Rip It & Run! World Building…

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.