At the same time, humans, orcs, elves, manticores and cockatrices all inhabit the same world. They're all part of the same reality. Maybe there are "monsters" and they may not be strictly part of the ecology, but they're just sort of there in the same way that mountain is there or a tree is there or a jackdaw is there.
I'm getting less and less interested in this as time goes by. In fact I'm getting more and more interested in adventure as taking place in the spaces where the human world touches others. This could be the dungeon as mythic underworld. It could be the wilderness as mythic otherworld. It could be other planes of existence. It could be the realms of the gods. It could be the abyss. But adventure must happen when there is cross-over between different realities, in one form or another. That could be in a physical space, like when PCs venture into a megadungeon which is some version of hell. Or it could be temporal, like certain circumstances in which realms collide or overlap or rub together.
As a corollary of this I'm getting less interested in "monsters" in general, and more interested in antagonists as being spirits, demons, faeries. Not monsters, but things from other realities which are confronted because they have slipped into our own, or vice versa. Not parts of the furniture in the world of the PCs, however rare or powerful, but things that are qualitatively distinct.
This is the approach I'm aiming for with my Ainu Moshir game. When you're in the wilderness, you're not really in the world of farms and towns and villages. You're in a place that is other. You're in a space where you are an outsider. And the stuff that is out there is not tangible or understandable in any way that you have experienced before. It is a place which you can see or touch, but which you can never hope to be a part of. It is a place which is independent and which maintains its independence just as your world does. And just as you can venture into it if you dare, things from the wilderness can venture into your world - the world of farms and towns and villages. And just as you will never be a part of the wilderness, those things will never be part of your world. But they can see or touch it, in all manner of unexpected and frightening ways.
Lead on MacDuff, I'm right behind you. There's something to be said for old Mr. Gygax's prediliction for putting odd things in dungeons with no explanation. The purple altar of death in G2 and G3 spring to mind here, deadly and evil objects that really are inexplicable - they have no explanation for mortal men, being nothing but extrusions of chaos into the mundane world. I tend to think of those things as feeders, more proboscis than tentacles. That is, they may look like tentacles, but the exist to suck the life force out of the unwary. Yes, they don't make sense. Yes, they appear random. Yes, they exist only to kill. Those are *features* not bugs.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong, I like Sigil as much as the next guy, but when you get right down to it? Planescape did as much to make the planar realms mundane, as it did to make the rest of the world fantastic.
Yes, I'd agree with that. I like Planescape but there was a missed opportunity there.
DeleteI would say that what you are describing is an elemental part of Tolkien. And, one that Gygax and D&D left behind.
ReplyDeleteConsider how much importance was put on entering and leaving. Crossing the border from one realm to another. How time, and nature, would pass differently in one place, than it did another. The idea that the road that you walk on each day, could sweep you off across a continent, on a whim of it's own.
When D&D was created, these things were, well not so much rejected, as ignored. The game was built around the now, the idea that where ever we are, this is where we are now. The rules are the same for all, and game balance must be maintained. The idea that the elf in the party might be more powerful against the spirit it faces, because they are both part of the spirit realm, as well as this one, is a break in the balance, and must be rejected. In the end, D&D took the magic out of the world, codified it, and put it into things, and made getting the things the object of the game.
In the LotR, where you were meant everything, but you could bring a little piece of another world, to help you in your darkest moments. D&D did not, or perhaps, at the time, could not, make this a part of the game, and never did, later.
I don't really agree with that interpretation of Tolkien's work. It seems to me that elves, humans, orcs, ents, etc., are all part of the same stuff, which you would expect, because they've all got one creator.
DeleteI think I understand the impulse because it is a concept with which I try to distinguish low level gaming (lvls 1-4 or 5) from high level gaming (lvls 5 or 6+) but it is easier to want the distinction than to bring it into effect, largely because an Orc is actually as ineffable a monster as any DM will ever need.
ReplyDeleteThere really are only the binary categories of the real and the invented. Bear in mind that anything we can conceive is merely an extrapolation of the real and simply *defining* a monster to be stranger than any marvel hitherto conceived is a sleight of rhetoric.
I take the point that it is just a sleight of rhetoric, but if you put it in those terms basically anything fictional or imaginative is just a sleight of rhetoric. You could say that there's no difference between Lovecraft and MR James except for "sleights of rhetoric", which is basically true, but ignores all the differences stemming from that within the fiction they created.
DeleteI am not saying that that the different monsters imagined by different writers are sleights of rhetoric. I am saying what you said is,
Delete**I'm getting less interested in "monsters" in general, and more interested in antagonists as being spirits, demons, faeries. Not monsters, but things from other realities which are confronted because they have slipped into our own, or vice versa**
Why are spirits and demons not monsters? The monsters of Tolkien that most people will think of are the Balrog and the wraiths, very much creatures from another place.
If you are reacting to the lazy, unthinking cliched use of monsters in gaming then join the club, it's fairly large. It is possible though to take a single standard humanoid from AD&D and create a Grendel. It is also possible for 'unknowable' 'unutterable' monsters to come across as empty and identical as they do eventually in Lovecraft. All a writer can do is imagine his monster as strange as he wishes and let others decide whether the concept works. The proof is in the pudding as they say.
And yet we can imagine the inconceivable as a concept. A concept that has terrified/beatified the pious and the artistic alike for, I would suggest, the span of human consciousness. Hence come forth descriptions of monsters as being unlike things. The Lovecraftian, 'this is what they are not'.
ReplyDeleteI might also suggest, that altered states of consciousness draw from potentially unknown realms. I'm not saying this with any certainty (how could I?), only that the possibility exists.
As I kid I found the Barrow Wight to be the scariest thing in the books, for exactly this reason. It was outside the natural order and completely without explanation.
ReplyDeleteThe Ringwraiths, Balrog, and possibly the Watcher in the Water all seem to instil immense fear in all who behold them for this reason too, because they are from or able to pass outside the natural world (and to a lesser extent the army of the dead oathbreakers - Tolkien does an excellent job of portraying death itself as something outside and apart from our world, which is why mortals fear it). In the book the Balrog is described as something much more lovecraftian than the typical demon is normally gets depicted with visually.
I guess what I'm saying is that Tolkien conceived of plenty of "beings from outside our world", but they are so rare that people almost never see them, and in the books we mostly just get hints.
I'm with you though, I really like mysterious invisible fairies and evil spirits, and the mundane physicality of D&D demons and devils is one reason why I dislike them. I tend to replace them with something more like evil spirits. I also tend make most monsters, like goblins, into fey and non-biological in nature.
Ars Magica always handled this fairly well, what with its ideas of realm-specific auras and regiones that let you slip from one realm into another.
ReplyDelete