Crypt: A Found Fiction FKR MicroRPG

Recently I've been editing a TTRPG book with a found fiction element to it. By found fiction, I mean to say that the game book also functions as a book in-universe, a part of the fiction that has been annotated by other characters prior to falling into the player's hands. And unlike something like the Book of Gaub which is supplemental in nature (and which you should buy if you haven't!), this one contains its own stand-alone ruleset. I'm not sure if found fiction is the right name to give this, or even if there is a proper term for it. It's a little like the found footage trope in cinema, or an epistolary novel without the back-and-forth.

Whatever it is, it's extremely novel to me, and the first of such a game I've ever encountered, let alone had the privilege to work on.

So it's weird that just the other day I ran into another one. Two nickels and all that.

"Are you seein' this!?"

Trollish Delver, patron saint of this blog's pseudo-reviews and main character of my Itch.io collection, recently released Crypt, an addition to a growing collection of Free Kriegsspiel-style games in what was once a catalogue dominated by ultralight d20 and d6 OSR rulesets. Mechanically, it's Yet Another FKR Thing with one or two tweaks. But the mechanics are not the only reason why I'm writing this post.

Crypt bills itself as a recently discovered piece of TTRPG history, a long-lost game written by an anonymous British wargamer sometime in 1970, years before Arneson and Gygax ever got to work on the zero'ith edition of their critically acclaimed friendship-ruiner. The manuscript was lost for years amid the aroma of stale rhubarb pie and nerd musk in some West Yorkshire wargaming club, only to be rediscovered by one Thomas Culottes. Culottes did his best to compile the manuscript into a coherent whole and track down the creator, but he never succeeded in the latter, and once he passed away in 2021 a family friend handed the manuscript over to Scott Malthouse, the Trollish Delver himself.

Malthouse (the character) then annotated and published this manuscript alongside Culottes' story in order to share this artifact of gaming history with the world, while also helping to make it comprehendible for modern audiences. Malthouse (the real person) then uploaded it to his Itch.io, where I found it while I was five-and-a-half hours deep into listening to a new song on repeat until I had wrung every last mote of dopamine out of it (this one was country rock sung by Nurgle for some reason).

With character!Malthouse as our guide, the rest of the book is dedicated to the quirky and weirdly charming rules of the game itself, plus marginalia offering context, speculation, and occasional quips on the sides.

You learn that the creator was probably a theater kid because of their reliance upon Shakespearean archetypes and some of the language of theater that they use as a way to explain what the heck a fantasy imagination game inspired by Middle-Earth and Zothique is supposed to be like. Players are cast members treading upon the boards of the theater of the mind for example, and the list of character attributes (Courage, Humour, Romanticism, Status, and Friendship) is far more tied to interpersonal drama than to combat, which barely gets two paragraphs in the whole book.

They also came up with some mechanics that I find very believable as novel ideas cooked up by some wargamer who didn't know what they were doing as they branched out into a whole new genre in the '70s. Instead of rolling d20s to resolve chance, players flip one or more coins (ideally penny farthings) like a sort of proto-dicepool system. Yet it's still grounded in what the writer was familiar with in little ways, like the game master being called an umpire, as in actual Kriegsspiel.

The book is short and sweet with some stylistic jank, both a game and a piece of self-referential short storytelling. And for the price of PWYW, I thought that was worth a shoutout.

I feel a sudden and mighty need to "run" Lucian's A True Story or one of the lesser-known Arthurian poems with this system to see what sort of shenanigans can be gotten up to.