ROLLING IDENTITIES No. 2
FEATURING JOHN PATRICK COOPER
Rolling Identities is an interview series of sorts where RPG creators roll up characters for old tabletop RPGs—and then unpack what those characters reveal. Through stats, classes, and quirks, we explore the design choices, worldviews, and cultural echoes baked into these games.
In the second edition we’re making a character for what might be the world’s first RPG heartbreaker - The Spawn of Fashan. Written and published by the high school student K.L. Davis in 1981. The book is bursting at the seams with endearing and infuriating design choices.
“The Spawn of Fashan is a great parody of role-playing rules! The publisher doesn’t miss a trick. All the classic role-playing errors are included in this booklet. First, Spawn uses the time-hallowed method of organizing the rules so nothing can be found without five minutes of page-flipping. Table of Contents? Index? Who needs ‘em? The text of Spawn is written with the disdain for grammar and spelling we’ve come to know and love from other rules and scenarios..”
- Lawrence Schick, Dragon Magazine #60, April 1982
Let’s meet John Patrick Cooper and his character Snelgrove:
HI JOHN!!!!!
Uhhh... Hey...
First off, did you have fun creating your character?
It’s was more mystifying and confusing than fun. But that was fun in and of itself. Trying to decipher his ramblings was funny as hell.
What stuck out to you immediately?
The bad layout, the stream of consciousness style of knowledge transfer, the expectation you’re gonna know what he’s talking about because DUH, why wouldn’t you. I had the OG Arduin Grimoire books back in the day so I do have a fondness for poorly laid out single spaced typewritten rules systems. The level of minutiae in the character creation process. The fact that I can’t remember if there was any of that charming amateurish art that I like from that era of games. All I remember is walls of text.
Ok listen to this. The second step of character creation is to roll for “parent’s choice”. I had great troubles find any table labeled as such. After some frustration I managed to find this paragraph:
The Referee begins step two with a roll on the Human Chart [see section VI and the Inhabited Area Charts of the player's chosen area: The resulting character-type is considered the PARENTS CHOICE (i.e. character-type) for the character. If the Parents Choice is "Misfit;" the character must be a misfit.
So I went to Section VI. Nothing. After some more searching and a few tears I found the table pictured below (in Section VII), could this be it?
But, wait! This table can’t be it since it doesn’t have an entry for Misfit. Back to searching… After a few small aneurysms I finally found this paragraph in a totally different part of the book:
Misfit. As some of you may have noticed by now there was no Misfit charecter-lype in the Character Charts. This does not mean there is not an official Misfit character-type, for there is! What this means is that we left it out to let the Referee have his own little addition into the rulebook that is right in the rules. So each Referee can make up his own character-type for Misfit, at least until we publish ours.
John rolled Farmer as his parents background and Creeper as his own background. Ok cool! What does that mean? Well, you have the option to either follow your parents choice or your own. John decided to chose Creeper over farmer and got some convoluted turn-to-smoke abilities.
So… Wow… Uhm… After rolling the basic abilities and background you’re instructed to perform what the game calls “body rolls”. These are meant to determine eyesight, sense of smell etc. Each roll is preceded by a Save; rolling a d20 against a low bar around 5. If you fail, you’ll get to roll on the table. The tables include results such as x-ray vision. You didn’t get to roll on those, that must have made you sad?
Yeah I wanted to fail every one of those rolls. Just to see how fucked up this guys mind was. I mean cooking ableism into your system is a very 70’s thing I guess. Our hobby has deep roots in dickishness though. I mean if you’re a woman in the game your stats are halved if I remember correctly… The mysoginy rises off this book like stink lines in comics.
Anyways, did the character creation process inform you about the game world and who your character might be? Should we expect a game to accomplish that?
No it was a jumbled mess, it felt a little like going to a junkyard on acid. (I haven't done acid in decades for the record) There's a lot of disorganized stuff, its piled everywhere and I'm too high to figure it out so I just kind of hope my friend whos there with me can guide me through this.
There was that map of the world you had to pick where you were from but it didn't really give any insight to the world itself. I just picked one of the places that said "humans live here". They did denote there was an area a dragon lived so I guess that was kind of worldbuildy.
I do like getting a view of the world via character generation and other means. Lore dumps bore the shit out of me. The author might be fully invested in who ran the empire a thousand years ago but I kind of want to just get on with it and pick it up as we go along if it's relevant. You absolutely need setting to get immersed in the game but I prefer more ADHD friendly messaging.
Troika! has my favorite world building via character generation thing going on by far. I also dig anti-canon games like Ultraviolet Grasslands or Swyvers. My favorite worldbuilding happens collaboratively at the table with players having an active hand in it, PbtA style.
