Just a wandering gill-man, in search of love and adventure...

The other day, I saw some toys for sale in a local shop at a knock-down price; I thought my son might like them, so I bought him some. They turn out to be part of some complicated multi-platform media franchise called 'Skylanders', which I've never heard of until now. My son (who is two years old) eagerly grabbed the first two toys, which he promptly christened 'Cake Belly' and 'Robot Guy'.

This is Cake Belly.

This is Robot Guy.

I, however, was much more interested in the third of them, a buff, bicep-flexing fish-man dude with a big, happy smile. I told my son that the thing he was holding was an anchor, so he was swiftly named 'Anka', which isn't nearly as good a name as Cake Belly or Robot Guy. But he's still my favourite of the three.

This is Anka.

According to the packaging, his real name is 'Gill Grunt'. I looked him up online, and discovered that he actually has a surprisingly tragic backstory:

Gill Grunt was a brave soul who joined the Gillmen military in search of adventure. While journeying through a misty lagoon in the clouds, he met an enchanting mermaid. He vowed to return to her after his tour. Keeping his promise, he came back to the lagoon years later, only to learn a nasty band of pirates had kidnapped the mermaid. Heartbroken, Gill Grunt began searching all over Skylands. Though he had yet to find her, he joined the Skylanders to help protect others from such evil, while still keeping an ever-watchful eye for the beautiful mermaid and the pirates who took her.

So at this point I was pretty much in love. A happy fish-man who wanders the world looking for his kidnapped mermaid girlfriend (whom he met in a cloud OMG WTF) and whacking people with an anchor. And his battle-cry is 'Fear the Fish!'

But wait. It gets better!

Gill Grunt grew up in a typical Gillmen city on the ocean bottom. From his glass bedroom bubble window, he would gaze out at circling cyber squid and menacing mega sharks. He couldn't have been more bored. 

Cyber-squid? Mega-sharks? Boring! I'm gonna join the army and work out and date mermaids and maybe shoot some guy with a fucking anchor. Fear the Fish! FEAR THE FISH!

I feel a very real connection to Gill Grunt. I identify with him on a very deep level. I can think of very few better ways to live than as a happy, romantic, easily-bored fishman with an anchor gun.

In fact, if and when I get a chance to actually play in a game instead of running one, this might just be my next character...

Romantic Fantasy Revisited 4: So what does this look like in practise?

Finally: the last post of the series. Having explained what I think 'romantic fantasy' is and could be, why you might want it in an RPG, and how you might incorporate it into your D&D games in practical terms, I'll now try to explain in what sense the setting I've been developing for 'Against the Wicked City' might be considered an example of romantic fantasy, as well as what a more 'traditional' D&D adventure might look like if it was translated into a more self-consciously 'romantic' style.

An anonymous comment on the previous post asked whether what I was calling 'romantic fantasy' was basically the same thing as what Armchair Gamer, in an RPG.net thread from back in 2012, called 'Paladins and Princesses' D&D. In that thread, this style of D&D is described as being 'romantic', but also as being 'a "clean" fantasy, with shining castles and good kings, friendly innkeepers and helpful travellers'. ATWC has none of those things; instead, it's a setting full of smoke-blackened towers, awful tyrants, miserable refugees, and fearful, suspicious caravanserai-keepers who may or may not be planning to sell you out to the secret police. All of these are trappings that we've come to associate with 'grimdark' fantasy-horror settings, in which life is cheap and horrible and usually meaningless. So why do I call it 'romantic fantasy', instead?

Well, odd though it may seem at first glance, ATWC as-written is actually all about love.

Let me put it like this: the Wicked City represents a failure state. It is meant to communicate an idea of what can happen when, under conditions of extreme social stress, the failure of human beings to love one another reaches epidemic proportions. So at the heart of the whole system you have the Wicked King, who embodies inhumanity; then beneath him you have the Secret Police, who worship that inhumanity; then the Ministries and the Cobweb, who serve it; then the people of the city, who endure it; and finally, right on the edges, you have people like the Red Brotherhood and the Rubble Tribes, who resist it. The symptom of this inhumanity, this failure to love, is dehumanisation: that's why the Secret Police, the Cobweb aristocracy, and the Skull Wearers all wear masks, why the Secret Police have given up their names for codenames, why the Men Without Faces are literally faceless, why the Steel Aspirants hunger to replace their bodies with clockwork, why the bodies of the Maimed have been warped by their afflictions, why the Wicked King may actually be completely bodiless, and so on. So to be against the Wicked City is to be against all that, against this miserable grinding system of oppression which keeps turning people into literal and figurative monsters. In a more traditional fantasy game the assumption would be that the way to fight this would be to make a long list of all the bad people, and then kill them: massacre the King's Men, massacre the Cobweb families, massacre the Ministers, massacre the Secret Police, and so on. You can totally play it like that if you want to. But in writing it, I've also tried to keep open the possibility of approaching these as social problems, requiring social solutions.

He's not really such a bad guy, once you get to know him...

It would have been easy for me to write the Rubble Tribes as frothing, murderous savages. It would have been easy for me to write the process of Maiming as involving irreversible spiritual corruption. It would have been easy for me to write the Skull Wearer rite as permanently transforming its victim into a monster. It would have been easy for me to write the King's Men as brutal, sadistic enforcers, and the Cobweb Families as irredeemable pits of ancestral evil. In fact, in every case, this would have been the traditional D&D approach, because by writing them in those ways I would have turned them into guilt-free targets for slaughter by the PCs. But, instead, I wrote Maiming and Skull-Wearering as curable conditions, the King's Men as a cowardly rabble, the Rubble Tribes as weird and suspicious but basically pretty decent, the Cobweb Families as damaged products of a dysfunctional social environment, and so on. A Murder Harlot is just a Jewelled Fan Dancer who's lost faith in everything except sex and violence. Every serpent-folk drug peddler could just as easily be a healer, instead. Maybe even the Men Without Faces could be saved if you could somehow give them their faces and identities back. (It's probably too late for the Hounds, though.) Maybe the only reason the Man With Stones For Eyes is so horrible is because of the way the world looks to him through those frozen rocks in his eye-sockets, and if he could get his real eyes back he might finally understand the horror he's become and stop being so vile to everyone. (Then again, though, maybe not.) And, yes, sure, you can just kill them all if you want to, and maybe that's sometimes even going to be the right and moral thing to do: it's certainly hard to argue that the world wouldn't be a better place without the Men Without Faces in it. But the other options are always there as well.

This extends out to the rest of the setting, too. It's why I wrote the Pig-Men and the Shurale as dangerous, but also stupid and easy to trick: I want them to be the kind of monsters that can be outwitted by cunning children, rather than the kind that can only be dealt with via overwhelming military force. It's why skull chieftains can be disposed of non-violently by reminding them that they're dead. It's why most of the encounters on the random encounter tables involve weird social interactions with the possible threat of violence, rather than just 'this thing turns up and attacks!' I've tried to write all this stuff in ways that will make it useful in traditional D&D games as well, and I do want to emphasise that I don't think anyone is 'doing it wrong' if they borrow something I've written for use in a standard kill-'em-all dungeon bash; that would be pure hypocrisy on my part, given the number of such games I've enjoyed playing and running in the past. But the setting-as-written should also support games in which every step towards the Wicked King's throne room is marked by friendships forged and souls redeemed from despair and evil, rather than just hacked-up corpses and trails of blood.

As all this is still probably a bit abstract, I'll try to finish up with an example: notes towards a romantic fantasy rewrite of what may very well be the most famous and influential D&D adventure ever written, B2 The Keep On the Borderlands. I assume everyone knows the set-up: there's a keep on a wild borderland region, a bunch of different clans of feuding monsters live in the 'caves of chaos' nearby, concealed within the caves is the Chapel of Evil Chaos, and the priest in the keep pretends to be helpful but is actually an agent of Evil Chaos hoping to lure people into the caves and then murder them when they're at their most vulnerable. While there are some opportunities for roleplay and negotiation, the adventure as a whole clearly assumes that most encounters will be resolved through violence, with most of the monsters attacking on sight. So how could we turn something like this into a romantic fantasy scenario?

