Books, Pen, Paper, and Dice

Part One: Tomes of Lore.
By Kerey McKenna.

Like pretty much...EVERYONE these days I have been cooped up in my own house for extended periods of time. Now in this catastrophe that we all find ourselves in, it’s natural for bibliophiles and nerds to cozy up with their reading lists and media streams to wait the whole thing out. Now that we have all this time with our media, good thing we all got our reading glasses before everything shut down right?

While perusing my shelves trying to decide whether to pick up something from my “to read list” or to seek the comfort of an old favorite, I noticed a small subset of my collection that had been gathering dust...my RPG books. Here at Nerds Who Read we’ve looked at prose books, comic books, and TV and movies based on said books, but so far we've never come upon a reason to discuss that nerdiest of nerd books, the RPG book.

We get a lot of different kinds of nerds here at Nerds Who Read and I assume some of you are very familiar with RPGs, so most of this first article will be things you already know. Others may not have played but will recognize the general concept and the most famous RPG game, Dungeons & Dragons, from shows like Stranger Things. Perhaps for some readers, their only familiarity with the genre came from the “satanic panic,” when some moral guardian objected to the occult themes and use of dice in such games. Because dice, lead to vice, and the RPG, that rhymes with T, that stands for Trouble. RIGHT HERE IN RIVER CITY.

Paper Pencil RPGS as we know them today are a unique confluence of improvisational theater, board games (specifically tabletop war games going back to the late 1700s), and genre fiction (usually but not always some flavor of fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc). RPG stands for Role Playing Game because the players adopt the role of characters in a story. In board games like Monopoly, Clue, or Settlers of Katan, players are never not themselves and the actions they take on the game board are always towards the goal of winning. Even in a game like Clue where the game’s cover art (and the hilarious movie adaptation) suggest that every color of token should be a different eccentric character, participants don’t play act as Miss Scarlet or Professor Plum through a game framed as a manor murder mystery. Actually if anyone wants to host a murder mystery night game of Clue (after we’re released from social distancing) and we all dress in character please let me know if I can come and play too.

To me, RPG books are amazing artifacts in and of themselves. During my first foray into RPGs as a teenager, the clerk of a hobby store once told me that they believed the majority of customers bought more RPG books then they ever actually expected to use to play the games as intended. Over the years I’ve acquired books with no clear guarantee that I would ever get to play the game the book is a part of. And yet I will from time to time enjoy picking them back up to read. The vast majority of RPGS have a “Core Book” that may come in at several hundred pages because of all the things it has to do for the game. It serves as an instruction manual explaining how the mechanics of the game work. Furthermore because those rules can be so complex, many games include bestiaries of creatures, catalogs of items, and atlases of places real or fictional that are part of the RPG’s story. It can contain a work of short fiction or perhaps even an anthology of short stories that serve to illustrate the themes, lore, and game mechanics. And speaking of illustrations, depending on when the book was published and how much funding was put into it, there will be illustrations ranging from amateur art reminiscent of self-published fanzines to lushly painted illustrations created by professional graphic artists. Furthermore, many games will have supplemental books with additional, optional content like different stories, characters, game mechanics, settings and new approaches to playing the game.

The bit about this hobby that may surprise readers who only know RPGs by association with its most famous game, Dungeons & Dragons is that there are many, many RPGs that are not about stereotypical medieval high fantasy quests inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien with elves and dwarves casting magic spells. I have one game called Starfinder which takes some of the aspects of high fantasy but adds a science fiction space opera twist. I have another game called Shadow Run which is a mashup of high fantasy and the cyberpunk. Most of my collection dates back to when I was a teenager playing games set in the “World of Darkness.” This line of books are set in a world that was superficially like our own but just under the surface all manner of supernatural creatures like werewolves, vampires, and fairies are in hiding and the players assume the role of those creatures. I have another game, Mutants & Masterminds that is an all-out pastiche of comic book superheroes.

Inevitably, while revisiting my collection, I started pouring over my Space 1889 books. Space 1889 is very much a steampunk game; it takes a lot of inspiration from Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, imagining a world in which Victorians used fantastical machines to travel around the solar system, encountering planets teeming with life and alien civilizations.

Looking over my books, with their maps of Martian canal cities, story hooks about sinister secret societies, and rules for weapons right out of John Carter of Mars, I resolved to use my books to run a game for some friends while we are all stuck inside—via web conference of course.

I’ll tell you all about that next time.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, MA. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

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Photo Credit(s): HistoricalBoardGaming.com