John Kim’s terrific article from Push 1, Immersive Story Methods for Tabletop Play, is now nicely formatted and available on Bleeding Play. John lays out a solid set of guidelines for running a style of tabletop campaign in which one of the central goals is for the characters to explore their imaginary environment physically, socially, and emotionally.

Hopefully I can get the rest of these up this weekend, now that I’m less focused on other projects. Three more to go.

bleedingplay.com now redirects to this site. Yay!

Also, Emily Care Boss’ terrific article, Collaborative Roleplaying: Reframing the Game is finally formatted properly, as is my much less cool introduction. Emily’s piece is one of the go-to resources about the whys and hows of GM-less and “everbody GMs” play. The other stuff from Push 1 should follow shortly.

Getting closer. All the text from Push 1 is up and I’ve started formatting the introduction and Emily’s article, which are looking pretty sweet actually. Hopefully, by the weekend, I’ll have all the articles formatted properly, with tables and graphics included. Good luck understanding Mridangam without the gestures to go with it

In the formatted articles, I’ve stuck in links at the top to the PDF version of the entire book and the last few print copies available through IPR. Once those are gone, the book will only be available through Lulu and I probably won’t even bring copies to conventions. So if you’ve been planning on getting a print copy of Push 1 and don’t normally make Lulu orders, this could be your last chance.

I got the approval of the Push 1 contributors to post their articles online, so I’ve begun putting them up over on the new Push 1 page. So far, the only article up is my introduction, but I’m using it to fine-tune the CSS before going down the list and posting the other articles. Eventually PDF versions of the articles will be up too. Then it’s on to Push 2.

I’m also trying to redo the overall look of the website to prepare it to host the Plays-Well.com domain name and become the core of my publishing activities. Hopefully none of the feeds will change, so everyone can just keep being subscribed to this blog. More updates as I get more material posted.

Finally, an update after a long hiatus. I’ve been dealing with work and real life for the past several months, without much time to devote to Push 2, but I’m beginning to gear up again.

My time away from working on Push has given me new insights into how to make the journal a less stressful and more productive project for me. Hopefully, my fellow contributors can get exciting about the new plan with me, since it’ll be more difficult (if not impossible) to implement without their cooperation. I’ve been ruminating and speaking with a few folks about my plans, but things really started to get rolling when Brennan Taylor emailed me that Indie Press Revolution was running out of copies of Push 1. I wrote in return:

I’m currently in the middle of rethinking my publishing operation. Like Clinton, I’m excited about turning my business back into a hobby and we’ve been trying to brainstorm on how to do this. Unfortunately,
it’ll likely require removing Push 1 from distribution through IPR, which I probably should have warned you about earlier. I apologize. But I think my products will be gradually moving to a free, at cost, or for charity, non-profit model.

This is not at all a reflection on my dissatisfaction with IPR. IPR is the greatest thing that’s happened to indie roleplaying in a long time. The move is really a reflection of my dissatisfaction with self-publishing under the model established by folks on the Forge. It’s a great model, but it doesn’t really fit my publishing goals, so I’m going to try to figure out something else. It may crash and burn horribly and I may come crawling back to IPR, hat in hand (or have new products a year or so down the road that are meant for this model), but I feel like I need to at least give this a shot.

I hope you understand and I really look forward to the opportunity to work with you and/or IPR in the future.

Brennan was very gracious about this, as I expected he would be, and even expressed his sympathies, since IPR has always dominated more of his game design and play time more than he wanted it to, I think. Being involved in publishing or distribution is not a small commitment. I certainly do not envy Brennan the amount of work it takes to run IPR, even with the excellent help he has now in Fred Hicks.

