Arthur over at Refereeing and Reflection has posted a review of the late ’90s British indie horror RPG Principia Malefex. His review is spot on and picks apart the clunky system, reactionary politics, and dreary setting stuffed with mundane details about everyday life in ’90s Britain.
I’m not going to defend Principia Malefex. I agree with essentially everything Arthur has written (as is so often the case). Despite all that, I nevertheless find Principia Malefex a fascinating curio of British indie gaming history. It not only predates The Forge, it predates indie games like Obsidian: The Age of Judgement (the indie RPG that originally inspired Ron Edwards to start The Forge).
Imagine a tabletop RPG written by Rust Cohle by way of Victor Meldrew. Principia Malefex must be one of the most misanthropic, nihilistic (yes, and mundane) settings in all of gaming – and that includes games like Kult and Delta Green (at least Kult positions humans as creatures of fundamental cosmic beauty). The central message of Principia Malefex is that humans are irredeemably selfish, cowardly, spiteful creatures, and possibly the most wicked things in the cosmos to boot – certainly a thousand times more evil than anything the morally indifferent Cthulhu mythos has to offer. It’s not a philosophy I personally subscribe to (though I still find myself drawn to it in art in the same way I find the philosophical pessimism running through Thomas Ligotti’s fiction both repellent and morbidly fascinating).
Having said all that, I can think of at least one use for Principia Malefex. I certainly wouldn’t use the actual system, but I think the setting might make a nice P.I.S.C.E.S. campaign set in 1990s Britain. Even mundane scenarios with no supernatural elements could be firecrackers if you threw a team of paranoid agents with maximum authority and minimal accountability into the mix. Add some Ramsey Campbell-esque grime (Principia Malefex was apparently designed in Bath, which lies in roughly the same neck of the woods as Campbell’s imagined Brichester), and I can only imagine the holes my players would dig themselves into.
I am perhaps more tolerant of the mundane in my games than most. I love mixing the crushingly, depressingly ordinary with a sprinkle of supernatural ultraviolence, as seen in films like Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, which blends mundane(-ish) kitchen sink drama with folk horror. Nevertheless, my players don’t share my odd proclivities, so even if I used Principia Malefex’s setting for a “bleak 1990s Britain” P.I.S.C.E.S. campaign, I imagine I’d still have to dial up the supernatural a notch.
Anyway, I appreciate Arthur taking the time to investigate one of the deep cuts of British tabletop role-playing. Speaking of “deep cuts”, perhaps next Arthur might be encouraged to review the 1990 edition (the 1st edition, not the more recent 2nd edition) of Blood! The Roleplaying Game of Modern Horror? I suspect he’d enjoy that one even less (it’s essentially a video nasty in tabletop RPG form), but it’s another odd curio in the history of British role-playing.
Arthur says
Glad you enjoyed the review! Using the setting for a PISCES-based campaign? I mean, I guess I see your point, but my question would be “What setting?”, since for all of its verbosity I found the setting presented in Malefex to be incredibly thin on the ground – it’s literally just a very cynical take on British society at the time, plus a magic system with associated implied metaphysical details.
Funny you should mention Ramsey Campbell; I was talking about Malefex with a friend at the weekend and they said that it sounded almost like a game adaption of Ramsey Campbell’s fiction – or rather, the mundane B-plot to one of his stories, with the actual horror that disrupts the tedium of everyday life missing.
I’m not against the mundane in gaming myself – hell, in 10 days or so I’ll be running a LARP based on the 12th Century Anarchy period with no supernatural aspects to the game whatsoever. Problem with Malefex is that it’s *boringly* mundane. Like I said in the review, if it was “dark edgy Eastenders where everyone’s trying to sabotage each others’ petty domestic schemes and also some people have magic” there’d be the nucleus of an interesting idea there.
I think I will pass on Blood! – I’m not averse to video nasties myself and have even reviewed a few on my non-RPG blog, I just don’t think it sounds that interesting. As I understand it, its main selling points are the extensive critical hit tables (fun when you get a good one but old hat by 1990) and the absurd number of weapons it stats up, and I feel like weapon stats are a bit of RPG design which just isn’t that interesting. Just give people guidelines for guesstimating how much damage a particular random object does and what damage type it does and have done with it. Sure, there may be some mild differences between one type of polearm or another, but are they significant enough that it’s worth modelling them in game terms rather than just using a general weapon type of “polearm”? I don’t think so.
