Experimental TTRPG Reading List

TTRPG School, class 1

My friend Chris wrote an essay about falling out of love with tabletop games and said it had to do with how young this medium is. This is something I’ve been known to say on twitter. It’s something I’ve seen other people say as well. A common sentiment, you could call it. But this time I want to take another approach and make an argument against that idea.

In their essay, Chris talks about how TTRPGs have been “cribbing” from video games in both design and in the language used to talk about games. And while I agree with that, I want to also say that video games, as a medium, are younger than tabletop games. Depending on when you begin measuring, tabletop games are at least a few years older. And I want to sit with that for a moment. Because if we want to measure the two industries, or talk about “cribbing”, or if we want to borrow from video games, I think we need to contend with The Stanley Parable. We have to contend with “Mario 1:1 teaches you how to play it.” We have to sit with the way that Doom levels are held up as a monument of FPS design. We have to sit with the recent release of MyHouse.wad in relation to that. We have to contend with the Lain PS1 game. Or LSD Dream Emulator and the legacy of Yume Nikki.

I could go on and on and I’m sure many of you have these landmark games in your head that you would put on your own list. And that’s exactly my point. Why is it that our industry is *at least* as old as video games yet we sweep ourselves under the rug and call ourselves young? Where is the history? Where is the understanding of movements and historical context?

I started thinking about this and then I found a game text that blew my mind.

It came out in 1995, when I was three years old.

It’s called “Freebase” and it’s an experimental, satirical LARP that reads like an early precursor to what would be the Lyric Games movement that came and went in the blink of an eye on itch.io in 2019 and 2020. Reading it made me think, “wow, people were being weird and experimental all the way back then.” But then the follow up thought was, “1995 was 20-whole-years years away from Gygax and the creation of dungeons and dragons.” And then hit with the next thought that, here we are nearly 30 years out from 1995.

And Freebase is not the first game to make me think this and it’s not the first game to inspire me or show me the experimental nature of tabletop games or roleplaying games in general. It’s not the first game that made me sit, nodding my head, and saying to myself “yeah, there is a difference between board games, video games, and tabletop. We are a medium of our own.” It’s not the first game where I saw someone (or a group of people) playing with voice, mechanisms, and the limits of what could reasonably still be called “a game.”

One thing that might make all of this make sense to you reading this, is that I don’t really give a damn about any of the Stuff that’s currently being held up as Good Game Design. I don’t care about game loops or incentive structures. I don’t care about layout-first design or two-page spreads. I don’t care about usability at the table. I simply do not value those things as highly as I do other parts of the form of tabletop games.

Some of the things I do care about: role playing, writing, voice, poetics, experimentation, worldbuilding, the magic circle, bleed, the experience of reading, stretching the bounds of “play”, perspectives, filth, emotion, personality, outsider artist, ritual, impossible play. I care about the longevity of a piece beyond the reading. Beyond the playing. I care about the life a piece of art creates in your head. It’s free real estate up there, baby! I want you to move in and hold the house from me until it’s yours forever and ever.

And I understand that this goes against so much of what this industry is. Any creator can attest to the amount of questions you get about each game you create. About what a certain rule means. Or if the game can be played with X amount of players. Or how long the playtime is. People ask what you meant by a certain thing. Or, more usually, they critique the way you made your thing because they didn’t automatically understand it as readily as the dominant role playing games. It’s always critique. “You made the game wrong because I can’t play it the way I usually play things.”

I’ll always push against this because I like what I like and I will always want to see more of it. And I’m not hurting the industry or losing anyone sales by having opinions about art and liking art and wanting to marry art and create art children with art in a super sexy polycule of form and media. I am, in truth, little more than a skin tag on the armpit of this industry.

But I want to make the argument (going back to Chris’s essay) that there are form-pushing books out there. That we are NOT as young as we pretend. That we do not (and fundamentally are not) reinventing the wheel with things like GM-less games, or dice-less games, or tarot-based games, or anything like that. Not that there’s anything wrong with making those, but, listen, there’s a lot we gotta read haha. I don’t know how else to say it. We have a lot to learn from what has come before us and even a lot to learn from other modern games.

I know people will get mad at me. They always do whenever I talk about art. But, hey, if me saying “you need to learn some history” is going to make you mad, then that’s fine. Don’t learn about it. But you’re here in my house right now, my internet house, and I want to talk about history and give you a list of games that blew my mind and helped show me the bounds of what we’ve done so far, as an industry.

