February Miscellany

"Poetic Dungeon and Hex Keying" (Monsters and Manuals) considers a versification of dungeon descriptions. Your humble critic believes this would be a positive development, matching the text itself to the elaborate yet formalized "control panels" and layout design of many role-playing books. If all boxed text had to be written in heroic couplets, we might not have so much of it.

"E. Gary Gygax, Social Psychologist" (Roles, Rolls, and Rules) is an older post that is at least worth a skim. One might think that the "alignment system" of Dungeons and Dragons, which classifies characters on good-evil and law-chaos axes, makes for nice memes, but doesn't seem to cohere if applied in the real world. This post attempts to match the D&D alignment system with contemporary research in social psychology, while also explaining its awkwardness.

Notebook: Leiber's Sinister California

From Mount Waterman and steep Mount Wilson with its great observatory and hundred-inch reflector down through cavernous Tojunga Canyon with its many sinuous offshoots to the flat lands and then across the squat Verdugo Hills and the closer ones with Griffith Observatory and its lesser 'scopes, to sinister, almost inaccessible Potrero and great twisting Topanga Canyons that open with the abruptness of catastrophe upon the monstrous, primeval Pacific—all of them (the hills) with few exceptions sandy, cracked, and treacherous, the earth like rock and the rock like dried earth, rotten, crumbling, and porous.

- Fritz Leiber, "The Dweller in the Depths," collected in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

On a gray day in Rhode Island, it is not so difficult to feel that one has found the setting of a Lovecraft story: that the dark and patient forests have retaken many an ill-fated farm, and some force within them is planning the next advance, that a mouldering old mansion in Providence contains a forbidden library and a sorcerer's undecayed corpse. Your humble critic writes from the southern Appalachians, which can, from time to time, suggest grim secrets in the gnarled rhododendrons of some hidden holler.

But southern California is a sunny Eden, at times almost shadowless. A visitor might wonder how such a paradise could ever seem sinister. Filmmakers from Billy Wilder to David Lynch have managed it, as have Chandler, Didion, Steinbeck, Ellroy, and, perhaps most memorably, the exiled Brecht¹, but the focus is typically on the cities, farms, and general human overlay of California. What is interesting about Leiber's "The Dweller in the Depths" is that he finds a sinister quality in the geography, describing it as "outwardly wholesome and bright, inwardly sinister and eaten-way landscape, where Nature herself presents the naïve face of youth masking the corruptions of age." Indeed, the occasional visitor easily forgets the threat of earthquakes, wildfires, droughts, and mudslides.

Leiber is one of the nimblest stylists of twentieth-century fantasy and science fiction; his prose dances and capers around that of his many plodding contemporaries. And beyond his sinister California, there was a wide and mysterious America. We catch a glimpse of it in another brief passage:

