Reflections on Making up Genres for TTRPGs

25 Nov, 2024

It's one thing to write out examples of the times I used the setting's literary culture to communicate something in my game; it's another thing to figure out how to do it well, or what the possibilities are. I'm more than happy for you to use what I've written in your own game, but I think there's going to be limited value in some of it. After all, I made these texts and genres to communicate particular ideas, and you're not especially likely to want to communicate the same things. Going forward I'd like to examine in more detail how to make up literary texts and cultures yourself, that suit the needs of your own games. This is going to take more than one post; to start with I will share a few more general observations, and in future posts in this series I will present some exercises you can try, either as practice, for fun, or to meet a need in your home game.

"To The Cuckoo," Ray Sadler 2012 at flic.kr/p/bwnzRe, CC BY-NC 2.0

This is going to be a long post. First I discuss the different aspects of an in-setting literary work or genre with which you can communicate something to your players. Jump down to the bottom for briefer, practical, more general suggestions for using them in your game.

Aspects of a Work or Genre

One big thing I've learned is that there are many ways a made-up literary work or genre can communicate something in your game. Of course on some level I knew this from the outset, as I was doing it intuitively, but actually sitting down and working through the Planegean storytelling forms made me explicitly aware of what I already knew implicitly. Each of these ways is better at communicating certain kinds of information than others. I'll go through what I've noticed – but by no means do I imagine this is exhaustive. It's just what I've learned.

I have consciously tried to communicate something to my players with each of the following aspects of a work:

1. an individual work's content;
2. an individual work's style;
3. a whole genre's tropes and style;
4. a whole genre's history;
5. an individual work's presence in a particular time and place.

I want to look at each of those in more detail. But first there's something to note that's true in nearly every case: when an author makes a particular choice, they are influenced in that choice both by their own talents, knowledge, and preferences, and by what they think their audience wants. Now, the audience they write for might not be the audience who reads them: they might be writing for just one person, or for an imagined posterity that's more receptive than their contemporary readers. There's nonetheless always two levels going on, which won't always be helpful to remember but sometimes will be.

(My apologies for any of this that's obvious to you. I'm proceeding on the assumption that it isn't obvious to someone.)

An Individual Work's Content

Of course the most straightforward way of using a literary work to communicate something to your players is to make the information you want to convey a subject of the work. This is very much like giving them a non-fiction book about a subject, except the information is part of a story instead. Perhaps instead of a book chronicling the history of a region, you give your players the scripts of some history plays which use that history as its dramatic material. (I talk a bit about that here.) Now, as with most history plays, it might contain some inaccuracies, but of course there's no reason a work of non-fiction couldn't contain inaccuracies, either; I think players should treat all in-game books with a degree of healthy suspicion, and maybe giving them fiction instead of non-fiction will encourage that.¹ And you might be surprised what kind of information you can get from poems and plays. One of the strangest long poems I've ever read is Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants, which is an extended allegory translating Linnaeus's work on botany into English pastoral poetry, where plant reproduction is figured as the complicated love lives of shepherds and shepherdesses. And literary epics formally require digressions, not just with the hero getting diverted from the quest, but also the poet including barely-related exposition about history, geography, religion, and science; you could always put the information you want them to have in one of an epic's many tangents.

But it doesn't have to be that obvious, either. If you know your party will be visiting an unfamiliar culture, you could make sure they encounter a book from or about that culture before they get there, and use it to introduce them to some of that culture's norms and expectations. You don't have to write out a whole story for them any more than you'd write out a whole etiquette guide. Allow any of them who read it to make an Insight check or similar roll, and depending on their success you can tell them something like, "It seems like a lot of the characters are concerned about appearing charitable," or, "The characters' decisions don't make sense to you at first, until you realize the author expects you to know that the characters never want to appear frightened," or, "One thing all the villains have in common is that they don't respect their elders, and the one time the hero disrespects an elder, things go disastrously." My sense is that many players will feel that they earned the information this way, even if it is realistically little different than you putting a guide to etiquette in their hands.

If your players aren't the type to read a book, that's OK. I have suggestions for getting them to see a play regardless, but also a user on reddit noted that first editions could make good treasure. (Ben Robbins at ars ludi said treasure should tell a story,² though I doubt he meant it quite so literally.) Maybe that hobgoblin captain believes it is as important to hone his mind as his poleaxe, and keeps a small chest of books in his command tent, or maybe the lich has been collecting original manuscripts of poetry going back generations, some of it now quite valuable.

An Individual Work's Style

Personally I think there's less to be communicated with an individual work's style, but there's an important exception: a work's style can tell you a lot about the author, and that might matter if that author is an established or upcoming NPC. Diction can tell you something about how educated they are, or who they imagine their audience to be, or what part of the kingdom or world they're from. Maybe they misuse a lot of fancy words, suggesting they're trying to appeal to an educated audience but don't have much of an education themselves. Or maybe they're using weirdly old-fashioned language; this might just be an aesthetic preference, but it probably suggests something about their politics or allegiances, too. These all matter particularly in games with lots of intrigue or politics, but it could still be useful in mostly hack-and-slash games to at least suggest whose side the author is on.

