During the first year of our marriage, my wife announced that she had made a discovery that had eluded historians and archaeologists for centuries going on millennia. She had identified the material that had been used to construct the pyramids of Egypt, such that they had withstood centuries of wear and weathering and still existed perhaps four or five thousand years after they were originally built. This marvelous substance which defied all efforts to dissolve or destroy it, she asserted, was dried corn grits.
Obviously, that’s one of those jokes that has a serious aspect. She, born and bred of people whose families had lived in the Philadelphia area suburbs of New Jersey since colonial days, had never eaten the hot cereal which I, son of a southern gentleman whose father (that is, my grandfather) was a Mississippi banker and cotton landlord and who (that is, my father) graduated from Georgia Tech, had come thoroughly to enjoy in my youth, and having attempted to prepare this for me for the first time was daunted by the effort it took to clean the pot when we were finished–and she, raised on Maypo™-brand oatmeal and farina, was never much impressed with the food so prepared. I suppose that there is something in each of us that asks whether the meal we might prepare is worth the trouble, and in this case she concluded it was not. Since then, my grits have been of the Quaker™ instant (just add hot water) variety. Yet this same designation, that of which the pyramids were built, has since been given to overcooked scrambled eggs, burnt hash brown potatoes, and several other substances which clung to the pots and pans like Juliet to Romeo when we attempted to part them.
Yet one day I might just design a world in which the locals are building huge monuments out of corn grits or flour paste or oatmeal, which for some reason stand the test of time.
That thought causes my mind to wander over to NagaWorld, E. R. Jones’ quirky alien world published in Multiverser: The First Book of Worlds which is the usual starting point for most versers, that is, Multiverser player characters. It’s not the glass city that draws me there, nor the pleasant monotone singing of the nagas themselves. It’s the orange tangerine-scented Astroturf™-like grass. More specifically, it’s what happened when I, as a player character, started experimenting with the grass. I had found an electric generator driven by a gasoline powered engine, and I believed that I could adjust the carburetor to run on alcohol–if I could make alcohol. I knew that the grass tasted sweet and was edible and at least nominally nutritious, so it must contain sugar. I knew that in our world, yeast spores were so prevalent that unleavened bread was not considered kosher for Passover if it the dough had been exposed to the air for more than fifteen minutes before baking. Those spores must have been in my hair, my clothes, everywhere. I had water, and a few tools, and so I mashed up the grass, attempted to contaminate it with yeast, and hastened to ferment and distil it into fuel. It all worked, and I had electricity.
I had something else, too, though. There was a black goop in the bottom of my pot, the residue from the grass. This I scraped out and dumped on the ground, needing to make another batch of alcohol sooner rather than later (and trying to keep my fermentation process active so I wouldn’t find myself without yeast). Yet I kept an eye on the stuff, and I noticed that it dried or solidified into something hard and resilient, something between plastic and steel, yet harder than either without becoming brittle. I began to make things of this–larger fermentation and distillation tanks first of all, tools to cut grass, tools to work with my new building material, defensive walls around our camp, looms and spinning wheels and pottery furnaces and paper screens and a water tower and I’ve forgotten all I made as I built a city of it all. You really could have built the pyramids of this stuff, and they would have stood for thousands of years. I know. I built Umak Tek.
Looking back, though, I have always wondered whether E. R. Jones always had that in mind when he created that world, or whether he devised it on the fly to see what I would do with it. He never gave the slightest hint that it had not always been in his design; yet in half a decade of running that world, he had never had a player attempt to do anything like that. As I was helping put the world to paper in the years that followed, it was evident that there were some secrets to it which had been part of it from the beginning, which I had been first to uncover; some which were still undiscovered by any player; and some which were known to me because other players had done things before or after me. Yet whatever I attempted, he always provided results without ever hinting that this was not something that had always been in his mind, part of the world from the beginning. I managed to make a flammable Sterno-like fuel which I hoped I would be able to use for our truck’s diesel engine, and to create glass which was psionically active as so many of the objects we’d found in the glass city had proven to be. I still don’t know what things were his improvisation of the moment and what things were my pioneering discoveries.
Perhaps that doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s sufficient that the world came together, a bit at a time, and always felt as if it was of one piece, even when there were disjointed aspects. It’s that poker face, that ability to roll with the punches, to make it seem as if everything was set in stone forever even when it wasn’t there until the player asked the question that inspired it. I remember when I was playtesting The Dancing Princess with Chris Jones, he asked what was on the mantle above the fireplace in the princesses’ room. My notes on that room at that time said only that it was fully furnished sufficiently for three girls, and that there was a throw rug on the floor in the middle. It had been a spur of the moment decision that there even was a fireplace there (as opposed to a brazier), and I tossed knickknacks on the mantle because I’ve never seen one that wasn’t so accoutered. I named several items, including three silver goblets engraved with the names of the princesses. These he took, thinking they would be a nice memento of his soon to be ended visit (the princesses had vanished, he had no clue where they were, and the guards were chasing him as he had escaped their efforts to execute him). Those cups became a significant object in the stories ahead, and wound up in the published version of that world.
They also became the inspiration for a game tip I wrote some years back: make it seem as if the world is fully formed; answer the players’ questions as if you have always known the answer to that one and were just waiting for them to ask. Nothing really exists until you say it, not even the pyramids of Egypt even if they were made of plastic steel. Yet once you have said it, it should be as if it had always been there.
It might be different for me. After all, so many of the worlds I run are worlds I’m still writing, and by playing them I discover what I need to include or add or remove to make them work effectively. That was what I was doing with Chris in Princess, and may well be what was happening with NagaWorld when I was a player within it. Yet even the most complete published worlds and modules have a few holes in them, if you’re in the wrong place. Patching those holes is one of the key tasks of the referee, and one of the reasons our games don’t do as well when modeled by computers. Patch the holes; do it as if they had never been there.
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.
