We were driving along a multi-lane highway, headed home late one afternoon in light traffic, when I saw something I’d not noticed before. Someone had taken that black patching tar that is used to fill cracks in pavement to prevent them from worsening, and in letters perhaps three and a half feet tall had written BOB squarely in the middle of our traffic lane. It was quite clear, quite apparent, and did not look at all random. I cannot help but think that some road worker had a free moment and decided to write his name on the road with the road tar. I suspect it will be there for some time to come.
It will not last so long as some, however.
Some decades ago I was a scout leader, and before that a scout; and our particular troop did a great deal of canoeing. Along the Delaware River there is a rather notorious stretch of water known as Foul Rift; the earth rises in cliff faces on either side. On the Pennsylvania side there is a bit of a still place against the wall, a sort of backwater eddy in which one can for a moment rest if desired; and on this cliff face are scrawled in various media names of many forgotten people. One of them is said to have been one of General George Washington’s scouts. I do not know if that is the oldest there; but I suspect there are older examples of names left in odd places. The genesis of cave paintings is a matter of speculation, yet it does seem that our perhaps preliterate ancestors were responding to that universal urge in mankind to leave something behind that tells the world we were here; or in the case of headstones and memorials, we tell the world that someone was here about whom we cared.
It is not merely our names that we leave behind. World War II soldiers were fond of a picture of a large nose, a couple of eyes, and a pair of hands hanging over a wall above the words Kilroy was here. In the sixties, words worth remembering as the story is again revived appeared in major U.S. cities: Frodo lives. Poems and limericks, bawdy jokes, intellectual gags, and amateur artwork decorate walls and railcars, bathrooms and mountainsides, ancient edifices and modern sidewalks. It is so ubiquitous that Stephen Wright was able to know he was not the first child before he was born, or so he says, by the graffiti on the wall of the womb. There is, far from here, a plaque which in some ways is the pinnacle of the expression of our inherent need to scratch our names on the walls of the places we’ve been. In part it reads, We came in peace for all mankind, and adorns the side of a piece of scrap metal which was once the landing gear of a lunar module, still resting on the moon. We traveled to another planet, and wrote our names in the dust so it would be known to those who followed that we were there.
The application seems almost as obvious as handwriting on the wall. One wants to ask why this delinquent effacement of every unprotected surface in the world isn’t echoed in our games. It seems that nothing is ever written on the walls of the dungeons, spaceships, mines, caverns, castles, tunnels, control centers, barrooms, and anything else we explore unless it has some terrible significance. Why don’t we ever carefully translate an inscription, only to discover that it says Pieter of Bordland was here on the Third day of the Third month of the Fourth Year of King Pelham of Nocturne–or something even less enlightening, like Immanuel Kant, but James Cann? How many bawdy limericks have you read on the walls of out-of-the-way places? How many have your characters read? How many names were written on or carved into the tops of school desks you’ve used? How many have you placed on the furnishings in your imagined worlds?
I once wrote that if the only tapestry in the castle is the one that hides the secret door, it’s a bit obvious; but if there are tapestries on every wall, players will stop looking. It seems to apply equally here. Of course if there’s an inscription on the wall, and there are never inscriptions on any walls, the players are going to take note of it. But if they are accustomed to the idea that other adventurers are going to have marked up the walls with their own identifiers, they may well give little attention to yet another bit of writing on the wall. They might even add their own, if the mood takes them. If it’s important, you can give it greater attention–use a brass plaque, or fix a light on it. But in many cases we give too much attention to things that should be overlooked, merely because we’ve failed to make them seem as ordinary as they are. A single sheet of paper on a desk is going to be noticed; a desk covered with papers one of which is important is likely to be overlooked. Graffiti on every wall will make all such graffiti seem ordinary, and allow you to slip a few bits in here and there that do matter without making them seem overly important.
In the recesses of my mind I remember one party of adventures whose games I ran who ordered custom-made metal plaques identifying themselves, and proceeded to mount these in the out-of-the-way places they’d visited. At the time I recognized the possibility that someone reading them might, for good or ill, seek out the group. In retrospect, it strikes me that I didn’t think of including similar Kilroys from other adventurers for them to find along the way.
I did, however, include a plague on one door deep in a dungeon maze, in an ancient dialect few could read, prominently displayed in their only path forward. After much difficulty, the characters managed to decipher the ancient script and gain the esoteric knowledge it concealed. Whether they considered the possible ramifications of the message I cannot say; perhaps it told them more about the place they were exploring than I realized. Yet it seemed the right words at the time. It read, Employees Only Beyond This Point.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
