The Incompleteness of GREED, and the Necessity of Gameswriting
Note: I would draw your attention to something along these lines that my colleague Jared wrote, earlier and with more eloquence than I. This piece is little more than a muttered “Amen” to that.
I had originally planned to review GREED by Gormengeist and CXA as a kind of informal “game of the year,” as it is very nearly the best and certainly the most fresh TTRPG book I have read in the last 365 days. However, after consideration, I decided that I could not in good conscience do so, at least not at the time in which we currently live.
Make no mistake–GREED receives my wholehearted recommendation and, crucially, many enthusiastic cries for an encore. These I give with no reservations. However, such a project as declaring a “GOTY,” even casually, necessarily invokes the whole of the industry, and so must be undertaken with a consciousness of such. That sort of award-giving is always-also a request: “more of this in the new year, please.” And when I look at the state of things, I cannot bring myself to say that of GREED, as much as I would like to.
The reason for this is very simple: when you have read GREED cover-to-cover, and allowed its pitch-black charm to seep its way into the strip-mine where your soul used to be, when you have gathered your comrades and found a table and sat down to actually play the thing; your work is not yet done.
I will elaborate. Praise first.
GREED joins the slim ranks of Troika!, Violence, and Mothership as a “system” which, in my estimation, manages to be more than the sum of its parts. I cannot overstate how vanishingly rare this is; the vast majority of published system books, both from the corporate and indie scenes, are serviceable at best and actively painful to read, run, and write for at worst. GREED escapes this not through some breakthrough miracle of “game design,” but by not being chiefly a system. It is a setting first–the spare mechanics flow viscously from that source. And that setting is wickedly imaginative. Again it does something rare: it manages to envision a new kind of game, apart from the tropes and clichés that so many of its competitors reflexively import into TTRPGS from the blockbuster franchises of other artforms. More simply: it showed me a universe unlike any other I had seen previously, and how I might play a game in it.
It is simply well-written: creative, witty, stylish, atmospheric, and deeply funny. This quality, thoughtfulness and technical skill with language and ideas, is what I would encourage other writers to emulate, and why I think GREED deserves special recognition.
All the more frustrating, then, that for all its uncommon successes, GREED is, for now, commonly incomplete.
Allow me to put the tiger on the table: there are not, at the moment, any adventures for GREED. I expect that this might soon change, but at the time of writing I am not aware of any third-party modules, nor of any plans for Gormengeist to publish their own.
Let us set GREED aside, difficult as that is; we will return to it.
Table Culture, “Prep,” and the Adventure-as-Afterthought
In a recent conversation with a good friend, fellow GM, and exclusive runner of D&D 5e, I mentioned that I was writing a megadungeon for publication. Their response, paraphrased, was somewhat surprised: “Do people just make dungeons for other people to use?” Later, after some thought, they offered, “I can’t see myself ever running a game using someone else’s adventure. It just wouldn’t feel genuine.”
Nothing I am about to say is intended to put this person down, disparage them as a GM, or even to argue against their position personally. They are great at what they do, and I am having a fantastic time as a player in their campaign. Rather, I intend to examine this sentiment as discursively dominant among GMs, players, and publishers, and to show how limiting I believe it to be.
One of the many idiosyncrasies of the mainstream culture that has formed around “trad” games in the last decade is the conflation of two distinct roles: the runner of the game, and the writer of it. There is no natural law that says these must be different people, but they are self-evidently different roles in kind, each with its own set of challenges and considerations. This distinction might be (very) loosely compared to that which exists between the composer and the conductor (or performer, for that matter). The two roles may frequently be filled by the same person, and there might be something special or admirable about such an event, but few would be so callous as to expect or demand that one should or must be both.
And yet, it is an attitude analogous to this that I have encountered at multiple tables, heard expressed without challenge in various public forums, and seen imposed on many GMs, both by their peers and themselves. The logic, as I have most often understood it, can be summarized: “a central and inherent aim of GMing is to present a personal vision of a campaign to the players; the ability of the GM to personally produce the game is thus a key factor in their success or failure, perhaps even the most so.” Under this framework, the statements made by my friend are completely understandable. Drawing on another’s creativity to build the experience starts to seem like a dereliction of duty, even akin to plagiarism. Indeed, why would you give the players ideas from someone else? They’re here to hear your work!
This mentality, in which the players are likened primarily to an audience, dovetails nicely with the playstyle widely popularized by “actual play,” in which “adventure” is considered mostly or wholly synonymous with “plot” or “story.” Pre-written plot points, often conceived of in private with one or more players, are the core of the experience, and both the physical makeup of the world and the emergent/chaotic outcomes of freeform play are peripheralized. Again, this makes an aversion to externally-sourced adventures unsurprising. If I came to the table primarily to be told and perhaps to gently influence a story, it might be disappointing to learn that the story was purchased. The general content and quality of adventures written specifically for this purpose would do little to dissuade me. They are, with few exceptions, little more than demos tucked into the back of systems–specifically positioning themselves as “starting points” (in the mind of the GM, read: training wheels), written with the expectation that they will be internalized as templates rather than appreciated or utilized in their own right.
