In the Long Term We All Diminish Into the West

Epochal change is a rich, but I think generally underappreciated and underemphasised, theme in fantasy literature. 

I was thinking about this recently in connection to Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Bradley is a problematic figure these days, but The Mists of Avalon does an excellent job - for all of its rather tired and now somewhat trite anti-Christian stance - of depicting a world that is in transition from a pantheistic or pagan culture to a monotheistic one. Without giving away spoilers, the backdrop is one of a withdrawal of a particular kind of religiosity, and with it a retreat of a certain way of life and a certain type of magical, or mystical, power. In a particularly effective scene about two thirds of the way in we witness the main character, a pagan priestess, witnessing a sort of trivialised re-enactment of a ritual with which she was familiar when she was young. The original version - full of sex and sacrifice - had been denuded of its significance and bowdlerised into a comedic dance with sweet treats being distributed to children. This gives a poignancy to that character's sense of loss: in witnessing the spectacle she realises the extent to which times have changed.

Another good, but very different, example is M. John Harrison's Viriconium series, which if read in omnibus form chart a transition from a fairly robust sword-and-planet style fantasy world to a fragmentary, dissipating dreamscape that exists only in the reflections in the window of a down-at-heel British cafe. Gene Wolfe's A Book of the New Sun in a sense does the opposite - its backdrop is that of a dying sun that may or may not find itself being revived. George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has little of the poetic or elegaic qualities of either of these, but is itself of course set at a moment of epochal transition from summer to winter. Jack Vance's Lyonesse, meanwhile, is set at the cusp of epochal change, in that the entire continent on which the action is set is soon to be submerged beneath the ocean and never seen again. 

And then there is the ur-text of them all, The Lord of the Rings, which all takes place against a background of the retreat of the elves 'into the West', the drawing to a close of the Third Age, and a wider historicised 'decline and fall' narrative that goes through peaks and troughs, catastrophes and eucatastrophes. There may be antecedents to this (it is notable that ER Eddison, one of Tolkien's fellow inklings, may have been a braching off towards a more cyclical and nihilistic historicism) - readers will have their own recommendations. 

The idea of a epochal change can be a central part of the drama, as in A Song of Ice and Fire or The Mists of Avalon, but in its own right it is a useful way to add richness to the background of a story - or RPG campaign. It creates a sense that matters are not simply fixed, of course, and that actual events are taking place. But it also creates the impression that something is at stake. Things matter - ways of life are brought to an end, civilisations decline and fall (or rise anew), and the structure of the world itself changes.

Epochal change can be natural - a big earthquake, tsunami or volcano remakes geography, and the campaign takes place in the aftermath of, or during, the event. It can be mundane - a big war or invasion is taking place; a civilisation is in collapse; and so on. It can be apocalyptic - a meteor strike, zombie plague, and so on is sweeping the earth. It can be elegaic - the elves, Gods, alien overlords, etc., are leaving (whether suddenly or slowly). And so on. The important point is that there is a dynamism to the backdrop, to which the PCs must in some sense respond (if only to survive). 

All the Right Notes: On Notekeeping

As we all know, YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.

Since I think time records are really just an aspect of keeping notes, I would expand this maxim to YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF NOTES ARE NOT KEPT. One of the most important things that a DM does is to keep notes during play and reflect on them in between sessions as a form of homework. Indeed, this may be the most important thing to do to keep a long-term campaign going, beyond the really basic stuff (like showing up).

I am curious about others' note-taking practices. For my own part I have never made a science out of it - my notes are just jotted down in a notepad whenever it feels like something is important to remember. This could be an NPC's name and motivation, a running tally of character XP and HP levels (I usually periodically note these down, perhaps once or twice a session), an event, a reminder to myself that such-and-such an ocurrence is happening 'off camera', the current date in-universe (I tend by default to start each campaign on 1st April and then keep a count, so that I know that at the moment it is Day 134, or whatever, and can extrapolate from there to an actual calendar date), occasionally something funny or remarkable which somebody has said. 

What I typically then do, in advance of each session, is review the notes from the previous week (sometimes of the couple of weeks before that) and refresh my memory, then add some supplementary notes about where things might go in the session that is upcoming. So I might recall that, oh yes, Baron Blueflame has decided he wants to kill one of the PCs and steal his magic battleaxe, and is plotting to do so with the Gurning Goblins of Mount Gababababab, and so I make some notes about how that plot is advancing.

