Forget Hooks; Try Threads

The last post did so badly I'd better get started writing a new one.

As a teacher, I probably don't use repetition often enough. I write some concept out here on the blog, then I walk away from it without addressing it again for literally years, sometimes a full decade... assuming the reader understands, that they "got the lesson," when in fact it was only partly understood and no doubt needed revisiting more often.

My best posts are those in which I teach myself. My thoughts are often scattered before I start to write, a sort of "thought pile" waiting to be ordered and tagged in some manner, for which writing serves as a method. As I writer, I'm what other writers these days have taken to calling a "gardener": I plant a seed, such as the start of this post, then begin writing and see where it goes. I sketch it out the first tendrils of the idea, which then appear as callbacks in later paragraphs, so that ideas I lightly discussed at the outset are revisited and fleshed out more wholly, until miraculously, without a second draft, I pull the whole thing together at the end as though it were designed... but it isn't designed. I just have a memory that allows me to connect something I said at the start to something else I've thought of in the last minute. It is a practiced skill, honed over time.

As such, I don't write outlines. I've tried, but I always wind up not using them because invariably as a long story progresses, I have a better idea than I had at the outset, which actually doesn't deviate from the story or the article so far. As such, I simply throw away the outline and keep going.

This idea that structure emerges through conceptualisation serves me very well in comprehending my D&D setting. I've been thinking that there is a way of breaking down that process so that it can be explained, even taught, if perhaps the explanation is repeated with example after example. I thought I'd try it here, as a way of working though how to better explain setting design on a micro-scale for those who I've heard say they have no skill at it. I don't think this is a waste of time. I've been creating setting moments in D&D for more than 46 years and I'm not bored of it yet, nor do I think I know everything about it, since often I still find myself confronted by the problem, "Okay, what do I do with the players now?"

There are always those who will say, "I don't need this." Many of them will insist that since they only run modules, either their own or someone else's, there's never any reason to investigate the environment of the setting and "produce" for it. That frankly baffles me, but only because I insist on viewing D&D not as set-piece adventures one after another, but a single ongoing saga that begins with players sitting around a bar and steadily transforms, without any apparent intervention or contrivance, into an unpredictable, spontaneously developing narrative that moves the party towards a series of events that "shake the world," merely from single decisions and unpredictable outcomes that gather as they roll downhill. I can't say, and don't want to say, what a given party of mine might one day find themselves doing that shakes the Pillars of Heaven... but if they should get there, if it happens, it won't be on account of something I've planned or something the players at the outset wanted. And it yet it shall feel, at the moment, utterly organic and natural, as though we always knew this was our destination.

How is this wrought, however? That is the puzzle. The typical DM sits at the table with nothing prepared, is faced with a village the players have just entered... and has not one thing to say about it. Inevitably, all there are is tropes. An old man approaches the party... a person at the bar pushes the fighter... we see a man murdered... an unidentified body turns up in the street. For most, "spontaneous D&D" is an amateur class of streaming television plot generation, in which some detective is called to a scene, a family member bursts into the room with an announcement... or a guy with a card tells the contestants what the contest is going to be about today. That's as far as "creative reach" reaches. I don't say it to disparage. I say it because it's the problem to be overcome.

There is an artificiality in the trigger because it has no connection to the village whatsoever. Even the village has no connection to a "village" in any conceived sense. DMs tend to view the game world as we might small towns along the side of a road we pass at 65 miles an hour, where each is a similar collection of houses, trees, parks, a main street and a highway that allows us to just blow past it. Warren is not significantly different from Wentworth or from Rumney or Plymouth or Ashland or New Hampton or Franklin as we drive south on I-93... which I can say from personal experience because I have driven south on I-93. I could say the same about Waldeck, Herbert, Chaplin, Mortlach or Caronport as one drives east on the TransCanada highway. We don't know these places except by the names, because we've not lived there, we've not conceived of life there, we haven't any sense of the people or the homes or the reason for the town's presence as all, because we're just driving by. This is D&D, also, when we add dots and names to a map. We're just driving past. We're not thinking about these places.

