Sunday 27 April 2014

Competing with 200,000 years of creativity is difficult

The other day the RPG Pundit reviewed Isle of the Unknown; I don't have the book, although I have read through it, and my thoughts were somewhat similar - it's beautiful, but the content is simply not properly thought through.

The big problem with Isle of the Unknown for me was the monsters. As the Pundit puts it:

Every single creature is different, and usually a pastiche of various animals plus some weird quality. For example, a cat with metallic fur, immune to all mental attacks and ordinary weapons; it can see the invisible and has poisoned fangs. Or a bipedal frog the size of a man, who can fly and is immune to surprise, and has a slime spit. Or a bipedal skunk with bat-wings; where slaying it means the killer will later be pursued by its sire, who is a giant bat-winged skunk.  
So there's no rhyme or reason to it at all; no tribes, no reason for the monsters to be there, nothing. Its a menagerie of crap, and I'm sure its meant to be "weird fantasy" but I'd put it closer to "stupid fantasy". The monsters serve no purpose, make no sense, in many cases what they do isn't even predictable (nor unpredictable in a good way; they just do things you wouldn't ever be able to expect for no reason at all).

Or as a different reviewer put it a while back:

Although occasionally spiced with some interesting abilities, [the monsters] really are giant pigeons all the way down: Pick a random animal. Make it bigger than normal. Randomly determine the number of limbs it possesses. Now, randomly combine it with another animal; light it on fire; have it ooze pus; or give it a random spell-like ability. Ta-Da! You’ve re-created the vast majority of the monsters in this book.

My aim isn't to further put the boot into somebody else's creative efforts: It's more to observe that creating totally new and unique monsters is really hard. Why? Human beings have been creating monsters for about 200,000 years, and that means the monsters that still exist today in the human imagination are beings which have survived 200,000 years of mimetic evolution. These motherfuckers have been honed for generation after generation, out-competing all the other mythical beings that have been dreamed up by children, parents, grand-parents, witch-doctors and story-tellers, and which have subsequently fallen by the wayside and been lost in the mists of time. They are core archetypes (the dragon, the succubus, the sexual bloodsucker, the man-beast, the faerie, the people who live underground digging up treasure, the beautiful magical bird) which, over millennia, have been carefully perfected by unconscious selective processes: the more a new variation scares, amazes and interests us, the more likely it is to be passed down.

Monsters, in other words, are like roses, dogs, and cattle: they've evolved through unnatural selection. We have bred out of them everything boring and unappealing through aeons of repetitive story-telling showing tiny graduations of improvement. They're the peacock's tail: they are that way because we, like the peahen choosing the peacock with the most impressive tail, carefully pick out the monsters we find scary and keep them going, and cast the others aside.

It's tough to compete with that. A few rare exceptions - creatures created by RPG bestiarists or fantasy authors - suggest themselves: the beholder, the owl-bear, the displacer beast, the bulette, the mind-flayer. But of those, I think only the mind-flayer truly comes close to competing with the resonance which a vampire, a werewolf, a succubus, a phoenix, or a giant has in our psyche. Those things have been around forever because they work. Randomly throwing together a mixture of animals and abilities simply can't compete.

20 comments:

  1. Although I am aware of monsters being described and pictured by ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, I did not think it went much further back than that. However, it probably goes back to when humans first started telling stories to each other. I can just imagine a caveman telling his fellows about a big sabertooth cat he saw. The next telling it has become a Really Big sabertooth, then it becomes a giant sabertooth that's immune to flint spears. Finally it becomes a half-dragon were-sabertooth with immunity to lighting, poison, and equipped with vorpal fangs...
    I feel a bit sorry for the creator of this "Isle of the Unknown". It sounds like he put a lot of effort into some aspects of this product, but fatally ignored certain others (like internal logic). Perhaps if there was some rational explanation for these weird creatures the product might be a little more useable. It does remind me of both Warhammer-style mutations (is there an equivalent mutating influence?) and also the experiments of mad wizards (that previously resulted in owlbears and bulettes).

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    1. Exactly.

      I hoped to be half-defending McKinney here. He took a game stab at doing something different. It doesn't really come off, but kudos to him for trying.

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  2. And that's why I think Alien is such a masterpiece. Also, big kudos here to Lovecraft.

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  3. I would like to voice a different opinion.

    First, while not overly fond of the creatures of Isle of the unknown, I think that the "randomness" makes for a perfectly fine monster-logic that works well with the overall feel of the Isle.

    Second, I think that the monsters we know and love today are by large a product of the nationalistic/folklore movements of the nineteenth century and that much of the fine tuning has been done in novels, cartoons and movies since then.

