Victor Hugo's Les Misérables: A Review For RPG.Net

Les Misérables
Author: Victor Hugo, 1862 (tr. Norman Denny)
Publisher: Penguin Classics
System: System-neutral/free-form
Setting: French social realism/pre-steampunk

Let me just start with the elephant in the room: If you like GM-PC characters; if for you the whole point of Forgotten Realms is to rub elbows with Elminster, and you would willingly mount a campaign in the world of Conan even though it means the characters are either going to be Conan or someone who isn't Conan, then "Les Mis" is your bag.

The pachyderm in question is Gary ValStu -- sorry, I meant Jean Valjean. He strides through this sourcebook, soaking up attention in every scene he's in. And make no mistake, in spite of the system-neutral descriptions, he's clearly 18 Strength:

"In physical strength Jean Valjean far surpassed any other inmate of the prison. On fatigue duties, or hauling an anchor-chain or turning a capstan, he was worth four men. He could lift and carry enormous weights ..." (p. 99)

But the stat carnival continues:

"His dexterity was even greater than his strength" (p. 100)

So, 19? Book learning-as-dump stat aside,  he's a super-high level rogue who climbs walls like a staircase, bowls people over with force of personality, and survives death plunges. His disad's are many but they're of the kind that only add to his cachet: some kind of helpless dependent or other, false identity, wanted, hunted, and above all a nitpicking adherence to Chaotic Good alignment.

But is alignment really a disadvantage when the book lays out ways and means to weaponize it? Yes, if you stick to your Good behavior even when it would do you great harm - even when your beneficiary is a scoundrel - even when they are actively trying to rob you - even when doing the right thing would ruin thousands of people - Hugo describes benefits ranging from forced alignment change in the target, to confusing and paralyzing adversaries, even to the point of suicide.

Valjean, then, works best as a benefactor for hard times, striding in, doling handouts and plot coupons - but you can't escape the temptation to put him in the hands of a player, if only for the fun of seeing them play him "sensibly" and never attain the full potential that's sitting under their noses.

Then we have the arch-villain NPC, Inspector Javert, Lawful Neutral over into Evil. Say one thing about this guy, he's the absolute right way for the GM to handle a persistent adversary. As much as he's unbelievably skilled and lucky at hunting down his prey - he finds Valjean twice from a cold trail in completely different cities of France - he also will make that little fudgey mistake that lets the players get away, assuming they haven't made any serious mistakes themselves and don't actually (like Valjean) want to get caught.

There actually aren't that many other NPCs for a 1200 page book. This is due to Hugo's habit of having coincidental meetings pop up routinely, so this new person is "none other than" someone we met 200 pages before. Paris and indeed all of France thus behave in Hugo's hands like a village of a couple hundred. Corny as it may seem, at the table this is actually a great way for both GM and players to stay emotionally invested in the developments. Frankly, too, it's easier to remember a plot with six or so recurring names than with thirty-six of them. Those that are described, in more or less detail, are very good - the Patron-Minette gang, with its varied characters and capabilities, almost begs to come to life as a player character party.

Fortunately, the characters, their doings, and other things "storyline" take up only about half of Les Misérables. The rest is great sourcebook material: minute descriptions of buildings, neighborhoods, and historical adventure sites like the Battle of Waterloo, the 1830 barricades, and of course the sewers of Paris; long essays about politics, necessary if you're going to understand 19th century France with its parade of monarchies, empires and republics; and quirky sidebar material like the analysis of convents in France, or the description of Parisian thieves' cant.

Pretty much all the locations are gameable, whether as sites to loot, PC hideaways, or places of intrigue (the scenario where PCs have to help a convent carry out an illicit burial and at the same time help Valjean escape is a tense masterpiece.) Infuriating, though, to see a complete lack of maps and illustrations - the GM will have to dig up historical ones or rely on the "theater of the mind's eye" to fill in. Fan material online can't quite compensate for this crucial flaw.

More of this, please.

Overall, while Les Misérables is a worthy sourcebook, it also takes a lot of work on the GM's part. I understand the limitations of system-neutral, but at times it seems the author feels the need to narrate rather than describe happenings in a systematic way the GM can use.  Less plot railroading, less of the author's own political rantings (fortunately, these are contradictory, half pro-Republic and half pro-Napoleon, so it's not as annoying as it could be), multiple system stats, and above all maps and encounter tables, these would take this product to five-star territory.

Style: 2
Substance: 4

Off-The-Shelf Fantasy Worlds

Having just finished Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, a Christmas present, I can see why it's such a divisive novel. It's a sharply told story, with lots of interesting challenges and characters. It has a smartest-guy-in-room protagonist who skates just on the right side of insufferable. It has, dare I say, a well-thought-out magic system that puts sorcery side by side with science.

But, but, but. The world in this novel - cramped, generic, no great vistas of space or time. If there is a fault of American fantasy authors, at least those who do not do their research like Wolfe and Martin or drink deep of the weird well like Vance and Clark Ashton Smith, it's that they have no sense of the strangeness of history. Their worlds (for example, Donaldson, Eddings, Jordan, Gary Gygax when he turned his pen to fiction, and now Rothfuss) tend to default to a kind of off-the-shelf pre-industrial idyll.

Although sometimes compared to the cod-archaism of a Renaissance faire, the better comparison of these fantasylands - aptly for the young age of the American republic - is to a nineteenth century sans gunpowder or steam. No feudal ties, ancien regime, or dead hand of the past burden these republican minds in a nominal monarchy. The sparse areas recall the Wild West, complete with the ever-present taverns and bartenders; farmed areas populated by sturdy Midwestern yeomen; cities as Dickensian hives of colorful crooks, pompous officials, and kindly benefactors; Rothfuss' University not too far away, either, from the Tom Brown's School Days playbook more famously cribbed by J. K. Rowling.  Chattel slavery stays away from fantasyland, perhaps a wish that by going back to mock-Europe and eliminating black and red people from the narrative, one can also wish away that ugly resonance of American history. (Credit must go to Orson Scott Card for confronting the mythology and history of the American frontier head-on in his Seventh Son series.)

In other regards the generic fantasyland shies away even from the strangeness of the nineteenth century and before. Yes, the trend has been to write that era's dialogue in the stilted literary language it left behind (David Milch's Deadwood, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain) but I'm talking about more intangible things. The rules on affectionate relations between the sexes, and within the sexes, were different. Honor and reputation counted for more. But the generic American fantasy writer tries to buy our sympathy by making the main characters "just like us" - or better - in personal and sexual mores.

Now British makers of fantasy worlds grow up in cities and countryside filled with ancient ruins, partitioned by ancient boundaries, ditches, roads and hedges. If anything, their sins of laziness are to view history too much from the modern eye, either gussied up in the twee accents of folklore or vulgarized in the manner of the "Horrible Histories" children's books into a panorama of gross-outs and sadism.

It's hard enough to find good psychological historical fiction - novels that present characters who are sympathetic but also believably alien, like Aubrey and Maturin, Patrick O'Brien's archetypal Tory-Whig duo from the age of fighting sail. But to construct a fantasy that comes with its own psychology -- the casual cruelties of Gene Wolfe under a sun that may go out any moment, for example, or the low-tech future African witchcraft of Nnedi Okorafor - that is what I would most see as worthwhile to read. Anything out there?

