ROLISBOA DEBRIEF

Rolisboa - Portugal’s premier roleplaying game convention - emailed us this year, as they have done for the last few years, asking if we’d be interested in sponsoring their show and giving them some money. I countered elegantly and suggested that actually THEY should give ME their money, or rather pay for my travel and accommodation in Lisbon, and in exchange I’d come and guest at their show.

I have an ulterior motive or two to this, rather than merely a love for Europe’s most westerly capital city:

- My parents live in Portugal - in the south, down in the Algarve with all the other British immigrants. I was raised there, and spent the vast majority of my teenage years sitting quietly on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere just outside of Loule, which might explain why I’ve turned out like this. Cadging a free ticket to see mum and dad seemed like a no-brainer.

- I am keen on jollies. A jolly, which is a term I picked up back when I was a games journalist, is the sort of content-free fuckabout excuse for a press trip during which you would be plied with cake and circuses by Ubisoft, or by a trained representative on behalf of Ubisoft, or some sort of Ubisoft equivalent. Aside from the free computer games, jollies were the sole benefit of the job - and while I’m in a much better position professionally now, I can still enjoy a good old-fashioned waste of time. Rolisboa sounded like the sort of jolly I could enjoy.

So. Here’s what I did on my holidays:

THE ARRIVAL

After arriving by free bus from the airport (free in as much as none of my cards worked on the payment device and the driver seemed generously uninterested) I joined Nuno and the others for dinner on the night before the con. Nuno is an old acquaintance from London, back when we both lived there - he’s managed to put himself together a career in Growth Marketing, and when I asked him what that meant he sort of shrugged. Nuno seems handsome and well-adjusted enough to sustain a normal career doing a normal thing that normal people do, and more power to him, but I wasn’t about to push him for details.

Some other folk arrived, slightly late on account of arranging vampires into a LARP formation at the Galveias Library - the beautiful old building where the convention would actually take place, pictures attached - and, after I’d expressed a desire for something simple and unpretentious to remind me of my days growing up in the rural south, we went to a Portuguese restaurant so authentic we could barely get served. 

I ordered segredos, which is a secret cut of meat - it literally translates to “secrets” - from an Alentejian pig. It’s delicious. Maz will barely eat anything else when they come over, and I don’t blame them. I got the impression that the man who eventually took my order would much rather I asked for sardines like a grown man, or at the very least some rabbit stew with bits of buckshot in it, but I opted for Pork Nugs regardless. 

And then: driving to a brewery on the other side of town where the crew were putting together a Rolisboa karaoke icebreaker, and fuck me running is a brewery a terrible place to hold karaoke. The big empty room with loads of exposed brick struggled to work from an acoustic point of view, so yer man on the 1’s and 2’s overcame this by turning his machine up as loud as it could go. A lot of the people taking a turn up front could sing, I’m sure, but you jam that noise through a microphone and bounce it off three different walls and it gets cacophonous fast.

Beer was all right though. I smoked cigarettes outside and talked to anyone who’d pay me attention and went back to the hotel when I was drunk enough to sleep properly, which is roughly three beers.

THE WORKSHOP

I have been touring my Kitbash Games Design workshop, written about at length last year as part of my Kamping Kitbash Debrief, around the world. (Well. Europe. Still pretty impressive I feel.) The next slot on the tour was upstairs in a back room at Rolisboa on Saturday afternoon.

I feel like out of every country who’ve tried it so far, the Portuguese fuckin’ got it. 

A lot of people come out with very structured game experiences - closer to, say, Ollie Darkshire’s one-page literary simulators than anything like a trad TTRPG - with little in the way of player choice. There’s stages of play and dice and things the users have to do, but there’s not much in the way of niche protection or character choice or creativity. They end up closer to a roll-and-write game than a multiplayer storytelling affair.

(That’s fine, mind. It’s their first time out and the real goal of the workshop is to help the participants think about games in a different way. I’ve added a disclaimer to the top of the session, depending on how long I’ve got, which is essentially “This will not actually result in a game.” And I’ve been proven wrong several times! But really, what I want to do is show how easy it is to bodge a game together out of found parts by providing said parts and a loose structure to some enthusiasts, and next time they play a proper game in a book and everything they might be able to see it differently.)

