[Fanzine Focus XXXIII] Pregame Lobby Issue #1

On the tail of Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another Dungeon Master and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry and Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. Some fanzines though, do traditional fantasy, but not in the way that you might expect.

Pregame Lobby Issue #1 is a fanzine for .Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG. Published by Project NERVES, .Dungeon is a storytelling game which plays around with ideas and conventions behind the play of a MMORPG, using this to help the players build and explore a shared experience of playing in a shared play space. The conceit behind Pregame Lobby Issue #1 continues that of .Dungeon as a MMORPG in that it moves the online game from a beta test and into full release, presenting the space onscreen in the game where the publisher can gives updates about the game, a player can find other players, and so on, before leaping into the game’s first event. So there is a ‘Your friend’s list’, a list of your friends that are playing and what their current status and an introduction to the game’s launch event quest. This primarily focuses upon the release of a new play area, ‘Snowbleak’, and even carries the warning, “Don’t fast travel to Snowbleak”. Snowbleak is also a hexcrawl in terms of the pen and paper roleplaying and it turns out that the village and its surrounds atop the wintery mountain are infested with zombies. Zombies that are very difficult to kill! At every server reset, a fresh blanket of snow drops onto both mountain and village and every day at 12:01 Pacific Standard Time, all of the surviving zombies get up and make a co-ordinated attack on the village. The problem is that it takes a lot of co-ordinated damage—for which the players/Player Characters—are going to have to work together to inflict. If they succeed, the zombie is removed from the server, but if they fail, the zombie just gets up again. Worse, if a player/Player Character loses all of his Connection (to the server)—the equivalent of Hit Points in .Dungeon—he will not only die, but a zombie will rise in his image, thus increasing the number of zombies blighting Snowbleak!

As a hexcrawl/region to explore, Pregame Lobby Issue #1 includes a PVP Arena, a cave home to a roaming boss monster, a couple of NPCs to encounter, the location of Snowbleak, and a table of random encounters. The ‘PVP Enabled Dueling Arena’ allows an aspect of the MMORPG to be brought into the traditional roleplaying, which the latter traditionally avoids, and that is player versus player combat. Or rather, the conceit of it. For whilst ‘PVP Enabled Dueling Arena’ includes tables to generate players to face in the arena in .Dungeon, these are, of course, not Player Characters in the traditional roleplaying sense. In this way, Pregame Lobby Issue #1 continues the conceit of .Dungeon. Several NPCs are detailed, including Colossus, a roaming Boss monster which the players/Player Characters can persuade to help them if they know how.

Snowbleak—variously described as a city and a village in Pregame Lobby Issue #1, but definitely a randomly generated settlement from pre-beta best known for the ease of the beginning quests in and around the area. All that seems to remain is a few buildings around a river crossing, inhabited by those NPCs who not yet been driven out by the zombies. The descriptions do feel underwritten, in particular, it would have been useful to have included a Quest or two that the players/Player Characters can undertake. That said, there is plenty of scope for the Game Master to develop these and further content in and around Snowbleak, including on the backside of the mountain, given a cursory description in its own region/hexcrawl at the back of the fanzine. Pregame Lobby Issue #1 is rounded out with a list of cheat codes for .Dungeon to further enforce its conceit.

Physically, Pregame Lobby Issue #1 eschews the landscape format of .Dungeon, but not the bold colours and bitmapped style font for its titles. The layout feel perfunctory, but the artwork throughout is excellent.

Pregame Lobby Issue #1 is both a lovely little supplement for .Dungeon and slightly disappointing. It does feel underwritten, as if there should be more to the location of Snowbleak. Some of that is due to the conceit, that .Dungeon and thus the region of Snowbleak is a MMORPG and their play is not as demanding or as involving as a traditional pen and paper, tabletop roleplaying game typically is. However, .Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG is actually played as a traditional pen and paper, tabletop roleplaying game, so the details and the involvement required are greater. Ultimately, Pregame Lobby Issue #1 provides a good introductory setting for .Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG, but the Game Master will probably want to add her own content to flesh it out further...

Share and Shared Alike

Dungeons & Dragons and its various iterations informed our fantasy and showed how explore new worlds, including the virtual ones we can view and interact with via our computer screens and our television screens. In turn the fantasy of those virtual worlds is having an influence upon the roleplaying games we bring to the table—even Dungeons & Dragons in the form of Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition. More recent entries in this computer fantasy game influenced genre have included the Fabula Ultima TTPG and BREAK!! In between, there is a smaller roleplaying called .Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG. This is a fantasy roleplaying game inspired by computer games such as The Legend of Zelda series, the Final Fantasy series—especially the earlier ones, and even World of Warcraft. As much as it takes inspiration from the virtual world of these computer games and MMORPGs, .Dungeon is intended to be influenced by the real world around the World—as the Game Master is known in .Dungeon. What this means is that whilst there is a structure to the world of Annwn, as the setting of .Dungeon is known, and that structure is fundamentally an icosahedron, the World can literally look at the world around her and use it as inspiration. This can be from her bookshelf, her games shelf, newspapers, or even the computer games she is playing, and for each item she takes as inspiration, it is mapped onto one of the twenty faces of Annwn.

.Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG is both a virtual world and a shared world. This is perhaps the most important aspect of .Dungeon for there are actually three types of character in the roleplaying game, two of whom share the world. Here is where .Dungeon gets weird and straddles the virtual world and the real world. First, there are the players. They are roleplaying their own avatars in Annwn and are known as the Players. Essentially, they are sat round the table roleplaying a game called .Dungeon. Then there are players who are not sat round the table roleplaying a game called .Dungeon, but are playing a MMORPG set in the world of Annwn. They are the equal of the Players and have their own motivations which they bring with them from the real world. They also share the world of Annwn with the Players. Lastly, there are the traditional NPCs of such games, who are almost present with the exclamation and question marks over their heads. The world is also shared in that the Players game together and share the same pool of the equivalent of Hit Points. This is Connection, representing both their internet connection to the game, and ultimately the time they can devote to the game. As play progresses and any time a Player fails a roll, the Players collectively lose Connection, until they have no more Connection, have to stop playing and must go back to school, get a job, and the like…

A Player in .Dungeon is defined by six stats—RNG, Meta, System, Tilt, Charm, and Perception. RNG is a Player’s relationship with the programming of the virtual world and its will, covering reaction rolls, loot, and random chance; Meta is the Player’s knowledge of the world of Annwn; System is the Player’s skill over the game, including fighting and climbing; Tilt is the Player’s capacity to keep calm; Charm is the ability to invoke the player’s real-world presence in the virtual world of Annwn; and Perception the Player’s physical senses. These are rated by die type, from a four-sided to a twenty-sided die. To create a Player, a player assigns a single die to each stat, decides upon his screen name, and notes down the player’s actual job. If ever this comes up in game, it grants a second die to roll and choose from in a task. Depending upon the nature of the world created by the World, this can either be very useful or utterly useless. The players are often going to work hard to apply jobs such as editor or barista or bus driver to the fantasy of Annwn. A player also has to decide upon his Player’s hair, body type, outfit, and other details.

A Player in .Dungeon also has a Class. There are ten given. These are the Knight, the Hacker, the Beast, the Mage, the Witch, the Leader, the Artist, the Troll, the Dungeoneer, and the Bard. These are lightly drawn though highly specialised. These often play around with their archetypes as much they do the virtual nature of the world of Annwn. For example, the Dungeoneer builds on what he learns of dungeons and settlements, gaining an Understanding each time. These can be spent to add details to a settlement or dungeon, but also saved and exchanged for a Rest Die. The Troll can rage and so roll percentile dice for all physical Contests, whilst losing less Connection. The Troll is also encouraged to make exaggerated, if false statements about the world, obliging NPCs and Player Characters, and even other Players to correct him in a patronising manner. This can be played for the humour, but also played to learn information about the world, because after all, the Troll is being corrected. The Leader gives gifts, such as a sincere compliment, a trinket, a hug—consenting, and if accepted also gives that Player a die type to add to a Contest. The Leader can also roll a Meta Contest against anything Annwn. If the player wins, the Leader can find the information he seeks in the manual for the game (thus forcing him to do the one thing nobody does and that is read the manual!). There is the sense that a lot of the Classes are playing with aspects within the game and outside of it. A Player also has equipment, which simply adds flavour rather than mechanical benefit, and some gold. This can be spent on further gear, legendary gear if he has enough. Legendary gear can also come from quests. Gold can also be spent to fast travel across a world. Lastly, it is possible for the Players to have skills, but to learn a skill, a Player must find a teacher who willing to teach him.

Mechanically Player actions are handled through contests. Contests are opposed rolls, with the highest result winning the situation. In combat, this can be to deal damage to the opponent’s Connection, equal to difference between what the player rolled and the World rolled. Losing a Contest means two things. First, the action takes more time, and second, the loss of Connection in combat. Player can team up to achieve objectives and combine the rolls, but then so can the opposition! Reducing an opponent’s Connection removes them from the world, there are situations too, which might cause a Player to respawn. For example, this might be in a big boss fight or some other tasks, and is designed to complicate a situation rather than punish a player and his character. Every twenty points of Connection lost grants a Rest Die, which can be rolled to restore Connection.

Advice for the World is relatively light, but does suggest Contest difficulties and suggests ways in which scenarios for roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons can be incorporated into .Dungeon. It also details how to populate the twenty worlds of Annwn. However, the World populates the various faces, each has its own settlement, complete with common knowledge, history, and secrets, quests, and both a Princess and a Knight, each of whom is also a Player Character. Player Characters are other players in the game and do not have to act as supinely as NPCs do. They can act however they want and they have reasons to be playing which can influence their portrayal in game by the World. Further, each Player Character has hidden depths, represented in play by a mini-dungeon of shared moments and experiences that the player is not necessarily aware that he is exploring alongside his exploration of Annwn. This organises and elevates emotional interaction and exploration within the game as well as the virtual. Rounding out .Dungeon are notes for solo play, which feel more complex than the rest of the roleplaying game does.

Physically, .Dungeon is notably for being a small, slim book presented in landscape rather than portrait format. The cover has strong colours which are also used inside the book’s pages. The book uses a bitmapped style font for its titles which are often done in the style of a programming language.

.Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG is a storytelling game, but it hides this and its potential for emotional engagement under the familiarity of its double genre of a roleplaying game and a computer roleplaying game and virtual world format. However, the simplicity of .Dungeon in terms of mechanics and inspiration make running the roleplaying game not only easy to run, but also easy to run with a minimum of preparation. It requires knowledge of the language and play style of certain type computer or console fantasy games, but most players in coming to .Dungeon will have a familiarity with both, making itself easy to grasp. However, with that knowledge there is definitely a sense of a world shared, not just between the Players, but also the Player Characters. Every roleplaying game is a shared experience, but .Dungeon extends that by making us draw upon already shared references and experiences in the World’s creation of her Annwn and then not only share its exploration around the table, but literally share an exploration of the lives and emotions of others exploring the same world—just not at the table.