RPG Errata: Immortal Lich Henry Kissinger, and Personal Games

Immortal Lich Henry Kissinger, by Graham Gentz, is an artifact of its time.

It’s hard to explain what Henry Kissinger is to people who don’t know. It’s very easy to explain who Kissinger was, but what “Kissinger” is…

Memes of Death playing a claw machine, Steven Colbert dancing in his office, and a prevailing sense of an omnipresent cruelty existing in the world; its easy to see why The Immortal Lich Henry Kissinger was made. Henry Kissinger was, in many ways, a complicated person.

Now, even saying that feels like giving too much ground to a horrible monster. Let’s not beat around the bush, Henry Kissinger did horrible things to the world. He caused millions of deaths and encouraged the oppression of countless more. Something as irrefutable as calling him human is problematic; encouraging sympathy for inexcusable acts. To even suggest there was another side to him and his actions implies that there is a worldview where his actions were acceptable.

But here’s the thing; not many people know a lot about Henry Kissinger.

Sure, you know the words Vietnam, Cambodia, The middle-east; you could even drop by the Wikipedia page and pick up some more words, but that’s all just facts. You can’t fact your way into an understanding about Henry Kissinger, his historical influence on the imperialist project of Western Society, and the cultural reaction to this influence.

Even that is a loaded phrase: “Imperialist Project of Western Society.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you might balk, or even bristle at those words. Who am I to say what’s imperialist? Am I saying the Communists should have won? That we should all be speaking Russian and be poor?

Well, we are all poor, but that’s neither here nor there.

Keris and the Dream is an RPG that is barely an RPG. It’s more of a poem; one that encourages audience participation in the form of four prompts, one of which involves drawing on the back of your hand. It uses second-person pronouns in a kind of guided meditation on your connection with the world around you and the totemic power of memory and ancestry.

Un-Navigatable is a solo RPG about the deep cringe one feels by looking back over their old blog posts. Soft Focuses is a game about another you who has ADHD. Body to Die For is an RPG about being a transgender necromancer, and the struggle between fighting for your joy and the ticking clock of mortality. Splithand Sugarbush is about sharing stories from the comfort of a northern cabin, a respite from the rest of the world.

Each of these games is fundamentally and inescapably personal.

I don’t mean personal in the artistic sense, though these are certainly that as well, I mean these are games that are clearly personal expressions of a single individual’s life. They’re not games to create your own stories in, they are letters in bottles thrown out into the digital sea. These aren’t games to play every weekend with your friends. These aren’t games about character builds or ongoing story arcs. These are interactive stories; books, even. They are ways of telling a very specific story, conveying a very specific feeling, and making it as personal as the story was to the artist.

They are windows into a specific point in time. They are poems and treatises and songs and they are distinct.

It’s a burgeoning genre in the underground RPG sphere. In every medium you have your experiments and your crowd-pleasers. You have your action movies and your film-fest sleeper hits. You have your beach-reads and your history text-books. You have your pop sensations and your classical compositions.

And every medium has the personal account. Whether an art-house indie documentary, a painfully honest ballad, or an autobiography, there are pieces of art that are just one layer less removed from the artist. “Based on a true story” is the usual tagline, as the creator struggles to put something of themselves out into the public sphere without being as gauche as publishing a therapy session. They aren’t just saying “something,” they’re saying something about themselves.

Our world has become cold and lonely. We are isolated from our neighbors in favor of online friend groups. Absent a nutritious diet of human interaction, we eat the empty calories of social media, and wonder why we are so starved for understanding and attention.

And kids these days just won’t get off my lawn!

Okay, snap out of it. Am I really going to try and tie the art of self-expression in the RPG space to late-stage capitalism?

I could, but I won’t. That’s not a very unique or unexpected connection for me to make, I feel.

What is important is these games are personal. They are a means by which an individual tells you something of themselves, their lives, their journey. Immortal Lich Henry Kissinger doesn’t get made by a professional game studio. It probably doesn’t even get made by a small indie team of two or three. It gets made because one person tried to wrap up all their feelings about this horrible person, the omnipresence of his influence, and the horrific strength of his legacy into a single primal scream of a game.

They may not even realize that’s what they’re doing. They might think it’s just an ironic joke, a final derrogitory wad spat at the fresh grave…but you don’t make that joke without some history.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of these games is that you don’t have to play them to get the message. Immortal Lich Henry Kissinger carries its message in the title. Keris and the Dream carries so much in its own writing that you cannot help but be drawn into the story, even if you don’t take part in the promts. By virtue of the taglines, you understand the struggle that Body to Die For is addressing. We all have smells and locations that affect us the same way Splithand Sugarbush affected them. Just having the concept brought to our attention is sometimes enough.

But “enough” is a nebulous term. Knowing the feeling is there is different than feeling it, deep in your bones, as you write out another journal entry. Processing our emotions and dealing with our lives is not always a simple task, and it can be hampered by the separation between performance and truth. How I feel is concrete and experiential, but how others feel will always be — in some ways — theoretical.

We can never feel exactly what (or how) others feel, but games like these do their best. They are tiny capsules of emotion, experience, and poetry. They may not be worth bringing out during games-night, but if you admire the medium of RPGs in all its varied forms, they are certainly games worth trying at least once.

And hey, you get to shout “f*** you, Henry Kissinger” in some of them. That’s flipping awesome, right?