A waste of a great concept

In 1975, Empire of the Petal Throne introduced roleplaying gamers to the world of Tekumel, a beautifully detailed fantasy setting that was the first of its kind to feature non-Caucasian characters in a society nothing like the usual Graeco-Roman or medieval world. In fact it was the first ever society of any kind to appear in a roleplaying game, D&D and its imitators up to that point being just "a medieval Wild West" whose society consisted of nothing but a shop to spend your loot in.

Tekumel’s creator, M.A.R. Barker, drew on inspiration from South-East Asia, the Middle East, China and Pre-Columbian civilizations without his world actually being like any of those cultures. The result was something very different from other RPGs – and from most American or European fantasy literature. What made Barker's creation so revolutionary in 1975 was its vision of entire civilizations that didn't look, think, or act like variations on medieval Europe. Barker’s greatest gift to the fantasy genre was showing us that other worlds could be genuinely other. That lesson feels more important now than ever. Paul Mason gives a taste of what I’m talking about here.

That’s not how Tekumel gamers (a small and dwindling group) usually get to approach the setting, though. For example, Bethorm is the name of one of many Tekumel-set RPGs that have appeared in the half-century since EPT. It’s also the Tsolyani word for a pocket dimension, apparently. But why do the Tsolyani have a word for "pocket dimension"? Why do they even have the concept? It can hardly be something an ordinary citizen would use in everyday life, after all.

Consider the real world. "Galaxy" was the Middle English word for the Milky Way. Nobody knew until the 1920s that we lived in one galaxy and that there are trillions of others. Nobody knew until the 1950s that the universe is billions of light-years across. We don't even now have single words for dark matter and dark energy, and they are observable (in the first case, anyway), so I'm stumped as to how even educated Tsolyani ended up coining a word for "pocket dimension".

One argument is that the Tekumel setting incudes “learning spheres” – find one, give it a twist, and you’re an instant expert in whatever was originally programmed into it. So if learning spheres are common, that means the technological know-how of yore need never have been lost. Tekumel would be like the world in Zelazny's Lord of Light, where most people think that gods and demons and magic are real, but the select few know that's all just a way of explaining science to the uneducated. And if you spoke to those select few they would know all about quantum theory, atoms, cybernetics, etc.

(There's actually a real-life equivalent of this, incidentally. When William Kamkwamba wanted to build a dynamo in his village in Malawi, he told the locals he needed to collect old bits of machinery "to do some magic" because he knew that's how they would interpret what he was doing.)

The trouble is, we’re told that learning spheres are used up when activated. And they were constructed at least 30,000 years before the present day. So I don’t think they’d be a significant factor in the education of the Tsolyani, certainly not to the extent of making the concept of pocket dimensions commonplace.

This opens up the question of how much magic is there in "real" Tekumel. I imagine a world where priests do a lot of rituals before and during a battle, and those rituals have a real effect on morale, and many soldiers will swear blind they saw miraculous things like lightning bolts, but in fact that's mostly in the mind. So this would be a low-fantasy world with no more magic than Westeros, not a pulp sci-fi setting with spells like phaser-blasts. I do realize this would be unpopular with Tekumel enthusiasts, but after all they are an endangered species. My Tekumel doesn't consist of characters discussing abstruse cosmic concepts like bethorms.

What would Tekumel look like if it were contemporary SF/fantasy rather than 1950s-influenced Planet Stories, a bit like the way Battlestar Galactica was rebooted? Most Tekumel fans seem to prefer the space opera version, a genre that was repopularized by Lucas in the '70s after all. They play games in which the rich culture of Tsolyanu, Livyanu and the other states is all but irrelevant. Instead player-characters gad about between bethorms encountering alien/human multidimensional politics and yammering about warp drive and gravity engines, while Barker's invented societies, so marvellously different from our modern world, are flattened into the same sci-fi mush you’ll see in a dozen fungible entertainment franchises. 

It makes no sense. Barker was a linguist and anthropologist and he describes wonderfully strange civilizations which he brings to life in minute detail. That's where Tekumel shines. He wasn't a scientist and his science fiction ideas are a dime a dozen. His SF is also typically mid-20th century Western in flavour, whereas the cultures he created don't resemble any historical setting, most especially not any Western one. Not that setting alone is enough to deliver a compelling story, especially not in an era of BookTok, celeb book clubs, and dopy romantasy sagas. You need characters you care about. But the setting is the environment they move in, and if it's off-the-peg then the situations are too. Lizzie and Mr Darcy's relationship means nothing outside the special context of Regency culture and socioeconomics. Jane Austen even starts the novel with an ironic statement about that.

