RPGaDay 2023, Day 12

Reheating Leftovers

I bet you’ll be guessing that I’d choose Traveller.

But in truth, there are no old games I still play.

Of course I began with Traveller. Everybody begins with Traveller. it’s not like there were any other games on the market at that time, right? Right?

But “old style Traveller” means the Little Black Books, and I haven’t picked up a LBB since before the turn of the century.

I don’t play any of those old games any more, not in their original form - RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Ars Magica, Vampire: the Masquerade, Mage: the Ascension (1st, 2nd, Revised), or Hunter: the Reckoning.

I also don’t play Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition, or Steve Jackson Games’ GURPS (though I do still have copies of some GURPS supplements: Cyberpunk v2.0, GURPS Illuminati and Warehouse 23, and GURPS Humanx Commonwealth. I never bought the GURPS core rulebook.

I also don’t play Atlas Games’ 1st edition Over The Edge.

Also, while I may still have plenty of the early copies of books by Berin Kinsman’s old Dancing Lights Press before it became Lightspress Media, I probably won’t ever find anyone to game with using those old books in the near future.

Early Problematic Content

One reason, though it’s not the only reason, is the problematic content of some of the earlier games. I could not play D&D in its earlier incarnations (I’ll never play D&D at all, but that’s not the point) because of an underlying sexism running through the story. Similarly, I could not really run The Design Mechanism’s Monster Island because of the liberal use of the term “Savages” - even though Monster Island’s inhabitants are all lizard people, it’s still straight black-coding, and an issue I cannot really reconcile. The Human settlement, Port Blacksand, evokes an atmosphere of a Colonialist slave trade port on the Ivory Coast. It’s too much.

I won’t put Drow into my fantasy stories, or Lolth. If my stories feature lycanthropy, there’s none of that hideous A-B-O shite.

Similarly, I would refuse to play, or run, any games set in the Old West on the 1800s, or playing Confederate troops during the Civil War, or any historical games set in Colonial Africa, India, or the Far East. That counts out every incarnation of Victorian steampunk. The Irish famine is taught to Irish kids as an accident. It wasn’t It was an act of genocide by the Victorians, a way of forcing a Clearance so they could step over the cold, emaciated bodies and claim the land without firing a shot.

Churchill did the same in India, by the way, single-handedly claiming as many lives with one stroke of a pen as the nazis claimed during WWII in the death camps.

So you can tell there are historical games I will never play, and never run, because of the historical atrocities associated with those times (the Trail of Tears, the Holocaust, the Irish Genocide, the Gallipoli Massacre, the Algerian Massacre, the Killing Fields, the Magdalene Laundries …)

The aliens would have contacted us long ago, but I guess they must have smelled all the blood in the air and decided to leave us the hell alone.

Back To The Games

This is the main reason why I don’t pick up older game books any more. The earlier games were simpler. Your characters could create some Barbarian character and set the game in the African jungle, with their Barbarian swinging on vines through the trees, and you wouldn’t once imagine that the little men in khaki and pith hats were slavers and murderers in real life. Your Old West characters could put on a Stetson and pick up a pair of sixguns and shoot it out at High Noon down the main street of Dry Gulch, AZ, and not worry about the lack of Native Americans in your story.

I guess that we don’t play the older games any more because the games never changed. We don’t play the older games any more because we did.