Review: The Curse of Mizzling Grove

The Curse of Mizzling Grove is a generic DIY elf-game adventure module written by prolific blogger Idle Cartulary, crowdfunded in Zine Month 2024. I have the physical version, a 38 page perfect bound booklet fulfilled via Lulu. It also features really striking art by Niosis, which is what originally caught my eye. The module centers on Renwall tower, a haunted wizards lair in Mizzling Grove packed with memorable encounters and furnishings. I should disclose that my zine month project last month received a nice plug in Idle Cartulary's substack, although I was thinking about doing this review before that happened, and I will make this review honest and be critical where I see appropriate. I have not run this module.

One of my strongest impressions of The Curse of Mizzling Grove (or CoMG) after reading it is that it was written by someone who is well versed in the various techniques in the modern OSR. The first page acknowledges Anne from DIY & Dragons for her most well known blog post Landmark, Hidden, Secret, and utilizes this technique explicitly with "H"s and "S" in room descriptions to indicate Hidden contents that need to be explicitly asked about before being revealed by the referee, and Secret contents which need to be discovered through more committed investigation. The module demonstrates another recent best practice from the blogosphere, being strongly reminiscent of what Gus L. calls Jewelbox design. Jewelbox design is named after house design for retirees who have financial resources, but lack mobility to make use of a large house. These houses are small but very deliberately and meticulously designed. Such dungeons exemplify quality over quantity of rooms. Each of CoMG's rooms is well seated in the tower's fable-like origin story, the inhabitants are unique and weird, and their relationships with each other are detailed. A third bit of OSR wisdom that it employees is that it uses the ultra lethal wandering monster (the Star-gazing golem) that is not intended to be a combat encounter but a hazard of the dungeon meant to be cleverly dealt with in the tradition of the crawling giant in Deep Carbon Observatory. Each of the dungeons 20 rooms has a page dedicated to it, and a map of each floor is reproduced near its descriptions for convenient reference at the table. The complete map of the tower's five floors is also shown near the beginning. I have noticed this technique in the OSE modules I've read, but I'm sure this trick dates from further back. Finally, the layout seems to be based on the Classic Explorer Template by Explorer's Design, but I may be imagining this last one. The protagonist in the lore of the dungeon is the wizards daughter Valeria, and a story centering a woman is not something common in the OSR.

Despite the high quality of form in the construction of the module, I do feel that despite all the attention put into the details that come together to make it, it is a little disconnected thematically from a big picture perspective. The tower was once inhabited by a great sorcerer Cacus Aquilia and his daughter Valeria. Cacus' specialty was astrology, but the dungeon is also filled with clockwork creations, and Valeria studied dragons. This combination of sorcerous specialties feels mostly arbitrary. It's likely that the Star-gazing golem was conceived of together with the complex brass telescope on the top of the tower, but the combination doesn't feel meaningful to me. There is also an apprentice mummified in moss on one of the balconies, which I have trouble placing in the dungeon. He is certainly an interesting encounter, but what does magic moss have to do with astrology and clockwork creatures? These are all very interesting features on their own, but there is a sort of disconnect I feel in the overall picture.

CoMG features a variety of puzzles. The secret doors of the tower are tied into the lore of the setting and tower itself via crystal paintings of historical sorcerers. Some of these paintings have constellations on their frames, and if the correct constellation of their birth is depressed, a secret door will open. The correct constellations are recorded in a book by the Star-gazing golem, so solving this puzzle means taking a dive into the fiction woven throughout the tower. Gaining entrance to the tower itself is a puzzle as well, a few possibilities are offered in the module. The most salient is the secret door (the visible door is a ruse, totally impenetrable) hinted at by an obscure pedestal outside the tower that calls for a "wizened eye." One way of discovering the door is to look through a shard of wood with its eye burned out that splintered from a tree struck by lightning, which serves no real purpose other than to furnish the shard. This is a bit video gamey to me, but at the same time I can imagine a players excitement on looking through the shard to discover the secret door, and that makes it fine for me. There are also alternate entrances to the tower, including treating with the highwaymen who have a lair in a cave with a secret entrance to the tower basement. Players can also climb up to the various balconies visible from the outside. The titular Curse of Mizzling Grove is another major puzzle. To break the curse, players need to collect several scampering eyeballs and reattach them to the statue of the Observer, a god whose protection has been broken, resulting in the scattering of its eyeballs. This could easily constitute the main activity of the delve, I can imagine searching the tower trying to catch them all would take a lot of time and effort. This puzzle is a bit video gamey as well, and is mostly optional, so I feel the same way about this as the secret door. 