I think it’s probably my fault. I provide only the loosest instruction on what to do and assume that everyone present knows what shape a roleplaying game is and can assemble these gags into something similar. I could go for something more structured like Steph’s romantasy game workbook, perhaps, remind people how an RPG isn’t a series of mathematical steps and dice games at the core but, instead, a scaffold for make-believe, but:

A) I barely have enough time to get them to make any sort of game, let alone the specific kind I want, and 

B) I don’t want to tell people what not to do, and would rather they came up with something that they had fun making together without worrying if it’s, you know, any good

Anyway, as I said: the Portuguese got it. We got drunk wizards on their way home from the pub (still a little roll-and-writey but they had some excellent dice-stacking mechanics, with a pointy hat on top in the form of a D4). We had a revolution in digital heaven. We had a vampire street-racing game where you were actually playing your car, because your car was also a vampire, and it ate you if you drove it too fast and you had to get a fresh vampire to steer it around. 

And we had three different games (magical girls, space pirates, and I wanna say World of Darkness style occulists) all wedged into one metaverse sandwich where intruders from the outside realm were entering the real world with an eye to destroy consensus reality, and then the twist was that you were the intruders and you were competing to remake the universe in your image, and - sometimes you get people who want to make their lives difficult on purpose, I suppose. From the looks of it, it worked, which is testament to the skill of the people involved and their dedication to working independently. 

I’m not sure why the groups grasped it so well, and I’m also not sure why I’ve selected fifteen people to be representative of an entire country, but I have a few ideas if I’m going to stick with this sweeping generalisation: mainly, Portugal doesn’t have D&D the same way we do. 

DUNGEONS AND WHO NOW?

I noticed the same thing in Poland. Poland didn’t have roleplaying games until the Berlin Wall came down - apologies if I’m wrong, I’m repeating what I’ve heard - and the first one through the gate was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, so the whole Polish industry has a faint smell of Small But Vicious Dogs to it. No-one really gives a shit about D&D. 

Portugal hasn’t had a proper translation of D&D for, oh, six editions? Seven if you count Basics, and I don’t, so six. Which lead to the fascinating development that in a con attended by a few thousand people, over one hundred different systems were available to play thanks to the efforts of volunteer GMs. 

(I heard that Portugese people don’t like playing RPGs from Portugese texts, anyway. It doesn’t sound “fantasy” enough. Apparently invoking the name of a LONGSWORD carries much more mythical weight than the local equivalent ESPADA LONGA, and seeing as I write books in English, that’s great news for me and my many adjectives)

Compare that to the UK - and it’s even more pronounced in the states - our hobby is Dungeons & Dragons. A huge number of people use the term “roleplaying games” and “Dungeons & Dragons” interchangeably, and apparently they don’t care that my artist’s heart cries a single tear every time they do. 

So, and I’m guessing here, by the time that people are engaged in the hobby enough to attend a convention, they’ve played a few different things - good and bad. They’ve got a sort of critical stance. They’ve grasped the idea that a game can be different shapes. They’ve got a bit of dirt under their fingernails, and maybe made a game or two in the past, and so we can skip past the structured safe space and into something riskier and weirder.

But as I said: I need to get better at telling people how this all works. 

THE LIVE GAME

Sunday morning brought with it a performance game of Sexy Battle Wizards, and full disclosure, I’ve never had a cast turn up in costume before. At least not like this; one woman had an attendant to carry her fucking wig around when she wasn’t wearing it. This lot went to a lot of effort to look good on camera. (I, on the other hand, put on a shirt with buttons and combed my hair.)

Here’s a thing that won’t come as a surprise to you: I like flirting with characters. 

(Not people, mind! I’m married, and I don’t get out a lot.)

But if I’m in character, and they’re in character, and we’re both supposed to be flirting because this game is called SEXY BATTLE WIZARDS then by gum I’ll flirt with them. I’ll go further than that; I’ll profess my love for them. I’ll try to get married. I don’t care who’s playing the characters, mind: every single NPC I have is relentlessly player-sexual, be their player my cup of tea or not, and equally over-eager to get themselves in trouble after falling head over heels for whatever paper-thin facsimile of a person we’ve confected together before the session starts. 

