Domain is the Name of the Game – Kingdoms and Towns in RPGs

I've always been fascinated by the concept of community building in roleplaying games. I'm not talking about building a community of players, though I've certainly been through all that in the last two decades. I'm talking about the incorporation of elements traditionally left to strategy computer games like Civilization into the tabletop rpg. Early editions of D&D had sketchy notes on the concepts of followers and strongholds, indicating that a transition to a position of rulership over a kingdom was a goal of high level play. My personal largest design project was the initial structure and mechanics for the Living Greyhawk Town Project. Written for the Living Campaign's Illinois and Indiana region of the Viscounty of Verbobonc initially, long after development of my rules passed from my hands, the system spread. Before long, players nationwide were sinking character gold and personal creativity into building and growing a village for PCs and NPCs to call home. The notion of domain-level play continues to fascinate me, and the inspiration for a flurry of design has eluded me since I wrote most of the Town Building rules in a single feverish night.

Screenshot from Majesty 2. I kind of want to do this, only not limited to fantasy, and in a Tabletop RPG.

What is domain play? Simply put, it is characters in control of something larger than their personal characters and a small group of henchmen. Whether that means a town, a kingdom, a temple, guild or street gang, there are events that must be endured and responded to, resources to be collected and power structures to be built. One of the most well known examples of domain play is the AD&D Birthright Campaign setting, which was interesting on its surface, but failed to catch on, as suiting the management of a kingdom to individual play groups felt unwieldy. It almost felt as though Birthright was two games, one a strategic solo play that felt almost like a board game, and another that cobbled the rulers of the local kingdom, temple, wizard's guild and thieves guild to adventure together somehow. DMs were confused by how, specifically to structure the narrative of their campaign to have both the dungeon exploration and roleplaying mix with the micromanagement and politics of the domain turn.

Domain gaming isn't unique to Dungeons and Dragons, either. The Lodge rules in the Savage Worlds setting Rippers that I recently wrote about are a very abstract and simple example of this style of gaming. TORG had a set of mechanics for player controlled megacorporations competing in economic warfare with hostile takeovers, market manipulation and stock splits that most likely only interested a tiny sliver of gamers that includes me. I'm fascinated by the idea of a system that incorporates gathering of materials, building defenses and infrastructure and establishing trade to watch a player-built organization flourish. Every rule set I've encountered has either been too abstract and mechanically murky, or has otherwise seemed half-finished. The best of these rules have been complicated, requiring a lot of bookkeeping and end up feeling like a separate game that is tacked on to an RPG.

I've met so many people who read and loved the idea of this boxed set.
No one who actually played it.

There are some examples of domain play in more recent gaming systems, but I know only enough about them to list them here. Green Ronin's A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, based on Martin's books includes rules on managing a character's own House in the Game of Thrones, an essential aspect of the setting, in my opinion. Goodman Games also recently published the D&D 4^th Edition supplement Crime Pays, which handles a fantasy take on running criminal organizations. What little I've gotten to see from Crime Pays amounts to a pretty decent little set of rules for managing anything from a street gang through a thieves' guild or a player-controlled Mafia complete with bribing officials, assigning specific crimes and getting involved in wars for territory. I'm currently grappling with whether or not I need to add this to my collection of domain gaming books I am unlikely to use, but which I really like the idea of.

Smaller publishers and fan-supported projects have gotten into the act as well, with standouts being Greg Stoltze's REIGN system for the ORE (One Roll Engine) system, available as either print-on-demand or downloadable PDF with a pile of supplements licensed under Creative Commons ready to download from his website. The strength of the Reign system is in random generation of power groups with conflicting goals and a streamlined system for resolving conflicts between them. Currently under production and in beta-testing is the Borderlands domain game for D&D OSR (Old-School Rules) being written and refined over at the blog Hill Cantons. I've seen the preview of the Table of Contents, and I'm looking forward to checking out the finished product when it is ready for public consumption beyond those few lucky groups who can commit to a full playtest.

I recommend looking into the setting and deciding if the setting info is necessary for
your game if you want to try this, otherwise there is a cheaper edition without it out there.