As we ate by its dancing, crackling flames, he regaled me with brief impressions of his trip west—the cold, primeval pine woods of southern New Jersey with their somberly clad inhabitants speaking an almost Elizabethan English; the very narrow dark roads of West Virginia; the freezing waters of the Ohio flooding unruffled, silent, battleship gray, and ineffably menacing under lowering skies; the profound silence of Mammoth Cave; the southern Midwest with its Depression-spawned, but already legendary, bank robbers; the nervous Creole charms of New Orleans's restored French Quarter; the lonely, incredibly long stretches of road in Texas and Arizona that made one believe one was seeing infinity; the great, long, blue, mystery-freighted Pacific rollers ('so different from the Atlantic's choppier, shorter-spaced waves')…

~~~~~

¹ Brecht's dyspeptic view of Los Angeles's gardens is impossible not to quote:

In Hell too
There are, I've no doubt, these luxuriant gardens
With flowers as big as trees, which of course wither
Unhesitantly if not nourished with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great heaps of fruit, albeit having
Neither smell nor taste.

Chesterton's Defense of Melodrama

G.K. Chesterton's first book of essays, The Defendant, contains a short piece entitled "A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls." "Penny dreadful" was the British name for a type of a serialized novel, sold a few chapters at a time in penny-priced issues, and usually dealing with violent, lurid, or horrific subject matter. These stories were controversial among the English upper classes; it was thought that the penny dreadful inspired working-class boys to lives of crime.

Chesterton's defense of penny dreadfuls is occasionally quoted as a defense of "genre fiction" or "adventure stories" in general. In truth, this is a part of the argument, put quite memorably:

People must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. [...] Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

[...]

The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared.

The larger part of Chesterton's argument, though, is a denunciation of class prejudice, albeit in terms that discomfit the democratically-spirited American reader by assuming the gap between the educated and working class, then specifically addressing the educated class as a member of that class:

There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception than the current boys' literature of the lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture.

Chesterton assumes that his audience needs no defense of the more literary adventure stories by, say, Walter Scott, or Robert Louis Stevenson. It is noted that Scott and Stevenson have chosen scoundrels for protagonists, without inflicting noticeable moral degradation on their sophisticated audiences. If the non-literary writers fail to provide subtle commentary on human character and motivation, they nevertheless offer archetypical heroes who need no such subtlety:

While the increase of the artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.

Decades later, at the very end of his career, Chesterton returned to the subject in "Fiction as Food," collected in The Spice of Life. More specifically he returned to his maxim that "literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." Having forgotten that he wrote the line in the context of class prejudice and penny dreadfuls, he provided the general argument that fiction, of whatever literary quality, meets basic needs of the human spirit:

Human beings cannot be human without some field of fancy or imagination; some vague idea of the romance of life; and even some holiday of the mind in a romance that is a refuge from life.

What your humble critic calls "genre fiction," Chesterton calls "sensational fiction," and one must admit that Chesterton has the more accurate label. Literary realism is, after all, its own genre. Fantastical stories, or science fiction stories, more often than not appeal to some effect of romance, horror, or sublimity, rather than refined artistic considerations of the particulars of human nature. Chesterton raises the standard of the sensation:

My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world. [...] A novel without any death in it is still to me a novel without any life in it. [...] On the whole I think that a tale about one man killing another man is more likely to have something in it than a tale in which, all the characters are talking trivialities without any of that instant and silent presence of death which is one of the strong spiritual bonds of all mankind. I still prefer the novel in which one person does another person to death to the novel in which all the persons are feebly (and vainly) trying to get the others to come to life.

[...] 

I believe that sensational novels are the most moral part of modern fiction, and I believe it upon two converging lines, such as make all real conviction. It is, I think, the fact that melodramatic fiction is moral and not immoral. And it is, I think, the abstract truth that any literature that represents our life as dangerous and startling is truer than any literature that represents it as dubious and languid.

Chesterton's defense of sensational literature easily applies to much classic American pulp fiction, but one must wonder how what it makes of the cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard. Lovecraft portrays human culture and morality as a pragmatic necessity but an objective falsehood: we can only be happy while we remain ignorant of the universe's amoral indifference to us and all that we hold dear. Howard, on the other hand, uses Conan and his other muscle-bound warriors to moralize the fall of Rome, condemning the decadence of all civilization, glorifying instead vitality and physical domination.

d12 Explanations for the Devil-worshipper's Unexpected Religious Pluralism

The "random table" has been an emerging poetic form since Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Good contemporary random table poems may be found in Sholtis's The Dungeon Dozen. See, for example, Sholtis's "Monumental Sculpture in the Underworld."

In that spirit, and with reference to the latest installment of the Storm King's Thunder review, your humble critic offers his own random table.

~~~~~

d12 Explanations for the Devil-worshipper's Unexpected Religious Pluralism

1. Invincible ignorance regarding Asmodeus's true aims: argues that Asmodeus is protecting everyone from the other devils.

2. Required by now-regretted pact to worship devil, but is constantly exploiting technicalities to keep other people from similar pacts.

3. Just an edgy poser.

4. "Worship" mostly consists in getting bankrupted by clever but fraudulent direct-mail scheme.

5. Believes that kindness is the truest tyranny of all.

6. Biding time for a heel turn that everyone else sees coming.

7. Actually wants to impose her beliefs, but cannot because of extreme shyness.

8. Has an intuitive understanding of the civil-religious obligations of this liberal fantasy world's social contract vis-a-vis cultural particularism.