In all, this is an excellent adventure module, full of character and carefully designed. I've called attention to the many ways this module draws from other places, but it is also decidedly not written by anyone but Idle Cartulary. The concept, rigorous attention to detail and sense of humor come together to make a memorable experience. For all the attention the author gets as a critic and commentator on the scene, I think it is worth considering her as an adventure writer as well.

The TTRPG in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility

This blog post contains my analysis of TTRPGs using the ideas in Walter Benjamin's influential essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, if that wasn't obvious by the title. In his essay, Benjamin discusses the development of new forms of media created by technological advances around the turn of the century. He uses a critical Marxist lens to analyze the social and material conditions that determine the role of art in society. Assuming that his basic premises are true, I think there is a lot of insight to be gained from using them to look at the TTRPG hobby.

There is a huge amount of discourse around this nearly 100 year old essay, and I am only moderately knowledgeable of it, having watched a few lectures and listened to a few podcasts on it. I will try to focus mostly on one of the main themes of the essay, the idea of aura versus exhibition value of art, which was discussed at length in my cursory research. Aura is the inherent physicality, history and presence of an object or person. Exhibition value, is the value of the reproduced art as a commodity accessible to and consumable by the masses.

Benjamin discusses the new forms of media from his time: photography, sound recording and film. In comparison, TTRPGs are much less technologically advanced, even though they are newer. TTRPGs encompass many forms of media at once, making up an ecosystem of play. This includes the medium of play itself, which exists in our minds and words while playing, game texts, adventure modules, the notebooks of game masters and players, and so on. 

One comparison he spends a lot of time on is theater versus film. Film is more or less the technologically reproducible version of theater. The aura of the performer is destroyed in film creation, while theater requires physical presence, so it allows aura to remain. As Benjamin puts it, "Aura is bound to [the actor's] presence in the here and now."

Benjamin says that an audience receives a film, reacts, and immediately regulates its reaction. In this way, the masses absorb media as distraction, habituating themselves to new modes of apperception. This is in contrast to the way it was in the past, when the individual was absorbed into a piece of art in quiet, solitary, asocial contemplation. Benjamin's view is more or less that this mass, regulated reaction is a progressive, proletarian experience, whereas solitary contemplation of aura is regressive and bourgeois. However, contrary to what Benjamin says, in a movie theater filled with individuals, aura is anything but absent. If an audience can receive mass produced art, react and regulate its reaction, the aura of audience members themselves affect each other as they perform being in an audience. 

A similar dynamic exists in the TTRPG, where the group reacts to the fiction they are producing themselves, and regulates their reactions. Just as members of the audience of a film experience each others auras as they watch together, the individuals playing a TTRPG experience each others auras. Beyond affecting each other as members of an audience, they are also performing and creating fiction, distracting and habituating, reacting and regulating in a tightly closed loop. The aura once only accessible to the asocial elite bourgeoisie, becomes more and more prosocial and democratized in the TTRPG hobby space. TTRPG play brings a return to aura, but with its role inverted. 

Where the technology that produces film can be used to manipulate media and reveal dimensions of reality and experiences that do not exist outside of film, the TTRPG medium of play is produced in the mind. No media even exists as true record except for as memory, GMs notes, adventure modules, and game texts and in some cases, audio or video recording of play. Players often prioritize the idea of immersion, an experience of fiction that evokes powerful responses in players. Immersion represents the height of distraction versus quiet solitary contemplation, which may be why it is such a valuable experience to so many players. I would even say that immersion and distraction are the same thing.

