“To be or not to be – that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep…”
~ Shakespeare, from Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
Alright, I’m gonna make a serious effort this week to finish up our discussion of my favorite storytelling influences. With that in mind, let’s jump straight into it, shall we?
First and foremost, R.A. Salvatore stands like a god above my Forgotten Realms game, The Sellswords of Luskan. I say this because, as the name implies, Sellswords is set primarily in Luskan, a place that we know about mostly because of Salvatore’s novels. His book The Pirate King describes in some detail Luskan’s descent into chaos, and I’ve used this description extensively in my game. Indeed, my game features Jarlaxle prominently and Athrogate to a lesser extent, and my PCs have had more than one run-in with other drow and drow-allies from Jarlaxle’s Bregan D’aerthe. More to the point, Captain Duedermont’s war with the Hosttower of the Arcane is a major plot point in my game—and honestly how could it not be with the game being primarily a Stronghold Quest focused on rebuilding the one-time City of Sails? Hell, we’re even working towards using a form Salvatore’s “Five Ships” system of government!
With all of that said, I feel like the physical place descriptions are really only the least bit of Salvatore’s influence on my gaming. Because despite the fact that Salvatore has a decided—and occasionally horrifying—tendency to break my First Rule of Avoiding Humanoid Invasions, there’s a lot to like in his writing. Most importantly, at least for me, he keeps the stakes small. Personal. I like that. With Salvatore, the Fate of the World is never at stake. Even when the host of Menzoberranzan is marching on Mithral Hall, Salvatore takes pains to keep it local and, yes, personal. And yeah, the drow invasion could mean the end for this one smallish clan of half-forgotten dwarves and their erstwhile allies, but in a larger sense, we realize that this is just a passing note in the larger tune of history. The Whole World is not in danger. In fact, even if disaster strikes—as it does in both Legacy and The Hunter’s Blades trilogy—we know that at least a few of our heroes are likely to survive and escape. Which, I think, actually serves to heighten the tension in the story. Because if the world was at stake, we’d be pretty sure that everything was gonna turn out okay. But if the world IS NOT at stake, then Bad Things can happen, and we’ll still survive to feel their consequences. That, to me, is an important story point.
I try to use it as often as I can.
As an aside, I’ve always wondered why some Bad Guys want to destroy the world and why other guys, usually Good Guys want to stop them. Especially since the Bad Guys are almost always charismatic leader types with a host of followers and a bunch of really cool toys whereas the Heroes are so often misunderstood loners who don’t actually seem to have all that much at stake in the fates of their fellow men. Consider, for example, the end of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy finally gives it up to her guy Angel, only to have him turn into a total a-hole. Her life is wrecked, and much angst ensues, which is good. But then Angel (now Angelus) decides to Destroy The World! Say what? Why the Hell does Angelus want to destroy the world? The guy seems like he’s having a good time over there, no?
I’ve always thought that a more-logical ending to that season would have gone something like this:
Angelus (while opening the Hellmouth): Hahahaha! And now I will destroy the world! Forever!
Buffy: Good. No more slings and arrows of outrageous fortune! Adieu! T’is better to die, to sleep. Perchance to dream!
Angelus: Uh… what?
Buffy: I said, ‘Do it!’ pretty boy! What do I care? My life sucks anyway. All these a-holes hate me, you hate me, my mom’s pissed at me, school sucks, my friends suck… Do it already!
Angelus: But I… uh…
Buffy: Go on! (shakes her head) Clown.
Angelus: Ummm… Crap! How do I turn this thing off?
Buffy: Turn it off? What?! Get away from that thing!
Angelus: But, but… (starts futzing around with the “end of the world” machine) There are so many great things about this world! Like blood. And sex! And blood! And sex! I mean…
Buffy (Draws Sword): No! I won’t let you stop it. I WANT TO DIE!
Angelus (Draws Sword): But I DON’T want to die! My life is AWESOME right now! (Aside) Man, this was a STUPID freakin’ plan…
They fight. End as originally shown.
Heh.