9. Really has more of an aesthetic appreciation for the accumulated achievements of centuries of Asmodeus-worship.

10. Gaming the system: fewer Asmodeus worshippers here means less competition in Hell.

11. Experiences uncontrollable fire-sneezes on days when hell-devotionals are neglected.

12. The Asmodeus cult is the only way to get a date in this podunk town.

Consider the Tiefling: Storm King's Thunder Part II

Previously: Part I

II. Nightstone

The first section of the adventure, which takes place in a village called Nightstone, is meant to be unnecessary to the larger narrative. The authors intend that other books could be "swapped" into the place occupied by this chapter; as long as the protagonists all end up at the fifth level of power, any adventures could work. The usefulness of this section, from the perspective of what comes later, is that the protagonists see that rogue giants are attacking the outposts of civilization, and that they are then steered toward the proper beginning of the narrative. Since the connections to the larger story are so tenuous, your humble critic hopes that he will be forgiven for focusing this section of the essay on a detail that seems, at first, a mere crumb, but that upon close investigation turns out to be a delectable morsel of satire. The detail is as follows:

Destiny Agganor (age 42) is Nightstone's tiefling midwife. [...] Destiny worships Asmodeus but doesn't impose her beliefs on anyone else.

- Storm King's Thunder, p. 31 

A "tiefling" is not a generic fantasy type such as a dwarf or an elf; it originated in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons. The tiefling is a human with some of the features of a cartoon devil: the horns, the tail, the sharp teeth. It is said that this appearance is due to a pact made between a powerful devil and the ancestors of the tieflings. Although this might appear to be a straightforward allegorical representation of the Christian notion of original sin, the allegory is rather more modern: although the tiefling's outward appearance is redolent of hell, the tiefling has no extraordinary predisposition to sin. If tieflings are overrepresented in the ranks of criminals and assassins, this is due entirely to the warping effects of general social prejudice.

To be greeted with stares and whispers, to suffer violence and insult on the street, to see mistrust and fear in every eye: this is the lot of the tiefling. And to twist the knife, tieflings know that this is because a pact generations ago infused the essence of Asmodeus—overlord of the Nine Hells—into their bloodline. 

- Player's Handbook, p. 42

In short, the tiefling is the designated subaltern in the typical Dungeons and Dragons setting. The tiefling is, in a sense, the way that Dungeons and Dragons examines the effects of the 1980s "Satanic Panic," during which the wider culture suspected that the role-playing game was an occult dissociative initiation ritual. For the players and readers too young to remember Tom Hanks's Mazes and Monsters, the tiefling might be also be thought of as either "goth" or "intersectional."

What is odd about Destiny Agganor, the tiefling midwife of Nightstone, is her tolerant mode of Asmodeus-worship. In this setting, Asmodeus is the overlord of all devils, and a living symbol of aggression and dominion: 

Devils personify tyranny, with a totalitarian society dedicated to the domination of mortal life. [...] Asmodeus, the dark lord of Nessus, strives to subjugate the cosmos to satisfy his thirst for power.

- Monster Manual, p. 66

The Dungeon Master's Guide describes Asmodeus's dominon as "the ultimate plane of law and evil and the epitome of premeditated cruelty." It is self-contradictory to attempt a liberal worship of totalitarianism's essence. It is akin to a being a teetotaling devotee of Dionysus. Real-world historical Satanism is sometimes explained as the only available resistance to hegemonic Christendom; no such explanation is possible here, given the surfeit of deities in this fantasy's cosmology. Nor is ignorance an excuse, in a world where sufficiently motivated adventurers may visit Asmodeus's realm and determine its character for themselves.

Destiny Agganor, therefore, profoundly misunderstands the nature of that which she worships. In a few brief sentences, we find a devastating satire of liberal religion. If one can trace out the throne of European monarchism in the story of the giants and their "ordning," here one finds the altar of pre-modern religion, subtly complicating the apparent "multiculturalism" of the fantasy setting.

