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.