Advantage on Arcana

Example: Making a Literary Scene for a Single Culture

In my last post I offered an exercise for making a literary scene for a single culture; in this post, I'll go through the exercise myself as an example. Now, I don't have a game for which I need to make a literary scene, or at least not one I'm willing to make public quite yet, so I've had to invent one for this exercise. That doesn't feel quite reflective of the actual process, but it will have to do. Of course, if you're doing this for fun or for practice, you might also wind up doing the same.1

a stack of zines on a table
"zine stack," Jessie Lynn McMain, 2014, Flickr, CC BY-ND-NC 2.0

1. What culture or subculture are you working on?

I've decided to make a literary scene for a Deviant the Renegades game idea I've had kicking around in the back of my head. For those who don't know, the eponymous Deviants, also called Broken, are mutants, hybrids, cyborgs, psychics, and other victims of unnatural transformations, with strange powers and terrible afflictions. In Deviant there are clandestine organizations called Conspiracies. These Conspiracies are usually the game's villains, hunting Broken down for exploitation, experimentation, or extermination, but some Conspiracies are allies; a few are even Deviant-run. After all, behind the GM's screen a Conspiracy is just a set of mechanics for representing a secret organization. For this exercise I will make the literary scene for one Deviant-run Conspiracy:

A Conspiracy by Deviants and for Deviants, hiding out in the Niagara region of Ontario, Canada. It was founded by a Baseline doctor who defected from another Conspiracy and the Broken he helped escape. The Conspiracy is well-connected with local Deviants, especially as it provides the only health care specific to Deviant needs, but it is also the only pro-Deviant Conspiracy in the region, making it quite socially isolated. Many members and facilities have punk, grunge, or emo attitudes and aesthetics. Overall it has 15 members and 25-35 loose associates or allies. The players would eventually be invited to visit one of the Conspiracy's hideouts, but they aren't members.

2. What are the primary media of your culture's literary scene, and how are they distributed?

At first I was thinking they'd have a slam poetry scene. It came to mind because Fallout 4's Atom Cats greasers wrote and performed spoken word poetry, which I've always thought was funny and charming, and also because slam poetry feels like an urban, underground kind of art form. However, there are two problems with it: first, I know nothing about poetry slams, so it would be hard for me to do well; and second, I likely wouldn't be able to put any slam poetry in front of the player characters. I doubt that an average group of player characters would attend a poetry slam, and Fallout 4's solution, leaving a bunch of recordings on cassettes laying around for the Sole Survivor to find, doesn't seem much more promising.

The next idea I had was zines, and that is much better. Now, I still know very little about zine culture, but I do know that virtually any kind of writing or graphic art can end up in a zine, so my ignorance isn't going to get in the way. Furthermore, zines have been associated with the alt scene, which is the feeling I want to evoke. The low technological cost for zine production makes sense for the Conspiracy, too. Finally, it is much easier to put a zine in front of the player characters: one big reason the players would contact the Conspiracy is to meet the doctor, and the zine could be the only thing to read in the waiting room. So what I decided is that one or two members of the Conspiracy produce a bimonthly zine, which they physically distribute among the Conspiracy's hideouts and to some of its allies.

I spent some time thinking about how many readers and contributors there are; it's probably not very many. They are quite isolated in the Web of Pain (an abstraction of all the Conspiracies in the world and the connections between them) and, though many members have access to popular culture, very few people outside the Conspiracy are reading their work. This isolation works for me, though: it allows me to give them a self-contained literary scene. That means that each writer's intended audience is usually the other writers (a very normal thing in a small literary circle).

Two members of the Conspiracy produce a literary zine, published in the traditional way: a photocopier. It has 8-10 regular contributors (including the two who produce it) and half a dozen more occasional contributors, nearly all of whom are also regular readers. The contributors are all Deviants, and mostly they write for each other. There are a little more than a half dozen devoted readers who never contribute, some of whom are Baselines, making just over twenty readers total. Various other members or allies of the Conspiracy might pick up an issue now and again when they have nothing better to do, or might keep meaning to read some back issues without ever getting around to it.

