The Poughkeepsie problem

It turns out I need to set the record straight about my attitude to The Lord of the Rings. As I confessed in an earlier post, I haven’t read it. When I tried the first book, back in my mid-teens, the cosy Little England prose style didn’t grab me. I was more into Elric and Conan and the whole sword-&-sorcery side of fantasy. It might be different now, but the intervening years have made the plot so familiar that I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it.

All of that doesn’t mean I don’t respect Tolkien’s craft. I’m sure he knew what he was doing, and he did it with imagination and elegance. It’s much like my opinion of the Earthsea and Discworld books. I’ve dipped into them, I can see they’re done well, I admire the authors; the books just aren’t for me. And that’s a very different thing from disdaining them.

This cropped up recently when a friend told me he was planning a roleplaying campaign about defiance and resistance in the face of political repression. “There’ll be difficult compromises and harsh moral choices,” he promised. “And it’s all set in a brutalist industrial landscape.”

Sounded intriguing. I was almost hooked. But then he added: “And it’s got elves!”

Instant heartsink. "Oh," I said. "You had me until the elves.”

“It’s a long way from traditional D&D,” he protested. “The elves aren’t the Tolkien kind. It’s mysterious. It's dark and gritty urban fantasy.”

Imagine you were an HBO exec in 2016, you'd just heard Jesse Armstrong's story pitch for Succession, and then he'd concluded with: "And they're all orcs!" 

I'm against torture, but...

So -- disgust, obviously. But what really gave me pause was that my friend must have got the impression I despise Tolkien’s use of elves. Not a bit of it. From what I’ve seen, Tolkien put a lot of thought into them, and given that he was attempting a European (indeed, British) flavour of fantasy their presence makes sense. It’s worlds always from a recent bestselling fantasy polylogy I had the misfortune to come across, which had elves with guns and mobile phones in a Middle-Earth meets Blade Runner setting. Why elves? The author might as well have called them Romulans or Vikings or Cossacks, all equally out of place in an urban fantasy environment. This is using the surface styling of a fantasy trope without any of the context that forms its roots. It’s cosplay masquerading as storytelling. Ursula K Le Guin would have plenty to say about it -- and did, in her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”:

"The lords of Elfland are true lords, the only true lords, the kind that do not exist on this earth; their lordship is the outward sign or symbol of real inward greatness."

Le Guin is not talking about moral greatness, by the way. The elves she refers to aren’t angels. In at least one of her examples the elf is being petty – but grandly petty, gloriously self-centred, whining as only a silver-tongued immortal can.

Talking of the stir-it-all-in approach, the modern mangling of myth, she says:

“It is not fantasy, for all its equipment of heroes and wizards […] A writer may deploy acres of sagebrush and rimrock without achieving a real Western. He may use spaceships and strains of mutant bacteria all he pleases, and never be anywhere near real science fiction.”

Le Guin recognized that Tolkien had the genuine fantasy touch. When I say that I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings, that’s not a judgement on the quality of the work. I could have mentioned Dune, another series I never got into only because it doesn’t happen to chime with me. That doesn’t mean it isn’t good. There are plenty of absolute stinkers in the fantasy & SF genres (Sturgeon’s Law tells us that) but also some gems, and those gems are worth celebrating, so I just wanted to be clear where I stand.

More about elves next time. The proper kind of elves, I mean.

A faerie contest

Talking the other week about Mark Smith's Virtual Reality gamebooks reminded me that I was also called in to do some editorial work on the first one, Green Blood. In the original version, your only chance of dealing with the elves was if you'd picked SWORDPLAY, SPELLS or UNARMED COMBAT at the start of the book. Given that you create a character by picking four out of a list of twelve skills, that means that more than one in four randomly chosen characters wouldn't be able to complete the adventure.

Mark's argument was that a player would be crazy not to start with at least one of those skills, but I was more used to roleplaying games like RuneQuest, and there the whole point is to customize the character by picking skills. It's never a given that you have to be a fighter or a wizard, as in D&D. Even one of the pregen characters in Green Blood (the thief) couldn't have finished the adventure.

It's really no fun to learn halfway through a gamebook that you never had a chance, so the publishers asked me to create some other contests you can use to best the elves using FOLKLORE, CUNNING or ARCHERY. You can play that sequence of the book here -- start at 21, and if you don't use any of the options I added then you'll eventually be sent to 18, which was the entirety of the original contest. 

You can also read the whole book here or try Stuart Lloyd's version Ravages of Hate, which weaves Green Blood into the material of Coils of Hate.