If I were to reboot Tekumel, I’d throw out the “Doc” Smith space opera stuff and make it more about everyday life. Much less magic and much, much, much less whizzy technology. The Eyes wouldn’t have standard names; they’d be too rare for that. There wouldn’t be an internet of telepaths reliably sending messages across thousands of miles overnight. There’d be no thousand-year-old plans hatched in “pocket dimensions”, no routine encounters with robots and gadget-wielding aliens. I’d strip it all back to what really is unique and wonderful: the cultures that Barker created. As we look toward the future of fantasy gaming and fiction, his example reminds us of the beauty of diversity. The most memorable worlds aren't built on clever mechanics or exotic technologies. They're built on the patient work of imagining how people actually live, love, struggle, and die in societies radically different from our own. That's the kind of magic that never gets old.

It's called irony

I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts over the last couple of years, to go with the long country walks of the covid era. One of my favourites (podcasts, not walks) looks at the books and authors Gary Gygax cited as influences on D&D. But, oh my, it can be wearing to hear genre fans blunder their way through an interpretation of what an author is saying. You'd think that reading fantasy and SF would open you up to ambiguity and nuance, but instead those readers are often the most insistently literal.

Take this episode about Lin Carter’s The Warrior of World’s End. Xarda the knightrix (sic) says: “Knighthood promises a colourful and exciting life of action, such as every red-blooded woman normally craves.” (26m 23s in.) But, the presenters solemnly go on to say, Lin Carter then undercuts this with a further passage: 

“Many folks would doubtless say that a lady knight is a strange thing, or an intelligent metal bird that flies, or an old geezer who covers his face with lavender smoke.” 

Oh no, the sexist hound. One of the presenters grumbles that “it’s putting a warrior woman in the same category as a flying bird and an illusionist with purple haze over his face as though it’s just as wacky and weird!” Oh yes, agrees another earnestly, those were the deplorable attitudes of the time.

Does anyone think that when Jane Austen writes, “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” that she is expressing her own personal view of the matter? Or that Hilary Mantel’s description of the Duchess of Cambridge as "a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore” was intended as Mantel’s unfiltered opinion? Mantel should not have had to explain that she was employing irony; that is, using a variety of free indirect speech to convey and expose the attitudes she was criticizing.

I found the same thing in some reviews of my political gamebook Can You Brexit that complained about the snobbish and dismissive attitudes of the central character. Well, duh. That character was modelled on the senior Tory politicians of the day. If you disagreed with the tone of their inner voice, so too did I.

Authors do this all the time. Carter in that excerpt from The Warrior of World’s End is not telling us the attitudes of the 1970s – at least, that wasn’t his purpose. He is using a form of generalized free indirect speech to express the general astonishment at a female knight in terms that place us in the mindset of the people who inhabit his fantasy setting. The mechanical bird and the smoke-wrapped sorcerer are other characters in the adventuring “party”, incidentally, so it’s also self-aware irony on their part. But even when a sentiment like that is expressed in the narrator’s voice, it’s a technique writers use a lot, and usually to express precisely the opposite of their personal opinions. Unfortunately it seems like it’s wasted in genre fiction if the readers insist on taking every word literally.

Why it matters: you are missing nine-tenths of the value of fiction if you think that authors write simply to express personal points of view. The presenters of another podcast were vexed by how Arthur Conan Doyle could have believed in fairies having created the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes. "Doyle would regard seances and fairies as unknown science," theorized one. "He wasn't Holmes, he was Watson," countered the other. No, no, no. Authors aren't that careless. They don't typically just drop themselves into any one character but into all of them. I've written religiously devout characters, for example, and indeed stories that have a Christian message, despite being in real life an agnostic. Neither Jack Ember nor Estelle Meadowvane are me, though naturally they must have something of me in them.

(Incidentally, it seems like I'm really whaling on those two podcasts, but in fact they're both firm favourites of mine. They just happened to end up in the firing line when I was looking around for examples. But give them both a chance, do.)

I once wrote a vampire novel for a YA horror series. An editor at the publisher's office said, "There is a bookshop called Horniman's and the school is called Urnfield. I don't think the writer is aware of the connotations." What, I wasn't aware that those names might evoke themes of sex and death? In a vampire novel? What do publishers think authors do all day? We don't just slap this stuff down without any thought.

So, next time you're reading a book -- even a trashy fantasy adventure novel -- it might pay off to park your own assumptions and attitudes outside and dive in with the faith that the author is not simply some dope who unthinkingly uses his or her characters as mere mouthpieces for the -- shock horror! -- discredited views of the unsafe bygone era when the novel was written. Here is the finest literary podcast I know of, and one that will dispel any notion that "literature" has to mean difficult, or sombre, or even highbrow. Open your mind and even the humblest book might change your life.

