Structured Freeform in the Indie Game Design Community ...



Blurring the Boundaries

Structured Freeform in the Indie RPG Design Community

Bill White

The small-press tabletop RPG design community is making connections to other gaming traditions and communities as its members seeks new ways of achieving their design goals.

It is August, 2009 and I am sitting at a small table in the Indianapolis Convention Center during Gencon, a large annual gaming trade show that has its origins entangled with the emergence of Dungeons & Dragons. With me is game designer Paul Tevis. In the booth run by the small-press game distributor Indie Press Revolution, Paul explains how to play his newly published game, A Penny for My Thoughts.

“The set-up for the game is that you are suffering from acute global amnesia,” he tells me. “Complete loss of memory.” He tears a sheet of paper into little slips as he talks. “You are undergoing this experimental therapy with this breakthrough new drug called Mnemnosyne, which—as weird as it sounds—allows people to connect with the unconscious minds of their fellow patients.” The little slips are for players to write “memory triggers” for the amnesiac characters in the game. A memory trigger is a phrase that suggests a Proustian stimulus. Paul writes “chopping red bell peppers” on one of the slips he’s torn as an example of a memory trigger.

“Several years ago, I was chopping red bell peppers and I nicked my thumb,” he says. It was fine, but he had to go the next morning to the doctor to have it cauterized to stop the bleeding. “And now every time I chop red bell peppers, I get this phantom pain in my thumb.”

To begin the game, players write down five memory triggers each and put them in a hat. Then one player, the traveler, pulls one of the slips out of the hat, treating it is a fragment of memory brought to the threshold of consciousness by the Mnemnosyne drug. The other players are the traveler’s guides. Each guide may then ask a question about the memory trigger. “The answer is always ‘yes, and . . .’” Paul says. “What they see is essentially right but it’s lacking some detail,” which the traveler then provides. Paul gives me examples: “‘Were you in your kitchen?’ ‘Yes, and I was making dinner for my wife.’ ‘Were the red bell peppers fresh?’ ‘Yes, I had just picked them in my garden.’ ‘Were you making one of your favorite dishes? ’ ‘Yes, and my wife loved it as well.’”

Then, thus aided by the prompts of the guide, the traveler begins to relate the memory that has been newly recalled. “I remember a time when I was in my kitchen chopping fresh red bell peppers that I’d just picked in the garden that morning, starting to make dinner, and my wife came into the kitchen.” As the traveler “recalls” the details of the story, he may introduce new details about what he or she saw or felt as well as what others did or said. The only thing the traveler cannot introduce is his own actions. “You GM your character,” Paul explains, “and other people play your character. It’s a weird inversion.”

To signal that he wants to find out what actions the traveler took in the shrouded past, the player holds up a penny, at which point each guide may offer a suggestion for the traveler’s action. One guide might ask, “Did you kiss her?” Another might say, “Did you ask her to bring you something?” The traveler then gives the penny to the guide whose alternative he likes best. Ultimately, guides who acquire enough pennies can find out the answer to their own traveler’s question, “How did I lose my memory?”—if they want to. “Some people choose not to find out,” Paul says. “They’d prefer not to know.”

The style of game that Paul is experimenting with is called “structured freeform,” and A Penny for My Thoughts is one of the first games emerging from the small-press RPG indie game design scene that makes use of this design aesthetic. This style focuses on establishing social procedures that constrain how players interact, or what they may introduce into the in-game fiction, rather than on creating game-mechanical procedures to resolve in-game conflicts. Jeepform, Paul reminded me, was another structured freeform style of RPG play that was a cousin to his own improv-inspired game design.

The Jeep Arrives

That same summer that Paul and I had our conversation at the Indie Press Revolution booth, the tabletop RPG blogosphere had been aflutter with the news: “jeepform” was a nominee for the Diana Jones Award, given at Gencon each year since 2000 to recognize “excellence” in gaming. According to the nominating committee, jeepform is “an innovative and increasingly influential style of roleplaying” developed by some sort of “Nordic collective.” A hybrid of multiple styles infused with “clear-eyed maturity,” said the committee, “jeepform games are often deeply moving, occasionally hilarious, and always compelling.”

