Shit - The Sump - The Roots of the Earth - The End of Intelligibility

I had a good little exchange with the lovely Morgan last night about shit and sewage in dungeons. The basic premise was that, if you have monsters (or humans) in your dungeon, and if those monsters eat, then they need to shit somewhere. One ought to have a toilet, a latrine pit, a hole in the earth, whatever, for them to do this.

Not such a mind blowing idea, but it got me thinking - I always do this, and those rooms are usually the locus of something in my dungeons. I'm not especially interested in the long-running debates around naturalism and realism in dungeons - I like spaces to be 'convincing', as opposed to 'realistic'. Something can be made convincing ('consistent' is another word that feels relevant here) without reference to realism, and there are any number of ways you can do this. 

In my dungeons, an inhabited space will generally have:

• Somewhere the inhabitants sleep.
• Somewhere they eat.
• Somewhere they shit.
• A place where the food comes from.

Once these are in place, the rest is gravy. But I'm personally interested in what the something mentioned above is, the room or the pit or the trench where the waste goes and the stench comes from. You can always smell it before you see it. This is a place of no honour, etc. etc. 

I have some sense that personal dignity is an important component in the image of the hero and the sage; they have the dignity of their majesty, indifference, resources, and especially their insulation. They can say no, they can take time to think and know their minds, they don't spend their days doing drudge work. Even the most horrible adventuring is more fun than tilling the fields or carrying shit - it is certainly more interesting and glamorous day-to-day. Something in here too about the libertarian fantasy of the adventurer band whose material competence and clear, unclouded, pragmatic vision and thinking allows them to make good without any mutual dependence on the societies they exist inside of. 

The sump is the antithesis to this insulated dignity. It is where everything that cannot be allowed into the sacral/civic space collects and rots and ferments. It is, I think, a good thing to make your heroes wade through filth in the pursuit of their aims. To have to touch the stuff, to be covered in it, to feel its reek and be in danger of poisoning and infection - a reversal of the heroic posture. The realisation that you are not immune - that your physical/mental/spiritual integrity is contingent and cannot be relied on - that you are, in some deep way, made of the same, abject fundamental stuff - a potent set of horror images. 

I remember in a crit during my MFA (years ago now) discussing the difference between a vampire and a cannibal. The vampire operates on a principle of symbolic draining and transference - it takes your essence and makes you dead but alive, unlike yourself. The cannibal eats you and shits you out. There is nothing symbolic about this - it shows you that beneath your various insulating layers of sentience, symbol, dignity, and remove, you are meat, which is eventually shit, and nothing more. In dnd terms, I think this is one of the reasons why ghouls and gnolls remain such good horror mainstays (related: vexingly, I've yet to get my head around what a Barony gnoll looks like - maybe they are just the dogs of war?).

The body as meat is also the body as breeding site for diseases and parasites. It is porous and cannot protect itself. No end to the vectors of degradation. 

Why is this fun? I think it's fun because it's more true to how it is to live in the world, where most people are exposed to arbitrary illness with few options to treat it, have their bodies fail, are confronted with their own contingent survival. There's all sorts of reason why roleplaying can be an escape from these things, but my sense is that art that tries to say something about human existence (a tall order at the very best of times with the very best of minds, obviously), probably should have something to say about decay, impermanence, sickness, death, etc. These things also throw courage, strength, friendship, devotion, kindness etc. into their proper relief - as something that can save you from the horror. You can dispense with the 5e thing of LARPing the Power of Friendship, and re-cohere onto what is actually valuable (and beautiful, sublime) in having people in your life who you can trust, implicitly, with your life.  

The sump, then, is a horror stage on which humanity can be revealed as frail, vulnerable, precious, powerful. Deep underground, deep in the muck and the stench and the gore, where no one else will hear you die, and where the things that swarm around you understand this and can taste the terror of it. 

You could be reduced to matter, to shit, by the grinding material gears around you (they have to be material, they have to be impartial, they have to be without mercy, you cannot fudge dice rolls); or you could triumph - find strength, assert your dignity in the worst place, emerge changed. 

There is a limit state, after which this assertion is no longer impossible. Where matter churns together so violently that no one can save you. You cross the threshold and you are damned. Again, this must be a material process and not a spiritual one - it is impartial and utterly destroying. These limits (they exist in all directions, interior and exterior) are the frame inside which an articulation of human dignity can find meaning. 

The killing tools of your profession, the strength of your arm, the steel in your mind, your mettle, your courage; all of them tested by these means or none!