Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Rehabilitating the Special Snowflake Setting

Tool around an old school/OSR forum, con or blog at the tail end of the last decade and one wouldn't have to go far before hearing the dismissive phrase “special snowflake” aimed with deadly force at fantasy worldbuilding or character backstory.

To be sure there seemed to be a good deal of antipathy to the idea of creating detailed, minutely fleshed-out imaginary worlds. A bit of defiance even: “no one cares about what color hats the burghers of Madeuptown wear or the burial customs of Whatthefuckistan.”

I understood and agreed to some extent with much of the impulse. Decades of Tolkien pastiche, awkwardly-executed exotic setting and paid-by-the-word splat had left behind reams of setting whoha. It was--and is--too much this steady accumulation of bad and failed imaginary worlds.

The ultra-terse settings of the Wilderlands and Greyhawk folio were often cited as counter-examples. This trend ran along for a while and culminates with the creations of (to borrow and madly mangle a phrase) "nega-settings" like the Isle of the Unknown. And then without much acknowledgment the phrase and the sentiment starts disappearing over the past few years.

I say good fucking riddance.

See a part of me always bristled at the notion. For I genuinely like robust worldbuilding. You can actually make me care about color those damned hats are or whether or not those sad Whatthefuckistans swaddle their dead or not.

And you don't need a random chart or oblique mechanical hiding of it, that can help, but really you just have to make it good. It needs to reach through the page or better the gaming table and grab me.

Look I dig the gamey aspects of well-aged D&D and its brethren: the micro-exploration and tactical choice of the dungeon, the emergent story (if any), the boardgame-like rise of zero-to-hero etc. But I also just want the rush and thrill of pretending to walk the streets of a deeply imagined city.

Concretely my favorite experiences as a player (and what a real joy having had a chance to play in as many divergent campaigns as I have thanks to the Google Plus boom) have all entailed at least a few sessions of “off-topic” just schlepping around interacting with other GM's worlds.

Meandering through dark alleys and salons in Jeremy Duncan's baroque Galbaruc only to have my scumbag/sailor character's spine get ripped out in a street boxing match. Taking a day job as a corrupt rookie cop in the Sword-and-Planet meets He-Man wildness of Robert Parker's Savage World of Krul. Hustling at a wine bar with my Apollo-the-demonic-snakegod-worshiping priest in the ancient astronauts meets ziggurated (not a word) ancient Mesopotamia of Evan Elkin's Uz (really he puts this kind of robustly world out every few months). Plying a magic caravan in the refracted real world of Michael Moscrip's Anglia.

And as a reader I want more of the compelling visuals, imaginative reach and clever little nooks of Trey Causey's fantasy 1930s Weird Adventures and the sweet-spot 70s space opera of his soon-to-be-released Strange Stars. More of the grotty and decidedly strange mythic underworld of Jason Sholtis’s Operation Unfathomable (the Hydra Collective's next big project yes, but I am a passionate fan). More of the science-fantasy strange gods and divergent magic of Gus L's clerics in HMS Apollyon

And more newer things like the pithy, baked-into-a-game charm of Chris McDowall's Into the Odd or the pointcrawled epic weirdness of Paolo Greco's underworld in the Chthonic Codex (along with Zak's Red and Pleasant Land the two most physically gorgeous game-related literature I have the pleasure of owning). The list goes just on and on looking through my bookmarked pages.

So bring that special snowflake. More please.

21 comments:

  1. We never used the term special snowflake (to refer to settings) in my gaming circles, but we did have sort of an opposite term: Thatched-Roofs-Black-Plague, which referred to settings so ordinary and by-the-book that there was nothing compelling at all in them. I say bring on the weird... we've all played the pseudo-Anglo-Saxon Europy stuff a million times.

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  2. "You can actually make me care about color those damned hats are or whether or not those sad Whatthefuckistans swaddle their dead or not."

    I believe the preferred nomenclature is "Whatthefuckistanis".

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  3. You're both wrong. Denizens of Whatthefuckistan are referred to by Westerners as Whatthefucks, while they themselves think of themselves as members of a tribe, not citizens of a geographic creation made by imperial powers.

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  4. Rich evocative settings are fun things to daydream about even when you're not at the table, which I think is an important part of the hobby (or else there wouldn't be any blogs or chatter on forums and social media).

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  5. That's a damn inspirational post right there. Makes me want to sit down and start writing up something off beat and weird right now.

