There’s a really wonderful discussion taking place on the RPG PUB forum about my earlier post. Lots of great input, with people sharing memories of gaming in Britain (and Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere) back in the day.
There was some gentle pushback against the term “B-OSR”. It was never really intended seriously, so I’m not overly attached to it. I chose it, with tongue in cheek, because it implies Britain is in some sense in second place (the “B-OSR” to America’s “A-OSR”) and, despite the current trend towards jingoistic boosterism, people in the UK have a long tradition of thinking their country is a bit shit. Still, if you prefer, “British old-school” works just as well (and it can be considered a vibe or aesthetic rather than a revival).
A couple of extra ingredients have been added to the British old-school mix:
– British prog rock (e.g. King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Hawkwind, etc.)
– British children’s TV shows (e.g Knightmare, Children of the Stones, etc.)
– Alan Garner (e.g. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service, etc.)
– British computer games (particularly ZX Spectrum games like The Lords of Midnight and Chaos)
Also, some really interesting discussion was had on the reaction to the so-called “Satanic Panic” in the UK compared to the US. This, for example, from Warthur:
“Actually, you can point here to another distinction between the US scene and the British scene in the 1980s. TSR reacted to the Satanic Panic by toning shit down, going easier on the devils and demons and Dragonlancing things up a bit. Games Workshop threw up the heavy metal horns and kept on doing what they did, and at points deliberately steered into gruesome areas, as did Fighting Fantasy. (Note how as the Fighting Fantasy line progressed you got more and more horror-tinged books coming out – because the scary shit sold!)”
On the other hand, Voros pointed out that we weren’t entirely immune from moral panic on this side of the pond:
“The UK had its own irrational panic in the form of the Video Nasties scare. And unlike rpgs it actually led to some people going to jail just for distributing horror films, most of which are far tamer than the average episode of TWD [The Walking Dead – Ed.].”
The Yanks had Patricia Pulling, we had Mary Whitehouse!
Arthur says
Another suggested influence: folk horror, particularly the British strand. Wicker Man, Witchfinder General, Blood On Satan’s Claw, and a cross-section of other stuff from the 1970s seems to have percolated in people’s minds and emerged in some of the gaming materials of the era.
Like I mentioned on the RPGPub thread, the Fighting Fantasy line tended to drift more into horror as it went on – and a lot of that had a folk horror tinge to it – and WFRP’s strange rural cults, corruptive influences, and fascistic witch-hunters show the influence of the major folk horror movies I mentioned.
SJB says
Call it what you like: write about what interests you! Personally, I think there is probably a generational difference between 1970s and 1980s Old School. The 1970s sensibility was pre-video recorder – so you took what you were given on TV: Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Laurel and Hardy, Flashing Blades, Pan’s People, Top of the Pops. It was pre-Call of Cthulhu, pre-Fighting Fantasy, pre-Thatcher, way pre-Warhammer. The stars of gaming were Don Featherstone and Tony Bath.
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Arthur Completely agree. Blood On Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General have all the trappings of WFRP scenarios. I certainly think horror and comedy (black comedy and satire) seem to be the two richest veins running through the British old-school.
@SJB Cheers! I’m especially fascinated by the earliest British commercial RPGs: Bifrost (1977), Heroes (1979), and Fantasy Wargaming (1981). So, it will be interesting to see if there are big generational differences (in terms of style, feel, etc.) between those games and some of the ones that came later in the 1980s.
Black Leaf says
I didn’t mention it over on the Pub (no politics rule), but I think the influence of Thatcher on the gaming scene can’t be overstated. Not just the references in Warhammer, but the very cultural fabric that RPGs existed in. Things like 2000 AD were very much placing themselves as oppositional and I remember overt attacks and references to the Miner’s Strike in Your Sinclair. Which led to White Dwarf carrying adverts for “Class War minatures” and Dave Langford in particular being openly anti Thatcher.
I said this on the Twitters, but in many ways anyone claiming to be Brit old school can’t escape that. Certainly in the RPG circles I was moving in as a teenager saying anything nice about the Tories would have been social suicide.
