The Setting for the Game

I’ve had the new experience lately of being a player (of which much more anon), and of playing in a pre-written setting. I’ve been playing RPGs for… more than 30 years now, and I have never really run anything in anyone else’s setting, with the exception of the city of Sigil in Planescape, and to be honest, my version of Sigil is different enough to make it very nearly homebrew anyway. Everything else is completely and utterly so.

The first named setting I had was Merefellen, a small alliance of kingdoms on a planet that existed inside a stupidly huge Dyson sphere called Bluefall. I had some odds and ends of stuff before that, but I don’t think any of them had names beyond “my campaign world”, which is what Dragon Magazine had taught me to call them. The next one was Davon; an absolute kitchen sink of a setting which I created when I was about 20, and have played in continuously since. Davon has existed since well before I learned how to restrain myself in picking setting elements, so it just has everything, sometimes with bells and ribbons on. I love it dearly, and so do the players who’ve grown up with it (and some of those who came later are fond of it), but it’s not a setting you could ever publish. Merefellen and Bluefall still exist within the wider cosmology of Davon, in among the crystal spheres of Spelljammer and the planes of reality of Planescape.

There are at least a dozen settings that I’ve never developed much beyond initial concepts and a few maps. There are a few in which I ran 4th Edition D&D games, none of which really had names, per se. And then there are the two in which I’m running games at the moment. These are called Utterbaum and Heliomar, and I’m intending to tell you about Utterbaum in this issue - not so much in the detail of it, but in the influences I’ve chosen to emphasise for it, and the ways in which I’m presenting them to the players.

Utterbaum is the name of one specific town in the setting, strictly speaking. It’s an odd place, set right next to a place called a demondelve, an area of land where fiends, inhabitants of any of the lower planes, can apparently just walk through and arrive in the world. Obviously, many of the inhabitants of the world - and specifically, the servants of the guardian god Kemaro - don’t like this, and so most such demondelves have attached “guardian towns”, populated by paladins, clerics, wizards, and other people set up to deal with the arriving fiends. It’s not like there’s a constant flow of them; it’s more like living near an active volcano that rumbles every few days, and has a bigger eruption once in a while. Utterbaum takes an academic approach to its demon fighting, so it has a number of large libraries, and some parts of it function a little like a university. If you imagine somewhere like Oxford, and a little like Stratford-upon-Avon, but inhabited by high-powered demon-hunters and the like, it’s not a million miles off.

Utterbaum sits in a range of hills on one island, Sommerland, among an archipelago of more. Technically, you might argue that they’re three separate archipelagoes which happen to be near one another, and that’s geologically true, but not culturally. The Isles lie west and north of a continent that has a fair variety of land types and political approaches, and east of a vast ocean.

I went into writing the material for this setting with some definite aims and influences in mind. First, I wanted there to be a sort of bucolic rural underpinning to it all, so many of the small villages, and even the outskirts of towns - the Isles have really only one city - are inspired by the 17th century paintings of Adriaen van Ostade and Karel Dujardin. Most parts of the Isles have heavy snow and storms through the winter months, and ordinary travel becomes pretty much impossible for about three weeks either side of the winter solstice. The peasantry has plenty of stored food in any given year, so they more or less bed down and hibernate for those months, with plenty of ale and meat and cheese, and the other end of the year is hay-making and drinking in the fields. There are probably maypoles, and there are definitely harvest festivals.

Next, I wanted to draw in a non-standard form of rulership. The assumption that all fantasy settings have post-Westphalian nation-states with firm borders and clear hierarchies annoys me, so the Isles run on something much more like the Irish Brehon Law. Rulers are administrators, but don’t have the power of law or justice; that rests with advocates and judges, who travel from place to place and make rulings, which establish precedent. Local rulers are squires, usually, at basically a manor-house-and-village level. Some manors don’t even have villages. They’ll owe allegiance to a Lord or a Baron, who will owe allegiance to a Duke or Prince or King, more or less, although there are a plentitude of squires who are in fealty directly to a king, and a few in fealty to nobody at all. Fealty is actively maintained; if a squire feels they’re not getting a good enough deal in terms of protection or whatever other services are agreed from their current liege, they can, at the next time of renewal, choose to swear fealty to someone else. So duchies, principalities, and kingdoms are geographically distributed, and most peasants haven’t the slightest idea who the king is - and the next village over might have a different one.