January Miscellany

"A Taxonomy of Roleplaying Utterances" (Trilemma Adventures) is an unexpected and possibly unnecessary approach to over-theorizing role-playing games, which is to say, not entirely unlike what we do here. It would be interesting to apply this taxonomy to the examples of play in various roleplaying games, in order to see which kinds of typical table-talk are covered in the manuals, and which are not.

"The Gygaxian D&D Implied Setting Recipe" (From the Sorcerer's Skull) is a handy estimation of how different ingredients from Appendix N got mixed together to create the setting for early Dungeons and Dragons adventures.

The Goodman Games website is always a good place to learn a bit more about "golden age" pulp fiction. This month, they have added reflections from two of the best adventure writers they work with:

• Harley Stroh gave an interview about Robert E. Howard (author of the Conan the Barbarian series).
• Michael Curtis wrote an article about Clark Ashton Smith, the poet-turned-horror-writer-turned-sculptor.

Appendix N at Project Gutenberg

Gary Gygax's Dungeon Masters Guide included the famous "Appendix N," a list of fantasy and science-fiction writers and books that inspired the world of Dungeons and Dragons. The list was and remains an excellent starting point for exploring the golden age of fantasy literature. Some of the material in the appendix has escaped copyright and may be found in the cultural treasure trove that is Project Gutenberg. Since Project Gutenberg is excellent at maintaining stable links, it is worth the effort to gather links to various Appendix N resources on the site.

Major Works Available

The authors whose works are best represented on Project Gutenberg are the earliest ones, and much of their work has passed into the public domain.

• Edgar Rice Burroughs: although his later writings are still under copyright, the beginnings of three of his most famous series are free.
• The Barsoom/Mars series begins with A Princess of Mars.
• The Pellucidar series begins with At the Earth's Core.
• The Venus series is not yet in the public domain.
• Gygax does not mention Burroughs's most famous character of all, but the Tarzan series begins with Tarzan of the Apes.
• Lord Dunsany's early works are here as well, including The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924) and The Book of Wonder (1912).
• The majority of the Conan stories from Robert E. Howard are missing, but the novel and the last story are there: Hour of the Dragon and "Red Nails." We also find the eerie and unusual "Gods of the North" (published elsewhere as "The Frost-Giant's Daughter"). Sadly, the site is missing the essential and energetic early tale, "The Tower of the Elephant."
• A few of H.P. Lovecraft's major stories are available, but his complete works are freely available elsewhere on the internet. If, however, the seeker of major works is only looking for "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Dunwich Horror," and "The Colour out of Space," Project Gutenberg provides them.
• Two novels by A. Merritt may be found: The Moon Pool, which is explicitly recommended in Appendix N, and its sequel The Metal Monster, which is not.
• There are a few works by Fletcher Pratt, including the Gygax-recommended novel The Blue Star.
• Clark Ashton Smith is missing from Appendix N, but he so obviously belongs there that I am including him here. Project Gutenberg does not have his stories, but it does have two volumes of his poetry: Ebony and Crystal, and The Star-Treader. Smith's poems are full of pulp-fiction imagery, but take an elegiac tone: fantastical fever-dreams recollected in tranquility.
• Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" is on Project Gutenberg. It is not a long story, but it marks a transition away from the planetary fantasy of Edgar Rice Burroughs and towards something that feels more like contemporary hard science fiction. The follow-up Mars story, "Valley of Dreams," is available, as are the three mad scientist stories that begin with "The Worlds of If."

Minor Works Available

Other authors from the Appendix N list do not have any major works on Project Gutenberg, but do have short stories, usually from classic genre magazines such as Galaxy, Weird Tales, or Planet Stories.

• Poul Anderson, Philip José Farmer, Fritz Leiber, Andre Norton are all represented by early stories from science fiction magazines, but not by any of the fantasy stories that are listed in Appendix N, nor by their later longer novels.
• The Leigh Brackett stories at Project Gutenberg seem to all be from Planet Stories, and presumably count as "sword and planet" stories in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
• Margaret St. Clair's page has a mix of planet stories and science fiction.
• None of Manly Wade Wellman's classic Silver John tales are on Project Gutenberg, nor are his John Thunstone books. However, there is a Weird Tales horror story called "The Golgatha Dancers" that gives the reader a good introduction to Wellman's pulp style.