    That is: I don't think our current pantheon of monsters is so popular because we think they are especially good, rather that we think they are good because they're so popular.

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    1. Well, which came first, the pheonix or the ashes? ;)

      You may be right, but in that case, simply retitle the entry "Competing with 200 years of creativity is difficult".

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  4. Mindflayers happen to have a memetic similarity to Lovecraft's Cthulhu as well. Powers of madness, disregard for humanity, octoface. I think it's touching on something deep in our society or nature.

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    1. Like all the best monsters do: they touch on something primal.

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  5. Hey, thanks for opening this discussion. Erol Otus's illustration of "Shub-Niggurath" (though actually it's CAS's Abhoth) in the AD&D Deities & Demigods Cyclopedia is the most emotionally powerful and primal image I've ever seen in a RPG product. I was blown-away by it when I first saw it as a 10-year-old in 1980. (I was also blown-away, but to a less extent, by the rest of the drawings in that section of the book.) Nothing in D&D strikes me as deeply as does the bubbling, heaving Shub-Niggurath in deep caverns.

    What sort of weird things crawl out of Abhoth / Shub-Niggurath? Isle of the Unknown is an answer to that question. (My Carcosa book has a different answer to that question. The spawn of Shub-Niggurath / Abhoth are the one commonality between my two books. I can't get away from Abhoth! It keeps bubbling up in my brain! :) )

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    1. Thanks for the explanation, Geoffrey. Having read other explanatory comments by you about how you expect the product to be used, the project makes more sense to me.

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  6. The one RPG monster that has real resonance, in my view, is the Gloranthan Broo. I suppose it draws on some older things (devils, satyrs, Moorcock's beastmen), but it has a horrible and compelling logic of its own.

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  7. That said, isn't the Orc essentially a "new" monster that has very quickly acquired resonance? Its obvious forerunners are MacDonald's goblins, but the militarised, squat, long-armed legions - and the sense of unease that these things were once something wholesome (though quite what seems never to have been decided) - are essentially Tolkien's invention. That is, Tolkien's goblins *aren't* really like folkloric goblins, although George MacDonald's provide a sort of halfway house.

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    1. Maybe you're right about that, actually, although I think he was using pre-existing frameworks. It's hard to imagine a world in which orcs were 'new', isn't it?

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    2. It is. But - putting George MacDonald and The Princess and the Goblin aside - it's hard to think of anything that really fits the role of the orc, in European traditions at least. The key characteristics of Tolkien's orcs are that (1) they're smaller than humans; (2) they're warlike; (3) they're very numerous; and (4) they're intrinsically evil.

      That basically lays the template for most RPG humanoids (D&D introduces a non-Tolkien distinction between orcs and goblins and then adds various other types of increasing size).

      In European mythology, "evil humanoids" are always almost giants rather than small creatures. Dwarfs can be wicked, but they can also be helpful. And elves are much the same.

      Of course, there are all manner of malign fairies, but they don't have much in common with JRRT's goblins. They're not militarised or tribal; they don't maraud and invade. In that respect, I think the Battle of the Five Armies may be the first RPG-style "humanoid" incursion (apart from the "off-screen" ones described elsewhere in The Hobbit). And even George MacDonald's goblins are a local phenomenon - they don't appear to have any interest in anything other than their former lands on the surface.

      I could be wrong, but I really can't think of anything European that's much like the "evil foot-soldiers" of D&D, etc., before The Hobbit. Sure, you've got knockers/kobolds/goblins dwelling in mines, but not forming armies and raiding human lands and serving evil powers.

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    3. You won't have a hard time convincing me that Tolkien was a bit of a genius. ;)

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    4. Unless there's something in Finnish mythology, which I know Tolkien was a big fan of.

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    5. I would say that Wells' Morlocks are a strong contender for ur-orc.

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    6. That's an interesting idea. And I suppose the savagery of the LotR Orcs is in line with the Morlocks, whereas The Hobbit's more comic, blustering Orcs are closer to George MacDonald's goblins. Tolkien had definitely read The Time Machine too - and both the Morlocks and JRRT's goblins run in a hunched-over fashion. I see that it's been suggested that The Island of Doctor Moreau was an influence too; one of Tolkien's many ideas on what the Orcs actually were was that they were beasts that had somehow been "raised". In any case, you're quire right that the Morlocks are definitely a pre-Tolkien example of RPG-style "humanoids". The military/tribal society and relatively high-tech weaponry are from Tolkien, though, I think.

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  8. Shoot, 600 million years of evolution beats the pants off of most everything humans have come up with as far as monsters go. Deep sea creatures and insects. Bam.

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