Reinventing fantasy cliches

[Dannyalcatraz]

Maybe he's done in by a lucky arrow. Maybe he falls overboard. Maybe he catches a cold. But he dies. Guess he's not the world's savior, after all.

Now what?

So it's up to the PCs to save the world. But how can they win against a broken prophecy?

There are all kinds of broken prophesy tropes out there...

Perhaps the interpretation was simply wrong.

Perhaps one in the party (or someone of the party's acquaintence) is the true Chosen One- the other was merely deluded/or The Chosen Decoy (and may have known it!).

Perhaps the prophesy is false and was designed to root out would-be saviors by getting them to rise up to get hit like an errant nail by the hammer of the BBEG's forces.

Perhaps the fallen one was truly the Chosen One, but had to pass through the afterlife in order to become refined, quenched & tested in tests beyond the mortal realm, and will return to life some point down the road to lead the party against the BBEG in The Final Battle.

Etc.

 

[InVinoVeritas]

There are all kinds of broken prophesy tropes out there...

Perhaps the interpretation was simply wrong.

Perhaps one in the party (or someone of the party's acquaintence) is the true Chosen One- the other was merely deluded/or The Chosen Decoy (and may have known it!).

Perhaps the prophesy is false and was designed to root out would-be saviors by getting them to rise up to get hit like an errant nail by the hammer of the BBEG's forces.

Perhaps the fallen one was truly the Chosen One, but had to pass through the afterlife in order to become refined, quenched & tested in tests beyond the mortal realm, and will return to life some point down the road to lead the party against the BBEG in The Final Battle.

Etc.

This is what I like about changing a Chosen One story into a Broken Prophesy story--it lets the audience know that the story can change, and so you can't be sure what will happen next. There are also a large number of directions that the story can take from here, like the ones above.

Also, perhaps the Powers That Be ARE reachable. They respond with, "The Chosen One is dead??? You were his guardians, and you FAILED, and we are DOOMED! Die, loathsome heretics!" Or, perhaps the PCs know that will happen, if they ever discover that the Chosen One is dead, but they aren't expected to return for a decade.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I remember coming across this interview that discusses the problem with Eurocentric fantasy as well as introduces some authors and works who go against that.

The problem with non Eurocentric fantasy is that while authors have a whole novel to explain the concepts behind the setting, players usually have to understand the setting in a far shorter time. After all, not everyone has time to read 100+ pages of setting description.

Eurocentric fantasy works so well for game settings because most gamers are already familiar with its elements. Settings based on other cultures tend to do less well, with the major exception being East Asian-centric settings thanks to the recent influx of anime and wuxia into the Western cultural mainstream. But other settings - based on, say, India or Africa - are rather more likely to become fantasy heartbreakers than commercial successes.

 

[InVinoVeritas]

The problem with non Eurocentric fantasy is that while authors have a whole novel to explain the concepts behind the setting, players usually have to understand the setting in a far shorter time. After all, not everyone has time to read 100+ pages of setting description.

Eurocentric fantasy works so well for game settings because most gamers are already familiar with its elements. Settings based on other cultures tend to do less well, with the major exception being East Asian-centric settings thanks to the recent influx of anime and wuxia into the Western cultural mainstream. But other settings - based on, say, India or Africa - are rather more likely to become fantasy heartbreakers than commercial successes.

Absolutely. In most cases, time spent explaining how things work is time spent boring the audience. Many times, you can get away with just letting them experience it, and then explain it after the fact, once they're curious. So, many times, you're left with sticking to cultural tropes that are well known, and introducing less well-known traditions as flavor.

I mean heck, not even full Eurocentrism survives. You can't really explain manorialism or oddities with fuzzy borders very well. We expect well-delineated borders and freedom of travel in our games. So it's not as much Eurocentrism as much as knights and castles. My wife is from Europe, and I have a hard time understanding her feelings on prestige and classes from my American point of view, from time to time.

But even then, because of the lack of full-on Eurocentric tropes, it becomes much easier to introduce other cultural snippets. Grab a picture of Angkor Wat, and say that the high priest's temple looks like that. Make a bunch of gods with Egyptian-style animal heads. Give the kings giant Ottoman-style turbans. Have the elves use a magical system of ley lines based on increasingly complex earthworks like the Cahokia mounds. Explain that even though a member of the lowest caste might do well, become the best fighter, and become rich, that he is still unworthy of respect--and, perhaps, is forbidden from owning property--because he's a member of the lowest caste, and if he was supposed to be a great king, the gods would have had him born to the appropriate caste. So, now he's a nomadic warlord terrorizing the countryside, but that's the way the gods wanted it (or not, and he's expected to have stuck to dirt farming or whatever).