Mass reproduction can not create exacting technological copies of the medium of play of TTRPGs. True, zines and books can be mass produced, but fiction produced by play can not, because it doesn't come from a film projector, but the human imagination itself. Any game text or practice; systems, procedures, settings, modules and the like, all seek to reproduce fiction in some way or another. A player reads a text, and then something is imagined. One player describes their imaginings, and another player imagines it in their own unique way. I think imagination as film projector and game text as film reel works as a rough analogy, except that each individual will reproduce fiction uniquely in their own way, and that fiction produced enters a melting pot of other fiction. 

TTRPG capital must be removed from the mass reproduction of game texts in order to allow the masses to regulate their own consumption in their desire to know themselves and their class. Benjamin discusses how the number of readers has increased with the growth and extension of the press, and as a result, so have the number or writers and opportunities to write. In our current advanced technological society, nearly anyone can have a blog and an itch page. In TTRPGs, we can move towards the ultimate conclusion of Benjamin's example, where reader and writer are the same, bypassing capital as a mediator. 

TTRPGs give us an opportunity to experience our own unique auras and react to those of others. As we develop a dialogue with the people in our groups through play, and with others in the hobby space through the sharing of our zines and ideas, we can learn to be audience as much as we are artist, to obliterate not aura, but the dualistic view of artist and audience itself.

Ecological TTRPGs

A document circulated in the online left called Politigram and the Post-left, chronicles various tendencies of political memes on Instagram in the late 2010's. In particular, it focused on the post-left, which is a political position arrived at by anarchists after being disillusioned by Trump's first election (round 2 here we come!). Overall, the document serves as a leftist critique of anarchism, depicting it as nihilistic and ineffective. The book chronicles the political journey of some prominent influencers from a vanilla anarchism to more advanced versions, which celebrate a motley crew including Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, egoist nihilist Max Stirner, and AI overlord worshipping accelerationist Nick Land. To be clear, these things represent a bad turn for anarchism, but they do not, as the author of Politigram and the Post-left would have you believe, represent the ultimate conclusion of anarchism. There is a prescient critique of these tendencies made by the eco-socialist anarchist Murray Bookchin, which predates Instagram by many years, centered around what are called first and second nature. I'm going to make the argument that designers and influencers in the TTRPG space follow the same thought process as the post-left on Instagram, and that the critique can be meaningful for us game nerds just as they are in the political sphere. 

Bookchin's critique looks at a trend in ecology calling itself deep ecology. Deep ecologists come to the conclusion that society is antagonistic to nature, and the only way for humans to come to an ecological balance with nature is for us to reject technological society. They reject one of the most fundamental aspects of humanity itself, which is the ability to understand the world and develop tools that serve as extensions of our will as much as tooth and claw serve other species. They argue that technology can only exist in one mode, and that is as an artificial force that exploits and devastates the natural world. This same argument for primitivism is made by Kaczynski. The same perspective of technology's only possible mode of existence is shared by Land, although he nihilistically embraces it rather than rejecting it. In a totally uncontroversial comparison, I am saying that many in the TTRPG world similarly depict the technology of TTRPGs as monolithically bad, and hold that rejecting game mechanics is virtuous and liberatory.

Bookchin says that our relationship with nature reflects the relationships in our own society. Capital allows the ruling class to exploit the working class, and in the same way, it allows them to exploit nature itself, extracting value from it without giving anything back. Capital here takes the form of the technology of consumerist mass production. Rather than rejecting human capacity for tool making, he proposes an alternative, ecological approach. First nature is the natural world itself. It is the inorganic world and the flora and fauna that has sprung forth from it and depends on it. Human society is not part of first nature, but it can be reimagined to coexist with it according to ecological principles. This ecologically harmonious society is second nature, which is continuous, yet discontinuous with first nature.