Let's try an experiment. Here is a part of the world that I mapped today, that I have no previous experience with because I only just discovered the land form as I created the map. Because I run in the real world, it is of course a real place... as it happens, in Italy.

This is the Marano Lagoon, atop the Adriatic Sea, northeast of Venice. Until today, as I've said, I knew nothing about it. Reading through Wikipedia, I find the usual largely useless details for either imagination or D&D, not because Wikipedia isn't thorough, but because it's thorough about the wrong things: we learn the size, when the lagoon formed, what the houses are made of in the area, the name of a typical boat that's used there, a little bit of touristy information, the depth, the location of political or religious structures, the names of towns around the lagoon, travel details, economic details, a little bit of geographical description of the shore... and the article is done.

We have this, also, from GoogleEarth:

Geographically, we can glean a little more. This isn't the 17th century, obviously, but from this we can see the land is almost entirely arable; we can see that the lagoon isn't uniform, it is filled with channels and thus currents, inconsistencies, a collection of small backwaters, shallow places, places where the environment is hazardous, opportunities for natural and unnatural creatures alike to steal into the bay or live here. It is large enough that even something as large as a dragon turtle to sit quietly in the mud unnoticed, for weeks at a time before stealing out to sea. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Pretend that the players do not exist. Imagine the setting has nothing to do with them; it is not an adventure service provider, it is not there to be discovered or crawled over or clensed of its monsters. That is the usual structure we consider when we invent a part of the game world, but the weakness in that thinking is that it limits our imagination as creators. It causes us to think of this place as a vehicle, not a place; a filing system, not something alive. And this last is incredibly important while being egregiously overlooked. The players cannot imagine themselves as there, if it's so flat in its construction that they might as well be watching pictures of it on a Viewmaster... one of those ancient things where you flip a lever and the next picture rotates into place. Game settings are therefore usually no better than corpses, just laying there waiting for the players to come along and find them. That is no way to bring about immersion.

Recall that at the start of this post I spoke about invention... the sense of just coming up with things from the setting as it exists. That isn't possible unless the setting has the potential to surprise the DM with its possibilities. This is why, most of all, that I want to stress that the setting is not there for the players. It is there to provide opportunities for us to be creative out of what we learn or imagine about the place.

As such, let's imagine making the setting not for a purpose except its own. We are shaping the environment of Merano so that we understand it. And for the sake of applying a structure to the lives of the people who dwell in this place, for their own reasons, without being Disney actors in a D&D theme park, let's employ Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Every person contained in this setting has the same fundamental structure that affects their day, regardless of their wealth, power, skillset or where on the map they are: they must eat, they must have shelter, they must sleep... they have drives that encourage them to seek others and engage in sex. These things, including breathing and excretion, seem incidental, but consider how much society must be organised on some level to effect the servicing of these needs. Humans must shit, so the shit must go somewhere. For a time, no doubt, it can be moved into the lagoon, but after a thousand years of that, no, it's been proved by then that's not sustainable. It may seem silly to the reader, wondering where the people of Merano shit, but in fact this has always been a very serious problem in the organisation of human culture. It is worth at least a minute's thought, if we're going to make the place real.

Moving up on the scale, we find ourselves digging into the very structure of society. A hamlet cannot merely be a place where the residents fish, it must be made safe. The resources, both those that must be gotten from elsewhere and those that are produced locally in abundance, must be managed somehow. Property must be divided. Families bond together, support each other, distrust outsiders who threaten our food or our safety. Those without property need employment; there are right and wrong ways to act, to approach others, reaching into what we wear, carry and what we believe both religiously and socially.

