Fantasy and the Real World - Or, Yet More About AI?

Is it possible to create a fantasy world that is totally sui generis - borne out of one's imagination and nothing else?

Of course not. We are all products of our biology, history, language, culture, and time, and we perceive and imagine only through those lenses. A feat of pure fantasy in the sense of bearing no relation to the real world is therefore itself a fantastical notion. Fantasy is always ineluctably rooted in reality. 

An individual's imagination in other words is best thought of as a kind of confluence of many currents coming together to form little eddies and whirlpools, none of them ever the same but all of them born from the same mixture flowing in from the various tributaries. Think of Tolkien's Middle Earth as the paradigm case - a great imaginative feat, of that there is no doubt, but plainly and unabashedly springing from the author's cultural background, knowledge of history, birthplace, language, and all the rest. And there is no creation in the field of fantasy and science fiction about which similar things could not be said - the only real difference being that very few authors or game designers embed their creations in the real world as consciously as Tolkien did.

What we downplay in this, and what truly separates us from our Robot Overlords, is the role of experience. There is no question that the World Wars - both of them - were significantly present in the mixture of influences that created Middle Earth (certainly in its later iterations), for example, and no question either that other important features of his life (such as his Christianity and his very loving relationship with his wife) were also in the water. This will be, to a greater or lesser extent, true of everybody, even at the level of what books one has read, what films one has seen, and where one has been on holiday. It all goes in; it all contributes; and we personally often have little to no insight into how.

The individual human being is therefore a unique blend of all of those features that I earlier identified - biology, history, language, culture, time, and so on - combined with all of the things that have ever happened to them, every second, since the moment they were conceived. This makes their imaginative ventures inescapably an expression of themselves. 

AI cannot hope to replicate this, since all it is capable of is drawing together existing creations, mixing them together, and spitting out pastiche. And we should therefore play to our own strengths. Pastiche is treated as an inferior act of creation partly because it apes too much the work of another, and we sense that there is something illegitimate in this: the original work has so much of the author in it, and to copy is therefore to expropriate the product of his or her unique experience and character. What we need, in fact, is a properly worked out critique of pastiche, and a philosophy of creativity that emphasises above all pastiche's negation. We need, in other words, to embrace the fact that fantasy is a product of reality and an expression of ourselves, and worth taking seriously as a consequence.

On Moral Ambiguity and Colonialism

I have recently finished reading three books on a roughly similar theme: Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose's account of the Lewis & Clark expedition; and Buddy Levy's Conquistador (a biography of Hernan Cortes) and River of Darkness (about the first descent of the Amazon by Francisco Orellana).

This theme is, in essence, the moral ambiguities of imperialism and colonialism. I am fully persuaded by the argument that these are basically Bad Things and that trying to carry out a defence of them (as some have recently done) is probably misguided. And it is very difficult, in reading the accounts I've mentioned (all three of them fabulously written, by the way) to see past the sheer cultural - in many cases genocidal - destruction and environmental degredation that would follow in the wake of the endeavours of men like Cortes and Pizarro. Even genial Meriwether Lewis, who clearly loved the natural world and was fascinated by the people he met in the American West, was the unwitting harbinger of an apocalypse that itself followed on the heels of other European-induced apocalypses of staggering scale. Yes, the Aztecs and Inka were themselves callow and brutal imperialists, and yes, American Indians were no strangers to genocidal violence, and yes, everybody was at it in those days, but the cataclysmic effects of European colonialism are truly without historical parallel and are worth treating separately on that basis alone. As Napolean said, quantity has a quality all of its own, and the fact that the Aztecs and Spaniards, for example, were both imbued with fairly similar sets of motives shouldn't distract us from the sheer vandalism that was unleashed by the latter in their conquest of Mexico. None of this is our fault (only a moral illiterate would suggest that the sins of the great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather should be visited upon the great-great-great-great-great-great grandaughter), but it should nonetheless fill one with horror to contemplate just how much destruction was wrought on the New World and the scale of what was lost.

