Wednesday 9 March 2016

The Voice of the Earth



I like how this programme (The Last Seabird Summer?) presents an encounter with a seabird in an intelligent and thoughtful way. You get a sense of what it must be like to be a shag - living in a "slum hell-hole", scampering about the rocks, freely spraying shit wherever you feel like. (Look at the shag's face as it does that. Isn't there a look approaching pride on its face? Isn't it almost triumphant about the complete liberty it has to shit where it pleases?)

Our ancestors must have spent a lot of time thinking about animals, because their relationships with them were so intimate. And that doesn't just mean domestic animals - it includes creatures like the shag, which until fairly recently people living on the coasts of Northern Britain would gather to make into stew. It doesn't surprise me in the least that folk tales in any culture you care to name are almost obsessed with animals which can turn into humans and vice versa, animals which can talk, animals which are magical, and so forth. Imbuing animals with totemic significance is completely natural if you spend any time whatsoever interacting with them in their wild environment. It's only a small step from there to imbuing them with supernatural powers: a shag becomes not just a sea bird, but "the voice of the earth" - some elemental being produced from the collision between land and sea.

Animals are an undervalued resource in fantasy RPGs. They tend to appear on random encounter tables to cause trouble, or in lairs as "giant [x]". All the attention is diverted towards mythological creatures - the monstrous. There is something more interesting to me in the subtleties of animals presented not as monsters but as spirits of nature with significance and power - which, if the players think about hard enough, may be in some small way understood.

10 comments:

  1. Taking a moment to consider a selection of possible peaceful (or at least not hostile) encounters one could expect to have with every bestiary entry would lead to exciting places. I like this a lot.

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    1. Yeah. It would take a bit of work, but it strikes me you could do that with the reaction dice. There are three or four possibilities each for neutral, suspicious, friendly, etc., which you roll for after getting the reaction result. You could do that for each bestiary entry or every entry in a random encounter table.

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  2. The forest gods in _Princess Mononoke_ come to mind.

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    1. Good call. Japanese religion and I guess all animist belief systems are full of stuff like that.

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  3. I think on a very basic, primal level, we as Humans are aware that we too are animals. Furthermore, we are astounded that they are other living things that eat, sleep, poop, and reproduce as we do. How much more fascinating is it when they DON'T do one of things as we do? Pretty freaky, no?

    My day job is working with dogs, and I have a dog myself. I have always had animals in my home of one kind or another, and it's hard to imagine life without one.

    From the time I was very young to this very moment I am writing this, I look at my pet, in this case my dog, and I think, 'There is a carnivorous, pack-oriented hunter/scavenger whose DNA is barely any different from a wild wolf living in my house. It sleeps on my bed. That's amazing."

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    1. When I was a kid I used to find it fascinating that my pet dog and cat were actually alive. I used to marvel at that in a "Mind: Blown" sort of way.

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    2. Yes, similar thinking.

      I was very much aware of what was alive, and not alive (as well as dead). My dad made that lesson clear so I would understand the value of life.

      The idea that life outside my parents, my sister and myself could come into my house and it was OK, and a good thing was very formative.

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  4. For all the Tolkein influence on D&D, the bits with the thrush and the ravens from The Hobbit didn't seem to make as much of an impact as other elements that got lifted.

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    1. That's true. Maybe because of a perception that stuff is childish?

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  5. So I used this concept in a recent Stone Age campaign but didn't harp too much on the spiritualism of the creatures which was probably a wasted opportunity. The animals had 20 things they could be doing when encountered. It forced some DM improv when I got strange results (animals playing but hostile reaction or animals mating but friendly reaction!). Sometimes the players just watched or made friends by copying behaviours. Mostly though they looked at animals as (A) Food? (B) Raw materials for making things or (C) Useful pets for training? Would definitely use the sub-table in the future if running a wilderness campaign or had druids/savage type PCs running around.

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