Fictional Racism

This is probably going to be an awkward post, so bear with me.  It's about racism and fictional worlds, and why it all matters.

Not racism in the story -- that's actually the easy part.  Toss in a "we don't serve goblins here" and boom, you've got fictional racism.

Order of the Stick #13 - Rich Burlew

This is a post about real-world racism that fictional stories bring up.  Sure, this thing I've been writing is just a fantasy world, but like all fiction, it's made of metaphor and parallels and simplification from the real world around us.

The big parallel, of course, between Signs and the Wilderness and our own world is the story of the colonial frontier of North America.  It's not a perfect match, but it's clearly a major source of inspiration for what I'm writing, and it's the story of the land where I live and the culture I grew up in.  So while this setting is fictional, we humans are not as good at separating fact from fiction as we'd like to think.  The best fiction pulls us in and makes us feel like we're part of the story, and those emotions and impressions take root and stick with us.

Thankfully, I'm living in an environment where the most overt racism is abhorred.  If I went to work and started claiming I was part of some superior race that ought to rule others, I'd be fired in a heartbeat, and everyone there would think it just.  I live in a place where it's very easy to say "don't hate Thai people" and we all nod our heads and agree that hating people is wrong and we shouldn't do it.

It's another matter to face underlying racism that's part of our own story.

I'm an American through and through, which means my people came to be a people at the intersection of empire and slavery and manifest destiny.  It's a fascinating story and one that's worth telling, but it's full of darkness for one fundamental reason: it's easy to justify the use of power when you're the one in power.

You might point out that America isn't unique in this regard, and you'd be right.  Plenty of other countries were built on racial oppression and there are plenty of other cruel stories in history.  But the story of America is the one I know best, so that's the context I'm using today.

American Progress - John Gast

I should keep some perspective here -- none of what I'm writing is going to fix this dark history, and I'm still learning about it myself.  But something I can do is point at it so we don't forget it's there.  I'd like to make sure my writing doesn't try to hide racial oppression or pretend it never existed.  How much you choose to engage with that is up to you.

With that in mind, I'm looking at three areas where oppression has left some nasty scars on our landscape of ideas, three kinds of justifications for racism that I think I need to keep myself aware of:

• That the oppressed are Evil and the oppressors are Good.
• That the oppressed are Passive and the oppressors are Active.
• That the oppressed are Gone and the oppressors have Replaced them.

Civilization vs. Evil

This is the easiest form of racial oppression to see, so thankfully it's one our society has come around to recognizing more and more.  But based on my own limited experience with education, I think it still needs to be said.

Colonial empires are brutal, both in building them and maintaining them.  Sure, disease played a huge role in the conquest of the New World, but colonial empires followed it up with a great heaping of theft, destruction, and murder, and they justified it by finding real or imagined flaws in their victims to call them Evil, while ignoring their own flaws to call themselves Good.

Power corrupts.  We all know it, and we all need to keep remembering it.  When the big, powerful empire wants the land and resources of other people, of course they'll make that conquest sound good and noble and justified.  And for the most part, they'll probably believe that's exactly what they're doing, seeing the suffering they've wrought as good and necessary.  It's easy to justify getting what you want.

Not that oppression somehow makes an oppressed people good.  People are people, and every society has its flaws.  Everyone in, say, 1600s New England had practices that look strange and unreasonable to us today.  There are no races of good people and races of evil people.

But when you're the powerful ones, it's easy to spend all your time talking about other people's flaws and minimize your own.  So while I'm including strange practices in all the species of my fictional world, it's the brutality of the colonial empire that has done the most damage (both the fictional one and the real-world ones) so that's the brutality that needs to be pointed out.

Passive Victims

There's another racist idea that is more subtle, which has let it hold on longer.  It's the idea that people from the empire are the only ones Doing things, while indigenous people are just waiting around for things to happen to them.

Think of the typical adventure story: the empire sends people out to explore, while the locals are sitting there, waiting to be explored.  Those stories are half true: that explorer really is going out and exploring, but they're also half false: the other people aren't actually waiting around, they're striving and achieving with all their strength and with all the resources they have.

In Signs in the Wilderness, I want to make sure to show that every group is striving and doing, that all people are protagonists of their own stories.  The empire may be richer, but that doesn't make their stories better.

