Friday 16 September 2016

Dungeonizing the Wilderness

From Seeing Like a State, an extremely important book which everybody should read:

[Edmund Leach] suggested that we look at the precolonial Burmese state not as a physically contiguous territory, as we would in the contest of modern states, but as a complex patchwork that followed an entirely different logic. We should picture the kingdom, he insisted, in terms of horizontal slices through the topography. Following this logic, Burma was, in practice, a collection of all the sedentary, wet-rice producers settled in valleys within the ambit of the court center. These would be...the state spaces. The next horizontal stratum of the landscape from, say, five hundred feet to fifteen hundred feet would, given its different ecology, contain inhabitants who practice shifting cultivation, were more widely scattered and were therefore less promising subjects of appropriation. They were not an integral part of the kingdom, although they might regularly send tribute to the central court. Still higher elevations would constitute yet other ecological, political and cultural zones. What Leach proposed, in effect, is that we consider all relatively dense, wet-rice settlements within range of the capital as "the kingdom" and the rest, even if relatively close to the capital, as "nonstate spaces". 
The role of statecraft in this context becomes that of maximising the productive, settled population in such state spaces while at the same time drawing tribute from, or at least neutralizing, the nonstate spaces. These stateless zones have always played a potentially subversive role, both symbolically and practically. From the vantage point of the court, such spaces and their inhabitants were the exemplars of rudeness, disorder and barbarity against which the civility, order and sophistication of the centre could be gauged. Such spaces, it goes without saying, have served as refuges for fleeing peasants, rebels, bandits, and the pretenders who have often threatened kingdoms. 

Two thoughts emerge from this.

1) I dimly perceive a map which is not birds-eye, but horizontal. A bit like what Christian Kessler has been posting about lately. It is subdivided into strata, each of which has a distinct character based on its elevation and ecology - getting more dangerous and strange as the elevation increases. This is in effect a way of (let's coin a phrase, shall we?) dungeonizing the wilderness. Think of a city state in a valley. All the way up and down the valley it exerts control and authority. But on either side are very tall steep hills and then mountains, which ascend ruggedly and rapidly. You wouldn't have to travel far from the city to be in a radically different, alien environment which civilization simply cannot touch. And moreover, it is stratified into levels - of, say, 500 feet of elevation. What this is is, in effect, a dungeon that is upside down: the higher you go, the more dangerous things are and the more potential there is for discovering things that are amazingly weird and/or valuable. Here the wilderness is not just a hex-map in which the PCs might equally be confronted by a dragon as by some kobolds; it takes on the same function of a dungeon in providing a somewhat predictable range of risk-taking.

2) To the city state discussed above, the wilderness is a threat which it wants to neutralize, and ideally draw tribute from. For some reason I have never really thought about this properly before, but why not conceptualise PCs in a D&D game as being representatives of the "State" rather than simply rogue-like murderhobos - competent independent frontiersman types with letters of marque, or even diplomats, sent to the dungeon or the wilderness to neutralize it? Not in the sense of clearing it, but in the sense of reducing its capacity to pose a threat - by creating tributary relationships (one way or the other), trade links or even ultimately civilizing it? In a strange way this seems to have been what my Three/Four Mysterious Weirdos campaign ended up resembling without me quite realising it. I find the concept interesting partly because it subverts so many typical D&D assumptions, but also because it puts the PCs in a role which is (at least in my view) fundamentally wrong-headed, in an intriguing way.

14 comments:

  1. Isn't this something like what the Romans did when they came to Britain "one of the dark places of the earth" to which, with the exertion of a few legions, they brought sanitation, baths and so on?

    Or the endless project to civilise the old forest tribes across the Rhine, in the end inviting the germans back home to their own destruction.

    The problem as described so far is that it appears more suited to a war game with PCs as political-generals. On a small scale maybe the PCs could be special forces recruiting/sponsoring/favouring one tribe to dominate their neighbours.

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    1. If the elevation model is important then I think standard contour maps would be better than vertical maps.

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    2. You are undoubtedly right about the contours.

