May 27, 2001
Fantasy adventure RPGs, from CRPGs to paper-and-pencil games to MMO's like Ultima Online and Everquest seek to a simulate the experience of being an heroic adventurer from legendary medieval times. One thing most of them have lost, since perhaps the earliest days of D&D gaming, is the concept of the amorphous wilderness. Or perhaps they never had it to lose. They apply our modern cartographic technologies to a psuedo-medieval world, and lose the vast (unmapped and unmappable) wilderness from which legends spring. If you head west from Midgard, you run into the Black Woods. And so do I. And so does everyone else. Because as we can see on the map drawn in excruciatingly precise detail with a sophisticated CAD program, the Black Woods are west of Midgard, period. I submit, the Legendary World is hardly so detailed. One, it is anamorphic: The world is distorted by the preception of it. Like the old world map in The King and I - if you're a citizen of Siam, then Siam is a very large country, and China (say), is your insignificant neighbor somewhere "thataway". From an RPG perspective, this means that you don't need to bind yourself to the constraints of geography. You can start out with a tiny little town and build it into a vast empire - without worrying about just how exactly that empire "fits" where only a tiny hamlet used to be. In this fuzzy world, an empire can grow without crowding its neighbors. More importantly, civilization can expand without diminishing the size of the wilderness.
The wilderness, meanwhile, is just wild-ness. If you leave these familiar lands and head off into the wilderness, then you might find the Black Woods. You might find mountains though. Or jungles. Or Dragons. If anyone knew what was really out there in the wilderness then it wouldn't be the wilderness, after all. Ancient travelers relied on an itinerary to get from point A to point D. They might not know (and might not care) where precisely one town was in relation to the rest of the world: They knew they could get there by travelling from A to B to C to D.
Heroic adventurers, as opposed to mere travellers (and cartographers), deviated from their maps into the Great Unknown - found new lands and new adventures that no one else had ever seen before. New lands that quite possibly, no one else would ever see again. The wilderness was the timeless land of fey. In many legends, travellers to the land of fey didn't even age. This ambiguous worldview would be of tremendous use in fantasy adventure RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons (et al), whether they are of the paper-n-pencil or computer variety. It lends itself particularly well to the distributed server model of the upcoming Neverwinter Nights: Where quite literally, the manner of getting from point A to point D is going to be by travelling to each point along the way (through one server portal after another). You get to point D by travelling from A to B to C... and no other route will suffice. Deviate from the path, and you find yourself in undiscovered country - perhaps even a termporary server that will vanish as soon as your adventure has concluded. It lends itself just as well to offline, paper-and-pencil games. Those weekly meets at the local game shop, where the geography changes with each DM. Where heading out into the wilderness is indeed a trip into the land of fey - and what you discovered "out there" last week has nothing to do with what you might discover in this week's game. Oddly enough, this is not a concept that gamers in general embrace. They spend their time mapping worlds in detail. Or they rely on boxed campaign sets such as Forgotten Realms to provide them with consistent geography among a plurality of game masters. Neverwinter Nights' projects coordinate the efforts of GMs to accurately recreate ("to scale"!) a fantastic world that never existed, or give their worlds a fantastic rationale for how it is travellers are able to come and go from one world to the next (e.g. "This world is a nexus of worlds in the multiverse"). Is it because we're just not comfortable with the medieval worldview of an unmapped, unmappable world? Is it such an alien concept that the notion of magical portals between multiple worlds now strikes us as being more "realistic"? I don't know. Page Layout snarfed from http://www.webpagedesign.com.au, but I did the java buttons myself. With MS-Paint! |
