Late afternoon. I’m trying to be very unproductive. Not doing chores. Not reading the newspaper. Not programming.
@sbr asks:
What’s your favorite setting for playing tabletop role-playing games?
Geographically, I fall back to something that is geographically close to where I live. There’s always mountains nearby. Like the maps my Alpine generator produces: woods, mountains, the valleys often filled with swamps, the highest peaks covered in ice. The mountains are hostile, the swamps are hostile, rivers are important. It’s what I know. No matter where we are on the map, I can produce scenes, castles, rock formations, caves, fields, villages.
Ethnographically, I like to use “EDO” fantasy: elves, dwarves, orcs, i.e. “boring” fantasy.
My player handbook has elves, dwarves, and halflings, my monster manual has orcs… It’s the most bog-standard, D&D derived, Tolkien derived setup. I regurgitate the superficialities from all the media I consume and call it a campaign setting. – 2020-01-31 EDO Fantasy (Elves Dwarves Orcs)
2020-01-31 EDO Fantasy (Elves Dwarves Orcs)
Other than the simplicity this provides for new players to immerse themselves because they almost certainly have read Tolkien or similar books, or seen series and movies of the genre, this setup also provides some other benefits.
A generic setting doesn’t violate any obvious intellectual property rights. I can write about it on my blog, on the campaign wiki, I can assemble rulebooks and publish PDFs, no questions asked.
A familiar setting is one where I can talk about the geography and culture I know without feeling that trepidation I do when I draw inspirations from regions I don’t know that well. It’s an unfortunate problem of the culture wars: there’s a line between respectfully drawing inspiration and crudely reducing a foreign culture to a few talking points for a game, and some people appear to draw that line in places I find very surprising. Thus, playing in regions that I am familiar with is simply the safer option when playing with strangers.
Navigating our preferences is difficult enough: I just don’t want to have discussions about having orcs in the game is racist, the borderlands being colonialism revisited, the depiction of despots being a sign of orientalism, and so on. I’ve had many discussions about cultural appropriation, I’ve read Edward Saïd’s book, I have Chinese ancestors, I practice Japanese martial arts, my wife did Oriental dancing, we both do Latin dancing, and so I think with respect to my gaming, the discussion just bores me to tears. Please don’t have this discussion with me.
If our preferences don’t align, let’s not play at the same table and we should be fine. There are enough points to make it hard for games to happen: how big is our preferred rule book, how much sex is there in our games, how much violence, what about cruelty and torture (this being my particular no-go!) and on and on.
Choosing a boring setting helps me navigate all that.
I still like to have some stereotypes in my setting because I love to take those broad directions and see them as opportunities to fight back, with the fantasy being that within the game, this is possible! That is the measure which I apply to the despicable parts of my game. Let’s look at some examples.
I don’t want to hear about cruelty and torture and so I put that out right at the beginning of the game. I don’t want to hear the details at the table, let alone play that game. Stop.
In a related vein, even if we don’t see the cruelty and torture of slavery, I find it so distasteful, so revolting, I can’t stop thinking about the implied necessary cruelty and torture required to keep it up. There are a passages I read burnt into the back of my brain and I don’t want to revisit them. Putting slavery into a game turns it into a black hole of plot: all other plots disappear, get sucked up and are subjugated under the one goal that drives me: to end slavery and catapult slavers and slave owners into the sun. So unless this is a campaign about ending slavery, I don’t want it in my games.
Colonialism, the conquest of land, and the rebellion against it, however, I think that’s different. I’ve run Razor Coast by Nicolas Logue, Lou Agresta, Tim Hitchcock and John Ling, and it’s as OK as an ongoing war. A war is not OK, of course, but in boring fantasy, I usually like to have a far away war.
I guess I have Skerples to thank for that.
There’s always a war on. Maybe it’s not *the* War, but at the very least, there’s *a* war, and you should have one in your setting. It’s a useful plot device. The War is happening Over There: over a mountain range, an ocean, a river, a plane. Its effects are felt at home. The War isn’t an epic struggle between good and evil. The marauding hordes of barbarian orcs are just propaganda. Both sides are roughly equal, speak related languages, fight using the same methods, have similar codes of conduct, and are generally interchangeable. – OSR: Don't You Know There's A War On?
OSR: Don't You Know There's A War On?
You can pick sides. In the kinds of borderlands where things are at the tipping point you can reasonably push back the needle within the game. That is, I’m not interested an overbearing exploitation setting where we can’t ever get rid of the Europeans. The kind of colonialism I want in my game is where you can either try to play the people and monsters around you against each other in order to find yourself a plot of land and build that castle, or you can ally yourself with one faction against the others, and they’re all similarly good and evil, noble and savage. None of that white saviour trash, of course, but also no turning away from the power struggle because it’s interesting to me, picking sides is possible, and determining the local outcomes is at least possible within the game.