Power is like its constituents wealth and technology.  It lets you conquer more or build bigger, but it doesn't make you strive harder for success.  (If anything, having more certainly makes me more complacent.)  Power lets explorers travel farther, but it doesn't make their stories better, just more widely known.  Great kings and scholars and lovers once lived and fought and dreamed in the land where I live now, and their stories were worth telling, even if no one alive remembers them today.

Replacing a Dying Race

This last idea I think is the one that's put down the deepest roots in our own world, the idea that the oppressed people are all gone now, or are fading away, and so while it may be very sad, they're all gone so they don't really matter anymore.

Here in the US, it's so terribly common to think of indigenous people as something of the past, and I've heard that view is common elsewhere.  Yes, there's no longer, say, a Comanche empire ruling over Texas, but the loss of political power isn't the same as vanishing altogether.  But it's easy to conflate the two, so we've got a lot of stories where native people were rather than are.

I'm not sure what to do about this idea in my own setting, made strange by fantasy and the passage of centuries.  Like the rest of these pernicious ideas, I'm just trying to point at it so we don't forget it's there.  I'm glad to see that people are writing stories about and from indigenous people today, people who can write more informed and meaningful stories about their own society than I ever could.

(Incidentally, while reading about this concept I came across a number that surprised me.  How many indigenous people do you suppose there are in the US today?  Six million, give or take.  That's more than the population of Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Louis combined.  I think that's a fact that deserves to be pointed out.)

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I'm sure none of what I'm doing here will have any impact in changing people's lives.  There's no room for illusion: I'm writing a little hobby game that maybe someone will enjoy for a good adventure or two.  It's just fantasy.  But maybe that fantasy will help tell the true story of how we got where we are today.  We can't go back, and we can't undo.

But we can remember.

Mystery plot hooks: foreshadowing without railroading

Or, how to look like you've planned it all from the start without railroading the story.

Imagine, the party finally breaks through into the crypt under the village.  Inside they find a massive one-eyed clay statue.  As the thief reaches out his hand, the eye opens.  They have awakened the Eye in the Mountain, a mystery you've been planning out for months.

Only you didn't really plan it out.  You just tossed in the phrase "Eye in the Mountain" and let the players run with it for a while.

I like to keep a list of mystery plot hooks, about four or five at a time.  In the very first adventure, throw in a snippet of vague but evocative information.  It could be a password, an engraving, a note clutched in a dead man's hand — anything to drop it in the game.  Don't worry about what it means yet.  In fact, it's more fun if you have no idea yourself.

The idea here is to foreshadow things you haven't even planned out.

I don't care for preplanned plots, myself.  They always end up robbing the players of their agency in the world, making their choices feel insignificant in the shadow of the story the DM wanted to tell.

But preplanned plots do allow foreshadowing, building of tension towards a narrative climax and a more satisfying story.

One way to combine the two is to add mystery hooks that you'll figure out later.  Short phrases tend to work best:

• the Lady of Spring
• the Withering Stone
• Silence will Fall
• Beware the Red of the Grumbler
• the Day of Resounding

Toss a mystery hook into the game with no leads, no clues of how you could learn more about it.  Let the players speculate, but don't give them more information yet.

There are many ways to sneak a hook like this into the game.  Some that I've enjoyed:

• a nursery rhyme
• the last words of a dying man
• an informant tells you they overheard it while spying on someone
• inscribed on an artifact
• a prophecy being talked about by superstitious people
• carved into a tree (but misspelled)

For example:

Beneath the dry hand of the corpse you find a page that's been scribbled all over, random squiggles around a single phrase written in the center, "the whispering glass".

Don't explain it.  After all, you don't know what it means yet either, but don't tell the players that.

Then wait a few game sessions, and throw in another reference.  This time add a few details nearby that don't really explain anything.

She says there was a fairy tale her grandmother told her, many years ago.  Something about stone and glass and whispers you shouldn't listen to.  So long ago, when she was just a little girl.  They lived by the sea then, and she ate corn porridge with a bit of pepper.

Over time, sprinkle a few of these mystery hooks into the story.  Listen to the theories the players come up with, and let the mystery stew for a while.

Then when you need to introduce a new element to the story, decide how it relates to one of the hooks you already introduced ages ago.  Armed with more of an explanation, you can start to add clues that actually mean something.

