This diary has its roots in the early 1980s, back when your resident historiorantologist was a diehard (or, to be more accurate, obsessive) participant in late-night sessions of Dungeons & Dragons - while unwittingly laying the groundwork for several later-in-life events which intersected at DailyKos. Back in those days, a Commodore 64 was cutting-edge technology, and the Internet was still the stuff of WarGames antics – we who wished to live out Second Lives as elves, and paladins were left to our own imaginations (and handfuls of oddly-shaped dice) to create our collaborative realities. In the process, many of us developed passions for literature, history, and storytelling that have been with us ever since.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we'll take a look at the Last Great Fad before computers absconded with the attention spans of America's youth. I'll also – with many thanks owed to Swordsmith - finally give an affirmative response to those of you who've so kindly asked over the past two years if there'd ever be a published tome of Moonbat history: Yes, there is, it's about the Crusades, and it'll be out in June.
Historiorant: We'll get into the mechanics of some of this stuff a bit later in the diary, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with the genre, here's a great definition from David Waldron at the University of Ballarat (Victoria, Australia), who published a really interesting article on manufactured moral outrage and role-playing games in the Spring, 2005 edition of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture:
Role-playing games (RPGs) are a form of interactive novel in which the protagonists create and control the actions of a cast of characters. The characters operate in a virtual world controlled by a referee/narrator figure called the GM or games master, depending on which variant of game is being played. (Variants include Dungeon Master, referee, narrator, storyteller, etc.). The GM creates a virtual world and the players make decisions, based on their character’s interaction with that world and moderated by a combination of statistics, probability and characterisation. The worlds themselves vary from the traditional Dungeons and Dragons adaptation of Tolkeinesque fantasy realms to Cyberpunk, Gothic Horror, Espionage, Space Opera and Westerns and include some settings that are so surreal as to defy simple definitions. Most forms of literature have an expression as an RPG, some much more popular and mainstream than others.
Role-Playing Games and the Christian Right: Community Formation in Response to a Moral Panic
In Days of Yore...
Like most things in our modern world, the roots of role-playing games goes back far further than most people might venture to guess – it's pretty easy to imagine early humans, sitting around the same fire night after night, inventing a sort of group-based story as a means of staving off boredom. By the 16th century, traveling groups of troubadours were engaging in Commedia dell'arte, a kind of improvisational theater based on stock characters and situations; within another couple of centuries, rising literacy rates (and, probably, electricity's penchant for allowing us to stay up long after sundown) led to the creation of board- and parlour games that often included role-playing elements.
Mock trials and legislatures lent themselves particularly well to this – a game called Jury Box was one of the first to incorporate RPG-style elements – though sets of "Theater Games" created by American drama instructor Viola Spolin (1906-1994) were soon utilizing similar improvisational techniques. In his autobiography, Harpo Marx also apparently referred to a role-playing "assassination" game that was being played in New York in the 1920s, though none of these early efforts combined the improvisational aspects of acting with the elaborate rules later developed as part of RPGing.
The other half of the lineage of the RPG comes from wargame simulations, which began around 1780 with Helwig, the Master of Pages to the Duke of Brunswick, who drew upon chess as his inspiration to create realistic, but theoretical, battles. The idea caught on in Northern Germany – between 1803 and 1809, many of these kriegspiel were being created by the Prussian General Staff, who moved little lead soldiers around a tabletop, winning or losing encounters based on rolls of dice.
In 1913, HG Wells released Little Wars, a series of rules for toy soldier battles. Though originally intended for children, it found a niche market among adults who tweaked and modified the rules with increasing complexity, which spurred interest in other, similar games that focused on Napoleonic and later warfare. One of my personal favorites, Diplomacy, set in pre-WWI Europe and designed not to rely on any random element (dice, cards, etc.) outside of human nature itself, was invented in 1954 (released in 1959), and brought into gaming a social interaction and need for interpersonal skills that earlier variants hadn't taken into account. It's worth noting that the blurb on the box lists Diplomacy as Henry Kissinger's favorite game.
