But Why Must Evil Barons and Vampire Counts Intervene?

In my most recent post and various others over the years, I made the case that the default OSR-style fantasy sandbox (and I suppose any other kind of sandbox) is ill-suited without modifications to a campaign in which the PCs are, self-consciously or otherwise, 'goodies'. There needs to be a way, I suggested, to systematise the appearances of threats which the PCs-as-goodies then defend against.

This prompted the following comment, on my most recent post:

But, in a game, a vile world is most conducive to PCs being the goodies. You can sandbox a game full of evil barons and vampire counts and the players can fight against it however they choose; if the world is doing well then the DM has to proactively introduce the bad elements, which is just not how this game functions best. That way lies predetermined narrative setups.

I take this to mean that there is in fact no need for any special systematisation or modification to run a 'goodies' sandbox. All you need is to fill a hexmap full of baddies and watch the PCs go out and fight against them. To 'proactively introduce bad elements' on the other hand is 'not how the game functions best' and leads to railroading.

I decided that this comment needed special rebuttal, as doing so will help to elucidate just why it is that fresh systematisation of 'goodies' sandbox gaming is necessary.

Let's go back, crucifixes and garlic in hand, to a time when Zak S was in his pomp and had not yet been declared persona non grata. In an old post from that era, which I can no longer find, Zak made the important and useful observation that there is a point of distinction between campaigns in which the PCs are rogues versus those in which they are heroes. In a campaign in which they are rogues, the PCs start with ready-made motives and can be (I don't remember if Zak put it in these terms) active while the world is passive. The PCs want gold. Off they go into a world of adventure to get it. The DM's job is to set up an interesting landscape - typically a hexmap - populated with various sites where treasure can be found. The PCs are thus the active agents; the landscape is passive - it is to be explored. 

In a heroic campaign, such a setup feels inert. What do heroes do? They don't go about just looking for bad guys to beat up. They protect people. They are much more passive against active threats - Clark Kent happens to notice a bank being robbed, jumps into the nearest phonebox, transforms into Superman, and catches the villains: this is contingent on the villains having taken the active step of robbing the bank in the first place.

The commenter's premise, then - that 'You can sandbox a game full of evil barons and vampire counts and the players can fight against it however they choose' - is, then, not really true. You could make a hexmap full of evil barons and vampire counts, for sure, but then why are the PCs going off into such a hexmap to fight them? Some unsatisfying and implausible conceit might justify it ('the PCs are Evil Hunters and have been tasked by Lord Uzanohakna to go out and smite evil wherever it can be found'), but the result feels bland and inert. One pictures the PCs waking up each morning and deciding between themselves, 'OK, which evil baron shall we go and slay today, then?' The result is fairly one-dimensional and, frankly, not all that heroic. 

No: what I believe is reqiured is a method by which threats are introduced into a sandbox, which the PCs must then deal with as they see fit as protectors or guardians or something of that sort. They live in a region of the world which has its own dangers but which, from time to time, is invaded by evil beings, whether from 'beyond the mountains' or another plane of existence or faerie or whatever, who must be found, rooted out, and destroyed. 

This method must be carefully designed so that the threats which appear are not scripted, are unique, and interact with existing elements of the campaign setting in interesting ways. But this can I think be done, and I indeed came up with the rudiments of such a system here. What is required is a more formal description, with lots of examples and options, and a bit more thought devoted to the subject of how the existence of threats is incorporated into the sandbox itself in an active way, how advancement takes place, and so on. But the basic model of 'you can sandbox a game full of evil barons and vampire counts and the players can fight against it however they choose' is, to my eye, in itself a non-starter. 

Must the World Be Saved?

It is hard to reflect objectively on the nature of a book that is so well-known and which has been so influential as The Lord of the Rings. This means that we rarely, if ever, dwell on how strange it is: since its furniture is still to a large extent the furniture of the entire genre, we accept it as unthinkingly as we accept the decor in our own living rooms.

But the central feature of The Lord of the Rings is far from normal or banal - at its core it rests on positive answers to three questions which other novelists, prior to Tolkien, would rarely if ever have even thought to ask, namely:

1. Is it necessary to save the world?

2. Is it possible to?

3. Is it desirable?

In Tolkien's story, that is, the world is threatened, but it can be saved, however improbably, and it is worth saving. 

These are by no means the obvious answers to those questions, particularly when the questions are not being examined through a filter of Christianity, and ever since Tolkien was writing the major figures of the genre have been rowing back from them. To most genre writers today, save-the-world plots are a bit passe - it either isn't necessary to save the world to begin with (A Song of Ice and Fire; The Scar), is impossible (Lyonesse; Viriconium), or would not be particularly desirable in the first place (Stone Dance of the Chamleon). There are big exceptions, naturally, Gene Wolfe's work being very obviously and explicitly in the Tolkienian tradition, but overall the shift has been towards a much more secularised understanding of the role of humanity in the ongoing existence and justification of The World.

