The Distant Mirror of Fantasy Religion

Growing up, there were three topics my mother, the Southern Lady, instructed me to avoid in polite company: money, politics, and religion. Like much of the rest of her advice, I spent a good chunk of my life ignoring her missive (often proving her right), but not in gaming. Except for the occasional lapse of passion, I have tended to studiously avoid those hot buttons with my fellow gamers.

However, today we are going talk about religion; how it plays in our campaign worlds and how its shape in those worlds often reflects our own attitudes and approaches to the subject.

Last night, over a glass of cheap Portuguese wine (or three) I hunkered down to read M.A.R. Barker's essay “Create a Religion in Your Spare Time for Fun and Profit.” It's a thoughtful 28-page piece arguing against the usual hodgepodge, sloppy introduction of gods, mythos, and religion into fantasy rpg campaigns. Barker, fortunately, also spends a good chunk of the article getting at the range of questions a world builder can and should ask to have a deeper approach. (The essay is available here for the slightly too-high price of $4).

One observation he makes--which jives with my own recent thought train about how our gaming can often be a distant mirror of the world we experience—is that: “both science-fantasy fiction and fantasy role-playing games are created by and for people of THIS time and THIS generalized Western European heritage...It has to be underlined again and again that we are creatures of our own cultures, bound by them, limited by them, and unable to produce anything that really transcends them.”

While I bridled and got huffy a little at the cultural determinism of that statement, it did produce one of those little cartoon light bulb over the head moments.

Ding.

Yes, I can imagine and enjoy even the seemingly alien religions of exotic settings (cough, cough, Tekumel), but my own worlds' religions mirror sometimes closely, sometimes distantly my own attitudes about things supernatural. When I think about it, the Hill Cantons are firmly in the former camp.

See I was raised a good American cafeteria Catholic. My family slogged its way to a mass every odd Xmas or Easter and tended to pick and choose what it followed and didn't. Settling into adult life, I have tended to bounce back and forth between a skeptical agnosticism and an appreciation (if somewhat heretical) of the solace of the Church. Add in a Special Lady Friend who is Jewish and a failed attempt to write a novel about the Hussites, then you get something of the vague ballpark that is my spiritual life.

Now back to the HC. Vaguely renaissance Counter-Reformation Catholic Church check. Heretical movements in said Church check. Looming cosmic chaos check. Hosts of cosmological add-on bits and pieces taken what I had been reading that year check, check, and check.

Now here's where the strange twists--also part and parcel of my spiritual ballpark--weave in. I have often described the cosmological fabric of the campaign to be something like: imagine if Jack Vance wrote a Lyonesse-style fantasy about Bohemia in the mid-renaissance. Remember in Vance's work, religious doctrine is often treated like he treats most human mores, he exaggerates their absurdities mostly for comic and satirical effect (mostly gently).

Vance also tends to stretch the fabric even when working with an-almost historical setting, alongside early medieval Christianity in Lyonesse you have a crazy quilt of historical pagan and utterly fantastic religions. It's hodgepodge, but hodgepodge that works alongside that reoccurring theme.

Thus while the Supernal Orthodox Temple of the Puissant Sun Lord has a (mostly off-stage) trace of menace with its monopoly on gunpowder (thanks to Piper's Lord Kalvan) and the intellectual life of the lands outside the Weird, it is mostly an institution characterized by an inward obsession with layers and layers of absurd-seeming theological differences.

The players have helped co-create and perpetuate this through most of the life of the game, most notably Desert Scribe whose fiddly scholar of a character, Mandamus, who feels confident enough to extemporize about this or that element. Confident because he knows that I will play along to that spontaneous creation with great relish (I think).

In one exchange, we follow the lively disputes of the many temple schools on the correct way to make the circular sign of Sol Invictus: whether it's three fingers moving in a clockwise fashion with a pinky flourish at the end, four moving in counter-clockwise sans flourish, or as the ultra-orthodox demand with the whole hand. In another whether the Sun Lord's chariot has two or four wheels. To which Brad's now-dead Cugel character retorted incredulously with “now you just are talking about a cart.” I can barely choke back the laughter at the table.

There is more to set out here to bolster the close mirror case as they stand-in for interlocking pieces of my own mental architecture: the bickering heretical sects of the Morning and Evening Star societies who follow the spurned female deity; the heavy themes of astronomical happenings and numerology; the world-weary pathos of the older, forgotten gods, etc. But I think you get the drift.

Maybe this rings all wrong for you out there. Maybe your own campaign's approach to religion doesn't reflect the idea sets you trundle around in your head in the slightest. Maybe this navel-gazing just bores you full stop.

Or does it? Do you get beyond the bounds of your own time and place or is it a mirror reflecting some piece or the other of your life?