My characters name is Barrington Snelgrove. I have a tradition of using the Jamacian Names Generator for most of my Chargen needs. Because it generates some truly AMAZING names.
Your character speaks common and Worlong. What can you tell me about the Worlong language?
Ha! Here's a chance to world build collaboratively! Worlongs are basically long haired capybaras that are plentiful in the wilds of Fashan. They are everywhere, like rats but adorable. They communicate amongst themselves and love to gossip. So, it comes in handy when I'm tracking someone down I can just ask a Worlong "which way did he go?" They're usually pretty receptive because who the hell speaks Worlong?
The system is pretty darn granular. What do you think this game wants players to care about?
You know, homey had a VISION but he's so lost in the details. I don't think he was thinking "How can we tell a rewarding and fun story together?" It seems like he's into obsessive resource management. I mean i didn't dig too deep, even in the character creation, because it's reputation of being a confusing, confounding game with missing tables preceeded itself. But it seems it wants you to care about how many arrows you have and what your buffs and nerfs are in combat. Idk it's a walking distaster so hard to say.
I think the boy wants us to care about realism. Look at all these modifiers on the character sheet! There's even one for opening doors.
See that shit doesn't even make any sense. It's like he's writing in cuneiform and expecting everyone to know what he's talking about. This level of granularity is a total TTRPG boner killer for me. I like broad strokes, I wanna open the door, I rolled a 15, yay! Let's keep it moving and get to the good stuff.
Could this game have been made today? Might there be treasures like this to be found if you scroll long enough on Drivethrurpg?
I'm sure there are. There are legions of proCrunch people out there and I'm sure there's people who have taken a stab at making the crunchiest thing ever. I will guarantee there is some crunchy stream of consciousness game out there with all the coherence of the Unibomber Manifesto. It's probably a word doc too. I just have no interest in seeing it.
The idea of tracking torches or how many turns it is til we have to rest or making sure we've brought enough water just gets in the way of telling fun stories. To me. I'm not dissing crunch I just hate math and don't have the head for the endless monitoring of stuff. I've mostly played rules lite games since I got back into gaming. I'm also not a fan of Fantasy as a genre for the most part so I've unintentionally avoided these type of games. Recently I've been hopping into OSE and OSR type games and it's a totally different experience. It's not really about collaborative storytelling. It feels like going through a lot of checklists before you roll some dice all in a very specific order and then someone says "forsooth" or "hail!" in character to cover roleplaying.
Would you ever play this game?
FUCK NO!
What if someone gave you 10 bucks?
Nope.
What about 50 bucks?
If I was promised I didn't have to read the manual and they would do all the math. Sure. Is that an offer? Are you starting a campaign?
No. Anyways, who are you? Where can people find you? And which release of yours should a Cooper-newbie check out?
I'm John Patrick Cooper and I'm a Game Designer, Artist and overall Game Dork. I'm on a bunch of discords and just started a bluesky so you can catch me over there, @johnpatrickcooper.bsky.social.
I've designed two games Get in the Van, a Troika! hack about being in a hardcore, thrash or glam band in 198X and going on your first tour. You "battle" the audience to see if you had a good set or not then you get on the road and get into all sorts of rock n roll bullisht.
Then I designed Dead Mall, a Tunnel Goons hack that is basically a Dawn of the Dead simulator. You're unarmed and stuck in an abandoned mall and you have to scavenge shit to stay alive against the throng of monsters/zombies/aliens/whatever coming after you. There's also a d100 table of defunct mall stores so you can rummage through them to find shit to stay alive.
Theres an adventure for Get in the Van called Wasted Youth. It's a mini point crawl for a tour where the venues get bigger as you go. You get to beat up Nazis in the very first encounter too!
And lastly there Satanic Panic at Crowley Place Mall. A Dead Mall adventure where you're trapped by a bloodthirsty Satanic Cult led by an insane doctor whos on the Abominable Dr. Phibes tip.
BONUS CONTENT!
Some of you might be interested what the author is up to now. Props to him, because he seems to have continued writing and being creative.
He has published several books (“God’s Furry Angels” among others) and In his spare time he managed to have time to:
Developed several tabletop games.
Played the lead in a one-act play penned by his hand.
Performed his own songs in several benefit concerts that he organized and hosted.
Served several nonprofit organizations.
All in all, Davis seems to be doing great and I’m happy for him. The Spawn of Fashan might be an infuriating read, but he aimed for the stars and fired at a time when the hobby still was in its infancy. I think that’s kinda cool.
Nice idea! It is close to what I ran along 2024 for the italian audience with no success... all the best!