Animist Perspectivism in Roleplaying Games
At their root, roleplaying games operate on a divisive, labeling model of reality. Worlds are parsed into categories that can be used to balance their mechanical expressions. The good ones have embedded in them the notion that the rules can and should be thrown away under certain conditions. Communication is one of the places where this not only should happen, but must. When applied to language, the power of game mechanics to isolate abilities into categories spirals into useless fractal geometries of skill-trees and specializations in obscure dialects. There are games where that’s awesome. Dungeons and Dragons is not one of them. Fifth Edition provides a fairly restrictive set of language options for the sake of game play, but role playing demands a deeper, more palpable world. The presence of ancient languages, or even antiquated, or extinct forms of Common, Elvish, or Dwarvish is a start, with dreams of racial and regional dialects promising that most useful source of conflict in history and myth: miscommunication.
Reintroducing miscommunication into the game is implied by spells like Divination, Contact Other Plane, or most deliciously of all, a poorly worded Wish. There’s a place in the role of the Dungeon Master for using selective confusion as a tool to tantalize the explorers, fascinate the interactors, and raise either the paranoia or the hackles of the fightclub. Where things can become truly fantastic is with the application of hallucinatory environments, poisons, or illusions, to say nothing of any time your adventurers might spend in a place like Limbo, or deep in the wrong side of the Feywild. When reaching for the character of the creatures encountered in such locales, the story calls for a somewhat more radical departure from linear modes of communication like conversational speech. This is where we can borrow notions from animism and perspectivism to inhabit a place of otherness from which a storyteller can convey the experiences and world views of creatures far beyond ordinary human experience. To bring the fantasy to life.
The term perspectivism was coined by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to describe the far more ancient notion that any information one encounters is subject to, and limited by one’s perspective. For the purpose of inhabiting alien modes of being, we’ll be inverting that notion by examining a situation or scene from different points of view than or own. Arguably this can and should be applied to any NPC your players are interacting with, but is even more important when portraying something as deeply ‘other’ as a seven millennia old dragon, or as fleeting as the insights of a fresh bloomed flower. Animism is the notion that every animal, object, place, even ideas or stories are persons, that they have a perspective, a way of moving through the world. Arguably any animal with a Wisdom score has some agency, identity and thus at least some measure of personhood. Or expressed more mechanistically, any creature with a Wisdom score can make Perception checks and therefore has a perspective. A sword carried, or a farm lived in by ten generations, that has a name, of which legends are passed down is more than just an object, or a place. When players use spells to interact with these beings, from Speak with Animals to Object Reading, there is no reason for the answers to be stated in plain, clear human words.
Breaking down communication even further, we come to question words themselves as necessary carriers of symbolic information. From cries, cheeps and growls of excitement or alarm, to a stick-insect trying its damnedest to say ‘stick’ to a bird’s brain more loudly than it says ‘insect’ to the bird’s belly, the whole forest is speaking. This immeasurably broader world of communication comes alive in the work of anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, who’s concept of sylvan thinking provides the perfect ground for leveraging perspectivism and animism to bring the magic of roleplaying games to life. The meaninglessness of sylvan thoughts to humans is an artifact of our perspective, the assumptions of language, culture, society and history, those funhouse mirrors that make garden soil ‘dirty’ and nuclear power ‘clean’. To climb inside of another creature’s skin, all you need to do is let your self shift into the place from which it labels the world, the locus from which it finds meaning. When roleplaying that creature, remember their locus of the meaning is their locus of personhood. Where Kohn might use the example of a jaguar, we shall turn to a more D&D specific apex predator, The Illithid.
The Illithid ‘word’ for humanoid-brain would almost certainly translate etymologically as ‘food’. To an Illithid, a humanoid is not a person, it’s meat. Mindflayers survey their slave pits with the same self satisfied sense of accomplishment that farmers a few thousand meters overhead would survey market-ready hogs wrangling for position at a trough. An attack by adventurers is one of the dangers of allowing such savage animals to run free. Illithid levels of racism, while a wonderful narrative mirror for most modern societies, is the kind of warped perspective that, historically speaking, humans are perfectly capable of, but is far enough from most humans’ thoughts to be a jumping off point into weirder territory. The most significant difference when imagining the world from the Illithid point of view is their use of telepathy.
Telepathic contact is the most rudimentary of abnormal sensory experiences. It seems unlikely that telepathic language structures would rely on something as nebulous and ephemeral as a ‘word’ to contain symbolic meaning. With an Illithid’s ability to transmit thought, elaborate arrays of interconnected feelings swirl violently into an image of blood on teeth, fragmentary memories of pain. A childhood injury, but expressed through the experiences of the receiver mapped over the message of the transmitter. Some telepathy may seek unity, but Illithid leverage their power to crush and control, meaning what they send out is more likely to project as intricate tapestries of empty labels and emotional cocktails for the receiving mind to struggle with, ultimately filtering it all through their own perspective. A cunning Dungeon Master can wrap the intent of such a creature around imagery drawn from the target character’s backstory, pulling both the character and it’s player deeper into the fabric of the story. When encountering such a terrifying, alien presence, the more of that fear-experience bleeds through into the players, the more real and evocative a dungeon master’s imagery becomes.
