I’m calling this a book report, and will use that word in the future for entries like these, because I don’t want to be a reviewer. A book report is just me, ahem, reporting about what I read and sharing my thoughts about it.
In my effort to try and learn how to be a better solo TTRPG player, I came across a YouTube channel a while ago called “Geek Gamers”, run by a single lady who, as far as I’ve seen, never appears on camera. She seems to know what she’s doing.
Being a fan of Gothic literature, at least the horror aspect, and Weird Westerns, I had my interest piqued by the description of one of her books titled Wanderings, with a subtitle of literary hexcrawl table, which promised in the blurb “A system-neutral meaty d88 table…[p]erfect for running fantasy, horror, gothic, Lovecraftian, occult, or weird games.”
Also being pretty reckless with my spending, I decided to buy all of her books, three in print and one in PDF.
I’ve just recently got around to reading them, or am currently reading them, more precisely, and before I forget all of my thoughts about them, I’d thought I’d write them down here. These topics don’t necessarily follow a particular order. There are a lot of areas covered in these books, some related and others, not.
The first thing I should say is that I’m glad I bought them. I wish I had read these when they first arrived on my doorstep, because I do think they will be very helpful.
She even has an exercise of coming up with a scenario taken from two TTRPGs that I actually already own, Index Card RPG and Scarlet Heroes, both of which I like as books but haven’t done anything with, and so now I can just jump right in and start playing them.
But that’s not what I want to talk about.
Okay, first things first…
I read in her book, Solo Gamemaster’s Guide, the addendum titled “A Place, Underground or, Dungeon Theory for All”. It’s basically an essay, complete with copious footnotes, arguing for the dungeon as TTRPGs’, like, breath of life. This might not seem all that controversial, but she does a good job of making her case. As a long time player of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games, which I’ve heard recently described as “blue sky” RPGs by the people behind The Legend of Akeroth, and which description I actually approve of, I’m not sure I agree with her. But she does make some persuasive arguments.
One of the things she mentions is how a dungeon creates narrative structure, and she goes on at length about this concept. Honestly, if you want to read it, you should buy her book, it’s pretty interesting and more learned than anything I’m going to write here. I’m not going to cover all of her stuff on this blog.
But I am going to say something about a few points she makes.
First, she quotes a guy named Steve Winters, on page 156, from a publication called “Howling Tower: Respect the Lowly Dungeon”, where he evidently says “nothing truly like a D&D dungeon exists in mythology or fantasy literature before the publication of D&D.”
I don’t know about that.
If by “truly” you mean a dungeon with a Beholder in it, and Mimics, then probably not. I’ve never read anything like that, and I was a literature major.
But there was the Labyrinth of the Minotaur that Theseus had to enter, and as soon as I read this line my mind recalled that story. I think that was really the first dungeon.
(edit: this might have been because Welcome to the Hellfire Club, which is the beginner’s boxed set I bought for the kids and ran for them, had a minotaur in the first dungeon as the big bad. I forgot about that.)
Later in this addendum, she quotes Gary Gygax on something else, but it bears on this point. On page 161, “The idea of measured progression (experience points) and the addition of games taking place in a dungeon maze struck me as being very desirable.” (emphasis mine).
A dungeon maze is basically a labyrinth. (There were others in antiquity, some of which were chronicled by no less than Pliny, and they were all underground.)
That’s how I’ve always viewed them anyway. I know that I have only recently started playing TTRPGs, but I had the graph paper out back when I was a kid and was mapping my way through Wizardry dungeons on the computer on the weekends. The Lone Wolf books were mostly in dungeons too. I’ve done it enough to know.
Anyway, not exactly the most important point to make, but something that bothered me because, in my opinion, it’s wrong. And also because it’s related to something else that I think the essay misses in its discussion of dungeons.
She goes into Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey, basically. On page 163, “Gary Gygax attributed the success of D&D to the fact that… ‘it enables people to experience what Joseph Campbell called the heroic quest…[t]he FRPG is merely an extension of that deep-seated part of our minds that hears and answers the call to adventure by picking up a game.’”
Thank you, Gary. That’s what I’ve been thinking for the past year. But it seems like you and I are the only ones who get it. And maybe this lady. And maybe a couple others.
This is what bothers me so much about what I found when I started playing D&D. It’s like no one even knows what this game is supposed to be. And what Gary just said is exactly the answer. I understood that, and maybe the reason I did so was because I was never part of the TTRPG community. I just played Wizardry alone as a youngster, and tried to survive.
I don’t want to rehash some of the stuff I went over in my rant post, but that’s a lot of why I backed the Deathbringer TTRPG. In the advertisement, or trailer, for that backerkit campaign, the first thing the character of Deathbringer asks you is “Do you remember when D&D had balls?”
This is what I’m talking about! As silly as it sounds, this is actually what really makes the dungeon the heart of TTRPGing, because it takes balls to enter it! It’s a dungeon, that’s where they used to throw you to die. It’s underground. That’s the realm of the dead. The great, and very brave, Theseus was the only one who could make it out of the Minotaur Labyrinth. Others tried and died.
It’s also a liminal space, a space between worlds, where anything can happen. Like running into a half-bull, half man.
She talks about some of this, but doesn’t ultimately land upon the right answer. That’s it, above.
The author ends her essay by saying “Dungeons nurture our stories. Dungeons are our stories.” (p.167)
But what story is that?
I would argue that D&D, in particular, is about entering that most dangerous of dungeons, which is the dragon’s lair, a monomyth if ever there was one.
That’s what bothers me so much about all this modern TTRPG stuff. The dungeon is a gauntlet. The experience is not supposed to be fun, it’s not supposed to be safe. It’s supposed to be a rite of passage, of sorts. It’s supposed to be “[a] land of trials” as Campbell puts it on page 163. It is a way to interactively experience that old story of answering the hero’s call, as Gygax mentioned above.
If it’s not these things, you’re missing the point. Why even bother?
There are other monomyths, besides the dragon’s lair. I think this explains the popularity of the gothic horror modules for D&D, like Ravenloft and The Curse of Strahd. There is even a book called The Modern Myths, by Philip Ball, which presents the case for vampires, among others, as modern analogs for the monsters of myth and legend.
And you could argue that the gothic manor, or mansion, or Dracula’s castle, is basically an above ground dungeon.
So, I’m not saying that all TTRPGs have to be about entering the dragon’s lair, literally, but they should be in that spirit. Or, at least, that explains the impact of D&D, because it did do that. Originally.
Anyway, I’ll be back with Part II of this discussion in a few days.