Fantastic Detours - The Country

You know when sometimes there’s something you feel like you should’ve seen on Twitter, but instead you don’t hear about it for days or weeks or months so you feel like you missed out on it? On 2021-04-19, Luke Gearing published a blog post called “The Country”, a lifepath character generator and descriptive list of factions for a World War II-inspired war game setting [1]. One month later, on 2021-05-19, Roz of Two Rats Press released a zine adaptation The Country which includes Gearing’s combat ruleset Violence [2]. Graciously, like the blog post, the zine is available for free online, so that was my first contact with the text.

The Country is an excellent basis for a modern period campaign. It’s giving something like Braunstein or Blackmoor or Boot Hill, except instead of being about Napoleonic Germany or “medieval fantasy” or the American West, it’s about a twentieth-century “Uryupean” town full of liberals, monarchists, fascists, and communists—a familiar situation that could have taken place anywhere across Europe from Spain to Germany. It’s extremely fruitful for a war gaming plus political intrigue campaign, especially with its fleshed-out character generation procedure.

The Lifepath

I thought it was weird, at first, that you roll percentile dice to determine your character’s age. It wasn’t until reading over the different age-category background tables that I felt something click. Maybe I’m misreading or taking away something different than was intended, but there’s nothing wrong with that if it turns out productive. The lifepath works, as I understand it, by rolling for your character’s age and then rolling on each background table representing major years of their life. If you rolled a 100, for example, you’d have an especially full life, with memories from when you were 16-24, and 25-45, and 46-70, and 71+.

The fun part is that, like in Traveller, your character’s survival is not guaranteed during character creation. At each step, there is at least a 1-in-6 chance of dying. This creates a really interesting, morbid perception, something like “This character could have lived to be 100, if they had not died in the War.” That’s compelling when incorporating themes like trauma from violence, which is not just relevant when discussing the World Wars but also pertinent to considering the long-term effects of violence on people in general. Like, gee, did you know that violence is complicated and traumatic even if you’re fighting for the right thing? This is a level of depth which is missing from most treatments of the time period, or from period war gaming in general. In some sense, that consideration may even be the tipping point from war game to role-playing game, where the participants are not just concerned with winning or losing, but also with the personal (subjective) consequences of either outcome.

AHEM! This is future Marcia speaking, oh man, six months from when the above was written! Having reread the text, I think I misread it and the player is meant to roll on just one table corresponding to their character’s age band. This is evident from the instructions as well as the backgrounds themselves, since only young characters have a chance of dying during The War, whereas older characters could have died during The War or The Revolution that preceded it. Mea culpa, but this is not a fruitless mistake. I even think a little bit of Cassandra popped out up there when I said, “…there’s nothing wrong with [misreading] if it turns out productive.” Regardless of the author’s intent or the ‘true’ meaning of the text, my misinterpretation provoked strong feelings in myself and proffered a new way to use and relate to the text. How’s that for an example of the relationship between intent and meaning, especially as it pertains to ‘technical’ texts that are not just read but applied? Characters can still die during background determination, though, so my commentary is not completely null and void.

Something I would have liked to have seen is correlation between a character’s life story and their faction. There is something to be said for leaving the connection up to the player since it gives them the ability to weave things together sensically, or greater freedom to create a more unique character. However, it leaves some (not all) backgrounds feeling disconnected from each other as well as from the setting’s history. The most interesting backgrounds immerse the player in a critical situation (“Your mother told you to never mention the foreign men with coats and money who took envelopes from the garden”); the least interesting serve as character trivia without obvious or interesting motivation (“The War was not your first guerilla campaign”). I think a life path would have been an opportunity to observe a character’s social mobility during their life, whether they survive social crises or come out on top of them, and what that means for their current standing and motivation. Here we rub up against the other pillar of the text, which is how it portrays its setting’s factions.

The Factions

This club has everything: fascists, liberals, Christians, communists, monarchists, lumpenproles, and spies of any aforementioned faction or belonging to a corporation. I’m not a war gamer but I am a drama lover (and someone with an interest in how social movements are motivated and interact with each other), so imagine my delight. Each faction has a description of their ideological underpinnings, their demographic makeup, their members’ typical holdings, and their most common allies. I’ve made a graph of ally relationships below; notice that fascists ally themselves with republicans, but not vice versa. Meanwhile, the communists’ only allies are from the northern countries whose revolutions have succeeded for the time being. And there is no honor among thieves.

