Non-stock fantasy

[Rob Carriere]

In this post,

This may be something that belongs in a new thread, but I would really like to hear more about such "non-stock" fantasy; I for one haven't read Pollack, Lessing, or Donaldson, and I don't think I've read the LeGuin books (or stories?) you're referencing.

Allright, I'll start with a brief list of the stuff I mentioned,

Rachel Pollack, Unquenchable Fire (and the sort-of sequel Temporary Agency) are set in a more-or-less contemporary US. Except that the spirits are real. At the end of the assembly line, cars are blessed (and that actually has measurable effect!). There's a federal bureau that occupies itself with human-spirit relations. There are government-sanctioned dream interpreters. And so on.

Doris Lessing, The marriages between zones three, four and five is officially part of the Canopus in Argos SF series, but is really different from the other volumes. There's this world(?) that's divided into Zones. The lower numbered zones have higher elevation, both physically and morally (in their own estimation as well as the author's). It is possible, but extremely difficult, for someone to ascend to a higher zone. And then the order comes down from On High about interzone marriages. Needless to say, some anguish is had.

Stephen Donaldson, Mordant's Need (in two parts: The mirror of her dreams and A man rides through) is pretty much stock fantasy with one twist: magic is done with mirrors. Literally. Any mirror is a magical device and that is the only magic there is. You can push stuff into a mirror (and it will show up in the location shown in the mirror) and you can pull stuff you see in the mirror out of it. Mirrors do not, normally, show the location adjacent to the mirror (and in fact it is very dangerous when that happens as your mind gets lost in the infinite "translations".)

Ursula LeGuin. The psychomyths are, as you guessed, short stories. They're spread through her various collections. The classical stuff is in The Compass Rose and The wind's Twelve Quarters. I can get you some of the more recent titles, but my bookshelves are currently about 10 miles out arm's reach and memory isn't willing to serve. They vary wildly in subject. Some of my favorites are about a group of identical clones involved in an accident where some of them die, about an interstellar survey team that's not quite there (would you really consider sending sane people out among the stars?), or the man who reinvents math after it's been outlawed.

Now, the reason I brought this up in the other thread is that just as some of the people there were complaining that "all" SF RPGs are about either cyberpunk or space opera, so I occasionally get annoyed that "all" fantasy RPGs are about Tolkien, Howard, or Leiber. I'm not necessarily suggesting that anybody should play in any of these settings (although I do in fact believe that many of LeGuin's short stories would make cool one-shots), but I am suggesting that something is missing when none of these settings, not even the Donaldson, can be adequately handled by of the major fantasy RPGs out there, including the ones styled as "universal".

SR
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[Black Iris Dancer]

This is going to increase my to-read list significantly isn't it? A few other interesting non-traditional fantasy / SF worlds not mentioned:

His Dark Materials, by Phillip Pullman. The world of His Dark Materials seems a bit Victorian in broad relief. There isn't any explicit magic, per se, and I suppose one could question its credentials as a “fantasy series” but nobody I know of whose read the books really has any doubt. The devices and such present definitely give the world a rather weird science / Victorian steampunk flavour. Oh, and people have Daemos—animal-shaped familiars. Their shape tends to reflect the nature of the person, and is set from puberty (they are capable of shapeshifting, prior to that). Overall, a cool world; I've long wanted to run a game wherein half the players play people, and the other half play those people's Daemons.

Most any fantasy-ish novel by Neil Gaiman. Playing off “hidden world” story archetypes, Neverwhere introduces the reader to London Below—an entire city built in the subway tunnels and alleyways and, basically, the cracks of the London we know (London Above). The world is rather more feudal, a bit more gritty, and completely invisible to the vast majority of London Above residents. There are a number of other Below cities, as well, pretty much one in any large-ish city we know of. American Gods populates the world with living, physical incarnations of various gods, given life by the peoples who believe in them, and dragged across the ocean to the new world by the same. Coraline is Victorian gothic fantasy, in which a little girl opens a door to a mirror of her house, where everything seems a little more pleasant (and, naturally, isn't) and everyone has buttons for eyes. And then, obviously, Sandman.

Homo Zapiens (or, in Russian, Generation P), by Victor Pelevin. A modern-day tale of a fellow who gives up poetry and goes into advertising following the fall of the Soviet Union. The fantasy elements in this one are somewhat subdued, but there's a definite connection to Sumerian mythology.

