From Implication to Prescription - Building a Setting
I've had the task of capital W Worldbuilding on my backburner since the beginning of this project. I'm a fan of anti-canon; I really struggle with the idea of running a game in someone else's setting and strongly prefer either a collaborative setting or developing my own with the guardrails of a system's implied setting. When I ran 5e D&D I wrote a custom setting that engaged as little as necessary with D&D canon to function with the magic in the rules. When I ran Old Gods, I had never listened to the podcast and just worked from my experiences going to college in Appalachian Virginia. His Majesty the Worm has anti-canon built into its DNA, so I build the surface setting with my players in order to develop character buy-in. So why should I write a setting for a game if I expect others to do the same as I do? Hell, the playtest adventure is just written around a part of West Virginia that I like.
Well, there's enough implied setting built into the playtest rules that I felt compelled to do some deeper thinking about the cosmology at work. We know that we are writing around a contemporary setting which helps with first-order legibility. If anything, this first-order legibility was immediately felt by players in my first test; our Fixer asked, "Hey, shouldn't there be consequences for me drawing my compound bow on these vandals?" Since then, I have revamped rules for intimidation and de-escalation in combat :)
What I mean by the implied setting details, though, is that we know that our player characters have all bet and lost their souls to some supernatural entity at work in contemporary Appalachia. This means that supernatural forces observably exist and can make deals with mortals. Why not interrogate this further? Are these the only supernatural entities? Probably not. Who else is at work?
As I mentioned in my Appendix N post, I recently read Alan Moore's novel The Great When: A Long London Novel. Part of the deliciously occultish lore of the novel is the idea that London is not just a city on the map, it is a lesser-dimensional projection of a magical and baroque pocket dimension. The relationship between the two is summed up as
If this London is what they call the Smoke, then that place is the Fire
I find this premise really evocative. Within the pocket dimension, there are "Arcana" which represent the platonic ideal of things that make London itself and dream the dream that we mere mortals interact with as London. This has been simmering in the back of my head all summer - is it the right fit for Hellbenders? I didn't have an answer.
A Brief Aside in Praise of Rowan, Rook, and Decard
I didn't have an answer until I finally sat down and devoured RRD's Royal Blood, a tarot-based heist game. Grant Howitt paints a wonderful picture of a City under the management of a court of reality-warping Arcana. Players are Royals, mere Minor Arcana playing cards looking to unseat one of the Major Arcana using their wit, their magic, and some good old-fashioned gambling. As you can imagine, my noggin was tickled.
One of the great techs that Royal Blood uses is the Major Arcana as a subtle randomization table - each Icon has a dedicated page where the corresponding tarot card is associated with a classical interpretation, a few Persons, a few Locations, and a few Objects for use in building a unique Heist spread. There's also some jaw-dropping art for each card, but that's neither here nor there.
I had these two books, The Great When and Royal Blood, mixing around in my head this past weekend at a wilderness medicine conference and had my (obvious in retrospect) Eureka moment. I haven't formalized exactly how I want to capture it for a rulebook, but my vision is that our game's Appalachia is not just ancient mountains and rivers in the eastern United States. Our Appalachia is a song that is sung by a choir of voices. When those voices are in harmony and balance, Appalachia grows and flourishes with her children. When some voices conspire to drown out others and that harmony is interrupted, its dissonance is felt in the physical world.
So What?
RELAX! This is gameable!! I have two visions of what campaigns could look like in Hellbenders. The easier one is probably an episodic sort of investigation/adventure pace along the lines of the X-Files. The Dealer can generate adventures by drawing on tables for regions of Appalachia, a table of the Arcana, and a decision about whether the selected Arcana is shouting or whispering; this should tell you what changes and dysfunction is taking place, and players learn about it from Granny at the Support Group.
The sandbox mode instead lets the Dealer build a map of a local region, maybe a tri-state area, and place factions who have some positive or negative relationship to the Arcana and are introducing local dysfunctions. I think this could also be generated with tables to spark ideas!
To return to where we started, however, I think these means that the 8 Creditors that we included in the original playtest either are Arcana themselves or they are smaller fragments of greater Arcana. This means that, as a campaign progresses, players may come into contact with agents of more powerful Arcana who could become Creditors and assume the debt of the players from their original contact.
I've been really happy with this progression of the Hellbenders cosmology. I've also felt satisfied lately that it is moving away from an OGOA-style horror cliche/pastiche of Appalachia and toward a game that is about complicated people trying to make and fulfill Promises. I'm excited for some more table time and hope everyone else is interested too!