I'm not sure about in other areas of the world, but localism is becoming A Thing in Britain. For a long time home grown British things were despised, through a combination of fascination with the world outside and all its exoticism (The Empire was a bad thing, but it certainly made Britain a place that was interested primarily in foreign climes); a fascination with immigrant cultures (particularly from India and Pakistan) which replaced the old suspicion people held for them; and the legacy of industrialisation, which had taken a mostly rural population and transformed it into a mostly urban one over the course of 100 years, replacing local traditions, culture and knowledge with bland uniformity. (Any mainland European visitor to Britain will be amazed at how everybody eats the same things, all city centres have exactly the same shops, and everybody dresses exactly the same way.)
In the past 10 years or so, though, I have noticed a significant trend towards localism, particularly favouring local produce. British people have always been extremely proud of their regional allegiances, but this switch to appreciating locally-made foods and drinks is significantly new. You really notice it when visiting the countryside. Everywhere you go you find micro-breweries making local beers, local dairy farms producing local cheeses, local fisheries producing local seafood, local restaurants selling locally-sourced meats. Part of this is, I think, because of consciousness about the environment (people want to buy local because they think it means less of a carbon footprint from transportation), part of it is wanting to support British producers (I think Britain is generally a more patriotic place than it has been for probably 30 years), and partly it is lead by the BBC, which for whatever reason has been producing series upon series about British history, geography and culture in recent years.
Generally speaking I like this trend. I think the economic and environmental arguments supporting it are probably utterly bogus, but it doesn't matter: Britain is a very interesting country, with interesting local traditions and dialects and music, and with a delicious and varied cuisine which is not well represented by the shit most people actually eat.
I got to thinking about this recently because the local supermarket sells smoked Northumberland cheese, locally sourced, which is probably the most heavenly thing I have ever eaten. As I was stuffing my face with this last night, I started to ponder: is there, or could there be, a local trend in gaming? Might gamers, like foodies, become more interested in setting games in their local areas - whether fantasy-inflected or otherwise?
The advantage of the move towards the local is that knowledge is extremely high. Not to get all Hayekian on a Monday evening, but knowledge in society is dispersed and decentralised: the closer you are to something, the better you know it. I noticed that, when I ran a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign about a year ago set in the area I grew up (Merseyside), I felt a level of comfort with the setting which I don't normally have. Whenever a player asked me something, I was able to respond with the familiarity and detail which only a local person could have (and the players, also being locals, were able to flesh out their characters and the setting very easily too). It's standard for a DM to know his own setting, and nothing less should be expected. But you can't know a fictional place you've made up as well as, and in anything like the same level of detail as, you know a real-world place you know intimately.
Localism in gaming does not have to be modern. Because I grew up in the North West of England, I know the climate and geography of the place very well. I know the landscape, I know the weather, I know the way the sky looks, I know how green the grass is. It would be very easy for me to simply remove what currently exists in terms of human habitation, and replace it with a complete fantasy culture/cultures and society/societies, while retaining the geography and all of those things I know about the physical space as a wilderness. This would give a game I ran in that environment a level of authenticity I could not give a completely created fantasy setting (in, say a desert or a jungle), because of all the extra knowledge I have about how the place feels.
Of course, part of the fun of role playing is using your imagination, so I would hardly advocate only ever running locally-based games. But isn't it a notion worth considering?
It's something I've been thinking about a lot, a sort of recurring idea... but, you know, America. We stare wistfully across the Atlantic at all your castles and history and folklore.
ReplyDeleteThis is why I find myself adoring Lovecraft Country, or considering how to run a post-Apoc game like Stephen King's Dark Tower - with gunslingers and mutants and vast open spaces like the American West.
Neither of which are ideal for a very traditional looking D&D game.
Although don't you think you could take the area in which you live, remove all of the existing cities, roads, etc., and then put in fantasy stuff instead?
DeleteI've heard tell that that's what Gygax did with Greyhawk; took a map of the Great Lakes region and worked from there. I've heard of this sort of thing working for modern games; had a friend run a Mage game set in his hometown once, and it went well.
Delete"We stare wistfully across the Atlantic at all your castles and history and folklore."
DeleteBut we - especially us Californios - have Zorro!
I've done a couple of settings over the years set in a fantasy version of the North American continent for this reason.
DeleteI've never done anything like this, I think because somewhere at the back of my mind, I fear that if something is so familiar to me it will also be familiar to my players -- who are also local -- and so runs the risk of being dull or predictable.
ReplyDeleteBut that familiarity makes it cool, because you have all the same shared knowledge/assumptions. You don't have to spend time explaining a lot of things, because you're on the same page. And it won't be dull or predictable if the content isn't.
