Campaign Settings: Noble and Debased

It is my strong belief that being a writer is among the most noble of human activities and that its nobility lies in its capacity to give other people the ability to imagine things that they could not themselves imagine, and thereby frees them from the drudgery of everyday life.

(I am trying to think of a way to pithily express this so that it can be printed on t-shirts and baseball caps and thus make me millions.)

It sounds a bit pompous, perhaps, but this is why in its own humble way the writing of RPG campaign setings can also be a noble endeavour. You will all, I am sure, have experienced the strange sensation of reading an RPG splatbook and having it conjure in your mind all kind of images that would never have entered your thoughts otherwise; this has in itself made the author's efforts worthwhile, in my view, irrespective of whether the book is even going to be used to run games. He or she has succeeded in transporting your awareness to hitherto-unknown places. And he or she has moreover engaged you as a co-creator (since the images that are appearing in your imagination are in a very important sense your own, being comprised of the pre-existing contents of your own mind rather than simply being an unfiltered replication of the author's). 

This capacity to partake in wonderful daydreams at the instigation of some talented person you have never met is a great gift to humanity and is what makes the written word so superior to visual storytelling: it is not mindless escapism but participatory escapism in which the reader is enjoined to exercise something of their own creative faculties in imaging a world and its occupants from purely verbal cues. 

What is all the more remarkable about an RPG, of course, is that in that context the circle of participation is widened out so as to include not just the author and reader, but the author, reader, and group of players. Through the author's creative effort, the imaginations of the wider circle are brought together around a collective vision - unique in the mind of each individual, and yet also shared. This is a strange and powerful alchemy, which is utterly distinct in the universe as we currently know of it. 

We should celebrate that more. But we should also expect more from ourselves. Setting creation is debased when it merely produces pastiche and cliche - when the author is simply serving up what the reader could himself easily prepare (the RPG equivalent of a microwave meal). This is the central complaint against ChatGPT, but it is one that we could equally level at the banal fare that is generally on offer at DM's Guild: it does not instigate a participatory creative process of note, but simply operationalises a kind of mimicry - the parade of tired Forgotten Realms-esque fantasy archetypes that we all now know by rote. Mimicry is not a fundamentally human activity - monkeys can do that. To be human is to have one's own imaginative faculties be expanded through inspiration, and that is when it is proper to describe the author's work as noble.