Tabletop Role Playing Retrospective Two of Five: The Crisis, by Alan Bligh, published in White Dwarf, July 5 2019
The Red World
The Double Crisis in 1979 was a very bad omen for the tabletop hobby in the United Republics.
The mobilization of the country for what would become over ten years of warfare across the global south, as well as the chaos caused by the move into war communism[1], created enormous waves in the United Republics tabletop scene. Most notably, a clique of overzealous planners in the great lakes region shut down all "frivolous" printing in the region in 1981 as part of local rationalization programs, essentially killing the local industry. Of the Great Lakes developers, only TSR managed to survive, and although the planners all lost their seats to recalls organized by local gaming clubs, the damage had been done. TSR moved to Seattle in protest, and many of the designers and personalities of the industry relocated to the west coast with them. Other than RuneQuest (Chaosium was more than safe from the clique, being based in San Francisco), large-scale firm printing of tabletop games all but ceased in the United Republics for nearly five years, as the industry reestablished itself on new footing.
However, while "official" work all but ceased, fan clubs and hobbyists filled the void. Tabletop zines continued to survive due to their lower resource pull, and published settings, modifications, and house rules for the countless games that had popped up between '70 and '81 continued to proliferate. The hobby continued to diversify into more of the fantastik genre than the works of Tolkien and Howard.
Traveller continued to grow in popularity through the 80s, despite SimRAD stopping printing in '81 and eventually dissolving in '84. A Troika of former SimRAD writers led by Marc W. Miller eventually published a variety of adventures and supplements through the Travellers Aid Society Journal, an Oregon Traveller Zine that would eventually become the core of Portland Game Design Collective. Details in these supplements and adventures accreted into the
Imperium setting, one of the first great tabletop settings. It portrayed a dystopian vision of a stellar neighborhood split between a feudalist empire and an interstellar descendant of the ComIntern that has fallen into bureaucratic decay. The focus of
Imperium play materials was on interstellar smugglers and mercenaries, known as "Free Traders", operating in the hotly contested border region of the Spinward Marches.
Meanwhile, Chaosium released the long-coming Call of Cthulhu RPG, a direct adaptation of the fantastik works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and the Mythos created by him and his collaborators, using an adapted and streamlined version of the d100 engine used in RuneQuest. While it would be a sleeper hit in the United Republics, it exploded in ComIntern East Asia, with a licensed Shin Esperanto translation out of Pyongyang selling over a million copies. Additionally, the adaptation work that Chaosium had done with the engine led to a subcommittee being formed to begin work on a universal game design toolkit using the engine as the studio's next project. What would become the Basic Game Engine Toolkit took another 18 months to develop, and would become a success for Chaosium on its release in 1981. Games using the engine proliferated in the low-volume printers of the west coast and midwest. Over the course of the 1980s, the BGE Toolkit became the mechanical basis for the vast majority of the new RPGs emerging as a new industry built itself up on the west coast.
TSR remembers the 1980s as a dark time. The move to Seattle was, in hindsight, something of a mistake, and their lack of output at the start of the decade lost them crucial momentum. The industry slack was eventually picked up by GMs making their own "homebrew" games using copies of the BGE Toolkit, with some distributing them on their own (the most famous "DnD Killers" being HârnGame[2] and Age of Kings*). This meant that once TSR got back on its feet, they realized they had almost no market to sell to. The collective spiraled somewhat, trying anything from novels to setting guides to published adventures. Nothing seemed to stick, and TSR bled personnel over the course of the decade. They eventually stabilized, distributing reprints of ADnD for the remaining niche audience, and guides on how to create a similar mechanical base using BGE Toolkit. TSR survived, but would be a shadow of its former self until its resurgence in the 90s.
Outside of the United Republics, TTRPGs continued to slowly but surely build up steam. In the Soviet Union, Russian and Esperantist printings of ADnD and RuneQuest became very popular amongst college students and younger workers. In the East Asian Trio, Call of Cthulhu had its aforementioned boom in popularity, and BGE games proliferated. Traveller and the Imperium setting in general became exceedingly popular in Angola and Azania, with Portuguese printings out of Luanda and local printings in Capetown becoming very, very popular.
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The Blue World
While our Red Transatlantic cousins might see the Long Eighties as a somewhat dark period for the hobby, here in the Blue World, we remember it as a time of a thousand flowers. Imports of new editions of American games more or less stopped with the Emergency Acts in 1979, and so the nascent industry building up in the north of England had to improvise. Games Workshop began earnest work on their home-grown projects in Warhammer, and by the late 80s FASA had released their wargames BattleTech and BattleFleet and were already in the process of spinning them off into licensed RPGs.
The Indian tabletop scene was quiet during the First Period, mostly confined to the Ganges River Delta, with secondary school and college kids being the primary market for regional preprints and modifications of Warband and a variety of imported American RPGs, at least until the early 80s. But then
Dark Days hit the scene like a bolt of lightning, and Cyberpunk was a fixture of Indian anorak[3] life from then on. Two very enterprising college students living in Dhaka decided to make something of the new craze. Over the next two years they developed their pet project, a mixture of Indian cyberpunk and American fantastik, and successfully pitched it to GDP. Three months later, the first edition of Shadowrun would be published, and tabletop roleplaying finally exploded out of Bengal.
Shadowrun was a much different beast to any of its contemporaries. Mixing Howard and Tolkien with cyberpunk, players could choose to accomplish their goals with magic or technological means. While nominally classless, it was optimal for players to optimize their character into specific roles, like Mages to deal with magic, Hackers to deal with computer and security systems, and Road Warriors to deal with direct violence and drive the getaway car. Its primary mechanical inspiration was clearly Warband, but instead of controlling entire units in combat, players controlled individual mercenaries, known as Shadowrunners. Combat was tactical, and the first edition box set came with a set of tiles for GMs to build maps out of.
Shadowruns primary innovations were twofold: bringing cyberpunk to tabletop, and merging it with another genre. Following it were dozens of follow-ups, most notably Cyberpunk 2012 in 1990. It also is what arguably brought tabletop RPGs outside of Bengal, as players looking for similar but different experiences to Shadowrun began to hack the system to create their own games, or import Franco-British printings of pre-Emergency American RPGs.
Shadowrun even penetrated outside of the Indian Market and into the broader Indo-European world. It outpaced the Entente Edition of ADnD in sales in 1986 in the FBU, and is still the most popular game on the Continent and in Egypt (the Egyptian Arabic localizations notably being of
excellent quality [4]). It was also the very first game the Humble Author played, and still has a place of honor in my heart. It even got popular as a bootleg in Iran, when an Iranian Army officer found a mostly-complete box set in a captured Egyptian Alliance Peacekeepers camp during the Syrian War. Unofficial farsi prints of Shadowrun more or less kickstarted the Iranian underground TTRPG scene.
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As the Long Eighties wound down, links began to build back up between the Blue and Red tabletop worlds, and the two would eventually fuse. But that's a tale for next month[5].
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[1] While Bligh is betraying a bit of his Capitalist education here, the fact that the tabletop publishing industry was still mostly producing a play item popular with a fairly niche segment of the population means that the early years of lower stage communism were… not kind on the industry
[2] There is a real version of this, it's quite neat and called HârnMaster
[3] Term roughly analogous to OTL Japan's "otaku"
[4] A little nod to the OTL Pegasus Spiel German editions of Shadowrun being by far the best versions of the game
[5] With the pace I'm writing these it's more like 3 or 4 months from now lmao
Special thanks to
@MistahC for helping to develop the Indian tabletop scene and cyberpunk, and to
@Spartakrod for faer groundwork on R!DnD and R!GW during this period
