Science fantasy gets a makeover

It was Empire of the Petal Throne, not D&D, that hooked me on roleplaying, and the reason for that is I was into sword-&-sorcery and science fantasy rather than the Tolkienesque strain of epic fantasy that caught on through the late 20th century. You know how a duckling follows the first thing it sees when it hatches? Ten-year-old me discovered fantasy through Mike Moorcock’s Mars books and A Planet Called Krishna by L Sprague de Camp. There was no looking back – or forward – from that point on.

Genre is slippery, so bear with me, but technically those books belong to what is now defined as sword-&-planet or planetary romance:

‘Planetary romance is a sub-genre of science fiction that has a close relationship with fantasy in the sense that the cultures that are described are very frequently pre-industrial. The pseudo-medieval warfare with bows and arrows and swords is frequently reminiscent of medievalist fantasy, but this is also a space in which some writers explored American notions of the primitive, mapping the mythology of the American West on to the plains of another planet.’

- Farah Mendlesohn & Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy

Usually spacefaring humans arrive – or better still, get stranded – on a planet at an ancient or medieval level of technology. Sometimes, as in Vance’s Planet of Adventure series, the indigenous civilization has technology of its own. Then it can shade off into Flash Gordon territory, if the natives fully understand their advanced devices, or Tekumel, where the remnants of ancient technology are rare and thought of as magic.

Outliers here (I can’t resist a digression) include Arthur Landis’s Camelot novels, which I basically agented to Don Wollheim back in the early ‘70s. That has some tropes you’ll see recurring: human operative dropped into a more primitive world with just a few bits of kit to give him some magic powers. Swords, princesses, mystic powers, and high adventure – the familiar ingredients of Star Wars, but drip-fed rather than delivered by fire hose.

I call it science fantasy because I don’t seem any intrinsic difference between those planetary stories and, say, Lin Carter’s Thongor books, which are set on a lost continent in Earth’s distant past but still have all the familiar elements. Likewise our own Abraxas setting.

As science fantasy stories are set in ‘exotic’ civilizations, there’s usually a lot of world-building. That could explain why science fantasy has been largely superseded by the Tolkien/Game of Thrones/Witcher variety, in which the settings are more-or-less identikit medieval Europe. We in the West seem to be less enamoured of other cultures than we used to be. In the last century, exotic customs were occasion for surprise and delight. We found them intriguing, and the more troubling elements like suttee looked like they’d been safely banished by modern secularism. Nowadays the news tends to focus on the less quaint features of other cultures: morality patrols, girls being denied education, ancient artworks being blown up, the demonization of gays and albinos, gang-rape of low-caste women, 'honor' killings, and mobs murdering people of other religions. Is it a coincidence that many Westerners have retreated into a genre of fantasy that depicts a cosy cosplay version of their own past? A kind of fantasy where bad things are only done by bad people, so as not to have to face the different and disturbing ways that a whole society can behave? Of course, actual medieval Europe wasn’t a bit like the Middle Ages of most fantasy literature and games, but the difference is it is comfortably dead and gone so fiction can feed us the denatured version.

I’m only speculating as to the causes, but certainly there’s little interest these days in all the cultural minutiae we were presented with in games like Empire of the Petal Throne. In most Tekumel games these days, the participants no longer bother to try roleplaying Tsolyani. What grabs them is all the science fantasy stuff. They want to stand apart, to be the clued-up modern folk luxuriating in a sense of superiority over all those 'primitive' NPCs.

If you've hung around here long enough you'll know that the rich diversity of human culture is precisely what I personally find enthralling; and when it comes to fiction, the more different from modern Western democracy the better. But I've also noticed that the books, movies and games I like are not usually the million-sellers. In this post I'm trying to figure out the kind of makeover science fantasy needs to avoid bombing like John Carter. What does it take to turn it into the opposite of the kind of niche culture-gaming that can barely muster a cult following? It seems that if Tekumel were ever to break out of its ever-shrinking ghetto, those Star Wars style mass-market fantasy tropes mentioned above are the strengths it should play to.

What would that look like? Imagine Star Wars several centuries on. A single planet isolated from the rest of the empire or republic or whatever. Science is largely forgotten, apart from a few Christopher Johnson types who everybody else thinks of as wizards. If you find a light sabre it’s like picking up a magic sword. Droids are tantamount to elves, immortal and nonhuman. The Force is – oh well, that’s always been about black and white magic.

So this reboot of Tekumel would take its cue from Star Wars, blurring all the ethnographic particulars and instead foregrounding the elements that are easy for modern audiences to grok:

• Alien powers that have set themselves up as gods
• Remnants of near-magical super-science
• Shapechangers meddling in human affairs
• Secrets of the ancients known only to a few
• Robotic guardians that are dangerous but can be reprogrammed to become servants (Terminator, golems, etc)
• Swordplay and derring-do
• A world in which a few people can make all the difference

Culturally it would retain only the specific Tekumel USPs that might resonate with modern audiences:

• Non-white societies
• Women, gays & trans characters are fully accepted and equal
• Stereotypical nonhumans are there for flavour (the Stepin Fetchits of modern fantasy)

The weird linguistics would need to be downplayed. I've spent four decades listening to D&D players sneering at Tekumel's "unpronounceable names". Gamers can't be bothered to figure out consonants like tl and ts, never mind ng and nd. In any case, most Tekumel players already don't say the name of the planet correctly. It should be TAY-koo-male; they tend to pronounce it TECH-you-mell.