Layered onto this, we have the merchants-and-magic level of society. These are people who live in the chartered towns, guardian towns, and other not-just-village places across the Isles. They transport and sell goods, are members of clerical or arcane orders, fight off demons or sea-serpents or wild magic or fey invasions, and have their own complex of politics and interrelations, which touch on the kingdoms, but are separate as well. Among these are the Havnagar, druids and rangers and treants and fey who hold that civilisation is a plague; the Dark College, necromancers and demonologists who in theory study such things to fight them, but keep on having ‘rogue’ elements; the Storm Paladins, a cross between mountain rescue, street thieves, and holy warriors; and many other organisations and groups who have not as yet surfaced in the campaign. There’s something of the Hanseatic League about this, and also the various scientific and spiritual associations of the Victorian era. There are no murder hobos here; everyone has some allegiance, and belongs to some group, or else they’re starting their own.

The kings and princes gather armies; those armies go to war, but not usually in the Isles. Instead they’re in far-away places with strange names, and the veterans who come back from them - almost always into the villages and rural places - are a little bit strange. They’ve seen things. This is influenced by reading about the experiences of sailors and soldiers in the 17th through early 19th centuries in Europe, who might be away from home for years at a stretch, and come back changed to places that mostly hadn’t altered a jot. And while it’s not the same kind of setting, what I’m looking for here is the feeling of Simon Stålenhag’s paintings (now part of the Tales from the Loop game and TV show) wherein weird stuff is blended with the prosaic in an utterly matter of fact way.

And into these Isles, there are people coming from the continent, mostly from the Beacons (think Enlightenment era Scotland and France, perhaps); from the elven lands far to the West (Tolkien; if Tolkien’s elves who went into the West could in a few cases experience ennui and dissatisfaction and come back East to be weird among mortals again); the inner parts of the continent, noble orcs, from whom the rulers of the Isles claim descent, when they can, and strange tieflings; and from the sea, merrow and merfolk and the realm that lies between and beneath the Isles. And the fiends, through the demondelves, of course. All these are parts of my reaction to the “thin” self-contained nature of so many fantasy settings, where there are only five kingdoms and nothing else, and to the ongoing efforts among historians to demonstrate that European history is in no way solely that of white men. Part of that, too, is coming from China Miéville’s Bas-Lag, which has wave after wave of immigration of strange creatures, but in a less settled way.

And when I list off all those things, Adriaen van Ostade and Karel Dujardin and Brehon Law and the Hanseatic League and the Victorian societies and Simon Stålenhag and the Enlightenment and Tolkien and anti-Eurocentrism and Bas-Lag, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is another kitchen-sink setting. But really, honestly, I’ve been so very restrained in what I include in this. There’s no time travel, no planar portals, no interventionist gods, no flying ships (that was hard), no ancient networks of magic or ley lines or anything, no deep history (there was a huge flood 1690-ish years ago, and that’s as far as history really goes), no chunky continental map with unexplored areas, and absolutely minimal monster presence - dragons are only alluded to, and the entire panoply of aberrations, oozes, and so forth just aren’t a feature.

Because of that restraint, I think that Utterbaum and the Isles have a clear and definite feeling, which is expressed to some degree in play. But it’s also expressed in the setting documents, which in this case I have chosen to do entirely in-world, in-character. I’ve always loved the concept of “player handouts”, things you can while running a game give to players and say “it looks exactly like this”. Mostly they’re documents and maps. In my games, they’ve often been newspapers, in part modelled after the earliest newspapers in European history, but also after the polemic local-scale magazines which I think I only ever encountered pre-internet when they were gently satirised by Susan Coolidge. So for Utterbaum, there’s no abstract “setting bible”. Everything is a document in the world, with its own biases and point of view. Should you be interested, you can read them, all but the maps and one astrological chart thing:

This does a few interesting things. First - I think - it makes the setting documents far more interesting to read. Fantasy setting books, particularly the more detailed ones, have an incredible ability to turn settings that are wild and fabulous and inspired into ditchwater dull this-town-has-two-mills-and-a-grain-store travelogues. I am all for there being a reasonably well-though-out economy for the setting (indeed, I am nigh on fanatical about that, and also geology), but it should be shown, not told. Second, it allows me to start establishing notable NPCs before the players ever encounter them. The player characters can literally read about them. And third, it allows me to start giving out details of plot and event in the setting without spoilers. I’m keeping the complexity of plot in Utterbaum right down - my own preference is absolutely baroque, though I’ve learned that that’s not great for player experience - but there’s still some. Having it there in the setting documents is, I feel, a stellar way to establish continuity.

I’ll talk about Heliomar, the other current setting, in a future issue. It’s a good bit more sandbox-y, I think, but also has a bit more to say, which is proving an interesting combination.

Drew.