I still daydream about being able to run a game where city construction and management is as integral to the play as delving into dungeons and trade, diplomacy and resource management have to be mastered as well as the sword. I'd love to play a tabletop RPG where the management of an organization works without endless charts and bookkeeping. Maybe one of the existing systems I haven't tried or don't know about will fill this need to mashup computer strategy gaming with my tabletop roleplaying. Maybe not. I was pretty much the perfect target audience for the indie RPG Recettear, imported from Japan on Steam and focusing on running an item shop in a little fantasy village. I still load up and play X-Com: UFO Defense and Jagged Alliance. I'd just like a little more building bases, running guilds, expanding the territory of my character's street gang and successfully building a community in my games. Anyone know how?

Post #100: Dungeons and Dragons.

Here we are in July, and including bonus posts and guest blogs, we're up to 100 articles published here, and there's a subject I'd been waiting to talk about until the time is right. That time is now. I cover a lot of subjects in the same manner, I give an introduction, a basic history and maybe a little bit of how it relates to me on the end. Not this time. I'm going to presume for the moment that most of the people know just a little bit about D&D, and that I'd be wasting my time doing a full writeup of the most popular geeky activity in the last three-plus decades. If you are still in the dark about it, here's the Wikipedia article... suffice it to say that D&D, or any other tabletop roleplaying game isn't like a board game or video game. Your “piece” is a set of statistics that describes using numbers and game terms, what your character can do and how good he or she is at any given task. From there on out, the Dungeon Master acts as narrator in a fantasy story, and every player is a main character, deciding what their character will do and then sometimes rolling dice to determine success or failure. Good enough.

I didn't even know this was in a world called "Mystara" until over a decade later.

Instead of devoting the rest of this article to a history and further description of what D&D is that many of my readers know and the rest likely won't care about, I want to talk about what D&D is to me. I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons for a frankly ridiculous percentage of my life. I was a precocious and extremely bookish child enrolled in a tiny private school in a bad neighborhood just outside the city limits of Chicago in the early 1980s. The school was small enough that as a K-8 (That is Kindergarten through 8^th grade for the nine years of American pre-High School education) school, the entire building would have fit on a single public school bus. My 8^th grade graduating class consisted of four students and the year before us had two. For this reason, first through fourth grade were in the same room in the building for at least one year. What does this have to do with D&D? I'm getting there.

The year I was unceremoniously skipped directly from Kindergarten to the second grade, bypassing first grade entirely, I met Ron, a fourth grader who was into stuff I thought was cool. We both liked video games, Transformers, and he bullied me a little, but not too much (and to be fair everyone did, I was tiny and brainy with a big mouth.)  I'd already heard of Dungeons and Dragons in books, but I couldn't puzzle out what it was. One day, Ron brought the D&D books to school, and let me look at them. I was instantly captivated. Knights and wizards, crumbling ruins filled with monsters and treasure. I wanted to play. Begged to, even though my teacher yelled at me when she saw me looking at the book. I was barely seven years old, and small for my age. I was told I was too little by the teacher, my parents, even Ron... but I persisted.

Tools of the trade from that first book. I didn't know what this stuff did,
but by God, I meant to find out.

My first Dungeons and Dragons character was a thief named “Thief” (c'mon, I was 7...) due to our incomplete understanding of the rules and a series of bad die rolls, my first level thief singlehandedly dispatched a carrion crawler at the entrance to the sample dungeon in the Red Box GM book, with nothing but his dagger. I'd only managed to get Ron to run a game with me as the only player, but it was a victory. The fact that I was killed several rooms later by a wight in a chimney did not dampen my triumph. I knew what I wanted for my next several Christmas and Birthday gifts. I got my own Red Box from Toys 'R Us, where they'd stuffed it on a bottom shelf out of the way, and it was the only one left not damaged. I read it obsessively, made characters, made dungeons on graph paper and eventually got a copy of the Expert Set.

My first ever kill, and Google tells me that I'm not alone in this.

I didn't actually get to play D&D again for years, and until High School, D&D always started with me begging my little brother, my Dad and neighborhood kids to try it, with me getting frustrated and them getting bored and stopping without even being willing to sit through a full session. I didn't care. I kept getting the books, making dungeons, reading about monsters and spells. Even in High School we only got a handful of sessions off, but by then I had myself a little collection and was set when I got to college. College opened my eyes, as I had willing and capable other players, I didn't have to beg anyone to play, and I didn't have to DM the group if I didn't want to. Those were some great years.