Bridges to Reality

Let's define "autonomous fantasy": a work about a world not our own, without attempting within the text to place the created world in relation to our own world (henceforth known as "Earth").

But if you look at literature, autonomous fantasy is actually pretty rare. George R. R. Martin's wildly popular world is one such world. But most of the D&D inspiration list "Appendix N" is not. Most of the works there have some kind of link between the fantasy world and the real Earth.

Below is a list of the ways in fantasy world-building to link the created world ("you") to our own Earth. The list is, of course, exhaustive (this claim is meant to stir the blood to objection, so object away!)

It is also only coincidence that there are twelve is the number of entries in the list and twelve is the number of sides of that funny-looking die you have lying on your table there. Please do not leave such momentous decisions as the very nature of reality to the whim of the roll.

1. You are in Earth's far or mythic past.
Examples: Tolkien's Middle Earth, Howard's barbarians, Moorcock's Melnibone

2. You are in the real world's future
Examples: Wolfe's New Sun, Lanier's Hiero, Gerber's Thundarr the Barbarian, Okorafor's Who Fears Death, Boulle's Planet of the Apes

3. You are in a parallel dimension, communicable to Earth
Examples: D&D's default cosmos, Pratt & De Camp's Incomplete Enchanter, Moorcock's multiverse

4. You are on a distant planet where fantasy/magic holds sway
Examples: Farmer's World of Tiers, Barker's Tekumel, McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern

5. Your world and Earth are both the dream/simulation/shadow of a higher world
Example; Zelazny's Amber series

6. You are in the dream of someone on Earth
Examples: Lovecraft's Dreamlands, McCay's Little Nemo

The rest have less of a fictional pedigree to my knowledge, but are no less fascinating.

7. You are in a simulation run by someone on Earth
8. Earth is the dream of someone on your world
9. Your world is the afterlife of Earth
10. Earth is the afterlife of your world
11. You are in a fiction maintained by someone on Earth (the literal truth, and the doctrine of Narrativism, no, not that kind of Narrativism)
12. The wall is absolute (Westeros and all other self-contained worlds such as Earthsea)


At any rate, each idea suggests itself strongly as a Big Reveal that is hinted at in the middle of a fantasy gaming campaign, and that outright drives events in the later stages of such a campaign. And in the next post: what implications each of these ideas carry.

D&D Meets the Literary Bigtime

This article in the website of record -- the New York Times -- uses the generic form "D&D" but I have to give special props to Junot Diaz. In his Pulitzer-winning novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao*, Diaz gives shout-outs to the obscure 80's majesties of Fantasy Games Unlimited (Villains and Vigilantes, Aftermath!), Rolemaster, and holy shit Tekumel and Skyrealms of Jorune. A fuller set of annotations to all the roleplaying, sci-fi and Latin American references, though not as complete as the author-annotated excerpt on Litgenius, is here.

Junot Diaz (photo: ALA)

And here we don't even touch the "role-playing backwash" into fantasy literature I mentioned before. As more or less realist authors, the literati in the NYT article instead are reminiscing about the effect of the real game on its real players. One way to answer the question I previously posed -- "What would literature that draws on role-playing be, without role-playing that draws on literature?"

I also have to say that in a well-run campaign, the experience is literary in a way that cannot be reproduced in a novel. It is a collaboration-through-roles, lived but not written down. As an example, the current metaplot in my 2 1/2 year Band of Iron campaign comes from a new mid-campaign player's starting magic item improvised from two randomly drawn spells (Strength and Hand of Doom), an iron hand which the player then gave a backstory to (discovered exploring an ancient mound), which then fed into the campaign backstory as its purpose as a larger set of iron bodily parts was revealed, and so forth. All developed in real time into a world-pounding mega-plot that has also grafted in third-party adventure modules like Matt Finch's Tomb of the Iron God and Monte Cook's Ptolus.

And oh yeah, as usual New York Times about 4 years late to the trend.

*cover tragi-cluelessly illustrated in the UK edition with a photo of an East Asian youngster (Oh yeah, Wao, sounds Chinese) even though the protagonist is a Dominican-American of Afro-European extraction, who gets his sobriquet through a slurring of "Oscar Wilde."

Cultural Literacy, Gamer Literacy

Of all the reactions to 5th D&D Basic I find this one most intriguing - that the cultural reference point in the game has shifted from external history and legend (and to be fair, a lot of 1920-1970 pulp literature) to the adventures and novels produced for the D&D game itself.

It's tempting to tell a narrative of decline. But more realistically, then as now, it's only a minority of participants in roleplaying games - especially the mass-market, first-stop kind of game that D&D has always been - who know who Ogier the Paladin was, either in legend or in Poul Anderson. When these players import cultural content from history, legend and literature, they become superior Dungeon Masters and character-concept roleplayers.

In fact, I would say there are more new players now who would know about the Paladins of Charlemagne than about the Dragonlance Saga. Say what you will about the decline of attention spans, for the young people today who catch the history and legend bug, the Internet offers a far more vast resource than anything possible when I was growing up. What's more, it's far easier to find discussions and examples of gaming design and practice online, and that is the stuff that really matters.

If my high school D&D group is any example, I was the only one who could rattle off the differences between Lin Carter's Ganelon Silvermane and John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian; who was in the library every Saturday absorbing Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings and the Macaulay castle books. We had another guy who was imaginative but more with a horror and violence bent; three guys who would go into engineering and IT, who knew fantasy and SF but not the weirder corners of the genre; and a couple of average dudes who were just there to play. But none of this cultural literacy could help me run a better game, and for all I tried to put things like historical Christianity in my dungeon, it was at the core a monster motel with a lot of pointless dressing.

Say what you will about the literary merits of the D&D canon (and the vaunted Appendix N is no Harold Bloom paradise either) -- because it sticks so closely to actual gaming, a discussion of the approach of the GDQ series, versus Dragonlance, versus Forgotten Realms actually has more direct bearing on how a DM would run a campaign. I know the actual name-drops in the new Basic document don't lead you directly there - but again, we have the Internet to point out those easter eggs for the clueless.

Cheever vs. Plot

The stories of John Cheever are said to epitomize late 20th Century middle-class life in New York and its suburbs. But he's got much more than his contemporaries John Updike or Philip Roth achieved in that department. There is a willingness to reach into magical realism, a sense of life's capriciousness, a tendency to play it as it lays. The influence of Cheever can be found, by Matt Weiner's own admission, in Mad Men. Cheever would have hated Dragonlance or Ravenloft. If Roald Dahl had written Tomb of Horrors, Cheever might be responsible for Caverns of Thracia, and Tom Wolfe, perhaps, Rahasia.

Let Metro-North be your only railroad.

