Last week I
talked about professional publishers
releasing licensed roleplaying games based on popular media properties, particularly in the context
of West End Games’ often ambitious licensing designs in the
mid-1990s. But in a hobby often infused with a do-it-yourself spirit
nothing prevents individual gamers from running their own adventures
in their favorite film, television, novel, and comic book settings.
The roleplaying game hobby has always cultivated an informal
tradition of gamers doing their own thing, taking established games
or settings and developing them for their local player groups.
Reading
Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World one realizes how
the entire adventure gaming hobby evolved from people taking someone
else’s ideas and modifying them to varying degrees into something
different. In the same vein fans sometimes unofficially channel their
enthusiasm for a media property into their roleplaying games, often
in a more timely manner than professionally published licensed games
delayed by the production and approval process.
The average
hobby gamer doesn’t have official rights to their favorite
roleplaying game rules and media properties, but nothing prevents
these independent creators from adjusting them to run their own
adventures at home. My own personal experience reflects this urge to
integrate elements from media into my home games, whether in part or
wholesale. My first forays into
Basic and
Expert Dungeons &
Dragons included monsters and locations from Tolkien’s
The
Hobbit and
Ray
Harryhausen’s stop-motion films like
The 7th
Voyage of Sinbad and
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (which
apparently also influenced Gary Gygax in his development of fantasy
roleplaying games). Even before West End Games released
The Star
Wars Roleplaying Game I incorporated bits from that galaxy far,
far away into my own
Star Frontiers scenarios. I also ported
materials from classic
Doctor Who episodes into both
Star
Frontiers and
Traveller adventures I wrote for my games at
home. When I started hanging out with friends who enjoyed watching
Star Trek: The Next Generation I immersed myself in the show
and its expanded universe, even creating a bare-bones roleplaying
game so we could explore story elements, characters, and situations
on our own. After the
Starship Troopers film I drafted an
unofficial, d6-based roleplaying game framework based on the film,
using character quotations for skill names, just for fun (maybe I ran
it once at a convention, I don’t recall). At the height of my
interest in
Doctor Who and the rebooted
Battlestar
Galactica I created
D6-System adventures for each to
engage my enthusiasm for the media well before the official
license-holders released their own games. I expect many roleplaying
gamemasters have engaged in similar activities in their home games
over the years. Whether it’s taking signature elements from media
properties – like my own integration of the villain from
Predator
into fantasy and even
Star Wars roleplaying adventures – or
crafting an entire campaign in a branded setting, gamers continue
using whatever makes for a satisfying play experience on their own,
unofficial level.
Some
engage in “filing
off
the serial
numbers”
– changing
enough setting elements, primarily names, but keeping the spirit of
the original to avoid copyright infringement –
to
bring their games inspired by media properties to publication at a
professional or hobby level. (Although I use the terms “professional”
and “hobby” to describe broad categories of activity, I still
consider both as admirable publishing endeavors. In fact, some hobby
publications display incredibly professional levels of quality in
writing, game design, art, layout, and overall production value. Some
hobby publishers actually consist of creators formerly working in the
professional publishing side who continue to share their ideas
despite lacking publishing company resources). My system-neutral
Pulp Egypt sourcebook
evolved from a proposal I never managed to pitch for West End Games’s
Indiana
Jones
game line,
Indiana
Jones and the Valley of the Pharaohs;
the
resulting sourcebook avoided intellectual
property elements
covered in
Raiders
of the Lost Ark
and focused more on
merging actual history with pulp tropes so players could run their
own archaeological, espionage, and criminal underworld adventures in
1930s Egypt.
Heroes of Rura-Tonga developed a setting inspired by the 1980s television show
Tales of the Gold Monkey –
island-hopping adventurers exploring the South Pacific in the 1930s –
adding more historical framework and several scenarios to help gamers
play in the broad genre. Others have produced
games based on settings that encompass one or several media
properties. One might consider
Rocket Age
or
Cosmic Patrol
as emulating the space opera action seen in
Flash
Gordon
and other early serials. Certainly games like
Warriors of the Red Planet
seek to replicate the adventures from “sword and planet” media
such as
A Princess of Mars
at the gaming table. One might argue
D&D
itself was an unofficially licensed game intended to let people play
out fantasy adventures in the
host of inspirational sources listed in
“Appendix
N” and its corollary in the Moldvay edition of
Basic
D&D, “Inspirational Source Material.”
