In a shocking turn of events, this may be my first article that is both serious and not an attack on some trend. On three separate occasions, such an event has been predicted to signal the apocalypse by various messianic cults, so be warned. If you have any fear of Dh’kalkth’aah in your heart, prepare to have it ripped from your chest. Your heart, that is.
It’s been a long time since I’ve bean an active reader. I like to tell myself that reading articles and discussions online still counts as reading, but honestly, it counts as reading about as much as eating eating shreds of plastic and horsehair counts as brushing your teeth. (I can confirm that it does not.) For a few weeks I was just reading reddit’s writingprompts sub, where users submit inspirations for short narrative works and visitors work with that inspiration to create something unique. It generates a lot of stories, many of them very new and original, especially those that play with the original prompt in ways the prompter never expected. Unfortunately, they’re very short, almost always under 500 words. The idea is to jump into a story world for just a few minutes, be immersed, and then end with a bang or whimper. Most of the authors choose the “whimper” option, because it leaves them with an easier cliffhanger and the audience with a hunger for more. At some point, I was getting tired of every story ending like the jacket of a mystery novel, so I stopped reading the site actively. It was too formulaic.
What has grabbed my interest is the revival of “magic realism”, a genre of literature that Wikipedia tells me bloomed during the first half of the 20th century. I’m late to the party, too, which is a good thing when for someone who wants to consume as much as possible on a backlog without waiting for new material. The basic idea is to tell a story where life is almost the same as it is now, but things are weird in general, or an event sets things in motion to dramatically alter the way the universe works, but nobody bats an eye.
First, I like this because it’s plausible escapism. When we start writing a story about Earth Prime, and the audience slowly realizes it’s actually Earth 2, that transition opens up a lot of doors. By the time the differences become apparent, and the otherwise real characters respond to those differences in an unreal way, the reader is already part of this new universe. It’s so familiar and approachable, but still new. When Johnny Everyman grows two extra arms and becomes a ping-pong god, it’s more fun to see how that plays out in a world almost identical to ours, rather than one completely in the fantasy realm.
Second, I like it because it’s highly extensible. Magical realism is well-liked in roleplaying games, because it makes use of the largest and most thoroughly mapped gameworld we know – Earth. Vampire: The Masquerade is an RPG where a fantastical story takes place among fantastical beings in a world that’s hardly different from our own. It’s easy to get a sense for, because despite the fantasy politics, gang wars, magical curses and conspiratorial new world orders, the plot lives in Earth’s cities, meant to be an invisible battle happening right on top of our mundane, human lives. The players are left to grow within that invisible layer, and expand it when it stretches too thin. There’s consistency to the supernatural, but it never needs to be explained.
Really, it’s RPGs that I want to talk about, now. I miss the art of make-believe. We all grew up playing games that way – inventing characters in a world that had agreed-upon but magical limits. Even if it was just “house” with 4 parents and a talking dog, there was this sense of shared world-building. I feel like there isn’t a lot of that left once we’re done being gradeschoolers, and it’s something I’m direly missing. I’ve had good experiences with one-off RPG groups, but never anything long term and persistent. I think I should search for a community willing to put something together, but I’m not sure I’m up for the time commitment.
For now, I’m looking at ways to experience the excitement of the classic RPG in time-constrained setting. One attractive option is collaborative “shared universe” fiction, where a group of like-minded individuals come together to construct an extended cast all living in the same world. This is especially interesting when the authors see the same situation from distinctly different angles. To some, a universe may foster only tragedy, while others see it as an adventure. The format lends itself to some good discussion among collaborators. As far as I can tell, though, the process is a bit of a lost art, relegated to IRC recluses and proud Geocities website owners. I’m not sure where to find such a community and not be assailed by 12-year-old fanfiction authors.
For now, it can’t hurt to write more.
Profanity Filter Testing Domain 