Then, the IPR member publishers — on the mailing list that I am still a member of, for now — began discussing what it would take for IPR to collectively put out a magazine of short articles or supplemental game materials. I wrote in reponse to some of this discussion:

I’m in the midst of totally revising the way I do Push, hopefully making it much easier for me to administer, and I can imagine doing an IPR magazine under a similar format. What I’m thinking about doing with Push is:

• edit / layout one article at a time, working with the author(s) directly
• post each article online in HTML / PDF format as the editing / layout is finished
• once I have a number of articles done (say 5), enough for an issue, collect them and make that issue available in print
• move on to prepping articles for the next issue

This kind of “rolling” publication model might work really well for an IPR magazine, because you do it in chunks, one piece at a time. That means that progress occurs in measurable steps and you only have to hound one contributor at a time instead of the “herding cats” approach I previously took with Push (and Matt took with Daedalus, I gather).

Certainly, one of the things I’ve always found the most challenging about Push is knowing which piece of the puzzle to tackle on any given day. For example, as I prepare to get back to work on Push 2, what’s my next move? Do I contact Eero about suggested revisions / additions to his game about memory palaces? Do I do redlines for Bill White’s article about using roleplaying games as educational tools in the classroom? Do I edit Thomas Robertson’s interview of Sarah Kahn into something that we can publish? Do I contact the various people who haven’t sent in drafts yet, talking them through whatever writing difficulties they’ve been having? Under the old model, I felt like I had to do all of the above at the same time, keeping track of everything but never really feeling like I was making progress on the issue as a whole.

I’m really excited about the prospects of working on a issue one article at a time, working with the author when they are available and ready to turn out a finished product. And then being able to post it once it’s done, have one article in the bag for a given issue, get immediate feedback on the posted article through the website (feedback that might eventually be included in the marginal commentary in the print version), and move on to the next piece of the puzzle. That seems, to me, like a model that’s likely to work much better with my busy schedule and the busy schedules of all the other contributors.

I’ve already contacted the contributors to Push 1, asking if I can cease commercial sales of that issue and post the contents online, in preparations for Push 2. Now, my next step is contacting folks who submitted or planned to submit to Push 2 and run this new plan by them. Hopefully they’ll still be interested and I can start polishing up existing drafts for immediate release on this website, which I’ve already begun revising. First up will probably be Eero’s game and Bill’s article + game, assuming everything goes well. Can’t wait.

While we were all sleeping, Rob McDougall secretly posted another section of his Secret Pre-History of Roleplaying thing. It’s super interesting, since it’s tangentially related to my day job.

Also, in other news, Timothy Burke, of Swarthmore and Terra Nova, has this to say about the possibility of writing something for Push:

I loved Rob’s article and the publication, and I’ve been thinking about material that might well suit what you’ve got in mind. I recently wrote an essay for a volume on games and politics that was primarily about how players try to influence developer actions. One of the minor arguments in the essay is that the “grammar” of player-developer politics has been historically influenced by the relation between players and GMs in pen-and-paper role-playing, that there are structural inheritances. Let me think a bit on this and come back at you with an abstract…

So we might have Tim Burke dropping some science about MMORGs in Push 2 or, if deadlines are extra tight, Push 3. Exciting!

So I met Maddy through my brother a few years back and it just so happens that she’s a BNF (that’s Big Name Fan) in the online freeform Harry Potter fandom roleplaying scene, which has probably more total people involved in it than any tabletop roleplaying game. She’s working on an article for Push 2 and, using Thomas Robertson’s interview with Sarah Kahn as a starting point (unfortunately, it’s not available on the web anymore), we talked a bit about her experience with HP-based online play.

