A Sense of Place

I recently had a conference in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and though I did not get much of a chance to wander around and get a sense of the place, I was acutely aware that I was in the place where my favorite hobby was essentially born. It reminded me that within a four hour drive south one could also find the birth place of both GDW, creators of Traveller, in Normal, IL and Judges Guild in Decatur, IL.

Recently, James over at Grognardia asked the question if there was such a thing as “California games.” He cites Runequest, Arduin and Warlock and now (thanks to Dan of Gobinoid Games) Wizards’ World is also part of that tapestry.

In Orthodox Christianity, there is still a very strong pull towards the pilgrimage. I myself have done so on several occasions — to Mt. Athos, Thessaloniki (to follow the footsteps of St. Paul), and the island of Aegina and the tomb of St. Nektarios. There is a personal presence that accompanies these places because of the people I went to see — the various saints of the Orthodox Church. There is also a very powerful sense of the holy.

Lake Geneva, Normal and Decatur are not Mt. Athos, Thessaloniki and Aegina, but I cannot help but wonder what it is about the plains of the Midwest that inspired such a creative explosion in the 70s. It is a reverse of James’ question about California: Are there common themes in gaming cultures that coalesce into a certain kind of game? I would ask: How much does a sense of place have to do with these expressions?

Given that the primary place for gaming culture is no longer something one can find on a map, is this question even relevant any more, or am I just waxing poetic because of a deep sense of nostalgia?

As G+, FLAILSNAILS, Kickstarter and POD become the new gaming norm, what sense of place do we as gamers have anymore — if we ever had one in the first place?

My First Long-Running Traveller Campaign

If I am honest, over the years I have probably spent more money on Traveller than I have on D&D — I certainly own a lot of Traveller related stuff that takes up more space on my bookshelf than my D&D books. That money, however, has never produced any kind of long-term campaign. It's not that my fiends and I didn't play Traveller (we did), it's that we had a lot more fun playing the mini-game of character and world creation than we did when we finally got around to doing something with those characters and worlds.

I mention this because in my Lost Colonies campaign, there is a real possibility that my players not only will not be heading back to Headwaters any time soon, but may be hopping from one world to the next in ways that I will not be able to predict. I do have several options available to me, one of which I don't relish at all: creating from scratch all of the various possible choices my players could make. I could also assign various pre-fab campaign worlds to each of those possible choices. While I certainly have a couple in mind to have as options, I don't have enough and too many of them are not only interchangeable, but some of my players are also intimately familiar with them.

Enter Judges Guild. Back in 1980 and 1981, Rudy Kraft produced his Portals series of mini-campaigns. Each has a radically different flavor than that found in a typical D&D world and they are all connected by a series of portals that teleport players in-between worlds (thus, giving them all a dungeon-like feel). The world that I find most inspiring is the world presented in Portals of Twilight.

Whereas the other two installments derived their uniqueness from their inhabitants, Twilight is unique because of the world itself. The rotation of the planet is parallel to the orbit so that one side is always in light and one in darkness. Thus, the only inhabitable part of the planet in the narrow strip of twilight along the equator. This sounds like something straight out of Traveller.

Thus, the inspiration for my solution for dealing with the potential meanderings of my players: revisit the mini-game of world creation in Traveller. This method has several things I find very attractive:

• It is random — which usually results in more creativity on my part.
• It's fun — I have literally spent days of my life creating sub-sectors for use in Traveller.
• All the results can be recorded in a simple code wherein there will be enough information for me to be able to improvise should I need to.
• I don't have to waste a whole lot of time creating a bunch of worlds my players will never visit.

I do this with a very real sense of irony — my very first long-term Traveller campaign has turned out to be D&D.

Mining Some Circa 1981 Gold

. . .many fantasy gamers see nothing wrong with a game-universe ruled by evil forces, or by a callous "Neutrality" barely distinguishable from evil, but let anyone suggest having an omnipotent good power, and they'll scream, "Blasphemy! That spoils GAME BALANCE!!!!

Is it my thesis that a D&D Campaign can assume the existence of an omnipotent God — in fact, the God of the Bible — without losing the quality of suspense, just as, in reality, the existence of that same God does not make life predictable or unchallenging on our "Prime Material Plane."