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Arthur I just watched “Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter” for the first time last night, and I think that would also make for a rollicking WFRP scenario. A lot of Hammer Horror films seem to combine (sometimes unintentionally) horror and comedy in a very British way. I’m sure Hammer was also a big influence on British old-school gaming; the most horror-themed of the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, “House of Hell”, was clearly influenced by stuff like “The Devil Rides Out”.
@Black Leaf Mate, you are not wrong! WFRP definitely expressed it most clearly (what with the punk dwarf on the cover). However, many of the ingredients that went into British old-school gaming (e.g. Michael Moorcock, alternative comedy, 2000 A.D., heavy metal, etc.) contained a strong counter-cultural bent. Plus, gaming in Thatcher’s Britain it was difficult to escape politics.
Anyway, the politics of the British old-school is something we may not be able to talk about down the RPG Pub, but can speak of freely here.
Shock Slogans says
(Black Leaf changing my name. Using an American cultural reference felt odd for this discussion).
And yes, we really can’t overstate that I think. Talking to American friends who grew up under Reagan there was opposition, but the whole idea that everyone had to take sides simply wasn’t there. I remember at university it being in vogue to have videos of the Poll Tax riots playing at parties which says a lot about quite how hostile people were.
I think the countercultural element may be a large part in why so many Brits embraced Runequest as their own. It was a lot weirder and more hippy than D&D.
At its worse (and I saw this mentioned on one of the posts you linked to in the original discussion) it lead to a kneejerk Anti Americanism. With the benefit of hindsight the Price of Freedom controversy was not the Brit old school’s finest moment. The idea that Greg Costikyan (of all people!) was some kind of commie hating redneck and that PoF had no satirical intent at all was just a bit embarassing. On a more personal level I remember my American born mother being lectured by strangers about American military policy. Considering she’d been at Greenham she was already fully aware of the issue.
There’s another element to the Brit old-school that I’ve been trying to put my finger on and I think I’ve got it. There’s a definite element of camp, especially in the WFRP world and Titan. Vecna is straight out of an epic fantay novel. But Lord Azzur would fit in perfectly as a pantomime villain.
Final observation is that it’s interesting to note that the fighting fantasy kids of the eighties were largely the same people that became the Vampire LARP university students of the nineties. While that was an American IP there were definite differences between the US and the Brit scenes that may be partially explained by the earlier differences in the RPG scene. In particular, my understanding is that a lot more Brit games were fiercely independent of the official Camarilla fan club, that those that were tended to be much bigger (30-40 rather than 5-10 players) and that the networking between independent games and shared canon was much more of a thing. Obviously, this is past the Brit old school era, but it’s interesting to consider how it may have influenced developments in the nineties.
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Shock Slogans
This is very true, but also quite weird (and regrettable), seeing how important and influential American games were in the British old-school (e.g. D&D, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, Paranoia, etc.). Here on Uncaring Cosmos I’m focusing on homegrown British games like WFRP and Dragon Warriors, but I definitely get the sense that the Games Workshop editions of US games were, in general, much more popular among UK gamers.
This is so very, very spot on! I’m sure that things like the Hammer Horror films (and, to be honest, the Carry On films) had an impact. Also, the British traditions of music halls, variety acts, and (of course) pantomime.
It’s interesting to consider pantomime in relation to folk horror. Panto has its origins in old folk plays (“Mummers’ plays”), and the word “pantomime” goes all the way back to pagan theatre in the Roman Empire.
Pantomimus apparently means “imitator of all” (with a single performer taking on both male and female roles). It’s also interesting to note that the Greek god Pan was, as well as being an over-sexed nature god, also the god of theatrical criticism. Plus, pandemonium was the word John Milton coined for the capital of Hell (and is now associated with chaos, which is oh so WFRP). Oh, also, the word “panic” (seen in the phrase “moral panic”, natch!) derives from the god Pan.