Not all cultural lenses are so twisted, however, most forms of telepathic contact can and should play out in less invasive and hostile ways. Most telepathic experiences character’s have are fairly ordinary in the mythical sense, spirit voices, demands from gods, illusions and the like. Every character is likely to interact with each of these types of experiences in a different way, much as hearing voices would result in shamanic training in some cultures, exorcism in others, or medication and even imprisonment in the most barbaric societies. Cultural values taint perspective. Gaining enough perspective on oneself to see the lenses warping one’s own point of view is one of the greatest gifts roleplaying games can give.
At its most simple this kind of otherness can make the more mundane elements of the game bloom as well. The quiet murmurings of a warlock’s patron, half forgotten spells and vicious secrets, seeming to grow up from the hiss of wind through leaves. A Paladin feels the hand of her god upon her shoulder as she prays before rushing into battle, the thrum of angelic hymns echoic silently through her bones. Everything flashes to white with a mind crushing shock, as a wizard’s familiar winks out in his thoughts. Telepathic experiences should always be highlighted in some way, through the use of sensory miscommunication. Calling sounds silent, leveraging pressure without touch, blinding light that’s invisible, a skillful dungeon master ensures the otherness of the narrative experience is enough to transport the players and elevate the experience of the game.
When the beings in question become truly alien, however, there is a delightful point beyond which simple labeling language completely collapses. This is where the only option left is to invoke the high strange. Synesthesia, deliberately warped metaphors and even the use of something like a screen memory can drag an audience towards understanding a deeply alien being’s motivations.
Synesthetic imagery is as simple as cross wired sensory language, like a wet, dim light that rushes in, flooding your chest with suffocating fear; Or a the sound of rainbows laughing, sweet tinkling spatterings of giggles that run together down the side walk to beaming puddles; Or darkness that stretches out so far and fast it draws you with it, spreading you across that infinity of inky nothingness so thin you shred. Synesthetic imagery leverages mislabeling to transmute a recognizable experience into a strange one, a shift in perspective.
Warping metaphors operates on the same principle: She is the sun, whose darkness damns your final rasping breath to loneliness. A mountain of man rumbled towards us from the horizon, though as he came closer, his height was unchanged, leaving him just tall enough to look you in the eye if he stood on a molehill. Unexpected meaning forces an audience to think for a moment, from which they typically either leap to an hilarious conclusion, or shift their perspective to work out where the spirit, or insect intelligence, or psychic monstrocity is coming from.
‘Screen memory’ is a term that refers to imagery drawn up from a subject’s memories to overwrite traumatic sensory stimuli. This kind of imagery needs to be something the players can understand, not just their characters. The whole group must be able to have more or less the same conception of what the dungeon master is describing, so as to juxtapose their human understanding with the alien one. For example: The asteroid-nests of space-based telepathic insects are being knocked out of orbit by the miles long corpse of a star dragon that’s been sucked into a planet’s gravity. When the insects come to defend the nests and the players manage to hold off on attacking long enough to attempt communication, they all experience a single startling shock of pain. Together the characters experience a wasp climbing into their beehive, it’s stinger wet with the blood of countless guards. The wasp lumbers forwards, ripping open the nursery cells of larva, slaughtering the infants within. The bees inside the hive swarm, piling atop the wasp and stinging it again and again until it dies and the remaining larva are safe. The players are, of course, the bees swarming, the wasp the vast ultra-dracolich still barrelling towards the planet, scattering everything in its path, asteroid-eggs and all.
Beyond even the most tangentially related visions cobbled together from the collective subscious of player character childhoods, there is the insane, sublime and typically annoying non-sense of anti-communication. Beings whose communications cannot fit inside of human(oid) thoughts, may come across as a pulsing thrumming that ripples reality, imparting disjointed information alongside precognitive visions, or an intermittent ringing in the ears, buzzing secrets in a tiny, mosquito voice. The simplest manifestation of this is babbling, or with a slightly more focused set of chaotic noise a glossolalia that almost implies meaning. The most accessible example of this kind of near-sensical imagery is J.J. Abrams’ show Lost, which uses cryptic nonsense as a kind of structural, breadcrumb-cryptoglossa to draw the audience deeper and deeper into an illusory web of meaning.
No matter how far down the rabbit hole surrealist narration spins, it’s important to maintain a solid baseline of coherent information upon which the group’s collective understanding of what’s happening in the game world can rest. While the mechanics are a passable bedrock, a thread of meaning, a pinch of rationale, or a splash of logic is necessary to anchor madness addled minds to the shared reality of the story. Going gonzo with descriptions works best once the players have a sense of the ‘ordinary’ version of the world their character’s inhabit. There also needs to be a place for the characters to arrive at again, hopefully with a new point of view on the ‘ordinary’ elements of their world, ideally with at least some of their alien experiences remaining at least a little weird and confusing. Ultimately the story is the only thing that really needs to survive a brush with the incomprehensible intact. The characters, their worlds, and even their players can be changed, with the story there to support them.