Sexy Battle Wizards provides almost unparalleled flirting opportunities, and I leant the fuck into it. Every NPC was at minimum hot and in several cases a ten-outta-ten dimepiece smokeshow, even the animated terracotta soldiers that the wizards were fighting. Now, in practice, despite offering myself up to the majority of the cast, I focused mainly on the one male player who was sitting next to me because:

1) I could reach him, and therefore engage in light simulated breath play / make him put lip gloss on me to the delight of the audience

2) The optics were better on two bearded men smiling breathlessly at each other than one haggard forty-year-old man pawing at women ten years younger than him on camera

Tremendous fun. The organisers recorded it, as they did with all the scheduled events, and god knows where or when it’ll show up on the internet but it ought to be a laugh once it does. I probably even did some of the breath play in frame.

THE PRESENTATION

Then, lunch, and it was the sort of hermetic retreat lunch that I enjoy at a convention - me and no-one else I know sitting in a restaurant where no-one speaks my language terribly well, sitting quietly and enjoying two beers and, almost as an off-thought, having my notebook open on a blank page with a pen next to it which implies that I might Do Work in it at any time. Now the hermits at a retreat probably don’t eat more Argentinian beef than is strictly sensible, nor do they indulge in deep-fried bananas, but the black beans and rice could be pretty monastic if you picked out the offcuts of unctuous slow-cooked meat scattered throughout. 

Suitably fueled (read: full as a fucking egg) I tottered back to the con to deliver what amounted to a keynote speech. I’ve done workshops and bits and pieces before, and I’ve strong-armed my way into schedules, but I’ve never been asked to deliver a presentation for a full hour. 

The name of the talk was “BREAKING (DOWN) THE RULES,” and I’ll be honest with you, I sent off the title, it got approved, and then I didn’t think about it for several months. Sounds like a good talk, right? Probably something metatextual or introspective or, fuck, at least clever in there. 

Reader, the weekend before Rolisoba, I recorded a practice improvised version in the bath. I thought: what if I just talked about rules? For an hour? How hard can it be? I’ll natter anyone’s ear off about this shit. My job is games design and my hobby is games design. All my books are games. I’ve even played one or two. 

Turns out it’s hard. I managed to get through seventeen seconds of listening to the resultant twenty-minute rambling wet diatribe before immediately deleting it out of visceral electric shame and getting out of my now-cold bathwater in a sulk. I would, it turned out, have to actually prepare for the damned thing.

I’m loath to do things by halves; either too much or not at all, that’s my motto. So I sat down and started writing a game about writing a game about delivering a speech in a foreign country, and annotated that design process. I erected enough baffles of arm’s-reach detachment from the concept that, maybe, somewhere towards the end, I could maybe show a little bit of vulnerability.

Roleplaying games use rules. What happens when you stop using them? Because: no-one runs games as they’re written. Everything we make is three steps removed from the final user. And what sort of rules don’t we even know we’re following? And what happens when we break those?

(Another mark in the Portuguese audience’s favour - when I said, towards the end of the talk, “I can turn up and play a Dragonborn Paladin, a creature born from an egg that breathes fire, and that’s fine. But can I play, say, a young Chinese woman? What are the rules around who we can pretend to be?” - they looked back at me, nonplussed. Of course you can, they suggested. Just be cool about it.)

If you’d like to watch the whole thing, you can do so here where Maz painstakingly cut it together as a proper video. The cockamamie conceit of the game about a game about a speech lasts for, oh, most of the presentation before I kick it into touch and get to my point, but it’s the source of a few decent gags. 

THE ROYAL WEDDING

My final duty was to put on a game for five people in a private room. I had elected to run Orc Borg, because it’s a laugh, and because I already have my favourite ever scenario prepared: the Royal Wedding one from the multi-table Orc Borg game we run at GenCon.

(I have attached a PDF of it for you to enjoy, although it introduces a third husband I don’t use in the standalone version.)

Here’s the gist: the players are all acolytes to Chief Yellpriest Rip Tendozen who is about to marry his cousin, a noteworthy shitheel, to a well-to-do himbo; both are orc princes from different families and this union promises to unite the warring factions of HULL (I called one of the regions on my spaceship world HULL) and let them expand outwards throughout the entire Derelict.

