Orkish Odyssey

Postmodernism in TTRPGs

Note: I have not read Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson. If I read it, I will update this essay with any new insights.

I started writing this post in a burst of inspiration several months ago and then let it sit in my drafts forever. I’ve finished it now, but there are no guarantees that this flows or makes sense: read at your own peril!

What is Postmodernism?

What would a postmodern tabletop roleplaying game look like? Well, first we must understand what postmodernism is and what it looks like in other media.

In the 1950s and 1960s, traditional “modernist” understandings of knowledge and language came under fire: the idea that the application of science and rationality would result in a constant progression towards a better world no longer seemed as reasonable after the horrors of World War II and the development of world-annihilating nuclear weapons. Post-structuralist philosophy sought to reconsider our assumptions about the way we use things like language to construct meaning, and I think postmodern literature shows a lot of influence from this desire to question the way we think about narratives.

Postmodern Literature

A while back the L.A. Times put out a list of “essential postmodern reads” which were all characterized by some combination of 9 features:

These features are definitely useful for spotting postmodern literature in the wild, but I think it’s important to recognize these features all work toward a common purpose, which is frustrating the reader’s expectation that the fictional world is somehow independent from the author.

Despite the fact that all narratives are artifices constructed by an author, we as audiences kind of trick ourselves into believing that the events happening on the page are “real” in some sense, and that what the author is describing is something more akin to a record of an event which could have happened, either in our world or in an alternate one. Even fantasy novels which include obviously unreal elements are presented as if they did happen or are happening, albeit in an alternate world where magic is real or dragons exist or the dead can come back to life. Telling a story which continuously reminds the reader that they’re reading a fabrication is difficult, if not impossible, simply due to the conventions by which stories are told in our society.

Postmodern literature, however, uses certain conventions to force the reader to confront the fact that what they’re reading is an artifice that has been intentionally designed. The chapters of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch are designed to be read out of order, which forces the reader to confront the fact that the structure of a story is a deliberate choice made by the author. The frame narrative of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is told in second person, which draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the main character of a story (i.e. “you”) is not actually doing the things they are supposedly doing, because they’re not real. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves has several layered narratives which interact with one another in impossible ways: the reader’s confusion at how these narratives intersect can only be satisfactorily answered by pointing out the obvious truth that the entire book is a fabrication.

I have generally used language with a negative valence to refer to the way postmodern literature works on a reader, like “frustrate” and “confront” and “confuse,” but I think there is a great joy to be found in these works as well. There is a kind of playfulness or roguishness in the breaking of traditional rules that I personally enjoy in my favorite postmodern narratives, as well as a sense of wonder at seeing someone do new things with an artform, which is why I think so many people find value in these kinds of works.

Postmodernism in Film

Film is obviously a different medium from literature, but it is still true that audiences are expected to treat the fictional narratives of a film as true for the purpose of a kind of “engrossment” or “immersion.” Like books, films can contain non-diegetic elements (like credits and a soundtrack) but the events that occur on screen are usually presented as if they were being recorded by a silent and invisible observer. Some films, like Festen (1998) and The Blair Witch Project (1999) go to even greater lengths to immerse and engross the audience.

Rarely, films will deliberately alienate the audience in ways which are analogous to the conventions of postmodern literature. And ironically, while postmodern literature is considered high-brow, what I would consider to be “postmodern films” are often seen as popular entertainment: Blazing Saddles (1974) blurs reality and fiction just as much as House of Leaves, and Inglourious Basterds (2009) is the best example of a film containing historical falsehoods that I can think of.

The lack of postmodern elements in film may be in part due to the youth of the medium compared to books (though I don’t completely buy this argument for reasons I’ll get into in the next section), but I think the main reason is simply that the amount of funding required for a film often prevents the kind of experimentation that a single author or developer can get away with. That said, there are people doing interesting things in the general postmodern space (Kaufman and Lynch spring to mind) and I think audiences may be getting a taste for more experimental, provocative, and perhaps alienating cinema: the spark to this line of thinking was 28 Years Later (2025), which does some interesting things with intertextuality and definitely comments on its own “filmishness” in subtle but noticeable ways throughout the film.