John Cheever, interview, Paris Review, published 1976, set as free verse:

I don’t work with plots.
I work with intuition, apprehension, dreams, concepts.
Characters and events come simultaneously to me.
Plot implies narrative and a lot of crap.
It is a calculated attempt to hold the reader’s interest at the sacrifice of moral conviction.
Of course, one doesn’t want to be boring . . . one needs an element of suspense.
But a good narrative is a rudimentary structure, rather like a kidney.

In an improvised game, apprehension and intuition come from the tentative advance of a concept - and then a Darwinian selection as it either becomes more elaborated or drops out of the game entirely - depending on the will of the players to pursue it and of the game master to play along - or on the will of the game master to develop it and of the players to play along.

Last time in Game of Iron I presented the players with a dragon. It attacked a place they were in -- but it wasn't a Hollywood second-act "base invasion," rather more of an illustration of the heating up of the conflict between powers that they were entering into. They chose to withdraw rather than fight it, chose to pursue their existing quest rather than go dragon hunting. The dragon had a lair in my book, from an old Dungeon magazine - had a whole plot attached, fitted into the power structure. That dragon may or may not show up again. 

Plot is what you look back on. I only started out running Tomb of the Iron God and somehow that iron statue spawned a whole conspiratorial prophetic mythology over the run of two and a half years. It spawned a gigantic iron statue in pieces and the smaller wearable pieces that control the big pieces and the revelation that this is only one possible way the coming Iron Age could turn out.

Plot is the kidney, not the heart or the brain. All you need is a number of powers, a number of places and maguffins and people that are key to that power, the revelation of the need to transport or unite or create or destroy or defend in order to shift or preserve the balance of power- and that is enough for play.

From Dungeon Kitsch to Dungeon Camp

I was going to do some writing -- about some people's resistance to my identification of gaming aesthetics as kitsch, about how it might be more productive to think of it in terms of the warmer category of "camp." With a huge warning sign that here, we are not talking about an aesthetic mode meant to bridge the gap between masculine and feminine, but rather, between the wonder of the child and the consciousness of the adult.

Then I went to re-read Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on Camp" and discovered that most of the things I wanted to say, she had said, and all I had to do was change "Camp" to "Gaming" and a few other words (in blue). These aphorisms out of her list of 58 are perfect. The others are too tied to specific examples, to a view of camp based in gender and sexuality, or to camp as aesthetics rather than gaming as experience, to make them work.

1. To start very generally: Gaming is a certain mode of simulation. It is one way of imagining adventure within the world. That way, the way of Gaming, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of adversity, of stylization of "awesomeness".

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Gaming sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.

3. Not only is there a Gaming vision, a Gaming way of looking at things. Gaming is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are "gamerly" movies, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . . This distinction is important. True, the Gaming eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Gaming. It's not all in the eye of the beholder.

4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Gaming:

MacGyver
Aurora monster models

The Transformers
Conan the Barbarian (stories, comics, film)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Kurosawa's films

6. There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Gaming." Or "too important," not marginal enough. (More on this later.) Thus, the personality and many of the works of Iain M. Banks are Gamerly, but not those of Margaret Atwood. Many examples of Gaming are things which, from a "serious" point of view, are either bad art or kitsch. Not all, though. Not only is Gaming not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be approached as Gaming (example: the major films of Guillermo Del Toro) merits the most serious admiration and study.

8. Gaming is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in dungeons, the most typical and fully developed Gaming style. Dungeons, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of skulls, the living room which is really a habitation of disguised monsters.

10. Gaming sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp" (worth 500 gp); not a woman, but a "woman" (2nd Level, Thief). To perceive Gaming in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

16. Thus, the Gaming sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Gaming. Pure Gaming is always naive. Gaming which knows itself to be Gaming is usually less satisfying.

19. The pure examples of Gaming are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Dungeon designer who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine gaming -- for instance, the encounters devised for the TSR modules of the late seventies -- does not mean to be funny. Gaming "humor"-- say, the Order of the Stick -- does.

23. In naïve, or pure, Gaming, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Gaming. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

24. When something is just bad (rather than Awesome), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. ("It's too much," "It's too fantastic," "It's not to be believed," are standard phrases of Gaming enthusiasm.)

29. The reason a movie like On the Beach, books like Winesburg, Ohio and For Whom the Bell Tolls are bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is that they are too dogged and pretentious. They lack fantasy. There is Gaming in such bad movies as The Prodigal and Samson and Delilah, the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Maciste, numerous Japanese science fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy - and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.

31. This is why so many of the objects prized by Gaming taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Gaming sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.

41. The whole point of Gaming is to dethrone the serious. Gaming is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Gaming involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

44. Gaming proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

49. It is a feat, of course. A feat goaded on, in the last analysis, by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Gamer taste cannot be overestimated. Gamer taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence.

53. Nevertheless, even though adolescents have been its vanguard, Gamer taste is much more than adolescent taste. Obviously, its metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justification and projection of a certain aspect of the situation of adolescents. (The Gamer insistence on not being "serious," on playing, also connects with the adolescent's desire to remain youthful.) Yet one feels that if adolescents hadn't more or less invented Gaming, someone else would. (To be precise, middle-aged men did.)

55. Gaming taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Gaming is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Gaming taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

56. Gaming taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "player character." . . . Gaming taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a game," they're enjoying it. Gaming is a tender feeling.

57. Gaming taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. The absence of this love is the reason why such kitsch items as Dark Dungeons (the tract) and The Big Bang Theory aren't Gaming.

58. The ultimate Gaming statement: it's good because it's awesome. . . Of course, one can't always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes.

Broken Sword, Broken Elves

As a teen I read Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions but never got around to its slightly later-written companion volume, The Broken Sword, until recently. Both can rightly be said to be foundational works in fantasy literature and gaming, influencing both Moorcock and Gygax with their supernatural struggles between Law and Chaos. But what's also informative is what Gygax didn't pick up from this "Appendix N" novel and put into Dungeons and Dragons.

The trippy UK paperback cover.

The Broken Sword uses many of the concepts and adversaries from Three Hearts; elves, trolls, Christendom, witches, a magic sword, and the Law-Chaos divide. The mythic terrain changes, from a fantasy world based on Carolingian legend to a semi-historical Norse England. So does the point of view; instead of a transported modern hero we have an omniscient, archaism-dotted narrative of a Norse jarl's son fostered in Faerie and the changeling who replaced him.

The Law-Chaos war in Three Hearts is straightforward, but the main matter in this novel is a war between two powers of Chaos, the elves and the trolls. The conflict is tragic rather than heroic, because its Pyrrhic outcome heralds the weakening and fading of the hosts of Chaos. Our lawful world, as in Tolkien's and Moorcock's fantasies, must somehow be arrived at from these narratives set in a dim and unknown past.

Although cruel and evil, the fey races and their mortal allies cannot help but be read as the antiheroes of the story. Law is also more complicated; although Christian belief and oath protect against Chaos, the "White Christ" is far offstage, compared to the Lawful Norse gods - in particular, Odin - who are shown taking a more active hand to set Chaos against Chaos. This situation has parallels to the further complications of alignment in AD&D. Strife can happen within the camp of Evil (Chaos) as well as Good (Law).