For those of you who follow this blog, you might mistake the above quote for something that I had written from one of my earlier posts; however, you would be mistaken. Rather, it is from an article that ze bulette of Dungeons and Digressions brought to my attention from the Oct/Nov 1981 issue of Judges Guild's Pegasus Magazine — Monotheism In Fantasy Games by Joseph R. Ravitts.

From my perspective, it is a fascinating piece of gaming history because it indicates that the seeds that eventually drove me away from playing D&D for many a year were already planted and bearing fruit in 1981. The fact that Ravitts is having to make many of the same arguments that I have in this blog (that monotheism is not only a legitimate choice in FRPGs, but is well supported by fantasy literature) demonstrates a trend within the hobby that may very well have contributed to that dark and ridiculous association of D&D with Satanism by the likes of Pulling, Schoebelen and Hickman. However, I think the most interesting aspect of this article (and what distinguishes it from my own writing) is that Ravitts feels the need to spend a lot of time arguing for a fantasy world where Jesus Christ is not one of many active deities.

Over the course of the last three decades, hobbyists have come to agree with Ravitts; however, the majority chose to rid their games of Christianity rather than pagan gods. Which, of course, is where I come in. I have endeavored to demonstrably find ways in which to go the other direction and play this game with a very strong Christian foundation. A foundation that was, at least in part, present in the early years of the hobby as evidenced by Ravitt's need to argue that Jesus Christ cannot coexist with the likes of Odin, Crom, Set, Cthulhu or Krishna as active deities that directly influence fantasy worlds through granting spells to clerics etc.

Here are (from my perspective) some of Ravitt's more instructive observations:

Jesus Christ had to warn His followers, "In this world you will have tribulation." Sam Gamgee, in The Return of the King had a vision of "light and high beauty forever beyond (Sauron's) reach," but this did not relieve him of the responsibility to fight against the immediate threat to his world.

Others will object that the stern moral authority of the Christian God puts too many limits on a character's freedom. But have you considered the restrictiveness of other cosmologies? The Eastern religions view man as the prisoner of Karma; in Greek mythology, gods and men were subject to Fate, and often brought on a predestined doom in the very act of trying to avoid it; and in Norse mythology, everything that a hero achieved or enjoyed was overshadowed by the inevitability of Ragnarok. The Judeo-Christian view, in contrast, dignifies mankind by asserting the our will is truly free, and our free choice is crucial to our eternal destiny (Genesis 4:7, Deuteronmy 30:11-14, Joshua 24:15, Matthew 23:37, James 1:13-14).

However, the true gem to be found in this article from the annuls of our hobby is Ravitt's description of his own campaign world. Citing the fact that C.S. Lewis had Aslan/Christ supply Narnia with human beings from earth rather than creating a whole separate human race, he imagines his own version of Middle-Earth where two or three hundred years after the fall of Sauron, God arranges for Christians from our world to be transplanted to Middle-Earth to preach the Gospel to the beings that inhabit it.

While I would not choose Middle-Earth myself, this approach has a tremendous amount of appeal. It plugs into a deep seeded trope within Pulp Sci Fi and offers a fabulous way to introduce all kinds of sci fi elements, as Ravitts himself points out:

Subsequent crossovers from our Earth brought in the English language — and whatever other elements of the real world I wanted to have appear in my game-world. (That's how you can get anachronistic items in your dungeon without spoiling the internal logic!)

This has caused me to have a very bad case of Gamer ADD because this has put an extremely cool twist on my proposed version of Greyhawk. Rather than use one of my Aslan-esque Christ analogues, I could actually use Christianity with the understanding that St. Cuthbert is one of those Christians brought from our world to preach the Gospel to the World of Greyhawk. Thus, whenever someone says, "That is St. Cuthbert's Church" it is understood that it is the place where you go to worship St. Cuthbert's God — Jesus Christ. It also gives me the freedom to introduce some of the more gonzo elements of the early hobby with impunity.

If you have access to Pegasus IV, I recommend reading Monotheism In Fantasy Games, if for nothing else than a fascinating look at the early years of the hobby.