Pan – Pandemonium – Panic – Pantomime
I’m stream-of-consciousness rambling here, so I hope I’m articulating my thoughts clearly. To wit, folk horror is about suppressed pagan ideas bubbling to the surface, much to the horror of right-thinking Christians. The idea of playing with strictly-defined gender roles has a long folk tradition (lots of men dressing up like women and women dressing up like men) and pantomime is definitely part of that (it’s axiomatic that every panto has a “pantomime dame”). So, it makes complete sense that camp (which also plays with ideas of masculinity and femininity) is an important part of British horror, particularly folk horror.
So much older British horror had a healthy dollop of panto camp, very much including the folk horror films. Vincent Price is, of course, the Dark Prince of Camp, and Witchfinder General has a brilliant scene with a camp peasant asking the John Stearne character what line of business he’s in (“Witchfindin'”… “Ooh, that’s nice! Very nice.”).
I was watching the folk horror film Midsommar the other day, and there’s a great scene where a man in a “girly” frock talks about hermaphroditism in pagan religion.
Anyway, I’m rambling. My point is that I think you’re absolutely right. Camp is a really important ingredient, and has a long and healthy tradition in British culture (and, likewise, there has been a long tradition of trying to suppress camp behaviour and mannerisms as somehow deviant).
Fascinating! I have no experience at all with Vampire or LARPing, but I’ve heard VtM introduced a lot of people to RPGs in the ’90s (including getting more women into a traditionally very male hobby, which is awesome), so I’d be really interested to learn more.
Shock Slogans says
I really should set up a blog of my own to wax lyrical about LARP at some point. (Interesting aside, if we’re talking about Brit old school “LARP” it should actually be “LRP”. First record anyone has found of the former term being used in Britain is 1990).
I’ll separate the Vampire stuff from the general history of old school LRP as it’s likely to be long.
I’d suggest there’s essentially three separate “year zeros” as far as British LRP is concerned.
1982 – The founding of Treasure Trap at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire. This was a linear dungeoncrawl game. Interestingly, the ruleset shows influence from Runequest. This would be the birth of the Brit Old School as far as LRP is concerned. (At least if we ignore the claim that it was invented by Elizabeth I in 1598. Which is actually quite well supported, but more a subject for an academic enquiry!)
December 1988 – The first “fantasy party” by Andrew Rilstone at the University of York. These were almost certainly the first of what later became called “UK Freeforms”. One shots, pre gen characters, plot heavy etc. (They were known as “parlor larps” or “theatre style larps” in the US).
1992 – Getting a bit past the period to be genuinely considered part of the Brit old school, but this was the founding of Lorien Trust and the birth of the modern fest LARP. (And in this case I do think its LARP). Rubber sword with lots and lots of people.
At the risk of overgeneralising I think all British LRP has its roots in one or more of those games. Something like Empire LRP arguably takes parts from all of them.
References for this:
CJ’s UK LARP History Timeline is very useful – http://www.grandtribunal.org/2015/UK_LARP_history
The Peckforton Papers is free and contains writings about the last 40 years of British LARP. I actually think that Brit tabletop could do with something similar but I’m not volunteering considering how much work it must have taken!
http://www.wychwood-end.com/publications.html
Shock Slogans says
On Vampire, firstly I should mention my own bias. Official Camarilla games vs the Independents was a big thing back then with both sides looking down on each other. And I was very much an indy partisan. So I’m no more objective than a ZX Spectrum fanboy talking about the rivalry with the Commodore 64.
That said, I’m pretty sure I’m right we had bigger independent networks than much of the US.
The main ones I know of.
The northern networked games – Sunderland (my group), Manchester, Liverpool.
Vampires in Public – Coventry, Oxford, Lancaster, Birmingham, Worcester
I’m sure there will have been more, especially as we’re talking the days just before the net became mainstream so people communicated less. And a lot of solitary games as well. (In particular, I think the lack of anything south of Birmingham except Oxford is almost certainly not going to have been the case).
I also actually know very little about the Cam UK games of the time, considering they were supposed to be our bitter rivals.
