There are phrases which catch and blossom within us, arrangements of words in particular orders and contexts which cut through all our conscious bumbling and to the deep-quick of our being. Sometimes, if the wording is universal enough to human experience, and if the translator is skilled enough, the world-stopping beauty of such arrangements even survives the contortions of moving into another language. Truly, it is magic we spell out and cast across the world, inscribed upon nets woven out of pages.
What I mean is poetry. By every measure I possess, poetry is magic, and crafty magic at that. (this is also true of advertising, but that's likely another post)
Before we go further, some context: I love novels. For decades after beginning to learn to read I only read novels. In the last seven years or so, historical non-fiction has come to at least equal my love of novels. Partly this is due to how I read novels more critically now, there are some books that I riotously enjoyed a two decades ago which have become merely luke-warm for me. The other part has to do with how endlessly fascinating and surprising history is--how it very much is not a singular set of facts, but rather a seething, unfinished mass of competing narratives and hot-takes we apply after the fact in order to understand, communicate, and propagandize prior events.
The trend in both these types of writing is to spell everything out. This is most clear in history texts, which are largely concerned with presenting a great many happenings (which oftentimes were simultaneous events as they emerged) as a cogent and graspable ordering, a narrative for us to learn. Not only is this the trend in some traditions and styles of novelization, we can also see a similar trend to "spell everything out" in much of the popular USian media of tv shows, movies, and news programs, which rely just as heavily on the presentation and manipulation of a narrative. To mis-summerize Neil Gaiman (& likely many other humans): people are made of stories, construct all notions of "the world" by repeating stories to themselves and others, are made larger in their interiority by the learning new stories, and (with exceptions, of course) mostly believe the stories they repeat.
Poetry works differently. In a poem you intentionally don't spell everything out. Instead, you strip things away. You strip as much as possible, then come back later and find something else unnecessary to remove. What then becomes interesting and effective, as you pare down to the most essential bits of communication, is how you arrange and contrast what remains. One begins to stretch grammar, exclude or include punctuation to create effect, and choose words and phrases with as many layered meanings as possible.
Then the magic is revealed. We have these, let's say, twelve words on a page or in a stanza, and they almost form proper sentences, but not quite. We are left with a string of clauses and seemingly isolated words. However they only seem that way, because in fact the point is that these are the least number of words required to cause the author's desired effect, to communicate what they wanted to convey. The words matter, are inevitably related, precisely because they are on the page together. Yet the relationship between them is not entirely spelled out. The reader must pull their own weight.
And the magic is there, in the things not written, in the gaps. It is the way the connection is made from one word to the next inside the reader, sketching out different, branching meanings drawn from the reservoir of the reader's own experiences--and how they relate to the words on either side of the gap. In the flashing connections across synapses we understand something new, or another nuance of the already known.
And, as if that wasn't beautiful enough: every person lives a unique life. Even people who experience the same event understand and remember it in different ways, tinted by different histories and considerations. Thus, the way each of us bridges the same poem-gap will be different. Or even a poem read by "the same person" twice, but with decades between readings, will pull different associations and meanings to the surface. Or send the reader into a different part of their own depths, if you prefer.
A skillful poet can craft pieces which take people of desperate backgrounds and unify them in an experience. They can choose the words with such archetypal associations, such deep metaphors, that they can catch and pull at the lived memories of almost every human. We are enchanted by their verse, only afterwards noticing ourselves again. They transcend and undermine barriers, abolish differences, and show us the multitude we have inside ourselves.
The thing is: some RPG products function like this. Yoon-suin, Veins of the Earth, Scenic Dunnsmouth, and similar "toolkit" publications are entirely built around lists of flavorful, related descriptions which, in aggregate, begin to suggest locations, factions, characters, plots, and similar game-related considerations. By far, this is my favorite type of game supplement. I suspect it's related to what noisms was writing about ontological flickering, and how the amazing potential for "good" gaming materials stems from how many of my internal connections and imagined implications they can activate at one time. Some things you pick up to read and they, you know, leap off the page with seething potential. Sometimes, you can find lightning in a bottle.
For me though, Maze of the Blue Medusa is probably the most interesting example. Compared to the above-listed supplements MotBM is circumscribed, bound at the edges. It is strictly limited and delineated in ways that would undermine the intended implementation of a toolkit book. Yet it functions on the same ontological-flicker/poetic-gap prompting of association--requiring some work on the part of the reader, some movement within which completes the circle of the story. It's just... using a different meter, as it were, the "Megadungeon meter", which forces particular genre constraints upon the text. It is a megadungeon, yet it is in many ways written as poetry.