• The Keep: The keep is a stronghold of civilisation, for better and for worse. Its people have mostly managed to maintain  a policy of uneasy coexistence with the creatures in the Caves of Chaos, but recently there's been an outbreak of attacks, thefts, raids, disappearances, and kidnappings, and the inhabitants - goaded on by the fake priest - are increasingly demanding that the castellan's soldiers be sent out to slaughter these degenerate savages once and for all. Uneasy at these demands, and suspecting that something else may be going on, the castellan asks the PCs (as a notionally-neutral third party) to investigate. 
• The Shrine of Evil Chaos: In the original, anyone who touches the relics in the Shrine of Evil Chaos must save or 'become a servant of chaos and evil', compelled to guard the chapel forever. So that's our first change: to make explicit that the adepts, priest, and torturer at the shrine aren't really villains, just unfortunates who have fallen under the spell of the relics. (They were, of course, led to the chapel by the fake priest in the keep.) If the relics could be destroyed, they would return to normal, and be horrified by the things that they have done while under the spell. They all have families at the Keep, who are worried sick about them, and desperate to see their loved ones returned.
• The Fake Priest: The fake priest at the keep, and his two acolytes, clearly aren't under the spell, as they're able to leave the shrine at will. So they're the real villains, individuals who have voluntarily devoted themselves to Evil Chaos. They can be kept as 'pure' bad guys; PCs hate being betrayed by people they thought were their allies, so it's probably best that they don't need to feel any guilt whatsoever about hacking them down after their inevitable change of sides. The Priest probably started worshipping Evil Chaos because of some horrible trauma in his backstory, but at this stage he's probably too far gone to be redeemed. 
• The Goblins: In the original, the hobgoblins have a secret door into the goblin storage chamber, which they use to steal all the best stuff that the goblins loot from the surrounding area. As written, this is basically just an excuse for a surprise encounter; the PCs are hanging around in the storage chamber, checking if anything in it is worth stealing, when - surprise! - the wall opens up and a bunch of hobgoblins walk in. But this can easily be upgraded to the primary motivation for the goblin tribe: all the food they had laid up for the winter has just vanished from their storeroom, and now they're raiding the surrounding area because they know that without extra food supplies they're all going to starve. Emphasise how scrawny and desperate the goblins seem; have people at the keep mention that the goblins have never raided like this before; let the PCs discover that the only things the goblins ever seem to be interested in stealing is food. The PCs should quickly work out what the real motivation behind the goblin raids is, and be able to defuse the situation either by taking their food back from the hobgoblins, or by securing them some other food supply elsewhere.
• The Ogre: The original specifically highlights this as an encounter which can be avoided non-violently; the ogre only fights for the goblins because they pay him, and will stop fighting if the PCs make him a better offer. So let's make him a rather dim, almost amiable figure: greedy, amoral, easily bribed, willing to break heads in exchange for a good meal, but bearing no real malice towards anyone. Provided he gets good food and regular pay, he'd be just as happy working for the keep as for the goblins, and could potentially be a real asset to its defenders.
• The Orcs: In the original, there are two rival tribes of orcs who are being manipulated into working together by their leaders, who are holding secret meetings in a concealed room. So let's play on that: the orcs aren't normally aggressive, but they've been manipulated into taking aggressive action by their leaders, who have engineered a situation in which each tribe believes that only a constant policy of aggressive action can stop the other tribe from thinking they're weak and attempting to exterminate them. The leaders, in turn, are being manipulated by the Priest of Evil Chaos, who has fed them lies that it is only their shows of aggression which are keeping the men of the keep from marching out and killing the lot of them. (In fact, the reverse is true; the men of the keep had previously been willing to put up with them, but now their tolerance is waning fast.) If the tribes realise that they've been tricked, they'll turn on their leaders. If the leaders realise that they've been tricked, they'll turn on the priest. (Also, one of the orc leaders should be female, and the two of them should have a whole forbidden romance going on.)
• The Kobolds: They're just kobolds, man. They want to be left alone. They're very suspicious of outsiders due to prior bad experiences - everyone thinks they can push the little guys around - but could potentially be enlisted as allies if persuaded of the threat posed by the Shrine of Evil Chaos.
• The Hobgoblins: In the original, the hobgoblin chief is described as being accompanied by 'four large female hobgoblins, each equal to a male', presumably his wives. They've also imprisoned a merchant and his wife. So let's work with this: the hobgoblin chief is a figurehead, real power within the tribe resting with his four large and warlike wives. The chief is desperate for domestic harmony, and will do whatever his wives tell him to, but they're currently deadlocked; two are staunch hobgoblin supremacist traditionalists who argue for an aggressive policy (stealing more from the goblins, eating the prisoners, war with the keep), while the other two are realists who argue for a more conciliatory tone (ransoming the prisoners, leaving the goblins alone for now, maintaining peace with the keep). One of the latter pair has even struck up a kind of friendship with the imprisoned merchant's wife, and is trying to work out a way of getting her out alive. PCs who see to it that the less aggressive faction win out can ensure the safe return of their prisoners (for a suitable ransom), and maybe even forge some kind of peace treaty between the hobgoblins and the keep in order to avoid further violence. 
• The Bugbears: In the original, these are a weird bunch; they pretend to be friendly, offer meat kebabs to the PCs, and then stab them with the skewers. They also have loads of slaves, including a mad hero and a rebel bugbear. But why on earth would anyone fall for their trick, unless they had prior reason to believe the bugbears would be friendly and helpful? So let's rewrite this slightly: until recently, their cave really was a safe haven for travellers, and the bugbears offered food and shelter to creatures of all races in exchange for a fair payment. Then their current chief staged a coup and enslaved all their 'guests', as well as the previous chief (the 'rebel' bugbear in the slave pen); since then, everyone who's come seeking shelter has also been enslaved. The bugbears are very divided on the merits of their sudden career change from innkeepers to slavers, but their new chief has the backing of both the minotaur and the priests of Evil Chaos, both of whom they fear terribly. If he was deprived of this support, then some of the bugbears could probably be persuaded to side with their old chief again, especially if he was backed by a slave revolt.
• The Minotaur: He just likes eating people. The new bugbear chief has promised him lots of slaves to eat in exchange for his support.
• The Gnolls: These guys are a pretty boring bunch in the original, but their chief does fight alongside his two sons and four wives, which suggests that at least he's a family man. There's also secret tunnel which no-one knows about, connecting his room to the Shrine of Evil Chaos. So I'm gonna go for a minor rewrite and say that the fake priest does know about it, and has been using it to manipulate the gnoll chief into more and more aggressive acts via illusions, ventriloquism, 'messages from the gods', and so on. The gnoll chief has always been a bloodthirsty sort, so he didn't need much prompting; but he does genuinely love his family, and if he sees that his actions are placing his wives or sons in danger, he can be made to reconsider his recent choices, especially if confronted with evidence that all the 'omens' he's been seeing recently might have a less-than-divine origin. 
• The Mad Hermit: The original says that 'The DM may choose to have the Mad Hermit approach the group on friendly terms, claiming to be a holy man seeking goodness in nature - perhaps he actually believes that at times' - but then insists that he attacks as soon as he gets a chance. Let's flip that: he really was a holy man seeking goodness in nature, but when he confronted the fake priest about his frequent visits to the Shrine of Evil Chaos, the priest stabbed him with a poisoned dagger. The hermit's pet lion saved his life, but the poison has destroyed his mind, so now he just wanders about babbling. The lion is very protective, and attacks anyone who looks like they might harm him. If his mind is restored, he can reveal much about the priest's actions to date.

So, there you have it: the Caves of Chaos rewritten as a talk-'em-up, in which the whole looming tragedy of conflict between the humanoids and the keep is basically the work of one scheming bastard who has been playing on the worst tendencies of all those around him in order to generate (evil) chaos, and whose whole tapestry of manipulation and deceit can be unpicked one link at a time. For the full romantic fantasy effect you'd want to rewrite the keep as well, filling it with potential PC love interests (including non-heterosexual love interests) and people with really amazing hair, but I figure this post is already long enough!

So. Romantic fantasy. It's a thing. Your group might like it, at least in moderation. I'd never claim that it's inherently 'better' than any other kind of play; but if you fancy a bit of a change from your PCs just stabbing everyone, you might try giving it a whirl...

