Part of the reason I love the Wilderlands of High Fantasy so much is that its broad geography includes lots of little weirdnesses. Here lies an ancient sculpture of a two-headed goat that’ll turn your head into a goat’s head if you steal it’s treasure. There lies a wrecked hot-air balloon with a still-functioning astrolabe. The Wilderlands have a decidedly old-school fantasy mix of anachronistic technology and “modern” fantasy staples like swords and magic. It’s truly a fantastical place, with plenty of those gaps in the setting I lke so much that allow my imagination to run wild in them. What the hell is that goat-thing? Did someone make it? What possible reason could they have had to do so? Is it the result of hostile magic? Some bizarre technology my character doesn’t understand? What about that hot-air balloon? From what civilization did it spring? Were there more like it? Is it a crazy tinker’s construction, or did some bygone culture produce significant quantities of these? If it’s the latter, why haven’t I seen more? If it’s the former, where’s his workshop? (I want to plunder it.)
By contrast part of the reason I don’t have the same level of enthusiasm for places like the Forgotten Realms or Eberron is that the worlds feel more “known” and inherently less wondrous. Vital civilizations own the world maps, and the only places that feel foreign, alien, and dangerous are designated, contained areas, “danger gardens” where the world-spanning cultures have agreed to let the crazy flourish to bleed off some of the overabundance of adventurers that seem to populate their cities. Granted, Fourth Edition D&D is much better about these sorts of things, given the economy of words it uses in its support material, but it’s just impossible to escape the feeling that someone has already overturned every rock in these worlds and painstakingly catalogued their contents.
Something happened here, and I want to stumble across the place and speculate as to what.To me, the beauty of the exploration campaign is having the sense that my group is the first to find a location, or if that’s not the case, that we’re the first people here in eons. While I’m certainly able to enjoy a more cosmopolitan campaign (you know how I loves me some politicking, backstabbing, and concocting long-term plans, all of which are key components of Vampire), when I’m after exploration, I want to be dazzled and endangered. When I’m running an exploration campaign, I want my players to feel like they’re discovering or re-discovering something awe-inspiring or curious — but it has to be memorable.
Now, none of this is an attempt to enforce a One True Way. It’s rather an exercise in building setting from the perspective of knowing what I want in that setting and understanding how to achieve that result by design. There are amazing cosmopolitan fantasy game city-settings out there, like Ptolus and Sigil. (Perhaps paradoxically, I’m not all that interested in the Wilderlands’ City-State of the Invincible Overlord.) Plenty of genre fantasy has its adherents, or it wouldn’t sell and it wouldn’t be the standard it is today. But those aren’t the worlds I want to build or the purposes to which I want to use those worlds, so I need to know how to avoid the methods by which they’re constructed.
Too pastoral. Doesn’t freak me out enough.I know why I have the tastes I do. They’re my favorite parts of all the genre fiction I enjoy so much, from back when fantasy meant fantastical instead of a publisher-mandated trilogy with li’l kids in a reliable Western Europe pastiche and, oh, here’s your frontispiece maps. Instead, I want the weirdness of Clark Ashton Smith and the decadent ruin of Robert E. Howard. Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar feels like an opium dream. Jack Vance’s world careens toward the end of its history, and labors under the shame at having forgotten much of that history. I apologize for sounding like a broken record, but the reason I enjoy these pioneers so much is that when they were writing, much of this was new stuff, and hadn’t yet become a by-the-numbers department of the book store. (I don’t want to come across as a purely curmudgeonly advocate of bygone days. I’m rereading some of the Elric tales right now, and they don’t do a whole lot for me, nor does the saga-homage of Tolkien.)
Along those lines, I want the games I play and run to have that feel for the player of being a visitor in a strange, often hostile land. That means I have to challenge my players’ sense of comfort with the world that surrounds them. However, I have to do it in a manner that makes them want to accept that challenge and bring the world to heel. I can’t be so weird with the world as to alienate them, disconnect them from sensory understanding, or risk ridiculousness.
