Storytelling Genres for Planegea

02 Nov, 2024

Last week I said that, before I could move on to general lessons about using the literary works of your campaign setting in your games, I needed to describe the storytelling genres I came up with for David Somerville and Atlas Games's stonepunk setting Planegea. The trouble is, I'm struggling with this post: I fear any readers unfamiliar with Planegea won't really understand it. The reason I wanted to talk about my Planegean forms is that they are fundamentally grounded in, and communicate things about, the specific setting for which I made them. That's the goal, after all! I suppose what I shall do is forge ahead, using footnotes liberally and hoping you can infer the rest.

The way it started is that I asked the folks on the Planegea Discord server if any of them had come up with storytelling genres for their Planegea games. It's an active server with creative and collaborate GMs on it, so I thought someone might have come up with something they felt comfortable sharing. Unfortunately, no one had (yet), so I gave it some thought and came up with my own. As it happened, putting them on the server prompted some people to invent some good ones–but those are not mine to share.

For context, Planegea is a prehistoric sword-and-sorcery setting filled with dinosaurs and giant insects and other megafauna, where mortals live in the Great Valley, between the giant empires surrounding it and the deadly Venom Abyss within, a jungle of constant evolution and monstrous vitality. Elves are translucent, dwarves are stone-crusted, and humans are beast-whisperers. Also, importantly, this is a pre-literate setting: all storytelling is oral. You can learn more in Somerville's The Star-Shaman's Song of Planegea (2022) and other materials.

What appear below are lightly-edited versions of what I shared to the Discord.

Planegea's Oral Storytelling Forms

The Companion-Song

The companion-song is an ode to a beloved animal (pet, mount, beast companion), first emerging among human populations. It has no fixed form, though it is usually relatively short and leans heavily on alliteration and assonance, especially with the animal's name; common tropes involve praise of the animal's appearance and temperament and lists of their accomplishments. Although well-known ones are sometimes sung around clanfires by wandering chanters,¹ most of the time companion-songs are adaptations of the chanter's versions, sung by untrained singers and altered to suit the singers' own animals. Sometimes they are addressed teasingly to the singer's lover, usually without changing any of the clearly animal descriptors: look at your little paws, look at your elegant whiskers, and so on.

There are various mock companion-songs, as well. Some of these are addressed to unsuitable pets, relying on the absurdity of having a hunting-snail or a lap-hydra. Others are derisive: druids and orcs might sing companion-songs about a rival clan's god, for instance.²

The Oyster-and-Pearl

The trick story called the oyster-and-pearl developed three times concurrently among different–and often competing–organizations: Kraia's Children, the Scavenger's Vow, and the Worldsingers.³ However, members of these groups cooperated on enough ventures (and cracked each other's codes enough times) that the three emerging forms have long since blended into one.

In essence, an oyster-and-pearl in its most stereotypical form is a story that has certain elements that can be changed arbitrarily between tellings; these changes form a secret message to someone who knows what to listen for, but are meaningless to anyone else. For instance, the time of day a particular event in the story occurs might indicate when the speaker wants to hold a meeting. Among the Scavenger's Vow, early examples were just well-designed for use with the Code.⁴ Because the other factions lacked such cryptic communication, they at first relied more heavily on allegories, which were unfortunately more ambiguous than strict codes. This led to a second generation of oyster-and-pearl tales, where each came with its own precise methods of interpretation, which only the faction that used that particular story would know.

The second generation of oyster-and-pearl stories had a problem: the changeable elements were too obviously arbitrary, and unaffiliated listeners began to suspect something fishy was going on whenever they heard one. Storytellers fixed this problem by making more engaging stories, where the point seemed to uninitiated listeners to be about the ways little changes to the basic formula add up to a surprising result at the end of the story; therefore, third-generation oyster-and-pearls didn't have a fixed ending. The storyteller would have to come up with a new ending depending on the elements they needed to change in order to encode their message; this way, the changes did not seem arbitrary to suspicious listeners. It took more skill to tell these later oyster-and-pearl stories, however, so usually only storytellers and chanters kept up the practice.