Romantic Fantasy Revisited 3: How do I use this in a game of D&D?

Man, I need to get this series finished. I promised Derek Holland a review of his magic item book!

OK: part three. In my last two posts, I discussed what I mean by 'romantic fantasy' (although Yora has now started calling it 'Hope and Heroism' instead), and why someone might potentially want to emulate it - or at least parts of it - in a game of D&D. In this post, I'll address the next obvious question: how?

Let's say that you and your group are totally up for a romantic-fantasy-themed D&D game, full of redeemable villains and non-violent solutions. How do you make that happen? What do the rules need to do? And why aren't you all just playing Monsterhearts instead?

The biggest burden, as usual, falls on the GM. The GM is the person who establishes what kind of world the game takes place in, after all; and if the world that they present to their players is one that doesn't seem like it's going to be amenable to romantic-fantasy-style problem-solving, then the PCs will probably just turtle up and start murderhoboing instead. So what sort of things might one expect such a romantic fantasy game or setting to contain?

1: Injustice may be severe and commonplace, but it is neither inevitable nor invincible

As I've been emphasising throughout, romantic fantasy narratives don't have to be all sweetness and light; in fact, they're very often full of cruelty and darkness. But if you want PCs who are willing to go the extra mile to resolve situations without just killing everyone and taking their stuff, you need to make clear that the campaign world is the kind of place where things might be bad, but they can get better. If the tone is one of bleak, cynical amorality, where every petty tyrant you overthrow is immediately replaced by another one who's twice as nasty, then the players will very rapidly stop bothering to strive for a better world.

Let me repeat: this doesn't mean the setting has to be nice, but it does mean that it has to be improvable. Specific injustices can be ended. Cycles of violence can be broken. So let your PCs have the victories they work for, demonstrating to them that, with enough determination, they really can build a better world around themselves, even if it's only within the confines of their own community or home.

2: Very few people are irredeemably awful

Some are. Some people are just plain horrible. But mostly people do evil either because they're badly damaged individuals lashing out at the world that has hurt them (in which case the PCs will potentially be able to heal them), or because they've been socially conditioned to believe it's necessary (in which case the PCs will potentially be able to persuade them of the error of their ways). NPC villains may be hated, but they should often also be pitied; and PCs who really, seriously want to redeem someone, and who are willing to devote sufficient energy and attention to the task, should usually have a decent chance of success.

'Oh, my tormented soul! If only someone would come along and redeem me already!'

3: Motivations are personal

Characters in traditional fantasy RPGs often have very abstract motivations, like 'wealth', 'power', 'knowledge', or 'justice', or else by commitments which relate to abstract entities, like 'serve the Faith' or 'protect the Kingdom' or 'take over the world'. In romantic fantasy narratives, motivations tend to be much more personal: 'impress my elder sister', 'marry that guy I've got a crush on', 'get back at that woman who insulted and humiliated me all that time ago', and so on. By giving NPCs motivations like this (and by giving PCs ample opportunities to discover them), you'll make it much easier for PCs to steer, influence, and generally manipulate them via social interactions. Someone who just 'wants power' can't really be influenced except with straightforward bribes ('help me and I will give you this power') or threats ('help me or I will take your power away'), which reduces social interactions with them to a simple matter of logistics: if you don't have sufficient resources to credibly bribe or threaten them them, then you're out of luck. But someone who wants their big sister's approval is a proper character-based storyline waiting to happen: a storyline in which anyone can potentially play an important role.

4: Encounters usually won't go straight to violence, and diplomatic solutions are possible

In most romantic fantasy narratives, violence isn't exciting or fun; it's horrible. As a result, very few people are likely to do the whole 'attack on sight and fight to the death' routine so common in modern D&D games, because they know that wounds hurt and fights are terrifying and death is forever. Stumble across a bunch of dudes in a dungeon and they might well leap to their feet and point weapons at you - but then they'll hesitate, hoping that the whole situation can be resolved without them actually having to risk their lives, and that hesitation opens up a space for people to talk to one another; bribe, threaten, bluff, negotiate, whatever. This doesn't mean that the PCs can simply deal with situations by walking from one group of monsters to the next and saying 'Hey, let's be friends!', because - as mentioned - the world is a cruel place, and its inhabitants have been forced to adapt to its cruelty, which includes learning not to let their guard down; they'll have been hurt before, and will have every reason to expect that this latest bunch of strangers just want to trick or exploit them, too. But PCs who are prepared to make an actual diplomatic effort - to listen to what each group wants, to understand why they're doing whatever it is they do, and to try to find a non-violent solution to the situation in which they all find themselves - should have a decent chance of success, and may even be able to convert potential enemies into friends or allies, instead.

5: Everyone is important

It's easy for fantasy RPGs to default to a paradigm in which only the movers and shakers really count. The PCs are important because they're good at killing people; the king is important because he has an army; the evil wizard is important because he can cast cloudkill; but the swarms of 0-level characters who circle around them are just unimportant extras. In a romantic fantasy game, though, this doesn't have to - and indeed shouldn't - be the case; there should be plenty of important characters, playing pivotal roles in whatever is currently going on, who are just ordinary people whose significance comes not from their ability to blow stuff up but from their emotional connections to those around them. The fact that the queen relies on her handmaiden for advice on her love life makes that handmaiden at least as important as the champion the queen relies upon to kill her enemies. Of course not every passing groom or maidservant can be a major character; but ensuring that a good number of the significant characters in any given situation are relatively ordinary should help to emphasise that this is a world in which emotional and social bonds are at least as important as sheer firepower.

Also important: pet dogs!

I think that applying these five principles to any RPG should go a long way towards making them amenable to the style of play that I've been discussing, here - always assuming, of course, that you've talked to your players and checked that they're onboard with the whole idea first. (If they're not onboard with it, they'll sink it faster than you can say: 'Gosh, shooting the princess in the back and then stealing her tiara wasn't very romantic, was it?') The exact same set-up - a keep on an unsettled borderland region, for example, adjacent to a cave system inhabited by feuding humanoid tribes - will play out very, very differently if all the groups involved are presented as relatively sympathetic, willing to listen to reason, and bound together by personal connections and motivations, rather than simply as murderous savages who attack anyone trespassing on their turf. But these principles could be applied to almost any game, in almost any system, which brings me onto my last point: how does any of this fit in with OSR D&D?

These days, there are plenty of newfangled games around which build systems for social interactions right into the rules. Apocalypse World and its derivatives, especially Monsterhearts, place inter-character relationships at the heart of the rules, and indeed make them much more mechanically 'solid' than the kind of things that most traditional RPG rulesets generally try to model, while Fate would be an example of a more traditional game which tries to give social interactions the same mechanical 'weight' as physical ones (and, indeed, models them in pretty much exactly the same way). Social mechanics like these are very, very divisive among RPG players; some people love them, while others feel that such matters should simply be roleplayed out rather than reduced to a matter of dice-rolling, and/or deeply resent the idea that the dice can tell them what their character now thinks or feels, even if they think that she would actually be thinking or feeling something completely different. If you want a game which will mechanically model a conversation in the same way that an older game would model a sword-fight, then OSR D&D is obviously a terrible choice. If you prefer more traditional games, though, in which talking to people is modelled by, um, talking to people, then I think it has a lot to recommend it: it's quick, it's simple, most people are already familiar with it, the fragility of its characters serves to heavily dis-incentivise combat, and - as I've written about before - it actually has a surprisingly robust social interaction system in the form of the reactions, morale, and henchmen rules.

The Knights of the Round Table, failing yet another morale check.

