Dwarven Radios and Elven Light Blubs

Geoff Manaugh from BLDG BLOG posted an interesting article about the artistic endevours of Ryan Jordan and Caleb Charland called Alternative Inputs. Essentially, Ryan Jordan is an artist who led a workshop about constructing crude amplifiers out minerals like pyrite and crystals based on the Adam's crystal amplifier.

(From Jordon's Derelict Electronics)

Caleb Charland is an artist that makes installations focused on biological batteries creating light in some way, particularly by powering lamps. 

(From Charland's website)

This sort of primitive take on technology got me thinking. They seemed to fit well with the sort of technology that dwarves and elves might develop. 

I can see dwarves using these pyrite-and-crystal-based radios in their caverns. With a little tweaking these simple amplifiers could be used as microphones. So only could they be used for communication, they could also be used as surveillance. By setting these devices up they could keep tabs on outer parts of their territory for intruders. 

In another article called, Electric Landscapes, Manaugh talks about how if we used landscape to create electricity it would probably be in marsh environments, but this are elves and fantasy we're talking about so whatever. The elves have bred special trees that contain bacterial strains that are especially adept at generating electricity. They have these trees growing at the centers of their cities. Power lines stretch out and criss-cross through the trees giving elves electric starlight even on the cloudiest of nights. 

The Broomway

The Broomway is three miles of murky, foggy, muddy, coastal wasteland that disappears during high tide. I'm just going to leave these here for your perusal:

The Xenotopian Impulse

Walking the Broomway

The Grey

Looks terrible, doesn't it?

Back in 2012 and hot off the steamy shit pile that was The A-Team Liam Neeson and the director of The A-Team, Joe Carnahan, put out The Grey. When I first saw a trailer for it, and each subsequent viewing in between things I wanted to watch, I thought it looked like a terrible action movie that was cast in the movie abyss that is January. I'm not entirely sure what put it in my radar again or why I decided to watch, but damn, was it impressive.

The movie is about of group of men who work on an oil rig at The-End-of-the-World, Alaska. The movie starts with Liam Neeson's character, John Ottway, narrating a letter he was writing to his ex-wife about how much he hated his life and how he is going to kill himself. He talks about how he's surrounded by terrible people and there's shot of a bar fight. At that moment I realized this was going to be a D&D movie without magic and swords.

Once the environment and Ottway's character has been established, he gets on plane going back to Anchorage. Mid-flight the plane goes down, and in the midst of snow, burning metal, and broken bodies, a group of men must survive in the harsh wilds of Alaska. Though, harsh is truly an understatement when your looking out at the desolate grey wastes of the tundra. Then things go from bad to completely fucked when Ottway is attacked by two wolves in the middle of the night.

The wolves are like an awesome combination of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park and the xenomorph from Alien. It's a man-versus-nature, survival movie that's comparable to Jaws. Where Jaws had a charm and wit to it, mainly thanks to Richard Dreyfuss, The Grey is a lot more serious and bleak. It's a meditation on the why we choose to struggle when faced with such terrible odds and no real purpose. It's also excellent inspiration for designing wilderness adventures.

The movie gives a great sense of how to challenge players in the wilderness. From the bitter cold to the lack of oxygen. It shows how even falling into river can bring a great sense of drama. I wish I could share more, but I don't want to give any spoilers. Just watch the movie!

There's something terrifying about using normal animals, like wolves, for something greater than random encounter fodder. If you can make your players tremble after fighting mundane animals, think about the possibilities once magic gets involved. If your players every begin combat with, "It's alright, they're just..." you're not doing your job as a DM. They've either seen it enough times that it's boring, or you've made combat predictable. The wilderness has "wild" in for a reason. Don't be afraid to take away some of the safeties. It's okay to thrill your players. That's the point of combat. To quote one of the many excellent monologues in The Grey, "What's wrong with a little fear?"

Dungeon as Narrative: Rethinking Storytelling

Like a lot of people, you probably got into GMing, because you want to tell stories. You’re probably avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, maybe even an aspiring novelist, and you want to try your hand at writing something. You start developing your world, fleshing out realistic NPCs, and tweaking the minute details. You probably spend a great deal of time making sure every aspect of your world has a compelling backstory. Stop right there.

Your players don’t care. They don’t care that you’ve sweat, cried, and bled to make sure that your world’s history and inhabitants are fully developed and interesting. They don’t care that you’ve constructed character arcs for them that challenge their morals. They want to murder the ever-loving hell out of imaginary goblins, dragons, and Lovecraftian horrorterrors. This is their playground of kill. Yes, even the ones that are polite enough sit there and allow themselves to be railroaded. They aren’t as interested in your story as they are in making their own.

Think about how you interpret the word narrative. When the average person thinks of a narrative, things like novels, plays and, depending on their age, video games come to mind. The problem with our thinking is that pen&paper RPGs aren’t like other storytelling mediums that we’ve had experience with. The players are active participants in the story and they have an infinite number of options, unlike novels and video games which railroad the reader and player. So the game’s narrative can’t be constructed like a novel or a video game. At any moment, a player can choose to make their character walk away from an adventure hook or kill an important NPC. That’s a lot of power, and it needs to be respected if you want to tell an interesting story.

Narrative doesn’t have to just be transmitted through social interaction between the quest-giver and the PCs. Narrative doesn’t have to be the stuff that happens before and after the quest. Narrative is the quest. Narrative is the dungeon. Narrative is the random encounter. Narrative is the treasure. Narrative is participatory. There isn’t one person at the table telling a story, each person at the table is telling their own story. It’s the GM’s job to reconcile the differences and keep all the plates spinning.