Fantasy F*ckin' Vietnam

Fantasy fuckin' Vietnam.

Some of you may remember the above phrase. A couple years back it took on a life of its own in classic D&D circles, hanging around just long enough to spawn a killer dungeon-style adventure and a great deal of vitriol about its ostensible offensiveness.

As used it was supposed to signify the dead-at-any-moment life of old school dungeoneering. The kind of play where you inched along the corridor, 10-foot pole in hand probing every foot of the floor, walls, and ceiling for traps. The kind of play where losing a limb prying open the lid of a chest was as quick as a death by an arrow from your flank. It was the gaming mirror of then still-fresh cultural memory of the stress, paranoia, and grittiness of the Vietnam War.

For me the phrase had a deeper resonance, transporting back 30-something years to my childhood. The war permeated that life. Not the actual war, the US-backed puppet regime had collapsed at the barrel end of North Vietnamese tanks a few years before, but its aftermath.

My father was a Vietnam vet. Not a “I scrubbed B-52s on Guam” or “flew F-16s in the Texas National Guard” kind of vet, but a Purple-Hearted combat veteran of the First Cavalry. I always felt that he hated the war though, what it did to him body and soul--he still carries shrapnel in a shoulder to this day. It haunted him, but he spoke freely of it and even let it enter our play with him.

On long hikes he'd send me or my brother, stick in hand, to walk point--several yards in front so that the sudden blast of an imaginary mine or grenade didn't wipe out the “squad”. Hike done we'd jog back to the car jody-chanting: “I wanna be an Airborne Ranger, living my life full of danger.”

And I played D&D with the man.

Somewhere in the summer of 1981, I ran a few sessions as a DM where he played a first-level mook of a Fighting Man, fittingly called the Tunnel Rat, alongside my brother's bland-by-comparison elf. He played the game with every bit of a rigor that phrase conjures up for latter-day REMFs.

He pored over the equipment tables, grilling me on the properties of this or that item. It took him about five seconds to grasp the killing power of the standard molotov-like flask of oil. He bought 20. Groking the need to travel light and mean he skimped on armor and the excess weapons so common in our summer camp D&D experience. He bought dogs instead.

He pounded through that dungeon with a ruthless efficiency. At first my brother's PC walked point. When that nearly ended with his death at the hands of a goblin ambush, he switched to running his dogs into rooms and closing the door before running in on the attack. When that stopped working, he doused the dogs with oil set them on fire and loosened them into the massed ranks of his opponents (a sardonic nod of my head to him in that tongue-in-the-cheek post).

There wasn't a trap in the place he didn't find, and little in the way of anything hidden missed his eye.

The game was tense, adversarial even. It brought out a side of him that scared me a little. I think sometimes we forget that games—especially such demanding ones as the role-playing variety--aren't always leisurely fun, sometimes they mix passion and a welter of emotions in them. Those sessions certainly did, but I treasure them because they taught me something about the man.

They brought me closer to him through the language of a game I loved—and they taught me how to be one mean mother when I was at the table. Thanks Dad. 

A Wee Bit More on Jumpstarting a Tékumel Revival

Looks like a few more virtual fronts are being opened on the ether to tackle the Tékumel revival question.

Brett Slocum has set up a new blog, The Eye of Joyful Sitting Among Friends, and is involved there with a parallel discussion to yesterday's. He has a rather simple solution: play more with whatever system you have on hand. I would urge readers interested in such esoteric matters to hop over there and weigh in.

Along the same lines, Howard of the Tekumel Project has launched another blog, Heroes of the Age, to discuss gaming on Barker's planet. Check it out here.

Speaking of playing in the setting more, I am looking to set up a pick-up game of Humanspace Empires at one of the open-game sessions at the North Texas RPG Con this coming June (where I will also be playing in Steve Marsh's EPT game). Drop me a line if you are attending and have any interest in playing.

Less-lazy post coming later. (Because I know you hang on my every word.)

What Tékumel Could Learn From Glorantha

Tékumel fans have been making a lot of noise recently around a perennial subject: how best to revive M.A.R. Barker's almost-famous setting. The rarefied, usually-quiet Tékumel list is a-thrum with exchanges over what product vehicle would best spark said revival.

Most seem to be advocating for a switch to a modern, bigger-tent game system (d20, Pathfinder, or Savage Worlds), others pushing for a system-neutral re-release of source material or a sprucing up of the primal game system Empire of the Petal Throne.

While my sympathies lean to the latter camp, I find myself wondering if any of these noteworthy projects are enough. Could any of them on their own weight deliver this lovingly baroque, sword-and-planet world to a broader audience?

