PESA – Declaration of Holistic Adventure Gaming

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all players are created equal, that they are endowed by their willed existence with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life and Death as governed by dice and rules, Liberty of action and the pursuit of holistic adventure gaming.

Explanation

A hag is haunting Europe, the hag of holistic adventure gaming. Since time immemorial, have there been, publications, theories, games, groups and movements that attempt to divide players into groups, thereby taking basic rights from all participants of adventure games. Those basic rights, especially player’s rights, are under constant attack by a variegated multitude of actors. What are those rights we are talking about? The right to freely mix, move between and use the full measure of adventure gaming elements. But is that not only a single right? As there is a multitude of elements, the way outside and inside forces work against their free association and liberal usage is restrictive usually in a piece-wise manner. So the impression arises that multiple rights are curtailed by their many enemies each with a different reason. But in fact it is all one right: to holistically adventure-game! Let us instead of continuing the defensive, positively review the full measure of adventure gaming elements.

The declaration is divided into four parts:

I Adventure Gaming and Holistic Activities
II Enemies and Allies of the holistic adventure gamer
III On politics in adventure gaming
IV Closing Words

I Adventure Gaming and Holistic Activities

Elements of Adventure Gaming: Origins

Ever since the Reißwitzian Kriegsspiel got into the hands of a bunch of unmarried, subaltern Prussian artillery and logistics-officers, the professional simulation has become a hobby simulation, a pastime, and has transformed a countless other hobbies, itself undergoing many changes. Well-known precursors to adventure games were the many varieties of chess, travel boardgames, parlour games, alternate-world writing, superhero-, detective- and adventure comics, model railroading, and following sports‘ statistics such as is done in baseball. In fact, the numerical stat lines for baseball-pitchers might be the most direct precursor to the character sheet that has been found.

Of these changes and outgrowths the most direct ones were conflict simulations using abstracted units (later mostly hex & counter games), miniature wargames with pewter and lead miniatures and themed boardgames such as Diplomacy. From the intermixture of Kriegsspiel and Parlour Game arose Fletcher Pratt’s Naval Wargame, the first wargame to often and repeatedly attract female players, origin of the hit point and the critical hit table.
From the intermingling of Napoleonic Miniature wargaming and the Kriegsspiel tradition arose Braunstein, famous for the intentional re-invention of the non-zero-sum game and the Gamemaster (from „der Vertraute“ of the Prussian training tool) for leisure activities.
From the admixture of alternate world writing i.e. „Fantasy“, Miniature Wargaming and Hex & Counter Wargaming, Chainmail was created, so famous for it’s numerical modelling of Fantasy into the first Gygaxian Building Blocks.

From the joyful miscegenation of Diplomacy and fan-fiction writing, arose the method of Role-Assumption in the Dip-Zine-scene.

From the brew of Dip-Zine and Chainmail (or the Society of Ancients for the UK) arose the Great Kingdom campaign and before it Tony Bath’s Hyborian campaign in the UK.
From the blend of the Great Kingdom Campaign and Braunstein arose Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor, monumentally inventing the Dungeon. This invention got turned immediately into Megarry’s boardgame Dungeon!, even before the full chain reaction developed.

The full chain-reaction of course, being the alloy of Blackmoor’s refereed Dungeon and Gary Gygax’s application of the (his) building block method, most famously creating D&D. I hope the reader sees a consistent pattern here, combination leading to innovation and increased depth of the experience. Let us also note that our paragraph started with the ludo-ex-machina Reißwitz, but the Kriegsspiel itself is a compound of chess-like war-modelling (cp. Venturini) with current (at the time) advances in cartography and the idea of statistical numerical modelling itself.

Elements of Adventure Gaming: Taxonomy

Ever since the chain-reaction started we live on a post-Gygaxian world of adventure leisure activities, everything adventure-like that led up to and came after Dungeons & Dragons is now viewed through that lens, that zero point, of adventure gaming. This entails but is not limited to such colourful activities as:

• miniature painting
• miniature collecting
• Phantastik (German: creation of, interaction with, consumption & collecting of speculative fiction)
• comic-books
• hex & counter wargaming
• miniature wargaming
• themed board gaming
• Ameritrash board gaming
• Euro board gaming
• filk
• LARP
• Fanzines & APAs
• podcasting
• youtubing
• TikToking
• solo-rpging
• postal gaming
• computer gaming
• playing RPGs
• blogging
• reviewing rpgs
• reviewing modules
• DMing RPGs
• modelling (crafting) terrain
• sewing costumes
• building GunPla
• thinking about gaming
• talking about gaming
• visiting conventions
• reading and watching adventure gaming content
• organizing adventure gaming clubs or events
• think about and debate historical population desnities
• think about and debate ancient & mecieval coinage and its potential modelling
• etc.

