Tabletop

Lucidity takes place in the world of dreams -- a world filled with Dreamers, real people who dream without awareness, and Lucids, those few who understand where they are, have a sense of self, and can learn to manipulate the dreamworld to their own advantage. The players, naturally, are Lucids.

Yet "a sense of self" only takes you so far; the Lucids have snatches of remembrance from their former life, and the process of character creation is, in fact, a matter of deciding how many memories you sacrifice for the sake of power and sanity -- and what things you do remember. You can bargain with the Dream King (that is, gamemaster) for some additional memories, by taking disadvantages in exchange.

Because the world is, literally, such stuff as dreams are made of, you can attempt to shape it, creating 'dreams' within it, and moving from one 'dreamscape' to another. There are, naturally, monsters -- both Dreamers' nightmares, and 'dreams from outside,' Lovecraftian extrusions into consensual reality. And there is danger -- the danger of dying, of losing your memories and ultimately your lucidity -- and perhaps the danger of 'waking.'

As with many short RPGs, Lucidity offers little more than a character generation system, a conflict resolution system, and an evocative background -- but the background here is very evocative, and something that, in the right GM's hands, could easily create a compelling and disturbing campaign. Something more is needed, I think -- an story arc, secrets of the dreamworld to uncover, the connection between this world and the waking one but Prahl, perhaps sensibly, does not try to provide that here -- after all, if it's in the game rules, then it's canonical and available to the players, which obviates the mystery of discovery.

Unlike many indie RPGs, Lucidity is not playing with the nature of narrative and its expression through play; instead, it's taking roleplaying into the world of dream-logic, the sense of epiphany just around the corner, always delayed by the stream-of-conscious permutation of one event into the next through a sort of magical connection that defies logical analysis.

Joe Dever's Lone Wolf series of "which-way" (or, if you prefer, "choose-your-own-ending") books were part of an efflorescence of such works in the 80s. (The other two most popular series were the Bantam Choose Your Own Adventure books, and the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks from Ian Livingstone and the UK Steve Jackson [not to be confused with the Texan Steve Jackson], both of whom have gone on to stellar careers in digital games).

This game you cannot play, I'm afraid -- at least, not unless you possess a time machine, and can travel to the premises of Carrington Bowles in mid-18th century London to purchase it, or you are among the handful of people lucky enough to own one of the few extant copies of the game. Lacking that, you will have to be satisfied with the image at left (a more detailed one here). It's a scan of the board as it appears in Table Games of Georgian and Victorian Days, which is my primary source on the subject.

Illuminati is the classic Steve Jackson Games boxed set of conspiracy and high weirdness, inspired by the equally classic Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. The game won the Origins Award when it was first released in 1982, and inspired a trading card version in 1995 called Illuminati: New World Order, which plays similarly. In all honesty, I think no other boardgame has had such an influence in my life as this one –- both in terms of my admiration for its tight yet expressive game mechanics, and also for introducing me to the work of Robert Anton Wilson, and ultimately to the Discordian Society, of which I am a key member (I could tell you why, but then I’d have to scramble your brains with a spoon).

Four terrible diseases have broken out all over the world, and they're spreading fast. The fate of humanity hangs in the balance. The clock is ticking, and your small team of health professionals has to find a cure to all four diseases before time runs out, or before infection spreads so far that it's just too late to save the human race. There goes Kinshasa! There goes Mumbai! There goes Tokyo! You'd better hurry.

My Life With Master is as seminal a work in the history of tabletop role-playing games as Frankenstein was for literature. It's a game designed around not a narrative, but a dramatic scenario that you act out, producing your own unique narrative. From a game designer's perspective, it's something that must be studied, it's something that must be played.

Pirates -- there have been several iterations now, starting with Pirates of the Spanish Main, with Pirates: Rise of the Fiends being the latest -- is a trading card game. Sorta kind. Or it's a miniatures game in which you don't have to paint the damn miniatures, which is what always stopped me from being a miniatures gamer. Any how you look at it, though, it's a damn clever little thing, and given how kitschy pirates are in general, it's amazing it's been a commercial success. I mean, Wizkids has gone through 10 expansions from the originals now, they actually ran TV commercials for the damn thing, and you can find it at Walmart -- I have to assume it's a commercial success.

You see, senor, in the beautiful Republica de los Bananas, life is cheap and times are hard. Each player controls one of the great families of the nation, and the important government jobs -- El Presidente, Minister of Internal Security, and the leadership of the three army brigades, air force, and navy -- are shared out among them. The ultimate objective of the game is to have the biggest Swiss bank account at the end; each turn, El Presidente draws a fixed number of bills from the money deck, and announces a budget for the coming year.

It is 1928, the kulaks are starving by the millions, and the collectivization of agriculture is proving to be a disaster. Careworn by his awesome responsibilities, our beloved leader, Comrade Stalin, wishes to have a pleasant evening with the other valiant leaders of the CCCP, and be told a folk tale similar to those he was told in his youth. Naturally, Comrade Stalin being who he is, at least one of the rest of us will be executed before the evening is out. And try to stay off the subject of agriculture.

Some years ago, at Fastaval in Århus, Denmark, I had one of the most splendid, if brief, roleplaying experiences in my life, in a mixed company of Danes, Swedes, and Finns, who partially in my honor and partially because English was the only language they had in common, chose to play with me in a language I found comprehensible. The game we played was The Upgrade; and it's a source of some little frustration that, reading over the materials they've used to present it to the world, my main emotion is a sense of dissatisfaction that the prose itself does not impart a clear notion of the pleasure to be gained by experiencing this remarkable ouevre. In part, perhaps, this is because it is translated from the Swedish (and for those who read it, a version in the original tongue is also available via the link above); but in part, it is also because some things that can be experienced in play are impossible to express in the more mundane form of the words used to describe their rules. Not always, to be sure; in reading, say, My Life With Master, you obtain a sense of the genius that likes within; but in the case of The Upgrade, surely, you do indeed need to play the game to understand what it has to offer.