Season 3 episode 14: Jailbreak

JAILBREAK is a one-session scenario for Unknown Armies, originally written by Greg Stolze of this parish, in 1998 as a demo adventure for conventions, and subsequently published in the One Shots adventure anthology. It has since been described as one of the great horror adventures for any RPG. Greg is, of course, one of the creators of Unknown Armies, along with John Tynes, and his insights here into how the adventure came together, its structure, how it works and how it’s played are fascinating. Enjoy the episode! 

“Keep your friends close and your enemies in a trunk in the attic” – Greg

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SHOW NOTES

These are the notes for the episode, a chance for us to pick up the threads, fill in the blanks and correct the occasional errors that we didn’t have time to pursue in the episode itself.

We previously discussed Unknown Armies in season 1, episode 13, and we weren’t just being polite to Greg in our enthusiasm for it. One thing we refer to in this episode, which has been mentioned before, is that back in the late 1990s Greg and John Tynes offered James’s company Hogshead Publishing the opportunity to publish UA 1e, and he turned it down. (Specifically I didn’t like the art and I thought it needed another draft, which Greg and John declined to do since Atlas was happy to publish it as-was. Twenty-five years later I think we both made the right choice: Hogshead would not have been a great fit for UA.)

Greg’s ‘disastrously unfun’ experience with the Paranoia RPG is described in season 3 episode 10, where we covered the Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues adventure.

SEO, ‘search engine optimisation’, is the voodoo science of manipulating content and links to improve a website’s ranking in various search engines, to bring more and better traffic to that site. Plaguing the internet since the mid-90s, these days it mostly involves trying to stay one jump ahead of Google’s changes to its algorithm, which grow increasingly unhinged, less useful, and more driven by ad sales and AI.

Chekov’s Gun is a writing principle that playwright Anton Chekov described around the turn of the 20th century, in a number of letters to young writers: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” Scholars will know that in his play The Cherry Orchard Chekov includes two rifles that are never fired, but on the other hand that kind of uncompleted action is what the play is about so he gets a pass.

Greg talks about a recenly published history of RPGs in graphic novel format. We’re aware of two of these: there’s Gamemasters, which kickstarted in 2024, and Side Quest which came out in early 2025. (There’s a third, as yet untitled, which Ken Hite and John Kovalic have been talking about doing for years, but that doesn’t exist yet. Pester them about it.)

In the episode James explains his theory of how one can map the key moments of the history of cinema, particularly the introduction of sound and the introduction of colour, onto a similar timeline of the key moments in the development of commercial video games (real-time 3D and probably intelligent character behaviour, which hasn’t arrived yet). The question is what the equivalent moments in the history of RPGs would be. There are a number of candidates (we’re not counting the wargames in the run-up to the arrival of D&D), including:

  • Adding rules and story structure (roleplaying parlour games have existed at least since the 1600s, notably at after-dinner gatherings in northern Italy; see the work of the peerless Wobbuffet for more);
  • Larp;
  • Call of Cthulhu and RPGs not being about winning;
  • Diceless games;
  • The Forge;
  • Powered by the Apocalypse; and
  • Greg’s suggestion of Mazes and Monsters, a 1981 novel by Rona Jaffe, filmed as a made-for-TV movie starring Tom Hanks (we mention the region-free deluxe Blu-ray rerelease), as the thing that pushed a branch of the RPG form towards exploring-in-costume. I am dubious, frankly. If you have theories or opinions, please come and discuss them on the LND Discord.

Greg mentions that he used to play RPGs at Jonathan Tweet‘s house while at college, which took me by surprise. I asked him about this after the recording and he told me, “I turned 19 late in 1989, so this would have been around then or 1990–91. He’d recently graduated from college and rented a house back in his hometown (Rock Island, Illinois) with a friend, Jay Ferm. He was selling life insurance as an investment as his day job while writing stuff for Ars Magica and contributing to Alarums and Excursions. A mutual brought me to a game and it just sort of escalated from there.”

Cluedo is the UK title for the game that was renamed as Clue for its American launch. The original title is a pun on ‘Ludo’, the British name for the anglicised/kiddified version of the traditional Indian game Pachisi, known as ‘Parcheesi’ in the USA.

The Devil Rides Out (US: The Devil’s Bride) is a 1968 Hammer horror film directed in the UK by Terence Fisher from a Richard ‘I Am Legend‘ Matheson script based on the Dennis Wheatley novel of the same name. With Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, a young Paul Eddington and a plot involving occult rituals and devil-summoning in the 1920s, it’s generally regarded as one of the best of the Hammer horror movies, though it was not a commercial success at the time.

Delta Green is the modern-mythos horror RPG we’ve talked about many times before, notably in season 1 episode 6.