There is very little material at all for August Derleth, Gardner Fox, Sterling Lanier, Andrew Offutt, Jack Vance, or Jack Williamson.

Finally, there are no stories from J.R.R. Tolkien, but his Vocabulary of Middle English is freely available, and could be handy in certain rather unlikely situations.

Entirely Absent

Some of the Appendix N writers have no work at all on project Gutenberg: 

• John Bellairs
• Frederic Brown
• Lin Carter
• L. Sprague de Camp
• Michael Moorcock
• Fred Saberhagen
• Roger Zelazny

Postscript

The Monsters and Manuals blog, by a writer called "Noisms," has its own "Project Gutenberg Appendix N," but the idea of that post is to list the writer's favorite public domain fantastical works, rather than to chase down Gygax's favorites. Noisms's list includes Coleridge, Voltaire, and George MacDonald.

A comment on that post recommends a role-playing game, the entire premise of which is to role-play in the future as envisioned by Victorians such as Rudyard Kipling or Arthur Conan Doyle. The game is called Forgotten Futures, and its website is a marvel of digital endurance. The game is so old that it was initially distributed as "shareware," and it is still maintained and freely available.

Finally, Goodman Games is a gathering place for Appendix N obsessives, and its "Adventures in Fiction" section is full of further information on all of the authors listed above.

~~~~~

QUESTIONS FOR COMMENTERS:

• Of the Project Gutenberg short stories by Appendix N authors, are there any that should have been highlighted in this post but were not?
• Are there other authors with work in the public domain that would fit well on this list?

The Ghost of Tragedy: Storm King's Thunder Part I

 Storm King's Thunder
by Christopher Perkins, et al.
Wizards of the Coast, 256 pages, $50 (hardcover)

The literary critic of RPG texts must take a primary interest in the narrative forms that are commonly referred to "adventures" and "campaigns," and which were formerly called "modules." The rules for a system are useful for understanding the assumptions of a narrative, but in themselves the rules are a mode of rhetoric, or, arguably, ethics. It is in the adventure book or campaign book that we may study the tantalizing interplay of particularity and indeterminacy.

In the present day, the best-selling adventure and campaign books, far and away, are the official Dungeons and Dragons campaigns published by Wizards of the Coast. Alongside the Dungeons and Dragons rules and setting books, these are the RPG texts that are stocked in ordinary bookstores. Presumably, these books find an audience beyond players. One such adventure text is Storm King's Thunder, published in 2016. It is a book that draws on treasured text of a previous generation,¹ most notably Jennell Jaquays's The Savage Frontier and Gary Gygax's Against the Giants trilogy.

How does it work? What are the mechanics of its narrative?

I: Introductory Material

The book begins with a dramatis personae. Since the list is not grouped by faction or ranked by importance, it is more properly an index of characters. Its placement is the first clue of the Shakespearian ambitions of the text.

Very early on, we are introduced to the notion of the "ordning," a divinely ordained social structure which each one of this fantasy world's giants intuitively understands. There are different types of giants: thunderous "storm giants" rule over all of the other types, while lowly "hill giants" find themselves last in the ranking. At the outset of the adventure, the "ordning" has somehow ceased to function, and the various types of giants have become disruptive and violent in their efforts to seize power. This notion is openly aristocratic, even monarchist: the ordning is directly analogous to the "estates of the realm" in medieval Christendom. It is interesting to see a supposedly "woke" publishing group like Wizards of the Coast attempting to induce in its readers a fondness for the ancien régime.

The change in the ordning is due to a sort of ersatz King Lear situation, featuring an aging king and his three daughters, two of whom are self-interested and amoral. But King Hekaton has much better prospects than Lear: for example, rather than disinheriting his virtuous daughter, he favors her. Nor has he retired form the throne; he has merely been kidnapped, and should he be rescued, all tragedy will likely be averted. This is Lear as comedy. The sensitive reader, however, will intuit that the ghost of tragedy has not been exorcised, and that the story's most fitting ending is not the glorious action-movie finale of the text, but the Bard's original bloodbath of poisoning, execution, and suicide.

The introduction presents the factions at play in the narrative, but, disappointingly, describes them as mostly waiting to be either aid the protagonists, or to be thwarted by them. This leaves the situation much less dynamic than it might have been. For example, the groups of giants are all pursuing unrelated quests, leaving them unlikely to collide with each other. The protagonists are not meant to come upon an earth-shaking battle between fire giants and frost giants, and neither will the thieves' guild, under cover of chaos, act decisively to eliminate its rivals. It was not so in Qelong: there, the rival factions are set to collide in some way no matter what the protagonists do.

The protagonists' view of all this is much more restricted. At the outset, they will only know that the giants have been accelerating their attacks on settlements and travelers. In the course of their journey, they will piece together the larger story with which the reader begins the book. A book like this one must present the solution before the mystery is fully posed: in any actualization of the possible narratives, the clues will come in dribs and drabs, in a way that will become clear when we consider the wilderness-map section. When we enter the sequential part of the narrative, we will know that our protagonists find the path that will eventually lead them to rescue the king; we play the agents of providence as we close off the paths that would fail to converge.

Next: Part II

