Some years ago, my friends and I had the pleasure of meeting
Steven Brust, one of my favorite writers, and talking about writing. I asked him
about the best way to write epic events. Steven Brust’s answer was
brilliantly simple: in opposite proportion. The greater and more complicated
the events you tell about are, the simpler should the language and narrative
techniques be.
If you look at some of the greatest works of speculative
fiction, you will see works
that describe very outlandish and fascinating worlds, but focus on the plainest events (for these worlds and times). Take Starship
Troopers, the Forever War, Flatland, the City & the City, When Gravity
Fails, The Star Diaries, Homeland and countless other works.
It is true that the events of Homeland change Drizzet’s
life forever and leaves a deep impact on his family, friends and enemies, but
they don’t change the world. They don’t even change his city or school.
Furthermore, Drizzet’s desertion only occurs after many, many pages of ordinary experiences. All these murders, conspiracies and dark sorcery –
they are what constitutes daily life in that world. Presumably, a young man deciding to escape this somehow, is also something not unimaginable, though certainly uncommon.
Salvatore doesn’t shatter the world, allowing us nothing,
but fleeting glimpses at the shards. He takes us on a grand tour and concludes
with a surprise.
In the same way, Tolkien’s The Hobbit, establishes a strong sense
of normality and shows us how a typical adventure in his world looks like,
before culminating in the dragon’s defeat and resulting War of the Five Armies.
And even these are, in a way, ordinary for his world because both
dragon-slaying and fantasy wars are events its citizens are well aware of.
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| Just one of these lazy afternoons... |
Recently, I notice a tendency among beginning DMs to turn to extraordinary,
paradigm-shifting events from the very beginning of their campaign. I think
they are forgetting that for young players, doing anything in a fantasy world
is already extraordinary. Just casting fireball at a gang of orcs is already interesting, banal though it may seem to gaming veterans. If you start big, all you do is
establish bigness as the default.
For example, a game in which the players discover that an
ancient God is about to wake up and devour the world and, despite being
low-level characters, no one but them can stop this, offers little satisfaction
and makes no sense. It feels forced and artificial and will be treated as such
by young players. And why wouldn’t it? If you never had to deal with anything,
but the lives of billions and the power to change the universe, what does one
life mean? One contaminated river, one hungry family, one displaced monster –
they are, objectively speaking, inconsequential. There is nothing there to make you feel for the world, turning role playing game into nothing but a flowery war game.
Suspense of disbelief can’t work without a framework. The
players want to believe in your campaign, but you’ve got to give them at least
something to cling to. There is a reason why every published adventure includes
hooks. Hooks are as important out of character as they are in character.
Now, consider a game where the PCs are the militia of a small
humanoid settlement in hostile territory. This premise offers no less challenges than the Cthulhu pestiche, and maintains a sense
of normality at the same time. For me, small quests such as rescuing a
kidnapped child from the hag sisters, defeating the goblin raiders, or finding the
treasonous cultist inside the village, offer infinitely more potential for drama
and imagining than the grand quest of finding the nine parts of a magic weapon
needed to kill the evil God.
For a game to have value as a simulation of reality, as a
collective story, and an emotional and intellectual outlet, it must be ordinary,
at least at first. This doesn’t mean that the events should be mundane and the
world similar to ours. Au contraire, the world should be strange and
fascinating and the stories should involve as much of its magic as possible. If
the setting is good, the world’s uniqueness will organically enrich your
stories and they will feel like life itself -- the true advantage of tabletop RPG over other media.
