CRY HAVOC, AND UNLEASH THE BLOGS OF WAR: PART 2

You can find part one here, which goes into great detail about how great Wushu is. Part two is another three and a half thousand words about the rise and fall and rise of the Havoc Engine, and why it matters to me, and there's a nice picture of some dumplings towards the end so you've got that to look forward to:

ENTER: ME

I, alone I believe, fell for Wushu. I saw the majesty underneath it. It was solved, sure - but what bells and whistles could I put on it? How could I play with it as I took my first faltering fawnish steps into tabletop roleplaying game design? What stories could I strongarm it into telling?

Where, effectively, could I say no?

Goblin Quest is a Wushu hack. One Last Job is a Wushu hack. Goat Crashers, We That Remain, Beautiful Space Pirates, There But For The Geese Of God - all Wushu hacks. Other one-pagers, too, that I can’t recall at present. The delves in Heart are a Wushu hack.  Fallen, an unreleased GMless game I wrote in 2012, is a Wushu hack.

At the core of me, sheltering from the storm of simulationist OSR and plastic Forgery, is a big number that represents a challenge and a single mechanical way for players to lower that number. They can say whatever they want before and after they roll the dice. Get to it.

The most direct hack of Wushu, and the game I’ve written which felt closest to it, was Havoc Brigade. 

Havoc Brigade began life as ORK HIJINKS YES, a Dark Heresy hack, and crumbs if that wasn’t the exact worst system to simulate boisterous orks trying to outdo one another. (By the way: orcs with a “c” are from the mythic past, and orks with a “k” are from a particular grimdark future and are copyrighted.)

I knew I wanted to let players be orks - or rather, be orky, with all that entails (violence, humour, reality reached only by consensus, wacky inventions, a goblin is there) - and, after the high-concept gambits of One Last Job and Warrior-Poet, the soft animal of my body wanted to write a simple game where you hit things, told jokes and made a big number get smaller.

If you read Havoc Brigade today - and you can, it’s ten bucks, and it's free on itch.io because I forgot to charge for it there - you can see how it would form the basis for Eat the Reich. Players roll big pools of D6, earned mostly by tagging and expending equipment, they succeed on a 4+, and the game isn’t in any way concerned with sound tactics or even narrative consistency. 

Do the thing! Stop not doing the thing! Tell me you do it and roll the dice and then do a different thing!

Break into the zoo and steal a giraffe! Build a boat out of a bath and a wet rocket! Disguise all six goblins as a single, lumpy princess! Kick a snooty elf wizard off his own tower! Decide what music is and then do music at unsuspecting bystanders! 

Go! GO! GO GO GO!

Any specific rules I write for any of those things would just get in the way.

AN ASIDE ON THE ABSOLUTE NUMBER THAT WUSHU HAS DONE ON ME

It’s either that or the ADHD, but I don’t like to pathologise, so let’s presume it’s Wushu. 

Here is a list of reasons I am a horrible player:

I hate levelling up. You don’t level up in Wushu, so why should I bother elsewhere? It’s supposed to be the bit that excites you but I approach it with all the thrill of filling out a tax return. I have made a solemn vow to never select another feat again. (It was when Chris told me that all the interesting 3.5 feats were suboptimal that my heart broke.) 

I hate rules. When I’m playing, I mean. They’re brutish and inexact and can’t hope to fit the situation. If they’re too complex I make fun of them. If they’re not sufficiently complex I also make fun of them. There’s no right answer. It’s even worse if I wrote the rules: how dare I? Disgusting. 

I want the plot. Gimme the plot. If you haven’t written a plot I don’t care: I will charge headlong and reckless into every situation on the understanding that plot is in there somewhere. I do not want to prepare. I do not want to build platform or establish characters. I want to pull the lever drink the potion kick in the door find the treasure kiss the prince fuck you get out of my way. 

I will lead this scene. And by “this” I mean “every,” unless I’m more cogent than normal, in which case I will sometimes apologise for leading too many scenes in a row and then suggest that someone else leads the scene instead. Usually I’ll pick whoever’s been quietest up until now, and presumably they wanted to be quiet, but here we are. Get to it, Mumbles!

I can’t play in long campaigns. I can’t run them. Wushu isn’t designed for that. (Longest continuous campaign of it I managed was six sessions on the trot.) I can’t think in terms of stories longer than, say, eight sessions. I haven’t run a proper massive campaign since... I don’t know. I can’t remember. 2009 maybe. I don’t want to. 