This of course is a laundry list of activities that all can spring up in adventure gaming leisure time. Not all of them are equal in scope or whether they might be grouped or are in fact part of one of the other entries (ontologically). Let us just remind everybody that all these and more activities can be joyful and worthwhile activities unto themselves, but can be even more so if combined to work on a single project. And this is in fact the hag that is haunting Europe: Holistic Adventure Gaming is the right to bring any of these activities into an ongoing adventure gaming campaign! But such a simple wish is fraught with risk, risk of utter arbitrariness and lack of focus.

And exactly such are the arguments by some of those groups who want to take and curtail that basic right & freedom. But if applied correctly, that basic right to HAG can, will and does lead to the greatest heights of enjoyment and community attainable! Depth and meaning will strengthen campaign and character, beyond what any particularism ever will lead to.

What are the pillars of such correct application? Easy, the focus must be on the Adventure Gaming Campaign itself. No activity shall be done for it’s own sake, but linked to and for the sake of the adventure gaming that is being done as a group activity among humans. More concretely we already know some of the enemies of holism try to shift the focus, so let us sharpen our view: what are crucial, basic elements of holistic adventure gaming? What are the equivalents of deejaying, MCing, writing and B-boying in Holistic Adventure Gaming? We call the following the Four Bedrocks of Holistic Adventure Gaming:

1. Playing
2. Dungeon Mastering
3. Miniature Wargaming
4. Hex & Counter Wargaming

It is clear that some each or even all activities from earlier might be done in support to one of those four Basic Elements.

Furthermore, we did not yet include a more detailed list of directly RPG-related activities that we all have a basic right to bring to the gaming table to widen & deepen the fun, depth and commitment at the gaming table. Examples are:

• create modules
• mine published modules
• run them BtB
• draw maps
• create artwork
• search / generate imagery and artwork
• administer your character sheet in off-time
• think about spell-selection
• create starships/stronghold etc. when not playing
• write in-game universe background
• read non-fiction to inform your world-building
• curate music for your sessions
• play music at your sessions
• fantasize about what will happen next time you play
• talk to others about our character(s)
• think about manners of speech of your characters or NPCs
• create cultures for your world
• economically model your player holding
• economically model your game world or part thereof
• reminisce about campaigns past
• talk in first person voice as your character during game-time
• never leave 3rd person when talking about your character
• assume the voices of NPCs as a DM
• consider special mood enhancing lighting or scents for special occasions at your table
• create and use props
• bring or prepare food with relevance to either players or characters in the adventure world
• wear a funny hat
• crack jokes
• quote Monty Python and/or Memes
• be annoyed when people quote Monty Python and/or Memes too often
• search and paint matching figurines for characters NPCs and monsters
• make plans for the future of the character you play
• write a diary for your PC
• write a chronology of campaign events
• make photos of the game table
• fully role-assume a shop-keeper
• quickly fast-forward a shopping segment of the adventure
• let players buy from the standard list, unsupervised
• play diceless
• fully model regional price increases and availability
• solve big battles narratively
• use wargames to play out big battles of your campaign
• do pre-game modelling, inventing new minigames
• come up with quick rulings on the fly
• debate martial arts and realism of a game system
• restrict your game to published content
• write letters to NPCs or players and seal them with wax or send them electronically
• learn or use a constructed language
• create building blocks yourselves
• stick to the rules
• ignore certain rules
• take the game world seriously
• include puns & linguistically smartly derived names on your game-world map
• import other games‘ rules and/or miniatures
• etc.

The Five Pillars of Adventure Gaming.