If you're playing in an explicitly romantic fantasy idiom, the only rules changes I'd suggest making are these:

1. Except in extreme situations, no reaction roll should lead to immediate and automatic violence. A roll of 2 might indicate such extreme hostility that violence will very likely ensue unless the PCs either leave rapidly or take immediate steps to calm the situation down, but 'You walk into the room and the guy inside it shoots you in the face' should be something that basically never happens unless one character has powerful pre-existing reasons for wanting another dead.
2. Be generous in permitting bonuses to reaction checks based on PC actions. PCs who make good-faith efforts to interact diplomatically with people should be rewarded for it!
3. Morale rolls should probably be called for more often than they are in the standard rules. Unless they're already under attack, most intelligent beings should probably require a morale roll to enter combat against any kind of credible opposition: even if they'd really like their enemies to be dead now, it takes guts (and/or reckless stupidity) to translate that desire into actually running up and attacking and maybe getting hacked to death. Similarly, once combat starts, a morale check is probably called for every time the situation takes a dramatic change for the worse. The more morale checks are used, the less likely it is that any given bunch of people will insist on grimly fighting to the last man.
4. As Yora's suggested, you might want to award XP for something other than stealing people's gold. (Exactly how such an XP system would function is beyond the scope of this post, but I'm sure you can think of lots of possibilities!)

These house rules, in addition to the general morale and reaction rules, should ensure that there is very often a chance for situations to be resolved socially rather than violently. Whether the PCs take advantage of that chance is up to them, but at least it'll be there.

So. That's the what, the why, and the how dealt with. In my next post - which should be the last one in this series - I'll try to explain why I'd describe ATWC as a romantic fantasy setting, and to give some concrete examples of what a traditional D&D adventure might look like if translated into a romantic fantasy mode...

Romantic Fantasy Revisited 2: Why would I want this in a game?

So, I my last post I explained what I meant by 'romantic fantasy', and why I don't view it as being purely defined by the presence or absence of love stories within the narrative. Now onto sub-question two: why would you want something like this in an RPG?

Even though I've already written several times about how romantic relationships might take a larger role in D&D campaigns, I don't really think that the fictional genre of romance proper is very well-suited to the strengths of tabletop RPGs as a form. For one thing, the basic romance narrative is usually a story about exactly two people, and thus ill-suited to a group game such as D&D. For another, the things which are most important to the romance genre are the things which traditional RPGs are worst at, namely exploring the slow development of people's complex feelings towards each other, feelings which may well not be expressed in actions or even in words until almost the end of the story. (I love RPGs, but they are much better suited to melodrama than to any kind of emotional nuance.) Yet another problem is that traditional romance narratives have a predetermined end point, in the form of the 'happily ever after', whereas RPG campaigns are expected to run and run. Thus, in order to get something more readily gameable out of the concept, I think one would need to foreground the more general characteristics of the genre which I discussed in my previous post: fantasy adventures which emphasise the importance of relationship-building and diplomatic solutions. There might be lots of actual romantic relationships such games as well, but they probably wouldn't be as central as they are to much of the source material.

The idea of resolving encounters through non-violent social interaction is hardly a new one. If you look at the very earliest D&D rulebooks and adventures, they presuppose a world filled with danger which can be navigated in three ways: via combat (kill the monsters), via logical problem-solving (work out a way to rob or evade or outmanoeuvre the monsters), or via diplomacy (persuade the monsters to leave you alone, and maybe even help you out or fight your enemies for you). WotC D&D has mostly been all about the combat, whereas OSR D&D is more likely to emphasise the problem-solving, as Arnold K's eloquent discussion of 'OSR-style challenges' demonstrates; but while you're more likely to find diplomatic elements built into OSR adventures than into, say, Pathfinder modules, they're usually not accorded any kind of central role. (Maze of the Blue Medusa may be an exception, as the best way through it really is just to walk very cautiously from room to room having very strange conversations with very strange people.) If your group prefers combat and/or problem-solving to diplomacy, then that's fine: those are totally legitimate preferences, and indeed almost certainly define the majority of participants in the hobby. But I've gamed with a number of players over the years who really enjoy things like befriending goblins by swapping make-up tips ('I hear mud-brown is in this season!'), flirting with princesses, developing weird love-hate frenemy relationships with local authority figures, adopting strange outcast kids as sidekicks, and generally using social interactions with NPCs as one of the main methods through which they interacted with the game world. And if that's a mode of play which your group enjoys and wants to encourage, then I think there's a lot to be gained from building it into the game at ground-level, creating a world which is built around relationships and thus amenable to relationship-based manipulation.

That's from the player's side; but I think it can be a rewarding mode of play for GMs, as well. It always makes me sad when I see an adventure where the author has gone to the trouble of writing a bunch of interesting and sympathetic antagonists, and then just put them into the actual module as so much sword-fodder. (Pathfinder APs are the worst for this, regularly giving multi-page write-ups to NPCs who will be lucky to survive three combat rounds.) Why is the last line of the description so often some minor variation on 'so now (s)he is totally evil and just wants to kill people'? Doesn't that render everything else meaningless? The PCs aren't going to care about the tragic backstory of that hyper-aggressive bandit / cultist / wizard / pirate who attacked them on sight and fought to the death; they're just going to loot the corpses, and quite right, too.

'I don't give a fuck about your sympathetic backstory!'

If you want to run a combat-based game, then the sensible choice is just to cut all this stuff, and accept that Bandit Bob is never going to be anything more than a speedbump in the party's quest for loot and XP; but if you actually quite like coming up with interesting antagonists, then a more relationship-focused, diplomacy-heavy game will let you get much more mileage out of them. If the general expectation is that very few encounters will go straight to combat, and that the non-violent resolution of conflicts is usually a real possibility, then the PCs are much more likely to actually talk to your NPCs, find out about them, explore how the situation arose, discuss where they might go from here, and so on. Maybe they still end up fighting each other; but if that's one option among many, rather than the standard default setting, then you're much more likely to get to use your NPCs as something more than just a statline, without having to resort to all that garbage where the PCs kick down the door, kill the villain on sight, and then have to learn about who they were and why they were doing what they did from a convenient journal left lying on their desk. ('Dear diary, today I raised an undead army as a way of getting back at my abusive step-father. I hope no adventurers come by and stab me to death!')

Running a game like this means giving up certain other things. In particular, it means abandoning the idea of an adventure as a carefully-based, carefully-balanced series of mechanical challenges, because the idea that the fights with the orcs and the goblins should each use up about 20% of the party's resources and thus weaken them enough for the battle with the giant to be a fair but challenging fight goes out of the window when the PCs might end up making friends with the goblins and persuading the orcs to take up gardening instead. If you're the kind of person who reads OSR blogs, though, you're probably not very interested in that style of play in the first place; and from a more sandboxy, OSR-ish perspective, I think the loss is more than made up for by the increased freedom granted by such a model. If every encounter ends in violence, then you can't put anything into a game which the PCs aren't capable of either killing or evading; but the more possible you make it for players to talk their way through encounters, the more that limitation falls away. Go ahead: put the dragon in the level 1 dungeon! Maybe the PCs trick it. Maybe they befriend it. Maybe they unite the orcs and the goblins and the hobgoblins into a grand alliance against it. One of the key tenets of romantic fantasy is that emotions and relationships are great levellers, and the fact that Kate is a hundred or a thousand times better at killing stuff than Bob doesn't actually matter very much if what Kate wants from Bob is not his death but his love, or his approval, or his understanding, or his forgiveness, or his respect. The more you allow personal motivations like these, rather than brute power and violence, to be the motors that keep your campaign world running, the less you need to worry about power disparities and challenge ratings and all those other new-school annoyances. All it requires is for the GM to trust the PCs to come up with good, socially-based solutions, and for the PCs to trust the GM to present them with situations in which such solutions have a decent chance to actually work.

It's not going to be for everyone. That's fine. But if it's something you might be interested in incorporating into your own games, then hold on for part 3, which will address the all-important question: 'How can I incorporate this stuff into a game of D&D?

Romantic Fantasy Revisited 1: What it is, and what it might be.

Almost a year ago, I wrote a short post about romantic fantasy and OSR D&D. It was really only intended as a brief explanation of what I meant by the phrase 'romantic fantasy' in the blog title, which might otherwise seem weirdly at odds with the darkness of much of the material I wrote about; but it's gone on to be one of the most-viewed posts on the blog (number 3 at time of writing), and it's the one that people have most frequently contacted me about, asking for further discussion or explanation. What do I mean by 'romantic fantasy'? Why might you want it in an RPG? Why would D&D, as opposed to some kind of fancy storygame like Monsterhearts, be an appropriate system to use for it? And what does any of this have to do with the world I've been describing in 'Against The Wicked City'?