I habitually overstep the line around narrative authority. I’ll suggest ways things might go wrong for my own or other characters, even if the dice don’t suggest that. If an NPC has a cool voice that I like, I’ll be the NPC. No negotiations. Get out of the way: I am him now. Terribly sorry GM, you weren’t being interesting quickly enough, and now I’m here. 

So: I do not get invited to many games. Sorry, let me correct that: any games. (If the last five years are any indication, anyway.) I am, I believe, a detrimental influence on the player side of the screen unless thoroughly reined in by trained experts, and I think people have started to realise that.

And that’s okay - I get my kicks elsewhere. I have biscuits and painting and marijuana and cats and hot baths and video games and sandwiches and standing in the cold midnight air, breath steaming, staring up at the stars.

THE YEAR IS 2022

Stacy Ann “Fergie” Ferguson, having left behind both the Black Eyed Peas and her career as a solo musician to focus on television and voice acting, would not be featured in a musical production until her guest role in Sturdyyoungin’s Trippin in 2025. I was also not involved in any musical productions, but since writing Havoc Brigade in 2014, I had carried on writing games to such an extent that it seemed sensible to form a business entity around me for tax purposes - and Rowan, Rook & Decard (as it would be known) had become a going concern in the UK tabletop games scene.

I am on a plane back from Italy with Maz and Chris. (Usually, when I travel with other people, I like to get out my notebook and pretend to be working.)

I write the words “EAT THE REICH.”

This is good, I think.

I write “ARE YOU A BAD ENOUGH DUDE TO DRINK ALL OF ADOLF HITLER’S BLOOD?” underneath it.

Like most of my good ideas, I immediately take a picture of it and post it on the internet when we land; this is about as far as any of them need to go, and I am glad I have an outlet for it. 

But then: months later, in my kitchen, I keep writing it. I want some variety with my vampire commandos. I figure out that vampires are all either Spooky, Bestial or Gross and come up with three D6 tables of abilities for each. I work out what each combination of types would be called; Spooky and Bestial is a Spirit Tamer, Bestial and Gross is a Cave-dwelling Throwback, Spooky and Gross is a Leech Punk, and so on. 

It was at this point that I tried to make Eat the Reich an Apocalypse World game, and I am not good at that. I figured it would be good for a distinct action game and I could have specific rules for “drink blood” and “terrify nazi” without necessarily having to work out complex grappling or morale rules. (For those curious, you can read the entire thing here; I never got past the core systems.)

We did a playtest and it was... fine. But it didn’t scratch my itch. There’s something about AW that doesn’t sit right with me, in practice - it feels unreal, ephemeral, false, as though the world doesn’t exist until my players go and poke at it.

That doesn’t matter so much when you’re in a blasted wasteland occupied by sexy independent weirdos who are hounded by the extant psychic maelstrom spawned by the deaths of billions; when you’re trying to describe a gunfight in a specific nazi base, it struggles. 

(And: I’m not great at running it, and actively poor at writing it. I appreciate that it’s good. I want no-one to think I am throwing shade at AW. If I’m throwing shade at something you’ll know.)

Like all of my best ideas, it was actually Maz’ idea to use a modified Havoc Brigade system to run Eat the Reich, and I merely took all the credit. Havoc was a great fit - it escalated the gameplay immediately, because Havoc, thanks to its roots in Wushu, doesn’t have rules for “a guard.” It has rules for “this squad of guards” or “everyone present in the barracks” or “this one guy in a gnomish mechsuit.” Suddenly, my vamps were fighting whole squads of the bastards instead of engaging them one-on-one. 

The tone went from “desperate last-ditch mission” to “ultraviolent romp” overnight, and I was much happier about it. It was an easier sell. It was easier to write. And, crucially, I wanted to write it, rather than trying to make AW fit into it for reasons I could barely remember.

“SMOOTH-BRAINED ONESHOT BAIT”

With the Havoc Engine in place, and Will’s gorgeous art drawing everyone’s attention, the Kickstarter went really well. The release went well, too: there were only three of us involved, so it was quick. (Four if you count James Mendez Hodes, who did the lion’s share of the sensitivity reading and wrote a good portion of our safety tools.) No-one got in anyone’s way. I wrote stuff, Will drew stuff, and Maz made the physical book as gorgeously overproduced as they could. It retailed for 25 quid, which is cheap for a roleplaying game, and we were able to make it cheaply because a lot of people wanted it. It was bright pink and antifascist* and different from everything else on the market. 

