Free Kriegsspiel & The Flat Circle Of Time

FKR (Free Kriegsspiel Roleplay) is a new appellation for an old playstyle, one with a diversity of roots, a limb of which lies in the 19th century among the wargames of the Prussian officers. Indeed it is this limb which donated the first two letters of the acronym FKR. 

 

Free Kriegsspiel, as practiced by the Prussians, did away with much of the humdrum of "Dice, and Tables of Losses, and Rules." in favor of relying on Referee (Umpire) jurisprudence and adjudication. One of the primary documents we have from the period which describes this style is "Beitrag Zum Kriegsspiel" or "The Tactical Wargame," of which an English translation made in the same period can be found here. 

While the whole of the text is interesting from a historical perspective, what I chiefly want to share in particular is several segments of the two prefaces which have proven themselves to be rather timeless.

To quote my friend Weird Writer (of the blog Roll To Doubt):

 

"The Elusive Shift presents the flat circle as starting after the publication of OD&D, but it seems we're one century late on repeating stuff"

Without further ado, a series of excerpts from "The Tactical Wargame."

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"The General, it will be seen, holds the view that the elaborate rules for deciding certain results by the throwing of dice are needless and that the Umpire may well be left to settle all doubtful questions arbitrarily. Whether he is or is not correct in this is not, for the student, of great importance. The principles of the Game are the same whether the Umpire is left entirely free to decide all the issues, or has in certain cases to to resort to the dice. There is no difficulty in applying the recognized "tables of losses," &c., to a Game played on the lines laid in the present treatise." (page 6, italics mine)  

The fiction takes precedence over the method of adjudication used.

"The utility of the War Game is universally acknowledged at the present day. Nevertheless, cases are often met with in which attempts to practice is have been very speedily abandoned... Now, when I have inquired into the reason, I have, in most cases, received the answer, "We have no one here who knows how to conduct the game properly." (page 9).

A classic problem which no doubt resonates with many nowadays.

"For what the Game especially requires is a knowledge of the capabilities and fighting power of all arms, as well as of their principal accepted formations. Now, the elementary training of an officer ought to have laid the foundations of these acquirements; and even what it has not sufficed to do so, the very playing of the Game would develop more fully such knowledge as might be already possessed." (page 9, italics mine).

 

Playing the game is the best way to learn it.

 

"It is, indeed, only by severe toil and a great expenditure of time that any one who has not learned the Game by actual practice can, through unassisted study of the books of instruction, so thoroughly master the subject as to be competent to undertake the conduct of an exercise of this kind. So it comes about that there are assuredly in the smaller garrisons many officers who should be especially fitted, from their position, to take the matter in hand who utterly shrink from doing so." (page 10, italics mine).

As above, the game exists as a social game which is best learned via actually playing rather than merely reading, and the style of Free Kriegsspiel is a method which allows for a greater ease of entrance into play.

 

"I in no way underrate the service which the received books of Instruction, with their Rules, Dice, and Tables of Losses have rendered, and will render in the future. It consists chiefly in this, that the Umpire finds in the Rules, fixed principles by which the limits of the capacity and fighting power of the troops are defined, that the effective use of weapons gains full credit by means of the Tables of Losses, and that the dice, which give to chance its due influence, provide an apparent security and partiality in the decisions." (page 11, italics mine).

 

Rules and procedures still have their places as tools for the Referee.

"In the exercises on the ground itself, when it becomes necessary, for example, to say to an officer, "Imagine that you see a column of infantry debouching from that village on to the high-road," it is often found that very good officers who, when they see the enemy immediately know what they ought to do, find it very difficult or even impossible to think of him in a given position. The reason of this is, that they want the needful imagination, and this defect is generally overcome by the placing of the pieces." (page 13).

Theatre of the mind not working for your players? Use some minis!

 

"The following pages are only intended to assist those who may not happen to have learned the Game in the third form." (page 14).

 

Rulebooks, play examples, and the like are means for introducing players who lack a group to learn from via play.