And yet the mature human mind should be capable of holding within it contradictory emotions without feeling the need to reconcile them or banish one in favour of the other. And it is important also therefore to accept that, for all the bad that resulted from the expeditions of men like Cortes or Merwether Lewis, they were in many respects hugely admirable people. Cortes (Pizarro even more so) was a truly monstrous figure. But he was also, without doubt, one of the bravest and most intelligent men who ever lived - somebody who truly merited being labelled a genius. Think of the sheer courage and resourcefulness that it must have taken to set off on those ships across the Atlantic, let alone to conquer an entire civilisation after arrival on the other side; think of the iron will, the determination, the absolute intolerance of failure that must have imbued every atom of his being. Think of having the balls - I think the use of the word is appropriate in this context - to burn your entire fleet, your only vehicle home, right before the eyes of your men to make it clear to them that the only alternative to victory was death. Think of taking on and defeating a much bigger army of your own countrymen in order to remain at liberty to finish what you have started. Think of what you could achieve if you had a tenth of his gumption and cunning. This was a serious man. 

Lewis and Clark, meanwhile, are much more relatable figures, partly because they seem to inhabit a world much more like our own, and partly because the records they left are so much more personal (and endearingly spelled). But it bears remembering that these two were striking out into a vast continent that was, as far as they knew, peopled entirely by hostile bands of native people who would just as soon shoot them full of arrows as look at them, and possibly roamed by prehistoric megafauna and lost tribes of Israel. And they had no means of contacting home, no means of travel except by boat or on foot, and nothing to live on except the supplies they could carry and whatever they could hunt or catch in the wilderness. Whatever the results of their expedition, these men were giants: 'undaunted courage' barely begins to describe their character. Francisco Orellana, meanwhile, had already seen three quarters of an approximately 4,000-strong expedition die before they had even left the Andean foothills, yet plunged on to get all the way to the mouth of the Amazon with his small band of 50 comrades a year later. Believe me, stumbling around in the dark in an English woodland at night is scary enough. Doing that in the Amazon rainforest can't even be contemplated - and after he had finished he set off to do it all over again. 

A person's personal qualities, that is to say, can in themselves - taken in isolation - be deeply admirable and even inspirational despite the causes in whose name they are deployed and the ultimate consequences which they have. This is unpalatable, perhaps, but inescapable. And it is worth contemplating with reference to D&D, given that many D&D PCs, particularly those in the old school framework, themselves represent mini-Corteses, Pizarros and Orellanas. These rogues whose characters we play often do despicable things for despicable reasons. But that doesn't mean that they can't also display certain qualities that in other contexts would be described as virtuous. 

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a TPK

In honour of the players in my weekly campaign, whose PCs were all killed last week. Think of it as thirteen things to do with a campaign once a TPK has taken place.

I

The new PCs appear on the scene afresh

They have no relationship to what came before

II

The new PCs are the friends, relatives or former comrades of the old ones

Their first task is to recover bodies for burial, or exact revenge

III

The new PCs are the descendants of the old ones

Generations have now passed

And they come chasing after legends

Or to recover heirlooms

IV

The PCs' ghosts attempt to return to the world of the living from the halls of the dead

V

The PCs' ghosts find new life

In heaven or hell

VI

Reincarnation is real

The PCs' souls are reunited once more after many rebirths

Their home is now the stars - or the aftermath of the apocalypse

VII

Reincarnation is real

The PCs were sinful, and return as beasts

VIII

A god spares the PCs' souls from oblivion

In return, they must serve him

IX

A change

The players now take on as their PCs the enemies that killed the original ones

Until they too are killed in turn

X

The campaign ends and a new one begins, different in every way

XI

Generations later, the PCs are resurrected

They are now a necromancer's slaves

XII

The coward's way out

Not death but capture

XIII

A butterfly flaps its wings in Peking

The PCs actions all had their consequences

The next campaign begins in the world extrapolated from what they created

What is the most important thing in life? Meat.

A month ago I posted an entry lamenting the 'thinness of fantasy thinking', in which I described modern fantasy literature, and fantasy RPGs, as generally simply replicating the thinking of post-enlightenment liberals dressed up in fantasy furniture, rather than engaging deeply with the question of how people in radically different worlds would think and engage with the reality around them.

