“Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.”
~Julia Penelope
I meant to finally close out our discussion of Influences and Inspirations last week, but we kind of got caught up in our discussion of The Hobbit as the original piece of fantasy travel fiction. However, thankfully there aren’t that many books and authors left on my list, and none of them are even half as iconic as some of those we’ve already discussed. Unless something really bizarre happens, we ought to be on to the next thing when this column appears next week. With that in mind, let’s get started!
The discussion this week is mostly going to be about my favorite current working authors, and at the top of that list sits Richard K. Morgan. Morgan burst onto the scene a few years ago with an explosive piece of science fiction called Altered Carbon, a book that’s one of the finest sci fi novels that I’ve ever read. I mean, yeah, a lot of authors like to use anti-heroes as protagonists. But Morgan takes that task seriously, and indeed, his bad guys are BAD. And he keeps it personal in a way that I’ve honestly never seen another author manage. It’s inspiring stuff, at least to me, and it’s frequently heavy in theme and thinking, both things that I wish I could work more successfully into my own writing.
It’s Morgan that inspired me to run Sellswords of Luskan as a campaign of anti-heroes, and more to the point, it’s his idea of keeping it personal that has me continuing after our campaign’s PCs in such a dogged and particular way. Because, as Morgan says in Altered Carbon, when someone’s trying to kill you, it doesn’t get more personal than that—regardless of what the business and political implications are.
Close behind Richard Morgan in my personal pantheon of writers is a guy I’ve already written about this week, Brandon Sanderson. As you should already know, Sanderson is the author that Robert Jordan’s wife picked to finish up The Wheel of Time. But he’s on this list because of his Mistborn series, specifically the second book, The Well of Ascension. In Mistborn: The Final Empire, the first book of the larger Mistborn series, Sanderson runs a kind of conventional “overthrow the dark lord” plotline, save that the setting is a hyper-industrial dystopian wasteland, and the book itself is steeped in religious and spiritual overtones. But still, though the setting and execution are unique, the actual plotline is strictly in line with genre expectations, and in fact, I think that’s part of what makes the whole thing hold together so well. Sanderson doesn’t start to actually break new ground until the series’ second book, Well of Ascension. It’s at that point that all the “good” that the heroes have done starts to really come back to haunt them, leaving the post-revolutionary world in much, much worse shape than it was before the fall of the previously dread ruler. Not to put too fine a point on it, but suddenly, a lot of the bad guy’s policies start to look sensible now that our heroes are actually in charge. And that’s brilliant! Really. In reading it, I was very much reminded of the realities of the invasion of Iraq and often found myself wondering if that was part of what inspired Sanderson to write this series in the first place.
The point of all of this is that the best of intentions can sometimes lead to terrible consequences when radical changes of policy are executed without proper care and forethought. Or, to put it another way, sometimes bad things happen to good people, especially when those good people don’t take the time to really think through what it is that they’re trying to accomplish. Brandon Sanderson and Richard K. Morgan are very different authors, but in this their work is complimentary. For me personally—already running a campaign of anti-heroes—the direction to go was obvious. Especially for a town like Luskan. A town that was essentially destroyed by misdirected good intentions. In my game, my players are acting in their own self-interests, but they are at least acting decisively and effectively. In a place like Luskan, that’s better policy than the town has seen in quite some time. I like that dichotomy—that good intentions destroyed the town and self-interest is effectively rebuilding it. It’s like a reaffirmation of capitalist ethics. I think it’s working in my game.
Along the same lines, I’ll include former Army military intelligence officer-turned-novelist Ralph Peters on my list of favorite influences. I’ve been reading Peters’s stuff off and on since my Academy days—back when he was still in the Army—and I’m a fan of his thinking. I mean, don’t get me wrong: the guy has his definite crack-pot moments. But his stuff is fun, even when it’s terrifying. And that’s definitely the case in his latest offering, The War After Armageddon. Armageddon is—if nothing else—an excellent example of how one might run a campaign with an ostensibly good-aligned paladin as the primary antagonist. I don’t know that it’s specifically influenced any one particular aspect of my current campaign, but I read it as part of a block that included a healthy dose of Richard K. Morgan’s work and came away feeling distinctly burnt and cynical. It’s the influence of that cynicism that I’ll point to here.