The impact of the creative energy that accompanied the 1960s and 70s was felt in gaming in a big way. On the West Coast, groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism (founded 1966) were physically re-creating medieval life, while Back East, the first tentative steps toward what could definitively be called a new type of game were being taken by organizations like the New England Wargamers Association, which in 1970 demonstrated an RPG at a convention of military wargamers.
The Late, Great, Somewhat Irascible E. Gary Gygax
One of the groups that was pushing the envelope of what could be done on a tabletop in the late 1960s was the Wargaming Society at the University of Minnesota, and one of the individuals who pushed it the furthest was Gary Gygax, who in 1971 published the rules for a late medieval war simulation called Chainmail. What was unusual about Chainmail was the Appendix, which included rules for battling dragons and casting spells; by late 1971, fellow Minnesota gamer David Arneson was incorporating these features into the Blackmoor campaign world he was developing. This made Blackmoor the world's first truly recognizable RPG, as it focused on the actions of individual characters, rather than groups of warriors. Blackmoor is also the longest-running campaign in RPG history – it was still going as late as 2006.
Blackmoor included many of the features later gamers would instantly recognize as critical components of an RPG – things like armor class, hit points, experience points, and character levels (don't worry, non-gamer types who've made it this far into Nerdworld – your resident historiorantologist will be giving a brief overview of these sorts of things in a moment – u.m.). Shortly afterwards, Gygax and Arneson collaborated to create Dungeons & Dragons, which first hit the shelves of boutique bookstores – this was way before the age of Barnes & Noble – in 1974. In 1979, the basic rules were vastly expanded via a set of hardcover books which included the Dungeon Master's Guide, Player's Handbook, and Monster Manual. These became the core of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and by the time bands like Flock of Seagulls had played their last note, the campaigns they spawned had consumed untold hours of this young moonbat's life.
My own gaming dropped off considerably when the Air Force sent me to Germany in the late 1980s, but AD&D adventured on. The company Gygax and partner Don Kaye founded back in the early 70s, Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (a/k/a "TSR"), reached its peak employment in 1984, with over 300 people managing an empire that included the rule books, dozens of "modules" for Dungeon Masters to incorporate into their own gaming worlds, a cartoon TV series, and the much longer-lived Dragon magazine. Gygax severed his relationship with the company in 1985, but remained a part of the gaming world (and an important enough cultural force to voice his own character on an episode of Futurama in 2000) until his passing on March 4 of this year.
Some of you may remember this module as a real ass-kicker – curse you, Acererak!
The Offspring of Success
The game had broad appeal: a 1990 estimate places the number of people in the US, Canada, and Australia who were playing RPGs at least once a month at around 7.5 million (Waldron, 2005), and cultural references from the period abound – that was D&D those kids were playing when E.T.'s spaceship was landing on the hill behind their house. The number had dipped to around 5.5 million by 2000, according to a survey conducted by TSR's successor, Wizards of the Coast, due in part to the rise of computer and online versions of role-playing games and the sudden and unexpected popularity of WotC's own Magic: The Gathering, the 1993 release of which started a trend in trading-card-based games that is still going strong today.
Role-playing games came under attack from Christian conservatives in the early 1980s, and the manner in which they leveled and pursued their accusations have since become a template for right-wing swiftboating. Patricia Pulling, who founded Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (B.A.D.D.), a one-person advocacy group, after her son committed suicide in 1982, was one such trailblazer on the path of ignorance. Lacking any evidence but that generated by her own imagination – as buttressed only by a collection of unsourced anecdotes – she invented a whole, heretofore hidden subculture of satanic recruiting and demon worship that the game had inflicted upon American society. Though she lost every court case she brought (or in which she testified as an "expert" witness), Pulling's insane conjectures, loudly repeated by the nascent right-wing noise machine, managed to cast a certain stigma over the game – it became an article of faith among certain Christians that playing D&D would lead as surely to satanic rituals and human sacrifice as would listening to a Kiss album.