This video casts a bit of light on this. It is an interview with some members of one of the last true 'hunter-gatherer' societies, the Hadza of northern Tanzania, ostensibly concerning 'life's biggest questions'. Take a look:

What is astonishing about their answers is how unexpectedly practical they are. To the Western mind, filled with prior conceptions about what people in such societies think and do, the assumption is that they will have views on life that are steeped in spirituality, emotion, and transcendence. But actually they don't mention those things at all. What are the most important things in life? Meat, honey and corn porridge. Oh, and water. What happens after death? Well, you get put in the ground and everybody goes away. We think a person goes to the sun after death but we don't really know. What is your happiest day? Well, you need meat and honey to be happy, so a happy day is when you have those things. What's your greatest fear? Lions. What's your biggest struggle? Getting hungry. What does the moon mean? Nothing, but a full moon is bad for hunting. What do your dogs mean to you? They help us catch bush pigs, elan and baboons. 

There are three thoughts that spring to mind. The first is that, trite as it might be, there is something genuinely humbling about the fact that there are people in the world (many millions of people, of course) for whom there are no 'first world problems', and who, when you ask them about their biggest struggle in life, will say 'finding food'. Yes, it is a cliche to say that this gives one perspective, but it undoubtedly does - or ought to. Most of the things in life that we worry about don't actually matter and would disappear tomorrow if we had to start caring about actively satisfying our physical needs. This does not mean it would be a good thing if that were to happen, but it ought to give one pause the next time one is minded to complain about how 'stressful' one's life is.

The second, deeper point is that these are people who very clearly live in a coherent culture, and that this has a profound affect on how they think and converse. Their answers are those of people whose thoughts are embedded in a particular way of seeing the world, and who therefore do not really consider alternatives. What are the most important things in life? You or I would think carefully about this question and come up with answers, I suspect, like 'family', or 'justice', or 'freedom', or 'fairness', or any number of other abstract concepts. This is because we are used to values being contested, and having to be justified vis-a-vis other values. My interpretation of this clip is that the people being interviewed probably have a set of values which they do not really reflect upon (they are the water in which they swim, so to speak), and so when asked what is important in life their immediate responses are only practical and physical. This is not to say that they are simple or unintelligent. (I tend to agree from my own experience with Jared Diamond's assessment that people who grow up in supposedly 'primitive' societies are often more intelligent and curious than those who grew up in 'developed' ones.) Rather, it is that their experience of the world comes from being rooted in a relatively fixed and autonomous conceptual framework. It is premodern, for want of a better word, in that it takes most things as given and hence not really worthy of comment - as opposed to a modern post-enlightenment perspective, which sees nothing as given and seeks to put everything before the 'tribunal of the intellect' (as Michael Oakeshott once put it).

The third is how deeply in touch they are both with each other and with their surroundings. Notice how they mimic the sounds of the various animals they refer to and how animated they are in describing them. Animals are so important to them that just talking about the subject energises them. Notice also how they incorporate the same gestures when they are talking, as though it is second nature. These are people who live together and hunt together and spend every day cooperating with one another. It is totally natural for them to adopt the same mannerisms and speak in unison - they are not people who are accustomed to reflecting on their own individuality, bur rather to their collectivity. This is abundantly evident.

It is useful to reflect upon evidence like this when considering how differently one would think and behave if one was embedded not just in a coherent and premodern culture as these people are (as much as I dislike the term 'premodern' in this context), but one in which there was actually real magic, a real spiritual world, real monsters, real other planes of exitence, and so on. How To Think Like a Fantasy Person is a topic about which we have not even scratched the surface, and merely to open the door to the subject is to allow a Pandora's box-worth of fascinating topics out into the world.

Writing the DMing Ten Commandments

Let's community brainstorm.

What are the desiderata of DMing, boiled down into a series of pity aphorisms, ten commandments-style? I will suggest some below; feel free to add your own in the comments, but please keep them to advice about running the game itself, not table manners or social mores. When the exercise is finished, I will publish the list of the best 10.

1. Thou shalt not kill a PC while the player is absent. Whatever happens to PCs when their players are not present for whatever reason, they should not be killed. [It is not right for somebody to be told their PC died while they weren't present to witness it, and therefore through no real fault of their own.]