While this has no doubt opened the genre up to more creative applications - nobody would want endless Terry Brooks or Tad Williams retreads, as charming as they can be - the result can sometimes be a rejection of the concept of salvation as such. There is a strong antiheroic strand in modern fantasy writing (and particularly modern fantasy gaming) which rejects the very notion that there may indeed be things beyond the self that are worth saving from some threat - be they a nation, a place, a family, or even a single soul. In OSR gaming in particular the emphasis is almost exclusively on the mere survival or glorification of the individual often set against a backdrop of a decaying reality which is itself irredeemable or moribund. (This has even got itself a label: the aesthetics of ruin.) This is enjoyable, but thin; it does not speak to the drive within the human heart to be redeemed, or to redeem others.

I would like to find a way to combine the Old School emphasis on emergent narrative with the Tolkienian answers to the three questions posited above. I would like to design a game that is about redemption, or salvation, but that does so in a way that avoids railroading and predetermined narrative or plot. And I would like to do it in such a way that it makes use of the insights developed in the laboratory of OSR gaming. I have written various posts on this theme in the last couple of years, and have now collected them under the label of the Paladin Project. This can be considered a statement, or manifesto: expect more concrete details in the coming months. 

The Quadrants of Modern Fantasy

An entertaining recent episode of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy brought up the question of how to distinguish the genre of sword & sorcery from epic (or high) fantasy. I am a sucker for this kind of discussion, and I liked the answers offered, particularly the shorthand of 'If it reminds you of Conan the Barbarian, it's sword & sorcery, and if it reminds you of The Lord of the Rings, it's epic fantasy.' The problem with this definition of course is that there are lots of fantasy books that remind you of neither (Perdido Street Station, A Song of Ice and Fire, Little, Big) and lots that remind you of both (The Wizard Knight, Wizard's First Rule). And it also relies of course on received ideas about genre that may not be accurate. There are probably not many fantasy fans who have not read The Lord of the Rings but there will be many who have not read the Conan stories, or read them very deeply, and therefore form an impression of what they are like from cliche and hearsay. 

And that's of course to set to one side the existence of other subgenres - sword & sandal; science fantasy; low fantasy; etc. - which may or may not fall outside of this rubric altogether.

Entirely as a way of encouraging debate about this Extremely Important Issue, I would like to propose an alternative model for classifying fantasy fiction that is slightly more abstract. Here, the aim is not to rigidly box off individual works into neat categories, but rather to locate them thematically in such a way that no appeal needs to be made to specific genre furniture (such as that sword & sorcery books tend to treat magic as suspect and dangerous; that sword & sorcery books tend to have anti-heroes; that high fantasy books tend to involve saving the world; and so on), which always have so many exceptions that they are pointless in defining categories.

My proposal then is that the modern fantasy genre can be divided into four quadrants, reflecting two broad axes that cut across the field and which seem to me to be important.

The first of these axes concerns the locus of the fiction: is it concerned with the fate of the individual or the world? I don't mean by this that the action is focused on one particular viewpoint character or incorporates many. Rather, I mean that there are some books that are concerned with a particular individual's (or set of individuals') struggle to find his own place in the world, and some books that are chiefly concerned with the fate of something much bigger - society, civilisation, the world itself - that tends to occupy the attention of the protagonist, 

And the second of these axes concerns what we'll call eschatology. Is there considered to be a final doom of the world, whether that is just something which is possible, or inevitable? Or is the world one of open historicity without a final cause or end? Does it just go on and on and on...?

Here, then, is a stab at plotting major fantasy works as follows:

Yes, yes, I know - Malazan Book of the Fallen. This me after I'd screenshotted the chart. What I'd like to focus on here is that this seems to group fantasy fiction in a way that does not do an injustice to important existing intuitions about what belongs where, but which also does not (I think) dwell too much on superficialities or tropes. Rather, it directs attention to certain themes which seem to my eye to transcend distinctions about substance (In Book X technology is vaguely medieval whereas in Book Y there are spaceships, etc.), and which rather concern genuine philosophical differences. For instance, it seems to me to matter that in the Bas Lag books the word as such will not 'end', whereas in The Lord of the Rings, it might, or indeed, in the fullness of time, will. And this matters much more than, say, the distinction that in the Bas Lag books technology has advanced to the steam age whereas in LOTR it has not.

You may now quibble with the existence of the axes, the places I have located the various works, and the purpose of the entire project, in the comments.