Dragons in the Dark

A lot can change in forty years. Attitudes and opinions especially. I was reminded of that when I came across the March 1986 issue of a fanzine called Dragons in the Dark, edited by Henk Langeveld, and flipped it open to discover a letter from my very much younger self. So what games were grabbing the attention of the Dave Morris of four decades ago? Let's find out...

"I agree with what Mike Williams said about getting the rules out of the way of role--playing. I have enjoyed several games where there was no dice-rolling at all -- not because the players didn't get into combats, but because the game was flowing along so smoothly that I decided not to break it all apart by insisting they get out the figurines and the dice. Games can't always work out like that (my sessions have their share of dungeoneering too), but at their best they are pure role-playing, an improvised story created jointly by the players and the GM. Some letters in White Dwarf objected that this type of gaming is just chaotic – no rules. There are rules, I have found, but rules of a very subtle sort that arise out of the nature of storytelling. A player may spontaneously invent some power, item or general get-out if he thinks the others will accept it. As GM, I cannot just take the item away from him without forcing a re-take in the adventure, so I have to be inventive and twist things against him again. I really think that for a group of experienced gamers who are used to one another’s foibles, this gives an opportunity for imaginative gaming and shared fantasy that the old rule systems (that mostly developed out of wargames and table-topping) do not allow. This is one of the reasons that I'm against things like fatigue points – who can be fagged to calculate all those numbers and things during a game that should represent the triumph of imagination?"

Here in 2026 I'm still in favour of improvisation, but not in the authored sense described there. I value roleplaying precisely because it is a work without an author, so I would rather not have players seeing their characters as pieces to move around a story. I want them to improvise in character. You know, the way we do in real life.

Anyway, back to 1986:

"I didn't invest in RuneQuest 3 (though I have looked through it) because I didn't see that much wrong with RQ2. The RuneQuest Compendium could have handled any necessary adjustments and expansions, but instead wasted itself with useless padding on how to cook a walktapus and suchlike. Since the world of Glorantha is defined by the game, it means that the old Glorantha has gone – the world must now be a very different place. If the POW gain for priests has been changed there will be fewer priests of great power, for example.

"For me, the main role-playing event of 1985 was the publication of Swords and Glory, M.A.R. Barker's complete reworking of his Tekumel game. Greg Stafford was right to call Barker a genius – he developed Tekumel as a real place and his rules merely interpret that into a game. 'Game' Tekumel is asymptotic to 'real' Tekumel, but there is no sense that with a new set of rules the whole world has changed."

I guess I'll stand by most of that, except that Barker has nowadays been cancelled for his assumed views so we're not to mention him, and anyway if I were still playing Tekumel-based games I'd use the Tirikelu rules rather than S&G. 

Moving on, we get to a kind of cultural appropriation that still makes me seethe:

"I cannot say that I'm waiting for Chaosium's feudal Japanese supplement to RQ3 with much enthusiasm. Bushido seems to handle this setting very competently and evocatively anyway. The attitude towards Japanese culture and folklore that shows through published Chaosium material is not particularly auspicious in this regard. I found the dragonewts write-up in – was it Different Worlds or Wyrm's Footnotes? Can't remember – pretty offensive. Dragonewts, these utterly unhuman creatures, apparently fight with katanas, perform seppuku, compose haiku... all things that maybe seem utterly unhuman to the Californian mind, but personally I think don't measure up. Probably these Japanese elements are grafted onto dragonewt culture in a spirit of amused incomprehension rather than outright chauvinism, but I am not impressed. Returning to the example of Tekumel, Barker manages to make his nonhumans (the ssu, the hlüss, the pe choi, etc) look and feel alien without recourse to traditional Western myth or swiping from non-European cultures."

And the letter rounds off with a last little bit that's of historical interest because it pins down my and Jamie's inspiration for creating open-world gamebooks:

"Tales of the Arabian Nights by West End is well worth a look, though pricey. It is an original concept, attractively presented and great fun. I bought it a month ago and have been playing three or four times a week since then."

That would have been in the autumn of 1985, two years before we pitched a gamebook series we were calling Hero Quest. It's interesting to look back now and see the glint in my then-youthful and sparkling clear eyes.

Oh, you're wondering about that cover? The image above is ChatGPT's retconned version, but for the sake of historical interest here's what RPG fanzines actually looked like in the days of typewriters, Letraset and Cow Gum:

The same cigarettes as me

So I'm not the only one irked by seeing modern characters popping up in period dramas. I don't know who writes the Movie Media Hub posts on Facebook, but I'm with them on this point. Not specifically feminist characters, though: any character whose function is to spout modern attitudes a few centuries ahead of their time.