When I started writing this post, I blithely assumed I could cover all this in a single medium-length piece. I was wrong. So this will be a sequence of posts, instead, tackling each part of the question in turn: first what the genre is, then why you might want to use it as part of a D&D game, and finally how, in practical terms,  you might go about doing that if you were interested in doing so. If you're just here for the Central Asian stuff, then, um... come back in about a week?

So. Like its on-again, off-again girlfriend, 'Gothic', the word 'Romance' has meant an awful lot of different things over the years. (It's one of the things they like about each other.) In the Middle Ages, a 'romance' was a fantastical story of chivalric adventure. In the early modern period, a 'romance' was an epic tale of love and war set against the backdrop of an idealised fantasy version of the historical past. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a 'romance' was a story of improbable and possibly supernatural adventures with an exotic (and usually historical) setting. And in the twentieth century, a 'romance' was a love story. The whole fantasy genre, especially the tradition of sub-Tolkien 'high' fantasy, is basically an outgrowth of 'romance' in the older senses of the word, but its relationship with 'romance' in the word's modern sense has been rather conflicted. Within the male-dominated fantasy tradition that D&D is primarily based upon, love stories often feature as parts of the plot, but very seldom provide the main focus of the story.

Now, in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, something of a female counter-tradition of fantasy writing began to appear, written by people like Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley (who was huge at the time, despite all the awful stuff that's come up since she died), and Jayne Ann Krentz. Their books were very popular, but because both their readers and writers were primarily female they tended to get marginalised within the fantasy genre as a whole. In their works, romantic love stories very often formed a major element of the plot, and so the genre that they helped to create - and which, more recently, has been developed in the works of people like long-term D&D gamer Elizabeth Vaughan - is now what most people probably mean when they use the phrase 'romantic fantasy'. As a genre, it fades away on various sides into paranormal romance (Annette Curtis Klause et al), time-travel romance (e.g. Diana Gabaldon's Outlander), young adult fantasy (e.g. Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle), fairy-tale rewrites (e.g. Ella Enchanted), urban fantasy (to the extent that it's possible to distinguish this from paranormal romance), and the 'mainstream' fantasy tradition of Tolkien, Eddings, Brooks, etc, etc. Its core tropes include imperilled but determined heroines, troubled heroes, animal companions (magical or otherwise), an emphasis on problem-solving through empathy and relationship-building as well as (or instead of) through violence, and a strong focus on the importance of sex and sexual attraction as a force in people's lives, for better and for worse.

Whenever my students start gushing about Frozen, I try to remind them that aggressive rewrites of fairy-tales have been part of mainstream popular culture since the mid-1990s...

There is, to my knowledge, only one RPG that bill itself as being a 'romantic fantasy' game, namely Blue Rose. (Monsterhearts is paranormal romance, which is related but distinct.) Blue Rose is specifically and explicitly modelled on the novels of Mercedes Lackey, and as such it emphasises one version of the genre: novels set in fantasy realms where people are mostly decent, the world is a pretty nice place to live, awful things certainly happen but they remain the exception rather than the rule, and so on. I would emphasise, however, that this form of romantic fantasy is by no means the only kind. As Trollsmyth points out in a post Yora linked me to, a lot of the genre - especially along its more Gothic edge, which is like this vast misty borderland infested with sexy shirtless vampires - is actually really, really dark. It differs from regular fantasy, and even 'dark' fantasy, not because it has any lack of horror or cruelty, but because it tends to have a very different view of where horror and cruelty come from, and what might be necessary to defeat them. 'Mainstream' fantasy usually mythologises the traditionally 'masculine' problem-solving methods of logic and violence: identify the baddies, formulate a plan which makes efficient use of your available resources, and then kill the fuck out of the bastards. Romantic fantasy, by contrast, tends to foreground traditionally 'feminine' problem-solving methods, based around relationship-building, empathy, diplomacy, healing, and love. Many of its antagonists are redeemable, and the ones who aren't are usually defeated as much by the heroine's ability to build alliances and make emotional connections with people as by her ability to beat people to death.

It's in this sense that I'd describe fantasy films like Labyrinth, Spirited Away, and Song of the Sea as being 'romantic', as much in the older sense of the world as the new: they depict worlds in which almost no-one is irredeemably awful, and in which the powers of evil can be overcome by ordinary people equipped only with the gifts of bravery, determination, intelligence (especially emotional intelligence), and love. I see them as similar to romantic fantasy 'proper' insofar as they share its focus on solving problems by building relationships and talking to people, and a corresponding lack of emphasis on solving problems by being super-awesome at murdering people. Their protagonists, like almost all romance heroines since the modern romance genre was invented, find themselves in worlds full of darkness, which they usually appear ludicrously ill-equipped to fight; but they beat that darkness back through acts of healing and fortitude and empathy, rather than by stabbing it in the face.

(I mean, some romance heroines also stab it in the face. And some of them manage to get their boyfriends to stop moping for long enough to stab it in the face on their behalf. But the face-stabbing is usually of secondary importance when compared to the relationship-building which precedes it.)

When I write about 'romantic fantasy', then, I don't just mean 'fantasy stories where the plot is built around two people falling in love'; as I'll discuss in my next post, I don't think stories like that are very well-suited to tabletop gaming in any case. Instead, I mean that form of fantasy which, like such stories, emphasises the importance and viability of non-violent solutions, and tends to take a relatively optimistic (or 'romantic') view of human nature, although usually not of the human condition. In this I see it as akin to many older 'romance' narratives of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, where kidnapped princesses are often able to guilt-trip their captors into behaving more appropriately, psychic governesses can bring out the good side of their horribly damaged hero-villain employers, and Gothic heroines can overcome their monstrous persecutors armed only with a straw hat and a sketchbook.

So. That's the genre. Next up: why any of this might be something that someone might want in a game of D&D!

Romance plots in RPGs

19th century Armenian riflewomen. Real love means never needing to remind your girlfriend to bring an extra revolver. 

Look, romance plots are not very complicated: they're just anti-individualist, which is why the genre comes in for so much criticism from people wedded to the idea that a lone individual, male or female, should be able to solve all life's problems single-handed. But then, D&D is also anti-individualist in its own way, especially in its earliest incarnations: a single B/X PC, stranded alone in a dungeon, is likely to be a dead man walking. What allows survival is not the abilities of the individual but the collective capabilities of the party, traditionally embodied in the classic fighter-mage-cleric-thief quartet. Collectively, they become much more than the sum of their parts.

Romance is like that. Romance is about finding the mage to complement your fighter, the cleric to complement your thief. It's about two people who are in trouble because, alone, they simply cannot deal with what the world is throwing at them; they need to find each other, because each has a sphere of mastery which complements the weaknesses of the other, meaning that together they can handle pretty much anything that they're likely to encounter. In traditional romance fiction this division of competencies is split along strongly gendered lines: the hero possesses the strength and power necessary to exert mastery of the external world, but is unable to conquer his own grief and rage and pain, whereas the heroine possesses the empathy and wisdom necessary to exert mastery of the internal world, but is unable to protect herself against the external forces which threaten to destroy or dispossess her. The heroine heals the hero; the hero protects the heroine; they both live happily ever after.

If that sounds like a rather railroady plot, in RPG terms, that's because it is: the genre is big on One True Loves and relationships that were Simply Meant To Be. One of its most cherished values is the belief that if two people are really and truly right for one another then they will find each other, no matter what gets in the way: indeed, the fact that they are willing and able to fight their way through to one another, despite the physical and social obstacles that divide them, is part of the process through which they prove that they deserve one another at all. In a traditional RPG, however, the whole point is that the players are free to have their characters do whatever they choose, and that the story could thus end up unfolding in any number of ways, rather than simply plodding forwards towards some pre-scripted conclusion. Tell the average RPG group that two people are simply meant to be together - let alone that a given NPC is their PC's destined One True Love - and they'll immediately start plotting how best to break them up.