2. Thou shalt roll all dice in the open where the result is immediately relevant (e.g. combat rolls, surprise rolls, reaction rolls, etc.). [Some dice rolls are necessarily secret, but if they are going to have an immediate consequence the PCs should be privy to the result so they know the DM is not fudging.]

3. Thou shalt not make use of GMPCs. [The appearance of bias is as bad as bias itself, and in any case it is bad form for the DM to dominate the limelight by being both DM and PC at any given moment. If for some reason an NPC ends up accompanying the party without them having hired him or formed an association organically, he should be 'given' to one or all of the players to take charge of.]

4. Thou shalt maintain strict time records. [Gygax was right about this; it is impossible to have a long-running coherent campaign without carefully tracking the passage of days and hours.]

5. Thou shalt subject PCs, NPCs and monsters to the same rules. [It is bad practice to, for example, not apply the same rules for critical hits and fumbles to PCs and monsters equally, and it is the work of satan to have differentiations between monsters, so that some are 1-hp 'mooks' and others are not. This breeds laziness and also makes it impossible for the PCs to plan, and anticipate events, effectively.]

I await your comments, thoughts and suggestions!

The Single-Class Paladin Campaign

One of my ambitions is to develop a variant ruleset for single-class paladin campaigns, and indeed to run such a campaign over the long term.

The more you think about single-class campaigns, the richer they tend to seem. A singe-class paladin campaign in particular gives rise to a lot of interesting ideas about settings, about the way campaigns begin and hold themselves together across time, about the rules of experience and advancement, and about the basic structure of play. Let's deal with each of these in turn:

Settings

The basic conceit behind the D&D paladin is a largely ahistorical idea of a holy warrior or hero whose duty is to protect the faithful and smite evil. But this is a wide concept, and can include under its umbrella many variants. For example:

• The traditional D&D paladin, a paragon of lawful good, who attempts to 'do good' within a typical TSRan type setting
• A more Arthurian, Pendragon-inspired 'knight of the round table' fighting for Christian order within a world imbued with ancient magical forces
• A pseudo-Japan in which mighty heroic samurai do battle against demons and evil spirits 
• A pseudo-Ancient Mesopotamia or Levant where Gilgameshian heroes or 'Book of Judges' style judges fight against primordial chaos embodied in monsters and devils
• A vaguely Iberian class of holy knights who do battle againts evil infidels
• A somewhat Warhammerian set of 'demon hunters' in a reformation-era Old World (with the serial numbers filed off)
• A group of dwarven warrior-priests in Lanthanum Chromate
• &c. 

The point of all of this is that the necessary ingredients are simply that there is an objective good and an objective evil, that those things are personified in the world and have real content, and that the PCs belong to a class of heroes whose job unselfconsciously is to fight for the cause of good against the cause of evil. This can be ported to almost any type of setting.

Campaign Beginnings

An important consideration in the single-class campaign is, I think, having an 'HQ' - a reason why the PCs get together to begin with, a rationale for their endeavours, and an ongoing source of replacements and hirelings. This could, for example, be:

• A guild, which attracts a continued stream of apprentices and also has links to other guilds of adventuring trades (fighters, magicians, thieves, etc.)
• A temple, which has a body of novices and masters
• A holy site, which attracts pilgrims and healers
• A martial order, like the Shaolin monks or Knights Templar
• &c.

Experience and Advancement

The big change that would need to made to the standard D&D rules for a single-class paladin campaign would be to change the method of gathering XP. XP for GP simply wouldn't be appropriate, thematically. Possibilities to consider: XP for killing specific enemy types (demons, infidels, dragons, giants, etc.) is worth 10 times as specified in the Monster Manual? XP for rescuing people from harm? Specified XP hauls for slaying specified named individual monsters on the hex-map or dungeon? And so on.

Structure of Play

A single-class paladin campaign may envisage the PCs as something like knights-errant, who range across a hex-map (or adventure into the Abyss, or whatever) simply looking for trouble enemies to smite and innocents to protect. Alternatively, they might be concieved as defenders of a particular city, region or holy site that is beset by enemies: this would require a process whereby threats are generated and deployed in a quasi-random fashion, to which the PCs must respond. Another possibility: something like my old Random Demonic Incursion Generator; the PCs live in a region of the world which has its own dangers but which, from time to time, is invaded by evil beings from another plane which must be found, rooted out, and destroyed. 

