My philosopher friends tell me it was Hegel who began to use the word “dialectic” to describe the clash of ideas as expressed in history. Classically, dialectic was a style of logical disputation; nowadays, anyone who has read the Communist Manifesto will find it natural to see history as a succession of forces developing in contention with each other, and any sufficiently complex society as holding many such conceptual forces in balance as best it can, even as technology shifts every weight and measure.
All of which is to say, if the history of a fictional setting is to be more than just one tedious thing after another, it should be structured in dialectical tensions. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth does this very well: the gentle country-bourgeois Hobbits contrast with the valiant warriors of Gondor; the aesthetic elves and the economic humans; the glacially slow Ents versus Saruman’s industrial production. It accords with his theology that evil does not really participate as itself in the logic of history: Morgoth, and later Sauron, aim their temptation at the weakness of every society, but don’t progress or grow in a “cultural” way. The dialectic has bite because the time of the elves is really ending; the world really is moving on from them.
In flatter settings, there is no dialectical motion, simply archetypical conflict. Cataclysms and invasions recur but feel weightless. This is one of the many ways in which the Disney Star Wars movies were artless: they abandoned any sense that the distant galaxy could express a recognizable history. I worry, too, that the Forgotten Realms setting is Tolkien made static.
Glorantha, of course, is dialectical through and through. From the beginning of its linear history, its many cultures express conceptual logics and develop, inevitably tragically, in their conflict with each other. But Glorantha’s mythic layer resists development: the Gods are supposed to be frozen outside of time, so the world itself snaps back against conceptual innovations ungrounded in myth. The setting is richer than what is given to the players; in particular, the philosophical Malkioni of the western lands ought to clash beautifully with the empires and clans of the Dragon Pass area, but there’s very little current setting material on those western lands.
Ars Magica, on the other hand, drops players into Mythic Europe, a version of high medievalism where powerful Hermetic mages are scheming in secret behind the facade of known history. The game asks you to begin in roughly 1220 AD, with cultures, political rulers, and major events as they are known to us. But magic is real, and it works by the logic of medieval philosophy and cosmology, or rather it posits a survival of something like late antique theurgy at a certain remove from Christianity: the faith of mass religious movements creates an aura that suppresses the abilities of the mages. Virtually any historiographical perspective on medievalism seems playable, and the scope of a campaign seems as though it would accommodate multiple perspectives quite well: a mage who hates and fears the medieval church alongside one who admires it, for example.
This much connection to historical possibility tempts me, I must admit, to leave the divine harmonies of pure possibility and consider the scratchy fiddle tune of actualized narrative. What I mean is, I can imagine few more potentially interesting role-playing experiences than exploring late antique Alexandrian and Syriac philosophy and theology in the course of an Ars Magica campaign centered on Constantinople.
But to return to criticism: I take it as a general principle that the best invented histories have an underlying historical and conceptual logic, and this is a fair angle to take in the consideration of tabletop roleplaying game sourcebooks.
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