I suspect I am nearly alone in this reading of the product though. I'm not going to bother digging up various different kvetching about how terrible and unplayable a product it is--the search engine of your choice will provide well enough. What most complaints seem to reduce down to is how it's not "ready to run", confusing, overpowered, or entirely nonsensical crap. (Other people seem primarily concerned with content, which at times could indeed cause problems, so: talk to your players about sensitive topics beforehand! know your group, respect them.) These criticisms, it seems to me, stem from what the heaping drivel shoveled out into the rpg adventure industry have conditioned people to expect. It is the sign of a mind in some manner inoculated against imagination, which lurches after media where everything is explained and no hard inquiry or extended digestion must be provided by one's own faculties.
Possibly one reason the poetic quality of MotBM is missed is because of its abundance. Poetry is, I fear, mostly thought of as something relatively brief. Not many people these days go in for The Book of Nightmares or The Waste Land or whatnot, but they used to. History is lousy with the likes of The Odyssey, The Mathnavi, The Ramayana, Beowulf, The Parliament of Birds, and other lengthy works of verse. It's part of the magic of meter and rhyme that they embed so easily in the human mind -tapping into our natural proclivity to detect patterns, make inferences, and draw associations with our raw experiences- in a way that allows for truly prodigious feats of oral memory and recitation. Some people are still into reading thing like this. Patrick Stuart is definitely into it.
It's even spelled out on MotBM page xi:
What I mean is poetry. By every measure I possess, poetry is magic, and crafty magic at that. (this is also true of advertising, but that's likely another post)
Before we go further, some context: I love novels. For decades after beginning to learn to read I only read novels. In the last seven years or so, historical non-fiction has come to at least equal my love of novels. Partly this is due to how I read novels more critically now, there are some books that I riotously enjoyed a two decades ago which have become merely luke-warm for me. The other part has to do with how endlessly fascinating and surprising history is--how it very much is not a singular set of facts, but rather a seething, unfinished mass of competing narratives and hot-takes we apply after the fact in order to understand, communicate, and propagandize prior events.
The trend in both these types of writing is to spell everything out. This is most clear in history texts, which are largely concerned with presenting a great many happenings (which oftentimes were simultaneous events as they emerged) as a cogent and graspable ordering, a narrative for us to learn. Not only is this the trend in some traditions and styles of novelization, we can also see a similar trend to "spell everything out" in much of the popular USian media of tv shows, movies, and news programs, which rely just as heavily on the presentation and manipulation of a narrative. To mis-summerize Neil Gaiman (& likely many other humans): people are made of stories, construct all notions of "the world" by repeating stories to themselves and others, are made larger in their interiority by the learning new stories, and (with exceptions, of course) mostly believe the stories they repeat.
Poetry works differently. In a poem you intentionally don't spell everything out. Instead, you strip things away. You strip as much as possible, then come back later and find something else unnecessary to remove. What then becomes interesting and effective, as you pare down to the most essential bits of communication, is how you arrange and contrast what remains. One begins to stretch grammar, exclude or include punctuation to create effect, and choose words and phrases with as many layered meanings as possible.
Then the magic is revealed. We have these, let's say, twelve words on a page or in a stanza, and they almost form proper sentences, but not quite. We are left with a string of clauses and seemingly isolated words. However they only seem that way, because in fact the point is that these are the least number of words required to cause the author's desired effect, to communicate what they wanted to convey. The words matter, are inevitably related, precisely because they are on the page together. Yet the relationship between them is not entirely spelled out. The reader must pull their own weight.
And the magic is there, in the things not written, in the gaps. It is the way the connection is made from one word to the next inside the reader, sketching out different, branching meanings drawn from the reservoir of the reader's own experiences--and how they relate to the words on either side of the gap. In the flashing connections across synapses we understand something new, or another nuance of the already known.
And, as if that wasn't beautiful enough: every person lives a unique life. Even people who experience the same event understand and remember it in different ways, tinted by different histories and considerations. Thus, the way each of us bridges the same poem-gap will be different. Or even a poem read by "the same person" twice, but with decades between readings, will pull different associations and meanings to the surface. Or send the reader into a different part of their own depths, if you prefer.
A skillful poet can craft pieces which take people of desperate backgrounds and unify them in an experience. They can choose the words with such archetypal associations, such deep metaphors, that they can catch and pull at the lived memories of almost every human. We are enchanted by their verse, only afterwards noticing ourselves again. They transcend and undermine barriers, abolish differences, and show us the multitude we have inside ourselves.
So, what about roleplaying games?!?