This is in no way a complete list. I mean, there are probably thousands of games that aren’t even documented completely on the internet. There are thousands of games you can’t really access anymore because some asshole got the Trove taken down (rip). We don’t have that many catalogers (catalogists?) or collectors in the industry. We don’t, in general, have a lot of infrastructure at all haha. Our history-keeping systems suck ass and it’s probably all of our faults but I choose to blame Wizards of the Coast cause I hate them and you should hate them too.

But this list also isn’t complete because I haven’t read everything. Similar to earlier when I was rattling off some Big Video Game Things and you probably started making a list in your head that contained all the games that I missed, you might look at this list and think to yourself “well, what about x, y, and z?” And that’s a good question. As a student (you’re my student now) of tabletop games, you should be asking those questions and you should also make your own list and blog about it. Sharing ideas is good. I think the lack of sharing ideas (or maybe just the ephemeral nature of tweets (or sheets?)) is to blame for this lack of understanding/history when it comes to Game.

My guarantee to you with this list is that you will find at least one game here that you haven’t read AND that you will find one game on this list that completely blows your mind. Money back guarantee. If that ends up not happening for you then we probably are not compatible in our artistic interests and that’s okay. Every other artistic field has many different schools of thought that flourish and flounder underneath it and TTRPGs should too.

Also, I have added links to purchase games wherever I could. Otherwise I added links to pdfs online that I found by searching [Game Title] pdf. If there is a purchase link for one where I didn’t put one, you can let me know and I’ll update it. Support artists!

Also, also, if it wasn’t clear this far, this list will not feature games that teach you how to play tabletop games. Like, this isn’t a starter list of games you should read if you want to play DnD or Pathfinder or Powered by the Apocalypse or Blades in the Dark or, or, or. This list doesn’t care for any game that is very popular right now or your personal rubric of what is considered “popular.” It cares specifically about games that pushed the barriers of what was possible in my mind.

I also (god I have so many addendums to this list) do not condone every creator on this list? I don’t know the complete history of all of these people. I’m sorry. If it comes out to me that one of them is actually just fucking horrible, I will change my mind. Some of these games might also have content warnings so do some research on any of them that sound weird to you. I don’t know.

Anyways! This is our reading list, class. You will probably hate some of these. You will probably find some of them inscrutable or completely unplayable. And that’s good. They are listed in alphabetical order. Some are old. Some are recent. You might ask “why didn’t you put chuubo’s on there instead of WTF?” and my answer is that I don’t like chuubo’s very much. You can extend that answer to any variation of the question “why this work from this artist and not another.”

Here’s the list.

• Adventure RPG (in Need of Translation), Mameli – https://better-legends.itch.io/adventure-rpg-in-need-of-translation

• Apollo 47 Technical Manual, Hutchings – https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/products/apollo-47-technical-manual-an-rpg

• Care for Hecuba, Libre – https://bigstuffedcat.itch.io/care-for-hecuba

• Clay Creatures, Sinclair – https://s-jared.itch.io/clay-creatures

• Disk Horse, Geist – https://fm-geist.itch.io/disk-horse-1-off-to-the-races

• Don’t Lose Your Mind, Baugh – https://evilhat.com/product/don-t-lose-your-mind

• Everyone is John, Sullivan – https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/271276/Everyone-is-John

• Feedback, Slattery – https://adira.itch.io/feedback

• Flying Games, Dragon – https://possumcreekgames.itch.io/flying-games

• Freebase, Thron & Shaughnessy – https://i.4pcdn.org/tg/1411822901179.pdf

• I EAT MANTRAS FOR BREAKFAST, Mison – https://mariabumby.itch.io/i-eat-mantras-for-breakfast

• kill puppies for satan, Baker – https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1370/08/1370081361036.pdf

• Lady Blackbird, Harper – https://johnharper.itch.io/lady-blackbird

• Paranoia, Costikyan, Gelber, and Goldberg – https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/224392/Paranoia–First-Edition

• Plot Armor, Black – https://oriondblack.itch.io/plot-armor

• Print Weaver, Morrison – https://nlmorrison.itch.io/print-weaver

• Teen Witch, Adler – https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/variations-on-your-body

• Ten Candles, Dewey – https://cavalrygames.com/shop/ten-candles-pdf

• This Discord Has Ghosts in it, Jobst & Vass – https://willjobst.itch.io/ghosts

• Unusual Esoterica, Unpleasant – https://axesorcs.itch.io/unusual-esoterica-series-1

• We Are But Worms, LaBresh – https://riverhousegames.itch.io/we-are-but-worms-a-one-word-rpg

• Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, Moran – https://afarandasunlessland.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/wtf.pdf

P.s. – as you can see, I did not provide commentary on why I included any of these on here. I want you to read them. Listening to me talk about them is for a future class.

Love,

Snow

Back Soul Cemetery!!!