I struggle with traditionally written roleplaying game settings and adventures. They feel like university textbooks, full of hidden salient points unclearly flagged, information not directly relevant to the examination at hand, an opportunity for the writer to flex their literary muscles rather than for me to be provided tools to experience the world or invite my friends to experience it.

Then there are the numbers. Pages of ACs and HDs, like a samurai sudoku hidden in a full page search. Overwhelming for me! There is poetry, no doubt, hidden between the numbers — at least in the best written of them — but I cannot auger these mysteries.

It’s physically overwhelming. I open the book and my brain screams out in I Can’t Deal.

A big chunk of OSR-adjacent mutuals talk about the concept of anti-canon, notably Luka Rejec (Ultraviolet Grasslands) and Zedeck Siew (A Thousand, Thousand Islands). Rejec writes that his anticanon formed from play at Wizard Thief Fighter:

One part the bricolage of found modules, another our ideas as players (including my refereeing self as a player), a third the random play of dice and tables.

And became this in the practice of creating Ultraviolet Grasslands.

[…] games that revolve around the dynamic interaction of players and referees and texts, and where the world is a unique and ephemeral creation that appears for a moment in the collective imagination of the group, before dissipating again, falling to the subconscious to fertilize new ideas, new worlds, new stories […]

So, how does this take shape in Ultraviolet Grasslands, which I’m unabashedly a fan of? To talk about that, I need to separate out three things: The first two are what I complained about being overwhelming for me in the first two paragraphs. I’ll call these canon-text and mech-text (short for mechanics-texts). These are the things I find hard to process, albeit for different reasons. Luka doesn’t name his solution, but I’ll call it anti-text because I think that’s funny. It’s text that may or may not be true in the game world, but rather serves as seed for spontaneous collaborative worldbuilding.

The anti-text of Ultraviolet Grasslands is a glorious garden, full of remarkably coloured fruit and vegetables the likes of which I haven’t seen, weird and wonderful and flavourful, and every time I flick through it I’m excited to choose with my friends what dish to cook with it. But what struck me as I read through it is that SeaCat – Luka’s heartbreaker system – saturates the book, draws me out of it, and clogs the text up for me with mech-text that is a significant barrer to running it. That said, it was the first play-text I’d read that was a step in the right direction. One hurdle down, one to go.

Let’s digress and talk about Troika!. You’ve probably heard of it. Troika has rules, as most roleplaying games do, but Troika! is remarkable to me because a Troika! supplement doesn’t feel to me like it has mechanics, even when it does. A creature stat block is 4 numbers, a mien and a description. Pretty minimal. A character background is simply a description, a few possessions and some skills that are not from a list and can run the gamut from mundane to absurd. Because of this, it’s become a favourite for a specific (and significant) portion of the community. Troika’s mech-text, while extant, fades into the background when it comes to playing the game itself. Most of the Troika Numinous Edition is anti-text, with mech-text cunningly hidden as single numbers amongst it. Troika is evidence to me that a game can exist that has mech-text but that doesn’t overwhelm me with numbers and rules. Troika isn’t a game to be studied in the sense that you must sit an exam to play.

Ok, back to anti-canon. So, after the half-revelation and half-disappointment that was Ultraviolet Grasslands (don’t get me wrong, I still adore everything Luka creates and Wizard Thief Fighter is a something I read as it’s published), the next text I found inspiration in was A Thousand Thousand Islands. This series of zines by Zedeck Siew and Munkao (Munkao, the artist, genuinely deserves equal footing in the project that is A Thousand Thousand Islands), is truly systemless, and in a way that I find inspiring, lacks instruction in how to use it. You simply read it, and sense how to use it. It is sparse, allowing for notes on how it evolves, and it is inspired by the mythology of south east Asia, and so is unique in many of it’s anti-text approaches. It is simply there, if you wish. It is genius. I didn’t read it before I wrote Ludicrous Compendium(and it predates it by about three years), but Ludicrous Compendium was a similar approach, with minimising instruction and maximising space.

So, for me, I have before me two challenges: I want more game-texts like A Thousand Thousand Islands. Anti-canon, settings the lie in gaps, voids at their heart. I want to write them, bring them into existence. Reach of the Roach God, A Thousand Thousand Island’s first full-sized book, raised almost $150 000 on Kickstarter. I am not alone. But also, I want more game-texts like Troika. Troika is a unique setting: It’s eclectic and gonzo in a way that is reminiscent of the AD&D 2e settings of Spelljammer and Planescape – both things that I adore. But my heart lies in the traditional, heroic, low-magic sword-and-sorcery settings of AD&D 2e. I adored Dragonlance as a child, dabbled in Forgotten Realms novels. Troika doesn’t want to be those things. And I wish that Troika had less numbers, if that is at all possible.

My anti canon, my playful voids, people are reaching for them, breaking ground, but I must write them myself. I must write them myself because I want to run a game with no mech-text if I play as a GM, I want to play in a game with as little mech-text as possible whilst maintaining complexity and interest if playing as a character.

That is my goal. This was a long-winded way to talk about how canon, as much as it can be beautiful, as much as it takes skill and loving care and attention to detail, is not for me, and not because I’m lazy or don’t care, but because it canon and mechanics are a barrier to play for me, and they are barriers I want to innovate and eliminate from my play if I can.

6th January 2022,

Idle Cartulary.