From Blind Descent

I started Tabor's Blind Descent today. Two quotes stood out:

"[W]e prefer to think of our heroes as clean and beautiful. Think our grandest explorer icon, Neil Armstrong: immaculate and pure, his knightly suit burning against the gray moon and black space. Caving on the other hand, is by its very nature dirty, dark, and wet."

"What ordinary man, after all, would sacrifice everything for the privilege of going to hell?"

As literature guy, those sentences are phenomenal. As a gamer, more specifically a DM, they perfectly capture the mood I've been striving for in my games. I want characters to test themselves in the darkest, most terrible parts of the world. I want to examine what it means to be an adventurer and to achieve. Against awful grandeur, the sublime, of the world is it all worth it? Or should you have just stayed home and been a dirt farmer, or taken over the family business, or married so-and-so?

Stranger than Fiction: My Nonfiction Reading List

Touching on the same ideas in my previous post, there seems to be a set canon of literature in our subculture that gives us everything we need to write plots, dig dungeons, and build worlds. Fiction, comics, TV shows, and movies all provide us with fertilizer for our imaginations. Just by reading the list of mediums, I'm sure you're already developing a list of "acceptable" sources of inspiration. What about nonfiction? I rarely see anyone discussing useful nonfiction, though it's possible I'm just not going to right places; at the same time, this is a subculture almost completely based on the premise of fiction and the willing suspension of disbelief.

For a while I've been grathering of nonfiction books I'd like to read. Based the research that I've done on these books, I believe they'll help me gain different perspective on the process of worldbuilding.

1. Blind Descent by James Tabor. It's about exploring caves that are thousands of feet deep. He did an interview with John Stewart on the Daily Show about his book. I don't what could be a better resource for a game that's all about exploring underground labyrinths. Tabors makes mention of something cavers experience called rapture. After being underground for a long period of time and getting so deep the brain freaks and wants out. I think it would be interesting to include a game mechanic that simulates this. 
2. The Wild Trees by Richard Preston. It's about exploring the canopies of the redwoods in California. Preston writes about the strange ecosystems that exist in the canopies and details about how people live their lives up there. Sounds like elfland to me. He did an interview with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report about the book. On a side note, earlier Preston wrote a book, called The Hot Zone, all about the Ebola virus. We seriously don't need zombies. We already have Ebola and it's absolutely, organ-liquefyingly, terrible. Literally, your organs liquefy because the virus replicates so quickly that it destroys everything inside you. Scientists believe that Ebola came from Kitum Cave, which Tabors references in his book.
3. A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain. It may seem weird to have a book about cuisine on the list, but hear me out. First off, I don't know about you, but most of the foods my characters have ingested over the years have been renaissance fair fare; beef, meat pies, potatoes, bread, and stews. One of the best ways to engage the senses and give people the idea that they're dealing with another culture is through food. Describing the sights, scents, and tastes of the food helps players to understand where their characters are. Changing the cuisine as they travel to different parts of the world also helps make the world feel like it's a real place. 
4. Psychogeography by Will Self and illustrated by Ralph Steadman. It's about how place and the objects that inhabit the space there affects us psychologically. It out of print, unfortunately, but there are other books that discuss the ideas of psychogeography available.

Every once in a while I'll post commentary about what I'm reading. Are there any nonfiction books that you think would help in the noble art of worldbuilding? Post them in the comments. 

My First Dungeon

My first experience in a dungeon wasn't on a piece of graph paper and there weren't any dice involved. It was Super Metroid.

Back in 90s, when there was a Blockbuster around every corner, my parents would take my brother and I to rent video games for the weekend. We would get a copy of Super Metroid and from the moment we powered up the Super Nintendo we knew we were in for an interesting experience. We didn't start a new game. We just played other peoples' saved games.

It was like waking up in the middle of a labyrinth without any recollection of how we got there. How many times have you pulled that plot on your players? We would explore the environment and try to find our way out. And fail miserably at it. We'd expend all of our resources or get stuck somewhere and end up getting killed in the process.

Zac Gorman's Magical Game Time - Video game nostalgia at its finest.

My favorite part of the process was discovering the different environments. Even if it led to my demise. It was my first experience in a dungeon and it left a powerful impression on me.

Many times, as world builders or dungeon designers, we have a narrow perspective on the process. We feel like we must constrain ourselves to a limited number of sources: Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Conan the Barbarian, Elric of Melniboné, Lovecraft's Mythos, and Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Maybe it's out of some sense of purity? Those are well-trodden paths. Reduced, reused, and recycled ad nauseum...

Don't be afraid to use something outside of the realm of fantasy or paper&pencil. Interesting things happen when we take disparaging and dissimilar ideas and try to make them work in concert.

What inspires you? Leave some comments. Let's see what we come up with.

Inauguration

This a pen&paper RPG blog. I'm going to post stuff here about the different facets of gaming. Most of the content will be geared towards people who are interested in running games and building worlds for D&D-esque games. The flavor of the content is going to be darker and weirder than your average ideas of fantasy role-playing games. I'm also interested in looking into the literary aspects of gaming, such as using metaphor and symbolism to illustrate ideas and meaning in subtle ways. Let's call it the intellectualization of hack&slash.

The title is a joke about myself. It's not very good...

Or flattering.

But what's the point if you can't laugh at yourself?