So don't do that. Instead, if you're interested in incorporating romance plotlines into your games - and given their potential to generate drama, I don't see why you wouldn't be - then just scatter a whole bunch of NPCs through your scenarios who are what I call romance ready. That means that they need to be:

1. Single.
2. Part of some well-defined social group whose members are expected to marry within that group. (In most pre-modern settings, this includes just about everyone.)
3. Potentially attractive. (This doesn't mean that they need to be super-hot, and in fact it's traditional for them not to be; but they need to be people it's easy to see other people being overpoweringly attracted to, even if you, personally, don't find them especially attractive.)
4. Really good at some important sub-section of human life: socially adept, physically powerful, learned and intelligent, empathic and emotionally intelligent, rich and well-connected, whatever.
5. Really bad at some other, and equally important, sub-section of human life: socially clueless, physically frail, ignorant, lacking in self-control, poor and vulnerable, etc. 
6. In a situation in which being bad at the thing that they're bad at is a real problem, and consequently miserable and/or in trouble.

Follow these guidelines and you'll end up with a whole bunch of people who need rescuing, and possess the means to potentially rescue someone else. But they're also in social situations which mean that the people who they are best-equipped to save, and who are best-equipped to save them, are not the kind of people they're expected to fall in love with and marry, meaning that social pressures will be brought to bear from both sides to keep them apart. You know what happens then? DRAMA ENSUES, that's what!

Charles Lebrun Guillaume, The Love Token. Countdown to DRAMA: 10... 9... 8...

The crucial difference between this and actually plotting out romance fiction is that you don't just have one Romeo set up for each Juliet: instead you have a whole bunch of people, who can potentially help and be helped by each other in many different ways. So if Guy A and Girl B never actually end up crossing paths, that's fine; if you've got enough of these characters scattered around, then just being part of the general chaos that makes up most RPG campaigns should, sooner or later, bring them into contact with someone else who could also work. So maybe Sophisticated Urban Girl never did meet Folksy Rural Guy; she could still find happiness with War-Weary Veteran Guy, or Intellectual Bookworm Girl, or Charming Low-Life Scoundrel Guy, or any number of others. Your job as GM is just to ensure that, when they do meet, the PCs see the initial sparks of mutual attraction and fascination fly between them... and then stop. 

That's right. You stop. You stop because this isn't actually the story of Sophisticated Urban Girl and War-Weary Veteran Guy: it's the story of your PCs. If your PCs don't take an interest in these NPCs and their relationship, then they just become minor characters. You can assume their romance narrative is unfolding in the background somewhere, and from time to time it might surface in the campaign - 'We need that veteran guy to help us with this! Don't tell me he's off chasing that socialite again!' - but mostly it's way, way off-stage. But if the PCs do take an interest - if they decide that these two NPCs are perfect for each other, or that they're all wrong for each other, or that one of them would rather romance this NPC instead - then you dive in. You let them get involved in the relationship, and then you start to throw other potentially suitable characters into the mix - and again, while in a romance novel it would be decided ahead of time which one is the Real Hero(ine) and which one is just the Other (Wo)Man, in an RPG everything is open. When Sophisticated Urban Girl starts falling for Charming Low-Life Scoundrel Guy while she and Veteran Guy are on the outs, it's up to the PCs to decide which relationship they want to try to encourage. Let them play matchmaker. Let them fight to maintain the affections of their preferred love interests against the advances of other suitors. Let them argue with each other about who should end up with who. ('He's not right for her! He doesn't deserve her! He smells!') And, above all, let them get dragged into the chaos that these developing relationships inevitably create in their wake, as people from two different worlds fall in love and fight to be together despite the increasingly frantic efforts of those around them to keep them apart. Finally, when the couple get together and solve one another's problems and save one another's souls and live happily ever after, let the PCs reap the benefits: because now, rather than just having two individual friends, they are friends with a couple who are capable of much more than either of them ever would be alone, and who owe it all to the PCs. After all, if the romance genre believes in anything, it's that real love is always worth supporting. 

To get you started, here's a handy list of romance-ready NPCs, suitable for almost any setting or genre. Some parings are more obvious than others, but almost any of them should work if the PCs are around to give them a bit of a push!

1. Conformist: Reliable, hard-working, practical, socially respectable, fundamentally decent... a bit boring. Not good at taking risks or thinking outside the box. Harbours secret dreams and desires which they've never dared to act upon. Slowly dying inside.
2. Embittered Ex-Lover: Passionate and devoted... perhaps too much so. A previous relationship went horribly wrong: their heart got broken, and they've sworn never to love again. Currently utterly miserable, but could be an outstanding partner for anyone capable of dragging them out of the past and persuading them to give love a second chance. 
3. Empathic Healer: Sympathetic, intuitive, a great listener, the kind of friend everyone wants to have. Also sensitive and easily wounded. Currently surrounded by extremely hurtful and insensitive people - neglectful parents? abusive co-workers? - and consequently deeply unhappy.
4. Folksy Rural Type: Strong-willed, practical, athletic. Lacks education or worldly sophistication, and is easily fooled or manipulated by those who possess either or both. Coming to the big city has left them dangerously out of their depth.
5. Impoverished Worthy: Good, kind, brave, intelligent, loyal to their friends... but low-status and penniless. Being a genuinely good human being turns out not to count for very much when your poverty means that everyone assumes they can treat you like shit. 
6. Ivory Tower Intellectual: Hugely intelligent and well-read. Very limited social and practical skills: approaches everything as though it was a theoretical exercise. Finding it very difficult to cope with life outside the ivory tower. 
7. Jaded Aristocrat: Charismatic, witty, and fashionably sinful. They have the wealth to indulge in all manner of pleasures, but the appeal of empty self-indulgence has long since palled: they continue to act the part of the amoral hedonist, but secretly they're deeply depressed and spend an awful lot of time thinking about suicide.
8. Low-Life Scoundrel: Charming, inventive, quick-witted, streetwise. Very bad at forging relationships not based on manipulation or deceit. Having too many enemies and no real friends has placed them in increasing danger.
9. Manic Pixie: Bubbling over with life and fun and energy, but so quirky that they never really fit in and have real trouble conforming to expectations. Currently stuck in a situation where they are expected to conform to very strict expectations indeed: an army, perhaps, or an elite academy. Everyone there hates them and they are deeply miserable. 
10. Righteous Rebel: Enormously determined, with a clear sense of right and wrong and a hatred of all forms of injustice. Doesn't really understand the meaning of compromise or the need to choose your battles, and is rapidly heading for burnout or martyrdom as a result.
11. Rootless Wanderer: Has been everywhere and done everything, but lacks any real connections: has no home, no family, no close friends. Increasingly feeling that their life has no meaning or purpose. Likely to end up throwing their life away on a whim unless they can find something (or someone) to live for.
12. Sensitive Artist: Passionate, emotional, creative. Brilliantly eloquent. Terrible at managing the everyday business of life, and utterly miserable if unable to practise their art. Currently stuck with people who are forcing them to become a lawyer or something. 
13. Sophisticated Urbanite: Clever, witty, well-educated, socially capable. Lacks any real understanding of the practical realities of life. Their social lifeline (to money, family, whatever) has just been cut off, and they're heading for a hard landing in a situation which they won't be able to talk their way out of.
14. Voice of Conscience: Has a strong moral sense, and the courage to do what's right regardless of how difficult it might be. Currently stuck in a situation of total disempowerment which makes them complicit in all kinds of petty acts of cruelty and exploitation. Hates it.
15. War-Weary Veteran: Highly skilled and physically capable. Depressed and miserable because of the horrors (s)he has seen. Doing a very bad job of fitting into civilian life.
16. Wild One: Athletic, alert, tough, and cunning due to a lifetime spent in the wilderness. Finds civilised life scary and confusing. Not coping well with life outside the wilds.

PC/NPC Romances: From Liability to Asset!

As I've mentioned before, one reason why a lot of D&D players are reluctant to get their characters involved in any kind of romantic relationship is that they've had bad experiences in the past: of GMs killing off the loved ones of PCs as a way of generating some cheap drama, or using them to manipulate reluctant characters into following the plot. As a teenager, I was guilty of this myself: character has a family? Have them kidnapped by the villain: they they have to go after him! Character has a love interest? Have them killed by the baddies to show they're serious! Unsurprisingly, after a few experiences of this kind most players start insisting that all their PCs are orphans with no living relatives, who are either totally asexual or are interested in only the most transitory of casual relationships. After all, if you have no loved ones then they can't be used against you.

