Games Blog

Those wacky liberatians at Samizdata.net bemoan the decline of heroic libertarian SF of the style of Heinlein and co. in this article. It has rude things to say about Robert Jordan.

Actually modern fantasy writing in Britain started out as broadly anti-statist. Tolkien (for all his Catholic distaste for people who were obsessed with money making) was no statist – and neither was C.S. Lewis. And the American fantasy writers followed them in the their belief that a good government was one which protected the nation against other powers and did not do many other things. In short there was similar political outlook among the fantasy writers and the science fiction writers.

This reflected itself in role-playing (when this grow up), the format of most role playing was an individual or group of individuals opposing evil (evil being defined as forces, human or other, who came to rob-kill-control). External invaders, internal corruption, tyrannical government – it was all basically the same thing (force attacking people).

People who were socialists in ‘real life’ never thought of setting up welfare states in fantasy or science fiction games – because that was not the nature of things (and games did have an effect on “real life” beliefs over time).

So RPGs are a tool of libertarian indoctrination, are they? Seriously, though, I find there’s a whole range of political ideologies in science fiction, fantasy and roleplaying games, and I for one much prefer reading something where the writer is more interesting in telling a good story than in writing a political tract. I’ve also never quite understood the deification of Robert Heinlein, who I find rather dated nowadays.

Several of the commenters have mentioned the two Scottish writers Iain Banks and Ken McLoed, and commented on their politics, both of them too complex to be ideologically pidgeonholed. At least one commenter had trouble with the idea that not all non-villain characters are necessarily mouthpieces for their author’s politics.

As for roleplaying games, I haven’t seen many with an explicitly political or ideological agenda, except that most games revolve around heroic player-characters stopping bad guys. In some games the good guys are heroic libertarian free agents, but there are plenty of games where the player characters are servants of a quasi-statist higher power.

This reminds me of the playtest on Pyramid Online on an In Nomine sourcebook featuring a writeup of Lilith, Demon Princess of Freedom. One libertarian playtester really, really didn’t like the concept of Freedom being a demonic concept, representing the selfish, sociopathic elements of freedom. I suppose his real problem was that In Nomine is set very much in a Judeo-Christian worldview; Angel PCs are very much servants of a benevolent higher power. To some people, that would make it the ultimate Statist game.

Game WISH is a weekly question set by Ginger of Perverse Access Memory. Each week’s WISH focuses on some aspect of roleplaying games. This week’s question is about fantasy novels for gamers:

What three fantasy books/series would you recommend to other gamers? Why? What particularly makes them suitable for gamers to read? Would they be particularly good for novices or better for experienced gamers?

I’ve already made a list of top ten invented worlds, largely works that inspired me as a GM. Two of those three appear again here, this time as inspiration for players.

Let me state at the beginning that I’m not really a fan of most of the ‘generic fantasy’ published nowadays, much of which I find formulaic retreads of earlier, better works; indeed many read like fictionalisations of D&D campaigns, so much so that you can work out at what points characters gained levels!

First, Lord of the Rings, on the remote chance that the gamer in question hasn’t read it already. There’s not much I can say about it that hasn’t already been said, but it is the work that established most of the tropes we now recognise as those of ‘generic fantasy’, noble elves, dour warrior dwarves, orc hordes, dark lords, good and evil wizards. And I very much prefer the original to the hordes of lesser imitations written by the legion of hack writers that followed. For novice gamers, this is a must-read!

Second, The Saga of the Exiles by Julian May. Although marketed as science-fiction it’s really high fantasy in SF clothing, with high-powered magic explained by technobabble. It’s also one of the few series I’ve read with a huge cast and many point-of-view characters that doesn’t collapse under the weight of it’s multiple plotlines, which says a lot about the author’s talent for dramatic pacing. For gamers, the books make heavy use of archetypal characters, and the eight initial characters (‘Group Green’) come over very much like a party of PCs, thrust into the setting by the GM, and knowing nothing of the world they find themselves in. And finally we have one of my favourite villains in Marc Remillard, who makes his first appearance in book three.

Third, Ash, A History by Mary Gentle. This tale of a late-medieval mercenary captain and her company of mercenaries starts out resembling historical fiction but then gets increasingly strange. I chose this partly because the lead character reminds me very much of one of my on-line players; the supporting cast (i.e. the other PCs) are good as well, and some of the set-piece scenes are very reminiscent of gaming scenarios. Although there are no spell-slinging sorcerers, there’s plenty of magic, and a truly terrifying inhuman enemy.

Of course, for a specific player playing in a game run by a specific GM, the best thing to read is probably whatever inspired the GM, or the published setting the GM is using. Obviously for licenced games like Dune, Amber Diceless or The Dying Earth RPG this means the original source material! For my own Kalyr game, read May’s Exiles saga (above), Gene Wolfe’s New Sun and Long Sun series, and anything by Jack Vance you can lay your hands on!