The Oldest TTRPG Forum on the Net

Did you know there is an online forum for tabletop role-playing games that has been around since the early 80s, and which still is active and operating?

Admittedly in a much diminished state than at it’s heyday.

I don’t know if you ever heard the term Usenet before, and even if you did, if you don’t just connect it with data piracy. Because that’s what it is mostly used for nowadays.

What it started out as were discussion forums.

Back in the late 70s, after ARPANET had been created and email had been invented, a few programmers came up with an idea for an electronic bulletin board that could be read asynchronously. This was the time when computers still were only in big institutions like universities, big companies, and the military, and the whole idea was to create “a poor man’s ARPANET”. Connections between computers were rare and expensive , but possible. So these “news” started as a way to propagate articles and messages along servers that were not constantly connected to the internet. Some of the servers involved would only connect once a day to the network to transfer messages in and out (often at night because charges were lower then). A message might travel for multiple days before it reached all nodes in the network, and some of the earliest were messages about a nascent hobby popular among the people using this network: fantasy role-playing.

From what I can see the first two messages on the brand new group net.games.frp were sent out on the 12th of January 1982.

To give you an idea just how early this was: it was before the abbreviation RPG became common, people were still talking about Fantasy RolePlaying instead, so even today the group-names use the abbreviation FRP.

It’s quite a fascinating system that over time has become ever more complex and popular, before the ascent of html, hyperlinks, and the world wide web pushed it into the seedy corners of the ‘net.

Instead of having websites, Usenet is organized in newsgroups, and those groups are organized in hierarchies. There are the so called Big Eight that have a certain standard for group creation and posting (e.g. rec. for recreational topics, and comp. for topics concerning computers), and there are others, organized in one way or another (famously alt. which had lower standards for the creation of new groups).

Messages are sent to one or more groups (crossposted), distributed around the network, and people respond to these posts. Interesting discussions and arguments ensue, people get angry, flame wars ensue, other people learn something new, weird in-jokes develop, stuff happens.

All that can be read via archives, the biggest of which is Google Groups, which both is a boon and downfall of the service: Google purchased the old newsgroup archives of DejaNews back in the 90s, and integrated it in it’s Google Groups service. In a picture-perfect example of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the users of Groups had a web interface that allowed them access to their old newsgroups, access to new groups that only existed on Google, but also allowed spammers to flood the connected newsgroups with loads of unmoderated spam. Spam that recently was quoted by them as a reason to cut the connection with Usenet, bringing this phase of the network to an end.

But Usenet still is running, and most likely will be running as long as there are people willing to run servers for it. But the biggest Usenet servers nowadays are piracy servers that keep the text-part of the Usenet as more of an afterthought. At one point someone came up with a way to use the text-only format of Usenet in a way to distribute data that was binary, i.e. not purely text. And this took over most of the system.

But I am not really interested in that and never was. What I am interested in are the fantasy roleplaying parts of that network.

rec.games.frp.*

I said that the forum has been running since the late 70s, but that’s not quite correct. The original structure of Usenet grew organically from the beginning. People were creating new groups when it suited them and it seemed logical. Which soon caused some hierarchies (specifically the net. hierarchy) to swell with groups that could barely be maintained. In a great upheaval in 1987 all the groups were renamed and restructured.

Some old hands are still angry about it and will bitch about it for days. That also is Usenet.

One can argue that the fantasy roleplaying group has existed since before that time. One also could argue that it only exists since 1987. Which still is older than the World Wide Web.

Usenet is divided into hierarchies, and the frp-hierarchy is part of the rec. (recreation-hierarchy) and .games. sub-hierarchy.

There are currently 11 .frp. groups in that hierarchy:

rec.games.frp.dnd	of course… it’s the hierarchy for Dungeons and Dragons. Always one of the biggest topics of the whole FRP forums this one got it’s own group.
rec.games.frp.misc	for basically all other kinds of discussions about roleplaying games
rec.games.frp.cyber	for cyberpunk systems (e.g. Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun).
rec.games.frp.super-heroes	for superhero games
rec.games.frp.live-action	anything LARP goes here.
rec.games.frp.announce	announcements and news about products go here
rec.games.frp.industry	for all kinds of discussions about the rpg industry
rec.games.frp.storyteller	yes, this was created when the World of Darkness was big enough to demand it’s own forum
rec.games.frp.gurps	For GURPS, this part was created because while never the most popular game, it’s fans flooded the main group with so many messages about builds that it was decided to give them their own place.
rec.games.frp.advocacy	all kinds of discussions about roleplaying games as such and how they work. This is where the Forge came from back in the day
rec.games.frp.market	I guess this is for selling stuff. I have literally never seen a message in there.