I have no need for friendship! Friendship causes pain!
I touch no-one and no-one touches meeeeeee!
I am a rock! I am an iiiiiiisland!

In ATWC, I want to do the opposite: to ensure that, in all but exceptional circumstances, having someone out there who you really love and care about, and who really loves and cares about you, is a major asset, rather than a liability. Furthermore, in keeping with the overall themes of the game (and the romantic fantasy genre), I'd like to concentrate on all the ways in which this can be true beyond the rather tiresome 'they're just as good at fighting as you are!' option. PCs should follow their hearts, rather than worrying whether the person they're romancing has enough hit points to provide a meaningful advantage on the battlefield!

Fortunately, one of the things that romance fiction is very good at is identifying and celebrating those traditionally feminine 'soft skills' which are chronically undervalued by most other media, but which - as the romances themselves often point out - are, in reality, absolutely essential to all kinds of grand undertaking. Critics who attack romances for showing the heroine doing the cooking while the hero plans his Manly Heroics are often missing the point: these stories are very often celebrations of women's work, pointing out that unless someone does the cooking (and writes the correspondence, and does the social networking, and keeps on good terms with the family, and provides emotional support and encouragement, and all the other forms of unglamorous but essential labour which women have performed throughout history), then the Manly Heroics are never going to get off the ground. Now, in ATWC, the roles are just as likely to be gender-swapped; but the essential point that someone can be of substantial assistance to the kind of adventurous endeavours which D&D games are usually about even if they, personally, aren't much good at swinging a sword is a highly applicable one. So, with no further ado: six ways in which your romance with an NPC noncombatant can turn out to be an asset after all...

1: The NPC connects you to a family and a community

Marrying into a community is an extremely effective way of gaining very strong links to it, effectively turning a whole bunch of its members into family. A PC who marries into one of the families of the Cobweb, for example, has just gained a lasting foothold in the heart of the Wicked City; a PC who becomes engaged to one of the People of the Rubble gains a safe haven from the King's Men and the secret police, and so on. No community will ever treat outsiders in the same way that they treat their own; but a sufficiently serious romantic involvement with a member of that community can go a very long way towards bridging the gap. Furthermore, family networks are extremely important to most people in pre-modern settings, and it's a real advantage to be able to call upon two rather than one: you might not get on with all of your in-laws, but when it comes right down to it they're probably going to stand with you rather than against you. After all, what happens to you reflects on them, now, whether they like it or not...

2: The NPC has, or has access to, specialised knowledge and resources

Have you and your sexy snake-girl morphine dealer fallen very much in love? Well, not only might you be able to score opiates at discount prices, you now have someone you really trust who can give specialist advice on all medical, narcotic, and alchemical matters. Are you and your cyborg boyfriend planning on tying the knot? Say goodbye to having to repair your own clockwork gear! Even if your love interest doesn't possess specialist knowledge or resources themselves, they might very well be able to connect you to someone else who does: someone who might previously have wanted nothing to do with you, but who may look at you very differently now that you and their brother / niece / old university buddy / whatever are practically engaged...

3: The NPC can look out for your interests while you're off adventuring

Let's say you've shacked up with someone 'ordinary', like a farmer or shopkeeper: he's a nice guy, you get on well with his family, but he's not going to be slaying monsters any time soon. Does that mean that he (and they) aren't useful to you? Not at all! While you're off questing in the wilderness, they can look after your business interests, keep their eyes and ears open for information, put the word out that you're looking for someone or something important, stand up for you and your reputation while you're not around to do it yourself, and generally do the kind of social legwork that you only really appreciate when you discover just how difficult life can be without it. When you finally get back, you can look forward to finding a hot meal, a hero's welcome, and a wealth of support and information waiting for you, rather than just having to slope off to a hired room and hope that the guys you paid to look after your stuff didn't decide to run off with it while you were away.

4: The NPC cares whether you live or die

Captured by pig-men? As you languish in your filthy cell, you can at least be sure that there's someone out there who will be doing everything within their power to find out what's become of you, and to bring you safely home again. Even if they're in no position to be riding off to rescue you themselves, they can and will throw all the resources they have at gathering information, organising rescue missions, guilt-tripping your old friends and colleagues into looking for you, and generally ensuring that you're not simply permitted to drop quietly off the face of the earth. If someone with no connections vanishes, then virtually no-one is going to notice; but you have someone who will not shut up about you, and whom you can rely upon to continually bring your case to the attention of anyone who might be able to help until you're either saved or dead. And if you do die, they'll just shift to trying to get someone to avenge you. Isn't that a comforting thought to take with you into the dungeons?

5: The NPC probably knows you better than you know yourself

Genuine emotional intimacy dissolves people's boundaries and barriers like nobody's business, and after just a comparatively short time spent living with your new love interest, you'll probably realise that they've acquired a shocking level of insight into how your mind really works. That means they know when you need supporting and encouraging, and when you need dissuading; they can sense when you're really onto something, and spot when you're about to make a huge mistake. In game terms, assume that any major project your character undertakes - starting a business venture, planning an expedition, researching some obscure fact - is going to be substantially more efficient and effective for as long as their significant other is around to help. Again, this doesn't require the SO to have any relevant specialist skills: they're helpful not because of how well they know the thing you're working on, but because of how well they know you. They might not know the first thing about building a giant robot battlesuit, but they will know exactly when they should bring you an extra pot of coffee, and when they should tell you to put down the gears and get some damn sleep already instead: and as a result, the project will go much more smoothly than it ever could have done without them.

They also remember exactly where you're always leaving those things you keep thinking that you've lost. That alone probably improves your efficiency by at least 10%.

6: The NPC gives you something to live for

Whether it's the kind of grand romance where you would do absolutely anything for one another, or a slightly more down-to-earth affair where you just really enjoy being together and would really rather not die until you've had the chance to do a whole lot more of it, your relationship gives you something - someone - to care about and cling to in an often confusing and hostile world. This probably makes you reluctant to throw your life away in the name of some grand abstraction - there's a reason why unattached young men are always the ones who get used as cannon fodder - but it also gives you a hell of a motivation to make it back alive. GMs might want to consider granting bonuses to applicable FORT or WILL saves, or even allowing characters to survive unconscious for a couple more HP than would normally be the case, to represent the tenacity with which characters will cling to life when they have someone that they really can't bear to leave behind.

* * *

One final note: if romance is going to be an important theme in a game, I think it's really important to be up-front about it. Straight-up tell the players that you're not just going to treat their love interests as exploitable weaknesses, and that, on the contrary, they're going to be important resources in the ongoing campaign. (This would also be a good time to talk to players who aren't interested in getting their PCs involved in in-character romances, and about what might fill a similar niche in the lives of their characters.) Let them know that if they randomly form a romantic relationship with an NPC along the road somewhere, that's actually going to matter, and that it will matter even if the NPC in question is just an 'ordinary' person with no super-powers or special skills. Then it's just a matter of scattering your scenarios with plenty of quirky, characterful NPCs of both genders, and letting events take their course...

On romantic fantasy and OSR D&D

When most people think of the older editions of D&D, 'romantic fantasy' is not the first genre that comes to mind. OSR D&D tends to get used to run games which are either about grim, violent, sword-and-sorcery fantasy-horror, or borderline-absurdist kitchen-sink science-fantasy weirdness. Sometimes both at once.

But I think it's a good fit. And I'm going to explain a bit about why.

* * *

Here is the default plotline of most heroic fantasy narratives:

'One day, the Forces of Darkness found a big stick. They used the stick to beat everyone up! It was terrible! So the Forces of Light had to go on an Epic Quest to find an even bigger stick, which they used to beat the Forces of Darkness back down again. Then everyone lived happily ever after, except the Forces of Darkness, who had all been beaten to death. The end.'

Might makes right. The good guys don't win because they're good; they win because they are able to attain a greater capacity for acts of spectacular mass violence than their enemies. The world remains shackled to a treadmill of violence. Viewed with even the slightest cynicism, the whole narrative starts to look deeply suspect, the kind of story that victorious empires always tell about their origins: 'Of course we're the good guys! We won, didn't we?' This is probably one reason why world-weary amorality is so common in OSR fantasy games; strip away the genre conventions and it's easy to see the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness as little more than two interchangeable warbands, flailing away at one another with whatever physical and rhetorical weaponry happens to come to hand.

