THIS EPISODE COVERS DOGS IN THE VINEYARD, a 2004 game by Vincent Baker, who is better known as the co-designer of Apocalypse World, the game that the entire Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) RPG design movement is based on. Dogs in the Vineyard is no longer available for sale, for reasons that we discuss in the episode.
“Mormon Judge Dredd” – Greg Stolze
See the Wikipedia entry for Dogs in the Vineyard
See Vincent Baker’s homepage
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SHOW NOTES
These are the show notes for the episode, where we delve further into things that we don’t have time to explore in detail in the podcast itself, usually with copious links for your rabbit-holing pleasure.
Dogs in the Vineyard was not Vincent Baker’s first game: that was a little thing called Kill Puppies for Satan, what kids today would call a ‘zine’ (not a zine) which he mailed as a draft to various indie game designers around 2001, and released commercially a year later. Like Dogs in the Vineyard, it is no longer commercially available. His other games include Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, a romance-mecha game (2017), Murderous Ghosts (2017), Under Hollow Hills (2021), and of course Apocalypse World (2010), all co-designed with his partner Meguey Baker.
Apocalypse World was the first RPG we dissected, all the way back in season 1, episode 00, the preview episode we created for our first Kickstarter, before we really knew what we were doing and James still had that bad microphone.
Dogs in the Vineyard was withdrawn from sale in the mid 2010s. For this episode Greg contacted Vincent Baker to talk about that decision and you can hear his thoughts in the podcast, but in 2018 he posted on the Storygames website: “Basically, Westerns can go to hell, Utah history can go to hell, and unless i extricate Dogs in the Vineyard, it can go to hell too.” DOGS, the generic repackage of the DitV mechanics, was released in 2019 by KN Obaugh with Baker’s permission, and has been well reviewed.
(Dogs in the Vineyard has nothing to do with either Lasse Hallström’s movie My Life As A Dog (the pun on Lasse/Lassie was not intentional but works) or Iggy Pop’s song I Wanna Be Your Dog, both of which we recommend.)
On the question of the first RPG in which you make up your own skills instead of choosing from a list, James did some research (he asked social media) and the general consensus was, as he suspected, Ghostbusters (1986), although Runequest and Champions fans insist that those systems included elements of the idea alongside long lists of possible skills.
These shownotes are too long for an exploration of the American Cinematic West and the myth of American Exceptionalism, the latter very much in the news these days, but boil down to the idea that Americans are better than everyone else, because of reasons, and that means they can do whatever they want.
Likewise, this is not the place for a detailed dive into the history and theology of the Mormon faith, not least because the religion described in Dogs in the Vineyard is not explicitly Mormonism. However we do refer to the ‘Mormon massacre’, meaning the Mountain Meadows Massacre. This took place in 1857, when Mormon settlers surrounded a group of at least 120 non-Mormons, forced them to surrender, and then massacred them, sparing only the youngest children who were subsequently adopted into Mormon families. It was the worst act of domestic terrorism in the USA until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
The Book of Mormon is a stage musical by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It has been wildly successful, taking over $800m dollars worldwide. I (James) haven’t seen it and don’t intend to, after a friend described it as “astonishingly racist”.
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith is a 2003 nonfiction book by Jon Krakauer, which juxtaposes the investigation of a double murder in Utah in 1984 with the history and development of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormons. It was made into a TV limited series starring Andrew Garfield in 2022 – a little uneven but Garfield is excellent. “With great power comes a great many wives,” he doesn’t say at any point.
I was wrong: the number of Mormons in the UK is around 145,000 (2011 figures), while the number of Scientologists in the UK is claimed to be 118,000 (2004 figures).
Balance of Power is a 1985 strategy video game by industry legend Chris Crawford, depicting the cold-war geopolitics between the USA and Russia. One of its core features is the escalation/brinkmanship mechanic, which is described in the podcast. This is what happens when you blow up the world (click to enbiggen).
Interactive Fantasy was the ‘journal of roleplaying and story-making systems’ co-created by James Wallis and Andrew Rilstone in 1994. It published four issues, which can be downloaded from DriveThruRPG for free.
Interactive Entertainment Design was a quasi-journal published by and mostly written by Chris Crawford between 1987 and 1997. Groundbreaking stuff and still very readable. Crawford also founded GDC, the annual Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco.
The Colt Single Action Army, better known as the Colt Peacemaker, was the standard pistol of the US Army from 1873 to 1892 and is recognisable from a thousand westerns.
Character combat in DitV: in my playthrough of the game we played online, each person rolling physical dice on our own (real) desktops, which meant that we couldn’t see each other’s pool of dice. And yes, that does change the dynamic, but not necessarily as much as you might think: it makes it less collaborative, if that’s the way you tend to play, and changes the tactics and emphasis a little.
The menswear guru that Greg refers to is Derek Guy, who has written for most of the major papers, and who dispenses fascinating and often cutting advice on Bluesky that you should read, you scruffy git. His advice is based on style over fashion, and how to wear clothes well over both. Since following him, James has begun wearing a gilet.