Heck, just the fact that the default D&D world expects polytheism is a major difference between it and a Eurocentric society.

So, I say mix it up. Dive deep into multiculturalism. Keep the stuff you like (architecture is easy to stick in a game, is something that needs little explanation, and gets the creative juices flowing) and dump what you don't (a lot of details on the histories of cultural taboos are too complex to be adequately appreciated in an evening of monster-slaying, so should be kept on the sidelines for whenever). Find a cool picture, keep it. Read a cool legend, keep it. Mine the world for ideas, pick a few, and slap them together. The details will work themselves out when everyone gets to a stopping point.

 

[haakon1]

They buy and sell among the various humanoid tribes. There is some trade of other goods (Salt, spices, rarities and oddities, bitumen) with humans but that mostly goes through Bugbear hands. My Bugbear culture borrows from Malay culture of the Indonesian archipelago: many petty kingdoms, a strong sea-going impulse, the beginnings of trade with "civilised" races (ie the European styled humans) as per the early colonisation period.

Having a Malay culture in D&D is cool.

But to me, bugbears and gnolls are irredeemably evil, viewing human as mortal enemies who are either killed on sight or kept as slaves until it's time for lunch. I think it's good to have contrasts between evil but negotiable (kobolds, goblins, and hobgoblins IMC), mostly evil with some exceptions and a racial connection to elves and humans (orcs IMC), not evil but alien (lizardmen), and plain old kill everybody and eat them evil (bugbears and gnolls IMC).

I should point out my Borderlands are about 1 million sq. miles. Plenty of room for many tribes and cultures, with room for additional stuff I may want to throw in along the way (random encounters!)

My Borderlands are smaller -- the edges of Bissel in the Yatil and Barrier Peak foothills and the wilds of the Bramblewood and Dim Forests. Which is all Greyhawk, if you're wondering.

It's the border between civilization and wilderness, and also between "eastern" civilizations (the western-European like Suel and Oeridian cultures) and "western" civilizations (the Eastern on our world Baklunish). I view it as being a bit like Yugoslavia, a "Clash of Civilizations" area, combined with a frontier.

 

[haakon1]

So, I say mix it up. Dive deep into multiculturalism. Keep the stuff you like (architecture is easy to stick in a game, is something that needs little explanation, and gets the creative juices flowing) and dump what you don't (a lot of details on the histories of cultural taboos are too complex to be adequately appreciated in an evening of monster-slaying, so should be kept on the sidelines for whenever). Find a cool picture, keep it. Read a cool legend, keep it. Mine the world for ideas, pick a few, and slap them together. The details will work themselves out when everyone gets to a stopping point.

Nod. And thus, D&D fits with the postmodern, globalization culture of our times. I wonder how many countries the readers of this thread come from . . .

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Nod. And thus, D&D fits with the postmodern, globalization culture of our times. I wonder how many countries the readers of this thread come from . . .

Well, for the record I'm from Germany.

But I have to wonder how deep that "globalization" of settings really goes - are we really taking genuine elements of other cultures and their history, or are we only using a fairly superficial understanding of the same - one that's propagated within our own culture?

Let me give you an example. What do most Americans think of when they hear the word "castle"? The image that will likely spring into the minds of most is the fairy tale castle from Disneyland.

But the Disneyland castle is not a genuine castle, but a knockoff of the German castle of Neuschwanstein that has been used in the marketing of Disney to such an extent that it has become part of the American cultural mainstream.

But even Neuschwanstein itself cannot really be considered a "genuine castle" by German standards - it was build after specifications by a rather nutty Bavarian king who had his own views of what a castle ought to look like. And it was built centuries after traditional castles became obsolete after the invention of the cannon.

So the castle imagery in the minds of most Americans (though probably not most American role-players, who likely have a more in-depth knowledge of this period in history) is several layers removed from real castles - but giving them an understanding of the functioning, layout, and other essential aspects of genuine castles will require a lot of additional explaining. So what to do when you plan to use castle imagery - do you use the superficial image so that everyone gets it at once, or do you use the genuine historical thing and need to provide a large info-dump to clear up any misconceptions?