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Arthur
Hehe, fair point, but that’s also the kind of setting I love most: very, very thinly-sketched and impressionistic. It’s part of the reason I greatly prefer the setting of older editions of RPGs, such as WFRP 1st edition: because they’re so thin on the ground. They provide just the bare bones, and then my players and I fill in the blanks. Yes, yes, Principia Malefex makes WFRP 1e look like the collected works of Tolkien (plus apocrypha), it’s true. :-D
Regardless, I sort of see the setting of Principia Malefex as being more about mood, atmosphere, philosophy, attitude, etc., than locations, factions, NPCs, etc. It reminds me of early Old World of Darkness, but with the cynicism and human wickedness dialed all the way up and the supernatural dialed all the way down. To be fair, there are also story seeds scattered throughout the text (e.g. the students dabbling in the occult under the entry for a local school – though, of course, there’s no supernatural element involved).
Yup, that’s also my feeling. I think the idea is that signs of the supernatural are everywhere in PM, but 99% of them have a mundane explanation. There’s a similar idea behind Occam’s Razor, the (delayed) Kickstarter from Stygian Fox. I think the rationale was to keep players constantly guessing and paranoid – is this guy really a cultist, or just delusional? And, most of the time, he would be just delusional. But if it IS a real cultist (as in the opening fiction for the book) then it becomes incredibly significant, and contrasts strongly against all that mundane backdrop.
I also think there’s space for the players to make mistakes and create the story themselves. I’m reminded of the Call of Cthulhu scenario “The Surrey Enigma” by Marcus Rowland (published in White Dwarf), that has the players tracking a group of “cultists”, only to discover they are actually a group of Orthodox Jewish scholars. If the players go in gung-ho (as PCs almost always do) then they could inadvertently hurt completely innocent people. Then it becomes a game of rapidly escalating consequences, all based on the initial player presumption of the supernatural.
Of course, my players wouldn’t have patience for that shit. They all have families, jobs, etc., and we meet once a week for a three-hour session. If there were no action or supernatural elements involved, they would feel absolutely cheated (and rightly so).
There is an occult agency in Principia Malefex called Section, which aligns nicely with P.I.S.C.E.S., I think. That would be one way to boost the supernatural in PM (because Delta Green is, naturally, a more supernatural-rich game).
Again: why? I know all this sounds like I’m defending Principia Malefex. I actually think it’s unplayable on its own – my players want adventure, not a performance art project that shows them a world even more grim than their real lives. Still, I think BITS of it could be borrowed.
It could, for example, potentially make a useful 1990s Britain sourcebook (I lived through the 1990s, and I’ve forgotten a bunch of mundane details). Given how grim it is, it also might make a useful “Brexit Britain” sourcebook, but I may be getting too political with that one. And I think borrowing some of the more mundane elements (plus story seeds and adventures) to sprinkle into a supernatural-heavy P.I.S.C.E.S. campaign would work.
See, I think “Section agents (or P.I.S.C.E.S. agents) with too much power and not enough sense” could be interesting, especially if you follow the logical consequences of their actions and allow things to rapidly spiral out of control (you mentioned Fiasco, and that’s maybe a good model). Present them with half a dozen situations at the same time, and all of them look supernatural, but only one of them is GENUINELY supernatural. Have a timeline of events, so all of the situations play out (and if the genuinely supernatural one plays out uninterrupted then awful things happen). Give your players unlimited authority and access to heavy ordinance. Sit back, and enjoy the chaos.
I realise I keep making it sound like I’m defending PM. I’m really not. But I do thing it could at least be cannibalised to support a campaign in a stronger setting and system, like Delta Green / P.I.S.C.E.S.
Hehe, yup, that’s pretty much the sum of it. I find it (like PM) an interesting artifact in itself – it’s written in a very informal style, and very British in its assumptions and sense of humour. The system is basically a modern-day RuneQuest heartbreaker. Again, I would never run it – but might nick bits (like some of the more exotic critical hit tables) for use in a campaign.
Arthur says
I see the value in having an occasional non-supernatural scenario in a mostly-supernatural campaign to keep everyone on their toes – but I think you need the ratio to very much be mostly supernatural scenarios/rare non-supernatural ones as opposed to the reverse.
After all, the examples you give all rely on the PCs acting in a gung-ho fashion and assuming that the supernatural is at work – a situation you’d only get if they’re expecting mostly supernatural scenarios. If they expect that most investigations will turn out to be wholly mundane then they’ll behave differently!
Of course, just because an investigation has a supernatural aspect doesn’t mean it’s wholly supernatural, or even that the supernatural bit is the A-plot. Perhaps a better way to get a mix of mundane and supernatural stuff while avoiding giving your players the sense of feeling cheated is to have a mixture of supernatural and mundane plots in an investigation.