As an aside,
the Open Game License (OGL) enabled hobby and professional publishers
to legally access the engine behind the field’s most popular
fantasy roleplaying game. While this allowed a host of professional
publishers to initially capitalize on the d20 craze of the early
2000s, it later allowed hobby publishers to share their house-ruled
versions of older, out-of-print rules sets, adding further
innovations to the game system to the point where some seemed almost
original games themselves. These don’t capitalize on a media
setting as much as an intellectual property centered on roleplaying
game mechanics. It’s provided a platform for hobby publishers to
engage gamers’ nostalgia for early roleplaying game systems,
explore new genres using familiar mechanics, and expand into more
innovative game design.
The rise of
desktop publishing and the internet have enabled hobby gamers to
harvest information on their favorite media settings and better share
their creations with others. Back in the 1980s and 1990s gamers
relied directly on the media itself and any print source material
they could find for inspiration. I recall when
Babylon 5 first
premiered I spent several evenings watching some video tapes of
broadcast episodes, taking notes on all kinds of setting elements:
aliens, starships, planets, technology, adventure hooks. For a
brand-new media property it was the best I was going to get for a
sourcebook. As a
Star Wars fan I was overjoyed to find Raymond
Velasco’s
A Guide to the Star Wars Universe in the bookstore
in the late 1980s; it served as a core continuity resource until Bill
Slavicsek released a revised version in 1994. The
Star Trek
franchise proved better at providing fans with episode guides and
background sourcebooks. Middle-earth fans had the inspiring
Atlas
of Middle-earth and a few guidebooks, though Iron Crown
Enterprises provided comprehensive gaming source material through its
numerous supplements. Nearly any media property that reached a level
of popularity had some guide published to provide detail on the
setting. Today the internet offers encyclopedic information on nearly
any media property, mostly unofficial, fan efforts, but enough for
gamers to get a better handle on the setting beyond watching/reading
the primary source media. When I have a question about a detail of a
franchised setting, I just Google it, look it up on Wikipedia, or
find an encyclopedic fan site. Have a
Star Wars question? I
don’t bother reaching for a guide to the galaxy or even one of West
End’s sourcebooks, I just surf on over to
Wookipedia. The internet
seems to offer information on everything at one’s fingertips;
“fan-made” or “unofficial” is often good enough for gamers
bringing this material to the table.
Technology has
also allowed amateur gamers to better produce and share their
media-based creations (and gaming materials overall). In the
pre-internet gaming world one required the resources of a
professional publishing house or, at the very least, access to a
photocopier or local printer to publish original game material...and
even then the distribution structure favored corporate entities and
not individual hobby gamers. For example, I had limited access to a
photocopier to produce my extremely amateur gaming fanzine in high
school – with its manual-typewriter text and poorly pasted-up
graphics – but its distribution was (thankfully) limited to my
gaming friends in my neighborhood and school. Today gamers can use
desktop publishing tools to design professional-looking books and
distribute them as PDFs through blogs, websites, or e-commerce sites
like
DriveThruRPG, avoiding the expense of printing, warehousing, and
shipping (though print-on-demand through e-commerce sites can also
put printed books in gamers’ hands). This created a boom in amateur
publishers (as well as another sales venue for professional
publishers), some of whom also develop their own presentations of
licensed settings with the serial numbers filed off.
Are licensed
settings a boon or bane to the overall roleplaying game landscape?
Some argue they divert creative energy and financial resources from
the development of more original gaming materials. Others feel they
capitalize on enthusiasm for a media property by catering to gamers’
interest in exploring the setting. For some amateur publishers it
satisfies their own creative need to engage in a particular genre.
Just like a brand’s popularity, gamers’ interest in media
settings can wax and wane; some quickly fade, a flash in the pan, but
others endure or evolve over time. Licensed games don’t dominate
the roleplaying game field, but they represent a sometimes
influential aspect of an incredibly multifaceted hobby.
Comments....
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your
experiences
integrating popular media into your home games?
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