The same is true for Angkor Wat - do you merely use the image of the complex, and thus are likely to get all sorts of details wrong, or do you do a lot of research to get everything right and risk overwhelming your players with information?

(Or, to provide a flip side to the Neuschwanstein example for German readers: When using a pseudo-Native American culture - which would certainly qualify as "exotic" in Germany - do you try to get the details right, or do you confine yourself to the imagery thought up by Karl May?)


Truly researching the historical and cultural details often is highly rewarding, and I strongly recommend it even if you don't end up using them - they often contain all sorts of cool adventure ideas. But again, all this has to be weighted against overwhelming the players with details.

 

[Set]

Truly researching the historical and cultural details often is highly rewarding, and I strongly recommend it even if you don't end up using them - they often contain all sorts of cool adventure ideas. But again, all this has to be weighted against overwhelming the players with details.

And overwhelming the DM as well. If the DM is a nut, like me, and *likes* reading about old dead moldy cultures and stone-quarrying and all that stuff, then cool, but the *vast* majority of gamers, yes, even gamers, can't keep their eyes focused two pages into one of H.P. Lovecraft's thirty page short stories.

That stuff bores the hell out of most of the people I've gamed with, so when I run a game, I just gloss over all of the background stuff that I've developed, 'cause they don't want to hear it. If it matters, it comes up, and I have had a player or two gape at me and ask how I 'made up all that stuff on the spot,' and since I didn't feel like boring everyone else at the table, I went ahead and let them think that I was some mad improv genius and not dispel their illusions with the messy detail that I actually *thought about the game* before I sat down to play it.

When I was a teenager, and had to take history classes, they bored the living piss out of me. Now, at twice that age, I read history books for fun, but none of my friends are likely to get to that point until they are eighty, so I just keep my boring hobbies in the closet and put on my best 'interested' look when they start gabbing about the Red Sox, the team members and habits and past histories of which they know enough creepy intimate details for me to think that they are all stalkers...

If a picture of Angkor Watt is enough to set the mood, then that's all you need. If someone pipes up and asks what they ate, you can have someone make a roll to figure out that the land around the structure was a massive series of rice-paddies, otherwise, let that little nugget of information sit in the back of your head, 'cause if they didn't ask, they probably would rather be shoving their swords through lizard man giblets than know that.

 

[InVinoVeritas]

Jürgen's discussion of castles in Germany is a great example of what I'm talking about. Yes, for the most part, we ARE using a superficial understanding of a culture, as shaped by our own norms.

But, since Americans have been doing it so completely for European medieval culture for so long, why stop there?

Certainly, I've watched it go the other way, as well. Spending any time seeing how other cultures view America is eye-opening.

In the end, we probably don't want to use everything about the originating culture in the game. For example, the high priest's temple may look like Angkor Wat, but perhaps I don't want the high priest to be particularly Buddhist or Hindu. So it's probably for the best that most cultural borrowings remain superficial.

I can share a melded example from my homebrew campaign. In the "new nine races" campaign I described earlier in the thread, someone wanted to make, essentially, a dwarf samurai. There weren't any "dwarves" per se in my campaign, so he ended up making a High Man Fighter who carried a katana, a brusque attitude, a beard, and a mock-Scottish brogue. He said he came from a land called Dikama, which had recently closed itself off from the rest of the world. At a certain point in the campaign, I had to balance some new stuff I wanted to add to the campaign, and the party was just about to find a way to cross Dikama.

I started with a culture of disciplined samurai and angry Scotsmen. I started seeing hordes of angry mounted swordsmen in formation, and it looked Turko-Mongol to me. So, I created a people with onion-dome castles whose leader was called a Caliph (not a true Caliph by the Islamic meaning of the word, but I stayed superficial here) and wore a turban and long, neat beard. Instead of Islamic geometric art, I replaced it with Celtic knotwork. Armor was based on classic samurai designs with an armored kilt, and rice and fish were major crops.

What was I looking to add? Raptor mounts. So, now we have fields of rice paddies overseen by raptor-mounted, Scottish-brogued, bearded samurai, protecting onion-domed castles decorated with Celtic knotwork.

Is that anything like what we have today? No. But it didn't confuse or bore the players in any way. The Caliphate of Dikama was different enough to be interesting, but each element was easy enough to understand that it didn't bother the players.

 

[Afrodyte]

I was going to list some of my own ideas, but I should probably do that on another thread.