[John Kim]

I occasionally get annoyed that "all" fantasy RPGs are about Tolkien, Howard, or Leiber. I'm not necessarily suggesting that anybody should play in any of these settings (although I do in fact believe that many of LeGuin's short stories would make cool one-shots), but I am suggesting that something is missing when none of these settings, not even the Donaldson, can be adequately handled by of the major fantasy RPGs out there, including the ones styled as "universal".

Is there somewhere you are looking to go with this?  What would you say is missing?  More generic and/or universal fantasy RPGs to handle a wider range of fantasy?  Or more non-stock fantasy RPGs?  My comments would be:

1) There is an endless list of fantasy fiction, or fiction in general, which has not been adapted to RPGs.  For that matter, there is an endless list of fantasy fiction which has not been adapted to movies or comic books or books on tape.  I don't think listing through what hasn't been adapted is very useful.  

2) I don't see it as a dominance of Tolkien/Howard/Lieber so much as a dominance of D&D -- which is quite distinct.  Popular non-D&D fantasy RPGs include Amber, Ars Magica, Castle Falkenstein, Changeling: The Dreaming, Exalted, In Nomine, Legend of the Five Rings, and Rifts.  I think these are pretty varied in their sources.  On the other hand, you could put in the Tolkien/Howard/Lieber genre games including The Burning Wheel, Conan OGL, HarnMaster, Lord of the Rings RPG/MERP, RuneQuest/HeroQuest, The Riddle of Steel, and Warhammer FRP.  So I'd agree there's a bias, though it's not total by any means.  My picks for favorite non-stock fantasy would be GURPS Goblins and GURPS Fantasy II.  Though I'm not a fan of the GURPS system, these are excellent and original fantasy.  

3) IMO, you shouldn't expect a universal RPG like GURPS or The Pool to emulate any particular setting or genre with zero effort on adapting it.  Different games will need different adaptation.  For example, Fantasy Hero can handle the mirror-based magic of Mordant relatively easily, but would need other tweaks for the genre.  Other games might need more effort for the magic (especially alien summonings like the armored spaceman).  

Though for what it's worth, in my own http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/wateruphill/">Water-Uphill World campaign, I used a homebrew and invented my own magic system.  To my mind, the biggest hurdle for the system was being able to handle ordinary schoolchildren as PCs well.

[Snowden]

Rob: thanks a lot, those sound interesting; Pollack and Donaldson don't sound THAT far away from "traditional" fantasy fiction to me at first glance, though!

John: maybe we can agree to disagree, but I think the D&D/non-D&D distinction is in danger of missing the forest for the trees.  Although there are substantial differences between them from a fantasy gamer or reader's perspective, I think in the big picture all of these games are essentially derived from the same tradition of fantasy writing -- the adventure narrative.  When I encouraged Rob to start the thread, I was hoping to hear more about "fantasy" writers who had taken a more speculative approach.  It sounds like Lessing might be a good example of what I was wondering about, along with "The Gate To Women's Country" by Sheri Tepper which it reminded me of.

[John Kim]

John: maybe we can agree to disagree, but I think the D&D/non-D&D distinction is in danger of missing the forest for the trees.  Although there are substantial differences between them from a fantasy gamer or reader's perspective, I think in the big picture all of these games are essentially derived from the same tradition of fantasy writing -- the adventure narrative.

I'm not sure if we disagree.  I was responding to Rob's starting post about Tolkien/Howard/Leiber, not to the prior thread.  "Adventure narrative" seems like a pretty broad category to me, and I'm not sure what you mean by it.  My impression is that you think that nearly all fantasy fiction falls into this category, so it wouldn't surprise me that nearly all fantasy RPGs do as well.  

When I encouraged Rob to start the thread, I was hoping to hear more about "fantasy" writers who had taken a more speculative approach.  It sounds like Lessing might be a good example of what I was wondering about, along with "The Gate To Women's Country" by Sheri Tepper which it reminded me of.

So you wanted to talk about fantasy writers rather than RPGs per se?  Well, it's a little off-topic, but I suspect that this is definitional problem.  Both the Lessing and Tepper works are generally classified as science fiction, not as fantasy.  If something is about logical speculation, it is categorized as science fiction.

[Rob Carriere]

Is there somewhere you are looking to go with this?  What would you say is missing?  More generic and/or universal fantasy RPGs to handle a wider range of fantasy?  Or more non-stock fantasy RPGs?