A visit to the real Legend

“It has become something of a dare for the children of Banlet to walk widdershins around the tomb thirteen times before inserting a finger into the keyhole of the wooden door. The challenge being to leave their finger in for the longest time at risk of the dead man gnawing at the tip.”

What’s the difference between Dungeons & Dragons and Dragon Warriors? No doubt whatever curve we draw around the two there will be outliers, but on the whole D&D seems to like world-shattering plots that, if you put them on screen, would involve a couple of hundred CGI experts. Dragon Warriors is much closer to ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush,’ as one of our greatest novelists put it.

In one of our recent campaigns designed for playtesting the Jewelspider rules, Oliver Johnson ran a scenario in which we were able to give a cow to a farmer who had had his livelihood destroyed by rustlers. There was also a plot about finding a bottle of ‘the perfume of Heaven’ to deal with a prophecy about the end of the world, but I can’t even remember that. Real emotion is saving a few people you’ve actually met, not the millions you haven't. That’s why The Seventh Seal is still one of the best Dragon Warriors films.

In a typical D&D campaign, that perfume of Heaven would be a magic item – in effect a bit of tech – to be used as part of a CRPG-style solution, ie matching the item to the problem. In Dragon Warriors it matters that it’s holy. The cultural and theological aspects far outweigh the practical. You won’t catch Legend players saying something like, ‘Give the perfume of Heaven to the warlock because he stands at the back, so he can throw it on the monster while we hold it off.’ You wouldn’t think of a relic as a tool to help you in a fight. You wouldn’t think of tactics as something that trumps the social order. For that matter you wouldn’t even voluntarily associate with a known warlock.

But, of course, he or she may not know they’re a warlock. That’s why I particularly like Nigel Ward’s adventure of two monks in the new Red Ruin chapbook. These two fellows are not the usual cosplayers who inhabit many fantasy campaigns. They are thoroughly part of their world and they perceive everything, including their own abilities, in that light. The adventure is also a perfect example of why Miss Austen was right about the two inches of ivory, and why Michael Fane in Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street has a far more magical, marvellous and heart-stoppingly menacing childhood than J K Rowling was able to dream up for Harry Potter. Less is more, and “The Wickedest Man in Banlet” delivers in shudders, thrills and authentic triumph in a way that no we’re-off-to-save-the-world-again epic ever could.

You can pick up The Adventures of Cedric & Fulk free here with several of the best Legend scenarios you'll get at that or any price this year.

Other news. Here’s an interview with Joël Mallet, who has been translating the Fabled Lands books into French for Alkonost. Segueing from that, Alkonost are in talks with Mark Smith to publish his Virtual Reality books Green Blood and Coils of Hate and maybe the never-seen-before Mask of Death.

On the subject of death and cemeteries, if you enjoy the creepy frisson of a visit to Sir Rickard’s graveside then take a look at Jack Cooke’s The End of the Road, in which he drives around Britain in an old hearse in search of storied tombs.

And I’d better not let a mention of books pass without adding that my wife’s new novel Ever Rest is now available for pre-order. I’ll tell you how it came about. It’s loosely based on a short story Roz wrote twenty years ago, which in turn was based on an anecdote my school’s assistant headmaster, Mr Bishop, told me fifty years ago. He was climbing in the Alps and a body was brought in that had been carried down the mountain in a glacier. The body was a little battered but still recognizably a young man. An old woman came and kissed the body, and somebody said that she had been engaged to the man fifty years earlier when he fell off the mountain. Given that Mr Bishop was in his late sixties when he told us that (he came out of retirement to help the school out) the incident probably happened in the 1930s, meaning that the man fell into the glacier in the early 1880s. So Ever Rest really has been a tale one hundred and forty years in the making. Give or take.

Pointing the finger

British literary critics of the 19th century had the notion of the "Young Lady Standard", which was a kind of family-friendly U-rating for novels that would not offend the sensibilities of a Victorian girl. Because of this, British literature often shied away from the sort of forthright depiction of life you find in French or Russian novels of the time. There was a feeling on the Continent that literature was an art form and had a right, indeed a responsibility, to mirror life warts and all. In Britain literature was the forerunner of early-evening television.

Even so, authors like Jane Austen were not the twee and cosy yarn-spinners that many suppose. Lady Susan Vernon is an amoral, manipulative adventuress who deserves a place in the ranks of dark antiheroes alongside Vic Mackey and Walter White; Catherine Morland runs afoul of predatory sexual vindictiveness; Lizzie Bennet takes on a real-life dragon for very high stakes; Becky Sharp is willing to betray even those who love her just to squirrel away some cash. Nonetheless, though depths of human depravity are certainly there to be inferred in 19th century British literature, those are all pre-watershed conflicts. None of them is described with the uncompromising raw honesty and occasional breathtaking brutality of authors like Balzac or Chekhov.

