A Kickstarter coming in February will have two goals. The publication of a tabletop RPG adventure zine of modern urban horror called A Perfect Wife originally released as a blog post. And providing airfares and living expenses for Amanda Lee Franck, Scrap World, and Zedeck Siew to spend one week in Nottingham and attend the opening of the Weird Hope Engines, an exhibition at the Bonington Gallery that will be featuring their RPG work. Thanks to Amanda, Zedeck, and Dying Earth Catalogue (David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards and Jamie Sutcliffe) for talking with me.
Charles Dunwoody (CD): Zedeck, How did A Perfect Wife evolve from the blog post version and what has been added to the adventure?
Zedeck Siew (ZS): A Perfect Wife is based on the pontianak, a man-eating vampire monster from Malaysian folklore. The pontianak is always female. That she is a stand-in for what patriarchy fears about women, especially women freed from the yoke of childbearing and homemaking, is pretty obvious. Especially in the detail that, if you trap a pontianak under specific conditions, she transforms into a demure, loving woman—i.e.: the perfect wife. The blogpost version genericizes somewhat the setting of the adventure; I wanted to make it easier for people to transpose the adventure to their own local cities. The zine version returns the setting to where I had envisioned it, originally: a refugee community situated in inner-city Kuala Lumpur. There are the standard additions: more locations, more characters. A stronger thread for the investigative elements of the module. A set of proposed backgrounds for player-characters. We are also including support for the Liminal Horror and The Lost Bay rulesets. And some short editorial notes and commentary on how to run adventures in a Southeast Asian contemporary context.
CD: What RPG work of yours will be presented at Weird Hope Engines and how did you decide what you wanted on display?
ZS: I have been thinking about shrines as a simile for TTRPGs, lately. Roleplay is an intimate experience that bends towards being local to your own players, much like the keramat/tokong/corner saint in your neighborhood. As opposed to other game forms, like videogames or even boardgames, which are like churches—where even if there are mods or house rules, all those are weighed in relation to doctrinal authority (the source code, design intents, et cetera). So: I am making a shrine in the gallery space. A crocodile shrine—composed of stones, jars and fake flowers, on a garish lino mat. There will be a printer nearby, constantly spitting out short texts printed on colored paper, real-life accounts of personal and family trauma. The crocodile is a god that eats pain. Folks are invited to ritually feed the crocodile with these stories, as a way to rid the world of pain. As the show goes on the jars fill; colored paper covers the crocodile’s back, spills over … The crocodile refers somewhat to Lorn Song of the Bachelor, the first adventure I ever published, but it’s become its own thing for Weird Hope Engines, I guess? I liked the idea of a deity, swallowing the sins of the world, gradually getting overfed.
Charles Dunwoody (CD): Amanda, what is your favorite piece of art you created for A Perfect Wife and how did the adventure inspire you to create it?
Amanda Lee Franck (AF): I had to think really hard about the piece that’s opposite the page headed “The Woman of Your Dreams”, which describes the way the pontianak entraps men—Zedeck’s writing is really confrontational in this section, and I was hoping to capture the way the text makes you uncomfortable, while also centering the image on the woman and her experience of this moment. I had the idea to draw her looking at her reflection in glass, so that you could see her expression—which is hidden from the man who is either helping her or doing something violent. It was hard to paint because the figures are in a complicated position—if I’m having trouble with poses I’ll usually take reference photos, but even with a second person helping we couldn’t get everything right. I ended up making a little model of the figures in clay.
CD: What are you presenting at Weird Hope Engines and how did you decide what you wanted to display?
AF: I’m going to present some ink drawings and sketchbooks, and the big (3’x3′) comic-style dungeon map I made for Dungeon24 last year. I’m very excited about that, because it’s so detailed and large there’s no good way to see the whole thing unless it’s hanging on a wall. I’ve actually never seen it that way as I haven’t got a wall big enough!
Charles Dunwoody (CD): David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards and Jamie Sutcliffe; how did all of you come up with the idea of displaying RPG art in an art gallery?
Rebecca Edwards: Originally the idea was to have a follow up to a symposium we did in London last year, but after speaking with Niki Russell at Primary who introduced us to Tom Godfrey at Bonington, it quickly turned into an exhibition! As a curator of digital/new media arts for the last eight years, I’ve seen an increasingly sophisticated integration of gaming technologies, languages, and interactive structures into artistic practices. This goes beyond merely using gaming as a medium; it involves artists dissecting and reinterpreting the frameworks of play, interactivity, and narrative to create works that bleed into entertainment. There’s also a lot of interest in going “away from keyboard” and so I’ve seen many artists focusing on printed matter, in-person storytelling, and communality in their work. These analog methods offer a counterpoint to the digitally saturated gaming culture, focusing instead on the messy, intimate, and relational dynamics of face-to-face interaction. In this space, RPGs can act as a fertile ground for exploring themes like collaborative worlding, identity formation, and collective storytelling – practices that are deeply resonant with contemporary concerns around agency, community, and interconnectivity. What remains largely underexplored, however, is a comprehensive exhibition platforming new commissions by game-makers, illustrators, and designers who are explicitly engaging with the medium of role-play and analog gaming. While digital gaming has received substantial institutional recognition, with blockbuster exhibitions around the globe, the same attention has not yet been afforded to the tactile, pen-and-paper-led practices that drive much of the creative energy within RPG communities. I’m incredibly excited to forefront that.
