Slobbovia

Cardinal Boleski (James Ritchie), author of Boleski's Unkonkize Hiztory of Slobbovia (the first history of the realm) wrote me recently, mentioning that he had seen Mo'reen Boleski, the former Czar, not long ago. It occurred to me that, having posted about 1480: The Age of Exploration, I might also post about Slobbovia, an equally dead, and if anything, more bizarre game.

Slobbovia began in 1969 at a lake in Killarney, Manitoba, where a number of teenagers played a "King of the Hill" variant which they called "Emperor of Slobbovia." The game involved campaigning in canoes and fighting battles by splashing each other with paddles. (This is the origin of that distinctive Slobbovian weapon, the pluglunk.)

As time went on, each player assumed the persona of a great lord of Slobbovia, and traditions about the world began growing. The first map was drawn, based on the lake where Slobbovia originated. Many of the provinces of Old Slobbovia were named after features of that lake -- Cabanania was named after a cabin; Rabittania was a place where rabbits were known to congregate; and so on.

Some of these teenagers became involved with Diplomacy, and thus the Diplomacy variant of Slobbovia was born. It ran from 1972 to 1984.

As a Diplomacy variant, Slobbovia had two major innovations. One was that the leader of a country larger than a certain size was required to place some of his units under the control of subordinate commanders. While subordinates could be removed at will, they could also rebel, either joining another liegelord or establishing their own polity. The other was the ability to build railroads.

To call Slobbovia a Diplomacy variant is, however, misleading; the game purposefully had no victory conditions, and the formal game itself served as little more than a framework for structuring a written roleplaying game. The postal Diplomacy hobby has a tradition of "press," whereby a player may, each turn, include a written statement that is published with the turn's results (e.g., "The Office of the Kaiser today announced..."). In Slobbovia, press was the focus of the game, rather than a minor adjunct.

In other words, it was a form of collaborative story-telling in written form; each player had a single "main" character, but could also introduce subsidiary characters. An tacit rule prohibited killing off another player without his permission, and it was considered polite to get a player's input and permission if you intended to include one of his characters in a scene. Events in the ongoing story would certainly cause players to change their behavior in the underlying game, and vice versa, but no one seriously tried to play the game in a min-max, win or die kind of way.

A typical issue of the Slobinpolit Zhurnal, the fanzine that carried the game, would have more thsn 100 pages of prose, and perhaps 3 pages of game results.

Over time, quite a lot of lore built up about the world of Slobbovia -- its great families, nations, cultures, traditions, cuisine, language, and so on; one reason for its eventual demise, I suspect, is that this world-building eventually produced so rococo an artifact that joining and participating became daunting to prospective players. Getting up to speed on the world took some effort, and while there was a novice packet, and two works of history, well, you had to really want to play.

One of the players, by the way, was the mystery writer Sharyn McCrumb, and some of the characters in Bimbos of the Death Sun are recognizable Slobbovians. Only I ain't saying which.

For many years, the game was run by Charles Sharp, who eventually burnt out on regularly publishing so massive a zine; Robert Bryan Lipton, one of the players, organized "APA-Slobbovia" to carry it on. "APA" stands for "amateur press association." Originally (in the 1920s) APAs were mainly formed by geeky print-technology enthusiasts, who published zines to show off their technical chops, but the idea of the APA was quickly adopted by science fiction fans. An APA is a sort of group fanzine; members typically each print their own, short zine, and then either sent them to the collating editor or get together someplace and collate them into a single publication, which then gets sent to all members. APAs produce the same kind of mutual commentary and joint exploration of ideas you see in group blogs and their comment sections, but do so using a technology that was widely available even in the 1930s, when the first "fan" APAs started appearing.

In the case of Slobbovia, the formation of an APA was a way of sharing the burden of publishing the zine; the job of acting as collating member rotated among a handful of Slobbovians (myself included) who owned either mimeographs or ditto machines. Players could submit their zines either in printed form for collation, or on mimeograph/ditto stencils, which the collating editor would print. The editor also served as gamemaster for the current term of the underlying game, then assembled and mailed out copies. It all sounds pretty complicated, but this worked for almost ten years.

As is typical of this kind of intesne, shared experience, Slobbovia became for many of us an important adjunct to our social lives. On meeting one or more Slobbovians face to face (which, at least in the New York area, was not uncommon), you'd often spend quite a lot of time discussing the game, and perhaps planning some joint story effort; Slobbovians corresponded widely as well, and distance (or nationality -- many players were, naturally Canadian) was no bar. One might even talk by phone from time to time, although of course, long distance was then an expensive proposition.

Some of the funniest things I ever read appeared in the pages of Slobinpolit Zhurnal. Albeit you probably had to have that shared sense of the world, and of the characters of the players to get much of the humor. It was a good time.

One of the things Ritchie mentioned was that he'd heard something about an attempt to revive the game; we agreed that it was probably a bad idea. Or rather, it might be a good idea to try to recreate the loopily humorous aesthetic of the game, and the sense of collaborative world-building -- but in the context of a new world. Slobbovia has had its day.