Where have all the mercenaries gone?

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Where are all the mercenaries in TTRPGs?

What an odd question, you must be thinking. After all, is not “mercenary” (adjective), the most ubiquitous one you can apply to TTRPG characters? But I’m asking about the “mercenary” (noun) here. When do you actually get to play a honest-to-Mammon mercenary? Why instead, it seems most people you play in TTRPGs are just some kind of cop.

And why it only seems to be one kind of mercenary?

The Adventurer-Conquistador

The germ of some design work and these thoughts, was wondering why only D&D gets to be “old school” worth “reviving” through a “renaissance”?. Why it is never Traveller, Runequest, Mercenary Spies and Private Eyes? Call of Cthulhu? West End Games? Warhammer? Top Secret? Battletech? Recon? Metamorphosis Alpha? Pendragon? Why it also never seems to be any game from the 90s, despite all of the artistic movements that this artform has seen since then?

Baffling to everyone, even games like Godbound, Stars Without Number and Mothership are doing a type of deedee, reanimating it back to the conversation. The richness of the actual period of “old school” is lost, and one is that every player character¹ is some kind of adventurer-conquistador. So that is the mercenary we have.

A mercenary attitude is often the anti-social drive of such games, the reason you do things is to get the silver coin. Their take on the adventurer-conquistador is thus “gritty”, “realistic”, “morally ambiguous”, “philosophically challenging”, and many such claims. Still, it is not really that, is it? It is just — if not more — as much of a theme park experience as mainstream deedees and their adventurer-conquistador. It is just Westworld where Hasbro license is Disneyland. It is just as hyperreal entertainment, indulging in the biopolitical and necropolitical violence through the management of bodies/purging of places of the worthless-living-who-can-be-worthy-in-dying. This comes from a focus on currency divorced from the social, and a lack of — or lack of understanding of when it is present — of debt and its role in mercenary drive, adventuring endeavors and conquistador monstrosity. All the pieces are there, but floating apart: it ends with mercenaries being from capturing treasure or for patronage, when historical mercenary work it claims to be closer to was all about looting rights and where those fit in space, society and violence.

That type of mercenary is well-covered, and you can find it easily to play. But it was not the only type of mercenary in the 80s. Runequest had its share of mercenaries, but always socially connected and focused in loot. Traveller has the debt mercenary, flowing organically from the pressures of starship shares ownership and dry seasons of trade, as mercenaries as the cast of The Expanse. Top Secret and Mercenary Spies and Private Eyes and even Call of Cthulhu are about the detectives and super spies mercenaries. Or Warhammer Fantasy literal historical German mercenaries. The adventurer-conquistador was there at the postmodern inception of the artform, but it was just one of many mercenaries, in conversation with all others.

Why is this one so special to be the only one many of you will think to play?

A FISTful of Mercs

Okay, but the Old School movements do not dominate the artform, as loud as they may sometimes be. What about other mercenaries?

To be fair, the ubiquity of adventurer-conquistadors leaves a bad taste in the collective mouth. Most people contributing their own art to TTRPGs go out of their way to make games about them, and even other sorts of mercenaries fly too close to that. In fact, even Hasbro, the finest providers of adventurer-conquistador experience, are comfortably embarrassed by how successfully they do that. Despite their flagship TTRPG being the adventurer-conquistador game where every system is about adventuring-conquistadoring, they sheepishly keep this away from marketing; instead, they turn to the queer necropolitics of “you can be a gay tiefling farmer that kisses the baker” to avoid the three rulebooks and many sourcebooks in the room. So, if even them are shy about their own games, it is quite easy to understand why others would not want to get anywhere close to it.

For the most part, mercenaries and mercenaries-types have become less of an assumption or people that have games made about them. Instead they move to anti-heroic archetypes, cautionary tales and/or antagonistic forces/dark mirrors to the player characters. The only remarkable exceptions are mercenaries in mecha genre and on Flying Circus, where they are good alternative to military forces in games about hardware and the relationship with people with and through hardware.

Enter FIST.

FIST suffers from the success of being both a popular game and having got popular riding entirely on the fact it is a great game. Unusual, I know. A game you enjoy the more you spend time engaging with it artistically.