Fair question and one that I should have addressed explicitly in the initial post. Lemme see what I can say in response.

First, some points of non-focus :-)

[*]I'm not particularly interested in Ye Olde Liste of the Non-Adaptedte Stuffe either. I listed the examples in part to have something concrete to work with and in part because of a direct request.
[*]I'll agree with your position on D&D vs Tolkien et.al. as it's more to appropriate to games.
[*]I do know that there are more original games out there, the quotes around the word "all" were not an editorial accident. But, as per your first point, those games cannot adequately address the general problem as the space of possibilities is far too large; the exact game you're looking for will never exist.[/list:u]
Onward to an attempt at topic focus:

Now, obviously, I can take a fantasy system or a fantasy-capable system, certainly a universal system, get out the toolbox and twiddle until I have a system that reflects my perception of the world I want to use as a setting. Been there, done that, bought the chainmail.

But...

[*]It's a significant effort. Out of the fixed amount of time that I can afford to spend on RPGs, this directly takes away time that might otherwise have gone into, say, designing a glorious introduction.
[*]It is risky. Doing this means that you drop an untested system by an amateur designer into the game. Maybe all is well, maybe it will collapse the game.
[*]It is often unreasonably difficult. I would certainly not enjoy doing the mirror magic in GURPS.
[*]Everybody who goes through this process with game X will have to reinvent the same set of wheels to get this done.[/list:u]So, I quite agree with you that it would really unreasonable to expect a universal system to cover everything without additional effort on my part. But, I'll add to that that is nearly as unreasonable for the system designer not to expect me to do such adaptations (why else tout yourself as "universal") Therefore as a "quality of implementation" issue I would like to see system support for adaptation.

In particular, that would mean the game addressing the points above by providing at least hints and tips and preferably meta-mechanics.

Given that the big boys have not done so, a sub-species of this question would be "is it possible to attach such support to an existing game?"

I think my annoyance stems primarily from the final bullet above. Anytime you have a bunch of people reinventing the same wheels, you have a situation that would be better addressed by pulling out those common aspects and solving them once and for all.

Am I being any clearer?
SR
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[clehrich]

My own take on this depends quite a bit on whether we're talking about Nar or Sim or Gam design.

With Nar design, I don't see why something akin to Vincent's "How to design a town" in DitV couldn't be constructed in a relatively freeform way to handle a wide range of potential fantasy settings.  Then you'd have a Nar system akin to his, and you construct setting situations that fit well.  It may not have been done much, but DitV is proof-positive that it could be done.

With Sim, however, I think it's a very different beast.  I think that a really coherent Sim design has to incorporate the setting from soup to nuts, which means that a piecemeal universal construction method isn't really going to work.  It'll be sort of like those Doom skins, where you transform the buildings and the monsters to look different, but it's the same game inside.  (I realize the Doom parallel dates me, but there you go.)

Gam I still don't understand well, but it does seem to me potentially possible to generate a universal method that would produce the same Gamist game with different situations and challenges dependent on setting.

As always, Sim is the odd man out on this one, I think.

Is this topic-drift?  I'm still not exactly clear on what the question is here.

[Tomas HVM]

Interesting!

Note on Donaldson: "The chronicles of Thomas Covenant" would be interesting to play. It's too good to be classified as traditional fantasy.

Note on original fantasy: William Horwood; "Duncton chronicles". Superb fantasy with moles in all major roles! Love and war! Loyalty and betrayal! Magic! And to top it off; the main character (mole) is crippled! I'd love to see a serious RPG-work on Horwoods books!

[neelk]

With Sim, however, I think it's a very different beast.  I think that a really coherent Sim design has to incorporate the setting from soup to nuts, which means that a piecemeal universal construction method isn't really going to work.  It'll be sort of like those Doom skins, where you transform the buildings and the monsters to look different, but it's the same game inside.  (I realize the Doom parallel dates me, but there you go.)

I disagree -- the way i do sim games is to take as much of the setting out of the mechanics as possible. The structure of what causes what is generally pretty intricate and hard to represent mechanically, and so I find it works better to not try to do that at all -- I just leave the important stuff as English rather than die-rolling.

Jared Sorenson's octaNe was a real revelation for me, becuase its rules manage narration rights rather than deciding what happens. I had thought about this many times before, but had never found the right expression until I saw it. That gave me the understanding I needed to realize that the ideal game for sim-style play (for me) is Heroquest, which I really like. Its mechanics answer three questions -- 1) "What ratings do abilities have?", 2) "What is the mechanical (not descriptive) result of winning a contest?", and 3) "How much of a mechanical bonus can another ability give?"