I am certainly no expert myself on rpg product development—and it's really a very foolish person who looks to me for my unsolicited armchair advice—but I keep thinking that Tékumel needs something broader and more ambitious if it wants to widen its niche. To be exact, I keep hoping that Tékumel took some cues from the recent history of its distant cousin, Glorantha.

Tékumel and Glorantha share a good deal in common on the face of it.

Both settings sprung Pallas Athena-like from the heads of brilliantly creative--and detail obsessed—single creators (Barker and Greg Stafford) years before a game could give them expression. Both evolved in the 1970s variant game systems out of the OD&D mothership (EPT and Runequest)—and both posited (and delivered) themselves as much deeper explorations of fantasy worlds than vanilla D&D. Both of them also wandered in the wilderness for a while intellectual property tangles after their respective heydays-- EPT after being cut loose from TSR and Runequest after the Avalon Hill debacle.

But for all those similarities Glorantha fared better.

While its public profile is still pretty modest even by the diminished standards of the tabletop rpg hobby today, Glorantha does have some kick to it. It has, for starters, not just one living game, but two. Instead of detracting from each the two game lines seem to complement each other by satisfying two different fan niches: Mongoose's confusingly-titled Runequest II for the lovers of the game system proper and Heroquest for the hardcore, narrativist lovers of Third Age Glorantha. Tellingly both games are pumping out a stream of attractive new products.

Meanwhile on the side you have an almost-bewildering array of clone projects giving other living game platforms for people interested in gaming that world: the streamlined RQ-lite systems of Openquest and now Doomquest (thanks to the Stafford-dedicated recent issue of old school zine Fight On!) ; the high crunch of Steve Perrin's SPQR, or the abstracted new edition of BRP.

On top of all that you have the (perhaps soon) re-release of one the best introductions to Glorantha ever devised, the computer strategy game King of Dragon Pass. By virtue of being a computer game—and a smart-phone app to boot—its highly likely that it will help bring audiences back around the setting than any tabletop game, no matter its success in this period, could ever muster.

Thinking of all those things I find myself dreaming about a similar revival for EPT. Something like...something like...

[Now you have to imagine here a dreamy harp playing and the camera lens shaking around to signify a Gilligan's Island-like dream sequence.]

...Something like if you took all the stirrings of the current contemporary Tékumel corners and yoked them to revamped historical legacy projects for a full-court press aimed at the returning tabletoppers of the rpg “Baby Boom” of the 80s.

Let's parse out that mouthful.

What if you started with two new-old living games. Say on one level for the old system-lovers you took the old EPT rules cleaned them up, reformatted them, and added in some new art here and there. It's not an audience of the thousands that some seem to have stars in the eyes for, but an attractive OD&D variant game is highly likely to attract an audience in the hundreds (yes, let's be real). And hell the rules are already written.

Now if you really wanted to be ambitious with that audience you could start to release a few high-profile supplements I believe guaranteed to have as much appeal as the rule set above: the much-coveted Jakallan underworld, the lengthy and excellent Swords & Glory sourcebooks; perhaps even a porting of the deep, interesting Temple-based magic of S&G.

On the second level you could have another living game for the hardcore based on an even-simpler system: the super-lite, almost rule-less story-focused mechanics that Barker himself used for a time. (Ironically of which I first read in the program book of a Runequest convention.)

And now here's the other pillar that I think is as just as necessary as the products above—or more—an explosion of creative hobbyist energies canonical and not around the setting. 

Here we can already see the seeds: the creative, consistent play and preservation efforts of the Aethervox Gamers up in the tundra; the Tekumel Project's excellent, drop-dead gorgeous range of figures; Victor Raymond's runnings of Jakallan underworld games at recent conventions; The Drune's efforts to expand the space opera pre-history of EPT into a fully fledged game of its own with Humanspace Empires; and the list goes on (and my typing hand tires).

Idle, pointless dreams perhaps, but hope does spring eternal.  

W is for Why Blog?

Why blog about roleplaying games? Seriously, why bother?

You certainly aren't going to make much--if any--money off it, the next Great American Novel (or Great American Mega-Dungeon) isn't likely to arise from it, and ego gratification is just plain silly considering the subject and audience.

So why do it?

Every other week these questions float through my head when I sit down in the two-hour period I have allotted in my life to this here blog. Before in life just about every publication I touched whether it was a punk rawk zine, college newspaper, online news service, or monthly magazine had some rather obvious over-arching reason for me doing it: up end the cultural/political apple cart; start a career; turn a buck; etc.

I have noticed that my own motivations for running a gaming blog have shifted in rapid zig zags over time in a way that I never have experienced before.

