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Topic: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic
Started by: Doctor Xero
Started on: 2/1/2004
Board: RPG Theory


On 2/1/2004 at 12:30am, Doctor Xero wrote:
For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

split from Mysterious Magic http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9404

I apologize for such a long thread, but I'm interested in efforts to apply a more folkloric
form of magic to RPGs.

However, first a quick aside about definitions:
one of my university degrees is in folklore, so I'll show you the official definitive efinitions of
myth and mythology and magic and such -- there aren't any! General notional definitions,
yes, but exacting definitions, no. There have even been numerous articles and book
chapters discussing the elusive nature of myth and fable and fairy tale et al. (A similar
inexactness occurs in defining fantasy as a genre or meta-genre.)

For that reason, a lot of folklorists just lump it all together under the umbrella term 'Folklore',
and when we have to differentiate myth from magic from fairytale, we present our
favored definitions as well.

I hope knowing the above helps.

Personally, I think we're overlooking a few elements of folklore in our discussions about
locating 'the mythic' and 'magical realism' in games.

I've really enjoyed all the threads thus far. These are simply further ideas I would enjoy
discussion on.

1)
First is the suspension of disbelief. The original audiences for the stories gathered by the
Brothers Grimm and for the tales penned by Perrault and Anderson no more believed that
cats can speak than do modern Americans believe that action heroes can outrun explosions.
They simply accepted it for the sake of the story. It's as Harlequin wrote in the Mysterious
Magic thread: "Usually, in these, there's no 'mage' type at all; magic is just there, and
everybody interacts with it, whether that be via objects, places, or what have you."

With gamers it's a little more difficult because gamers are not a passive audience but
interacting with the story, and they need some sense of their campaign world. Engaging
suspension of disbelief from the players requires that they know ahead of time the parameters
of the situation -- just as people unfamiliar with the traditions of superhero comic books
often balk at the physics and biology of superhero RPGs.

*)
The second, third, and fourth concerns deal with the interactive nature of the fairytale or
mythic reality. Fairytales and myths involve a world which is alive, not dead (they live
on Mother Earth not on the third rock from the sun) and which is organically interactive not
mechanistically reactive. Many magic-based game systems still use the assumptions of a
lifeless reactive reality as default assumptions, mechanistically listing the exceptions and
meticulously quantifying magic as merely a means for evoking reactions from this dead
reality rather than as a method of interacting with it. Instead, what players need to know
for such a mythical/magical game is that the gameworld itself is alive and active and
that sometimes things occur sympathetically rather than causally.

2)
Second is that in many tales, monsters and magical devices are metaphors for something
else, to make the hidden truths more obvious and to deal with terrifying ideas one step
removed. Jack Zipes writes that fairy tales have been used as "a means to conquer the
terrors of mankind through metaphor." Iona and Peter Opie have noted that the purpose
of enchantment is not to improve someone but to make reality more obvious -- wishes
seldom work out in folklore, and fairy godmothers are there to make a person face the
truth about herself or his situation, not to provide an easy escape. (I assume the
Campbellian aspect is already known to everyone these days.)

For example, in various versions of The Beauty and The Beast, the prince is made a beast
so that his cruel inner self is obvious, and when his inner self is changed, it requires that
an outsider recognize his new inner kindness despite his beastial appearance before the
enchantment is broken. His beastial appearance also works as a metaphor for the sexual
threat of the animalistic side. In various older versions of Cinderella, Cinderella is a
nobleman's daughter (or son in many versions!) forced to pretend to be a filthy servant, and
her magic helper's enchantments only make her inner nobility obvious -- they change nothing
about her. In older versions, the Prince must fall in love with her while she's filthy before
he is worthy of seeing her true nobility unveiled. One reason she (or he) is covered with
ashes and cinders in so many forms of the tale is that ash and cinder have been European
symbols of loss and mourning for centuries, and in many older tales Cinderella first lived
among the ashes because she couldn't stop mourning the physical death of her mother and
the subsequent emotional death of her father.

For gaming, this means that the campaign must have a philosophical or spiritual grounding.
The problem is that this usually results in trite, uninspired moralism.

One solution is to have the metaphors be specific to each character. Perhaps if each
player were to list a fear, a hope, and a confusion for each character, the game master
could create opponents which work as subtle metaphors for each fear, each hope, each
confusion. The philosophical or spiritual grounding needs to come from the world interacting
with the player characters. This helps avoid trite philosophical and spiritual generalizations.

Another solution is to ensure that all transformations and enchantments result specifically
from roleplay and reflect the character's personality. Coldhearted princes become frogs;
daydreaming princesses fall into long sleeps.

Magical devices also function as metaphors, often enriching good people and harming
evil people as with the story about the salt mill and its misuse by the evil neighbor (the
same with the golden-egg laying goose as metaphor for the misuse of natural resources).
As neelk wrote in the Mysterious Magic thread: "I think the causal logic of a magical tool
reflects moral, social, and psychological concerns in a way that a mechanical tool doesn't."

3)
Third is that folklore magic works in a world where the laws of reality respond to human
intensity, whether intense emotions or an intense purity of character (as when unicorns
respond to the purity of virgins). As neelk wrote in the Mysterious Magic thread: "When
people in engage in magical thinking, they believe that their beliefs have a causal impact
on the world -- a voodoo doll works because you hate the victim, whereas a gun can
go off accidentally."

This answers gobi's desire from the Mysterious Magic thread:
"I want to express this sort of magical realism in a more tribal/mythic context for
Gears & Spears. I want it to be possible for a coyote to suddenly speak a few words of
wisdom and a robot can cry so terribly that he forms a lake in the shape of his lost love."

In a world where the laws of reality respond to intensity, the scientific laws which state
that a robot could not produce enough liquid to form a lake in a certain shape are
bypassed. Spontaneous generation may even populate that lake with fish and game.
The fairytale world is not coldly reactive -- the lake may even result from the earth's
weeping in sympathy with the robot.

A game striving for this needs to encourage game-masters to keep track of the more
intense behaviors of their player characters.

4)
Fourth, in certain types of folklore, the magic is the way the divine communicates with
mortals. This happens frequently in Arthurian tales, with knights constantly encountering
magical events only to run into forest hermits who can explain to them the hidden meaning
behind their magical encounters. It's like Harlequin wrote in the Mysterious Magic thread:
"If there's any 'mage' or 'wiseman' archetype it's invariably the counselor/guide figure,
not appropriate as a PC at all."

I've really enjoyed all the threads thus far. These are simply further ideas I would enjoy
discussing.

Doctor Xero

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On 2/1/2004 at 1:44am, clehrich wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

I agree with all your main points, Dr. Xero. At the same time, I think there are a few somewhat dangerous assertions. Given that the point here is to talk about all this in the RPG context, I'll restrict my remarks to those areas; the good doctor and I can go argue about other parts of this somewhere els!

1. I suggest that one needs to go further in avoiding "trite moralism". In fact, much of the time you need to throw away conventional morality entirely. Some types of folkloric tales do indeed make such moral points, or adhere to in-culture moral standards, but this is often the effect of a deliberate editor (e.g. the Grimms) rather than some sort of "natural" cultural effect. Chapter 1 of Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked makes the point well, in that the hero of a Bororo myth rapes his mother but is never punished; indeed, he remains the hero throughout. While conventional morality within the culture may be expressed overtly or "obviously", this isn't necessarily the case. Consequently I would recommend that you throw away morality tales from the start, if you want a "mythic" or whatever feel in your RPG. One of the things, in fact, that will make it seem most like mythic material is for morality to seem strangely absent. This doesn't mean celebrating immoral behavior; it means discarding any moral structure whatever, as though it were obvious that such questions simply don't matter a whit.