It did so well, in fact, that it drew ire from both sides of the divide. That sort of thing just happens when you achieve a certain amount of visibility, and doubly so when you mention Hitler. The right thought that we had hired too many sensitivity readers (we had seven? It was a lot); the left thought that it was reckless glorification of the military-industrial complex. I am assured that it is antisemitic. I’ve been accused of putting a “literal holocaust theme park” in the game, which I definitely have not. There’s one blogger who uses the words Necropolitics and Fremenisation a lot to refer to it, and I don’t believe it’s in a positive way. 

I try to find the humour in it - and I try to listen, too, especially to the stuff on the left. Those are, ostensibly, my lot. If there’s something I’ve missed, I want someone to tell me about it, and I want to fix it. I don’t believe most of the complaints were grounded - especially the antisemitism ones, those came out of left fuckin’ field - but, you know, they get to you.

And then one person said it was “smooth-brained one-shot bait” and that rang me like a bell.

Unlike the other criticisms, it seemed entirely fair. It was a one-shot game, for sure. You can’t play it as a campaign. And, yeah, I guess it was smooth-brained, in that it’s not a complex thing. There’s no clever choices to make. You can’t play the game especially well or especially badly; the dice are something that happens en route to killing Hitler. It’s not for complex play. It’s not for campaigns. It’s not for character arcs.

Go! Do the thing! Do it and then do a different thing!

But: that comment crept into my psyche, popped its feet up on the coffee table, and had a crafty wank in my mental living room. My stance on the game changed from something joyous and liberating, something that borrowed Wushu’s casual disregard for the norms of narrative authority, something that was big and sexy and kinda goofy and gross, into work that I was mildly ashamed of.

It was stupid. It was a sparkler of a thing, a bag of sweeties, and as a Proper Games Designer I should be focusing my time on worthy, intelligent, fearsome and transgressive works - not building a haunted house where you could eat the plastic skeletons for points. 

It was around this time that I was on the hook for writing up the Havoc Engine Toolkit, having promised to break out the system of EtR as a stretch goal for the Kickstarter, and gosh it was hard work. I tried to spur myself on by picking some settings for it and writing up examples in them: Beautiful Space Pirates, Gritty Cyberpunk Animism, Generic Dungeoncrawl. I wrote a whole adventure set aboard a far-future pleasure cruiser with jokes about wipe-clean orgy-proof velvet and a ball room that was a literal ball that you could float through. 

My disregard for the system shone through; it wasn’t respectful of it. It was a list of ways you could write, essentially, more stuff for or very much like Eat the Reich. I said that it was for fights and big action, although presumably you could do something else with it, I don’t know, I haven’t tried. Take it. Take it away from me. It’s a silly frippery that got out of hand. It should have stayed a shitpost.

I am endlessly thankful to Maz, my husband**, for their feedback on this. Maz said: this isn’t right. It should be fiery. It should be frantic, enthusiastic, excited, wild. It should be a manifesto about this type of games design and why it’s great. It should get the reader fizzy to make something. Broadly, the entire thing needed to be rewritten from the ground up.

I was not endlessly thankful at the time. I was endfully thankless. I wanted to be rid of the manuscript, and my obligations towards it, and to just release the damned thing. As neither of us have total authority in the business, and Chris didn’t really give a toss either way, instead of arguing about it I instead took the most sensible course of action when met with a block like this: ignore the problem until it goes away forever.

However, it didn’t. Instead I took it to Poland.

LAND OF HOPE AND DUMPLINGS

It was two years ago, trouserless and peanut-stoked in an expensive B&B on the outskirts of Enskede kindly paid for by the Dutch arts council, that I came up with the idea for a kitbash games design workshop. Thanks to the efforts of a gang of enthusiastic Belgian dorks, I would go on to make it happen - you can read about and download it here - but before that happened, I was on the hook to run something at Pyrkon.

