Some Thoughts on Fiction in Roleplaying Games (Patreon)

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Eight or so years ago, some guy on a forum I frequented opined that you can find fiction in roleplaying games because RPG authors are failed novelists. I told that guy to go fuck himself while drowning in a lake at the same time, which astonishingly enough is not the reason I don’t post on that forum any more, but it does point to a pretty basic question for anyone interested in making and publishing a roleplaying game: Why have fiction in your book? Or, why not have it?

“Why not” is relatively simple and it’s an option people lean toward more often these days. It’s easier on pagecount not to have it, and thus easier on budget not to have it. Maybe your game doesn’t need it. Maybe you’re trying for something clean and bare and minimalist and a short story or vignette doesn’t line up with that. Maybe you’re doing the whole thing yourself and prose isn’t one of your strong suits. Maybe your rules fit on two pages and your setting on one, so seven pages of fiction feels pretentious. All good reasons to abstain.

So why have it? There are a lot of answers but nearly all of them point to something your RPG is already accomplishing somewhere else (explaining the setting, or giving an example of play), so I’ll offer this as the definitive selling point of in-product fiction: You are selling the audience on the fantasy of inhabiting an imaginary space. You’re giving them a taste of what you have to offer.

Except! and here’s the fun part—except, you’re almost certainly not doing that, because the logistical challenge of doing that in a reasonable amount of space is almost impossible to overcome. So you’re engaging in a bit of illusionism, and it’s worth considering what kind of work you’re really getting done while doing that.

Let me break that down and then go into examining a few specific examples.

What I mean by illusionism in the context of a roleplaying game is presenting the appearance of something without it actually being present. Any decent GM is going to be familiar with this because it’s one of the best arrows in their quiver: most players are very keen on the idea of freedom of choice, but not inclined to interrogate the reality of that freedom. If confronted with two doors, one of which they know contains treasure and the other a terrible monster, they’ll be pretty happy opening one and fighting the monster behind it. They don’t have to know that whichever door they picked first was going to have the monster. You’ve presented the illusion of a real, concrete space and that’s usually all that matters in RPGs. Ultimately, the whole idea that there’s a world to interact with at all is an illusion that everyone’s bought into.

RPG fiction offering immersion and a preview of the game-to-come is a similar shell game. You can offer something, but probably not something remotely authentic to the experience of playing. Actual play constantly jumps in and out of the fiction layer, as people ask about rules, poke the boundaries of the illusion to see if things are where they think they are (“is he close enough to run up and hit him with my sword in this round?”), ask what they can do (“Can I try bypassing the guard post by going over the wall? Are there any trees nearby?”), and so on. Actual play probably has 3-5 characters bumbling through an adventure, and most RPG fiction focuses on a single character because introducing and utilizing five focal characters plus antagonists plus supporting cast in 2,000 words is a really tall order.

So you’re probably not presenting an example of play. In traditionally structured RPGs, you’ll find one of those in the introduction, or the GMing chapter. What you’re presenting is an idealization of play, or just a dip into the universe. You’re selling the idea that the setting is a real place that the reader wants to visit. You’re opening a window on an imaginary space they will hopefully want to access.

But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re wasting a lot of words and space, because your artwork also does that (assuming you have an art budget).

So: What kind of work is your intro fiction doing for your game?

Let’s look at a few examples, including a few near and dear to my heart.

Plus ça Change kicks off Shadowrun Second Edition, spanning seven pages, and it gets work done from the title onwards, which is reinforced with the opening paragraph: “Some things change, some don’t. Take the sprawl, for one. On the outside, Seattle may look like it’s always changin’. But don’t be fooled, chummer. Underneath all the glitz and the grit, everything’s the same.”

At a glance, it looks like the author clearing his throat, getting ready to get rolling. But what it’s actually doing is establishing a baseline for you to imagine the magic-and-cyberpunk world of 2050. It’s telling you that you can use the real world as a blueprint, that unless the author tells you otherwise, this is Seattle, and you can fall back on your knowledge of the real world as a reliable guide. And, indeed, the paragraphs that follow do start building up the points of divergence: the gleaming pyramid of the Renraku Arcology looming over the city, the megacorporate influence, the privatization of the police force, and so on. It’s also starting to introduce you to the slang, the dialect, and the style of the game.

Plus ça Change is one of the better pieces of intro fiction in the history of the hobby, which probably has something to do with being written by novelist Paul Hume. In seven pages it establishes the salient details of Chicago, the major points of the setting (cybernetics, magic, Native American political resurgence, megacorporate dominion, the Matrix), introduces an entire team of shadowrunners (briefly sketched but still present), and shows you what shadowrunners do (conduct illegal but not entirely amoral missions in the shadow of sinister magical and corporate powers). After Plus ça Change, you head into the rest of the book armed and equipped to imagine and understand everything that is going to be presented to you, and having witnessed a “vertical slice” of Shadowrun in action.