2. Resist the temptation to see myth or folktales as explanations of anything. This is certainly often true in some fashion, but almost anything you are likely to think of off the cuff as "explanation" will drive your game into a type of scientism that will not work well. If you have read extensively in the debates about explanation and causal logic and such, go for it; otherwise, again, just reject the "explanation" thing from the start.

3. When setting up monsters, devices, people, etc. as "metaphors for something else," try to avoid a 1:1 relationship. Usually it's facile to read the Beast as a representation of bestial nature; it's usually more complex, as in the interrelationship of beast and man within the one figure represents a similar parallel in male nature, as it plays out in the further relationship.... and so forth. It's the relations that matter, not the objects.¹

3a. As a corollary, consider trying to develop metaphorical meanings for relationships rather than characters or objects. Thus this character's relationship to that character is a thing, perhaps further symbolized by a more physical object. Now if we see this all as a concrete thing, what does it represent? Of what is it a metaphor?

Again, I agree with everything Dr. Xero suggests here, but I'm afraid that without his background reading the results will be disappointingly mundane.

Chris Lehrich

1. Some may recognize this as a principle of structural myth-analysis, which is indeed where I got it. But while Structuralism may be dead as a method, that's because we have to go beyond it, not that it was wrong in the first place. Until RPG manipulation of mythic/folkloric concepts begins to touch on the level of sophistication that the Structuralists achieved, whatever their flaws, we're not ready to transcend them.

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On 2/1/2004 at 2:00am, Doctor Xero wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

I agree about throwing away conventional moralism, but that is why I made note
of an underlying philosophical or spiritual grounding rather than a moral grounding.

Remember, one philosophical ideal often reflected in much folklore is that bad things
happen to good people, period -- the spiritual perspective emphasizes not a divine justice
behind bad things but a perspective which acknowledges and accepts the general
unfairness of much of life. It is not the hero who bemoans the unfairness of his/her
life but the hero who dusts the ashes off her rags, accepts the unfairness of his poverty,
or otherwise copes with his bad circumstances and moves on who succeeds. In much
European folklore, virtue is linked to the ability to cope with life's unfairness without
losing hope.

I'd also purposely excluded folktales which existed only for the sake of humor and
burlesque (many of which embarrassed the Brothers Grimm) since they didn't seem
relevant to RPGs.

I suspect that the fairytales and myths and fantasies we still read today are those which
carry a sort of "yeah, that's it!" on an unconscious or psychological level or which give
us tools to express and personalize our inner feelings, fears, needs, ethical concerns,
etc.

I was probably too vague about metaphoric aspects of folklore since I'm studying that
and since I'd rather read what other people have to say or why they consider my
thoughts nonsense than go on about it overmuch myself.

Doctor Xero

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On 2/1/2004 at 2:07am, Shreyas Sampat wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

I think one essential component of the fairytale feel is to abandon the notion of "magic"; when an out-of-the-ordinary thing happens in a fairytale, it is not because someone has supernatural capabilities, or because someone manipulated mystical tools in specific ways; it happens in an unnatural way because it is more expressive and meaningful for it to happen that way than it would be to happen mundanely.

That could just be the fajitas talking, though.

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On 2/1/2004 at 2:12am, Christopher Kubasik wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Hi all,

I don't know if we've got any Gloranthians reading this thread, but isn't HeroQuest's default setting of mythological Glorantha pretty much in line with the descriptions above? We've got

objects and relationships bound by emotional ties;

magic that simply is;

a frequenlty amoral universe;

a universe unencumbered by the laws of physics;

main characters meeting and dealing with mystical events larger than themselves;

the intensity of the characters emotions being a driving force of magic and power;

a world that is MYTH, so that anything can happen, really, to reshape reality as it corresponds to the drive, needs, ambitions and passions of the people;

and so, in this manner, the "mundane" world is shaped by the magic beyond in the "other" world.

I am curious about this. Am I a) misreading what Glorantha is designed to be?; b) reading it correctly, but nobody is really playing it this way?; missing an issue of Color (people want deep Germanic forests and talking foxes, and Glorantha doesn't deliver); d) Glorantha is close, but with all its emphasis on different "cultures" and trying to build a "logical" version of mytholigical world, it kind of misses the boat we're trying to catch here?; e) (d) is correct, but with just the slightest tweaking, (by relaxing the decades old Sim agenda still running through the setting), Glorantha would work just find.

I look forward to any replies.

(Also, I think might tie to the Hesitation/Glorantha thread, but I'm not sure. For this reason, maybe this post should be bounced down the HeroQuest board with a link to this thread.)

Thanks,
Christopher

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On 2/1/2004 at 5:10am, AnyaTheBlue wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Not that I'm exactly a card-carrying Gloranthophile or anything, but I do have an extensive collection, so I'll take a stab at it.

Yes. Glorantha (and HeroQuest) is the first thing I thought of while reading Dr. Xero's post.

The second thing I thought of was Pendragon.

The third thing that occured to me was that you could model this fairly well with something akin to some (unholy?) combination of Pendragon traits, The Riddle of Steel Spiritual Attributes, and some notion of 'convincing' or 'influencing' the natural world. Treat casting a spell like a social interaction, where you attempt to convince the Active World (Gaeia, frex) to do as you want, and your ability to be convincing would be some combination of "Pure of Heart" (traits), desire and motivation (spiritual attributes), and knowledge of the Arcane in some form (ie, wizards or fey who are just magical).

The fourth thing I thought about was the metaphorical angle. I like this. Slice the major campaign and/or scenario NPCs, particularly those who USE magic and assign them some metaphorical role or meaning. This could be as generic as 'evil', or it could be more specific, like 'lust', or 'greed', or even 'honor' and 'love'. Then, work out metaphorical relationships between these things and the characters, perhaps using something akin to the Relationship Maps from Sorcerer. Oh, I would include magic items and spells as metaphorical entities in their own right, and in fact would treat them as NPCs, to the extent that I could. A magic sword, or a magic spell, or whatever, would be, in some sense, an active and alive *thing*, with an agenda of some sort. Again, Sorcerer provides *a* way of approaching this, although I'm not sure I'd make it quite that dark.

Anyway, not very well formed, but I definitely like it. I think it would mesh with TRoS mechanics fantastically.

I'm very interested to see where this thread ends up...

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On 2/1/2004 at 6:05am, clehrich wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

AnyaTheBlue wrote: The fourth thing I thought about was the metaphorical angle. I like this. Slice the major campaign and/or scenario NPCs, particularly those who USE magic and assign them some metaphorical role or meaning. This could be as generic as 'evil', or it could be more specific, like 'lust', or 'greed', or even 'honor' and 'love'. Then, work out metaphorical relationships between these things and the characters, perhaps using something akin to the Relationship Maps from Sorcerer.
I like this, although I'm still not comfortable with the mostly ethical angle. Perhaps if you added social factors, such as marriage, class, relatives, etc.? The other thing would be to choose really vague parallels, not literal or obvious ones. So for example, instead of having Thror's relation to the Diamond be Greed, have it be Marriage. Then you're perpetually trying to make sense of the connection, and in the process adding scads of other connections.