"I write especially for those of my brother officers who, it may be, have been hitherto frightened away by the Dice, and Tables of Losses, and Rules." (page 15).

Once again, a statement which resonates with many who, in the current era, will cite similar reasons for having been drawn to FKR as a playstyle.

 

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As you can see, many of General v. Verdy's thoughts and comments have a kinship with those of the present day. Throughout the history of the hobby FKR as a playstyle (or rather its many antecedents upon whom the appellation is backwardly applied in this case) has proved itself a well-used option to those issues that arise in games which drift away from the world and into the mechanics of play, which under a Free Kriegsspiel derived playstyle remain but tools. 

Morrow Project - Damocles, Review #2

Onto module two! The first post of this series can be found here.

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THE PREMISE
 
This module takes place once again in Michigan, this time eschewing the warmer southern portion of the state for the pine forests and rugged hills of the Upper Peninsula. Again players take charge of a Recon Team, the most basic Morrow Project player unit, this time with a slightly different cold-weather adapted load-out.

As is typical, players awaken in their bolthole (slavishly described with technical detail as to its functioning, despite this being unlikely to factor into play of the module) with little information to guide them beside outdated maps. Presumably motivated by exploration, or seeking some of the project caches listed on the map, they will leave and wander out into the harsh winter of the new world.

The module bills itself as a sandbox, and as such loosely describes the region of the Upper Peninsula the players will find themselves within. Features of note are the harshness of the terrain, massive wolf packs, gangs of brigands descended from "cons" escaped from a penitentiary during the War, a nearby outpost of lake-going shipmen, a distant off-map university town with steam engine level technology, and of course the Damocles compound.

The compound and its titular inhabitant, a military AI named Damocles, take up about half the module's description after the broad strokes of the region and the loosely keyed town of Wittsend (plus inhabitants). It is, in all respects, the intended locus of play.

THE LAYOUT

Very basic, very homemade, 1980s chic. Two columns black and white. Minimum illustrations or maps. Some odd placement of sections, but for overall coherent and functional.

 

WHAT IT HAS

The supply caches are a good start to the sandbox, giving players immediate goals, and potential additional resources. Although, fascinatingly, the actual contents of the supply caches is left entirely up to the Referee. They are labelled on the player's outdated maps.

The module, in usually Morrow Project fashion, slavishly describes each and every component of the players kit, armament, and vehicles down to how many ounces of sunscreen the players have. While being a tad irksome to my usual tastes, this extreme detail isn't entirely without merit. The core premise of the game is that players are some of the last vestiges of the modern (at the time of writing) day now stranded in an alien world. What is in their kits is quite literally all they have of the old world (ignoring supply caches and such). As such it makes the play experience more visceral, particularly since the modules hold an unspoken but obvious expectation that players will leverage their detailed gear list in trade with the locals. And to this end the Recon Team’s detailed kit is actually quite useful.

The module opens up in the depths of winter, January to be precise, and this specific choice of season does well to lend the environment a distinct character of its own. The sketch of local terrain and clime makes sure to describe plenty of hazards and challenges for players to confront.

The real good stuff comes in the sketch of the region, which unlike the previous module Riverton with its isolated impoverished farmers, has far more ties to a wider world as well as a unique aesthetic to the region.

Notable details include a university city-state in Marquette to the northwest which is said to have steam engines and has attempted to introduce coinage to the region (with limited success). Details about schooling are given, including the note that local villages and woodsmen send their most promising youths on pilgrimage to the Northern Michigan University in Marquette to study (with notes on the particular subjects most valued and how the University has would-be scholars help maintain its fields, all very fun lil ways-of-life details). There is a widespread usage of flintlock rifles and muskets for hunting and a cottage industry maintaining them. A sketch of local governmental structures (or rather the lack of) is made with an emphasis on informal laws and appointed mediator-judges. Books are said to be valued, but rare, and apparently Shakespeare, Nietzsche and other classics are very popularly known and discussed. Delightfully it seems Ojibwa has made a comeback, intermingling with English and Finnish as the local dialect of choice.

