Back in the 20th century, the grimdark fantasy tradition had its beginnings in Michael Moorcock's Von Bek novels (The Warhound and the World's Pain, etc) which surely inspired Games Workshop's Warhammer RPG. In the early '90s, Jamie and I signed with GW to write a pseudo-Japanese supplement for Warhammer, which made sense given that the Sengoku period makes the Thirty Years' War look like a tussle between two drunks outside a kebab shop. But enough of me and Jamie...
Tetsubo had been commissioned by Paul Cockburn. Unfortunately he left GW the same week we delivered the manuscript. The new people in charge of roleplaying games there didn't have much enthusiasm for an Oriental take on the game -- and possibly not for roleplaying in general, as soon after that I think GW passed the Warhammer licence on elsewhere.
So that left Tetsubo in limbo -- or rather in Yomi -- until 2018, when Daniel Fox of Grim & Perilous Studios asked to adapt it as a supplement to his Warhammer heartbreaker, Zweihänder. The good news was the renewed spark of interest drove me to dig out the Tetsubo manuscript and scan it all, most of the book never having even been saved to disk and only existing in a faded dot-matrix-printed box of papers. The bad news: after a burst of activity it sank back into the land of mists, and after a year the contract lapsed.
Daniel Fox got back in touch last month to talk about renewing the contract, but his thinking had moved on. He wanted to bring in elements of 1960s chambara movies. That wasn't in itself a problem. Jamie and I are Kurosawa fans, even though we harbour no illusions about his movies being in any way authentically Japanese. But Daniel wanted to square the circle by meshing that with a real Sengoku vibe, and he had the problem that the book as written was more of a fit with the Bakumatsu -- because, of course, GW had wanted players to be able to bring their Old World characters in.
And then there was the question of who would tackle the redesign and conversion to the new system. Daniel proposed hiring Graeme Davis, who would have been ideal, but he was too busy to take it on. Now, at this point I should probably address the notion of "cultural appropriation", whose proponents (I think; I don't actually know any) might say the game could only be done properly if it had a Japanese designer. But would "a Japanese designer" have to mean somebody born and raised in Japan? Or could it be a Japanese citizen (wherever he or she was born) with a deep knowledge of medieval Japanese culture? Or simply somebody who happens to be ethnically Japanese -- Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance, who went to school down the road from me in Surrey? You might have guessed by now that I don't subscribe to the woke obsession with ethnicity, an obsession which is supposedly progressive but in fact quite the opposite; we are all human, nobody owns culture or history, and there's no reason why the world's leading authority on, say, Classical Greece shouldn't be Maori.
But those are all just distractions. The bottom line is, a year on, Jamie and I could see that Tetsubo just wasn't going to happen. At least, it will only happen if we do it ourselves.
Currently we're mulling over whether this is worth doing as a Kickstarter. We'd need to rebuild it around a different game system, of course, and our first thought was Powered By The Apocalypse, which we enjoyed for its simplicity when we played our Sagas of the Icelanders campaign, but the appeal of Tetsubo will surely be to traditional roleplayers whereas PbtA would take it in a whole other narrativist direction. So not that.
One option is to use a variant of my Tirikelu RPG, but I'm not sure that would make best use of the skills and career paths in the Tetsubo book. I intend using Tirikelu for my Abraxas RPG (a good fit, hopefully, being science fantasy) and also Tirikelu isn't GURPS; we can't just tack it onto everything. Jamie suggested using a variant of my currently-in-development Jewelspider rules, on the principle that OSR players and Warhammer fans might have at least a nodding acquaintance with Dragon Warriors.
But then we had a brainwave. Paul Mason is an Anglo-Japanese academic who has lived in Japan for over twenty-five years. He's not only an authority on Japanese culture and history, he's also an editor, author and RPG designer with his own (as yet unpublished) game Outlaws, based on the stories of Liang Shan Po. What if we used the Outlaws system for Tetsubo? Not only would the gaming world get a taste of a brilliant and authentic Eastern-influenced RPG, but we'd get an extremely erudite Japanese scholar on board to consult on the final manuscript.
We asked Paul, he said yes, and that's the plan right now -- unless somebody throws an even better suggestion into the comments below.
Paul Mason is famous in roleplaying circles as one of the uber-fans involved with Dragonlords and as the editor of the superb if infrequent imazine, in which he treated us to a stellar series of articles and reviews in his inimitably trenchant and thought-provoking style. He was also for many years one of my Tekumel players and has written Outlaws, a great but so far unpublished RPG of the heroes of Liangshan Po, which I used as the basis of my (also unpublished) Heian Japan roleplaying game, Kwaidan.