A reboot like this wouldn’t  involve entirely abandoning the more obscure bits of Tekumel culture. They just wouldn't get mentioned. It can be useful for any fantasy setting to have those ‘iceberg details’ supporting it, as long as they don’t get in the way of the 95% of players who want to ignore them. Given easy docking points for new players and a familiar rules system, maybe it could avoid the demise that Steve Foster predicted and prescribed for thirty years ago.

Why I think Tekumel would be worth such a reboot is because it has dwindled to barely a cult interest, and yet it does have those USPs and it’s a truly American sui generis of fantasy, something original in a field where almost everything else is a mutant strain of Lord of the Rings. Also, it has a champion in Steve Jackson, who once offered to publish a set of three GURPS Tekumel books. M A R Barker, who I think everyone agrees had extremely poor judgement, turned that down for a publishing deal with Lou Zocchi to release an RPG that nobody even remembers anymore. Tekumel has become in effect the obscure but authentic R&B that achieved breakthrough success only when diluted and dumbed down to become white rock & roll (think Numenera in this analogy). Maybe there’s a way to give it one last shot, even if that means chucking out most of what diehards like me cherish about it.

Rumble in the jungle

A picture is worth a thousand words. More than a thousand when it's by a master artist like Kevin Jenkins. So I'll keep this short. Kev has been madly busy on visual design for the next Star Wars movie - or maybe the next but one - but he cleared some time recently to do a few sketches of the cover for the seventh Fabled Lands book, The Serpent King's Domain. And when I tell you this is one of the designs we rejected, you'll get a hint of how amazing the finished cover is going to look.

Kev says of this one: "Our hero is taking down an attacker while being surprised by a second assailant, below massive jungle waterfalls with temples carved with massive stone faces." Of course we apologized for dragging him away from a galaxy far, far away but he added, "Believe me, after four years on the same subject it was nice to sketch a dragon."

An awesome guy and an awesome talent. We're lucky to have him. And anyway, I'm a Trekker.

Save the world, I want to get off

You know when you first started role-playing and every other campaign seemed to be about saving the world? Because that’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it? The stakes don't come any bigger than that, right?

Well, how about finding your little niece who's gone missing in Central Park at sunset? Compared to something like that, saving the world is a pretty unrelatable goal. Even the laziest author or GM recognizes that and, to solve the problem, they usually add, "The world's in danger and only you can save it."

What are they aiming for there? They're trying to make the threat personal. Because, when it's personal, the reader or viewer or player will care about it.

Look at Star Wars. Nobody tells Luke Skywalker that he's going to have to save the world. In fact, he's going to have to do that and a whole lot more, but what kicks it off is a plea for help from a beautiful princess. (Yeah, beautiful. Try to forget about the ear-muff hairdo, that’s all I’m asking.) Princess Leia personifies and clarifies the abstract goal of struggle against a galactic empire. Luke gets drawn in, and we go with him.

Save-the-world is so hard to care about, you see. It’s like: “Evil will triumph.” But what does that even mean? Show us. Evil is your former neighbor herding you into a gas oven. It’s a warlord who cuts your father’s hands off in front of you. It’s not a guy in a black robe spouting nihilistic philosophy and laughing sneerily.

Also, as Claude Chabrol pointed out in his essay "Les Petits Sujets", a small-scale story can be just as powerful -- and often more so, as a self-consciously "epic" story can swamp the individuals involved. The death of a waitress in an alley, Chabrol said, is no less important than the death of a hero of the Resistance. Often picking a big theme for your story is just a desperate attempt to make the story itself profound. Look for that profundity in the smaller and more personal subjects. The endings of Turgenev's Fathers & Sons, or Chekhov's "In the Ravine", or Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop all deal with personal tragedies that are no less earth-shattering in their emotional impact for being drawn on a small canvas.

Paul Mason and I, playing characters in a Tekumel game years ago, were told that we had to go off into another dimension to stop an ancient evil from destroying the planet. Simple Tsolyani soldiers that we were, that meant even less to our characters than it did to us. But the “ancient evil” had sucked up the spirit of our slain clan-cousin, and in our beliefs he couldn’t go on to the afterlife until that “evil” was destroyed. We managed to find a way to make ourselves care more deeply than the abstract victory condition of save-the-world could ever have done.

So personal threats are the way you can engage the players. Don't make the mistake of locating those personal threats within the game set-up. Players don't want to sit through a long spiel that tells them how their family has been kidnapped and then throws them into the game to sort it out. Their identification with their character begins only when the override is taken off the steering wheel and they’re in control. The classic adventure game Dark Earth involved a complex plot of betrayal, mystery, and danger, but it made sure that these plot elements were uncovered during the game. By the time you start to figure out the intrigue, you’ll have already been playing for an hour, and, then, just to make sure you take the threat to the world seriously, the game embodies it in a very personal way by having your character get infected with a slow-acting poison. Never mind "You have two hours to save the world"; how about "You have two hours to stop yourself from becoming a monster?"