Postmodernism in Video Games

I find video games interesting with regards to this topic because, while film and literature are obviously different, audiences approach these media with similar assumptions. Movies and books are passive: the assumption is that the events of the narrative are taking place regardless of how the audience interacts with them, which contributes to the impression that the work is merely documenting something “real.” On the other hand, video games (and tabletop roleplaying games) are active: the player’s choices affect what happens in the game. Most video games try to achieve a sense of “immersion” for the player despite this, but there are a number of notable games (mostly indie games) which deliberately alienate the player in various ways. These include many of the features from the L.A. Times article, but also some new elements unique to the medium of video games.

Rather than giving a brief overview of a bunch of different games, I want to talk in some depth about Garage Heathen’s 2022 point-and-click adventure game Who’s Lila, a game that has a lot of fascinating postmodern characteristics (minor spoilers for the game below).

In Who’s Lila, you control a man named Will: by going to different places in the game, interacting with objects, and communicating with other characters by manually manipulating Will’s facial expressions, you discover “endings” that reveal a small aspect of the game’s central mysteries.

In Who’s Lila, the developer of the game is represented as a character in a sort of oblique, abstract sense that is easy for players to miss but relates to the underlying themes of the game. However, the more significant way that Who’s Lila meets the “author is a character” metric is by including a number of different characters which represent or stand in for the player themselves. In most games, the player kind of “possesses,” or inhabits the body of the main character: though the player character may have a past before the game, and a future after it, their actions during gameplay are controlled by the player. Over the course of Who’s Lila, the player realizes that they are not only inhabiting the body of Will, but that they are controlling an entity which is itself inhabiting Will’s body within the story of the game. Furthermore, the player’s presence and role in furthering the events of the game is playfully acknowledged in two characters: Detective Yu (you), a nigh-omniscient character that discusses the various endings with the main character; and the Prince, a preternatural force which is the origin of consciousness in the world of the game.

Most games have a self-contradicting plot, in that the player’s choices can lead to a number of different endings (the most common being some variant of “Game Over” ending for failing at an objective). This ambiguity is often resolved by declaring one ending as canon, or real within the world of the game, thus preserving the integrity of the game’s universe by declaring all other endings mere hypotheticals. Who’s Lila explicitly rejects this canonical/noncanonical dichotomy, as well as the corollary idea that each ending takes place in an “alternate universe” because all endings are just “dreams,” i.e. equally fictional.

The ways that Who’s Lila blurs reality and fiction are, to me, the most innovative and exciting postmodern aspects of the game, and probably the most applicable to tabletop role-playing games. Some endings require you not just to interact with the game and its mechanics but to go to websites on the (actual) Internet, to check the game’s Steam and Itch pages, to look through the game’s files, or even to change the clock settings on your computer. This creates an experience of going “out of bounds” of the game itself which complicates the player’s understanding of what exactly constitutes “gameplay.” The player is forced to confront the way that their intentions shape the story in a similar manner to how postmodern literature forces the reader to confront the way that the author’s intentions shape the story.

Making a Postmodern TTRPG

(Or, perhaps, making a TTRPG postmodern.)

At last we come to tabletop role-playing games, and I want to reflect a bit on how one might apply these kinds of ideas and conventions to TTRPGs. I’ll go through the list of postmodern features and discuss how I think they might be applied to a tabletop role-playing games as well as some specific examples for making a game or as a feature to add to an existing TTRPG.

Author is a Character

AKA the Gamemaster or the Players are characters. This could be fairly literal: the players play a version of their real-world selves transported to a fantasy realm (some of the first fantasy role-play sessions DMed by Dave Arneson had this premise).

This could also be more metaphorical, where the players or GM are represented by a kind of “stand-in” that serves to break down the boundaries between the participants in the game and the roles they take on. Perhaps the players play not as flesh-and-blood people but as spirits which inhabit the bodies of different hosts. These hosts have their own memories and lives outside of what goes on during play, but when the game is being played, the possessing spirits are in control. This could even be in real time, where the hosts (the PCs) take actions between sessions when the players are not directly controlling them.

