For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

[Doctor Xero]

Now, I can certainly appreciate that GM's (and possibly players) need to be able to use their own imaginations and creativity to create their own critters and magical powers.  But, I'm not personally interested in a system that requires it.

So, I would appreciate a little clarification from Doctor Xero as to what kind of system is he is looking for with this thread.

John, my initial goals for this were threefold.

First, I wanted to explore the idea about re-creating the feel of folklore with one's own subcreation -- more like The Professor's re-creating the feel of epic mythology with his own subcreation of Middle Earth and its history and inhabitants.

Second, I simply enjoy discussions about folklore.  ^_^

Third and least, I was frankly curious about what the various posters of The Forge would write because I often find their comments set off inspiration in my own work.

The lack of authentic folklore in systems such as D-&-D and AD-&-D (I'm not putting down D-&-D as a wonderful pioneering gaming system, simply noting that authenticity in folklore has never been a major concern!) has made me skeptical about teaching folklore through a gaming system.  Your own system seems to do that better than I would have expected possible, to be honest, but I hadn't seen it at the time I began this thread and so it wasn't a factor in my starting this topic.

More importantly, I genuinely believe that teaching the feel of folklore is far more important than teaching the facts of folklore.  To use a common example in the world of teaching, asking my students to recite the tale of Theseus or the Chinese variant of Cinderella only imbues them with data and only for those stories-- but helping them develop an appreciation for the mythic consciousness and the sense of magic which underlies these tales will help them enjoy (and perhaps examine) folklore from that point forward for the rest of their lives.  You might be surprised by how many high school and college teachers ruin folklore and mythology because they reduce it to memorization exercises and institutionalized faux awe.  I see us as working against that.

Doctor Xero

[clehrich]

More importantly, I genuinely believe that teaching the feel of folklore is far more important than teaching the facts of folklore.  To use a common example in the world of teaching, asking my students to recite the tale of Theseus or the Chinese variant of Cinderella only imbues them with data and only for those stories-- but helping them develop an appreciation for the mythic consciousness and the sense of magic which underlies these tales will help them enjoy (and perhaps examine) folklore from that point forward for the rest of their lives.  You might be surprised by how many high school and college teachers ruin folklore and mythology because they reduce it to memorization exercises and institutionalized faux awe.  I see us as working against that.

So are you seeking a way to construct a system that produces folkloric material, i.e. that formalizes a kind of mythic process?  I'd have thought this was far too rooted in the specifics of a particular culture to be generalizable at a game level and still produce actual myth-like product.  I mean, you could I suppose create a game that produces mythic structures akin to those discerned by structuralist myth-analysis, or Eliadean morphology, or whatever, but without huge amounts of concrete cultural data to slot into the various bits and pieces, I'm not clear on how this would produce anything other than a very abstract intellectual exercise.  Fun though it might be....

Chris Lehrich

[Doctor Xero]

So are you seeking a way to construct a system that produces folkloric material, i.e. that formalizes a kind of mythic process?  I'd have thought this was far too rooted in the specifics of a particular culture to be generalizable at a game level and still produce actual myth-like product.

No, I'm seeking to reproduce the mythic consciousness which underlies the human interest in telling folktales and suspending disbelief in folklore (faerie stories, mythology, legends, etc.).  That consciousness is not rooted in the specifics of any particular culture but appears to be universal to human nature (as best as empirical studies can determine since such a thing is not subject to the scientific experimentation method) -- and the specifics of the particular culture determine the manifestation of the mythic consciousness.

Yes, for an actual  particular game, I'd need to specify the culture for the mythic consciousness to manifest.  However, teaching people about specific cultures is far easier to accomplish in this post-Enlightenment science-is-god modern society than it is to help people to understand on both an intellectual and an intuitive level mythic consciousness.  Thus, I turn to this forum to look into means for accomplishing the more difficult task of inducing mythic consciousness in players.  I can handle the data/lore of cultural specificity myself.

Doctor Xero

[Mike Holmes]

shamanic fetish-binding isn't an imposition of the shaman's authority upon the bound spirit

I am not familiar with the game in question, but I think that in real world religion this varies some from faith practice to faith practice.

No doubt, but consider that the game was written by Greg Stafford, a practicing Shaman. So I think that he's got a good grasp on what's potentially realistic here.

In general, Xero, it's considered common courtesy on these fora to assume that people know what they're talking about. Indeed a lot of people here do have long lists of accreditations to their name. But that's not considered neccessary to gain respect - all one need do is to converse consistently and respectfully themselves to gain that respect (better be, I don't have a single degree to my name). :-)

Mike

[clehrich]

I'm seeking to reproduce the mythic consciousness which underlies the human interest in telling folktales and suspending disbelief in folklore (faerie stories, mythology, legends, etc.).  That consciousness is not rooted in the specifics of any particular culture but appears to be universal to human nature (as best as empirical studies can determine since such a thing is not subject to the scientific experimentation method) -- and the specifics of the particular culture determine the manifestation of the mythic consciousness.

