Vantage: Nine Pounds of Possibility

 Vantage
by Jamey Stegmaier
Stonemaier Games, $90

Vantage is almost a board game. It's designed by a board game designer, it sits on store shelves among board games, it has dice and wooden tokens and cards, and it has an extensive rulebook with procedures of play. What sets it apart from other board games is that its fiction can overrule its system: the game asks for player judgment on whether conditions pertain to certain in-game situations, even when to end the game. The question players are encouraged to ask is not "how do I win?" but "what's possible here?"

The Vantage box really does weigh about nine pounds, and most of that is the game's 1,300 cards, plus seven booklets for resolving player actions. The game supports one to six players, each of whom controls a member of a spaceship crew that has crash-landed in different parts of an alien planet. Genre-wise, it's planetary adventure à la John Carter of Mars. Each player starts with a card representing their character and another card representing their current location: every location card shows an illustration of what the character sees, complete with fascinating characters and visual clues about the environment.

Generally, the game is not played with reference to a large map, though certain maps may be found within the game. Instead, characters move from card to card, typically by cardinal direction. Movements and other actions require rolling dice; certain dice results tick down characters' health, time, or morale counts. It's possible to lose the game to exhaustion. But the game also reveals more and more ways to mitigate bad dice rolls or avoid their consequences altogether as players gather more cards. Players get a mission card at the outset of the game that may direct their efforts, but it's perfectly fine to ignore that mission and pursue some other goal, or just to wander around. You can take completion of a mission as a reason to end the game, or you can keep going, or you can just end when you feel like it or when you run out of time.

It's important that this is not a campaign game. Each playthrough is a new journey into a pristine possibility space; it's a player's ever-increasing knowledge of the game world that leads to more controlled and less chaotic experiences. In other words, there are two layers of fiction in this game: the static, gradually discovered fiction of the game world, and the local fiction of any given play session. Having played a handful of times, I'm still using missions as guides to discovering new parts of the world, but I also have a checklist of things to try to get to in the world, and subsystems I've caught sight of but not engaged with.

All of this reminds me, in a way, of getting into Glorantha. There's too much about this world to summarize or to explain top-down; you just have to get into the details and start piecing things together until the larger picture comes into view. Vantage isn't a TTRPG book, but the way that it's structured—a discrete number of cards, linked for traversal—that it seems almost like a deconstruction and reconfiguration of the game books I've been reviewing. And I certainly could pull all of the cards out of hte box and attempt a top-down analysis of the structure, but for now I'm perfectly happy to put it together one game at a time.

I don't know if I'm actually recommending this game; it's not cheap and it's probably not for everyone. But I was reasonably sure I'd like it, and once I got started I was very quickly delighted by things I hadn't expected to find. The designer clearly aimed to bring in whatever familiar things from open-world RPG computer games that he could fit. By putting a toe over the line separating discrete-state-progression games from anything-is-possible RPGs, Vantage put itself into this blog's critical converation.

I Should've Told You In August

Your humble critic didn't mean to drop the ball, but early August brought in a bit of the old "cripplin' depresh."

It's not that I didn't have ideas for posts. I wanted to write about how character creation sections tell us something about how much agency protagonists have in the setting. I had something about ancient adventuring parties of Central Asia. I wanted to write a review of the first have of Ultra-Violet Grasslands, just to keep the ball rolling here. I still had Delta Green's Labyrinth fresh in my mind, back at the beginning of August. There was material, is what I am saying. But instead of writing, I crawled into bed.

It's embarrassing to admit it, but I don't actually make any money from literary criticism of roleplaying. I know it seems like I'm some kind of Walter Pater figure, but, in this modern economy, my income derives from salaried corporate work. If this deflates the carefully built illusion of this blog, so be it. There's a man behind the curtain. And that man has a huge deadline at the end of September that has him losing sleep and questioning his personal and professional choices.

Life is hard, but what I try to remember is that there's a way of looking at the disappointments and burdens with such vitality that hope comes through, which is to say, a kind of sublimation. Not that sublimation means anything under materialism, but one hopes that hope itself is a sound from beyond.