The thing is: some RPG products function like this. Yoon-suin, Veins of the Earth, Scenic Dunnsmouth, and similar "toolkit" publications are entirely built around lists of flavorful, related descriptions which, in aggregate, begin to suggest locations, factions, characters, plots, and similar game-related considerations. By far, this is my favorite type of game supplement. I suspect it's related to what noisms was writing about ontological flickering, and how the amazing potential for "good" gaming materials stems from how many of my internal connections and imagined implications they can activate at one time. Some things you pick up to read and they, you know, leap off the page with seething potential. Sometimes, you can find lightning in a bottle.
For me though, Maze of the Blue Medusa is probably the most interesting example. Compared to the above-listed supplements MotBM is circumscribed, bound at the edges. It is strictly limited and delineated in ways that would undermine the intended implementation of a toolkit book. Yet it functions on the same ontological-flicker/poetic-gap prompting of association--requiring some work on the part of the reader, some movement within which completes the circle of the story. It's just... using a different meter, as it were, the "Megadungeon meter", which forces particular genre constraints upon the text. It is a megadungeon, yet it is in many ways written as poetry.
I suspect I am nearly alone in this reading of the product though. I'm not going to bother digging up various different kvetching about how terrible and unplayable a product it is--the search engine of your choice will provide well enough. What most complaints seem to reduce down to is how it's not "ready to run", confusing, overpowered, or entirely nonsensical crap. (Other people seem primarily concerned with content, which at times could indeed cause problems, so: talk to your players about sensitive topics beforehand! know your group, respect them.) These criticisms, it seems to me, stem from what the heaping drivel shoveled out into the rpg adventure industry have conditioned people to expect. It is the sign of a mind in some manner inoculated against imagination, which lurches after media where everything is explained and no hard inquiry or extended digestion must be provided by one's own faculties.
Possibly one reason the poetic quality of MotBM is missed is because of its abundance. Poetry is, I fear, mostly thought of as something relatively brief. Not many people these days go in for The Book of Nightmares or The Waste Land or whatnot, but they used to. History is lousy with the likes of The Odyssey, The Mathnavi, The Ramayana, Beowulf, The Parliament of Birds, and other lengthy works of verse. It's part of the magic of meter and rhyme that they embed so easily in the human mind -tapping into our natural proclivity to detect patterns, make inferences, and draw associations with our raw experiences- in a way that allows for truly prodigious feats of oral memory and recitation. Some people are still into reading thing like this. Patrick Stuart is definitely into it.
It's even spelled out on MotBM page xi:
"The idea is you read all the way through the dungeon
before running it and, as you're running it, the pictures will remind you
where you are so you can just grab the relevant details."
I suspect most people running it, in their excitement to try it out, did not take that advice to heart. For lack of a regular gaming group I sat around reading the book for the better part of three seasons before running it at a table. Looking back, it seems to me that extended mulling lent me a comfort with the text overall, and an ability to improvise with many of the overlapping, in-built possibilities of the devices, factions, and personalities all held within consideration.
The text defies linear reading--constantly giving cause to flip to different sections to follow a lead or define a relationship (and is amazingly well-designed to facilitate such referencing!!). In reading it I found myself exploring as the PCs would: beginning with Ashen Chantrelle and Lady Capilli, and then branching through the nearby rooms, then through the further branchings those initial choices might take one. At various intervals I would peruse the deep reaches of the Archives, Wedding, and Almery to get a sense of their general layout and dynamics. Even more rarely I would read through the various personalities in the Cells (figuring it would be at least a few sessions before any party would reach this far) and contemplate their release, and their inevitable connections to other situations and dynamics within the maze.
It is a nearly singular experience for me, in terms of adventure design. I would appreciate more books crafted similarly, blending setting book with poetry or a megadungeon within a novel. It's no doubt a niche market (or is it?), but I know it's more than just me alone.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the only other another setting or adventure book I can similarly place is Silent Titans. I am still reading through it though -bouncing from section to section, sussing out unifying metaphors, considering the whys and wherefores of the various travel routes and encounters in terms of frequency and character, and in general imaging the "atmosphere" of a place I have never been to- and so will not offer any definitive opinions right now (except I think I like it, and Dirk is a genius).
The way little nuggets of "setting" woven into the Backgrounds, items, skills, spells, and encounters of TROIKA! also strikes the same chord for me, providing just enough fictional context to inspire something better from myself.
The way little nuggets of "setting" woven into the Backgrounds, items, skills, spells, and encounters of TROIKA! also strikes the same chord for me, providing just enough fictional context to inspire something better from myself.
If you can think of other examples of similarly constructed rpg texts, please let me know!
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