Setting Presentation as Big Mystery Seeding

I had a new insight about one of my favorite topics, worldbuilding for open-world, sandbox games. Think of it as another tool in the toolkit.

I want to focus on the initial presentation of your very own evocative snowflake setting to players. Here's an idea. When we share a "setting" or "background" with our players in an open world sandbox, we should think of ourselves as sharing actionable intelligence. Rather than painting an ornamental backdrop for the real action, we should think of ourselves as placing pieces to be engaged with in yet to be determined ways on a game board. But how can we build and convey a setting through actionable intelligence?

Now, there's a school of thought that one used to hear much more retro-gaming circles, that we should worldbuild "from the bottom up". Don't start with an info dump, or a half-realized fanfic novel; instead start small with a little corner of the world. Give people just what they need to know to get playing--and no more. Build the rest organically from there. Sensible advice for someone who gets overwhelmed by prep, or those whose past experience consisted primarily of scripted adventure paths. Forget all that and plop down a hexmap, with a few jotted notes about a town, select adventure hooks, and one or two little dungeons. Then go wherever the adventure leads!

While this works, there is a cost to doing things this way. One cost is that it's much easier to imagine small scale things if one has a working sense of large scale things. I can improvise more easily if I know what "feels right" or is "plausible" given the general way I've been thinking about things. Without a bigger context, it's hard for me to imagine things on a small scale.

But a more important point is that one of the great pleasures of sandbox play comes from the slow-burning long game. One feature of the long game is that you need to have it in view from early on, ideally before the first session. I'm talking about the tantalizing horizon of possibilities that lies off in the distance, igniting desire and curiosity among the players, drawing them in. If all you know is that the town is called Hofberg and there's a dungeon filled with salt ghouls in a mine nearby, you just can't play this kind of long game.

What this slow-burning long game is like will depend on what kind of a game you're running. It will likely involve the relations and intrigues of various major factions. These are the things in the setting that most directly correspond to game pieces, with which players may choose to interact. But if your game is focused on exploration and discovery, as mine usually are, then the long game should also be, at least in part, about the exploration and discovery of the unknown. Now discoveries come in all sizes. The slow-burning long game is about the really big ones, the mind-blowing mysteries that are tied deeply with the setting and world, the learning of which has the potential to change everything.

To build this in from the start, when presenting your setting, instead of conveying facts, try leading with the unknown. Go with the questions rather than the answers, the big ones, the slow-burning mysteries. Nothing says "this is a sandbox of exploration and discovery" like introducing a setting by emphasizing what facts aren't known. (Aside: it's fun to hold some questions back too, because it's also a slow-burn pleasure to have the players stumble onto a big mystery that's been there all along after a long time playing in the sandbox.) 

This WWII encryption device was literally called an "enigma machine".

I just did this with the intro to my players guide to Jorune: Evolutions. In recasting the setting of Jorune, I found myself replacing the perfectly fine narrative sci-fi info dump in the original (2nd edition) books with conflicting stories and outright mysteries. In essence, instead of saying, "Human colonists came to Jorune on such and such a date for such and such reasons, and here's what happened...Then their ships were destroyed in such and such a war," I replaced this with conflicting oral histories and cycles of myth that essentially said, "Some stories say they came because of this, other stories say this other thing. Nobody knows what the hell happened to their Ship and Earth-Tec!" Given that the discovering Earth-Tec is a major thing in the game, this ties the questions about the past directly to the heart of the action. Similarly, when I introduced my own new trippy psychedelic element, "the dream of the egg", to the setting, what I introduced was a blatant enigma almost literally calling out to be solved.

One thing that's fun about questions is that you don't need to have your mind made up about the answer at the start. Perhaps you'll have some idea about some of the answers, but perhaps others wait on the setting taking more shape in your mind through play. That fits with the sensible "you don't need to have thought this out before sitting down to play" ethos without giving up on the big picture. (But, if you're like me, you'll have answers to some questions in mind from the get-go, because it's the answers that will have made the questions alluring to you in the first place.)

Another thing that's fun about questions is that factions and NPCs may have theories or think they know the answer. Allow theories to proliferate! Maybe everyone has a take. This is especially appropriate for a setting where baseless speculation, psychic visions, wooly tales, and "metaphysical" extrapolation of drugs experiences are bread and butter. But actually, I think it could work for any sandbox game where exploration and discovery are core activities and a lot actionable intelligence is unknown.

So, there's one more tool for your tool kit. When presenting your setting, lead with the mysteries and enigmas. Emphasize the questions without answers. In a game about exploration, knowing what you don't know is actionable intelligence.

