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Originally publsihed 2/24/23 on Substack
Hello, folks! Today is my 51st birthday!1 Last year at this time, I announced my first-ever ttrpg product, Owns the Road, a new focus for the Cypher System rpg. Today, I’m “leveling up” (har har) and making a bigger, more ambitious announcement.
I am writing an Against the ’70s ttrpg.
In a fit of originality, I’m currently calling it Against the ’70s: The TTRPG.
Want to know more? Look at this handy FAQ I made!
ISN’T THIS WHAT YOU WERE ALREADY DOING?
No! But I understand if you’re confused. What I was doing previously was creating little bits for the Cypher System, various rules and additions in order to bring an Against the ’70s game to the table. Could I have eventually collected all those rules and additions into its own book? Yes, that was the original plan, and with the new Cypher System Open License, this would’ve been a great time to do it. I still may! But I feel, in order to fully express what an Against the ’70s game should be, I need to build something new from the ground up.
SO WHY A WHOLE NEW RPG?
Two reasons. Let me get the very short and depressing one out of the way: I have, if I’m lucky, about 25 years left on this Earth. If I’m going to make something like this, I need to do it now. (I really needed to do it about 10 years ago. Bygones.)
Only ’90s kids will remember.
The other reason is I’m starting to outgrow the Cypher System, at least for the purposes of AT70s. Don’t get me wrong — it’s a great ttrpg, I still recommend it, and I still think it was the right choice to begin my journey. What attracted me to the Cypher System in the first place was its peculiar way of creating characters. A player selects an adverb (Descriptor), a noun (Type) and a verb (Focus) from a prewritten list. The resulting sentence is the character, which can be something like “Appealing Warrior who Fights with Panache” or “Mystical Adept who Grows to Towering Heights.” If you have some outré ideas about the kinds of characters you want for a game, the Cypher System provides robust rules underneath whatever kind of kooky specifics you come up with. (I ended up building two foci, Owns the Road, a sentient car as a playable character type, and Struts, a disco dancer with special powers, with little trouble. Both of these are free to download on their respective pages.)
Here’s the thing, though. The great part of this system is that you essentially just reskin mechanics to make new kinds of characters; the downside is that you’re just essentially reskinning mechanics to make new kinds of characters. Because I’m extremely picky, or have high standards, or am just dumb, that’s not good enough for me anymore. I want each character in an AT70s game to be built from an individually-sculpted wedge of rules. Each character archetype should play as differently from each other as possible, whether that’s a stubborn reporter, a confident P.I., a disco dancer, an ex-demon-possessed teenager, a psychokinetic, or a cyborg.
Some player character archetypes for the Against the ’70s: The TTRPG.
Yet, if that was my only issue, I’d likely just stick with the Cypher System. It’s very easy to play and create for! But writing my Adventuring Against the ’70s posts (Part One, Part Two, and Part Three) revealed to me the inadequacy of most types of prewritten ttrpg adventures, at least for my project. Now, the Cypher System doesn’t demand any particular style for adventures; it can handle just about anything. Normally, that’d be great; for me, though, that’s a bug. (Not that kind of bug.) I need something different. I need an adventure style that works hand-in-hand with whatever game system I end up designing, ideally one where the concepts are so enmeshed that it’s difficult to separate the two. Basically, I’ve come to the conclusion that what I want is the spawning of the cage and aquarium: adventures that have structure and are strongly ensconced in the AT70’s “world” (whatever that might come to mean) but freeform and flexible enough to let the players help direct play, and not be beholden to an in absentia author’s prepared “scenes” and encounters.
(This is a topic for another day, but I’m feeling more and more like it’s the height of arrogance for me to write an adventure where I dictate the flow and pace and even the content of the game. It’s like that “I consent” meme, with me as Jesus. Admittedly, that’s not a fully supportable stance — at the very least, people do want and need adventures that do that. Still, the more I work on ttrpg material, the more I feel that my imagination — which to be honest, isn’t that great — can’t compete against the combined imaginations of three to six people at a table. I don’t want to make adventures. I want to make tools for others to make adventures.)
My apologies to literally every living being in the universe.
ANY IDEA WHAT THIS TTRPG WILL BE LIKE?