DeleteThere was a trend in the earliest days of Superhero gaming to create superheroes that protected the area in which you lived, as opposed to New York City (home of all the freakin' heroes in the world at one point) or a fictious city like Gotham or Metropolis.
ReplyDeleteThis was further encouraged (whether or purpose or not I can not say) by the game Villains & Vigilantes, since it's default concept was that you were playing yourself but with superpowers.
So, if John Smith, who lives and games in Beaver City, Nebraska is playing Captain MidWest, who is secretly John Smith of Beaver City, Nebraska, why shouldn't the campaign take place in Beaver City?
Unfortunately, this next effected my gaming group and I. We live in New York City. ^^;
Just for the record, been to England (mostly London and the surrounding countryside) a few times and I love it. I'm a bit of an Anglophile to be sure.
Tell me, what is the favorite candy or chocolate around your way? British candy, chocolate bars and the like are another obsession of mine.
Actually living away from the UK for a long time has kind of put me off British chocolate a bit - a lot of it's too sweet for me now. I do still love a Double Decker though. Also Galaxy Minstrels. They do a dark chocolate Kit-Kat these days, which is delicious.
DeleteDo love me some British Kit-Kats.
DeleteBritish one's too sweet eh? See, I find American chocolate too sweet and without a true taste of chocolate. An American Snickers tastes like sugar. A British Snickers tastes like Chocolate around roasted peanuts.
This is a great idea. Especially if you can use maps from google earth.
ReplyDeleteI remember a couple years ago I played that video game for Ghostbusters. There's an event in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it is very well animated. Then I went to New York for the first time. Standing at the front of the Met, I was overwhelmed with a sense of deja vu. I'd been here before, but I had never been there. It's just that I had virtually been in that space before... and I had busted ghosts on those stairs.
Anyway, I think evoking that feeling would be interesting. It would especially be cool to go to a local library and think "I butchered and ate radio active spiders... right there."
Using maps from google earth is a god send. I tend not to use a laptop at the game table - I prefer to keep things lo-tech - but I can see the advantage in letting the players look at the screen and telling them "You are here".
DeleteThe environmental thinking behind it is correct IF (and it's a big if) everything you buy is produced locally AND you'd need to combine it with a vigorous recycle/reuse scheme..oh, and everyone has to do it...it's real strength is in producing a genuine sense of culture ...still, nowt ventured etc
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm more interested in it because actually a lot of the locally produced food is really tasty and different to the norm.
DeleteI live in Las Vegas and it seems like just about every local game of Vampire I knew of (back when there were a lot of Vampire games to know about) was set (at least partially) here... not NYC or New Orleans like I might expect. At the time I thought that was kind of 'cute'.
ReplyDeleteFunny that in all the games I've ran I've never tried to put the setting in a desert, like the one in my own backyard.
You should do it, then.
DeleteInterstingly I have a very detailed understanding of various aspects of local botany, zoology and geology that could be very helpful to describe in meticulous detail the local environment but only to those already versed in that knowledge which restricts things a little i.e. You enter a Tall riparian Lowland subtropical rainforest dominated by Syzigium floribunda and Argyrodendron trifoliatum with a mixed Ligustrum lucidum and Linospadix monostachya midstory, soils are based on rhyolite, there are spiders.
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine that many people appreciating this level of information but I do think that one of the big benefits of post-apoc games is the ability to do some wild gonzo shit in a pimped out version your old stompin' grounds.
For sure. The Cyberpunk 2020 game I ran set in Liverpool was a lot of fun because it basically involved the players doing heists in our local area - doing all the things that you would never do in real life.
DeleteTom if you took all that Latinate stuff and turned it into direct sensory description then it would be fascinating. No-one cares what abstract species of plant they are marching through but if you can tell them the sape, the colour, the smell and touch then they will be interested. And the spiders of course, which all act a bit differently but its impossible for a DM to differentiate them, unless they know a lot about spiders.
Delete"No-one cares what abstract species of plant they are marching through"
DeleteSeveral people do, it's just a matter of getting them all into the one game ;) But seriously, excellent descriptive prose can make unfamiliar scenarios accessible and evocative and immersive it's just a matter of achieving the balance between detail and succinctness. A level of specific knowledge on the part of the players serves the function of augmenting descriptions and thus making the job easier.
To get back to your earlier outdoor posts, this is probably why most of the wilderness areas in my games resemble various Northern Californian geographies (which, thankfully, cover quite a range of different ecosystems). My months spent backpacking with my family as a child now means that perhaps the "strongest" aspect of my GMing lies in talking about hiking through the mountains (helped by the fact that when I was walking through the mountains I would be imagining where ambushes would take place, where great battles of antiquity would have occurred, etc.).
