Three games about religion
Ron Edwards:
Last fall, I conformed to a common stereotype about men in their mid-40s and apparently became obsessed with matters of religion. Its roots lie in my work on Shahida but that's all politics and history, very little to do with specific religious content. Still, I did a lot of reading of and about Judaic, Christian, and Muslim texts, and I suppose it's not too surprising that a lot of stuff went into the dark well at the bottom of my head and fermented.
So, long story short, I wrote three alpha game drafts, none of which is definitely titled yet, only one of which I've playtested, and which I strongly suspect are totally not suitable for presentation or discussion on the internet. Which ridiculously, I'm doing anyway right now.
First things first
These are not Story Games. They are arterially-spurting Narrativist, yes, but the whole connotation of the "story game" term is totally not applicable. That connotation, as I see it, is a cute little wind-up game which you sit down to and kind of free-associate into, and you move tokens around the table and stuff, and it spits back a fun little story for you. It will take care of that little task no matter what you say. Your job is to figure out how the currency works and at most, strategize about how to get a lot of the black tokens, or something of that sort. These are not like that. They demand commitment to the moment on the part of everyone playing, specifically, without reference to how things are going to go, without planning for the ending. Everyone has to read and know the rules; there cannot be a person who says, "Hey, look at this Ron Edwards hotness, let's sit down and I'll show it to you."
Furthermore, not one of them will give you a blowjob. They are written much more in the frame of mind I was in when writing Sorcerer: a set of musical instruments. Which is to say, at least in terms of my ideal, the first electric bass, for instance. So that's a real tricky aesthetic design goal: the consumer has to be skilled enough to understand what it can do when they see it, but it's new, so they don't really know they want this exact thing, but also has to really want it nevertheless. In other words, although they've never seen or tried an electric bass, they have to be musicians who will assess it in musical terms. Which adds up to a kind of arrogant take-it-or-leave-it presentation: (i) if you really want to try this for the right reasons, then it'll work for you; and (ii) if you don't, and you suffer and flail, it's no skin off my nose. Not nice, but as far as I can tell, necessary.
The reason I went into all this is worth explaining too. Usually, my design process grows right out of successful play. I do X when playing a particular game, and then I say, "Hey, X really made that game work well," and I manage to articulate X and make it the rules-basis for a new game. For example, the rules for scenes and conflicts in Trollbabe grew right out of the techniques that I found made Dust Devils work really well for our group, especially since they were so different from the techniques that worked well for us in playing Hero Wars. But these games or notes-for-games are different. Here, I was designing totally out of my comfort zone, combining techniques that I wasn't sure that worked with others that were frankly utterly new - raw inspiration, stuff that really shouldn't be let out of the workshop at this stage. I am completely ignorant concerning whether any given piece of the rules or the rules as a whole work at all.
So, OK, what are they?
1. The "red" game, which I'd love to call Estimated Prophet, or possibly The Stress of Her Regard, both of which are already commercially-important titles of other works, so I can't. It's about ordinary people who experience mysticism, revelation, and madness. It relies very heavily on a personal commitment to the concept of beauty. Overall it gives off a very strong whiff of Philip K. Dick's Valis, but also allowing for some Matrixy or Akira-ish glowing zaps. The system includes making a collage, really, actually right there at the table. Scissors and glue and all that.
2. The "ophite" game, which is definitely the most ambitious of the bunch. I'm not even sure how to describe it ... well, it's mainly about coming of age and confronting death. Both playing it as an experience and the fictional content draw heavily upon semi-autobiographical comics techniques, being highly conversational and unconstructed, as well as combining embarassingly revelatory naturalism with free-floating visual weirdness whenever you feel like it. It's also supposed to be short-form, at least potentially, meaning that a session might be as short as twenty minutes. And if that weren't odd enough, it also requires learning a made-up religion and being honest about your own early religious observance (and boy have I found that people lie like rugs about that!).
3. The closest to a real title, Relic, which is about a church as an institution and the various soap operas that occur at different historical stages of its existence. You play it backwards, chronologically, using both a sanctified skull and a page or two of religious text as touchpoints. I was a bit stalled out on this one since I couldn't seem to get away from its initial notes as a minor hack of In a Wicked Age, but then the Solitaire RPG Contest provided exactly the mental breakout I needed. You do have to put some writing time into the preparation, but after that, play is quite simple. It's the only one I've tried and I used the experience for the examples.