Pleasures of the OSR: Secrecy and Discovery

This is the first in a series of posts that try to say something about the theory of the OSR style of play. I promise never to use jargon, but if you don't like self-conscious reflection on what we do in practice, then this series probably isn't for you. That's why I added the label "Theory" to the posts in this series: so that you can avoid it like the plague.

My way of conceptualizing our play style is to speak about the distinctive pleasures this style facilitates. It is play after all, and so the whole point is for it to be a pleasurable activity. Each post in this series will explore how the rules and methods we use facilitate one or another distinctive pleasure. These pleasures are, in many cases, mutually supporting in OSR play, and so they come as a package, but in other cases they're in some tension with one another. So there's going to be a little bit of explaining why I'm keener for some elements of OSR play style than others.    

Recently I have been reading a lot of story games, including Apocalypse World and its progeny, "Powered by the Apocalypse" (PbtA) games, and Blades in the Dark and its scions, "Forged in the Dark" (FitD) games. I've also been hanging around the Gauntlet Community. I have signed up for my first session in their delightful and ongoing storygame version of Constantcon. I also have been listening to the excellent Dungeon World (a PbtA game) actual play podcast We Hunt the Keepers. For me this process has been tremendously clarifying. I think what they do is really neat, and seeing how it's different from what we do helps me to understand why we do some of things we do. There's nothing like seeing the space of alternatives to better understand the niche you occupy. I'm also interested in how we could get some of the pleasures they chase into our games without diluting the pleasures we're chasing. As it turns out, this is not so easy, for reasons I'll explain eventually.

One of the primary pleasures I get in playing D&D is discovery. Discovery involves uncovering  something previously unknown. When I discover something, I learn or finding out about that thing. In some uses, say in science or geographical exploration, we use as the subject of knowledge humanity as a whole, and speak of "discovering" something only when knowledge is first brought to light. This is the sense in which Einstein discovered special relativity, and the sense in which Christopher Columbus emphatically did not discover the "New World", in spite of what your junior high school teacher might have told you. But we also speak of discovery in an individual register, as I might discover that I'm really good at philosophy, or I might discover some interesting historical fact about my neighborhood--a fact which other people know and have known, but which is news to me. 

The pleasure of discovery

One crucial point is this: in the ordinary sense of the term, one can only discover something that is already there. If you make something up, that's not discovering it. Another important point is that we need to distinguish between the character (PC) discovering something in the world of the game and the player of that character discovering something about the world of the game. Those are two very different things. It is possible for the character to discover something while the player does not discover anything. One case is where the player already knows what his character discovers. Another case is where in the "fiction" of the game the character comes to discover something, but the player does not because the "fact" was made up on the spot, either by the player or by the DM. In this case, although in the "fiction" of the game there was a fact about something that existed in advance, and your character just found it out, in reality there was no fact about this feature of the gameworld in advance, and so, as a player outside the fiction, there was nothing there for you to discover.

So here is one of the pleasures of the OSR style of play: it makes available the pleasure of discovery about the world of the game and the things in it. This fact depends on a differentiation of roles between DMs and players. The DM in designing the world, building the sandbox, creating and stocking the dungeons, making up the NPCs, and so on, acquires one secret after another. On the OSR style of play, prep is essentially stocking a storehouse of secrets. The players, by contrast, go into the situations they choose to enter in a state of ignorance. They are in the dark about the nature of this strange tower their character has decide to explore; they do not know what is around the next corner, or in that chest; they do not know what the NPCs are up to, or even what NPCs and factions there are; they do not know what will happen if they put that obviously magical crown on their head. This is tremendous fun for both the player and the DM.

For the player, there is immediate tension in entering into a situation without knowing what's going on. In OSR games, the stakes are almost always high, since they include the life and death of the character, but also the success or failure of many schemes. The lack of knowledge is thus a source of peril and uncertainty. It is both an obstacle to be overcome and a hazard to be dared. There is also a thrill of discovery, of uncovering things that are hidden. If the game is being played well, what is uncovered are not boring things. Every dungeon is initially a mystery, every artifact a hidden wonder, every faction an unknown quantity. To explore a dungeon is to unravel the mystery of the place.

This is the DM's map (above) from Judge's Guild's First Fantasy Camapaign by Dave Arneson, and the blank version of the same hex map, as filled in by players.

