Advanced Designers & Dragons

H is for HōL

HōL: Human Occupied Landfill (1994) will likely end up being the RPG in this A to Z listing that's been the least played. That's because playing it really wasn't the point. And, it wasn't necessarily an influential game either. But it was groundbreaking — and beyond that a real milepost for the industry's increasing maturity.

HōL has been produced by Dirt Merchant Games (1994), White Wolf (1995), and The CaBil (2002). Obviously the middle edition is where the game got its most attention, though that was built on extensive critical acclaim and interest in the Dirt Merchant original. The premise is simple enough: HōL is set in a SF universe where players are trapped on a garbage-dump/penal-colony world and must survive. The mechanics are ... well, minimalistic. There isn't even a character-creation system, just a set of pregenerated PCs, ala the original design of The Adventures of Indiana Jones (1984).

However, rather than really being a game, HōL is instead a satire. The entire book is handwritten. It mocks other games. It mocks gamers. It mocks itself. Its skills are silly names. When a character creation system did finally come along in Buttery Wholesomeness (1995), the only HōL supplement, it was a labyrinthine series of charts that parodied Traveller.

HōL was thus the first example of RPG-as-art-object, a baton that's been picked up by another game with weird diacritics, M�rg Borg (2020), and other artpunk RPGs. It was the first example of an RPG that was intended to be read at least as much as it was intended to be played. It wasn't the earliest satire in the industry: there had been wonderful satires before, like Paranoia (1984), and horrible satires, like WG7: Castle Greyhawk (1987). But it was the first RPG to so totally fill itself with satire — exactly because it didn't have to be a functional game.

In many ways HōL demonstrated the maturity of the roleplaying market. By 1994, there were a large enough population immersed in a wide expanding roleplaying hobby, and a widely expanding roleplaying culture, that there were sufficient people willing to stop and read a bizarre mockery of the hobby and able to understand its many in-jokes.

In Interactive Fantasy magazine, James Wallis compared HōL to Bored of the Rings and called it the "funniest role-playing-related product" that he'd ever read. That, along with its ante-artpunk stylings is what made HōL innovative at the time. Today, it still remains interesting as a time capsule into a different era.

I is for Inspectres

Though Fiasco (2009) is the game that really broke open the indie category and brought it to the attention of a somewhat wider audience, there were a couple of predecessors that got some mass-market acclaim; one of them was Jared Sorensen's Inspectres (2002).

Inspectres is essentially "Ghostbusters: The Reality TV Show: The Roleplaying Game". Now the first part of that equation had already been done well by the Chaosium crew in the classic Ghostbusters (1986) RPG. It's the latter parts that really caused Inspectres to hit it out of the park: a roleplaying game that took the shape of a reality TV show.

When Sorenson was developing Inspectres, the indie community was still in a very formative stage. Thus his idea of player/character divide was quite new for the hobby. It posited that while players take on the roles of characters, they simultaneously can metagame outside of their character role. Though the idea seems obvious enough, it isn't supported by classic RPG mechanics. It's pretty hard in D&D, or really most traditional RPGs, to be acting orthogonal to the goals and even interests of your character: there's just no way to do so as long as your only way to affect the gameworld is through the actions of your character.

Inspectres introduced that orthogonal mechanism via confessionals: a variety of interviews that characters give "to the camera" throughout the game. There are interviews that get each game going, and then there are confessionals throughout the game that report how things are unfolding and what a character thinks about them.

The thing is, those confessionals don't have to solely be based on events that have already occurred. They can also introduce new story elements that hadn't been obvious in the game so far, or even foreshadow the future of what is still to occur. As a result, each player gets to shape the game beyond just their character's actions within the game. They can introduce their own challenges, create their own spotlights, or just get the ball rolling on plots that they're interested in playing through. That's the player/character divide right there: interacting with the game in both the role of player _and_ character. And it's all done via a well-constrained mechanic that gives players this limited authority without dumping them into the narrative deep end.