But to many observers in the tabletop gaming world, the nomination was puzzling: jeepform? What is that? What does it even mean? Others were downright curmudgeonly: “It's a kind of Scandinavian mini-game LARPing,” explained one skeptic dismissively on a forum called . “It's meant to be very politically or socially charged, and to cause one to think about a particular subject in a new or unusual way.” Thus damning jeepform by its pretensions to seriousness, the skeptic drove the bolt home: “Most famously, one jeepform game was called ‘Gang Rape’ and is meant to teach you that gang rape is transgressive and bad, and the rest of it is at about that level of intellectual sophistication.”

Even amid these carping sneers, however—and even with jeepform’s runner-up finish to the card game Dominion in the 2009 Diana Jones Award—there is increasing recognition of the possibilities inherent in a gaming form that, as veteran game designer and observer of gaming Greg Costikyan says, “blurs the boundaries between theatrical improv and tabletop roleplaying; indeed, you could see it being performed before a theater audience, and perhaps one day games of this type shall be.”

And so a small but diligent group of American designers from the small-press, “indie” tabletop RPG community is beginning to apply—or as in Paul’s case independently develop—the principles and techniques of jeepform gaming to their own “structured freeform” games, in effect creating a North American version of this European-pioneered hybrid gaming style that combines elements of table-top RPG, improv, and LARP. This account attempts to describe this cross-cultural engagement, offering it as an example of the creative possibilities that emerge from the interaction of different ways of thinking about games.

In short, then, it is the story of two gaming traditions, each with its own history and approach to games, coming together and coming to influence each other as individuals meet, interact, and collaborate with one another. It is told from the perspective of a participant observer—an indie RPG designer with an interest in structured freeform. My involvement, however, is on the margins. The real story begins at the center.

Meet the New Boss

If the North American school of structured freeform game design can be said to have a dean, it is Emily Care Boss, an energetic and thoughtful RPG designer whose company Black and Green Games is best known for a trilogy of romance-themed indie games called Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon, and Under My Skin.

“Indie games” are creator-owned, small-press tabletop RPGs that are often experimental in form, playing with the design conventions pioneered by “mainstream” games like Dungeons & Dragons, Steve Jackson’s GURPS, and White Wolf’s World of Darkness. The on-line locus for this sort of innovation in the middle years of this past decade was a place called the Forge (indie-), moderated with a firm hand by a biology professor-cum-game guru named Ron Edwards, whose game design paradigm can be summed up in the motto, “System Matters.” In other words, the procedures used to play any given RPG reward different player approaches to playing it in different ways—so some approaches to a particular game will tend to be enjoyable and others frustrating, and this will vary by game. This may sound uncontroversial, but from the earliest days of tabletop role-playing a philosophy has been around that says that system doesn’t matter, that what matters is the quality of the Game Master (GM) or the players’ ability to immerse themselves in the fictional world of the game (“role-playing not roll-playing,” is the chief tenet of this camp).

As a participant in the deliberations and discussions about games on the Forge, Emily helped formulate what is sometimes called “the Lumpley Principle,” which defines a game’s “system” as the procedures used to determine who is allowed to introduce what into the game’s fiction, its diegetic “shared imagined space.” She is interested in creating collaborative, player-centered games. As she explains in a 2006 essay appearing in the sole extant issue of a gaming journal called Push:

In “collaborative” games, rights and responsibilities formerly held solely by the GM have been extended to all the players. . . . Collaborative roleplaying games take advantage of the multiple viewpoints people bring to the game. Instead of primarily using one person’s ideas—those of the GM—they find ways to intentionally weave together the many creative strands that are present. The historical GM/Player split is but one possibility along a continuum of collaboration, and new games that make more of an effort to make gaming more of a team effort capitalize on the inherent potential of gaming: the creativity of the entire play group.