Now, about those elves. Anderson's elves, trolls, dwarfs and other fey creatures inhabit a parallel world. They are normally invisible except to those humans who have been granted "witch-sight" through sorcery. However, their deeds sometimes manifest as omens, portents and misfortune for humans.

(As an aside, this would be a great campaign rationale. Ever wonder why the king with his retinue of knights can't go after those goblins threatening the village? They need the adventurers, witch-sighted all, to actually see the goblins.)

Fey creatures also cannot handle iron and are harmed by it. This means that a fostered human or changeling, as well as the dwarfs who are not iron-shy, become valuable tools in the elf-troll war. We catch a glimpse of this in the OD&D and Holmes D&D logic of elves choosing to be fighters or magic-users each day. Holmes apparently elaborated on the reason for this in a novel. Simply enough, the choice to wear iron armor and weapons would nullify the elf's magic. But although games like Runequest took the idea and ran even further with it,  AD&D dropped it cold.

If people complain that elves are overpowered in AD&D and later editions, perhaps one reason is that Gygax chose to go with the Tolkien view of elves as benevolent, superhuman beings. What would have happened instead if he'd taken up the Anderson view of elves as powerful and innately magical, but limited by weakness to the inexorable forces of Law and metallurgy? We'd have perhaps a darker D&D, one with the kind of fey elves that other new-old-school settings have embraced (here, here and here as notable instances.)

Preamble N: Role-Playing Backwash in Literature

Reading someone's list of the top 13 new and forthcoming fantasy novels -- most of which appear to involve white male antiheroes caught up in what you might call a strategic competitive process for seats embodying rulership -- I was struck by the approving phrase "a well-thought-out magic system." 

Indeed, I appreciate that the author in question, Brian McClellan, has achieved something that Tolkien, Dunsany, Leiber, Wolfe, Howard, Mirrlees and so many others failed to do. But I'll also pounce on this phrase as evidence of a second wave of re-infiltration of role-playing games into genre literature.

The first wave: the back-derivation of content from role-playing. But, whether we're talking about a lite-medieval society with dwarves, elves, and polytheistic clerics, or a shadowy modern underworld of supernatural creatures divided into stylish rival factions, this material eventually became hackneyed. Besides,who can compete with the game company's own hired guns turning out Forgotten Realms novels and the like? 

Thus, the turn in the late 90's to content more directly inspired by history. The model here is George R. R. Martin's reach back to English and Scottish medieval dynastic struggles. McClellan, it seems, taps 19th century Europe for inspiration. Being unique in this choice can get you attention, as happened with Saladin Ahmed's detailed creation of a medieval Arabian milieu in Throne of the Crescent Moon. I read that novel, and while it was enjoyable and flavorful, there was something itching at the back of my mind. I couldn't put a finger on it until that phrase, "a well-thought-out magic system," made something click again. 

When I compare Ahmed  to the authors who inspired D&D, the much-discussed "Appendix N" list, I get the feeling of ...

• not just magic, but a magic system
• not just characters, but character classes, character options
• not just monsters, but a monster manual
• not just adventures, but adventure modules (or better yet, adventure paths)

What is it that gives me this feeling? It might be just a little too much emphasis on the signposts of a roleplaying adventure: combat, healing, investigation. It might be the assembling of a diverse team of adventurers, each with their own talent. 

I had a similar reaction when I read Caitlin R. Kiernan's Daughter of Hounds. I was expecting a warped and transgressive look at a society of Lovecraftian ghouls, and while there was some of that, it was embedded in an all-too-familiar urban monster party -- a world of insufficient light, if you will -- where vampires rub elbows with ghosts and hard-bitten human investigators mourn wrecked relationships.

It's inevitable, perhaps, among generations that grew up with these games as a way to perform fantasy. Appendix N has become preamble, the flow reversed. Literature now draws structure unconsciously from role-playing.  You can read this as a repayment of the turn role-playing took in the 80's and 90's, when it started embedding literary devices, plots, and character development into prepared material, instead of letting them emerge haphazardly from play. 

What would literature that draws on role-playing be, without role-playing that draws on literature? I suspect the derivation would be less obvious; the end product, more postmodern.

D&D's Appendix N Roots Are Science Fantasy

Happy 40th birthday, D&D! The world's oldest fantasy adventure role-playing game?  Yes, but ... most of the world doesn't know about the role of science fantasy in the first eight or so years of your existence. The genre purges of the 80's - serious fantasy only, please! - saw science-fantasy shaken out of successive D&D rule sets. But psionics, giant insects and blobs, and the crashed spaceships in both Arneson's and Gygax's games, are important sci-fi intrusions in the early game.

Science fantasy confronts modern and ancient ways of understanding the world, often giving credence to both. Its trademark solution is to identify witchcraft with the quasi-scientific ideas of ESP and dimensional travel. Most significantly, this happens all throughout Lovecraft. The "technology of the ancients" is another frequent theme, whether we or some other civilization takes the part of the "ancients."

But beyond fiction, science fantasy casts a sympathetic light onto the gamer's own activities. You, a modern, rational person, are using actuarial tables and polyhedral number crunching to enact a Dark Ages drama. Hell - the very activity of role-playing is science fantasy!

If any more proof is needed, below are the inspirational works and authors from Gygax's famed Appendix N. I've highlighted them as non-science fantasy (yellow), science fantasy by one of the three definitions below (green), or straight science fiction, albeit sometimes with a medieval or ancient setting (blue).

1. Scientific explanations or sci-fi settings of apparently fantastic phenomena. Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, where knowledge of chemistry and physics explains the dragon's breath or the giant's curse. De Camp & Pratt's Compleat Enchanter, where voyages to fantastic worlds stem from modern-day adventurers' mastery of higher mathematics. McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern and John Carter of Mars - sword-and-planet, dragon-and-planet.

2. The return of the fantastic to a far future or post-apocalyptic world. Vance's Dying Earth, Lanier's previously mentioned Hiero's Journey, and others.

3. The fantastic intruding into a world ruled by science: Lovecraft, Zelazny's Amber series, or the explorer's romances of A. Merritt.

Anderson, Poul: THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS; THE HIGH CRUSADE; THE BROKEN SWORD 
Bellairs, John: THE FACE IN THE FROST 
Brackett, Leigh 
Brown, Frederic 
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: "Pellucidar" series; Mars series; Venus series 
Carter, Lin: "World's End" series
de Camp, L. Sprague: LEST DARKNESS FALL; THE FALLIBLE FIEND; et al
de Camp & Pratt: "Harold Shea" series; THE CARNELIAN CUBE 
Derleth, August 
Dunsany, Lord
Farmer, P. J.: "The World of the Tiers" series; et al
Fox, Gardner: "Kothar" series; "Kyrik" series; et al 
Howard, R. E.: "Conan" series 
Lanier, Sterling: HIERO'S JOURNEY
Leiber, Fritz: "Fafhrd & Gray Mouser" series; et al 
Lovecraft, H. P. 
Merritt, A.: CREEP, SHADOW, CREEP; MOON POOL; DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE; et al
Moorcock, Michael: STORMBRINGER; STEALER OF SOULS; "Hawkmoon" series (esp. the  first three books) 
Norton, Andre
Offutt, Andrew J.: editor of SWORDS AGAINST DARKNESS III 
Pratt, Fletcher: BLUE STAR; et al 
Saberhagen, Fred: CHANGELING EARTH; et al
St. Clair, Margaret: THE SHADOW PEOPLE; SIGN OF THE LABRYS
Tolkien, J. R. R.: THE HOBBIT; "Ring trilogy" 
Vance, Jack: THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; THE DYING EARTH; et al 
Weinbaum, Stanley
Wellman, Manley Wade 
Williamson, Jack
Zelazny, Roger: JACK OF SHADOWS; "Amber" series; et al‏.