July Miscellany

"All Hail the Ultra Bastard" (Dead Tree, No Shelter) presents a set of free old-school rules that I would try, if I played.

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"Against the RPG Rulebook Spartanism" (Monsters and Manuals) warms the heart of this jaded old critic:

I reject RPG Rulebook Spartanism. I don't think that RPG rulebooks should only be designed with usability in mind. The only ones I have ever read and wanted to play, in fact, are precisely those that prioritise readability over usability. And I am going to out myself. I have played lots of RPGs over the years. But I also - and I am going to shock you, now - going to proudly declare that I own many RPG books that I have absolutely no earthly use for, but which I like because they are enjoyable to read and full of interesting ideas. I do not think it is a sin against God for a designer to prioritise the reading experience over the gaming one. I have no problem with confessing to reading things and enjoying the images they conjure in the mind as an end in itself.

While I bear no ill will to efficiency-minded GMs, some popular RPG books are not much more than glorified GM screens.

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"Think For Yourself" (New York Review of Books) is an article in which Dan Chiasson considers what is lost when we let AI finish our thoughts for us. He considers how writers from TS Eliot to Elizabeth Bishop let thoughts hang and ripen until they completed themselves. Apparently, in Emily Dickenson's manuscripts, you can get an idea of how long she paused to think of her next line by how dark the the blob of ink is in the spot where she rested her pen. From a certain point of view, this essay is all about possibility: if not the designed "possibility structures" that this blog takes as its structure, the creative space of possibility in the mind of the artist as she creates. Chiasson quotes a passage from William James laying out the idea of "active gaps" in one's mind:

Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it... the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when described as gaps.

 He also quotes Luise Glück:

It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished... the problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.

Perhaps RPG sourcebooks aren't at all the right place to look for the resonant "power of the unfinished." Perhaps...

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I stumbled onto an old blog post by Seth Kenlon arguing that "Game Books do History Better than History Books". As a historical wargamer, Kenlon has found that books about actual history are much less clear, and hence more frustrating, than sourcebooks for made-up role-playing game worlds. This seemed to me a good occasion to recommend the Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations by John Haywood, which is a slim and map-filled paperback that really is a sourcebook-level overview of the ancient world.

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For years and years, I've heard Tolkien's Middle-Earth criticized as too Euro-centric, and M.A.R. Barker's less-known world Tékumel, the basis for the early RPG Empire of the Petal Throne, praised by contrast as a fantasy world with serious interest in non-Western cultures. One might think Tolkien was the reactionary and Barker the liberal multiculturalist. So I was quite surprised to find out that in 2022, Barker was discovered to have been an anti-Semite and Nazi revisionist at the end of his life: under a pseudonym, he had published a novel where the hero joins up with Nazis to bring about the Fourth Reich. Tolkien, meanwhile, is very much on the record as having been opposed to the Nazi movement. Needless to say, M.A.R. Barker's stock has fallen; read details in "Ruins and Racists" by Gregory Jones-Katz, in the Baffler.

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In "REVIEW: 50 Years of Text Games," John Psmith got into some things that I hope to get into eventually in this blog, namely procedural generation and simulation as they relate to the idea of the possibility structure. Choose-your-own-adventure books and early text games are some of the simplest possibility structures out there: possibilities of a text, rather than the more abstract possibility of a narrative. But, as the review points out, you eventually run up against their limits.

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Free League Publishing, out of Sweden, puts out an impressive variety of RPGs, from original games like Mörk Borg and Vaesen to licensed games like the Alien or Blade Runner RPGs. I always wondered: why Sweden? How did role-playing games make such a cultural dent there? I learned the answer: state subsidies. Roleplaying did take off in Sweden in the 1980s, but in 1988, an organization called Sverok set itself up as an umbrella organization for local Swedish youth roleplaying clubs, and it was big enough to qualify for funding from the Swedish government. This meant that the clubs had support for getting places to meet and money for rulebooks. From Wikipedia:

Since forming a club and joining Sverok meant receiving funds (rather than paying a membership fee) many teenagers saw it as a good way of getting some gaming supplements essentially for free. The only real requirements were – and are – that the clubs need to be open for members and organized in a democratic fashion. From a governmental perspective, this ensures that a large number of people are involved in a democratic process early on in life. During these early years much of the organizing of the federation itself was done on a volunteer basis.