Emily’s engagement with jeepform gaming began in 2007, when she was the guest of honor at a Finnish gaming convention called Ropecon, where she met two Swedish members of the jeep collective, Tobias Wrigstad and Thorbiörn Fritzon. “I had an amazing experience with jeep,” she said. “It hit on a million things I’d been looking for.”

The hallmarks of the jeepform style that appealed to Emily included its focus on social realism rather than the fantastic, its emphasis on psychological inquiry as part of the design, and its use of the player “as part of the field of play instead of it just being about the fiction.” In other words, jeepform is more about creating an experience for the players than about constructing a shared narrative. Its games emphasize “techniques” that structure the interactions among the players and the action in-game in particular ways; for example, in the game Gang Rape, the attackers are only allowed to describe the physical actions and reactions of the characters in the game, while the victim is only allowed to describe the thoughts and feelings of those characters. The effect, according to one young man I met right after he had played the victim, is viscerally powerful.

We Go By Jeep

Meanwhile, the jeepers were also excited by their meeting with Emily.

“We had met a lot of other American writers of roleplaying games,” Danish jeepformer Frederik Berg Østergaard told me, but the impact was not the same. “They had their own thing, and we had our completely different thing.”

Before the formation of the jeepform collective, Frederik had begun to play and write “scenarios” for the Danish convention scene in the middle of the 1990s. “That was a special tradition of play,” he recalled. “We called it ‘semi-live,’ which was in a room with a table, without costumes, but you could stand up, you could yell and move around.” He played one memorably mind-blowing gothic game in a room whose walls were covered in black velvet, and then went home and prepared and ran the same scenario for his friends. “We called that ‘systemless role-play’,” Frederik explained. “We didn’t use rules systems, we didn’t use dice; what happened was based on what the GM felt was good for the story.” Danish convention scenarios were heavily oriented toward the GM guiding the action, with the scenario instructions telling the GM what the game was about, what should happen, and how it should end.

“We pushed the medium,” said Frederik, experimenting with things like GMless games, player-controlled narration, avoiding conflict, and other challenges to the typical conventions of role-playing. Then, at a gaming convention in 2003 in Malmö, Sweden, Frederik met Tobias Wrigstad. “It was like meeting a long-lost friend,” he said. “We met, and we exchanged contact information, and it was just a matter of time before we began to collaborate.” Thus was born the jeepform movement, under the sobriquet and rallying cry Vi Åker Jeep (“we go by jeep,” i.e., not by fiat; according to some accounts, the name was selected to make it easy to find via Internet search engine), which began to refine and extend the techniques they had been experimenting with in the Danish and Swedish freeform traditions. Ironically, Tobias once told Frederik that if they hadn’t met, he would have stopped playing. The freeform movement in Sweden was slowly dying, but the Danish scene was still—and continues to be—vibrant and energetic, with a strong presence at Denmark’s annual Fastaval gaming convention.

The flagship jeepform game, hammered into shape between 2004 and 2006 by Tobias and Thorbiörn as well as jeeper Olle Jonsson, is called The Upgrade. It is a reality show parody that serves as a showcase for various jeepform techniques. According to Jason Morningstar, an American game designer (whose historical game Grey Ranks, about Polish teens fighting Nazis in World War II, did win the Diana Jones award in 2008) who had met Olle on a visit to Denmark, “Olle told me, ‘You should really look at The Upgrade, which is our teaching text. It’s sort of remedial jeep. It teaches you all the techniques you need to know to play real games.’” By “real,” Jason told me, Olle meant serious. “The Upgrade is light-hearted and lots of fun—deliberately,” Jason went on. “It’s captivating, it pulls you in, it’s familiar, it’s extensible, you can play it in front of an audience, and when you’ve finished it you’ve mastered a bunch of techniques that you can use to play abusive alcoholic fathers, which is really where their interests lay at that time.”

