The Godzilla Cipher

I. Dear Reader

There are lots of Godzilla movies—around 40 across Japanese and English. Each of those movies showcase a monster but at the same time, they showcase more than that. Godzilla is usually born from nuclear fallout. The destruction he causes are the ripples of a greater disaster, the fear he elicits an echo of a greater trauma. In later movies, Godzilla becomes a kind of anti-hero, protecting the world from other, worse monsters. In the most recent Japanese movie, Godzilla Minus One, even as they kill it, the soldiers reverentially salute the monster. You know, what’s scarier than a monster? A metaphor. Especially if you have to write a book report about it later. Or worse, if it suggests rising nationalism.

In his iconic essay, “D&D Doesn’t Understand What Monsters Are“, Dan D writes, “Monsters have a cause… Monsters are made to be so.”

The crux of the post is that monsters are created by social circumstances. Or to put it another way, monsters are made by people. It is a powerful idea. It’s an axiom that if you accept, has a domino affect on all of your worldbuilding. It also means that, for heroes in such a world, “Violence is not a solution, it is a stopgap measure. The root cause that has created the monster is the real challenge to overcome, and it is likely to be much more complex and rooted in past events than not. Sometimes, there’s likely to be no solution, or at least no solution that the players can enact. The damage might have already been done, and you’re just trying to plug the holes in the hull.” If monsters are made and every act of violence has an institutional or systemic cause, the story becomes about those institutions and systems. The characters will live their own narratives in the cracks of these systems, perpetually compromised.

When I first read this post, the thing that struck me about it is that it was a decision point. Now, every time I ran a game with monsters, I had to decide what kind of game it was going to be: which Godzilla do I want this time?

If I want a game where the characters are small parts in a world that has its own logics, its own politics, its own reality outside of them, there is a Godzilla for that. If I want a game where the world is framed around the characters, where monsters reflect their stories back to them, there’s a Godzilla for that. If I want a story where my characters dropkick the big lizard, of course, there’s a Godzilla for that too.

In your instance, this might not be a decision. You might like all your games a certain way all the time. Or you might be like me and oscillate.

The last case, that’s just ordinary D&D, I don’t think you need examples. But want to see an example of the first case? See any of Zedeck Siew or Goblin Punch / Arnold K‘s work. They’re both excellent at grounding a monster in a social circumstance. There’s lots to learn from them.

Want to see an example of the second case? The bestiary in the DIE RPG explicitly constructs its monsters around psychology and theme. To pick a couple at random, it suggests using giants to echo parental figures or gorgons to echo victims of exploitation. It’s a very steal-able idea. But this can never be cookie cutter. At the very least, you have to consciously pick from the bestiary based on what will resonate with the characters and players.

The tricky thing about this case is that it requires collaboration with players. Characters need to have qualities that you can mirror back at them—broken friendships that see their cracked reflection in the collateral destruction of two big lizards fighting, unspoken wounds that resonate with the big lizard who’s only angry because there’s a thorn in his claw. To make good psychodrama, you need the raw material.

You can skip this step having a focused game from the start: a game about teenagers doing illegal skateboarding so when the monsters reflect authority figures, that’s a slam dunk. I mean, an ollie or whatever, I don’t know anything about skateboarding. Basically, Slugblaster‘s godzillas are good because it knows what its about.

Yours lizardly,

Thomas

PS. This is me testing out the idea of reworking an older piece from one of the first newsletters I ever wrote. My main problem with the older one is that it became about sociological versus psychological storytelling and I think that’s the wrong direction for this piece. It’s an interesting subject but Dan’s post is about something else and my goal is to do interesting commentary on the original, not change the subject.

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II. Media of the Week

• I enjoyed this review of Paul Czege’s (My Life With Master, The Ink That Bleeds) new game, The Balsam Lake Unmurders. It’s a clever little solo game with a fun premise.

• Sasha Reneau, the designer of oracle game Spindlewheel, is doing a video series about designing games using tarot. There’s two parts that have been published. This one is about the properties of cards that lend themselves to use in games.

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• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

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III. Links of the Week

Articles

• Sam Sorensen writes an interesting blog about judging games based on how hard it is to do a “cool move” in them. I’m happy to see that the post explores its question across multiple play cultures.
  • I’ve said something related in the past: something like “the designer’s job to maximize the number of cool things the players get to say and minimize the number of boring things”. Of course, the GM is included in the term “player” here.
• Indie Game Reading Club reviews the second edition of Lovecraftesque, the cosmic horror storygame-in-a-box (that I contributed one small scenario towards). Paul Beakley captures the way the game has been redesigned to make it easier to play. It still remains a “frame a scene” kind of game but it’s probably one of the best supported in that category.
• On the Roll to Doubt blog, a lovely retrospective on Tunnels & Trolls and its cultural legacy: “What’s most infamous about Tunnels & Trolls, beyond its accusations of being a pale imitation of Dungeons & Dragons (it is no such thing), and what Ron Edwards has dubbed a certain “bloody-mindness”, is its sense of humor.”

Misc

• Geek Native has an interesting post about hobby spending in Australia being surprisingly high.
• The entire Dolmenwood version of the OSE ruleset is available for free on their site.

From the archive:

• On the Games Study Study Buddies podcast, a nice conversation about The Elusive Shift, Jon Peterson’s book about the invention of roleplaying among D&D players in the scifi fandom. (Issue 91, May 2022)

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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.

• Claim your free copy! Rust Never Sleeps is a solo ttrpg with doomed mecha pilots, blackjack mechanics, a card deck for your battery pack, and character sheets that you color in.
• Critical Kit are excited to announce that we are publishers of Cezar Capacle’s Midnight Melodies, Wraithound and Against the Wind, with more titles coming.

This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding.

• Feng Shui 2e, one of the first action movie emulators, is back with a core bundle and one with adventures and supplements

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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!