Come to think of it, you could do the same thing with an individual work's content, as well. If you have a classic brooding vampire, motivated by his misogynistic belief that he's been wronged by women, then maybe his lyric poetry is always about a belle dame sans merci, the beautiful, pitiless woman who tempts the knight but never loves him.

I haven't tried this, but you probably can use an individual work's style to tell the players something about the whole culture with the language it's written in. If a dwarven ballad has Elvish phrases sprinkled in it, your players can expect that the dwarves have ample contact with elves. If the phrases are used neutrally, maybe they are happy trade partners or staunch allies; if the phrases are used mockingly, well, that suggests a deteriorating relationship. As before, you don't have to write a whole ballad and wait for the players to notice something about it. You can tell the players, "You find a broadsheet with a dwarven ballad printed on it. It seems to be about a drinking competition, though it's described like it's a battle. You notice the loser uses a few elvish phrases, even though the rest of the poem is in Dwarvish. It seems like that's supposed to make him look weak or prissy or half-hearted." If you feel the need, you can put the last insight behind an appropriate skill check. If any of the player characters speak Elvish, tell them the Elvish phrases are accurate, meaning the author and maybe their intended audience speak at least a little of the language.

A Genre's Tropes and Style

Unlike the individual work's style, I think there's a lot more that can be communicated with a whole genre's style and conventions. Here in particular the literary culture says as much about the audience as it does about the authors; either way, it tends to communicate a lot more about the culture as a whole than about a specific author or a specific topic.

Like with an individual work's content, a genre's conventions or tropes can tell you something about the culture that produced it. As an example, the drow in my campaign write and read harem comedies, which tells the players that there's an appetite for that kind of story in their society. More specifically, because some of the player characters are half-elves, I could use their discovery of the harem comedies as an opportunity to say, "You'd already know, or at least have heard it said, that the drow practice the kind of polyandry depicted in these books. And the books don't have to explain it to the reader, so that means they assume the reader is already familiar with the idea." If none of the player characters were half-elves, I could still hope the players would use the discovery of the harem comedies as an opportunity to ask, "Wait, do the drow have plural marriage?" We could then make some knowledge rolls, or they could ask one of the drow in the room about it.

Style can also be important. First of all, if there are books at all, some of the population is literate. In a non-literate society, these stories will all be told aloud. Furthermore, in general, the more complicated and ornate the poetry, the more experienced the readers will be with poetic forms. You can give a sense of how educated a population is, at least in aesthetics, by the style of their poetry. Of course, the poets might be writing for a specific social class–but in a world with rising literacy among even the lower classes, you would expect to find popular verses in print as well. These verses might also have strict formal requirements, but they'll be strong meters that are striking and memorable when said aloud, like the rhythms ballads and limericks and lullabies have.

Maybe you've noticed this already, but your players don't necessarily need to realize what a genre's style says about its culture by themselves. I'll talk about this more at the end of the post, but for something relatively subtle, you can use the work as an opportunity to simply tell your players something about the world, or as an occasion for a relevant ability check.

A Genre's History

This one's trickier, but it's the one that excites me the most. A genre's history can tell your players about differences between classes or cultures, or about how a culture has changed through time. The best examples I have come, again, from the storytelling forms I made up for David Somerville's Planegea. The companion-song is a poem sung for a cherished animal, usually, but it has been adopted satirically by druids and orcs to mock other clans' animal gods; this tells you, first of all, about the relationship certain people or clans have with particular animals, but second of all it introduces or reinforces details about how druids and orcs typically see gods. That's a difference across cultures. For a change across time, take the hero epic: the shift of subject matter from a giant ruler, to an individual god or mortal hero, to a whole group of mortals, corresponds to a shift in power in the Great Valley from the giants to the gods to mortals working together. (Of course, in Planegea none of these shifts in power are complete. The poets can dream, however, and things are changing.)

It might help to remember some of the ways genres really do develop and change. For example, a genre has to come from somewhere. Often a few works in one or two precursor genres create or reveal an appetite for more works like them, and authors aware of this appetite, likely ones with the appetite themselves, write works to fulfill the demand. In this case there will be a few proto-examples that create or reveal the appetite, followed by some early examples which first develop the tropes and style, which are followed in turn by one or two popular works that codify the genre. That genre might then get picked up by a different group of people who use it to their own ends (satirically or earnestly). Or maybe the audience and authors begin to find the codification stale and trite, so an appetite develops for something new, and some author happens to write something that by the same process as before becomes the first example of a subgenre. Or maybe the audience's conditions change, meaning the reality they want to see reflected (or denied) in the work changes, and the genre changes in response. Or maybe it's the authors' conditions that change: public education might mean that more of the middle class are literate and can become authors, while increasingly authoritarian rule might mean the authors are allowed to write about fewer and fewer subjects.

