Exercise: Making a Literary Scene for a Single Culture
In the previous post of this series I promised some exercises for making up literary genres to use in your TTRPGs. This is the first of those – though, in a sense, I wasn't quite accurate in my promise. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I've almost always gone about it by making up whole literary scenes rather than simply tackling a genre or individual work. There are exceptions, but everything I've shared so far in this series was made this way. So that's what the first exercise will do: I'll adapt the approach I took to developing the drow literary culture into a set of prompts you can follow. In my next post I'll go through it myself, in case seeing an example helps anyone.
"Book sale," Andy Lederer, 2009, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
The Exercise
I'm going to put the questions and prompts in numbered headers, and below each I'll explain it further. For your own purposes, I suggest you just copy out the numbered questions and prompts, leaving a block of space for your answer after each.
1. What culture or subculture are you working on?
I'm assuming you have already decided on key details about the culture or subculture you're trying to introduce to your players. You could, I suppose, try to learn things about the culture or subculture by doing this exercise, but it really wasn't designed with that use in mind. At any rate, I'm assuming you're starting with a pretty clear sense of the milieu: some concrete, explicit details, as well as a general sense or feeling of the whole thing that will let you make up more details on the fly as needed.
Now's as good a time as any to point out that by culture we could mean a workplace culture or a school culture. If you're running a Strixhaven or Monsterhearts game, for example, you could use this exercise to flesh out what the poets and theatre kids are up to.
At any rate, just write down a brief description of the milieu to make sure you have a clear idea in your own mind, like what you can find in the Ewistar bookstalls or the literary culture of the drow below Ewistar or the Strixhaven student body.
2. What are the primary media of your culture's literary scene, and how are they distributed?
Before doing anything else, you need to narrow down what kinds of texts you're making up here. I'm talking here about the medium stories come in. Are there booksellers in the market? Or storytellers around a fire? Or storytellers releasing their work as podcasts? Players in a stableyard or in a street festival? And out of all these, which are the ones you want to focus on? Make your task a manageable size.
In my experience it helps to keep in mind two kinds of realism here. First, what kind of literary scene would this culture realistically be able to have? Second, what kind of literary scene would your players realistically stumble on?
Regarding the first kind of realism, the problem is this: if you're inviting your players to think about what the literary scene says about the setting, you're not doing yourself or your players any favours if the literary scene doesn't match the setting. For example, if people in your culture are largely illiterate, then you'll just confuse your players if you have a bunch of people selling books. (Unless, that is, the thing you want to call attention to is the reason illiterate people are buying books.) You don't need perfect realism by any means, but remember that you are inviting some level of scrutiny into what the literary scene means, and it should stand up to the level of scrutiny you invite. Otherwise you will miscommunicate.
The second kind of realism is more important, though. One thing I didn't talk about in my previous posts on early modern English literature was how much poetry was circulated in manuscript form. Various nobles were writing poetry, including very long poems and collections, and showing the manuscripts to their friends. A lot of important, formative work in English was written this way. However, the nobles rarely published their work. Indeed, publishing was seen as common, commercial, unaristocratic. I assume that's also going on among some of the nobles of my campaign – but my players will realistically never see it, so why would I bother to make any of it up? Focus on what your players actually stand a chance of encountering.
3. What genres is your literary scene very likely to have? (Optional.)
It can be helpful at this point to note down any kinds of writing that leap to mind as something that your scene almost certainly would have. I very roughly modeled the Kingdom of Ewistar on England in the late 1500s, so I felt that theatre would be a big part of the literary scene, with history plays, comedies, and tragedies. For another setting, though, different ideas will leap out at me. If nothing leaps out at you about your setting, don't worry about it. This question is strictly optional. Ideas generated at this stage can be useful, but you don't need them.
Regardless of the setting, though, one thing your literary scene will almost certainly have is bad writing. In fact, feel free to write down "bad writing" if you have nothing else. It might be whole genres of bad writing, or just bad examples of every genre, but there will be bad writing, and there will be people who love it (or at least some of it). The good news is that, while actually reading or hearing bad writing is tedious, the idea of bad writing is funny. This may come in handy later.
4. Choose 2-5 facts about this culture you want to convey.
The facts you want here should be general more than specific; think about attitudes, assumptions, practices, priorities, and values. Galowan's sword was taken by the Reapweald elves and is not buried with him in the Harrow Hills is better communicated by a single saga or lai than by a whole genre. Reapweald elves honour allies by taking their prized weapons back to their halls, and dishonour enemies by leaving their weapons on the field is something that might work better here. If you have some mechanics for representing your factions' values and cultures already, those mechanics would make great facts for this exercise.
