Introductions from the editors to the first issue of Playtest Material.

What is an RPG like?

This is the question Laurie posed to me and everyone who wanted to submit for this first issue of Playtest Material. An RPG is like literature, as it comes in books and often revolves around stories. But RPG books are not literature, as they are rarely texts that are expected to be read from beginning to end, or even sequentially, and don’t tell a story[1]. They are instructions on how to create a story, so like a script for a play or a movie. But none of the lines for the players are contained in the books[2]. They’re like a framework for creating a story, like a prompt for improvisation, a script with just stage directions. And those stage directions are often coded as “rules”, as mathematical games of chance, or instructions of what is possible and impossible in a particular imagined space. People often laugh during games, laughing at sequences of words they’ve just summoned, or situations they’ve helped mentally construct. So RPGs are like improv comedy, but often riffing off stories set down and repeated hundreds of times, like jazz or the stories of griots. And RPGs are also put together from fragments, mental images placed upon image to create something new, like collage. Or they’re built from nothing but the player’s imagination, pencils and scraps of paper, like drawings. They can be cathartic, like therapy, rambling and silly like a soap opera and subversive like agitprop or standup comedy. Like a boardgame without a board, or a videogame without boundaries or a play without an audience. Or stories with rules, or lasers with feelings, or dungeons with dragons.

"From itch.io to Paizo, you can feel cultures of play changing, people poking at the edges of things, tuning engines, hacking codes, patching broken hardware and seeing what this baby can do."

In the difficulty of its definition lies the truth of RPGs. They are their own thing. An artform that has been with us since the beginning of storytelling, at the same time as being younger than comic books. RPGs are a baby crying, screaming and giggling at the world. Raucous, unruly, unruled, we’ve only just begun to fully investigate what is possible through this medium, and I believe that RPGs are only going to get more popular and more weird, more emotional, more profound. From itch.io to Paizo, you can feel cultures of play changing, people poking at the edges of things, tuning engines, hacking codes, patching broken hardware and seeing what this baby can do. And one of the things that I think RPGs can do so well is bring people together. Bring people together to play, and bring people together to feel.

In an increasingly atomised world, where new technologies are prompting hyperbolic questions about the function of humanity, we need more things that bring us together, that help us think through where we are, where we’re going, and how we can alter that trajectory. And I believe RPGs can be one of those things; a portal to other worlds, or our world through a different lens. Like any tool, like any powerful medium, RPGs can be used to reinforce regressive paradigms or push hateful worldviews, just as much as they can be engines for empathy. But encoded in their essence is a resistance, an acknowledgement that other worlds are possible, that our thoughts are what make the world.

So let’s imagine more, and do more, and let those imaginings inform our deeds. Like comics and cinema, RPGs have had their golden and silver age. But I’m excited to see what comes next, and what RPGs will be like then. Maybe they’ll remain like they are – like nothing else.

David Blandy

David Blandy (he/him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas as diverse as ecology, history, science and arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again. He also writes and lays out TTRPGs, like Lost Eons, Lone Eons and The Awards 2024 winning ECO MOFOS!! David is also a part of Dying Earth Catalogue, a collective that put on exhibitions and events that explore TTRPGs as sites of simulation, fabulation, and disruption.

[1] Luke Gearing’s The Isle (2024) being an exception that proves the rule here.
[2] Barring boxed text.

Editorial

Some years ago, I shared a panel at a convention in Italy - Lucca Comics - alongside a good friend of mine. Something that she mentioned then has stayed with me. “If we consider role-playing games alongside the history of another art form; let's say cinema," she said, "we are barely at colour images yet." 

For a long time since then I've pondered what it means that TTRPGs are both expanding extremely rapidly, and are very, very young. The only art form I can think of that has undergone such a rapid transformation and expansion is club music, and that is quite a tenuous comparison to draw. Playtest Material was conceptualised as a place to pause to think in the midst of all that rapid development. 