Imagine being a teenager, and having Uncle Sam pay for your Player's Handbook...

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"Arden Vul - Conclusions" (Writings) describes the end of a sixty-session megadungeon campaign in the Halls of Arden Vul, which apparently has over 2,000 rooms. It sounds like the players came in with a suitably epic strategy.

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"The Destined Heroes Play Style" (Patchwork Paladin) lays out the elements of what is perhaps the dominant way of playing Dungeons and Dragons today. For our purposes the point is that the players and game master aim for a particular narrative shape, where the players' characters get individualized arcs and time in the spotlight, bundling together a hero's journey for each player. This is very different from the "scoundrels in a harsh world" story that's associated with the "old school" playstyle.

Tolkien's Sandbox

If your humble critic sometimes seem to overpraise J.R.R. Tolkien, it's not because I think his books are beyond criticism. I can acknowledge the flaws. There is indeed something troubling about orcs, a sentient but irredeemably evil species with central Asian racial tinges, though I don't think this is a central concern of the books. What I find remarkable is, rather, the scale of Tolkien's achievement, the degree to which his particular vision of myth, history, and morality has proved itself globally resonant and endlessly inspiring. Although I am not a habitual manga reader, a recommendation piqued my interest in one called "Delicious in Dungeon," where a party of explorers in a D&D-like world figures out how to survive in the dungeon by making gourmet meals out of the monsters they slay. Tolkien's ideas about dwarves and elves have travelled to the other end of Eurasia: the adventuring party at the center of this story includes a human, a half-elf, a dwarf, and a halfling.

The inventors of Dungeons and Dragons liked to claim that sword and sorcery authors like Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard were bigger influences on their game than Tolkien.was. Possibly this claim had a touch of legal defensiveness in it, but it's clear that they had sword and sorcery in mind. Their customers, however, were surely overwhelmingly in pursuit of the Toklienian. The lithe elves and stocky dwarves and lucky halflings have stuck around. To get away from Tolkien's framework, you must either excise his fantasy races or make an equally drastic change to the setting—or make a work of explicit critique. Glorantha, for example, comments on Tolkien by adopting a very different view of mythology and religion, and reimagining the dwarves and elves in light of that.

I recently had the opportunity to stroll through a shopping mall, and in that mall was a bookstore called Books-a-Million. I looked at the two bookcases devoted to roleplaying games. In my quick perusal, it seemed to be eighty or ninety percent Tolkien-inspired: Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Daggerheart, and a few others: all have the family resemblance, and took up most of the shelf space. The remainder was divided between Lovecraft (Call of Cthulhu), George Lucas (Starfinder), and the whole band of creators behind the Warhammer 40K experience. And I think this does represent something about the mainstream of the role-playing hobby: as much as I enjoy the strange individual visions of eccentrics' imagined worlds, most people really want to play in Tolkien's sandbox.

The Experience of Conversation

Many role-playing games, in their rulebooks, assert that playing the game takes the form of a conversation. Even games like Pathfinder, which tends to use grid-based tactical combat, lets the game master give bonuses for things that aren't covered in the written rules, which keeps the conversational element that separates RPGs from board games. Now, the premise of this blog is that your humble critic does not play role-playing games, but I have had quite a few conversations in the course of my life, and I believe I know something about them. This morning, I discovered a recent essay entitled "An Analogy About Rules for Sickos," on a blog called To Be Resolved. The essay asks whether conversation games that are defined by rules leave space for infinite human creativity, or whether the rules function by subtractioin, marking off a bounded set of conversations from the set of all possible conversations. The writer uses the infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot set's border as an analogy for how creativity isn't dampened by limits. ("Cantor Dust," created by the infinite removal of middle thirds of line segments, has some properties that could enliven the analogy further, but it's not so pretty to look at.) Now, I like this analogy and I think it does the work it needs to, but for the blog, let's try pushing a little further.

