“The finest, most courageous, truthful and humane book written in Europe in the course of this accursed war.”
That's Maxim Gorky talking about H G Wells's 1916 novel Mr Britling Sees It Through, a straight-from-the-heart response to the Great War that takes us through the experience of looking on at such a calamity. It's like the stages of grief, with anger, bargaining, negotiation, denial, guilt. A magnificent work full of anguish and humanity which was deservedly the best-selling book of its day.
Today the novel is in public domain, yet no major publisher offers an edition. There's a profusion of badly formatted editions from small publishers, including one that unaccountably has a photo of Montgomery Clift on the cover.
Do the big publishers think the book is no longer relevant? "All that was a century ago, let's move on..."? Not so, sadly. Wells would be appalled to learn that it's still possible for one man to order the invasion of a neighbouring country and unleash untold suffering on its inhabitants. Sons still die, daughters are still raped, civilians terrorized, all because of an autocrat's ambition and the senselessness of nationalist imperialism.
"Strange to think a book so fêted and successful could drop so comprehensively off the radar.
What makes it stranger is that the novel is exactly as good as Wells’s contemporaries thought: a wonderfully detailed, evocative and moving portrait of England at war."
What dat, you ask? Here's what the Yellow King RPG has to say:
"Each player receives an index card with an X on it. When someone
introduces subject matter that a player finds truly, personally fun-ruining,
the player holds up the card. The player can either suggest that the troubling
element be dialed back, or dropped entirely.
You and the other players, as the fine and considerate people you are,
accede to the request without pushback, adjusting the narration as desired."
In preparing for the first session I'd been assigning nicknames to the player-characters, who were all members of an infantry platoon in a sort of not-quite WW2 with bits of steampunky WW1. One of the players complained that one of the other characters' nickname was in poor taste. Don't worry, it wasn't some awful racist David Starkey offence; I'm not that insensitive to modern etiquette. It was pretty much in the same line as the name of the corporal pictured left, actually. But I don't do "no pushback" so I pointed out that squaddies in a brutal mid-20th century world war would not share the sensibilities of civilians in 21st century London. Taste would be very low on their agenda when inflicting a nickname on a new recruit.
In fact it helped me make up my mind to pull the plug on the game. It's always better to do that before wasting the players' time on a session or two, as happened with another famously crowdfunded RPG that I'd better not mention. It wasn't because of that x-carding -- I could easily enough have changed the character's nickname to something untroubling to that player -- but because it had been dawning on me throughout the character-creation process that the Wars campaign I wanted to run wasn't the one most of the players wanted to be in. Mine would have ideally been The Red Cavalry meets Kafka, and I'd have settled for Charley's War; the players were hoping for Kelly's Heroes (perhaps with a dash of 'Allo 'Allo) and would have settled for Fury. And it was quite enough work just to prepare the game; I didn't also want to have to stop and justify my creative choices every session against what one or other of the players might regard as good taste. Once you do that you start to self-censor, and then nobody is happy. Better to walk away.
We are back to the question of how sentimental and moral the universe of the campaign was meant to be. For me, there would be no heroes or villains. NPCs would say and do the sort of things I'd put into a novel, where nothing should be out of bounds. Attitudes would be harsh, soldiers brutalized, taste offended. Players who are accustomed to adventure stories in genre settings would not find that water lovely. (Case in point: listen at 24m 24s here to the Appendix N fellows describing how to efficiently ruin a fine Robert E Howard story for the sake of making it palatable to the dopiest readers.) Even if I removed the original cause of offence there'd be something else to complain about in short order, because the real problem was the disconnect between my whole gaming ethic and the players'. One player said to me, "This group prefers games where we survive and win." So of course they were never going to go for a campaign set in an endless war whose origins defied logic and where their characters' orders were (a brilliant touch by Robin D Laws, this) to report to their own side for execution.
Gumshoe-style RPGs like The Yellow King frequently liken campaigns to long-running TV shows. The shows I like best tend to be the ones that get cancelled, often before the end of their first season: Vinyl, Action, Journeyman, Aquarius, Cupid. Same with the kinds of games I'd like to run if I could. A couple of players might say they were great; most would find something else to do until the campaign wound up. To avoid doing lots of set-up work that ends up in the bin, I have to rein in my own preferences, keep an eye of the Neilsen ratings, and just do it "for the network". It means never pushing the boat out to try anything very startling, disturbing or original, but that's what RPG referees have in common with TV producers. C'est le jeu.