Jamie Sutcliffe: Building on what Rebecca’s said, I think Weird Hope Engines might also be an attempt to correct some of the rather simplistic ideas of what gaming is or might be within critical art contexts. Independently of our art careers, we’re all keen gamers, and get very excited about developments in video games, TTRPGs, experimental solo works and zine supplements. And yet despite all of the incredible things we see taking place in those communities, art institutions are still playing catch up, often using rudimentary ideas of interactivity, immersion and worldbuilding to frame their understanding of how games might function. Of course, if you’re actually engaged in gaming cultures, you’ll be aware that those are the fundamental goals and principles we almost take for granted, they’re the things that are usually set in place before all of the really interesting stuff starts to occur… the crazy dialogue, bizarre solutions, “diplomacy” with NPCs etc. There’s a tendency within contemporary art practice to twin the future-oriented imaginaries of game worlds, or the possibilities they provide for imagining how circumstances could be otherwise, with our ongoing real world political and ecological crises. As a result, play becomes a strategy for dealing with the awfulness of the world right now. That’s a really exciting idea in some respects, and it harks back to the earliest instances of tabletop roleplaying and miniature wargaming being tools of simulation that were used to try and test out different future potentialities. The downside of this more generally is that gaming becomes somehow didactic and unimaginative, or risks being instrumentalized by a political intention that forgets the importance of play as a nebulous, joyful, and surprising pastime full of wonder and experimentation. So putting this show together is an exercise in deepening the language we might use to think about what games can do, and perhaps sidestepping some of those fundamental ideas of immersion and worldbuilding to ask more textured questions about the characters of experience games can provide. What might it mean for a game to make you confront awkward feelings? Unanticipated responsibilities? Social dynamics you’d never really had to consider before? Game designers and writers like Zedeck Siew, Chris Bisette, Amanda Lee Franck, Laurie O’Connel, Angela Washko, and Patrick Stewart for example, are really great at foregrounding some of these questions while crafting play experiences that are deeply engaging and transportive.
CD: What do you hope visitors will take away from the exhibition and how do you plan to evoke the vision you have for the exhibition?
Rebecca Edwards: Most importantly for me, I really want people – seasoned pros, avid gamers, and complete newbies – to have a good time! The whole point of this exhibition is ‘play’ so I encourage people to not be afraid to do so. For new gamers, I think this space can often feel overwhelming so I hope that this exhibition encourages those who have never played before to dip their toe in, explore what it’s all about, and experience something new. We’re presenting a lot of different gaming styles and systems to showcase some of the variety of RPGs out there, as well as exhibiting ephemera such as early drawings, paintings and sketchbooks to contextualize the artists’ practices. For some artists we’ve reimagined their work into more sculptural presentations, like Amanda Lee Franck’s maps which we’ve turned into a giant lightbox, in an effort to offer fresh perspectives and new ways of looking. The zine fair we’ve planned for the day after the opening will delve even further into gaming mechanisms, RPG culture, and modelmaking with lots of talks and gaming sessions, as well as things to buy from people like Melsonian Arts Council, Warp Miniatures, and Bastionland. We’ll also be screening a bunch of things like World Of Darkness and Eye of the Beholder.
Jamie Sutcliffe: I totally agree with Rebecca, the most important thing is for visitors to have fun and to play around with all of the different games on offer. Bonington have been so great in supporting all of the artists, writers, and game designers involved to explore new ways of presenting their works, and as a result we’ve been able to rethink the gallery as a kind of games lab, with so many different worlds and mechanics of play on display. It’s also an opportunity to introduce people who may only be familiar with mainstream systems like D&D, Pathfinder, or Call of Cthulhu to the richness of the OSR and indie scenes, where the tropes of science fantasy are pulled apart, questioned, and re-arranged in all sorts of interesting ways. If you’re only familiar with the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, then Patrick Stewart and Tom K. Kemp’s weird celestial setting Gackling Moon might just cast some revelatory shadows onto how you think of day-night cycles functioning in your game worlds. Similarly, if you’re used to European fantasy settings, hero quests and material treasures, then Zedeck Siew’s lyrically evocative and ethically probing writing is going to add a huge amount of potential difference with its suggestion of cultures and creatures derived from Malaysian folklore. You might discover something that changes the nature of your games entirely!
David Blandy: TTRPGs are a powerful medium. The memories I’ve formed from campaigns feel just as emotionally real as things that have happened to me in life. And they’re memories that you share with everyone else around that table with you. But it was the imagery from my earliest encounter with these games that really reignited my love of this space, the illustrations from the Dungeons & Dragons “Red Box” and the intensity of that recognition I felt when I saw those images again, made me realize the potential that these games still held. My hope is that this exhibition will help conjure these feelings for others, as they discover the breadth and complexity of images and games made within the contemporary scene. This is a truly international, wildly diverse community, and this community of amateurs, hobbyists and professionals has produced a body of work that deserves to be considered as an artform in its own right. TTRPGs can help us understand other lives, and other ways of living, a speculative fiction we can enter into through the ritual of telling stories and rolling dice. This exhibition is just the start of thinking about what might be possible.
Charlie is a participant in the Noble Knight Affiliate Program and the OneBookShelf Affiliate Program, both of which are affiliate programs that provide a means for participants to earn money by advertising and linking to Noble Knight Games and DriveThruRPG respectively. Charlie on Facebook. Posts and articles posted here by others do not reflect the views of Charlie Dunwoody. If you like the articles at EN World please consider supporting the Patreon.
Read more at this site