me: one of Sarah’s points was that it’s sometimes hard for people to describe what kind of game they’re hoping for 1:00 PM i was wondering if you think that’s true because i’m not sure i see it Madeline: I think it is. 1:01 PM There isn’t easy terminology, and there are more options than in the tabletop world, I feel — or at least more common options. It’s common to have a romance-focused RPG online, for instance, whereas that’s not so common tabletop. me: you can’t be like “semi-canonical, minor-character centered, gay-friendy, sex-positive, etc.” Madeline : Well, you can but “semi-canonical” — what does that mean? Yknow. me: right, there’s a lot of range there Madeline : Also, you can say “romance focused” 1:02 PM me: right, and that could mean a lot of things Madeline: but it’s hard to define what that will mean in the context of the game. which are the “lead characters”? are there any? those lead characters usually develop based on who posts most ultimately and you can’t work that out without actually playing it, at least not well in a journal game you never know whose schedules will line up best unless you’ve played together before. me: right 1:03 PM most of the PBEMs i’ve been in have burned out it seems like you either need a large group or you need a core of really committed people and they have to be committed to each other, not just the game Madeline : Or both me : right Madeline: One of the ways that journal RPGs can help with that is having a fan club when you get reinforcement from fans/readers, it helps you stay on track me: right 1:04 PM Madeline: which is one way I see it being like Primetime Adventures but in a more organic way me: and they post somewhere else, tangentally from the real action? Madeline: if the fans like a small character, that character will get more “air time,” yknow? yes me: seems like there could be better ways to work that into the software allowing fans to reply to actual posts, but have those invisible unless you want to read them Madeline: For instance, the This Is Now/That was Then fans posted on associated communities called TWiTs and TIN_Hats Yeah, that would be really cool 1:06 PM me: so are you planning to talk a bit then about how to make one that’s more than temporarily successful? Madeline : Yes, definitely me: because it seems pretty easy to set them up 1:07 PM but hard to sustain them Madeline : Part of the issue is in the set up me: and even harder to end them effectively Madeline: and rules One of the key things in my mind is having an end in mind. me: tabletop, until recently, has been really bad about endgame it’s only indie games that have focused on that, really because the big companies want you to keep playing forever Madeline: Unless they’re intended as the RPG version of crackfic (like milliways), they need to have a definite endpoint in order to hold together well. 1:08 PM And all the really beloved ones, like NA [Nocturne Alley], have had that endpoint, if they’re intended as a serious game. I also want to talk a little about how to create an online RPG without a “canon” me: right, i think people are more likely to really committ to something where they know the ending 1:09 PM Madeline : or with a modified canon (like Lightning War, which is a Harry Potter RPG set in a WWII alternate universe that’s been around for years) me: what’s the line between collaborative fiction and online RPGs for you? because i’ve done more of the former, really, than the latter Madeline: It’s really fuzzy. Format is a large part of it as is the number of people me: where the posts were longer and there was not that back-and-forth in the comments 1:10 PM Madeline: I’ve been involved in a very large collab fic endeavor part of it has to do with the rights to other characters if you’re in an RPG, you don’t have rights to other characters. At all. at least, not usually. me: the big ones are basically asynchronous MUSH, no? well, many collab fic games have that as a ground rule too 1:11 PM you have to run posts involving other characters by their “owner” first and they can make changes 1:12 PM Madeline: Yeah… I need to think about how it’s different, but I feel like there is a difference in RPGs maybe that there’s more of an emphasis about having the character’s owner narrate what that character is doing first, before you ever begin writing your character’s post rather than you have the right to come up with something, which the “owner” can then change. me: right 1:13 PM more of the GM going “ok, what are you doing?” Madeline : yeah, except with no GM, it’s more like you IM the other character’s player and say “hey, I’d like us to have an interaction, I was thinking that my character would do X,” and going from there. Of course you can post really obfuscatory things 1:14 PM some of the best threads I’ve seen have been people starting trouble by letting the scene just play out me: awesome Madeline : like, posting “DRACO, WHAT DID YOU DO?” with no explanation or previous discussion. Just that. Nothing else. Draco’s player has to decide how to respond. me: right that’s what Mo [Turkington] calls “pull,” I think as opposed to “push” Madeline: nod 1:15 PM me: you solicit creative input from someone else Madeline: It seems like that’s a hallmark of good journal