Author: elftorp

But I guess this story started almost 40 years ago…

I used to play a bunch of Role Playing Games back in the 1990s. Always tabletop, never live action. Actually, I started even earlier, because me and some of my classmates got the opportunity to do it on the school’s budget when I was in 5th(?) grade, so we got the Star Wars RPG, Lord of the Rings and Mutant (a Swedish postapocalyptic cyberpunk game), if I remember it right. Maybe also Drakar & Demoner (D&D), the Swedish version of Dungeons and Dragons (DnD). I think those were what was available at the time in Varberg, where I lived at the time. At least I think that’s what happened, but we got to keep the games afterwards so I’m not sure. Maybe the school just let us have them? It was kind of a different time…

Before that, in the late 1980s when I was in 3rd or 4th grade, I had played some game books. Mostly the Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever (illustrated, as it turns out, by Gary Gygax, the creator of DnD). They were books written in the second person, where the reader was the protagonist and you’d read a few paragraphs or pages at a time, then you’d choose what would happen next, i.e what page to comtinue the story on. You had a little character sheet in the end of the books where you’d keep track of things you got and how you progressed through the story. There was even a system for combat and skill checks, based on a simple random number generator: a page with a bunch of numbers on it and you had to put your finger somewhere with your eyes closed to see what you got (or you could use a D10 if you had one of those).

I mostly borrowed the books from a friend, who sometimes read them to me and I had to just listen and make the choices, almost like a real RPG. This was also the same person who later got me into the Dune books, which I’m currently re-reading (Heretics of Dune at the moment). It was fun, and often pretty difficult. I only managed to actually succeed in a couple of those books without dying or losing in some other way.

We used to spend recesses at school writing our own gamebooks in our glossary books (instead of using them to practice English or handwriting or whatever they were meant for). So I guess I actually wrote my first (still unpublished) book when I was 9 or 10. A sci fi story called Pang, sa det! (loosely translates as: “It just went Bang”), where you had to fight Hitler the second on Earth II… It may not have been great literature, but it was a complete story and a fully functional gamebook. I still have it lying around somewhere. Having done that back then is probably what made me do something similar in comics form, 22 years later, with Piracy is Liberation 010: Hypertext Consciousness (and some of the later Piracy books as well). I wanted to have a pic of Pang, sa det! beside Piracy010, but I couldn’t find it right now…

But anyway, in high school in the 90s I picked it up again, playing a bunch of different games, like D&D, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun and various World of Darkness games, such as Werewolf: the Apocalype and Wraith: the Oblivion which was the one I was Storyteller for (the WoD word for Game Master). And I tried creating my own RPG called Wormholes, set in an adjacent world to the comic zines I was making at the time, possibly the same world as Pang, sa det! (I was reading too much comics not to make it an interconnected multiverse). Maybe I’ll write more about all that at some point, if/when I finish the Piracy RPG…

We also played a few Collectible Card Games. The first two that reached Varberg were Magic the Gathering (which we never got into) and Doomtrooper (the one we started playing). I always lost because those games were often designed so that whoever could afford to get the most cards would be able to build the best deck and would always win, and that wasn’t me. We also tried Mythos, the Lovecraft-based CCG, and Rage. Rage I still think was the best of them. It was based on Werewolf: the Apocalypse and the system favored strategic thinking and an optimized deck, which meant that you could actually do pretty well even if you didn’t have the most cards. I tried playing it again a few years ago and it actually still holds up.

My -90s gaming days were followed by two decades where I didn’t play any RPGs at all, but I’ve been getting back into it. I now have one group where I play with Dice Dominion and Trauma Command (the other half of Wormgod) with Factory Farming as Storyteller, where we’re playing a long-running World of Darkness campaign. With a side quest in Kult that tied into the Werewolf story. I also have another group where my brother runs mostly Call of Cthulhu sessions.

Getting back to my original point: I’ve never had a lot of money, so the CCGs were bad enough. Playing miniature wargames back in those days would have been impossible, because those miniatures are expensive. I also don’t have the patience or fine motor skills to paint them. So I never even tried it, until now.

If you’re unfamiliar, miniature wargames are basically advanced strategy board games with RPG elements mixed in. DnD has always included something similar when it comes to combat, but you can play most RPGs using just theatre of the mind so the board game part of it is pretty much optional. Games like Warhammer 40 000 (which I’ve never tried nor even seen played, so I’m doing some educated guesswork here) do it the other way around. They’re set in a world with chracters and storylines, but all of that is more or less optional and the main part is the strategic minature warplay.

So a while ago, Anton Heed who has some zines in Fosfor and who is also a member of our collective workshop, Fanzineverkstaden, came to print out the rules and worldbuilding documents for his game, Muterad Medeltid i Europas Ruiner (Mutated Middle Ages in the Ruins of Europe). He told me about it and it seemed interesting. Long story short, I ended up at the Death By Die fest with Kinga, who was there to sell dice as Dice Dominion. And it was fun! I played 2 games in that setting and even won the first bout, though it didn’t feel like it was about winning. It was more like how I described it, an RPG focusing mostly on the startegic warplay.

My days are mostly about much the same things. No matter if I’m doing administrative work or design or project management for exhibitions or even actually writing and drawing, it all revolves in one way or another around things related to comics or art or comics art. That’s a complete simplification, but let’s say it’s all about storytelling, and even if Muterad Medeltid was also about storytelling, it still felt a lot like something new, and I liked that feeling.

There. I was just going to say something about having been to Death by Die and then it grew into an autobiography about my history with RPGs. Now I’m going to have some breakfast, then go to the post office to pick up my copy of Aphex Twin‘s reissue of the Selected Ambient Works II vinyl, and then I’m going to get some work done, or take the day off and read some Dune, because I haven’t had enough rest for the last few weeks and I’m soon entering another period of too many things at once, and I’m still digesting Hokage (Shinya Tsukamoto‘s laest movie) that I watched last night…