Howdy!
what's new
It's been a blistering couple of weeks for The Chaos since the last issue.
The third print run was delivered after the game sold out of its first two runs, and right now it seems to be flying out the door. The poor guys at the local sorting office are doing an amazing job, although I do suspect they wince internally every time they see me rocking up now!
I've spent the last couple of weeks exploring and setting up the best way to formalise the wholesale availability of the game to local FLGSs. That's all in the bag now, it's on a few shelves already, and hopefully as time goes on, you'll begin to see it in a store near you. It's such a joy to see it out there in the wild.
After a bit of a whirlwind in the last couple of months since the game was launched, in the next few weeks before Tabletop Scotland where I'll be exhibiting as usual, my plan is to step back a bit and spend a little more time creating battlemaps. It's been a while since I focused on that side of things, and it's always a relaxing activity that takes me away from it all for a bit.
Let's be honest though, something else'll happen and I'll be distracted again!
new scraps
One of the other things I've been continuing to do though, is to write more scraps of the chaos. Right now over on my Patreon, there are two-page adventures for The Woods, The Deep, and The Ruins. Right now I'm writing a new one for The Town, one that introduces you to a creature called The Debt, which has been possessing folk who've not been meeting their end of deals and bargains.
As I've said, the plan is to create quick two-page adventures for each location in The Realm, so that if you're short on time and need something to run for your game or at a con without having to prepare anything, you'll have something to run with. You can grab these on Patreon, where there's also exclusive roll generators for the game and much more.
Emergence, and Why The Realm is Blank
Although there are these two-page adventures available though, I've been getting this question a lot: why is The Realm so bare? No sprawling gazetteer, no thousand year history of the Duchy of Wherever, just some locations, a handful of rumours, and a lot of empty space. So I wanted to dig a little into the actual thinking behind that in this issue, because there's more to it than just my own preference. The way I see it, there's a pretty long tradition backing up this approach.
Most of your play time is spent on the tables
Think about how a session of The Chaos actually unfolds. You're rolling on random tables and then figuring out what the result means for your world. The rumour you follow up, the creature blocking the road, the point of interest you stumble into, all of it comes from a roll and then a bit of interpretation. That interpretation is doing most of the heavy lifting in terms of what The Realm actually feels like at your table.
Games have approached it like this for decades
Powered by the Apocalypse games put this into words that have stuck with me for years. Vincent and Meguey Baker built Apocalypse World around a small set of agendas for the person running it, and one of them is simply to play to find out what happens. The job isn't to drag players around by the nose on a tour of a pre-planned setting while forcing them to watch the GM's own ideas play out. That game has no canonical world map or timeline, and the setting is more implied. There are no pre-planned adventures or settings, just clear principles for building the apocalypse together and finding out what happens as you go.
That idea has spread a long way past Apocalypse World itself. Games influenced by it often encourage shared authorship, player-driven discovery, and endings that aren't predetermined. The Chaos wasn't built with that game in mind, but the same instinct is in there. Give the table the raw material and trust it to build something out of it.
OSR games have their own word for this
Old school design has been circling the same idea for years, usually through the idea of treating a setting as a toolbox rather than a finished world. A toolbox, or 'toolkit design', does for worldbuilding what a random encounter table does for adventure design, offering pieces that share a tone and letting the group's own creativity turn them into something with emergent properties. There's no official canon version of the world, and the whole point is that you're meant to do what you like with the material provided.
The Realm leans further into that than most toolkit settings do. Instead of handing you fifty pre-written locations to remix, it hands you almost nothing and lets the tables generate the material as you play, session by session, roll by roll.
This ain't a new idea
Zoom out further and this stops looking like a modern game design trend at all. Instead, it starts to resemble how people were telling stories even before writing existed.
Scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord studied performers in the Balkans who could deliver epics running for hours without ever reciting a fixed, memorised text. Parry and Lord's theory holds that these poets worked from a stock of verbal formulae they could recombine within traditional structures to build a poem in the moment. Singers could deliver stories lasting many hours across many days and the result would still hold together as a coherent, powerful narrative.
Nobody handed those singers a finished epic to memorise word for word. They had building blocks (stock phrases, recurring scenes, familiar figures) and the skill to assemble them live in front of an audience, differently from performance to performance. This kind of fieldwork showed performers improvising long narratives out of traditional phrases in a way that mirrors how the Homeric poems themselves were likely composed.
That's roughly what's happening at your table when you roll a rumour and decide what it means. You're not reciting my lore. You're doing what storytellers have always done with a shared set of building blocks, assembling something new out of them in the moment, in front of the people you're telling it to.
Random rolls serve a similar purpose to oral formulae
The formulae gave an oral poet a starting point without dictating the whole story. The dice do the same job here. A roll tells you a bell tower featured in a rumour. It doesn't tell you why it's important, who's spreading the rumour, or what's waiting there. That's on you, same as the singer filling in the specifics of a battle scene from their own store of images while keeping the shape of the epic intact.
Play built this way is associative and collaborative, oriented towards emergent play rather than characters being dropped into a plot or setting that already exists. The way the story ends up constructed and experienced can't be worked out in advance. That's true whether you're rolling on a rumour table solo at your kitchen table or trading a bike gang's fate back and forth with three other players.
A pre-built setting works against this
Plenty of games hand you the finished world and that works great for them. But if The Realm shipped with a hundred pages of established history, every roll you made would need to somehow slot into a picture that already exists. You'd be checking your interpretation against what's 'canon' instead of just building. That's playing in someone else's garden, following their rules about what's allowed to grow there. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've run years' long campaigns in the likes of Ravenloft or the Star Wars galaxy, and that's been a superb experience, but with The Realm, the entire concept is that this is a setting that's wholly yours, that it belongs to whoever sits down at your table, that you all have a part to play in painting it as you go.
Just another way to enjoy your fantasy roleplaying experience, really, but with this approach, you don't need to learn all the lore and do the prep. You just dive in and see where it leads.
So what does this leave you with?
A drowned bell tower turns up on a rumour roll and nothing in the book says it can't be there. You decide it is, and now it's part of your realm. Next session builds on what you made, not on what I made. Six months from now your realm looks nothing like anyone else's, because you built it the same way storytellers have built worlds for as long as there's been an audience to tell them to: with a set of tools, a bit of chance, and whoever's at the table filling in the rest.
thanks so much!
for your support & inspiration
Please share the game with all & sundry, spreading The Chaos into every dark corner its flickering torches haven't quite reached. My aim is for the game to grow like an invigorating fungus on the minds of the OSR community and beyond, and I can't thank you enough for being a part of this.
Meantime, if you've not yet joined The Realm discord, here's the link for that, and I look forward to seeing you there! Be sure to let me know any suggestions you have about what to include in the next issue, or about the game itself, and enjoy the rest of your day. :)
Best,
Scott
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