Possible Landscapes

I. Dear Reader,

I’ve had two essays published over at Rascal in the last month that I’m really proud of. The first was a look at Austin Walker’s Realis, which I turned into a history of surrealism. The second was this week’s review of Impossible Landscapes.

I mentioned wanting to run Impossible Landscapes back in November last year. And over the last couple months, it sneaked into a couple issues — especially when I was comparing to the other games I was running. It was a big deal for me because I have run exactly zero adventure modules outside fantasy, i.e., D&D. And even within fantasy, it’s probably less than five. I genuinely didn’t know what to expect. and even in that very first mention, you can see that I’m worrying about railroading.

In the end, I had an excellent time. I ran the game as a group of artists rather than Delta Green agents. That was fun and then it led to the review just becoming this over-the-top piece of writing — there’s diary entries, there’s scripted dialogue, there’s doppelgangers, there’s an analysis of weird fiction. It’s a pay-walled link but I think it’s worth the 1$ to read.

Generally, as a reviewer, I never talk about things being good or bad, I talk about what makes them interesting or how to engage with them for interesting results. Which is why the review led to me to a very useful personal insight about horror and railroading. Which was borne out by conversations with different people — including OSR and storygame folks who feel strongly about open-ended campaigns. The idea is that because Impossible Landscapes is a horror adventure, the ending being inevitable hardly even registers as a thing to be concerned about. The players are disempowered, sure, but because it lines up with the characters being disempowered, it doesn’t feel bad at all. When you get into the mode of playing a horror adventure, you stop worrying about meaningful decisions to some extent.

I love that a lot of storygames come explicitly advertised as “play to lose” where you enjoy the downward spiral of the characters and cheer as they die. But Impossible Landscapes isn’t like that. It doesn’t say anything so clear. Which make sense because it’s coming from its own tradition. And the broader insight is that one of the reasons that so many of the most popular trad modules are horror is because that is a good marriage of form and content.

When a fantasy module is too trad, it’s much more grating. It can be hard to enjoy a trad module if your whole mindset is “more agency = more good”. The very format of a trad adventure takes something away from you. But since horror is about taking things away, it just works better.

So what is the fun of Impossible Landscapes? It’s the fun of a rollercoaster — an emotional one. In an article called ‘Railroading is Good Actually’ in Knucklebone Magazine #1, Evan Torner puts it well: “If you remove suspense around narrative elements in the design, then the suspense shifts instead to how the PCs feel about the events.”

Don’t get me wrong, there’s suspense galore in this game but the other lession is easy to miss. If you run Impossible Landscapes or any low-agency horror adventure and don’t take the time to play out how the characters are feeling and how they’re dealing with consequences, you’re missing out one of the best, most memorable parts. It’s never in the book because they can’t really predict what your characters need. Your system might specifically help with that (and I think it should) but if it doesn’t, you can still do it yourself.

Yours possibly,

Thomas

PS. Here’s the review again! It’s fun!

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II. Media of the Week

• I haven’t shared Design Doc in a while so time to remedy that. They had a good episode recently about writing rulebooks and how even the table of contents tells a story. There’s something in the air about reinventing or at least, paying more attention to how we write rulebooks that I’m really enjoying.
• It’s nice to see Weird Place doing well. Their videos about RPGs in Japan seem to blown up. Good for them!

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III. Links of the Week

Articles

• Patrick Stuart interviews Scrap World about her new monster art book, Malustrious Brood, and it’s a great art-focused conversation about her process.
• There’s a paper titled Game Rules as Player Tools and it’s a great academic overview of the current thinking about what rules are: “If games truly are “the art of agency,” as Nguyen argues, then understanding rules as malleable constructs becomes a way to a more varied aesthetic engagement with games.”
• Mollie Russell of Wargamer speaks to professional GMs about what its like to run games for cash.
• EnWorld has a solid interview with Jason Carl about the rebirth of White Wolf.
• GeekNative has a report on the “Pay versus Play: Women in TTRPGs” panel at UKGE

Misc

• GeekNative also reveals that Adrian Tchaikovsky is holding off on publishing a fantasy novel till the TTRPG is confirmed.
• Tabletop Bookshelf is looking to commission professional writers to do reviews of RPGs. They say they’ll pay up to 500$.

From the archive:

• On the Pretendo Games site, a really good blog about the three layers of RPG rules: the social, the fictional, and the abstract. It’s not just theory because moving from the abstract to the social is what people mean when they say “talk to your players” is the solution to all RPG problems. Don’t let it become about elf sociology, make it a conversation about feelings. (Issue 99, July 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.

• Nothing this week!

This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• For Pride, you can get queer games from queer designers, including Yazeba’s, Starcrossed, Moonlight on Roseville Beach and Thirsty Sword Lesbians.
• Also, you can grab Inevitable, the mythic game of doomed cowboy-knights from Soul Muppet Publishing.

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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!