It might be fun to have a stack of cards for these thematic elements, and then draw randomly every time you decide that a new connection has been formulated. I suppose these could be called mythemes....
Oh, I would include magic items and spells as metaphorical entities in their own right, and in fact would treat them as NPCs, to the extent that I could. A magic sword, or a magic spell, or whatever, would be, in some sense, an active and alive *thing*, with an agenda of some sort.
Most definitely. I see no reason whatever, in fact, to distinguish between living things and others; after all, half the time the rocks end up talking.
I'm very interested to see where this thread ends up...
Me too.

Chris Lehrich

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On 2/1/2004 at 6:23pm, Christopher Kubasik wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Dr. Xero,

Are you familiar with the ubiquitious HeroQuest and it's setting of Glorantha? I'd love to hear your comments about it.

Christopher

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On 2/3/2004 at 2:15pm, simon_hibbs wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Christopher Kubasik wrote: I am curious about this. Am I a) misreading what Glorantha is designed to be?;


No, I think you're spot on.

b) reading it correctly, but nobody is really playing it this way?;


Just because Glorantha contaions high powered mythic magic and heroes that change the face of the world doesn't mean all your games have to be about that. Glorantha also contains ordinary people that just get on with their lives. Nevertherless because Glorantha is build on mythic/folkloric foundations you see the efefcts of this everywhere you look. You can't realy avoid it because it's everywhere so even if you don't put in a huge effort to run a mythic game, mythic/folkloric influence is goign to be there anyway. It's then up to you how you deal with that.

missing an issue of Color (people want deep Germanic forests and talking foxes, and Glorantha doesn't deliver);


Well there are plenty of deep forests and talking animals in Glorantha, but I sense that I'm missing your point...

d) Glorantha is close, but with all its emphasis on different "cultures" and trying to build a "logical" version of mytholigical world, it kind of misses the boat we're trying to catch here?;


Perhaps in a way. Folklore doesn't necesserily have much in the way of cultural context. Ok for a tale involving princes and princesses you need to know what those are, but whether it's german, chinese or arabian, a folk tale generaly stands on it's own merits. Or an I talking horse puckey?

e) (d) is correct, but with just the slightest tweaking, (by relaxing the decades old Sim agenda still running through the setting), Glorantha would work just find.


Well I supoose that's what HeroQuest is all about.


Simon Hibbs

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On 2/3/2004 at 8:07pm, Doctor Xero wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

simon_hibbs wrote on Tue Feb 03, 2004 2:15 pm
> Folklore doesn't necesserily have much in the way of cultural context.
> Ok for a tale involving princes and princesses you need to know what
> those are, but whether it's german, chinese or arabian, a folk tale
> generaly stands on it's own merits.

Yes and no. Campbell and Propp and company were able to identify
universal tendencies in folklore and mythology, but really, what they found was
the skeleton of this genre (proving universal structure) -- the flesh of a tale,
its particular form and style and even aspects of its meaning, tie in to the
specific culture. When a folktale ceases to be relevant to a culture, it is
forgotten or revised until it becomes again a story to which they can relate.
That's why there are so many Cinderella tales yet each has its own regional
variant (the Chinese Cinderella focuses more on family loyalty, the German
Cinderella has revenge against the evil step-family, the later French Cinderella
converts her step-family with Christian forgiveness, etc.).

I think campaigns parallel this: house rules are ways each individual gaming
group edits and adapts the same gaming system to a group's specific interests
and needs.

clehrich wrote on Sun Feb 01, 2004 6:05 am
> The other thing would be to choose really vague parallels, not literal
> or obvious ones. So for example, instead of having Thror's relation
> to the Diamond be Greed, have it be Marriage. Then you're perpetually
> trying to make sense of the connection, and in the process adding
> scads of other connections.

A side comment: this reminds me of Hesse's glassbead game and Hipbone
Game's version of it http://home.earthlink.net/~hipbone/

One concern I would have with the metaphoric element of monsters and
magical devices in RPGs replicating folklore/myth is that it is too easy to
devolve from folklore/myth symbolism into trite allegory. One thing I would
do is attempt to figure out the metaphor personally and then ~hide~ ~it~
~from~ ~the~ ~players~! This would give that wonderful folklore sense that
there is something beneath the surface for those who want to look yet that
enjoyment of the tale is not dependent upon looking for that something more.
Knowing the relationship between The Beauty and The Beast and the fear of
male sexuality (only one of many aspects in that tale) may increase my
enjoyment of the story, but I can enjoy The Beauty and The Beast perfectly
well without knowing anything about its archetypal underpinnings -- knowing
them adds to my enjoyment but is not required. I think the same thing would
be true for underlying metaphors in monsters and magical devices.

Doctor Xero

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On 2/11/2004 at 6:12am, John Kirk wrote:
Organic Magic

I've been giving this topic a lot of thought in the past months. I've come to the conclusion, for RPG magic to have a "folklorish" feel, it needs to be more organic than current systems allow. You should be able to nurture it and you should be able to kill it. This is the kind of magic system I'm planning on developing for the next edition of Legendary Quest.

As a simple example, let's take an enchanted forest populated by elves, dryads, unicorns, and the like where the trees are continually blooming and the air is filled with the scent of nectar. In a classical RPG system, this condition would be produced by a powerful mage casting a spell (this is the case now in LQ). But, it now makes more sense to me that the enchantment is more of an ecology of magic rather than a simple (albeit potent) spell. I would envision a group of nature-conscious elves moving into an ordinary forest and, through long years of sweat and toil, slowly improving the health of the forest until the magic naturally inherent in the trees and fauna would begin to exert itself. So, the flowers would begin producing particularly potent pollens and the environment would evolve into a sort of "techno-color", pristine version of common forests. Over time, pillywiggens and other sprites would be attracted to the area. They would take up residence and lift the burden of tending the forest from the elves. In other words, the forest would begin maintaining itself. The elves, then, would be free to either enjoy the fruits of their labor and live blissfully in their idyllic woodland, or move on to repeat the process in some other mundane wood. If someone then came along with a can of insecticide and sprayed for pillywiggins, the only immediately obvious effect would be a bunch of dead sprites littering the ground. The long-term effect, though, would be the fading of the wood's enchantment. Without the sprites to maintain the "upkeep", the fauna would have to divert more and more of its resources to simple survival. Within a year or two, the forest would revert back to its original state.

In a magic system like this, there wouldn't really be any spells, just magic-like effects produced by living things. The more "magical" effects could actually be interpreted as the inherent powers of the spirits of those things when the physical form no longer burdens it. The specific effects would be nothing more than the natural abilities of any given species, taken up to and beyond what would be considered the "limits" of the thing's normal abilities. The nectar of flowers, for example, would be particularly nutritious. Honey produced from such nectar would provide remarkable health benefits to the consumer. Magic would exist everywhere, but it wouldn't be undirected or random. It would always have purpose. It may be sentient. It may even be insane.

A magic system set up in this fashion may or may not have mages, depending on the game designer's goals. If it did support mages (LQ does and will continue to do so), then the only distinction between one mage and another would be the kinds of spirits they know how to bind and control. Currently, there are many mage types in LQ, each of which deals with a different selection of spirits. Wizards, for example, gain levels in lores concerning various types of dragons. Spells based on these lores have effects similar to those produced by dragons. The logic is that they control dragon spirits and these spirits have the same powers as when they were living. Thus, a Wizard can cast a "Dragon's Breath: Flame" spell when he becomes powerful enough. But, this kind of system is still very mechanical. It has a slight flavor of folklore, because the various mage types are loosely tied to various spirit types, but it doesn't go far enough to satisfy my ultimate "organic magic" vision for the game.

