A Small Footprint, Or A Curious Omission

I stumbled across a review of Flashing Blades by Arthur at Refereeing and Reflection: Tangled Thoughts On RPGs and Related Hobbies published about seven years ago. Here's a short excerpt.

What’s even more interesting to me than these rules themselves, however, is Pettigrew’s notes on their use. He makes the entirely fair point that they aren’t necessarily going to suit all groups – especially if you’re just running a one-shot – but for the purposes of an ongoing campaign they can add a heap of flavour. On top of that, he even makes the point that you can use them to break up periods of adventuring (with one or two adventures happening a year) and make a truly generational game, with the campaign unfolding over a span of years. This I find fascinating because it has Pettigrew enunciating, a full year before it was published, the concept of generational play over an epic span of history which became a major factor in Pendragon – thus anticipating a widely-celebrated innovation in game design and in the idea of what a campaign might cover.

I find it intriguing that FB still gets positive reviews, in this instance thirty-three years after it was released, as well as a well-deserved call-out for innovation in roleplaying games.

It's rare that I find anyone with anything bad to say about the game. Many of the retrospectives I read over the years speak highly of Flashing Blades, and the stories of different campaigns are fun to read. And that made me curious: how big a foootprint did this fun, innovative game make when it was released?

If the major roleplaying game magazines of the mid-Eighties are any indicator, Flashing Blades didn't even leave a pinky toeprint. A search of the indices of Dragon, Polyhedron, Space Gamer, and White Dwarf don't mention the game at all: no reviews, no articles, no adventures, nothing. Only Different Worlds mentions it, with reviews of the core rules and the Parisian Adventure and High Seas supplements.

That makes the game's continuing good vibes, which appear to be largely a blogosphere phenomenon, all the more fascinating forty years after its release.