Post-college I joined a few different campaigns, and ran more than a few of my own, though by then I was better known for running Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu. I did a tour of the classic modules during years playing 2^nd Edition AD&D, going through the Giants Series, Slavers Series, Temple of Elemental Evil, Castle Ravenloft, Through the Looking Glass, and even Tomb of Horrors. Years went by and I learned about acting as my character and actually roleplaying in Classic RPGA events where completion of the adventure was sometimes secondary to just acting like the character you were handed. In tournament play at Gen Con, in 1994 I was on the Winning Team for the NASCRAG event Nexus II: The Weather Stone, youngest person on the team, but I was used to that by now. Three years later I was on the 2^nd place team in the D&D Open Tournament, using the “Cutters” scenario at Gen Con 1997... I remember the adventure was set in Planescape.

Still have this on the wall by my computer, and still have the shirt and tiny
cut sapphire from the NASCRAG tourney.

I'd had years of experience as a DM, player of home games, convention tournaments and I even played a bit of Living City. Everything changed when I got a set of playtest rulebooks for Third Edition. I was in the vanguard pushing local gamers to embrace D&D3e before it even came out. By then, I was manager of a local hobby shop and when the books came out we sold tons of them, and I was running games on both days every weekend. With my boss' blessing at the hobby shop, I founded the Ides of March game convention to bring gamers together to play Warhammer, Magic: the Gathering, and most of all, D&D. (More on that convention is a tale for another day.) My convention attendance was up to seven or more cons per year, and I eventually met my wife while playing.

It's funny. When 3^rd edition (and later 3.5) came out, I prided myself on being open to change, and I mocked the people who hung onto earlier editions from behind my counter to my friends and customers as the “Gaming Amish.” After all, I'd played since 1983, I knew all the editions and had adjusted with the times... progress, you know? After the hobby shop had closed, my convention was a risk I couldn't afford to take financially anymore and my con attendance was back down to one or two per year, I got a look at Fourth Edition D&D and... I hated it. I wanted to like it, but all the old sacred cows were slaughtered and what was left might have been a decent fantasy roleplaying game, but to me, it just wasn't D&D anymore. Times changed, and this time, they left me behind. I was one of the Gaming Amish.

The last edition of D&D I really played.

I've since tried 4^th edition, and I still don't care for it. I still do an awful lot of tabletop roleplaying, but despite all those decades of it being the other pillar (besides video games) of my hobby and entertainment life, I haven't played actual D&D in years except that once to give 4e a real shot. This may seem or sound kind of sad, but I really don't feel that way. Since I started blogging, I've come into contact with all sorts of people who game in their own way, some play D&D Old-school, and I learned that OSR (Old School Rules) is a hobby all its own. I'm playing the new Arcanis RPG which has its roots in D&D, I run a lot of Savage Worlds, and may try Pathfinder Society as I've heard it is a lot like D&D 3.5... From age seven to, well... I'll be thirty-five come a week from Friday, I've been a D&D player for 28 years (80% of my whole life,) and I don't think I'll ever see myself any differently.

After all, somewhere out there, there's a crumbling ruin... a carrion crawler guards the doors to the forgotten keep where ancient treasure still lies, guarded by worse things in the darkness. There has to be a roguish young man in leathers and a black cloak with adventuing tools in his pack and a dagger at his belt, ready to pilfer those forbidden riches... He just won't be named: “Thief.”

Living Campaigns - Players and Paperwork

For the bulk of the time I've spent as an adult gamer attending annual conventions, especially Gen Con and Origins (where I am as of the publication of this post) the main reason I've made the annual pilgrimage is for tabletop roleplaying games in general, and to participate in living campaigns in particular. So, what's a living campaign? In short, a living campaign is run by a team of volunteers organizing a single campaign with a shared world that thousands of people at home, in game shops and at conventions participate in. That is an accurate summary that does a poor job of answering the question. I'll do my best to elaborate.