This feature receives dramatic representation in the fact that one begins a hexcrawl with a blank sheet of hex paper, and dungeon exploration with a blank sheet of graph paper. Judges Guild for example always included both a filled in DM's map and a blank map for the players to fill in. All that white space on the map is a representation of your ignorance as a player, and the satisfaction of marking what is known is the graphic record of the pleasures of discovery. This pleasure extends to larger scale discovery of elements of the setting and world. Since the OSR specializes in highly evocative settings, from the deep geological horror of the Veins of the Earth to the mythic slavic weirdness of the Hill Cantons, this journey into the unknown is also a coming to know about a fantastical world and its secrets. 

For the DM, the associated pleasures are different. The DM sets something up and then sees how the players cope with it in their state of ignorance. First of all, there is pleasure in knowing something that others don't know. The DM is the one in the know, the one who has the synoptic vision of what's going on that others lack. This is represented at the table in striking form by the presence of a DM screen, a kind of symbolic and real veil that hides the prepped storehouse of secrets from the view of the players.

Just look at this gorgeous screen that Anthony Huso just made!

From behind (literal or figurative) screen, the DM gets to hear the player's theories, suppressing a smile when the guess is wrong (or right). They see the consequences of the players' high-stakes choices in conditions of ignorance, getting the thrill of anticipating the cascading consequences. Another pleasure of having secrets is sharing them. The DM gets the immense pleasure of letting the players in on the secret as they discover more and more. This includes the dramatic pleasure of the "big reveal" or "the Saturday Night Specials", but also the more quotidian pleasure of describing something (a room, an NPC) for the first time. But that's just the beginning. If the DM has done their job right, then the PCs are walking into a tightly coiled spring. The DM participates in that sense of palpable tension that flows from player ignorance. They don't know what choices the players will make, coping well or badly with their ignorance, and the DM is as much on the edge of their seats as the players are. In one way, the tension is greater for the DM, since the DM knows what the players are up against.  

One way to see the significance of this pleasure is to see how it is undermined by some of the basic aims of story games. This is not a knock against story games, since my view is that they're largely chasing different pleasures that are not so easy for us to get at. I also don't mean to say that you cannot pursue this pleasure in a story game. But there are certain widely shared design goals in story games that make it harder. Story games generally try to break down the asymmetry of DM and players by allowing the players into the role of creation. Through myriad techniques and rules they distribute to players the world-making, scene describing, NPC reacting, job that the OSR reserves for the DM. The idea is that the players and the DM are telling a story together in a certain genre, in a kind of improvisational mode. Reality is, in a certain sense and to varying degrees, up for grabs in accordance with the rules that dole out narrative control. This means that while their characters might discover things, it's much harder for the players to do so. To the extent that discovery is possible for the players, it's because the DM is reserving some things and refusing to cede narrative control over them. They are facts that are fixed in the fiction independently of what the players want and choose, facts know to the DM and not known to the players. The point is just: a lot of rules in storygames push against this. This steers the game away from the pleasures of discovery, whereas the OSR is on a straight road headed to that destination.

A conceptual test case is the fascinating game Lovecraftesque. First, let me say that it seems like a really fun game that I think I might enjoy playing, especially on a cold winter night in New England. Lovecraftesque eschews the asymmetrical roles of DM and player altogether since it is a DM-less (some prefer to say "DM-full") game that distributes the entire bundle of DM powers and prerogatives to the players in turns. For each scene participants occupy one of three roles, "the narrator" (DM), "the watcher" (DM's helper), or "the witness" (the one player character). It is thus on the outer limit of the common design goal of story games of democratizing control "over narrative". It's interesting for our purposes since it also concerns the genre of Lovecraftian horror, which is all about the slow burning discovery of some terrible secret. It is a genre that would seem to be tailor-made in roleplaying games for realizing the pleasures of discovery. But the game faces a basic problem: it wants to give the pleasures of discovery, but since the participants in the game are making that truth up as they go along, this is not so easy. Here's how the rules navigate this problem.

Each scene, up until the final confrontation with the horror, ends with a clue being revealed by the current narrator. At the end of each scene each player "jumps to a conclusion", writing secretly on a sheet of paper their current speculation about the nature of the events befalling the witness and the cosmic horror behind it all. Perhaps events will prove their speculation wrong (almost certainly so) as different players, with different ideas and inspirations, take control of the role of narrator. So their speculations are likely to develop or change all together from scene to scene. At the end, after the horror has been revealed, the player share all their speculations with one another. It is almost as though there had been a fact about the matter, almost as though they had assembled clues to guess about it, and almost as though they learn the terrible truth at the end. Except nothing was fixed as the truth in advance, and so it is an elaborately constructed pretense of the pleasure of discovery, rather than the real thing. If you 100% abandon the asymmetry in knowledge between DM and player, it's about the best you can do.