3. What genres is your literary scene very likely to have? (Optional.)

Given the contemporary setting, the zine probably receives as submissions a lot of mediocre and bad free verse poetry, some in imitation of Rupi Kaur.2 I'm thinking both angsty teenager poems and saccharine Chicken Soup for the Deviant Soul stuff. And it likely doesn't get enough submissions to be too discerning about what they publish. I think the two editors have pretty high standards, and so the worst submissions are rejected, but even so some pretty bad writing is mixed among the mediocre and the good. This is especially the case because the editors have to work with, and maybe even live with, all of the contributors; they feel like they have to publish at least some of everyone's work. However, all that being said, people who write together almost always become better writers as a result, so even the worst contributors are better than they would have been if it weren't for the zine.

A lot of mediocre and bad free verse poetry.

4. Choose 2-5 facts about this culture that you want to convey.

The great news is that Conspiracies already have mechanical elements that work well here. Each has one Virtue and one Vice, anchors that give members benefits for acting in particular ways; each also has three Principles, representing how the Conspiracy thinks and governing how the Conspiracy operates. That gives me five points of information that the players might want to know about. I decided the following Principles and Anchors best represent what I had in mind for this Conspiracy:

Principle: The Web takes what it can and so must its victims.
Principle: Anyone in need is family.
Principle: Sometimes a doctor must cut the patient.
Virtue: Cautious
Vice: Gossipy3

I want to make genres for three of these, using the genres as clues, or as pegs for exposition if players make and pass an appropriate skill check.

5. For each fact, try to come up with a genre that communicates it.

The Vice, Gossipy, was the first element I was drawn to, though I can't tell you why. I thought about real genres of writing and song that have a large component of interpersonal drama: AITA and r/relationships posts, Overheard sections in newspapers, advice columns and letters to the editor, diss tracks, Taylor Swift singles, Facebook vague-posting. None of this was what I was looking for, however: first, although this is similar to gossip, it is not quite the same thing (gossip being about other people's affairs, not your own conflicts with other people), and second, none of these are really a genre you could find in a literary zine. Eventually I realized, though, that I could have a poetic form based on these kinds of gossipy writing, but transformed into something more. Maybe, I thought, contributors started sending the zine letters to the editor that rehashed the same conflicts over and over, so the editors, who really want to run a literary magazine, announced they wouldn't publish anything that wasn't poetry or fiction. The poets, equally committed to pettiness and to craft, started writing their letters to the editor as poems. But it became more than that, with poems taking the format of Overheard sections, advice columns, and r/AITA posts, and some of them are clearly fictional. Although many poets do still write about their own relationships this way, there's an undeniable Nextdoor-like quality to much of it. Of course, the gossip isn't always negative, either: some of it has the spirit of live-tweeting a date at the next table over and being pleased that it's going well.

Many poems mimic the form or language of letters to the editor, advice columns, r/AITA and r/relationship posts, or Overheard and Missed Connections newspaper segments. They might stick to the format exactly, but have overly lyrical language, or they might keep the everyday language but change the formatting with line breaks. Some of the content seems true but anonymized; some seems fictional. The tone varies from snippy to meditative, from schadenfreude to You-go-girl enthusiasm.

I took a look at the other facts again. Virtue: Cautious suggested cautionary tales, which I wasn't interested in. Principle: Anyone in need is family looked like it had potential, but after a little thought I was getting nowhere, so I moved on. Principle: Sometimes a doctor must cut the patient looked better. It made me think of motivational posters and recovery support groups, and I believe this Conspiracy and its allies is a group whose members would want to help each other through treatment. (The Conspiracy's doctor, after all, is trying to help Broken manage their unnatural afflictions.) I felt like there was something here that could work. Thinking about it, this seemed like the perfect place to use the bad poetry I felt must exist: maybe there's a kind of poem, always free verse, that exhorts its readers to seek treatment and to stick to treatment, even when it's difficult. A lot of this poetry seems trite or uncomfortably earnest. Not all of it has to be bad, though. Better versions might have an expansive understanding of what "difficult" can mean: it might be difficult to admit you need help, for example.