So we ask ourselves, what do these people count as important? There is little opportunity in the 17th century, or earlier if the game world is set in a more primitive time, for these people to have obtained an education. And while yes, the trope of residents being distrustful of strangers holds to some degree, there are so many people here, in a part of the world where access to the sea makes certain that there will always be strangers in some manner, the larger question is what does the stranger have that I might want, and what do I have that the stranger might want. In a place like Merano, between Venice and Trieste, with multiple little hamlets everywhere, the bigger question is not, "Who are you and what do you want?" It's, "Do you have anything to trade?"

Already this lifts us free of a few tropes. The people are not isolated; they are hungry for news; they need to know what changes may have taken place in the larger centres. In this part of the Adriatic there are many refugees, pirates, smugglers, traders and mercenaries, none of whom have any particular reason to plunder people who raise food, catch fish, ship fish to larger markets and rarely trade in coins. What is collected is taken to larger places and sold, and then while still there the money is converted into potables, tools or contrivances that are brought home. Coin is not hoarded, for what possible purpose would coins not translated into something useful be for?

Now, how do I know this? Am I making it up? I told you, I've never heard of this place... and I linked wikipedia and it obviously has nothing to say about this. I linked Maslow but anyone can see from the page that it provides a guide for inference, not a description of Merano Lagoon. So, have I said anything of value, or is this all just flimflamery?

Not at all. I'm taking a real geography, applying a pre-technological condition, addressing ordinary social and biological needs, the visible existence of the lagoon, the presence of farmable land and water that teems with fish before overfishing ruins it, sea access, the presence of nearby centres outside the map, like Monfalcone in the upper right, then asking what must be true of people generation after generation living in an environment like this.

I can do that because I study geography not to use it as a shortcut for a D&D world, but to appreciate it. My first love was geography, which meshed so well with D&D when I discovered the latter. I comprehend the technology of the period because I've steeped myself in it. I can conceive of what it must be like to walk and not drive, or depend upon animals, because I accept at face value what I've read in books, both non-fiction and fiction... and I find it difficult to imagine that people then lived constantly in some kind of perceived fear because they were limited to the resources at hand. Because they didn't know any other kind of life, because they had every reason to believe they could defend themselves just as we do now, I believe they did what we do: dreamed of things they wanted, learned what was within reach, applied themselves methodically to supporting themselves and their families, looked after their children, attended to their parents, married, left home, died of disease... just as we do, though in our own different way. But again, they didn't know their life wasn't perfectly normal. We might be terrified to live in their time, but they were not. So all the constantly assumption that NPCs in a D&D world existing on the edge of violence just makes no sense for me. I don't assume that when a party enters a village that the residents can't wait to hang them. I think the villagers just want a little news, to make an exchange, to maybe remark on the strangers and then get on with their lives.

Because of this, I don't need to create the old man who approaches the party with a pat speech and seventeen notes about what to look out for while sending them off to Castle Runerock. I can have a peasant on the road look up as the players approach, ask why they're here, hear the players say the usual thoughtless prattle about "We're looking for treasure and a dungeon," and translate that into 17th century speak: "We just want to know what's hereabouts."

"Well sir," (because the player is heeled out in armour and weapons), "You'd most likely be wanting to speak with the folk up at that there castle, just beyond yon hill. Most folks like your sort set out for that place sooner or later."

The castle isn't a set-piece. Everyone knows about it. They just don't do anything about it because, well, they're peasants. What are they gonna do? They've gotten used to it, orked in the sight of it, avoided it, gone near it when required and stayed away as policy. But they're not confused about it being there. It's not a secret. And if the player chooses to kill the messenger, so often a problem with emissary adventure delivery systems, nothing's changed. Castle's still there. One less peasant in the world, reduced to a somewhat inconvenient body on the side of the road, with nothing accomplished.

And here is the leap forward to be made: the element that makes the adventure, like the castle, is part of the landscape. That's all. It's just there. There's no need for a hook. The players will go toward a castle, an abandoned church, a hole in the ground, like moths to a flame. Making the adventure is not the problem. The problem is having the adventure mean anything.

