Uncaring Cosmos

Digital & Analogue Esoterica

Cultural Influences on early British Role-Playing Games

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If you’re interested in early British tabletop role-playing games (particularly from the 1970s and ’80s), I recommend keeping an eye on the #BOSR (British Old-School Role-Playing) hashtag on Twitter. There was a great thread last month trying to sort out which games fit into the BOSR (a fun but likely impossible exercise).

I particularly recommend following @AwesomeLiesBlog. He’s been posting a numbered series of “BOSR Zeitgeist” tweets exploring the influence of British pop and geek culture on BOSRPGs, starting with BOSR Zeitgeist 1 (on Quartermass), and continuing (so far) with:

– Zeitgeist 2 (on Doctor Who)

– Zeitgeist 3 (on Target Luna)

– Zeitgeist 4 (on Hammer Horror)

– Zeitgeist 5 (on Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet)

– Zeitgeist 6 (on UFO)

– Zeitgeist 7 (on Space: 1999)

– Zeitgeist 8 (on 2000 AD)

– Zeitgeist 9 (on the ACTION comic)

– Zeitgeist 10 (on war comics)

– Zeitgeist 11 (on EAGLE)

– Zeitgeist 12 (on TV21)

– Zeitgeist 13 (on British comics more generally)

– Zeitgeist 14 (on The Boys’ Own Paper)

– Zeitgeist 15 (on The Goon Show, Monty Python, and The Goodies)

– Zeitgeist 16 (on Jabberwocky)

– Zeitgeist 17 (on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)

– Zeitgeist 18 (on Not the Nine O’Clock News and The Young Ones)

– Zeitgeist 19 (on Blackadder)

– Zeitgeist 20 (on Discworld)

– Zeitgeist 21 (on ‘Allo ‘Allo)

– Zeitgeist 22 (on WW2 movies)

– Zeitgeist 23 (on the 1975 TV series Survivors)

– Zeitgeist 24 (on Blake’s 7)

– Zeitgeist 25 (on The Adventure Game)

– Zeitgeist 26 (on The Hobbit for the ZX Speccie)

– Zeitgeist 27 (on Level 9 text adventures)

– Zeitgeist 28 (on The Quill text adventure software)

– Zeitgeist 29 (on Delta 4 Software)

– Zeitgeist 30 (on Halls of the Things)

– Zeitgeist 31 (on Elite)

– Zeitgeist 32 (on The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge)

– Zeitgeist 33 (on Rebelstar Raiders)

– Zeitgeist 34 (on Chaos)

– Zeitgeist 35 (on Atic Atac)

– Zeitgeist 36 (on Knight Lore)

– Zeitgeist 37 (on Fairlight)

– Zeitgeist 38 (on Avalon and Dragontorc)

– Zeitgeist 39 (on Knightmare)

– Zeitgeist 40 (on Marsport)

– Zeitgeist 41 (on Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach)

– Zeitgeist 42 (on Heavy on the Magick)

– Zeitgeist 43 (on John Wyndham)

– Zeitgeist 44 (on the absence of pulp fiction)

– Zeitgeist 45 (on Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper)

– Zeitgeist 46 (on folk horror, part 1)

– Zeitgeist 47 (on folk horror, part 2)

– Zeitgeist 48 (on folk horror, part 3)

– Zeitgeist 49 (on folk horror, part 4)

– Zeitgeist 50 (on Robin of Sherwood)

– Zeitgeist 51 (on Chocky, Chocky’s Children, and Chocky’s Challenge)

– Zeitgeist 52 (on Mervyn Peake)

– Zeitgeist 53 (on New Wave SF)

– Zeitgeist 54 (on Zulu)

It’s like an Appendix N for the BOSR. I’m sure there will be more to come; the list of cultural influences on the BOSR is surely nigh endless:

– The Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, and Blood on Satan’s Claw;

– Michael Moorcock (especially Stormbringer);

– Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit;

– Gormenghast;

– The Narnia books;

– Children of the Stones;

– ZX Speccie games (e.g. The Lords of Midnight);

– Threads;

– Alan Garner;

– Those terrifying Public Information Films that were basically video nasties for children;

– Red Dwarf;

– Blake’s 7;

– Angela Carter;