This is really neat! You can visualize the sorts of treaties and concessions that might take place. This is a superficial complaint, but I wish that there was a little bit more going on. As it were, the fascists, monarchists, and clergy constitute a single political bloc except that fascists are willing to engage with the republicans. This is not historically inaccurate, at least on a high level, but some entanglement would produce greater intrigue. For example, in both Italy and Spain, the republican movement (which is on some level distinct from the broader liberal movement) enjoyed some cooperation with the communist movements with respect to the Civil War. Maybe it would be worth distinguishing the radical republicans from the liberal government, even if they are ultimately radical liberals. Maybe it should be a distinction between communists, socialists, and liberals. Who knows. The important part is less the lines themselves than the conflicts they generate. Why do people take sides? Put a pin in it.

A deeper issue I have is best exemplified by the following injunction: “You might be a member of any of the following [factions] - except a Fascist. If you want to play a fascist, I suggest you play in traffic instead.” The so-called Olivia Hill Rule usually says that fascists shall not play a certain game; this is almost an inverse, that you shall not play a fascist. Superficially, it makes sense. You don’t want someone to internalize the ostensible values of nationalism and the insurmountable might of the human will while playing your war game. Yet this sentence made me evaluate the stated natures of each faction more closely. The communists are utopians. The republicans are liberals. The fascists are losers with lineage. On one hand, these descriptions seem very much like they belong to an observer from our time period rather than from someone who might be participating in that faction during that past time. Would a twentieth-century communist say they are fighting for a utopia, rather than some shit about historical materialism and class consciousness? Would a fascist call themselves a sore loser?

Related to this and more importantly, however, is that these factions seem to be motivated by abstract ideas more than by the material conditions of its members. It’s very funny and accurate to call fascists losers with respect to their cuck ideology. But perhaps it is more insightful to regard fascism in its social function. Historically, fascists are members of the petite or national bourgeoisie who resist downward social mobility (a handy term: “proletarianization”) as a result of competing with the big or international bourgeoisie. We could maybe speak more generally than their position relative to capital—for example, we can think of racists or sexists who are scared of losing their social privilege. In any case, though, we find a solid motivation: they are scared of losing what they have. The communists, on the other hand, have famously described themselves as having nothing to lose. Distinguishing themselves from the utopians, they characterized themselves as being driven by their own living conditions (notably, a lack of property) and by a scientific comprehension of history—being a Marxist myself, I’ll spare you my opinion. The liberals get away with the best representation of their ideology, and yet don’t have much reason for it. Why not talk about their relationship to international capital [3]? Or why else do they want things to stay more of the same? Anyway, this is all just to say that I think role-playing someone with particular class interests and living conditions might be a productive angle of critique, to understand what choices they make and anticipate what they will do next.

Besides, in the social and historical context of early twentieth-century Europe, what makes a fascist worse than a monarchist or even a liberal, not even insofar as these factions often collaborated in their own countries? I can think of three atrocities at the top of my head—the Bengal famine under Churchill, the Congo genocide under Leopold II, and the Holodomor under Stalin—that were orchestrated by non-fascist governments. Reducing fascism to an ideology elides its social function which yet operated in nominally non-fascist governments, and ignores that such governments very well enacted similar policies [4].

Also, I don’t know, I think there’s some potentially juicy stuff in there if you put fascists on the table. Maybe you know about this or maybe you don’t, but Benito Mussolini up until 1914 was the director of the Italian socialist newspaper Avanti!, whose headquarters the fascists would later attack in 1919. Mussolini left the socialist party and founded the fascist party because he thought that Italy should participate in the First World War against the advanced (i.e. imperialist) countries [5]. His ex-fellow party members, Amadeo Bordiga and Antonio Gramsci, would also end up leaving and forming a communist party because the socialist party went reformist. At some point, Gramsci gave a speech at parliament against the political acts of violence committed by the fascists—Mussolini would then, condescendingly, quote Bordiga back at Gramsci about the justification of violence for political aims [6]. That’s like a whole angst fanfic right there. Anyway, there’s something engaging about interpersonal relationships mixing with political struggle, or using one to explore the other.

