A Bar Brawl Addendum

A while back, I posted an article about the forgotten genre of bar brawl scenarios, once a staple feature of White Dwarf. Since then, I've done further research into the topic, and I have more to share.

For starters, a few more examples of this trend. After digging up another post on the subject from Interloper Miniatures, I have discovered that - regrettably - I've overlooked another classic entry in the canon of bar brawls! White Dwarf issue 33 featured another bar brawl scenario entitled Rumble at the Tin Inn, this one for RuneQuest. In addition to showing the breadth of tabletop content that White Dwarf once covered, this gives further indication that bar brawl scenarios were so popular they warranted support for multiple different systems and settings, at least in the British scene. Furthermore, from the scans I've found, Michael Cule, the writer of this adventure, explicitly credits Lew Pulsipher's D&D bar brawl from issue 11, which further points to that scenario being our Patient Zero.

In addition to the other examples I discussed in my previous post, Interloper gives a newer example of the genre in Bust-Up at the Moon and Parrot from Fight On! magazine's issue 11 (fittingly!). I also managed to dig up a retrospective post from Graeme Davis himself, discussing A Rough Night at the Three Feathers. In it, he does in fact cite the trend of previous White Dwarf bar brawl scenarios as inspiring his work, and helpfully names a few more recent examples he's worked on - The Last Resort in Tales of Freeport, Nastassia's Wedding in Pyramid issue 19, and The Edge of Night for third edition WFRP. The latter two use the same setup of a conflict-rife situation with multiple interesting NPCs involved, but move it to different settings by placing the action at a wedding and a ball respectively. I'd be interested in seeing what other situations could lead to a classic bar brawl setup.

If Davis's thoughts on the matter were so readily available, however, it gave me another lead. I decided to go straight to the source and track down anything I could about who wrote these scenarios. In terms of who had an online presence, I could only readily find access to Alan Merrett, one of the credits for Brewhouse Bash in White Dwarf 223, and Lew Pulsipher, the writer of the first bar brawl scenario for D&D in issue 11.

But I was lucky enough to pick their brains, which dug up many interesting details.

Furthermore, I managed to dig up a copy of White Dwarf issue 11 to see the genesis of the bar brawl genre myself. In the introduction, Pulsipher mentions that he decided to base the scenario on a (presumably unpublished) Wild West adventure he had heard of at a Games Day event. So, although we do have precedent for these kinds of games before, the one in issue 11 appears to be the first example of these scenarios in the fantasy genre - something he himself corroborated in my talks with him.

He was not, however, aware of further scenarios being written with his own as a model until I brought it up to him! At the time, it wasn't exactly common practice at White Dwarf to keep writers in the loop of how their articles were received, or to reach out to them when writing derivative works. However, Merrett made it clear that the scenario was quite popular, and that he and others around Games Workshop enjoyed playing it, leading to a proliferation of similar scenarios.

What else immediately struck me about the White Dwarf article is that it appears to play more like a wargame than a traditional RPG scenario - there are only eight NPCs, while 15(!) of the bar-goers are intended to be controlled by different players. Each of these premade characters has their own goals and agenda, some of which conflict directly with those of others, and the adventure instructs each player to write down their actions and hand them to the DM without the knowledge of others at the table. This may suggest why bar brawl scenarios tend to be so chaotic and full of opposing goals, as initially, the roles of the different participants would be taken by players competing against one another.

I find this particularly interesting, because from what I've seen of British gaming, the crossover between wargames and RPGs seemed to have persisted much longer than it did across the Atlantic - for instance, there were at least attempts to ensure cross-compatability of character stats between Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Roleplay, and Rogue Trader notoriously includes many RPG-like elements. Pulsipher's scenario, then, fits naturally into this continuum - a wargame-like scenario using D&D rules (although he emphasized that the idea behind it was more to have fun enjoying the chaos caused by having multiple players involved than to win - which I feel is an admirable goal anyway!). When I spoke to him, he speculated that this may have been a result of the prominence of Avalon Hill leading to board-based wargames becoming more popular in the US than miniatures, or the greater availability of Featherstone books in Europe, but he isn't quite sure about how this came to be himself.

As for the popularity of bar brawl scenarios? Merrett believes that they caught on as much as they did because of the cross-genre universality of a rowdy bar fight. Regardless of what setting you're playing in, there's always room for a bar brawl, and the concept is immediately recognizable. He also posited their utility for RPGs as stemming from the prominence of taverns in the popular imagination of D&D as the starting point to most adventures and as a place to meet patrons, trade, rest, and acquire new skills. To that end, he believed that it was only inevitable that someone would write an adventure centered around a bar brawl - and apparently, among the Games Workshop offices, the idea was popular enough to be recycled multiple times in various forms.

The holy grail of bar brawls?

Not all these examples made it into the pages of White Dwarf. In addition to the unused Dragon Warriors entry I discussed in the previous post, Merrett revealed that Rick Priestly designed a board game version of the concept that was sold exclusively at Games Workshop's in-house bar, Bugman's Bar - and, due to such exclusivity, it's predictably rare today. Similarly, Lew Pulsipher was working on adapting his bar brawl rules to a standalone board game called Troll Tavern, but it never saw the light of day, in part because of the difficulties in adjuciating the chaos that can happen in a bar brawl without a DM.

Regardless, though, his creation definitely cemented itself as an important piece of British gaming history, and the legacy it created is undeniable.

Tomorrow, I'll post the full interview with Lew Pulsipher for the curious. And I'm still working on a related project of my own - so watch this space!