Write from the world

Taking inspiration from the World

Image from ECO MOFOS!!, Art by Daniel Locke

• “Human skill either completes what nature is incapable of completing or imitates nature” Aristotle, Physics

• “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

One thing I like to consider when creating scenarios or situations for play for TTRPGs, is to try to give them some sort of emotional truth. I want players to be invested in this fantasy space, to feel it as well as understand it. One of the most straightforward ways to achieve that is to give your scenarios or NPCs the appearance of the complexity of life, of multiple factors acting at once. You can get to this is by imitating life, by basing events on situations from the real world or NPCs on people from your life.

A scenario should be a space ripe with potential, a jumping off point for ideas and action, something that the players can get involved with rather than just watch unfold. Unfolding distant events are fine, obviously, to create the sense of a living world, but all events should at least imply that the players could intervene in some way. Player agency is at the heart of things for me. But when faced with having to devise scenarios, I often think about how events in our world play out. Refecting the real world, maybe not in appearence but at the level of structures and systems, is a way of building in cascading complications and unforseen circumstances. Life can influence how we construct events in our fantasy worlds. How does a community react to an powerful oppressive force? Often with small acts of resistance, the forming of secretive cells leading to larger acts of rebellion, as in the French resistance to the Nazi invasion in WW2 or Guy Fawkes, reacting to the repression of Catholicism, trying to blow up Parliament. So these halflings form a secret society, furtively echanging messages and material, building towards bringing down the Orcish temple.

The advantage of using a framework from “life” rather than just making stuff up (which is obviously always fun), is that real events are often incredibly messy, in ways that are hard to fathom from just following the obvious patterns. Chaos theory in action. Borrowing from life can give fantasy situations a sense of reality, of depth; This Goblin I’m writing can be like this guy I knew from school, obsessed by ancient texts but loving silly wordplay, always trying to measure up to his father’s legacy.

I was never really satisfied by the way Corpos impact the world in ECO MOFOS!! The Corpos always felt a bit passive. The Faction system that I cooked up works well over time, each faction slowly changing the situation in the world, but the Faction moves are much more about what the Faction wants to DO rather how they AFFECT the world around them. And in a low-communication setting, the disruptive ripples are what will be seen or felt first. I also wanted to play into the Punks’ role more, for them to act as a counter to the ecological devastation caused by so many of the processes of a culture of production, to help the players feel that they’re able to intervene and change the world.

So for Islands of Weirdhope, I wanted to insert all the various ramifications of extractive activities into encounters that the party of Punks have as they sail the world, and adapted Mythic Bastionland’s Omens system into Corpo Schemes. My main motivation was to turn the abstract effects of Corpo actions into lived-in events. Many of the Schemes are based around things that exist in our world; A military base, a safari, a coal mine, a holiday island (like the Maldives or Mauritius), an old nuclear site. Each impacts the world in their own way. With a little bit of research (yes, I can use search engines) I can find out what effect each of these activities has on the world, and use that as a springboard for a situation that the players can interact with. Maybe they solve the issue at hand, maybe they ignore it, or maybe they start to follow the lead to discover the larger Scheme, shutting it down before the next situation occurs.

My process

So here’s a little of example of my process for writing these. First I decided to tackle one of the activities; creating and maintaining a Mine. Researching the environmental impact of a Mine, I got this list:

Habitat destruction, deforestation, biodiversity loss, land degradation (erosion, subsidence), air pollution and major water pollution (acid mine drainage, heavy metals).

So for my escalating list of events for the Corpo Scheme, I started with the water pollution, thinking about how that would affect one specific area, and one specific person. Fish die from the pollution. Seagulls swarm around the easy meal. Anyone fishing around there no longer has their usual source of food:

A. A cloud of gulls. The stench of rotting fish. The gulls thrash in the water, fighting over the carpet of carcasses. A fisherwoman sits in her little skiff, crying.

My aim is to give enough detail for a meaningful encounter, some visceral details (an image, a smell), and an emotional hook, with a character to talk to, to gather more information or just help on their way.

The other thing you can do with this structure is create threads of a story. I started thinking about how, in a world without labour laws, child labour becomes something that the unscrupulous will turn to, and wrote these entries:

C. A fisherman is searching for his daughter. Several children have gone missing on local islands. Some people are saying it’s Pirates, and some that it’s Crablins.

D. A gang of kids are haphazardly piloting a skiff. They were press-ganged into working in a stinking mine, but now they’ve escaped. No idea where they’re going.

So maybe the players follow up on the fisherman’s story and track down his daughter and some other kids, ignoring the rumours. Or maybe they get caught up in other events, or even another Corpo Scheme, and find a bunch of the kids have made their own escape. But if they don’t track down the source of this trouble and shut the mine down, the Scheme culminates in this:

E. A great wave spreads across the sea. The mine has caused the collapse of a whole chunk of cliff, sending a small tsunami fanning out from the impact.

Maybe this affects many of the towns around, maybe it impacts some NPCs the Punks care about, but it’s certain that ignoring the issue leads to major problems in their world. Much like in real life.

Examples

Here are a few different instances of art reflecting life:

The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin; a direct response to the Vietnam War and American imperialism, exploring ecological destruction and militarism, human colonists destroying an extraterrestrial forest world.

Jaws was loosely based on a real series of deaths attributed to a single shark in 1916.

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin imagines the “soul” of cities as a living thing, mirroring the communities that live in them.

Kindred by Octavia Butler uses a time travel narrative to consider the visceral realities of slavery and its complex legacies.

And one instance of life reflecting art; as John McCroo (RiseUpComus) pointed out on Bluesky about Lord of the Rings, “That’s why they had to go through Moria. Isengard is a Strait of Hormuz situation”.

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Other news

We currently have a Jam on, if you fancy writing something inspired by the Weirdhope world, run by symphonicStoryteller, who I’ve got to know through the Copy/Paste discord.

https://itch.io/jam/islands-islands-islands

And we’ve released a new Science Fantasy module by IsaacIsAfraid if you’d like to check it out, available in print and digital.