games — an equal balance of pull and push, maybe emphasis on pull. 1:16 PM Because of course other players can jump into discussions they see going on in-character, and bollix things up but good. Doing a bit of their own “pulling.” me: yeah it’s like improv in that way 1:17 PM sometimes throwing another body on the pile is no good but you can’t really create rules for that, no? you just have to set out the issues so people are aware 1:18 PM Madeline: Well, the way it’s often worked in games I’m in is that if you have an exchange you don’t want other people jumping in on, you send the list or the out of character community a warning beforehand “Warning: Harry and Voldemort will be having a sniping series of asides. Please don’t jump in. Harry will make another post afterwards, and you can get your commentary in on that post, but we’d really like this one to just be H&V duking it out.” me: so the players involved have to put up the fence, instead of people checking before tagging in? 1:19 PM Madeline : That’s how it’s always been run as far as I’ve seen it. I like it that way, too. It encourages people to participate. me: i guess that errs on the side of interaction yeah, jinx Madeline: Part of the reason it’s important is time zones if the people who were having the interaction go offline and you come on two hours later, and want to take part, you can’t email them to ask, you have to just do it 1:20 PM me: right how do you deal with flurries of posting by a few people who are online at the same time? Madeline: Uh… be happy? :p me: since that can come to dominate the game pretty fast, no? ha Madeline: It can If it becomes truly excessive, other players usually comment in the OOC about it 1:21 PM but a lot of times that just is part of what develops the game me: sure does it ever get to the point that the game is just too time demanding? Madeline : In TWT, that’s what lead to the marauders becoming very significant background characters, and the secondaries really taking over the sort of clowning mainstream leads. me: because of the ever increasing speed of posting? 1:22 PM so you feel like you have to post all the time, just to keep up? Madeline: Well, sometimes. But you can always opt out. You can either give your character an excuse not to post so much, or you can switch characters with someone/leave the game and find yourself a replacement. For instance, I left That Was Then for that reason, and they got a new Lily/Hermione. 1:23 PM me : yeah, but quitting seems like a bad solution Madeline: And I came into Nocturne Alley because someone had been unable to play their characters or, you can (again) talk about it on the OOC community that was helpful in TWT for a long time. me: especially if you want to be involved, but have like a X hour a week limit Madeline: That’s part of what you talk about going into a game in order to decide what character you get/what game you join. 1:24 PM It gets the same way with tabletop games, and it’s dealt with in the same way either the group changes, or you do, simple as that… me: right, i’m sure things change all the time all of a sudden Colin Creevy becomes the center of a major plot Madeline: Yeah 1:25 PM Also, people tend to have periods of activity/inactivity that go in waves so you’ll have a plot about Colin Creevy and his friends, then they’ll be quieter for a week or two while Hermione takes center stage, then the professors will have a subplot, then Colin Creevy will be back. just cause that’s the way people’s schedules go me: right 1:26 PM also, i bet how “canonical” or “romantic” the game is switches over time too some of it intentional and some of it not Madeline: That can definitely be true heck, or “action-riffic” me: like “holy crap we forgot that X happened two days ago in Book 3″ Madeline: hahaha 1:27 PM Also, you can have games like NA where the subplots were very “romantic” but the overarching plot is canon-focused NA was actually extremely canonical, as far as the overarching plot went. despite the major subplots being sometimes silly and often slashy/romancy 1:33 PM me: is “romance” just a codeword for “slash”? Madeline: No me: because that’s something that laymen should know Madeline: it isn’t 1:34 PM it can mean either there are a lot of games that do het romances, ex. TWT/TIN and Lighting War for that matter me: do people come out and say that they want slash, or are they too embarrassed or socially chastized for it? Madeline : Oh, they totally come out and say it 1:35 PM why would they be embarrassed? LOL. Only rank newbies are bothered by slash, or people who are entrenched in the OBHWF (One Big Happy Weasley Family) end of fandom. And in other fandoms slash seems about equally enjoyed only a minority of people who are devotees of certain het pairings really object to slash, is the general fandom feeling. me: is HP fandom just rolling in their own jargon? i think that may be a trademark of online communities in general Madeline : haha me : the inside jokes stack up like crazy 1:36 PM Madeline: HP fandom has a LOT of jargon, and I’m embarrassed to say I’m responsible for a lot of it I imported a bunch from X-files fandom back in 1999 (wow, long ago) and it caught on a lot. me: ha Madeline: not that it wouldn’t have happened anyway