I disagree about why such characters are inserted into stories. There are multiple reasons. Most obviously, it's a way for a lazy writer to get laughs. "Heh heh, it's Victorian times but Holmes just said 'OK Boomer'." Ursula K Le Guin griped about fantasy writers who put contemporary American slang into their heroes' mouths:

"...Since fantasy is seldom taken seriously at this particular era in this country, they are afraid to take it seriously. They don’t want to be caught believing in their own creations, getting all worked up about imaginary things; and so their humor becomes self-mocking, self-destructive. Their gods and heroes keep turning aside to look out of the book at you and whisper, “See, we're really just plain folks." '

It happens because some audiences are easily pleased. They are asking, as Oscar Wilde put it, for art "to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity."

Anachronism is also a quick and easy way to get the audience on-side with a character. How can you not root for the guy who's denouncing slavery in the 18th century? Well, there were indeed plenty of people denouncing slavery back then, and a good thing too, but if you are going to put them in a script they shouldn't talk like 21st century characters. Unlike us today, they exist in a world where it apparently wasn't obvious to everyone that enslaving another human being was a monstrous crime. And even if you get the mindset and the dialogue right, it's still a lazy way to create rooting interest. Consider first whether you need to start with a hero whose every attitude is right-on. We were talking about the superfluity of likeable characters in a recent post and, as a great storyteller once pointed out, it is more satisfying to see one sinner that repenteth than ninety-nine decent characters who need no repentance.

Mainly, though, I detest this trope because of its cultural chauvinism. If somebody is interested in a story with an historical and/or non-Western setting, what is the point of inserting modern Western characters? You may say we can't fully know how people in such settings would see the world. Equally, we can't all be as selfless as the Buddha but that doesn't stop us giving money to charity. We make an effort at all sorts of things we can't hope to do perfectly, so why not storytelling or roleplaying? We do know that a farmer in medieval Iceland won't share the attitudes of people at a TED talk. If we want the farmer to make a stand for something we believe in today, we should look for a way he'd credibly conceive of and frame that in the context of his times. In writing or playing such a character, we can find stepping stones that help us imagine their interior life, for example using a process that Robert Graves called analeptic mimesis, effectively taking what you know of a time and place and dreaming it back into existence. That is true even in a fantasy story, as long as it's a fantasy setting where somebody has thought out some of the culture and economics that shape it.

In his book Medieval Horizons, Dr Ian Mortimer contrasts historical accuracy with historical authenticity:

"We impose our own prejudices on the past and reinvent it as 'how it must have been' to conform with our outlook. To appeal to a modern audience, therefore, a medieval heroine in a book or film must be shown as having control over her own life. Alternatively, she must appear constantly fighting her oppressors. Male peasants must similarly include at least once plucky, Robin Hood-like character who leads the others in defying authority. The result is a reproduction of modern society draped in medieval clothing." 

It might be an interesting exercise to write a modern drama but insert one character with the (imagined) attitudes of somebody from the 23rd century. Presumably even the least demanding audience member would spot something amiss then. And how would they take to having their currently fashionable beliefs scorned as antediluvian and even toxic by some supercilious git from the future?

Of course, your tastes may vary. Looking for fiction or games set in the early 19th century, do you want Middlemarch and War & Peace -- or, alternatively, are you looking for Bridgerton? Taking an imaginative leap into another society, or just dressing-up in period costume? Now you know where I stand. Still, those Regency greatcoats are jolly tempting.

Good versus the other thing

‘Can anybody play characters in service to Napoleon and think of themselves as the good guys?’

A gobsmacking comment (55 minutes in) from Mr Cule there, I thought -- not complaining; it’s for those comments that I especially love the show -- but presumably millions of people did follow Napoleon and definitely they thought of themselves as good guys. This interested me because a few days earlier I’d come across a note I made a few years ago:

‘Has anybody ever written a novel like Lord of the Rings but instead of being “good” vs “evil” in a generic sense, we actually get to hear the ideologies on each side? It is in effect left vs right, Dems vs GOP, or whatever.’

The thing is, that’s a very modern take on how people justify themselves. We expect to be presented with a manifesto and then pick a side. Or at any rate we think that’s how we pick a side, but other than William MacAskill and a few monks most of us really only pay lip service to these high ideals of ours, don’t we? ‘I’ve given up meat,’ we plead in our defence, while enjoying a comfortable life that three quarters of the world are denied.