And FIST, not only is a good game, it is a good game about mercenaries. It is a focused game, that knows what it needs to do, proposes itself to do that, and disregards all distractions in favor of providing a solid base for you to build upon, and extensive. Not going into the trap of crowd-financing an art book, not bloating design that does not connect with its care, not falling in the traps of gun porn and military violence circlejerking. It is a TTRPG. About mercenaries. Every paragraph of it, every page, is about a TTRPG about mercenaries.

And these mercenaries are not adventurer-conquistadores. Well, they may, but you have to purposefully do so. Because you can. Because FIST is the ur-contemporary Mercenary TTRPG. So, of course, anyone thinking about mercenaries or designing around this space, has to be in conversation with it.

FIST draws more of old media about mercenaries (like A-Team) or media about old media about mercenaries (like Metal Gear Solid), neatly covered by the moniker of “paranomal mercenaries”: soldiers of fortune that are a bit extra in some way. You do not fit in society, you’re a little guy in a world of nation-states and corporations. You take the jobs nobody would do, nobody could take, and just because you don’t have other ways to thrive than to infringe in the monopoly of violence of those oppressive powers — and shoot your way through living yet another day. The mechanics, simple and versatile, offering you many tools and toys; it remains coherent and avoids stepping into theme park territory by being aware of the nature of a warmachine and knowing full well which fantasy of struggle, endurance and competency it seeks to fulfill.

And it is apparent how well it is nailing it the more you play it.

This changes the conversation of design in a post-FIST artform.

Walking Away From The Conquistador And Learning From FIST: Designing The War-Machine.

So what do you do if you want to make a mercenary game:

• Do some old school movement art from the 80s that is not based on a deedee.

• Learn from FIST.

• Be aware about war-machines and their place in our contemporary world.

Modern war-machines are a product of necropolitics, of extra-political dead-zones and for the void left between the armies and police forces that keep the monopoly of violence to the nation-state and the corporate world-order they back. So the war-machine, either a necropower subject or an useful agent of state-violence is a criminal element to the mainstream society.

Except for the former, they have to wrestle control of violence back to their control to even live; and thus, even breathing locks them as criminal and a vector of violence. To them, there is no alternative — it is that or be the good necropolitical subject and die to give someone else’s meaning. You don’t get to be a person, but through violence, you can demand your own lifeblood.

How FIST does its thing provides many lessons, the main one for our purpose, the power and of focusing and clarity of purpose. As such, it became clear that we wanted out designed war-machine game would focus on two elements: criminality and depersonalization. Violence, the tension and axis holding these two nodes.

From this, three sister games emerged.

• Trigger, a game about war-machines pushed into criminal depersonalization, reduced to being weapons. A game about submission, about putting yourself beneath the hand of a real person — an employer, — and get a glimpse into personhood chaffing against the chains and the euphoria of having your trigger pulled.

• Mustaqbal, a game-space, a setting, a place where criminality, money, debt, personhood collide in all the extravagance of our current transition period of neo feudalism astride climate colapse.

• Revolver Chapstick, a game about war-machines that embrace their depersonalized criminality, that embrace the violence and accept they are a weapon. It is a game about stopping to try to be human or seen as a person, about becoming the best weapon you can be and using your Swiss bank account to coerce others to giving you what you have been denied.

Of those ideas, Revolver Chapstick was the one in more communication with 80s TTRPGs. This became not only more thematically, but also mechanically. It is a renaissance of many of the mechanical trappings of some of the games I mentioned in the first section. However, the conversation puts increased focus on the depersonalization and embracing the capacity to “grow” into a better tool of violence. You are not a person, but you know what is real for the “real people” in society? Your bank account, and your credit score. Your character IS your bank account and their credit score, and their nice toys and equipment. The thing that claims to have a name, is just a human-shaped cyst that carries the cash, guns and skills related to their use.

Mercing On

It is pretty easy, under the current artistic movement, to convince yourself to not pursue something because it is either “solved” by an exemplar art piece talking about something or to consider something “done” because it is just something that has become passé to be in conversation with.

Either approach is providing destructive lies. These conversations are alive, and are happening either we are aware or not. If we feel things, if we have art about it on us, we have to put it out, we have to converse.

You may not even know what you have to say when you discuss and talk about it. Otherwise, all we have left is the silence of those talking over us; or in this case, the finger-wagging underneath the colossal shadow of the adventurer-conquistador.

1. Actually, more often than not, player. The majority of this artistic movement does not believe in player characters being actual characters, and addresses the players as unitary with them.