13. Vermis I (2023)
Vermis I is a narrative art book by Plastiboo that presents itself as a strategy guide for a videogame that doesn’t exist. That game is dark, surreal and obscure in a way that seems to channel David Lynch’s later work. The central question the book asks is, “Which flesh is your flesh?” The world it conjures in answer is full of horrors.
Though not an RPG itself, Vermis represents to me something important about RPGs. For most of their existence, tabletop RPGs have been cheerfully derivative. Beginning in the 80s, there’s been a flood of games based on licenses from other media that has never let up. D&D itself is cobbled together from a pile of pulp fiction and weird comic books, and it’s an old saw that the best way to run a game is to lean into cues drawn from the favorite books or movies of the players. Now, though, the influence of tabletop RPGs seems to be flowing out into the world as fast as the world flows into RPGs. Video games, which have long used mechanical elements from tabletop RPGs, have been a primary crossroads for this development. Through the influence of the Dark Souls games and Shadowgate and the murky aesthetics of early 3D videogame RPGs from the mid-90s, Vermis inherits a larger legacy, and transcends it. Ever stranger things will come beyond this milestone.