The rest of Inspectres is a clean, evocative, and fun game. There are even some other ways for players to minorly control the story, such as when they succeed at a skill. But it was the confessionals that really innovated the form, both through their specific mechanics and through the larger questions those mechanics asked about what it meant to play an RPG.

The tongue-in-cheek world creation of Inspectres was also innovative enough that it spun off a small-press Inspectres movie (2013). It's a pretty rare game that can say that!

J is for James Bond 007

Obviously, Top Secret (1980) got the espionage roleplaying category going, with Espionage (1983) bringing the genre to HERO just a few years later. But that same year James Bond 007 (1983) also appeared, and it was the espionage RPG to really knock the ball out of the park, thanks both to its great design and production. (Grognardia suggests that it was likely the best-selling espionage RPG of all time.)

Much of that is thanks to James Bond 007's excellent pedigree. Its story begins with TSR's amoral financial manipulations of SPI, which allowed them to capture and kill the classic wargame producer. Most of SPI's designers wanted little to do with their company's killer and so within days of TSR's hostile takeover of SPI, eight of them jumped ship to Avalon Hill, among them John Butterfield, Mark Herman, Gerry Klug, and Eric Smith. There they formed a new subsidiary: Victory Games.

Victory produced over 50 games, including the innovative paragraph-based wargame Ambush! (1983). One of those games was an RPG: James Bond 007. (It would also be well-supported with supplements.)

So what made James Bond 007 great? That answer comes in at least four parts.

First, you had great game design from Gerry Klug. The game was foundationally simulationistic, which is somewhat less in vogue today, but it was a simulation that really expanded on the designs of the time, including point-based characters, a unified task system with easily adjustable difficulty levels, and a Quality Results Table that allowed variable levels of success. Obviously, point-based characters dated back to The Fantasy Trip (1980) and Champions (1981), but the idea wasn't yet widespread in the industry, while James Bond 007's task and results system was quite novel.

There were also a few other mechanical innovations, apart from the game's core simulation. The most important was Hero Points a renewable resource that allowed players to adjust their level of success, a stunning amount of player agency for the era. Clearly, it was inspired by Top Secret's Fame and Fortune points, but those were focused on survival and beginning characters respectively, while Hero Points were a much more ingrained part of the James Bond 007 system. Another was the game's intriguing chase system, which actually allowed players to _bid_ levels of difficulty to achieve success. Shades of indie design 15 or more years down the road!

The second thing that made James Bond 007 great was the license for James Bond. Especially back in the '80s, Bond was the public's prime icon for espionage. Sure, you had The Avengers or The Man from UNCLE TV shows or the excellent writings of John Le Carr�. But not only was James Bond better known than any of them, but his big-screen exploits had become the archetype for spies. A James Bond RPG could be no less.

Third, you had excellent adventure production from Avalon Hill (which is to say Victory Games), with adventures based on the movies (more or less) each appearing in boxed sets. Perhaps more than any other category of roleplaying, adventures can make or break mystery and espionage RPG sessions, and Avalon Hill didn't stint. Because Avalon Hill was a printer, those boxes also tended to include printed clues of various sorts that added to the verisimilitude (and fun!) of the play.

Beyond all of that, James Bond 007 excelled as a licensed product, really showing the way for games of this sort when extant publications like Stormbringer (1981) and forthcoming products like MERP (1984) and The Adventures of Indiana Jones (1984) didn't always make the best use of their source material. It do so by turning the simulation into emulation. James Bond 007 feels Bondesque top to bottom, back in an era when no one had ever said "System Matters". That was aided and abetted by those adventures, which really nailed the feeling of action-packed over-the-top espionage. But throughout all of that, the designers were also thinking carefully about how to cleave close to their license without hewing so near that players could be spoiled for the events of some of the movie-adventures; thus the movies were sometimes just jumping off points for the similarly named adventures, and when they were more tightly connected, major scenes or events were sometimes changed to keep players on their toes.

Maybe some impressions of James Bond 007 are rose-colored today, but it was certainly innovative and inspirational in its time: a masterwork of 1983 game design.