What is the razor though, with which we cut the interference and distraction from the addition? Easy, it is again the focus on the adventure gaming campaign. Below you will find the Five Pillars of Adventure Gaming that create the edifice which the campaign lives in and might be decorated. Let us remind ourselves, what is Adventure gaming about? Firstly, it is about exploration, be it on Air, Land, Sea in Space or the Dungeon Underground. Secondly, it is about problem-solving of problems that are from outside the agency of the players, but inside the agency-realm of the player characters! Thirdly, adventure is about riddles & puzzles, both literal as well as in the case of a criminal case or a scientific conundrum. And fourthly, it is about combat (no elucidation needed) and fifthly about breaking & entering the wizard tower or the arisaka arcology. If your game & modules themselves are honouring one or more of these Five Pillars, you are welcome in the house of holistic adventure gaming. If, on the other hand, you have other load-bearing-elements that have the power to overturn any of those five, then you are not participating in adventure gaming neither holistic nor otherwise! A simple example would be a game driven by the constructive element of story (as it’s proponents cannot properly define it, we shall not attempt it here, but we know it when we see it), but also including combat. The true non-adventure gamer will resolve the combat part but allow interference from the so-called story concerns. Consequentially the combat pillar bursts and the temple of adventure gaming collapses.

In conclusion, we have shown exemplarily that a myriad activities can adorn, embellish, decorate or fill the temple of HAG with meaning, depth and joy, as long as the five pillars are honoured, no other load-bearing construction is applied and the foundation is built upon the 4 historical bedrock elements. Should you yourself not engage in all four bedrocks, then you have to rely on those who did and do, do only temper with these foundations within the realms of your expertise. Similarly, not all five pillars have to be used all the time. But honoured they must be in process and in spirit. How does this look in practice? In the case of the bedrocks, should you not be interested or privy to the hex and counter gaming, than do not meddle with established practice regarding hexes and movement. Take advice from the elders, use their procedures. Second guessing hexes without understanding leads to erroneous behaviour and madness such as partial movement within a hex, the wrong application of the basic idea of unit speed, turn length and movement points and many other fallacies that obscure and mystify a clean, discretized concept. Be not like the Alexandrian. What does it then mean to honour a pillar that I do not use or am interested in? It is done easily: always construct your milieu & module such that answers concerning any of the other pillars can be generated by interpolation at best or extrapolation at worst. For example, even if you are not interested in modelling sea travel times for your game, have no vessel ever travel „at-the-speed-of-plot“. You might make up an answer at the spur of a moment, but honouring the other unused pillars means then writing down your answer and extrapolate the further consequences from that on. Or, in the easier case of interpolation, look at the distance on the map and the time used for travel, and generate the average speed of the vessel. Easily an answer then can be generated whether the vessel was delayed or somebody lied regarding the departure time and so on and so on. From these rather lofty and imprecise tenements we can already derive that in Holistic Adventure Gaming we will most often have to have some kind of maps and some kind of time records! Let this example be a lodestar for how far-reaching the five pillars and the four bedrocks are, banal as they might sound.

II Enemies and Allies of the holistic adventure gamer

Clearly, the HAG-movement is the only truly unifying and encompassing as well as player-based gaming philosophy out there, and as such is flaming across Europe, igniting embers in the downtrodden and isolated, set to burn away the inhibitions and deconstructive load-bearing elements. While we now can express what we stand for, let us not forget what historical precedence and spiteful actors have arrayed against us players.

Rune Quest-Fans

While in principle their game is 100% usable for adventure gaming, holistic and otherwise, the RQ Fans have a long-standing enmity against D&D. And suchly they more often than not have thrown out the adventure gaming with the not-D&D-bathwater. They keep claiming that no meaningful immersive or simulatory experience can be had with D&D. To deny the fellow adventure gamer the right to partake in holistic activities, to deny their existence, to claim what another group of adventure gamers does is „roll-playing“ and only they can „role-play“ is both petty, vindictive and plain wrong. Many RQ-players are standing strong on the four bedrocks, and many honour the five pillars. But just as many claim superiority and exclusivity, which is clearly unwholesome. Furthermore many of those double down on the need to separate from D&D and do not honour all the pillars anymore. From the latter mindset sprang trad gaming.