Future Marcia again! I do feel like there might be a difference between "You shall not play a fascist" versus "You shall not want to play a fascist", the latter of which is fair as far as you wouldn't want someone who themselves identifies with fascism to participate. However, I still felt like the former was important to draw out—especially in a historical war game where, if no one else, the referee is likely to play a fascist (or, if you read it as a Braunstein, someone in your group is going to play the baddie). In such a case, how should the participant handle playing as a fascist? Should participants only play as non-fascists but yet still collaborate with fascists, as per the faction graph? That's more the angle I wanted to poke at.

The Braunstein

What do you get when you combine motivated characters, entangling factions, and a war game? You might get something like a Braunstein. Braunstein was the name of a Napoleonic campaign run by Dave Wesley in 1969; specifically, Braunstein was the name of the German city in which the game took place. The players expected to be participating in a standard war game, where you control troops on a battlefield and fight to the death et cetera et cetera. Wesley instead assigned each player a role of a certain individual in the town, with their own motivations and connections and so on. Before long, the players stopped coming to Wesley with ‘commands’ for their characters [7], and ended up interacting directly with each other’s characters on the map. Wesley thought he fucked up, but everyone else had fun. It especially influenced college student Dave Arneson, whose medieval fantasy campaign Blackmoor would lay the groundwork for his later campaign guide Dungeons & Dragons (coauthored by, of course, Gary Gygax). To summarize, a Braunstein is a campaign that tricks war gamers into LARPing or playing with dolls.

Reading The Country as a Braunstein helps contextualize the way in which it elevates its subject matter and formal rules. Despite the ‘system’ only really explaining how to shoot guns at people, the gun-shooting is incidental to the interests of the characters and their factions. Even if your goal is strictly to eliminate a target, that goal is contextualized by individual desire and factional disputes. The outcome is comparable to how Adam Decamp of Chocolate Hammer describes his campaign of Boot Hill [8]:

There was another benefit to not having any social mechanics at all in the game, counter-intuitive thought it might seem for a game about managing adversarial relationships without combat. While combat in Boot Hill is decided immediately and obviously, and is thus very well suited to open dice rolls, the game’s social conflicts created tension by being uncertain. One never knew whether to trust an NPC, whether an NPC trusted them, whether a bluff had succeeded, or whether a threat had landed. They had no reason to expect success because a number was high or failure because a number was low.

It’s for this reason that Decamp calls Boot Hill “the best political intrigue system” he has ever used, and it’s this same tendency that elevates The Country. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gearing’s firearm ruleset Violence takes inspiration from Boot Hill. Admittedly, I think (like Boot Hill) it’s a little bit clunky, but since it’s sort of arbitrary with respect to the campaign itself, it feels easy to substitute with something quicker if one wanted.

I have just one more comment, tangential to the above discussions: the text is somewhat male-centric. We see this in both the backgrounds and the factions’ demographics. Politics is considered by many to be the discourse of men, and it’s not inaccurate to say that women were not employed by many of these factions as foot soldiers anyway. Even if women typically occupied different roles in social movements, though, it is still worthwhile to explore those roles. This is not even to mention that women did, indeed, take on positions in leadership and armed struggle during this time period. Why does it matter? I play nothing straight because I’m gay lol, and because even for things I like a lot there’s always something that I end up adjusting to taste for myself or my friends. Still, although there is nothing stopping myself from playing a character similar to the likes of Rosa Luxemburg or what have you, it’s disappointing that the text lacks this dimension.

Conclusion

The thing about a fire is it burns after being extinguished. Embers glow beneath the ash. The powers beat out the fire, but don't worry about the glow they can't see.

The Country offers a great campaign framework for characters and factions to explore the political dynamics of twentieth century Europe. It feels like a modern take on the Braunstein game and its immediate descendants in Blackmoor and Boot Hill, with its emphasis on character drive, factional strife, and rules-avoidant play. However, for its efforts to model social conflict, it falters by ascribing such conflict to ideologies rather than to the material conditions which give rise to them. It is still one of my favorite playable things I’ve read in the past year. Gearing is an evocative writer without pretension, so that combined with his approach and subject matter is compelling.