This is what things are looking like right now, based on the articles that I’ve actually seen finished or partially finished drafts of, and the stuff I’m currently in negotiations about.

Full Drafts

• Eero Tuovinen, Ludi Imaginationis (game)
• Bill White and Dave Petroski, The Persuaders: Pedagogical Game Design in Progress (game+)
• Timothy Walters Kleinert, Jazzing It Up: Improvisation and Thematic Play

Partial Drafts

• Jason Morningstar, Improvisation and Roleplaying
• Rob McDougall, The Reverse Secret Pre-History of Roleplaying
• Eirik Fatland, Nordic Larp 101
• Sarah Kahn, topic: “online freeform, remix of Thomas Robertson’s interview”

Confirmed, But No Draft

• Madeline Klink, topic: “online freeform”
• Keith Yim, topic: “roleplaying in Greater China”

I Would Like to Include

• something by Jess Hammer, which I need to talk to her about
• something about roleplaying in virtual worlds, which I’ve emailed Timothy Burke about, hoping for suggestions on possible authors, and plan to mine Second Person for other possibilities

Woohoo! Inching steadily closer.

Rob MacDougall has begun to post previews of the article he’s writing for Push 2. I am ever so excited.

Timothy Burke and I at the AHA in January:*

Me: It seems like 2006 was the year that a lot of academic bloggers came out of the closet as online gamers.

Tim: Definitely. There used to be a real social stigma attached to gaming in academia, but now with World of Warcraft and Second Life and so on, it really can’t be denied that online roleplaying games are a social phenomenon worthy of serious critical study.

Me: I’m just waiting for the same thing to happen to tabletop roleplaying games.

Tim: You mean like Dungeons & Dragons?

Me: More or less.**

Tim: Yeah, like that’s ever going to happen… loser.

It’s not much of a secret, if you’ve read my LiveJournal or just triangulated from my other interests, but from 1980-1990 and then again from 2001-2005, I played a lot of roleplaying games. Which today are called tabletop roleplaying games or pen-and-paper games, in the sort of prefix addition (think dial telephone, snail mail, liberal Democrat) that generally implies the object in question, while once the norm, is well on its way to the boneyard.

I’m writing something on the history and pre-history of tabletop RPGs for Jonathan Walton and his excellent journal Push: New Thinking About Roleplaying. You can see my original sketch of the article at the top secret Push forum, but it keeps getting longer and weirder than I’d planned. And although I just emailed Jonathan to tell him I’m going to miss his already generous deadline, what follows is something I’m not sure I can fit into the article and that I wanted to share right away.

Some Daves I Know

It’s impossible to name any one inventor of tabletop roleplaying, but it’s fair to say that in the Midwest, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of guys, many of them named Dave, started doing some very innovative things with miniatures war gaming. One of the Daves was Dave Wesely, who ran a game in Minneapolis in 1967 or 1968 about the fictional village of “Braunstein.” The Braunstein game was Napoleonic miniatures on acid. Each player had one figurine representing one character, and rather than recreating some grand military battle, each character had a personal goal to be pursued by means of negotiation and intrigue.

Braunstein begat Blackmoor which begat Chainmail which begat Dungeons & Dragons, but that tale has been told elsewhere, and will be part of my Push article besides, so I won’t repeat it here, except to remind you (since I’m sure you’re all up on this stuff) that one of Wesely’s key contributions to tabletop roleplaying was the re-introduction of an impartial, all-powerful referee who devised the scenario for the game and adjudicated the results of each conflict: i.e., a Dungeon Master. (Except that Braunstein featured no dungeons as yet; Wesely’s friend Dave Arneson would introduce that wrinkle in 1970.) I say re-introduction, because complicated war games had long enlisted neutral referees. The “thinking the unthinkable” nuclear war games that Herman Kahn ran at RAND in the 1950s and 60s had similar game masters–but that’s a story for another time. Wesely got the idea for such a referee from a dusty old book he found in the University of Minnesota library: Strategos: The American Art of War, published in 1880 by Charles Adiel Lewis Totten. (You can pick up your own copy at that URL, complete with dice, compass, maps, and hundreds of playing pieces, for a mere $7,500.)

