Playing Monsters as PCs Continues: Beatdown

So Thessaly's second book, Beatdown at Big Battle Ridge  has been for a month and is selling well. Of course T&T products usually do. A lot of the feedback that I am getting from longer term PeryPub buyers is surprise. Funny how few of my intimates, they buy my products in a very niche market, ever heard of Monsters! Monsters! though they are familiar with its ancestor. 

 

As playing monsters go, Thess is making herself a master. That is not surprising, she like any really good scenario/setting designer does a whole lot of face-to-face roleplaying before presenting the material. As you read through her work, you see the insights given to her from dealing with players creep in here and there. She is a GM's GM as an author. The person running her material pretty much can sit back and help the players develop their Characters, introduce the obstacles and watch the plot happen.

Now, I know there are schools of thoughts these days, that are promoted by publishing houses that are supposed to be the wave of the future. One side is one where RPGs are supposed to be a product that sells miniatures made in China with paper products from Europe, what every good board game should be, as God meant it. Another side is that products for the Adventure Gaming hobby should be wholly the meeting place of antagonistic cliques competing with each other to score enough points to not only win the internet but to WIN D&D, ADVANCED even. Then there are others that want to produce books for sale showing how they have moved beyond the world of daydreaming but wanting to show how clever they are with verbage and strategy and looking over other people's shoulders. While the RPG hobby can be all of these and more, it is my supposition is that these are not the real draw to our cottage industry.

By the way, playing monsters is nothing new. Games like Runequest and Monsters! Monsters! aside, here are some of my own experiences.

Ever since I first started roleplaying back in '79, with AD&D as my gateway drug, I wanted to play orks. That game system's half-orc option just wasn't that exciting either. Instead my Illusionist PC (a human) would end up marrying an orc princess to make peace with the orc tribe whose living area was where he was building his keep to reflect his D&D character development which was lotsa NPCs and your own little fiefdom. Was I supposed to kill them? My PC was Chaotic Good folks. He was 11th level. By 18th level, I was a bit bored of Dor Tarlson, and started playing his son Tar Dorltarlson, a half-orc Monk. At 4th level, Ken the GM mixed the world up. An Assassin from the 666 planes of Hell, or some such, killed my Illusionist character as well as all of the play groups' high-level PCs playing in his games. While I didn't mind so much, the other players took it kind of personally and stopped playing with our FRPG dealer. Consent issues aside, I had just started playing an interesting ork dammit.

That summer, spending time in my father's familial homelands of Texas, at the store called Austin Books and Comic Books I would discover Tunnels and Trolls, the 5th Edition. While its solitary dungeons, err tunnels were fine and dandy,  I was more interested in the expanded races, called Kin, which included even real monsters as opposed to just the regular dwarf, elf, human, and short ones that everyone was used to. Having a couple of kids near my age nearby, we were able to do a rather expansive campaign involving a leprechaun, an ork, a human, and a dwarve(?). Our group would reclaim the dwarf's clan stronghold, Mine Brand (the dwarf Player's name was Brandon). We'd also have a city adventure and get into a fistfight with some small town bigots that didn't like humans and dwarfs having a leprechaun and an ork as friends. The bar brawl got out of hand where a pen of slaves, conveniently next door, got freed. Before our PCs knew it, they were leading a slave rebellion against the Autocrat of Marshoom City.  We and the surviving now freed people, of many Kin, would escape aboard a  stolen frigate into the cold waters of the Whaling Straits. Promises of a pirate campaign to happen next Summer. We were now Tunnel Delvers on the High Seas! PIRATES, bitches! PIRATES! Six years before the first pirate RPG I ever saw.

Now before you, seated reader, get all persecuted about your political beliefs being under attack, please remember we were around thirteen years-old (9-14 to be exact). It was the Summer of 1979. We had three boys and a kid sister. I was the only white guy among three homegrown Texans (two Hispanic and one Native American, the GM). I was too busy wanting to play a damn ork to develop my taste for DMing, alas the term "game master" just wouldn't catch on for another three years for me. Decades later, I don't marvel at the diversity of the group nor its in-game politics, I am amazed how our tale could have been the inspiration for the movie Ice Pirates that would come out five years later.

The point of this story, is how organic these multi-species yarns wove themselves among two very different gaming groups. We didn't have collective groups of self-approved semi-scholarly sorts looking over our shoulders to not be racist or colonizers. The GMs weren't worried about the cores of their very civilizations being threatened by the self-approved, self-appointed, and ultimately self-serving folks mentioned. We had some good times. We experimented with game systems, doing that thing called roleplaying. We played roles. Those roles were often beyond us, not just being who we normally were but with day dreams of having swords or wizard staves that weren't really our penises, and accumulating wealth and lovers (breasts!). It would open the door into looking deeper in the works of fantasy of many authors. It was, and still is, a hobby for people that want to find something new in themselves.