The earliest living campaigns were based on Dungeons and Dragons games or their derivatives, which typically have a single game master controlling the world, the story and all of the monsters and characters not played by individual players. The RPGA (Role Playing Game Association) originally came up with the concept of a game that could be played with players creating characters that conform to a published set of uniform guidelines, to keep individual “house rules” to a minimum. These characters would play a series of adventures published in Polyhedron, the RPGA newsletter, and track treasure and experience gained on a form kept between play sessions. Different groups could form under different gamemasters to play any new scenarios using the same characters, as the standards for character creation and session tracking kept everything organized and honest. Set in the Forgotten Realms city of Raven's Bluff, this first campaign was called Living City.

Living City became extremely popular at game conventions after its 1987 debut, new Polyhedron articles clarifying, refining and announcing various aspects of the campaign. Most new scenarios were written by RPGA members, and distribution over the internet for printing replaced a magazine-style publication allmost completely by the mid-1990s. Special treasures, titles or other important rewards were tracked using paper certificates signed by a gamemaster to indicate the reward had been earned in-game. Living City thrived until the release of the 3^rd Editon of Dungeons and Dragons in the year 2000, but by then many other living campaigns had been launched for play by the RPGA.

Men and women of the RPGA playing Living Greyhawk.

Living campaigns offer an alternative to gamers who cannot find a group to play a standard campaign with that meets their schedule, or who prefer to play with a different group of people in a different environment regularly. The community aspect of participating in the same campaign world with thousands of other players instead of (usually) three to six other people makes a living campaign a good fit for convention gaming. Conventions also sometimes have larger scale events such as “Interactives” which might include Live Action Roleplaying, in-character item bazaars, or events hosted by campaign world organizations like guilds recruiting for membership or sponsoring a competition of some sort with a unique reward for the victor. Conventions also play host to the mega-event called the “Battle Interactive,” where a large scale fantasy war is played out with each table of players representing squads, and their table gamemasters playing a series of rounds representing important skirmish actions in the battle, with tables overall success or failure rate in achieving objectives determining the outcome of the war.

A Living City Interactive from 2001, "A Game of Masks."
Funny story, seven years after this picture was taken, I'd end up marrying the girl in green on the left. 

Some of the individual impact of characters upon a setting is lost in a game mostly played at conventions and in the back rooms of retail stores, but it is a different sort of experience for those who want to play many adventures with different people, but with advancements to a single character persisting throughout. The paperwork and tracking of certificates, experience and gold adds a bit of accounting to these games no present in a typical roleplaying game, and filling out the forms is daunting for some. Living games also require some suspension of disbelief as many players complete the exact same scenarios at different tables, but the game works best not trying to reconcile a singular timeline inclusive of everyone's different experiences in previous sessions.

Today, living games are run both within and outside of the RPGA, some to promote a particular game, others simply by groups of dedicated fans who volunteer to administrate and handle the questions and rulings that keep gameplay as universal and consistent as possible. I'm currently involved in the Chronicles of the Shattered Empires campaign set in the world of Arcanis, and preparing to play in the Shadowrun: Missions campaign as well. (Preparing my Arcanis character for the con actually is the reason for the extreme late time of this article's publication.)

Legionnaires, Flintlocks, Intrigue and Dark Fantasy - a Profile on the World of Arcanis.

Of all the fantasy settings I've spent time playing in, writing for and reading about, one has had more impact than all the others. Shared interest in gaming in the world introduced me to my wife, and for many years even when money was extremely tight, we'd make an annual pilgrimage to one of the larger gaming conventions to participate in events. I'm talking about Paradigm Concepts' Arcanis – The World of Shattered Empires. When I first encountered this setting, I'd already been gaming for over 15 years, and I would have told you, if asked, that there was no room in my gaming life for another fantasy roleplaying setting. If I'd said that, I wouldn't have known what I was talking about. I was already jaded when I first gave Arcanis a try, and it pushed all other gaming for me into competing for 2^nd place.

Classic Arcanis Logo.