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  6. Whattefuckistan is just a vague approximation of the Whateverburgian derogatory ethnonym, Uaddefakestan, for the people of U'addi Fahhak. The term for "place", "stan" in Whateverburgian, is actualy U'addi, while the people refer to themselves as the Fahhak. Also, the hats of their merchant caste-clans are either Reddish-brown for the Wahodi clans of the Rising Sin, or reddish-yellow for the Sahodi clans of the Falling Sin.

    Sheesh.

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  7. People- many people- rear up and spit the bit because 95% of everything is utter masturbatory axe-grinding crap. It's a straw argument to say those people who have been conditioned to hate everything because they are correct to do so 95% of the time are 100% wrong.

    Everyone loves awesome. Show us awesome and we will love the heck out of it and make the creator rich. Nobody hates awesome.

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    1. If we're following Sturgeon's Law and 95% of everything is crap as you suggest, then it isn't a straw man to suggest setting writing is being handled different when the tenor of the discussion is that its 100% crap.

      It's also trite and fallacious to say that awesomeness is rewarded with riches.

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    2. One man's awesome is another man's masturbatory crap.

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  8. "Nobody hates awesome. "

    ....except for the goddamn Communists.

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  9. Great post! What Druillet book is that from?

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    1. Also I agree about the Cthonic Codex. I don't have the physical book yet but I've been reading through the pdf and it's amazing.

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    2. Gorgeous, isn't it. It illustrates the opening lines of Salammbo

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  10. I remember seeing "special snowflake" applied to characters, but do not recall it applied to settings.

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    1. I've most encountered it - aimed at me - as "my precious setting."

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  11. I think there are a lot of caveats in running a unique setting, and at its core it needs to have simplicity - a two sentence pitch, and then the players who like the setting can dig deeper during the game. For example, I describe HMS Apollyon to new players who haven't heard anything about the setting as "You've been pulled out of the water after a shipwreck, into a huge derelict cruise ship, like several miles long huge. The people here have decided that if you want to eat you need to wander into the haunted parts of the ship and recover anything valuable or useful."

    One can't go too far, and unless someone asks about specifics the weird is best slowly fed into the setting without info dumps. Like all the strange voodoo clerical magic and machine gods, or whatever else it is? Yeah that's something players can figure out through play if they like the game.

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  12. A little late to the party but I like this topic.

    For me it comes down to the context and how much information I need to start playing. If I have a choice between discovering the world and information in game and someone handing me 10 pages of back story to read, I'll take the in game discovery every time. Just give me what I need to start playing and let me discover the rest. I would say that 9 times out of 10, when starting a new campaign, you don't need a ton of information or background to start the game and the GM can weave the details into the game as we play.

    That said, I will qualify the point above by saying that if I am joining an ongoing campaign that has been running for, say, a year and a half, then I do expect to read and catch-up on what the players have been doing during that time. That's just being respectful of the time the other players and GM have already put in.

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  13. What a smörgåsbord of delicious looking settings you lay out here! Makes me want to play all of those games, dipping into the links... And inspires me to get my shit together and get some gaming in.
    I love a rich and deep setting, but I agree that there shouldn't have to be miles of buy-in before starting play. A good short pitch is essential, as Gus says, and I much rather playing to find out than reading background material. There's nothing wrong with the gm feeding tidbits only as they become relevant, or throwing in references to mysterious setting detail that's not expanded on; that's lots of fun. But what do you think of handing over some things to the players? Like a player asks "what do I know about Lurien's harvest festival?" And the GM comes back with : "I don't know, you tell me. Caerwyth has lived in the area all her life; what DO you know about the harvest festival?"

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    1. That is actually pretty much how the Hill Cantons campaign evolved. Originally it was tiny--less than 30 by 30 miles--with huge grey patches and aggressively unplotted. But it evolved over the last six and change years with player co-creation and exploration.

      A couple posts on that evolution: http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2012/05/proairetic-code-and-player-driven.html

      http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2012/09/whither-west-marches.html

      http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2012/11/are-there-distinct-patterns-in-how.html

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    2. God dammit! You realise I am now going to have to go and read, like, ALL OF YOUR BLOG! curse your interestingness. Your latest post provides a good way into that.... So. I'm going in.... I may be some time.

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  14. I am having trouble untangling the threads of this topic. Like Michael above, I get what "special snowflake" means in reference to characters, but I can't quite figure out how to apply that in any useful way to settings.

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