#7: Evil Monsters Are Evil? š¾
Itās been a hell of a week for me. We hit 300 subscribers on the newsletter though! Which is a sweet moment that I will gladly take. Hope youāre all having a nice Sunday.
I. Monsters, Evil and the Meaning of Fantasy
Monsters have a cause.
That is the lesson of the Champawat Tiger.
Monsters are made to be so.
This is a quote from a post titled āD&D Doesn't Understand What Monsters Areā from the blog, Throne of Salt. Taking the example of man-eating tigers, the author lines up the concepts of āevil-by-nature creaturesā and āexperience by combatā in D&D in their crosshairs. āMonsters are madeā is a powerful idea. Itās an axiom that if you accept, it has a domino affect on all of your worldbuilding. It also means that, for heroes in such a world, āViolence is not a solution, it is a stopgap measure. The root cause that has created the monster is the real challenge to overcome, and it is likely to be much more complex and rooted in past events than not. Sometimes, there's likely to be no solution, or at least no solution that the players can enact. The damage might have already been done, and you're just trying to plug the holes in the hull.ā
I think this formulation is wonderful and calls back to something that weāve discussed on the blog before, which is, sociological storytelling versus psychological storytelling. To recap, psychological storytelling takes the characters and their internal lives as the primary focus of the narrative. This is almost a TV/Hollywood axiom. Sociological storytelling (The Wire is the preeminent TV example) takes institutions, systems or communities as the focus of the narrative. If monsters are made and every act of violence has an institutional or systemic cause, the story becomes about those institutions and systems. The characters will live their own narratives in the cracks of these systems, perpetually compromised. This isnāt a story of heroes.
This thought process also led me to a video I had watched a long time ago from youtuber Matt Colville. In the video, Colville talks about his campaigns versus the campaigns on Critical Role. He references an essay on the meaning of epic fantasy by writer Stephen R. Donaldson which Iāll spare you the details of (itās linked under the video if youāre interested). Essentially, Colvilleās campaigns tend to have very concrete, politically sophisticated worlds. Players react to the incontrovertible facts of the world. Whereas in Critical Role, the world (or rather, the story) is built around the characters and is constantly reacting to them, rather than the other way.
So, we have these essentially opposed structures for a story that has some connection to the idea of psychological and sociological storytelling. Is the world or the story an expression of the internal life of the characters? Or are the characters the tools by which the world expresses itself?
If the world is an expression of the internal life of the characters, every evil is a metaphor. Slaying that evil is cathartic. Itās some kind of psychodrama. Speaking for myself, this doesnāt make much sense to me. I get it on some level - Geralt of Rivia slays monsters and in the process, discovers his humanity, sure. Likewise, Sauron in Lord of the Rings is just a stand-in for all the evils that Tolkien saw in the world. (The fact that evil included industrial modernization is slightly eyebrow-raising. I donāt believe Tolkienās pastoral Eden ever existed.)
This isnāt to say one kind of story is deeper or more interesting than the other. Character-driven stories are so common because they are the most successful at engaging audiences. But I am hyper-aware that this idea bleeds into the real world in weird ways - simplifying situations into Good and Evil / Us versus Them. And playing with stories that require engagement with institutions, systems, structures beyond the lone individual are a fun and easy way to train myself into thinking in non-simplistic ways.
II. The Questions That Drive Your Sessions
I think one of the types of fun of being a GM is having an interesting question and not knowing how the players will answer it. These are the questions that drive campaigns and give meaning to individual sessions or scenes. I donāt play 5e anymore but when I was learning how to GM the system, I loved Matt Colvilleās videos. But of course, watching them, it was clear to me that we probably ran very different games.
Colville is a great writer - and probably knows a lot more about than I do about games. But what Iāve noticed is that often heās happy for the excitement of a session to be pinned on āWill the heroes survive?ā And I think Iām not. Danger is important to me, definitely. Itās the cornerstone of drama. But I donāt like going into a session with this as the primary unanswered question in my head. Partially because the genre Iām engaging with almost always assumes they will survive. I prefer existing in the space between āWhat will they do next?ā and āHow will they pull it off?ā
I like games that give players and GMs fun ways of asking and answering that question. The idea of Beliefs in Burning Wheel as a way for players to tell GMs what they want to do in a session - brilliant. (The rest of Burning Wheel hasnāt clicked in the same way.) This was a hardcore mechanic built into the game. On the other of the spectrum, in Heart, one of the rules is āask your players what they want to do in the session before you start playingā. Which isnāt a āmechanicā but yeah, that works. Itās just a way of setting up the ideal form of the sessionās conversation.
III. Miscellaneous
The 2020 IGDN Diversity Sponsorship Application is out!
Want to get the hang of a fiction-first RPG and trying to figure out FATE? This thread has the answers. Someone mentioned the Book of Hanz and then Hanz appeared.
For the 100th episode of Gnomecast, they did an episode on āGMing Advice We Wish Weād Had When We Startedā.
An itch.io collection showcasing more than 50 games from Brazilian designers.
Want an in-depth analysis of the Genesys system? Just want someone to walk you through the basics?
IV. Small Ads
Nothing this week! If youād like to advertise with the newsletter, the submission form with all the guidelines can be found here.
This is kind of a short issue. I didnāt want to force myself into writing an essay - especially with the week Iāve had. (Was awful.) But at the same time, I didnāt want to skip an issue. So I hope next week is better for me and for you! See you around, friendos.