Gender roles is a similar thing. I like to offer that as a side note to all my campaigns. Elves and dwarves and goblins are strange in that they have fantasy biology. The elves all look the same, slightly feminine and beardless, and they don’t talk about gender. The dwarves all look the same, hairy and bearded, and they don’t talk about gender. They might come alone or in pairs, or more. Goblins aren’t born but pulled out of magic mud where earth blood leaks. Trolls are stones and tree trunks vivified by the same earth blood. Pushing against expectations is possible. Going against the grain in my boring fantasy is easy.
Witches, dryads, nixies, harpies, centaurs, satyrs, even medusas… these are all monsters involving sex. I put that out there because it is strange and uncomfortable and yet it is something that can be acted upon and I personally don’t react as badly to it as I do to torture. But I imagine not all people react that same way. It’s a thin line to thread. In my games there are abductions, disappearances, but no details. All I know it’s not as bad as death and mutilation, but it can come close. It’s definitely something monstrous that’s going on. I’m just not going to point the camera at it. I don’t like the cruelty, remember.
In a similar vein, perhaps surprisingly to some, I treat all *charm* spells as non-consensual mind fuckery that deserves the victim’s wrath. All the things you did while you were charmed, you’ll see them in the most negative light. Think about the coercion of your parents and teachers when you were a kid. It’s for your own good, they’d say, and force you to do the things you didn’t want to. I felt a lot of rage back then, and still do when people order me around – even if they are right and it was to my own benefit. Now imagine being forced to do something you really don’t want to do. Hurt your friends. Oh, the rage. The vengeance.
In any case, I think the “boring” setting offers plenty of tension.
Finally, there’s also the aspect of narration rights when it comes to settings. There is an unspoken power dynamic at play in a traditional game: the referee tells you about the environment, what it looks like, how people react. That’s fine. I don’t want to share narration rights with my players and when I am a player, I want to explore a fantasy world, which means that I don’t want to narrate what I find because I want to explore this other world, not my inner world. We’ll get to that when I run my games. Exploration means believing in that shared imaginary external world. And that in turn means that the more exciting and strange the world is, the more it affords one-sided exposition. The referee gets to talk and talk and players get to listen.
A boring setting circumvents that. There’s a village. There’s a mountain. There’s a palisade. There’s a dog. That was easy. It could be a different experience. These are round houses like the Hakka build. These are hanging gardens, like they used to have them in the old Mesopotamian city states. This particular spear is as long as the Macedonian sarissa. This mountain is like one of the tepui in Ecuador, those flat top mountains rising above the clouds. It’s interesting. I feel the pull! I want to read all about these things on Wikipedia. I want to put them in my games. But … exposition. A boring setting helps me avoid droning on and on about all the smart-ass ideas I have and that I want to expound to the detriment of my player’s ability to make interesting decisions.
And that’s the point, as far as I am concerned: making interesting decisions.
The act of participating, of actively influencing the shared imaginary events at hand is what elevates the campaign from boring elves-dwarves-orcs-fantasy to the greatness that is role-playing games. – 2020-01-31 EDO Fantasy (Elves Dwarves Orcs)
2020-01-31 EDO Fantasy (Elves Dwarves Orcs)
#RPG
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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“Please don’t have this discussion with me” and then proceeds to having the discussion, laying out the arguments 🤷🏻♀️
– Sandra 2022-11-18 23:55 UTC
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I found out that slavery is a hot-button topic among my players (for reference, we’re all Americans). Any mention of slavery will derail the current story line as my players go all ultimate-murder-hobo on the slavers and the buyers of slaves [1].
My players don’t quite have the same reaction to charm as you do. It’s a thing that happens, but they do tend to go after the caster, just not quite as hard as they do for slavers.
What I tend to dislike about D&D is the murder-hobo aspect of it. I try to create scenarios where combat is just one of many possible ways to resolve the issue, and the non-combat way is preferred. I don’t always get that outcome, but I try (I also try to limit combat to actual monsters). I’ve also had my players actions come back to haunt them (usually, the local law enforcers arresting them). Once when they destroyed a carnival (”They were all bad!” “Yes, but you took the law into your own hands.”) and once when they stole books from a royal library [2].
[1] I threw in an encounter were they came across some slavers delivering slaves. The party just asked who the slavers were for, and once that was answered, immediately killed the slavers, set the slaves free, then tracked down the buyer and took him out as well. Only then did the group continue on the main story line.
[2] What followed from that was an amazing set of sessions were the players had to think fast to remain one step ahead of the investigation. They even tried to pin their crime on an NPC, but I gave that NPC an iron-clad alibi by having said NPC murdering a local lord on the day my party stole the books.
– Sean Conner 2022-11-19 01:16 UTC
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Yeah, establishing the tone of a campaign can be tricky. I currently have one player intent on being pushy and he’s getting a lot of pushback from intelligent monsters and last session he jokingly complained that I was leading him into combat every single time.
In a way it’s perfect: he has an *armour of the dark lord* that grants him the ability to *command* at will. And so, with the best intentions, he sets people off. On the way to villain-hood! 😄
– Alex 2022-11-19 15:14 UTC
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“I’ve read Edward Saïd’s book, I have Chinese ancestors, I practice Japanese martial arts, my wife did Oriental dancing, we both do Latin dancing, and so I think with respect to my gaming, the discussion just bores me to tears”
This is a very European take.
