Spells
A spell is a contained, axiomatic system structured around an impossibility. Inconsistencies in the laws of nature create tiny seams or breaches in reality, and spells use sequences of sentient thought and ritual to widen these breaches until they allow for greater and more useful impossibilities to be accomplished. The human mind seems to have been designed specifically not to comprehend such things. Untrained readers oversimplify, gloss over, overcomplicate, or outright deny the impossibility in order to protect their own psyche.
This is more intelligent than what spellcasters do. Spellcasters focus their energies on the impossibility until it breaks something within them, and then they hope that they can comprehend it afterwards.
This breach in reality, once apprehended by the spellcaster’s consciousness, does not cease its resistance. It writhes and spasms inside the caster’s mind, attempting to force itself to be forgotten. Holding onto a spell during this process is extremely painful. After a certain point, spellcasters become used to it. This combination of maintained focus and pain tolerance is what allows more experienced spellcasters to maintain more prepared spells than neophytes.
Finally, the spellcaster performs the necessary rituals of thought and action, which wrench the seam open for an infinitesimal moment, and from the breach emerges the energy-stuff that casters call Bleed. Thought itself shapes Bleed into being; it is understood that it was created as an intermediary matter during the world’s creation, to allow the Fundamental Plane to be shaped by the gods present at that time. Bleed is so volatile that any lapse in concentration in this moment causes the spell to misfire disastrously. Magi of incomprehensible power have burst into cascades of undying cancer, or been swallowed by unnamed gods, only because they mishandled Bleed.
But if they hold fast, adhere to every movement of the ritual, and place every thought in the right place, the spell takes a reliable shape.
Spellcasters
“Of all the controls necessary for the maintenance of a stable state apparatus, second most important is the strict control of magical knowledge (the only factor more critical being the constant suppression of the common people). If spells and their components are circulated outside your control, they will by themselves sow anarchy and ruin.”
— from Control of Minor Realms, Dominator Thauroch
If one wishes to attain the rank of Magus, lowest in the Oracular order to which all spellcasters of the Low Countries are member, they must obtain two writs: one from the noble house of a Karth Treaty signatory, the other from a representative of the Order itself. Only those of solid reputation, stable temperament, and good breeding have any hope of obtaining these writs, and among themselves the prospective magi clamber and claw for top position, the less fortunate among them returning to their humble ranks as nobles, merchants, and officers.
It should go without saying that you never had a chance of obtaining either of these writs.
Casting spells as an unsanctioned commoner is, in all but the most backward places in the world, a serious crime, for which the convicted perform community service by swaying gently on a rope. For the kings and dukes of the Low Countries, this is a matter of survival. A literate commoner holding a scroll might be more dangerous than a hundred men-at-arms. At their least dangerous, they might assassinate a tax collector, or make an attempt at the life of the king. At worst, they might distribute scrolls among conspirators and make a coordinated attack upon the seat of government. The most extreme rulers attempt to smother spellcasting in the cradle, by limiting the literacy of their populace. The more liberal among them concede that this would be the ideal solution, if they could afford to dispense with the economic benefits of literacy.
A single spellbook, nothing but soft vellum bound in leather, contains the destructive power of an army.
Still, underneath the eyes of power, in secret and alone, some so-called ‘hedge wizards’ remain. Exiles from sanctioned academies, or literate commoners who stumbled upon a scroll and learned to use it. Once attuned to the power and mystery of the arcane, they cannot return to their prior lives. On the run, with assumed names, they learn quickly that the only way out for them is forward– to piece together further secrets, to steal fire from the gods until the crown’s word cannot destroy them.
Outside of the Order, no scrolls or books may be sold, copied, or kept. A small number of minor spells circulate in underground markets, known to thieves and brigands, most of whom are illiterate anyway. Of these, enough copies exist that even the efforts of the Order cannot relegate them to obscurity; the box has been opened for good.
Otherwise, there is only one place where the secrets of magic are found: the places of its origin, the ruins of the civilizations which discovered those secrets centuries ago. For a hedge wizard, these ruins contain their final hope. If they discover something powerful enough, they might survive on the fringe of civilization, in a stone tower or fort, alone. Or they may bargain away their freedom, handing hair and flesh to the Order so that their magehunters, if needed, can track them to the ends of the earth, and in exchange be granted status as a Reformed Mage, a provisional title at the bottom of the Order’s hierarchy.
