And talking of waste...

It's been a very long time since I played in the world of Glorantha but, like Tekumel, it's another of roleplaying's famously detailed subcreations, and the way you present that so as to hook players is not by giving them the anthropology textbook or even the tourist's guide, but by immersing them in what it's like to live in that world.

The mistake there lies in telling, not showing. Bad writing is the cause of the rot in the case of much bigger IPs than Glorantha. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Marvel, for instance. Wokeness often gets blamed, but that's not the problem. Star Trek always espoused a liberal humanist ideology. The difference was that the writers used to know that if you want to embed ideas in a story, you have to explore those ideas through drama, not lecture the audience while trying to distract them with characters who talk like they're in a high school comedy. Author David R. Low explains all about that here.

Rarely pure and never simple

We were talking recently about alignment, and because I don't believe in those concepts I've never been very interested in heroes and villains, either in games or in fiction. The kind of fantasy stories I grew up with featured characters like Cugel, Elric, and Conan. No nursery-room ethical posturing for those guys. They did what they did for their own reasons. We could sympathize, even root for them and despise their foes, but there was never any suggestion of objective cosmic goodness.

I expect the same of player-characters in roleplaying games. Some have been very decent -- or have tried to be, as it's never easy doing good in a realistically complex world -- and some have been murderous and sought to justify it. The important thing is none of them were fairytale saints or pantomime villains. They acted from the motives that make real people do things.

That's why this post ("Why Most of my TTRPG Characters are Dislikeable") resonates with me. Personally, while I think likeability is not an important trait in a character, I don't set out to make my PCs dislikeable. I just want them to be interesting and feel genuine. Often in fiction I'm drawn to characters like Walter White, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings, Zachary Smith and Vic Mackey. But I also like Spock, Kirk and McCoy. Steve Rogers too. And Robin (both of them) in Robin of Sherwood -- because Robin fights for justice without being "good" in a soppy children's story way, and the Sheriff is his and our adversary and definitely not a nice guy without being "evil". The drama benefits from those characters and that world feeling real, not nursemaided along by a partisan narrator.

How real is make-believe?

Which strikes you as more real: Bambi or The Deer Hunter?

When William Goldman talked about “comic book movies", he didn’t mean the MCU. This was back in 1983. He didn’t mean movies like Superman either – a movie he’d been invited to write, incidentally, being a Golden Age comics fan – or not only Superman, but also Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gunga Din, E.T., Star Wars. And The Deer Hunter. If you want to know why, and how Bambi doesn’t classify as “comic book” storytelling and The Deer Hunter does, read what Goldman has to say about all this in Adventures in the Screen Trade.

Andrew Gelman, a statistician, raised a similar point on his blog recently:

“I was rereading Lord of the Rings […] and was struck by how real it felt. […] In contrast, take a book like Golden Hill […I]t doesn’t feel ‘real’, whatever that means.”

You may not have read Golden Hill. Not to worry, I read it for you. Prof Gelman is right, there is an artificiality to its picture of 18th century Manhattan that feels like a TV drama with machine-tailored suits and the wrong haircuts and makeup. This often seems to be the case with historical fiction. Compare The Essex Serpent, set in a late 1800s that never feels real, with The Odd Women, actually written in the late 1800s, which rings true throughout.

Prof Gelman seems to be focussing on prose style, which mainly has to do with whether the author is using a storytelling voice or not, but I’m more interested in stories that set out to describe a milieu that feels like our real universe rather than a “story universe”. Contrast the 1968 novel Pavane with almost any steampunk story (a genre of which it might well be the progenitor). Keith Roberts set out to tell us about something that could happen. Steampunk is usually predicated in let’s pretend – here is a fun universe for cosy adventure, even cosy misery, but you are never expected or intended to think of it as real.

For a very real story (David St. Hubbins might say “a bit too fucking real”) try George Gissing’s The Nether World. In the hands of Dickens we'd accompany a well-born character into the nether world of poverty in Clerkenwell the late 1880s. Dickens would give us their perspective of the monstrous characters and comic turns to be found there. And I like Dickens, but Gissing has an entirely different approach. We see the characters through their own eyes. We see how poverty brutalizes them. There's no sentiment, no avuncular author nudging the plot to satisfy the readers with warm life-lessons and unrealistic outcomes. Gissing's humour is sparing and far drier than Dickens's and he gives us an angry, despairing, unforgettable journey through this hell. Which is not to say it's a story without hope, only that the good is achieved at great effort and only sparingly. 

Once you start using this filter you see lots of examples. As SF, Children of Men is more real than Black Mirror which is more real than Babylon 5 which is more real than Star Wars. Breaking Bad is more real than Better Call Saul, less real than The Shield, but all three are far less real than true crime dramas like Rillington Place or The Staircase, because real life is messier and more surprising than the predictable twists and tropes of genre fiction.