Endnotes

[1] Luke Gearing. 2021-04-19. “The Country”, Luke Gearing.

[2] Luke Gearing & Roz. 2021-05-19. The Country.

[3] Yeah, I know this is specific to the government liberals and not the aforementioned radical republicans. Keep scrolling.

[4] Referring to Churchill, Leopold II, or Stalin’s governments as fascist misses the point. Fascism is not a particularly special state of capitalist society, but (w.r.t. its violent repressive function) it is an utterly normal and essential aspect of it.

This is not to say that liberal governments in general are not qualitatively distinct from fascist governments. Liberal governments (at least, in theory) tend to work towards dismantling non-capitalist social relations, such as racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, et cetera. Fascism meanwhile relies upon these things to privilege a certain subset of the population and violently repress the rest (notably using often the same techniques as liberal states, only towards its own population instead of or in addition to those of other nations). This is related to the conflict between international and national capital, but has implications for the wellbeing of victimized groups beyond the scope of capital as such. It also impacts the extent to which these domestic groups can seek better treatment within the scope of the government: it is easier for trans people (e.g.) to advocate for reform within liberal structures than for them to take up arms against a state violently repressing them. So to speak, I much prefer Biden over Trump; however, especially in the context of the twentieth century, it is difficult to suppose that the big players are not all reprehensible in practice if not in theory.

Besides, liberal states love a little fascism as a treat. American police have killed approximately 30,800 people from 1980 to 2019, and 1,182,170 people are incarcerated across the country as of 2020 (peaking in 2009, with 1,553,570 incarcerated). Black people are overrepresented in both of these metrics, being 3-5 times as likely to be killed or incarcerated than white people. See "Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression" (The Lancet 398.10307, pp. 1239-1255), and "Growth in Mass Incarceration" (The Sentencing Project, 2020). It’s not inaccurate to say that most capitalist countries enjoy a mix of liberal and fascist policy, often along racial, religious, or geographical lines—and this is to the “benefit” of the country.

Let’s also not forget colonialism and imperialist war, in case you walk out of this long-ass footnote thinking that domestic (i.e. internal) policy is all that matters. If a capitalist state is eating its own babies, you might guess that it’s because other babies are hard to come by. Have I sufficiently qualified all this? Goddamn. This is what I get for running things by our very own Union of Soviet Writers, not that I’m complaining.

[5] Mussolini was, I think, employing the notion of the imperialist stage of capitalism where countries with excess capital flood other (developing) countries and thus take over their economic development. Lenin’s original stance was that such imperialized countries should revolt in order to establish their own democratic (capitalist) states—meanwhile the communist party should also equip the burgeoning proletariat there with the practical and theoretical means to join the international movement, being careful not to treat the democratic state as the end-all-be-all. Mussolini, on the other hand, considered Italy a “proletarian nation”, such that its struggle against other nations superseded the class struggle within itself. Notice that these stances represent the interests of different classes.

[6] My partner said something really funny: "I think I know why Bordiga is in jail, and why Gramsci is speaking at parliament."

[7] In this style of war game, players usually communicated troop orders to the referee who would resolve them on the map.

[8] Adam Decamp. 2019-01-09. “Boot Hill and the Fear of Dice”, Chocolate Hammer.

Fantastic Detours - Frontier Scum

Frontier Scum is a fantasy “acid western” tabletop role-playing game by Karl Druid, published in 2022. The subtitle reads, “A Game About Outlaws Making Their Mark on a Lost Frontier”, a description you might find typical of any classic American Western work. For its part as a game manual, it’s totally serviceable. Character creation evokes the flavor of a weird Wild West, especially with the different tables for characters’ background and equipment; it’s pretty fun! The math is standard for a light-weight game, even if the rules use too many four-sided dice for my liking. There is a spread dedicated to hunting and foraging on the frontier, which I adore since I like having minigames on the table. The layout is stunning, looking like an old-fashioned catalog (update: mistakenly attributed it to Johan Nohr!). All in all, it’s nice. What was I going to write about?