– Diana Wynne Jones;

– Alan Moore;

– Worzel Gummidge;

– Napoleonic wargaming,

– Fawlty Towers;

– The Sex Pistols;

– Tanith Lee;

– Black Sabbath;

– Deep Purple;

– Led Zeppelin;

– The Damned;

– Jethro Tull;

– Roald Dahl;

– Hawkwind;

– Yes;

– King Crimson;

– Pink Floyd;

– Iron Maiden;

– Ramsey Campbell;

– Viz;

– Steptoe and Son;

– Morcambe and Wise;

– Jane Gaskell;

– The Two Ronnies;

– Yes, Minister;

– Dad’s Army;

– Carry On;

– Tom Sharpe;

– Monkey;

– Only Fools and Horses;

– Sven Hassel paperbacks;

– anti-Thatcherism;

– Stonehenge;

– battered fish and soggy chips wrapped up in newspaper;

– British wrestling;

– grainy BBC footage of strikes and riots;

– pubs;

– rain;

– video nasties;

– tabloids;

– teletext;

– Christmas panto;

– rain;

– roll-ups;

– pints of lukewarm bitter;

– rain;

– rain;

– shitty local football teams you support by standing in the rain;

– rain;

– rain;

– rain.

Even older stuff like Punch magazine, Lewis Carroll, P. G. Wodehouse, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, George MacDonald, Gothic Horror, and on and on and on could be chucked into the mix. There were also likely strong local and regional differences.

Even limiting the scope to “geek culture” is tough. The idea of “geek culture” feels slightly anachronistic. I grew up in the 1990s, so am not sure how it was in the ’70s and ’80s, but we didn’t really have “geeks” in the early ’90s (everyone played stuff like video games anyway). When I went to school, I don’t remember anyone being called a “geek” or “nerd” or “dork” (those being American terms). I guess there were “anoraks”, but much more common at my school was “keener” (i.e. one who is too “keen” to work hard at school, which seems like a rather self-sabotaging term of abuse) or, more frequently, just “gay” (violent homophobia being absolutely rampant in the playground as a child).

Regardless, I think an Appendix N for the BOSR would be absolutely brilliant. I hope Awesome Lies will eventually compile everything into a blog post, because then it could help serve that function. In the meantime, he has offered a spot of interim analysis on Twitter:

“There seem to be a few themes emerging from my meander through British pop and geek culture: a tolerance for horror and violence; a subversive, anti-authority attitude; down-to-earth characters; and the importance of social class… Into the British-old-school cocktail mix we can add surreal humour, satire, mocking the absurdity of everyday life, a rebellious disrespect for authority, down-to-earth protagonists and anti-heroes.”

I look forward to more!

Image from The Forest of Doom, Puffin Books Ltd., 1984

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Comments

  1. Thanks for the heads up; but thank you even more for a reminder of the Forest of Doom computer game which I created. That really brought it all flooding back.

  2. @SJB Hah, that is wonderful! Purely a coincidence, but I’m glad I chose it. :-D

    I didn’t have a ZX Spectrum myself, though my cousins had one and I mucked around on it a bit (the thing that blew my mind was that it used tape! We had an old 386, or possibly even a 286 with the big 5¼-inch floppy disks at home, so cassette tapes in a computer was a novelty).

    We did have a BBC Micro at school, which had Granny’s Garden on it. Apart from that, though, the whole UK micro computer scene largely passed me by (it was all PC vs. Amiga among me and my friends, while others where playing NES, SNES, etc.).

    I would love to hear how you came to adapt Forest of Doom for the ZX Spectrum. You also worked on The Citadel of Chaos, right? But Warlock of Firetop mountain was a different team?

    I just, this very evening, gave my tattered old copies of Titan and Out of the Pit to my 8-year-old daughter, and you should have seen the look on her face. I hope she gets as much joy leafing through the monsters of Out of the Pit as I did.

  4. Thanks for mentioning my BOSR Zeitgeist tweets. I hadn’t really considered them in terms of Appendix N, but it’s a good analogy. I do hope to tie them all together one day in a blog post. As I mentioned at the start of the series, that was my original intention for this content. However, as the blog post never seems to get written, I thought I’d try in the interim dumping bits on Twitter and seeing where it goes. There’s a lot more to come; I’m about to move onto video games.