Skills, Trade, and Traveller
My idle project is a trade-based seafaring game. This naturally inclines me towards Traveller, which is probably the oldest system to which speculative cargo trade mechanics are central. The trade system in CT is remarkably simple: the GM rolls to determine the best available good and quantity available, the party rolls to determine purchase price. The party may then roll to re-sell those goods wherever they bring them. All of these rolls are subject to modifiers, and those modifiers are predictable enough that the party can engage in some guided speculation. The fairly-reliable profits of these ventures are then used to pay the basic overhead of the spaceship (wages, supplies, maintenance) and to service the party’s significant debts.
None of this, of course, is in any way specific to science fiction, and a few of the core conceits of Traveller’s system (two, really: the rate of interstellar travel, and that interstellar communication should never exceed that rate) make the translation from space-opera to fantasy that much more direct. So direct that the work has already been done for me (Notably in Paul Elliott’s Roman-Empire hack, Mercator).
Traveller hews away from the OSR/NSR zeitgeist, however, in its adherence to a skill system which gamifies a lot of things which might be better left ungamified. Skills such as Tactics and Streetwise abstract elements of roleplay which are very fun to act out.1 This project of mine involves enough dungeoneering and hexcrawling that I would prefer it to play like a dungeon-crawler in situations where the party isn’t sailing between islands. Hacking Traveller, Mercator, or even Worlds Without Number directly would give primacy to that skill-based resolution mechanic. I wish to avoid that layer of abstraction. This would be trivial, but the trade system relies on that very abstraction. And so I need to replace it with something.
A lot of social skill-checks can just be replaced with referee-player interactions. The NPC’s being convinced or not is not too hard to adjudicate in typical cases, where a typical dungeon-crawling band of miscreants are trying to parlay with a member of society. It is largely binary, and outcomes of social interactions do not feel especially probabilistic when we encounter them in life, so dice checks are hardly a flawless solution in the first place. I waver when I consider haggling; it no longer feels reasonable to expect a GM to fairly arbitrate an NPC’s negotiation of prices or other matters of bookkeeping. For one thing, the NPC knows more about the matter than the referee can be expected to simulate. For another, their reasoning is utterly divorced from the referee’s– the referee, by nature, is exclusively considering the needs and wants of the players, and not the virtual agent within the game fiction. This can be papered over when it happens occasionally. If it needs to happen as the backbone of the game loop, it will fall apart. The nature of the referee’s fiat is too arbitrary. It feels like fudging a die.
The simplest answer, then, is to excise all references to player skill and hope the calculations shake out. Without even testing it, I assume they won’t. A die modifier of +1 to the Traveller ‘Actual Value’ table imparts somewhere between 10% and 100% of the total value of the goods being traded, and it imparts this bonus at purchase as well as at sale. This will probably have to be replaced. I could do this by making the trade environment more friendly than in CT or Mercator, by changing the table itself, or by trying to find some more player-focused way of getting a +1 on that table, something the party can try to do proactively to further their odds of profit. Ultraviolet Grassland does the latter by having the party spend time and money. I could also use dice modifiers for NPC relationships, or for information.
I find it interesting that for such a skeletal component to the Traveller gameplay loop, the trade system is dead simple. It fits on three pages of CT, with the tables included. I might strip naval combat down to the bearings and yet I’m tempted to add layers to trade economics.
I find this less a problem in practice than in theory, when I play CT. Nobody is ever tempted to roll Tactics in the middle of a gunfight. Still, it is never truly clear how much use we are supposed to get out of a zero or a one in such skills.↩︎
The Case for Medieval Stasis
The Mechanical Case for Stasis
I would argue that, more than D&D having originally been engineered to mimic the medieval period, the medieval period was uniquely suitable for D&D. Historical wargaming, if anything, leans toward the Napoleonic and American Civil wars– and surely, there were enticing reasons to turn the clock backwards some. Gunpowder is perfect for a tabletop mass combat system: you roll the dice once, and simulate an exchanged volley, and it almost appears as if the two armies are ‘taking turns’ just like they do in a wargame. Large units form into controlled lines and fight in a largely probabilistic manner. Cannons, muskets, and cavalry each fill well-understood tactical roles that leave plenty of room for clever expressions of gameplay. But when you reduce the company of riflemen to a single rifleman, gunpowder weapons become obviously unwieldy at the table. They require multiple resources to fire, don’t hit reliably, and have a long period of downtime between shots. Not until the late 19th century do gunpowder weapons become a viable basis for an RPG combat system (and I would argue that even modern firearms are unsuited to the TTRPG, being less suitable to ‘theater of the mind’ combat and forcing unwieldy abstractions like line-of-sight and cover mechanics, neither of which are especially satisfying).