Apocalypse World, the text which many in the world of RPGs consider revolutionary, came out only sixteen years ago. The lyric game and solo game “movements” are younger still. We move fast and understand slowly.  As such, within the pages of this issue readers will find two articles analysing Apocalypse World and other TTRPGs, both through the lens of language. Benjamin Klug returns as far as Plato's Republic and classical Greek concepts of mimesis and diegesis to propose a discussion of the linguistic turn in RPGs, starting from Apocalypse World. Amelia Stephen adds to this by elaborating a very basic primer to speech-act theory; essential reading for anyone wishing to truly understand the intersection of mechanics and play. Their inclusion in this magazine reflects a desire to look at the building-blocks of our current scene, and our current methods of play. But we understand that these are starting points; the opening of a conversation.

It may seem odd to define role-playing as “young”, when games have been played since before humans were even writing. Indeed, playing pretend is almost certainly one of the oldest types of game there is. “Costumes” are older than pottery. Greek gods inhabited human roles solely for their own entertainment. And one of the greatest early modern novels; Don Quixote, is arguably about a man who gets too much into his own larp, and about how others make the choice to play along or refuse.

But the TTRPG movement of the last fifty years seems less interested in being a new frontier in the ancient history of games—people are often taken aback when I tell them I initially came to game design through playing bridge—and much more interested in defining itself in relation to storytelling art forms. Roleplaying consistently undergoes a kind of combined and uneven development wherein we steal everything we possibly can from film and literature, fantasy and science fiction, boil it down to its essential components and then instil it in a game, which itself lasts for only a brief window before we move on to the next big development. Rarely do we stop to think about why and how we are borrowing. Kayla Dice's piece on melodrama in TTRPGs is a good demonstration of this: RPGS are in so many ways a child of movie culture and fan culture, raised on the most popular forms of pretending that currently exist, and it shows in how exaggerated our storytelling instincts still are. Sometimes in ways film itself has already mostly moved away from.

It's not an accident, then, that so much of the money in this hobby is in licensed games. A growing child eats whatever's nearby. In the cycle of media consumption, absorption and reiteration, the hobby also occasionally spits something back out, returns something to the earth, as in the short-lived Kindred: The Embraced TV series, reviewed by Stephen Wilds in this issue. 

We initially intended to carry a piece in this issue which covered the question of licensed games in more detail, but it proved unfeasible given the sheer number of submissions we received. Nonetheless, I think we can learn a huge amount about our scene from the slew of licenses and off-brand TTRPGs which emulate everything from Firefly to Alien, and then of course the big guns: ATLA, Lord of the Rings, and so on.  It seems almost perverse such an imaginative, inherently playful activity can be so closely wedded to corporate mega-franchises, and indeed, in many cases, rely on these licenses for financial survival.

It seems like a contradiction, but perhaps it's a creative one, not a destructive one. Constraint produces innovation (The Dr Who RPG, for example, produced a fascinating initiative system designed to mechanically incentivise pacifist play). I asked a lot of designers who'd worked on licensed titles what the appeal was, and the answer was almost always "getting new people into the hobby"; though lately, now the hobby's got big enough some licensors have started treating it as a way to get viewers instead. But that answer takes us away from the more interesting question: what does a licensed game give you that the source material didn't? What do I get from Mothership that I don't get from watching Alien? From the Buffy RPG that I don't get from the show?

The Work of A Thousand Possibilities

Almost without pause, the majority of TTRPG writers and players I spoke with offered a variation on the following: TTRPGs are a way for people to play within the story they love, to influence the world, and to change it. Playing in someone else’s world feels inherently exhilarating, as every new part of the game offers possibilities which can be interpreted by humans in uncountable and diverse ways. Noa Chazan explores this with reference to procedural generation in this issue, but there is more. A single line of setting in an RPG acts as a wrapper for a thousand variations, iterated at different play tables. What is potentially created into a story through implication or outside knowledge is bigger than what is actually written down, a concept explored by both Irving Benitez, through the lens of hermit crab literature, and Philippa Mort, in a case study on hinterland knowledge in Wanderhome. While this may be a nightmare for a license holder hoping to sell a game license to something whilst keeping their entire gig consistent and without lore plotholes, it's a blessing for humans—a mammal species who from birth are endowed with endless curiosity and a tendency to ask "why?" and "what if?" as an essential part of our process of understanding the world.

