Concrete and Abstract Dungeoneering

Aleksandra Walizsewksa, Untitled

A quick followup to the last post about Altman's 3 Women, and about dream films (it was apparently the 250th post on this blog? Wild), because I have been thinking a lot recently about running games that are more or less dream-inflected, but which are also highly interested in concrete physical spaces, tools, weapons and armour, physical combat; and especially with logistics, with food, shelter, and light; with what cannot be abstracted, wished, dreamed, imagined, written, or painted away.

This comes by way of Their Submission only Shames the Victor, a small megadungeon campaign I am currently running for some glogheads, currently on hiatus because my job is a bastard at the moment.

The game is (sort of) about dreams and dreaming; it is about traversing them, it leans very hard on the formal conceits I lay out in that last post; it is interested in doubling, in the emergence of things from obscure depths, in tone and image functioning as a sort of carrier medium for scenes, characters, events, environments that do not follow the logic of cause and effect. 

At the same time, as mentioned above, the minute to minute gameplay of the game is as concrete as I can make it, to a potentially overbearing and anti-fun degree. And this concreteness is important to me, for reasons that I find it difficult to articulate. 

Writing about 3 Women I realised that in many ways what I like about dreams is that they are situated inside the concrete - inside the space that is basically impermeable, that resists the dream logic. It doesn't matter how subtly you manage the transitions, the doubling and monstrosity, the medium that allows for slippages and hallucination; there is a concrete substrate (food, physical maiming, illness, exposure, unheroic death) beneath your careful management of the dream.

This is more or less the condition of the artist, I think. I talked a bit in the other post about how much of a director's time and energy goes into finding a lump of money such that they can work. Writing and painting are not quite that (they are remarkably democratic forms as far as it goes, writing especially), but they truly do not change anything that isn't also already in the dream world (leaving aside for the moment the fact that people can and do make a living from them  - I'm not really talking about that). You can change yourself, or your dream of yourself (Spacek emerges out from the depths of Spacek) by writing, but the concrete conditions resist you in exactly the same way before and after the change. 

 

For me a lot of the nobility in trying to express things truly is in this play between the change and its vanishing on contact with the concrete. Don Quixote and other great dream books have great fun with this. It vanishes... No! It's back! The dream is triumphant after all! No, it's vanished...

You can write beautifully about someone you are in love with, and it changes nothing (or maybe everything if it also changes you, if you have let yourself express something authentic). 

So it goes also in the glog game, although I am not sure that it is really working as intended. The dream tableaux cut through by the intrusion of the concrete. The mercenary is a dreamy sort of character, and a nightmarish one, a bit like the entrepreneur - they bring the dream and the nightmare of their success with them. The dream needs to be managed, almost pharmacologically, because too much dreaming is lethal (you find yourself suddenly pulled back into the concrete, pushing your intestines back in, limp with shock - there is a whole microgenre of images of the over-dreaming mercenary who experiences the sudden intrusion of the concrete as a final trauma before they are torn apart), but so is not enough. 

Running the game I am nearly constantly aware that dream tableaux are actively resistant to interpretation, and that an enormous amount of player activity in games like this is in attempting to interpret with limited information. Unfortunately this makes me feel like a bad DM - I'm sure there is an elegant way to do it, but I worry that the mismatch in concrete/abstract means that I've given the players too little AND too much to grapple with, at the same time.

I have often wondered if a less crunchy system would run better given the scenario, but I am always pulled up short by the idea that there is no space for the re-intrusion of the concrete. 

I am hoping to finish running Brythwin Island over the Christmas period, and will hopefully have more fully formed ideas about all of this in the aftermath. 

Gustave Moreau, The Muses Leaving their Father Apollo to go out and Light the World