Trad Gaming extremism

The trad gamer usually is more separated from the four bedrocks and clearly has made decorations of the temple and sometimes even cardboard-standees into load-bearing elements. Fictional canon written by other men and women, group permanency, player character permanency, atmosphere & mood, shared aesthetic experiences have become so essential, that the five pillars cannot all be honoured anymore. Usually, the trad gamer will then go on to not only ignore the five pillars, but denounce them as annoying and will in many cases ridicule and defecate on them. Interestingly, player character permanency as load-

bearing element goes back even before the Perrin Conventions, as it was a cornerstone of the (2nd) Tekumel campaign as run by Phil „M.A.R“ Barker. Also, a common load-bearing element is the increased concern for a social hierarchy within the game, leading to weddings, apprenticeships and backstabbing being a cornerstone game feature from Jakalla to Vampire the Masquerade and later the Story-Gamers. Trad gamers are in the defensive in the last two decades and have a great wealth of atmosphere enhancing techniques and well developed world-building as well as memorable NPCs. Learn from then what is to learn, their decorations and embellishments can be agreeable, but never ever get fooled into their modules. AD&D 2e was mostly acted out as trad game which goes double for the official modules for it. As a group they are not well organized on the defensive and are such not dangerous anymore. Yet their cultural detritus keeps many players bogged down, unfree. Let the trad DMs wither away and recruit their players: they can have almost anything they want but character permanency. A specifically sad case are those trad gamers stuck to a specific franchise, an imaginary world not their own. Their specific canon hanging around their necks like a millstone. Help them lift it so they might escape, but many will then sit next to the stone and cry for their separation. Invite them, but leave them until they join on their own.

Story Gaming

Story games developed out of great arguments RuneQuestians had with Trad Gamers online. As such they might seem „unnatural“ as they are unthinkable without the advent of internet discussion boards or UseNet before that. But nothing in gaming is natural and the combination of two strands leading to a third is the core method of how our hobby develops (see above). The online arguments first lead to the development of the threefold model, were they separate all gaming onto either drama, game or simulation. It is easy to show that pure RQestians were the simulation proponents, protoTrad-RQians and Trads the proponents of drama and the non-participating players like D&D players were subsumed under game. The attempt itself was mostly directed at creating a sort of truce within the developing RQ-Trad split, to stand with academized slogans against D&D. As such it is an embellishment of the roll play vs role-play slurs of the 70s and 80s. But the tone was relatively civil, and the new truce between sim and drama held.

Then Ron Edwards fused sophomore college party question games like truth or dare, theodicy ruminations and middle-class moral dilemmas with trad gaming and created “narrativism”. The term nowadays is best known as story games and permanently split and alienated the sim and drama crowd from each other only shortly after they had created their truce. A new way of publication was tied to his unique art theory (aka GNS), the indie-rpg, structurally modelled after independent comics distribution. As most middle-men were cut out some individual authors could make a living, setting a precedent for other areas. As such story-gamers can be an inspiration for their distribution channels, they broke ground in educating more people about the possibility of DIY and self-publication. Apart from that, Story gamers are structurally inheriting all anti-D&D sentiments from RQ (Ron Edwards is somebody who was not let into the cool West Coast RQ group he wanted to get into and had to play Trad-style Champions in his youth), so they will spout many falsehoods about adventure games and gamers. Furthermore, they permanently damaged official D&D by indirectly influencing the design of 4th Edition D&D. With both their little publishing empire in shambles and 4e the most reviled D&D edition ever, they are no organized threat. Yet, some remnants attempt again and again to hop on other non-mainstream movements and peddle their wares and ideology. Whereas Trad gamers neglected and ridiculed the five pillars, Story gamers structurally and actively tried to undermine them. So the greatest distance must be kept to all their products and suggested activities. On the upside, many story game player are comfortable with character death, so might be viable players, once they are taught to respect the five pillars in full. On the flipside, they are the most alienated from the four bedrocks, as campaigns were basically non-existent in their tradition and as such they draw many wrong conclusions. A more recent and rather famous example was an ex-Story Gamer podcast talking about 9th level AD&D and proclaiming that „no one ever used or will use the XP for gold advancement rules into the hundreds of thousand of gold pieces“.

Traveller

A tradition of its own, stronger in the fourth bedrock than even D&D and Gygax himself, participants in this tradition are natural allies and have no history of exclusionism. In fact one might think of the Traveller tradition (extending into BattleTech and partially Shadowrun) as the most pure holistic adventure gaming tradition, as they had no big cultural shifts compared to D&D across the decades.

So only a slight warning must be given, as due to the decrease in adults who read, and an increase in streaming consumption there is a tendency for current Traveller-tradition adherents to be vulnerable to genre-media aping, leading to plain trad gaming. As they are solid in their foundations, and used to honouring all pillars, they remain stalwart allies and untapped resource of the free gamers.