The first thing to note is that fractals, or the fractal-like border of the Mandelbrot Set, require properties of continuity. The "zoom" has to be infinite; if there's a lowest level of resolution, you have to end your recursive process when you reach your atoms. Now, an in-person role-playing game or a face-to-face conversation partakes of enough sensory experience that I'm willing to hypothesize fractal-like continuity, but people also play by post, or play by chat, and digital text is ultimately discrete rather than continuous. The space of possible human interactions may be uncountably infinite, but the space of possible digital texts is countable and, given an arbitrary upper bound of length, finite. So if play-by-post is a valid instantiation of a conversation game, we aren't in a situation of fractal-like possibility.

What Borges was getting at in "The Library of Babel," a story about a library that contained all possible texts of a certain length, is that a large enough set of possible texts is functionally infinite for human cognition. And meaning does not automatically adhere to a text; a random generation gives you an ocean of gibberish with a drop of meaning. The Library of Babel is what I think of when I try to conceptualize the space of possible conversations.

In the era of chatbots, the large language model (LLM), is something like a structure for generating semantic paths through the space of possible texts. The Library of Babel finally has a decent card catalog. And, given how intellectual history tends to go, I believe we're entering a stage of culture where it's as seemingly obvious to us that the human mind is a kind of large language model as it was to Freud that the mind was a kind of steam engine, dealing with all sorts of explosive internal pressures. Which is to say, we always reimagine ourselves in light of our dominant technologies.

But human beings are not actually known to be procedural text generators. For all of our science, we don't understand our minds particularly well, and we seem to be stuck with the "hard problem of consciousness," insofar as internal experience is self-evident but incurably internal. And, after introspection: how does our conscious reasoning relate to what we actually say and do? When we speak or write fluently, where does the next phrase really come from? The unconscious in mysterious and not obviously algorithmic.

Perhaps most importantly, for our purposes, is the question of how social expectations, laws, and rules function in our unconscious minds. Learning to participate in a social practice, such as a conversation game, means that our unconscious or subconscious minds can effectively present our conscious minds with reasonable options for action, so that we can deliberate rather than feeling lost in the rules. We experience the rules of even a finite game as positive options rather than constraints on our freedom: the strong chess player doesn't waste time consciously discarding invalid moves as options.

So, to sum up, the fractal-like border of the Mandelbrot set is a wonderful image for illustrating infinite creativity within bounds, but the "space of all possible conversations" is an abstraction with little relationship to how we speak and think. Besides, so many creative endeavors involve adding things to an empty space, whether it's paint on a canvas or words on a page, that "subtractive" arts seem like an exception. A noble exception, to be sure: heaven forbid that I cause any offense to stonecarvers or practitioners of Moog-style subtractive sound synthesis.

Points of Interest on the Map of Dragon Pass

It's a two-page spread, the map of Dragon Pass, early in The Glorantha Sourcebook. The left page is mostly green with forests and grasslands; the right page has more brown, indicating aridity. There's a mountain range running from southwest to northeast on the left page and another range in the bottom half of the fold between the pages. Highly visible labels include Tarsh, Beast Valley, and Prax. Looking a bit closer, we find Esrolia, Grazelands, Heortland, and others. The Shadow Plateau jumps out as a roughly rectangular spot of gray at hte bottom of the left page; the map scale indicates that it's about sixty miles wide and thirty miles from north to south. Villages are scattered across the map, as are oases in the desert of the right-hand pagee. And there are interesting marked objects: the Sun Wheel Ruins, the Throne, the Obscure Plinth, the Block, the Stump.

