Sunday, January 26, 2014

World Building 101: Throw Away The Whole Cloth, Make A Quilt Instead

I've talked about mingling Norse and Iroqouis traditions when creating the culture of the Vetrur, and how the Doro people are a mixture of Mongol and Apache influences. It's very clear that the other Allied Nations of Angarn, Cymrik, and the Cualish Free States are drawn from Medieval and Renaissance influences: predominately Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern in their origins. Kever is drawn heavily from historical Egyptian and other Super- and Sub- Saharan cultures. Harak-Ur, if you haven't guessed, was influenced heavily by Babylonian and Sumerian mythology and culture.

Why?

Why not just create my cultures out of whole-cloth, and come up with really new, interesting, novel stuff?

Easy.

Because creating entire cultures and their respective idioms, biases, traditions, and methods is really amazingly difficult to do believably.

No, I mean, it really is. It is phenomenally hard to come up with truly unique and novel cultural concepts that haven't been done before, and then, on top of it all, to do it believably.

Don't buy it? I'll prove it to you.

Star Wars.

Star Wars?

Star Wars.

The universe presented to us in Star Wars is one of strange alien races, with enormous walking carpets, snooty robots, and so many aliens. Man, look at all those aliens. Oh, and laser swords! And crazy mystical magical powers!

And Star Wars just all fits together, man. It is so interlocking and well woven, it is a brilliant piece of world-building. Every planet is one of extremes, which leads to an interesting Mono-Climate scenario for each planet - which in turn influences all manner of behavior in the way people develop culturally. The people of Tattooine are so completely different from the people of Coruscant, who are in turn super different from the cultures on other worlds that aren't monolithic City Complexes. The aliens are alien and they aren't just people in funny suits.

It's an amazing piece of whole-cloth world-building, isn't it?

Except, it's really not.

There is absolutely nothing in Star Wars that doesn't come from somewhere in Human culture and history, somewhere. The reason the Rebellion fighting the Empire strikes such a chord in us when we watch the movies is that we understand the struggle between the underdog and the oppressor. The reason we identify with the people of Coruscant and their hustle-bustle city-planet life, and we can so easily contrast it with Farm Boy Anakin Skywalker, is because we are familiar with the disparity between the country boy and the city boy. We immediately accept Obi-Wan Kenobi's explanation that "sand people always ride single file to hide their numbers" because this is a plausible scenario for a culture of savage, desert dwelling nomads. And we understand the concept of "savage, desert dwelling nomads" because (for better or worse) we have grown up on the idea that such things exist. The "oh-so-alien" Aliens? Not even they are exempt from this. They are bombastic and prone to overblowing their own importance. They are crime lords and shady junk dealers and jittery-nerved co-pilots. There is nothing about any of the aliens in Star Wars that doesn't resonate with us as part of the Human experience somewhere, somehow. Even the concept of The Force comes from a place buried in the Human psyche and in our collective experience - The Force is an analog to magic, to mysticism, to the careful and controlled application of martial force in pursuit of a higher ideal. It at once combines Western magical theatrics with Eastern mysticism. It is at once a fencing school combining longsword techniques from Middle and Northern Europe with Japanese techniques and the type of balefire-and-lightning sorcery that we reserve for the most powerful of all fantasy magicians.

Star Wars combines our world's historical trials - all-consuming wars that bring upheaval on a cultural level, the desire for freedom, the need for spiritual guidance, and the cautionary tales of granting too much power to any single body - and distills them down into a series of adventures and stories that speak to us of a time long ago, in a place far away. How does it do this? If all that's being done is taking these aspects of the Human experience and moving them around, then how did the universe of Star Wars become so unique?

Simple: Because Mr. Lucas and the others involved in its creation knew that story telling, world building, is like making a quilt. You don't make a quilt from whole cloth. You make it from scraps, from pieces. You have a few large pieces of cloth, you have a few medium-sized pieces of cloth, and a very large number of smaller pieces. Scraps, bits, leftovers. Ask any quilter - a quilt is a story. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end to the story of the quilt. The quilt can be made to a pattern, sure, but more often than not, the quilt builds itself from what you put into it.