Oh yeah! In my first super duper serious blog post, “Towards Better Critiques of Games”, I said the following [1]:

All sorts of liberal-minded people in this scene can readily accept that the fantasies modeled in games are representations of meta-game fantasies, whether racism or sex or imperialism or whatever else. However, this sort of analysis is always accompanied with the moral obligation to select socially appropriate fantasies, or fantasies which are adequately censored and confined according to the scene’s expectations. For example, the old school dungeon campaign is taken to be an example of racist and colonialist aspirations, and the solution often proposed is to substitute inhuman monsters for rich people who deserve to be burgled or killed.

This analysis is not interesting to me for the following reasons: first, it is a moral analysis which is satisfied with a critique of games only insofar as they deviate from acceptable mores; second, it is a content-wise analysis which is blind to the structures of the games’ fantasy, and so it is satisfied to replace the explicit content without considering its symbolic structure. It is satisfied with the substitution of dungeon crawls with mansion crawls, despite the underlying petit bourgeois fantasy of thriving outside the system. It is satisfied with an uncolonized America composed of indigenous republics and empires, reproducing the same modern fantasy as an eternally pseudo-medieval Europe with the birthmarks of an idealized Wild West.

I have a particular interest in texts which, despite making conscious and unsubtle efforts to avoid certain conclusions, still end up reproducing the presuppositions they’re trying to run away from. This is often because they oppose things on an aesthetic basis, but their underlying patterns of thought and belief align with what they think they oppose. In particular, some texts posture themselves as anti-capitalist or anti-colonialist or anti-this or anti-that, but a superficial understanding of what constitutes those things results in works that are yet stamped by capitalism and Eurocentrism and so on. I find certain aspects of Frontier Scum to fall victim to its own presuppositions about capitalism, turning the Wild West into a monopoly-busting fantasy that puts cowboys back in the protagonistic spotlight.

The Wild Wild West!

The goal of Frontier Scum’s setting, according to co-author Brian Yaksha, is to depict the social circumstances which ran rampant in the Wild West, without depicting the atrocities to which those circumstances led [2]. After all, it would be a downer to adapt Blood Meridian to tabletop theater, or otherwise to depict the genocide against American Indian peoples by American settlers in general. Does Frontier Scum accurately depict the circumstances or motives which might have led to a slaughter of indigenous people if there were any in the setting? Or, to speak more generally, does it offer an alternative weird Western setting which is faithful to the historical reality of the Wild West without being morbid? Does it accurately analogize the Wild West?

The city swells, bloated by the teeming and exploited masses living and dying by the whims of the Incorporation.
This foul profiteer collective leers over the Lost Frontier, avaricious as a buzzard above a field of ripe corpses. Not a single soot-blackened coin is spent in Covett City that they do not profit from. They rule the Incorporation, and the Incorporation rules the modern world. Every building in the city, all industries, all ideas any dare to dream are theirs to lease and to plunder.
…
All manner of earthly, artificial delights are crafted in their haven of hedonism and endless consumption. This city, Covett City, this factory capital of the world is subjected to countless, untold atrocities and experimentations, both industrial and technological, that ensure the Incorporation’s monopoly and supremacy. Everything can be made here, no tradition is safe from facsimile or counterfeit, and anything not found in stores can be ordered bespoke from an indentured artisan and delivered by debt-shackled courier.
To ensure the endless material hunger metastasizes throughout the Lost Frontier, roiling trains shriek through Cathedral Station like knives in a swine.

Frontier Scum, p. 4.

I don’t think so. Frontier Scum presents a very different social context than can be said of the Wild West. Rather than settler colonists conquering and expanding into a ravaged frontier, the setting lays blame at the feet of an industrial monopoly called the Incorporation. The description of the company city run by the Incorporation, unsubtly, evokes the image of cyberpunk dystopia with a frontier veneer. The narrator snidely comments on the city’s (“earthly”, “artificial”, “hedonistic”, “endless”, “facsimile”, “counterfeit”, “material”) consumerism (p. 4). Although the American South might not be a stranger to industrial projects—see the classic folk song “Sixteen Tons” from which Yaksha likely drew inspiration—mass production is a stranger to the agrarian Wild West as a literary genre and a historical period. Even more anachronistic is mass consumption, especially when historically it has been predicated on a base of consumer-workers with enough revenue and a desire to purchase mass-produced goods. Who is buying “all manner of earthly, artificial delights being crafted in their haven of hedonism and endless consumption”? Likely not “the teeming and exploited masses living and dying by the whim of the Incorporation” [3]! It’s hard for there to be modern capitalism in one city, when it depends not just on a division between the city and the countryside but also between imperialist and periphery markets (to mix up the language of Lenin and Wallerstein).