The most magnificent fantasy creature I’ve experienced to date is the alzabo from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I won’t spoil it for you, because those books are damned well worth reading, but it’s a dangerous, horrifying, alien, otherworldly thing that is going to wreck your shit unless you’re extremely clever or insightful. Contrast that with, say, the garden-variety goblins that populate so many ersatz fantasies, which are so commonplace as to be known quantities. There’s no horror, no wonder, no fantasia at all, even though we’re supposed to be dealing with Others or monsters.
Not even a Scott Fischer illustration can redeem this mess.It’s possible to take horror, wonder, and fantasia too far, of course. The D&D monster I hate with the heat of a thousand suns isn’t the goofy flumph or the preposterous flail snail (You know what? I actually kind of dig the flail snail). It’s not even the hokey nilbog. It’s the goddamn rast. The rast isn’t weird or alien, it’s just gibberish, a grab-bag of dumb-looking critter bits and screwy game effects. It’s a trans-dimensional, fire-aspected, dog-headed, blood-drinking, paralysis-causing-when-it-looks-at-you, clawed volcanic spider oh, God, make it stop already. It’s the opposite of an alzabo. It’s just a pile of stupid.
That’s why, in my current worldbuilding exercise, I strip the comfortable stuff out. In my Wilderlands campaign, which is under revision, I’ve tried to capitalize on that brilliant original Judges Guild material and I’ve pulled out the parts that don’t hit the themes I want and have replaced them with the ones I do. Included among the things that had to go were all the stock fantastical races, the elves-n-orcs-n-dwarves-n-gnomes. Instead, I replaced them with things that are either one-off mysterious entities of wholly inscrutable origin like the psychic fungus that had symbiotically attached itself to a ruined tower. I didn’t have any idea what the symbiosis with an inanimate structure might be, but the idea felt out-there enough to tantalize me. Alternatively, I’ve left the critter cultures there, but pulled them back from common contact with the world. You don’t meet an orc, you meet an odd humanoid with violent tendencies and bestial features that perplexes you with its similarity to you but puts you off with its bellicose nature.
I don’t overload the detail. I don’t write encyclopedia entries for encounters. I give enough sensory input to create an impression, and I let the unspoken aspects of creature encounters resonate with my players. They can’t all be perfect encounters, but that’s okay. I ust don’t want any of them to be run-of-the-mill.
Next time: Building accessibly weird places.
I think the sense of ever-present, poorly (if at all) understood danger combined with vast, unknown landscapes is one of the main reasons why I enjoy less traditional post apocalyptic RPGs. Examples include Dark Sun, Tribe 8, heck, even early editions of Gamma World.One interesting trend I’ve noticed in fiction is the tendency toward authors to add tons of weirdness to urban settings as opposed to wilderness settings. China Mieville’s Bas-Lag books all have tons of really odd stuff. The same goes for Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris setting.Looking forward to your next post on making the weirdness accessible. There is a fine, but definite, line between interesting-weird and nonsensical.
Entirely agreed, we need more magic, more unexplained things, more of the fantastic in fantasy. High weirdness is one route, gonzo fantasy is another, so many options but they are all full of possibilities at least they should be. What the point of fantasy if it is not fantastical?