I'm thinking in the next version of LQ, mages won't have spells. They will have specific spirits bound to them in some way. Those bound directly will be "familiars" while those bound to objects (magic items) will be "fetishes". Either way, a mage will direct the spirits and can produce spell-like effects, but a mage's power is all indirect. When a mage gains a new familiar or fetish, he gains a whole group of related effects. Thus, a magus gaining a naga fetish would gain some charming abilities along with control over rain and possibly lightning and thunder. If he put his naga spirit into dangerous situations, then it might actually get killed and he would suddenly lose the abilities he formerly possessed.

The main requirement of this kind of system, obviously, is a wide repertoire of creatures along with the "magical" abilities they naturally possess. I'm not really even sure how many creatures I've written up for LQ, but list is fairly extensive. I hope it will prove sufficient.

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On 2/11/2004 at 6:28am, clehrich wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

John,

Your image of folkloric magic is of course quite specific; it's not a generalizable view of all folklore. But that said, I think your inclination to construct lots of different kinds of critters may be going in the wrong direction.

In essence, I think that what you have to create -- and I'm not quite sure how you go about this -- is an aesthetic of how magic "feels" in the game-world. If magic is just a continuation of natural forces, such that (as in Tolkien) elves don't even really understand what mortals mean by "magic" in the first place, then what you have to instill in the players is a sense of how nature extends itself and can be extended.

I think that the best thing in your description was the complicated forest itself as an ecology. For me, this hits the nail on the head: you're constructing a world that has its own logic, and doesn't really require a lot of rules or mechanics to make it function. It just does. In the same way, our own world can be described biologically and all, but for most folks it's just the way it is, period. Then people interpret nature in terms of their own aesthetics and whatnot, and some people end up thinking of forests and so forth as a wonderful thing, and others think they're a nifty source of extra oil to support impoverished Halliburton executives.

What you're trying to create, I think, is a world in which the choices are just quite a bit different from those in our world. But if you simply detail it all out, you will provoke envelope-pushing. This is an extension of one of Mike's Rants, in which he points out that having an elaborate combat system provokes fighting. Similarly, did you ever notice that Ars Magica for example provokes people to push the edges of the system? I think the world you have in mind is one in which such envelope-pushing is emphatically not the point.

Again, I'm not sure how you should go about creating and instilling an aesthetic, but I doubt very much that lots of stats for beasties will help. Sorry to sound so negative, but I'm afraid that if you go in that direction you will get something radically other than what you want.

Chris Lehrich

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On 2/11/2004 at 9:33pm, Doctor Xero wrote:
Re: Organic Magic

John Kirk wrote: I would envision a group of nature-conscious elves moving into an
ordinary forest and, through long years of sweat and toil, slowly improving the health of the
forest until the magic naturally inherent in the trees and fauna would begin to exert itself.

John Kirk wrote: If someone then came along with a can of insecticide and sprayed for
pillywiggins, the only immediately obvious effect would be a bunch of dead sprites littering
the ground. The long-term effect, though, would be the fading of the wood's enchantment.
Without the sprites to maintain the "upkeep", the fauna would have to divert more and
more of its resources to simple survival. Within a year or two, the forest would revert back to its original state.


I think you're on the start of something good. May I push it a little further?

In Peter S. Beagle's magnificent novel (and film script) The Last Unicorn, he successfully
captures the folkloric feel of the magic of The Forest. The Unicorn in the story causes
eternal springtime in the forest ~simply~ ~by~ ~her~ ~presence~. She makes no
conscious effort to enchant (or disenchant) the forest. On some levels she seems no
more aware of the effect of her presence than you or I might be aware of the effects
our respiration has on nearby plants and insects. She does not evoke magic.

She IS magic.

Or, to use the more theoretical language of my original posting, she is (among many
things) a metaphor for springtime/life blooming/growth/youthful energy.

To anthropomorphize for an example: worker bees do not gather pollen from different
flowers specifically to cross-pollinate -- they gather pollen for the "pleasure" of creating
honey, and they are oblivious to the side effect of pollination and cross-pollination. In the
same way, in much folklore the nature spirits/fae/kami/elvenkind are oblivious to their
"ecological" functions of bringing about spring or autumn or fecundity or stormy weather --
these are side effects of actions they undertake for pleasure (not so much enlightened
self-interest as "flow" or self-actualization, to apply modern terms -- in some folklore,
sprites evoke blossoming from flowers in the same way that a lover evokes a sigh from
his/her sweetheart as an unintended byproduct of loving him/her).

To translate from the folklore mindset to the modern mechanistic science-is-god mindset,
the closest parallel to the function of a nature sprite could be a theoretical physics particle :
just as a photon is said to be the carrier particle for light and a graviton is said to be the
carrier particle for gravity, so a type of faerie creature might be said to be the "carrier
particle" for fertility or spring thaw or the force of falling to the ground (a dryad might be
the "carrier particle" for the tree's "biology", a river nymph the "carrier particle" for a river's
"hydrodynamics" and "marine ecology"). So the act of killing off all the sprites would be the
equivalent in modern day thought to "killing off" all the expressions/manifestations
of the laws of physics!

Some people have argued that, in modern folklore-based fantasy tales, the biggest
difference between faeriefolk and gods is that faeriefolk don't care about the "magical"
effects they have on ecology and the world and have no sense of duty to humanity as
a whole whereas gods are very aware of the "magical" effects they "bestow as blessings"
on ecology and the world and have a paternalistic relationship towards humanity as
a whole.

This might be brought into a folklore-based fantasy RPG through treating the magical
forces of a particular type of faerie creature NOT as its powers or magical talents but
instead as side effects of its presence, primarily outside its conscious awareness (not
uncontrollable, but something it would seldom notice enough to control). Therefore,
player-characters in the presence of a muse might become more inspired (bonuses to
creativity-based roles in the mechanics?), player-characters in the presence of a unicorn
might find themselves healing faster, and player-characters in the presence of a spectre
might find themselves slowly withering away even if the spectre has no interest in
harming them.

This is the reason why, in many folktales, the wise woman or wizard often knows more
about the functioning of a faerie creature than the creature does about itself! Faeries
simply live while humans instead orchestrate and manipulate . . .

Similarly, it is why in many folktales, only those who are half-faerie blood may cast
spells and are often more powerful than the full-blooded fae -- they have the innate
magicality of a faerie yet the human mentality which enables them to manipulate this
consciously.

A folklore-based fantasy RPG would probably work off very different assumptions than
RPGs based off the more familiar late medieval/early modern visions of magic as more
metaphysical proto-science and of faeriefolk as the class ex miscellania of the Great Chain
of Being or as simply a beautiful class of monsters to be conquered/killed off/annexed
(the AD-&-D model).

Or so it would seem to me.

Doctor Xero

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On 2/12/2004 at 7:46am, John Kirk wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Doctor Xero wrote: In Peter S. Beagle's magnificent novel (and film script) The Last Unicorn, he successfully captures the folkloric feel of the magic of The Forest. The Unicorn in the story causes eternal springtime in the forest ~simply~ ~by~ ~her~ ~presence~.


I agree that this movie gives a good "folklorish" feel (I haven't read the book) and that the magical nature of the unicorn is inherent in its nature, rather than being a conscious effort. But, I would also think capturing the unicorn would diminish its "magical" qualities. A unicorn just wouldn't easily take captivity. A unicorn imprisoned would be analogous to an enchanted forest without sprites, IMO. In other words, the further a creature is taken out of its native environment, the more "stress" it would suffer and the more its inherent magic would be suppressed. So, capturing a unicorn would not only be exceptionally difficult, it would also benefit the captor far less than he might expect. The magic would probably take a while to fade, however. So, keeping a unicorn captive for any length of time would constitute a true accomplishment.