Unfortunately, James Bond 007 would ultimately be let down by both its publisher and its license. It went out of print in 1987, by which time Avalon Hill was already floundering in the roleplaying business. In later years, the creators of Avalon Hill-published games such as RuneQuest (1978) and Tales from the Floating Vagabond (1991) had to jump through big hoops to recover their games as Avalon Hill was sold off to Hasbro. James Bond 007 likely still lays there in Hasbro's vaults, and is simultaneously unpublishable because of its license.

With that said, the game system has been revived as the DoubleZero retrocolone (2008), which has recently become a prolific line, and as Classified (2013).

K is for King Arthur Pendragon

Four emulative icons of the mid '80s led the way for storytelling in roleplaying games: James Bond 007 (1983), Paranoia (1984), Ghostbusters (1986), and perhaps most notably Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon (1985), the Arthurian Roleplaying Game.

Though James Bond 007 might have demonstrated how roleplaying games could emulate specific styles of play, King Arthur Pendragon was the game that nailed down the style and offered it up to the indie design community to come. It's a game about knights, and that's it. There are no thieves, no clerics, no magic-users (except briefly in fourth edition). There are knights and their activities. Tournaments, jousting, feasting, and warfare are all placed in the rules specifically to encourage and to support play based on Le Morte d'Arthur. It's a game of knights about knights and for knights.

If there are other innovations in King Arthur Pendragon, and there are, they all originate from this same heart of emulation.

Personality traits and passions are usually noted as another of the novel aspects of Pendragon. These are paired traits like Chaste/Lustful, Valorous/Cowardly, and Merciful/Cruel and more general concepts such as Love (Family) that can guide players in their roleplaying. However, they can also take over characters if they are allowed to grow too large, just like the wild madnesses that knights sometimes experienced in Le Morte.

The unhurried and measured take of King Arthur Pendragon is yet another nod toward its source material. Adventures often intrude upon players at a feast or some other mundane event, leading them into the wilds of adventure, but afterward characters retire away until the next year's story. It makes the everyday of the life of the knights that much more real, while simultaneously turning adventures into phantasmagoric and dreamlike interludes.

This staccato pace had two additional effects.

The first was the introduction of winter phases. For the first time ever, roleplaying wasn't just about what happened in adventures, but also what happened in-between, allowing players to engage in roleplaying interludes amidst the large stories and to build up their resources in a way that any powergamer would love. Ars Magica (1987) and The One Ring (2011) have advanced similar ideas, but as was so often the case, Greg Stafford got there first.

The second was the introduction of generational roleplaying. Just as the central story of the Matter of Britain is about Uther, Arthur, and Modred, so does King Arthur Pendragon follow the paths of a character, their children and, and their childrens' children. Rules carefully allow for continued advancement across the generations, ensuring that players would want to engage in this roleplaying that was unlike any other.

However, the greatest success of King Arthur Pendragon may not have been in its wonderfully thematic rules, but instead in what could be the roleplaying industry's most notable campaign book ever: The Great Pendragon Campaign (2006). Building on the generational, staccato roleplaying of King Arthur Pendragon, The Great Pendragon Campaign offers a storyline spanning 80 years, from 485-566. There is nothing else in the roleplaying field that has that scope of time and imagination. It's literally the campaign that King Arthur Pendragon was create to enable, even if it took over twenty years to get there.

After a considerable time away from home, King Arthur Pendragon has happily returned to original publisher Chaosium in recent years. A Quick Start for the impending sixth edition called The Adventure of the Sword Tournament (2022) premiered last year, with a Starter Set (2023?) waiting in the wings.

L is for Labyrinth Lord

When Wizards of the Coast made their self-serving decision to release the d20 mechanics under an OGL, they opened up a Pandora's Box of unexpected consequences. They thought they were mainly allowing other publishers to produce adventures, but they cleared the path for competitive supplements like the Creature Collection (2000) and competitive RPGs like Pathfinder (2009). They allowed the creation of fantasy variants such as Blue Rose (2005) and more farflung d20 games such as the superheroic Mutants & Masterminds (2002) and the science-fiction T20 (2002). Perhaps most surprisingly, they allowed for the resurrection of all the old versions of D&D as part of the OSR.