So, if we reject system nihilism and accept that humans have the capacity to create tools that act as extensions of our own human nature, what does that look like? Ecology is the research and theory of the dynamic relationship between organisms and their environment, and that relationships evolution over time. The major theories of ecology look at species abundance, niche, population dynamics, interactions between species, geographical distribution and connections between individual behavior and population phenomena. From here, I'll describe some of these concepts, and then try to draw parallels to TTRPGs, or propose ways to express them in TTRPGs. 

Ecosystem

The word ecosystem describes the complex relationships between many interacting species and the inorganic environment they depend on. Originally, ecologists tried to scientifically isolate flora and fauna from the environment to study them, but this separation was artificial and unhelpful. Instead, they came to see things as a single interacting whole. In this totalizing idea of the ecosystem, the line between organisms and their environment is unclear. Dead and decaying life forms are a critical part of the activities of species, but it is not so easy to call them strictly biological or not. 

Influential TTRPG forum of the 2000's, the Forge, created a Big Model that looked at the big picture of TTRPGs, from the players to the society they come from, down to the game being played and the dice and character sheets they have. However, the Forge held game mechanics as their primary focus. An ecosystem perspective rejects this hierarchy, and instead looks at all the related factors as contributing equally to the picture. The players are just as important as the game being played, and the medium of play, be it using physical dice, a deck of cards, pen and paper, or be it a virtual tabletop, all are just as important to the experience. Game mechanics will change and operate differently depending on all these factors. The line between the biological and non-biological components of play is not clear. People design rules, fill out character sheets, and write scenarios and lore. The line where game texts end and where players' creations begin is not clear cut. They are all part of the ecosystem of play. Not System Matters, but Ecosystem Matters. 

Niche

Niche is the position within the food web that a species occupies. It is its habits, habitat, and evolutionary traits that allow it to gather resources in a way that is different from other species. In an ecological community, diversity is a key factor, with each species occupying its own niche, contributing to the economy of the ecosystem in its own way. The principle of competitive exclusion describes the occupation of a niche by only one species, with competing species inevitably being forced out. 

In TTRPGs, niche could mean a few different things. It could mean that character classes available to players are distinct, and engage with different economies from each other. A good example of this would be the classes in Ava Islam's Errant. The Violent has their Damage Dice, the Deviant has their Jettons, The Occult has their Sorceries, and The Zealot has their Relics. These characters almost seem like they belong in different games and engage in different game currencies.

Another example of niche could be the division of GM roles in Avery Alder's Belonging Outside Belonging system into Setting Elements. In this GMless system players each get a character, and also control some aspect of the setting traditionally held by the GM, like Varied Scarcities, Psychic Maelstrom, Society Intact, Digital Realm, Outlying Gangs, and Earth Itself.

Succession

In ecology, succession refers to the change in a community over long periods of time. The flora and fauna in a location can change over time (or over distance), in a process that can be related to evolution. While partly in competition with each other, organisms are also related in a stable and harmonious web of niches. Ecologist Henry Cowles' described succession as a never-ending dynamic process in which all life is interconnected through a vast and complex symbiotic relationship.

We can see succession in the games played by a table and in the popular games within the greater hobby. The individual table and the scene are connected to and influence each other. A single table might go through several games, fleshing out their preferences and gravitating more and more towards a type or types of games. A single table might also play one system for may years, making incremental rules changes through rulings and hacks, slowly drifting and evolving their system and style of play. Fads seem to come and go quickly in the TTRPG hobby. Some games fade away, and some have longevity because of various material causes, mostly related to things that happen at individual tables. Games appeal to players in terms of system, theme, writing, lore or a steady supply of supplements, and they can replace games that don't appeal to players in the same ways.

Interactions between species

I had a specific idea relating to predator-prey relationships for this last topic. Organisms lower on the food chain are typically more specialized in the way they receive nutrients, while predators higher up have less discrete consumption. This allows for the collapsing of the food chain in times of scarcity, with predators feeding on other predators. 