Doctor Xero wrote: Or, to use the more theoretical language of my original posting, she is (among many things) a metaphor for springtime/life blooming/growth/youthful energy.


I like the metaphor concept and I think it would have a place in an RPG game. But, I don't think they need to be explicitly stated or detailed by the game itself. As you say, a unicorn can be a metaphor for a great many things, including one of its original metaphors of sexuality (it is no accident that a unicorn has a single horn and can only be ridden by virgins). I think players and GM's are perfectly capable of coming up with their own, although some guidance on the appropriateness of doing so and/or techniques of coming up with them is probably in order.

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On 2/12/2004 at 4:29pm, Mike Holmes wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

FWIW, I've been watching John's game deveopment, and one thing that I can say is that he's an expert in the field of folklore.

That said, it's interesting, John, that we're having very much this same discussion on the HeroQuest rules group in regards to animist magic, and the viability of the concept of captivity. Notably the idea of fetishes being objects into which spirits are bound. Isn't this a case of captivity? But isn't this a primary tool of the Shaman?

Mike

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On 2/12/2004 at 6:11pm, Shreyas Sampat wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Mike, my knee-jerk response to that is that shamanic fetish-binding isn't an imposition of the shaman's authority upon the bound spirit; rather, it is a mutually beneficial and consented contract between shaman and spirit. It's the sorcerer's demon-binding that represents Captivity, and that relationship is dramatically different and more dangerous to enter into.

That said, that still raises questions from the sorcerer's perspective - how does he draw power from a being that he has emasculated and rendered helpless?

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On 2/12/2004 at 6:19pm, Mike Holmes wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Aw, damnit, I wanted John's take, Shreyas. :-)

Yes, that's precisely what I and others argued on the HQ list. As far as demons, I think that the power comes from actually loosening control of them. To get the Djiin to do something you have to let it out of the bottle. Hell is the ultimate confinement, and bringing a demon to our world can't be any more confining no matter what. Right? In fact the fact that they remain potent waiting forever in containment shows that they should grow in power when not contained, no?

Mike

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On 2/12/2004 at 7:15pm, Peter Nordstrand wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Hi,

This great discussion reminds me of this:

On his homepage, John Hughes wrote: What do I mean by myth? Basically a myth is a story that provides an explanation about the universe and your place within it, a story that you invest with meaning. A myth is a tale where ideas are tested — ideas about who you are, how you should act, and how you might begin to understand your place and purpose within the world.

Myth is mirror. Myth is mindscape. Myth is ‘good to think’.

Its not so much that myths provide the answers, but they are the tools by which a group agrees to think about the questions they pose. This is why they are so versatile, and why they survive ongoing re-interpretation over time. Myths frame the questions and provide the categories that we use to think about the answers. They predispose us to think in certain ways).

Myths are playful and work on many levels: they don't come pre-digested like prime-time tv. They always leave room for your own response. A myth is sensitive to the numinous and the sacred, but it can also be earthy and even lewd, cutting through taboos and sensitivities that might otherwise keep you from realisation. You need to work at a myth, put in an effort to understand how it applies to you and your situation.


Cheers,

/Peter N

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On 2/12/2004 at 8:06pm, Doctor Xero wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

John Kirk wrote: But, I would also think capturing the unicorn would diminish its "magical" qualities.


My thoughts exactly!

It may be an unconscious/unintentional interactivity between world and faerie creature, but it is
still an interactivity.

Admittedly, there are many different types of folklore, and the schema of Propp, Rank, Campbell,
Johnson, Jewett and Lawrence, etc. all show how the similar structures underly very different
styles and meaning-structures. You and I are really only working with one type of folklore here
-- I chose this one because I thought it might be more amenable to RPG construction, but I could
be wrong.

I read that you are also a folklorist, like me? I ask rather than guessing from your writings
because I've noticed a wonderful breadth and depth of learning in most of the posts on this forum,
something for which my previous experiences with other forums had not prepared me! ^_^

Shreyas Sampat wrote: 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. For example, in some Slavic and Inuit practices, the
shaman gains power over spirits specifically after his/her spirit has been torn to pieces in the
spirit-realm and then devoured by the spirits -- he/she then has power only over those spirits
which had "digested" some of his/her spiritual essence. This may be a merging of the shaman
and the spirit, but it may also be an enslaving of the monster who killed the shaman, a
not-uncommon ironic-reversal image in folklore/mythology/religion.

Doctor Xero

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On 2/13/2004 at 5:24am, John Kirk wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Mike Holmes wrote: FWIW, I've been watching John's game deveopment, and one thing that I can say is that he's an expert in the field of folklore.


I'm flattered. Actually, I consider myself to be a well-read amateur. I have no degrees or credentials to qualify me as "expert", merely a passion for the subject.

Mike Holmes wrote: That said, it's interesting, John, that we're having very much this same discussion on the HeroQuest rules group in regards to animist magic, and the viability of the concept of captivity. Notably the idea of fetishes being objects into which spirits are bound. Isn't this a case of captivity?


Not necessarily. There are many examples of natural spirit "bindings" in folklore. Dryads are bound to specific trees, Oreades frequent specific grottos, and Vodyany and Rusalka are tied to specific lakes or streams. There are other binding examples of a more "spooky" nature. Many phantoms haunt a given castle, forest, or road but are never seen elsewhere. Further, not all such affiliations are to buildings and areas. Others are of a more "portable" character. The Screaming Skulls of Great Britain are essentially ghosts bound to human skulls or bones. And, there are numerous accounts of haunted chairs, wardrobes, and chests. Is there reason to suspect these spirits were deliberately enslaved by some mage for nefarious purposes? Absolutely not. The spirits are associated with these areas and items because, for whatever reason, they choose to be.

Incidentally, I think how a mage "recruits" spirits is an important discriminator between black and white magic. Mages that entice, suggest, and encourage spirits into service practice white magic. Those that forcibly coerce spirits employ black magic. I would expect a shaman to interact with spirits using the former techniques rather than the latter.

By the way, I am interested in reading the discussion to which you refer, if you could provide a link.

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On 2/13/2004 at 7:33am, John Kirk wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Mike Holmes wrote: Aw, damnit, I wanted John's take, Shreyas. :-)

Ha! It looks like you got your wish, Mike. I got home from work, did a "reload" in my browser, and responded to your post. Imagine my surprise when I found out there was a whole second page of posts after yours that I hadn't noticed!

It seems like the HQ thread already came to some of the same conclusions that I posted, so I'm not sure if I've actually added anything yet.

Shreyas Sampat wrote: That said, that still raises questions from the sorcerer's perspective - how does he draw power from a being that he has emasculated and rendered helpless?


I fear that I was not precice enough in my assertion that the magical qualities of a captive unicorn would fade. I did not intend to imply that the magical characteristics of all captive or bound creatures would diminish. Only that capturing a unicorn dramatically reduces its "unicorn-ness". That is, much of what constitutes the myth of unicorns is the impossibility of capturing them. If you actually trap one, you have, in effect, "killed the pillywiggens". The same cannot be said of all spirits.

In my mind, a spiritual binding does not equate to imprisonment. It is more analogous to a legal contract. That is, the spirit is obligated to obey certain rules as set out by the binding. As long as those rules don't contradict the quientescence of the creature, it will not diminish it in any way. Thus, if you bound a pixie into service with the stipulation that it could no longer play practical jokes, it would be diminished. If you subjugated a dryad into service, taking her away from her native tree and forest, her powers would lessen. But, if you bound a nixie into service to guard a bridge crossing over her stream, the binding would not enfeeble the faery in the least.

