![]() Fortunately, Colonel George Washington ambushed a Spider Lord detachment in the forests of western Pennsylvania, capturing their weapons and gear, and Benjamin Franklin was able to reverse-engineer the Spider Lords’ lightning guns. Like a lot of RPGs these days, it takes place in an alternative history in this case, it’s one where the great European and transatlantic wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries didn’t happen, because those sinister arachnids, the Spider Lords of Shambhala, burst out of their warrens deep under Central Asia’s mountains in 1751 and attempted to conquer the world. ![]() What makes Airship Heroes an unintentional commentary on the cultural politics of our era isn’t the game itself – it uses a good workmanlike set of game mechanics and stats – but the setting, which is discussed at great length in the rulebook. The points I hope to make ought to be just as clear that way as any other. I have no desire whatsoever to upset the designer or the publisher of the game in question, nor to do anything that might deprive it of so much as a single sale, so I’ll call it Airship Heroes (not its real name), pretend that it’s a steampunk-themed game (which it isn’t), and swap out other details as needed to provide everyone involved with as much plausible deniability as they could wish. Still, that’s what happened, courtesy of one of the RPGs I picked up in the course of my research. I didn’t expect any of this research to cast light on the cultural politics of our era, much less to explain at long last why the Left can’t meme and why Hollywood has churned out so many politically correct flops since Donald Trump’s election. I’ve had plenty of both experiences, though by and large the admiration has been the more common of the two-there are a lot of really good games out there these days. One of the things I’ve been doing to try to make the game as good as possible is to read a bunch of current RPGs, in the hopes of getting a sense of where roleplaying games have gone in the years since I played regularly, admiring (and drawing inspiration from) the things that work, and wincing at (and being warned by) the things that don’t. ![]() The working draft is already in the hands of the publisher editorial feedback, playtesting to destruction, and frantic editing will follow, and with any luck it’ll be unleashed on a world trembling with dread in early 2020. I’m pleased to report that the game’s squamous and rugose bulk is slithering toward you-yes, you!-with uncanny speed, reaching out hungry pseudopods…well, you get the idea. Readers of my Dreamwidth journal will be aware of this, but those who simply follow this blog may not yet have heard that I’ve been asked by a game publisher to create a roleplaying game based on my fantasy series with tentacles, The Weird of Hali. It so happens that in recent months I’ve had the chance to explore it from yet another angle, by way of the research I’ve been doing for an unexpected project of mine. The collective confusions we’ve been exploring since I returned from January’s break form a tangled web, and no one loose end leads straight to the heart of it.
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