As hypocrites we’re no worse than our ancestors. They would say they fought for God, but it’s funny how often God just happened to support their own country. Throughout the 18th century, most Christian groups other than Quakers were in favour of slavery. Freethinkers too; Tom Paine argued against slavery, but few of the Founding Fathers listened to him. In the French Revolution, most of the left-wing firebrands (if calling them left-wing means anything*) entirely overlooked equality for women. And "Kill them all; God will know His Own" and "Slay the pagans" show that total war and the butchering of civilians began with people who claimed to be fighting on the side of the angels.

The best we can say of most human beings is that they are basically good with a lot of blind spots. (And, yes, in that we must include ourselves.)

To return to the Napoleonic period, if we asked Marshal Ney why he considered himself a good guy I’m sure he’d talk about patriotism (admittedly a bit of a grey area for him), honour, and loyalty to the Emperor. I don’t suppose he’d cite the specific revolutionary aims he felt the Emperor stood for, though many at the time (even in England) did find that a reason to praise Napoleon, whereas nobody in the world would have declared support for the Houses of Hanover or Bourbon on the basis of their professed ideology.

So we can see a new era dawning at the start of the 19th century, one in which some men wouldn’t simply fight for tribal symbols like king, country or religion, but instead expected those to be backed up by specific principles chosen of their own free will.

Yeah, but did they, though? Was the USSR really a free federation of states based on egalitarian principles? Or was it the Russian Empire under a cloak of socialism? Did Mao whip up the Cultural Revolution to bring about a utopian society, or simply to shore up his own power? Did the average Wehrmacht soldier charge into battle to bring about a thousand-year Nazi reich or because he believed he was doing his duty for his country? Did any major world power ever march into Afghanistan in the interests of the Afghan people themselves? Or just because of their own geopolitical or economic needs?

Do people today decide disinterestedly which side to take in a dispute, or do they see which side their tribe takes and then find reasons to justify it?

The British used to be under no illusions about that. In the First Gulf War, US troops were given leaflets that explained why their cause was just. ‘Saddam has invaded a sovereign state and that is against international law,’ one GI explained on TV. The same camera crew interviewed a British squaddie, who had not been given any leaflet. ‘I got nothing against this Saddam bloke personally,’ he said, ‘but he’s in Kuwait and we been told to kick him out.’

So would it make sense to tell the story of a fantasy world, or any period in history, as if ideology actually made a difference? I don’t think so. This revisits an earlier post in which we discussed whether any non-modern society could usefully be described in modern terms. For example, SF writer Damien Walter posted a tirade about how the Spartans were fascists (he also calls them cowards and pederasts) but to try to squeeze them into a modern box like that is not only cultural chauvinism, it's plain dumb.

There was a bit of a pram fight a while back about "evil races" in D&D. Before the movies came out I assumed orcs were in fact supposed to be people just like the Gondorians (if that's the right word) and that Tolkien only described them as monstrous and evil because that's how "our" side saw them. I don't have any problem with utterly inimical species in fantasy. #NotAllDaleks? Gimme a break. But I think that's a less interesting way of looking at Lord of the Rings than my misconception.

Perhaps what we're seeing now is D&D moving beyond its simplistic good vs evil origins towards a more realistic kind of world. Characters (whether human or nonhuman) are not motivated by alignment in Tekumel or Glorantha, or even in Legend come to that (apart from the actual devils, that is). Instead they have desires, foibles, personalities, political alliances, and so forth that all contribute to how they behave. Where it gets messy with D&D is the game inherited its elves and orcs and whatnot from Tolkien, for whom good and evil meant something. If you want to create a more believable and nuanced world then great, but maybe better to start from scratch in that case.

In one sense, of course, simplistically framing a struggle as Good vs Evil might be the most honest way to describe any human conflict. You just have to remember that both sides think that they’re the good guys.

* Roger from Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice has pointed out that there's almost no better use of left- and right-wing, seeing as the terms came from the seating plan of the Estates General and later the National Convention. Touché, citoyen!

Going to the gods

If you believe in gods and in life after death, it's not inconceivable that you might consider it an honour to be sacrificed in order to carry a message to the world beyond. Some real-life cultures seem to have taken that view. Frazer gives several examples in The Golden Bough and talks about the sacred king whose reign might well end with a trip to the afterlife. Describing the 16th century customs of the Chichimecas, the friar Marcos de Niza said: "They cast lots to decide who will have the honour of being sacrificed, and with joy they crown him with flowers upon a bed on piles of wood which they set on fire, and so he dies. The victim takes great pleasure in this rite."