The same is true of game worlds. I put it to you that it is easier to build a believable, enjoyable game world (or heck, any work of fictional world-building) if you take familiar aspects of the real world (the oft-mentioned Human experience from this essay) and turn them ever so slightly on their ears, than if you sit down and say "Today I am going to build a world where everyone lives in magical trees, no one ever uses gender pronouns, and the word for 'war' doesn't exist."

I am not saying it cannot be done. In fact, that kind of sounds like a neat idea, and it would be awesome to see someone do it. I am saying that you will have more luck if you take a cue from the world we live in than if you attempt to go it without. The Human experience is a vast and amazing tapestry. It's full of myths and legends that are begging to be adapted to your story.

You don't have to recreate the entirety of Regency Era France in your game world (unless that's your thing), nor do you have to fall prey to the temptation to make your Sub-Saharan African analog cultures into skin-wearing savages (which is not only really annoying and overdone, but is also buying into "dark skinned savage" tropes that I am really truly tired of seeing in so many fantasy RPG worlds... sorry. Got away from myself, there). You can grab the bits of Norse and Iroquois culture you find coolest and mingle them liberally with the cosmology of your world, turning them into a long-standing, proud people. You can, if you choose, grab Late-Period Victorian England and run it headlong into 1950's Americana, if you really want to. (And as a side note, if you don't think those two eras are story- and culturally- compatible, you're not paying attention.)

When you are building your world, then, look around at your favorite periods of history and your favorite bits of culture and philosophy, and ask yourself "How can I make this work in my game world?"

Odds are, when you figure that out, you'll have the basis of a really amazing quilt.

Monday, January 20, 2014

GM Advice: Keep Yourself Humble

No tag for Under Sleeping Suns this week, because this is not a Loris-specific essay.

This week (sorry for the delay, folks, life got in the way), I'm going to talk about something that a lot of GM's, designers, and world-builders often forget:

It pays to be humble about your creation.

When I say that, when I use the word humble, I'm not referring to you being meek about your goals: don't say "well, it's obviously not that good because Joe didn't like it." I'm also not suggesting that you be submissive in what you want to see in your game world: no giving in and putting everything in that your players want and nothing they don't (well, unless that's your thing).

No, when I say humble, I mean that you should have a state of being unpretentious about it. You should strive to let go of your ego in the building of your game world and be willing to accept input and criticism about the way that your game world (and therefore, your game) is developing. I mean that you should ask the players at the end of each session "Did you have fun?" and if even one of them did not, step back and take a good hard look at why they did not. Is it a difference in play style? Is it that the player feels that their character didn't get enough spotlight this session (and the last several sessions)? Is it because of personal issues on the player's side?

The art of being a good GM stems from the same root as being a good world-builder, or being a good host and friend. It requires practice, patience, and the understanding that sometimes you're going to get things just plain wrong. You aren't a "bad GM" if you make a mistake during a game. You're not a "bad GM" if you forget to follow up on a promise to a player to delve into a particular plot-hook. And you're not a bad world-builder if you let certain aspects of your world get away from you and go running off onto their own tangents at the expense of others. But here's the thing: Just as you can't be a good GM if you're not paying attention to your mistakes, you similarly can't be a good GM if you only ever pay attention to your successes. The art of getting it right – whether it's just for your regular game group, a convention tournament, or for the thousands of people you hope will one day buy your adventure module – is a constant process of comparing and contrasting your successes with your failures. You must learn from both equally if you want to succeed.

Sure, this is pretty common-sense stuff, but honestly in my day I've seen a lot of games, and I've played in just as many, and I've had good experiences and bad. All of the bad experiences were identical in their failures: the GM didn't take time to really think about the outcome of the actions of the NPC's, the world-building was rushed, set in stone, left little room for adaptability to player actions, and the GM's game style was not compatible with the play style of the group. The good experiences all shared identical qualities, as well: The GM was adaptive to the actions of the player characters, the world was established and firm but still malleable enough to adapt to the events of the game, and the GM (even if their play style and that of the players wasn't the same) was able to figure out what the players needed in their game and provide it to them.