OSR

The OSR itself was born out of a wish to get back to the roots of D&D, thereby reconnecting many with honouring all five pillars as well as with the four bedrocks. Sadly, this process is incomplete for many, leading to many sub-varieties and half-measures. Also as more and more money could be made, outside considerations and influences dilute the waters, making outside appearances of compatibility tenuous at best. The most dangerous are the following two developments:

Style over Substance

Calling itself other names at different points, it is easy to see that this is typical GenX call-back, where not the humane, the community or the adventure gaming campaign is the focus, but where all these are an excuse to construct a self-image by aesthetic choices (buying) and outward appearances. Those who, down in their hearts, long for substance are natural allies & recruits. There is no easy way separating the one from the other. Hopefully they will be freed from their predilection of looking in the mirror by looking into the hearts and minds of their fellow beings once given enough chances to play.

NuOSR

This group comprises an eclectic group of newcomers, latecomers, tourists as well as a smattering snake-oil-salesmen. Naturally very alienated from all the four bedrocks (not much play, no campaigns, no wargaming) Presenting themselves just as well as the Style over Substance crowd, their motivations are more varied. Greatest care must be taken to avoid both Story Gamer subterfuge, that counter-reformatory wants to undermine the pillars actively (Dungeon World et al) and the rules lite fad (too numerous to count). The rules lites are all built upon sand, not the bedrocks, and while honouring the pillars, they use cardboard to erect them. Nobody is writing poems or constructing strongholds for their name-level Into-The-Odd or Cairn characters. The wilful move into the adventure gaming space must be taken as an opening to free the players of NuOSR DMs and lead them to true holistic communities and joy.

CAG or FAG

The Classic (or Fantasy) Adventure Gaming scene is a compatible and in fact a subset of holistic adventure gaming. The CAG proponents are only self-limiting in how far they put their foundation into the four bedrocks (all the while honouring it), but do exemplary work in educating players and DMs about honouring the five pillars. They are play-centred and do not care about who purchases what. There is a tendency to overcompensate against perceived contact-poison of many activities we as holistic adventure gamers see as wholesome and fun. Especially the idea to reduce any oddness, any extravagance such as using voice changes during role assumption, using direct speech at all, modelling beyond the immediate use of the adventure is limiting the ceiling of immersion & enjoyment. All CAG play is solid, if pedestrian, HAG play, but not so the other way around. This is the critique we have: CAG is partially limiting the decoration of the temple and thus limiting player’s basic rights. Furthermore, the third and fourth bedrocks are viewed with some trepidation by some CAG actors. Instead of examining the proven games and modelling experience of the wargaming tradition, some look for an oblique salvation in games such as Adventurer Conqueror King System.

ACKS

ACKS being the re-invention of the RPG-wargaming wheel not by means of extant knowledge and honouring the elders, but by the wedding of D&D to EVE-Online and Excel-spreadsheet logic by a single man. Contrast this with the wargames of old: designed and tested by teams of highly capable, educated and dedicated individuals. Left activists like Donny the Punk or John Prados cooperating with RAND-corporation hirees and DOD contractors such as Jim Dunnigan all united by the search for truth. Compare to the results of the single-man process: a wonky NuWheel, that knows not about scale & elegance. ACKS is like coming up with a penny-farthing (highweel) in an age of E-bikes. As it (Excel-EVE war modelling) is still a bicycle we cannot disprove it being a functional vehicle, but let us shake our heads on the impracticality of it.

WotC D&D

The mainstream of D&D has, in the last ten years moved strongly towards imitation of streamed content and the platonic idea of D&D as a nerd-friendship activity, an acted-out para-social activity as a stand-in for the actual game. As such, players are at least once removed from the thing itself, if not twice. To fill this gap, to connect directly with the game, players have been taught and come to expect the game content should directly address them, based on their actions and input. Sadly, this not only disrespects at least the pillars of puzzles as well as exploration in some form, the ongoing tradition of encounter balancing and railroading storylines with plot-reveals further undermines the others in the Trad Gaming way. Still, current D&D is the newest combination yet, drawing in a totally different demographic than before. On the downside, they are greatly separated from the deeper bedrocks in consequence. Also, due to the para-social/cargo cult element of campaign play, their foundations in the first and second bedrocks is something from diluted to being a mirage. On the upside, the adventure game that is D&D is so strong, it captures those who long for it and out of imitation can grow true understanding. While Holistic Adventure Gaming can offer direct speech, impersonations, individual quests for individual character backgrounds, but this only goes as far as the pillars will carry. Mournfully we had to realize, this is not enough for many of them. There even is material alienation, in that many players of current D&D do not want to make their own characters with pen and paper without aid of the proprietary online tool. Such developments are of utmost concern and educating the youth must become a main goal of the movement for the sake of the youths own-self-empowerment.

