Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers: Games and the Environment

As promised, here is the video of our recent event, ‘Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers: Roleplaying Games and the Environment’. The panel featured indie game designers and academics exploring the ways in which players create, encounter, and interact with the environment in indie roleplaying games.

Our Speakers were

• Paul Baldowski, creator of the award-winning Cthulhu Hack roleplaying game.

• Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley, Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University, and author of various works on the Gothic and Horror, as well as ‘Deep Roots’ for Cthulhu Hack.

• Howard David Ingham, creator of the Shivering Circle roleplaying game and author of We Don’t go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror.

• Kathryn Jenkins, writer for Cthulhu Dark and Cthulhu Hack.

• Dr Nicholas Mizer, Lecturer in Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and author of Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds (2019).

• Jesse Ross, creator of the Trophy roleplaying game and owner of Hedgemaze Press.

 The games we discussed included, Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold from Jesse Ross and Hedgemaze Press; The Shivering Circle by Howard David Ingham; Cthulhu Hack and the Dee Sanction by Paul Baldowski; Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley, Kathryn Jenkins and Helen Gould, with many more suggested by the audience. These games have in common a penchant for eerie, weird, gothic or inhospitable places, with secret histories and unnerving inhabitants.

We discussed the lure of the Weird and the Gothic for game designers and players alike, and the cathartic effects of entering dangerous worlds through play. We also considered Dr Nick Mizer’s thesis that roleplaying games allow us to use the tools of disenchantment, such as rules, to re-enchant the world and explore multiple possible worlds.

Alongside the talk we had a really lively discussion in the Zoom chat and we promised to share the links to resources posted there. We post them here without much context (you had to be there for that):

• Actual play of Howard David Ingham’s The Shivering Circle recorded to accompany the talk: https://www.manchestergamestudies.org/blog/2021/4/28/folk-horror-rpg-actual-play-podcast

• The US Game in Lab event is GENeration Analog, held online August 4-5, 2021. Free and open to the global public. Keynotes are Scott Nicholson, Elizabeth Hargrave, and B. Dave Walters: https://analoggamestudies.org/generation-analog-tabletop-games-scholarship-virtual-conference-at-gen-con-2021/

• Alun R’s actual play of Paul Baldowski’s The Dee Sanction: ·https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJvz2EFnWIXNUuIdkZT0lit0avF84YyAj

• The Gauntlet, a gaming community and podcast network that focuses on indie RPGs, story games, and the OSR: https://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/

• Clint Krause’s Don’t Walk in Winter Wood , a storytelling game of folkloric fear: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/104196/Dont-Walk-in-Winter-Wood

• Sandy Petersen, ‘Was Lovecraft Racist?’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLL037UiQhk

• Reviews of Nick Mizer’s book Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030291266 And https://www.manchestergamestudies.org/blog/2019/8/20/tabletop-role-playing-games-and-the-experience-of-imagined-worlds

• Jon Peterson, ‘Western Gunfight (1970): the First RPG?’: http://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2021/02/western-gunfight-1970-first-rpg.html

• ‘Roommates Wanted’, an incursion for Trophy Dark where a group of acquaintances stay in a strange, rich recluses estate with him for the promise of riches: https://darkliquid.itch.io/roommates-wanted

• Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright Side about how “positive” affect is kind of a poison in of itself: https://g.co/kgs/XFQuKx

• Aaron Trammell, ‘Analog Game Studies and the Digital Economy’: https://analoggamestudies.org/2019/03/analog-games-and-the-digital-economy/

• David Sax’s book Revenge of the Analog: https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/david-sax/the-revenge-of-analog/9781610395724/

• Sensory Cartographies: https://sensorycartographies.info/

• David Howard Ingham’s work on Drivethrurpg (all available for whatever you want to pay): https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/8635/Howard-David-Ingham

• Kathryn Jenkins on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/kathrynjenkinsart

Finally, thanks to our event sponsors, the Centre for English Literature and Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University and Game in Lab.