What makes Arcanis different from other fantasy settings? This is a very complicated question, that takes more than a few sentences to answer. It is a world where the First Imperium of Man has long since fractured into many kingdoms, some of which war on each other, and even the last echoes of that ancient empire, The mighty Coryani with its vast resources and legions seems to be headed into twilight. The Mother Church tries to guide the faithful in their service to gods who have gone silent generations ago, while staving off heretical cults and perversions of the faith. In this world, a singular theme is repeated over and over again. Actions have consequences. The world reels from these consequences of choices made both recently and in the distant past.

The technology level of the world is a fusion of Ancient Rome and Late Medieval Europe with the additional “blessing” of blast powder allowing for cannons and flintlock weaponry in the hands of the very few who can obtain it in any significant quantity. The well-developed and distinct human cultures tend to determine common types of weapons and armor with specific local flavor, from a Coryani (similar to Rome) Gladius and Lorica Segmentata, to an Altherian (think Moorish) flintlock rifle, or the Milandesian (roughly most like German/Hungarian Knights) heavy plate and Tralian Hammer. The perspectives, secret societies and politics of the various human nations alone would make Arcanis distinct.

An Altherian man, complete with Flintlock Pistol.

Fantasy races in the world of Arcanis are also different takes on traditional swords and sorcery humanoid races. The Noble Val, who are very similar to humans, only tinged with the blood of the divine and imbued with some small portion of the powers of their family's patron deity are often the highest caste in the human nations. Val look human aside from the color of their eyes which indicates their capacity for psionic abilities (or lack thereof,) and they can and do marry and breed with normal humans. The reptilian Ss'ressen are the few members of a race that coexist with humanity out of a species that most typically belongs to the hostile and destructive Ssethregoran Empire, perpetually at war with other races. They follow the path of the Fire Dragon, rather than the Ssethric Dark Gods and often lend teeth, claw and tail to the human empires which their lands exist in or near. The Dark-Kin are remnants of a time when Infernal Lords tortured and enslaved humanity in the time of terror, and the demonic tainted blood made its way into human bloodlines creating something... else. Despite their dark heritage and sinister appearance, Dark-Kin are not universally evil, and many who fall to that path do so out of the fear and hatred they encounter at the hands of others.

A Val'Mordane of Canceri, sitting upon his dark throne. The Val'Mordane are
scions of Neroth, Lord of Undeath and Master of Pestilence.

Even standard fantasy races have their own unique flavor in this world, as elf, dwarf and gnome are represented in unusual ways. The Elorii are a people once enslaved by the reptilian Ssethregorans; legends say they were created by binding powerful elemental lords and fleshcrafting their powers into a species of slaves. Now free, each of the long-lived and graceful beings serve the elemental gods whom they share affinity with, and nearly all revere the fifth aspect named Belisarda, the Eloran Goddess of Life. Dwarves labor in their enclaves generation upon generation, revering the human pantheon and trying to atone for the sins that cursed them with their current form. They were charged in ancient times by the human gods to safeguard the human race when they walked the land as Giants, but betrayed their vow by setting themselves as tyrants over the humans. The punishment for their sin of putting themselves above humanity was the curse of the stunted dwarven form, and the denial of dwarven souls to paradise. This curse will only be broken by the dwarven enclave who creates the singular perfect item in the sight of the gods, so they serve their penance, and they craft. Gnomes are twisted abominations, nearly universally reviled as the unnatural and obscene progeny of a human and a dwarf. They have no distinct culture, no lands, and frequently no place in any proper culture.

Religion and Lore, especially in the human/val/dwarf pantheon has a major impact on the feel of any fantastic world, and it is particularly important in Arcanis. The gods have their individual priesthoods and orders of Holy Champions, and there is a greco-roman sort of familial divine hierarchy that defines each deity as a personal being. Every god or goddess has concepts within their portfolio (Nier: the Lord of Fire and War, Iliir: Father of the gods and Lord of Light and Truth, Sarish: Lord of Blood, Secrets, Oaths and Magic, etc.) and have immortal beings which serve them. These servants, the angelic/demi-godlike Valinor each serve a particular god and represent an aspect of that god's personality. Should one of these beings be lost or slain somehow, the god loses that part of themselves.

Elandre Val'Assante, Matriarch (think Pope) of the Mother Church.