Let HAG be a bigger tent for all joyful activities and as listed and implied. Anyone who wants to experience dramatic action, rousing speeches, fantastic miniature battles, expertly modelled economies, boardgame-tie ins, postal gaming, Braunsteins, filk-songs, props, grandiose immersion, full character freedom, interaction with an imagined world on and off the table alone and in a group: Holistic Adventure Gaming is there for you. You do not need product, image, aesthetic. Neither publisher nor author will save you, only DIY will.

Just arrive with an open mind, open heart and a steady hand for your dice and there will be a solidarity & great fun!

Miniature painting

While it is a in general a commendable activity, linked to the third stratum of bedrock, ever since CoolMiniOrNot and later with the rise of painting-YouTubers, it has in many ways become it’s own hobby. What fundamentally changed painting minis was the wide distribution of digital cameras and the rise of image boards leveraged by the JPG file format. Which is not a problem in principle, but pragmatically discourages the average gamer to act holistically. Everyone can paint, who wants to. But the rising standards the YouTubers and close-up cameras propagate create anxiety and frustration and a perfectionism in people, that we deem unhealthy for holistic gaming. A whole sub-genre of media is concerned with “piles-of-shame”, that is unpainted miniatures that make the owner sad. While this ancillary hobby will have to solve its own problems itself, from a HAG perspective we recommend to ignore 99% of the ancillary hobby and concentrate on painting table-ready miniatures, being agreeable from 1m distance and without a spotlight on them. The spiritual difference is between creating something for your game campaign and human eyes, vs creating something for the digital camera lens.

Wargamers

From our talk about the bedrocks, one would assume the wargamers to be in a state of bliss and insight beyond any doubt. But sadly, it is not so! What happened across the decades is that wargamers have so many options of fantastic games out there, that they can play just subsets of them, losing sight of how it all might fit together. While skill and openness are still abound, they have mentally followed the separation of RPG-campaigns from wargaming methods. They do not limit the players, but they self-limit themselves, they accept the artificial line between Adventure Gaming techniques. As such, much talent is lost, a great tragedy of neglect. Many do play TTRPGs, but to them it is a separate thing often. And in many ways, the loss of holistic perspective has also consequences for the wargaming hobby itself gone are the monster games of old such as the unsurpassed Empires in Arms, for example, and unrelated scenarios and tournaments without linkage among themselves are the pre-dominant playstyle both in lead as in cardboard. Some re-invention of campaign activities happens all the time, but as only few real-life wargaming clubs still exist, so are holistic perspectives waning.

III On politics in adventure gaming

The last decades have seen a fervent increase in the politization of many so-called nerd media, that as follows from our holistic viewpoint are in fact mostly adventure media. Without giving a full analysis, we want to share that we do not think it is too useful in this day and age to look at the fictional content for political judgement. Is a person who likes to play Space Marines and listens to Sabaton a militarist crypto-fascist? Is an RPG fan of Cyberpunk or RedStar a Stalinist? Do FPS games create school shooters? Quite clearly this leads nowhere, except hysteria, puritanism and sanitized content and even worse, the dilution of using extreme words for categorizing the politics of practices of people when this is actually warranted. Humans are complex beings and the interactions between actual mindset, realized, enacted politics and content of adventure media is even more complex. Those who follow and partake in honest debates about such questions know how muddy those waters are, just beginning with the question of cause and effect. Tekumel fans are not Nazis but it’s creator was one, for example.