You know, I think its interesting to consider this from two angles. The comment about post-apolocalyptic is more to the point (in my mind) of taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar/threatening/grotesque… This has worked in many pieces of great rivitting fiction. I think the thing about Tolkien and many staples of Western fantasy culture is that what once was wondrous now seems pastoral. I am not a huge fan of Tolkien’s writing style, but can remember how I could easily visualize the landscape and the excitement was what (for me at the time) was a new view on Hobbits, Wizards, orcs and the like. It launched me into wanting to read Norse and Saxon mythologies. (I’m 41 so give me a pass on this, those of you who cannot see LoTR that way). But I think the sweet spot is taking the familiar and transforming it someway that puts people on edge. The picture of a ruin, and the question of what happened here is exactly the point. The reason why I discarded D&D and Palladium FRP for WHFRP was the dark semi-realistic Holy Roman Empire like setting of Warhammer was hugely refreshing. No one was doing that around my circle of friends, and it set the game on a fresh edge. The balance of the rules, the more restirctive magic system, the narrative quality of careers, all of that was accepted because we had a great time playing the Rat Catcher and the pious/corrupt priest. I was reading a bloggers resurecting 13th century France/Aquitaine using google maps and a good history book, and I thought, “what a lot of work” but the genious was how he took that landscape and made it threatening again, and not some extention of a Europified suburbia of safe villages, and out of place dungeons. Monsasteries loomed large in that landscape, and like Ars Magica’s sence of Covens made Europe something different than we expected.Anyway, I liked the post, and don’t often comment. Thank you for the thoughts. I will take it home to my 4th Edition adaptation of Rise of the Runelords (Pathfinder) set in Forgotten Realms. I hate feel restricted by a setting, but found I had to come to realize its my setting now, and play.
I’m struggling to make my fantasy setting, Caldera, have that crazy and wondrous fantasy feel. It has to be a place for cosmopolitan intrigue, but it also has to support a LOT of weird exploration below the city streets. I’ve done a lot, I think, to push in that direction, but your essay makes me wonder if it’s enough.
Great points, and I agree that putting the fantastical back in is paramount to keeping fantasy games fresh.The question I want to raise, however, is how do you give your players enough info on what they should know about the world, while keeping the wild parts weird? What I mean is, if you throw out all the bog standard elves & orcs stuff, how much should the players know to play their characters properly? Or is it simply that the basic world is relatively familiar, but that the PCs are adventuring “off the map” for the first time? (thus the character AND player learn about the wild stuff together). Not sure I’m explaining myself well, but I’m thinking of movies when the protagonist is learning about the New World at the same time the audience does, so there is no need for pages and pages of backstory.
I totally agree on this matter.Personally I can’t stand reading Tolkein. First it just doesn’t grab me, plus for all the fantasy races, they all do rather mundane stuff. I grew up reading all types of mythology and so Tolkein at the age of 10 was rather boring. This dislike of mundane fantasy came back to haunt me when I worked part time at a Games Workshop store. Why? LotR wargaming. I got told by the manager I HAD to read LotR (I had only touched the Hobbit). And well when you have been playing Warhammer and WH40k games for almost 10 years by this point, settings with substantial and interesting ideas and themes, LotR was just not interesting. This is harsh considering Warhammer is just LotR presented by 2000AD. So I just read the LotR stuff in the game rule books and of course Wikipedia.But considering I had played Warhammer before I started roleplaying, my start with Classic D&D did not last long before I jumped onto other settings and systems. The reasoning? As you say, Western Fantasy is just too pastoral. ‘Oh look, Skellies. Send the Cleric and turn them to dust!’.Now it was when I had been playing Vampire and Mage for some time, and Exalted has just been released. I still didn’t latch onto it and I think that was because I still thought fantasy rpgs were boring. How wrong I was. By the time I picked up Exalted I had watched enough anime that I could connect to it better. Exalted was what I need from fantasy. A level of the unknown. Thanks to Exalted I learnt of Gene Wolfe (Oh god the things in the city walls… wtf???). And that setting is just…. wow. I need to find a copy of the GURPS book for it. Hell it is even better than my boss at work loves the books also!Now these points about the unknown and the fantastical are quite valid for sci fi exploration games. For example Fadings Suns is great in that there are the Known Worlds, which are about as well known as the bottom of the ocean. But this region of space is the place where things are sort of safe and not too weird. So when in the game a new world is found that discovery has impact.I think it is this balance between On and Off the map that allows for players to become immersed in the setting quickly while still having moments of ‘What the hell is an alzabo???’ (Yes that thing was so weird. But then so is the starship in Urth of the New Sun!) Something I really love about Book of the New Sun, and in the same way Exalted, is that the predominant race is humans. You will interact more often with humans, and things that are variations of humans (undead, demon possessed etc) This allows these groups to be mundane to a certain extent, allowing for the weird shit, when it arrives, to stand out enough to make the players go ‘Wha…?’