In other words, the "good" games in this list all come from a place of humility in their creation. The "bad" games are inflexible, unconcerned with player actions/ingenuity, and generally fairly rigid in their premise and execution. Under the premise of this essay, then, a successful GM and world-builder must therefore be able to accommodate these things, and enact changes in their approach when necessary.

So why bring this up today? Frankly, because one of my players pointed out that I had done something in my game world that was not consistent (and we do know how I love to be consistent) with the rest of the worlds cosmogony. He asked several astronomical/cosmology related questions, and in seeking to answer them, I discovered that I'd made a few blunders that were not only inconsistent, but outright contradictory to what I'd written elsewhere. Now, blatant contradictions is good for in-game philosophy or religious texts, but it's really bad for observable phenomena such as the worlds orbiting Loris and how they interact. Since I don't want to just hand-wave his questions and say "my world my rules" (and especially since I have made a point of trying to remain internally consistent), I had to step back and ask myself how I was going to answer him while keeping the previously related items.

I did find a way, but in the doing, I had to change a few things. The orbital "dance" of Loris' two suns, to be specific, and the method in which the planets move through the cosmos around Loris herself. But in the end, I think the game world's believability has come out the stronger for it.

Of course, all of this long-winded essay can be summed up with a few short sentences:

* Don't have an ego about your work.
* Be willing to accept your defeats with as much enthusiasm as your victories.
* Get your players input, and apply it where you can.
* Make sure everyone's having fun.
* That includes you.

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Under Sleeping Suns: What About The Monuments?

For those of you paying attention, we skipped an essay last week. That was intentional, as I needed a week off and wanted to take some time to address a few things (about this very game blog) that could be used to help the players in my current game. This week, I'm back, and it's time to talk about building things. Specifically: enormous monuments, strange stone circles, and that sort of thing.

So let's say that you're an aspiring (or well-seasoned) GM, and you've come to a point in your game where it's time for the players to encounter a long-dead (or heck, thriving and alive, just unusual and unknown) culture through those most lasting of endeavors: the enormous stone edifice. Whether it's a Henge, an Obelisk, a vast and forgotten temple complex, or the most easily recognized of all of them - the Pyramid - it's important to know where these things come from, and why. Today I'm going to talk about the reasons these things exist in Loris, and hopefully give you some ideas on how to integrate them into your game without having to completely replicate the how's and why's of their creation here on Earth.

So, let's start with Pyramids. On Earth, the Pyramids of Egypt were built for pretty much one purpose and one purpose alone: the interment of the mortal remains of their namesake Pharaohs. And before we get into the debate about whether or not any actual remains have been found in the Pyramids, let me assure you that there have been remains found in Pyramids. The commonly accepted archaeological understanding, currently, is that part of why the Pyramids are so sparse in terms of identifiable remains is a reaction to grave robbers and tomb looters: the Pharaonic cults (as well as the very government of Dynastic Egypt itself) moved the bodies into more easily hidden (and thus defended) tombs and burial complexes. If you have these enormous monuments standing as a testimonial to the greatness of your God King, and the looters know there's likely to be all manner of offerings and accoutrements in there to see the dead ruler off to the afterlife, they're going to come knocking. Curse or no. Therefore, since you don't want the looters to desecrate the corpse, you (wisely!) go back in, pack him up, and leave the monument standing.

It bears mentioning that the Egyptians were not the only Pyramid builders in Africa. The Kush (or Nubian) Pyramids were also built as burial monuments, not only for the great rulers of the Kushite empire, but also for their respected priests and other persons of note and import. As with the Egyptian Pyramids, these were looted and their tombs desecrated. Unlike the Egyptian Pyramids, the Nubian Pyramids were apparently organized into actual burial complexes (Wikipedia likes to refer to them as cemeteries, actually), and they appear to have eschewed the Egyptian tradition of building elaborate temple and worship complexes in the surrounding area, preferring to build the worship temples directly into the Pyramids themselves.

