Austin Walker’s newly released Realis is a high concept tabletop role-playing game about how the language we use influences our reality. The former Waypoint editor and host of Friends at the Table — a long-running actual play that has influenced shows like The Adventure Zone — designed this diceless RPG to use sentence construction to explore the Thousand Moons and turn archetypal protagonists into complex, flawed individuals. Since the game’s announcement early this week, the tabletop corners of the internet have exploded with excitement. But the catch is it’s not quite the full game yet. It’s an ashcan version. But what’s an ashcan?
In tabletop games, an ashcan is an unfinished version of a game, complete with playable rules but without the polish you’d normally find online or on the shelves of your friendly local gaming store. It’s an amorphous umbrella word, representing everything from a quick 10-page rules description in a Google Doc to (like Walker’s Realis ashcan) a 125-page behemoth with 20 playable classes, 40 NPC classes, factions, and original art. So how did it come to encompass such a wide range? The same as any century-old media term: through borrowing and evolution.
The term “ashcan” comes from the comics industry. According to a 1994 edition of Wizard: The Guide to Comics Magazine, the term came about in the 1930s and 40s (the Golden Age of Comics). Ashcan copies were quick, incomplete versions of comics, often done without lettering or coloring or on occasion just a cover with blank pages. These were made for publishers to send to the U.S. Patent Office to claim copyright protections over titles and characters with an initial publication date. They were named “ashcans” because they were meant not for public distribution, but for the ashcan, a contemporary term for the trash.
The term was largely out of use with the change in copyright laws in 1946 but returned to circulation when comic book collector and publisher Bob Burden used it in 1984 to describe black and white prototype editions of Flaming Carrot Comics sent to friends and collaborators. The term evolved into a pre-publication, mass market hype-builder in the 90s thanks to Rob Liefeld of Image Comics, who used the rarity of the Golden Age ashcans to promote Youngblood.
The term has also been used in film for similar reasons, in the same vein as unaired television pilots or proofs of concept, or for legal licensing purposes. In tabletop RPGs, a largely creator-driven medium that shares some DNA with the comics industry, the term has taken on the more contemporary definition as a step between a public beta playtest and the final product. The rules are more or less solid, though tweaks can still happen based on feedback and public opinion.
Walkers’ Realis is one of the more developed ashcans there are, mainly because he’s been working on it for four years, with layout by Possible Worlds Games (the RPG’s publisher), art by Sam Beck and Oddesque, design by Jack de Quidt, additional writing by Janine Hawkins, and character sheets by Takuma Okada and Brendan McLeod.
With the ashcan currently available for $15 on Walker’s itch page, it seems more than worth the value, even if something better yet is still to come.
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