To paraphrase Bill Hicks, the RPG world is probably divided into two camps of people: those who think Tom Bombadil is an annoying idiot, and those who think he is an evil fuck.
I am one of the few who think that instead of compromising around the proposition that he's an annoying evil idiot fuck, the Tom Bombadil sections are some of the best bits of The Lord of the Rings. In fact, I'll go you one further: the opening bit of The Fellowship of the Ring, the bit before Bree, is my favourite bit of the entire trilogy. It's the bit I always look forward to reading the most.
I don't put this down to any special mystery, ultimately - I think it's quite simply because I love the English countryside and so did Tolkien, and since those chapters are a mixture of paean and elegy to it, they can't but strike a chord. As somebody who spends a lot of time hiking (or rambling) around places that are a lot like the Shire is supposed to be, and being dismayed by the existence of the pylons, motorways and monocultural megafields which increasingly blight it, I'm probably perfectly constructed to be receptive to Tolkien's nostalgic vision.
That vision is almost totally absent from D&D (and most modern fantasy). D&D's tonal palette is broad - over the years it has accumulated metal, anime, Westerns, horror, high fantasy, sword & sorcery, steampunk - but there isn't much of the rustic (another word would be "pastoral") in there. The occasional brownie, the occasional pixie, the occasional sprite - mostly played for laughs and/or the DM's opportunity to irritate the players.
But there is enough inspiration, a sufficient number of touchstones, for there to be a rustic version of the game out there somewhere, in the ether. Where is it found?
Certainly, in the opening section to The Fellowship of the Ring. Certainly in Tolkien's other work - not so much The Hobbit, but definitely the peripheral works like Smith of Wootton Major or Leaf by Niggle. Certainly, in a lot of animal fantasy - I am thinking in particular of the Redwall books of course, but also Duncton Wood and Watership Down. It's in Mythago Wood in much darker form. It's also in the work of American authors too - probably The Wizard Knight, and (unexpectedly) in Vance's Lyonesse books; it also even appears from time to time in the work of people like Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes has a touch of it) and Stephen King when he's feeling particularly "Down East".
It's in music, too. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks/Moondance period. Anything by Runrig, or Fairport Convention, or Nick Drake.
Also perhaps important is the relationship between the "rustic" and real-world geography. Most D&D campaign settings are strangely placeless, in the sense that they're set in a very vague, loose simulacrum of a real world biosphere type: here's a foresty bit, here's a mountainy bit, here's a deserty bit. They don't have the sense that the Shire did of being founded in a very particular known locale: the Shire is not Worcestershire or Herefordshire exactly, not at the level of being a copy, but it's clearly rooted in that part of the country.
The locus between literature, music and geography is worth thinking about and exploring, and also potentially transposing to other non-English "rustics" - whether in America or beyond.
I am quite sympathetic to your fondness for Tolkien's loving vision of the English countryside and I would like to think about what makes that 'rusticness' attractive. If it is the particularity of place as you suggest, then the addition of fine-grained detail based on the real world could help to bring out a sort of echo quality to a game setting. The more research the better, really.
ReplyDeleteI think another aspect here is tone, and a rustic setting would need a relatively consistent tone compared with more gonzo games. I would imagine this would require lower-powered characters, or at least a concern with everyday people and things. Seems like you would really need players that are looking to replicate that vibe.
Yes, I agree with both those sentiments. Especially scale. I think small scale possibly just breeds a different tone.
DeleteWhat about Mouseguard? I've only looked at the art and briefly perused the system. Does anyone know whether that successfully channels Redwall and the rustic tone therein?
ReplyDeleteI'm in the same position as you. My general sense was that it was hard to get much from the game without having read the comic. Not sure if that is a fair assessment but that's how it felt.
DeleteI suspect many D&D sites feel "placeless" because fantasy worlds tend to be focused on the rural or the wilds, yet so many of the writers and consumers of D&D content are urban. And the urban youth of today are much more urban than were the urban youth of my childhood, meaning they have much less contact with the rural and the wild.
ReplyDeleteAlso, North American small towns have an entirely different aesthetic than English villages, so don't expect a Shire-like feeling from most North American designers. Although what they might do better, if they come from certain areas, is portray convincingly the feeling of the deep wilds.
