Human Non-Universals, or: Make Your Own Vancian Culture (tm)

"Remember," Anacho warned, "the Khors are a sensitive people. Do not speak to them; pay them no heed except from necessity, in which case you must use the fewest possible words. They consider garrulity a crime against nature. Do not stand upwind of a Khor, nor if possible downwind; such acts are symbolic of antagonism. Never acknowledge the presence of a woman; do not look toward their children - they will suspect you of laying a curse; and above all ignore their sacred grove. Their weapon is the iron dart which they throw with astonishing accuracy; they are a dangerous people." 

"I hope I remember everything," said Reith.

-From Jack Vance, The Dirdir

One of Vance's neatest tricks and the secret of his worldbuilding success is to create a culture with unusual, even absurd, characteristics and then play out the consequences completely straight. You see this technique, if that's the right world, appear time and again in his Tschai and Gaean Reach books, and it is a large part of what gives them their appeal - if you want to learn 'What then?' worldbuilding from a master, Vance's science fiction writing is the place to start. 

But if you want to cheat, try this Make Your Own Vancian Culture Generator (tm):

First, determine the rough lifestyle technology level of the culture:

1 - Stone age, 2 - Bronze age, 3-4 - Medieval, 5-6 - Renaissance, 7-9 Industrial revolution, 10-14, Contemporary modern, 15-28 - Gaean Reach standard, 29-30 - Hyper-advanced 

This does not indicate the limit of technological advancement of the society, but rather the general level of social development enjoyed in the average settlement. 

Then, determine the culture's geographic origin:

1-2 - Swamp, 3-4 - Hills, 5-6 - Mountains, 7-10 - Forest, 11-14 - Plains, 15-16 - Jungle, 17-18 - Desert, 19-20 - Aquatic

Next, determine its d3 absurdities by rolling on the following table (adapted by subverting elements of the list of 67 'Human Universals' proposed by the anthropologist Donald Brown):

Dice	Absurdity
1	Lack of abstract thought
2	No affection expressed or felt
3	No distinctions made between different age grades (such as ‘child’, ‘middle-aged’, ‘old’)
4	No religion
5	No belief in fortune or misfortune
6	Biological and social mother are usually a different person
7	Abhorrence of body adornment
8	No classification of colours
9	No classification of flora or fauna
10	No classification of kin
11	No classification of weather conditions
12	No classification of sex
13	No conflict
14	No cooking
15	Taboo against sex in private
16	No cooperation
17	Absence of greetings
18	Absence of daily routine
19	No distinction between right and wrong
20	Nocturnal
21	No understanding that dreams are not reality
22	Lack of envy
23	No etiquette rules
24	No facial expressions
25	No fear of death
26	Lack of figurative speech
27	Generosity considered weak
28	Lack of gift-giving
29	Absence of group living
30	No attempts made to heal sick or injured
31	No concept of imagery
32	No rules concerning inheritance
33	No concept of inheritance
34	No concept of humour
35	Language is only a simply reflection of reality
36	No concept of law
37	No distinction made between general and particular
38	Women dominate public realm
39	Women more aggressive
40	Women more prone to lethal violence
41	Women more prone to theft
42	No concept of meal times
43	No concept of metaphor
44	No prohibition of murder
45	No numbers
46	No personal names
47	No concept of poetry
48	No concept of music
49	No concept of promising
50	No concept of revenge
51	Extreme risk-aversion
52	No concept of punishment
53	Lack of shame
54	Time only understood as cyclical
55	No concept of trade
56	Language has no verbs
57	Language has no nouns
58	No concept of weapons
59	No death rituals
60	No preference for one’s own children or close kin

Then, determine its d3 Suspicions and Taboos:

Dice	Suspicion or Taboo
1	Standing upwind of someone
2	Standing downwind of someone
3	Walking across somebody’s path
4	Entering a building without explicit invitation from someone inside
5	Sitting down in company
6	Eating in public
7	Being seen while asleep
8	Contact with animals
9	Being in the shade
10	Being in direct sunlight
11	Particular colour
12	Direct speech between members of the same sex, age category, etc.
13	Eye contact
14	Discussing intentions or desires in public
15	Refusing requests
16	Stepping on anything living
17	Being touched by rain
18	Laughing
19	Being seen to be bleeding
20	Shouting
21	Standing in front of, behind, or beside somebody
22	Encountering any acquaintance without performing extended ritualistic pleasantries
23	Being seen/heard to ask for, or accept, money
24	Being seen to be breathless, sweaty, or having otherwise striven in the performance of any task
25	Being visible through a window
26	Exposing one’s hands, feet, nose, ears, etc.
27	Carrying anything in one’s hands
28	Asking a direct question
29	Picking anything up off the ground
30	Whispering

Each of these suspicions or taboos might be vitiated:

1 - At certain times of day, 2 - After performing a particular ritual, 3 - While wearing a particular item of clothing or other body decoration, etc., 4 - On certain days each year, 5 - If performed by a person of a particular caste, or a particular type of person such as a man, woman, child, etc., 6 - After making a donation to a temple, etc.

