I was invited to attend Conpulsion, a long-standing and proudly non-commercialized convention in Edinburgh.

This year, the convention theme was “The Future of Gaming,” which led me to ask the organizers to reconsider whether I would be a good guest. I told them: I don’t think the activity celebrated by Adept Play, whatever you want to call it, is any sort of gaming, and although I think gaming as such is intrinsically a fine thing, I also think its future is most likely more militarism, more bad design via crowdfunding, more surveillance, more profiteering for techbros and conglomerates, and more eco-destruction. They said they were OK with me anyway.

So I went to Edinburgh! I have definitely internalized Swedish life habits. To me, Scotland was weird: the city and street signs are in English, of all things, and many social activities involve “pints.”

Fun and play

Gregor had engineered a surprise for me, by inviting Jerry and Renee! Read about us playing Fantasy for Real at Irresponsibility and integrity.

In this post, I’ll focus on the RuneQuest game. If you’re familiar with the offbeat early RuneQuest hack I’ve been messing with over the past seven years or so, then you know that its four-god pantheon is awful and atrocious. It’s a ramped-up version of everything toxic as far as I’m concerned, especially at the roots of the problems and not their momentary manifestation.

It has to do with playing (very) beginning characters and effectively admitting that the adolescent suspicion is true, that the adults surround them are actively evil, terrified into internalized compliance, or somewhere in-between. Every social construct, especially those which seem opposed, is some reinforcing mechanism for the power-abuses and perpetuation of the system.

I’ve found that the only way to develop any of the content is to play it while still barely-formed, which is why the Oome and Ord Lindas cult write-ups are pretty good, as well as the “godling” cults of Cze Ga and Nea, but the others are sketchy even in concept. This time I decided to focus on the cult of Wendrara the Loving Wife and Mother, and possibly the oppositional nascent cult of Mari the Joy, called the Whore.

I ran into internal blocks in preparing, and wrote about it at the Patreon, including these bits:

I don’t think I’m coming up with much playable solidity in terms of, well, playing anything imaginable as fantasy adventure, even allowing for the very broad range of that concept before it was turned into a tiny, narrow genre in the 1980s. Brooding vague horror, heinously effective passive-aggression, and punishment via “it’s not torture” and poisoning are not really what battle-axe attack vs. round-shield parry can handle.

Then again, maybe things like the poison rules, various perception and lore skills, Charisma mechanics, and spells like Detect Detection and Detection Blank do provide enough effective play for this to work fine. Even so, maybe it’s best in parallel with something a lot more dramatically in your face. The Mother is already designed to complement and oppose both The Witch and The Warchief, so that’s good … but I’m talking now about using her as the dominant cult in a region, so that those two as well as Urhoss are present only as Belonging Laymen and maybe a couple of Initiates. And any community in this case would in fact be much like the asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and any sugary-dystopia you care to name.

Again, conceivably, this is nothing to complain about and might be considered a real creative bar to set … but now for the hard part, immediate social context (the thing everyone always wanted to elide when I brought it up back at the Forge). Right now we’re talking about a single session of convention play, i.e., people won’t be in the “let’s try it, it might fail, that’s OK” mode, I’d like to showcase some early RuneQuest action, and I’m feelling uncharacteristic pressure to be awesome in play because I’m a named convention guest and will be presenting unfriendly content in a workshop.

The good news is that this setting/content has shined brightly every time I’ve tried it, eliciting almost primal uptake by the participants, and I might as well believe in it.

Having vented some of the pressure away by sharing that (thanks patrons!), I moved on to finding maps and scribbling things pretty easily. I liked the combination of Studio Ghibli and teenfic post-apoc implied by this map, although I really don’t know where our exact spot of play is on it.

I conceived of two villages, closely associated but in distinct micro-geographies, and I was astonished to find two perfect maps for them which even provided two perfect names. Greenleaf lies in the river foothills,

and Harmony is up on the mountainside (I asked the players to imagine its map as very steep at various levels, not flat as implied on the map).

My thoughts continue to evolve regarding preparing for this game, walking into design territory. In this case I added a “during the month before” training-up phase, influenced a bit by between-adventures rules in Bushido and similar games. I worked up the following proto-sheets for characters, for them to complete.