Elves as cosplay

“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 have meaning only to mortals.

I recently quoted that (a line from the elf’s story in Heroquest book one, The Fellowship of Four) when somebody was telling me about their game: "The other players assume my character's an imp, which is funny because actually I'm playing a sprite."

It’s the sort of distinction that probably makes sense in a D&D campaign, where the Monster Manual is treated as a diegetic text. (“It’s a ghoul.” “No it’s not; it’s a shade. Ghouls have red fingernails and regenerate.” Something like that, anyway.) It would make no sense in Legend, the setting of the Dragon Warriors and Jewelspider RPGs, where the peasant warning you about that damned thing out on the moors might call it an imp, pixie, sprite, goblin, redcap or elf all in the same breath.

Another gamer I know, after reading the blog post in which I elaborate on that theme, singled out this line:

“The point is: you don’t need player-character elves or dwarves.”

He asked the other players in his campaign:

“What's your take on the tendency to play 'furries'? I include the Dragonborn (half man, half dragon playable creatures in D&D) and the Tieflings (humans tainted by demonic heritage in D&D) in this. I think it's the same impulse. It's a very millennial thing, perhaps? How does everyone feel about playing nonhumans? Does it appeal? What's the appeal? Does it repel? Could there be a race that would be enticing to play? What would that be like?”

By the way, the faerie folk in Legend never say “human” or “nonhuman”. It’s a bit too Desmond Morris, that. They say “mortal”, stressing their own point of superiority but perhaps also betraying their envy of the part they don’t share, the immortal soul.

Naturally, like for anything else in roleplaying, everyone's mileage is different. For me, those elves and dwarves and trolls aren't “races” in the D&D sense. They are the very embodiment of the Other. So it makes no sense in a Legend game to have player-character elves or whatever. Elves don't have souls, nor goals that we could ever relate to. There's nothing about them that's human except in the glamour that clothes them in a form we can perceive.

But lots of people like playing exotic aliens and races, and if that's the style of fantasy they enjoy then why not. I guess it's a kind of role-cosplaying. They do then get tied in terrible knots over issues like “Drow -- oh dear, are they racist?” Well, maybe, if you're interpreting them as another Homo racial line, ie a sort of mutant humankind. But if they are simply manifestations of how we conceive these debased and residual spirits called faerie folk, then no.

One of my gaming friends likened it to picking avatars in computer games. Avatars (and an avatar is clearly not the player; think Gordon Freeman or Geralt) must have influenced players’ choice of character types over the last few decades. I notice that players very often refer to their characters in third person these days, as though they were avatars that the player controlled rather than personas that they put on. Roleplaying has become the middle-aged man's version of playing with dolls. But as for those dolls being nonhuman, there were plenty of halfling thieves scampering about in D&D games back in the ‘70s, so maybe the trend was set by Tolkien rather than by World of Warcraft. 

I also discourage players in my Tekumel games from taking nonhumans, even though those are simply alien species and not mythical beings. The reason for that is they always end up bring played as stereotypes, extreme versions of human types. Then the game almost becomes an allegory with characters standing for Aggressiveness, Greed, Pedantry, etc. Now if a player could portray a truly alien mindset then I'd be intrigued to see them explore that, but it would have to be a lot more out there than the likes of Worf or Spock.

David Kajganikh, creator of The Terror, said he wanted to appeal to the viewers “who would watch the show if it didn’t have monsters”. That’s where my hand goes up. Unfortunately, Mr Kajganikh meant those who would watch whether or not it had monsters. For me, there’s a fascinating story of ambition, egotism, stupidity, bravery and resourcefulness in the Franklin expedition. It’s not only quite unnecessary to tart it up with Eskimo demons, it’s an insult.

Eliot believed that “anything that can be said as well in prose can be said better in prose.” He wasn’t against poetry (obviously), nor am I am against fantasy when I say that whatever can be done as well with human characters is better done using human characters. Legend is a low-fantasy world not because I want to sweep fantasy under the carpet, but because fantasy is a powder worth keeping dry. That way it counts for something when you do use it. High fantasy adventure is a different style, and in a long-running campaign it leads to diminishing returns; eventually even mainlining the pure stuff isn’t going to give you a kick.

But now I’m mixing metaphors, so perhaps it’s time to wrap up and hand over this over for discussion. Let's close with a typically thought-provoking line by Ursula K Le Guin:

“Fantasy is the language of the inner self.”

At its best, fantasy isn't taking us out of ourselves into dressing-up and escapism. It's taking us deep into our dreams where logic cannot go.