Good thoughts, all.@Jesse: I’ve set the campaign start at day zero of the new age. The PCs are the first adventurous types to leave the safety of home after untold years of isolation. It’s the end of a dark age, the home base wants to grow, and the only people able to look out there and see what’s happening are the PCs. I’m tempted to make the PCs each the only member of their classes that exist in the world (if I end up using D&D 4e), which would also allow me to scale the pacing a bit, as the downtime required to learn a level would bring the PC back to home base for a while. Not sure that I want to do this yet, but I’m thinking about it. Also, humans are the only race, so they don’t have to know a United Nations worth of history for the other peoples of the world, because they don’t exist.@Adam: That’s part of what I dig about urban fantasy. I’m planning to go into it more in the next post in this series, but I agree — a compelling city setting is a very fertile ground for this sort of weirdness.@Geoff: If you’ve made that step toward realizing the setting belongs to you (and your players; it’s your game), you’ve already won. Like Geoff, you touch on a topic that I’m going to discuss more in the next article in this series, in the familiarity of ArM and WHFRP providing a great starting point with which to contrast the weird. Good luck with your game!@Sean: Amen! That’s part of the reason I think Harry Potter (as you mention in the linked post) is so much better than Twilight. They’re both ostensibly fantasies, but of the two, Harry Potter is certainly the more fantastic. I haven’t read Percy Jackson, but I get the same vibe there.@Greg: Funny you mention Gamma World. When I went into campaign re-planning, I thought about running the Wilderlands using Gamma World. As I mentioned in my response to Jesse, this campaign intends to be the dawn of a new age after the Big Awful Thing (which doesn’t necessarily need much detail), and is right on par with GW. I wanted to play it a little more straightfaced than GW, though. And I’m also really looking forward to Dark Sun’s relaunch.@Kris: I agree; I found much of LotR’s tale boring. Two hundred and fifty pages into the Fellowship of the Ring, some dudes walked to a dude’s house. I did like the setting description, as Geoff alludes up there, but as far as what went on… well, I liked the Saga of the Volsungs and the Nibelungenleid more. Making it (mostly) a human drama felt more compelling to me, I think largely because when the otherworldly elements showed up, that made them more, well, fantastical in their rarity.
Achilli, can’t you tell your boss or something, that you need to do a homepage for WOD online and have a official forum on it…. It’s annoying to read and post in forums with like 200 members….I think you should show something about the game now, :) but as you don’t want to show something yet, please make an official homepage with a forum, or just an official forum on CCP’s homepage…
Interesting post. I agree with the ideas that when preparing a setting you have to be willing to make it your own, tune it to fire your imagination, and learn how to present it. Know what you want, and make it happen. If I were to comment on anything, it might simply be to allow room for there to be a discernible and communicable point of entry for the players, a way as Jesse commented for them to be comfortable enough with what is to be considered mundane that they can recognize and appreciate the weird. I would also want to emphasize the need you cite to plan from the point of view of what the players will enjoy. No matter how fantastic a world one creates, if those who experience it, either by reading it in a tale, or experiencing it through play, can neither relate to it nor get excited by it, then the effort is wasted on them. In a way, this stands out to me in reading your reaction to some authors versus others. It doesn’t matter what millions love about my work, if none of those millions are currently playing in my games or reading my books: “No, thanks. That idea doesn’t do much for me. Next.” We have to remember that not only do we know what we like, they do too. The rush of creation, and the enjoyment of designing the world and how it works, can – perhaps too often – come to overshadow the specific needs, limits, and interests of the audience.