So anyway, that’s a lot of books. If you’re less literary then maybe you’d prefer something from TV, say the short-lived Sci Fi (now SyFy) Channel original series The Dresden Files. That series was based on a set of urban fantasy noir novels by author Jim Butcher, a series that is a favorite of mine. Now there’s a lot to like in Butcher’s work, but the thing that influences me the most is the way that Mr. Butcher structures his plots, scenes, and sequels. I don’t want to get too much into scene structure this week, but I pay a TON of attention to it in my everyday writing, and I think it helps a lot in keeping things moving. Jim Butcher’s work informs that because he has the best, most transparent scene structure of any of the working authors with which I’m familiar, and it inspires me. Effective scene structure is what turns an otherwise interesting concept into a genuine page turner (or fails to, if you screw it up), and in this regard I think Jim Butcher is simply without peer.
Finally, my last two books are both modern classics, chosen purely for my love of their use of language. Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch is perhaps the most effective purely dialogue-driven novel that’s ever been written. Meanwhile, I think Martin Cruz Smith deserves a place in the pantheon of English authors that’s below only Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. Gorky Park is already quite a well-celebrated novel, and honestly, it’s even better than advertised. What Mcdonald and Smith have in common is tight dialogue written around sparse prose that’s nevertheless evocative in the extreme. Bottom line: I wish that I could write like those guys. So does everyone else in the world.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about a few of what I personally think of as anti-influences. There are two, and they’re here mostly because they’re huge influences on others. The first is Batman, but I could just as easily point out James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans as the genre’s original primary source material. It’s not that Cooper’s work is bad or even that I just don’t like Batman. Far from it. The problem is that Cooper’s archetype—the lonely ranger who exists outside of society but nevertheless fights to defend it—has simply become far too pervasive. So much so that it’s destructive. Why can’t our hero be personable? Hell, why can’t he even be happy? Or, as Orson Scott Card would ask, why can’t he have a family?
Here’s the thing: if our hero has few ties to the world, then he has far less at stake than he could have otherwise. That doesn’t raise the stakes. It lowers them. This is not the plan. I mean, yeah, anti-heroes are cool. But too much of a good thing is still too much, and more to the point, there are a lot more ways to tackle emotional angst than simply setting the hero outside of society and making him or her uncomfortable in it. Occasionally, I’d like to see some other ideas explored by folks.
When applied to D&D, the Batman Problem tends to manifest as an overabundance of lonely-ranger archetypes being played by our players. I think as DM’s, the best that we can do is to gently encourage guys to go outside the clichés and develop characters that are more talkative and fundamentally more well-rounded. And when pressed, I think most players would rather play a character who’s opinionated and likeable rather than one who is an angry curmudgeon that lets others take charge and tell him what to do.
My other anti-influence is the comic book Spawn, which I think we can safely blame for quite a lot of the world’s problems. After all, Spawn is almost completely responsible for the indie glut of the late 20th century that almost destroyed the comic industry as whole, and as if that weren’t enough, the book simultaneously inspired a raft of hideous imitators that collectively defined a new sub-genre, the execrable urban fantasy “War between Heaven and Hell” sub-genre. Look, I get that Spawn is a decent book. Creator Todd MacFarlane has certainly done more than his fair share of ground-breaking work, and God knows that there are legions upon legions of his fans and fanboys out there. But for my money Spawn never quite pays off on its potential—in much the same way that the TV show The X-Files never paid off on its potential—and against that, the sheer number of imitators and that awful freakin’ movie make the entire experience less than worthwhile for me when taken as a whole. So yeah. I am not a fan.
But the real reason that I bring this up is because Spawn is also an example of how not to start a story. MacFarlane opens his epic with backstory—which is always a terrible idea—and then relies on his skill as an artist to carry where his skill as a writer falls short. This creates confusion for the fanboys and is overall the cause of much mischief. Because the art is really good. And at that point, the legions of imitators think that the Right Way To Do It is to open with this hideously noir bit of backstory like Spawn does—cue the gravelly voice: “There is a War between Heaven and Hell”—and this is so, so, so not the plan. And since they’re not sporting that crazy MacFarlane-style art, the whole effort falls flatter than Hell. Unfortunately matters are complicated for MacFarlane-fan DMs because D&D carries its own implied requirement for some kind of divine conflict as your characters approach their inevitable immortality once they enter the Epic Tier. And D&D doesn’t even have art to bail out poor storytelling!
So. It’s a thorny issue, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you how to deal with it. Certainly, I’m not telling you to eschew all divine conflict. But I do think that you need to be careful how you approach divine conflict, and I especially think you need to be careful with how you introduce it. You want to build it up right, and you want to pay it off right, and neither of those things is particularly easy to accomplish—especially if you’re inspired by poor source material.
Eh… maybe we’ll talk about that some more next week. ‘Cause by then, we’ll be into something totally new.
Have a great weekend!
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