~~~~~

¹ It's also a book that I bought years ago. Having twice failed to gather enough friends to use it for a campaign, I am hell-bent on getting some kind of creative use out of it. Hence this series of posts.

Three Obstacles to Literary Realism in Roleplaying Texts

Mark out a triangle and label its vertices "fantasy," "science fiction," and "horror." You will find that most role-playing games can be plotted on this triangle. Exceptions include a handful of indie games (World Wide Wrestling, Bubblegumshoe) and historical games (various GURPs sourcebooks, Hillfolk, Night Witches); many of those exceptions can be tied to an identifiable genre.

Would it be possible to write a good RPG book whose setting is "realist," not fantastical or genre-specific? Or is there something in the nature of the form that makes realism difficult to achieve?

One difficulty, it would seem, is that, in the modern world, individual action is so rarely clear in its effects. Our society is, to a great degree, bureaucratized; getting things done often involves tedious committee-coordinating, permission-gaining, and fund-raising. Realism in such an environment restricts us to the sort of interpersonal dynamics that are hard to specify for an indeterminate protagonist, but that the traditional novel, with its wealth of specific detail and dialogue, conveys with ease. Genre fiction, on the other hand, offers protagonists a broader scope of action: the detective, the wizard, the space ranger, and the vampire slayer intervene decisively in their worlds, and rarely bother asking for permission. In horror, it is the rupture of the bureaucratized world that requires the protagonist to break with routine. The tropes of genre fiction push the protagonists to face their problems squarely, rather than doing what most of us would do in perilous situations, which is to find a proper authority better equipped to handle the problem. Genre fiction offers the RPG writer a range of strong motives for all sorts of protagonists, and settings in which it is not hard for a protagonist to make things happen.

Another problem is that of familiarity. When a person lives in one place for a long time, we say that they become rooted in their community. There is an interdependence between a rooted person and their place: the person's nature affects how they come to relate to their community, while the community's influence shapes the expression of that nature. Myriad realist novels explore such characters, but the interdependence is so complex that it's hard to imagine accounting for a range of possible characters simultaneously.¹ RPG books tend, on the other hand, towards discovery of the unknown: journeys to new lands (as in Qelong), exploration of underground labyrinths, or solving mysteries, for example. If we are looking for a realist style of RPGs books, we should probably begin looking at stories of new beginnings, where a character faces an unfamiliar world.

A third difficulty has to do with the RPG book's origin in a culture that values "playability" and "usefulness at the table." In a tabletop game, a group of people actualize a potential narrative, using the RPG book as a source. Romance and love, classic subjects of realist fiction, are notoriously awkward to role-play; there is a sort of vertiginous social double-vision that happens when players are trying to imagine the social norms of their characters while observing social norms with other players. A system such as Delta Green may specify the breakdown of a character's personal relationships, but those relationships are part of the character concept, and do not seem to be meant to connect directly to textual material. If the form can develop beyond "playability," it can approach matters that become weird and unpleasant when people have to act them out with their friends.