I find this idea appealing, and may elaborate it in a PDF.

Preview of Work in Progress

 

Pursuant to this post, I think I have arrived at the decision that I will keep Monsters & Manuals going here, but start a new parallel endeavour on substack. Tentatively called (somewhat pompously) Multiverse of Noisms, the idea for that project will be to produce a series of settings posted/delivered piecemeal. Free subscribers will get setting overviews, random encounter tables, bestiaries and 25-mile hex maps. Paid subscribers will get all of that plus 5-mile hex maps, fully keyed, for each respective setting.

The first setting I think I will release will be Lost Eskinoot: 

‘Spoken in hushed tones in the city states of Yu Quan; remembered in the epic poetry of the nomads of Waisimadun; sung in the hymns of the Priests of the Red Lilac in Old Koesy; written in the skin-bound volumes of the High Chroniclers of the sorcerer-kingdoms of Ebbw - is the name of Lost Eskinoot, that grand and ancient realm which, swathed in mist and storms, appears on summer nights or winter mornings like a ghost and remains for a week, a lunar month, or a year and a day, before disappearing from whence it came. Its mountains are high; its forests are deep; its deserts are scorched; its cities are proud. Its sherbets and wines make the tongue sing, yet its poisons are the deadliest known. Its people are by turns beautiful and grotesque; generous and cruel; capricious and steadfast; honest and deceitful; hateful and loving - they know no intermediates. Its halls contain knowledge, arts and magicks which can be found nowhere else on this world, and its wild places contain wild things that are wilder than the most infamous of monsters found elsewhere. Its air is hazed with gold, pink, purple or green; its breezes carry unearthly cries and whispers; its waters are sweet; its rocks and earth are sometimes themselves alive. It throngs. It seethes. It throbs. 

'And when it has vanished the people who saw or visited it do not forget it even to the ninth generation, nor even the ninety-ninth. And hence it is spoken in hushed tones in the city states of Yu Quan; remembered in the epic poetry of the nomads of Waisimadun; sung in the hymns of the priests of the Red Lilac in Old Koesy; and written in the skin-bound volumes of the High Chroniclers of the sorcerer-kingdoms of Ebbw - that mysterious and legendary name of Lost Eskinoot.’ 

 -From the Account of Yezekal Sqrn, a Traveller, Chapter XI.

Goodies versus Baddies: Good or Bad?

D&D PCs kill lots of ostensibly sentient beings, and often other humans, and don't usually think twice about it.

Is this good or bad? In some ways, the OSR can be understood as a backlash against a predominant squishiness on this point that had emerged and gained traction during late-TSR/early-WotC era. Whereas Gygaxian D&D had been 'intensely relaxed' about the idea that orcs and the like were simply there for the killing, that approach had gone out of fashion during the course of the 90s, to be replaced by two somewhat paradoxical impulses. On the one hand, there was a growing desire to 'humanise' (for want of a better word) the traditional evil humanoid races and treat them essentially as misunderstood 'others' whose very 'othering' was problematic. And on the other it had become de rigeur for the PCs to be conceived as morally complicated, edgy anti-heroes - the pinnacle of this trend being the creation of the Tieflings as everybody's favourite PC race - and as a consequence it had become hard to commit to good versus evil as a legitimate metaphysical struggle; what we were into were shades of grey. 

These two trends, which never quite sat well alongside one another, nonetheless somehow combined into the notion that there isn't really any metaphysical difference between humans and (say) orcs, that there was something a little embarrassing about 'black and white' moral thinking, and that it was terribly grown up to feel a certain amount of angst about traditional D&D's purportedly simplistic goodies-and-baddies style morality. 

The OSR was in many ways a rejection of this dominant paradigm. This did not come in a return to goodies-and-baddies style morality, however; if anything, it took the form of an even more wholehearted embrace of moral relativism. Indeed, we saw during this period the expression of a strong antagonism towards qualms. D&D PCs, the proponents of the OSR used to say, are murder-hobos. They are rogues. They do not have alignments; they are not heroes; they loot and kill for a living. Therefore, the reasoning went, there is no point in being moralistic about what goes on in a game, and no point in being squeamish. So the PCs encounter a load of orc babies. What difference does it make if they kill them or not? This does not mean anything - it is just part of the slightly arch, detached tone of the game.