Some of these techniques employed in jeepform games include “bird-in-ear,” in which one player will literally whisper first-person perception into a player’s ear to guide their character’s actions; “pillow talk is better than sex,” where players describe what their characters are seeing, somewhat after the fashion of an old-fashioned radio play; “fast forward” to aggressively move in-game action to a crucial point; “insides and outsides,” where players shuttle between acting out characters’ surface actions (the outsides) and their private thoughts (the insides). Other devices involve differentiating the playing space by function, so that one area is used for confessional-style character monologues or for acting out what happened in the past or the imagined consequences of the main action in the future.

“Meeting Emily put a human face on the Forge,” Frederik said. “It was an interesting scene to discover, but at the same time it seemed like a step backward because of all the rules.” The focus on game-mechanical procedure—System Matters!—characteristic of Forge-inspired games was something that jeepform gamers in particular found hard to wrap their heads around. “What are you doing here? How are you playing this?” They invited Emily to write an essay explaining Forge theory—Ron Edward’s “Big Model” of RPG play—for the annual Scandinavian LARP conference that that rotates among Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway, changing its name as it does to match the language of the hosting country: in Finland, where it was held in 2008, the conference is called Solmukohta—in English, “Nodal Point.” That essay, called “Key Concepts In Forge Theory,” appeared in the Solmukohta proceedings book Playground Worlds, and was called “the highlight of the book” by Finnish jeeper and fellow contributor J. Tuomas Harviainen for condensing the diffuse and unsystematized Forge conversations into a single coherent and accessible summary.

See Emily Play

Emily returned to the United States in the summer of 2007 energized by what she had experienced at Ropecon. “I came back a converted woman,” she told me. That year at Gencon, she began searching for allies, people who would help her spread the word about jeepform. She knew of some members of the indie RPG community who were interested in improv, including Jason Morningstar, who had already made contact with some of the Danish freeform gamers, as well as Paul Tevis, who was at that time beginning to show people the “ashcan” (printed playtest draft) of A Penny for My Thoughts. “I didn’t run any jeep games at Gencon, but I told people, ‘Come to Dreamation,’” a smaller gaming convention held in New Jersey each year that attracts indie gamers from across the Northeast and sometimes even further afield.

“Tobias Wrigstad was living in America at the time,” Emily said. “He was here for two years.” At Dreamation in January 2008, he ran jeepform games for indie gamers, including The Upgrade and Drunk, in which three players rotate through the roles of an alcoholic husband, his co-dependent wife, and their angry 16-year-old daughter as the man locks himself in the bathroom to drink himself to death. Emily playtested the jeepform version of her own game, Under My Skin, which pairs up players as couples and then tempts each partner with a different romantic interest in order to explore themes of commitment, jealousy, and faith. In April 2008, at the Danish gaming convention Fastaval, Under My Skin won the Players Choice Award, given to the game or scenario that proved the most popular among attendees. “Here’s how a good a game Under My Skin is,” said Remi Treuer, an indie gamer with a strong improv background who played it later that summer. “I shouted, I was cursing, but it was controlled. It wasn’t a social faux pas.” The game allowed him to to play his character “organically” in an emotionally charged way without that emotional charge spilling over into the real world later. “It wasn’t scary.” The game, Remi said, lets you play dangerously.

Meanwhile, other gamers in the indie scene were picking up and playing with the jeepform style. Peoria-based game designer Seth Ben Ezra wrote A Flower for Mara as a fairly straightforward application of jeep techniques. Players are the family members who mourn for a woman named Mara at her death; they hold flowers to represent their grief. A player who decides that his or her character is beginning to heal can only put down the flower once he or she has revealed a personal loss experienced out of character. The game is a meditation on grief and healing, and according those who’ve played it is a powerful experience. For my own part, I ran a jeepform-inspired version of my tabletop game Ganakagok several times, including once at Knutepunkt, the Norwegian Nodal Point conference. In that game, players take on the roles of both the members of an ice-bound tribe in a star-lit world and the spirits who shape their fate (Emily was at Knutepunkt, shortly after Fastaval 2008, and played in my game; at one point she took the role of a sea serpent that had to be placated by the People so that they could seek safety on a distant isle). During the first half of 2009, there was a lot of experimenting going on, and Remi started a Web-based forum called Structured Freedom (forums) for discussing structured freeform game design and coordinating efforts.

