Detroit - A Roleplaying Game

This is a (digital) reprinting of the game “Detroit”, originally published in 1982 by MASHER Games, the shortly lived independent roleplaying project of Games Workshop veteran Heap Robinson who is widely known for his work on Fresh Ice. Detroit, MASHER’s first and only game was released as a boxset in a short run of less than a hundred copies, where they lingered on shelves longer than Robinson had hoped. It was never reprinted, and indeed almost all of the original edition boxes were lost in the 1995 British Inkcrash. This reprinting – unauthorised, the copyright having lapsed due to MASHER’s dissolution and Robinson’s disappearance – has been pieced together based on scans from a recovered copy found in a tip on the industrial-suburban fringe of Liverpool. The box and all its contents were, interestingly, coated in a translucent slime no trace of which was found on the surrounding items. On the inside of the box’s lid is inscribed the words “For Wall Parker; it took my breath away.”

The game is provided here as a single pdf, containing faithfully retyped and laid out versions of the original three booklets, as well as an appendix containing images of the box itself and the various additions that came with it. Printed at the front is a foreword commissioned from fellow designer and preservationist Lichen Arrowsmith who has played a key role in the decoding and digitisation of the recovered materials. We include an edited version of the foreword in the blurb below to hopefully give you a sense of the game and see why you should give it a try.

Detroit is suitable for mature audiences and groups of 2-4 players and one GM. It is designed for mid-length campaign play, but is suitable for self-contained one-shots.

Foreword – Lichen Arrowsmith (game designer)

Detroit is a really fascinating kernel of a game hidden behind the facade of a generic looking dungeon crawler. The early 80s were something of a golden age for the experimental edge of British role-playing design- no longer satisfied with merely imitating the efforts of TSR and Chaosium in the States, designers started pushing the at the boundaries of the medium, particularly inspired by the pulp sci-fi horror that you might find in an issue of 2000 AD or decorating the latest Iron Maiden record. Detroit was made at the awkward transitional point after the beginning of the movement but before its surge of popularity: too late to be seen as new, too early to ride the tides of the market to success. Its poor marketing likely contributed largely to its failure as Heap Robinson, the lead (and in fact only) designer on the project, was inexperienced with the business side of the industry and made little effort to spread word about his project beyond asking individual shops to put up a box or two on their shelves. It’s no surprise, then, that it was almost lost until very recently and we are very lucky, I believe, to have stumbled across a still readable copy that could be digitised and preserved with modern technology.

Regarding the game itself: it is set (and good luck adapting it to other settings, the game is rather specific) in the undergrowth of the Detroit borough of London after which the more famous Michigan city was named. The player characters are variously adventurers, scoundrels and thieves, sent belowground by the Boss (capitalised in the book, and confusingly also the term it uses to refer to the game master) to look for relics of a not-so-mythical precursor city that existed on land now inhabited by Detroit. The game follows in the footsteps of its forefathers, expecting the Boss to present a labyrinthine dungeon for its players to explore, interrupted by the usual combat, traps and looting that have become such staples of the medium, almost to the point of stagnancy.

The unique feature that Robinson hoped would draw in buyers was the inclusion in the box, alongside the standard collection of cheap dice, uninspired miniatures and a “First Dive”, of a collection of video and audio tapes meant to flesh out the Below-Detroit (the name given in the book to the underground) and provide ambience during game sessions. That audiences would hence have to sit in front of their television sets and not the usual kitchen table to get his intended experience did not seem to bother Heap. It is my personal belief that he let himself become too excited with this particular inclusion, and allowed it to overshadow the actual inventive game design happening in the book that he had first written. We unfortunately cannot know if these tapes really lived up to the hype the box (with its large and enthusiastic “15 hours of taped ambience!” printed on the front in a jarring yellow font) suggests, as none of the tapes recovered were salvageable and indeed several mentioned in the contents were missing.

Mechanics are where the game is most fascinating. It used many of the same dice-based resolution mechanics found in earlier games, but scattered throughout with other, more unorthodox ideas, many of which we have seen developed and delivered on in our modern games industry. Alongside the use of dice, Robinson invokes, albeit messily, playing cards, dreidls, burning candles, dripping taps, the growth rates of various fungi (both rare and common), Fighting Fantasy books, the phases of the moon and – for the more violent scenarios – the players’ blood types. These are all haphazardly jammed into the book in a way that feels at first like an amateurish imitation of experimentalism, as if someone had seen Ten Candles and thought “I can do that”. We must remember, though, that this game came out in 1982 and likely was being written earlier. It is still amateurish, but more in the way of attempting a craft that has no foundations than attempting but failing to create something solely intending to evoke “the avant-garde”. There is no clarity of purpose here, only a frenzy of ideas that made their way into a book that had no editor.

As a designer, I find inspiration in the book’s encouragement to introduce theatricality and craft into the act of play, both as a player character and as the Boss. Sprinkled liberally throughout the margins are small instruction guides for the creation of props, background sets and miniatures. Robinson wants the players to move freely between the theatre of the mind; microcosmic representations on the table via figures and maps; and full acting and improvisation. When playing Detroit, you should expect to abandon your chairs mid dice roll to enact the violence your characters enact in the game, or to decorate your environs with the foliage and fauna of the Below-Detroit that so damply haunt the pages of the books. This blurring of lines is something that I have aspired to include in my own works, building on the work of previous lyricists and storygame designers, and I find it remarkable to see the inklings of it on pages from forty years ago.

Detroit won’t necessarily replace your go-to for your weekly game nights and long campaigns, but I think it’s still well worth a read, especially given the new digital availability that restoration has given us. Perhaps you’ll want to play a session or two, and maybe even be driven to create something yourself, following in Heap Robinson’s iconoclastic footsteps.

Content Notes

- Body Horror
- Graphic descriptions of violence
- Implied racism

Acknowledgements

Original Text – Heap Robinson
Foreword – Lichen Arrowsmith
Initial Find – Alfie
Cleaning and Restoration – Jen Kinnings
Scans – Aled Khan

For Wall Parker; it took our breath away.