 

One faction (though I hesitate to call them such, as they are not fleshed out enough to be a real faction, but they are certainly an implied faction) is the “cons” who are roving bandit bands formed from exiles and descendants of convicts who broke out of the state penitentiary. They are described as having "no society to speak of" and "initiation rituals" which, yeah, pretty typical 1980s attitudes towards imprisoned populations. Interestingly however, and in contradiction to the previous, it is briefly noted that the “cons” keep families in their camps and that books and horses are said to be the items most commonly traded for by these brigand bands, which has some delightfully implications. Another good detail is that there's a common belief in the brigand-gangs having a big conspiratorial alliance, which is said to be untrue. A good touch.
 
The social effects of prolonged raiding and low level warfare between the brigand gangs and settlements is also a good addition, as it further characterizes the settlement pattern of the region and its people. A lack of isolated farmsteads, walled towns, people going out to farm in groups and returning at dusk. These are all useful details for a Referee attempting to portray this post-apocalyptic society. And offer up some potential hooks.
 
There are also the Lakers, a group of nomadic ship-people who get a little mini-section. They’re wintering on a nearby island (connected by lake ice to the mainland), are suspicious and armed, but potentially hold large amounts of information concerning the broader world as well as connections to it for players.

The village of Wittsend (the only described settlement sadly) is presented well, in terms of what the players from the past will notice: lack of power lines and such (being stripped for metal), more barns. And has a complement of colorful npcs organized into lil factions with their own wants.

And lastly, there is the titular Damocles. An ancient military AI busy squatting in its old compound fulfilling ancient directives while sending out strange robotic scouts to plunder metal for repairs from the surrounding area. Damocles's compound forms an open ended mini-dungeon for players to deal with. It is heavily (and I mean heavily) armed and there are extensive notes about the history of the compound, its fancy tech, and features and some neat (if clumsy) storytelling via the various corpses of the long dead base personnel and the commander’s journal.

 

WHAT IT LACKS

Damocles bills itself as a sandbox, a space for Referee to build a campaign off of. And it almost, almost gets there. Yet I find it to have fallen short, lacking a robust framework of factions or points of interest or intersecting motivations or anything to really sustain long term play. It alludes to these things, yes, and sketches out a potential sandbox. But the actual work of filling it is left, in a very early roleplaying game fashion, to the Referee.

In truth there is just Wittsend, Damocles, and some threads leading off the edge of the map which is otherwise empty.

WHAT'S JUST WEIRD
 
I would probably need to be more familiar with the cultural milieu of the 80s in order to understand some of the stuff going on with the module's treatment of Amerindians and such. I've mostly glossed over that, and the bits with the Finns as well, but the way the Morrow Project approaches ethnicity will come up again in later modules and while not egregiously bad it's certainly... interesting. Depictions are very stereotypical even if intended as friendly.

CONCLUSIONS

The Morrow Project is different from most other post-apocalyptic media, particularly in the RPG-o-sphere, where most works tend to run either gonzo (Gamma World, Mad Max) or at least cinematic (Powered by the Apocalypse, Walking Dead). Morrow Project meanwhile engages with realism on an interesting level, being concerned with such details as farming and clothing and infrastructure. This often generates tension however, with the other half of the game, which is very much about heavily armed players blowing and shooting shit up. Nominally however, the game is about “rebuilding civilization” and as such is concerned with infrastructure, hygiene, farming, and other such features of the apocalypse.

It’s what has made me so fixated on the game and its modules and often what frustrates me with it, because I don’t want another several pages of statted up guns I want more ethnographic sketches about these post-apocalyptic societies!

Overall, despite its flaws, the Damocles module sparked my imagination. With a bit of work it can be expanded into an actual sandbox worth running and most of the ideas it does present are interesting and fun, there simply is a need for more of them in order to flesh out the environs. Having read it, I am enticed to find out how players would interact with the contents, and in that regard it is a success.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

I really like how the Lakers exist in this module, and particularly how they tie in with the local glassblower, it's an actual proper seed for sandbox intrigue and offers a way to draw players into the wider setting. And it does this through a criminally underused historical industry, that being the production and trade of glassware.