Enduring (Structured) Freedom

But there were growing pains as indie game designers tried to apply jeepform techniques to their own projects. After playing in The Upgrade at Dreamation and bringing it back to run at gaming conventions in Los Angeles, podcaster and game designer Ryan Macklin tried to write a jeepform game. “It was a game born of many conversations,” Ryan told me, with people such as Paul Tevis and Tobias Wrigstad as well as others. He wanted a game that would emulate the social realism of the jeepform style. “Eventually we hit on a game—and I’m trying to think of a way of saying this without sounding completely horrible—a game about playing a man going to therapy for abusing his wife and child.” It was called Damned Anonymous, and Ryan submitted it as a scenario to the Danish game convention Fastaval. “It had a fancy little mechanic where you passed a hammer back and forth between you and your personal demon and if you pushed it too far, you would smash this breakable object, and this breakable object was something you loved. But it didn’t quite work.” The reason it didn’t quite work, in Ryan’s opinion, lies in the fact that, in contrast to most North American indie games, jeepform games have a specific “destination” in mind—the ending is an established part of the scenario, and the drama lies in how it is reached. “My training as an American role-player, and my sense as a post-Forge developer even, meant that I still could not completely conceive at the time of making a game where I knew the destination entirely. I need that bit of uncertainty for tension, and so it was really difficult to make.” So, “in spite of the fact that I liked playing that sort of game I hadn’t learned to be a developer of that sort of game, because I hadn’t learned the craft of making that sort of thing happen.”

Ryan elaborated on the cultural disconnect between jeepform and Forge-style indie games. The difference, he said, has to do with their respective attitudes toward conflict. “Tobias has said that one of the unfortunate things about Forge roleplaying training is that people go to conflict too quickly, and a jeep game is about drawing it out. A jeep game is about exploring the tension of that moment, rather than simply resolving it. Because that’s where stories come from: people don’t resolve things, because they’re afraid to resolve things, because they’re uncomfortable—for whatever reasons. We often say in life, ‘If only they’d talk.’ But that talking thing is scary.”

Chad Underkoffler had a similar experience. “I attempted to take one of the settings for Truth & Justice [a superhero game Chad had published] that didn’t work in tabletop and make it work as structured freeform.” The basic conceit of Chad’s scenario was that you have a dream in which you are told you’ve been chosen, and now you’ve got superpowers. Then you wake up. Until now, there have been no superhumans in the world—what do you do?

“It was too big,” Chad recalled. “You need to set up the situation; that’s the structure.” In other words, the situation needed to be more tightly defined and more self-contained, driving the action in a dynamic way. If he were to try again today, he would do it differently. “You’re members of a superhero family. It’s Thanksgiving. What do you do?” He mused aloud for a few moments on the possibilities: how does the speedster son interact with his flying father? But the game isn’t about the powers, it’s about the relationships among the people with powers. So the rules of the game have to establish structural limits on player action that pay attention to the relationships. “It’s the limits that makes these things work,” Chad concluded.

Meanwhile, on the Structured Freedom discussion site, planning was underway for an “American Jeep Sampler” event to be run in May 2009 at Camp Nerdly. Emily, Jason Morningstar, and Remi Treuer would each write a small game to demonstrate a specific jeepform technique. “I wrote a game that was influenced by The Upgrade,” said Jason. “It was lighthearted, it used a very accessible theme, and it was just designed to teach you how to use bird-in-ear, which is a meta-commentary technique that’s super-powerful.” The idea was that once people had played all of the sampler games, you’d have been exposed to all of these techniques, just as if you’d played The Upgrade.

How did it go?

“It didn’t work at all,” Jason reported ruefully. The focus on individual techniques meant that there was no overarching theme or story to give the techniques meaning. “What I took away from that,” said Jason, “was that the gestalt was valuable. Techniques don’t exist in a vacuum.”