Y’know, I’ve got one more thing to say about Salvatore before we move on: What is up with all of those damned humanoid invasions?! It’s like Brian Wood with the blond girls and attack helicopters. I mean, come on! Barbarians and goblinkin both in The Crystal Shard, the drow in Siege of Darkness, orcs and more orcs in The Hunter’s Blades trilogy, even more orcs in The Orc King, even more goblins (much, much more!) in The DemonWars books, and—the worst, most egregious violation of the First Rule of Avoiding Humanoid Invasions of all time—the fracking Yuuzhan Vong in Vector Prime! The Yuuzhan freakin’ Vong! Extra-galactic bio-terrorists from beyond the edge of space! In STAR WARS!
Seriously? Ugh. Just… ugh.
Some of those I can forgive, but Vector Prime was a crime against nature.
Next on my list of influences is Laurel K. Hamilton. I really liked maybe the first ten or so of her Anita Blake books, and indeed, I find myself incorporating more specific ideas from that series into my games than ideas from any other single source. In particular, Ms. Hamilton makes interesting and creative use of necromancy, use that’s fairly easy to model with the Fourth Edition rule set, especially if you have access to the Monster Builder via Insider. For example, I used a homebrew version of a necrotic naga taken from the werewolf biker gang in Obsidian Butterfly as one of the main baddies in a game that recently concluded. We’d been looking for a certain PC’s brother, and when we found him, it turned out that—like the poor victims in Obsidian Butterfly—the brother had been sewn living into a giant naga-like undead monstrosity. As with Ms. Blake, in our game wackiness ensued.
After Anita Blake, I’ll mention J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. I mean, yeah, D&D was initially based on Tolkien’s fantasy world, so at a certain level there’s no way around listing The Hobbit as an important influence. And that’s fine. But really, the reason to bring up Tolkien in this spot is that he was a master of writing journey fiction. You know what I’m saying? Sometimes the setting IS the story. The reason that the characters exist is so that they can travel the world and show it off to the reader. And yes, the plot—the whole purpose of the story in general—is to give the characters a chance to go out and explore interesting places, thereby taking us as readers out of our every day lives. The Hobbit (or There And Back Again as it’s also correctly called) is an example of this kind of storytelling at its very finest. Another example of the same kind of thing is Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. We could even include Peter Pan or Where the Wild Things Are on this list if we’re willing to buy into the idea of a child’s imagination as a destination worth visiting.
One of the real tricks of being a successful long-term Dungeon Master, I think, is learning to balance the need for travel that’s inherent in the game’s structure with the need for your players to feel like their characters are rooted in the world around them. When I plot out my games, I try to stay focused on the reality that my players are playing because playing gives them a chance to step however briefly outside of themselves and their real-world lives. They already know what the real world looks like. They come to D&D—and specifically to the Forgotten Realms—to get away from that and into something else. Something different. Something weirder and spookier and more dangerous and more freakin’ fun. So yeah, they want to go to the Shadowfell. And the Feywild. And the Astral Sea. And even down into the City of Brass. And as a DM, it’s up to me to find reasons to take them there. It’s up to me to make those places real. Stories like The Hobbit and The Wizard of Oz provide a template for how to do that.
As another aside, the thing that makes online D&D—and specifically Play-by-Post—so awesome is that time is not a constraint. We can afford to get a little closer to the source material. I mean, look, Tolkien had a bit of tendency to let it all hang out when it came to his descriptions. The man might spend two pages on the weather and another three describing a particularly enticing bit of forest-glade. But when he was finished, those places were REAL. You knew them. You’d LIVED in them. However, when we play around a table top, this kind of description becomes a necessary casualty of the game. No one wants to listen to ten minutes of some jackass DM reading his homebrew forest-glade description. Table top D&D is about discussion. Interaction. Friendship. It’s not about one guy telling a story, and there’s nothing wrong with that. PbP, however, is an entirely different animal. Since a simple back-and-forth is all but impossible, upfront description becomes necessity rather than luxury. I mean, my players can’t ask me rapid fire questions like, “What do I see?” or “What are those guys wearing?” In PbP, that sort of thing is liable to take a week. So if I want to make it real, bottom line, I have to take the time to tell the guys what they are experiencing up front. I have to paint the picture with my words.
That can be a virtue if we embrace the medium for what it is. PbP is a storytelling medium as real and as vibrant as any other. It’s just a little more interactive than most.
And… crap. We’re almost 2000 words in, and I’m still only about halfway through my list of influences. We’ll have to come back to it again next week. But I promise that I’m getting to the point. Eventually.
Until next week, stay safe!
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