For a more conventional game, imagine a culture that believes a person’s soul is reincarnated 7 times before it passes into the afterlife. Players create and control characters as normal, but if they lose 7 PCs, they must quit the campaign because the “soul” they are playing as has passed into the afterlife.

Self-Contradicting Plot

This is one of the more difficult ones to make work in a TTRPG because the lack of constraints on player choice kind of requires that players be able to make informed decisions that actually matter. I think this can work if the cause of the self-contradicting plot is properly conveyed, a part of the mechanics, or sufficiently foreshadowed through play.

Some good examples of this phenomenon can be found in the surreal noir roleplaying game Itras By. Itras By has a mechanic called Chance Cards: at any time, a player or the GM can call for a Chance Card to be drawn, which adds a surreal and chaotic element to the game. Some of these are relatively mundane (“The character feels an irresistible urge to do something she will regret”) but some completely defy traditional conventions of TTRPG play. These include the card “Reality Split,” where each person at the table describes a contradicting set of events and the player who drew the card decides which one actually happens; and the card “In Reverse,” where the events of the last few seconds are negated and the polar opposite occurs instead.

It’s not difficult to imagine applying these ideas to other kinds of TTRPGs: in a game about characters with a tenuous grasp on reality, like a cosmic horror game, or a game where a character is somehow experiencing multiple alternate universes, you could have a mechanic where multiple possible events are all described and only one is true. Or in a game which involves time travel or altering the timestream, things may occur and then later be nullified, either by the PC’s actions or those of other characters.

Disrupts/Plays with Form

This is another feature that can be difficult to apply to tabletop role-playing games. In literature and film, this is fairly straightforward, because most narratives are told in chronological order, and telling narratives out of order is an easy way to disrupt the form. This doesn’t quite work in TTRPGs: maintaining chronology is usually important to preserving the impacts of player choices. There are other ways, however, to disrupt form in a tabletop RPG, by changing how the players relate to the mechanics of the game.

Itras By has some excellent and very exciting Chance Cards that illustrate how one might do this:

Comments on its own Bookishness

Or in this case, TTRPG-ishness. One of the easiest ways to do this is to have the PCs play a tabletop roleplaying game. If you have two RPG campaigns with the same players, you could even have one campaign be played within the world of the other (which would also count for player as character).

Another, subtler way would be to incorporate other (non-roleplaying) tabletop games into your RPG sessions. If the PCs are playing poker or chess, actually play poker or chess (this can backfire, don’t do this without checking with your players). In this way, you draw attention to the fact that even when the PCs are not playing a game, the players still are. The natural endpoint of this approach would be something like a game about professional poker players which uses poker as a central resolution mechanic for events in the PCs’ lives.

Plays with Language

Books are a linguistic format which deliver information through the written word, and messing with or disrupting that method of information delivery is a good way to make the reader think more critically about how language can be used to construct meaning.

TTRPGs are also primarily a linguistic format, using both the spoken word (the conversation between the participants, unless you’re doing PBP) and the written word (of the rulebook). While spontaneously talking in gibberish might frustrate the other participants in a given tabletop role-playing situation, there are still opportunities to mess with the conventions of language, like changing how we think about conventional terms of the hobby (“Player,” “PC,” “Gamemaster,” “NPC,” “AC,” “HP,” “Level”). Recall how the game Undertale surprises the player by revealing at the end of the game that the markers of advancement, XP and LV, actually stand for “Execution Points” and “Level of Violence.”

On the other hand, while books construct meaning through language, TTRPGs also construct meaning through the actual procedures of gameplay. Ways of playing with/disrupting these would be creating mechanics which describe or formalize procedures in the real world (Ironsworn does this with beginning and end of session moves, though not for a particularly postmodern purpose), take place entirely outside of the bounds of traditional “play” (i.e. a TTRPG about trying to set up a time to play a TTRPG with your friends that you will never actually play), or with mechanics for impossible things in the real world (something like “if the real world ends while your PC casts this spell, they get +1 to effect.”)

Includes Fictional Artifacts

Lots of postmodern literature includes epistolary elements, like letters. This may seem to enhance the reader’s immersion in the story, but the obvious artifice (“there is no Jonathan Harker, so how could he have sent a letter?”) contributes to the overall impression that the work as a whole is artificial.

