Creature, Monster, Nameless, Created: Frankenstein transformed in role playing games

This paper explores the transmission of Frankenstein’s Creature - or Monster - into tabletop and computer gaming. It briefly covers the 'Flesh Golem' archetype and Frankenstein-esque figures as encounters in Dungeons and Dragons - superficial imitations, influenced more by cinematic adaptations than the novel, and emphasising the ‘Monster’ reading of Frankenstein’s creation. Then, it moves on to more developed versions in which the player or players adopt a persona akin to the Creature as avatar and central character: the Nameless One from Planescape: Torment and the player characters of Promethean: the Created. These games are transformative works, influenced by and addressed to Frankenstein. While they do not directly adapt Shelley's novel, their narrative and mechanics evoke a corresponding ‘feel’. They locate the player’s ‘readerly’ perspective within a created entity who is in search of identity, purpose, and sense of the world, and confronted with an evolving moral education, which is developed further by iterative gameplay process similar to repeated readings of a challenging text. By creating complicity in the role of the Creature, Planescape and Promethean engage players in the process of growth, development and discovery which Shelley’s original character undergoes

The evolving Gothic of White Wolf's Vampire games

This chapter looks at the evolving Gothic of the Vampire role playing games created by Mark Rein-Hagen et al. It offers a brief explanation of role-playing games for the uninitiated, defining their textuality in Bakhtinian terms – as chronotopes. It will lay out the relationship that role playing enjoys with the Gothic, drawing on Spooner’s postmodern ‘ludogothic’, and Kryzwynska’s sense of genre as defined by coordinates. It will then summarise of Vampire’s complex design history, and offer a swift tour through Vampire’s various editions, charting how the game’s Gothic has evolved and, eventually, come to transcend itself over nearly thirty years. Jon Garrad, The evolving Gothic of White Wolf's Vampire games, published in The Palgrave Handbook of the Contemporary Gothic edited by Clive Bloom, 2020, Palgrave Macmillan, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan

Fluff Ain't Rules: absence, presence and haunting in RPG design

Fluff means fiction, framing and flavour; it’s the material around a game’s actual rules, that illustrates and indicates but has no substantive impact on how the game is played. Rules are crunch. They are - particularly if you’re a serious player or a traditional ludologist - the important bit. “If your game doesn’t blend the two, it says one of two things: either you’re not efficiently using your words, or your game isn’t really about what it says it’s about.” — Olivia Hill “Fluff” is often an absent presence within game design. It’s clearly important to the aesthetic experience of playing the game, and the context - narrative or otherwise - that provides play with impetus, but it too often exists at some point of discretion from the actual rules that reify the game’s intended or desired themes, affective experience and outcome. This paper offers a hauntological perspective on RPG rules - how the developers' claims about a game’s fictive and cultural context are frequently a spectre, missed and yearned after but not fully secured by the (relatively) concrete reality of its rules. What is not reified by a game’s rules does not exist within the game - and what is reified by a game’s rules is often not what the game claims itself to be

Reviews

The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis: A Critical Edition. Edited by Don W. King. Reviewed by Joe R. Christopher. Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North. G. Ronald Murphy. Reviewed by Jon Garrad. Anglo-Saxon Community in J.R.R. Tolkien\u27s The Lord of the Rings. Deborah A. Higgins. Reviewed by Yvette Kisor. Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C.S. Lewis and Gender. Monika B. Hilder. Reviewed by Laura Lee Smith. Arda Inhabited: Environmental Relationships in The Lord of The Rings. Susan Jeffers. Reviewed by Jeremy Larson. Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis. Abigail Santamaria. Reviewed by Crystal Hurd. A Naked Tree: Love Sonnets to C.S. Lewis and Other Poems. Joy Davidman. Ed. Don W. King. Reviewed by Joe R. Christopher. The Hero Enkidu. Lewis Turco. Reviewed by Nicholas Birns. Encyclopedia of Goddesses & Heroines. Patricia Monaghan. Reviewed by Cait Coker. The Oxford Inklings. Colin Duriez. Reviewed by Crystal Hurd. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings. Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. Reviewed by Crystal Hurd. The Pilgrim\u27s Regress: Wade Annotated Edition. C.S. Lewis. Edited and introduced by David C. Downing. Reviewed by Mike Foster. North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies. Editors John Pennington and Fernando Soto. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft. Supernatural Studies. Special Issue: Television and the Supernatural. Editor Leah Richards; Guest editor Marisa C. Hayes. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft. Journal of Inklings Studies: Theology, Philosophy, Literature. Special Issue: Inklings and the Bible. Executive editor Judith Wolfe. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft

Reviews

George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity. Daniel Gabelman. Reviewed by Bonnie Gaarden. The Gender Dance: Ironic Subversion in C.S. Lewis\u27s Cosmic Trilogy. Monika B. Hilder. Preface by Matthew Dickerson. Reviewed by Joe R. Christopher. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: In a Modern English Version with a Critical Introduction. John Gardner. Reviewed by Perry Neil Harrison. Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal. Joseph Campbell. Reviewed by Christopher Tuthill. The Riddles of the Hobbit. Adam Roberts. Reviewed by Jon Garrad. The Modern Literary Werewolf: A Critical Study of the Mutable Motif. Brent A. Stypczynski. Reviewed by Sharon L. Bolding. Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings. Ed. by Susan Redington Bobby. Reviewed by Kazia Estrada. C.S. Lewis\u27s Perelandra: Reshaping the Image of the Cosmos. Ed. Judith Wolfe and Brendan Wolfe. Reviewed by Holly Ordway. The Ideal of Kingship in the Writings of Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien: Divine Kingship is Reflected in Middle-Earth. Christopher Scarf. Reviewed by Melody Green. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. By Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner. Reviewed by Mike Foster. Tolkien: The Forest and the City. Ed. Helen Conrad-O\u27Briain and Gerard Hynes. Reviewed by T.S. Miller. Tolkien Studies X. Edited by Michael D.C. Drout, Verlyn Flieger, and David Bratman. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft. Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 30. Edited by Marjorie Lamp Mead. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft

Endless Nineties: the perennial aesthetic of 'grimdark' games

The early 1990s saw a kind of crystallisation in gaming aesthetics, centred on games that either squinted towards Gothic or outright claimed a place in the culture and tradition: Warhammer 40,000 and Vampire: the Masquerade on the tabletop, Alone in the Dark and Wolfenstein on the PC. These games are genre-defining, persistent, and - to varying degrees - pretty damn Gothic. They’ve lasted for twenty, twenty-five years, and have carried their core aesthetic projects into the twenty-first century. Why? What is it about the Nineties ‘grimdark’ aesthetic that makes it last so long? To answer that question I look at each of these titles and establish its core 'negative aesthetic', establishing how Gothic shaped gameplay during the early 1990s and beyond. I approach each in terms of aesthetic theory, following in the footsteps of Graeme Kirkpatrick by establishing literally how the games make us feel, and go on to collectively place them in the context of a recurring fin-de-siecle cultural moment which has previously seen the flowering of the Gothic novel and Decadent art/writing

Bleeding Genre Dry: archetypes, stereotypes, and White Wolf's Vampire games

Roleplaying games have always leaned heavily on their literary sources. System mechanics and character creation options have been tooled toward evoking genre types and aesthetics ever since the first “Vancian wizard” memorised a spell before setting out to adventure. Naturally, when RPGs turned toward the Gothic, they did the same thing: riffing off the assembled archetypes and stereotypes of myth, film and literature to create an infrastructure of characters for players to occupy and navigate. This paper explores the most overtly Gothic RPG yet designed, analysing two different approaches to establishing a framework of archetypes that will be familiar to players while also curating a particular aesthetic mood. Vampire: the Masquerade​ bakes literary references into its heavily stereotyped clans and sects, strongly associating the two and extending the game experience step by step into new and broader territories. Vampire: the Requiem presents five recognisable archetypes, more clearly derived from particular mythic, filmic or literary concepts of the vampire, and five thematic political groups that interact with them in a way offering greater variety. This paper will establish the Gothic credentials and objectives of the two games in their own terms, explore how the playable character options embody and serve the games’ vision of the Gothic, and proceed toward a classic ‘compare and contrast’ conclusion, looking at how successive editions of the games have modernised these archetypes to meet evolving perceptions of what exactly Gothic roleplaying should be