The typical module undertakes this problem by first creating a reason for the thing to be gotten into. Then this reason must be conveyed, for reasons that make no sense, before the thing is seen or heard about. Why? Because it is perceived, like a book, that the characters must be introduced, the plot must be introduced, the motive must be introduced, before the scene can start. But D&D is not a book and it is not a story. The players seriously just don't care: "Is that a hole in the ground?" "Yes." "Let's see where it leads."

No actual logic is necessary. The game provides the motivation by ensuring that wealth, advancement, special benefits and excitement are probable. No story-like motive is necessary.

Meaning is not conveyed by purpose, but by what is found. When the castle or the church or the hole is cleared, what was discovered? What message was written on a wall, what skull was found, what colour was the dust of the former resident when the tomb was opened atop the tower? What does this mean? Why is this here? Where would we learn that? Who could tell us?

These questions provide motive that the players make for themselves, without our needing to make up anything. We don't even need to ensure they choose these specific questions. If there is some oddity that's found, the players will invent questions without needing to be prompted. Our goal, then, is to answer them interestingly.

Let us return to the lagoon. The players aren't interested in getting a boat and tooling around on the water, they aren't interested in picking a random swamp and cutting their way into it. They have no interest in this village at all unless it happens to be next to something that might have treasure or excitement connected with it. So we have to ask ourselves, first, where something like that might logically be? Is there an abandoned church? Probably not, churches tended to be expensive to build and thus were sincerely cared for. Is there a dungeon? Probably not, the water table is quite high. Is there a castle? No, again probably not, the land is flat and soggy and a castle needs a good hill to sit on. So what is there?

Well, as I mentioned, there are refugees, pirates, smugglers, traders and mercenaries... which makes abandoned camps that refugees have been driven out of; ships run aground in a storm; crates and barrels just visible on the bottom where they've been cast off in time to avoid discovery; a desolated village days after it was raided, now inhabited who knows what; a stand-off between enemies right now in progress; river bandits attacking parties upon the shore. That's six right there.

We're not asking, "What adventure can we put here?" We're asking what does the place permit, what would be logically unusual but plausible, what might threaten the party, what provides conflict? Bandits use shorelines because it gives them access and escape. Refugees are pushed out of the area because they are unwanted. Ships sink in shallow water and languish before a big storm pulls them out to sea. Smugglers get rid of things at night, before being caught with them, and then lose track of where those things were dumped. It doesn't matter. It feels better than a contrived adventure because it gives the players a sense of place, a grounding in that place, a logic, as if to say, "Yes of course this is here. Look where we are."

I'm wording that in a specific way: the players don't say, "Look at what the DM is giving us." If this is done carefully and well, the players automatically cease to visualise themselves in a false space and begin to imagine themselves there, for real, because our imaginations are built to do that.

But again, this brings us back around to meaning. This, once understood, is the easiest part. We merely need some evidence of who these refugees were before they were forced out of this camp. A torn tent flap with a symbol on it. A collection of worthless wooden holy symbols, but all the same, perhaps even that of the party's cleric. And what of the attackers? A lance cloth with the Duke's name on it? A broken Genoan sword, here, where we are in the environs of Venice? What does it mean?

Why is the wrecked ship an Ottoman galley? Why is the barrel we dredged up from the bottom, having to fight four eels to get it, only filled with ordinary stones? How did the abandoned village become a den of skeletons? How does this amulet, with a mage's symbol upon it, relevant? Surely, if we take it to some apothecary, they would know. What are these two peoples fighting about? Do we want to pick a side? Is there a consequence for us if we don't? Why are these bandits that attacked us, that are all dead now, half-starved? Why did the last one to die smile, and thank us, before he expired? What does any of it mean?

This is the thread we seek. Anything that makes the players stop and wonder, "Hey, it all seemed so perfectly normal, except for this one thing that doesn't actually make sense."

The answer is not a hook, it is a thread. It is a logical answer to what seems like an impossible question, that assures the players will follow the thread to the next conundrum, that we're ready to impose upon them just as soon as they leave this place and head north, where the answer to their questions lies...