These days Paul is too busy with his academic career in Japan to do much roleplaying, but the last time he was over in Britain I asked if he wouldn’t mind me running some of his articles as guest posts, and he gave a kind of oblique permission. That is, he looked at me with an expression that was more 'are you serious?' than 'don’t you dare'.
This piece might strike you as very basic stuff if you’re a roleplayer – but hey, I’ve been roleplaying since the mid-70s and I found it useful. Remember that once you reach 10th Dan you go back to wearing a white belt. Nobody should ever think they’re anything but a novice. Take it away, Paul...
In a role-playing game the rules are details: they are the trees from which part of the wood is composed. So let’s consider a different approach to writing rules for role-playing games. Let’s try to look at the wood.
goal
The purpose of this game is to take part in a story. The story isn’t told by anyone, but is built up from the improvised contributions of all the participants. See the sample for an idea of how this works.
how to play
The game creates a story. Participants in the game all play a part in creating the story, by making contributions. The goal of the game is to make it as easy as possible for participants to act or describe their improvised contributions to the game without spoiling the sense of immersion.
participants
There are two basic types of participants in the game. Players are a little like actors. They will usually act the life of a single person: their character. The referee is more like a director. The referee describes sensory information in the story, and may occasionally act other characters in the story, as needed.
action
A participant who contributes to the game by acting does so by saying what their character is trying to do. So in the sample, Fred says: ‘I climb up the gantry to the deck above.’ If you like, when this action is speech, the participant can act the speech by actually speaking as the character. So later in the sample, when Fred says ‘Set it to stun!’ he’s actually saying what his character is saying. In some cases you might need to check which it is, but usually it will be obvious. Two or more participants can thus act the roles of their characters, conducting a conversation which forms part of the story.
Anything which is acted by a participant takes place as described, unless it is challenged by another participant (usually this is the job of the referee, but other players may also challenge if they like). A participant whose action has been challenged must prove that the character could succeed. To do this, they need to use an agreed game mechanic (such as Outlaws Light, presented in imazine #33). An example of a game mechanic is that you must roll 9 or less on two dice to hit with your phaser. Really skilled characters like Worf need an 11 or less. Other Klingons need 7 or less.
Some complex interactions, such as fights, often involve continual implied challenges, and therefore may require a lot of use of mechanics. Other actions, if they seem reasonable given the character and the story, can pass unchallenged.
description
A participant who contributes to the game by describing does so by talking about something accessible to the senses of characters in the game. This is usually the job of the referee, but players may also occasionally describe things connected with their characters. So in the sample, Sam describes what the players can see once they have climbed the gantry, and what they can feel.
Descriptions, like actions, can be challenged. They shouldn’t be contradicted outright, but senses can be mistaken! A player who describes a scene is speaking only for their character, and other players, or the referee, may perceive things differently. Note that the referee is privileged in description: because they speak for ‘everybody’ a player who challenges a referee’s description is simply describing what their own character perceives, and not what anyone else does.
Obviously, not everything needs to be described, and referees should beware of trying to act events in the story in the guise of description! For example, if Sam in the sample goes on to say ‘When you walk on to the transporter pad, there is an explosion’ this is wrong, because the players haven’t yet said that they are acting by walking on to the transporter pad. Remember, you’re not telling a story by crafting it authorially, you’re creating one by inhabiting it.
contributing
There are no fixed rules governing how and when you can contribute to a story, but there are some obvious guidelines that should be followed. The most important is: take your cues from the story. If you act something your character is doing tomorrow, then everyone else’s actions today will have to be done in flashbacks. This will be difficult, and may even cause a contradiction with what you acted about tomorrow. Challenging other player characters, or getting into conflicts with them, is fine, but blocking the story itself is generally bad form.
A typical sequence of contributions will be:
Referee describes the situation facing the player characters, and/or uses a character to act a stimulus.
Players respond by acting their character’s reaction. There’s no fixed order to this, but if a player feels that their character should be able to act first, they always have recourse to a challenge.
Participants respond to the actions. This may lead to further description—the referee, or a player, may describe the result of actions.
Out of all these contributions, a sequence of events will soon be evident. This is the story.