The computer game Stardew Valley has a neat example of a simple romance. The protagonist is someone who has moved to a small town to take over a family farm. Among the friendly townspeople are certain characters that the protagonist can get to know, then flirt with by discovering what they like and don't like. There are sweet little cutscenes as the friendship or romance develops. Eventually, the protagonist can choose a mate and begin a family on the farm. In other words, the game offers a simple marriage plot, serving up a small slice of the subject matter of the eighteenth century novel.

If the marriage plot works in this computer game, it should be achievable in an RPG book, and this could, perhaps, crack the door for realism.

~~~~~

¹ If someone can create an interesting RPG campaign book based on Wendell Berry's fiction or Marilynne Robinson's Gilead series, I will consider this point refuted.

~~~~~

QUESTIONS FOR COMMENTERS:

• Are there good non-fantastical RPGs I should know about?
• Have you ever seen a protagonist romance successfully worked into an adventure or campaign book?

Landscape Architecture for Gardens of Forking Paths

Me detuve, como es natural, en la frase: "Dejo a los varios porvenires (no a todos) mi jardín de senderos que se bifurcan." Casi en el acto comprendí; El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan era la novela caótica; la frase "varios porvenires (no a todos)" me sugirió la imagen de la bifurcación en el tiempo, no en el espacio. La relectura general de la obra confirmó esa teoría. En todas las ficciones, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta con diversas alternativas, opta por una y elimina las otras; en la del casi inextricable Ts'ui Pên, opta – simultáneamente – por todas. Crea, así, diversos porvenires, diversos tiempos, que también proliferan y se bifurcan. De ahí las contradicciones de la novela.

- from "El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan" by Jorge Luis Borges

In Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths," a man learns to understand the real structure of a book which he had previously seen as a chaotic, self-contradictory mess. The book is about the nature of time, and how distinct choices and circumstances can all lead to the same result, like different routes through a garden that all converge at the central fountain. These moments of convergence, in the book-within-a-story, resonate with the full range of possibilities that could have led to them:

He read with slow precision two versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches to a battle across a lonely mountain; the horror of the rocks and shadows makes the men undervalue their lives and they gain an easy victory. In the second, the same army traverses a palace where a great festival is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the celebration and they win the victory. [...] I remember the last words, repeated in each version like a secret commandment: Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

It is, perhaps, another way to express the ancient human sense of fate, that certain things are bound to happen no matter what we do. And, of course, the man who discovers the book soon finds himself in such a resonant moment ("It seemed to me that the humid garden that surrounded the house was infinitely saturated with invisible persons"). It is classic Borges, and it is wonderful.

It is interesting that Borges seems to imagine this Garden of Forking Paths as a disjointed work of high modernism, like Finnegans Wake or The Waste Land. To those without the key, it appears to be "chaotic manuscripts," "an indeterminate heap of contradictory drafts," a labyrinth.

What if a garden of forking paths does not have to be chaotic? What if a bunch of wargaming nerds accidentally iterated their way to a tidier version of the literary form which Borges prophesied? This is the literary nature of the role-playing game adventure.

The original role-playing gamers began with procedures and probabilities, using dice to randomly determine the progress of improvised narratives. They developed rules and systems for delineating the potential capabilities of their fictional characters, defining ranges and options for their skills and motivations. Eventually, they wrote scenarios: texts that laid out possibilities, some of which a particular session of a game would actualize. The gamers believed, and usually still believe, that the texts existed to as aids to the actual game, which occurs "at the table."

But texts escape their authors, and these gaming books have found an audience beyond those who merely played the game. It is thought to be a shameful thing to admire these books without attempting to use them to extract a particular narrative. For this reason, role-playing texts have generally eluded formal aesthetic evaluation. Yet...

There are formal gardens that include high balconies, so that a visitor may climb the stairs and see the entire garden from above. A beautiful garden may also be beautiful when seen from a height. One can easily imagine a garden so beautiful that the pattern of its paths is sufficient for contemplative delight, perhaps even a garden where one's memory of the sight of all paths enriches any single perambulation among the flora.