Even accounting for these differences in specific historical circumstance, what is described is not an adequate analogy for the social circumstances of the Wild West. Most famously, the Wild West was not all driven by industrial monopolies who sought consciously profit over people, but by families and individuals who settled the land to establish homesteads or otherwise create a living for themselves (often escaping the more dire economic situations on the East Coast and in Europe, i.e. to avoid becoming proletarians). Again, without there being mass production, these people were not really employed by industry or slaves to consumerism. They worked their own land—which they dispossessed from American Indians—or became small shop owners or opportunistic gold diggers or bounty hunters or itinerant ranchers. To me, substituting these situations for one ruled by industrial monopoly ignores that the Wild West is a perfect example of how capitalism operates outside of (or prior to) mass industry, instead being composed of self-employers and self-sustainers. A reality where the unconscious dynamics of capitalism are driven by competitive (and unwitting) individuals is replaced by an intentionally evil big bad corporation. Moreover, whereas cowboys are typically the representatives of the American West in all its colonial expansionism, here they are primed to oppose what is supposed to be analogous to the colonial expansionist force. The metaphor seems mixed up, to me, and more importantly it’s just not representative.

The Moral, Moral West

I think this speaks to an unwillingness to view capitalist dynamics beyond some moral code. A moral stance against some notion of capitalism—specifically a notion which is already predetermined to be ‘bad’—is not only often fine with capitalism as such [4], but it is informed by bourgeois moral systems which developed precisely to rationalize and maintain bourgeois relations in society. This is apparent in the snide denigration against the Incorporation for being greedy. Greed is not an economic category, but a moral one which entails stepping over certain social boundaries for one’s own gratification. To charge the monopolists with greed is not to critique anything specific or inherent to capitalism, but to express disapproval at someone or some firm doing it wrong (morally, socially, etc.). Many real-life robber barons indeed took it upon themselves to be big-shot philanthropists to avoid repercussions for their treatment of workers. President Roosevelt’s monopoly-busting policy, likewise, was specifically to avoid anti-capitalist revolts on the part of workers, indicating perhaps that monopolies are destructive of capitalism in general even if they are profitable to themselves. The narrator’s emphasis on the company’s greed and the city’s hedonism, then, is not really a critique of the Wild West or of capitalism in general at all. Yet, perhaps fittingly, it aligns well with a traditional cowboy’s view of an ostensibly decadent modern world, his rationale to go out into the frontier to seek his own fortune.

What I find particularly worrisome in political circles is an inability to not recognize capitalist dynamics unless they are most obviously in the context of mass industry. The Wild West was, of course, a product of an emerging capitalist world order. Euro-Americans settled westward and brought with them a modern ideal of self-sufficiency and homestead economics; they also conquered land and resources from American Indians in order to do this, which might be considered some form of primitive accumulation. How well does this setting map onto a modern industrial one? Let’s be more specific: do the moralist criticisms against unquenchable greed and monopolized power make sense when applied to the American West? Not really. Who’s the centralized, organized power calling the shots? Was anyone at that point in time, in that part of the world, really motivated by “number go up”? Where’s the big corporations and where’s the number-crunching stockholders? How many people in these isolated settlements were engaged in industrial wage labor [5]? We are getting further away from the point but I hope it is clear that there is little similarity between the Wild West and modern capitalism, with respect to anything resembling mass production or mass consumption which constitute the latter. Instead, we’re making up fictional evil monopolies to make unsubtle, snide remarks at, as if they were real criticisms made against real historical actors. There is no connection I see, or at least not one where the stated moral concern against one reasonably applies to the other [6].

