POT-AU-FEU

A Free Kriegsspiel Renaissance Manifesto

by Tanaël Ghazarian, also known as Wizard Lizard

Kriegsspiel
In the XIXth century, German officers started to use modified chess pieces and boards to simulate
warfare, a game they simply called Kriegsspiel – The Game of War.
Being essentially a hack of Chess though, the board and pieces made it too unrealistic, until in 1812, a
Prussian nobleman and wargaming enthusiast called George Leopold von Reisswitz came up with a
more free-form version of the game, with tokens to represent units and a table with 3D terrain instead
of a board, to allow for more realistic troop movement, formations, etc. This quickly became a
popular game for officers of any military to play as the more open-nature of the game. Reisswitz's son
perfected the rules, most notably adding an impartial Referee called the Umpire, and used accurate
large-scale topographical maps for added immersion and realism. Later on, in 1873/75, Lieutenant
Wilhelm Jacob Meckel published two treatises with complaints about the overcomplicated rules: they
slowed down play, prevented the Referee from applying his expertise, were too rigid to model all
possible situations, and all that made officers unwilling to learn how to run it, which meant the one
unlucky sob who did learn the rules was stuck in the Referee role forever. Rings a bell?

Free Kriegsspiel
In 1876, General Julius von Verdy du Vernois adressed these issues by getting rid of all the non-
diegetic stuff: no more rules or tools, the umpire is the absolute authority and arbitrates the game as
he sees fit. It was well-received as it allowed Referees to use their own expertise and for games to be
as elaborate or as simple as required. I believe that this new approach to game design – having a
Referee use the rules to inform decisions without necessarily having to follow them to the letters,
finishes the shift from board game to wargame, and also is the first step towards adventure games.

Braunstein, Blackmoor & Greyhawk

In 1967, David Wesley started running Braunstein, an experimental-informal Napoleonic miniature
wargames where Players took the role of individual characters, essentially a proto-adventure
(roleplaying) game. Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax played in the same circles and enjoyed
Braunstein so much that they came up with their own adventure games – Blackmoor and Greyhawk.
These games were all played using Free Kriegsspiel – though random number generation and dicing
was involved, there were no rulebooks to study and the Referees often changed rules that didn't work
out or to experiment further.

Dungeons & Dragons

In 1974, D&D was published by TSR as a product of both Arneson's Blackmoor and Gygax's
Greyhawk, and other contributors from their gaming group. The game then was still played very much
in Free Kriegsspiel fashion, though its immense popularity meant that eventually, the traditional way to
learn wargame and D&D – to have an already experienced Referee teach you how to play, couldn't
sustain the number of people who got into the hobby. This contributed greatly to the variety of game
styles and games that followed as people started writing their own sets of rules and settings in the 70s
(like Tunnels & Trolls or Traveller), yet it also meant Gary and Dave started getting a lot of fan mail
from people who didn't have anyone to teach them the game (which assumed familiarity with
wargames to parse efficiently) and had questions about the rules and a need for authorial
adjudication. How should X or Y be handled? As every Player at a new table would read the rules,
debates over interpretations would come up since people didn't have the Free Kriegsspiel framework
assumption (which isn't mentioned anywhere, as obvious as it was to the authors, in D&D). While the
original gamers kept to their free-flowing style and still passed down that technique to outsiders, a
parallel and wider audience started to grow as a community around the notion that the rules would be
updated and clarified: Homes' Basic would introduce AD&D while Moldvay and Mentzer wrote their
own Basic Sets. Many exciting rules additions contributed to make D&D a less nebulous brand and
what was conceived as a toolkit to run anything became the reference in what was now called “RPGs”.
From Adventure Game to Roleplaying Game
Games are popping up left and right, very few people learn about RPGs from the original gamers
anymore, small companies become medium-sized companies and it's now pretty well established that
RPGs have rules, like board games, and a Referee, like...wargames. Except now the “so obvious
nobody states it outright” notion that the Referee comes before the rules and should really not feel bad
about changing what doesn't suit them or come up with their own stuff is mostly gone. So you've got
an ever-growing wide audience of people learning about games with one Player having a specific,
difficult-to-tackle role that has a built-in dissonance from one lacunae: they're supposed to create and
play the world, are “the law”, but also follow the rules of the game. It's as if the rules are there to stop
the Referee from controlling the whole game – as if there is a narrative being told by the Referee and
the rules is the playground where the Players get to affect that. Add to that monty haul Referees that
nurture power fantasy, killer GMs just out to dominate their friends in petty “haha, I get to kill your guy
if you don't act like I want you to” and suddenly it looks like there's a lot of problems that should be
solved by...more rules! Also, big rulebooks sell – remember these people in the 70s who sent mail for
rules clarifications? Big rulebooks don't lessen the need for clarifications. And it works well for
medium-sized publishers because they can make more books to add more details to the world and
more play options, that is, more rules, because that is where the game happens, remember? That's
why I say there's a shift from adventure game (ie: you go on adventures, dangerous journeys and
missions where you risk life and limb to reach your goals) vs roleplaying game (ie: the focus is on
being a character now – like in a movie! That comes with built-in assumptions about a story arc
instead of emergent narrative, characters only dying when “dramatically appropriate”, etc. Lots of stuff
that puts pressure on the Referee who is supposed to be impartial but also follow arbitrary rules but
also “tell his own story” if you go by typical 90s RPG advice section).