A great amount of digital ink has been spilled to sermonize about how aesthetic changes and choices are actualizing political change. Most of these debates thoroughly lack proper analysis and just regurgitate shallow arguments. As above, the mere existence of distinct fantasy races in a game does not tell us anything about its players stance on real life racism, no matter in which direction: the corporation-supported sanitized fantasy-diversity of say a fifth edition style PC party does not consistently relate to how the consumers and participants actually treat marginalized groups in real life. And a love for Frazetta’s paintings and thusly inspired worlds has no direct link to the real-world misogyny and racism of the aficionado. Care has to be taken though, as there are efforts by extremists in the culture war to summon forth those spirits. In 95% of cases, such battles over token aestheticized virtue & vice are waged by two branches of the privileged classes: the dentist’s daughter fighting the landlord’s son, figuratively speaking. Division among the regular, okay people and especially the marginalized and poor, based on brahmin-like-purity on one hand and wilfully offensive libertinage as realization of the Randian nightmare, is a double pit-trap: If you naively try to jump over one of them, you land in the other.

Let us lay the planks of solidarity and sanity over both!

As a movement that is set to bring connection, solidarity, joy and self-empowerment we abstain from all these content-based debates unless it is a crystal clear case. Instead we have found the day-to-day impact of who plays with whom, who buys what, of how the power relationship between buyer and consumer, author and reader are has a much, much greater impact if we want to talk politics at all.

As such we deeply criticize any culture or cultural element that excludes people from adventure gaming. We have uttered again and again, the gaming table is were antifa-activist, police, neuro-divergent, worker, medical doctor, trans-person, catholic, Presbyterian, Serb, Croat, Irish, English or whoever else should peacefully sit down and play. And it should only matter how we treat each other as human beings at that table and how we master the gauntlets the module and DM throw at us.

We also deeply criticize isolation and estrangement. Whatever the reasons and forces at work, any adventure gaming practice that leads to less play we deem as bad. Consumerism, especially conspicuous consumption, products by grandstanders who do not play their own games and that then gather dust on the shelves are detrimental to holistic adventure gaming. Successful second edition Kickstarters of game settings the creator never played a meaningful campaign in between editions are politically more concerning than most actual play could be.

You are not what you buy, and you cannot buy dreams. But with holistic adventure gaming, free rules from a wiki, some dice and other humans, you can create all the dreams and adventures you ever need.

Edgelordism is not so much a problem regarding the edgelord gaming content, but the moment the edgy, crass or rude methods are used outside the game, in the interaction between humans. Some edgy remarks are low-effort baits that try to drag the US-based culture war into hobby life. This has some overlap with basic trolling which used to be (and might still occasionally be) a legitimate tactic against tone policing and drawing attention.

We warn all activists to not take any culture-war based bait, though. The United States are a very troubled civil society at the current moment and have a gigantic mental health crisis, generational wealth & opportunity gaps, a loneliness epidemic and many other troubles that especially manifest in internet discourse.

It is no secret that the authors of this document are from what is called the politically left, at least in the US spectrum. It directly follows we are in solidarity with all marginalized groups. But how one goes about it, is important: Is one signalling and grandstanding, while not acting upon one’s own beliefs? Rather be humble on big speeches or minor questions of taste & decorum, but rock-solid in actually fighting together for the rights & inclusion of marginalized humans within the hobby. And maybe even one step below: play with all kinds of people, be open and helpful, be excellent to each other. Don’t exclude, include. Naturally, the exact strategies might be up for debate. Some might want to fight specific fights against slurs & denigration. Others might think fighting the basic disintegrating effects of Social Media and online culture is the most important activity, and so on.

What we cannot stress enough though, is our conviction that the fictional content of adventure games is not the battle ground, that is a distraction. The real struggle is in how we treat each other in the time between the sessions.

Of course, this might easily the section of this declaration that ages the quickest as dangers and strategies might see dialectically driven changes beyond our current horizon.

IV Closing Words

The astute reader might already have realized: there can be holistic gaming that is not adventure gaming. And that is true. Holistic Adventure Gaming is the combination of adventure gaming and holistic approaches to the meta-hobby. While we love & learn from our holistic brethren, they can go off on tangents that do not involve other human beings at all, staying in their mind-fortresses. As our time on this planet is limited, we thusly deem the marriage of adventure gaming to holistic approaches to be the best usage of said time, combining limitless possibilities and liberty with pragmatism and concern for our friends. We invite everybody to join us!

And who knows? Maybe by wedding two or more concepts, activities or adventure streams heretofore unrelated, some of you might create a new adventure game yourself!

Don’t let anybody limit your basic rights to freely do whatever you think brings more fun to an adventure game.

PESA