A Necessary Evil: Necromancy and Christian Death

This paper charts the changing definition of 'necromancy' throughout Christian history, and explores the reasons why 'dead-speaking' becomes 'black magic' within medieval Christian discourses and later occult scholarship. The paper contends that the doctrines of Purgatory and intercession compromise Christianity's relationship with the dead, meaning that certain 'dead-speaking' practices have to become legitimate within Christian doctrine while others have to be controlled and legislated against. The semantic mutability of 'necromancy' in its Greek and Latin derived forms allows the word to hold two meanings, one of which is rendered near-synonymous with 'witchcraft' and thus rendered taboo

The Horror of Bradensbrook: Gothic coordinates in World of Warcraft

This presentation responds to Tanya Krzywinska’s 2015 paper ‘The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates in Videogames’, which discusses the awkwardness of the video game environment as a ‘space’ in which the Gothic narrative can unfold, and calls for more specific analysis of individual game texts to deepen our grasp of genre functions in gaming. Krzywinska briefly references World of Warcraft’s credentials in using false heroes and semiotic aspects of the Gothic; this paper will extend that idea into a reflection on one of the game’s most successful deployments of the Gothic narrative, which partially negotiates the problems Krzywinska suggests are posed by the protagonism inherent in video gaming. The presentation comprises commentary on a recorded playthrough of a quest line and dungeon from the most recent World of Warcraft expansion. I use recordings to ensure familiarity with the material being discussed and to highlight those areas in which the Gothic narrative is most apparent. Key themes include the presence of Gothic anti-heroes as non-player-characters, and the displacement of the Gothic through the ‘revelatory’ mode of storytelling common within both the Gothic genre and video game form. I also address areas in which the genre mechanics of the MMORPG continue to interfere with the cultivation of a Gothic space, and the contribution of player mindset to establishing a virtual 'headspace' in which the Gothic can operate

Reviews

The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis: A Critical Edition. Edited by Don W. King. Reviewed by Joe R. Christopher. Tree of Salvation: Yggdrasil and the Cross in the North. G. Ronald Murphy. Reviewed by Jon Garrad. Anglo-Saxon Community in J.R.R. Tolkien\u27s The Lord of the Rings. Deborah A. Higgins. Reviewed by Yvette Kisor. Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C.S. Lewis and Gender. Monika B. Hilder. Reviewed by Laura Lee Smith. Arda Inhabited: Environmental Relationships in The Lord of The Rings. Susan Jeffers. Reviewed by Jeremy Larson. Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis. Abigail Santamaria. Reviewed by Crystal Hurd. A Naked Tree: Love Sonnets to C.S. Lewis and Other Poems. Joy Davidman. Ed. Don W. King. Reviewed by Joe R. Christopher. The Hero Enkidu. Lewis Turco. Reviewed by Nicholas Birns. Encyclopedia of Goddesses & Heroines. Patricia Monaghan. Reviewed by Cait Coker. The Oxford Inklings. Colin Duriez. Reviewed by Crystal Hurd. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings. Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. Reviewed by Crystal Hurd. The Pilgrim\u27s Regress: Wade Annotated Edition. C.S. Lewis. Edited and introduced by David C. Downing. Reviewed by Mike Foster. North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies. Editors John Pennington and Fernando Soto. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft. Supernatural Studies. Special Issue: Television and the Supernatural. Editor Leah Richards; Guest editor Marisa C. Hayes. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft. Journal of Inklings Studies: Theology, Philosophy, Literature. Special Issue: Inklings and the Bible. Executive editor Judith Wolfe. Reviewed by Janet Brennan Croft