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The map for this module places it firmly in the region east of Marquette, just below grand island and just south of Munising, Mi (the rough location of which is marked as 'ruins' on the map). Continuing the Morrow Project tradition of loosely copying real world locations. The module even recommends purchasing a copy of USGS MAP NL 16-5 for Marquette, which is a charming little detail.

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It's nice to see Michigan’s wolf population has returned after the nuclear war. Personally I would have gone with some mixture of feral dogs interbred with coyotes and wolves.

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For some reason the module uses “upanite” which is an odd exonym, given that “yooper” is the commonly accepted term for the Upper Peninsula's inhabitants since the 70’s at least and sounds much better to the ear.

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Damocles is, for its flaws, much better tied into a region than Riverton which mostly just nebulously existed all on its lonesome. With Wittsend there is a sense of being placed in a broader world, and I’d love to expand the Upper Peninsula as a setting using this module as a base.

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It's strange to read about harsh, all consuming winters and omnipresent cold when the Upper Peninsula of my lifetime has gotten warmer and wetter even in deep winter due to climate change.This cold will actually come up in future modules, as it ties into a bit of a cross-module theme of an oncoming ice-age triggered by the nuclear war.

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While mostly a sandbox, the module has some odd bits of railroading, or rather not so much a railroad as an expected unfolding of events it presents to the Referee.

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The encounter with the local boy, in buckskins, busy cursing, shooting, reloading, and shooting his flintlock at the tank with robotic arms currently dissembling his snowmobile is a fantastic introduction to the new world for the players and makes me want to run the module for just that bit alone.

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I enjoy  the sense of growth and rebuilding in the module. People are hoping for things, have dreams, the townsfolk want a school, the glassblowers are hoping to make a trade deal that will get their glassware traded all across the lakes. It fits well with the player's presumed mission goals of helping rebuild civilization.

Wizards Rule The World (badly)

 

Wizards, that's wizard with a capital W, tend to be egomaniacs. It comes with the territory of knowing esoteric secrets to bend the universe to your will. They tend to get big ideas, big appetites.

 

Presume for a moment, that there is an ambitious wizard. A dark lord if you will. They've set up their fortress, mustered armies, and brewed up monsters to serve them. Pretty soon their expanding their personal fiefdom and waging war on the world at large, or at least those bits closest to them. If they're a particularly smart wizard they might even try to play in the local political playground of shifting allegiances and motives.

 

Eventually though, more often than not, the wizard unsettles the existing power structure enough that someone, or an alliance of someones come along and kick their door in, blows up their fortress and scatters their armies and creations to the four corners.

 

The wizard likely dies and the remnants of their little empire become brigands and wandering monsters that plague the countryside, if they aren't recruited into the retinues of winning side that is.

 

 

In the war's wake veterans of the winning side might well become monster-hunters or mercenaries or brigands themselves and form a class of wandering rogues, neer-do-wells, and problem solvers. Adventurers.

Meanwhile the dark fortress lies in ruin, but a ruin still packed with the accrued wealth, occult artifacts, and other seductive treasures that the winning armies missed during the sack. Inevitably such plunder lures your usual miscellany of scoundrels. Perhaps one or two are magic users themselves and they dig up arcane secrets out of ruins, ally with remnants of the old wizard's armies, and starts the whole process over again. 

Now iterate, repeat this process for a couple hundred years till the ruins of wizard fortresses and holdings litter the landscape. Every time an upstart new witch king is smacked down you have shattered armies bumping around and suddenly a market flooded with arcane artifacts and treasures.

What about the previously mentioned victors, those powers that be? 

More likely than not they're simply the descendants of those wizards that managed to actually succeed in carving themselves out a kingdom and sustaining a lineage. The truly effective ones are the ones who incorporate the creations of other defeated wizards into their ranks.  