The First Dungeon Master?

Who was Charles Adiel Lewis Totten? Now the fun begins. Totten (1852-190 was a West Point graduate and a professor of military tactics, first at the Massachusetts Agricultural College in Amherst (today U-Mass Amherst) and later at Yale. He probably developed his war gaming system from the Kriegspiel conducted by Prussian military officers, which puts a funny spin on that subtitle, “The American Art of War.” As a lieutenant in the U.S. Artillery, Totten fought against the Paiute Indians in the Bannock campaign of 1878 and the Apache in the Chiricahua campaign of 1881. He also seems to have founded the U-Mass Amherst fencing program. But “the ruling motive of his life,” according to a biographical (and I suspect autobiographical) sketch written in 1890, was “the desire to get at the root of all that savored of the mysterious.” Totten, the grandfather of Dungeon Mastering, was himself a walking Suppressed Transmission, an old, weird American of the 33rd degree.

“His chief idea in going to college,” Totten, or his biographer, reported in 1890, was “to find out the secrets of some representative American fraternity.” He succeeded in joining the Delta Psi, known in the nineteenth century as the most secretive of college fraternities, through which he made the acquaintance of Henry Steel Olcott, founder and first president of the Theosophical Society. (In later life, Totten adopted the pseudonym “Ten Olcott” for some of his works.) After flirting with German “freethought” and giving a Fourth of July oration at West Point that earned him a reprimand for its atheistic implications, Totten became a Swedenborgian, a Cabbalist, a numerologist, and a pyramidologist. Oh, and a Freemason, but that almost goes without saying, and he soon left the Masons in order to pursue his own studies “upon independent and rather transcendental lines.” Ahem.

Totten was the chief American promoter of Charles Piazzi Smyth, the Scottish astronomer obsessed with the Great Pyramid who found in its every measurement some prophecy from God. Totten, like Smyth, campaigned against the Metric System in favor of the “god-given” pyramid inch. He wrote a book about the Great Seal of the United States (and you know he didn’t give a shit about the eagle–it was all about the you know what on the reverse) which I came upon, without recognizing his name or making the Braunstein connection, in MIT’s Archives of Useless Research. He wrote another book “proving,” through astrological calculations, that the Earth was twenty-four hours “out of schedule” as a result of the biblical Joshua making the sun stand still. (If you Google Totten’s name, among the first hits will be articles about a rumor that NASA computers in the 1960s had “discovered” the same thing.) And he left Yale in 1892, predicting the imminent arrival of the Antichrist and the end of the world in 1899. But Totten’s most ardent cause was the theory of British Israelism, the pseudohistorical belief that Anglo-Saxons are the descendants of the Lost Tribe of Israel and therefore the true chosen people of God. I guess that anti-atheism reprimand at West Point really stuck. He published twenty-six volumes on this subject in a series entitled Our Race: Its Origin and Destiny, still refererred to by modern “Christian Identity” groups.

Which is where the fun ends, I’m afraid. Because while it might be possible to regard 19th-century Anglo-Israelism as quaint Gilbert-and-Sullivanian crackpottery, since at least the 1940s this belief has been the province of racist, anti-Semitic thugs. This is a recurring problem for students of historical oddballs: what looks whimsical and eccentric from the distance of a century gone by can be quite unpleasant at closer range.

So Dungeon Masters and former Dungeon Masters like myself might not rush to embrace Totten as a forefather. And I know it’s anachronistic to refer to him as “the first Dungeon Master.” Still, the gamers I know will recognize his type, the tell-tale markers of geek DNA: a war gamer, keen on secret societies, a prolific writer of pseudohistory, given to drawing intricate maps of pyramids and tombs. (And didn’t I say before that modern geek culture is all shot through with a discourse on Jewishness?) Totten was wrong about the Israelites, it’s more than safe to say, but he was clearly one of our tribe, and his blood, metaphorically speaking, still runs in the hobby’s veins.

____________

*Paraphrased from memory, and possibly embellished. Tim is way too nice to say that last part out loud.

