An acquaintance spent last spring playing TSoY. I think that he might have overheated, for afterwards he could recount me the whole length of the history of Near, beginning several years before the Skyfire and ending with the Glorious Reascent of Yelm – that is, Absolon – no, Absolonda, I mean.
A certain irreverence and willingness to take on a narrative challenge even at the risk of failure is something we share in our tastes, so I can appreciate how he laughingly steals inspiration and makes it his own, using the wildest sources and refusing to follow conventions blindly. It’s a sort of narrative maturity, a refusal to hide behind the veil of authorship: we all know the pieces that stories are made of, so there’s no point in pretending to originality or a suspension of disbelief when you just want to tell and experience stories. Everybody at the table saw what you just did, but you don’t care, because you’re all in on the joke. I’ve found that in roleplaying I can at the same time be totally cynical and superficial in my sources, but also committed to taking the resulting story seriously; this is a lot like the way an author feels. There is no man behind the curtain, there is just us.
I was told that there was no Absolon, to begin with. She was called Absolonda, the grandmother. Ridiculous, of course, but there was proof: she had left a set of diaries (in true Jane Austen style) for safekeeping with a clan of dwarves concerned with history.
Furthermore, there was a boon that would change the shape of the world: a doorway to another world. As she would have it, one day a band of heroes would arrive through the doorway, make a mess of things and then set everything right. Now it stands abandoned somewhere in Sireap Valley, long forgotten by everybody.
Then there was also serious trouble in Qek: bodies of long-dead behemoths, brought up from tar pits by abusive spirit-talkers, were being fought to a standstill by the largest of apes: because of ancient jungle law there is always a larger ape, and thus the latter could ultimately crush the former, but not before causing great destruction. At this point the story got somewhat crazy, but I was assured that it was not only completely serious, but also going somewhere.
You see, it did not matter that setting canon and expected style was being broken, as long as the characters in the story believed in their roles, the Story Guide believed in the consequences of any actions taken, and the players believed in the story more than mere setting facts. Whatever the story would be in genre and message, that would be revealed after the fact, not before.
People have been dying in Maldor a lot. Forcing a Qek necromancer to travel there to do a resurrection job was not the smartest of moves. Now the dead are rising en masse, and nobody knows what to do.
The only real man’s way of having a sword duel is with light sabers, as everybody knows. You can make one out of semi-common ingredients, such as Three-Corner wizards properly motivated, or by proving your talents to a Highland Saint.
Trollbabes are something that’s been very current for me lately. These lovely lasses are all goblin and all woman. Meeting one is fun, because she’s not actually a part of this story, but she’s going to meddle in it anyway, just like a player character.
I was, of course, not believing a word of it. Especially not when Agarim got involved, and he was just a big wolf.
I think that part of it is a relaxed knowledge that you can write yourself up the tree and down the tree and around the tree if you want; there’s no hard need to get everything right and perfect anymore like there was when we were teenagers emulating Lord of the Rings; we’ve done the genre fantasy thing already, now we can just enjoy the elements and mix them anew.
Everybody who knew Absolonda had been long dead, of course. Fortunately, there is the so-called “Schrödinger Gambit”: travel back in time via the Green World, meet with Absolonda and then return, which would retroactively bring back her sasha, the spirit of memory. Don’t try it at home without proper guidance.
Elves make for mean assassins when they want to. There’s no point, though: no matter how many Prefects she suicide-bombs by surprise, they just elect more of them. It’s an eternal war, and thinking up a new way of sneaking into the fortress sort of gets old after a while.
Three-Corner wizardry is considered weak, but that’s just because the third trinity is not known on Near. The space goblins don’t have it much better, frankly, as they lack the Day trinity in turn. But combine those knowledges and you’re on the verge of discovering the Tenth Focus.
Opening a door to another world is easy when you know how. Aside from Soft Places, you can always use Wondersmithing, if you can get the dwarves to do it. There is no point, though: the heroes were us all along.
Thus, great adventures were had, and verily Story Guides took every possible opportunity to draw in multitudes of intertextual references and pop-culture shoutouts. The wildest of ideas, once brought afoot, were grabbed completely seriously and compelled to do the work of a thousand men.
And despite all this, still characters were made to do as their hearts bid them, and still great feats were attempted and recorded in sincerity, themes were realized and art was created, which made it all worthwhile.