Either can work, by the way. Goldman is careful to make that point. Gunga Din was his favourite movie of all time. Excalibur is one of mine, and there the characters screw and sit down to dinner in full plate armour. I used to enjoy the occasional game of Call of Cthulhu even though its 1920s is far less real than the entirely created world of Tekumel in Swords & Glory.

That reality – or authenticity, if you prefer – is what I’m aiming for with my current Jewelspider scenarios like “A Garland of Holly”. There’s still fantasy there, that’s not the issue. It’s that the society and the characters don’t feel like something set on a stage for you to watch and be entertained by. Instead you are there in the midst of them, the NPCs no less real than the player-characters. Events happen with the “ruthless poignancy” that C S Lewis admired in Homer. Like in life.

The real deal

M A R Barker used to draw a distinction between “real” Tekumel, the world as it would function if it actually existed, and “game” Tekumel, the version that allows for player-characters changing the course of history in sometimes rather slapstick ways.

It has widely been asserted that real Tekumel (I’m dropping those quotes) is unplayable. Some of Barker’s own gaming group take that view. I’m not so sure. Consider these remarks by the director Satyajit Ray:

“Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali was serialised in a popular Bengali magazine in the early 1930s. The author had been brought up in a village and the book contained much that was autobiographical. The manuscript had been turned down by the publishers on the ground that it lacked a story. […] I chose Pather Panchali for the qualities that made it a great book: humanism, lyricism, and its ring of truth. I knew I would have to do a lot of pruning and reshaping – I certainly could not go beyond the first half, which ended with the family’s departure for Banaras – but at the same time I felt that to cast the thing into a mould of cut-and-dried narrative would be wrong. The script had to retain some of the rambling quality of the novel because that in itself contained a clue to the feel of authenticity: life in a poor Bengali village does ramble.”

Would it be possible to run a game like that? Ray went on to describe how the filming of Pather Panchali affected him:

“These explorations into the village opened up a new and fascinating world. To one born and bred in the city it had a new flavour, a new texture; and its values were different. It made you want to observe and probe, to catch the revealing details, the telling gestures, the particular turns of speech.”

If modern Bollywood movies typically present us with game India, what Ray was looking for was the real India. And I think that stretch away from genre tropes towards authenticity can be achieved in roleplaying. When I ran Sagas of the Icelanders (Gregor Vuga's RPG, praised so often on this blog that I don’t need to do so again) there was no magic in the game. It became mostly a tale of farmers having boundary disputes, romantic affairs, family arguments. Some raiding and killing, but not a lot, just like in the Icelandic sagas themselves. Grettir’s Saga does have spells and undead, sure, but that’s an outlier.

I like The Northman but it’s set in game Scandinavia, if it’s even truly Norse at all. Grímur Hákonarson's Rams feels more like one of the genuine sagas. I like the pettiness – which isn’t at all petty once your focus adjusts; then it could be the wrath of Achilles. The loose ends and the ambiguity too.

A lot of Depression-era games resemble The Shadow – another movie I love, incidentally – but you could just as well forgo game-1930s for the real-1930s of, say, Patrick Hamilton’s 20,000 Streets Under The Sky, which has way more meat to it than one of Walter Gibson’s Shadow novellas.

Responses to escapism, realism and non-genre gaming suggest that the quest for a real Tekumel, or Legend, or Iceland, or wherever is not something most roleplayers are on board for. But how do you know till you try it? And anyway...

The really real

I’m not coming with any answers this time, just a question.

“To understand the Athenians properly, we must recognise that it isn’t just that they perceived the world differently, but that the world itself was different. […] That we tend to see [objective reality] as a ‘natural’ feature of the world and not as our own construct is inherently bound up with the development of colonial modernity in the West. On these grounds, histories of pre-modern cultures that make use of modern Western ontologies fail to capture something essential about the world as it was. Shackled to our own ways of understanding, we can only ever write what amounts to a shadowy prehistory of ourselves.”

* * *

That's from Claire Hall's article "The Day A God Rode In" in The London Review of Books. If you want to read the whole thing, I'll wait.

So should a historical Spartan RPG include divine favour? I'm not talking about a fantasy setting here, but one where you’re trying to recreate Classical Greece as it really was. Clearly that was a world governed by the same physical laws as ours. The Greek gods don’t exist now and they didn’t then. The cosmos didn’t care whether this or that Greek hero lived or died.

Yet if the rules reflect that, the players will think like 21st century characters, not like Greeks of the 5th century BC. So maybe you need to include things like POW (in RuneQuest terms) to fix that. I'm thinking about it because at some point I mean to finish my Sparta roleplaying sourcebook Λ and Basic Roleplaying seems like a good set of rules to use for that.

But what do you think? Can we ever achieve objective reality in a historical setting? Or must we make game rules that fit the worldview of the people who lived there? 

The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History

RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic