Bringing Reality to Fantasy: Quinns' article for Horizons Magazine

[[Horizons is a cool new women-led magazine offering content for folks' D&D campaigns. They asked if I'd like to do an opinion piece for issue #2, and I said yes, so long as I could share the piece with my Patreon backers. Here's the piece in full, but it's basically about how I might not be a D&D nerd, but I AM a huge nerd for fussy historical details.]]

When I last had my friends over for a night of roleplaying, the most dramatic scene wasn’t a battle. It was something altogether more gory: one of my players was called upon to help with the birthing of a goat.

In the scene, as a scorching sun blasted the outside of the hut, this hours-long struggle all came down to a dice roll. Would my player save the kid goat that had got tangled up in his own umbilical cord? Or would her character, a young priest of nature, gain a reputation that she couldn’t even be a hero to livestock?

The stakes were high- the locals had heard rumours about this player character, this “chosen one” of her goddess, and had little faith that she was anything of the sort.

As my player rolled the dice, everyone at the table held their breath, and... she passed the check. The kid was brought bleating into the world, bearing an auspicious mark of the player’s goddess. Wiping sweat from her brow, my player described cutting away the cord and the water sac from the kid, before pressing the bloody bundle into the hands of its owner, making sure to leave a massive stain on his clothes. “I think this is yours,” she said, before turning on her heels to walk out and rejoin her party.

When I GM fantasy RPGs, earthy details like this are my obsession. Other people look at the fantasy genre and get excited by the magic and the monsters. And I’m the same way! I am. Let the record show that my legendary swords and villainous ogres are up there with the best of ‘em. I just don’t want to lose sight of the backdrop behind these swords and ogres- there’s magic and monstrosity enough in human history, and I just can’t bring myself to leave it out of my story.

My players (the poor things) can’t hike between two towns without me describing how a forest is a baffling expanse to try and cross when you can’t see the sun, and the journey leaves them at their wits’ end. I’m merciless- in the same journey, rain might make lighting a fire impossible, which means no boiled water, which means they can’t make their dried rations edible. And that’s to say nothing of those priceless spellbooks of yours- how are you keeping them dry?

And dear reader of Horizons magazine, I regret to inform you that I am that guy: anyone wielding a bow in my campaign will have to string it before they use it, because in real life walking around with your bow strung for weeks on end is a sure-fire way to damage it. If you want to put on your fancy suit of plate armour, that’s going to take 15 minutes, and the help of someone else. And perhaps worst of all: I fixate on describing the relative value of textiles of NPCs.

Does that sound terrible? It really doesn’t have to be! A good game should resemble a series of interesting decisions, after all, and having to decide whether you have /time/ to get your saddle ready or grab your helmet could see a player more wracked with indecision than during the fight itself. And narrating your character nervously stringing their bow or sharpening their knife are ways to take an item on your character sheet you didn’t think much about and voila: Now it’s part of your body language. It’s part of you.

But equally, long evenings of this kind of pedantry have taught me that trying to bring history to life isn’t just about making the players suffer, it’s also about exploring our own romantic notions of medieval life. There’s a reason that a lot of the shots from the Lord of the Rings movies that end up lodged in our brains are where we see the Fellowship simply hiking, accompanied by a swell of orchestral music. Those shots are so affecting, they used them relentlessly in the films’ marketing materials, and there’s no reason your RPG campaign can’t capture a little bit of that energy. Fantasy doesn’t always need Strahd and an entire gothic castle. I’m telling you- if you think about enough of the little details, the fantasy of a week-long hike is exciting enough. Never mind magic spells- suddenly everything feels magic.

The campfire chats among your party become so much more intense when players realise how cold it is outside the campfire, and how much relief it brings to huddle shoulder to shoulder with one another. Think about the relationship you have with the person who diligently seals you up in your plate armour before each battle. I’ve heard that Hollywood actors sometimes have the closest relationship with the people who do their exhaustive makeup and prosthetics every morning. That’s the energy, the humanity, I want in my games.

And who says this has to be all about humans! Spare a thought for the poor horses and mounts of TTRPGs, who in almost every campaign are reduced to the status of equipment. Something that costs perhaps a gold piece and, if the poor animal is lucky, maybe the GM or the player describes their colour.

We can do better! Metaphorically and literally, let these animals breathe. Let the players get the first warning that some predator is on their tail when their mule becomes skittish. Let them narrate or discover the personality of each of their animals, then let them worry when the animals become sick or injured. Let the party arrive at a town of nomads, and have these horse-people be more excited to meet their horses than the  heroes.

About a month ago I had a terrifically tense scene where my players had to try and reach a town before a monster did, which ultimately shook out as a test of how resilient they each knew their horses to be. How hard would they dare to push these animals? And could they risk riding when it was dark, when there was a chance a horse could slip and break a leg? As the animals had become party members in their own right, these were emotional conversations, but there was a grim practicality to the scene, too. If any of the group’s horses fell during the ride, it would surely mean arriving too late to save the town.

Even players with a near-physical allergy to these kind of achingly practical details have something to gain from GMs thinking about the little details of historic life, because everybody loves immersion, and that’s what we’re doing here. The horror TTRPG Mothership has a legendarily good GM’s guide, and contained in that book is a great piece of advice: In focusing on the gritty details of what your players can taste, smell and touch - the exact details that can so often change history from a series of postcards in our head to something real - you take those players out of their head a little bit and situate them in their bodies. And when you do that, your players will disappear that much deeper into the theatre of the mind.

In fact, just like the Mothership GM’s guide, I’m now going to give you two example paragraphs of GM narration, and you can tell me which one feels more immersive:

“You emerge from the forest after two days, having consumed four rations, and in the valley below you can finally see the town of Havermouth. If you head down the path on the hillside you’ll be there in an hour.”

Or:

“Some of you have blisters, some of you couldn’t sleep for all the noises in the forest, but after two days you smell Havermouth before you see it. As the wind changes and you catch a whiff of baking bread, and on the next breeze human filth. You prepare for the last part of the journey- a climb down a crumbling hillside. Which would be fine, except you can’t feel your hands in the chill air.”

There’s another reason that the second paragraph is more immersive, aside from the fact that it plunges the players into their characters’ bodies. When you shift the focus of your campaign so that you’re thinking a little bit less about kobolds and Magic Missiles and a little bit more about what it was like to be a human hundreds of years ago, you’re using imagery that it’s just that much more easy for your players to connect with. 

It’s unlikely (but not impossible, I grant you) that any of your players have been caught in a fireball or cut with a longsword. But they have all had muscle cramps. They have all been swarmed by insects. And if they’ve never been bouldering, they’ve certainly seen climbing competitions on social media and can imagine what that’s like with enough intensity as to make their palms sweat in real life. These are the details with which you’ll make your players feel, perhaps for the first time, that they know a little bit of what it is to be an adventuring party. And then once you’ve got them thinking about their bodies? The minor ailments, what the clothes feel like, what the food tastes like? Then you can cut their hand with a longsword and watch the player wince.

One final reason why I could never bring myself to leave the history out of my fantasy?

On some level, even if you’re subverting it or your players are making a show of resisting it, fantasy is a genre about being a hero. And history, with all of its struggles for warmth and heat, with its communities trying to carve shelter and food out of unyielding wilderness, with all of its near-incomprehensible literal and metaphorical darkness? Is intrinsically heroic.

When your world contains that much more hardship for people on a daily basis, your players’ heroism means so much more. They didn’t just slay a dragon. They climbed a mountain to do so, and did it to help humans who needed all the help they could get.

Suddenly, this is no longer a story about killing. It becomes something so much greater. It’s a story about life.