These ideas were originally a campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons, but over the years, Arcanis has outgrown the edition changes and restrictions imposed by linking the setting to another company's system and have created their own game. The company has in the past, and continues to produce and sell source material, and supports their creation through the maintenance of a global shared world campaign. Players create and track characters as they play them, often with different other players and gamemasters at home, game shops or conventions as they run through adventure scenarios offered for free download to whoever is willing to run as GM. Major events such as Live Action Roleplaying Scenarios and massive Battle Interactives (wars played out with dozens of tables fighting indiviual actions in a larger conflict) determine the future development in the metaplot of the world, allowing players to have a direct impact on the setting with their personal play.

The cover for the Arcanis RPG, releasing this summer.

I played the D&D version of the “Living Arcanis” campaign from start to conclusion, and very recently got to try playing in the world using the new rules. I don't quite feel well versed enough to give a satisfactory review of the new system yet, but my early impression is positive, and once I've had a few more sessions under my belt and an in-depth look at the full rulebook (releasing late June 2011) I'll return to this topic for an evaluation and discussion of the mechanics of Arcanis post-D&D.

Unexpected Treasures from 1988.

 I've been reading for a very, very long time. Long enough that I can't remember a time when I couldn't. Very early on, I was fascinated by “swords and sorcery” epic fantasy, even more than science fiction. I have a very clear memory of seeing a picture of Gandalf battling the Balrog and not knowing what it was, but feeling that it was awesome. So I read the Hobbit, and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and then one summer, something amazing happened. Amazing things didn't happen in 1988 in Cicero, IL very often, and certainly not to pudgy curly-headed Irish kids who wore thick glasses.

Not this. This didn't happen. Not to me, anyway.

As kids, my brother and I would ride our bikes down the alley maybe more often than the street out front, and one summer day we found several boxes. I never really knew much about the person who put the boxes out by the garbage to be thrown away (I have a vague recollection of thinking someone said he was a pastor who moved out of the neighborhood.) This mystery person will certainly never know what they did for me. Inside the boxes were dozens of fantasy and sci-fi novels. C.S. Lewis, “choose your own adventure”, Twistaplot, even most of the collected Lone Wolf books and Steve Jackson's Sorcery! Whoever it was who threw the boxes of books away, they affected my life profoundly.

I think now that this series was the best part of those boxes.

I frantically dragged boxes down the alley to save the precious contents from the rain that was starting to fall, and looking back on it, I'm not sure I got them all. I wonder what treasures might have been ruined by water hours after I'd decided that I'd gotten “enough”. The trove of books in the boxes was in uniformly good condition, and I sat in the basement that summer sorting them into piles to be looked at later. I'd read some Narnia and Tolkien already, and I'd gotten a bunch of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” from the Scholastic Book club at school, but there were a LOT of those “adventure game/books” that I'd have never known existed otherwise.

Yeah, I still did the standard stupid kid stuff, played with toy guns (which was dangerous, because back then, toy guns looked real, and in my neighborhood there were more than a few young people out there with the real thing) set off fireworks, begged my Dad to go with me to put my allowance into Ms. Pac-Man, Elevator Action or TRON a quarter at a time... but there were those books. I'd already been an unusually bookish kid, winning a toy dog who wore a “Sherlock Holmes” kind of outfit for 1^st place in the 1981 MS Read-a-Thon  competition at the Cicero Public Library. I was the winner by over 25 books.

Some of these were really pretty hard. All of the gaming from my childhood had a difficulty level modern gamers wouldn't tolerate.

I can honestly say that those particular books, that particular summer before we owned a computer, and when I only owned 2 games for the NES, shaped me into who I am today. My first Piers Anthony was in there, so was my first exposure to something called the Mail Order Hobby Shop. A catalogue was in the bottom of one of the boxes for the mail-order game supply business set up by TSR, inc. I'd known about and played Dungeons and Dragons nearly three years before, but inside the catalogue was a whole new world. I excitedly showed my find to my mother, but she was no help there. She thought video games were a waste of time and money, that I wouldn't like Lord of the Rings because you had to “read between the lines”, and D&D was “that game that the people at church think is Satanic.”

This was the catalogue from the summer AFTER this story takes place, which exposed me to my first Gen Con.