This was back in the era before PDFs (let alone PODs!) were available for old games. The classic AD&D game (1977-2000) had just been replaced with D&D 3e (2000), and for the moment it seemed that the hobby's most nostalgic games, the versions of D&D that had brought many into the hobby, were gone forever. Though supplements still filled many a gamer's shelves, and though there was still interest in publishing more, there would no longer be rule books to allow those game systems to continue and prosper.

Enter Matt Finch, who created the theory of a legal retroclone: he posited that the copyrightable material encoded in the D&D 3e SRD could be combined with uncopyrightable game mechanics matching older game systems to resurrect those legendary games in a legal manner. The result of that theory was OSRIC (2006), a retroclone of AD&D, whose initial release demonstrated the classic possibilities of the OGL.

But OSRIC, and its contemporary Basic Fantasy Role-Playing (2006), were focused on the online OSR community, had limited production through PDFs, PODs, and short print runs, and had various levels of non-commercial philosophy built into them. For the OSR to become not just a hobbyist innovation, but a commercial innovation, required something else, and that something else was Dan Proctor's Labyrinth Lord (2007).

The first thing that makes Labyrinth Lord a standout was that Proctor imagined it from the start as a living line, not just a book. More importantly, he put it into game stores — initially through Key 20. As a result, OSR rulebooks became widely available for the first time ever, letting modern players know that they could play a variety of games, not just the ones being currently manufactured by the big producers. We often talk about the increased agency of RPG players in the 21st century: Labyrinth Lord, and the rest of the OSR, offered increased agency to RPG consumers instead.

Second, Labyrinth Lord retrocloned what may have been the most accessible and well-known version of D&D ever, the B/X rules. It was a game that had originally been taught in Tom Moldvay's tight 64-page rulebook (1981). Its iconic green character sheet had been a wonder of simplicity, while its Erol Otus cover had been a touchstone for all gamers of a certain age. It was published at D&D's early height, with the Basic D&D line tallying up more than a million sales during the two years when it was the core rules. (Again, Basic Fantasy got here first, but it had the strictest non-commercial requirements of all, which kept it from breaking out like Labyrinth Lord did.)

Third, Proctor doubled-down almost immediately with the publication of Mutant Future (2008), a Labyrinth Lord variant that (more or less) retrocloned the classic Gamma World game (1978, 1983). In doing so, Proctor (and Labyrinth Lord) helped to kick off the next era of OSR production, where creators began to redevelop classic game systems to create games in new genres, with new styles.

Through its innovations, made as part of the collaborative OSR community, Labyrinth Lord in turn led to the success of Swords & Wizardry (2008), where Matt Finch returned to combine his own legal lessons from OSRIC with the community and publication lessons from Labyrinth Lord to bring the OSR even greater mass-market success.

Labyrinth Lord has remained available through the years, and remains one of the three core publications that give the modern, commercial OSR its foundation. But Proctor turned to other projects in the '10s before ultimately returning with the cleaned-up Advanced Labyrinth Lord (2019) and kids-focused Lordling (2019). Old-School Essentials (2017, 2019), yet another game that likely wouldn't exist without Labyrinth Lord, picked up the B/X baton in that time.

But recent events demonstrate that the future of Labyrinth Lord remains just as innovative as it was back in 2007. Wizards of the Coast's failed attempt to destroy the OGL in early 2023 led Proctor, who at the time was working on a second edition of his classic game, to start considering alternative designs for Labyrinth Lord. Realizing that the world was far different from 2007, when a book like Labyrinth Lord was necessary to allow the continued play of a classic game system, he began going further afield in his design, considering new classes such as brownies and cyclops, new methodologies for spell-casting, and a new feel for the game.

It's the continuation of the very trend that Proctor began with Mutant Future, allowing him to create a new FRPG that suits his own interests, but is still based on a well-loved classic design.

It'll still be Labyrinth Lord, just for a new era of play.

