Slobbovia - History

History

The game first started in Killarney, Manitoba in 1969, among Venturer Scouts as a live action role-playing game. May 24, 2009 marked the 40th anniversary since the game started at a Scout Camp. The game mythos was set in a mythical land named Slobbovia, after the perpetually frozen country that occasionally appeared in Al Capp's daily comic strip, Li'l Abner.

The various regions of Slobbovia that appeared on the map were originally named after features around a local Killarney Lake: Cabinia was named after a cabin, Rabbitania after a bush where rabbits frolicked. In 1972, the game was adapted as a variant to the boardgame Diplomacy, which had reached its peak of popularity and had a convention known as "press" (press releases from the countries in play for propaganda purposes, or just plain fun) that fit in perfectly with Slobbovia. The game was chronicled in Слобинполит Журнал (transliterated from Cyrillic as Slobinpolit Zhurnal, meaning "Slobbovian political journal"). The stories were collected and printed, along with the adjudications for the game and mailed to the participants by a central gamemaster.

The game itself was simply a framework to write stories about the characters, institutions, and countries of Slobbovia. Contrasting starkly with Diplomacy, there was no way to "win" Slobbovia, and indeed, over-reliance on force ("Strumph") was looked down upon by the players. Players were free to name the countries they ruled, but more importantly played as a specific character, and not the country. This character was usually (but not always) the focus of that player's "press" (stories). Many players also developed stables of auxiliary characters about which they wrote, and sometimes the "strakh" written about these characters was more involved and entertaining than that for a player's primary character.

An important early expansion of the postal game beyond the original Canadian players and a handful of Americans was through the efforts of Charles C. Sharp, who operated for a substantial period as the sole gamemaster and publisher. When Sharp could no longer continue in those duties, the game went into hiatus for a short while before being revived as an amateur press association, APA-Slobbovia. Organized by Robert Bryan Lipton, an initial group of six fans took on rotating publishing/gamemastering duties until the game's ultimate demise. Publication under the APA was usually but not exclusively via use of mimeograph or spirit duplicator machines - it is an irony the game collapsed at the dawn of personal computers and the internet, which would have greatly eased publication burdens.

109 issues of the Slobinpolit Zhurnal were published, with a frequency that varied over the lifetime of the game. At the beginning of Charlie Sharp's stewardship, the deadlines were 3 weeks apart. The increasing volume of players' "strakh" or press, with the burden this placed on the publisher(s), caused this to go to a monthly, then eventually a bimonthly, schedule. The last few issues came out at irregular intervals.

Issues 1 through 26 were (presumably) put out by various of the original Canadian players, primarily James Ritchie and Roger Nelson with help from other classmates, and produced on the school's mimeograph. After this high school cadre went on to university, they met future players from Canada and the US through science fiction conventions. John Carroll, a student at Penn State College in the US introduced the game to their university bookstore manager Charles Sharp. It was Sharp who brought considerable development to the game, as an editor, writer and with his access to publishing equipment. Issues 27 through 41 were published by Sharp. In #41 it was announced that a triumvirate of John Carroll, Fred Ramsey and Bill Spangler was taking over publication responsibilities, but they then handed it over to the APA organized by Bob Lipton, which published the balance of the Zhurnal's long run. The last issue came out in 1984/1985.