Here, I'd like to bring draw together this blog's previous posts, "What's Glorantha?" and "Fantasy Maps as Possibility Structures" in a particular example. This map appears just before a thirty-page section of the sourcebook entitled "The History of Dragon Pass," which is presented as a document written by one "Amstalli of Nochet" in response to a request form his queen. Nochet is in fact a location on the mamp, about thirty miles southwest of the Shadow Plateau. Your humble critic referred back to this map dozens of times as he tried to understand the thirty-page history of the region. But this only whetted my appetite: it talked about major events and personalities but skipped over details about many of the specific locations. I wanted to know more. To illustrate the density (or dimensionality) of the map, I'll take three locations and look them up in the Guide to Glorantha to understand what they are and what they tell us about their fantasy world. I've chosen the Shadow Plateau, of course; Muse Roost, a village or city on the western side of the map, and Contemplative Rest, a peaceful-sounding place near the middle of the map.

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From the surrounding countryside, the Shadow Plateau looks like three-thousand-foot-tall black cliffs. For reference, that's the height of the El Capitan cliff face in Yosemite. The plateau is not a total wasteland; it has vegetation. But it also has a huge amount of obsidian sand, which is there because the plateau used ot hold a city-sized castle called the Palace of Black Glass, dating back to the God Time.

What is the God Time, you ask? In Glorantha, God Time was the era when the authentic myths occurred, when the gods interacted freely with each other. The chronology of the God Time is loose, with myths happening in certain senses simultaneously. It's similar to how ancient people probably didn't worry too much about whether Theseus preceded Hercules in the folk versions of the myths. Linear time, when events can be definitively placed on a calendar, began as the resolution of a catastrophe in God Time, but individuals and structures survived from God Time. Imagine if the Pillars of Hercules in Gibraltar were literal pillars, signed with Hercules's name, and had been since time immemorial.

The Palace of Black Glass was such a surviving structure, and it was ruled by a troll king known as The Only Old One. This fellow was born in the God Time and lived for 1,300 years of linear time, until he was slain by a new andd more powerful king. But he wasn't the only undying demigod hanging around in the region; in the RPG's default starting year of 1625, there are still beings from God Time to be found.

So, after the ruining of the palace, the top of the Shadow Plateau became a dangerous and haunted place, even as a whole troll society existed in the caves and tunnels of the plateau, and in the undestroyed basement of the ancient Palace. Glorantha's trolls appear to be the big brutes of the setting, like Tolkien's Orcs, but they're highly intelligent and quite sympathetic, exiled from their true homeland in the underworld and suffering under a centuries-old curse. In Glorantha's elemental system, trolls are associated with Darkness, but Darkness is distinct from and staunchly opposed to the Chaos that the thread to the setting. So, whiile the Shadow Plateau is dangerous for non-trolls, it's not an evil or corrupt place.

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I picked Muse Roost based on the name, thinking it might be a nice arts commune, or a little village of bird people. That's not what it turns out to be. It's the home and headquarters of an immortal mercenary captain named Ethilrist, Lord of the Black Horse Troop. The Glorantha Sourcebook tells us that he was famous for raiding the underworld for treasure, which included demon horses and a hell hound. Ethilrist qualifies, metaphysically, as a Hero, for having travelled into God Time and returned with power: he's on the just about same level as the other political power players in the era. But the Guide to Glorantha tells us more, and gives us his personality. First, the demon horses are carnivorous and pretty scary-looking. Second, despite having so much power, Ethilrist is needy and insecure. He's written a twelve-volume autobiography explaining why he's such a man of history and destiny; we get the sense that he's rationalizing. The Guide even includes an excerpt from the unfinished thirteenth volume of his opus. So Muse Roost is the city of a narcissistic immortal warlord who fancies himself a patron of the arts, and something of a writer himself.

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I picked out Contemplative Rest on the map because its name reminded me of Traveller's Rest, South Carolina, a little town just north of Greenville. And... neither the Sourcebook nor the Guide say much about this place specifically. It is one of a number of settlements of a non-human fantasy race called Dragonewts. If you're familiar with contemporary Dungeons and Dragons, you might htink that these beings look like the Dragonborn. But the Dragonborn are just dragon-people without much specific personality required. Dragonewts, on the other hand, are walking zen riddles, operating in a way that's totally alien to humans, often seeming to simply ignore everything around them. Their inscrutability is the point. If humans were to enter a Dragonewt settlement like Contemplative Rest, it would feel like something from another planet. The architecture wouldn't just be different, it would be weird, almost eerie. The Glorantha Bestiary is an RPG book full of creatures and non-human beings for players to encounter. It has sidebars for how a player can play as anything from a dwarf or elf to a minotaur or centaur. You can even be a small humanoid duck. But there are no instructions for as a dragonewt.

