@Taskerland I think Keep on the Borderlands is narratively important in the development of gaming for many 80s players for all the reasons that you found voids in it. We found those, but the existence of npcs and their lives was quite compelling, so we filled in. It was for many people the first time we fleshed out a scenario to make it breath, to create the social ergs. Vectors of interaction. You can actually see it *should* be there but they had no language for it.

@Taskerland That's just viewing people like us as itinerants on the commons that need "fenced away"

It's worse than chef and patrons I feel.

@RogerBW @Taskerland Yeah, I often do the same and it's a pretty joyful way to go about it.

Sometimes I do the sheep thing, too, but even then, I mix in some retailored works for variety.

@Taskerland I still think a huge tension in monetising gaming is caused by it being easy to give tips on "how to make better ceilings for your mega dungeon" than "how to deal with Derek who takes his socks and shoes off during the game"

The social contract of gaming is the important flex of it all, but also the hardest part to advise without sounding parental or patronising or both.

Or a psycho.

Which to be fair is probably my parental advice approach.

@Printdevil I used to play with a guy who used to wander around without shoes or socks and he'd often ask to borrow a pencil and then spend the entire game rubbing it between his toes.

@Taskerland See, very little of that in the youtube advice cycle.

@Printdevil That guy became a weird anti-fetish object for my best friend at the time. He used to just use the idea of what he might do to wind himself up.

He'd sit in silence, looking like a bulldog chewing on a wasp and I'd ask what was wrong and he'd say he was angry because he had imagined said weirdo sending him a photograph of his penis.

@Printdevil And it's interesting that it is a fruitful void whereas the lack of a town in Saltmarsh feels like doing someone else's homework and the lack of actual factions despite Hommlet gesturing towards them makes the adventure feel unfinished.

@Taskerland Someone I used to play with used to make a weird chewing sound before he rolled dice then sucked air inbetween a gap in his teeth, before it slowly whistled out. Then he'd roll, and go back to speaking normally. Till the next time he had to roll a die.

He is now embedded in the support concrete pylons of a local bridge.

@Taskerland I think that reflects on the authors as well as the culture.

I always think Secret of Bone Hill was the point at which TSR reached where scenario design should have been going, gathering up the strands the good bits of KotB and the lower normalcy of Saltmarsh.

I just seem to be in a minority because people wanted "Ceilings of the Dwarven Claustrophobes, a ninety level dungeon of thoughtless massacre"

Which then ushered in WoD

@Taskerland "My version of the Keep is a colonialist outpost, and the Caves of Chaos are a kind of refugee camp for non-human peoples who have been forced off their land by human colonisation. The inhabitants of the Caves are not monstrous but scared, hungry, and distrustful of humans."

Oddly, that is how we always ran it, after the age of about.. 11. I wonder was something in gaming lost along the way.

Or is that an Irish thing about being a colony in living memory.

@Taskerland @Printdevil SERIAL KILLER BEHAVIOR

@Printdevil @Taskerland I think it's the most perplexing thing I found when I wandered back into paying attention to The Hobby in the last while.

"Wait, you guys aren't just fiddling with everything to suit yourselves and your own table? When did that start?"

@Colman Yes, I took that break (from gaming society) and when I got back, it was like Stepford Gaming. There was a strong almost paternalistic influence emanating out of the local pathfinder crowd that there was a "proper way" to game.

And people just seemed to latch onto it for acceptance/easier life.

@Taskerland

@vortiwife @Taskerland @Printdevil naw babe that guy was autistic af. That was a stim, he was stimming.

I could go for a nice smooth Dixon Ticonderoga #2 between my toes right now, sounds heavenly.

@Poljack @Taskerland @Printdevil a guy can be autistic and also a serial killer???? People can be more than one thing

I can't.

Luckily my one thing is "lovely"

@vortiwife @Poljack @Taskerland

@Taskerland Very interesting thoughts on working with colonialist narratives. I would like to say more, but now I am pressed for time due to reading your likewise excellent linked articles. Kudos!

@Taskerland "When it eventually became clear that a top-down imposition of narrative control tended to result in brittle, stultifying adventures that were more likely to produce arguments than their intended outcomes, the English-language hobby drifted away from railroading and blamed GMs for acting like auteurs despite the fact that the ‘vision’ these auteurs had been implementing had come chiefly from the game designers themselves."

I think both sides contributed. I've tried to understand why I was fixated on canonical accuracy in settings, for instance, and I was not alone in this.

I've thought it might be some sort of existential anxiety, which was soothed by the idea of a fictional world that I understood thoroughly, described as if it had a real independent existence.

The way Keep on the Borderlands depends upon unspoken assumptions about colonialism and frontiers must have contributed to this, and it was when those assumptions were spoken that the spell was broken.

@foolishowl I think you are right that there is something soothing about the mastery of a world at a time when the real world seems insane. Tolkien wrote about this.

Where we differ is that I think that people were encouraged to take up certain pleasures by the industry. They still are.

Ttrpg books have always been presented as things that are subject to mastery rather than creation. GURPS being the great exception.