 

In fact its likely all the world is ruled by wizards, to one degree or another, at the very least anyone in power is keenly interested in the creations of wizards. Feuding, fighting wizards who have big egos and a tendency to try and build their own little empires on the ruins of generations of other feuding wizard rulers. 

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It is an inherently adventure-some world, the constant cycle of wizards making monsters (an entire world built on "a wizard did it") and fighting with each other both produces ruins to loot and class of itinerant adventurers to hunt that treasure and deal with the general resulting mess. 

It supports both gonzo and pulpiness, everyone is building armies out of the defeated troops of other wizards and steal each others magical secrets and arcane technologies. Dials can be turned for each element. Want more ancient ruins of past civilizations? No problem, sprinkle in some of those. So many pulp ancient civilizations are sorcery themed anyway.

Such a setting provides the "aesthetics of ruin" but with a route potentially circumventing the typical fallen empires.

Delegation, Dismemberment, & Disability

This post is still half-formed, but I'd prefer to put it out now and prompt some discussion rather then spend an eternity polishing it into whatever precise point I don't really have.

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A sentiment I have seen expressed is that a character losing a limb or otherwise suffering debilitating injuries ruins play for them. While I do not take issue (or I like to think I don't and actively try as best I can not to :P ) with what someone else prefers, I do find there is a note of something ableist about the assumption that a character is ruined once their disabled. At the least it betrays a lack of creativity in playing them. 

 

 

Add to this the pervasive notion in action orientated fiction, particularly fantasy, that the protagonists, 'heroes' even moreso, must be men of action (or woman of action still obeying the same archetypes). Characters who coordinate rather than use brute force are usually evil schemers, almost certainly so if they're men. This is part of the general fascistic anti-intellectualism in much of fantasy. A veneration of men of action and a vilification of the weak (and lookatthat, frequently, disabled) 'cowardly' schemers. I realize this is strong language, but it is a prevalent thread in our society and expresses itself in media intentionally or not, and the roots are, well, fascistic obsessions with strong, brave action orientated "heroes."

And among the men (and women) of action, note how rare is it for characters to suffer injuries which fundamentally change how they relate to the world. Or even for that matter to suffer injuries that inconvenience them for substantial periods of time. Power fantasy seems to forbid ever becoming incapacitated beyond a stagger and perhaps leaning upon a friends shoulder. Where are the scars? The amputations? The wounded being carried from the battlefield? 

 

 

 

To that end, often when people seek to include disabled characters in fiction or roleplaying the power-fantasy approach of granting some power, or technological means of circumventing their disability is extremely common. Which is understandable! Its a power fantasy! But what is lost is nuance. As well it comes at the cost of exploring modes of Adventure that aren't bashing things and fighting (a general problem in much fantasy).

 

Furthermore! Lack of injury also cuts off a source of interaction with the world and ends up obscuring and diminishing people who occupy traditionally supporting social roles like healers.

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Injury needn't remove characters from play, it simply requires re-framing how they interact with the world. Dismemberment and debilitating injuries are an opportunity for lateral growth and a chance to change up how you play your character. And debilitating injuries naturally fit into existing structures of play. Namely, hirelings! 

The Hireling To Apprentice Pipeline

Hirelings and henchman are an immensely useful asset, and Apprentices are a natural evolution of the henchman. They form excellent back-up characters, moreso than random hirelings, as your already invested in them, and to add on top of that, they naturally provide structure for retirement and delegation, as apprentices can be delegates that players can play to carry out their characters wishes. In this you have extra-characters, more characterful than a more generic hireling, to act as extensions of the player. 

For disabled player characters this is the natural route to interacting with the game world, the preexisting structure of henchlings offers the means to play a more coordinator type character.

Retirement

Retiring characters can be unappealing, but becomes substantially more interesting with apprentices involved as there is now a character who has been developed already ready, with direct connection to the previous character and their legacy/impact upon the game world, all ready to be used as the new player character. 