Those third-generation oyster-and-pearls became very popular with outsiders, and unaffiliated chanters began repeating them without knowing what nonsense messages they were accidentally disseminating. This provided useful camouflage, of course, because telling an oft-repeated story is less suspicious; however, it also meant faction agents might receive confusing messages. Fourth-generation oyster-and-pearls, therefore, have a mechanism at the beginning of the story for identifying whether it contains a secret message or not; uninitiated tellers don't know the signal, and so aren't likely to use it accidentally. The mechanism varies from story-to-story, however.

Outsiders might not be able to recognize oyster-and-pearls as a genre, but there are important formal similarities in contemporary (ie. fourth-generation) examples: they are always variations on a very recognizable formula, and the interest comes from how seemingly incidental details change the outcome in surprising-but-inevitable ways.

The Hero Epic

There is some argument about whether the hero epic emerged among the Stone Empire or the Air Empire; regardless, while it was once used almost exclusively in those two places, it has since spread throughout the Great Valley and been adapted to various local purposes.⁵ In its quintessential form, called the high hero epic, it follows very strict requirements: it is made up of nine pack beasts (what we'd call cantos), each of which is itself made up on nine saddlebags (what we'd call stanzas). Each saddlebag is somewhat variable in length but usually takes thirty seconds to a minute to recite. Using numbers unavailable to Planegean characters, each epic has 81 saddlebags (stanzas) and would have between 700 and 1,500 lines; the whole epic takes about an hour to tell, give or take twenty minutes.⁶ Each pack beast (canto) has a very specific subject matter and role.

• Pack beast 1 addresses and praises the audience, connecting them in some way to the epic's original audience, which is also praised; addresses and praises the event's celebrant, the storyteller's patron or host, the guest of honour, or another VIP, and connects them in some to the patron of the epic's first telling, who is also praised; introduces and describes the hero of the story; and introduces the context of the story (ie. "In those days when giants still ruled the Citadel…").
• Pack beast 2 introduces the threat (which could be an individual antagonist, an enemy force, or something more abstract like starvation or ennui) and elaborates the stakes.
• Pack beast 3 describes a journey the hero takes, including various obstacles they overcome.
• Pack beast 4 describes the hero's preparations, and ends with the hero confronting the threat from pack beast 2 directly (in combat when appropriate, but in any case proactively trying to overcome the threat).
• Pack beast 5 concerns the hero's conflict with the threat and the turn by which the hero is temporarily defeated and brought low (generally called the calamity).
• Pack beast 6 consists of a flashback describing how the hero got to the point described at the beginning of the epic.
• Pack beast 7 consists of more flashback, either a continuation of pack beast 6 or a different episode in the hero's past.
• Pack beast 8 describes how the hero overcomes the defeat they suffered in pack beast 5 (ie. through marshaling their strength, remembering some wisdom, or discovering some weakness in their enemy) and definitively triumphs over the threat introduced in pack beast 2.
• Pack beast 9 explains the consequences of this victory for all of the principal figures in pack beast 1: the hero, the original patron, the original audience, the current audience, the current VIP, and the overall context in which the epic took place.

Storytellers must adjust the first and ninth pack beasts according to the circumstances of the telling, although usually each epic has certain conventions about the sorts of praise and address the current audience and VIP might receive and what to do when the two are the same person or entity. Furthermore, in some epics the hero and the original patron were identical, so the form varies a little bit to accommodate that fact.

Furthermore there are certain common tropes, widely called hands (as in caravan hands), that are conventionally included in the form. Although storytellers are not expected to include them in any particular pack beast, they are expected to use at least half of them somewhere in the rendition of a high hero epic. These hands are 1) a character discovering something from a scent, 2) a description of a mountain, 3) a description of an item being made, 4) a comparison between a person and an animal, 5) a fortune told or omen interpreted, and 6) a figure hybridizing three unlike things (a giant and an element and a plant, for example).

