Too Many Genres

I often joke about mashing genres together. Sword and sorcery at boarding school. Totalitarian surveillance states with midnight feasts. It is an easy laugh, and a fun idea. But I rarely want to run those games for long.

I think the problem for me is that mashups tend to spend their best moment very quickly. The novelty does the work up front. Once you have clocked the joke, there is not much left for it to do. Like a bumper sticker, it is very satisfying the first time you read it, and then increasingly invisible, or potentially just irritating, every time after. That is not a criticism, exactly. I enjoy novelty as much as anyone. But I find that it doesn’t sustain my interest in play.

The genres I like, I like as they are. What draws me in is not the twist, but the texture. Sword and sorcery works because of its assumptions about danger, power, and consequence. School stories work because of their small stakes, social pressure, and quiet rebellions. Those things already have depth. They do not need to be justified by being combined with something else.

Look at my game Blaydon Grange for example. It is a school story. Not “school stories for vampires”, or “space outlaws at school”, or “magical girls in the dormitory”. All of those could be fun, and I am not opposed to them but they’re not what I am interested in exploring. I would rather do the genre straight and see what happens when you take it seriously. I quite often see a new game being advertised and get excited by the idea “Historical Adventures on the North West Frontier…” and then wince as I see “…As Mechpilots and Werewolves take on Cthulhu” or something similar.

For me, the interesting work comes from bringing something new to a familiar form, not from making the premise itself the clever part. Once the table accepts the genre on its own terms, there is room to push at its edges, to ask uncomfortable questions, or to notice things that usually get smoothed over.

Mashups are loud about what makes them different. Straight genre play is quieter, but it lasts longer. At least, it does for me.