Science fantasy is the largest of these three categories, and if you put the sci-fi authors in with it, it easily overwhelms the pure fantasy sources. I've also boldfaced what in my opinion are the most important influences on the actual game, the works that contributed most to the concept of the races, classes, magic and monsters in the game. These are evenly split between science and classic fantasy.

As I look over these influences I also realize that in my own Band of Iron campaign I've been taking a different approach to confront the mythic with the modern. Let's call it "fantasy-science." If all goes well the section of the campaign dealing with that will come to a climax in a session tomorrow, so in my next post I'll be at greater liberty to write about its secrets.

An M. R. James Christmas: Dead Man's Eyes

By chance, Michael Bukowski of Yog-Blogsoth has reached a stopping point in illustrating the creatures of H. P. Lovecraft's imagination and is now tackling the creations of an author much admired by Lovecraft - the teller of Christmas ghost stories, Montague Rhodes James (here's his very different take on the monster I statted up as the sack custodian).

I was inspired by this to read through some of James' less well known stories - all available here, in the spirit of Christmas scares.

Largely, there's a reason why the stories in his first collection are better known. The later tales for the most part are still soaked in that wry humor and English antiquarian charm, but require more moving parts, more apparitions and forebodings, to deliver increasingly anticlimactic shocks. James keeps challenging himself to come up with new ideas for scares, but many of these misfire (the haunted curtain pattern in The Diary of Mr. Poynter, for one).

One of these weird ideas that does work shows up in A View From a Hill (spoilers, perforce, follow). The dark secret to be discovered is that of an amateur antiquarian, Baxter, who dabbled in sorcery the better to show up his more learned peers. Two of his artifacts bear special interest for gaming. The first is a little mask ...

Lawrence was up in the bedroom one day, and picked up a little mask covered with black velvet, and put it on in fun and went to look at himself in the glass. He hadn’t time for a proper look, for old Baxter shouted out to him from the bed: “Put it down, you fool! Do you want to look through a dead man’s eyes?” and it startled him so that he did put it down, and then he asked Baxter what he meant. And Baxter insisted on him handing it over, and said the man he bought it from was dead, or some such nonsense. But Lawrence felt it as he handed it over, and he declared he was sure it was made out of the front of a skull.

The second mystery is a strangely heavy, hand-made pair of binoculars that our protagonist borrows. Gazing through them at an opposite hill, he sees a church and a gallows that had not stood for hundreds of years. As it turns out, this artifact results from one of Baxter's more advanced spells. Their optics are filled with the gelatin of boiled bones from beneath the gallows, which allow their user to "look through a dead man's eyes" in an altogether more modern and convenient manner.

Dead Man's Eyes

Be it mask, spyglass, or a more modern contrivance, this necromantic item is created with some part of a single dead being's body, and the spells speak with the dead, monster summoning of a level appropriate to the being, wizard eye, bestow curse, and magic jar, as well as 5000 gp of materials. When complete, it has the effect of showing a scene looked upon as the dead being might have experienced it, with typical or memorable activities of the day. (This power proved very useful to Baxter, as he could rifle the countryside for finds undreamed of by his contemporaries.)

However, after the first use, there is a 1% cumulative chance that each further look through the device will bring the attention of the device's spirit, who will then attempt to possess the user and drive him or her to ruin or suicide.

Scary Christmas to all, and to all a long night!

Hiero and D&D

Inspired by Appendix N fever, I recently picked up and read Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey (1973), which I'd never read before -although I soon realized that as a teenager I'd read some of its derivative works, like the nearer-future World Enough, And Time, and the farther-future Dark Is The Sun. For Lanier wrote the original post-apocalyptic, mutant-fauna, ancient-artifacts, psychic-powers fantasy, in which a heroic priest-mentalist and his psi-sensitive moose steed wander across the Great Lakes region millennia after the nuclear holocaust, gathering a band of unlikely allies to fight a cabal of evil psychic sorcerers.

Naturally, it has been noticed that Gamma World was pretty much an attempt to go gaming in this setting. What isn't recognized so much is how Lanier's universe also influenced the constitution of D&D from the supplements onward (although some are hip). Specifically, once you take out the mythical, natural and Tolkienesque creatures from the D&D wilderness tables, what you're left with is a mix of giant-sized animals, animal-men, and oddball mutant creatures. That's pretty much my "WEIRD" table when I tried to sift wilderness monsters into six different genres, and that's pretty much what Hiero finds, day in, day out, in his journey. The ancient ruins, the long distances between tiny points of civilization, all can be laid down to Tolkien; but the roll-four-times-a-day, teeming encounter-fest of D&D, that's Lanier.

Artifacts, too. There's a scene in Hiero's Journey that has to have inspired the artifact examination rules in Gamma World, where Hiero finds a strange device on the body of an evil sorcerer, and tries to find out what it does, at the end going as far as to prop it up and jab at its last button with an eight-foot stick. But this kind of procedure also describes D&D magic items. Unlike the heroes of folklore or fantasy, who come into fairly straightforward items as gifts or treasure trove, the heroes of D&D, like the far-future explorers of the ruins, have to contend with a relic of the ancients being possibly cursed. The artifacts section in the Dungeon Master's Guide even suggests creating random benefits and drawbacks. So, when your adventurers gingerly try out that new potion or necklace, they're acting more post-apocalyptic than fantasy -- acting out of wariness, rather than awe.

And then there's psionics, and perhaps only an obsession with Hiero and the Deryni novels can explain why Gary mixed mental powers with magic in both editions he had his hands on. It's pretty clear that the D&D psionic combat system draws on Hiero's many mental duels with evil forces, which describe different modes of attack and defense. Very present in the novel, too, is the central balancing idea for D&D psionics - while characters can luck into these amazing powers essentially for free, using them opens you up to attention from a whole new range of unwholesome entities.

Finally, one thing the illustration reminds me of: like Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea series and, a little later, Samuel R. Delany's Neveryon stories, Hiero's Journey is very much a post-Civil Rights movement fantasy, where North America has mainly been repopulated by ethnic minorities, and pale people are barbaric and seldom seen. A reminder, perhaps, that the old school had a more progressive streak to it - think M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel, based on non-European cultures -  before all the cliches about Scottish dwarves and the like sunk in.

Advanced Readings in Dungeons and Dragons

This has been going on for some time without the OSR seeming to take notice ... but Tor books is deep into an appreciation of the Appendix N works from the 1st edition DM Guide, courtesy of Tim Callahan and/or Mordecai Knode.