ReplyDeleteI suppose we all do it to a large extent without being aware of it.
DeleteYep, good advice. I keep finding local elements creeping into my games simply because it's what we all use as mental/verbal shorthand. Sadly, that means I can never play Tekumel with my lot:
ReplyDelete"No, dnabread are not space stotties!"
Please don't get me started on localism as lifestyle fashion though...
...partly it is led by the BBC, which for whatever reason has been producing series upon series about British history, geography and culture in recent years.
Some localisms are more equal than others. BBC drinking game: drink whenever England/the English is mentioned in a positive context post Act of Union (Hard mode: post-Victorian, Nightmare mode: post-WW2).
To be fair to the Beeb, they may never be positive about England, but they are positive about discrete areas of England. Last week's Countryfile was all about the wonders of Leicestershire, for instance.
DeleteThe BBC's activity could be part of the EU plot to create a 'Europe of Regions', breaking down the larger nation-states into harmless regions. If that's so it's not working so great, English patriotism seems on the rise. Anyway whatever their agenda it has some positive effects in this case, as you've noted.
DeleteI don't think the BBC has any sort of conscious agenda at that level. Its overall soft-left bias comes from the fact that most of the people working for it have that bias, and genuinely believe that it is neutral, the default position. It's a cultural thing within the organisation.
DeleteI actually just noticed the prevalence on Australian TV of shows with Welshmen rambling around Cumbria trying to muster enthusiasm for Snood-wrastling and Quilkin-pot-pie.
ReplyDeleteThomas M. You're in good company. I believe Tolkien's particular fondness and aptitude for writing about mountains came from a memorable trip in the Alps he took as a young'un.
I ran a Mutant Future campaign for a couple of years set in the Willamette Valley in Oregon where I live, just a few hundred years in the future.
ReplyDeleteI received a call at work one day from a very excited player who had finally figured out that he had been gaming in his backyard for months. His PC had a random encounter with giant cockroaches the session before that had literally occurred in his upstairs neighbor's apartment. One wiseass asked me next session if he buried something in the yard during the game, could his PC find it in the future...
Google Earth Terrain View was the single most useful game aid I have ever used. There was never any question of not knowing exactly what the terrain was like during our games.
What happens if you've never lived any one place long enough to real *know* the landscape... sob sob...
ReplyDeleteSome of my fondest role-playing memories are from a Bronze Age game we played which was set in Ulster, specifically in the area where we lived. As a player I knew exactly the shape of the loughs and hills as I could just look out the window and see them, and the distant outline of Scotland and the Mull of Kintyre. So when we had to cross the sea to Kintyre there was a real sense of place and distance which are often hard to evoke in what is normally more akin to a radio-drama.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I definitely do that for physical geography, climate etc, and I like to go back to the Scottish highlands and take a long hike to get back to a feel for what being in the wilderness is like.
ReplyDeleteWith human geography I definitely never run stuff in places I actually know, though - the 'canon' would be overwhelming. I might use my knowledge of eg the Southern English upper middle to upper class to inform how I played the aristocrats in my Yggsburgh game, but the Eastmark is not southern England, I'm not risking any canon violation if I get it 'wrong'. Likewise I'd rather set modern stuff in 'New York' where I've never been than real Belfast or London.
When I was 16, I worked in a third rate amusement park one summer. I designed my own zombie game using a park map in my spare time, as I sold these horrible modern replacements for the classic frozen banana, they were trying to introduce.. One day I sold six, so I had a lot of time.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I took the free maps and the back of a place mat and designed quick rules based on six sided dice. The fourth day, I got another map and designed a gamma world encounter and thus started my love for Gamma World in the real world, a trick I've used dozens of time since then in, pretty much every time someone hands out free maps of an area, which dovetailed perfectly with the midwestern college's love of steam heat and the need for tunnels to supply it.
I've also run Justice Inc locally, basing an adventure off of the Cleveland Torso murders and Elliot Ness.
I've written a short horror story set in my area. If I played Cthulu, I think it'd make a good scenario. I've started a couple of unfinished cyberpunk novels set here as well.
Just last week, I found myself contemplating how I'd run an Ohio frontier game. I was hiking by the canal, now a national park, thinking of how the area must have looked back when it was the first canal which linked the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. The violence of the canal towns is legendary. I was contemplating mixing in the abolition of the mad prophet John Brown, remnants of Tecumseh's rebels, the slaughter at Gnadenhutton, Mormons, and perhaps bringing the infamous Harpe brothers to visit from the Ohio river. I don't know just which system I'd try to use for this though. When you go looking for it, there are always some weird elements to find in any local landscape.
Like most Americans, I'm jealous of the opportunities you Brits have for such things.