But that's really only about treatment, not about pain, and I need it to communicate the whole Principle. Sometimes the doctor must cut the patient. Maybe that line, or variations and fragments of it, is repeated in multiple poems. This suggests the other kind of common bad poetry I mentioned above: angsty teenage writing. Some of the poems are frank about the pain; some might be a bit melodramatic about it. These poems therefore range from the edgy to the saccharine, though many are weirdly both, which gives them a strange kind of effectiveness. I wanted a name for them and the first thing that came to mind was cutting poems; that strongly suggests self-harm, however, so I made it a bit more medical: the zine's community calls them incision poems.

Incision poems, so named because many of them reference a doctor's incisions, are always free verse and range dramatically in quality. In general, these poems give voice to the pain and unpleasantness of the treatment the Conspiracy provides, while also resolving to go through with the treatment or exhorting the reader to go through with it. These poems are abundant with cliché and can be sappy or melodramatic, but they are not always bad. At times the combination of sappiness and edginess has a powerful effect. The work of Rupi Kaur and her imitators has had a clear influence on a few of the incision poets.

After this I spent a little more time thinking about Principle: Anyone in need is family, recalling the stories of Christian street ministry I'd heard once upon a time, before feeling that ultimately anything I come up with here would overlap too much with the other two genres: the first's preoccupation with other people's business and the second's sentimentality. So I moved on to something that had a different tone.

Principle: The Web takes what it can and so must its victims has a ruthlessness and amorality that worked for me at this point. I realized, also, that both forms I came up with are poems. What about some prose? Prose about victims of the Web taking what they need is a short story about thieves, then: picaresques, maybe, or the short fiction of Elmore Leonard, or what you might find published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. But, I wondered, what sets this apart from any regular crime fiction – and how do I convey the part about the Web taking what it can? Because this zine isn't circulating outside the Web of Pain, there's no reason for the contributors or editors to worry about breaking the masquerade, so I decided the protagonists are nearly always Deviants themselves. And in thinking about the protagonists, I thought they could be stock characters: maybe there are four or five Broken thieves and grifters which multiple contributors write their own stories about. In that way it's like fan fiction, but with no original. That helps reinforce the idea of taking what you can; no one owns these characters, and anyone is free to take them.

Do they all have to be in prose? Maybe not: maybe a handful of authors write quick scenarios as poems. In English sonnets and limericks are common, so maybe someone writes about these characters in those forms. And let's say there's a ghazal or two. I see those in English from time to time.

Crime fiction about grifters and thieves appears several times in the zines. Different authors use the same stock characters, though their interpretations of them aren't quite the same – it seems there's a bit of push and pull over these protagonists' traits. All the protagonists are Deviants, and all take from others to survive, though there's a playfulness to it more than cruelty. The stories do not moralize these characters, and they lose as much as they gain, but so long as they break even, they'll be OK. There are also a handful of limericks and ghazals about these characters.

I'm happy with that. It does the job I need it to do, and it feels different from the others.

Standing back a bit, I realize there aren't a lot of authors in this scene, and also there must be other kinds of work in these zines, too. Probably most authors have tried their hand at all three of these genres at least once. Maybe there's one regular contributor who now only writes the gossip column poems and one regular contributor who only writes crime fiction. Likely two or three occasional contributors write only incision poems; that's the kind of self-expressive form that a less practiced poet would try their hand at, without writing anything else. Otherwise people may write most often in one or two forms, but have likely tried all three, and contributed other kinds of work besides.