The takeaway is to think about the kind of game the players want. If we must see roleplaying campaigns as TV shows, the referee/GM is the showrunner and the players are the cast, sure, but they're also the audience. Ask yourself if this is going to be a show they'll stick with over seven seasons, or one they'll want to switch off after half an episode. Don't wait until they start to fling x-cards at you. An x-card means "I don't trust you to run this game" and the signs should be there long before you reach that point. You'll save yourself a lot of work if you're alert to reading the room, not blinded (as I was) by my enthusiasm for the campaign inside my head.
But here's one of those opportunities that playing over the internet has opened up. I don't have to find a campaign that appeals to the whole gaming group. Before, when we all arranged to meet up every other Thursday, whatever we played had to appeal to all of us. That was the equivalent of the network TV drama. But over Zoom, Skype, Discord, whatever, my campaign can be a cable show. There's a good reason you don't get stuff like Breaking Bad or Succession on ad-supported networks -- smaller audiences equals more quirkiness and more daring. So maybe I should be pitching the campaign concept and players can decide if they're up for it -- and for those who aren't there's always the other channel.
Judging by this review of The Yellow King by Mike Cule and Roger Bell-West, I have that x-card to thank for dodging a bullet. Roger mentions "the frankly intimidating amount of work it would take to run it well" and Mike alludes to the near-impossibility of improvising anything that could inflict shock or injury, which are the two metrics of damage to characters. I had already put in a full week just prepping the first session of The Wars, only to realize that what I really needed was another game system, a different war setting, and to invite only those players who were intrigued by the pitch. If you're worried about missing all the unsettling Ligottian stuff I had planned, though, I'll hopefully still find a home for it somewhere. Maybe in a scenario on this blog for Armistice Day -- if that wouldn't seem in poor taste.
Funny how things get dredged up. I recently got to thinking about a very old idea of mine. I’ll tell you a bit later what jogged my memory. A long while ago – must’ve been a couple of decades at least – I was watching an old Carol Reed movie called Odd Man Out, about an IRA man on the run in 1940s London. Thinking of spies having to lie low – soldiers, that is, but out of uniform – I got to imagining a society that waged war against its own future.
What kind of a war would that be? Well, one way to do it would be old Nazis plotting revenge against a modern, distinctly anti-fascist Germany, but that felt a bit tired. It hardly counts as a war when a bunch of OAPs set fire to a few shops or daub a swastika on a wall.
I was striving for something more jolting to the audience’s expectations, which probably meant more science fictional. A war against the future suggested society having reached an impasse that only time could break. So should it be sleeper agents in a literal sense, floating underground in suspended animation tanks until the moment came to rekindle the conflict?
Trouble with that, it’s a little like the core premise of Pyramids of Mars, only with a very different skin (or at any rate bitumen-soaked bandages) over the top. Nobody would notice, but I still felt like treating it that way would be wasting the idea. Obviously the best approach would be to have outright time travel, so that armies could pour out of the past to mow down their own descendents. Firing back could be a knotty problem. But then it’s not special. You wouldn’t notice that the interesting thing was a society at war with what it had become. The time travel business would overshadow all that.
Sometimes you just can’t see the way to make an idea work. Hitchcock wanted Cary Grant pursued by a tornado across Indiana. “But how can the heavies manufacture a tornado?” asked Ernest Lehman, who actually had to write the damned thing. Hitch settled for a crop-duster, but he wasn’t happy about it. I know how he feels. The war against the future got slung onto that subconscious junk heap of unworkable gems – or unpolishable you-know-whats.
And then I came across a couple of brilliant tweets by Paul Cornell that bought it all back.
I lived through Thatcher, and I have to say, this coming General Election is the one, the future or the past.
— Paul_Cornell (@Paul_Cornell) May 27, 2014
So there you are. No need for a Tardis or a cryonic pod. No need even for superannuated reactionaries blowing up their hippy grandchildren to teach them a lesson. The war against the future is interesting when it happens (as it always does) between neighbours, within families, both sides lining up to decide whether civilization should point forwards or backwards. And I knew that. I’ve read about enough revolutions, hot and cold, throughout history. That’s how to write my story. The answer was staring me in the face all along. Maybe it was just too close for comfort.
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