Yes, you have to release a djinn from its lamp to gain its aid. But, that doesn't mean the djinn is free of the binding when released. It must still obey the "rules" and provide its master with however many wishes it is obligated to provide. The lamp is merely the physical focal point of the binding. In this case, the lamp also serves as a sort of prison, which is why many such spirits do their best to warp the intent of the stated wishes. I can hardly imagine that a djinn would willingly enter into what can only be described as enslavement. So, any such binding would be an exercise of the black arts. Of course, the use of the djinn by Aladdin or other master that just so happens to discover an already existing magic lamp is not viewed critically in folk tales. Perhaps that just means that, once a binding is put in place, the only practical way to alleviate the "enslavement" situation is to fulfill the terms of the contract, thus setting the spirit free.

Doctor Xero wrote: I read that you are also a folklorist, like me?


As I said in the previous post, I do not consider myself a true expert, merely an avid enthusiast. I would welcome your critique and/or input concerning Legendary Quest, if you felt the desire to do so. Mike Holmes has already provided a great deal of valuable advice on how to mold an RPG to fit a particular genre. (LQ still has a ways to go to fulfill my vision, but I'm working on it.) I'm sure some expert analysis of my interpretation of myth and folklore would prove equally enlightening.

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On 2/13/2004 at 12:36pm, contracycle wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Shreyas Sampat wrote: Mike, my knee-jerk response to that is that shamanic fetish-binding isn't an imposition of the shaman's authority upon the bound spirit; rather, it is a mutually beneficial and consented contract between shaman and spirit. It's the sorcerer's demon-binding that represents Captivity, and that relationship is dramatically different and more dangerous to enter into.


Pardon my cynicism. I was once shown a gourd that rattled; it came from Borneo and had been brought back by a missionary. The gourd was the physical remnant/mainfestation/token of a fetish binding of a particular gruesome nature.

When the shaman needed an interlocutor with the spirit world, they asked for and obtained a baby from the community. This child was then raised by the shaman in total devotion of said shaman. When the child was 8 IIRC, they were tied up and heavily abused to the point that they swore undying devotion to the shaman, at which point boiling lead was poured into their throat, killling them in the act of the oath. This was believed to trap their spirit in the other world in a permanent state of submission, to serve as a vehicle for the shamans power. The body was then cremated, and the ashes and lead encased in the gourd.

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On 2/13/2004 at 5:27pm, Shreyas Sampat wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

I'll pardon your cynicism if you pardon my imprecision and cold-heartedness - I was referring to shamanic fetish-binding in the HeroQuest context, where (to my knowledge) such rituals are deemphasized in favor of developing spirit alliances. Furthermore, I don't feel that your argument in any way diminishes mine: though this contract cannot conclusively be said to be mutually beneficial, it is no less consented and contractual for this; the manner at which the accord was arrived has little impact on it. The crucial distinction I am drawing is one of contract vs. capture.

Alternatively, you can draw a distinction between analogues to symbiosis, parasistism, etc., based on the consequences of a binding on those bound, but I feel this is not only needlessly fine-grained, but not much more illuminating.

Incidentally, John, colour me impressed.

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On 2/13/2004 at 11:06pm, Doctor Xero wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

John Kirk wrote: I have no degrees or credentials to qualify me as "expert", merely a passion for the subject.

< laughter > Isn't that the basis of all learning, as opposed to mere education? (And I have been around
enough learned people and enough merely educated people to tell the difference!)

John Kirk wrote: In my mind, a spiritual binding does not equate to imprisonment. It is more analogous to a legal contract.
That is, the spirit is obligated to obey certain rules as set out by the binding. As long as those rules don't
contradict the quientescence of the creature, it will not diminish it in any way.

In some folklore, this "binding" is not treated as a legal contract, i. e. as a contractual obligation involving
obedience to exterior regulation and entered into consciously. Instead, the faerie creature is bound because
the binding works off the very ~nature~ of the faerie creature. For example, a wind spirit might be bound
to a ruby ring specifically because that spirit has an obsessive love of rubies -- allowing the ring-wearer man
to fly is a side effect of the spirit's love of being intermixed with the essence of the ruby, and as long as the
ring-wear makes no effort to take the ruby away from the wind spirit, the spirit is just fine with letting him
fly. But should he break the ruby and "free" the spirit, the spirit will be Very Angry . . .

In many myths and folklore, spirits have a hunger to find a duty/niche -- any duty or niche! -- to fulfill, and
thus again the spirit is bound not as a legal obligation but because it is part of its nature to be bound.

In other words, they "choose" to be bound for the same reason we "choose" for our cells to undergo mitosis
and not out of any economic or legal transaction (in such folklore).

Thus, the wise woman/wizard is able to bind the creature because she/he recognizes and respects the
intrinsic nature of the faerie creature being bound -- she or he must have psychological savvy first not
bargaining skills.

(Of course, there are also those who ~do~ want a legal or economic transaction, such as the ghosts bribed by
the blood of fresh kills to foretell the future. And there are of course the necromancers and such who imprison
or enslave or bribe otherworldly beings . . . )

John Kirk wrote: In this case, the lamp also serves as a sort of prison, which is why many such spirits do their best to warp the
intent of the stated wishes. I can hardly imagine that a djinn would willingly enter into what can only be
described as enslavement.

Sometimes entering voluntary enslavement is an act of penance, especially in some Arabian folklore. The djinn
of Aladdin's lamp likely granted wishes to wash away some horrible sin he had committed (possibly siding with
the fallen angels in the War in Heaven?) -- to use his divine powers in service to a mere mortal human would
be a definite act of pious humility for a proud djinn and yet also a humble show of acceptance that the Creator
has placed humans above djinn and angel both in the spiritual hierarchy.

In some tales, the legalism of the djinn is not a result of malice but simply within the djinn's nature because
creativity (and therefore following the spirit not letter of the contract) was a gift given to humans only, because
they were in the Creator's image but djinni and angels were not.

John Kirk wrote: I would welcome your critique and/or input concerning Legendary Quest, if you felt the desire to do so.

I'm having a glasses-on-top-of-my-head-while-I-search-futilely-for-them moment : could you point
out where to go to find that?

I hope my input is helping, and I apologize if I am data-dumping a tad.

Doctor Xero

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On 2/14/2004 at 4:15pm, clehrich wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Doctor Xero wrote:
John Kirk wrote: In this case, the lamp also serves as a sort of prison, which is why many such spirits do their best to warp the intent of the stated wishes. I can hardly imagine that a djinn would willingly enter into what can only be described as enslavement.
Sometimes entering voluntary enslavement is an act of penance, especially in some Arabian folklore. The djinn of Aladdin's lamp likely granted wishes to wash away some horrible sin he had committed (possibly siding with the fallen angels in the War in Heaven?) -- to use his divine powers in service to a mere mortal human would be a definite act of pious humility for a proud djinn and yet also a humble show of acceptance that the Creator has placed humans above djinn and angel both in the spiritual hierarchy.

In some tales, the legalism of the djinn is not a result of malice but simply within the djinn's nature because creativity (and therefore following the spirit not letter of the contract) was a gift given to humans only, because they were in the Creator's image but djinni and angels were not. [emphasis mine]
I really think this is starting to conflate a wide range of interpretive levels, and I worry that it will drag the game (John's, I mean) away from your stated intent of doing folklore/myth-style gaming.