This has the very important practical effect of helping my poor, tired, derelict shell of a mind to retain some thin fragments of information, as otherwise it could get rather messy. ('What? We're playing D&D? Is it time for tea yet? It's egg and chips on a Wednesday. What, today's Thursday??') 

But it also helps maintain the necessary fiction that the campaign is living and breathing and not merely set in aspic. What I have noticed is that, when I have properly done my homework, read through last week's notes, and put time and effort into thinking about what everything means, the next session starts with high levels of energy and focus, and goes well. If on the other hand I have not had much time and have just glanced at things 10 minutes before the session, there is more of a sense of slackness about things. 

Share your own note-taking practices in the comments!

Three Principles for the Post-Apocalypse

I went to the cinema on Friday to watch 28 Years Later: Bone Temple. Was it good? I no longer feel qualified to comment. Modern film alienates me. Nothing about it - character development and motives, narrative, dialogue, in-world physics, pacing - seems plausible to me. I've felt this way for so long I can't remember the last time I watched a new film and was genuinely immersed in it - maybe The Wolf of Wall Street? This is not to say I do not find them entertaining in their own way. But I find it impossible to unplug my brain and accept their aggressive stupidity.

28 Years Later: Bone Temple was not too bad in the aggressive stupidity stakes, although there was a lot about it that left me dissatisfied. And it was at least trying to do some interesting things with its completely incredible (in terms of human motivation) plot. In this regard, I would say - and this is high praise coming from me, let me make clear - if you go to see it you will probably say the experience was somewhat better than having your testicles flogged with a knotted rope. The experience may even be improved with the addition of a pint and some high quality salt and vinegar crisps.  

Anyway, three themes stood out for me in a kind of meta-analysis of the film and what it was trying to do, and these struck me as potentially being of broader significance - particularly for post-apocalypse RPG gaming (of which I am a fan). They are - NO SPOILERS - as follows:

1 - The mechanism of an apocalypse is the least interesting thing about it. I remember the original 28 Days Later. It was a bit of a tour de force directorally (I like Danny Boyle's approach to film-making) and its 'fast zombie' idea was no doubt rather revolutionary at the time. But ultimately the vector of apocalypse - whether it is zombies, a disease, nuclear war, whatever - is not the stuff of long-term interest. The makers of the 28 Periods of Time Later franchise seem to be aware of this. Hence, now that 28 Years Later: Bone Temple has rolled around, the zombies have become a rather minor sideshow; the interest revolves around the society and the human interactions that have evolved in the apocalypse's aftermath. This is an important lesson to learn, I think.

2 - The generational experience of the apocalypse is rarely adequately thought-through. If you were an adult when it happened, the before-time would remain vivid in your mind and would still be formative of your character. If you had been born after it happened, your entire experience of the world would be post-apocalyptic. Your motivations and values, then, would be extremely different. 28 Years Later: Bone Temple does play with this idea, but nowhere near adequately enough. If you had been born after the zombie apocalypse and had made it to the age of 25, your psyche would be utterly different to a person who had been 25 when it happened and could remember civilisation. In the same way that when you were growing up you heard adults going on about 'the 60s' or 'the war' and just let it wash over you because you had no experience of it, young people in the post-apocalypse just will not care about how the pre-deluvian world was except perhaps in a vaguely academic way. And their characters will have been forged on the crucible of hardcore 'fantasy fucking Vietnam' survival mode. The idea that they will be 'relatable' is therefore not, to my eye, very credible unless the apocalypse is so far in the past that a genuine fresh society or civilisation has been able to emerge. 

3 - At the end of the day nobody wants the apocalypse to be undone. The setting of 28 Periods of Time Later is atheistic; the zombie plague is caused by a virus. And one can clearly see that the arc of the series bends towards a final outcome in which They Discover A Cure. This, though, is not what the audience wants. The human drama of dealing with the fallout permanently is just way more interesting. If and when they make the third part in the series what we want to see is a grand thought experiment that plays out what kind of society would eventually emerge from the wreckage of the plague. What we don't want to see is 'They found a cure and then in a final coda we find out that everybody learned important lessons about love and kindness and caring for the natural world, and mourned the dead.' What I would want in fact is 28 Decades Later, when Scotland is ruled by various petty kings who have found ways to enslave zombies for deployment as warrior-slaves, and seek the help of Satanic druids to manufacture anti-psychotic potions to dispense to their followers to manage the effects of the disease - and nobody entertains the daft notion in their heads that any of this could possibly end.