The one thing we know about Contemplative Rest itself is it's part of a group of dragonewt settlements that are located in such a way that drawing certain lines between them makes the shape of a dragon rune. And something about dragonewt religion is that if the dragonewts are devout, they will eventually reincarnate as cosmic dragons, but if they stray from the path of righteousness, they devolve into dinosaurs.

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An interesting thing about Glorantha is that it's almost entirely expressed in games and resources for games. Greg Stafford wrote a "novel" for the setting but it's in the form of collected pseudo-historical documents that have been assembled into a critical edition by scholars of a later civilization. Lacking epic tales that would give me a tour of the setting, it's maps like these that provide paths into the imagined world.

Fantasy Maps as Possibility Structures

To begin with, let us propose a definition of a map. Let us say that it's a two-dimensional arrangement of symbols, where the spatial relationships between the symbols spatial relationships between the things symbolized. Importantly for our purposes, the things symbolized may be real or imagined. This definition is good enough for a simple drawn map, though it probably doesn't suffice for things like color gradients or borders. But we'll get to that.

A single symbol is not a map. Arrange two symbols, however, and you have the beginning of something. Put a mountain near the top-left corner of the page, and a castle in the middle. Questions arise. How close is the castle to the mountains? Can the people in the castle see the mountain? Do they travel to it? What's in the empty, in-between space? Add a road, a river, and other symbols, and soon you have a web of possible journeys. For a certain sort of mind it is impossible not to plot routes, imagine vistas, and consider obstacles.

The symbols may be arbitrarily dimensional: the dot labeled "Los Angeles" on a map of the United States stands for a dazzlingly complex city and landscape, while a different map's labeled dot may indicate a village that hasn't been imagined yet. The idea of the discrete symbol breaks down here: a color gradient could indicate temperature, or elevation, or any number of continuous things, while a boundary line may symbolize no particular or recognizable feature in a physical location, yet political division of territory is one of the things we want maps to show us.

At this stage, we have something like a map as a spatial symbolic field.

The maps that came with Tolkien's books entranced your humble critic when he was a boy. They were of course helpful in understanding the events described in the books, but it was the places the characters never thought to go that really caught my attention. In The Hobbit's map, what were the Grey Mountains like? And the Withered Heath? And the Iron Hills? Could the group have climbed the Mountains of Mirkwood to get their bearings, or would they have found worse monsters up there? And in The Lord of the Rings, there was that mysterious word on the right side of the map, Rhûn...

It is often said that the map is not the territory, but I do not believe that this necessarily holds for fantasy maps.

A territorial map is the first form of possibility structure, implying as it does any number of traversals. A second form of possibility structure extends in time, elaborating or suggesting a branching sequence of events. And the forms may of course be combined. I think of Hamann's assertion that painting was the first writing, while music was "the original bodily image of all temporal measures and intervals"; in other words, music belongs to time and painting to space. One wonders if the full spatiotemporal possibility structure analogizes to Wagner's total work of art, but one wonders this only briefly, before remembering what it is we're talking about: to wit, RPG sourcebooks.

Americans Don't Do Grimdark

I was reading Fall of Delta Green last week and it struck me how much iconic American horror is about trying to preserve the appearance of normalcy. Our bleakest and most nihilistic art is about dying for the American Dream while knowing full well that it's hollow. Lovecraft believes that people ought to be sheltered from the mind-breaking knowledge of the outer darkness. English grimdark is different: it's about blowing up a horrible world to epic proportions, exaggerating all the misery and brutality of our own world, and then taking it seriously enough that it becomes something other than satire. There's no beautiful dream to protect, no glimmering surface. There's no credible ideology of Mega-City One or the Imperium of Man that makes them look like something worth loving; they're just marginally better than the alternatives.

Americans are considering disillusionment. The English seem to be past that.

What's Glorantha?