So here we have two Earth cultures, both of whom use their monument building as methods of erecting places of burial and worship of their rulers – who are the physical embodiments of the Gods themselves, let's remember – nearly all of which end up getting looted as the years go on. So what do we do about this sort of thing in our game worlds? Do we recreate the Egyptian/Nubian cultures entirely? What if we don't have any Egyptian-Analog Gods to provide this sort of inspiration? What if there was never a Pharaonic culture present in your game world? You want Pyramids, but how to make them fit into your world?

Well, let's talk about Loris for a minute, and I'll tell you how I made this work.

So, remember, I've mentioned more than once that Loris has no creation myth and that the Gods Of Light And Darkness didn't so much create the world as they broke it apart and made it safe for man to live on. The GOLAD (we're using abbreviations, now) also had both Divine and Mortal forms, enabling them to keep to their Godly duties off in The White, while staying hale and hearty on the world of Loris herself. They ruled over Kever for thousands of years, guiding their favored civilization and making it the greatest (but not the only) nation of its age. When I was designing Kever and its surrounding civilizations, I had to come up with an answer to a very pressing question:

Where did the Gods live? Their Divine forms took up residence in The White, naturally, but what about their Mortal Forms? Did they just kip it under the stars every night? Did they stand vigil all day and night, never resting, never sleeping? Where did they live?

The answer became, as I fleshed out more and more of what it actually meant to be alive in the Kever Age, that they lived in the Pyramids. I knew I wanted to have Pyramids in the game, and I knew I wanted them to be the last standing monuments of a once great and powerful (but now utterly destroyed) civilization. And I knew that I wanted them to have at one time been vast, living edifices; bustling with priests, worshipers, and functionaries. So why couldn't the GOLAD actually live in their Pyramids?

And so, as the original twelve Gods became fleshed out, so too did their residences. For Doan and his brother Kalykan, a pair of matching Pyramids – each a full thousand meters to a side at its base – were built on either side of the widest of the 12 sacred Rivers Of Life: The River Natu. Their Pyramids would be connected by an avenue wide enough for fifty men to march shoulder to shoulder, and would meet at the Natu, where they would be connected by a bridge; this bridge would be constructed of both light and dark granite, so as to represent the divine interdependence of day and night. On either side of the grand avenues there were erected buildings for living and doing business. As the buildings were filled, and more were built, each successive row of construction was built one tier higher and broader than the one before it, so that the citizens who lived and worked within them could take to the rooftops to observe their God Kings as they took to the daily parade. It would be considered blasphemy and the highest of crimes to obstruct the view of one of the Gods going about their daily procession. Each dawning, Kalykan would march from his throne within his Pyramid, accompanied by the entirety of his priesthood. He would meet his royal brother at the apex of the bridge, whereupon he would give to Doan the mantle and scepter of Divine Rule, and Doan would kneel to receive them. For the duration of the light, Doan's rule would be kind and merciful. At each sunset, Doan, too, would proceed down his avenue so as to return the artifacts of Divine Rule to Kalykan, who would kneel to receive them, and wield their power justly throughout the night.

And just like that, I had it. The Pyramids of the GOLAD were no enormous burial markers, but rather the crucial keystones of entire, bustling communities. Thousands of functional buildings – merchants, craftsmen, public houses and more – lined the streets of the grand avenues that shot arrow-straight from each Pyramid out to one of the twelve holy rivers. And because the God Kings were living, breathing entities, and because they ruled with visible power, it would be unthinkable to build the highest buildings closest to the avenue: after all, you could not deny your fellow subjects the right of being able to take in the sight of their deliverers. To do so would be treason!

With this one decision, I not only had a reason for the Pyramids (and I also decided that the original twelve GOLAD would get the full Great Pyramid Of Giza treatment, while their numerous offspring would go on to develop the smaller, more angular Nubian Pyramids, among other types of edifice), but I also had some key bits of Keverite culture and history that my players could uncover. By figuring out the why of the monuments, I had also further developed the game world itself. Rather than putting Pyramids into the desert after thinking "Hey, I'd like to have some Pyramids here," the extra time taken to make it fit (remember: you can get away with almost anything as as long as you're consistent) ended up giving me rather a lot of extra detail and information that I could turn right back into the history and "look and feel" of the game. The Great Pyramids of Kever, once thriving centers of cultural development, would eventually become covered and buried under the sands of time. Inside their long-forgotten chambers would be painted hieroglyphs, once vibrant and urgent, now faded and nearly destroyed by time. What was once a grand avenue that would have been lined with cheering citizens standing on tiered balconies is now a sand-covered, time-worn ruin of a city with just barely a few recognizable walls and hearths still visible. The answer to the question "Where did the Gods live?" was not just the answer to that one question, but to a series of questions that hadn't even been asked yet.