Dr. Xero presents a possible interpretation of the djinn's behavior, in line with at least one major trend of Arabic interpretation, specifically a neo-Platonic Islamic reading; this makes good sense for the Arabian Nights text, historically speaking, and seems plausible enough. But it seems to me equally likely that what you have here is (1) a piece of folklore about a lamp and whatnot, and (2) a rationalization on the basis of theological and philosophical perspectives (to simplify to only two where there are certainly many more levels at work).

That is, elite culture often approaches peasant folklore of whatever kind by reducing itself to two possibilities: either eliminate the annoyance, or transmute it until it fits accepted categories. You see this with the benandanti in 16th-17th century Friuli, for example, where the benandanti describe something that cannot be interpreted coherently in terms of accepted theological categories and structures, so the elite culture (Inquisitors, priests, nobility, other educated commentators) have 3 choices: (1) pretend it doesn't exist at all, that is it's all peasant drunken ravings; (2) forcibly remove the annoyance through persecution (which fortunately didn't happen much in that case, but did elsewhere in Europe, especially Germany); or (3) insistently interpret in terms of accepted theological categories until the peasants themselves read benandanti as witches, at which point people stop wanting to be benandanti, eliminating the problem from within.*

But the point here is that if you want your game to seem like folklore, seeking rational cohesion is almost necessarily going to undermine your purposes. There may be underlying cohesive structures, of course, but these are going to be highly abstract and probably not very helpful in a practical sense of game or story design (see Levi-Strauss's work, especially The Raw and the Cooked and its three sequel volumes, for why this isn't going to help much).

Let go of straightforward logic. Sure, these things can be made to follow reason, but this will probably impose such logic rather than discern it already at work in the material.

Chris Lehrich

*See Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles (1966), trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982).

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On 2/15/2004 at 2:32am, John Kirk wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Doctor Xero wrote: In some folklore, this "binding" is not treated as a legal contract, i. e. as a contractual obligation involving obedience to exterior regulation and entered into consciously. Instead, the faerie creature is bound because the binding works off the very ~nature~ of the faerie creature. . .


Yes, I entirely agree. The “legal contract” analogy was only intended to illustrate the principle. The point is that there are certain “rules” by which the creature acts. Where these rules come from, whether by some external agent or simply by the creature’s own instinct or choice, is largely irrelevant to the end effect: a spirit behaving in a certain way.

Doctor Xero wrote: For example, a wind spirit might be bound to a ruby ring specifically because that spirit has an obsessive love of rubies. . .


Oooohhhh. Neat example. Is there a specific story in which this appears?

Doctor Xero wrote: Sometimes entering voluntary enslavement is an act of penance, especially in some Arabian folklore.


I stand corrected. So, binding a djinn in this fashion might actually be an exercise of white magic after all.

Doctor Xero wrote: I'm having a glasses-on-top-of-my-head-while-I-search-futilely-for-them moment : could you point out where to go to find that?


My apologies. You can download Legendary Quest from here. Since this thread discusses the general use of folklore in RPG magic systems, specific comments and/or recommendations for LQ should probably be directed to the LQ Discussion Forums (accessible via the “Discussion Forums” link on the website). You’ll need to e-mail me directly to get an account on that forum (via the “Contact Us” link on the home page).

Chris Lehrich wrote: Dr. Xero presents a possible interpretation of the djinn's behavior, in line with at least one major trend of Arabic interpretation, specifically a neo-Platonic Islamic reading…But the point here is that if you want your game to seem like folklore, seeking rational cohesion is almost necessarily going to undermine your purposes.


You make a good point, one that I have struggled with in the past. The problem is that, fundamentally, we are trying to create a system that is both playable (in an RPG sense) and which reflects a body of material defying any easy categorization. Ultimately, we want a system that is usable by those who are not, themselves, well-versed in folklore, but which nevertheless provides an authentic mythic setting. To some degree, the two goals are at odds with one another.

One approach, as you say, is to dispense with any pretense at “rational cohesion”. It seems to me that much of the burden on whether the end result had a truly folklorish feel would largely depend on the familiarity of the GM with the folklore the game seeks to emulate. And, even then, the outcome of certain events would be in question. In other words, players can have their characters perform actions that must result in some specific outcome, but the results of which are not conclusively provided by the underlying material.

For a simple example, suppose a group of adventurers is wandering through a Celtic woodland, and happens upon an old woman washing bloody clothes in a stream. “A banshee!”, yells the priest of the group. “I present my holy symbol and turn it!”. Assuming the act of “turning undead” works in a D&D sense, what happens? Does the banshee run away? Whether a banshee is classified as a “ghost” or as a “fairy”, in my experience, is largely dependent upon whether the classifier is writing a book on fairies or a book on ghost lore. (See Katharine Briggs’ “An Encyclopedia of Fairies” and Peter Haining’s “A Dictionary of Ghost Lore” for contrary opinions.) Folklore provides us no definitive answer, and yet the GM must somehow decide in this specific case whether the banshee flees in terror or not (assuming the woman actually is a banshee and not just some startled woodland crone doing laundry). Like it or not, when you drop down from abstract discussions of folklore to actual encounters of characters with mythic “reality”, concrete decisions have to be made. If those decisions aren’t going to be completely arbitrary, then the game needs some kind of structure, IMO.

Now, that doesn’t mean you necessarily take one interpretation and dispense with the other. In this example, both the ghost/banshee and fairy/banshee viewpoints are valid and both have their place in a game about folklore. The way I have approached this problem in the past is to write up both possibilities. Fortunately, folklore almost always oversupplies us with names. The Banshee is also known as the Bean Si, the Bean Sidhe, the Bean Nighe, the Caointeach, and others. So, if I thought there was enough merit and variety in detailing two versions of the banshee, I’d simply write her up as an undead ghost under one name and as a fairy under another. Problem solved.

The same can be said about magic systems. In my mind, the question isn’t “Does a spirit-binding based magic system provide the only valid interpretation of folklorish magic”. Rather it is, “Does a spirit-binding based magic system provide a valid interpretation of folklorish magic”. If the answer is “yes”, then this form of magic system should be considered for inclusion. If there are other valid interpretations, then those should also be considered. If you need more than one magic system to cover a sufficient breadth of folklore to obtain the desired “feel”, then you use more than one magic system.

Legendary Quest currently has three. What I have discussed, up to this point, is where I’d like to take LQ’s mage system and how to imbue a world with a magical “aura”. I haven’t even touched on the priest or spiritualist magic systems. (LQ’s “priest” magic deals with “mythic” or "pagan religious" magic while the spiritualist system deals with "psychic powers" and the ancient mystery cults. Yes, I know the lines between folklore and myth are very fuzzy, but, again, I felt these differing systems were needed to cover the breadth of the material as I interpreted it.)

The trick, in my view, is to find the minimal number of (hopefully simple) systems that covers the maximal amount of folklore and myth. We should strive to make those systems as compatible with one another as possible, but not constrain ourselves to making them identical.

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On 2/15/2004 at 3:18am, Christopher Kubasik wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Hi John,

Are you familiare with the rules for HeroQuest, Sorcerer, The Pool or Universalis?

I ask because in both of these, the "how" of the supernatural, and to a degree its effects, is determined not wholy by the GM, but by a negotiation between players. (When I speak of "negotiation," please don't think I nescesarily mean I'm referring to a bidding war of some sort -- althought Universalis is exactly that.)