Other formats ask us to consume stories whole; and yes, then to think about them, to discuss and discourse about them, but first of all to take them as they are. TTRPGs ask us to work at our stories from the very beginning, and accept that they may never be completed, or at least that they are heading in no particular direction at their onset. Far from being a downside, however, this presents immense potential. Within our pages we have published experimental writing by Anna Simpson and Milo Cassidy which approaches this in two completely different ways; one oriented around converting any preexisting story into a game, the other focused on breaking down a single short story and rearranging it, reconstructing its language and discovering it as a new tale.

"Not for nothing has play been described as the work of childhood, though there is no reason I have ever found that should confine play, and its transformative capacity, to childhood alone."

Karen David, in an excellent essay for this magazine entitled Someplace Between There and Here, offers an understanding of roleplaying games as projects of becoming, stories that resist becoming closed in lieu of continuing. She proposes that games can be understood as "carrier bags," in which we move experiences from reality to fiction and fiction to reality; a process which transforms ourselves and our fictions at the same time. Anthropologists have perceived a corner of this same experience when they observe children learning through play; parents call on something similar when they ask their kids whether a Time Lord would hit a classmate who refuses to share toys. It is a simple experience in one sense, and yet it resists easy definition and requires work. Irving Benitez's interview with Elizabeth Little introduces the concept of ergodic literature: works of literature which require active effort from the reader to understand. This, the labour of playing an RPG, is perhaps useful to add to David’s essay. Not for nothing has play been described as the work of childhood, though there is no reason I have ever found that should confine play, and its transformative capacity, to childhood alone.

The Craft of Storytelling

TTRPGs can, then, offer something truly special as an art form, even if we can't explain it completely yet. Part of that lies in its ability to transform that which already exists, thread together the known with the new, and be an ongoing conversation as much as it is a finished product.

This is the focal point of one of our features, by D. “Zhen” C. Zhen proposed an article comparing TTRPGs with Rakugo, a form of semi-improvisational one-actor storytelling popularised in seventeenth-century Japan. The Rakugoka (Rakugo master) appears as an isolated, solitary figure — a guide who leads an audience through their stories, whose sole purpose is dedicated to keeping the audience entertained. As one experiences the unfolding of a Rakugo story, one experiences something that is both familiar (the same few story scripts, or perhaps more accurately, containers, are repeated, such as Momotaro or Manjyu Kowai) and new every time, as the performer improvises, jokes, and adjusts the flow of the tale for their spectators. 

When we initially workshopped this article, Zhen and I thought we might gain something interesting by looking at another improvisational storytelling medium. We might compare the structures and skills across the two art forms to find, at the very least, some useful GMing advice which we could then package nicely. We did that, but more. What emerged was really a discussion about the culturally embedded nature of storytelling itself: who is responsible for the unfinished story, which bends to each new audience? What responsibility does the storyteller have to their audience, and to their own artistry? 

The Rakugo master is an experienced curator, a carrier of tradition, and simultaneously an artist in their own right. They must know which rules to obey and which to alter — an experience which ultimately comes from life itself. Their storytelling is positioned simultaneously as an act of constant, creative transformation, and the ultimate act of service; traditionally a Rakugoka would train by being an indentured servant to a master of the craft, attending their every whim, on the principle that if you cannot please one person, how can you please an audience?

Rakugo teaches us about what it means to take responsibility for a story. Artefacts of play from Zhen's own campaigns showed how a GM engages in specific techniques, like makura, designed to service their specific audience. We discover, in one style and one role within TTRPG, an expression of emotional labour, care, and craft excellence which emerges as much from an awareness of the constraints of real life as it does from a knowledge of the story that is to be told. And then a Rakugoka, like many GMs, wakes up in time for the next show and does it all over again; the same, but different. In this case, it is not only the storyteller who is becoming, but the story itself.

