Thursday, May 08, 2008

In Defense of Pipeweed and Klava

James Maliszewski has posted his appreciation for the embrace of anachronism in old school gaming. I’ll admit that there’s something wonderfully liberating about the blatant flirting with anachronisms that warms my heart. It lends the games a giddy sense of possibility, just like the impossible number of sentient monsters listed in the Monster Manual or the mild disregard for ecology in the dungeon. When you step foot in an old school dungeon, anything can happen and likely will!

Still, my love of verisimilitude can only take so much, and the “silly” dungeons (like Castle Amber by Moldvay) often grated on me. However, strict historical recreation and verisimilitude are not the same thing. Before I’d ever heard the word verisimilitude, I thought my goal was, in fact, historical accuracy. I banished tomatoes and tobacco from my fantasy worlds, converted gold to silver, and decreed all precious gems were polished and not cut, in order to better reflect the realities of medieval Europe.

Which, when you step back and look at it, was silly, since none of my games actually took place in medieval Europe. There was absolutely no reason why my fantasy worlds needed to model 12th century Britain or France. As I studied the history of the ancient Middle East or pre-Columbian Central America, my horizons expanded and I embraced the possibilities of my fantasy worlds. Tomatoes and pumpkins filled their harvests, pipeweed smoke filled their taverns, and their calendars were built around alternating periods of drought and monsoon. I even made room for the fantastical, placing green-hued poison oaks in their forests and night-blooming twilight glories in their gardens.

That said, words carry more meaning than is encompassed by mere dictionary definitions. If your starship captain speaks in furlongs and pounds instead of metric measurements, that says something subtle but important to your audience. At the dawn of the 21st century, pipes and tobacco seem archaic and quaint, but they were standard equipment for the engineers that worked on the Apollo program for NASA. A good analogy is coffee. A lot of people get annoyed when authors and gamers come up with replacement words for things like coffee and tobacco. But coffee is a thing strongly associated with the modern and mundane world. Yes, coffee has been drunk for centuries, yes it’s of ancient and foreign pedigree. But if you say the word to a modern audience, they think Seattle and Starbucks and Styrofoam cups of bitter caffeine that barely keep one awake through interminable board meetings. With every sip of coffee your elven warrior drinks, a bit of his fey glamour dies.

It isn’t anachronism that is fatal to verisimilitude, but association, and association is all about perception and not truth or accuracy. Where you need to draw the line is going to be an individual matter, for each player and each group. As we continue to push the boundaries of fantasy to encompass different cultures (like the recent embrace of oriental fantasy with games like Exalted) and different time periods (such as the pseudo-Victorian fantasies of steampunk), the load that verisimilitude can bear without breaking grows. Internal consistency, more than any one feature, no matter how anachronistic, is far more important to preserving the suspension of disbelief that is the first step towards wonder and empathy.

8 comments:

James Maliszewski said...

Castle Amber is one of the greatest D&D adventures ever written, part two of Tom Moldvay's two-part homage to pulp fantasy (the other being, of course, The Isle of Dread).

Max said...

What James said! It's a beautiful sprawl, offering challenges to players' battle skill, wit and diplomacy. Even if one misses some of its many literary allusions there are evocative, memorable encounters throughout.

Also, two words: Brain Collector.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this one, Brian!

trollsmyth said...

Don't get me wrong, I never said it wasn't a fun adventure. I had a great time running my younger brother's elf character through it. But it's utterly insane, too, and has the feel of adventuring through a haze of marijuana smoke while listening to the Moody Blues.

Er, not that we ever did anything like that. I mean, c'mon, I was 11 and he was 9 at the time. We could get the same effect by eating Count Chocula with extra sugar in chocolate milk and then running in small circles for half an hour. ;)

I much preferred B4: The Lost City, though it only made sense if you didn't think about it too hard. James, Philotomy says that one was inspired by Robert E. Howard, and I get a strong Red Nails vibe from it. How does that fit in with the other two you mention, if at all?

Also, did anyone ever make a module based on C.A. Smith's Xothique stories?

- Brian

James Maliszewski said...

The Lost City is another Moldvay classic and I can't believe I forgot it. I guess that means it's a trilogy of pulp fantasy homages. I've always loved B4, so it's remarkable I forgot it so easily in my response.

As for X2, the "haze of marijuana smoke" is very much part of its appeal and in keeping with the source material. Smith's stuff always feels phantasmagoric and that's especially true here, where most of the castle's inhabitants are, quite literally, insane.

As for Xothique, I point you here: http://www.eldritchdark.com/articles/criticism/30/zothique-d20-system-game-guide

James Maliszewski said...

Let's try that again.

trollsmyth said...

Damn, that's the same page I've been using to find the Xothique stories I've missed, and somehow I didn't see that. Thanks for the link!

- Brian

Max said...

And in addition to his trilogy of pulp fantasy adventures, there's B3: Palace of the Silver Princess, which I think of as a fairy tale homage, though even that one has some pulp horror influenced critters like the decapus.

Max said...

...though on further research B3 seems to be mostly Jean Wells' work...or at any rate Moldvay's revision/edit is tangled up with the title's complicated history. Sorry to threadjack, but it's kind of an interesting example of TSR's growing pains.