There is not much useful about a moral critique anyway. There is no analysis of how capitalism works or how it came to be, often because the perspective of the critique is not by anyone who has anything to gain for themselves from challenging the situation (and articulates it as such), but from someone who sees themselves as above it all. This seems especially like a lost opportunity when developing a setting inspired by the Wild West, which is a transitory period between pre-capitalist indigenous societies (and some pre-industrial colonial societies) and modern capitalist society. Rather than delving into the social factors which specifically made up the American West, Frontier Scum obscures them in a state of eternal industrialism which is deemed immoral by nature [7]. Why not focus the setting instead, for example, on self-motivated gold diggers who manage to wreck the area for their own gain without any organized efforts among themselves? It’s very simplistic, but the ‘unconscious’ mechanisms of a pre-industrial (and non-monopoly) capitalism are at least in play. Players can then observe, participate in, or try to overcome the social dynamics that are bigger than any one individual or firm.

Literary or Political Critique?

A lot of the above sounds more like a political critique of the text, which might as well be in-universe or diegetic, rather than a critique of the literary technique employed in writing it. It is not a fair assumption to make that the text is reflective of any actual political sentiment, any more than it would be fair to say Star Wars is fascist because it has stormtroopers. My goal instead is to show that the text does not meet its own aims, by being inconsistent with its external expectations or with its own internal logic. We have seen the former in discussing how the setting presented does not map very well to the Wild West, lacking any of the specific social (economic, political) factors which distinguish it from other time periods. Why does it matter, then, that after establishing this mass industrial setting, the text reproaches it for greed and hedonism?

The text postures itself as a political-via-moral commentary on the setting; that is, the text makes subjective statements about the world it describes, with the aim to condemn whatever it is creating. This is, on one hand, Yaksha’s stated intent with developing the setting: to try to depict what he views as the worst tendencies of the Wild West without directly depicting its worst atrocities (though I do not think the setting succeeds at this, as discussed). Yet it is also apparent from the text itself, which cannot help but describe the Incorporation as “foul” and “avaricious”, it being a “haven of hedonism and endless consumption”, it having “untold atrocities and experimentations”, it producing “facsimile and counterfeit” goods (p. 4). It uses such redundant language as if to make sure you don’t get the wrong idea. Seeing that the text emphatically denounces its subject, and knowing that we are working with a pseudo-Western setting that is apologetic for being so, we can extrapolate that the text is setting up an antagonist for the reader to dislike, expecting to find common ground against corporate greed and mass consumption.

So, once again: are corporate greed and mass consumption typical associations of the Wild West? Not in particular. However, let’s consider the implications of the attempted association. Both the Wild West and mass industry (including both production and consumption), whatever those things are, are bad. They both exhibit violence and expansionism, whether of settled land or of money. They share capitalism in common, whatever capitalism is—and this is the anchoring point if you were attempting to analogize one thing as the other, since you would need to decide what makes sense to carry over from one form to the other. My hunch is that the common ground, capitalism, was defined in terms of those moral categories (greed and hedonism) and it was on this ground that an analogy between the Wild West and mass industry seemed appropriate. This elides any specific dynamics of the Wild West which distinguish it as a historical period, and also obfuscates the historical development of capitalism between then and the period of mass industry (where, by capitalism, see [4]). This elision causes Frontier Scum to falter as a Western or as a meta-commentary on the Wild West, as genre or time period. Instead, it attempts to be a meta-commentary on mass industry, at which it also falters for the reasons mentioned.

Conclusion

If the stated goal was to emulate the social circumstances of the Wild West, I think the setting is off-base with respect to both intent and product. It is possible to depict the social circumstances of the Wild West without portraying atrocities or having to play as a settler. The attempt in this book just seems misguided by an unimaginative, moralist perspective of what constitutes capitalism in different forms throughout history. Must all critique of capitalism be reducible to cyberpunk stereotypes of big corporations, mass production, and ‘hedonistic’ consumerism? Aren’t there more relevant tropes at hand to deconstruct the Western [8]?

Frontier Scum’s setting tries to have its cake and eat it too, by presenting the dynamics of the Wild West as antagonistic while yet locating its protagonists in the figures of individualist, anti-system cowboys. It gives the impression that rather than critiquing the Wild West as a genre or as a time period, it is trying to find a way to afford the enjoyable parts of the Wild West genre without being ‘problematic’. I imagine that few people will want to spend time playing cowboy in the big cyberpunk city, so it might just not factor all that much into play, but it’s a decision that undermines both generic expectations of the Western and any internal critiques thereof.