Most of these lay fallow right now, with me and a few others being the only ones posting there every once in a while. I do have to admit part of it is because I don’t want to lose the that part of ttrpg history to a random deletion request for non-use.

Other TTRPG groups

The main hierarchies are not the only ones. Most normal Usenet servers carry at least the Big Eight, but most also carry others. The big other hierarchy is alt. (…definitely not named for Anarchists, Lunatics, and Terrorists, all evidence to the contrary…), which makes it easier to create groups. This means there are a few other groups here that might be of interest, if they ever would get someone to post in them. Their structure though is not as organized as the ones in the Big 8.

alt.games.frp.adnd-util	about utilities for playing ADnD. I would say, a general groups for RPG utilities.
alt.games.adnd	for ADnD. I am not sure why this exists, maybe because the main one was too stodgy, or it was created because someone thought ADnD was sufficiently different than DnD to warrant it’s own group
alt.games.earthdawn	for Earthdawn. Remember Earthdawn?
alt.games.x-files.rpg	For the X-Files RPG. Remember that?
alt.games.whitewolf	I guess a group for White Wolf games, which is also already covered in rec.games.frp.storyteller
alt.games.tolkien.rpg	a group about playing in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth

There are also local and language dependent groups around. Many languages and regions have their own hierarchies for exchanges between locals and/or in other languages.

uk.games.roleplay	group for roleplaying in the UK
de.rec.spiele.rpg.misc	general group for discussions of RPGs in German
z-netz.freizeit.rollenspiele.dsa	originally this was an Echo in a mailbox network, by now z-netz. is a small alternative German Usenet hierarchy. This particular one about Das Schwarze Auge/The Dark Eye
pl.rec.gry.rpg	Polish-language group
es.rec.juegos.rol	Spanish-language group
se.spel.rollspel	Swedish-language group
dk.fritid.rollespil	Danish-language group
fr.rec.jeux.jdf	French-language group
it.hobby.giochi.gdr	Italian-language group
hr.rec.igre.rpg	Hungarian-language group
aus.games.roleplay	Australian group

There are more, some of which I might not even find that easy because they are not on the servers I frequent (not all servers carry all groups) or are so specialized they might not be of interest to anyone but locals (e.g. saar.rec.rollenspiele exists, but I doubt many people in Saarland (the smallest of Germany’s federal states) still know Usenet exists)

Ok, ok, but how do you actually ACCESS this Usenet thingy?

That’s a bit more difficult, but not much. It used to be ISPs were all running their own news servers, this was actually the REASON you might want internet access as a private person, but that isn’t the case anymore. Google Groups is also going away, so that’s not a real option.

An easy way to check out what is being talked about on the FRP-hierarchy is campaignwiki.org/news. This server makes it possible to read and post on his own small server via a web-interface. The server is only running roleplaying-related groups, including the global FRP-hierarchy, and a few local ones that do not get carried in many other places.

Another way to access it via web browser is via web gateways. There are a few around, e.g. NovaBBS. There are a few of those around, but they might not carry all the groups (NovaBBS e.g. only rec.games.frp.dnd and .misc, because those are the ones with most activity).

The proper way to use it is of course by getting an account on a news server and adding it to your feed reader of choice. True hardcore users use terminal-based readers like tin or Gnus, but many Email programs like Mozilla Thunderbird allow you to subscribe to newsgroups.

But where do you get a news server?

Well, there are multiple free options (these are all technically text-only, although a few have some basic binary groups that allow pictures):

campaignwiki.org/news	(Switzerland) very small server, focused on ttrpg groups, also has simple web-portal
Eternal September	(Germany) popular free access server with wide range of groups
I2PN2	simple text server
NovaBBS	text server, as mentioned above also has web-portal
Solani	(Germany) server
dotsrc	(Denmark) focused on Danish users
Agency News	(New Zealand) server
Chmurka	(Poland) basic server focused on Polish users
CSIPH	basic server
Open News Network	(Germany) focused on German users
Gegeweb	(France) focused on French users
Hispagatos	(Spain) focused on Spanish users
Pasdenom	(France) focused on French users
NNTP4	(Germany) basic server

Most of these have instructions on how to connect on their websites.

Note: This is a redo of an article I wrote 13 years ago. Originally I thought I could just let that one stand like that, but just briefly reading through it I noticed things had changed dramatically in some areas. So I rewrote the whole thing from scratch.