I am a big fan of dream-worlds, faerie-lands, parallel universes, and so forth. The great struggle with all of that, though, is that - almost by necessity - it can feel as though events in the "non-real" otherworld can feel precisely that: non-real. They can lack weight and substance. It can feel as though nothing there has meaning, or can change, or can really be interacted with. On the other hand, if you start to introduce petty real-world concerns like money, land, and so forth into a faerie otherworld, you deprive it of its difference and make it seem like simply another part of the "normal" world.
I know of no better illustration of this than Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. In those stories the otherworld doesn't play by our rules of economics, politics, geography and so on. It operates on a different logic and has different considerations. It doesn't even abide by our understanding of time or space. As a consequence it has a strangely permanent sort of a feel - there is always the sense that Alice is an alien in it and her presence there doesn't particularly affect anything. That is part of those stories' charm, of course, but it would be hard to make an actual game purely about the Alice books. (Though A Red and Pleasant Land did a great job of pastiching it while mixing it in with other influences.) What does Alice do except wander around as a stranger in a strange land and encounter weird things? Put in more prosaic D&D terms - what would a party of PCs do in Wonderland except wander around as strangers in a strange land and encounter weird things? Searching for treasure or conquering new realms or doing missions for the Queen of Hearts seems in a sense like a category error. Wonderland isn't about that.
This is why the Tim Burton film of Alice in Wonderland was so dreadful. Not satisfied with simply re-telling Alice in Wonderland, Burton felt compelled to make it an actual story about power, rulership, and so on. This made Wonderland into just another fantasy setting, full of political struggle, which is just diametrically opposite to what Lewis Carroll was driving at in every single sense I can think of. Burton made all of it - the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat - just a vaguely charming version of any given fantasy setting, with a by-the-numbers high fantasy plot.
I call this the Mythago problem, after Holdstock's Mythago Wood books. The Mythago Wood books are great, but they aren't gameable. That's because the eponymous wood - a faerie otherworld if ever there was one - isn't a world in which typical D&D concerns (wealth, war, politics, quests, etc.) matter. It's a world where emotional concerns like father-son relationships and the growth from adolescence to adulthood matter. It's about expressionism. It's not about gathering XP. Play a game of D&D in Mythago Wood and it's not Mythago Wood anymore. It's just a wood full of stuff to kill, rob, play politics with, etc.
I have been wrestling with this problem a lot writing Behind Gently Smiling Jaws. I think I've got there - though the proof will have to be in the pudding - but its viciousness shouldn't be underestimated. The moment you introduce human concerns into a dream-world, you can quite simply end its independent existence as a dream-world and render it mundane. Kadath isn't Kadath if all you're doing there is the normal D&D things...but if you're not doing the normal D&D things, what do you actually do there?
In the case of HP Lovecraft's _Dreamquest_ you're searching for Kadath. It's an insane little hex-crawl that I could totally see working, so long as your players were interested in interacting with the odd little bits, like making an alliance with cats and ghouls against moonbeasts, or escaping one of the black galleys.
ReplyDeleteOn a similar note, what do you think of Gaiman's _Stardust?_ Is love fey enough in and of itself to preserve the fairy-land's sense of otherness, or does it make it too mundane for you? What about the politics of that realm? Too mundane, or bonky enough to keep the magic going?
I've never read Stardust. I think the problem with the Dreamquest as a hexcrawl is that it seems a bit too linear. You're looking for Kadath. You find it. Then what? There doesn't seem to be a great deal for the PCs to get their teeth into. (I often find that with any campaign which is essentially about getting from point A to point B.)
DeleteExploration and wonder and discovery are also normal D&D things.
ReplyDeleteI don't buy it. They happen in D&D games, yes. But I don't think in their own right they are what D&D is really about. It would take a really special DM to make a game that was purely about "wonder" successful.
DeleteWait, you're doing something with the dreamlands? Cool
ReplyDeleteNo. That was just an example. I'm actually not a massive fan of Lovecraft's dreamlands stuff.
DeleteMy approach to preparing my next campaign is to treat otherworld encounters as raids. Dungeons are mythic underworlds (though they also can be magic mountains, lakes, or valleys) and the party is steered to get in, grab some curious looking stuff, and get out. Preferably alive and with all parts still intact. Ideally the players are in too much of a rush to thoroughly analyze everything they encounter and just let the weird be weird. I'll have to wait and see how that will work out in practice.
ReplyDeleteYeah, definitely. That works.
Deleteive considered making a mythago woods like setting for years. TV show Magicians similar in some ways.
ReplyDeleteId contrast the waking and dream worlds - real world has drudge like bills, cancer, love gone wrong - dream world is a psychological landscape echoing waking world and sometimes using it as temptation with older echoes from prehistory and other past times
use different mechanics in different dreamland settings a possibility
That's why I think American McGee's Alice is a so much better re-telling; making the Wonderland in effect the Alice's psyche means it remains weird and Alice's place in it is inherently alien, but the consequences of her questing are very real and potentially severe.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's also sort of implicitly there in the original books as well, don't you think? There seems to be some sort of psychological/quasi-Jungian importance to Alice's adventures, I've always thought.
DeleteHave you read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? I read it around the time it came out, so my memories of it aren't too sharp. But one thing that Susannah Clarke does very well, if I remember correctly, is convey the sense that the pressing concerns of Faerie are very, very different from ours. I think that could be carried over to a game very well. So, the PCs find themselves in Faerie and are end up "being approached in a tavern" - but the task with which they're charged is utterly bizarre: perhaps fetching an egg inside a raven inside a fox inside a deer that lives on a glass mountain - perhaps because the egg contains the heart of their paymaster, who is eager to get it back. Or stealing an ordinary-looking wren that nests in the eaves of the castle of a giant - to be found beneath a lake.
ReplyDeleteOr what about being compelled to deliver an invitation to a masked ball to an irascible and always hungry ogre by a certain deadline? And getting his written acceptance - despite the fact that he's a slobbering, bloodthirsty beast with little more than animal intelligence? Because if you don't, the faerie earl who has contracted you will steal your eyeballs and add them to his cloak ...
Nightmarish, surreal and downright peculiar errands for elfin earls are surely the way to go here. There's a template of sorts in HeroQuest Glorantha, with its excursions into the [i]real[/i] underworld and taking out lawsuits against ghosts. As long as the adventures themselves are sufficiently otherworldly, with massively important trivia and complete indifference to cataclysms, the players should be able to enjoy themselves.
Yes, I like all those ideas. That was the kind of thing I was working on with New Troy.
DeleteThe suggestion above about using different mechanics in the other worlds is one way to go, but I think the problem you're describing calls for not just altered mechanics but a whole different game. Like, once you step through the dimensional portal you're no longer playing D&D, you're playing My Life With Master or whatever.
ReplyDeleteThat could be interesting, actually. I wonder if anyone's tried anything like that.
Delete^ This is pretty much what I do in my D&D games - I have always explored dreams and dreamlands quite a lot but I use a totally different mechanic. When we play dream sessions we aren't playing D&D anymore - the PCs definitely don't have D&D stats and abilities and it becomes more of a refereed story telling game, although I use my own house rules for how that works rather than an existing published ruleset. And yes, quite often the goals end up being more along the lines of emotional concerns, father-son, growing up, etc. Some of my most memorable sessions have been dream sessions, including the only time (to my knowledge) that I have made multiple players tear up because of the deep emotion that came out of a dream episode
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