It might also be said that the celebrity of the likes of Mercer & Mcelroy et al, specifically fixating on their skill as writers, has almost certainly contributed to this… but I digress.
There is little that I could say, even if I wanted to, to invalidate these preferences. They are, whatever their effects, merely the strokes of a different sort of folk than I. That being said, I do believe that their prevalence writ large produces contradictions, both material and logical.
One such bit of fallout is the inflation of labor required to engage in basic GMing, euphemized as “prep.” This term, like most articulations of labor produced by the market, is deeply misleading. You do not have to work your scrolling finger hard to find gigabytes of internet advice for new GMs that either implies or explicitly demands that they devote as many hours as possible to it. And yet, it is often left vague what this actually entails. The construction and use of the term connotes a form of labor that is at once mundane, expected, and unworthy of compensation, but also deeply vital as a prerequisite to having fun with your friends. Listening to the internet talk about “prep,” you would be forgiven for thinking that they meant cleaning the house or setting up the card table beforehand. And yet the sub/textual expectation is that a good GM will fully write and produce the material necessary to run recurring sessions, which are often themselves multi-hour and weekly. I will remind you that many GMs run multiple campaigns simultaneously, and are expected to produce physical media (terrain, minis, maps, etc.) along with whatever they themselves require. At what point does this stop being “game night” and become a full-time job paid in snacks?
There is no easy fix for this, despite the immense number of system books that will attempt to persuade you otherwise. For the usual sort of game, that is, a GM mediating the interactions between PCs and a world, the GM must draw that world from somewhere. Their choices are, as I see them:
- Write it themselves
- Draw it from an external source
- Improvise it
- Procedurally generate it
Most will do a bit of all, and none are wrong (except for procgenning everything, do battle with me), but the choice is, so far, inescapable. Many systems seem to recognize that the GMs they are marketing themselves to are looking for an escape from unsustainable amounts of prep, but are unwilling or unable to aid them substantively. And so you get endless promises that a given system is “low/no prep,” backed up by nothing but the copy’s word and a good dose of magical thinking.
Shout-out to Dungeon World, which has “Dungeon” in the title, and speaks of them in detail as if they’re in the room with us right now (“Speaking of traps—keep your eyes open for them, too.”) and yet specifically discourages the GM from fully making any, exhorting them instead to “leave blanks.” Whatever that advice means, I would much prefer if Koebel had put it into practice, extensively, on every single page of that “book.”
You can see this contradiction manifesting itself in the always-raging, never-changing Discourse around “railroading.” Many players, extremely justifiably, push back against what they see as an overly restrictive mode of play, and envision a freer, more exploratory way of doing things. But what often goes unremarked-upon is that the very ground they tread is labor, and if they wish to see authored content under every rock and over every horizon, someone must author it. The roads that lead in every direction are paved with sleepless nights.
Something-something commodity fetish.
The other common approach has been to escape into improv; to extol its virtues as the true mark of a great GM. Make no mistake, improv is crucial to even the most thoroughly written session. But as every fan of comedy knows, the difference between partially and fully improvised material is always noticeable at a glance. If that is the expectation, fine and good! But I speak from experience: creating entire spaces and opportunities for play on the spot is an unbelievably difficult and necessarily uneven endeavor, inevitably trending towards the simple and expected. As a young, ambitious GM comparing myself to the likes of Mercer and set up to fail by the likes of Koebel, I was (let’s be honest–still am) often deeply self-punishing when what I spat out when pressed was rote and trite.
The GM-as-author mindset also produces a number of strange, contradictory discursive conclusions. For example, while many would prefer that their GM be the sole author of the table’s material, very few would say the same of the system. Why? It is expected that the system be store-bought, yea, even more vigorously than that the adventure not be. Why? The implication is that while building an entire world in your spare time is achievable and necessary (though not necessary enough that you should be compensated), the design of a system is so crucial and difficult that it must be left to the professionals. Allow an amateur to alter our game? Prithee, the risk is simply too high! What if they do it wrong? How will we have fun then?
Enough has been said on the topic of how little of play is derived from the idiosyncrasies of the system; I will not add to it here. However, since we are talking of labor, suffice that I again speak from experience when I say that designing systems is, in general, easy to a fault, risking and requiring very little. Conversely gameswriting, the practice of producing material that can be actionably incorporated into play, is, like all forms of creative writing, deeply torturous and precarious. This is true whether the writing in question is done for publication, scrawled by ballpoint in the margins of a notebook, or improvised on the spot. It is the process of singing with your soul; of working the mind and the heart simultaneously in public. Of speaking into the void. Of bottling ghosts. It is hell, it is heaven, it is work. Grueling, terrifying work.