So far they've hit most of the right switches - correctly placed Vance between Clark Ashton Smith and Gene Wolfe (but missing the Planet of Adventure entirely), nailed down Derleth succinctly as an author and influence on D&D, and dug up hidden gold from obscurities like Fredric Brown.

Check it out.

Fungi and Swine: William Hope Hodgson's Disgust Morality

William Hope Hodgson was an early 20th century imaginative writer whose fictions often show up on old-school gamers' "Appendix N" lists of inspirational material (here, here and here for example). I've been trying to come to grips with Hodgson's appeal and limitations ever since I discovered his works, most of which are in the public domain and available on Project Gutenberg.

Two themes in Hodgson's work deserve attention, both using physical contagion to achieve horror. One is found in his sea-stories, the best of which is the oft-cited "The Voice in the Night," and the longest of which is "The Boats of the Glen Carrig." In these and others, the sea and its shores, islands, sargassoes and ships adrift teems with biological menace. Whether fungoid, lignic, or cephalopod, there horrors all have a certain flabby and spongy quality. They promise death or worse by assimilating, by being assimilated, by infecting, by crawling on the flesh in the night and leaving slime and sucker marks. I consider "The Voice in the Night" the best of these tales because of its excellent framing, its focus on a single monstrosity, and most of all, the way in which the physical threat merges with a moral struggle.

This element leads us to the next theme - the strange moral cosmos of The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, and the Carnacki the Ghost Hunter stories, of which the most revelatory is "The Hog."  In this shared universe, humanity is menaced by dark forces of evil which lie outside a protective barrier but sometimes break through. The postscript of "The Hog" explains this in terms of a "defense" around the Earth that is energized by the Sun's rays and weakest at night. In the far future world of the Night Land, set after the sun has gone out, the barrier is rather smaller - a circle of white "Earth Current" that protects the great pyramid of the last known city on earth.

The evil forces are tangibly corrupting, with a very physical sense of contagion. Their most usual visual and auditory signature is porcine, in "The Hog" of course, but also in the house-besieging pig-men of Borderland, the strange swine-phantom of the later visions, and in certain of the ab-humans in the Night Land. The image of the abyss or pit also stands for this evil, and its colors are sickly greens and yellows. It is difficult to read Tolkien's description of Minas Morgul and Mordor without seeing an echo of Hodgson's infernal visions published thirty years earlier.

What fights against this evil? The most ordinary struggle involves the individual with courage to resist the darkness, physically and mentally. When people find each other in these tales they almost invariably band together, the stronger helping the weaker. Technology sometimes helps, whether the electric apparatus of Carnacki or the far-future devices in The Night Land. But less often, when it is most needed, there is a mysterious supernatural intervention that almost certainly symbolizes the theological grace of God - as when, at the climax of "The Hog" when the foul entity is about to break through, a green-banded blue barrier manifests itself to dispel the evil.

Interestingly, there is no human moral dimension to this evil. People do not come to it by their deeds, at least not against each other; but they can be infected or possessed by mere contact with it. There is no hint of the strong theme, running through Tolkien, that lust for riches and power is the root of evil, nor even the glimpse of a possibility that evil might tempt people to use expedient but morally corrupt means to fight it. Hodgson's evil is one of contagion, one of disease, one of disgust - man against the Other, having nothing to do with man against man.

This, I believe, explains why Hodgson's vision is only partly compelling in the modern day. In our everyday experience, what stands in for the Other, the ab-human? We cannot really hate nature that way any more, nor can we hate people of other races, cultures, and social strata just for what they are with a clean conscience. After the hundred horrible years that began with World War I - in which Hodgson lost his life, and Tolkien survived - most of us now understand that the Enemy is not the inhuman, but the all-too-human, our normal lusts to level, exalt, defend or attack magnified into systems of slavery and genocide. Disgust is no longer enough; anger at injustice must fuel our outrage for it to be justifiable.

I also think Hodgson put a wrong foot down in choosing the pig as his symbol of Otherly evil. This became evident this weekend as I performed a dramatic reading of "The Hog" to my wife. I am afraid to say that we couldn't help laughing at passages like this:

A sort of swinish clamouring melody that grunts and roars and shrieks in chunks of grunting sounds, all tied together with squealings and shot through with pig howls. I've sometimes thought there was a definite beat in it; for every now and again there comes a gargantuan GRUNT, breaking through the million pig-voiced roaring - a stupendous GRUNT that comes in with a beat. [...]

'And as I gazed I saw it grow bigger. A seemingly motionless, pallid swine-face rising upward out of the depth. And suddenly I realised that I was actually looking at the Hog.'

Or in Hodgson's Mythos-tome equivalent, the "Sigsand Manuscript," where the following passage occurs:

If in sleep or in ye hour of danger ye hear the voice of ye Hogge, cease ye to meddle.

I guess in an era when very few people have heard the cries of slaughtered pigs in the city or countryside, the pig has become a figure of fun, a cozy barnyard animal, bdee-bdee-bdee-that's-all-folks. As Lovecraft, a big fan of Hodgson, realized to good effect - it's the invertebrate Horrors from Outside that have real staying power, the tentacled and flabby and chitinous things. If Hodgson had used his marine horrors for his metaphysical threats we would indeed have something very close to Lovecraft.

Instead, the pig's enduring horror is that it is too close to human, close enough to transplant organs, as smart as a dog, and its fate is uniformly horrible - of all the animals of the farm it alone has no purpose except to be slaughtered for meat. William Golding understood this when he called the doomed boy in Lord of the Flies Piggy, and had the marooned boys erect a pig's head totem. Margaret Atwood's abnormally intelligent pigoons in Oryx and Crake are disturbing because they are us - engineered to carry human genes and twice the normal complement of organs for transplant purposes. I guess the pig as metaphysical unclean evil might fly better with a Muslim or devout Jewish audience, but for those that eat swine, the pig's potential for horror is that it is us; within, not outside.

Next: Why is Hodgson's fiction so appealing to the old-school style of adventure gamers?

"Thangobrind, We Will Avenge You!"

It seems that whenever people discuss the appropriateness of D&D or whatever other roleplaying system to a fictional genre - sword & sorcery, gothic horror, existential horror - the answer that I end up agreeing with is:

D&D should bring the story, the literary source should bring the setting.

The plot that D&D supports, a band of 3 or more diverse adventurers looking for discovery, gold and glory, comes from one specific kind of fiction, the adventure yarn - originated in the 19th century by the likes of H. Rider Haggard, but with precursors as far back as the Argonautica, the original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Hercules! Orpheus! Jason! Castor and Pollux!).

Prof. Tolkien undoubtedly read these stories in his younger years and applied them to his tales, first the treasure hunters of The Hobbit and then the more epic yarn of Lord of the Rings. (If you ever wondered why the Woses are in Return of the King, just give them grass skirts and bones through their noses.)

