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.

Hell Upriver: Hite's Qelong

Qelong

by Kenneth Hite

Lamentations of the Flame Princess, 48 pages, $8 (pdf)

Qelong is Kenneth Hite's recipe for Apocalypse Now in a fantasy world. It is written in the "sandbox" style, which means that indeterminacy goes far beyond the protagonists. The objectives of the protagonists, the characters they encounter, and their final destination are possibilities. The possible worlds diverge. They do, however, share a nature that is unusual for the role-playing genre: the upriver journey from civilization to hell. The aforementioned Coppola film is the most tonally vivid model, but Hite helpfully offers Valhalla Rising and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly as inspirations, which helps the reader understand that the mythological resonance of this sort of journey is not tied to the jungle setting, nor even to the river. Dante's Inferno is a spiritual iteration of the journey; Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a historical instance also involving river and jungle.

There is, of course, a nonfictional model for Qelong as a setting: Cambodia in the late 1970s. Like Cambodia, Qelong has been ruined, polluted, and destabilized simply because it is right next to a Great Power war, except instead of the war being a proxy conflict between the United States and communists, it's between rapacious wizards who are so unthinkably powerful that the side effects and errant spells of their combat have distorted and poisoned the very soil and weather of the Qelong river valley. Two of the antagonistic factions are motivated by cruel and totalizing atavisms: distorted fictional reflections of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In all of this, and in the incidental details, Hite displays his particular genius¹ for gathering obscure facts from history and mythology, then spinning them into intricate structures of choice and alternative. The toxic environment is analogous to the poisonous herbicide Agent Orange. Your humble reviewer is certain that, were he to read about that era of Cambodian history, he would discover many more historical sources for Qelong's fictional elements.

Speaking of the toxic contaminant, it is called aakom, and the book introduces it early, and on a first read it is hard to imagine characters who would risk this sort of thing.

The most important effects of aakom are its effect on the human mind and soul. It twists both, exerting a dark magnetic force pulling them toward ultimate chaos and corrosion. Even Chaotic characters recoil from the laughing, grotesque specters somehow revealed in the corner of their vision as innately part of the very angles and helices of existence. Those poisoned by aakom become nihilistic or self- destructive, or both; even the meaning that the human ego assigns itself is peeled away in the boiling illumination of aakom.

However, a bit of calculation² indicates that even weaker protagonists likely have at least a few days before the poison might start to set in, and even then its effects can be mitigated or suppressed for the week or two of journeying to any one of the upriver sites. Unpleasant as the poisoned environment may be, it tells us that our possible narratives will converge on missions, motivated by a strong goal. The text provides examples. The protagonists might be selfless heroes, risking death to destroy the source of the region's contamination. They might be searchers, desperately following rumors of a lost friend or family member. Or they might be a band of outlaws, scheming to find a fortune and haul it through the chaos of war.

Whatever the protagonists' goal, they will likely begin their journey in the relatively intact coastal city of Qampong. They come from somewhere else; Qampong is a foreign city to them. Negotiating local markets, they supply themselves and start heading up the river. In a few days, and perhaps after a few harrowing encounters, they will find a mercenary company that has made a base in the mostly ruined inland city of Sajra Amvoel. The protagonists are tempted to be at ease around familiar accents and clothing, but perhaps it is best to be wary of rogue mercenaries in a war zone. Perhaps the protagonists continue; from here, their journeys will branch to various destinations. Or perhaps they have chosen an overland route and avoided Sajra Amvoel altogether. In most of the possible stories, they will meet murderous enemy factions, each with their own agendas for the river valley. The countryside becomes stranger, more hostile: monsoons, evil mists, or the mind-melting aftermath of wizard-war magic. The poison sets in. The protagonists limp toward their goal and whatever final confrontation stands in their way...

It should be noted that some of the protagonists' potential obstacles are truly terrifying, which makes sense given the author's extensive work in the horror genre. Your humble reviewer has found himself rather grossed out by the details of how certain ants in Qelong can take over people's brains. The horror elements generally suit the genre of the journey upriver to hell, although in one case there is an unseemly and probably unnecessary detail that a violent cult rapes its victims, as if simple massacre wasn't bad enough for the genre. Qelong is not for the sensitive reader, and certainly not for children.

But for a reader who can stomach the disturbing sections, Qelong raises interesting questions. What sort of people could make these journey? Surrounded by so much suffering, would they change their goals? Are the potential protagonists strong enough to make any kind of difference? It is an open critical question whether a form that declines to actualize itself in a particular fiction can wrest enduring significance from its inherent indeterminacy. Put another way, is there some higher aesthetic purpose in the arrangement of possibility structures? Qelong is a particularly effective structure for many stories, which are all, mythically, the same story, and as such it is a good clue for the inquisitive critic.

~~~~~

¹ A genius Hite also demonstrates, weekly, on the podcast Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff.

² The book's back cover, though not the text itself, describes the protagonists as between levels four and six in the Lamentations of the Flame Princess character system. With this source at hand, it is not difficult to estimate likely character hardiness. A protagonist classed as a miracle-working cleric will likely be able to his or her divinity for a measure of protection against aakom.