Popular RPGs in Korea in 2018

If I were to pick three games that are most popular in Korea right now, it would be Call of Cthulhu, inSANe, and Dungeon World. They are not the only games being played now, of course, but I see people talking about those games the most often.

Call of Cthulhu

Call of Cthulhu rose to popularity due to three factors. One is obvious — around the time the game was published in Korea, the Cthulhu Mythos had become well-known. Cosmic horror themes were and are common in various cultural contents and creators are working Lovecraftian ideas into a plethora of genres. I have not read it myself but there is even a wildly popular wuxia web-novel series that uses Lovecraftian themes as the core.

Another is that Dayspring Games, the publisher of Call of Cthulhu in Korea, was very successful in marketing the game to the market, both with-in and with-out the RPG community. Before Call of Cthulhu, Dayspring Games had published Night Witches that resonated powerfully with the wave of feminist movements in Korea. The good reputation carried easily into the Call of Cthulhu campaign.

The third one might be the most interesting to people outside the Korean geek cultural sphere — Call of Cthulhu appealed to many non-traditional RPG players. Freeform role-playing has been around for decades in Korea. It’s called Keomyu here, short for “community”. The idea is similar to freeform role-playing in the anglosphere, where people role-play their characters (mostly) without mechanical framework. To my knowledge keomyu developed separately and independently from blog-based freeform roleplaying.

It affected Call of Cthulhu in that keomyu players began to adapt their characters to pre-made CoC scenarios. Playing as their own OCs made the experience powerfully emotional as there was more commitment and understanding. This translated to many CoC scenarios being written for 1–2 players that put emphasis on emotions and relationships.

Call of Cthulhu evolved following an unexpected path in Korea. Later on, many pre-made scenarios emphasized less and less on Lovecraftian themes. In a way, the game had become an adaptable vehicle for character-based storytelling.

This development is not something I have firsthand experience with. Honestly speaking, I had lost my interest in the Cthulhu Mythos and I was never a keomyu player. As such I never played Call of Cthulhu and I did not pay much attention to CoC scenarios being distributed online. All I know is secondhand observations. Still, it is an intriguing phenomenon.

inSANe

inSANe is a Japanese horror RPG about secrets and revelations. It is based on the Saikoro Fiction engine that was (to my knowledge) initially made for Shinobigami, a RPG about trust and betrayal. In inSANe, players explore various nodes of information that have shocking secrets within them. As these secrets become revealed, more nodes become available or meaningful. The goal is to find out the truth behind a mystery and come up with a solution for the coming crisis.

In my opinion, inSANe is a perfect horror one-shot game. Due to the structure of Saikoro Fiction engine, it is extremely difficult to have a bad day of gaming, regardless of the experience of players. However, coming up with a story for inSANe is unusually laborious — the GM must come up with information nodes and their secrets; how they tie to each other; how players should react to them; et cetera. It is a game where ad-lib on-the-spot storytelling is impossible.

In recognition, experienced inSANe GMs have put together dozens of scenarios and made them available on the Internet. This removed the biggest hurdle and perhaps the biggest flaw in the game and running and playing inSANe became a very easy thing to do.

One common thing between how above games became big in Korea is that they have a vast wealth of pre-made scenarios in Korea. I personally lean on the side of on-the-spot game-running, so I have not tried them myself. Still, it is readily apparent that this made playing RPGs approachable. Game-runners did not need to worry if their own imaginations and storytelling were not to par. Players did not need to worry if today’s story was going to fit what they wanted to do with their characters.

Being a curmudgeon past his expiry date, I worry if this trend will lead to new players and game-runners stopping to create their own stories. Coming up with stories on the spot is one thing I love the most about RPGs. Though this may not jive well with the background cultural attitude of Korea, I fear that toning this down may remove a particular sense of wonder to be found in playing a RPG. Is this a worthy trade for getting more people into the hobby? We’ll have to see.

Dungeon World

Dungeon World is going strong even after 6 years. The most powerful merit that Dungeon World has is that its rules are freely available online. Theoretically everyone has access to the rules text. It was the most played RPG in Korea by far for years and I am not sure if I have ever seen its popularity dip down.

There are also many Dungeon World hacks in Korean. I make it a point not to call them Powered by the Apocalypse games. Perhaps that is a derogatory point, but from what I have seen, the innovations that Dungeon World brought to the Powered by the Apocalypse engine are almost never touched. I believe it makes sense since those innovations are what the general gaming population found familiar. It is, in a way, trying not to fix what they don’t find broken.

One might notice that the reasons Call of Cthulhu and inSANe are popular in Korea is diametrically inapplicable to Dungeon World. I find this curious. They may be connected — after years of playing Dungeon World, people might have craved pre-generated scenarios that would ease the game-runner. They may be disconnected and appeal to different sections of the RPG crowd.

And Many Others

Though I notice that the above three games are the most played RPGs in Korea, there is a wide variety of games being played. I personally play Exalted primarily now and I know that my team is not the only one. Sprawl and Worlds in Peril are recent offerings in Korea and people have excitedly played those games and talked excitedly about them on the Internet. Fiasco is a fan favorite. Log Horizon has fulfilled the craving for a Japanese fantasy RPG experience. World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness have devoted and loyal followings. And there must be many more that I have missed.

One interesting thing, though…

Neither Dungeons nor Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons is curiously small in Korea. This is not saying that nobody plays D&D in Korea — in fact there are dedicated teams and there is a continuous monthly/semimonthly D&D gathering. However, unlike in other RPG communities, D&D does not dominate the market.

I still have unformed ideas about this. One easy explanation might be that D&D requires heavy text use and they are mostly untranslated, but it is not like this does not apply to other unpublished games. D&D’s aesthetics appeal strongly to video-game communities (after all, D&D spawned the fantasy video game grammar), too, which makes me wonder why D&D is not the first game everyone tries.

I’ll think more about this and make a post later.