"Great pleasure"? Anthropologist Kathryn M Koziol isn't so sure about that. In this paper about another Pre-Columbian culture she says, "Among the Natchez, the mortuary rituals of the elite Suns [chiefs] included the killing of retainers. These retainers were members of the Natchez population and gained prestige for their kin by willingly dying, or at least by performing their willingness to die, to accompany their leaders." My emphasis there.

Professor Nicholas Humphrey gets outraged at the suggestion that the Inca "Ice Maiden" might even have been an enthusiastic participant in her own ritual killing (40 minutes in to this video)...

But Humphrey is a psychologist, not a historian or anthropologist, and the simple fact is we don't know. The sacrifice of the Ice Maiden might have been a crime inflicted on an unwilling victim; it might have been a signal honour jealously coveted among the Inca. Even framing it in those terms only makes sense in the context of our own culture.

Players of my gamebook Necklace of Skulls may have been on the receiving end of such an honour. On your visit to Chichen Itza ("Yashuna" in the book) the priests of Chaac invite you to jump into the sacred cenote with a message for the gods. Of course, in the gamebook the cenote undeniably is a gateway into the mythic world. In real life (see photo above; that's me on honeymoon) it's just a dirty great pond in which you'd soon go down for the third time. Pleading hydrophobia was no get-out, as there was always the option of getting sacrificed as an esteemed ball player, which is what the spouting snake-heads represent in this carving:

It's not just in Native American cultures that we encounter the willing (and even apparently eager) sacrifice. Ahmad ibn Fadlan, writing in the 10th century, gives a vivid account of a Viking ship burial in which a female thrall has sex with each of the mourners in turn and is then ritually killed. Wikipedia wonders at the attitude of the thrall herself (a volunteer, according to ibn Fadlan) and says, "While the scholarly consensus assumes that the slave girl would have felt happy and privileged about having sex with many people before being killed, recent work has suggested that we should instead see this as an account of rape and brutal strangulation."

What "recent work" could that possibly be? Time travel? A séance? Because otherwise they just mean "somebody's recent opinion", which is utterly useless. It only tells us about the attitudes of the West in 2021, not of the Rus in 921. We cannot know how people from those far-off cultures regarded a sacrificial victim without knowing what the world looked like through their eyes. Even the word victim implies a modern viewpoint. To them the afterlife was probably as real as sunlight and rain, whereas we know perfectly well they were not off to see Chaac or Odin with a message from the mortal world but were simply being snuffed out. Would they have been frightened or honoured? Both, probably. As Professor Koziol says at the start of that paper I cited, human societies are capable of acts that are simultaneously great and terrible. Our rituals aren't unambiguous, so why should our reactions to them be?

No matter how sure you are that you're about to enter the afterlife, there's got to be a natural fear of death too. A kamikaze pilot crashing into a warship no doubt had feelings of both fear and pride. The September 11 attackers presumably felt exalted, terrified, uncertain and excited all at once. They were told their martyrdom would earn them immediate entry into a heavenly paradise, but did they completely believe that? Would Wikipedia describe them as feeling "happy and privileged" or as having been manipulated and psychologically abused? If we can't even exactly pin down the mentality of modern jihadists, how are we going to judge the cultural mores of five or ten centuries past?

Yet thinking our way into other cultures and other mind-sets is part of roleplaying. On Tekumel, prisoners of war who aren't of glorious enough status to be worth ransoming back to their clans will usually get sacrificed to the gods. In Tetsubo, a character performing seppuku believes he is undertaking an act of courage and dignity. Spock in Wrath of Khan knowingly took a lethal dose of radiation as an act of logical altruism -- it wasn't his fault he was then doomed to an eternal afterlife of sequels, and we can only hope that any player-character attempting the same thing in an SF campaign would be granted the dignity of a true death.

We don't know what it's actually like to be a person raised in another era or culture, but we are all human and we have universal emotions and our imaginations. We can conceive of a credible mindset for a kamikaze pilot or a 10th century slave girl on a pyre or a Maya citizen jumping into a sinkhole. That's as good as it's going to get.

Ways into Sparta

I’m not one of those who are scornful of the struggles that actors face in getting into character. It’s not as hard as coal mining? Can’t argue there, but it does drive some needles very deep into the actor’s psyche and sense of self-worth. Don’t discount emotional hardships, is all I’m saying.