The trick then is to combine all this into plausible societies. Hence:

The Sevelites inhabit the mountains of Sevel, where they have reached a comfortable level of technological development. They are a highly fastidious and taciturn people. Their language lacks figurative speech, and they communicate only to import or receive information. They also have a strict taboo against exposing their hands, and go about in gloves at all times; except for a particular hereditary servant caste they do not pick anything up off the ground unless it has been purified with a fine spray of salt water. A Sevelite's hands are seen only by a sexual partner; an ancient, secret tradition of pornography focuses on the hands as an erogenous zone, and complex codes and rituals concern its sale and usage.

The Masoon are native to the plains of Masurine, where they inhabit vast industrial cities refining crude resources for export. Their society is highly communal, regimented and homogenous: they make no classifications of colour (and themselves wear only white), make no distinctions between the general and the particular (considering themselves, and the resources they refine, to be part of unified wholes), and live in almost total harmony, having no understanding of the concept of conflict. They abhor being seen to be seated in company, lest they disrupt the tenor of communal exertion with perceived relaxation, and likewise consider whispering to undermine social cohesion with a desire for secrecy that must always be unnecessary.

See what you can come up with!

A Good NPC is a PC in His Own Campaign

What makes a good NPC?

It is tempting to say, "a funny voice". That's only half-facetious. In my experience, a funny voice is often what makes an NPC memorable. But let's go deeper, because otherwise this will be a very short post.

Certain writers have an aptitude for writing good supporting characters - people who feel like, well, people, even though they aren't the main focus of the story. Jack Vance was notably good at this. (If it feels like I'm writing a lot about Vance recently, it's because I'm currently half-way through a quest to read or re-read all his work.) Everyone who appears in a Jack Vance book, right down to the lowliest hotel receptionist, tramp, waiter or shopkeeper, feels like they could be the main character of their own novel, and it is only happenstance that this particular story is focused on somebody else. This technique reaches its apogee in the Alastor books, which have a setting writ large across thousands of inhabited worlds, with a population in the trillions; one almost gets the sense, reading these novels, that Vance was simply plucking one of those trillions at random and writing their life story, and except for a different result on the  d1000000000000 it could have been another person entirely.

George RR Martin, however, is also a dab hand at achieving this sensation; it is not just his viewpoint characters who feel "real", but the incidental mooks too - all of whom tend to have wills and motives of their own. (One of the things I still like about A Song of Ice and Fire is that what happens to people like Hot Pie, Polliver and Rorge actually seems to matter.) And it's intrinsic to good crime fiction also; any crime writer worth her salt knows how to craft characters with desires and plans, as it is the interaction between those different purposes that often produces the mystery.

(Other writers either cannot pull this off, or do not intend to. Tolkien, whose characters are mostly just walking archetypes, is the obvious example of the latter category [it is committing a category error to complain that none of the dwarves in The Hobbit appears to have genuine agency, other than Thorin - they're not supposed to]; China Mieville, who simply seems to lack interest in human beings, is the one that comes to mind with regard to the former.)

When trying to create good NPCs, then (and I do not lay claim to be a special expert in this regard), one can do worse than simply trying to bear the basic motto in mind: an NPC is a PC in his or her own campaign. Every single human being who you meet in life is living their own story, and has their own purposes and their own will. This is what gives real people their vitality, and there is no reason why imaginary people will not also feel vital if they are imagined to be following their own path in exactly the way that real people do. 

This Thing About Scale

The most recent post on False Machine is an interesting one. It concerns the way in which a sense of scale is created in a film, book, etc. What makes a setting "feel" big, as opposed to small?

I am tempted to say that Alien is the paradigmatic example of a film that manages to convey a sense that its setting is one of vast size - i.e., that somewhat realistically depicts intergalactic scale. The Nostromo itself feels huge, like an island upon which the crew cling like tiny limpets; its distance from earth is given visceral reality by the awesome frigidity and loneliness of the cinematography, score and diagetic sound. It is a haunted house film at heart, but the haunted house sits at the heart of an ocean of infinite size, and you feel that.