The Guide to Glorantha
by Greg Stafford and Jeff Richard
Chaosium, 800 pages, $50 (pdf)

Glorantha is a made-up world, like Tolkien's Middle-Earth. It was initially devised by Greg Stafford, who then used it as a board game setting in the 1970s, and then again as a role-playing game setting after Dungeons and Dragons swept through the nerd world. In the following decades, Stafford colllaborated with his players and other friends to fill out the world of Glorantha, mostly in published ssourcebooks for various iterations of the Runequest RPG, but also in a novel, and in the computer game King of Dragon Pass. Contributors to Glorantha have included Sandy Peterson, creator of Call of Cthulhu, and Robin D. Laws. As a sort of capstone of world-building, Glorantha got its own massive two-volume encyclopedia in the 2010s, the Guide to Glorantha.

To return to the Middle-Earth comparison, there are two things that make Glorantha rather different. First, at a high level, it's built on an obsession with comparative mythology in the same way that Middle-Earth is built on an obsession with constructed languages and a Christian view of old English mythology. Glorantha literalizes the thinking of Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, such that the mythic is not just psychologically real, but a source of physical and political power. There's even in-world commentary on Campbell's idea of the Monomyth: the culture that studies world mythology and devises a synthesis then uses their synthesis as a means of imperial power. The second thing that makes Glorantha different from Middle-Earth is that it's stuffed full of low-level goofy things that clearly started out as in-game jokes and were then worked into the lore more or less seriously. For example, there's a wide and arid land inhabited by nomadic tribes of herdsman: a group that rides and herds bison, one that manages herds of impalas, another one for llamas, and one for antelope, but also a tribe of intelligent humanoid tapirs that drive herds of humans possessing only bovine intelligence, which seems to me like a classic Where's Waldo gag.

What I like most about Glorantha is that it's fundamentally, structurally tragic. The world is elemental, in the classic sense, not atomistic. But there are are more elements than just earth, fire, water, and air. There's also darkness, and concepts like law, truth, and illusion. These elements are the famous "runes" from which the RPG takes its title, and the fact that they can't be scientifically reconciled colors the world. The surface-level conflict is that the sun god, representing hierarchical order, and the storm god, representing restless freedom, are intrinsically conflicting and can at best exist in a condition of unsteady compromise. In Glorantha, attempts to synthesize these metaphysical distinctions threaten to break the world by introducing Chaos, the anti-order that will, if unchecked, dissolve the world. So nature pushes back, in one case making it impossible to travel the oceans for centuries in order to thwart an overreaching maritime empire, and in another case having giant dragons appear and eat an entire nation. There's an emphasis on the cultural violence of imperial expansion: there's no absorption without loss, and that's one reason these attempts to transcend opposites are dangerous. But mortals won't stop trying to move forward. To put it pretentiously, Glorantha is a world where Hegelian synthesis simply doesn't work. Progress has a brutal price, and The Guide to Glorantha tells us that the default starting year for the RPG is about twenty-five years away from total apocalypse and a new dark age.

I feel that I've barely scratched the surface of Glorantha. I have certainly only skimmed its encyclopedia. Beyond this, there are many volumes of mythology, and about 1600 years of linear history, with the Dragon Pass area detailed almost down to the square mile. But, of course, it's the distant and bizarre areas of the map that capture my imagination: the Kingdom of War, the Jrusteli Isles, Doraster, Slon.

Picking Up Where We Left Off: The Blog So Far

There are three posts that I regard as marking out the trajectory of what I'm trying to do here.

In "Hell Upriver: Hite's Qelong," I tried to depict how an open-ended hexcrawl was structured for a certain narrative shape: a possibility structure that collapses, in play, to some version of Apocalypse Now. The goal was to take this web of unrealized narratives as an object of criticism. I don't know that I was successful, but the idea of this blog is essentially that you can look at all the choices that go into creating an adventure or RPG setting, connect them to a wider view of human culture, and then analyze them as you would any other cultural artifact, with no regard for whether it's "usable" or "playable."