      Somebody commented on G+ that these things tend to start out small-scale. You first get what are, in effect, semi-criminal outlaw types venturing into the uncivilized lands. They are the vanguard of future conquest. This is exactly how the American West, Siberia, Australia, etc. were conquered. It may well have been true of the Roman Empire too - it's just we don't really know about it.

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    3. "semi-criminal outlaw types venturing into the uncivilized lands. They are the vanguard of future conquest." This is pretty much AD&D for me. When you mentioned 'state' and 'diplomat' I was think of the bigger scale.

      I like the idea of players being mentally robust but adventuring weak characters in charge of expeditions. They have high Int and Cha but no useful class. They have papers which claim they have charge of a company of shilly shally veterans. Increase in level means more knowledge, money, influence and friends back in the city but not skills.

      The state might have to provide expensive fragile breathing apparatus to soldiers to prevent oxygen deprivation and they could be reduced to a bunch of girls without them. Maybe a cloud layer protects those below a certain altitude from burning radiation around noon each day, so more technology needed.

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  2. This
    "For some reason I have never really thought about this properly before, but why not conceptualise PCs in a D&D game as being representatives of the "State" rather than simply rogue-like murderhobos - competent independent frontiersman types with letters of marque, or even diplomats, sent to the dungeon or the wilderness to neutralize it?"

    I've done that in adventures but not as a way to look at your campaign or the game itself. Very interesting idea. Thanks for sharing it.

    Adventurers as gentrifiers....

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  3. I like point 2. This is of course reflective of the mandala system of historical South East Asian states (see Milton Osborne's Exploring South East Asia), which looks like a nested set of concentric circles. The centre circle, A, is the palace and capital province; the next circle, B, are the inner provinces (the wetland rice cultivators in your example); the next circle C, the outer provinces who are still paying tribute to circle A (these may be friendly hill tribes and minor states themselves), and the last circle is D, the porous border regions reflecting unfriendly hill tribes, warlords, bandit gangs and so on. Plenty of potential for adventure!

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  4. Very good. Nothing to add. Just saying "thanks."

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  5. "why not conceptualise PCs in a D&D game as being representatives of the "State" rather than simply rogue-like murderhobos - competent independent frontiersman types with letters of marque"
    This is basiacally the pitch for Oltrée, a French rpg where you travel a hex map as Patrollers who have to regain the ruins of the Old Empire and extent the Capital influence by cleaning (randomly generated) dungeons, helping settlements and negociating with monsters

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    1. Interesting. I assume there is no English translation?

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  6. Reminds me of the first Runequest scenario I played, where we were soldiers from Sun County (our GM said 'think Mormon Spartans in the Wild West') sent to investigate a frontier village.

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  7. I am reading a book about the history of Transylvania (Kleine Geschichte Siebenbürgens by Harald Roth, very recommended) and it describes a similar "slice"-based ethnical, economical and social situation.

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  8. OK, now to add: I've always thought of the PCs as, not murderhobos, but as agents of Law reclaiming that which had been lost to Chaos. Making the wilderlands safe for common folks; amassing the wealth lost to Law in ages past.

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  9. Very interesting idea.

    There's a actually a good precedent for this sort of adventuring in The Hobbit, of all places. The Misty Mountains have become near-impassable to travellers because orcs have resumed their waylaying ways - hence Goblin-Town. So it gets more dangerous as you go up - but if you get through the *real* "dungeon" to which you may be shanghaied, you can emerge lower down, having traversed the mountains underground.

    And then there's the description of slopes of the Grey Mountains being "simply stiff with goblins, hobgoblins and orcs of the worst description" - through which Tolkien's synonymia inadvertently fed the Gygaxian urge for monstrous diversity, I suspect.

    But more than that, there's that bit where Gandalf talks about trying to find a friendly giant to block up the goblin entrances. Now there's an adventure hook: venture into the perilous mountains, find a doubtless dangerous giant and somehow persuade him to immure the orcs in their holds so that the king's people can travel across the mountains once more ...

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  10. I really like your idea of elevation being related to different adventuring environments. It is also a great way to create a sandbox adventure but communicate to players what areas are appropriate for their level of characters.

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