 

Furthermore, retired does not mean out of the world, simply incorporated into the background. In many ways its an investment, both retirement and apprentices serve to sink players into the social fabric of worlds. And when retirement is a natural life stage for all characters, it makes the prospect of characters who influence things not from the front of the show but the back more appealing.

Delegation & Deliberation

The concept of delegation is simple and stolen from this blogpost for the most part. Its a variation on the basic procedure of play. Instead of "describe situation" "players act" "describe result" it becomes "learn about situation through an intermediary" "order actions to be taken" "intermediary carries them out." It is a naturalistic extension of existing procedure to handle, well, delegating.

It is utilitous both in more broadly for handling expeditionary play, and more specifically for handling characters who work for intermediaries. In many ways it is simply a re-framing of an existing evolution in play adventure games can often go through. 

Now the other option alongside delegation is to simply take directly control of henchlings and lackeys and see through their eyes. Which works well too, however I would suggest that delegation can center play on the coordinating character, keeping them the center of the players play.

 

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The gist of all this is that the existing setup of typical adventure games are well suited for fitting disabled characters easily into the playstyle.

Now it is important to clarify that OSR adventure-gamey aren't inherently better at handling disability, rather they simply offer a different avenue of exploration.

I am not disabled. But I am queer, and the situation feels reminiscent of the matters of queerness in fictional worlds. Namely that a smoothed over "empowerment" style oft feels lacking of a certain meat and chewiness to it. There's criticism to be had with this, perhaps turning disability into some gameable element isn't an ideal route. Furthermore, I have focused upon physical disability here, and also, though unstated, on disability as result of injury. Mental disability is its own ballpark to be honest and I leave to be explored by others.  

 

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ADDENDUM (1) 

When it comes to technological compensation and "solutions" one must be careful, lest you fall into existing traps of eugenistic thinking that see's disability as something to be fixed. Prosthetics and other tools are just that, tools, that come with their own exsperiances and requirements to use.

ADDENDUM (2)

In general it is valuable not to think in terms of costs or bonuses, as games tend to do, but think laterally in terms of how it changes a characters interaction with the world. The taxonomical math nerd urge to assign mechanical reward or mallus must be ignored. 

ADDENDUM (3)

Hirelings are a good solution in OSR gameplay context as its part of the existing playstyle, but there are implications to consider nonetheless; the relying upon others, or being a burden on others, not to mention the matter of wage relations for care which are a contentious and tricky subject. For the purposes of an OSR-y game where your playing skullduggerous dungeon delvers its less direct, but nonethelss still there.

ADDENDUM (4) 

See this excellent blogpost that elaborates on the matters here.

Simple Reaction Rolls

 

When encountering NPC's or a group whose disposition is uncertain to the Referee, use these procedures.

 

Roll 1d6...

• High is positive, low is negative
• The exact number rolled can be used as the number of key social interactions an NPC will field before getting fed up and 'resolving' the encounter*
• A positive reaction does not necessarily equal full-friendship, but it does mean an otherwise hostile war-band might simply tell players to get lost instead of outright attacking.
• Likewise a negative reaction may mean outright attack, or it may just mean being snubbed or berated.

* Use it likes this: suppose Jorge rolls up to the wealthy burgher Hesod to try and convince him to sponsor their expedition to the old ruins and see if the burgher knows anything about their rivals plans, the Referee rolls a 3, a fairly neutral reaction with 3 'chances' to get information or make arguments, Jorge must consider how to use this short bit of attention he has out of Hesod. Firstly, he rattles of his request and reasons why, Hesod isn't convinced, he tries again and the burgher is still apprehensive about the idea, does Jorge use his last chance before the Burgher dismisses him to switch tracks and learn about the rivals or try to get funding one more time?

It doesn't need to be overthought, or argued over the precise number of "tries" just use it as a rough resource mechanic, attention and patience is a resource after all! Negotiate with players. One social action could be a Question, or any sort of exchange of goods (seduction leverages sex, intimidation leverages fear or threats, trade via barter is a classic).

Also have a mass combat post