtuously distinct from terrible juvenile dungeon-elf play, even though their instructions were identical to the 1989 AD&D/2 publication.
I’ve never claimed that this playing style and adventure structure are unique to DSA – all published German fantasy RPGing in the 90s had at least some resemblance to that.
Part of the reason might have been that DSA had a huge influence on that as the most widely played RPG, and the one most beginners started out with it.
Another part might simply have been zeitgeist – you’ve already mentioned Dragonlance, and Ron had mentioned Vampire: the Masquerade and the AD&D 2E GM advice.
Published modules for DSA 1E are a wild mixture, written by many different authors, without any unified vision for what DSA should be and how it should be played. There are fun-house dungeon crawls (Wirtshaus zum Schwarzen Keiler, Die Sieben Magischen Kelche), plot-driven dungeon crawls (Verschollen in Al’Anfa), but also town-based modules (Havena box). The outlier closest in later tone is probably “Fluch des Mantikor”, which superficially is a dungeon-crawl in a haunted house, but then turns out as the Scooby Doo plan of a star-crossed anti-villain, who PCs are supposed to feel bad for and help out.
It was only 4 years later around the release of DSA 2E that the game really solidified (in every aspect – mechanics, setting and playing culture), and that the modules and their contents took on an unified style.
Skyrock: you are not permitted to interpret Hans’ phrasing of “really no different” as dismissing and attacking your point. Your defensive crouch (“I never claimed …”) is hyper-reactive internet bullshit and I don’t need it here.
Continue the discussion as if Hans and I agree with you and are rounding out the topic as we understand it. Because we are. When someone disagrees, they will say so clearly, and exactly how they see the matter. They will not hide behind bland opening phrases and slip in little insults. So stop crouching.
The 1990s parallel with White Wolf Publishing is eerily exact, considering the initial appearance of Vampire: the Masquerade in 1991. I diagram the big picture for this title/franchise in Historical technique.
The first phase of White Wolf practiced the same ongoing development of setting/context for play via Camarilla LARPing, internal development (writing), and drawing upon fandom bubbles. Players (fans, consumers) were effectively told they had to “keep up” in order to play correctly, as the World of Darknes underwent changes which were marketed as critical for all role-players to incorporate into their play experiences.
The finances also collapsed at about the same time as Schmidt Spiele, not hitting final bankruptcy to my knowledge, but very close, and at that point Mark Rein-Hagen left.
From that point, it was effectively a different company, financially and creatively. Vampire “revised edition” in 1998 seems to me to parallel DSA 3rd edition both as product and as content.