I want to stress that none of them are about religious belief, which as I see it, is a huge non-issue which tends to blot out all the relevant issues about religion through its very non-ness. It's kind of the opposite of the elephant in the room that no one will talk about; instead, it's the elephant which is not in the room but which no one will shut up about.
I've made the current write-ups available here at the Adept website.
Related thoughts - warning, highly provocative
Here are two other notions which factored into these games' design, or at least, as far as I can tell in retrospect, given that I was musing over them more-or-less during the design period.
1. For a couple of years, I've been thinking a lot about how many of the role-players I've met in the last decade had strict religious upbringings. Many although not all of them come from the American evangelical tradition. Maybe "strict" is misleading; I've found that people will say, "Oh, it wasn't strict" and go on to describe hair-raising guilt trips and routine practices which are best described as behavior-mod indoctrination. In fact, I don't mind telling you this up-front, the main thing I've found is that many role-players flatly lie when it comes to admitting how they were raised in these terms. Or they deflect into what might as well be a lie when they go on and on about their current free-thinking atheism or exceptionally fuzzy feel-good alternate church, as a way of not actually saying how they were raised.
Clinton was a Baptist from the holy-roller 'Bama tradition. Vincent was a Mormon. Jim Henley was some sort of squeaky-clean evangelical Protestant, Presbyterian maybe or something like that. It goes on and on, nowadays with Joel, Kevin, Sydney, Clyde, and many others. And these are just the ones who are being up-front about their backgrounds. It doesn't surprise me that at least some of them seem to congregate (heh) at Vincent's blog, and I often get the idea that there's a need being met there on a level which only makes sense to the people I'm talking about.
What I'm saying is that this is kind of an unspoken commonality or at least well-represented demographic which may well be a primary source from which RPG hobbyist culture is fed, every generation. I think role-playing for this demographic was the most daring and scary rebellious thing they were able to do, What I'm saying most especially is that openly discussing this issue is so chilled and so not honest that it chokes up and stifles many other discussions. Even those who are up-front about their backgrounds do so only in the context of saying how Not Like That they are now.
I'm not part of it, coming instead from the radical left coast from a very distinct and brief time period, hence part of a scene or subculture which has no corresponding members of older or younger vintage. As a similar example with different details, neither was Josh Neff, who's a classic deep-red commie Jewish American, also a vanishing demographic. For us and a few others, role-playing wasn't our way to rebel against mommy and daddy and God. Nor did BADD rear up as a meaningful threat to my participation in the hobby. I think that's why my deeply underground, deeply politicized take on fantasy and sex (see Naked Went the Gamer) is so foreign to many role-players, and why I'm dismissive and bored regarding perceived mainstream views about role-playing, instead of fearing them.
The following points aren't intended to describe any single individual, but two or three per person do seem to show up again and again among the role-players I've been thinking about.
i) A strong tendency toward rebellious-looking attire and hair, frequently hippie-pagan but also sometimes punky - and completely divorced from the original political context in which these looks originated.
ii) A strong tendency toward prudishness in RPG content once you get past the original rebellion of playing RPGs at all. It's a weird kind of Victorian prudishness, though, perfectly accepting of extreme porn when it's "in its place," i.e., available in private and quite distanced from anything resembling ordinary or public human interactions.
iii) A strong tendency toward saving and helping others especially in anonymous masses, often in the full assumption that one knows exactly what to do and think better than they do. (i.e. despite breaking with one's natal church, retaining and even elevating its presumption of secret spiritual insight over that of humanity; i.e., not joining the ignorant mass "down there" but rather elevating above the church to a third plane of super-insight)
iv) An overwhelming need, even anxiety, regarding being liked, as opposed merely to operating in one's own terms and letting being liked find its own level.
v) Bright as hell, full of ideas, but often choked-up and anxious when it comes to implementing them.
vi) Surprising tolerance for militarism in details and even in full-blown political content, both in fiction and in life, to the extent of occasional fetishism and not recognizing military criticism or satire.
vii) A very strong commitment to a new name representing their break with their old upbringing, whether legally changed or a username or whatever.
Food for thought, perhaps.
