Subtitle: How new religions can spark odd responses and new traditions
Comicus: Have you heard of this new sect, the Christians? They are a laugh riot! First of all, they are so poor...
Swiftus: How poor are they?
Comicus: Thank you! They are so poor... that they only have *one* God! [drumbeat, everyone laughs]… But we Romans are rich. We've got a lot of gods. We've got a god for everything...
— History of the World: Part One
After the death of Yeshua ben Yosef (i.e., Jesus in English) until the Great Jewish Revolt (66-74 CE), Christians were considered to be another Jewish sect. However, Christians pushed against this during the Great Revolt, and Christians took it upon themselves to say that they were in no way a Jewish sect. This proved to be a double-edged sword that would both help the Christians and later push them up against a wall.
The Romans left the Christians alone during much of the Great Revolt. When the Great Revolt was over, which ended with the breaching of Masada’s walls in 74 CE, the Christians were not guaranteed the same protections under Roman law that the Jews had been given. This was due to the simple fact that Christianity was a new religious sect and was not as established as Judaism had been. The Romans truly thought of the Christians as a religious sect, an offshoot of Judaism.
These are just a few things that describe what kept clinking around in my skull kingdom when I lived in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado as a teenager. It was around the time my parents decided to end their attempt at emulating June and Ward Cleaver. Their marriage, much like their finances, eroded with each passing month after my parents formally separated and later divorced.
One of my favorite things to do is create fictional worlds and universes. These fictional spaces are, usually, located in some kind of future or future-present. The kind of worlds or universes where I’ve extrapolated various things into an absurdity, beautiful, odd, and worth exploring. The Singularity, a sort of socio-cultural and technological black hole that sucks us into its hungry maw before spitting out forever changed, is something I’ve always wondered about as a human being and a worldbuilder.
Wheels keep spinning around and round… As I sleep, I dream of electric sheep. Their bleating is that of popping toasting, bleeping Facebook messages, and the wailing sirens of police cruisers. Each has a programmed sign etched into its ivory fleece. These signs are made entirely of neon-colored LEDs, which burn bright images of familiar numbers into my brain. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…
They keep moving through my mind’s eye, jumping over an imaginary fence for my counting pleasure. I know that somewhere in the background is a factory pumping these babies out—mass producing them for my benefit, but I don’t hear, smell, or see this factory. Cake jams out in the background, making counting less of a monotonous task: And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians/While overweight Americans wear their patriotic jumpsuits/ Wheels keep on spinning round.
I recently opened the Core and Deluxe boxed sets for Mothership. And, boy, are these things beautiful. They surely invoked that nostalgic-sweet vibe of being part of the good ol’ days of tabletop roleplaying games. Their presentation while sleek, beautiful, and charmingly indie, also itched another part of my brain: This is (technically speaking) a pivotal moment in the TTRPG hobby. Smaller players are (ultimately) shaping where things are going, despite Dungeons & Dragons pulling heavier punches.
This moment, a combination of indie game design and development, the fruition of OSR and its discontents, and a market and hobbyists collectively hungering for something different, has brought us Mothership and others of her ilk.
Hit-point mountains in the current version of D&D are one thing I have trouble with. Why should anything, even a monster, have more than thirty (30) hit points?
Before you roll your eyes and dismiss me as an OSR bro looking to convert you, let’s think about hit points (HP) differently.
Hit points, no matter the ways they are dealt with, are supposed to be a resource pool that a player manages, with help from their character sheets and their referees (or insert appropriate title here).
Hit points also offer a finite timer, showing the players they can and will die if certain conditions are met within the game space.
I’ve been watching (and re-watching) videos by Professor Dungeon Master (PDM) on his YouTube channel, DungeonCraft. The channel has been a loyal companion of mine for some time now. While I find some of PDM’s videos clickbait, he does offer some great insights into the nature of rules-light TTRPGs and their value as great introductions to the hobby overall.
This last weekend I also decided to reread the deluxe rules of PDM’s Deathbringer, which sells itself as a rules-light, grimdark D&D– and OSR-friendly toolkit. While the claims are modest, I think Deathbringer and others like it have the potential to reshape the dominant conversations around TTRPG design.
Players today have a lot vying for their attention and time. Who has the time to explore a 600-page rulebook? When I was younger, when I had more time and a bit more patience, I could gobble up massive rulebooks and other such tomes with little effort.
I’ve been playing tabletop games for the better part of twenty years.
But I’ve almost left the hobbies behind due the the costs extracted from fans.
Like anyone, I’m not immune to rising living costs, inflationary doom spirals, and my greenbacks not going as far as they used to. I make more money now than I ever have, but, like many living in the post-COVID economy, this money doesn’t go as far as it used to. I also have a daughter, who adds pressure to my leftover cash.
*Kinda? I leave this with an asterisk because this isn't always the case
It has been a long time since I last posted—sometime in early July, I believe.
Since my last posting, I have been playing some games at my local public library, and it has been a blast getting back into the swing of things.
We’ve been continuing a trend of using rules-light or rulings, not rules, approaches to playing. This has been a great way to introduce players to tabletop roleplaying games.