Romantic fantasy narratives, by contrast, are usually built around defeating evil by means other than overwhelming lethal force. Consider a story like Ghibli's Spirited Away. Chihiro is thrown into a supernatural world dominated by cruelty and injustice, but she doesn't defeat it by hoarding magical power-ups until she's strong enough to punch Yubaba in the face. She wins because she's brave and clever and empathic enough to make friends and build alliances, and at the end of the day her courage and emotional intelligence prove to be more than a match for Yubaba's evil sorcery. By the end, when she leaves Yubaba's realm, everyone is cheering for her - even the frog- and slug-people who have been making her life a misery since she arrived. She has changed her world for the better. She didn't even have to beat anyone to death along the way.

Mission accomplished!

Now, you don't have to like those kinds of stories. You might even think they're 'unrealistic'. (It's certainly true that, in reality, love and courage don't always win out - but then, in the real world, overwhelming violence doesn't usually do much real good either, does it?) But if that is a style of story-telling you're interested in... why would you use OSR D&D to run it?

1: The reaction System

If you're using the old B/X reaction roll system, there is only a one-in-thirty-six chance that any given monster encounter goes straight to violence. Anything else gives you some room to manoeuvre: to talk, bluff, make a bargain, offer a bribe, whatever. If you want a fight you can have one, but you almost never actually have to fight. (And hell, even if they do attack, you can always just run away.) This is very different to later editions of D&D, which assumed that monsters would always attack on sight and usually fight to the death.

If you use the reaction system, then instead of the dungeon becoming a series of tactical combat challenges, it becomes a network of social challenges. What does each group want? What does it need? What can you offer them, and what can they offer you? With a bit of quick thinking and a lot of heart, you can talk your way through a dungeon much more effectively than you could ever fight your way through it.

2: The morale System

Even if a fight breaks out, the B/X morale system ensures that only crazy fanatics and mindless undead are actually likely to fight to the last man: everyone else is much more likely to try to run or surrender once you start killing their friends right in front of them. As a result, violence tends to be limited: bullets fly, bodies drop, the balance of power changes, and then you go back to negotiation again. You can kill 'em all if that's what you really want to do; but if you don't want that, if you'd actually quite like to find a better solution, then the morale rules give you a way to end fights while there's still someone left to make peace with. 

3: The combat system

As the saying goes, if you've got a big enough hammer, then everything starts looking like a nail. If you've spent hours building your character from half-a-dozen sourcebooks, and you have a giant heap of hit points and a list of combat abilities as long as your arm (as can easily happen in certain other editions of D&D), then why wouldn't you want to solve problems with violence? By allowing players to create characters who fight like action heroes, later editions also encourage them to think like action heroes - and action heroes solve all their problems by killing people. Usually lots of people.

OSR D&D isn't like that. At first level you probably have about four hit points. Even at third or fourth level you can still be killed outright by a couple of lucky hits. Getting into anything resembling a fair fight is a terrible idea.

For the 'amoral sword and sorcery' style of OSR game, that acts as an incentive to seek out unfair fights: poison them, ambush them, stab them in the back. That's great. But it can also work to incentivise less violent solutions. Like Chihiro, PCs don't have the option of simply brute-forcing their way through situations. They need to find other, better ways to succeed.

4: The retainers system

I love hirelings and retainers. Again, if you're playing grubby amoral OSR murderhobos - and you can! There's nothing wrong with that! I've done it myself! - then your hirelings and retainers are luckless saps who you bring along to do your dying for you. But they can do other things, as well.

Later editions of D&D, with their higher-powered protagonists, encourage PCs to rely on no-one but each other. The model is the superteam or the spec ops squad: a small group of badasses who are so much tougher than ordinary people that anyone else would just get in the way. OSR D&D, with its squishier PCs, isn't like that. Every other person you have with you - even ordinary, 0-level people - can make a real difference to your survivability. You can't just wander off on your own: you'll die out there. You need other people. 

OSR PCs build communities. Each PC has their own hirelings and retainers; a party of six PCs could easily have another twelve or fifteen people tagging along with them. This ensures that each PC is enmeshed in a whole network of relationships with other people, people who they rely upon - and who rely upon them - in life-or-death situations. Rather than just an atomised individual, caring about nothing except his +3 sword and his bag of loot, the PC has to become a leader, a friend, a companion-in-arms - because if they don't, hireling morale will plummet, and they'll desert you when you need them most. 

* * *

The cumulative impact of these four systems is to create situations which heavily favour relationship-building and non-violent forms of conflict resolution. Of course there will still be fights; of course the PCs will occasionally just say 'fuck it' and shoot a bunch of guys in the head. Of course there are going to be some people who just need killing. But mass violence isn't the default solution, and it usually isn't the best solution. The best solution is talking: treating your potential enemies like people, negotiating, finding common ground. With a bit of work, you can turn them into allies instead of enemies, leaving the encounter stronger than you were when you came in.

And if that doesn't work, and they really won't listen, then you can always circle back later, wait until they're sleeping, and murder them in their beds. Romantics can be pragmatists, too!

On romance in fantasy RPGs

Young Mongolian couple in traditional dress. Photo by Khoshutsuld.

Romance fiction, as a genre, comes in for a lot of criticism, especially from people who haven't actually read any of it. I feel that most of that criticism is inaccurate, based on vague assumptions about what 'everyone knows' the genre is like rather than any serious engagement with it or with the women who read and write it, but I'm not going to get into all that just now. What I want to call attention to is this: for almost eight hundred years, English used the same word for 'a fantastical tale of true love' and for 'a fantastical tale of magic and adventure', and that word was romance. The idea that stories about boys punching people belong over here, and that stories about girls kissing people belong over there, and that the two are polar opposites in every way, is a very recent historical development.

I understand that lots of groups, and lots of players, are uncomfortable role-playing out romantic scenes in play. That's OK! I completely understand how awkward it can be when, in the fiction, your swashbuckling hero(ine) is trying to put the moves on some comely lad or lass, but at the table this consists of a (male) player offering a series of lame chat-up lines to his (male) GM, desperately hoping that he'll relent and just let him make a Charisma roll already. But I think it's a shame to leave it out altogether, because it's a fantastic source of drama, and a rather important element of history, fiction, and, well, human life. People are drawn to one another, especially in the kind of high-stress situations which comprise most tabletop adventures. You don't need to roleplay out the flirtatious banter, let alone the sex scenes. But failing to include love, sex, and romance at all, with the possible exception of throw-away 'I spend my money on ale and whores!' remarks, seems rather a pity.

My assumption with ATWC is very much that, unless a player makes clear that they really want nothing to do with the whole subject, the PCs will rapidly become involved in various kinds of romantic entanglements. Why wouldn't they? PCs are the kinds of people who go to amazing places, do amazing things, perform feats of bravery and daring-do, and come home laden with cool stories and awesome loot. That's pretty damn sexy, no matter which way you happen to swing.

In running such relationships, I always try hard to make them assets. Another reasons why many gamers are so reluctant to involve their characters in romantic relationships is because they see them as liabilities: just so many things for the GM to exploit. Girlfriend? Kidnapped. Husband? Framed for murder. Kids? Murdered to generate extra pathos! No wonder so many PCs stick to casual liaisons with nameless and interchangeable prostitutes. I try not to do that. I also try to emphasise how useful it is to have someone out there who really cares about you: someone you can trust with your secrets, who can hide you when you need hiding, who can connect you to a larger community, who can potentially access information and resources that you could never get yourself. Your partner may not be your equal on the battlefield (although, then again, maybe they are), but they can still help you in all sorts of ways.

This all ties in with larger themes about how the Wicked City itself is an engine that runs on violence, and is thus unlikely to be defeated through violence; a capacity for empathy, the key value of most romance fiction, is going to be much more important in the long run, which is one reason why I'd describe ATWC as 'romantic fantasy' despite the proliferation of awful things in it. But that's a subject for another post.