At one point we mention Doomtown, where what we meant to say was Deadlands, the most commercially successful RPG set in something resembling the Old West, though far from the first: TSR’s Boot Hill dates from 1975 (only the third RPG the company published), though is mostly forgotten these days. It was created by Shane Lacy Hensley, and published by Pinnacle Entertainment in 1996. It combines the tropes of the Western with modern horror, specificially zombies and other undead, and should probably be categorised as steampunk rather than Western.
That quote about how everyone who saw the Velvet Underground started a band actually comes from Brian Eno in a 1982 interview in the LA Times: “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!” 30,000 copies is an order of magnitude more than most RPGs ever sell. A version of the same quote is sometimes used to describe the Sex Pistols gig on June 4th, 1976 at The Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, a venue with a capacity of 150 people. Among those 150 were Howard Devoto (founded the Buzzcocks), future members of Joy Division, Morrissey, Mark E Smith of the Fall, John Cooper Clarke, Tony Wilson and Martin Hannett who set up Factory Records and, er, Mick Hucknall. Tickets were 50p.
We apologise for any impudence regarding the correct pronunciation of the name of Vincent Baker’s partner Meguey, an amazing game designer in her own right. As previously mentioned we are not ones to talk, as we can’t even agree how to pronounce the name of our podcast.
We describe Dogs in the Vineyard‘s connection to Apocalypse World as “Northanger Abbey to Pride and Prejudice. The Pickwick Papers to David Copperfield. Gyo to Uzumaki”. Northanger Abbey was Jane Austen’s first completed novel (though published posthumously), a satire on gothic novels popular at the time, and while excellent in parts it is not the coherent work of genius that she would produce ten years later in Pride and Prejudice. Likewise, The Pickwick Papers has marvellous episodes that herald Dickens’ later masterworks but is very obviously written as an episodic partwork; and Junji Ito’s horror about the smell of rotting fish Gyo: Ugomeku Bukimi is a lesser work than Uzumaki despite coming out two years later… er… think we may have spoiled our analogy with this one.
HōL was a parody of early-to-mid-1990s RPGs, originally published by Dirt Merchant Games in 1994 and later by Black Dog Game Factory, part of White Wolf. Handwritten and filled with scabrous humour and asides directed to the reader, it portrays a garbage planet where PCs must fight for survival using a barely functional rules system. It is very funny, and apparently not for sale any more, which seems to be a theme of this episode.
Dogs in the Vineyard made the shortlist of the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming in 2005 (not 2004 as some sources state), alongside the board game Ticket To Ride by Alan R Moon and early internet-chat RPG Code of Unaris by Gary Pratt. Ticket To Ride won.
Upwind is Jeff ‘Blue Planet‘ Barber’s card-based Teslapunk RPG of flying ships from Biohazard Games, based on the card-centric ‘Q System’.
A Dirty World is Greg’s take on creating an escalating conflict system in an RPG ruleset.
Dark Future was Games Workshop’s 1988 ‘game of highway warfare’, designed by Richard ‘Space Hulk’ Halliwell, based on Marc Gascoigne’s unpublished cyberpunk RPG of the same name and set in a dystopian 1995. Dark Future was not a success but spawned a number of novels and fiction anthologies. The one I mention in the podcast is Route 666 by Jack Yeovil (the novel, not the short-story anthology of the same name) which indicate that the parallel universe in which it takes place seems to have split off from ours in 1854, when the story’s Mormon-proxies the ‘Josephites’ stage a massacre against other white settlers, which functions as a blood sacrifice to summon otherworldly powers. Edgar Allen Poe’s involved as well. The books are out of print but not too hard to find.
Drew Baker, Vincent Baker’s artist brother, has done a lot of nice work for Magic, Legend of the Five Rings and other games properties.
In the UK, the Beatrix Potter books have a distinctive cover style that’s is weirdly similar to DitV‘s. Well, I think so.
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is a long-running manga and anime series with a plot too improbable to explain here, but it revolves around long-running feuds punctuated by spectacular martial-arts conflict. It’s just one of many settings and genres that have been adapted to the DOGS system.
A ‘brain-burner’ is a tabletop game that requires intense focus, concentration and tactical reasoning. Any game with a BGG ‘weight’ rating above 4.0 is definitely a brain-burner. Often the complexity lies in the rules, but some brain-burner games like Go are based around simple core systems that generate a dense multitude of options and strategies. Apart from Go, the earliest is probably Rithmomachia, or what if draughts/checkers and Boethian mathematics had an orgy. The idea used to be big in RPGs: complex systems like Rolemaster and Phoenix Command had a decade of success from the early 80s to the early 90s but ebbed away in favour of less maths-intensive mechanics. Having said that, any game that requires you to read and assimilate a 460-page rulebook, or three 256-page rulebooks, is so far beyond the norm of what most people think of as a game… perhaps we’ve been burning our brains for years and didn’t notice.
Thank you for listening! The hosts of this episode were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, with audio editing by Ross and show notes by James. We hope you enjoyed it. If anything in this episode has spurred your interest then we invite you to come and discuss it on our Discord.
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