**Gamers have spilled billions of pixels debating how best to define or describe the hobby, but we’ve yet to come up with anything that says as much to as many as quickly as, “you know, like Dungeons & Dragons.”

Sami Koponen was nice enough to send us his thoughts on Push 1, which I’m reposting here:

Sorry that my answer is a bit unstructualized. I’ve been hoping to write comments for a long time now, and I’m afraid that the only way to get it done is to just do it. No fancy tricks, no deep analysis. Just some pointers.

First of all, about the idea of Push: I absolutely love it. It seems to be the best chance for inter-cultural discussion, to find out new ways of role-playing. I just realized how utterly fragmented the role-playing scene is here in Finland: no-one knows what the others do, and cares maybe even less. I myself am very excited about the possible combinations, which can be made out of traditional role-playing, board games, Forgean movement, Nordic immersionism, larping, hermeneutics, psychology, theatre, JeepForm and a dozen of other things I haven’t even heard of yet. I have to admit that so far I have no idea why this is so exciting - that is, why should we mix everything we have. Push seems to be aiming more or less for the same target and, what’s more important, creating a community around this innovative and experimental brainstorm. All I need after this is play more.

Then about the articles. Collaborative Roleplaying and Immersive Story Methods felt oddly out-dated. Boss is like celebrating things I’ve been playing here in the cold North for the last three years and Kim is writing against party protagonism, which is a blast from the past. Sure, both writers gather information into a whole and present some new ideas while at it, but surely you can do better than that. Instead of saying “that is bad, but this is cool” I’d recommend to make the old things smoother (how to get the best of GMing) and/or pointing out where they fit (what is the proper use of party protagonism). Or, if this is not possible / uninteresting / whatever, the leave them to rot and embrace the new wave. This of course depends to who you are writing to: if the audience is Forge-ignorant folks, then some foundation might be justified. Though even then I’d say that actually playing a couple of these games is going to be an eye-opening experience: I still remember how I thought that the lack of the GM would lead into an incoherent story and illogic events, no matter what people told me. On the other hand it’s not a bad idea to collect and present some things that have been in fashion in the Forge, for I at least have no time nor patience to read the forum (I’m not the only one, how considers Forge to be a bit hard to approach). Somehow I just tend to think that Push and Forge are pretty well connected in the readers’ heads: if you don’t know the other, you don’t know the another either. Furthermore, Push seems to be a publication for (wanna-be) game designers, who are more interested in going forward than looking back.

I’m not in the right position to judge Against the Geek, Choice, since it’s about my native roleplaying history. It also expresses the call for cultural activity, which is no news to me. Reading about different roleplaying histories is interesting only in the sense that they can learn me to see how big part of roleplaing culture is merely a historical consequence. That covers all kinds of things like the idea that there are only certain characters, which you keep on following and controlling, and the marriage with the speculative fiction. The end result is therefore finding out more things somehow connected to roleplaying (Universalis is a great example of this; it’s not really a roleplaying game, not according to the tradition at least). On the other hand, there are a lots of things that these kinds of contemporary scene presentations could contribute, especially about the social status (publicity, rpg organisations), position (the relations to the mainstream) and execution (how are the games played) of roleplaying. Go for the unique features.

The games, Mridangam and Waiting for the Queen/Tea at Midnight, were clearly the most interesting part of the journal. Both hold huge amounts of ideas, like “hidden” conflict resolution system; the lack of conflict resoltion system; emphasizing the characters’ thoughts and emotions; pulling players to cooperate and participate in the same story; a clear, board game-like narrative structure; adapting to new instant media, just to name a few. It may not be the first time I run across them, but it seems to take a couple of instances before I recognize them and their meaning for the game. Very thought-provoking material especially in the sense that they make me take a hard look at all games, both those I play and those I design, and try to understand what they do, how and why. Analysizing practice, I suppose, and a lot more cheaper than buying a single whole game (which sometimes aren’t even ready yet).

I have the feeling that this message needs some sort of final word. I suppose it’s clear and simple: you now know how to make a journal. Don’t make me wait another couple of years for the next volume.