The Dunblane Massacre: on 13 March 1996 a 43-year-old white man entered the small primary school in Dunblane, a Scottish town with a population of around 8000, and used handguns to kill 16 pupils and one teacher. It remains the worst mass shooting in British history. As a direct result of it the British government made the ownership of handguns illegal, and there has not been another school shooting in the UK for thirty years. The Port Arthur massacre took place in Tasmania around six weeks later: thirty-five people were killed. In response the Australian government massively tightened the national gun laws and ran a buyback scheme, and since then the country has averaged around one mass shooting a year. Gun bans work.

The Anna Seyfried movie about a remote house where bad things have happened but people move there anyway because property prices, right? is Things Heard & Seen (2021), which has mixed reviews, in the sense that some of them are bad and some are really bad.

Brian Snoddy’s Berni Wrightson-inspired artwork of the Rack (click the pic to see in larger glory, mild spoilers for the adventure) was the cover of the Atlas Games version of Jailbreak in the days of UA 1e. As well as being a well known RPG artist, Snoddy was one of the co-founders of Privateer Press in the early 2000s, creating well-regarded d20 material. These days he’s at Flying Frog Productions working on top-line board games like Last Night On Earth.

The ‘Jeepform’ manifesto was produced by the Vi åker jeep movement (‘We go by jeep’) within Nordic larp, advocating for a looser, more freeform, more experimental and creative form of larping. The manifesto was very influential and was shortlisted for the Diana Jones Award in 2009. Rather than linking to the whole manifesto, here is a list of the ideas that underpin Jeepform, which will give you the idea. As Greg says, we need more manifestos in game design.

James mentions Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois, and playing games for any reason than to have fun. Huizinga and Caillois were two of the first academics and intellectuals to seriously examine play and games. Their respective books (Homo Ludens (1938) and Man, Play and Games (1961)) are fundamental texts for the field but are now considered rather old-hat, a bit like trying to understand evolution by reading Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. A point both authors discuss is the idea that a games and play must be voluntary: if you’re playing a game for any reason than to have fun then it ceases to be a game in the true sense. The activity works the same way, it has the same rules, but the motivation and underlying purpose is different. Games and play are recreational by their very nature. Bernard Suits defines a game as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 1978), which leads us to lusory attitudes, but that’s a subject for another time.

Skinner Boxes and gamification are subjects we’ve discussed before, using mechanics and techniques taken from games to keep people engaged in non-game activities. Duolingo is a perfect example; as are loyalty cards and anything that involves gathering almost-worthless points and badges. The best books on the subject are Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll and You’ve Been Played by Adrian Hon, who should know is stuff because he’s one of the people who designed the very gamified Zombies Run! fitness app.

Long COVID. I (James) don’t think I’ve talked about this before, and there hasn’t been much progress in understanding it recently, let alone finding a cure, but it’s a mix of more than fifty health problems that persist long after the initial COVID infection has ended. Common symptoms include fatigue, brain fog, memory and focus problems, physical weakness, loss of stamina, and breathing and sleep problems. It presents a lot like ME. For some people it lasts a few weeks or months after recovery from COVID, for some of us it’s simply ongoing. I (James) am very lucky: I don’t show any of the physical symptoms, but my memory and focus have taken a beating, it’s like the floorspace of my mental gymnasium has been halved, I don’t have the same space to move around inside my head and bounce ideas off the walls any more. In concrete terms I used to enjoy board-games with a BGG ‘weight’ (complexity) of 3.5–3.6, but since COVID I struggle with anything more than 2.8–2.9, and it’s much harder for me to retain rules in my memory. If you are suffering from any similar symptoms then you have my sincere sympathy, please know you’re not alone, and do reach out if you want to talk about it. My email is elsewhere on the LND site, or message me via the Discord.

“People want to say what their character does and roll some dice”. These notes are too short to really get into a conversation about different styles of roleplay and the subject of players’ proximity to their characters, but if anyone knows of any writing that brings some quotable rigour to the subject, I’d be grateful to be pointed at it. Come and discuss it on our Discord.

If you enjoyed Jailbreak or our discussion of it, then these are two of the scenarios we mention that occupy a similar turf and which we think you’d enjoy too.

  • No Security by Caleb Stokes (2013), a collection of systemless horror adventures, with particular reference to Wives of March which can be bought separately.  
  • Machine Tractor Station Kharkov–37 written by Bret Kramer for Call of Cthulhu (2007), currently not available but worth hunting down a second-hand copy if you can.

Thank you for listening! The hosts of this episode were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, with audio editing by Ross and show notes by James. We hope you enjoyed it. If anything in this podcast or these notes has spurred your interest then we invite you to come and chat about it on our friendly Discord. 

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