Remi agreed. “For me what happened was a jumble,” he said. The sampler format meant that participants were cycling through the individual games without much investment in them, expecting a play-value or intensity that could only emerge in a longer form game where there was some commitment to the characters and the narrative. Emily was more sanguine, pointing to the success of a Danish freeform scenario they ran as the capstone of the exercise. Written by Olle Jonsson and called The Butter Forger, it was the story of the trial of a fraudulent confectioner of an ornamental butter sculpture. Light-hearted rather than serious, it was chosen to enable an American audience to engage with a kind of structured freeform perhaps a little less intimidating than the social realism of straight jeepform. “We did better things with The Butter Forger than it was written for,” Emily said. “We had a larger group playing in the audience, and everybody in the audience was engaged throughout the entire game. They were adding things, and they were using the techniques we had taught them in the earlier games.”

But the “American Jeep Sampler” at Camp Nerdly marked the end of the first flush of enthusiasm for jeepform games among the indie RPG community. The next steps would be smaller and more measured, more painstakingly considered as applications of the structured freeform design aesthetic, and more carefully adapted to the potential audiences for the games.

Baby Steps

Structured freeform enthusiasts in the indie RPG design community are moving forward with new projects. For example, Jason Morningstar’s new tabletop RPG Fiasco is a Coen Brothers-inspired story-game of ambitious losers with poor impulse control. And while it is not strictly speaking a structured freeform game, it does partake of that influence. In Fiasco, “procedural interaction is pared away to the point where it’s almost ephemeral,” Jason says. “You make a value judgment within a scene, and you don’t even have to talk about it. Everyone knows when you pick up a die what the implication is for the rest of the scene, so you don’t have a moment where you’re talking to the schoolmarm [in character] and then you have to say, ‘Let’s go the dice.’” Jason suspects that his European friends would be nonplussed by his new game. “Jeepers would say, well, that’s a baby step. But that really works well for what I’m trying to do.”

Remi Treuer is slowly playtesting the pieces of a game based on the young adult fiction of Daniel Pinkwater. “Pinkwater is a game about a young man or woman who’s unable to deal with the world,” Remi explained. “In the books, a kid—usually a fat kid—comes to a new town, and is not able to connect with anybody. He’s a little weird, not super competent. And then through an encounter with something strange or amazing, that kid becomes more self-actualized. It’s sort of a super low-key hero’s journey.” The focus on the young protagonist’s dramatic arc means that the game will have a three-act structure; Remi has finished developing the first act, the introductory and expository part of the game.

Remi’s caution is directly related to his experience at Camp Nerdly. “The thing that screwed me up with The Super Sad Death of Louse Lad [his game for the American Jeep Sampler] is that I didn’t give people a reason to care,” he said. “I didn’t give people a job. I didn’t give people structure. With gamers, you need to give them a reason to be invested. You need to hook them; you need to give them something to do.” He attributes this problem to relying on improv assumptions. “In improv, the base assumption is that if you’re showing up, you’re ready to go. You want to do this thing, and what you’re here for is to learn it.” Remi kept that in mind in designing the introductory part of Pinkwater, and ran it at Dreamation in February 2010. “It went great,” Remi said. “I gave people jobs, and I was very clear about what they were supposed to be doing, and I was clear about what would be happening in the game and the structure of the scenes, and then they just built into it.” He intends to keep working on the remaining pieces of Pinkwater, though he recognizes that the game emulates a genre that is not widely read or appreciated in gaming circles.

And Emily is collaborating with fellow game designer and Vampire LARPer Julia Bond Ellingboe, the author of Steal Away Jordan, a game about slavery in the Old South. Their project is called What to Do About Tam Lin?, and they bill it as a game in the theater LARP tradition. It emerged from Julia’s interest in English and Spanish folk ballads. “I was working on a game called Murder Ballad Blackjack,” Julia explained. “I ran it a few times, and it sort of worked and it sort of didn’t.” After talking with Emily, Julia decided that the material would be better served as live-action, jeep-style game where players would take characters out of ballads and decide what really happened. “I said, well, the mother of all ballads is ‘Tam Lin’,” Julia recalled, and that became the basis of their game.