Yes, some! The unassailable core will be the use of playbooks, an invention from D. Vincent Baker & Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World. Playbooks are character sheets, but they usually have on them both the rules that players need, along with character upgrade options preprinted on them. Playbooks, as far as ttrpg technology is concerned, are very opinionated — they aren’t blank slates, they exist to play a very specific type of character, and at every step of the way, enforce that character’s whole “thing.” (I hope their appeal for me is obvious.)
For adventure generation, I will be taking ideas from Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn, Thomas Eliot’s Fear of the Unknown, and especially Steve Dee’s TV procedural ttrpg Partners. I want adventures to be easily generated, flexible, open for input from both the GM and the players, and good for solo use.
Finally, I plan to start with the dice resolution mechanic from Ironsworn (which is a free book and you should get it), although I may use a variant of my own design.
The resolution mechanic from Ironsworn, from https://www.ironswornrpg.com/products-ironsworn
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR FILM POSTS?
Film posts aren’t going anywhere! As I’ve mentioned before, I will be scaling them back to one a month, which means I will no longer be able to have the Request Linefeature. (In fact, all these changes require me to entirely revamp large swaths of both the Substack newsletter and the Patreon2.) The current plan is for one film post and one “designer’s diary” post about the ttrpg every month. I’ll try to fit more film posts in if possible; in fact, I’m contemplating adding an end of month post with quick, Letterboxd-style blurbs of the noteworthy ’70s films I saw recently.
ARE YOU STILL GOING TO PROVIDE GAME MATERIAL AT THE END OF THE FILM POSTS?
Yes! And for the foreseeable future, they will still be geared towards the Cypher System, as I’ve gotten comfortable with writing for it. Eventually, however, I will transition to using the films as an introduction to AT70s rpg material. In fact, I’ve been holding back on certain films (Rollerball, The Night Stalker + TV series) because they are a key part of the AT70s rpg.
THE FUTURE
That’s not a question.
I do have some plans for another project/product, one whose existence suggests that I’m a complete hypocrite about something I said earlier. I probably won’t talk about that until much later in the year.
As for this project, before you see any movement on it, there’s two posts I need to get out. The first is the final Deep Red post, about how to run a giallo rpg session, which has been a real beast to put together. Getting there, though! Then, unfortunately, I have a very sad post to make, one that is tangentially related to ttrpgs. Even if it wasn’t, it’s something I need to write, despite how much I don’t want to. That one will be next.
Just a few notes to add to this. First, I’ve made absolutely no progress on this project in the two years since I made this post. There’s a number of reasons for this. One, it’s a huge project, a type I’ve never done before, and thinking I could break it into pieces and get it done while also doing the film stuff was, well, pretty dumb. I’d say the pieces need to be broked into pieces, and maybe those pieces broken further. Second, post #46 (this is #44), which will go up soon, kind of broke me for awhile. After that, I had one more film post a month later, then a “gotta get my shit together” post four months after that, and then my last Substack post in January of 2024.
So what happens now? Well, first, I’m restarting Against the ’70s as a film review + game material blog again. There will be a new post on February 10th, and then another new post every two weeks after that. Moving these posts from Substack to their new home here has caused me to, understandably, read them again, and I decided I like what I’ve written, and I should write more of them. So I shall.
Is the AT70s ttrpg defunct? No, not technically. I still think about it, and my idea of what I want from it has evolved quite considerably from what I was thinking two years ago. If and when we see more of it, it won’t be for a couple years, and even then, it will be in the teeniest, tiniest format, possibly as small as a rule or two. They say to make a big project, you should start with the smallest, easily-creatable version first, and that’s how I’m going to start.
Will you be creating more products like Owns the Road and Struts? I have a huge backlog of ideas for stuff like that, that I want to get to. However, for this year at least, it’s just going to the film posts + game material like it was in the beginning. Two posts a month is kind of an intense publishing schedule, for me at least, so I need to see if I can make it work before I add to it. That said, if and when I do, I’m thinking something like 4-6 products like Owns the Road each year. But we’ll see.
Anything else? Part of the reason I’m holding off on products is that I have a number of other, non-AT70s projects I want to complete this year, and I need to carve out space for them. I’m not sure if I’ll announce these projects here or not; if you don’t already, follow me on Bluesky at @kentmbeeson.bsky.social, because I’ll definitely be announcing them there. In fact, one of these projects is already done and I’ll be posting about it soon.