Dickens wrote stories to stir your emotions, but he and his readers knew they were parlour entertainment, to be read by the whole family -- a "safe space" in entertainment. A Victorian paterfamilias who opened a novel to be confronted with the likes of Madame Bovary might well have stormed back to the bookshop and thrown it through the window.

I think something similar is behind the uproar we sometimes see nowadays over "unsuitable" content in roleplaying games. There are some people who play games the way those Victorian families read novels; there are others who expect games with no holds barred. This has led to the concept of the "x-card" -- sadly nothing to do with homo superior, but a mechanism to interrupt games whose scenes or subject matter a player is unhappy with. To quote from the blog I linked to there:

"The x-card is used to signal that a boundary has been crossed or that a player is not OK with the content. The game stops immediately, and discussion shifts to the reason why the card was used."

For me that's as absurd as calling a halt to a disturbing play or movie. If you don't like what you're seeing, don't tell me about it; there's the exit. But there's a category disconnect here. I regard roleplaying games as art, no different from literature, theatre, cinema, poetry, and painting. The people who advocate x-cards want their games to be morally uplifting and to avoid upsetting anybody, just like those family novels for the Victorian fireside. We have different expectations.

I have a player who doesn't like horror scenarios. If we're going to be playing a horror campaign, that's OK; she sits it out. Sometimes there's a grey area. A scenario may not be overtly intended as horror, in the sense of belonging to the horror genre, but horrific things happen. There have been a few times when my players have shocked me to the core with some of the things they're willing to do. And that's fine. It's why I play, in fact, to see those things that emerge unexpectedly from characterization -- sometimes beautiful, sometimes very nasty. It's the same when writing characters. You ask yourself how far they will go, what lines won't they cross, and the answer is often revelatory.

What do you do if you come up with something you know will be shocking, whether as a player or a referee? If I thought my players couldn't handle it then I'd keep it to use in a story, perhaps. But really, if my players were like that then we'd soon part company. They and I know we're not setting any limits.

Taking the blog post I cited again, one of that player's boundaries is "I don't want any romance involving my character." But it's really hard to plan that kind of thing in advance, especially in the improv style of play that gives the best games. When refereeing, I wouldn't have an NPC profess love for a PC if I didn't think the player was capable of running with it. (I'm talking about their acting ability and imagination, of course.) What if one player-character falls in love with another? I'd much rather they both played it. Unrequited love is one option there, and it could develop in interesting directions as we know from countless TV shows and novels. It would be pretty disappointing if a player just said, "I don't want to roleplay that." In that case play your blocking. Reject them, spurn their advances in-character. Don't tell everyone about it.

But what about games in a public forum? Twenty years ago I went along to a convention to sign Fabled Lands books but soon got roped into a series of fascinating mini-RPG scenarios run by the guys behind West Point Extra Planetary Academy. Each game had a different setting and was built as a moral quandary to be played out in twenty minutes. They could hardly have started by saying, "This scenario deals with issues X, Y and Z." It's the trigger warning problem. If you're trying to capture a genuine sense of surprise in the game, you can't give too much away upfront. (Not to mention that the evidence indicates that trigger warnings are of no use in any case to the genuinely traumatized.)

Why have these debates crept into games of late? I think partly because roleplaying is becoming -- well, not mass market entertainment, not by any stretch, but certainly it has opened up beyond the hardcore gaming demographic of the early days. Aficionados take a sophisticated approach to their hobby. The casual fan tends to have a less mature outlook.

Also, American culture has always had a much more censorious streak than European. The idea of shutting down a discussion because it offends somebody's moral code is perhaps natural if your country was founded by Puritans. And because of social media, the Overton window has shifted away from liberalism towards moralism. Hence gripes like this, that maybe do make sense over in the US (American friends, feel free to chip in) but strike most Europeans as potty.

And because most roleplaying derives from genre fiction, and genre sensibilities tend to be a little less grown-up than proper literature, there's a tendency to expect roleplaying games to stick to the soft-soap forms of conflict you get in traditional SF and fantasy. Witness the outcries over Game of Thrones when the writers stepped outside genre norms -- even though that was pretty much the entire thesis of the show from day one.

Anyway, enough theorizing. What do we do about it? Well, surely few gamers want to sit around listening while one player explains their reasons for halting the game. The next stop on that line is struggle sessions, which nobody will enjoy. But those people's sense of offence seems genuinely to overwhelm them, and there's no point in subjecting anybody to an experience they disapprove of. So we're going to need better ways to signal which kind of roleplayer you are. High literary with anything goes, or pulp with puritan boundaries? As long as everyone around the table knows what they're letting themselves in for, I'm sure we can all keep on gaming without needing to call the thought police.