– 2022-11-20 02:58 UTC
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You missed the last sentence of that paragraph 😉
– Paul 2022-11-20 07:44 UTC
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To all those who only have a one-sentence negative opinion: please use your own venues. It feels like people come to shit in my blog. Please stop reading this blog. Please post on your own social media accounts, or on your own blog. There, you can be as short as you want to be.
Doing it here is like bringing Twitter energy to the blogs.
I also don’t know where the entitlement comes from to have any view points represented. It seems obvious to me that my posts are going to represent who I am, where I come from, what I have experienced. What else do people expect? If you don’t want to read blogs by a cis-het white bourgeois man currently living in Europe, then why did you come here? And once you’re here, why did you feel the need to poop? Please go read some other blogs instead.
There’s a thing somebody said. There’s the thought we’re holding in our mind. We’re ready to give that reply. Now, quick: imagine how the other person is going to react. Is this going to turn into an interesting conversation? If not, I’m already bored. Talk to somebody else. – 2021-07-01 How to make conversation
2021-07-01 How to make conversation
– Alex 2022-11-20 15:33 UTC
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The shortness came from two directions.
One, it’s enforced by your Gemini interface.
Two, you specifically asked us not to have the discussion. Which I read as a hard no on all the things I wanted to reply—and that list kept growing as you then went on to have your own one-sided version of the discussion.
As far as “please use your own venues, post on your own blog”, I thought that this entire post was a reply to
Which I posted just one week before. I got the impression that that’s what you were responding to (in connection to your reply to sbr’s question).
the borderlands being colonialism revisited […] I’ve read Edward Saïd’s book […] the discussion just bores me to tears. Please don’t have this discussion with me.
So from my perspective, I understood it as you
It’s difficult to know how to react when you seemingly shut down longer-form, nuanced conversation on the topic, leaving a link open for shorter replies and then getting my shorter reply compared to shit, to Twitter energy, to poop.
This topic is interesting to me—it’s one of the biggest challenges or problems with D&D as far as I’m concerned—and if it bores you to tears and you want to shut it down, it’s frustrating that you then do enage, do respond, do dismiss and discard some of the same points I raised on my own capsule, coming across as trying to slam the door shut on the topic. EDO is good, deconstructing colonialism and orientalism is boring, no further discussion necessary.
I’m actually super OK with someone finding it a boring topic and deciding they’re not gonna delve into it. That’s reasonable. D&D is a game, it works, all ways we can improve it or change it or polish it is gravy (I just happen to be interested in this psrticular area. Our B2 game was a disaster.)
But that’s not how I read this post, which comes across as both actively dismissing others struggles and ideas around the topic (to the extent that you happened to read my post in the first place, I know that you River of News things and sometimes miss things, and that the several specific references are within the range of what could be coincidental, but I’m laying out my perspective in order to proved a nuanced, non-”shitty”, non-”Twittery” explanation of my reaction here, and I, of course, reacted to your post in the context of my own), and as wanting to actively lay out your own socioaesthetic setting approaches, and as wanting to actively shut down all further discussion around it.
To the extent that those impressions are exaggerated, I understand that (and that was a third reason why my initial response was brief, as upset and frustrated as I was), but that’s a frustrating paradox triple cocktail of positions, either one of which might’ve been easier to digest on its own, but as a package became pretty challenging.
– Sandra 2022-11-23 16:59 UTC
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For me, your essay here becomes more understandable, less frustrating if it turns out it was not written after reading my aforementioned
And, I hope, the inverse is true: that if you actually did read it before writing this post, (in which case, thanks for reading), you can hopefully understand where my frustration and the emotional content of my reaction here is coming from.
It’s my answer to this question:
If you don’t want to read blogs by a cis-het white bourgeois man currently living in Europe, then why did you come here?
Because I thought it was a reaction to my own essay.
– Sandra 2022-11-23 17:05 UTC
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I hadn’t read your *Being the Enemy* post. Like I said in my post, it all started as I was writing that short answer on fedi and then one thing leads to another. My unwillingness to engage with people regarding the colonial aspects, the racism aspects, and all of that is that I’m trying to write about the kinds of things I like and don’t like in my games, and I don’t want to have a discussion about the merits of Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror and subsequent posts by @lula. There’s a place to have a discussion about that, and I didn’t want to discuss that, on this post, in these comments. I wanted to talk about the kinds of conflicts I like and the kinds of conflicts I don’t like in my games.
Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror
Anyway. Having read your post just now, I like it and have nothing to add. This is definitely the kind of setup I can get on board with.
– Alex 2022-11-23 17:32 UTC
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Thank you. ♥
– Sandra 2022-11-24 13:57 UTC
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More on Tolkien’s Squinteyed Orc-men via @ljwrites.
– Alex 2023-03-01 08:49 UTC