The other genres don't really support this plot. Sword and sorcery is for one or two protagonists. Horror usually involves a person or group who is in distinct danger of getting killed or worse (I guess early level play supports this, if you take away the characters' ability to fight back.) Gothic horror is a completely different kettle of fish. Stories of chivalry - the kind that drove Don Quijote mad - have a lot of interwoven solo adventures, but nothing like a party adventure.

Sure, these stories can contribute creatures, landscapes, buildings, tricks, traps, enemies, situations. But ultimately, it's D&D's own posse of fighters, thinkers, healers, sneakers that gets dropped into them. Kind of like Abbott and Costello never really went all Gothic tragedy when they met Frankenstein, if your adventuring party gets dropped into Jane Austen, you had best believe they will be checking out the silver candlesticks and dueling Mr. Darcy.

Thangobrind, for those curious, is the protagonist of Lord Dunsany's great, laconic adventure story. Alone, he negotiates perils that are very D&D, gets his hands on a great luminous gem, and meets a sticky end at the hands (?) of its guardian. His story is not D&D ... but the story of the four adventurers who followed in his path and tried to take the gem, that is!

I Cut My Twee With Some Gangster

Look, I'm not expecting D&D module writers to be Hermann Hesse. I'm not even ... sheesh, OK, let me back up here.

This is about my current campaign, so anyone who's in that campaign (or about to make a guest appearance) might want to look away and come back in a few months' time.

Wibaldwy!

So, our heroes got teleported to an area on the border between a stodgy theocratic state and the Elven realms. Wanting to have a change of tone in the campaign, I set out looking for published materials involving fey or faerie realms. I put out a call for help on the RPG Site forums and got a number of general pointers as well as a few specific modules.

Now when it comes to non-Tolkien elves - faeries, sprites, terrible monarchs and rotund little toadstool nobodies - and the human types that seem to crop up alongside them - roguish seducers, merry bards, manic pixie dream girls, pratfalling authority figures - there are three ways you can go.

You can go serious, as Gene Wolfe in his Wizard Knight series and Susanna Clarke in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Christina Rossetti in her poem "The Goblin Market" handle the fairy world, as Hermann Hesse (I warned you) in Narcissus and Goldmund handles the devil-may-care second titular character. There is magic, there is enjoyment, but it's glimpsed from a sober vantage point, and there are consequences. Terrible consequences for the faerie magics that annihilate space and time and cause and effect, tragic consequences for the thoughtless seducer like Goldmund or Don Giovanni.

You can go wistful, like Hope Mirrlees did in Lud-in-the Mist, like Shakespeare did in A Midsummer Night's Dream, like Neil Gaiman who avowedly was inspired by Mirrlees' approach, like rakes and fops in Restoration comedy. The fairy realm is strange and frightening, the seduction and carousing disruptive, but the overall mood is kindly and comedic. Out of the roleplaying materials I've seen, the closest thing to successfully evoking this kind of atmosphere is a One Page Dungeon contest winner, The Faerie Market (pdf link).

(Back to literature, let's not forget Jack Vance's wonderful Lyonesse, navigating its fairyland with skill between the dreadful and the merciful.)

Woguishness!

But then - alas! - we have a couple of role-playing modules who take an approach sadly reminiscent of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Outrageous Okona". They grab you by the neck, shove your face into the funny, and scream "Look! Are these not some merry pranks we have got here?" It is my duty to report that, as interesting as their adventure situations are, the Dragonsfoot module "Red Tam's Bones" by John Turcotte and the early-period d20 module "The Goblin Fair" by Matt Finch fall into this category when it comes to style.

Here's some advice for anyone trying to write a lighthearted adventure: You are not writing jokes for the DM to read aloud. You are setting up potentially funny situations for the DM and players to work with, which is the only way there is going to be laughter at the table. So, please do not write boxed text in a Renfaired-out, Keebler O'Shaugnessy voice. Do not wink and leer about the naughty goings-on, especially if your coy innuendo is laid on so thick that we have no idea what's going on and we're forced - forced I tell you! - to come up with perverted possibilities much worse than what you probably intended.

Anyway, even with that stylistic chaff out of the way, there's something in me that rebels against going full-on twee. This is why the aspect of faerie fiction that grabbed me most in the lead-up to this campaign was the addictive, disinhibiting "fairy fruit" explored by Rossetti and Mirlees. So the base for this campaign is turning out to be a kind of "Hamsterdam" from The Wire, the town of Famorgane through which both licit and illicit trade between the theocratic Inviolacy and the elven and faerie realms is conducted.

And naturally, there's a local strongman movin' that fairy fruit - "The Greengrocer," Anton the Mountain. Last night the party had some entertaining interactions with him, trying to sell off the purple worm ivory they had brought with them from the previous adventure, and somewhat unwittingly being tried out for roles in his gang, before setting out on their quest for Red Tam's bones.

There's time enough for fairy rings and little people later on, the way the adventure is headed. It's just amusing to realize that I've got to grit up my twee with some gangster to make it work for me.

Jack Vance and False Consciousness

Seeing the first novel in Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure series put up for free download in the USA, I'm reminded of how important false consciousness is in his novels.

(Spoilers for Planet of Adventure, Emphyrio, and Nopalgarth follow.)

False consciousness is a form of sophisticated social control that depends on getting people to believe myths that obscure their own exploitation, so that they fail to identify with others who are similarly exploited. It's a term associated with Marxism, though really it can be used in any critique of a social system. For example, Nietzsche and Ayn Rand use the concept a lot, though on behalf of a different kind of oppressed people than Marx's proletariat.

Throughout his work, Vance describes schemes of exploitation with detachment and brio, whether they be the crafty swindles of his picaresques, or the society-wide swindles of his space novels. The reader is left to supply moral outrage, admiration, or cynicism, as the case may be. The larger point of Vance's dry style: it is enough to describe straightforwardly a system that obscures itself by false consciousness in order to expose it. To follow through by detailing the back-and-forth of a struggle for material and political power is more Jack London (in socialist mode) than Jack Vance.

The Planet of Adventure series presents a world that four main alien races have settled. Humans also live there, but many of them are subservient to the aliens - Chaschmen to the Chasch, Wankhmen to the Wankh (cease your snickering, they were changed to "Wannek" in later editions), and so on.

The servant humans have become genetically and psychologically altered to resemble their masters. But beyond this, each human type has a different form of false consciousness that justifies their relationship with their superiors. For example, Chaschmen have been led to believe that they are the larval form of the Chasch, while Dirdirmen live to improve themselves and eventually become indistinguishable from the Dirdir. The intriguing point here is that false consciousness can blur even the species boundary.

Emphyrio, one of Vance's most political and heroic novels, presents a similar kind of exploitative society, with an alienated aristocracy that keeps the populace of the planet Halma low-tech, ignorant, and producing artifacts of great value for a pittance. Here, false consciousness again conceals that the exploiters are not just alienated, but aliens. When this fact is revealed, a near-bloodless revolution occurs, and all is set right.

What is this theme of nonhuman exploiters all about? On the one hand, Vance could be drawing parallels with systems of exploitation and false consciousness here on earth - a radical point. On the other hand, you could also see the implicit argument that humans are basically good when left to their own devices, so oppression is something that has to be explained by tagging oppressors as nonhuman. This is a more conservative point to make in a story, although here I'm using "conservative" and "radical" in a different sense than the usual right-wing/left-wing one.