I think that is all definitely true, but I also am sure that there is an "American rustic" too - it's in a lot of art by Wyeth, Homer, people like that, no?
DeleteMy experience with American Rustic, at least nowadays, is that there's a melancholy tinge to a lot of it. I grew up spending my summers and spring at my grandparent's farm in the country, and there was always a tinge of despondency or decay- the house down the road was abandoned, our nearest neighbors were all cranky conservatives in their twilight years, and most people in the area didn't have jobs. (Though to be fair, this was in Ohio- I'm sure down South or out West would have radically different experiences of the countryside!)
DeleteThe weird thing about the English countryside is that wherever you are in it, you are pretty much never actually outside commuting distance from a major city. (Cornwall and Devon are the possible exceptions, and Scotland and Wales are slightly different.) The South Tyne valley is probably the least populated and developed part of England but you can be in its most isolated spot and still be not much more than an hour's drive away from Newcastle or Carlisle.
DeleteThis means that most English villages are full of rich retirees and/or wealthy professionals, so it has a totally different dynamic to bigger and less densely populated countries.
Yes, the province I live in is three times the area of Great Britain, and perhaps 1/15 the population. And Google Maps tells me its a 7.5 hour drive from the small town of High Level to Edmonton, and there are plenty of places more remote than that. There are true wilds, and I still know several people who hunt moose and deer for food.
DeleteIt makes for a much different relationship with time, distance, and area. For those who actually leave the cities, that is.
Also, Bombadil just seemed out of place to me, like he belonged in a different book.
ReplyDeleteI really feel like he belongs very fully in the book, but I can understand the opposite way of thinking.
DeleteHow do you understand the "opposite way of thinking" too?
DeleteBecause I am capable of weighing two arguments against each other and deciding that ultimately one is more convincing than the other. I understand the position that Bombadil doesn't "feel" right but I also understand more the reasons why Tolkien put him in.
DeleteTo me, Tom Bombadil feels at odds with the "epic Fantasy" bits - Aragorn leading an army in battle against the evil orcs, the mighty wizard who dies in battle with a demon and is reborn, and the shield-maiden who faces off with the captain of the Ringwraiths. He feels very at home with Bilbo winning a magic ring in a riddle contest with Gollum, Merry and Pippin reciting poetry with forest giants, or the most powerful wizard in the world being mostly known for making rad fireworks.
DeleteMy totally baseless guess would be that whether or not you like Tom Bombadil depends on which bits of the story you like best- my mom's favorite parts are books 3 and 5 (the Aragorn parts) and she thinks Bombadil is weird, my favorite parts are most of Fellowship and the bits with hobbits and I think Bombadil is the shit.
I'm right there with you on Tom Bombadil and the first part of the Fellowship of the Ring. Maybe it's because I grew up in the country. It was a real bummer when Peter Jackson excised that portion from the movie version. He didn't even keep the encounter with the Barrow Wight which seems out of character for him as he seemed to want to turn every mention of the undead into a horror movie vignette.
ReplyDeleteYeah - I guess he thought it would be hard to pull off the barrow wight having already slightly over-egged the horror angle with the Black Riders already?
DeleteDoes "foresty" not count as "pastoral?" Because I find much of the Hobbit to be pretty rustic and old school fairy tale-ish (especially the bits between the Misty Mountains and Lonely Mountain).
ReplyDeleteOr are you talking specifically of the parts that take place in the Shire proper? One issue with what you suggest: I tend to think of "home" as "not a place for adventure." One's home village is supposed to be the place you come back to...for rest and recuperation and for spending your loot. Maybe you need to go adventuring to save the place or prevent it from falling into Chaos and ruin, but putting adventure proper on the homestead tends to be a darker type of adventure. "Dark pastoral?" Is that a thing?
[imagine characters born and raised in Hommlet...or Nulb!]
Maybe I'm just not English enough to grasp this concept. What do you think of the various UK adventures ("Beyond the Crystal Cave," etc.)?
I like that: Dark Pastoral!
DeleteI can imagine weaving through the over-filled stacks of musty paperbacks in the basement of the second-hand book shop, ducking around the Dark Paranormal Romance section, then the Dystopian Young Adult Mystery section, and finally, crammed into the lowest shelf of the farthest corner- 15 Dark Pastoral books set in hamlets around Nether Whitacre and Castle Bromwich.
