Crypt Dust

Cultural programming is a wild thing, when you think about it. If you get a group of people with familiar cultural backgrounds, a shorthand in communication appears. You need to say less to get ideas across. An arched eyebrow at the right time carries with it all the weight of your shared experience.

That is wild to me, and something I think about a lot. It has an impact on my day job leading people from across the country, but also in my regular Torchbearer games. In both cases, there are some commonalities, but also gulfs that need to be overcome.

Games suffer from the disconnect of missing shared experience. This is particularly significant once you start to move away from the Dungeons & Dragons mode of play, which manifests in table top games as well as video games. If your dominant experience is roll a die to hit a thing as the primary means of the game negotiating the fiction, other modes can feel awkward or wrong.

The Torchbearer RPG, on its surface, follows the same pattern of the D&D/OSR mode of play. Adventurers delving into dungeons for loot and glory with the familiar tropes of the warrior, wizard, dwarf, elf, and halfling burglar. Some people who engage with it never see past this veneer, and some hate it because it doesn't flow in the way they expect it to.

They buck against the system, because the system is a trick. It is a subtle one that you can choose to engage with or not. It is a metaphor that requires the shedding of the very cultural influences it wraps itself in.

The game isn't about dungeon delves. Adventures aren't exclusively about diving into ruins. The game is about what people do when they try to negotiate a world that is designed by those in power to keep their power and prevent others from getting it.

Rename a few things, and it could just as easily be about unionizing in the 1920s or today. A small group of people who rely upon each other and their own strongly held beliefs with limited resources attempting to gain agency through the only means in which agency can be attained...

The acquisition of wealth.