Conventional D&D play is frequently compared to westward expansion in the American west. Rugged individuals strike out into the wilderness and take resources from the native inhabitants in a lawless zone outside of civilized society. So player characters act like predators in this situation, in search of prey to take resources from. A comparison that is not frequently made about D&D as the wild west, but not far removed from it, is to the gold rush. Instead of adventurers being similar to pioneers who are rare in the wilds, adventurers would be similar to prospectors who are much more common. In this form of D&D, adventurers outnumber dungeons by a vast number, and have to compete with each other for them, short circuiting the food chain and forcing predators (adventurers) to feed on other predators. 

Disclaimer

Before I end I should say that Bookchin never went this far in looking at the actual principles of ecology beyond praising complexity and fecundity. Also, ecology itself is opposed to applying its principles to humans, instead favoring the pristine natural conditions of the world without humans. So what I am doing here is not really advocated by either. I would also accept that the comparison between game mechanics and tools that I base this blog post on is unfair, and that informal procedures and modules can be considered tools too (they're part of the ecosystem). Play is the zone of experimentation where we can try out ideas and that's the best way to treat these propositions. They are meant to be fun thought experiments, not a prescription or final judgement. 

Schismogenesis Redux

After reading Gila RPGs recent substack post On New Games I was inspired by a few thoughts, enough that I figured I could write a short blog post. I'll say that I think he is right in describing how science is done and how games are made, I have also written a handful of academic papers during my post-graduate work in Materials Science. In scientific research, people take an established field of knowledge and add a bit onto it to learn something new building on a solid scientific foundation. In exploring complex systems, if you change more than one variable at a time, you won't be able to suss out cause and effect. By analogy the same can hold true for TTRPGs. That said, I left an R&D position in industry because I was politically radicalized and delved into communist and anarchist theory, so I have some ideas that might meaningfully add on to this perspective. I think I can say everything I want to with examples from science, so I will stick to them for the sake of consistency.

My first comment comes from historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, who popularized the idea of paradigm shifts. In a paradigm shift, a new idea or perspective is introduced, which changes the foundations of our understanding of science. Einstein is the famous example of this, with his theory of relativity which changed the way we see Newtonian physics, and then soon after with quantum physics (by other physicists), which once again changed our basic understanding of the world. Kuhn's paradigm shift reminds me a bit of a topic I wrote about earlier, Schismogenesis in TTRPGs, where I cited Vincent Baker saying, "new games contradict the games that came before, at least as often as they build on them." Although you will be more successful in science and in game design if you take existing ideas and just add one new thing (we can't all be Einstein), it's also true that radically new ideas shape the field as much or more than cautious exploration does. 

Another historian of science, Paul Feyerabend has some ideas to add on to this as well. He had a critique of the scientific method that goes like this: the scientific method which follows the basic process of "question -> hypothesis -> experiment -> conclusion" does not represent scientific exploration as it naturally happens in the lab. It represents the process of reporting and control imposed on science by the capitalists who fund and oversee scientists. In reality, many of the greatest discoveries are made through joyful exploration and curiosity. For example, the discovery of conducting polymers, which are now widely used in industry, were discovered when a chemical reaction went sideways. Instead of throwing out the flask, the scientist was fascinated and probed deeper. TTRPG design can be based on research and sales, but it can also come from just messing around and spontaneously coming up with ideas for the sake of fun and curiosity.

The last point I have comes from evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould. He popularized a theory of evolution that contrasted incremental change in the development of new species', called punctuated equilibrium. Gould noticed the archaeological record apparently contradicted the theory of evolution with long periods of stasis where one species remained mostly unchanged. These periods of stasis were punctuated by periods of rapid change where new species came about called cladogenesis. I think the same sort of evolution can hold true for games, where history is not shaped by incremental shifts, but by big, discontinuous shifts.

People try to make new games through joyful exploration, and even though they mostly fail to find anything new, we will never find those breaking points were new styles of play are born, shifting our fundamental assumptions of what play can be and changing the course of games history.

