Just released from Austin Walker 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 real long-running work that has influenced shows like The adventure zone – designed this no-saying RPG to use sentence construction to explore the thousand moons and turn archetypal protagonists into complex, flawed individuals. Since the game's announcement earlier this week, corners of the internet have exploded with excitement. But the problem is that it is still not the entire complete game. It is a version of Ashcan. But what is an Ashcan?
In board games, an Ashcan is an unfinished version of a game, complete with playable rules but without the polish, you'd typically find online or on the shelves of your friendly local game store. It's an amorphous umbrella word, representing everything from a quick 10-page description of the rules 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 cover such a wide range? The same as any century-old media term: through borrowing and evolution.
The term “Ashcan” comes from the comic book industry. According to a 1994 edition of Wizard: The Comics Magazine GuideThe term emerged in the 1930s and 40s (the golden age of comics). Ashcan copies were quick, incomplete versions of the comics, often done without lettering or coloring or sometimes just a cover with blank pages. These were made for publishers to submit to the United States Patent Office to claim copyright protections on titles and characters with an initial publication date. They were named “Ashcans” because they were not intended for public distribution, but for the Ashcan, a contemporary term for garbage.
The term was largely out of use with the change in copyright laws in 1946, but returned to circulation when comics collector and editor Bob Burden used it in 1984 to describe prototype black-and-white editions of Flaming Carrot Comics sent to friends and collaborators. The term became 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 Handkerchief.
Walkers' Realis is one of the most developed ashcans out there, mainly because he's been working on it for four years, with possible world game design (game editor Hawkins, and character sheets by Takuma Okada and Brendan McLeod.
With the Ashcan currently available for $15 on Walker's page on Walker's page, it looks like it's worth the value, even if something better is still to come.