Far, Vast and Lonely: Describing and Confronting the World

Cloud and mist abode ever in the south, and only the foot-hills showed of the great ranges beyond Bhavinan. But on the evening of the sixth day before Yule, it being the nineteenth of December when Betelgeuze stands at midnight on the meridian, a wind blew out of the north-west with changing fits of sleet and sunshine. Day was fading as they stood above the cliff. All the forest land was blue with shades of approaching night: the river was dull silver: the wooded heights afar mingled their outlines with the towers and banks of turbulent deep blue vapour that hurtled in ceaseless passage through the upper air. 

Suddenly a window opened in the clouds to a space of clean wan wind-swept sky high above the shaggy hills. Surely Juss caught his breath in that moment, to see those deathless ones where they shone pavilioned in the pellucid air, far, vast, and lonely, most like to creatures of unascended heaven, of wind and of fire all compact, too pure to have aught of the gross elements of earth or water. It was as if the rose-red light of sun-down had been frozen to crystal and these hewn from it to abide to everlasting, strong and unchangeable amid the welter of earthborn mists below and tumultuous sky above them. The rift ran wider, eastward and westward, opening on more peaks and sunset-kindled snows. And a rainbow leaning to the south was like a sword of glory across the vision.

- ER Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros

I have long been interested in the subject of how wilderness exploration can be perfected as an aspect of 'old school' play in the manner in which I think dungeoneering has been (almost) perfected as a playstyle conceptually by the OSR. I do not think we have achieved anything like as much in this regard despite our desperate graspings, gropings and gesticulations in that direction. And I think this is a failing. If we can think of old school D&D as an attempt to make fantasy literature gameable, then we neglect wilderness exploration only by doing great damage to this goal, since the making of epic journeys across mighty and wondrous landscapes goes so deep into the genre's blood. It is in Tolkien, it is in Eddison, it is in Howard, it is in Moorcock; it is in Vance; it is everywhere. Fantasy is impossible to conceive of as we understand it today without this emphasis on the mythopoeic world as something that exists to be explored and also grappled with as an entity in its own right. 

We ought then to think seriously about wilderness travel as a fundamental feature of what D&D should be about - and not only mechanically, but imaginatively or (dare I say it) spiritually. The landscape is something against which the PCs should be contending, and which should do justice to the attempt to engage with it in its own right, at the level precisely of landscape. It should not be something that is merely crossed to get between points A and B, or traversed so as to uncover pre-arranged or randomly generated contents (although both of those things will inevitably happen in a D&D campaign and are obviously important). It should have an independent existence that interests, entertains and entices the players as much as would the exploration of a dungeon.

We can mechanise this, of course, and there are systems that can be used for doing so (many of which are available online), but in the end there is only so much that mechanics can achieve. Fundamentally, what makes a landscape come alive is more intangible than that; it is how the physical space is described. To read the Eddison passage that begins this post is to be transported - one can not only see but feel oneself on that place on the cliff-top, looking out over the 'far, vast and lonely' mountains with the 'sword of glory' of a rainbow in the distance.

Not all of us (well, let's call a spade a spade, none of us) is capable of coming up with prose like that on the fly, let alone simply rattling it off such perfectly realised imagery in a description to the players of what the PCs happen to see at a given moment as they survey the landscape. But there are two practical things that we can do - whether as DMs or as game designers - to facilitate the creation of more immersive worlds.

The first is to actually go out and travel, explore and hike, and to pay careful attention to the landscape as one does so and what the actual 'lived experience' of overland travel is like - what what one can see, what one can hear and smell, what one can imagine happening there. A few years ago I wrote a post in which I put this into practice, describing a hike I had recently been on in rural Northumberland, and shared some photos. Here is just one of them, chosen deliberately because it is so ostensibly undramatic:

Look at it carefully and notice the way the landscape unfolds itself before the eye: the rough track that runs across the tussocky grass; the boggy pool that lines right across its path about a third of the way up the length of the photo; the patch of gorse to the right that might conceal a hidden predator; the higher grasses in the middle distance in which enemies might be lying flat against the ground; then the way the ground suddenly falls away so as to conceal a cleft in the landscape cutting across the image - there is obviously a body of water down there but what is it? how deep and sheer is the valley? - and beyond it the low rise to a clump of hillocks beyond; the semi-woodland of leafless trees that half-conceal the bracken around their feet; and behind a glimpse of buildings and of lush green farmland that hints at the closeness of something more civilised. This is an almost studiedly ordinary rural image, but it is not difficult to look at it, and think about it, in an engaged way so as to understand between the scale of natural landscapes and what can lie within them - and what the eye can actually take in (or not take in) during an overland journey.

Doing this will not provide you with an instantly accessible mental library of images that you can simply regurgitate to the players at the table but it will give you the stuff of mental conjuring - you will be better equipped to picture landscapes of your own and put them into words so as to better communicate to players a sense of place.

The second thing that can be done is that people who are writing adventure modules and campaign settings can get good at writing descriptions of landscapes themselves. People may already have done this, but providing DMs with handy, accessible and beautiful three-line descriptors of what the players can see as they traverse one hex or another, or go from one point to another on a pointcrawl, would I think be a very useful addition to wilderness campaigning. We have plenty of models for what good descriptive prose looks like with respect to fantasy landscapes in the form of Tolkien, Lewis, Eddison, et al - not to mention the great travel and nature writers: the Apsley Cherry-Garrards, Barry Lopezes, JA Bakers, and so on, who have tried their hardest to give accounts in prose (or poetry) of how the world looks and what is in it. Good writing can achieve great things - and can be put to useful purpose.