  5. There’s an absolutely fantastic 2010 blog post from the much-missed “Fighting Fantasist” by CoopDevil, titled “The British OSR Starts Here…” Highly recommended and still relevant, I think. (Apologies, if I’ve mentioned it before–I fear that I may be a bit of a bore on the subject.)

    https://web.archive.org/web/20120217081856/http://fightingfantasist.blogspot.com/2010/04/british-osr-starts-here.html

    I would also throw in text adventures (as you will no doubt know, now “Interactive Fiction”)–and I actually played my first Level 9 text adventure (the very atmospheric “Dungeon Adventure”) in the same summer that I played Steve Jackson’s “Citadel of Chaos,” before I was even aware of the Dungeons & Dragons.

    There’s an excellent set of posts on Level 9, over at Jimmy Maher’s “The Digital Antiquarian” blog:

    — https://www.filfre.net/2012/10/level-9/
    — https://www.filfre.net/2013/06/snowball/
    — https://www.filfre.net/tag/level-9/

    At the time, I was frustrated by the fact that I more often than not couldn’t just launch an attack on a monster. But now, it occurs to me that these games may have primed me to want my vicarious adventures in RPGs to have room for cleverness and quick-wittedness …

  8. @David said:

    “I fear that I may be a bit of a bore on the subject.”

    No need to apologise at all, you’re among friends here on that front :-D

    “I would also throw in text adventures…”

    Absolutely, very true! @Gideon has just tweeted about The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum, which was a bestselling text adventure in the 1980s. And @SJB adapted some Fighting Fantasy gamebooks to video games. Definitely lots of overlap between gamebooks, fiction, text adventures, RPGs, and even other cRPGs.

  10. A friend and I created Forest of Doom and Citadel of Chaos just after we left school and were waiting to go to university. My mate phoned Ian Livingstone who invited us up to GW which was then in Acton.

    My main memory of the meeting was looking at the original diagrams for the books. They were dungeon maps rather than flow charts. That and the look on Mr Livingstone’s face when we mentioned Gygax: he knew that EGG would never do anything worthwhile in the games field again. Puffin offered us a contract and we made the games for the Spectrum and the Commodore 64.

    We decided to assemble the games on a C64 rather than a computer so my life was filled with those ghastly memory tapes for months to come. It was hard going because we had never done anything like that before and didn’t know anyone else who had either.

    Perhaps tellingly, I gave up RPGs when I got to university. My partner took it even further, became an evangelical Christian and abjured RPGs as the work of the devil.

  11. Gus L. said:

    “Speaking of ZS Spectrum games – this piece on Silverwolf (1992 text adventure) was pretty fascinating. A alternate outlier in Irish fantasy computer games. Seems fascinating, also maybe a damn cool game.”

    Oh my gods, that is wonderful. Thank you for sharing that, Gus – it’s exactly the kind of subculture story I love stumbling across. Also, ta very much for pointing me in the direction of Aaron’s Substack!

  12. SJB says:

    “My main memory of the meeting was looking at the original diagrams for the books. They were dungeon maps rather than flow charts.”

    That is fascinating! I re-played Warlock of Firetop Mountain with my daughter a couple of years ago, and we mapped it out on grid paper just like a game of D&D. It worked really well, and drove home to me that Fighting Fantasy was initially conceived as a way to teach (or, at least, to translate into solo form) the D&D experience. As the series went on, I think it developed into its own thing, with its own gamebook tropes. For example, a lot of the later FF books were less about exploring a single dungeon looking for treasure (or to kill a baddy) and more about epic quests across multiple scenes.

    “It was hard going because we had never done anything like that before and didn’t know anyone else who had either.”

    That’s brilliant to hear – great entrepreneurial spirit :-D

    “Perhaps tellingly, I gave up RPGs when I got to university. My partner took it even further, became an evangelical Christian and abjured RPGs as the work of the devil.”

    I’ve heard there was less of a “Satanic Panic” in Britain than in the States (it was a bit before my time – in the nineties, when I was a young’un, everything was terribly edgy, though occasionally the red tops would run a “Ban this sick filth” story).

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