FMC: Inaugurating the Icon0clasm Ball!

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

It's August, so submissions for The Icon0clasm Ball for Fantastic Medieval Campaigns have opened! I'm genuinely excited to see what y'all come up with, because the discursive universe of OD&D needs something new (and, dare I say, it deserves a better reception than as the germ of brand-name Dungeons & Dragons or of old-school revisionism). I've made steady progress on my major project for this, and I'm hopefully (hopefully!) going to run it this weekend.

Before leaving you to do your thing, I wanted to reflect on particular phrasing in the jam’s prompt: “This jam challenges you instead to make something novel; to deface the memory of this text with concepts untenable to the Gygaxian imagination; to resurrect this corpse into a new body.” The emphasized phrase, the Gygaxian imagination, struck an interesting chord with people which I initially attributed to pedantry: what is the Gygaxian imagination? What did Gygax imagine, or what do we imagine of Gygax? This was just a provocative bit of language on my part, but the implications are interesting. FMC as a work is concerned with four contradictions:

• Between old-school and historical D&D. How the particular play orientation and culture of the OSR is projected back onto earlier editions of D&D, which especially conflicts with the multiplicity of interpretations and textual dimensions of OD&D.
• Between the D&D of Gygax and Arneson. Not only was OD&D interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text.
• Between the textual and received OD&D. Similar to the first point, but both more general with respect to reception and more specific with respect to the source text: most readings of OD&D fill in gaps, both within the text as well as one’s own memory of the text, with a vulgar D&D (along the lines of B/X), despite the text’s misalignment with those conventions.
• Between early and late Gygaxian D&D. Gygax’s priorities both as an author and as a player of games (whether of war or role-playing) change over time, reflecting changes in his personal preferences as well as his relationship to D&D as it commercializes.

These contradictions interest me not because of the sanctity of OD&D as some seminal text taken for granted—I only prefer it to other versions of D&D in that it has a particular vision of what it wants to be, as a game, that isn’t over-determined by what it is supposed to be (since later D&D, just about everything after 1974, suffers from knowing it is D&D)—but because those contradictions are microcosms of larger discourses, within the (let’s be honest) repulsive discourse of role-playing games and that of interpretation in general.

Of my own two projects: one satirizes the themes of OD&D, i.e. the manifest and latent content of its fictional discourse, and the other satirizes the reception of OD&D as a text. In other words, if all the above is too high and lofty, think of the prompt as being satirical of OD&D and popular notions of itself. Good luck, and don’t fuck it up!