Can your magic amulet save your Jewish village from destruction? Uncover the truth and forge alliances with soldiers, peasants, bandits, anarchists, and demons!
The Ghost and the Golem is an interactive historical fantasy novel by Benjamin Rosenbaum. It’s entirely text-based, 450,000 words and hundreds of choices. Choice of Games editor Rebecca Slitt sat down with Benjamin to talk about fantasy, reality, history and more. The Ghost and the Golem will be available on Thursday, August 8th. You can wishlist it on Steam in advance of release—it really helps.
In this game, you’re revisiting the setting that you created for your Ennie-nominated TTRPG Dream Apart. What new stories did you want to tell? How is The Ghost and the Golem building on, or in conversation with, Dream Apart?
Initially I thought of them as very much the same; I thought of The Ghost and the Golem as “the computer game version” of Dream Apart. But the differences between the media led me in radically different directions.
A tabletop roleplaying game is not a story, or even a set of stories: it’s a toolkit for creating stories. Especially the way Avery Alder and I did it with the Belonging Outside Belonging framework for Dream Askew and Dream Apart: it’s an assemblage of little snippets, sparks of ideas, open-ended prompts pointing at the beginnings of tales and tropes, narrative impulses that the players will then pick up, elaborate on, and intertwine, creating story.
Fiction is always a collaboration between author and reader, but in the case of a tabletop roleplaying game, especially one from the tradition that used to be called “narrativist” or “Story Now,” it’s a collaboration in which the players are co-authors. So much happens at the table.
This means that Dream Apart can be an ahistorical smorgasbord of shiny bits from Eastern European history. Want to be a young soldier who ran away from the czar’s army after being conscripted as a child? Cool! Want to face the threat of a pogrom against your little Jewish town? Cool! The tools are there, and what you’re creating is an on-the-fly retelling which uses tropes and themes of Jewish fantasy. So it doesn’t really matter, for Dream Apart’s purposes, that Jewish children were conscripted in Russia from 1827 to 1859, while pogroms in the modern sense didn’t begin until 1881. So the history doesn’t line up, but who cares? Dream Apart table play doesn’t have to be any more of an accurate recreation of Eastern European Jewish history than Dungeons and Dragons table play is accurately medieval. It’s about evoking a different set of fantasy tropes.
But as I started writing The Ghost and the Golem, I got less and less comfortable with this slapdash, ahistorical mashup of historical periods. The Ghost and the Golem is a story, even if it’s one with a million different variations. I’m writing all the words. And that responsibility dragged me deeper into historical research.
Part of my unease was moral and political; part of it was esthetic. To take one example: acting as if Jews were always, ahistorically, at the mercy of random pogroms from their Christian neighbors–ignoring the 800-year prologue of Poland as the “Paradise of the Jews”–is, first of all, hardly fair to the Poles. It’s also less interesting. Jewish memory sometimes treats the pogroms as inevitable, a mere prelude to an equally inevitable Holocaust, reducing history to a flat and self-defeating ahistorical shrug: “the goyim hated us.” But treating them as a specific historical development, a snowballing series of events, with forces that were agitating for them and forces that were resisting them, treating them as something that might not have happened, treating history in its surprising particulars, as something alive, as it was to the people living it… is just more interesting.
So the form of The Ghost and the Golem led me even deeper into the history, from a vague sense of Isaac Bashevis Singer-inspired “fantastical Jewish history,” to a very specific moment.
When I really dove in to my research – on everything from the source and spread of the pogroms, to the religious rules for weddings during the Counting of the Omer, to the changes in Russian Imperial regulations regarding market days – it turned out there was literally only one day–one particular Sunday in May of 1881–that this story could plausibly begin. It’s totally rooted in history, and I love that about it.
One of the first things that players will discover about this game is that the narrator is a distinct character, with their own personality and a habit of addressing the reader directly. Why did you make that choice? What did this technique allow you to do that you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise?
I was very interested in the interior life of the protagonist, and the reasons they were making the choices they did. You can only conclude so much from actions by themselves. And the game isn’t just focused on action, but also on meanings and attitudes. Potential main characters aren’t just distinguished by what they can do, but by what they believe, care about, yearn for.
So the simplest thing to do was simply to ask the protagonist: why are you doing that? What are you feeling? What do you believe?
But that presupposes a kind of dialogue. That led me to the idea of a distinct narrator, which then opened up a lot of possibilities for evoking the setting, as well as for exposition.
I’m asking a lot of the reader, dropping them into a dense, strange, and sometimes harsh period of history. The narrator can smooth that over: not just explaining things, but expressing opinions, soothing, cajoling, nagging, and sympathizing; not just telling you about the facts of the setting, but also communicating (and sometimes critiquing) its attitudes.
The game becomes a dialogue with the narrator, and its emotional arc is inflected through that dialogue.
Despite the intensely serious – and often frightening – subject matter, there are also some very funny moments in this game. At one point you refer to “that particular lightness…that sly and melancholy humor, that does not turn away from the world’s horrors, but looks them straight in the eye, and then sticks its tongue out and makes an absurd face.” Could you say more about that, and about how you went about balancing the light and the dark?
In many ways, this is the tone of the Yiddish literature I take as my model, and particularly of the works of Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Dramatic and sometimes terrible things are happening to Tevye, to Gimpel, to Yentl; but the stories are very funny. They’re not funny in a way that trivializes or mocks tragedy; they’re funny in a way that is defiantly human in the face of tragedy.
This is a deep strain that runs through Yiddish literature, and into its inheritors in American Jewish comedy. Mel Brooks isn’t making funny movies about Nazis (To Be or Not to Be) or racism (Blazing Saddles) because Nazis and racism are funny. He’s making funny movies about Nazis and racism because fuck Nazis, and fuck racism.
