Why Should It All Mean?

"Thats... something. Weird, check. Dreamlike, check. Boozy, check.  This can have its place in a game, but in the end if you want this to MEAN something (as opposed to a dremlike divertissement) you will need some hard work"—Dada Dan Akiko (comment on my Appendix N Jam submission, The Stone Choir Sleeps)

Writing my entry, I took an unusual approach. I wanted to lay hold of the weirdness that animates much of the Appendix N fiction, and I wanted to reorient that weirdness within a different set of artistic coordinates. I wasn't so interested in the bright psychedelia or Romantic fantasy, but a sweaty, claustrophobic feeling that I used to get looking at a poster my older brother had where a large giant figure bent into one corner of the painting, dimly illumined, looming over other figures in a crowded room.

It might have been a Brothers Hildebrandt piece, but I can't turn it up with an internet search.

Whoever is responsible for that poster, it felt repulsive, fever sick, and full of meaning. I might actually have spent some time as a child sick and staring at it. It swaddled and soaked up some of the abuse of my childhood, giving me distance and intimacy with it at once. That deferred affect seeps into my vague memories of The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh that my brother ran for me and I can see the way it has shaped decades of games I have run and played in. I wasn't trying to escape into them, I was trying to use them to transform my feelings.

I wove little secondary worlds around those affects, either through the characters or settings they moved through. These worlds became proper swaddling, self-sustaining contexts that might soothe the suffering I felt as much as reflect it. I was working toward repair.

Sure, as I felt my way toward the interconnection of my abuse with the violence that structures so much of our society, those little worlds sometimes turned very dark, ringing with the constellation of abuses in our world of which my own was but a small, dark star.

But overall there was so much hope and optimism in what I was trying to do. Weird, alien, characters and origins proliferated but they were all shot through with peoples with their own forms of decency and love. Sometimes surprising moments of synergy occurred when I shared this in play, and the underlying feeling of the world changed with everyone's involvement. More often, the table simply didn't support that kind of play. If I tried to hold onto it, it was misunderstood and made into a sort of weird set dressing or, worse, grimdark.

I got better at masking, you know?

No blame is intended in this description, either for myself or people I played with. I didn't have good tools for articulating what I was looking for in play, and neither did the people I was playing with. Role playing promised just enough freedom, though, that I never quite stopped wanting to have that. Better frameworks existed for those discussions, to be sure, but not in role playing game circles. So I tried to be a good role player in terms the community recognized, because wasn't that being a good sport?

By the time I got to the Appendix N Jam, I had a better sense of what had gone awry. I saw clearly the pressures and possibilities that most excited me, and the ways I had learned to stifle those instead of trying to develop them. There was an anger, too. But I wanted to see if I could produce a module that could explore that hopeful possibility when I first tried to grasp what role playing (AD&D specifically) might be.

Reading around the Symbolists gave me an idea for how to approach the module. Symbolism uses deferral to sustain a vision, and through that deferral compose a surface along which what is deferred resonates for others to interact with.

The jam's four-page limit constrained what I could do, so I worked hard to distill the affect into every page, cutting to leave the most potent elements. I offloaded some work to the cover (the map points toward the deferred history that animates the work for the reader who likes that sort of thing). I made sure to include a relevant bit of the Symbolist Manifesto on the game page to make sure people understood the style (I admit, I worry with Weird Writer as to whether people actually want to read and play this way, but this was about how I play and design, so extended the Symbolism as an invitation to join me). I thought about what would be the minimum playable element for me to run this and pared my writing down toward that.

I knew that my most playable elements are not universal; accepting and working with my own peculiarities was an essential part of the writing process. If I am going to mark out my own trajectory for play, I need to get real with myself. I find developed settings overwhelming and unmanageable, and prefer to build from the small to the sweeping on my own terms. I can weave large webs with strong affective anchors; the sort of materials that Sam Sorenson praises for "doing the legwork" are difficult for me to work with.

(To illustrate: Listening to the recent Rascal Reading Club about the setting of Duskvol was revealing that way. Thomas Manuel's account of how the setting functions to make the game playable was entirely at odds with mine. The very first thing I did when I ran Blades in the Dark was throw out the entire setting, projecting outward from the playbooks and rules to lightly sketch my own that I could develop alongside the interests and actions of the players. The clocks worked just fine to create a responsive setting beyond the players. Keeping all the relevant clocks in mind during play got to be a bit challenging toward the end of the game, though; I never went back to Blades.)

In other words, I hope that if this comes to the table, everyone is working hard not to make it mean something and are instead working hard to feel their way through it. That deferral of meaning is precisely what makes it possible for the affect that animates it to be modulated and transformed by play. If its meaning breaks into the game, well, I think that's the end of that game. A key part of the Green Knight's "function" is to embody that deferral, right up to casting the player characters out.

I don't know if it is a "good entry" to the Appendix N Jam or a "good" module to pick up and play; I tried to make it both. I do know it is the right entry for me, a movement in the right direction for my creative work. And I do hope that I can develop that within role playing, that it isn't just ergodic literature in the shape of role playing materials. I wouldn't be mad about it, though, if I just ended up producing ergodic literature.