Pulling had chosen her enemy well, for the kind of people who played D&D were not the sort generally given to political activism or organization. As noted by David Waldron:
Overall, most correspondence (from survey participants) reflected a profound sense of frustration from gamers at their inability to be heard in the face of what, they felt, was an astounding level of ignorance and superstition among the mass media and public authority figures. Many letters and comments described feelings of having been betrayed by teachers and parents. There was an overall realisation by many contributors that the games were more than a hobby; they were a major social and creative outlet and an important vehicle for personal expression. Finally, many of the contributors described a sense of bewilderment. Many had no previous difficulties with public authority figures, maintained solid grades and maintained what they had thought to be good relationships with their parents. Suddenly they found themselves perceived as a major threat to the social order.
Role-Playing Games and the Christian Right: Community Formation in Response to a Moral Panic
McCarthey-esque attacks on RPG gamers became the order of the day in some circles, and a cottage industry sprang up fan the flames through the simple expedient of making stuff up. In 1984, an avowed Catholic-hater and fundie typist named Jack Chick published Dark Dungeons (DANGER: the Stupid is very strong in this one – u.m.), a comic strip which asserted that D&D gaming groups and satanic covens were one in the same. That same year, Chick Publications vomited forth William Schnoebelen's Straight Talk on Dungeons and Dragons, a masterpiece of innuendo and circular reasoning that was updated by the equally fallacious Should a Christian Play Dungeons & Dragons? in 2001.
As noted above, the background of most gamers did not prepare them to go as group into conflict with some of the best-organized, self-referential, loudest, angriest, and most closed-minded members of our society. Their weaponry was generally limited to boring statistics, actual experience with the game, and a sarcastic tone. A great example of the latter can be found in this response to the question of whether or not a Christian should play D&D, in which the author uncovers the hidden satanic meanings in the a presumably Christian-approved game:
A further heresy implicit in the play of Chess, is that of returning lost souls to play. If a simple pawn makes it unmolested to the final rank of the enemy's side, he can be transmuted to any other piece of the game. In this manner, lost pieces can be regained. The bible (sic) clearly shows that there is only one event of importance following an individual's death, and that is the judgment. After that, the soul is sent Heavenwards or dropped into the Lake of Fire. Reincarnation is the devil's idea.
CHESS: The Subtle Sin
As is typically the case with the right's hit-and-run attacks, they were eventually proven false – but generating detailed, researched responses to off-the-cuff accusations takes a lot more time (with a resultant wandering of attention on the part of bystanders) than simply making up horrid-sounding stuff on the spot, so the fundies pretty much won this particular battle for public perception. The phenomenon has been the subject of later studies such as INSIDE THE 'SATAN SCARE' INDUSTRY - THE DEVIL MAKES THEM DO IT - While nation's cops chase demons, taxpayers get burned, and in 1990, Michael Stackpole published The Pulling Report, which discredited the Great Satan Scare with gems like this:
That same negative evidence can used to "prove" that molemen from beneath the surface of the earth have perpetrated these (unsolved) murders. The fact that the molemen have left no evidence behind proves how good they are at remaining hidden. That no sewer or road building projects have ever cut across their tunnels proves that politicians and engineers and other professionals are in league with the molemen. Just as obviously, anyone who denies the molemen exist is either in league with them, or is a fool who cannot see the end coming.
But the damage had already been done – and the right wing/Christian propaganda machine had cut its teeth on a bewildered enemy without the resources to mount a proper defense. Having learned some critical lessons about the manipulation of public opinion, they were ready to move on to bigger, feistier targets, and by the late 1990s, men and women of the same sex who happened to love one another occupied the same place in the fundie mind as once had Dungeon Masters.
TSR's legal and PR departments stayed busy in other ways, too – besides the obligation to defend the game against the scurrilous, unfounded accusations of conservative nutjobs, books like Rona Jaffe's Mazes and Monsters (made into a 1982 TV movie starring Tom Hanks) were trying to capitalize on the disinformation fad, blatant copycats like Tunnels & Trolls had sprung up, and TSR itself had run into copyright infringement issues pertaining to the Deities & Demigods rule book (they'd included pantheons from H.P. Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné stories).