The Last Two Decades

RPGs/Adventure Games are starting to be old enough to be deconstructed and analyzed! The Forge
happens, then Storygames happen and people are talking about how to model different theories of
game design and start to use fancy words like principles of play, diegesis and external engagement to
talk about games, which is great because it means people start to be critical of every rulebook and to
understand what makes a given game do what it does at the table! There's also people getting tired of
the now corporate-funded big editions of the big game and the adjacent crunchy game books that
take hours to set up. Some of these peeps think “hey, back in the 70s/80s/when I was a kid, we used to
have way more fun playing the simpler, older stuff” and they go back to B/X or OD&D or AD&D or
Traveller. Bloggers blogged, G+ was still alive, and eventually the zeitgeist saw the emergence of the
Old-School Revolution (or Renaissance). People played the old games, or made their own in that style,
or took lessons from these games' design and made new things with it. It also was a refreshing new
step forward in developping tRPGs as a community – people noticed there was a lot to talk about
beyond character builds and “how do I make this adventure work it doesn't make sense” - stuff that
would again make everyone learn more about the hobby's nature. The OSR and associated
movements set new quality standards for the industry while simultaneously managing to push forth the
idea that really, you should go ahead and make your stuff.

Free Kriegsspiel Renaissance

There's always been people who stuck to OD&D, and these people learned from the original gamers
so they have that FK-style internalized. There's also a strong community of Traveller fans with a lot of
love for the Classic Traveller line which Mark Miller still plays (in FK-style). The new wave of the OSR
led to more minimalistic takes on rules, stripping down the unnecessary to keep the best parts of
games. The more you take away, the more you put on the Referee, the more porosity there is between
OSR and Free Kriegsspiel. G+ is dead but Discord and MeWe have solid bases, and blogs are cool
again. And people are getting interested in the earliest days of the hobby, and how that can inform
their gaming and game design today. I'm talking trusting the Referee wholeheartedly to run the world
and its inhabitants in a way that is both realistic and fun, trusting Players to be self-motivated, without
the need for an XP carrot – adventuring for its own sake and seeing where the next wonder lies. I'm
talking playing any world because the rules are all in your head, so you can dedicate all your energy
to actually playing the game – whether you're a Referee or Player. There's games coming out right
now that look bare-bones even for the OSR, that are open to interpretation enough that you have to
come up with your own way of doing things. Take back your imagination.
How to Play Any Game
Referee, read (or watch, or listen to) the world. Make it your own. Draw maps abstract or realistic,
take notes of interesting themes, places, people, things. Make or find random tables. Then, introduce
the Players to the world – they only need to know about what will be directly relevant in play, don't
exposition dump when you could already be halfway through character generation. Then, make
characters. If you're using an RPG game world, you can use pregens or a simplified version of the
game's chargen: roll stats, pick some abilities, write down some description, keep it fast and loose.
Introduce a situation to start the game, then play – it's a conversation between the Referee describing
the world to the Players – give them information so that they can make meaningful, informed decisions.
They make these decisions based on their own (characters) goals, and you reward them with
consequences, positive or negative. There is no story, only an emergent narrative. Nobody knows what
will happen next (at least, not around the Player-characters) and that's what makes the medium
unique. If you're going diceless, literally just say what happens, every time. Negotiate when unsure. If
you want to roll dice (it's fun), use them as an oracle: only ask them questions you want them to
answer for you, and commit to their answer. See where it leads. There is no story, and the world is a
real place – that Referee impartiality comes into play there, as you need to figure out what will happen
based on the fictional circumstances. The exact rules you use aren't important – if they're taking so
much space as to not be invisible, they're probably hindering your ability to make unrestrained
adjudications within a game of endless possibilities. Let rules emerge naturally through play, even
though a basic framework like “we'll use 2d6” can be reassuring. If all rules are a byproduct of play,
then you don't have to worry about them not fitting together, or being “broken” - if something doesn't
work, don't use it. This doesn't even need to be an involved process: you'll naturally forget about bad
rules and remember to use the ones that work well for your group.

Players, imagine what you would do in your character's position. Don't let them run you though – you
decide what's interesting to pursue. You are responsible for your own fun and that of the group – go
where the excitement is, trust the Referee and your fellow Players, and express yourself, be it to add to
the immersion of the experience, encourage others or let the group know of something that bothers
you. That's literally all you have to do.

I'm hoping this short-ish presentation will make people who are still on the fence about the FKR want
to check out the freedom it promises. That those who are interested in adventure games but can't be
bothered with learning rules and are willing to trust the Referee to do a better job at simulating the
world that words can, or simply don't know anything about RPGs or D&D and stumbled here (hello!)
will be reassured that things don't have to be, and won't be complicated. We can just sit down and
have fun with one of the most entertaining, immersive and powerful hobby I know of.

Further Reading
• Der Tresor, an online repository for the Free Kriegsspiel Revolution
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_4IIrBbn4ddoq-
9dYlsnaluDbJJmX20rvAKzL31vxK4/edit#heading=h.wu6hoz3jk8lv