Apologies to site owner Morrus for appropriating the name of his game for the title of this article. If you look at the news going on in tabletop gaming, you see more and more familiar faces. Nocturnal Media has purchased the remains of West End Games, including the rights to the D6 System. A new edition of Call of Cthulhu is getting ready to ship. Runequest 2 is getting ready to ship. Tunnels and Trolls and Grimtrooth’s Traps are available again. The rights issues around Villains & Vigilantes seem to have been cleared up, for the time being. A new publisher is promising a new, stronger Vampire: The Masquerade. On the more unofficial side of things, thanks to the OSR there are a number of things available for various versions of D&D once again.
I think that this is a good thing, for reasons that I talked about in my articles about OD&D and Runequest 2 at this site. We tend to forget about our history in gaming, and that can lead to the mistakes of reinventing the wheel being seen as innovation.
Embracing the history of tabletop gaming shouldn’t mean ignoring what is new. It also shouldn’t mean the fetishizing of the new, either. The design of the upcoming edition of Runequest from Chaosium is built upon the foundation of the second edition of the game, but it also looks to the design of games that have been set in Glorantha since Runequest, like Heroquest, that have differing sensibilities. The thing is, without knowing about the history of design, this sort of approach couldn’t happen.
Over the last few months, I have been playing in my first ever White Wolf game, a game of Werewolf Revised being run by my friend Stacy. As a fan of the fiction of Kelley Armstrong and Patricia Briggs, the idea of playing wolves appeals to me, and I have been enjoying the game despite not always enjoying the game. One of the reasons that I did not previously play White Wolf games was because I am not a huge fan of dice pools in RPGs most of the time, but as we play I can see that the system does stand on the shoulders of other games like the D6 System. Could this have been a factor in why one-time White Wolf co-owner Stewart Wieck purchased the remains of West End Games? You can see the parallels between the development of variant D6 systems like the D6 Legend rules used in games like Men In Black and the DC Universe RPG and with the dice pools used in White Wolf games.
The Savage Worlds game shows a strong influence from games by West End Games as well, but that makes sense when you see that Shane Hensley worked on a number of games for the company, and is involved in the resurrection of TORG (another old game that is being brought to new life).
Going back even further into the history of West End Games, you can look at how the D6 rules were designed for the company by the designers at Chaosium. Like with a number of games made from the minds of Chaosium, like the Arthurian games of Pendragon or Prince Valiant, you can see the fingers of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying rules on the development of the Ghostbusters rules. The BRP influences might not be as direct as they were on the games published directly by Chaosium, but they are still there in things like advancement, task resolution and other bits and bobs.
All of this draws a red arrow from 1978, with the publication of Runequest, that continues through important games of the 80s (West End Games’ Star Wars) through the 90s (White Wolf’s World of Darkness and West End Games’ TORG) up through today (Pinnacle’s Savage Worlds). When you think about the games that these games inspired, those red arrows are all over the history of game design now. White Wolf’s games have gone on to inspire much of Indie school of game design, whether that inspiration was positive or negative depends on the individual game. If you read Ron Edward’s Sorcerer game, you can see the fingerprints of Runequest and The Call of Cthulhu upon it as well.
Is there an actual direct line of influence and inspiration that draws between all of these games? Without talking to each of the designers and asking these things specifically, it is hard to tell. From a critical viewpoint, it looks obvious, but the most obvious answer isn't always the right answer.
Game design does not happen in a vacuum. The choices of designers are almost always a reaction to some other game, or their group’s experiences with that game. Most often that reaction is “I can do that better.” Often times, this leads to games that are then designed in a semi-vacuum as the designers ignore everything in game design happening concurrently to their work. This can lead to games that “discover” innovations that had become a part of the game design toolkit because the designers were focused on their works, without looking around them to see if someone else had already popularized this approach. This is how you end up with designers talking about how their games being put out today have the “great innovation” of not having classes or levels. This is despite games like Runequest or Tunnels and Trolls having gotten rid of these things to some degree or another back in the 1970s.
It is a great thing that so many old games are becoming available again, in some form or another. Whether we are talking about TORG or Shatterzone or Runequest 2 or Tunnels and Trolls, there are gamers today, possibly even the designers of tomorrow, who came up in gaming where some, or most, of these games were long out of print, and available sometimes only at conventions or in pirated PDF form. Being spoiled for choice in having these games available is a great thing.
Tabletop role-playing game design is not a technology. There is no obsolesce of older implementations of rules as newer ones come into play. Despite the publication of newer editions of D&D with 3rd edition and beyond, there are still people who play AD&D and AD&D 2e without problem.
This isn’t about nostalgia, it is about knowing the roots of game design and following them to the games that will inspire you, and your play. I wouldn’t have expected that my dislike for D&D games would have lead me to running a Runequest 2 game for our group. My introduction with the Runequest rules came with the third edition, so this is as much of a new territory for me as it is for the players. We’re having some bumps in the road as everyone gets used to a different mode of playing, but I think that by the time the group decides that it is time for the next game that we will have internalized these rules, and enjoyed them, as much as we did with the Swords & Wizardy rules a couple of years ago.
I had spent much of the last few years trying to fit our D&D games into something that was a better fit for the types of games that I wanted to run as a GM. Many of those experiments lead to mutant creatures that didn’t work well under the D&D paradigms, or just stretched the game into things that it wasn’t meant to be or do. But a simple side step found a basis more in line with the types of games that I wanted to run and play. If it hadn’t been for an investiture in the history of our hobby, not to mention a well-timed Kickstarter, I wouldn’t have thought to look at Runequest 2 and I would probably still be frustrated with our fantasy gaming.
Whether you are a designer or a game master, having an informed opinion on the other games available is a great thing. Not only does it allow for better choices in your games but it also can let you sidestep the mistakes that others have already made in their games.