6. Make examples of each.

As I scan what I've done, I see I've already started making examples. Normally I might begin with the first poems and stories of each genre, but if players are seeing these in zines left in a waiting room, they aren't going to see the originals at all. I won't make any of those, then, even though I do have ideas already. What I need is a short list of examples for each, no more than could reasonably appear in three or so issues. The poems are shorter, so I can make more of them. These poems seem like the kind that would be published untitled; that's very annoying to me as someone who cares about citation, but it's helpful here in that it means I don't need to come up with titles.4

I do need to make sure I cover all the ground I want to cover, so I'll go over the ideas I had for different variations. To start with, for the gossip column poems I wrote, "But it became more than that, with poems taking the format of Overheard sections, advice columns, and r/AITA posts, and some of them are clearly fictional." So …

I also wrote, "[...] there's an undeniable Nextdoor-like quality to much of it. Of course, the gossip isn't always negative, either: some of it has the spirit of live-tweeting a date at the next table over and being pleased that it's going well." For that I can make the following:

I had written an entry that said, an untitled poem formatted like an advice column, though the language is highly lyrical; the character writing in is named The Me I Could Have Been and the advice columnist character is named Rude Awakening. That isn't gossipy, though, so I'd be on the fence about including it. If I was using this as a clue, I'd certainly leave it out, because it misdirects.

That's enough for the gossip column poems, I think. Moving on to the incision poems, I have written, "Some of the poems are frank about the pain; some might be a bit melodramatic about it. This means these poems range from the edgy to the saccharine, though many are weirdly both, which gives them a strange kind of effectiveness." So …

I also need to get this in here somehow: "Sometimes the doctor must cut the patient. Maybe that line, or variations and fragments of it, is repeated in multiple poems."

And I wrote, "The work of Rupi Kaur and her imitators has had a clear influence on a few of the incision poets."

Those are enough incision poems for now.

I don't want more than three prose crime stories, and I want to make clear that different authors are writing about the same characters, so as much of that information as I can manage goes right in the titles:

I also wrote, "maybe a handful of authors write quick scenarios as poems. In English sonnets and limericks are common, so maybe someone writes about these characters in those forms. And let's say there's a ghazal or two." I'll do a pair of those.

(Ghazals are very repetitive poems, so they are good for events that recur with subtle variations.)

That's enough for now. Altogether this feels like a literary scene, and I think it contains the information I want it to contain. How I'd wind up presenting it to the players would depend on the details of a game that doesn't exist, so there isn't much value in working that out here. I could make more if necessary, but if this were for a real game I'd probably stop here unless and until I needed to go further.

—

  1. Credit goes to Rich Burlew's posts formerly at the Giant in the Playground forums about making settings (now only available through the Wayback Machine) and Matt Colville's videos about pantheons, both of which were in the back of my mind when I decided to go through my own exercise with you.↩

  2. What is bad poetry? Here's my take: good poetry makes unfamiliar the familiar, or makes familiar the unfamiliar. That could be either in content or language. It could make you see a common situation in a new way (or make you feel like you recognize something strange to you), or it could use words and form in surprising ways. Mediocre poetry tries to do one or more of these things, but with partial or mixed success. Bad poetry either fails entirely or doesn't try. Its content is perfectly recognizable, without any new perspective, and the language doesn't do anything you haven't seen before. This can make the poem very relatable, however, and on social media the relatable is often popular. It makes sense that certain kinds of bad poetry have large audiences online. If you want to include bad poetry in your setting, it might be worth thinking about why people like it anyway.↩

  3. One thing I like about how these turned out is that the Virtue, Cautious, is at odds with the second Principle, Anyone in need is family. That kind of tension can produce interesting ethical dilemmas and foster narrative conflicts.↩

  4. On reflection, however, a lack of title does mean you have to write more description in order to make each one feel real, so maybe in the long run it's actually less work to come up with a good title.↩

#Chronicles of Darkness #for GMs #made-up literature