None of this is especially new. The TTRPG concept of the medieval is in large part based on the invisible, hazy boundary between the age of steel and the age of gunshot. Some of this is symbolic: handled realistically, crossbows, especially the powerful arbalests of the 12th century onward, pose many of the same awkward questions that muskets do– but we are more willing to accept ‘unrealistic’ handlings of the crossbow, where its efficacy is neutered and the time taken to reload one is somewhat shortened in order to fit into a fantasy combat system. If we are unwilling to do the same for the musket, it is mostly because of what the musket represents.
Beyond gunpowder, the medieval period contains a few other useful elements: the leftover ruins from Rome, or some obvious facsimile of Rome, are the exact fodder needed to drum up a group of enterprising young grave-robbers. The medieval period was long enough, in fact, that even medieval ruins can easily be present without anybody needing to ask questions about the timeline. State capacity was generally low enough to enable the sorts of ‘borderlands’ which are so suitable for the violent and capricious vagabonds that make an RPG tick.
The Literary Case for Stasis
There is also a certain attraction that the medieval period has as a canvas for storytelling, one which holds true beyond the limited medium of the tabletop RPG, and beyond the limits of the fantasy genre. We need not belabor the medieval period’s utility to fantasy: Even were Tolkien the first writer to make use of it, that would be enough to explain its continued influence. But more telling are the stories which seem to have influenced Tolkien and his contemporaries: the works of Shakespeare, whose histories and tragedies permanently anchored the medieval period in the cultural imagination of the English-speaking world.
Outside the Anglosphere, even, wherever a roughly analogous period can be identified, before the emergences of gunpowder, colonialism, capitalism, and eventually industry, it might linger in the cultural consciousness, to become a sort of stasis point for genre lit: Japan’s Edo period, the indistinct premodern of Wuxia and Xianxia.
My instinct is that after a certain point in history, we imagine each moment in history as a part of the upward curve of technological and civilizational progress, and to select any point in that process would necessarily warn the reader (or the player) of what happens next. Certain outcomes are swallowed whole by the history of technology between the Renaissance and today. The world becomes larger, more nations and cultures become parties in the fiction. We view technology as such a world-shaping force that it dwarfs any story whose consequences are merely political or personal. Just remembering that some invention looms in the distance warps our expectations. The middle ages benefit from a post-hoc narrativization as an internally stagnant period, one which Europe supposedly woke from in the Renaissance and from there began her upward ascent. By all accounts, this is not true, but it does help the period retain a mystery which is largely agnostic to the arc of technological progress. This sets it apart from the Enlightenment or the Renaissance, whose overarching narratives are bounded by technology and progress.
The medieval period, having been scratched from the story of progress, becomes a Tabula Rasa onto which we can, paradoxically, write historically without writing about history. We can inhabit the same numinous pocket of time that contains Arthur and Lear, Joan of Arc and Wat Tyler. The oft-criticized stasis of many fantasy settings only mirrors this absence of progress. And perhaps this is worth critique, but this is also a useful tool buried within reader expectations.
The Social Case for Stasis
But we have so far approached medieval stasis as if a single point of consciousness, floating in a boundless space, arbitrating. In the TTRPG hobby, we less often make decisions than contribute to them. Perhaps the most important utility of medieval stasis is that the same indefinite medieval creates a long period in history where we perceive any point as largely compatible with the rest of the age. An adventure set in a vague facsimile of early-medieval England is likely to be compatible with a game set in a vague facsimile of late-medieval Bavaria (or premodern China, if the VIN number has been filed off well enough) without raising much of an eyebrow. The technologies, politics, armies, and peoples of each century of the middle ages are perceived as more or less interchangeable. And so, in our fictions, they are.
If we set these works in an era whose narrative is more intertwined with technological progress, it would be more important to write in near-adjacent centuries, or to make conversions so to amend the presence or absence of a historically important technology. Compared to the subsequent ages, the medieval period feels spacious and vague. There is plenty of room in those centuries to contain the ouvres of countless game designers, writers, and bloggers. It is a gathering-place of considerable convenience.