But I am a big fan of Michael Oakeshott's technique of setting up binary opposites as aids to reflection, and there is a ready made pair of such opposites, possessing a neat symmetry (or, perhaps I should say, asymmetry) in the form of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the JJ Abrams directed Star Trek films. The setting in the former seems quintessentially big. That in the latter seems quintessentially small. Let us explore why, across various metrics derived from the fundamental diametric opposition between these two cultural artefacts:

• Length. TNG is, in total, well over 100 hours long; each Trek film is about 2. Time pressure compresses the story, and this can tend to produce a feeling of squashed scale.
• Episodic versus non-episodic nature. TNG's episodic feel makes it really a set of 170 or so individual stories. That's 170 potential worlds to explore off the bat. A film cannot really compete with that and retain coherence.
• Mood. There is no doubt that the stately, unrushed feel of TNG, contrasting with the frenetic approach that characterises all of JJ Abrams' films and to which Star Trek is no exception, contributes to a sense of roominess. JJ Abrams' galaxy feels tiny - like the Enterprise can zip across it in a matter of hours - because he needs to cram in event after event after event; there is necessarily no time to breathe between them, and hence no journey time and no sense of great size.
• Audience expectation. I choose this term ahead of the more accusatory original, which was 'respect for the audience'. Partly because of the period in which it was created, but partly also because of the emphasis of the writers, TNG expects its audience to be patient. Each episode features many shots of the Enterprise just kind of zipping along from A to B, suggesting extended travel times. Abrams' Trek has none of this: he doesn't like to give his audience even a second within which to become bored. Why, then, waste many seconds on shots of space ships just flying through space? The consequence is a small-seeming galaxy, rapidly traversed. 
• Themes. All action, all the time, often creates the need for events to happen in rapid succession. Again, this has the byproduct of cutting out downtime, which means, of course, cutting out space within which there could be the suggestion of extended travel. Musing over moral dilemmas, technical conundrums, and the other kind of chamber-pieces which TNG specialised in have nothing of the same requirements; you could have an entire storyline play out over weeks or months of a journey between planets (though I don't think the TNG writers were ever particularly explicit about how long journeys were taking).
• Budget. Perversely, a higher budget can make for a more cramped feel. The bigger the budget, the more stuff there is. The more stuff there is, the more dense the action. The more dense the action, the more the audience gets the feeling that there just isn't a lot of space (no pun intended) to fit everything in.

None of these metrics is dispositive in itself. Coronation Street is 50 years long and counting, but that in itself does not make its setting feel big, for example. (Indeed, a lot of the TOS Trek films are even shorter than the Abrams ones, and yet the scale of their setting feels much bigger. Think of Wrath of Khan, for instance, which manages to communicate a feeling of gargantuan scale almost as effectively as Alien.) But in combination they tilt the feelings of the audience in one direction or another.

One could easily think of a different pair of opposites for novels. On the one hand, The Lord of the Rings, on the other, Westeros?

The Consolidation Session

I don't believe that the players rolled a single dice-roll "in anger" during today's session. I made a couple. It was what I think of as a consolidation session.

A consolidation session is one serving two functions: tying up loose ends and taking care of housekeeping and logistics; and psychological downtime. It will generally only become necessary in a long-term, open-ended campaign, but in such a campaign it is vital. 

Stuff happens in such a session. Treasure needs to be sold, magical items identified, rumours investigated, hirelings hired and equipped, mid-long term plans discussed, and construction projects commenced. Time is often accelerated - we covered about 9 days' worth of events in the space of two hours today.

At the same time, in a long-term campaign stuff sometimes needs not to happen. If there have been week after week of high-octane excitement and danger, the players and DM benefit from a low-intensity breather. This might seem strange to say, given that there is a gap of a week between each session, but a D&D campaign has its own rhythm - its own, parallel reality - and just as the PCs would need a bit of a holiday after a dangerous journey or dungeon delve, so sometimes do the players. 

The benefits of the consolidated session are felt in future weeks. Next time, the players will be ready to embark on what will feel like a new chapter, refreshed and reinvigorated. The PCs will be full of hit points, armed to the teeth, and with a new crew of underlings to replace their dead. It is the equivalent of the feeling an audience and actors share as the theatre darkens and the curtain raises after the interval in a play or musical. We've had our half-time ice cream, beer and toilet break, and now we're ready for action with renewed purpose. 

Incomplete Archive of Evocative Illustrations from the Forest of Doom

Malcolm Barter is listed as the interior illustrator for The Forest of Doom, the first Fighting Fantasy book I must have read (I think I was about 9 or 10). Some of these images have remained with me ever since; they seemed incredibly grown-up to my primary school mind - in a stratosphere of sophistication in comparison to the cartoonish things I had been exposed to in kids' books. 

Here are some favourites:

Now, what strikes me about them is their strange combination of understatedness and detail. Barter's world is grimy, lived-in, stark: it concedes nothing to modern nerd-dom's insistence on all-awesome, all the time. What you see is what you get. These pieces do not, like a modern D&D piece, depict larger-than-life heroes who the viewer is supposed to fantasise about becoming. No; they depict a real, inhabited world, with all its flaws, disappointments, sorrow and bathos.

I'm curious to know what happened to Mr Barter. Biographical information on the internet is scarce. Something about these pieces suggest that, given time and money, he could have produced work of (even more) exquisite skill. Yet he seems to have subsequently disappeared.