Entracte

Let me pause a moment before continuing this slowly evolving series on worldbuilding to address those who have expressed both wonder and confusion regarding the content herein.  I understand perfectly that you're saying it plainly it has meaning ... but equally, the path in how this meaning is applied is unclear.

I have been running and thinking about D&D a long time.  Unlike most, I've never seen it as a "game."  Many times, I've argued that DMing is a sort of performance art.  As an artist, rather than a hobbyist, I've chosen to study the pursuit in the traditional sense, in the way that one might study music or writing.  I've examined D&D's relationship with the chronological era and period that it's meant to take place.  I've studied the source material from which it comes, and here I do not refer to pulp 20th century b-fiction.  I've questioned the manner in which it's delivered, and the effects the process has on the players, and drawn connections between the way D&D works to create a social construct.  I've examined how it functions as an art, how it's perceived, how it's performed and how others would have to be guided to achieve certain elements of player response.  I've systematically cut the game to pieces, and done so in print, at extraordinary length, for many years.

With the sort of material I've been writing in this last month, I've had to crack my own skull apart in ways that are new to me.  Some of the things that I've been writing of late express my first thoughts on a given revelation that's never occurred to me before.  This last month, over and over, I've had to toss out thousands of words, because my train of thought has tried to take me places where I've been before, or where I want to rant about something, or where I become suddenly aware that the trail is leading up my own ass.

Please understand.  I have no help here.  I can't go to some clever D&D site, read a few brilliant comments about a subject and then riff for a few thousand words.  I'm just me.  I'm interpreting material written for some other purpose, like religion, like geography, like history, and translating it into the value it offers.

This would be easier if I knew the answers.  I don't.  I'm exploring the answers.  I'm seeing a pattern in arranging moments in a wilderness as I relate those moments to episodes in literature:

"The route taken by Hawkeye lay across those sandy plains, relived by occasional valleys and swells of land, which had been traversed by their party on the morning of the same day, with the baffled Magua for their guide. The sun had now fallen low toward the distant mountains; and as their journey lay through the interminable forest, the heat was no longer oppressive. Their progress, in consequence, was proportionate; and long before the twilight gathered about them, they had made good many toilsome miles on their return.

"The hunter, like the savage whose place he filled, seemed to select among the blind signs of their wild route, with a species of instinct, seldom abating his speed, and never pausing to deliberate. A rapid and oblique glance at the moss on the trees, with an occasional upward gaze toward the setting sun, or a steady but passing look at the direction of the numerous water courses, through which he waded, were sufficient to determine his path, and remove his greatest difficulties. In the meantime, the forest began to change its hues, losing that lively green which had embellished its arches, in the graver light which is the usual precursor of the close of day."

There is the text, like thousands of other texts scattered in a hundred languages in the long, winding path of human history.  A travelled route; knowledge of the land that permits choosing the correct path and signs that the forest is changing as the route is gone over.  The gripping pace of the text, published in 1840, sentence upon graceful sentence, pulling the reader along.  In the story, pursued and pursuers, struggling to find rest, food, enduring the savagery of the wilderness, outwitting and overpowering the enemy.  Translated to D&D, the party struggling to rescue an ally, or one of their own; blindly rushing into the wilderness, hoping to happen upon the enemy in time.  The DM, painting each scene — and not one!  But scene after scene, using the changes to lay out possibilities of ambush, hunting for a sign, desperately crossing an open lake in potentially full view of an enemy ... never knowing exactly what horrific way the collection of scenes will play out.

To build these scenes from a start of some kind, the DM must invent a thread.  Something that's found, someone that's encountered, some event that's witnessed, with a strong enough impact to make the players eventually engage.  How or why they should depends on what thread we invent; but it is only one thread.  As the players continue, we invent others, inserting each into the right moment, creating amounts of curiosity, indignation, compassion for others in pain, avarice ... or whatever it takes to make the players wade in and start swinging.

That I don't have a simple formula that allows the gentle reader to "just do it," I apologise.  There is no formula.  6,000 years of building stories and tales, no one has yet invented a "formula."  Steal a scene.  Steal a dozen scenes.  Cheat the players by making them believe they're seeing something new.  And if you do this for 20 years, you'll learn instinctively how these things are patterned, and how they're made without having to steal.  But if anyone here thinks I'm going to whip out a simple guide for "how to be really clever in making up shit," you're a gawddamned fool.

If the reader is able to apply one tiny thread of the fabric I'm trying to describe, so that it raises one player's eyebrow, you will have accomplished a miracle.  You will have done something for which there is no class, no coursework, no handbook, no youtube video, no blog post, no shortcut.  You will have done something artistic.  

Don't expect so much so soon.

It'll come.