I bring this up because your system seems driven by the needs of the GM o "figure this stuff out on the fly." But there are currently systems that allow a bit more interpretation and input between two or more players. This means that if the Banshee appears, it's not all on the GM's head to nescesarily have it all worked out ahead of time. (He might though, and then the players need to work from that point.)

I bring this all up because games where elements of description, the "rules" of magic and certain effects are determined by a kind of kibitzing by the group (to one degree or another), offers the "squishier" kind of folkloric magic Chris Lerhic just mentioned.

The strenth of this is is that as the group moves forward, the rules are established as the game progresses. Like an improv game, where the byword is "Yes, and..." a kind of bedrock for this game's and this world's magic is laid down. It becomes intuitive for the group, because the group is making it. It speaks ot the imagination of the group, because the group is constructing it. It ends up being cohesive -- and perhaps -- poetic, because all the elements on the table end up feeding the definition of magic, effect, color so on... Because that's what human beings do -- Faced with having to make choices, we build patterns, and the patterns are built off of what has come before.

Now, this is all assuming the group is working in tandem. But it seems to me the desired folk-talk "feel" demands a shared attentiveness. This seems the nature of the beast. Back when tales were told round group, people would offer up details to the storyteller and he would incorporate them into his telling.

This takes it a bit further -- but games such as HeroQuest, Sorcerer, The Pool and Universalis are doing it successfully. In all these systems, the mechanics aren't about "modelling" how things work, but about how the narrative gets shared between players, how the story gets told, what details from everyone present "stick" or get lost. (Again, that's a broad brushstroke to apply to four different and fresh systems. Details vary greatly.) This point of view of the game system's purpose, again, my help faciitate more a mythic, folk lore feel.

All of these games remove the notion of the GM with all the world's details worked out already, waiting for the players to bump into them. (Again to one degree or another. Universalis, at the far end, has no GM at all!) Thus, instead of the players "discovering" the rules of the world's folk magic from the GM, the group, as the "folk" of the storytelling community, create the magic together! I personally believe that such a system will help imbue the game with a terrific sense of folk magic -- because its magic grown orally out of the community -- not coming down from on high. It is much closer to the literal creative act of creative a "folk" tale.

Now, none of this may be what you're looking for. But by reviewing these rules and giving them a whirl in actual play, there might be a perspective that jostles something and gives you a new angle on your work.

Good luck with your project,

Christopher

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On 2/15/2004 at 3:44am, Doctor Xero wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

clehrich wrote: I really think this is starting to conflate a wide range of interpretive levels, and I worry that it will drag the game (John's, I mean) away from your stated intent of doing folklore/myth-style gaming.

You're right. I could (and have) write hundreds and hundreds of pages on this topic, though usually in a less recreational context than gaming, and I'm overcompensating by being too brief. Mea culpa.

Christopher Kubasik wrote: instead of the players "discovering" the rules of the world's folk magic from the GM, the group, as the "folk" of the storytelling community, create the magic together!

While I don't think this would work for all groups, I think this would work quite well for many groups in re-creating the syncretic aspect of folklore and myth as well as possibly bringing in the feel of folkloric wonder. (What we call Classical Greek mythology is the syncretism of Homer and Hesiod and various other mythopoets, not the single creation of one individual's revelations.)

I still prefer GM games to GMless games, but I think in this case this element of group-not-game-master storytelling could work quite well. I shall have to see if it interests my gaming groups.

Doctor Xero

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On 2/15/2004 at 3:59am, Christopher Kubasik wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

And just in case I wasn't clear, only Universalis is GM-less. The other three games have GMs.

However, for example, in The Pool, a player rolls dice off of what of his PC's "Traits." (Traits are a very broadly defined ability, such as Priest, Out to Avenge Father, Witch or whatever.) If the player succeeds on the roll, he gets a Monologue of Victory, and gets to describe the results of the Victory.

So, in John's example of the Banshee, if the PC is a priest, and the Player attempts to have the priest "turn" the Banshee, and he rolls and succeeds, he gets to describe what happens -- for the priest and the banshee's reaction. That description becomes part of the "reality" of banshees. If the roll fails, the GM describes what happens, and now that bit of business can either be: the priest trembles with too much fear and loses faith; the banshee laughs at his cross, or whatever.

As John points out, the interpretations of these beasties are all over the map. In some types of games, these numerous interpretations are simply in play until defined. And as the good doctor says, this might help shore up that sense of wonder.

I think this is because it would be "our" banshee, and it makes sense to us in a way it might not make sense to another group; and make sense to us in this series of events we're creating and actively a part of, whereas we might go a completely different route within a different setting or a different tale.

Christopher

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On 2/15/2004 at 9:59pm, John Kirk wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Christopher Kubasik wrote: Are you familiare with the rules for HeroQuest, Sorcerer, The Pool or Universalis?


I am familiar with Sorcerer and Universalis. I have a copy of HeroQuest on order, but haven't received it yet. Both Sorcerer and Universalis were mind-blowing.

In actual fact, Sorcerer was the inspiration for my new ideas concerning fetishes and familiars. I like the way that the game presents the Sorcerer's powers as indirect, effectively making him dependent on his demons and making his magic "organic", in a sense. This has good possibilities for making a folkloric magic system, although I wouldn't emphasize the tension between the spirit and mage quite so much in a game about folklore.

I actually tried out some of the "coins" ideas of Universalis on LQ, but the results were disappointing to me. The mechanic ultimately just didn't fit in well with where I want to take LQ. But, the experiment was quite educational. Better yet, the game introduced me to Mike Holmes (one of the Universalis co-authors), who has been patiently mentoring me on game design.

Christopher Kubasik wrote: ...there are currently systems that allow a bit more interpretation and input between two or more players. This means that if the Banshee appears, it's not all on the GM's head to nescesarily have it all worked out ahead of time...I think this is because it would be "our" banshee, and it makes sense to us in a way it might not make sense to another group...whereas we might go a completely different route within a different setting or a different tale.


Ahhh. Yes. I think you bring up a point which has been confusing me. In re-reading Doctor Xero's original post, it seems that this thread is really only looking for a system that feels like folklore, but really isn't about folklore (please correct me if I'm wrong).

If what we want is a system where the players can interact and create stories that have the sense of wonder and magic of fairy tales and myth, but doesn't constrain them to actual historical myths and legends, that is fine. But, that has nothing to do with LQ, which is where I have been coming from. LQ is a game about heroes undertaking quests in an authentic legendary setting. I don't see how you can separate a game about folklore and myth from the actual folk tales and myths. For my part, I want LQ to be as much an educational experience (about folklore) as it is a gaming experience.

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.

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On 2/16/2004 at 2:57am, Doctor Xero wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

John Kirk wrote: 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

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On 2/16/2004 at 3:55am, clehrich wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Doctor Xero wrote: 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

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On 2/16/2004 at 10:11pm, Doctor Xero wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

clehrich wrote: 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

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On 2/16/2004 at 10:42pm, Mike Holmes wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Doctor Xero wrote:
Shreyas Sampat wrote: 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

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On 2/17/2004 at 1:10am, clehrich wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Doctor Xero wrote: 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

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On 2/17/2004 at 3:43am, neelk wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

clehrich wrote:
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.

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On 2/17/2004 at 4:55am, Doctor Xero wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

clehrich wrote: 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

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On 2/17/2004 at 8:53am, contracycle wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

Mike Holmes wrote: 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.

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On 2/17/2004 at 8:22pm, Doctor Xero wrote:
RE: For Magic More Like Folklore/Fairytale/Myth Magic

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

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