Unreliable Narrators
In which I make the case for malleable backstory.
I’m writing this on January 6th, and spent some part of today listening to an in-depth interview with Nicole Hannah-Jones about The 1619 Project.
It got me thinking about ‘lore’, and in-game history. In my experience, history as experienced in RPGs exists on a spectrum.
One one pole, the GM is bringing everything to the table; they’ve developed the backstory for their world, down to discrete historical events and individual actors and they know with certainty exactly what they did and when and why. There are entire YouTube channels devoted exclusively to giving DMs exhaustive advice on how to flesh out “your lore”. (Emphasis mine, but not entirely)
On the other pole, we’ve got narrative games where ‘history’ is an entirely blank slate. We build it up as we play, collaboratively, with nothing pre-loaded because we’re playing 100% to find out! Not for nothing, there are games where that’s the whole game. Microscope, The Skeletons, etc.
Most of our games, especially OSR/Indie stuff, lies in the middle. The MC brings an outline and we help fill it in with our stories. Make maps, leave blanks, right? But in my experience, whether we’re spoon-fed the backstory, or bring it into being through some sort of narrative parthenogenesis, in play it tends to be settled and accepted, in a way that it struck me today is not necessarily the way we experience history, At least not all of it.
The forces responsible for the January 6 lynch mob in DC mounted an immediate and sustained effort to obfuscate what happened. If I were creating a character whose backstory included being there that day, in a ‘received history’ game, we’d have been told who were the aggressors and who were the victims, and our character backgrounds would include that received wisdom.
In a wide-open game, maybe whoever decided first that they were there would get to frame the narrative: if you were a Congressional page, it was a terrifyingly violent coup attempt. If you were a member of the mob, you’d get to frame it as an empowering peaceful political protest against a corrupt election. A sit-in!
In general, most narrative games respect player input to the point where it’d be kind of a dick move to say “Nope, your so-called protest was a coup attempt, because that’s what my Capitol police PC thinks. Your PC is clearly acting in objective bad faith and peddling a false narrative for political gain,” even though that’s how we talk to each other in real life all the time. Not just about recent events of a year ago, but about ostensibly well-researched ‘settled’ history from 400 years back (there’s the 1619 Project coming back around).
This is fine, because most tabletop games privilege player relationships in a way that helps everyone have fun. Very few of us sign up for RPGs looking for a tabletop simulation of political Twitter.
But I can’t help but think there might be some fertile ground there for games that include elements of similarly unsettled in-game history that can involves the PCs. ‘Secret History’ games like Unknown Armies and conspiracy games like Night’s Black Agents do a version of this, but it’s not exactly what I mean. I’m talking about everyone agreeing before play to have at least part of the game be about figuring out what the game world’s ‘lore’ got wrong. And that could easily encompass both received wisdom and emergent history.
It’d require everyone to be able to handle changing their minds about stuff they thought their characters understood (and I include GMC/NPCs in that). It’d be an interesting balancing act to allow for revision of some of the game’s established narrative, not in a ‘OMG VAMPIRES’ way, but in a ‘we didn’t get the entire report on that incident, and with new evidence, it looks like we need to revise our understanding of the cause and effect’ kind of way. And definitely not in a ‘LOL your leader was evil all along and has totally betrayed you!’ bullshit way. More subtle, but with arguably more personal and important stakes. Personal stakes rooted in history.
So, I’m curious if any of you have done something like that in your own campaigns. For my part, I’m thinking of ways to work something like this in. Top of my head, I’m thinking something like “Here are 10 things to know about the history of our game world. 1 of them is an outright fable with no basis in fact, 1 of them has been cruelly and cynically manipulated, 2 of them are very open to revision, and the rest are accurate enough to reasonably count on. The point of the campaign isn’t to actively pursue which is which, but it’ll be there in the background as we play.”
Maybe when I ask a player for historical details, I’ll ask for 3 each time, with the understanding that only 1 is reasonably-objective truth. It may not work for everyone! This sort of thing is something some folks explicitly play RPGs to get away from, and that’s OK. But it’s definitely got me thinking, and that means it’ll probably hit my table eventually.
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JUST PLAYED:
It’s a new year which means a new calendar of games! After the last letter’s big Holiday update, my schedule is pretty full again, ready for the cold, dark, damp, Northeast COVID winter.
Monday afternoon was the continuation of the street-level Masks campaign we started last month. My Scion, Pandora, had several appropriately emo conversations with both other teen heroes and her disapproving Aunt, a city EMT, before we got in a third act punch–up with some local vampire leg-breakers. We came out relatively unscathed, but did have something of a cliffhanger when we realized that the Delinquent’s ‘power drain’ ability was able to temporarily cure the lead teen vampire, so we’re taking her to the Protege’s mentor to see if she can help.
Monday evening was honest-to-God Dungeons & Dragons, on The Gauntlet(!!!) Our co-founder and community manager Lowell Francis wanted to explore the MtG crossover setting of Ravnica and put a 2-month mini-campaign on the calendar. We did a pretty indie-standard Session Zero, with safety tools and relationship building before we got into a deliciously cliche bar fight with some goblins. We’ve got a bit of a ‘Usual Suspects’ thing going on, where we all hate the same criminal fixer, my Loxodon cleric of Law (Azorius Guild) being no exception despite his squeaky-clean demeanor. Ravnica is one of those front-loaded settings, given all the established Magic lore, but I’m confident we’ll carve out our own fascinating little corner. This campaign runs 2 months, 8 sessions or so.
Tuesday we were back to Ex-Capes, my pbta game of semi-retired middle-aged superheroes. We were down a player, but it worked totally smoothly with just 3 PCs. The gang solved a Plot, apprehending the Synergy killer, and got introduced to the next Plot, The Apocalypse Remnants, based on in-game backstory they’ve been developing aout why their super-team broke up years ago. Playing it always re-motivates me to get back to writing.
No Stonetop on Wednesday due to MC job stuff. That’ll happen in a long-term ongoing campaign (which this officially is for me, now that it’s flipped over into another year) now and then.
Finally, Thursday evening was another D&D campaign, with the first session of a planned quarterly run through the classic A1-4 Slave Lords modules. They’re problematic as hell, and kind of a mess, but I have a place in my heart for them from classic D&D Days that my Gauntlet pal Mike Ferdinando shares, so he agreed to spin it up using the Old School Essentials rule set. We did CATS and safety discussion before setting out via Roll20 to explore the Slave Pits of the Undercity! My Magic-User (no wizards here, boy), all 9 hit points and 3 available spells of them, managed to not get eaten by ghouls in our first fight, so I am calling this a win. I am very much expecting that I will be playing several characters over the course of this run, but we’ll see! I’m pretty pleased right now to be on this fantasy adventure jag for a few months.
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You’ll find my game writing in the pages of Codex magazine and other Gauntlet publishing works, including the upcoming Trophy RPG. The recently-released issue of Codex, Void 2, has a Spelljammer-inspired Trophy Gold adventure I wrote called The Void Archipelago.
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My podcast, Just Played, is currently on hiatus, but the archives are available. Each episode features an in-depth recap of an RPG session I participated in as a GM or player.
I’m always looking for topics, so if there’s a tabletop RPG-related subject you’re curious about, let me know, and I’ll do my best to take a run at it. Comments responded to as I’m able and amenable.
But now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go play another game!