This is more or less what I meant about formalizing, i.e. constructing a system to produce, the mythic process.  The scholarly endeavor of discerning generalizable underlying principles in myth seems to have come grindingly to a halt, ever since Levi-Strauss pretty much proved (whatever else he did or did not prove) that these structures, if they exist at all, are so fantastically complex that in abstraction they are insanely difficult to talk about intelligently.  This is why his Mythologiques is so damn hard to read: he actually can keep all that abstraction in his head, while whipping through hundreds of intertwined myths, but few of his readers can do so equally well.

What I'm saying is that if you more or less constructed a gaming system that would actually produce even the clearly insufficient abstract structures that Levi-Strauss finds (in his 4-volume sketch introduction, which he never tried to go beyond), you'd sort of have to go one step beyond him in abstraction, making a model that's not only analytic but synthetic.  And without requiring all your players to read a huge amount of that sort of analysis, I just don't see how this is going to work.

I mean, I can sort of see some wacko grad students who've read far too much Structuralism sitting around and generating myths backwards, then playing the swap-the-structure game (inversion, transposition, etc.) -- in fact, I've done this myself in odd moments, but I'm a nut -- but I'm just not getting how this could be made into a game with an audience of more than about ten.  And those ten would probably do better to read Mythologiques and The Savage Mind and go make it up themselves -- the rules are all there, after all.

So what I'm saying is that without a predetermined set of units and transformational rules, drastically limited (probably by culture-area), I don't see how you're going to reproduce mythic consciousness.  I don't mean to be negative or anything, but you're talking about a game that will get people to do something that practiced professionals in living mythic cultures are much lauded for precisely because it's so damn hard.

Chris Lehrich

[neelk]

So what I'm saying is that without a predetermined set of units and transformational rules, drastically limited (probably by culture-area), I don't see how you're going to reproduce mythic consciousness.  I don't mean to be negative or anything, but you're talking about a game that will get people to do something that practiced professionals in living mythic cultures are much lauded for precisely because it's so damn hard.

I don't agree, because in an rpg you have one fewer constaint -- real myths need to be universal, in the sense that they hit a majority of the people of a culture right in the gut. A myth invented as part of an rpg doesn't have to be: it just has to have psychological force for the people at the gaming table, and no one else. This means that you can "make myth" in a game if you can create a social environment in which the players can bring out the weird imagery that has intense personal resonance in their personal mindspaces.

One of the most successful character creation episodes I have ever had was for a game called End of the Line, in which each PC was an archetypal figure from a now-destroyed world, making a last stand on Earth against the oncoming entity that destroyed their homeworlds. I told the players, specifically, that they didn't have to pick a character that was "mythic" in some universal sense: I wanted characters that hit their own myths. I didn't expect characters of the intensity and quality I got -- they were AMAZING -- and I've spent a lot of time thinking about why this worked so well.

First, I told the players that their own imagery was ideal, and then supported that in the setting: they were the archetypes of a world, and even if it wasn't "mythic" here in the modern US, we could claim it was mythic for that world. Furthermore, I was very clear that the PCs could be creepy and didn't have to  be "heroes", so there was no sense in which uncomfortable imagery could be attacked as "wrong for the game". Next, the premise of the game was intensely romantic and extreme, so that intense emotional states weren't only permissible, they were desirable. Finally, I was open about the fact that the mechanics would be invented to support the players' vision, rather than desiging the PCs from the mechanics. So I accidentally created an environment in which weird, scary, intense characters were the best possible PCs, and unsurprisingly the players opened up. For literally years afterwards, a topic of random gaming chat was other possible characters for that game, and I've seen that as a sign that something went right there, which I should try to replicate elsewhere.

[Doctor Xero]

What I'm saying is that if you more or less constructed a gaming system that would actually produce even the clearly insufficient abstract structures

You misunderstand me.

My goal is to evoke mythic consciousness from them.  This requires none of the levels of abstraction from them that you mention (although it helps me if I know them myself).  If anything, such levels of abstraction would get in the way.

People do not need to know complex theories of art before a work of art can evoke feelings from them.  In the same way, they do not need to know complex folklore theories such as those you mention in order for a game to evoke from them that feeling experts label 'mythic consciousness' -- they don't even need to know what that feeling is labeled.

Doctor Xero

[contracycle]

No doubt, but consider that the game was written by Greg Stafford, a practicing Shaman.

... allegedly.  After all, for a few clicks on the web you can get yourself ordained as a priest.

[Doctor Xero]

Thank you everyone for the insights you've shared with me from your various expertises and experiences.  I suspect this thread has run its course.  Anyone want it to continue or have final thoughts to contribute?

Doctor Xero