The State of Gaming This Summer
If their objective was to destroy the gaming industry, the fundies failed miserably. Millions of people still enjoy gaming on a regular basis, and publishers like Wildside Press have continued to put out new games and products based on the RPG model. Computer and online versions of RPGs, as well as card-based games, have gained significant market share in the past decade-and-a-half, but they have also introduced significant numbers of new gamers to the RPG world, and every year, hundreds of gaming conventions are held in cities around the world.
The first such gathering of gamers occurred in Gary Gygax' basement in the late '60s; from these humble beginnings grew industry behemoths like the Origins Game Fair held annually in Columbus, Ohio. This year's Origins runs from June 25 through the 29th, and will play host to over 4000 gaming sessions covering every conceivable genre – plus, it'll be attended by some folks that you know, including both yours truly and fellow Kossack Swordsmith. Everyone from hard-core RPGers to the casually interested non-gamer is invited to attend; when you do, make sure to stop by the WILDSIDE Gaming System (an RPG developed and published by Swordsmith) table and introduce yourself.
Enough History, Moonbat – How Do I Play?
Perhaps the best way to those unfamiliar with the model what an RPG looks like is to place one in the sort of context we blogospheric political junkies understand – and it just so happens that Swordsmith has one of those dwelling on his userpage. The Saturday before the November, 2006 elections, he and I published a mock-up of an RPG entitled Rove: The Roleplaying Game. In the pre-landslide frenzy, it didn't attract too much attention, so revisiting a portion of it here doesn't seem like it would be too out of line. Here's the background Swordsmith provided:
Note: For those who haven't played them, roleplaying games are basically a kind of improv. Each of 4-6 players creates a character (how strong and smart that person is, what sort of family he or she comes from, what skills he or she has) and then plays that character in a world created by the person running the game, known as the GM. The games are usually continuous - you may play the same character every week for a few months, during which time the character grows and changes based on the events in the game. Creatures - such as other people, monsters, and even Republicans - who your character meets and interacts with are often referred to as NPCs, meaning non-player characters. While this world is written for the Wildside Gaming System (which, naturally, we think all of you should be playing), it's not necessary to understand this or any other system to have fun with the adventure.
And here's what I figured characters would face if they dared to venture into the nightmare landscape of a Washington, D.C., that had come under the full control of the Dark Side. In this vignette, characters find themselves confronting an horrific, mindless monster in the very place where reason and respect for time-honored tradition ought to be deepest of all – yet as in most RPG adventures, defeating the monster and interacting properly with the NPCs results in things that could be helpful later in the adventure.
Supreme Court - Entrance - two large, Romanesque buildings on opposite sides of the street. Many goptrolls are gathered in front of the building to the north, the one with the broad steps and "Law Under Justice" carved above the 16 pillars gracing its west entrance. To enter the Supreme Court, characters will have to pass through a mob of goptrolls, who may or may not be violent.
Goptroll - inhabiting one of the lower echelons of Rethug society are the goptrolls, mindless automatons who protest upon command. They are usually found in the vicinity of television cameras, moaning loudly about how nobody's listening to them. Like their Internet counterparts, goptrolls seek to disrupt discourse and monopolize conversation. They are impervious to irony-based attack and sarcasm-based defense, but use their own Bellow attack to "get the message out" at +10%. If there are enough goptrolls present to form a Rally, the group may launch a Mass Berate attack, in which the victim will be surrounded and shouted to the ground, rendering him immobile for 1-6 rounds.