I wrote this a very long time ago, maybe one or two weeks after Frontier Scum was published. I did not post it then because I did not want to start negative discourse surrounding its release. None of this is intended to attack (or “call out”) the politics or character of the author. Seeing how texts such as these attempt to emulate, model, or echo history is simply an interest of mine. I think it says a lot about how history is viewed or, even, produced if we take history not as the past itself but as a narrative about the past. In fact, I have a positive review down the line about a historically inspired zine that (in my opinion) better reproduces the social dynamics of its period, or at least puts the players in a better position to explore those dynamics.

Still, as I have said before, these sorts of texts are not really politically impactful anyway. Analyzing them feels like playing with dolls (or whatever you prefer). Maybe it serves as practice to acquaint yourself with thinking critically in general, but I am not writing this for practice—I am writing this for enjoyment. It feels creative and enriching. Isn’t that reason enough? Who knows.

Footnotes

[1] B., Marcia. 2021-05-26. “Critique 1: Towards Better Critiques of Games”, Traverse Fantasy.

[2] Yaksha, Brian. 2022-07-19. “This is also not the real world; this is not some ‘weird west’ where a lot of really bad takes and appropriations are taking place. This is another world which has reached this grim, vicious, brutal period of technology, exploitation, and desire for dominion over the earth.” Twitter thread.

[3] A relevant passage by Debord on the topic of industrial versus post-industrial (consumerist) societies:

Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by regions which are ahead in the development of productivity. In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities. At this point in the “second industrial revolution,” alienated consumption becomes for the masses a duty supplementary to alienated production.

Society of the Spectacle, p. 42.

[4] A working definition: a society in which commodity production predominates over other social relations in the spheres of production and distribution. I know it's annoying to specify, but it can be just as annoying to get the wrong idea across.

[5] The main analogy I can think of is the First Transcontinental Railroad, commissioned by the United States government and carried out by three railroad companies. However, it was precisely this big project which began the modernization of the American West, bringing with it immigrant wage laborers and manufactured goods from the East Coast. It led directly to the end of the cowboy “industry” since cattle began to be transported by rail instead, and they were no longer kept on open ranges. The end of the frontier is not unknown to the Western genre, and yet it is not really referenced in Frontier Scum.

[6] Yet what I find very interesting is that the narrator doesn’t seem to find these outcomes specifically even to the big bad evil monopoly, but he ascribes them to humanity in general. When discussing the Scree Knives:

But humanity’s infinite hubris still seeks to claim dominion wherever it treads. Many religious sects come here seeking Providence and freedom to practice their heresies while gazing contemptuously down upon creation.

Frontier Scum, p. 9.

Was this written in-character? Aren’t we talking specifically about opportunistic adventurers going to a frontier full of “untold treasures ripe for the plunder”? Was it humanity’s hubris that killed the buffalo? Is the Incorporation also an expression of intrinsic human nature? What does this mean?

[7] Keep in mind that mass industry itself is also a product of specific social and historical factors, and that criticisms of certain monopolies for greed came just as often from fellow competitors just as they did from workers and consumers. One of the big instabilities of modern capitalism is between the drive to generate more value and the necessity for free competition lest the economy fucks up (and workers start getting mad). This is one reason why the American government was so invested in union-busting during the early twentieth century, as I have mentioned above.

[8] I recommend reading this blog post (link) on Blog of Holding about how OD&D excels as a western game with its frontier politics, early modern economy, and ostensibly ‘monstrous’ inhabitants. Of course, OD&D relies upon having fictionalized ‘monsters’ against which to exert colonial violence, so it does not meet the requirement of not depicting real-life atrocities or analogs to them; however, the other parallels do more of the heavy lifting anyway.

There is also the Anti-Western literary genre, from which we get books like Cormac McCarthy’s aforementioned Blood Meridian. These books are often written from the perspective of the violent and chauvinistic cowboys (or wannabes), in an attempt to show where such attitudes really come from and where they bring people. However, this is done by exploring the extent and effects of such colonial or fascistic violence, which is not pleasant. Though I wonder if there’s an unwillingness on some people’s part to give up the cowboy as a virtuous or fun figure, such that they will try to find a way to make the cowboy the good guy again instead of taking seriously their own predisposition for the cowboy figure.