Using fictional artifacts in a gaming context is pretty common, though these “handouts” are generally intended to increase player engrossment in the fictional world. To incorporate this feature more overtly into your games, you might tie the actual playing of the game into the use of fictional artifacts (like a play-by-post game where players send each other messages styled to look like letters from the time period in which you’re playing).

Blurs Reality and Fiction

This is a big one, and usually what people are talking about when they say something is “meta.” Taking a page out of Who’s Lila, one of the best ways to blur reality and fiction is to allow what happens in-game and what happens out-of-game to affect one another. Normally, it’s considered best practice to keep in-game and out-of-game matters separate to avoid interpersonal conflicts, but that’s not quite what I’m saying here.

Imagine a Lovecraftian deity in a cosmic horror game who is able to “influence” the real world, changing the ambient light, sound, or temperature of the room in which the game is being played, or even forcing the session to end early. On the other hand, you could have in-game events be affected by circumstances in the real world, like PCs getting bonuses or penalties for the mental and physical states of their players. The goal here is to create an “out-of-bounds” feeling, like trawling through the files of Who’s Lila to get information to use during your playthrough: the line between what the PCs are experiencing in the fictional world and what the players are experiencing in the real one should become as blurry and indistinct as possible.

Includes Historical Falsehoods

Including historical falsehoods is oddly specific compared to the other items on the L.A. Times list. I understand what they’re going for: making a reader expect that they’re reading historical fiction, something that plausibly could have happened, and gradually realizing that they’re actually reading alternate history, something that definitely didn’t, is a very clever way of tricking the reader into realizing that both genres are equally fictional. Instead, I would say “playing with genre.”

Early D&D has an interesting relationship to this trope because it was heavily inspired by swords-and-sorcery, a genre which modern readers would locate at the intersection of historical fiction, fantasy, and sci-fi. Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, for example, take place in our Earth’s prehistory, but they also feature magic and snake-men as well as sci-fi elements like aliens. This kind of playfulness in regards to genre has become a common feature of lots of OSR fare, often referred to as a module or setting being “gonzo.”

Beyond old-school D&D, there are lots of stories, many of them apocryphal, of people being tricked into thinking they’re playing one kind of game when they’re actually playing another. Usually, this is a bad idea because calibrating the GM and players’ expectations is one of the main ways to ensure mutual enjoyment. However, if done right or done with the enthusiastic participation of the players, this is one way to add a postmodern element to your games.

Other ways to do this are to run scenarios in unexpected rulesets and settings. Stay Frosty is a game which lets you take old-school dungeons and play through them as space marines with hi-tech weaponry. Have your D&D party catapulted through time into the Lovecraftian 1920s. For a while, I’ve wanted to run Veins of the Earth with a party of modern-day government agents à la X-Files.

Overtly References Other Fictional Works

This is kind of a corollary to commenting on its own bookishness (or gamishness), and just as postmodern literature does this in a variety of ways, there are a number of ways to feature this element in your game/campaign. One is simply to reference other TTRPGs: Public Access, a horror game inspired by ‘80s and ‘90s nostalgia, has the D&D-esque Serpents & Sepulchres with its own history of Satanic Panic hysteria. A more intensive approach might take a leaf out of Umberto Eco’s book: in The Name of the Rose, a labyrinthine library is kept by the blind monk Jorge de Burgos, a reference to the author Jorge Luis Borges, his book Labyrinths, and his story “The Library of Babel.” You can use this not only for games, but also for your own campaigns, by including similar characters, locations, and plot elements across multiple different campaigns, especially if these campaigns are in different genres, especially if these references are bizarre or impossible (think Patches the Spider from the Soulsborne games, or the same characters recurring throughout history in Legend of Zelda).

Conclusion

I think inserting postmodern elements into TTRPGs is a really exciting idea that people haven’t yet embraced despite how easy it would be given the lack of traditional constraints on the medium. I hope people will use my suggestions as a jumping off point for thinking about how they can play around with their own games and mess with their fellow players/GMs, and maybe get everyone to think more critically about roleplaying games as an artform.

#orkish odyssey #osr #postmodernism #ttrpg philosophy #ttrpgs