Silent Legions or 'How To Do Lovecraft Right'

It's a known fact I hold a very positive opinion of Kevin Crawford's work in so much as his tabletop games are concerned. There's not a whole lot I truly know of the guy overall (and to be honest maybe it's better that way) but he's generally never failed to produce excellent games, especially in the area of his sandboxing tools. KC's work is generally defined, in my opinion, by a strong support and encouragement of GM to build things their own way and providing the right tools for it and nowhere is this more apparent than Silent Legions.

I've bitched about Lovecraft and his mythos before or, rather, why it's a bad idea to use it. Lovecraft's own work is something I do enjoy and find quite good but my issues with it exist beyond the man's original writing. By themselves, these stories are fine. The problem emerge from Lovecraft's mythos being held as some coherent fictional universe by his friends and future writers. To do so completely miss the point. Even worse: to use his mythos for tabletop is generally a terrible idea overall. When looking at the Lovecraftian universe in a vacuum (as in just HPL's story) there is a very clear understanding that we the readers are supposed to not know what horrible monsters and dreadful gods exist just as much as the protagonist is initially in the dark. Knowledge of things such as Great Old Ones and sorcery are limited to older text and personal journals, the kind of things which academic papers or (in the modern time) Wikipedia would not deem reliable. The mythos exist below the surface of accepted historical and cultural details.

The problem emerge when one decide to run Call of Cthulhu or any other RPG using Lovecraft's mythos. People who run and play these games miss the point entirely. They play with a group who knows what to expect. Even if we separate the player/character knowledge there's an implicit knowledge of the expected genre conventions and the overall, overarching mythos or, worse, a desire from the GM to actively reference it. This is a mistake and completely flies in the face of the original texts. There's a reason the better 'Lovecraftian' works of the past few decades have been divorced from H.P. Lovecraft's universe. If the entire genre is built on things man was not meant to know, then why is it that modern Lovecraftian works plays it safe and rely entirely on things the audience know and expect to see? Silent Legions offer a simple solution of offering sandbox tools and GM aide to build their own nightmarish reality.

Otherwise you end up with a group thinking the point of it all was 'tentacles and weird unpronounceable names'. Which I think does a major disservice to the work of Lovecraft.

"But Star Wars will be done my way! I don't care what you (Disney) have to say!"

Star Wars: once loved and adored as the modern mythology, now reduced to a punchline and cautionary tale of corporate greed, mishandling and misplaced politics from the people involved. What happened to the Star Wars we used to know? Well, it's dead and gone. At least as far as 'official' material is concerned.

"No, I am the correct line. Not 'Luke, I am
your Father', damn it!"

The thing is, Star Wars is the modern myth and Disney has no power over me as a tabletop Game Master. They can burn, they can destroy, corrupt and revise the lore as much as they want. As long as someone, somewhere, still has a copy of the original trilogy out there, Star Wars will live. We're not yet at the point where Disney can destroy people's old copies. I'm sure eventually they will be as insane as to remake Episode 1 through 6 and corrupt and twist every character but we're not there yet. I'm lucky enough to have been old enough to remember a time before even the Prequel trilogy, where my father rented the VHS of the original trilogy (in its old, slightly crappy French dubs) and sitting on the couch being blown away by that line. You know, "No, I am your your father!". There was a time where this was still something a kid would be able to watch without knowing it was coming. But enough of more of my 'premature old man shtick'.

You Can Run Star Wars Without $$$

As I was pointed out on MeWe today, there's Mini Six: Bare Bones edition. It's a slimmed down, free version of the Open D6 System, itself derived from the classic Star Wars D6 by West End Games. It comes with a stripped down version of Star Wars, or rather Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off. Why get a copy of Edge of the Empire or anything owned by Disney? You don't need it. What, do you need the 'lore'? The lore is available on Wookiepedia, be it the movies lore, the early WEG proto-Expanded Universe, classic Expanded Universe or the Disney garbage if you feel like a masochist. It's all written down by obsessive fans already.

