Most Explorers Make Bad Maps

 "The Giant's castle was situated on a mountain, as it ought to have been, and there was also the usual courtyard before it, and the customary moat, which was full of — bones! All I have got to say about these bones is, they were not mutton bones. A great many details of this story must be left to the imagination of the reader; they are too harrowing to relate. A much tenderer regard for the feelings of the audience will be shown in this than in most giant stories; we will even go so far as to state in advance, that the story has a good end, thereby enabling readers to peruse it comfortably without unpleasant suspense.

"The Pumpkin Giant was fonder of little boys and girls than anything else in this world; but he was somewhat fonder of little boys, and more particularly of fat little boys."

 The Pumpkin Giant, by Mary E. Wilkins, 1882

We are affected by the stories we read as children, and the above was always a favorite of mine ... particularly because of the tongue-in-cheek manner with which the writer wrote it.  The sardonic was unquestionably the style of Victorian times, when dealing with peculiarly unpleasant subject materials designed to be read by children.

With D&D, I've always somehow equated the "giant" with an ogre, even though it is clear from the story that the pumpkin giant was probably much larger.  An ogre for me is a somewhat dense, frightening but altogether disorganized figure.  But of course, in D&D it is just another humanoid, with the same cookie-cutter characteristics as smaller figures like orcs and hobgoblins.  I have a different take on it, which can be read in full here.

The above feels like it needs a bit of a rewrite, but I'm going to get some distance on it first.  The invention of "Sarg Griksta" is an attempt to build a logical framework inside the game world, something that you'll see other writers of fantasy literature and game rules doing constantly.  The question is, how far do you go with outlining the backgrounds of such people?  I've seen designers attempt to write out "accounts" from such invented persons and it always rings poorly ... mainly because the designers themselves are not remotely of the writing skill we would expect from a Bede, Abelard or Bacon.  I would be loathe to attempt such a thing myself.  Griksta is better paraphrased than written out word-for-word ... and we must examine the value of using the trope at all.

We are used to quoting a contemporary source from an ancient period.  One can hardly discuss anything about history without quoting someone, as we wouldn't know anything if it hadn't been written down.  Unlike modern scholarship, where only the scholars recognize a writer's name, and most just assume it's reputable because "PhD" is attached to the sobriquet, fellows like Suetonius, Plutarch or Herodotus are famous because for a hundred generations, they were the same and only source for what we know about many events and people.  Three hundred years from now, some present day historian's legacy may have survived; but I would argue that while virtually every respected scholar today disagrees with Gibbon, three hundred years from now the names of all these scholars will be dust and people will still be reading the Decline.

Why?  Well, first and foremost, because surviving historians don't just write facts.  They insert their own personality into what's being written, and most of them were not that concerned with "absolute truth" but with "ethical truth."  Plutarch's Life of Caesar doesn't need to be dead-on accurate to have value; it is an account of a brilliant but flawed, ambitious but inconstant soul whose initiative was the source of his own downfall.  It doesn't matter whether or not Caesar actually said or believed or even did exactly as Plutarch wrote.  The purpose of the material is to convey wisdom, not veracity.  Modern historiography, with its endless compulsion to fact-check and tally every source, has gutted the very premise of history in its obedience to Toynbee's revolution.  As a result, we find ourselves reading "interesting" panegyrics to some faithfully rendered facet of human experience, but the historian is woefully bereft of any responsibility to convey sagacity.  Read an account of Rosa Parks and you will be inundated with the tale of a smart, capable, unfairly downtrodden yet resilient person who rose against the system to become respected and effective, despite her flaws.  You may find some ethical discussion of how her life was important; but you won't find any serious discussion of how to be Rosa Parks or how to recognize other people who, today, are Rosa Parks.  This makes history a sort of celebrity celebrant machine, with people reading about such-and-such and then choosing to believe they ARE such-and-such, when of course that's more delusion than wisdom.

But ... I am off topic.

An ancient writer, like the fictional Sarg Griksta, wouldn't be subject to peer review or the responsibility to quote sources.  Historians cheerfully ripped off one another, often word for word, without a hint that it wasn't their own writing.  There were no panels or commissions to censure them.  There would be no reason to believe that Griksta actually knew what he was talking about, or if he were making it up out of whole cloth.  Postulation, eye-witness accounts and second-hand story telling were often mixed and matched.  We know that Thucydides was alive and well and even acting as a general during parts of the Peloponnesian War -- and for that reason he is often treated as more credibly reliable than later sources.  I don't disagree.  But witnessing how a modern day general describes what is "really happening" in a given warzone, scholars are also right to point out that in many cases, Thucydides is clearly blowing his own horn.  We see that as a bad thing.  Thucydides would have seen it as his personal right.  He didn't see it as "writing history" in the sense that we mean it now.  He was frankly giving his opinion -- it was his truth, even if we don't right now see it as ours.

So if there is a Griksta, and the players were to get hold of his book, and go searching for the Orcrest Gate, somewhere in the East Sayan Mountains, how precisely useful would it be?  There's a very good chance that Griksta had never been to the mountains, or even seen them.  The gate might be a complete fabrication.  The actual source of ogres in my game world might be something unexpected.

It is in this squidgy uncertainty that game adventuring is lifted to the next level.  I see DMs handing out treasure maps that turn out to be perfectly accurate when the time comes; or telling tales to the players that are word-for-word true.  This is not how things actually are.  Most first-time explorers make bad maps.  Then later explorers make better maps, and explorers after that make better maps still.  People imagine mountains on the horizon that aren't there; they imagine rivers that lead to lakes that don't exist.  They create non-existent peoples and made up treasures and fountains of youth.  Writers forge, falsify and fake accounts.  If a party thinks they have all the answers, disabuse them of this idea.  The material research they have accumulated might be close to the truth and it might not; but they have no reason to believe all the facts are known for certain.