Everything’s ready to go. Rip gathers the acolytes in an antechamber and brings them together in a prayer to Jekt, the god of fate and explosions, to bless the wedding when his head immediately explodes and a demon crawls out of the smoking hole in his neck and starts pissing on the altar.

Now: you’ve got two hours (give or take) to put together whatever you reckon an orc royal wedding looks like and execute it.

Cake? Why not? Entertainment? Probably. (They decided on synchronised break-dancing.) Food? Definitely! (Our least hinged member drove a monorail to the human ship embedded in the side of the Derelict and gathered humans to eat, which he assured me are the equivalent of fine champagne to orcs.) Oh, and should you deal with that demon? (It stole one character’s heirloom extension cable and ran off.)

The inevitable climax is the one element that I always include, which is the Nuptial Beast, a sort of rhino-hippo covered in brightly-painted armour and spikes that the happy couple have to beat to death with their bare hands. Thanks to a legal loophole, anyone who takes part in the fight is legally married to each other, and we inevitably wind up with some light bigamy.

This session marked an unprecedented level of polyamory with more of the player characters married to one another at the end of it than weren’t, and we briefly paused in the sweltering hot sideroom to pose for wedding pictures before wrapping up. 

When I GM at a con, I don’t sit down. I leave it all out there on the court. I sweat like a motherfucker, I cavort, I twist my body into weird shapes, I climb all over people (with their permission! And, you know. Other blokes, usually), I stomp about massive when I’m big and I get down on my knees when I’m small. I use the space. 

And I don’t think I’ve smelled worse after a game than I did after the Royal Wedding. I’m glad so many people still married me.

IN CLOSING

Maybe it was a younger crowd than normal. Maybe I was in a good mood from the deep fried bananas and getting married to three different people. Maybe I was feeling big-headed after my presentation went down well. But I can’t recall attending a con with as much rampant enthusiasm present as there was at Rolisboa - maybe some of the punters at GenCon, but not the industry.

(There isn’t an industry in Portugal. From what I can tell, it’s about six people. But the audience is there, and they’re frantic for more.)

It’s refreshing! The players are diverse and engaged, the AP scene is pushing in fascinating directions (they have RPG dinner theatre over there!) and crumbs were they happy to have someone with a name on the front of a book pay them a visit to say hello.

I took along three copies of Orc Borg to sell on the International Games table and they lasted -no joke - thirteen minutes before selling out. I remain convinced that I could rock up with a suitcase of pretty much anything we make and someone would snap it up, which is how I intend to supplement next years’ attendance because Rolisboa really don’t make a lot of money (attendance is free! Free!) and I honestly think that paying for my hotel for a second year might cause problems. 

To see us out, here’s everything I purchased or that was thrust into my sweaty little hands for gratis during the con:

Dusk’s Embrace, from a lad whose name translates to “The RPG Machine” which is a weird one but here we are; I’ve been lucky enough to receive precisely zero shit for using my full real name everywhere but I appreciate that’s not possible for everyone. This is a Twin Peaks-alike game with some really interesting mechanics in there, and crumbs I wish I liked Twin Peaks more.

The back of the cover is a game about skateboarding skeletons. Couldn’t be happier with it.

“In a world... where dogs... are illegal... you... are a DOG.” Contains rules for a dog being a werewolf, which means they can turn into a wolf.

City-building game in the vein of Beak, Feather and Bone. Had a nice chat with the designer over a cigarette about the other stuff he was working on and encouraged him to Do Less Quicker, which is always liberating.

Speed dating for birds. Not my cup of tea but I know about four different people who’ll fucking love it.

Three games intended to be played as duets, and then the player goes on to become the GM for someone else. I like the one where you are first a wizard exploring a tower, and then you become that wizard’s tower awaiting the next generation of magicians. 

Jolly little wooden-and-leather dicebox. Smells like laser-cut MDF, which I enjoy.

Here it is open. The wee tray is cushioned so you can roll in it neatly without the dice ricocheting out into the corner of the room. Now: I personally don’t have much of a problem with dice rolling off the table because I’m a grown man with solid wrist control, but I can appreciate that younger or more enthusiastic players might need a play aid.