Maybe the Whispering Glass is a globe full of tortured souls that will drive you mad by listening to it.  Maybe there's a looking glass that whispers secrets you wouldn't want revealed.  Maybe there's a secret society that has a ritual where all drink from a common glass and speak in whispers.

Whatever the hook turns out to mean, the players will already want to know.  They'll be paying attention the moment you say "whispering".  If it's something they thought of, they'll feel proud for guessing what was coming.  If it's nothing like their ideas, they'll be surprised at the result.

Either way, you'll look like you planned the whole thing and they'll get the satisfaction of uncovering the mystery.

Striving against the world

I find myself looking for a fight.  An uphill struggle, striving against a world opposed or indifferent to my goals — that's what I like in a roleplaying game.

(In this post, I'll be using a lot of shoulds and don'ts and unwarrantedly absolute statements.  These are really just for me.  As long as you're having fun, you're playing the right way.  If you want to play the way I do, read on.)

But in the midst of all the talk about how roleplaying games should work, it's easy to forget that the players and the GM are playing two different games.

As a player, I'd better be using my wits, paying attention, and coming up with good plans, lest I get all our characters killed.  For me as a player, this is war.  Whether it's a gunfight in the street, a court case over our colonial charter, or chasing cryptic clues to buried treasure, I want to strive as hard as I can.  Whatever the struggle we're facing, the world isn't going to play fair and it's going to hurt if we fail.

Hopefully it's not too gauche to quote my own article about another game I worked on:

[This game] is like climbing a mountain — it's about a titanic struggle against a cold, hostile environment, striving to be the first to the top. It's about facing a challenge and working to overcome it. The greater the challenge, the more triumphant the victory.

As a player, I'd like to use every tool in my arsenal to achieve a triumphant victory (or at least manage a narrow escape).

As a GM, on the other hand, I can't do any of that.  Struggling with all my might against the world or against the players' plans isn't helpful.  Being in control of the world, the GM is no longer a reasonable adversary.  This leads to an important principle:

When you have creative control over the world, striving is meaningless.

If the players want to strive the way I do when I'm a player, there needs to be a dividing line.  On one side of the narrative boundary the players strive and contend for glory.  On the other side the GM manages a world for them to contend within.  Crossing the boundary in either direction ruins the game.

• If the players control the world their achievements are made meaningless, like they've been playing with cheat mode turned on.
• If the GM controls the players' characters, the players' achievements are also made meaningless, as their characters have become merely puppets for the director.

So what kind of game is the GM playing?  How can they be successful?  For me, it's twofold:

• presenting a living world
• making the adventure be worth the struggle

A living world is a tall order.  As much as I'd like to build my own creation and see its every detail, making a whole world is beyond any of our abilities.  Instead, I'd like to make enough of a world that it feels like there's always more to be seen.  Make enough agents and cities and forests for a first glance, then keep building under the spotlight of the players' gaze.

To make the world feel alive, it should act on its own, apart from any plans of the players.  If the party doesn't go down to the docks, the ship headed for the Summer Isles will still leave.  If the party never comes back to the old mission, goblins will probably move back in.  The world is full of its own comings and goings and generally pays little mind to the party unless they make it take notice.

Presenting this world well is also part of the measure of a GM.  An intricate clockwork realm entirely in your head is worth very little.  The best enjoyment in life is best shared.

All that worldbuilding is good, but I believe it's not sufficient.  Putting dangers and rewards in the world is necessary, so the players have something to strive for and struggle against, but just putting it there isn't quite enough.

The players need to know that the dangers are worthy of their skill, that the rewards are worth attaining.  In short, the players need to know that the adventure is worth the struggle.

To that end, it's my job as GM to give the players a hint of where the adventure lies, to tantalize them with treasure, to raise the stakes to make sure they know this is an adventure worthy of their efforts.

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As a player, I think I'm probably somewhere in the old-school camp, poking at rocks, ambushing enemies, and expecting death around every corner.  As a GM, I'm probably in some muddled mix of narrative, story-game, simulation, whatever the kids these days are calling it.  Those of you better versed in theory, I'd appreciate your insights.

But as I said, this is all just about the kind of roleplaying game I like best.  If none of this sounds like fun to you, go find your fun and know you're doing it just as right as anyone else.