Until recently I too broadly would have broadly gone along with this view of things. But at a certain point in the career of concepts, what was once counter-cultural becomes the mainstream, and what was once mainstream becomes counter-cultural. And so it is with 'goodies versus baddies' style morality. It is now very far outside of our cultural comfort zone to accept stories in which there are good characters who are just intrinsically good and bad ones who are just intrinsically bad (have you noticed how almost every villain in the movies for the last 25 years has needed to have been given a reason for turning out the way he has?). And it is even further outside of our cultural comfort zone to accept stories in which an unquestionably 'good' person attacks and kills vast swathes of enemies on the basis simply that he is a goodie and those enemies are straightforwardly evil and recognised to be such. (Top Gun: Maverick was execrable but a possible counter-example.) We tend to think of that kind of story - Rio Bravo, The Lord of the Rings, The Adventures of Robin Hood, etc. - as at best corny and at worst childish.

This, though, makes the timing ripe for a rediscovery or reinvention of the notion that the PCs in a D&D campaign could actually be heroes in the old-fashioned sense and the creatures they encounter unreconstructed villains. In a tired, jaded, cynical world, would there not be something refreshing about embracing the goodies-versus-baddies motif, and doing something fresh and interesting with it?

The Crisis of Masculinity and Pen and Paper RPGs

Pay careful attention to social trends and you will soon become aware that there is a crisis of masculinity afoot. Men are doing badly in school, badly at university, badly in the jobs market, and are turning to suicide at a genuinely alarming rate. At the same time, young men are increasingly told that their very maleness is 'toxic' and that, irrespective of their own personal struggles and background, they benefit from an inescapable 'privilege' that renders their failures deserved and their successes moot. Quite naturally, this embitters them and leads many of them to turn to conmen like Andrew Tate and internet dead-ends like inceldom, pick-up artistry and 4chan.

This is not an issue of 'men's rights', nor just a 'manosphere' talking point; it is a problem that affects everybody. The relationship between men and women is not zero-sum (it is one of the great absurdities of our age that so many people seem to have convinced themselves that there is actually a battle between the sexes), and the worse men do, the fewer good ones there are for women to pair up with, the more genuinely toxic ones there are to do society harm, and the more sons, brothers, fathers, friends etc. there are who will end up on the scrap heap. This suits nobody, men or women, and as a father with young daughters, I take the issue seriously on their behalf. I don't want them growing up in a world populated entirely by half-baked adolescent man-boys consumed with resentment and ill-will. I want them growing up in a world of fully-formed, decent men.

In her recent, excellent book Feminism Against Progress, the cultural critic Mary Harrington (who styles herself a 'reactionary feminist' - a position neatly summarised here) makes the case that a big part of the problem facing young men in particular is that society has gradually winnowed down the opportunities for older men to act as role models for boys in single-sex groups. As she rightly recognises, boys need to have civilised adult male behaviour modelled for them in order to grow up into proper men themselves. And there is a kind of alchemy that takes place in a single-sex environment that fosters this kind of interaction, and which I think particularly benefits young men - who, in the company of young women, often find it almost impossible to avoid either acting the goat or retreating into their shells. As Harrington herself put it in an interview somewhere (I forget where, annoyingly), there is a certain amount of 'chimp-like' behaviour that needs to take place amongst men, whereby the older, sensible ones discipline the young ones and show them what's what - often, in fact almost always, unconsciously - and it is very difficult for this to happen in mixed company.

The issue is that as soon as you start acknowledging this obvious truth (how could it be otherwise?) you immediately open yourself up to the familiar litany of accusations about being exclusionary, non-inclusive, etc., etc. I have nothing to say to those accusations except that only an idiot would suggest that the sexes cannot or should not mix in almost any activity you care to name, and likewise only an idiot would deny that single mothers (for example) often perform absolutely heroic feats in bringing up boys without fathers around, but that does not mean there is something wrong with - and nothing at all beneficial about - male-only and female-only groupings taking place here and there and from time to time as we make our way through childhood and adolescence.

