One
of the crucial things in establishing a roleplaying campaign is the
construction of a reality that will engage the players and keep them
interested; in short, a world that is well-grounded and built, from that ground,
up. A good campaign world will interconnect with itself on several layers,
supporting its elements in such a way that no-one involved in it will suddenly
stand back and say “what the-? That doesn’t make any sense!”. If this ever
happens in your game, you’ll know that it’s all over bar the shouting.
Speculative
fiction is a place to see this in action. With a created reality like Tolkien’s
Middle Earth, the world has been built in many layers upon a linguistic
foundation. If something is encountered during an adventure then there is a
word for it. Certain words and concepts imply other words and concepts, and the nascent world starts to grow from
there, generating from a series of “if that, then…” logical constraints. As
a flipside to Lord of the Rings,
Terry Brooks’ Sword of Shannara comes
up all hollow, despite using the same type of cloth. Within his world there are
Elves and Dwarves too, but there’s no rationale for them such as Tolkien
provided: they just are. It’s the
difference between mythologically-created entities and guys with pointy ears.
To
my mind this is a bit thin. If there’s no depth to the scenario then there’s no
sense of immersion into the narrative. Shortly after reading Brooks’ first (not
plagiarised at all) novel, I began to move away from fantasy novels as
entertainment and looked for more satisfying – grounded – material. This is not
to blacken an entire genre with a tar-brush; there are great fantasy writers
out there, just none who are writing these days. I’ll take Gene Wolf; I’ll take
Moorcock; I’ll take Mervyn Peake – each one of these guys has backstory built into
every one of their created environments along with the ability to make their
realities seem real.
I
read a fantasy novel by Richard Adams when I was young (perhaps too young, really, to fully understand
its implications, and not many people perhaps would call it a fantasy novel)
called Shardik. I had just finished Watership Down and was impelled into
continuing in the same vein - the last few chapters of that book were read by
me at night in bed with a torch because – despite being about rabbits, fer chris’sake! – I couldn’t
put it down. With my head on fire, I jumped straight into Shardik and found something completely different.
Shardik is set in an Iron Age-ish community in a
vaguely-European-although-possibly-Sub-continental forest, and definitely not
our world. A very large bear gets burnt in a forest fire and blunders into a
human settlement, encountering, but not killing, our protagonist. The giant
bear is a holy symbol for the tribe and they see the creature as a harbinger,
allowing it to walk amongst them and taking no retaliation when it attacks them,
or their structures. Our hero, having been spared a bloody end by means of a
paw swipe, becomes something of a ‘chosen one’ and is tasked with tending to
the bear’s wounds, something he does knowing that each moment could be his
last. From here on in, there’s religious politics, social unrest and …other
stuff. To be honest, I didn’t get much further into it; like I say, I was way
too young.
A
feature that stuck out for me though (apart from the hero’s harrowing
encounters with the bear each time he tried to change its dressings), was a
single word – “crendro”. In the world
of the book, there is a language that is highly developed: crendro is a greeting, essentially “hello”. We are told that it
comes from the same root as the people’s word for seeing, and literally means
“I see you”. This, although it doesn’t seem like much, is powerful stuff. At
one stroke, we have depth in a created world that might have just blown apart
at the seams under too much scrutiny. A single funny-sounding word lets us –
the readers – know that this is a measured, calculated and old universe of
possibilities.
Language
is fairly essential to this phenomenon, although not absolute – in essence
genre fiction is mostly a written, narrative process so it just follows. When
you watch something like “Blade Runner”
for example, it’s not just the language(s) and the funny words that hook you
in; it’s the sense that everyone has slept in their clothes and sunk into the
fabric of the rooms that they walk through. It’s not just the actors either:
most of the players in that film have never been better than what they produced
there. There’s a sense that this is all real, which is the genius of the piece.
Take
another example of world-building done badly: my personal bete noire, “Star Wars”.
This is an atrocious piece of rubbish: it’s badly thought-out; it borrows
blindly from everything without ever trying to be its own thing; and, at
bottom, it makes no sense. In that galaxy far, far away, there is demonstrably,
no Roman alphabet and there are no Arabic numerals (except when J.J. Abrams
wants to shortcut a sense of distant things getting close by means of
range-finding binoculars); and yet we have “X-wings” and “Y-wings”. Is there
tobacco? If not, why is there a “Chewbacca”? The planet of Tatooine, which was
filmed in Algeria, palpably takes its name from an old French prison there, to
where bad boys from Marseilles got shipped in the 50s to be turned into
hardened criminals. Everything about the film is strapped, or bolted on from
other things, or made up on the spur of the moment. “Darth Sidious”? Please.
What
makes “Star Wars” seem to work for
most fans is the extensive use of tropes that it borrows from a myriad other
places. Simply put, it does what other, better, movies do; it just puts them in
a different frame. “Star Wars” is
Akira Kurosawa’s “Hidden Fortress”
overlain with old storylines from pulp adventure serials as sub-plots and deus ex-machina moments. The only thing
about it that is original is the distressed state of the Rebels’ equipment,
something that can be laid directly at Dan O’Bannon’s door, a styling he used before
it in “Dark Star” and which he
carried over to “Alien” afterwards.
So, not that original in that regard either.
A
thing I used to do when I was running D&D for my cronies as a kid, was to
buy the prepared modules and then try to work them into the world that I was
building for my players. This wasn’t always easy: I knew that there was this
big Demi-Lich at the end of this particular module, but it seemed only
reasonable to me that he should be known about outside of his horrific lair. Accordingly, I seeded my world with
legends and rumours about Acererak so that, when my guys were able to confront
the “Tomb of Horrors” the place
wouldn’t seem to have sprung into being, cold, from nowhere. This didn’t always
work as well as it could have, but at least I made the attempt.
The
same thing can be said about HPL and his Mythos. Writers, especially the
Lovecraft Circle writers, were keen to borrow ideas from each other and to
extend those borrowed concepts into other interesting areas. This is fine,
until you start to pull it all together from an outside, non-literary
perspective – for roleplaying, as an instance – and you start to see how things
just don’t work so well. Sure, for Writer A it was useful to have a copy of the
Necronomicon in the community library
of Cibecue Arizona, but is that reasonable given the work’s notoriety? For a
compiler like myself, it means I have to work extra hard to make sure that that
particular fact makes sense in outlining the world of the Mythos, because –
like it or not – once it’s in print, it’s canon. Similarly, Robert E. Howard’s
assertion that all surviving copies of Die
Unnaussprechlichen Kulten have iron hasps to hold the book shut is bizarre:
no publisher in his right mind at the time of printing the book would have
signed off on such an outmoded feature. Nevertheless, there it stands, and it has to stand, and we collators have to
try and find rationales that work with the material, in order to not let such
anachronisms break the roleplaying ‘fourth wall’. Don’t get me started on the
fact that Basil Copper’s insidious Trone
Tables from The Great White Space
are written in Ogham. Just don’t.
In
many ways, the Cthulhu Mythos is no more or less bolted-on and strung together
from parts than “Star Wars” is;
however, just as the new directors are doing with the new films, the
established material can be massaged in such a way that it feels right for an audience, and that nothing jars them out of
their suspension of disbelief. As we’ve seen, a single ill-considered element
can break the entire structure, but, that being said, a well-thought-out minor feature
can make the entire construction tick over like a Formula-1 engine.
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