Think of the belief that the powerful people of the earth are disguised alien lizards. Such conspiracy tales don't facilitate radical action, in the sense of organizing for a power struggle. Their more usual effects are self-satisfaction at having figured things out, and frenzied desire to communicate the big secret. After all, if false consciousness can be reduced to a big secret, then your revolutionary praxis need go no further than Facebook, and the revolution will be televised, often to a stunned planet from a commandeered news station.

That's not how things work, though. Real false consciousness lets you see the facts (The government just passed tax cuts for the wealthy?), but imposes a different interpretation that is not liable to be punctured by a guerrilla broadcast (Great, I don't want to have to pay those kind of taxes when I move up to making that kind of money!)

So, peering through the dry and detached style, which side does Vance come down on? I think the key is to be found in one of his underappreciated novels, Nopalgarth, also known as The Brains of Earth. Admittedly, it's more a novel of ideas than of effective characterization or thrilling adventure. But what ideas!

Earth scientists are contacted by alien Xaxans who are fighting invisible Nopal, monsters that sit on a being's head and control their thoughts and desires. The entire population of Earth is colonized by these creatures, which the Xaxans remove from our heroes by a painful treatment. But the twist is that the aliens themselves are pawns of a more sinister intelligence, controlled by  an amoeba-like monster at war with the Nopal that sends invisible tentacles to control the Xaxans' minds. The human heroes eventually find a way to be free of both.

Written in the mid-60's at the height of the Cold War, the allegory seems obvious, though I don't know of any other commentators who have picked up on this, or even see this novel as worthy of interpretation. Marxism, Vance seems to be saying, gives you great insight into the system of oppression. But lurking behind it is an even less palatable system of mind control, centralized in the Soviet Union. This critique of the irony of radicalism is very much in the spirit of Burkean, small-c conservatism and Orwellian socialism. In the end, Vance promotes a rugged individualism in which all ideology is suspect; a message that lives beyond the death of the USSR, thanks to the timeless science-fiction setting of his writings.

How and Why To Shock

We can extend last post's discussion from sex to extreme violence, sadism, body horror ... but keep the focus on how people react and what they think about the author who transgresses taboos in a game or fiction.

When any creator tries for shock value, in whatever kind of narrative - writing, game, TV, film - there are two kinds of how it is done.  One way is to contrast the taboo-breaking to a recognizable version of our normal reality. The other is to have it as a norm in the setting - a whole world gone horribly or gloriously mad. That is, you can either have a world where one family in the peaceful village is secretly cannibalistic demon-worshipers (isolated shock), or where the whole world is (pervasive shock).

A harder job is to figure out why it is done. Perhaps the creator's actual purpose is not so important as the effect it has on the audience. But second-guessing of the creator's motives is always going to go on, and cues in the work may push the audience one way or another. If we just discuss effects, we avoid the tricky problem of the author's intention - is it wish fulfillment? moralization? sheer desire to disturb? - and also confront the possibility that the work might have unintended effects on any given audience.

Effects of isolated shock include:

* Contrast. At the most basic artistic level, the shocking element provides the goal of an investigation or adventure. It gives a dramatic, attention-catching payoff of surprise. In an interactive medium, it can also give clarity to a muddled situation - this thing is clearly an abomination, it needs to go!

* Demonization. A point is taken about things linked to the abomination - sex is bad, drugs are bad, religion is bad. Sometimes, in slippery-slope logic, the greater evil is a stand-in for some lesser form of deviance like homosexuality, race (or racism), unbelief. Sympathies are with the normal community trying to root it out, and if they're oblivious, this just makes a more effective call to arms for the crusade.

* Hypocrisy-bashing. The take-home message here: apparently normal society shares essential traits with the abomination it's so horrified with, maybe to the point of being more monstrous than the monster. This can be done savagely, by making the monster-haters ugly and brutal, or gently, by emphasizing the humanity of the apparent monstrosity. A related theme is to satirize conformist efforts to keep up normal appearances and ignore the monstrous, as in Jaws and many other films.

When shock becomes pervasive, this can convey:

* Existential stress. A "world gone mad" has an artistic effect of unhinging the audience, creating an atmosphere of constant and pervasive threat to one's values and assumptions. Note the difference with contrast. There, the viewer and protagonists have a solid ground and safe space to retreat to, whereas here, both of them are marooned in an existentially hostile world where rules of sex, rules for bodies, rules for eating are profoundly and disturbingly different.

* Dystopia. Endemic wrongness is often taken as the bottom splashdown of the slippery slope, calling out an evil in the world not by isolating it, but by imagining it taken to the farthest extreme. "If you let men marry men, pretty soon, incest and bestiality will not only be acceptable but fashionable!" "The logical consequence of sexism is the owning of women as property!" A fairly standard character in dystopia (as in Brave New World or 1984) is the one character who for some reason is "old-fashioned" and stands in for the audience's sensibilities.

* Relativism. Just as isolated shock has culturally conformist and nonconformist interpretations, so does pervasive shock. The nonconformist version of dystopia leads to a questioning of the very basis of taboos we take for granted, through one of two means. Either the taboo-breakers are portrayed sympathetically ( for example, Donald Kingsbury's SF novel Courtship Rite depicts a harsh, protein-poor planet where cannibalism is normal and institutionalized), or the reader's society is contrasted against the transgressive one in an unflattering light ( for example, Piers Anthony's short story "In The Barn," where an explorer of alternate universes finds one in which humans, lobotomized from birth, are used for meat and milk, and reflects on what an explorer from another universe might think of our own treatment of animals.) 


Finally, there are two reactions which have been presumed in both of these genres of shock.


* Wish-fulfillment. Based on the assumption that each taboo covers a deep dark desire, one presumed intention or effect of portraying shocking things is the vicarious service of such desires, both in the author and the audience. Undoubtedly this is the case for some, but how much we really want to break taboos may be overstated. The possibility of wish-fulfillment, though, does make for some good hypocrisy-bashing and relativism aimed at the audience itself. Nobody who's seen Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds can escape its point that the Nazis cheering the imaginary violence at their film premiere are uncomfortably mirrored by the audience cheering the imaginary violence against the self-same Nazis.


* Desensitization. This is less of a goal for authors, than an unintended side-effect. The Technicolor gore of 1978's Dawn of the Dead now looks laughable and primitive; pornography has ritualized a certain kind of sex so much that the only way to shock people now is to present sexual bodies that are hairy, lumpy and ugly. Desensitization has been a concern of regulators and moralists for a long time, exemplified most tellingly in the strictures of the Comics Code of the mid-20th century, which required not just that evil be punished but that it not be depicted overly graphically. This assumes only thing keeping us away from committing vile sins ourselves is innate revulsion, which can be desensitized by repeated exposure, much as medical students get used to the feel of cadavers.


Well, that's quite a scheme there. I'll let that sit, and pick up again with the ways these categories can be applied to confrontations with the past.