Is it better for this genre to consist of: "Our rural home is threatened" or "Our rural home has always been creepy, especially on the edges of the hearth-light, under the threshing barn, in the bath-house at midnight, around the standing stone in the clearing"? I very much think the latter.
Dark pastoral sounds like an alternate term for the '70s UK genre that is now called folk horror. The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan's Claw and Penda's Fen are all examples of that.
DeleteDark pastoral is definitely a thing - certainly a potential thing. Faeries who steal babies and replace them with changelings. Tree people who abduct lonely travellers in the night. Pixies who make you lose your memory and years of your life. Etc.
DeleteYou should at least read 'Beyond the Wall', a retro-clone of D&D focused in a grouop of young adults fighting for their village. It's very inspiring and definitely has the 'rustic' feel.
ReplyDeleteI came from a village in Spain and now I'm living in a even more little village (+/-350 habitants) in the mountains. I want so bad to run a game of 'Beyond the Wall' inspired in my own surrounds but I can't find players in here...
I will someday get around to "Beyond the Wall"!
DeleteI came here to suggest Beyond the Wall. It's lovely.
DeleteSomething something 100 years, 100 miles.
ReplyDeleteI think a big part of it stems from D&D being written mostly be Americans. For Tolkien, writing stories about Hobbits being tossed out into the huge world was based around that familiar, pastoral core. My feeling is that the American image is seeing everything in a 120 mile radius as "close to home", any map smaller than the state of California as inadequately tiny, and even quaintness as alien outside of the Amish.
Getting it to worth requires two things. The first, as you suggest, is getting the inspiration for composing it. The second is narrowing in the exploration big time - Perhaps instead of terrain hexes, you would do things in more of a point-crawl/hex-crawl hybrid? Something which really hammers in the sheer amount of "stuff" that can fit into a 6-mile hex; which can make those miles of sweeping country-side seem a "world", and the leagues stretching between states seem terrifying obstacles.
Yes, or maybe it just needs more of a British geographic sensibility. I can't remember the exact line, but in one of Bill Bryson's book he describes the distance between two very far apart English cities as being "the distance most Americans would happily drive to get a taco". People in the two countries think about distance very differently - but also how much stuff you can pack into distance (with Britain and particularly England being insanely densely populated in comparison to the US).
Delete"If you mention in the pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall, a distance that most Americans would happily go to get a taco, your [English] companions will puff their cheeks, look knowingly at each other, and blow out air as if to say, 'Well, now, that's a bit of a tall order,'..."
Delete- Notes From a Small Island
Just finished it a week ago, coincidentally, so I had it on hand.
That's the one. His observations about English men and driving are spot on. There is nothing English men like talking about more than driving conditions and travel routes.
Deletegreat post. i also think that rustic does not equates "englishness". for example mary wade wellman's silver john stories are rustic but not english. gogol's viy is rustic but obviously very slavic. i love rustic settings as the starting point for adventure/campaign.
ReplyDeleteYes, every country really has a rustic tradition in the sense that they've all got a history of agricultural, village living to some degree or other.
DeleteI think part of conveying this sort of feeling in an RPG is geographical granularity. Six-mile hexes just don't cut it for giving a sense of place. Compare to a small adventuring area in which Buckleberry ferry is right HERE and Brandywine Bridge is right THERE and there's a small wood of oaks with a fork in the stream right HERE and you can get a sense of the countryside on the same level as someone actually walking about in it.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of this map of the environs of Hommlet, drawn by one Paul J. Stormberg, which has always tickled my fancy: http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/548152/14499940/1317869771200/T2_PC100.jpg
How about the wilderness map with its 100-yard squares in Gary's B2: The Keep on the Borderlands?
DeleteIt lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Thinking about it, I'd say it's the abundance of specific landmarks on Stormberg's map, plus the variety of the terrain. Gary's map is more or less an anonymous stretch of road between a forest and a swamp. I can easily put myself in the position of an NPC in Hommlet giving directions to the PCs. It feels a lot more like a known and inhabited area, rather than a patch of wilderness.
DeleteYes, it's a combination of small scale and also everything having names - every single item of landscape in the English countryside has a name, practically down to the last tree. I will have to write a post about that.