What to Do About Tam Lin? takes place on Halloween, with the Fairy Court in session. Just as in the ballad, Tam Lin is to be given as the fairy’s tithe to hell, and his paramour Janet wants to save him. In the game, however, the Fairy Court is a court of law, with the Fairy Queen and Thomas the Rhymer presiding. “Other people have a stake in whether or not Tam Lin becomes the tithe,” Julia said. Playing characters from other ballads, these players act out a flashback scene inspired by something from their ballad to provide their “evidence” in the trial. “And then everybody votes as to whether that’s compelling.” Characters also have powers represented by cards that can be used to influence how people vote, and resources with which to bribe them. They plan to run it three times during 2010, at Dreamation, Fastaval, and a LARP convention in the Northeast called Intercon. “I would love for traditional larpers to check it out,” Julia told me.

The Prospects for Structured Freeform

“I think maybe our work is done,” said Frederik, in assessing the jeep influence on the North American community. He meant that the connection has been made, and now it remains for people in the indie scene to take up what the jeepers have offered and make it their own.

Remi’s experience jibes with Frederik’s assessment. “I would like it to get bigger, but I feel like it’s been ghettoized, especially jeep,” Remi said. “It feels like whenever jeep is brought up, all anyone wants to see is GR [Gang Rape]. People see [social realist games such as Drunk] and they get really scared. I want to say, ‘Guys, these are safe experiences; these are not harmful experiences.’ They’re powerful, but they’re not harmful.”

Jason sees game designers using structured freeform to push in different directions. “Because it sits in a space that is at a weird intersection of a bunch of different traditions, it’s easy for it to influence and be influenced by many different things,” he said. He gives the example of Frederik Jensen’s game Montsegur: 1244, in which players are Cathar heretics besieged during the Albigensian Crusade who must decide between apostasy and martyrdom. “On one axis it comes directly out of the Danish scenario tradition,” Jason said, “largely removed from what the jeep guys are doing, and what traditional Scandinavian larp is doing—but you can see similarities there. You can also see hints of the North American indie tradition there.”

“I think there’s a lot of potential. It’s going to continue to be influential,” Jason said.

Conclusion

If the experience with jeepform has taught the North American indie RPG design community anything, it is the importance of reaching out to other communities of play, less to proselytize than to imbibe what they have to offer. “I think we have certain ways of doing things, and they’re very limited,” said Emily Care Boss. “Our little pocket of community could really benefit from going to Knutepunkt.”

It is clear, in other words, that innovative freeform techniques have been reinvented in different gaming scenes over the years but not broadly disseminated beyond those scenes. Emily points to the theater LARP tradition pioneered by the North American LARP community in New England. “I was talking to some of their writers,” she recalled, “and they write new mechanics for every con. It’s like they’re writing a game, like us, but then they don’t publish it, they never see any money, and maybe they run it once.” This point is reinforced by the experiences of Rob Donoghue, a game designer who resists both being associated with the Forge tradition and playing jeepform games. Rob pointed to some of the techniques employed in the parlor LARP games run at Ambercon Northwest, a regional convention associated with the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game emulating Roger Zelazny’s eponymous science fiction series. “Amber is very close to freeform,” he noted, and that meant that scenario designers could focus on creating powerful and interesting experiences. One example: “[My partner Fred Hicks] had an egg timer,” he recalled, “and when players would have an audience with the king, you had five minutes to make your case.” The use of this device created a sense of urgency that added greatly to the drama and immersion experienced by the players, and other techniques were used to create feelings of dislocation, or of empowerment.

By reaching out and making connections to different gaming communities, bringing back their insights and incorporating them into games intended to be published and broadly disseminated, the indie RPG scene is blurring is blurring the boundaries between modes of gaming hitherto regarded as fairly distinct. Even if only modestly successful, this can hope to stand as a worthwhile contribution to the larger gaming scene.

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