Of course, in my personal opinion a more 'proper' Star Wars game would require a much more 'minimalist' approach to lore. This isn't me agreeing with the dickweeds at the modern Lucasfilm-Disney about canon. These people are idiots anyway. No, the issue is that while the EU has pretty good stuff its also quite messy. A GM is much better served by sticking to the movies and extrapolating from there, only adding any WEG/EU/whatever else lore if it benefit their game. The appeal of Star Wars originally wasn't in dozen upon dozen of metric tons of lore. I'm aware this may piss off EU fans and I understand, but the reality is there is such a thing as 'too much lore' when it bog downs your game or create arguments with players about what model of gun Storm troopers use or something along those line. To me, the most important lore elements are in the big lines, not the small details. So to recap, what you'd need:

• An internet connection.
• Mini Six (Free or a printed copy for about 3$).
• Maybe a printer, some sheet, pencils and dice.

Now considering most people in this hobby have a ready accedes to paper, a printer, a computer and all that it mean you can basically run your dream Star Wars game for under a few $. I guarantee you whatever the hell you run has a good chance of being more true to Lucas' original vision. It's about the spirit of adventure and cheesy scifi-meet-western-meet-fantasy. Now, to be fair, the prequels had a very different focus and a lot more politics but I'd argue the prequels are material for a group more focused on RP than raw adventure.

Still. Not a penny spent on new Star Wars material. As for my players, I'd encourage them to play into the archetypes. Now obviously, trying to directly copy Luke or Han is a bad idea, but there are many, many archetypes out there in fiction. Not everything needs to be some fancy, fart-huffing deconstruction. Let heroes be heroes and villains be villains, not everything need to be 'deep' (or a faked attempt a depth). Sometimes you just want to have space samurai cutting off space villains with laser swords. There's nothing wrong with mixing your inner child with time-honored mythological archetypes: that's the very thing one should strive for in terms of style and tone.

The Importance of understanding the past

This post will certainly skirt my 'no politics on the blog' rule a bit.

I don't really buy recent books (that aren't RPG books, obviously) anymore, there's not really appealing to it. Science fiction, fantasy and horror seems to suffer from a pretty bad exhaustion lately which, combined with the obsession with major intellectual properties which are then destroyed by inept writers (or perhaps on purpose, if you're feeling like being called nuts by people with their heads in the sand) just doesn't really make me want to buy scifi or fantasy novels. The other issue, which I've come to realize following my massive 'born again grognard' phase when I got really invested in the OSR is that fundamentally we (and by extension, most writers) are less and less able to grasp what makes a genre tick.

All we experience in pop culture are copies of copies. Like a telephone game, it increasingly lose its meaning. Ideas. Memes. Tropes. Call them what you want but they exist. Unfortunately people have lost much of their understanding and, when they do spot them, they often generate a sense of hatred for the past followed by a smug satisfaction of pseudo intellect nonsense. The 'trope has been subverted'. Your 'expectations have been subverted'. In actuality it just mean someone wrote crap and felt good about it. No, worse: they felt morally superior.

My most recent purchases in the last few years have been the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft,  Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, an English edition of Tolkien's work (I previous had it as a French translation). More recently (last Monday) I got my hands on Bulfinch's Mythology. Is that book perfect? Hardly, as it is well known that Bulfinch definitely loved to edit out things as to not 'offend' the delicate sensibilities of the Victorian, including young girls. Does that all sound familiar? We should not fear the past and we shouldn't shun it either. If I can keep being pretentious for a moment, I genuinely think anyone out there who is running a Tabletop RPG campaign of any type, but especially fantasy and/or scifi should go out there and read some old mythology. Not the modern takes, not the comic books and Hollywood version where Thor is an alien. These books are, for the most part, either readily available or in the public domain. There is no excuse.

Read some mythology and read some Conan and other pulp works. For science fiction, read the War of the Worlds and other works. You don't even have to like it. I'm not the thought police, you're allowed to dislike it or even think its abhorrent for all I care. Who am I anyway? A nobody. The important point is to at least understand the how and the why of these genres, how they evolved and what form their basis. You can't tinker around with concepts and ideas if there's no grasp of the basics and the core elements. This is how you end with a generation that felt so disconnected from the root elements and the myths that they don't even understand how to play Dungeons & Dragons. Hell, I sure at one point realized that I didn't 'really get it' and then this spiraled in a nearly ten year pretentious-as-fuck phase where I loved to use the term 'deconstruction' as if it meant something. Then one day you get tired of huffing your own farts. You crave the simple, the coherent. Are Conan stories 'deep'? Fuck no. It's pulp, man. However it definitely has lesson to teach on the simple basics of dropping characters in an adventure. The focus isn't on some deeper world building. Its not on some deeper meaning. It's about the how and the why and what adventures this bring.

You have to understand the rules before you bend them.