The Hill Cantons blog for most of it's life has been a sporadic, modest affair. I launched it way back in March of 2009 as a convenient tool for the 13 players in my West Marches-like drop-in/drop-out campaign (note that all of my posts from that time are house rules and session reports). Over time the blog evolved into the public face of my house rules tinkering, I would post here and there when an idea hit me sometimes with lapses months on end.

The motivations were rather simple and obvious: using a practical tool that added a little color and fun to my post-game session wrap-up. Gradually it also began to be a space was something like a public sounding board for my house rules. Then house rules bled over into tinkering with whole sub-systems like all those iterations of variant classes, character backstory and random equipment generators.

But then I guess something switched in my head last September.

Writing is not at all like riding a bike, at least for me—and it's mostly not about listening to a muse (though every once in a while she whispers sweet-nothings in my ear). It's a discipline, it's getting up and doing it over and over again until when you do it, it becomes second nature.

Unfortunately, when you stop doing it, it atrophies—sadly quicker than the process of building it up. Which is where I was at in my life after switching gears from the madhouse of the newsroom to the life of a professional political “plumber”. Last Fall, the blog became a means to regain that discipline.

Overall it was a helluva success, at least in terms of that goal. Not only did the daily posts start up, but they gained a momentum—and they kept opening up doors. One thread lead to another and the exploration has become obsessive—and dare I say fun.

It's the quest for granularity broadly speaking, a vector for more and more immersion with each layer. It's something that both drives me nuts for little apparent, material gain, yet is also immensely gratifying. And best of all as I have built it, you the readers have showed up day after day too, added your own thoughts, struggled with this and that idea, and made for some great gaming.

So here's to another six months of riding the tiger with all of you.

I get bored hearing my own voice and I find myself as curious as always about why you out there blog. I don't just wonder about why I do it, but I wonder why all of you do it. What's the demon that puts you in front of that computer everyday? What do you draw from this? Why keep on keeping on?

Good Bad Fantasy

Among Orwell's best essays is a gem from 1945 titled “Good Bad Books”. In it, he talks at length about various low or middle brow “bad” books that are “the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.”

He targets many of them as being frankly about escape: “They form pleasant patches in one's memory, quiet corners where the mind can browse at odd moments, but they hardly pretend to have anything to do with real life.”

Orwell goes on to spend sometime drifting over the brilliant clumisness or trainwreck reasoning of this or that early 20^th century writer before hitting on an essential truth about the durability of this kind of writing: “The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration. I imagine that by any test that could be devised, Carlyle would be found to be a more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope has remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his cleverness he had not even the wit to write in plain straightforward English.”

I could write you a river about all the good bad books in my life--all the rough-edged punk rawk travel monologues of Aaron Cometbus or the savory manly-man cliches and tropes of Bernard Cornwell—but in a short on-and-off again series I patiently queued up I'd like to explore that rather obvious good bad heavyweight contender in our D&D-loving lives: the fantasy novel and how it influences our gaming. 


We are not talking your literary over-achievers here: no Lord Dunsany, no Eddison, no Gene Wolfe, and lord knows no Tolkien. 

Let's take one of the heaviest of the heavies for starters: Robert E. Howard.

Howard was by every definition of the phrase a hack writer. Paid by the word, he churned out an endless stream of them before the flash of his revolver cut it all short. And to be sure a good chunk of it like many of his boxing stories were just plain bad bad. But the Conan stories were something of a pinnacle of good bad pulp fantasy.

I could fill up several blog posts on how the stories influence this or that bit of my thinking as a GM--the effective description, for instance, of adventure setting dress whether it's ages-lost ruins, a bejeweled tower, or a dusty exotic caravan city—but how about a focus on one biggie: action pacing.

During sessions I often write in my ever-present spiral notebook a few “stage notes” about how to improve my performance as a GM. A few months back I scrawled in the margin “describe action and combat more like REH” (that thought launched this ship). Given the abstract nature of D&D combat, a good GM is invariably looking for ways to flesh out the narrative bits, I am certainly no exception.

In lieu of me continuing to hurl quotes at you to build my case, indulge me with this little exercise. Pick up any collection of Howard's Conan stories you have available—if your hand is on one of those cheeseball post-humous collections not written by REH put your hand down, you are disqualified—if you don't have any on hand scoot over to Gutenberg to read “Red Nails” here.

Skim along until you find the first battle, chase, or other scene filled with danger. Read it aloud, let it along your tongue. Read it again or proceed over to the next.

How's that? Hit a good bad nerve? A little embarrassing, yet satisfying? Come back and tell me about it. Now channel that kind of terse pacing—and violence—into your next session.

Friends and not-so friends, what's the good bad fantasy book taking up space in your life? Why? What piece of that author's work can you see playing a direct influence in upping your game?