2. Here's a video of some of my recent talk at InterNosCon 2011: No one talks about religion in role-playing (the sound is crappy). The event was longer than 52 minutes; I figure the substantial talk lasted for another forty minutes or so, but I don't know if the rest is going to be posted. Key points include:
i) "Religion" as a term needs to be broken into four independent components to make sense: belief, observance, institution, and culture. Again and again, the current discourse clearly displays the need to get past the first and to recognize it as a non-issue, especially the misconception that it provides the foundation for all the others. As I see it, getting past that first term means that we will recognize that the other three are glaringly present and involved in our lives. (My example in the talk: as a self-described non-religious person, with the most political and non-spiritual Unitarianism as the only formal influence, I wear a wedding band. I can rationalize it and babble about it all I want, but the point is that my culture is Christian, like it or not, and I am of it as well as merely being in it.)
ii) Texts used for religious books - especially the fragmentary older ones which have been folded into what can only be called "church books" - often say and depict nothing like what the church doctrines claim they do. When I sit down and read them without being distracted by doctrine, I find that they are often mainly about people: families, politics, sex, power, obligations, cheating, and all that stuff, and frequently taken to rather shocking extremes. My take is that a very great deal of human discourse about really quite relevant issues has been conducted through such texts, and to reject or abandon familiarity with them on the basis of objecting to the metaphysics would be a stupid thing to do. Note that this point is not the same as the common desires to uncover the "real" religion through seeking backwards through texts, or to discover historical authenticity or lack thereof through such seeking. Those aims don't interest me very much.
iii) Religion in RPG settings is generally flawed to the point of absence, especially in the adventuring-party context of D&D-type fantasy, mercenary high-tech like Shadowrun, and anything based on those. Either it provides a skill-set for utility purposes or a setting-context for villainy. The main exceptions I identified were the Glorantha setting, especially in the post-millenial games starting with Hero Wars; the Church of the Celestial Sun in Fading Suns; and a couple of others I'm probably forgetting. Davide Losito (in the video, sitting to my right) offered some examples of churches used as centers of resistance against tyranny.
iv) The first content revolution in RPG play/design in the past 15 years concerned substantive drama as opposed to faking it; the second concerned sexual and gender content which acknowledged the reality of these issues for people at the table; and the third, already in progress, concerns both politics and religion as genuine human concerns. The third is receiving exactly the same combination of resistance and eager reception as the first two did, although my current thinking is that the barrier is actually higher in this case because the exact same people in the RPG community who want relevant content are the same ones who like to pretend they are above politics and religion. So far, the games in question for politics include carry, Spione, Steal Away Jordan, and Grey Ranks; the ones for religion include Montsegur 1244 and Thou Art But a Warrior, and I'm probably missing a couple. I suggest that Dogs in the Vineyard is a case study with special properties but we can save that for later posts.
What I'm hoping for
Essentially, I want responses straight from the heart. Whether it's your reading of the current write-ups, any attempt at playing them, your thoughts on religion in RPG settings, your personal accounts and admissions regarding religion and role-playing, all I care about is your honesty. As long as that's there, whatever you toss into this thread for those topics will help me a lot, and I hope to be able to provide interesting feedback that shows more about where I'm coming from with these ... well, not games yet, "things."
I really don't want writing advice. These are not game texts yet and if any of them ever becomes one, I'll write it from scratch and will need comments then. For now, these are design drafts, and I hope you can read them in that light.
Best, Ron
Abkajud:
Hey Ron,
I'm glad you're expanding upon that idea of RPGers having a strong religious background/presence in their background, and I am dying for more religion and politics in games (as you probably know).
One logistical thing, though: the links on the Adept Press site seem to not be working. Help!
Ron Edwards:
Hi,
Refresh the page and see if that works. When I first posted, I had to test the links and fix them, which is why the page is marked as edited. It's possible you're clicking on the first version.
Best, Ron
Lavinia Fantini:
The problem is that there's an extra
at the end of each link (it shows as <br%20> in the address bar when opened) when you try to open it. Delete the extra bit and you have the correct address :-)
Very interesting thoughts Ron, I'm going to watch your talk at INC (for some reason I still haven't!).
Lavinia Fantini:
*there is an extra < br / > at the end of each link
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page