Forgive me, but I wish to use a clumsy videogame metaphor. Please, do not stretch it farther than it can withstand. Imagine a universe in which the Steam marketplace, constituting the mainstream of available videogames, was populated almost entirely by consumer-facing game engines in the vein of Roblox and Gary’s Mod. Further imagine that cultural convention dictated that when you logged on to play a game, it would always be one that your friend had made, bespoke, for that play session, to be discarded afterwards. There would be absolutely nothing wrong with playing that way. Indeed, it sounds quite fun. Issues would arise, however, if that were the only way anyone was willing to conceive of games. The very idea of what a videogame could be would be artificially limited. That would be a universe in which none of your favorite titles would have had an opportunity to exist, or, if they did, would have found no avenue to cross your attention. And yet that world is very similar to ours, in another artform.
Oh, just one more thing… You told me you couldn’t possibly have been at the crime scene at the time because you were at home playing TTRPG. Now, forgive me for askin’, but how could you be playing TTRPG, given that TTRPG has got no games?
Ok, it’s time to talk about GREED again.
Not shipping with an included adventure is not something I will condemn GREED for, nor will I speculate overmuch on why it came to be that way. I wouldn’t dare to claim that Gormengeist specifically chose not to include an adventure for any of the reasons listed above. That would be an overreach. Rather, I assert that these beliefs and practices form the conditions of the industry into which GREED arrives; an industry that has so aggressively marginalized the adventure as an artform that it might as well not be one.
Why might that be? Certainly there is nothing special about the adventure that resists commodification. No, I think it’s the opposite: systems, especially when positioned as competitors to adventures, lend themselves especially well to it. Sinclair attributes this to Kickstarter, and I think he’s right. But it’s also worth pointing out what I noted above: systems are easy, almost seductively so. They are quick and breathless to write because for the most part they contain nothing. Writing pure system is writing about parameters of gambling outcomes on dice rolls, for which any would-be “designer” has a near-infinite supply of forbears to emulate as closely as they like. This drives their creation time down, and therefore their cost. Additionally, every system that achieves even a modicum of success opens the door to licensable expansions, editions, and yes, adventures–they are each product-lines in the making. An adventure, by contrast is, as a work of art, only ever itself. Of course you could produce sequels or spin-offs or what-have-you, but rarely is there ever substantive demand for such treatment. And if third parties take it upon themselves to do so, the value created by them is not so easily capturable as if they were using a copyrighted system.
GREED is, despite its name, quite generous, both in its construction and licensing. As I have said, everything that makes it remarkable comes from its gameswriting, of which there is quite a bit. Classes, spells, a handful of monsters, and several pages of brilliant, pure worldbuilding. And it should be noted that GREED is not, at the time of writing, undertaking some kind of aggressive third-party licensing scheme, so that’s good.
And so it is even more specifically vexing that GREED, like most of the industry, simply has no adventures. The Pleorealm, the netherworld towards which all of GREED gestures, is so far entirely blank except for inference. I would be glad to add to it myself (and indeed, I suspect I will when I have the time!) but this undercuts what drew me to GREED in the first place: Gormengeist’s authorial voice, their imagination, and their writing. I suspect that writing for the Pleorealm and running it will be quite productive and fun; this doesn’t lessen my hunger to see Gormengeist do it in the slightest. I eagerly, if not patiently, await it.
I suspect there may be some who will take this piece in a spirit other than that in which it was given, perhaps even to accuse me of elitism. Believe me, there is nothing I want to do less than suggest that adventure writing must be “left to the professionals,” or that casual GMs do not have the skill to do it themselves. This is not about skill or any other quantitative measurement of artistic value. The DIY spirit of the hobby is something I am deeply proud of, and I earnestly encourage everyone who has the time and the purity of desire in their heart to write and run their own adventures. It is an immensely valuable and rewarding experience, as well as being a necessary first step towards the sort of industry that I wish we had.
Rather, I would encourage more to move beyond that step, or indeed to recognize that there is nothing that binds them specifically to take it. Imagine a session for which you had been given the opportunity to prep for weeks, months, years. There is an entire population of artisans waiting in the wings who are not only willing to lend that level of labor to your table (for much less than it is worth), they earnestly and actually wish to do it full-time. Perhaps you are one of these! Survey their landscape of worlds, I beg of you; enjoy their imagination and hard work and take from it what you find useful. And if the urge to create for yourself wells up in you like oil from sand, share it with me, and with them. The future will thank you.
If I were to name an Adventure of the Year, it would quite likely be Reach of the Roach God by Siew and Munkao, brilliant and beautiful as it is. However, it feels wrong to take from GREED a category it inspired, so I will not. Nothing would please me more than to bestow it upon some wild and never-before-seen corner of the Pleorealm, this time next year.
To anyone who reads this, I give you my wishes for good life, good health, and pleasant writing in the new year. May your words flow more easily and swiftly than time.