The Prodigy and the Grand Master

Being half-Japanese American for me has meant a complicated relationship with Japan. I grew up exposed to Japanese culture through the lens of one person, my mother. I've visited Japan and have spent a bit of time there, so I've also had the chance to learn parts of the culture that appeal to me from family and every day lived experience there. Living in the US, I always feel unsure how to tease Japanese culture out of the Western fascination with Japan. I've never identified as "otaku," in fact in Japan it is a pejorative, not a hip counter culture.

Zen Buddhism is a staple of Western pop culture. Oddly enough, Japanese people often aren't familiar with the word Zen. They'll be like, "Huh? Oh like Zazen meditation, ok!" This is partly because Zen Buddhism is not the dominant form of Buddhism in Japan. Zen is wide spread and practiced across Asia, but every day Japanese people practice Shin Buddhism. This discovery was a bit of a revelation to me, and I feel much more comfortable eschewing the West-favored perspective of Zen, studying Shin instead.

With that the context there, I have some thoughts on Shin Buddhism in TTRPGs since that's where my brain takes everything.

In the book Dharma Breeze, Nobuo Haneda tells a parable of a young prodigy who visited Beethoven's house on a guided tour. At the house was Beethoven's old piano, which guests were allowed to play as part of the tour. So, the prodigy sat down and played an incredible performance, eager at the chance to play her hero's piano. When she finished playing, the rest of the tour group gave an enthusiastic round of applause. The next tour group came through, and in this group was a grand master piano player of world renowned fame. He sat down at the piano and caressed the keys but did not play a note. The prodigy watched him for a while, excited to hear him play, but he did not play. The prodigy grew frustrated and approached him, asking him if he would play. The grand master replied that he dared not, and that nothing he could play would approach the greatness of Beethoven's hands that had graced this piano. 

The meaning of this parable might seem to be that the prodigy is foolish. Instead the story is meant to show that youth is and should be eager to try everything, while spiritual mastery comes from simplicity and humility.

In Shin Buddhism, there is a single Buddha that is worshipped, Amida Buddha. There are many Buddhas, but it is taught that you should focus on the one, rather than the many Buddhas that exist in history. Even Amida Buddha sought to learn from as many masters as there are grains of sand in the Ganges River, but the teaching of Shin Buddhism is to focus solely on Amida. This is because of the need for humility in spiritual enlightenment. To focus on many is to indulge in hubris. There are many Dharma gates (practices of Buddhism), but at some point you need to choose and pass through one. The various Dharmas are like boats moored on a river. You can stand on the shore appreciating all of them, but you have to board one if you want to cross the river.

This idea applies to my personal experience with TTRPGs. There are many TTRPGs, different styles of play, and it is good to try many. But if you want to become skillful and grow personally, it is good to pick one approach and focus on it. Now I should be clear, this is not the stance of all of Buddhism, just Shin Buddism (hence the lengthy preamble). In fact other practices believe you should do the opposite. 

I do play a lot of types of games, I am curious and excited for all of the ideas creative game designers have and want to experience them. But at the same time, I do feel that I am always learning a little more about my preferred play style, and I am slowly honing my skills to create specific experiences I and my group want to have. I think this is the appeal of the "fantasy heartbreaker", the million OSR retroclones with slightly different rules and procedures, the seemingly never ending ranks of game designers interested in making their own systems, and the ravenously hungry fanbase interested in buying new games. It's all an attempt to chase that specific, idiosyncratic play experience that sits on the tip of each of our tongues.

Bureaucracy, Ritual and Games

Proto-Cuneiform tablet: administrative account of barley
distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure,
hunting dogs, and boars. Probably from the city of Uruk.

This will be my last blog post directly based on Graeber and Wengrow's book, The Dawn of Everything, an anthropological critique of our most basic assumptions about human civilization. I finished reading it a month ago but I revisited it and the notes I made to write this post. It is my final but also most sweeping application of their anarchist anthropology to TTRPGs, hopefully it is successful in making an interesting point.