Originally hero epics were composed for a particular giant, commonly as a eulogy or on the event of some public accomplishment (ascension to the imperial throne, for instance), though sometimes one giant might commission a hero epic for their betrothed, to be recited during their wedding celebration. Stone giants, who admire technical skill and craft, and cloud giants, who enjoy public aesthetics, were always among the most likely to commission such works, though frost giants and storm giants also enjoyed hearing their feats of valour extolled in this way. These giants most often made mortal storytellers compose, learn, and recite these epics, and part of the pleasure was in the sheer feat of memory and endurance of each performance.

Many of those mortal storytellers later escaped captivity, however, and they would take different subjects for their verse. Extraordinary figures like the Usurper Queen and Vyrkha the Shepherd are common subjects of contemporary hero epics, as are various of the Great Valley's gods. (Certain of the conventions must be adjusted for this to work: gods do not go on journeys, for instance, so the journey in the third pack beast might be made by a shaman or visitant on behalf of the god, or it might be a voyage of the mind.) Some spies and poets have heard that the Nin of the Gift of Thirst has also received her own hero epic, as have certain dragons, but they do not tend to share this news very often.⁷

There are, of course, derivations and variations. Low hero epics are any hero epics that do not quite adhere to form; in general, a low epic will meet more than half, but less than all, of the requirements described above. They may take various people (or beasts) as their subject matter: notorious thieves, feared and admired dinosaurs, spouses and lovers and friends, even the storyteller themselves. They might also vary in tone, from the genuinely admiring to the ironically mocking. Although high hero epics are better respected, low hero epics are often more enjoyed. Any Edgegatherer has heard the one about Valpa of the Rolling Hips.⁸

There is another new development of particular note. A few storytellers have composed epics that take a group, not an individual, as its subject. Some among the Worldsingers and the Council of Day suggest that this reflects a fundamental shift in how mortals are viewing themselves and their place in the world. Whatever the reason, there are four examples so far: the Epic of the Whale Clan, the Epic of Free Citadel, the Epic of the Lion Clan, and the Epic of the Venomguard. More will surely follow.

Using These Story Forms (In Your Planegea Game)

An oyster-and-pearl is a good way for members of the Scavenger's Vow to communicate to any rogue scavenger character through Thieves' Cant the Code, or for PCs who are members of Kraia's Children or the Worldsingers to receive messages from their factions. Otherwise, though, I see these forms almost entirely as ways to establish mood and deliver lore to your players.

• Companion odes could tell your players how much animals mean to human clans, or which animals are meaningful to a specific clan. Once your players are familiar with the idea of a companion ode, you can then use variations to show different things: the orc's mocking companion ode for a bear god show the orc's disrespect for gods; the chanter's ode to their hunting-snail demonstrates their creativity and sense of humour.
• High hero epics are, first and foremost, an opportunity to emphasize what a pre-literate setting can be like: you can emphasize the physical endurance and prodigious memory a storyteller must have to recite a high hero epic, which reflects what is needed of a storyteller in general. A chanter's success or failure when trying to recite one can say something about their respective skill. The genre's history, too, reveals something about the relationship between giants and smallfolk in the setting, while the recent changes in the hero epic's subject matter–from giant to mortal, from individual to group–can create a sense that things are changing in Planegea, as the balance of power starts to shift. And that's not even getting into the actual content of the epics, which you can customize to your table's needs at the moment.

Here's how I put it in further discussion on the Discord:

A good fantasy-setting genre or poetic form ought to be a three-fold lore-delivery system: 1. its origins are rooted in something specific about the setting; 2. the contents of the example your players encounter could include information the GM wants the players to have; and 3. the way it is adopted and adapted in different contexts/cultures communicates something about those cultures.

This is the heart of it: a story is never just about the subject of the particular story. Stories have stories of their own. They have histories. And the teller has a reason to tell it, which might be different from the reason its first teller had. All these different points are opportunities to tell your players something about the people they encounter or the world they're in. The next entry in this series will start identifying these opportunities.

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#Planegea #for GMs #made-up literature