In my blog post about the furry-themed online game Sociopolitical Ramifications, I noted that I do not consider myself a furry. However, because of the theme of SPR, and its focus on roleplaying as your player character when interacting with other players, I felt that I should create an anthropomorphic critter of my own to play as, in order to get something akin to the “full experience” of the game. Thus, I came up with a character that I named “Word Weasel” (it’s a play on the term “weasel words”), with a text description explaining that he’s an “unusually large weasel, standing on his back legs”, wearing a trench coat and a hat with a “PRESS” card in the brim. When interacting with other players, I roleplayed my character as a journalist exploring the world in order to write an article about it, since that felt close enough to my real-life purposes for playing the game. The funny thing is, my main inspiration for the character is from another Swedish game, though not an electronic one.
Sweden has a long and proud tradition of creating various tabletop roleplaying games, and among the most famous is a game called Mutant. It’s possible that I will write a dedicated blog post about this game in the future, but for now, it suffices to say that it’s a game that has gone through several very different editions over the years since its initial publication in 1984. There have been some notable variations in the theme and setting of the different editions (including an attempt during the 1990s to break into the international market with the obviously Warhammer 40,000-inspired Mutant Chronicles), but usually the setting is a postapocalyptic world inhabited by humans, robots, and of course various mutated, humanoid animals.
The prevalence of the mutant animals has varied in different editions of Mutant. They began to come to the fore in the 2002 edition, Mutant: Undergångens Arvtagare (“Inheritors of the Downfall”), with one reviewer describing the aesthetic of the game as “The Wind in the Willows on speed”. The 2014 version Mutant: År Noll (which was actually published in English under the title “Mutant: Year Zero”) had a book focusing exclusively on the animals, Genlab Alfa (published in English as “Genlab Alpha”), which could be used as a standalone game if you just wanted to play as a bunch of mutant critters.
To my great regret, I have never actually been able to play any edition of Mutant, but I have certainly been aware of it, mainly by reading about it in various Swedish gaming magazines. It was in an issue of one such magazine (the venerable and now sadly deceased Codex) that I read an article describing a part of the setting of the 2002 edition. Specifically, it was about a newspaper operating in the postapocalyptic world, and the various members of its staff. The article had an illustration, drawn by Martin Bergström:
It obviously made an impression on me, since I recalled it years later when I was coming up with my SPR character. While it would have been funny to try playing the game as an angry moose carrying a grenade launcher(?), I suspect that it might have made social interactions with other players difficult. So instead I took my inspiration from the animal journalist, which the article describes as a mutated marmot named “Evald Hildning”. I suspect that the choice of animal was because the Swedish word for marmot is “murmeldjur”, and that sound sort of similar to the word “murvel”, a (usually somewhat derogatory) slang word for journalist. I went with a weasel instead, and I do think that the illustration does look sort of weasel-y.
If you want to see some interesting art depicting anthropomorphic animals living in a postapocalyptic world, I can highly recommend doing an image search for “Undergångens Arvtagare”, “Mutant År Noll” or especially “Genlab Alfa”. This page in particular has a good collection of artwork from various editions of the game (just scroll down a bit to get to the pictures). I’m personally especially fond of the illustrations by Reine Rosenberg for Genlab Alfa:
As for the Word Weasel, in the (somewhat unlikely) case that I come across another Swedish furry-themed game, I might consider reusing him there. If you happen to come across a brown-furred weasel in a trench coat, scribbling furiously in a notebook, he might just be working on another article for The Swedish Games!