The thing to remember is, if the tropes and styles of a genre are good at creating a snapshot of a culture, a genre's history is good at showing contrast, either between cultures or subcultures, or within a culture over time. Of course, it is much harder to present a whole genre to your players than it is to present a single work. Here are some things I have managed to use, which are admittedly quite situation-dependent:

• one of my players' characters is a bard raised among high elves, so I can sometimes just inform him of a genre's history if I think elven bards might teach about it;
• the crew of the party's ship had purchased some sensationalist literature and presented it to the party as "research";
• while waiting with the party for inclement conditions to pass, a drow noblewoman leant them a few books, all of the same genre, which they were then able to compare; and
• a drow inn had a bookshelf and the party had a bit of spare time as they waited for a meeting the following morning, so they were able to browse and notice some general trends.

Although a bit rough, these got the job done. They also lead to my next point.

A Work's Presence in a Particular Place

Why are these books here? Why is this person telling that story now? Sometimes the mere presence of a work communicates as much as anything else. To use the example of the hobgoblin captain above, if he's reading history plays, what history plays is he reading? It might be interesting if the histories are all about elves. Is he planning an attack against elves, perhaps, and wants to understand them better? Of course, he might just admire them. And those manuscripts the lich has collected over the years: if they aren't all from the region around his lair, they might tell you something about where he's been. This is part of what I wanted to do with the storytelling night I didn't get a chance to run: the NPCs would reveal something about their personalities and priorities through the stories they chose to share. (I also hoped it would elicit similar information from the PCs, too!) In other words, these books or stories are clues about the people who keep or tell them. I imagine they could be clues for groups, too.

Six General Uses

Let's talk nuts and bolts. Exactly how, in the course of a game, do I use these works to communicate something – and therefore how could you? I've hinted at these already throughout the post, but there are six ways I've identified.

First, the setting's literary works can be clues. In other words, you want to give the players an opportunity to notice information, but you don't need them to notice it. There could be other ways they could get that information, or their failure to notice won't stop the story in its tracks: the party might just be in for a surprise later on. In these cases, being a bit indirect can be a good thing. Mention what books the hobgoblin general has in his tent, or what kind of stories the goliaths tell around the fire, and the players either pick up what you're putting down or they don't.

Second, literary works and genres can be pegs on which to hang immediate exposition. Sometimes you do just want to hand the party a bit of information; you could use an expository wizard, I suppose, but I don't think that's always the most elegant solution. If you know in advance you want to take the players somewhere new or introduce them to a new idea or creature, you could make sure they hear stories about it first. Otherwise, they can encounter a bookshelf or streetside puppet show whenever appropriate. Either way, when you introduce the work, you can immediately tell them what you need them to notice about it. I wouldn't want a surprisingly relevant book of epic verse to land in the PCs' hands all the time, but used sparingly in-world literature can be a less heavy-handed way to dispense lore than introducing a convenient wizard.

Third, they can be pegs on which to hang future exposition. As with the previous entry, this can be especially good when you know the players are going to encounter something later. You can give them a book, or let them see a play or hear a song, and leave it at that for the time being. Then, if they succeed at a knowledge check when it becomes relevant, you can use that literary work as a peg to hang your exposition on: "Actually, you remember this from the genealogies and comedies you read: the drow here seem to consider competition an indispensable part of any relationship between equals, especially friendship. They'd probably respond better if you didn't try to minimize potential future conflicts between you."

Fourth, these works can reinforce previous exposition. Even in two-hour movies, Hollywood uses a set-up, reminder, payoff formula, understanding the audience will better appreciate the pay-off if they are reminded of the set-up at least once. When game sessions are days or weeks apart, your players probably benefit even more from reminders. If you've already introduced an idea to your players, you can use in-world literary works to reinforce it.

Fifth, they can present opportunities for social encounters. I wanted to use the storytelling night not just to reveal more about some of the NPCs, but also to introduce a topic the party could use to segue into an attempt at Persuasion. I'm not able to report how well it worked because I didn't get a chance to run it, but I think this sort of use has potential. You could also introduce a stableyard play or other similar performance as a catalyst for intra-party roleplay, sort of like how my brother Nick uses rumours in his West Marches campaign.

Sixth, they can play a role in the plot itself. I discussed before that nobles really have used literature in their political intrigues, to greater and (mostly) lesser success, and in my home game an aristocratic faction has begun sponsoring satires as propaganda against the queen. I think you could get a pretty big response from your players if they learned some scribbler has written scathing verses mocking their characters, which are now being repeated at every tavern in every city they visit. Or it could go the other way: in Jaskier the first season of Netflix's The Witcher (2019) does a pretty good job of showing how a bard can change a public's perception of someone for the better.

I don't mean to suggest you make literary works do all this work for you. That would strain credulity fast. Moreover, I use them mostly because they excite and engage me; if you find all this tedious, you shouldn't feel obliged to use any of it. On reddit, however, some GMs said they really liked what I'd provided, but couldn't imagine how it would work for their party. And my brother told me much the same thing: the works and genres I made up were neat, but he wasn't sure how he would use them. If you're feeling the same way, maybe you can use this post as a menu, choosing from it anything you think might work for you and your table.

#for GMs #made-up literature