Take Charles Laughton, driven almost to despair by his inability to get a handle on his part in I, Claudius. He finally solved it by playing a gramophone recording of Edward VIII’s abdication speech right before he’d walk on set. Similarly, though with a lot less of the hand-wringing, Sir Kenneth Branagh reportedly sought advice from Prince Charles before embarking on the role of Henry V.

The point is: you need to find a way in. Paul Mason and I used to talk about finding “the Englishness of Heian Japan” or whatever abstruse setting we had picked for our latest roleplaying campaign. It’s not that we really believe there is any “English” component there, and in particular not that we wanted to anglicize the setting in any way, just that you’re looking for the stepping stones that will get you started. Once you have that first step, you can start to build a mental model of your character within the exotic setting – until eventually it doesn’t feel exotic any more. You have passed through the stage of liminality and, now that you inhabit the setting, you can jettison those familiar analogies that got you started.

That’s the good way to do it. The bad way is to try to conform the setting to tropes you find familiar. Leaving aside the speedos, Frank Miller reduced Spartan culture to a bunch of violent libertarian nutters. That said, Miller reduces everything to violent libertarian nutters, so maybe we shouldn’t read much into it. As an approach to roleplaying in Sparta, it’s barren ground; it will lead you back into your own concerns and cultural views, not closer to the mind-set of a Spartan. The film adaptation of 300 likewise. The 1962 movie The Three Hundred Spartans was long mocked for being inauthentic, and lord knows I’m not recommending it, but arguably it’s still a lot more authentic than anything Zack Snyder has ever perpetrated.

You could look at Steven Pressfield’s book The Gates of Fire. Pressfield was a Marine, so he knows about soldiering. Trouble is, the type of soldiering he knows is likely very different from the experience of a hoplite in 480 BC. I’m not talking about drill or weaponry. Recruits into modern Western military forces tend to be rural or suburban and from a lower socioeconomic status than the general population. This leads to a specific style of training, a particular idiom of social interaction, which in British Army terms we might characterize as the “you ‘orrible little man” attitude. Or, going back to the US Marines, who can forget the Gunny’s welcoming speech from Full Metal Jacket?

If Pressfield were familiar with the Gurkhas, he’d know that if your soldiers come from a society that esteems military service you don’t need to treat them like dirtbags to get what you want. No sergeant or officer in the British Gurkha units ever needs to scream at a Gurkha soldier. Theirs is a martial culture. In such a culture, discipline flows from self-discipline. That is nearer (perhaps, for we can only surmise) to the Spartan way of thinking. All of these spartiate warriors are, after all, the aristocracy of their world. Martial values have been inculcated in them from childhood. They’re not unruly rednecks who you have to break down and rebuild into soldiers.

That suggests to me another analogy. You know the saying, apocryphally attributed to Wellington, about the battle of Waterloo having been won on the playing fields of Eton. Those young Spartans, graduates of the agoge, are maybe not so different from the pupils of a tough Victorian or Edwardian public school. That system produced exactly the sort of chap who adhered to the values of his parents and grandparents, who would politely give up his seat to an elder, and who had the reckless courage to throw himself into battle at the head of his men armed with just a pistol and a stiff upper lip.

That’s one way into Sparta, anyway. I’ll reiterate that you’re not aiming to describe Sparta in terms of Rugby School or the Marine Corps or NRA anti-federalists or Baywatch extras. That would just be cultural chauvinism and it gets you nowhere in either acting or roleplaying. What you want is the key that opens a door in your own imagination so that you can construct a credible and internally consistent Sparta there.

And incidentally you might need several different keys. One of my players, seeing the map in the Sparta Sourcebook, said, “I never realized there were so many shrines and temples.” If you’re a Westerner who has travelled in the Orient, particularly somewhere like Taiwan, you won’t find that kind of society hard to comprehend. Even less so if you’re Taiwanese, of course.Another player was surprised that Ares wasn't much worshipped in Sparta, except as a cult among immature boys. The truth is that professional soldiers throughout history have rarely regarded war as anything admirable. A Spartan would tell you that it's not battle they worship, but victory.

Roleplaying in non-traditional settings doesn’t appeal to all tastes. It takes commitment, but when you carry it off it reaches a deeper place and yields more rewarding results than any campaign with Scottish dwarves and hippy elves ever can. So, if places like Tekumel or Sparta or Heian Japan are your bag, what tricks do you use for finding your way in?

Some sources that may prove useful and/or inspirational:

• Choice of the Petal Throne (game) by Danielle Goudeau
• Spartan Reflections by Paul Cartledge
• The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan by Ivan Morris