M is for Mutant Year Zero

Though roleplaying started in the United States, with Dungeons & Dragons (1974), and though D&D and many other English-language RPGs have been exported across the world, many non-English-speaking countries also have their own intriguing histories of roleplaying creation. Perhaps the greatest of those is the story of Swedish design.

It did begin with an import: Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing (1980) and Magic World (1982), which Fredrik Malmberg's Target Games translated into Swedish. Add on a brand-new adventure and you have the primordial Swedish RPG: Drakar och Demoner (1982). The game would transform into its own design over the years and also accrue a few companions at Target, the first of which was the post-apocalyptic RPG Mutant (1984).

For decades, Target went from strength to strength, largely defining tabletop roleplaying in Sweden, before Malmberg eventually spun his work off into a Hollywood-focused corporation that today owns the rights to not just several of Target's former games, but also Robert E. Howard's Conan.

Target's retreat from the tabletop roleplaying field offered room for new entrants, and the greatest of those has been Fria Ligan, or The Free League. Fria Ligan's first few years were spent publishing supplemental and original material for the Swedish market, but then they decided to enter the global market when they acquired a license for one of the country's primordial games. They negotiated for Drakar och Demoner, but didn't like the final terms, so they instead licensed Mutant from Malmberg.

Rather than sticking with Mutant's original BRP system, designer Tomas H�renstam instead adopted an indie-influenced post-apocalyptic system that he'd been working on for years, called "Version Noll". The end result was Mutant: �r Noll (2014), or Mutant: Year Zero (2014).

Mutant: Year Zero is intriguing in part just because it's a Swedish roleplaying game. It's part and parcel of a few decades of parallel evolution of design sensibilities, which included a willingness to bring indie ideas into the mainstream, something that wasn't yet a big focus in the English-language RPG world.

But, Mutant: Year Zero was a magnificent design beyond that. It's what H�renstam calls a "neotrad" design. It has a traditional setting and playstyle, but it also incorporates indie mechanics, such as resource management and improved player agency. Thus, Mutant: Year Zero uses a simple dice pool where sixes are successes, but allows for rerolls where each reroll increases the odds of success and simultaneously the odds of trauma. (That's indie-influenced player agency there.) This ties into a mutation system that creates a system of rising tension in the game, which climaxes at an adventure's finale.

There's a lot more to Mutant: Year Zero. The character generation is quick, based on fun archetypes that could have come out of Apocalypse World. The mutations are powerful and evocative. Combat is potentially deadly, creating a real sense of danger. The entire game is focused on survival gameplay, offering dramatically different tropes from traditional FRPGs. Part of that is focused on a large set of pre-defined threats, which combined with a zone creation system allows for the easy framing of stories.

This is all wound up with an evocative background and lavish, well-produced books, producing a world that proved exciting for players even before they got to the dynamic game system.

As a whole, Mutant: Year Zero has redefined the post-apocalyptic gaming space. It's one of the major forces in the return of post-apocalyptic roleplaying to the mainstream spotlight, something that hasn't been true since the decline of the Cold War reduced the spectre of WWIII-fears and pushed real-world-setting games like Twilight: 2000 (1984) to the sideline. For over a decade afterward, the post-apocalyptic space had been largely filled with nostalgic offerings like the d20 Gamma World (2003) and the B/X Mutant Future (2008). That was only changing with the release of Apocalypse World (2010), which brought indie sensibilities to the genre and was another mainstream hit. Mutant Year Zero would brought those indie design ideas further out into the mainstream, with plenty of new twists of its own.

The Year Zero system has also been successful enough that it's allowed Fria Ligan to create a whole series of Year Zero-based games, from the retro/legacy play of the FRPG Forbidden Lands (2018) to the noir future of Blade Runner (2022). Meanwhile, Mutant Year Zero has already been made into a "tactical adventure game", Road to Eden (2018).

Like Target Games before it, Fria Ligan is now going from strength to strength. Unlike Target Games, they've been able to break into the international and English-language market. As a result, they've gained a reputation as one of the top RPG producers of the modern-day. That's ultimately thanks to the strong game design of Mutant: Year Zero and its almost pitch-perfect depiction of a gritty, post-apocalyptic landscape.