Goptrolls generally prefer to shout and chant insults in a large group, but they will occasionally be moved to physically attack their arch-enemies, "the libruls" (the chance of such an attack occurring increases dramatically if the goptroll's adversary mentions anything that the goptroll construes as a "Democrat talking point"). When they attack, goptrolls will use either their bare hands or will employ placards with aborted fetus pictures or "God hates fags" slogans as clubs.
table: I (100/50)
fights: +1; bellowing
armor:5; immune to irony
If they make it through the goptrolls, the characters will find the Supreme Court building unlocked. In the entry foyer, the ghost of John Marshall appears before them. In a haunting, 1800s-orator kind of way, the great Chief Justice moans from beyond the grave:
"Go ye not any further into this place!"
Presumably, the characters will ask why they are being warned off. If they do, proceed with the dialogue below. If they do not, and rudely push past or ignore the ghost, then skip ahead to "The Chamber of Justice."
"The scales are broken! They tilt to one side only! That which restrained evil is no more!"
The conversation could take many turns at this point; the GM should be prepared to ad-lib from the perspective of the ghost of the man who first found in the Constitution the concept of judicial review - i.e., mournful and gloomy about the present state of Supreme Court affairs. Marshall's focus is on the now-missing Writ of Habeas Corpus. If the characters are looking for other information, they'll only get it if they can convince Marshall's ghost that it will help to restore the missing right. While conversing with the shade, the GM may impart any, all, or none of the following tidbits:
- What's going on the Court Chamber is unspeakably horrid; the ghost will implore the characters not to go any further into the Supreme Court building.
- He will intimate that the documents that once protected our great nation do so no longer, that waving scraps of paper in the faces of their enemies will do no good. "The only ideas that will rescue the Writ and save the Republic are the ones so important that our sculptors have carved them in stone."
- As suspected, the Writ is being held in an undisclosed location - i.e., a bunker beneath the White House.
- "The ivory towers may provide things of usefulness, but tarry not in the halls of Congress, for what good once dwelt there was sold long ago."
- "Go ye not to the Offices of the Republican Congressmen, especially if ye be a strapping young lad, and avoid those of the Democrats, for they are castrated, and are held in thrall by men meaner and baser than they."
- "Go ye not into the Offices of the Senators, for it is peopled by quack doctors and spineless panderers. The cause of liberty will find no help there."
Supreme Court - Court Chamber beyond the cavernous doorways where the 6 1/2 ton bronze doors once stood (the doors were themselves melted down and forged into cannon, spear tips, and swords for the Rethuglican Guard) lies the Court Chamber. Here, a 5-headed Hydra has strapped 4 Justices to the Bench, and is waterboarding them upon it.
A Hydra, especially a Court-unbalancing 5-headed one, is an extremely dangerous creature. In addition to its bulk and the waves of condescending illogic than emanate from it, each of the Hydra's heads has a special power:
- Alito - uses the "Vancufulo" attack, in which it hurls invectives in foreign languages and overwhelms the thoughtful with bluster and smug condescension.
- Roberts - sneaks up on characters by unobtrusively lying in wait and biding its time, then appearing out of nowhere to be named Chief Head (though it did once play second fiddle to Harriet Meiers, and it's still very pissed about that). It will then bludgeon characters with out-of-context interpretations of the Federalist Papers.
- Thomas - spouts opinions that cause confusion in characters; save vs. spell or be immobilized by the breadth of the nonsense flowing out of this head's mouth.
- Scalia - the most dangerous head, it can actually stop time and thereby alter the course of all subsequent events. This was last seen in Florida in December, 2000, but this head is so full of itself that it would not hesitate to use its terrible power if the opportunity again arose.
- Kennedy - this head pendulums back and forth, never knowing quite where it is going next. Its unpredictability will most often slam into the characters (75%), but occasionally it buts heads with one of its colleagues, too (25%).
If the characters defeat the Hydra, they can rescue the imprisoned Justices who will gratefully impart the following:
- Souter - the two is the power of the mind
- Breyer - the five the power of liberation
- Stevens - the one the power of leadership
- Ginsberg - `ware the fifty, for it is the power of power
In addition, the bedraggled, berobed judges give to the characters the Gavel of Justice, which, when wielded by Americans of sound mind and good judgment - and who understand the intent of the framers of the Constitution - dispenses ground-breaking waves of justice whenever it is used to broaden human rights.