It's up to you how many facts you want to communicate, but set realistic expectations for yourself and your players. How much do your players tend to remember about your setting? How much time are they willing to spend on this sort of thing? Plan accordingly.
However, you may want to overshoot a little bit at this stage. If you aim to make up three genres, you could still write down five facts, knowing you'll eventually have to come up with another way of communicating two of them. Of course, as you work through this exercise, you may realize you forgot something or took something for granted, so this list doesn't have to be written in stone.
As an example, with the drow the facts that resulted in the genres I shared were, roughly, Drow culture is ancient and ornate, highly valuing skilled craftsmanship, Drow noblewomen practice polygyny, and Drow nobility are obsessed with lineage, so that genealogy significantly affects a noble's status. As I was working on the genres, I realized another fact I wanted to communicate as well: Drow are comfortable with competition and see it as an important part of most relationships.
5. For each fact, try to come up with a genre that communicates it.
The trouble with an exercise like mine, of course, is that at some point you are going to have to do it for yourself. We have arrived at that point. However, from experience I do have a few pointers.
- See if you can use any answer you gave for prompt 3 to communicate one of the facts you gave for prompt 4. If all you wrote down was Bad writing, think about what makes it bad. There might be some connections between that and one of your facts. If not, that's OK. Your answers for 3 can just be for flavour.
- If you're struggling to come up with something for one fact, move on to another. Maybe you'll think of something later.
- If you have a vague idea for one genre but can't get it to cohere, you can jot down what you have and move on to another. Sometimes working on a different genre will make the whole literary scene gel in your mind, which will help you work on the other individual genres.
- Until you show it to your players, nothing is written in stone. Feel free to go back and change something if you come up with a better idea.
- You don't need to make a genre for each fact. There are other ways to communicate something about a culture.
- I said above that the idea of bad writing is funny, and it's true. But it's only so funny. If everything in a literary scene is bad, that's just sad. I find it more affecting (and more realistic) to say that some of the writing is good, actually.
- I try to aim for a few genres that feel a bit different from each other. My hope is for one genre that makes the players laugh, one genre that engages them intellectually by being anthropologically interesting, and one genre that seems sort of boring but technically impressive. You don't need to aim for these same goals, of course: the point here is that you're more likely to elicit the engagement you want if you have it clear in your own mind what kind of engagement that is, and that you can use different genres to create different effects.
For the drow, then, I made the long, formally-strict sestinas to communicate Drow culture is ancient and ornate, highly valuing skilled craftsmanship; I made the harem comedies to communicate Drow noblewoman practice polygyny; and I made the genealogies to communicate Drow nobility are obsessed with lineage, so that genealogy significantly affects a noble's status. As I was working on the drow's genealogies and harem comedies, it became clear that ambition played a role in both, so I made sure to work in references to the other fact I knew about the drow: Drow are comfortable with competition and see it as an important part of most relationships.
6. Make examples of each.
Once you have a number of genres you're happy with, come up with some examples of each. You're going to need a few to show the players. As always, you don't need to actually write an epic poem, but you should have a name and maybe a line or two about its style and contents. (You can browse my other posts in this series for a sense of how much detail I come up with for each. It doesn't have to be a lot!) Most importantly, you need one or two typical examples to give your players a sense of what's normal in the genre. Then you can make a few more.
If you haven't already, this is a good time to think of each genre's origins. I discussed this a little in my last post's section on a genre's history, but usually there will be some works in another genre that create the appetite that this genre fills. Then there will be some early works in which the genre starts to take shape, followed by one or two works that codify the tropes and style, and are fully recognizable as members of this genre. Where it's appropriate, you could come up with any of these. However, the origins of oral storytelling forms may be lost to time (although we can imagine situations in which they aren't), so you can probably skip this step for campfire tales, drinking songs, and the like. That's also true if you think there's no chance your players will ever see or learn about historical examples.
It can also make things more realistic and more engaging to come up with an unusual work or two for each genre: funny examples of boring genres, emotionally powerful examples of silly genres, and satirical examples of serious genres. Any little flourishes can make the difference between a genre feeling real or not.
One last note: it might seem like humour and realism are in tension here, but they don't have to be. There have always been good writers with a sense of humour and there have always been strange moments in literary history. Consider Shakespeare's ribald jokes or the work of Wil Hulsey. The right absurdity will make your literary scene more realistic, not less, so long as your absurdity feels like the kind that could really happen.
And that's it! Past this point you will need to fit what you made to the needs of your table, but by now you have enough to go on. In my next post I'll go through the exercise myself, in case seeing an example helps.