Even in your own mind, separate Action from Description. At first it’s tempting to think that your character could do absolutely anything, but soon you find that the limitations are what create drama. Maybe you can’t leap that chasm, maybe you’re not fast enough to outrun the fireball. Maybe the Ferengi saw you pick his pocket. Sometimes you should challenge yourself, not wait for other players to do it.
timing
Time for the characters in the story does not pass at the same rate as it does for the players. At times, it will pass very slowly, if you’re working out something that doesn’t take long, but needs to be explained in detail. At other times, it will pass very quickly, as with a long journey in which nothing much happens. As with most things in the game, time can be skipped over, subject to challenge by any of the other participants.
winning
There are no rules to cover winning. Players can decide on their own ideas of what constitutes winning. However, they may find that other players don’t agree with them. So how do you win? Well, how does a character win in a story?
ending
The game takes place in game sessions. A game session is when the participants get together to play the game. It can end at any time that is convenient for the participants. The end of a game session doesn’t mean the end of a story. The story can continue in the next session. A story only ends when everyone agrees that it’s finished, and you start a new one, or when you stop playing the game entirely!
postscript
Thanks to Dave Morris for providing comments and useful examples based on Star Trek. In writing this, I’ve been particularly inspired by all those games which have started with some vague waffle about how role-playing is like improvisational radio theatre, have followed it with a sample dialogue, without any explanation as to how and why people said what they did, and then plunged straight into tables of character generation. I’m also indebted to my own players, half of whom were complete beginners.
All next week we'll be running a scenario from way back in the days of White Dwarf. I mean the days when it used to feature material for D&D, RuneQuest, Traveler and other systems - in this case Bushido, a medieval Japanese RPG that had a burst of cult popularity in the early 1980s.
My own preference is for Heian Japan, a good five or six hundred years earlier than games like Bushido are set. No samurai to speak of then. No seppuku or dai-sho. And certainly no sneaky fellers in black pyjamas spending their days practicing on tiptoe over squeaky floors. I ran a campaign set around the events of The Tales of the Heike using Paul Mason's Water Margin rules, but when it came to Bushido we probably played one or two sessions at most.
"Kwaidan" got written because Oliver Johnson and I were asked to come up with a scenario to help sell Bushido, copies of which must have been lying too long in the Games Workshop window, curling and sun bleached. We had recently seen the movie of the same name at the National Film Theatre and Oliver had bought me Royall Tyler's excellent book of Japanese folktales, so we settled down at our two typewriters with a supply of green tea on hand and bashed out the scenario in an afternoon. Essentially it's an exercise in how to cram as many classic Japanese horror-fantasy elements as possible into one adventure. Not likely to make it into "The Best of Morris & Johnson" then, and most definitely not the kind of roleplaying we were doing in those days or now, but of interest to collectors, perhaps.
I'm going to leave the Bushido stats in. I can't remember now what all those MNAs ("maximum number of actions"?) and BAPs (a type of bread roll?) were all about, but it should be pretty easy to convert to your system of choice. Or you could use Tetsubo - rather apt, that, since it too was written primarily to help sell GW/Citadel products.
Now a footnote. I queued this series of posts up a month ago, but in light of the recent appalling events in Japan I can't let the coincidence of timing pass unnoticed. So I'm going to ask everyone who plans on using the Bushido scenario, or indeed who regularly drops in and enjoys this blog, to please pay for that enjoyment. Normally we believe in giving stuff away for free. But have you played the Heart of Ice gamebook? Or read Jamie's Fabled Lands comic book? Or downloaded Tetsubo? Then I'm asking you now to reach into your pocket on behalf of the people in Japan who need our help. Here's where: the Japanese Red Cross c/o Google Crisis Response. Doing it that way gets aid directly to where it is needed. And please contribute something now, this minute, before you do anything else today.
And then there was the question of who would tackle the redesign and conversion to the new system. Daniel proposed hiring Graeme Davis, who would have been ideal, but he was too busy to take it on. Now, at this point I should probably address the notion of "cultural appropriation", whose proponents (I think; I don't actually know any) might say the game could only be done properly if it had a Japanese designer. But would "a Japanese designer" have to mean somebody born and raised in Japan? Or could it be a Japanese citizen (wherever he or she was born) with a deep knowledge of medieval Japanese culture? Or simply somebody who happens to be ethnically Japanese -- Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance, who went to school down the road from me in Surrey? You might have guessed by now that I don't subscribe to the woke obsession with ethnicity, an obsession which is supposedly progressive but in fact quite the opposite; we are all human, nobody owns culture or history, and there's no reason why the world's leading authority on, say, Classical Greece shouldn't be Maori.
