Considering that I'm a Swedish role player writing a blog in English, I realized that is might be an idea to write something about Swedish rpg's in general. I don't remember exactly when I first played a roleplaying game, but it must have been sometime between 1989 and 1992. The game was Drakar och Demoner Expert. A game heavily inspired by Runequest (using a licenced Basic Roleplaying system), and a name that ripped of Dungeons and Dragons. I played with two friends, although we didn't really understand the rules to be honest. But my friends soon tired, and I only got to play sporadically in the coming years. In 1996 I started junior high school (högstadie in Swedish) and finally joined a regular group, and began to broaden my horizons. We strted to play other games than DoD, such as Mutant 89, Neotech and Dungeons and Dragons. I also started larping at this time.
I think this was a pretty common experience for role players of my generation. DoD was a pretty early RPG, released in 1981, and thanks to good connections with toy distributors, RPG's really hit it of in Sweden. Drakar och Demoner became a household name in the same way that Dungeons and Dragons did in America. Äventyrsspel, the company behind DoD had a near monopoly at this time, with probably like 90% of the market. The second game they released was Mutant, a post apocalyptic game with mutated humans and animals. For a long time those two Mutant and DoD was the two big games that EVERYBODY played. Now, my first interaction with Mutant was in the form of Mutant 89, where the post-ap style had started to drift into a Judge Dread inspired cyberpunk thing.
This era came to a sort of end when Äventyrsspel released Kult, a contemporary game of gnostic horror that, well, probably shouldn't have been distributed to toy stores in hindsight. Äventyrsspel lost a fair number of vendors because of this, and a moral hysteria began to rage. But Kult was popular, and was translated into many languages. This prompted Äventyrsspel to consider foreign markets, which makes sense seeing how they would be hard pressed to expand further in Sweden. As a move in this direction they released new editions of DoD and Mutant, (Mutant Chronicles and Drakar och Demoner Chronopia) with new more "edgy" settings inspired in part by Kult, but also by foreign franchisees like Warhammer 40 000.
It was my impression at least that Chronopia was really disliked by the fans, with most continuing to play in the old setting Ereb Altor. Mutant Chronicles was more popular, perhaps because it was the third setting for Mutant in just 4 years. Äventyrsspel really invested in the setting, with two collectible card games, a miniatures games and a board game. But despite this, Äventyrsspel lost customers and declared bankruptcy, except for the electronic games department, which became Paradox Interactive.
At the same time Äventyrsspels greatest competitor, Neogames, rose in prominence with their fantasy game EON. EON for me reached a peak in the quest for greater realism in games, which had dominated through out the 80's and 90's. In practice these rules was often far to cumbersome to actually use, which pushed people into adopting a more freeform style.
As I said Äventyrsspels games based on Basic Roll Playing dominated in Sweden during the first two decades. This meant that gaining XP for killing monsters or such was a completely foreign concept. In general treating rpg's as a challenge for the players to overcome was not really a thing. I think linguistics may have played a role as well. The Swedish word "spel(a)" means both game(ing) and play(ing), so the literal translation of Roleplaying game would be "Rollspels spel", which sounds redundant, and instead we simply called them "rollspel". But that term in it self only implies that you are playing a role, not anything about challenge, competition or such.
During the nineties larping became popular. It started with tabletop role players acting out fantasy larps out in the woods, and just as with the tabletop games, great focus was on realism. But rather than realizing this through more and more arcane rules, larps developed to have as few rules as possible, with everything being acted out, if at all possible. At the turn of the millennium the state of the art have moved away from fantasy, and larps are being considered as an art form, with lots of experimental settings. Larp was at that point more popular than tabletop games.
Influence from the larp scene comes back to the tabletop scene. Especially at conventions freeform roleplay took of. One off scenarios without any formal rule system, often with more serious themes, become common. The games start to focus more on relationships, specifically between the characters. And all other things are cut away. No npc's. No fantastic settings etc.
Personally I had started university at this time, and left my hometown. I played some games at conventions and was heavily involved in Vampire Larps (these tend to form a rather distinct and isolated subculture of Swedish larps).
In 2005 I moved to Lund, in large part due to all the friends I had gained from here during all those conventions. and I returned to tabletop games with a vengeance. At this point Äventyrsspel was no more, and Neogames made boring games. So we played American games like Fading Suns, and White Wolfs games. This is sort of a dark age for Swedish roleplaying games.
But somehow we rose from the ashes..
Oh yes and the name? Well Drakar och Demoner had ducks as one of its races. I don't think any of us really thought that they made much sense in the world of Ereb Altor. We wanted a serious fantasy experience and the ducks only made us think of Donald Duck. Perhaps it was because we where children. I have discovered that I care much less about appearing child like as an adult than as a teenager or preteen. But somehow anthropomorphic ducks are still a source of annoyance for me, and my regular gaming group seems to love teasing me for it. So when we was to register a team for Gothcon (an RPG convention), my boyfriend asked me what we should name it, and I replied "It should at least be no fucking ducks in the name", and he took my words somewhat literally. So when I started the blog I thought, heck why not, it is a fun name.
Oh, and I should probably apologize for all the errors regarding Swedish gaming history. It is just straight out of memory, with like zero fact checking.
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