The following scribbles document both my content and state of mind while working through it.

Here you can see the notes made by the player during this phase written on the proto-sheet that I’d provided.

Here’s the NPC notes sheet which served as my primary reference during play itself.

The players were Astral, Jamie, Chris, and Alan, and their participation validated everything I could hope for in playing this crazy thing. I especially liked the way they generated the teen characters’ habits and ways of getting around parental scrutiny, directly through stated actions rather than explanations. Briefly, play brought us through quite a web of adult expectations and dark implications, into two independent attacks upon the Mari encampment.

From the GMing perspective, the session taught me a lot about what this concept can be and how to do it better.

• We maybe lost a bit, rather than gained, by letting them choose which cults to commit to or not. Although it made sense in the “semi-play” run-up to play, it also diminished the focus on Wendrara.
• With so much going on among the adults, and due to the limited time, I only managed to punch in characterizations without very much illumination of their inner lives. Some content did hit toward the end, when two of the characters realized that the guard-captain and the Mari initiate had history together.
• As with prior play, I found my godling cult to be tough to play past introduction. Once an initiate of Mari is active in play, for example, they’ve served their purpose for destabliziing the dominant cults, but as characters, what do they do? It’s another crucial aspect of GMing to nail down a little, procedurally.
• I think my strongest contribution was playing the other teens. Looking through the past play using these ideas, the same thing’s evident, and I am thinking it’s a primary design consideration, on the GM-side.
  • In this case, I actually rolled scores for Conformity, Desperation, and Popularity, for the eight NPC teens (you can see them at the bottom right corner of the sheet above). These were not only successful/useful for me to employ during play, but in fact amazing.

A last funny bit: here’s the promotion for my session, which at the time I thought maybe I’d over-sold as “so dark, dahrrrk …”

But then I saw the card for the next game in the room and decided I wasn’t outside the margins.

Guest activity

I participated in the mid-day panels each day, all of which seemed successful to me insofar as such events are expected to go, and also as usual, I never know whether anyone thought I helped or hindered. I very much appreciated Trevin York’s positive input about digital games, as useful to me regarding my own gloomy perceptions. I guess you’d have to ask the organizers what they thought, overall.

I presented a version of the workshop “What Went Wrong” to a small group, who were attentive and provided a lot of useful content of their own. I hope it had some impact in its way. I know that “real” workshop presenters devote a lot of effort to connections and follow-up, which seems like a good idea, but it’s not my strong point to say the least.

Rough reflection

I’m kind of not liking myself for thinking any of what follows, but I do think it. My enjoyment of play is sometimes hard to reconcile with the despair of contacting anyone and communicating about it, outside of the exact tables I’m at.

I really don’t present this as criticism of Conpulsion. It is organized by people who are not beholden to powerful financial interests, and it’s a university event bolstered by long-standing participants and conducted – very well – by students. Similar to Gothcon, there’s no crossover or sponsorship with any company or publication or franchise. It’s a labor of love and completely authentic, not a word I use lightly.

But, as with Gothcon, as with anywhere, industry and hobby knowledge and values are baked in hard. Whether it’s reflexive dismissal of D&D 4E, or more generally use of “D&D” as a deep-meaning noun, or the common tropes of game-mastering, or the framing of role-playing as a subset of gaming, or its framing as defined by recent publications and by however Hasbro is touching itself lately … these and similar are present throughout the interactions, constantly, and it’s exhausting. It’s all compounded too by the hobby’s social standard that everyone can say any damn thing and it’s always OK, because anything else is “arguing” or contrarian.

I’d like to have a conversation about role-playing which isn’t necessarily immediately shunted into deconstruction and personal processing. I’d like conversations to share what we were playing, just now, rather than play being closeted (“done and we don’t talk about that”) and the conversations concerning abstractions or industry.

At least I can treat these aspects of the experience as merely history, necessarily present and understandable. The positive aspects are just as real and perhaps more prevalent, and more actionable. I hold out some hope that my attendance might have been, or become, useful to anyone.