Towards the other end of the spectrum, In We Hunt the Keepers, a Dungeon World (PbtA) actual play podcast DMed by Jason Cordova, Cordova often keeps a sense of mystery going by reserving knowledge and control of certain facts for himself. He operates, so to speak, with a DM's screen partially in place. Although the rules and ethos of the game dictate that he cede control of most details of the mystery to the players in play. And in Lovecraftesque fashion, at the end of the whole series the "big reveal" is going to be constructed collaboratively looking back on the clues assembled.

This brings us to a fault line in the OSR play style. The element in some tension with the pleasures of discovery and secrecy is a preference among some OSR types for low-prep gaming. In part this connected with a commitment to the pleasures of emergent story (hint: that's going to be the next post) and the universal hatred of railroading in all its forms; in part it's connected with a desire not to get paralyzed by unnecessary questions. People in the OSR regularly come out with sentences like, "Start small," and, "Don't get too far ahead of your players," and "Don't invest in a snowflake of a world." Given that prep simply is the stocking of a storehouse of secrets, these dictums all say: do less of that. On the side of tools, rules, and hacks, people have developed many techniques that allow a more improvisational style of play that fits those dictums, for example methods of procedurally generating at the table a garden in Ynn, the layout of Castle Gargantua, or a space hulk in Mothership.

This point needs to be handled with some care, since methods of random generation need not be in conflict with the pleasures of discovery. Start with a simple case: a random encounter table in a dungeon. I view these as essential elements of OSR play. To some extent, a random encounter table makes a variable of the movements and presence of various NPCs, factions, and threats. There is no fact of the matter about whether on turn 3 a band of crabmen is sidewalking your way until the die comes up a '1' on the encounter check, and the result of "Crabmen" is rolled on the table. But it would be confused to say that this speaks against the pleasure of discovery. Encounter tables represent the shifting ecology of an adventuring site: the factions, vermin, threats, and hazards that move around it freely. To have a random encounter is to learn something that is an already established fact about the locale: in this case (say) that Crabmen move through this area to feed on the giant clams in the submerged caverns to the North. It is important here that encounters can be repeated, and also that a well-designed encounter table reflects facts about the dungeon factions, interlopers, and environmental hazards. If well-designed, an encounter is itself a discovery about fixed facts about an adventuring site.

A harder case is where both the encounters and the nature and layout of the locale are procedurally generated. But even here a lot depends on the case. Take the Gardens of Ynn, one of the best products of the OSR (in my humble opinion). The Gardens of Ynn are meant for successive delves. Emmy Allen writes, "Ynn shifts and rearranges itself. Until the PCs actually look, the next location exists in a state of quantum uncertainty. There is, therefore, no need to roll up locations ahead of time. Every time players visit the Gardens of Ynn, roll up a new starting location from scratch." She has three different tables to roll on, one for the location, one for features of the location, and another for ongoing events in the location. These combine with random encounter checks that are Garden wide but that take a more dire form the more deeply one penetrates it. In one way these rules do block the pleasures of discovery. The DM does not have any concrete secrets in advance (the facts are all "in a quantum state"), and so the players cannot discover them. But in another sense that's not true. Part of the fun and the key to surviving the Gardens of Ynn is to understand the strange principles by which it operates, principles that are fixed in advance, and which the players will certainly need to learn. So it is a big discovery that when you go back in for the second time, you end up in a place that is totally different, and that the map has changed. The players learn they will only ever get one crack at each location. It is also a big discovery that when you push deeper, changes happen in a certain direction, that one can, as it were, plumb the depths of the gardens. Finally, there's a kind of aesthetic logic to the whole place that will be one of the main pleasures of discovery, along with a single shared encounter table. So it's a mixed bag in this regard: it systematically thwarts the pleasures of secrecy and discovery in one way, but enables it in another way: what it takes with one hand it gives back (in some measure) with the other. I wouldn't want to play this way all the time, but I think it would be fun to do for a bit.

This also explains why I'm not so keen on the raving enthusiasm for low-prep gaming that is expressed episodically in certain strands of OSR culture. I run zero or very low prep games when I DM for kids, which I do a lot. But that's because the higher pleasures are lost on them. It's not like when I play a proper game with grown ups. Different people like different things, so I'm not being prescriptive when I say that for me, the pleasures of secrecy and discovery are at the heart of roleplaying. One reason why the OSR style of play appeals to me is that makes this pleasure easy.