A bugbear yesterday
It's fashionable at the moment to talk about 'gender-swapping' characters in fiction, in order to get a magical 50/50 'gender balance' and eliminate sexist stereotypes. Aside from being a misuse of the word 'gender' (sex is the right word; gender in this sense refers to the roles and stereotypes society assigns to people on the basis of their biological sex -- in other words sexism), the concept falls down as soon as you run into a cast of characters whose sex has social significance. Thelma and Louise wouldn't mean very much if you changed it to Theodore and Lewis, would it now? And if the characters in a story lack real meaning, what's the point of them, or it?
So let us leave gender and move on to the real subject of this post: genre. Lead & Chrome is intended as a system for running games in three fictional genres: Western, Detective/Noir/Gangster, Cyberpunk. These are the subjects of the sourcebooks I'm writing at the moment. They are modern, realist, adult genres, with little or no room for romanticism, and the game is intended to reflect that.
You may ask: why these settings? Why not write a Fantasy or Space Opera game like everyone else is doing nowadays?
Class- and experience level-based fantasy role-playing games are a bit of a bugbear of mine. That is to say, they have 3+1 hit dice, Armour Class 5, they are of low-to-average Intelligence, are Chaotic Evil in alignment and 6D6 of them will appear at any given moment. Don't get me wrong, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson invented RPGs in 1974 with Dungeons & Dragons, and they deserve all the credit they get. But Fantasy has been done to death. D&D is the source of most of the clichés in the hobby and the subject of most of its parodies.
RuneQuest, which first came out in 1978, eschewed the class and level system, and Chaosium's other big games, Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer (both released in 1981) also broke the D&D mould: the latter was a conscious deconstruction of the fantasy genre, the former a disturbing cosmic horror game set in the 1920s, where players expected their characters to either be killed or go mad before the end of the campaign.
By contrast there hasn't been a proper Wild West game (as opposed to Weird West like Werewolf: The Wild West or Deadlands) since the third edition of Boot Hill in 1990, and no detective-themed games since Top Secret or Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes in the 80s. Of the two big Cyberpunk games, Shadowrun was a fantasy crossover which William Gibson hated, although R.Talsorian's 90s classic Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0 is still available.
The fact that Fantasy is experiencing a resurgence at the moment (along with the spate of superhero action films coming out of Hollywood) is no surprise. The entertainment industry worldwide has been busily infantilising culture for at least 35 years. Think how many times you read or hear the words 'terrorist' and 'terrorism' in books, films and TV nowadays. Whenever you do, there's a very good chance you're about to have your intelligence insulted.
Fantasy books and films and superhero comics don't have to be just for children, but the sad truth is that most of them are. Comic writer Alan Moore has said so. Both genres lend themselves to black-and-white, good-and-evil heroic storylines, but action films, dramas and thrillers are also being dumbed down. The hard-boiled anti-hero, born in the new wave of American detective fiction of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, has become just a cardboard cut-out, whose apparent vices and contradictions are just a thin veneer of grime over the shining armour beneath.
All this is the result of deliberate decisions by writers, editors, producers and directors, by the industry as a whole. These are commercial decisions, but they are also politicals decision that reflect the politics of our time. It's not a unique problem to the present either, as Mark Twain or Raymond Chandler could both attest. The battle between culture and philistinism has been raging for thousands of years. I may sound pessimistic, but in fact I look forward to the day when things get turned around again.
So I want to go back to the last time paperbacks and films were really about something, when writers wrote about real life from their own experiences. Hence the choice of these three genres.
Am I right, or am I talking bollocks? Please leave your comments below this post.
