More Modern Thrills

During my short history of Modern Thrills it was not my intention to short change any particular medium. I had to contract quite a bit and may have left an impression that somewhat obscures the subject.

Despite my representation of Family Star and the 1930s edition of Detective, Story Papers as a whole were quite dead by about 1900 or so. And they never really were what one would call a mass medium. They were regional, for the most part, and largely not similar to today’s scandal rags at all. Our modern supermarket tabloids actually trace their lineage to movie magazines from the 1920s and the proliferation of scandal magazines in the 1950s. That they wound up looking like Story Papers is just happenstance and more the result of their aping the presentation of British newspapers than any sort of direct evolution.

Anyone who looks into the history of this form of fiction is going to incessantly encounter the terms ‘steam fed press’ and ‘rural free delivery’ as explanations for basically everything from the spread of literacy to the rise of the middle class. The long and short of the story when it comes to the history of this sort of fiction is that rural free delivery, established in 1896, compelled the Post Office to deliver mail to everyone’s homes and the steam fed press, invented on no less than a dozen dates between 1812 to 1832, made printing affordable to the common man. Before this mythical time literature was all haughty and only the elite read. Once it could be reproduced on a mass scale, greedy capitalists created sensational dreck for the masses.

It’s a nice story. And such is often the sweeping conclusion of various histories of popular fiction. It’s also patently not true.

There was a living to be made in printing up entertaining fiction from the Dark Ages on. By the time Shakespeare arrived on the scene, it was a full blown industry. The popularity of ephemeral crud was mirrored to an even greater extent in France. Whether you call such a calendar, a pamphlet or a clap board novel makes little difference. The popularity of sensational, graphic, strictly for snicks stuff was well established before steam could be fed into tubes or postmen forced to truck past chicken coops.

Reading material of no apparent uplifting value to society was available widely as an impulse buy in American stores since before the Revolution. Ben Franklin was a purveyor of the stuff—and it was an established trade then. At no time in the history of this stuff were subscription sales nor advertising an important source of revenue. So rural free delivery would have meant nothing. They were always sold as impulse buys and arrived in bulk wherever dry goods could be found. I could go on, but let me just summarize plainly: rural free delivery and the steam fed press had NOTHING to do with the spread of the popularity of this form of literature.

There is also some confusion as to what a Story Paper, a Dime Novel or a Penny Dreadful actually are. Did they or did they not have color sections, comics features and whatnot and what, if anything distinguishes them from one another and how are they further distinguished from such modern forms as comic books, clapboard novels or pulp magazines. What distinguishing and unique features one form may claim is often so overshadowed by what they share, that making such distinctions seems at best an industry for professors of literature.

This is one of the reasons I decided not to make this exclusively a comic book hero game. Or a pulp hero game. Or a dime novel game. Or manga, whatever that is. Why draw distinctions where there aren’t any? The Modern Thrills setting is as distinct and broad and well known in its conventions as any fantasy setting. Bifurcating the setting further into exclusively horror or UFO encounter or noir fragments seems to only delimit the player’s choice as to the type of character he can play. There certainly is no justification for this found in the literature, wherein spacemen, cowboys and vampires have always contemporaneously coexisted. As opposed to obsessing on oddball period details we have obsessed on defining the events that transpire when the incredible tire meets the mundane road. Interior decorating the Judge can do with his setting and the Player with his concept. We do plumbing.

Another reason we decided not to limit characters into such things as classes and levels is because they had absolutely no justification in literature. There seems to be no point in creating hierarchies of skills, stunts, spells and experience epochs when there is no evidence of any such logical progressions in the type of fiction that we are intending to simulate. If anything, the characters in this fiction seem to be ala carte, dim sum, eclectic, individualistic masterworks and not the products of kits, schools nor conventions. In those role-playing games where the attempt has been made to fit these square pegs into round holes, the result inevitably is the creation of round pegs.

All of this led me to wholesale abandon the D20 ‘open resource’ system. First off, I ‘dis-believe’ in the entire concept of an open access system. Persons who write for such are going to be perfectly married to the idea of contributing to someone else’s game and permanently prone to systemic changes in that core product—which you do not now nor ever will you ‘own’. Moreover, the system is owned by a company out to make a profit for itself and not some paternalistic entity bent on improving your stakes in life, advancing your career, promoting your product nor in any way benefiting mankind as a whole. (Look up the history of the Avanti Motor Car, if you need proof that this is a bad idea.) Second, the D20 system categorically sucks. If you can tell me what the difference between ‘spot’ and ‘search’ are, or for extra points, what distinctions there are in defining an ability as a skill, spell or feat, you should contact the designers of that system since they clearly do not have a clue. Finally, what the heck did the D20 ever do for you, other than trip your mother when she was vacuuming?

My Modern Thrills section also completely bypassed the contributions Paperbacks, Movies and Video Games have made to this particular genre of fiction. The intention of the section was to introduce the readers to forms they may not know much about and to show the connections that those forms have. TV, Movies and Video Games are top of the realm types of media which primarily draw from other forms. As opposed to creating or contributing much to the genre of Modern Thrills, their role has been primarily to exploit it. Nothing really ‘new’ is in any of them. The same at one point could have been said about the radio. Paperbacks, on the other hand, seem to be an extension of what pulp magazines used to be. After World War II paper prices quadrupled and many former pulp publishers began dumping their inventory into paperbacks. That said, the pulp publishers contribution to the paperback book industry was as bit players. Paperbacks are as old as the other forms, but have always been more varied and not exceptionally wedded to the genre of Modern Thrills, so I skipped them.

Mark Lax, Chicago 2007