Believing in faerie

Recent posts and comments about Dragon Warriors, in particular the discussion about how Paul Mason used centaurs in "The Tower of Horglin", have been reminding me why I prefer "low fantasy" over the kind of setting used in most FRP games, and specifically how that preference shaped the DW world of Legend. I characterize it as low fantasy because Legend itself is intended as a pretty realistic milieu into which the fantastic occasionally intrudes. Because centaurs and elves and whatnot are not part of the infrastructure of the society, there is no necessity in DW to treat them as ethnic groups with their own customs and ecology. Instead, they stand for something in the human psyche. They can be (as fantasy should be) illogical and dreamlike.

The article below, in which I explain the thinking behind that preference, originally appeared in the DW fanzine Ordo Draconis which contains loads of useful material for roleplaying campaigns and is not tied exclusively to the DW rules either. It's well worth a look. (Incidentally, there is also a band called Ordo Draconis and their second album was released by Opus Magnum Records, while Magnum Opus Press publishes 2nd edition Dragon Warriors. So you see, there is a God and He has nothing better to do.)

If you've already come across this little article in OD, apologies for repeating it here. My excuse is that many Fabled Lands players may not be all that familiar with what's going on with DW and yet may still find it interesting. The line of reasoning behind these choices when I originally created Legend is pretty much the same as is elaborated in this post on the Lawful Indifferent blog - ie, human beings are so diverse and complex that you'll never get to the end of them, while PC elves and dwarves are just a way of avoiding immersion through stereotypes.

The FL world, of course, is all awash with high fantasy quests and not at all like Legend. So with that caveat in mind, here's the article...

FAERIE FOLK IN THE LANDS OF LEGEND

Lafcadio Hearn wrote a story about a mujina that haunted a stretch of road in old Tokyo. The mujina appeared as a woman without a face, terrifying travellers at night. Because the term “mujina” had not been seen in the West, readers assumed that it meant a creature that had no face. Eventually the word achieved its reductio ad absurdum: an entry in a the monster manual for a dozen fantasy role-playing games that were either set in the Orient or had reached the point of desperation where another few dozen new creatures were needed to sell a supplement and it didn’t matter what part of the world they came from.

The truth is, mujina doesn’t mean a creature with no face. It’s just a word for a goblin, sprite or imp, derived in fact from the medieval Japanese superstition that badgers and foxes were mischievous faerie critters. And the blank face? Just a spooky magic trick. Hearn – a folklorist, not a biologist - never intended it as the defining characteristic of a species.

Elf, dwarf, goblin. Where do those words come from? From the mind of Man, who is never happier than when he’s managed to tie a label on something and put it in a display cabinet.

All very well in our world, but this is Legend. Darwin is never going to exist here. The magic of Legend is not a science and, despite the convenience of the game rules, magic doesn’t yield to strictly logical principles. The creatures of faerie that we may call elves and dwarves may have very different ideas of how to categorize themselves.

Gin ye ca’ me imp or elf,

I rede ye look weel to yourself;

Gin ye ca’ me fairy,

I’ll work ye muckle tarrie.

The fays of Legend are not the elves and dwarves of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth or of Dungeons & Dragons. For one thing, they are rare. The people of Legend believe in elves and dwarves, but they don’t expect ever to meet one. They hope never to meet one, put it that way. Because they are rare, there is misinformation about them; conflicting stories. And because this is Legend, those conflicting stories may all be true. Logic sits in the corner without a dance partner, disapproving and ignored.

But what are fays, or faerie folk? They are the degenerate remnants of pagan nature spirits whose power has sapped away with the coming of the True Faith. As nature spirits, they take their form and their nature from the living landscape. In forests they are shadowy, agile, willowy. In mountains they are squat and strong as barrels. Out on the moors they are gnarled, spiteful and dank-breathed. You can call those elves and dwarves and goblins, but to the creatures themselves the terms would seem irrelevant. No doubt they do see themselves as distinct from each other, but the urge to fit things into categories is not part of a fay’s outlook. Referring to them as species like that means even less than the concept of race among humans.

As you travel about Legend, you’ll encounter local beliefs in the faeries just as you might have done in Cornwall or the Scottish Highlands not so very long ago. When a Cornumbrian tells you of mischievous pookas and an Erewornian tells you of murderous redcaps, the nature of the creature they are describing may simply be the vernacular penchant of the fays, shaped by countryside and weather and the attitudes of mortals.

More often, though, the talk in taverns is of a specific local fay: Long Lankin or Old Ned or Jack Hollyshoes. No two are exactly alike. A hobgoblin is just a goblin that nearly did for you. There’s no such thing as a genome we can use to pin down their faerie lineage. If you want to GM them properly, you can put that rulebook away for a start.

“My name is Eildonas of Hulda Hoo,” I tell him as we walk.

“I take you to be one of the Grey Elves,” he says with a sidelong glance, provoking in me a short laugh, since such categories only interest mortals.

What the fays do recognize is territorial sovereignty and status. An elf of the forest regards himself as cultured aristocracy, and may even model his manners on the etiquette of a mortal court. The kobolds or dwarves of crags and caverns are a more rough-hewn breed, but still pride themselves on having noble status. A mean creature of the moors and ditches, whether you call it a goblin or a boggart, knows its place in the hierarchy of faerie.

Now, all of this is the way it works in “real” Legend – that’s my and Oliver’s Legend. (You did get that I put "real" in inverted commas, right?) You’ve bought the Dragon Warriors books, so your Legend is entirely up to you. We don’t have no truck with authorial privilege in these parts. But I do have a good reason for recommending that you don’t start neatly indexing elves and dwarves and what-have-you into suitable player-character templates. That’s because it will ruin your game.

Mike Polling (the author of “The Key of Tirandor”, an excellent scenario in White Dwarf #49-50 that is to be reprinted in In From The Cold) describes a problem in fantasy fiction and gaming that he calls taxonomic reduction. It begins with a demand for details about elves, for example - their social organization, clothing, breeding habits, and so on. So you get a supplement with all that stuff… hit points for Grey Elves, magic for High Elves, eye colour and what they eat. Now you can play an elf. But actually all you are playing is another kind of human being.

Okay, so now your players start to sense that something has gone. Elves used to be mysterious. Now they know more about them than they do about Yanomami Indians. So you have to bring in something new. You scour legends until you find Trows, say, or Sith. Just words. Now they take the place of the elves who have been filed and categorized into meaninglessness. Yet pretty soon a player says, “How can I get to play a trow character?” and the whole reductive process begins again.

The point is: you don’t need player-character elves or dwarves. Unless of course you want to recreate Lord of the Rings in your games, in which case stop playing Legend right now because it’s not that kind of setting - what you want is D&D or MERP. Human beings (or rather mortals, as the term is in Legend) already have infinite diversity. If you aren’t able to find that in your own role-playing ability, dressing up as an elf isn’t going to do it for you.

We have to have the rules in role-playing, but they’re a necessary evil. They shouldn’t be allowed to shape the way we think about the world and characters. And most especially they shouldn’t be allowed to stifle the magic and mystery that’s the whole point of choosing Legend as your game world in the first place.

Of course, DW is a game system as well as a milieu. So you're perfectly at liberty to chuck out the low-magic medieval setting and spooky flavour and just use the rules for combat and magic. My own gaming group did it the other way round: our games are set in Legend but we use our own GURPS variant, 7URPS.

By the way here's a nice little companion comment on fairies by Alan Moore. And if you should be interested in running games in the authentic Legend style, it's worth tracking down copies of Maureen Duffy's book The Erotic World of Faery and Susanna Clarke's brilliant short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu.