Point One: Yes, it is just a game. Not only do I get that but I practice it. I played Cyberpunk for years and I haven't killed anyone. However I must say that all of my games have been affected by the real world that we do live in. The multi-cultural and multi-ethnic bent of Cyberpunk was one of the first games that seemed to actively embrace that. I do think there is a place for a D&D-styled game that takes these ideas into account.
Point Two: I understand that this is not the first time anyone had ever espoused any of these ideas. However I also know that the reason that this conversation happens all of the time is because new people come to these conclusions all of the time. This is my take on those ideas, not yours, and not necessarily the right one, but mine nonetheless.
Point Three: I think the game is a much richer experience if there is a reason for the many conceits of the setting. If you want to turn D&D on its head, you need to actually know where the head is. So knowing where we come from is important to where we're going.
Point Four: As for games where you save people and give them stuff, see Chad Underkoffler's award-winning Dead Inside RPG that inverts the core conceits of roleplaying into pure awesome. As for Blue Rose it is available digitally and in print from Green Ronin right now (and it's awesome).
Point Five: I am not so much “writhing with politically correct guilt” as realizing that I was pretty insensitive as a child and living in the south there is an awful lot of prejudice all around us. This kind of systemic cultural chauvinism is something that we should all feel bad about and take steps to correct it. Now that I have dealt with all of that unpleasantness, what are we going to talk about now? Oh yes, what I did to turn D&D on its head.
Many of you remember the heady days at the turn of the century when a truly gifted group of developers announced a third edition of the venerable Dungeons & Dragons RPG. I was completely blown away by the idea that D&D was seen by these developers as a separate type of fantasy. That D&D was in fact the style of fantasy that millions of us had created. It wasn't exactly the same conceits as Leiber, or Tolkien, or even Moorcock, but it had all of those elements cooked down to a fantastic melange with bits of Monty Haul, Monty Python, and thousands of other influences that had drifted down the collective unconscious over the years. Through the good graces of some people I knew at WotC I was able to receive a pre-release galley copy of the book a couple of months before its debut.
Without question I was blown away. The game exceeded all of my expectations and seemed to distill the D&D experience into a complete paradigm. Of course I had also had my own ideas about what it would take to turn D&D on its head, and so I went to work on a campaign that would eventually be called Sung. I didn't set out to break D&D, but I eventually did in my opinion.
Sung was going to be culturally very different from the traditional European fantasy setting. I had just read Jacqueline Carey's amazing Kushiel's Dart and though I didn't want to mimic her directly, she did inspire me to create a different kind of fantasy setting. I was also doing some reading in a few different areas of Asian history, specifically Chinese & Vietnamese. So that was where I started.
The land that was to become Sung was a chinese analog for a period of relative stability after the so-called Warring States period. I wanted a Mandarinate, a monkey king, and a few other tenets of the folklore that I thought were important from Chinese history. I also wanted the Truong Sisters and some other viewpoints that were significant to the Vietnamese perspective. There was a particular cultural viewpoint on soldiery and brigandry that was indicative of the Vietnamese culture. For most of the discrete history of Vietnam people felt that being a soldier was the lowest calling of all. If you couldn't even be a farmer, only then did you consider being a soldier.
I ripped off a few other ideas too, a Lama figure/”golden child” who appears as a baby. A lot of prophesy and oracles. A race against the forces of evil. Just a real heroic quest. I was planning on a dungeon or two, a lost temple complex and a cavern expedition. I just wanted big adventure, and I wanted it to be different. Like many times in the past, I didn't know what I was doing.
The premise was that a group of young adults just starting out in the world were to be shipwrecked in a strange land. Thanks to James Clavell for that conceit. They were all starting out as zero level Rogues, and as they came to first level they were going to choose a different class if they wanted. This allowed me to keep all of the players human and the same class, so that learning the ins and outs were easier for all of us. It also allowed the kind of play they wanted to engage in to affect their choice as a class.
I wanted the racial analogs to be more along the lines of Ringworld. A sort of splintering of humanity through many means. Magical, technological, and environmental. I also wanted them to be much more coarse and in the players' faces. As an example I wanted them to view many of the nonhumans as beneath them at first, especially the orcs, and I wanted them to gradually come to understand through the course of the campaign that their perceptions were just completely wrong.
I consider the campaign that I created to be one of the greatest achievements of my life. It had adventure, and heroics, and intrigue. It had all of the traditional elements that you might consider D&D. It only had one problem. It wasn't D&D at all. As the game progressed it became more and more not D&D. My players eventually lost interest, and by extension so did I. We never finished Sung. It was years ago now. My marriage was falling apart, so I stopped gaming for a while. I just couldn't bring myself to create, to emote, or to be a person for some time. Still, with all of the failure wrapped up in Sung, it taught me a whole lot about myself and about the conceits that are D&D.
So the point that I had come to, and the point I was tying to relate in these two columns was that the particular conceits that made up D&D were very much a part of my collective unconscious. After all I am a white guy from the midwest, much younger but similar to those men who rolled all of these conceits into what became my favorite game, my avocation, and the reason I write today. So I have had to come to grips with the fact that while we may have been wrong in many of the minutiae, that the game we created has clearly outgrown those narrow incivilities, and maybe that's the point.
In America we have very much surpassed those narrow incivilities in a very real way. After all, just a few short days ago we inaugurated a President who couldn't have eaten in a restaurant where I live fifty years ago. The very basis of the racial dialog in this country has changed, and with it so many of the conceits that we have taken for granted for a few generations are simply changed. Every month a new game or two or three is created or comes to fruition. The conceits change, maybe those changes aren't quite as dramatic as those of D&D, or of race relations in America as Back Hussein Obama is inaugurated as President of my United States. Maybe it just takes jarring changes like that to bring the smaller changes into focus. Maybe when you see the big changes, you realize that smaller ones happen all the time.