How those generally worked was there were separate games running in every city and we’d come together for a big game once or twice a year (often centering round major national events). I’d say that at our height the Northern Network probably had around 80 players.
On what it was like at the time I’ll take the liberty of crossposting something I wrote at the RPGPub in reponse to a younger poster asking about the “old days”:
“This is a snapshot of my local LARP scene in Sunderland. I have no idea how representative we were.
We came out of 1e and had a healthy disregard for canon. Our Harpy was called a “Herald”. We had National Elders found nowhere in the books. We took it and made it our own. Even as 2e came out, the only use for metaplot was to cannablise it and nick the bits our ref liked. (This is something that’s heavily influence the Vampire LARP I run today. We even use the same old ruleset we used then).
There’s this revisionism among some overly pompous old school White Wolfers that Vampire was a seismic shift and brought in all these cool club kids that wouldn’t have dreamed of playing tabletop before. It’s a load of bollocks. The vast majority of our players had been playing tabletop since school. It was just Vampire (and some other 90’s games like Ars Magica and Unknown Armies) appealed to us when we were 19/20 in the same way that D&D appealed to us when we were 14. Even when it came to LARP, that was new to us, but an offshoot of the university tabletop society. (And we’d started with rubber sword quest LARP before playing Vampire). And when it comes to British goths at least, anyone who is surprised by the idea that they might have played D&D can’t really know any. Most of my goth mates were properly geeky, even the non LARPers.
It is probably true that we saw a few more women, but they were geeky women and had just joined because it was interesting.
Were we sometimes a bit pretentious? Did we go clubbing three times a week? Did we run round randomly fucking each other? DId some of us take a metric fuckton of drugs? Course we did. We were in our late teens/early twenties. If you can’t be a pretentious hedonist at that age when can you be? And Vampire didn’t make us like that, we would have been like that either way.
Related to the last point, it is fair to say there were a hell of a lot more drugs flying around than in the modern LARP and tabletop scene. Although that might say more about who my mates were at the time than anything else. Looking back, I’d say only around ten of us were seriously into phet at the time. A handful of acid heads and a majority of boozers.”
In terms of new developments I’m seeng an interestng trend up here in Huddersfield. I’ve been running Freeforms up here in Huddersfield for the past six years. And it’s increasingly the case that our core players who attend every game are majority female.
To the point that they’ve now set up a University freeform society. With an all female exec, including my partner who’s the old lady of the group as a mature student of 34. The rest of the exec are all 20/21 years old. It reminds me of the early days of the Vampire boom a lot. Apart from they’re calling themselves the “Immersive Games Society” because they felt that “Freeform” was too vague and “LARP” would make people assume it was a rubber sword club.
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Shock Slogans That’s absolutely fascinating, ta for that! It sounds like I had a few misconceptions about VtM (in terms of things like getting new people – and women in particular – into the hobby), so it’s good to hear from someone who actually played it. Also great to get a bit more about the history of the UK old-school LRP / LARP scene.
I wonder if Vampire was played differently (in terms of style, vibe, aesthetic, whatever you want to call it) in the UK from in the US. In other words: did the “British old-school” feel have any impact in later RPGs in the UK? Definitely, I feel later homegrown UK games (like SLA Industries) retain that B-OS feel (though SLA Industries is definitely a game of the 1990s).
Shock Slogans says
It’s hard to know for certain without doing some actual research into how groups other than my lot were playing.
My guess would be that the Camarilla groups hewed nearer to the American way of playing; shared global plot and the same ruleset.
We definitely had a lot more obvious British old school LRP influence. In particular, some parts of the official canon were explictly rejected and at points openly mocked. Particular humour was found in the idea that the poll tax riot had been started by football hooligans and hippies and the fact that they’d decided that there was one Prince of a Manchester/Liverpool field. (Which has to have been written by someone with no idea of the rivalry between the two cities).
The other big difference is that we were a live combat system. There was a definite throwback to earlier LRP traditions there, latex swords, plus some gun rules.
I’d assume at least that the first was seen a lot in British tabletop games of Vampire.