Games, Artistry and Transformation

It is perhaps unsurprising that two of our features deal with the intersection between theatre and TTRPG—well-trodden ground, and yet one that continually offers more paths to explore. Nicholas Orvis's article on theatre and TTRPG play is an excellent companion to Zhen's in that it focuses on players and spectators rather than exclusively game-runners. He discusses, with fascinating attention to detail, what it means to pretend to be someone else, the potential consequences of it, and how it might be embraced within theatre, as well as how it might become a part of a player's personal development, for example through "emancipatory bleed." This topic is explored in a different, but equally useful way by Miriam Jackel-Dewhurst in her review of Unknown Armies, which discusses the use of the shock-gauge system as a model for trauma, and presents a case for how participating in a game that explores trauma with empathy can be transformative not only to the game, but to individual players.

We return once again to the theme which emerged from our pieces: role-playing is inherently transformative. It transforms the fictions that it acts on, and the players who engage with it. It carries hundreds of different expectations; the life experiences of all its players, the context of the writer and publisher, and above all the world outside. Tori Truslow's piece on collage in RPGs demonstrates this in a totally different way. Tori moves away from the concept of player and game-runner, fiction and non-fiction, and focuses instead on that ultimate truth of play: we bring what we can find, and rearrange it into something new. While collage and role-playing may be in many ways far apart, both deal with the act of transformation and ownership through playfulness. The magazine becomes my collage, the Fear of Manjyu story becomes my Fear of Hamburgers, and their Middle Earth, Springfield or Forgotten Realms becomes ours through playing in it.

Unanswered Questions

Nicholas Orvis also talks about the idea of speculative worlding: the manners and techniques theatre uses to ask an audience to think about the world and how it might be different. Once again, we bring fiction into dialogue with reality. The piece draws on Brecht's "epic theatre," the framing techniques through which he tries to prevent the audience from settling comfortably into the fiction, to discuss and truly understand its political and social commentary. Reading the draft article, I kept getting hung up on one question: if role-playing is genuinely a technology for transforming how people relate to reality, why does so much of it stay comfortably positioned in settings, genres and topics that ask very little of its spectators?

It was Brecht, after all, who once proclaimed: "to those who do not know that the world is on fire, I have nothing to say."

In the same way as there is a theatre of the oppressed, a documentary film, a political novel, can there be, as certain video-game developers have proposed, a gameplay of the oppressed? Can some types of roleplaying become something conscious of the edges of its fiction, where it spills into real life? This is a topic I believe is not covered enough in this issue, besides Luka Brave's fantastic piece on disability and hope in Apocalypse Keys, and Miriam’s piece on trauma already discussed. This is not for lack of possible content, as there are writers and play groups doing work that fits this bill. 

There are places for many types of art, covering many different topics, but role-playing as a whole will benefit from becoming more aware of the living world it’s connected to. Despite the proliferation of discussion about "human-made games," we rarely acknowledge the following truth: if our art form, in general, has nothing to say about genocide, ecocide, the hopeless, desperate position of ordinary working-class people, and the countless abuses carried out by our corrupt billionaire class, then it may be human made, but it is not truly human. 

This is not the responsibility of every individual game-player, but it is, I believe, one of the responsibilities of any magazine that would claim to discuss role-playing as an art form. As such, I would rather admit that gap than gloss over it. I believe it will be an important seed for at least our next two issues, which will be on the topic of Histories and Land/Lands.

RPGs are not only works of pure fantasy but are instead as much about ourselves and our experiences, good and bad. They are projects of becoming as much as they are complete tales. Not only are our games already full of artistry and expertise, they have so much further to grow. Roll on Issue Two: Histories, where I  hope much of the analysis in Issue One will act as a starting point for concrete discussions about our worlds, our histories, and the different fictions we connect with.

Laurie O'Connel, Lead Editor

Laurie O’Connel is a London-born, Dublin-based writer, archaeologist, and activist. Bridging the divide between satire and sincerity, his work focusses heavily on themes of systems and resistance, and pushes the limits of popular understandings of what tabletop role-playing games are, who they are for, and what they can do. In addition to game-writing, he has written on current affairs and political theory for publications including The Communist and In Defence of Marxism.