Off the top of my head, I can think of one other bit of intro fiction that equals and maybe exceeds it: Exalted First Edition. Its intro fiction, written by Geoff Grabowski, is almost impossibly clean, spanning only four pages. But in those four pages we not only get a well-told story about a young Solar Exalt fleeing through the ruined district of Chiaroscuro to escape the Wyld Hunt, we also get an incredible amount of world-building. Without bogging the story down, this intro fiction tells us: That the game is set in the ruins of a fallen golden age of bygone sorcery, that it’s a world of gritty and complex base motives (the ruined city of Chiaroscuro is not re-settled by seekers after its magic, but by a brutal-yet-practical warlord who clears out all the magic-seekers and then declares whosoever comes to settle the city and abide by his laws will be exempt from taxation for ten years); that the Realm dominates this setting, a far greater force than even the warlord who claimed Chiaroscuro; that the Realm is ruled by elemental superhumans; that these elemental superhumans hunt an even greater breed of divinely-empowered people; that such people can be empowered by the gods against their will; that spending the bestowed powers of the gods makes the Exalted unable to conceal themselves as they blaze with holy light; that the ruins of the old fallen world are haunted by dangerous, bloodthirsty ghosts; that the people of this setting use small magics to fight such supernatural threats; that spirits live among the people; that justice is swift and brutal; that the Fair Folk lurk outside the bounds of civilization and lust for souls; that other supernatural forces are at work in the world and have a vested interest in the conflict between the Dragon-Blooded and their mightier Solar Exalted counterparts; that Solars are hunted because the state religion of the Realm condemns them as incarnate devils; that Solars once ruled the world in the aforementioned golden age; that the Realm is teetering on the brink of civil war because its immortal ruler recently vanished, and that this has given the resurgent Solars room to breathe without being instantly exterminated; that Dragon-Blooded do not fight mounted because the raw power of their anima displays would kill the animals from under them; and then, the final page of the story is a fight scene between a Solar and the remnants of the Wyld Hunt seeking her, demonstrating exactly how powerful the kind of characters you will play and fight against are.

Four pages. Four pages, and it lays out most of what you honestly need to play Exalted—and most of it in the first three pages. If you’re looking for your intro fiction to act as a primer on your setting, that’s the high-water mark to chase.

By contrast, let’s look at another example that was not so well-received. The introductory fiction for Scion First Edition—Birthright, by Carl Bowen— gets a very similar amount of work done. The difference is that it got a very let’s say mixed reception, because it gets this work done in thirty-eight pages. It’s what Scion has instead of a setting chapter, and as a result people tend to look at Birthright as a massive bit of self-indulgence rather than compelling setting fiction. If you’re even going to try something like this, you need to frame it as an in-character overview of the setting before the reader engages it—jumping into it before you even hit the table of contents just leaves a reader drowning in prose. “Okay when does this introduction end and start tying all these things I’m seeing into concrete lessons and presentations? Hello? Oh God it’s still going. Oh God it’s still going! What’s going on?”

(Also, as an aside, if your RPG’s table of contents is on page 41, you have fucked up designing your book and need to rethink your presentation.)

Returning to my good and dear friend Exalted, the second edition of the game tried a very different approach to introductory fiction, using a short comic at the front of the book rather than prose. This is another Carl Bowen effort, and it works better than Scion, in its way. The virtue of EX2’s intro comic is that it’s able to quickly establish an entire group of PC Solars by simply drawing them, letting visual presentation tell you about them rather than burning expensive wordcount in prose to do so. You know about the big angry musclebound dude because he is big, he is musclebound, and he is drawn angry and punching stuff. What this approach is able to do is to present a very quick, compressed game session: the protagonists arrive in a flooded town and learn that the people are being attacked by a river god, so they go and fight the river god. Upon beating up the river god, the Solars learn the river god didn’t mean to flood the town; he simply grew despondent when the town’s young women didn’t come to sing to him as they did every spring. And they didn’t do that because they’d been kidnapped by bandits. So the Solars go and kick the shit out of the bandits.

This is a decent representation of the sort of thing you do in the game, but it comes at the cost of accomplishing very little world-building beyond “this is a world where gods live in the world and interact with people,” “gods can cause great destruction through carelessness,” and “Solars are powerful enough to beat up a minor god.” That’s not a lot of work compared to 1e.

There’s another thing you can do, of course, and that’s simply to set the mood for what your readers are about to head into. Maybe the best example of that is in the World of Darkness (now Chronicles of Darkness) book Second Sight, with its intro story Boogeyman (whose author I’ve been unable to determine). Boogeyman is an eight-page horror short featuring only a single viewpoint character recounting his history and recent events. It’s barely a story, more of a collection of vignettes. In no way does it represent what actual play is like; in fact I imagine nobody’s ever had a session that looked anything like Boogeyman. Nor does it really teach you anything about the contents of the book; I’m fairly sure you can’t use the systems contained within to build a PC psychic who works like the main character of the story.

What it does accomplish is setting the tone for the book that follows, because despite everything I’ve just said about it, Boogeyman is an excellent piece of horror fiction, generally considered one of the best bits of fiction White Wolf produced during the 2000s. It only tells you one thing, but it’s maybe the most important lesson you can carry into Second Sight: being powerful and different is not a blessing in this setting. It just means having an irrevocable backstage pass into a nightmare.

In summation: If you are going to use fiction for your roleplaying game, you need to not only get the fiction written, but consider what the fiction is doing to earn its keep. Ideally every paragraph should be doing something for your game other than just pushing a story forward: teaching the reader something, laying in a plot hook a GM can use, reinforcing a mood, or demonstrating a thing your game can do. If you’re not managing any of those things, ask if you can work any of those things in. If you can’t, ask why the paragraph needs to be there.

It’s easy to just fill space, difficult to be excellent. But people will respond to excellence.