There’s a tension in any game about tragedy or painful topics (including such tabletop RPGs as Grey Ranks, Bluebeard’s Bride, Steal Away Jordan, or Ten Candles). Games are supposed to be fun, historical trauma is not fun, how can you make a game about historical trauma? But I think this misses two points. One is that “fun” can mean more than “superficial and entertaining”; it can be the mechanism that draws you into deeper engagement and deeper learning. The other is that a balance of tone, balancing the light and the dark, can enhance both.
As Alkhonon tells Tzirel in The Ghost and the Golem, “Everything too sad to joke about, is also too sad not to joke about, if we are to survive in this broken world.”
Another element of balance in The Ghost and the Golem is the one between fantasy and reality. On the one hand, the game is deeply grounded in its historical moment. On the other, it involves a great deal of magic: not just the titular ghost and golem, but also demons, magic amulets, and more. How did you blend those elements, and how did you maintain the emphasis on human agency throughout the story?
I would say that the story is full of magic because it’s deeply grounded in its historical moment.
The protagonist is a young Jew of the “shtetl” (a village providing crafts and services to its peasant neighbors, in the Eastern European countryside) in 1881. That’s a historical cusp, in terms of the modern worldview. Our hero could be completely immersed in the traditional world of Jewish life, which is a world both centered around scholarship and intellectual debate, and also a world full of demons and miracles. Or they could be hungering for modernity, ready to shrug that stuff off as hidebound mystical hocus-pocus, eager to become a modern European or a radical bringing about the drastic transformations of the new century…but yet not completely free of those older superstitions and attitudes.
One of the interesting challenges was writing the supernatural events the protagonist encounters in both of those modes. Depending on the attitudes you’ve shown and choices you’ve made up to that point, you’re going to be seeing the magic either through a believer’s or a skeptic’s eyes. (Actually, since this is modeled with two different opposed stats – “traditionalist vs modernist” and “mystic vs rationalist,” it means that not only could you be a thoroughly modern skeptic or a passionate traditionally religious believer in the supernatural, there’s also the possibility that you’re traditionally religious but scoff at the idea that ordinary mortals ever encounter the supernatural, or that you’re modern and Europeanized… but more Romantic than Enlightenment, so you’re open to the world being full of inexplicable wonders). It was fun to inflect the prose so that what’s happening is described in a way that evokes the protagonist’s worldview.
It may actually be possible to have a playthrough where a skeptical character is able to completely explain away everything supernatural to themselves as hallucinations and coincidences. But most playthroughs aren’t like that; usually the magic is going to get in your face! So there’s a certain irony here, in that the skeptic character is probably closest to most modern players, but the skeptic character is also probably wrong, at least with regards to whether magic is real. The traditional worldview of the shtetl is, in fact, correct.
As for human agency, The Ghost and the Golem very much adopts the model of human agency of the traditions it comes out of – Yiddish literature of the fantastic, and before that, the foundational text of Rabbinic Judaism, the Talmud (which is also full of ghosts and demons). These describe a world absolutely centered on human moral agency. Indeed, to a large extent, this tradition sees the drama of human moral agency as the entire reason for the existence of the Universe. We are always free to choose, and always confronted with difficult choices…and those choices make the world. That seems a very appropriate metaphysics to capture in a Choice of Games title!
Your novel The Unraveling has a very different setting and themes: it’s far-future science fiction, dealing with questions of body and technology. What (if anything) does it have in common with The Ghost and the Golem?
Interesting question!
Well, there is a lot of what people have called “Space Talmud” in The Unraveling; it’s set half a million years in the future, so there isn’t Judaism per se, but a very Jewish-ish mode of discourse called “the Long Conversation” figures prominently; it’s a kind of riff on Talmudic discourse. And, of course, Talmudic ways of thinking are all through The Ghost and the Golem, particularly if you crank up that Learned stat!
There’s the same mixture of humor and anxiety in the face of chaos in both works…though The Unraveling leans more toward teenage embarrassment and family chaos, and less towards mystic revelations and horror. They are also both centered on families–parents are comical, but formidable, foils in both works. They both involve childhood friends, and friendships changing over time, potentially including romantic entanglements. Both see romance as fertile ground for confusion and comedy. Both works have an ambivalent attitude towards violence: they never see it as simply an unproblematic and wholly efficacious solution, but nor do they entirely escape it.
Lastly, I guess The Unraveling and The Ghost and the Golem share a model of moral agency. The world is very big and we are small, and we never understand everything that’s going on. Nonetheless, our choices matter; the differences we make add up, and sometimes they snowball into real changes. There’s never a single right answer, or a single solution to a problem; there’s never an end to history. “It is not incumbent upon us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.” We just get to play our part, eddies in the stream. Nonetheless, the whole drama of the universe can be seen through the lens of our choices.
What’s next for you creatively? Do you have any other novels, stories, or games in the works?
I seem to be susceptible to totally immersing myself in passion projects. The Unraveling took something like twelve years from start to finish; The Ghost and the Golem took only five, so I guess I’m getting faster?
I have many other things that have been pushed to the side during that time, from a YA environmental oceangoing nanotech adventure-romp, to a darkly comic dystopian-horror tale of a world run by LLM-like AIs. I hope I can do a little more shorter form work before launching into something huge. I also think I might mine the Dream Apart/The Ghost and the Golem setting for some linear prose fiction. With fellow SF author David Moles, I am writing another tabletop RPG, set in a cosmic-SF post-Singularity future.
I also have more ideas for Choice of Games titles, though it might take me a little while to come back to it. But the experience of making one was very fun, maybe even addictive, and also I have these forty-some Ruby scripts I wrote for stats analysis and ChoiceScript code generation, and I can’t just let them languish, can I…?
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