In "Landscape Architecture for Gardens of Forking Paths," I took a pretentious run at expressing the blog's thesis. With tongue a bit in cheek, I observed that you can make a comparison between "fragmented" or inconclusive methods of postmodernism and the scenario design of roleplaying games, the latter of which can very intriguingly set up situations that could resolve in infinite ways. Jorge Luis Borges imagined reality as a "garden of forking paths"; reading RPG materials can be like looking down on such a garden from above.

In "Three Obstacles to Literary Realism in Roleplaying Games," I got at a thought that's stayed with me ever since, and developed further. In RPGs (and in interactive fiction), we don't see a ton of literary realism. But consequential choices are in fact a part of everyday life, and personally I think that there are some possibilities here: not necessarily as playable RPGs, but as larger "what-if" structures along the lines of, say, It's a Wonderful Life or Sliding Doors. I'm sure I'll be coming back to this, but basically I think you could experss the possibilities of a person's romantic life in the form of an RPG sourcebook, without expecting anyone to ever play it.

But before pulling on that literary thread, I want to turn to the first possibility structure I ever loved: the fantasy map. And while I'm contractually forbidden from analyzing a certain map of the Sword Coast and the Silver Marches, I have an even better map in mind. Next time: Glorantha.

Storm King's Thunder Series: CANCELLED

 It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you of the cancellation of this blog's critical analysis of the Storm King's Thunder campaign. After the first two entries in the series, which I considered quite successful, in early 2023, I turned to the proper beginning of the campaign, where the heroes are deposited in one of three cities, and must aid the city guards in driving off some sort of attack from one or another group of giants. Little did I know that I was embarking on one of the more harrowing episodes of my storied critical career.

At first, everything seemed normal. I was going to compare the three options for the starting cities. First, Bryn Shander, which is famous in the Sword Coast setting, and was featured in the one Forgotten Realms novel I ever read. Next, Goldenfields, a boring place full of boring NPCs where the aggressive Hill Giants are a welcome break from tedium. Finally, Triboar, a medieval version of the American Wild West, with little factions and intrigues, where one day the fire giants show up in force to, as it turns out, dig an artifact out of the ground in the middle of the town. Obviously, the last one is the only cool one, and I was working up a clever way to tell you so.

Unfortunately, that's when I noticed something strange in the Goldenfields section: a particular pattern in the description of the sprawling agribusiness monastery's crop placements. The oat, barley, and wheat placements put me in mind of some of Robert Browning's poems, and in chasing down the references I had to dig a bit in scholarship of the early Renaissance, at which point it became clear that the Bryn Shander section of the adventure was heavily indebted to Marsilio Ficino. And, of course, by now it was autumn, and I had before me a need to make a closer study of scrimshaw as practiced in Icewind Dale, which took me to Nantucket and Cape Cod for a season.

By summer of 2024, I had unified a typological reading of Moby Dick with the later chapters of Storm King's Thunder, particularly in comparing the great kraken with with the famous white whale. But I had to go even further. My manuscript was running at this point to the hundreds of pages, and prose no longer seemed appropriate to the gravity of the subject matter, which had at this point become, frankly, Neoplatonic. I worked into the middle of 2025 rewriting my work into an extended cycle of sonnets, sestinas, and common-meter hymns.

In late June, 2025, I began reaching out to small presses of quality about a print run. Imagine my surprise when my doorbell rang one morning and I found on my front porch a squadron of burly men in brown wool suits and bowler hats. They pressed past me into my house, over my vociferous objections, and ransacked the place until they'd gathered all of my notes and manuscripts. A tall man in a well-cut frock coat then entered my living room. He addressed me in a thick Scottish accent: "D'ye think you're clever, a-delving into such mysteries as these? 'Tis no fit matter for thy wee blog." He then presented me with an elegantly handwritten non-disclosure agreement, on vellum, which bound me to discontinue my research and speak not a word of the raid for a full calendar year. After certain unpleasant alternatives were discussed, I chose to sign. Under his terms, I am to write no more on the Storm King's Thunder campaign.

I shall return, humbled, to the subject of not playing role playing games this month.

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.

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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.

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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?