This is all the mechanical support I need from the game system. The plain-English understanding of the setting is what lets me decide whether an ability is appropriate or not, and whether knowing one skill can help at using another, and so on. That's the real meat of the setting, and it stays in the form that's easiest to write and easiest for the players to read.

[clehrich]

With Sim, however, I think it's a very different beast.  I think that a really coherent Sim design has to incorporate the setting from soup to nuts, which means that a piecemeal universal construction method isn't really going to work.  It'll be sort of like those Doom skins, where you transform the buildings and the monsters to look different, but it's the same game inside.  (I realize the Doom parallel dates me, but there you go.)

I disagree -- the way i do sim games is to take as much of the setting out of the mechanics as possible. The structure of what causes what is generally pretty intricate and hard to represent mechanically, and so I find it works better to not try to do that at all -- I just leave the important stuff as English rather than die-rolling.

Let me give an example, assuming we're still on-topic.  If we're not, Rob, stop us, OK?

Suppose I have a fantasy world in which magic spell-casting is possible.  Now the mechanics I use to render this will quite likely incorporate much of how that spell-casting actually works.  For example, if spell-casting is a matter of manipulating a series of established types of force or structures of the world, say by constructing little sentences as in Ars Magica (rego corporem, etc.), then that tells my players a good deal about how magic works in the game-world.  It's not a one-to-one correspondence, of course, since presumably ArsMagica magi do not think of their magic as simply making up little sentences and then looking at a spell list, but the parallel is there.

Now if I just construct a "generic" magic system which has a bunch of spells listed, and I say, "Well, the magi think about magic in terms of these different structures of the universe, but that doesn't matter because here's a spell list," there is a mismatch.  In my opinion, AD&D has this problem, though I don't know what the designers intended.

What happens is that the players necessarily think about things like magic in the mechanical terms they themselves use.  If those terms are utterly at odds with or just wildly different from how the characters think, there's going to be a difficulty in sustaining the Dream.

I think this has long been a serious problem in Sim design, the lack of recognition of this necessary analogy between how players think and how their characters think, which supports their continuation and extension of the Dream.  If you drop GURPS Magic into a game where the game-world magic doesn't run that way at all, you're asking the players to pretend they don't know about the mechanics.  But sustaining the Dream is hard enough without this.

So I tend to think that coherent Sim design must incorporate the nature of the setting into the mechanics.  Do you see?  The upshot is that the universal-type system questions that Rob is grappling with will be more difficult to establish in Sim than in Nar or Gam.

[neelk]

I think this has long been a serious problem in Sim design, the lack of recognition of this necessary analogy between how players think and how their characters think, which supports their continuation and extension of the Dream.  If you drop GURPS Magic into a game where the game-world magic doesn't run that way at all, you're asking the players to pretend they don't know about the mechanics.  But sustaining the Dream is hard enough without this.

So I tend to think that coherent Sim design must incorporate the nature of the setting into the mechanics.  Do you see?  The upshot is that the universal-type system questions that Rob is grappling with will be more difficult to establish in Sim than in Nar or Gam.

I see what you mean, but I don't agree! I think trying to establish a direct correspondence between what happens with the mechanics and what happens in the game world is the obvious, natural way to proceed. My own experience has been precisely the opposite, that people spend far, far too much effort trying to model the structure of the setting in the mechanics.  Even very simple causal structures can require very complex mechanics. Worse, once you set up two "authorities" about how things happen -- the English prose description and the game mechanics -- you set yourself up for endless aggravation  every time there's an inconsistency between the two. (And there will be; bet your life on it.) It can be made to work with a sufficiently Herculean effort, but I know maybe four people who would do that much work, and I'm not one of them, since I switch games too frequently.

I think that it's a much better idea to write down how things work once, in English, and to use those words as the rules. You can see how I approach this with my HQ conversion of Mage, in the Heroquest forum. I think I was able to express some very tricky ideas in a very direct and natural way. (Mage was the game where I really learned how to play in a sim style, because I fell in love with the idea of treating the universe as a giant game of Nomic.)

[If we're not on-topic, we should break to another thread, because this is a topic that fascinates me!]