Now, of course, not every game requires such elaborate reasons for the rulers of your ancient, once-proud-but-now-vanished empire to build Pyramids. In Egypt, the Pyramids were built on a sort of Works Progress Administration – hundreds of thousands of people were deliberately employed by the government to build these things, and were paid for out of the various taxes the workers and their families had already paid in the years prior to the Pyramid being built. It's also incredibly likely that the people working on the Pyramids were happy and proud to do so, going so far as to actively compete with other work groups: there is evidence of graffiti at the quarry sites of the "we're better than those guys, they're slow and smell funny" variety. If you have a nation that has a large amount of unemployed youth, a lot of stone to quarry, and a good solid tax base to pay them out of (most likely in food, drink, clothing, and housing), there's no reason not to build a Pyramid or some other monumental edifice. The Parthenon, for example.

But what about the various Henges, stone cairns, and plinths that dot the rest of Loris? If I ever get around to providing you a map of the known world, you'll see that these things are thick on the ground, as it were. If Loris never had a neolithic culture (it didn't), why would these things get built? If I don't have the catch-all answer of "The Druids Did It" in Loris (I don't), then who did it?

Again, I had to stop and consider what would make these things internally consistent with the rest of the world I'd been establishing. Given that there are no Druids in Loris (sorry, Druid Hopefuls!), and that there was never a Neolithic age for all these massive stone circles, spires, and mounds to get built by, why are they there?

Well, again, you don't actually need elaborate reasons to build these things, but it helps. In the case of Loris, we have a built-in historical reason for various cultures to get together and start building these sorts of things: we have The Sunfall.

Remember, The Sunfall blasted most of the civilizations that weren't Kever almost literally back into the stone age, and I've spoken about the various ways in which things can go bump in the night in Loris. Putting these two things together, then, I have a few very good reasons for the survivors to start building these "primitive" stone monuments.

As the remnants of those pre-Sunfall civilizations started scraping themselves back together, they would of course start coming across places in which The Knot was just a bit too strong or a bit too weak, and of course, bad things would invariably happen. Oh, sure, good things would happen, too, but let's face it: when you find a mysteriously mystical place in the middle of the forest, it's almost always going to be something bad. So the wise men and women of these fragmented cultures would get together and figure out ways of capping these places. Of plugging these holes. Of creating gates and locks on these rips and tears and doors into the other worlds that make up The Knot. And they did it with stone and hard work, and they did it with knowledge passed down from parent to child. And perhaps, eventually, the incantations and inscriptions were forgotten by all but a handful of people. And maybe, just maybe, some of those gate-locks are starting to wear a bit thin, because perhaps one-too-many farmers have nicked "just a little" stone from this circle or that one-too-many times.

And for some reason, some vast and forgotten reason, so many of these circles are within a days walk of the walls of some of the largest cities in the Allied Nations, that it can't be a coincidence. Can it?

My players read these essays. I'm not saying.

But there you have another trail of thought on the why's and wherefore's of monument building: The "stone circle" builders don't have to be an ancient and mystic order of magical shape-changing folks who cut mistletoe on the first night of the full moon. They can be panicked locals who are tired of nightmares seeping up out of the ground. They can be grateful farmers who erect permanent gates for the helpful spirits to come through in hopes those same spirits will continue blessing their crops. They might even be the lucky survivors of twin kingdoms ravaged by The Sunfall, who managed to keep enough mystical and arcane knowledge intact so that they knew exactly what would happen if they didn't get those rocks in place, and soon. And when the Kolanthans came, with their armies and their engines of war, and knocked those blasphemous relics of the old beliefs aside?

Well that would just be bad, wouldn't it?