I'll give my parents credit, though. They didn't forbid me any of the activities that, once I got a taste for them, I chose to devote a lot of time and thought into, even if they didn't understand or really approve of them. I got more fantasy novels from garage sales, ordered a set of Lord of the Rings miniatures from the 1989 version of that catalogue, and even got my Dad to take me to Toys 'R Us to buy my own D&D Red Box, and later taking the longer drive to a mall game store for the Expert Set. (That is definitely a subject for another article, maybe two)

Yeah, looking at these covers hit me with serious nostalgia while writing this.

Oh yeah... those books? Though I lost a bunch along the way, since that summer was almost 25 years ago now, I still have about a third of them, paperbacks sitting proudly on our shelves.

Co-Operative Games (Unplugged)

 When geeks typically think of Co-op, we think video games, usually first person shooters with a cooperative campaign mode, or maybe classic arcade games where 2-4 players could team up to beat up hordes of bad guys and work together to progress. I guess a lot of other forms of gaming are cooperative as well, as tabletop RPGs are cooperative in nature (unless you play with one of THOSE groups, or are playing Paranoia.) I love all these games dearly, but I'm not talking about any of these.

Red Wizard Needs Food - Badly. I show my age by using this as an image instead of something like Left 4 Dead.

I'd like to discuss a fast-growing niche in the tabletop board gaming world. The cooperative game, and its twin sibling, the co-op game with a traitor. My first board game article touched on one of the more complicated and popular games in this sub-genre, Battlestar Galactica. There were a whole lot of games released before BSG unleashed suspicion and paranoia into deep space.

The earliest ancestor of this style of game (as treated by my narrow definition that eliminates games with one defined 'antagonist' like Scotland Yard or Fury of Dracula) that I could find evidence of is Arkham Horror. AH was first published in 1987, with a redesign and re-release in 2005, making the first proper game of this type still one of the most popular today. Investigators in the 1920s fight monsters, dig up clues, and close Gates To Worlds Man Was Not Meant To Know. Players work as a team, trying to prevent the return of one of the Great Old Ones from H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Personally, I love the new edition of Arkham, with or without expansions, there is so much going on and it fits the cosmic horror theme, running around with tommyguns and eldritch tomes, defeating cultists and going insane from shoggoths.

Remember, any wins are temporary. The Old Ones will eventually destroy all When The Stars Are Right.

Five years before Arkham was re-released, though, Fantasy Flight put out the game that introduced me to the cooperative board game genre. Lord of the Rings, by master designer Reiner Knizia had a group of hobbits playing against the board itself, attempting to bypass challenges and complete the classic Heroic Journey before the Eye of Sauron can claim victory. I loved this when I first played it, but the years have not been kind, as other games reveal a key flaw. Every turn, the game says “I'm going to make you lose," and the entire play is spent reacting, merely trying to stop it. This means most key decisions are made randomly, and all the players can do is react.

On the upside, any homoerotic hobbit bed-bouncing is entirely optional.

A few years later, we have the first really popular game with the “secret traitor” mechanic, Shadows Over Camelot, published by Days of Wonder the same year Arkham Horror was re-released. This is the one that really got me going on the co-op board game, and I still play it six years later (as recently as Sunday, matter of fact.) Players are Knights of Camelot, and every turn, on one of the many areas and sub-boards representing threats to Arthur's Kingdom, something goes wrong or gets worse. The balancing act of resource management in dealing with these issues and completing these heroic quests is that one of the Knights may be a traitor working for Camelot's downfall. It is random every game, with 8 loyalty cards (and 3-7 players) it is also possible there is no traitor at all.

This game is typical of Days of Wonder... impeccably made, art and components both sturdy and very pretty.

More recently, we've seen a mini-flood of these games, highlights being Pandemic, Forbidden Island and the new Co-op questing D&D boardgames like Castle Ravenloft, based on classic adventures. There's just something different about the mood and atmosphere in a game where (at least most of) the table shares victory or defeat. I actually like a game in this style that beats us as a group of players occasionally, the challenge makes the victory over the common foe that much sweeter. Even if the foe is a deck of cards and a little collection of plastic and cardboard.