[M. J. Young]

I think this has long been a serious problem in Sim design, the lack of recognition of this necessary analogy between how players think and how their characters think, which supports their continuation and extension of the Dream.  If you drop GURPS Magic into a game where the game-world magic doesn't run that way at all, you're asking the players to pretend they don't know about the mechanics.  But sustaining the Dream is hard enough without this.

So I tend to think that coherent Sim design must incorporate the nature of the setting into the mechanics.  Do you see?  The upshot is that the universal-type system questions that Rob is grappling with will be more difficult to establish in Sim than in Nar or Gam.

I think we actually managed to overcome this in Multiverser's design; but the ways in which its done are probably off topic for this thread, so I'll leave it at that for the moment.

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

you set yourself up for endless aggravation  every time there's an inconsistency between the two. (And there will be; bet your life on it.)

Mechanics win.  

I don't find your position here convincing at present - you can say that you express things in English, but HW is unusually well adapted to use English as a mechanism.  So I'm not sure there is much of a difference between expressing things in mechanics and expressing things in english/HW mechanics.

If there is a discrepancy between the intent and the result, then the model is broken.  It is not "aggravation", IMO, if people point out that the mechanics produce certain results that are not addressed by the rules.

I also cannot see why thre is any expectation that mechanics and text are hard to reconcile.  Most mechanical systems are very small compared to many algorithms and not very complicated.

I agree with Chris, IMO the setting must be mechanically represented in Sim, and the more strongly the better.  I think both HW and Mage are bad choices from which to explore this argument becuase they have complicated relationships with their settings; in fact I wonder if in these two cases the whole game system might not be seen as an expression of the setting.

Hmm, in fact in both these games, the mechanics are arguably more real than the content of the world.  The rules that govern how Sleepers reinforce reality are fixed, but the reality they reinforce is not.

[Rob Carriere]

Chris, Neel,
You are most definitely NOT off-topic as far as I'm concerned!

I agree with the thesis that the problem can be solved by taking the issue out of the "rules" part of the System and dumping it into the "prose description" part. However, that is, in a to me very important way, sweeping the problem under the rug rather than solving it. The reason the prose description trick works is that we are using the collective opinions of the players as a resolution engine. In such a situation, the most the rules do is to establish priorities between these resolution engines (the "narration rights"). Works fine, except it's too close to freeform for me.

I have run a three-year game freeform in the past, capitalizing on exactly the advantages that Neel describes. While that worked quite well, it was too much work in that every silly dubious issue becomes a decision and one open to debate. As a concrete example, if character A fires a spell and character B fires a counterspell, I want the rules to contribute more to the decision process than "well, uhhh, you decide."

Moreover, even dumping the problem into the players' heads doesn't always solve it. When I pull a guy out of one of Donaldson's magic mirrors, I (or whoever has narrative control at the moment) need to stat him. Like, right now. Yes, I'm aware of the trick of partially speccing a character, but you're still bringing the game to a grinding halt at what should be a dramatic moment.



Neel,
I just looked at your Mage in HQ writeup. To me, that's superior to straight Mage, I really like the looks of it.  However, it very clearly isn't straight Mage, and anybody coming to the table expecting Mage would have a legitimate right to be upset. In conclusion, I would argue that your write-up shows that you can describe cool settings in HQ, but it isn't evidence that you can successfully adapt an a priori setting to HQ, which was the proposed task.

Additionally, I think that your write-up still leaves a vast amount of space to judgement calls, which is precisely what I want to minimize.


Chris,
I think you pretty much nailed the issue I was struggling to articulate. Thanks.  I get the Doom parallel, so I guess I'm at least as dated as you are.  Wanna try for Pong? :-)

I think that any solution to the Sim-style design will have to do something about the soup-to-nuts issue, or the amount of work becomes untenable. As far as I can see that means that either,
- you take the whole issue out of the rules part of the system and accept the bad things that come with that decision as par for the course, or
- you accept a solution that is mostly generic with a few key custom elements (for example, GURPS with a custom magic system), or
- you find another angle to look at the problem that gives you decision power without erecting the entire world in the rules. (If I had an example here, I wouldn't have started the threat :-)

The third solution would be a magic bullet, but even the second one is problematic. Designing (e.g.) a magic system that will fit into GURPS, do what you want it to and not ruin the rest of the system is a very non-trivial task. It would be very helpful if there were guidelines, or, even better, supportive structures for doing such things.

SR
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