I’ve written about Pyrkon before, too, and will do so as long as they keep inviting me back. After realising that making several hundred tiles with games mechanics on them was too time-consuming and expensive to be worth doing, and seeing the yawning void of the Havoc Engine Toolkit ahead of me that I still hadn’t written, a plan bumped together glacial in my mind. 

Part of the issue I’ve had with teaching games design is that I know how to do it already, and no-one’s ever really taught me, so a great deal of my instruction boils down to:

“Here’s what a skill list is. Now: write one! No, not like that.”

So instead of the open-ended, high-effort kitbash workshop (which none of us wanted to go to the bother of physically implementing considering it wouldn’t make any money), we refactor the toolkit into a structured experience where I, international dice genius, get the audience to write a Havoc Engine game with as much guidance as possible. 

It was games design with most of the design bits taken out. We explained the system and the concepts within it - stats, resources, equipment, injuries, adversaries, escalating danger, etc - and asked people to arrange those things in an interesting order. To tweak them to better fit the fiction. To give them evocative names that tied back into their overall concept.

Every other time I've tried to teach games design, folks get bogged down in trying to make interesting choices. To make something - well, brilliant and transgressive and brave, to paraphrase myself. Now, all of the basic decisions were handled for them, and they could focus on being creative within very tight parameters.

And: it went well! Here’s what I said at the time:

One team had stats that were the five stages of grief. One team wrote a game where you played orcish wrestlers who were contractually obliged to fight a dragon tonight so the game is about discrediting the dragon, learning its weaknesses, cuckolding it to demoralise it, etc.

I'm made up about it. And it showed me that Havoc Engine isn't just for big dumb run-and-gun fun; you can make it do other things too. Exciting stuff. Keep an eye out for the revised SRD releasing at some point in the next two months probably.

Bless my heart: two months? What a gentle soul. Anyway, it’s seven months later, and we’re here. We’ve done it. I’d like to thank the people at Pyrkon who unwittingly rekindled the spark of enthusiasm within me for Havoc, and Elaine and Chant who assisted at the workshop and made sure I’d eaten something at least approaching food. 

I saw what Havoc could be: something quite clever, even if it’s not very complex. Something that pushed players into the role of GM, that made people think about their actions not from a tactical or logical standpoint but from a story positioning one. Not just set of jangling keys - a different way of playing games. 

And the reformatting of the toolkit into something other than a loose box of mechanics, or an attempt to retroengineer the gears and cogs underneath Eat the Reich, made sense. This is aimed at people who haven’t made a game before. Or people who’ve played around with a couple of one-page hacks, or wrote a few unique monsters for their D&D game, and want to try their hand at something more substantial. We’ve framed it around a series of questions, like the workshop at Pyrkon, and Chant - who did the editing and layout, so hats off to him there - has split them out into a workbook.

You know, like in school! A teaching tool! 

I sincerely hope that Eat the Reich is lots of peoples’ first TTRPG. And I sincerely hope it ruins every other game for them, like Wushu did for me: to say yes, over and over, to give them freedom to do what they want, and to show them that in fact they are the man behind the curtain, and it’s great back here, and tell me more about your Yellow Brick Road, why don’t you? 

THIS IS JAM? HOT!

As I said at the start, we’re doing a jam. It starts on Monday (which may have already passed by the time you read this) and the goal is to get you - that’s right, you, reader! - to make a Havoc Engine game. Or just to fuck around with it and see what happens. 

There’ll be voting, for a winner, and prizes. I don’t know what the prizes are. If you care about the prizes, you should not take part in this jam. It is not for prizes.

(On that subject, I’m so close to sending out the prizes for last year’s jam. They’re on my desk. They’re right here. I’m good for it. You gotta believe me.)

And if you don’t fancy doing a jam, you can just download the toolkit and see if it stirs anything within you.

Or do nothing at all! I'm not your dad.

But I am very fond of you.

- Grant “Havoc” Howitt

*I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: although EtR is definitely antifascist in its politics, in play it’s about as antifascist as a rabbit is antilettuce

** We’re trying out being each other’s husband for a while; Maz is non-binary, “wife” doesn’t work any more, and “spouse” feels like we’re reading from a legal document. “Partner” is fine, I guess, but it doesn’t thrill me. So I have a husband now. And it’s nice! It’s more romantic than having a spouse or a partner. There’s something exciting, there, something broader I can fit into that doesn’t feel alien and weird to Maz. So that’s nice