Stasis also serves as a sort of social contract regarding technological progress: despite that players might know of technologies or circumstances from later in history that would have proven quite useful earlier on, it would be boring for players to try and go around inventing technological solutions to various problems (boring, that is, whether it works or not). Likewise, a GM doesn’t want to need to litigate questions of whether a given item is or is not available in the exact pseudohistory of their fiction, and this becomes more complicated if the game world is in the midst of a technological shift which somewhat parallels our own history’s without mirroring it precisely.
Any genre is a social convention (which is a more satisfying description than saying they’re marketing gimmicks, though they mean similar things), and for all the limitations of the long, nebulous medieval, it does remain a place that we can coordinate around, a set of norms that more or less ensure cross-compatibility between games, set expectations for players and GMs, and avoid some of the difficult or annoying hypotheticals that any historical or pseudo-historical game is prone to.
there is no product here, and no promise of one which would emerge in this place. i am little more than a thief, and what i post here will be an arrangement of fruitful burglaries.
For the most part, cyberpunk just wasn’t concurrent with the old-school style of play. The literary genre came later, and by the time the genre had filtered into pop consciousness enough for someone to publish (for profit!) an RPG or two based on the genre, most RPGs already skewed heroic and story driven. the genre’s main representatives, Cyberpunk and Shadowrun, never had much of a funnel, both of them are on the crunchy side, they’ve got their love handles and they’re the kind of games that people build characters for at their desktop, finicking with the build options.
Which is really only to say that the old-school style and cyberpunk sort of passed each other by, that they never had much of an opportunity to meet until the OSR. And this is interesting, because there’s a lot about them that happen to suit one another.
Cyberpunk is a gritty genre, and you’d imagine that a high-lethality, unforgiving sort of framework would be well-suited to it. The classic old-school funnel— a whole series of unfortunate scoundrels in the right place at the wrong time, dying for a couple bucks— just fits, more snugly than it does in fantasy or space opera. The crunchier cyberpunk RPGs always ran into an issue with this, in my experience, where lethality was possible, but punches tended to be pulled, because characters were fairly involved pieces of work. Even if you’re especially committed to lethality and grit (and I tried), it’s just too cumbersome to make the process rewarding, rather than tedious.
The rewards of that heroic-RPG focus on customization are, to my eyes, also a bit limited in the genre. Cyberpunk protagonists don’t really need to be special— it’s enough for them to be profit-motivated scumbags without any better options, which is what you get when you roll stats in order and slap them together real quick. I don’t mind having more bespoke characters around, but at the very least it feels like they’re not as natural here as they are in fantasy.
And finally, I’ve always gathered the feeling that cyberpunk as a genre ends up skewing towards heavy niche-protection— you’ve got your smooth-talkers, your hackers, your ’borged-out combat freaks, and they all tend to do their thing in different ways— which itself isn’t especially old-school, but many of these niches aren’t combat-specific, and the big 80s and 90s combat resolution systems end up taking so long that the session can become very lopsided in favor of people whose ‘thing’ is shooting guns a lot. Pulling off strong niches in old-school systems can be tricky, but certainly it’s gotta be easier than balancing combat and non-combat in systems where you roll four sets of dice per attack, right?
The hard part is that the excellently-engineered dungeon crawl at the heart of most of those old games is absolutely worthless to us, to say nothing of the hexcrawl. Stars Without Number and Traveller also use stellar system maps which don’t do much to help us, either. The entire sense of space, of moving from place to place and finding out what’s there, seems more or less absent in cyberpunk game sessions— players navigate through an indeterminate soup of urban sprawl, drifting ashore at unkept bars and mounting raids upon corporate facilities which exist nowhere-in-particular. I think this is enough for the sorts of ultramodern storygames that are more willing to acquiesce to the GM, who tells the party “you get a phone call from the Plot Department”. But for old-school games, it seems like we’re going to want some way to reclaim space, to give the table something to navigate through. It feels to me that the binary “accept/decline” for job offers in most of these games is just going to feel unsatisfying in an old-school framework. But that, being the hardest problem to crack open, I want to think about more at some other time.
For now, I’m going to hack Mothership into an ad-hoc cyberpunk RPG. Wish me luck.
And don’t get me wrong— I think those storygames, things like Technoir and The Sprawl, are where cyberpunk RPGs are headed, in the grand arc of gaming history.