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?