One of the main concepts introduced in the book is that there are three types of domination that occur, which are in their simplest forms: violence, control of information, and charisma. These types of domination can scale up to create "state" like power, respectively becoming: sovereign monopoly on violence, bureaucracy, and competitive politics. It's possible to make diegetic models of all three of these within a TTRPG or apply them to the practice of playing TTRPGs, but I'm going to focus on the real world application of bureaucracy in the form of game texts and unwritten procedures. It is tempting to think of WotC's hegemonic control over the industry as some sort of sovereignty, but that is a bit of a stretch for me. Similarly, a charismatic player can lead the table in any direction they like through force of personality alone, but that's not what I'm interested here.

In the Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow look towards anthropology to examine historical precedent for many ideas we take for granted about human nature. One of these assumptions they deconstruct is the parallel growth of cities and a need for hierarchy. 

In Uruk, one of the earliest Mesopotamian cities, there was an interesting phase that lasted for centuries before royalty appeared. The city has the oldest recorded bureaucracy, documented by their famous cuneiform tablets, tablets that recorded transactions of goods and services made by temple factories that output products in uniform packaging for equitable distribution to its populace. The authors comment in the book, "administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening." 

Across the ocean and centuries later in the Andes mountains, there was a similar phenomenon. Before the Inca empire came to dominate the land, ayllu village associations were a form of bureaucratic administration that performed the redistribution of agricultural land among families as they changed in size, to ensure that wealth disparity did not develop. They also made sure the infirm, orphans, widows and disabled were taken care of. 

Ayllus used an accounting method involving tying knots in strings called khipu to track debts. At the end of the year debts were to be cancelled out and knots were untied. When the Inca empire came to rule over the ayllus, these khipu knots were never unraveled, representing a permanent debt to masters.

Now, it is important to point out that these examples are not indicating a pure, primordial period of human innocence, but instead that bureaucracy is not inherently coercive. Tracking and control of information can in fact be used as a means of producing equality as much as it can to take it away.

I think this same bureaucratic tension exists in TTRPGs, where game rules control flows of information. Mechanics, procedures and modules can be liberatory, and push us to more unfettered ways of thinking, but they can also dominate us, narrowing our thinking and funnel us into restrictive, hierarchical behavior. What these are exactly, is hard to say, especially without getting sanctimonious about wrong-bad-fun. To a degree, if someone wants to finish a hard days work, turn off their brain and play a railroaded adventure prewritten by DM Johnny, that is their right and they should be able to do so free of judgement. But at the same time, games can create a space where instead of reproducing the oppressive structures of capitalist society, they can help us to transcend it and try to imagine something new. 

In the Dawn of Everything, there is another interesting thing that happens with bureaucracy. In some societies where the two other forms of domination - sovereignty and political power - come to the forefront, bureaucracy can be pushed to the imaginary. The ajaws of Classic Maya used control of information very little to exert control over their people, while their society observed a complex mythological, cosmic bureaucracy. Here the control of information can become the domain of ritual, or even games. Ritual and games can act as a repository of knowledge and zone of experimentation for a society. Throughout history, new technologies emerged first as experimental flirtations with new ways of life through play. According to French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the indigenous Australian corroboree can be a festive ceremony where ritual is marked off from ordinary life, where essentially imaginary social institutions are maintained, and where the power to create new social orders appears, projected onto totemic spirits and their emblems.

This is games at their most grandiose, where they offer a window to the most ambitious and idealistic visions for society and possibility. They already inherently contain these seeds. We talk about some of these ideas in the game design world as "the magic circle," to describe the separation of a game world from the ordinary world. While I am not saying that people are obliged to use TTRPGs to recreate society, I also hope that we can recognize the full potential that game texts and unwritten cultures of play have to offers us. 

