Humans are social animals, creatures which thrived and thrive in herds. One of our significant evolutionary advantages--alongside opposable thumbs and the ability to get bored amid the unceasing majesty of material existence--is that we developed language with which to add breadth and scope to our empathic tendencies. We could tell each other where the good bananas are, where the bad water is, and why the ending to Dinosaurs was so fucking bleak. Language and the social instinct are allows us, in the words of Terry Pratchett (GNU) "to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape".
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| These two are gonna invent math and Orange Julius |
RPGs leverage that instinct in a couple ways, as do many art mediums.
What I wanna talk about is how it can be leveraged in something like a West March style campaign, rather than a traditional closed-table one.
It goes like this-- no one gives a shit about your campaign*. It's nothing personal! You can be an extraordinary orator, but there is absolutely something lost in translation because your audience lacks context. I've heard it so many times "we had this awesome fight with a necromancer-- and actually, we were hiding this godkilling sword, too, that he wanted-- it was happening in a split between two worlds which was where the sword got made in the first place", this litany of gilding details in an attempt to capture something much simpler and much less transferable.
There are feelings which happened at the table, a confluence of narrative and agency and action and history which came together in your chest. I'm sure your campaign was amazing. But no orator can completely capture simply having been there.
(Incidentally, this probably explains one of the draws of stuff like liveplays. You are in an important sense there for it even if you don't get to smell the tangy musk of the gamer sitting next to you.)
What interests me is how a West March can (to some degree) sidestep that. Or maybe utilize the social instinct and our natural frustrations in trying to impart deeply subjective experiences?
It goes like this-- you don't give a shit about what happened to me in the Tomb of Gallbargler the Throatacious. It's nothing personal! It's not your character, you weren't there for the session, you didn't imagine the meaty thump the first time one of the Throatacious' Swickdallowers nearly killed my PC Hummer Meathammer. Buuuuuuuut that ancient tablet with a cryptic poem on it, that seems to match a tablet pulled from another adventure location by you a week ago? Or commiserating about when you also had to content with the turgid throat-sacs of the dreaded Swickdallowers?
Those things don't happen at the table, happen at neither table, happen between tables, and can be shared. The sharing of details is significant much further than the mere details themselves. The social instinct becomes a social space; we do have the same context in a way we don't for individual sessions. 2+2 ends up equaling 5.
This is the promise of emergent narrative often trotted out by OSR enthusiasts, but applied between tables rather than at tables.
As my friend and bunion-masseur Eric Vulgaris said in a recent conversation, "What's interesting to me and west marches is that kind of roleplaying and thinking about the world almost always occurs outside the sessions. each session is so specifically goal oriented that digesting what we discover happens in the time between sessions [also I am grateful that I may sooth your tortured feet with the flower-soft strength of these hands]**"
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| The inscrutable maze of love may yet be traversed by a pair of firm but confident fingers. |
It's born out in my Eastmark campaign, to my delight. I've tried to incentivize that by ensuring each adventure location has plenty of connections to other adventure locations in ways that are either actionable or just very cool. Location A does not solve a puzzle at Location B without also knowing something from Location B. The nature of a West March--the rotating cast, the need to strategize and communicate with one another for scheduling if no other reason--helps push these interactions to the front.
The accretion of things like lore is largely invisible in a conventional campaign, because all the players have essentially the same corpus of experience. Because West Marches players lack that same corpus, they must construct it actively. And so the engagement with the lore, its accretion, is likewise active.
*My campaign is another matter, peasant. People give so many shits about mine. You're here aren't you? Open your mouth so I can spit in it lmao.***
**He didn't say that second part, I just inferred it.
***In truth, people often do care about each other's campaigns. My point is the the ineluctable insufficiency is not a matter of being inarticulate, but of having certain unrenderable elements.
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