What Diary Rescue and the Crusades have to do with All This
A little over 2 years ago (April 10, 2006, to be precise), the indomitable SusanG listed one of the diaries I'd been writing as part of what became a ten-part series on the Crusades in the evening's Open Thread and Diary Rescue. Though DR was then in its infancy (and the Rescue Rangers not yet conceived of), the rescue had a profound impact on my DKos career – I started cyber-meeting other history-type people around the site, and eventually the History for Kossacks tag was awarded the somewhat-rare distinction of being added to the Daily Kos FAQ.
Among the folks I met through later Crusades diaries was the aforementioned Swordsmith, who noted that the period from 1095 to 1192 would make an excellent setting for an RPG campaign. Given my gaming background – and pathological desire to see my work in print – I naturally concurred, and together he and I embarked on a partnership that has resulted in Wildside Press publishing (well, it'll be officially released at the Origins Game Fair in late June) a heavily expanded version of the first three Crusades diaries, now retooled as an adventure setting for the Wildside Gaming System.
Crusade of Kings
We sought to retain the flavor of an HfK diary – hopefully creating a fairly readable study of the early years of the Crusades, while at the same time providing an in-depth resource for Game Masters and players. Personally, I think it turned out pretty good (please take into account that I may be slightly biased in this matter), and the wise guidance and outstanding artwork that Swordsmith has provided along the way make for what we feel is a quality product. Here's a sample – feel free to click on the link which follows to avail yourself of the chance to see some more:
In 1094, the Byzantine Emperor Alexius Comnenus had a problem. There were Seljuks on his borders – Sunni Muslim Turks – and they were exerting considerable pressure on his eastern flank. Indeed, the borders of what remained of the Eastern Roman Empire were receding before these Turks. A lot of land that had recently been Byzantine was now Turkish. (This would become a big problem later when Crusaders wanted to loot and rampage through towns they captured from the Turks, but their Byzantine allies saw those towns as Byzantine land that had been liberated and should be left intact.) Compounding the problem was the fact that the Byzantines were lovers, not fighters – a fact decisively proven to them by said Turks at the Battle of Manzikert a few years earlier.
What the emperor needed was an army to fight with him, but the late eleventh century proved a little sparse in terms of acceptable, accessible allies. The Seljuks held the Holy Land and, after Manzikert, most of Turkey; the Fatamids occupied Egypt; the Russ were too powerful to demand tribute from anymore; and the Europeans had divvied up their tiny parcel of the world among a bunch of petty warlords, none of whom could supply more than a few dozen knights, even if he were so inclined (which he probably wouldn’t be). No, Alexius had to find a new angle, one that would coax huge numbers of Europeans to rally together and do the bidding of Constantinople – a daunting task, even for history’s Romulans.
Follow this link (pdf) for our schedule at the Origins Gaming Fair, and this one (pdf) for some exceprts from Crusade of Kings.
UPDATE: I'm so not used to this that I forgot to include my very first gushing jacket blurb:
"The most hotly anticipated book of the year! - pico"
Thanks, pico! :)
Historiorant:
I'd be remiss if I didn't thank some of the people who helped your resident historiorantologist get this far – SusanG, for the rescue that started it all; Meteor Blades, for the kind words when it seemed that no one else was reading the scribblings of a self-professed moonbat; the Rescue Rangers, for shining a spotlight on way-off-topic pieces like the ones I tend to post; Swordsmith and the folks at Wildside Press, for their vision in seeing what the diaries might become (and boundless patience in dealing with a publishing neophyte like me); and most of all, every single Kossack, NIONite, Progressive Historian, DocuDharmist, and Bits of News reader who has taken the time to rec, mojo, comment, or just read and send good vibes about the stuff I've been posting for lo, these past two years – without you, CRUSADE OF KINGS would have never become a reality. Thanks again, from the bottom of my moobatty little heart.
Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Never In Our Names, Bits of News, Progressive Historians, and DocuDharma.