Schismogenesis in TTRPGs

My wife and I have a game we play occasionally when we are people watching in the colder months. The idea is that couples and families will often have matching jackets. We call them Jouples. This sort of reflects that people who end up together often have complementary aesthetic tastes, or that their aesthetics grow together. It also probably reflects the fact that one member of the couple might be buying jackets for the other. So you can guess if a group of people are a family, or a more incidental group of individuals, like coworkers or something. You can also use it to guess how long a couple has been together, and it's fun to joke "oh those two will never work out," because their jackets don't match. There is, however, an exception to Jouple Theory. A child of a jouple will sometimes have a jacket with aethetics completely at odds with that of their parents. The idea of teenage rebellion is of course common to all of us. There is a big, fancy word that I've recently learned for this phenomenon, and it's the theme of this post: Schismogenesis. 

Schismogenesis is a word used by David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything, which they use to describe intentional culture creation by a society which is a direct rejection of their neighbors. The word's roots 'schism-o-genesis' mean generation through schism. The first example of this in the book is that of indigenous tribes in what is now the Pacific Northwest coast of Canada, like the Kwakiutl, who had decadent lifestyles and held slaves, and their neighbors in what is now California, like the Yurok, who were expected to be modest and focused more on individual work ethic. It is also used to describe the differences between the ancient Athenians and Spartans, with their sharply contrasting democratic and militaristic societies. 

So like the teenager who creates their fashion by rejecting their parents' fashion, or societies who create their own culture through rejection of their neighbor's culture, TTRPGs can also be created by rejection of other TTRPGs. In an AMA on the NSR Discord, Vincent Baker said:

"I think that there's a common misunderstanding of game design at large — the biological metaphor, the idea that a game has ancestors — that hits PbtA especially hard. The fact is, new games contradict the games that came before, at least as often as they build on them. PbtA should best be seen as a movement of contradictions."

So in other words, game designers in Baker's Storygamer cohort were influenced by traditional mainstream games like D&D and Vampire, but not in that they wanted to copy those games, but that they rejected them and the things that those games did. They disliked the idea that the game master had total control of the narrative, saying that complex mechanics meant that a game master had to plan encounters ahead of time because they needed to have opponents and scenarios statted out. Their design of contradiction meant that narrative control was partly taken away from the game master and redistributed formally through mechanics to the players. It meant that opponents needed minimal stats, so that they could be generated on the fly to handle whatever situation the table found itself in. 

Later on in The Dawn of Everything, schismogenesis comes up again. In discussing one of the first cities, Uruk of Mesopotamia, the authors mention a theory of Hector Munroe Chadwick, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge in the 1920's (apparently a contemporary of J.R.R Tolkien who was at Oxford). Chadwick popularized an idea that fell out and then regained popularity of what he called heroic societies. These societies were characterized by "heroic burials, indicating in turn an emerging cultural emphasis on feasting, drinking, the beauty and fame of the individual male warrior." These societies emerge again and again throughout history on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities like Uruk. What often happens is that a city rises to prominence, and establishes satellite settlements to help manage the flow of resources to the city, and that those settlements realize that rather than acting in service to the larger city, sending the majority of resources down the road, they can keep that wealth to themselves through the power of individual charisma and martial skill. 

My next analogy here is that the OSR emerged from mainstream D&D similarly by creating a 'heroic society' of their own. Groups of players existed on the margins of D&D culture, getting left behind as more and more complex editions written through bureaucratic process came down the pipeline. These tables eventually realized that their cultural cache could be used to carve out their own spaces, rather than bending the knee to 'Big D&D,' relying on individual writing skill and artistic talent to break away and forge their own path. 

There are of course many other indie games that have come about over the years through their own processes, some similar to the ones discussed above, and some totally different. I just mention these reductive analogies for their simplicity. 

Thinking in broad terms of these two artistic movements, its easy to imagine a dialectic of sorts, where there are two competing styles of indie games, and the logical way forward is through a synthesis of Storygames and the OSR. But through the schismogenetic lens, the opposite can also be the case. As much as artistic styles will go back to look at older games as biological ancestors, they will also reject their parents, and find cool new jackets of their own.