RPG Reporting

Thomas Manuel

I. Dear Reader

Over on Rascal, I wrote this big piece (around 3000 words) about the new wave of award-winning RPGs from Italy – games like Household, Fabula Ultima, and the Cowboy Bebop RPG. I pitched this article in my very first meeting on the 30th of September and have basically been reporting it since then.

It wasn’t the best time to work on a story like this – a lot of publishers were at Essen Spiele, the biggest board game convention (with a side order of RPGs) in the world. But lots of people were kind enough to speak to me – designers, publishers, players, all being generous with their time with a total stranger. And I think it shows in the outcome – I think it’s good work.

I can’t share the full thing because Rascal remains a business that needs its subscribers but I think is a big enough excerpt to make good reading:

Since 1966, the Lucca Comics and Games convention has been held in the historical city of Lucca in Tuscany, the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. The city is normally home to about 90,000 people. In 2022, 300,000 poured through the streets for convention. That isn’t just a turn of phrase. There is no convention center—the festival sprawls through the old part of the city. It isn’t contiguous—attendees step in and out of ticketed spaces, walking from one section to another through the streets of the city. Traditional shops shut down and give way to more geeky interests. “Outside, there is a [sign that says] shoe seller, and inside, there is somebody that is selling Harry Potter wands”, said Osiride Luca Cascioli. 

Cascioli has been coming to the convention since he was a child and now he’s one of the judges for the Gioco di Ruolo dell’Anno (RPG of the Year) award announced at Lucca. Somewhere in between, he made the time to get an impressive tattoo of the daggers from Blades in the Dark on his arm. It’s impossible to summarize the whole history of a country’s gaming scene but in the records of the awards at Lucca, there is one version of it. The earliest year listed on the website is 1993 and the winner of the Best of Show award (the predecessor to the Gioco dell’ Anno) was the localization of Call of Cthulhu. In fact, almost all the early winners are localizations, not original games. It’s worth noting that localizations are more than translations—they can involve substantive changes to content, presentation, and anything else. 

In 2018, the list of nominees for Gioco di Ruolo dell’Anno looked silly. Like ants lining up beside an elephant, there was a clutch of indie games and D&D 5e. 5e was the obvious favorite. It had been a global phenomenon. People had been playing with the English version or small fan translations for years by then already but the arrival of the Italian version was opening the gates for a whole new wave of players. 

One of the nominees was Lovecraftesque, a GM-less horror game by UK-based Black Armada Games. The Italian edition was produced by Narrativa, a company that has won multiple awards for its localizations, including for Apocalypse World in 2011. As with many localizations, Narrativa remade the entire book for the Italian market. The cover was pure white with a simple eldritch-looking rune in dark red in the center. But under a UV light, it transformed—a swarming mass of lines spiraled out of the rune, like tentacles, and filled the entire space. They had taken the theme of lovecraftian horror—of a truth hidden beneath the surface—and embedded that into the book itself.

Lovecraftesque won.

“The community scream[ed] about it”, said Cascioli. He wasn’t a judge back then but he remembered the flame wars, the angry comments, the shock and disbelief. But the jury’s decision was final and they had a very clear reasoning. “They decide[d] to not give the prize to D&D because there was only the player’s handbook.” Since just the Player’s Handbook was in Italian, the jury ruled that there wasn’t enough to play the game. They felt that, at a minimum, the monster manual was needed as well. They wouldn’t give the award to a game that was incomplete in Italian.

The next year, 2019, the award went to Household, a game about tiny people carving out empires in a big Victorian house, from Italian studio Two Little Mice. Whether the flame wars of the previous year played a role or not, this was the first time an original Italian game had won the award since 2003. 

Household would go on to become a gorgeously-illustrated, 300+ page book a few years later. Two Little Mice’s crowdfunding campaign, in Italian and English, raised almost half a million dollars. In contrast, the 2003 winner, Sine Requie, was a monochrome, staple-bound zine. The difference was stark. Times had changed

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Have a great week!

Yours excerptingly,

Thomas

PS. Thanks to everyone who wrote to me about other gamebook-style sections from older RPGs. I should’ve already known about the ones in Frank Mentzer’s D&D but well, now I do. I’m going to check out all of them and write something more comprehensive about this little design trend that died out.

II. Media of the Week

  • On Yes Indie’d, I speak to J Strautman and B Marsollier about A Fool’s Errand, their new tarot-driven game of divine meddling and sci-fi escapades. It’s based on their actual play podcast, Planet Arcana, and we have a fun conversation about the power of designing with tarot cards and “translating” an AP into a game. I think it’s a really cool game with some neat pacing and escalation built subtly into it so you always get these grand arcs of self-determination.

III. Links of the Week

  • On Polygon, there’s an interview with Tom Bloom, creator of Lancer, about his new investigative horror game, Cain: “There’s this big, supernatural problem that’s totally outside of human control, and we have this massive, underworld-y organization that launches psychic supersoldiers at it.”
  • Archipelago is a really interesting storygame and the Asked Questions newsletter has a nice explanation of how it imagines the The Conversation.
  • I got a very nice mention in long tumblr post about how to find new games.
  • A nice post elaborating on the classic advice to be a “fan of the players“.
  • Emmy Allen interviews Sarah Carapace, the designer of Violet Core.
  • Geek Native writes about for PbtA mecha anime game, Armor Astir Advent‘s campaign for a physical book.
  • The Split/Party newsletter has a glowing review of Triangle Agency. Here’s part one and part two. Read to learn more about “the uncanny horror of anomalies made mundane, appropriated by capitalism”.

News

From the archive:

  • Sharang Biswas writes about mystery RPGs for dicebreaker: “such games aren’t just mystery stories translated into game form; they wield the particular affordances of the medium of tabletop roleplaying – shared storytelling, social dynamics, choices unbounded by computational constraints, at-the-table calibration – to deliver unique experiences.” (Issue 62, October 2021)

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

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  • Now on Kickstarter: The Sorcerer’s Return! Can the party uncover a mysterious new town’s dark secret before it’s too late in this grimdark zine for Dungeon Crawl Classics?
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This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

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