These issues are illustrated very beautifully and poignantly in Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight, whose plot can be understood as a meditation on the theme of male role-modelling. The main character, Able, fatherless and apparently being haphazardly raised by his brother, stumbles from the real world into one of fantasy - wherein he resolves to become a knight after a chance encounter with a man called Sir Ravd. Sir Ravd - who instills in Able the notion that being a knight means to 'live honourably and die honourably', and to always tell the truth - provides the model for Able's subsequent adventures, and through the book we see Able transform from a boy into a man. Initially (having been granted great strength and size by an Aelf woman) he is little better than a fractious bully throwing his weight around, but through constantly keeping his vision of perfect knighthood in mind, he gradually attains discipline, self-control, and above all wisdom. In the end, his greatest achievement of all - his apotheosis, in fact - is not to kill, but to heal - and in achieving this he becomes worthy of manhood, and marriage, and all the rest that follows. 

This is not a complicated metaphor for the process of growing from a boy into a man - achieving sudden and surprising strength and power as a teenager, as well as plenty of rage, aggression, and good old obnoxiousness - and learning to tame and shape those impulses and eventually hammer them into a usable shape, so they are not deployed for harming others but for doing work that is of value. And achieving that status is, as Wolfe reminds us, the key to the door to so much more: marriage, family life, the contentment of adulthood as one who has made peace with oneself and one's position as somebody who contributes to the society in which one finds oneself a part. The critical point is that it is so much harder to do this alone than it is with role models - Sir Ravds, if you will - to teach and guide us through example, and it is therefore profoundly important that opportunities for such role-modelling are available to the young. Some will call this a conservative or old fashioned or even bigoted position, but it is a whole lot more useful and positive than any alternative vision I know of, and has the benefit of according much more closely with my own experience and with providing us with a plausible account of what we see going wrong all around us.

Which brings us to D&D. Let me say straight away that my earlier comments hold true: only an idiot would suggest that there is anything undesirable about mixed-sex gaming groups, and only an idiot would suggest that deliberately (or for that matter unconsciously) excluding people from any hobby is a good idea. But these things can remain true, even while we acknowledge the other truth, which is that lots of people who pay pen and paper RPGs are men, and that the hobby can itself therefore be a vehicle for the kind of male role-modelling that I am talking about (and indeed, probably has fulfilled this function to a certain degree ever since the 1970s). There is, in short, nothing so terribly dreadful about male bonding and probably quite a lot that is good about mixed-age but single-sex gaming groups from time to time and when nobody is being deliberately left-out. It might even in its own small way provide part of the picture by which the masculinity crisis can begin to be unwound. Should we not at least consider whether it could do?

An anecdote to conclude. I have practiced karate for a long time, off and on. At my club there is a young lad, we'll call him B, who is being raised by a single mother after his father went to live on the other side of the globe. A very good-hearted, sincere kid, he absolutely exudes the air of a lost soul - somebody adrift in life, at the position of having quit school after his GCSEs (the British equivalent, I suppose, of dropping out of high school before graduation), with no idea what to live for other than his natural athleticism and love of sport. His problem in karate was for a long time his tendency to seize up - to want to succeed so much and to perform so perfectly that he would literally sometimes freeze, incapable of moving, for minutes at a time. This problem persisted until one evening, after class, B, a few of the other old men at the club, and our instructor were doing a little extra practice and B (much younger than the rest of us) was afflicted by seizure again. Stuck in the middle of the gymnasium floor, shivering with exertion, dripping with sweat, and just unable to make his arms or legs move, it was painful for the rest of us to witness. But then our instructor simply walked over to him, slapped him quite hard on the back, and said, 'Don't worry about it, B. The worse thing that could happen is that you could die.' 

B instantly cracked a huge grin, we all laughed, and it was like the weight of a thousand planets was suddenly lifted off his shoulders. And he never had that kind of issue again. He was like a different person after that point - much more relaxed, much more willing to smile - and all it had taken was a brusque, probably instinctive comment that, crucially, I don't think a woman would have made in that context. It took a man's instinct for what a younger man needed to hear. And sometimes life is like that for human beings. It is crazy that we have become squeamish about the fact, to the real and lasting detriment of so many of the young.

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.