DeleteI actually have a long-unfinished draft post about the same subject - the richness of local toponyms and how they can inspire a game. I may have to finish and post it one of these days.
DeleteI second the idea that this is a cultural America vs. England thing. The Old School D&D strongholds-and-domains endgame is an analogy for the settling of the American west. There is civilization, but you start your adventure at the Keep on the Borderlands, travel into the wild frontier, and tame the wilderness.
ReplyDeleteMy worldbuilding has recently run toward "rustic" fantasy adventure, but for me that means cowboys-with-swords in a John Ford movie. An amalgam of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona, with some California desert and sequoia forest areas, dotted with Spanish castles defending city-states separated by savage wilderness. English countryside does nothing for me.
You need to visit then!
DeleteDefinitely on the bucket list.
DeleteQuite a few Dragon Warriors adventures were good at capturing a rustic feel, from what I remember: a sense that there was a real, functioning and mundane countryside - even if it was one in which a hobgoblin might occasionally kidnap an innkeeper's daughter. It's hard, though, to separate that from the game's (much) better-than-average evocation of a 'realistic' medieval environment.
ReplyDeleteThere also is possibly Harn?
DeleteRustic sounds to me a lot like pastoral. And that raises the question, what adventures would there be in such a place?
ReplyDeleteThey might be nice places to imagine, but almosy all fantasy requires adventure.
I would say adventure is in what comes *in* - or in a parallel faerie otherworld.
DeleteTroubles wih ogres, bandits, ghosts, and werewolves all fit in a rustic setting. Hunting,fishing, and searching out herbs can be adventures.
DeleteWar can loom next door and march across a rustic setting changing it for a time if not forever (as it does in LoTR).
The ever present threat of the other/elsewhere as expressed by jaunts into faerie are a natural as well.
Colville also has a bit of a discussion on Bombadil and his place in the world:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2U6RG4HOwM
I empathise with you, Noisms. I often find myself wanting to run a "rustic" game, except for me the connotations are those of my own country, New Zealand. What holds me back is the difficulty in portraying the environment to people unfamiliar with it, the actual feel of the characteristic beaches, flora, geological formations etc (bereft of tourists or the equivalent in-game colonisation, of course, nostalgia is definitely one of my motivating factors); plus the fact that I'm a pakeha, which is to say, descended from European settlers, and not part of the local Maori tradition, which I regard as important to any attempt to game-ify NZ. Taniwha were part of my youth, yes, but I always feel like I lack the background to do what I want to do justice.
ReplyDeleteWhen you say "Most D&D campaign settings are strangely placeless, in the sense that they're set in a very vague, loose simulacrum of a real world biosphere type: here's a foresty bit, here's a mountainy bit, here's a deserty bit. They don't have the sense that the Shire did of being founded in a very particular known locale"
ReplyDeleteI *completely* agree with you. So how do you fix it? Well either you're an incredibly gifted world builder or... you do research. I ran a pseudo-earth system using Warhammer frpg (2nd ed, no madness) as the rule. The map? Google earth.
I spent countless hours poring over map and researching the locales - what they ate, what the customs were like, the fauna/flora, the climate etc etc. I did my damnest to bring it to life (and now I really want to visit, but alas the area is now torn by war...)
…aaaand I'm not sure the players cared that much. As a GM, I should have spent more time on the adventure and less on the feel of the place, the authenticity. It's possible to do, but it takes massive amounts of time to do right, and I'm not sure it's worth it.
The only way to do it relatively effortlessly is to use an area you already *are* familiar with (say, your hometown) but then you're limited to that area!
So... I'm not sure what to do to get that sense of place.
I'm toying with attaching a landscape picture to every hex on my next regional map and showing it to the players when they are in that hex. I have built a large collection on Pinterest.
DeleteIt's all theoretical at this point though.
James, sounds interesting. Any link to that collection?
DeleteCourtney Campbell has a project where he does drawings of individual hexes to be plopped down into a setting. I think it's called hexplore.
One easy shortcut is to base everything very closely on your hometown when other people aren't familiar with it.
DeleteHere's the link to my Pinterest board:
Deletehttps://www.pinterest.com/jamescbennett/rpg-ideas-landscapes/