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Dungeonmastery as Soulcraft

Ben Dyer

My friend is adamant: second edition Dungeons & Dragons is the best edition of the game. I’m rather agnostic about editions, but when I asked him why he wasn’t, his answer was interesting. “It’s because they published more material for second edition than for any other edition before or since.” I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds plausible. Second edition was when something important about D&D changed. Monte Cook summarized it when he said that “worldbuilding became more important than adventure design.”¹ Where earlier editions published adventures that delved into dark and dangerous dungeons, second edition publications filled in worlds around them as D&D gained popularity.

It’s no accident that D&D grew in this way. Fantasy role-playing drew from a narrower collection of literary sources than are available today, and though the shade of Gary Gygax may haunt me for it, I’m going to suggest in spite of him that the most important of these were the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. But not for the reason you may suspect. It’s true that elves, dwarves, wizards, dragons, magic, and many other characteristic features of modern fantasy were given their contemporary forms in Tolkien’s work. Gygax and Dave Arneson drew from the work of many authors, including Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, and others. These sources, together with history and mythology, were significant in the development of D&D. But it was Tolkien’s commitment to building a coherent secondary world that was his greatest influence on aspiring Dungeon Masters, and as D&D grew, so too did the tools necessary to build the world beyond the dungeon. Dungeon Masters may or may not make use of familiar fantasy elements whose beginnings lay with Tolkien, but they must always put their players in a world. Dark Sun, Eberron, and the Planar City of Sigil little resemble the history, languages, lands, peoples, and places of Middle Earth, but they follow Tolkien’s practice of creating a world in which all these elements are meant to fit together. Many of us have nigh-encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkien’s world. (Some of us even speak the language.) But have you ever learned what Tolkien had to say about world-building?

The Essence of Fantasy

In 1939 Tolkien delivered a lecture that was later published as the essay, “On Fairy-Stories.” In it, he describes the essential character of fantasy. To get at that essence, Tolkien first sets aside features that are incidental. Although we first learn these stories in childhood, fantasy stories are not simply children’s stories. Although they frequently feature intelligent talking animals, they are not what Tolkien called, “beast-fables.” Although they often include great journeys, fantasy stories are not simply travel narratives. All of these kinds of stories have been told without reference to anything “fantastic.” Planet of the Apes and Star Trek are both fascinating, but they aren’t fantasy as Tolkien understands it.

No, fantasy is something that happens when we are taken out of this world and into another by a special kind of enchantment: the adjective. Relative to the invention of the adjective, Tolkien writes, “no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent.” What makes adjectives so special? Tolkien explains that:

When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power…we may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm.²

The first part of fantasy, then, is the human capacity to separate the qualities of things (redness, sharpness, hotness, etc.) from the things in which they appear, and to imagine them in other things that do not have them. However, imaginative reconstruction is not itself fantasy. For the capacity to imaginatively imbue the cold worm’s belly with hot fire (or acid, or frost, or other chromatic dragon powers) is not by itself sufficient to bring us away into Faerie or Feywild. These realms require more than imagination. They require what Tolkien calls “the inner consistency of reality.”

Inner consistency allows a “secondary world” to command “secondary belief,” and us to enter in by the enchantment of the storyteller’s craft. This consistency in craft is well known to Tolkien’s readers, and it is the Everest for many a DM because it is difficult to achieve. After all, what would it be like to live in a world of long-lived elder races? What is commerce and technology like in a world where magic is plentiful? And what are the ecological requirements of a huge dragon living in the depths of a dungeon whose only entrance is sized for ordinary human passage? When inner consistency fails, we are jarred out of that other world. However, when we do achieve it, “Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.”³

This idea of sub-creation is fundamental to Tolkien’s conception of fantasy, but it’s a strange compound term. Typically we now describe writers as “creators” or “creative,” not “sub-creators” or “sub-creative,” but Tolkien’s terms do not demean his craft. As a sincere Catholic, Tolkien believed that the creative impulse was not itself original to the human condition, but was an inheritance of the Divine image present in all human beings. To be made in the image of God was to be made in the resemblance of a creator, and therefore to inherit the creative impulse. As Tolkien says, “we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”⁴ So, we are sub-creators because we imitate our own creator, and because we create within an existing created order. Imagining a deadly green upon a man’s face is not, as it happens, quite the same thing as imagining green itself as an original creative act. One is well within our creative powers, the other is not.

Sub-creation then is the essence of fantasy for Tolkien. It is our inheritance as special creatures of God endowed with his image, and it is made possible by our care in crafting a secondary world with inner consistency sufficient to bring our readers or players into it. This is surely a great power, and Tolkien reminds us that though it can be put to evil uses, “of what human thing in this fallen world is that not true? Men have conceived not only of elves, but they have imagined gods, and worshipped them, even worshipped those most deformed by their authors’ own evil.”⁵ He continues by reminding us that humans have even worshipped their own materials by offering human sacrifice to idols of money, science, and social and economic theories. Tolkien allows that our fantasy worlds may be filled with evil and darkness, but he reminds us that it was we who made them so. It is not essential to being a fantastic world that it be dark and evil as well. In fact, Tolkien’s fellow-Catholic and near-contemporary G.K. Chesterton reminds us that the opposite is more typically true.

The Magic of Morality

“The Ethics of Elfland” is the aptly titled fourth chapter of G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy, and in it he writes: “My first and last philosophy, that which I believe with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery.”⁶ Fairy tales seemed to Chesterton “entirely reasonable things” because they respect principles of necessity (for example, that 2 + 2 = 4, or that sons are younger than their fathers), but recognize that all else could possibly have been different. This latter possibility is what philosophers call “contingency.” Notice that Tolkien’s enchanting adjectives are about the contingent things in the world, while his requirement of internal consistency is about respecting matters of necessity. What Chesterton adds is the insight that fairy tales are not just descriptions of alternate flora, fauna, peoples, and places. That much might be achieved by stories of alternate history or alien worlds. No, fairy tales contain something more than that. They contain magic.

Chesterton approaches this quality of faerie by introducing his readers to what he calls, the “Doctrine of Conditional Joy.” In fairy tales, all joy and happiness, all ruin and suffering, turn on an “if.” He explains that:

In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A lamp is lit, and love flies away. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.⁷

That first sentence is where we learn about what magic is. The incomprehensible condition is a hidden connection between apparently unrelated things. Why does forgetting a word destroy a city? Why does lighting a lamp extinguish love? These things are unrelated in our world, but in fairy tales things turned out differently. Although the connection is mysterious, it is no less lawful and binding than the laws that govern the rest of the universe. That’s what magic is, the hidden connection between apparently unrelated things.

This conception of magic comes to us from the Renaissance, when magic was regarded as a branch of natural philosophy. Renaissance natural philosophers sought to manipulate “occult qualities” that were naturally present in the world. Although modern usage has associated the word “occult” with supernatural phenomena, the original Latin definition simply means “hidden.” Occult qualities then were contrasted against the manifest qualities of things perceived by our five senses. Magnetism was thought to be an occult quality, as was gravity, and any other mysterious correlation between two apparently unrelated things. The Moon, for example, had manifest qualities such as being bright, white, and round, but it was in virtue of some hidden quality that it influenced the tides. Both manifest and occult properties were part of nature, and just as one might manipulate the manifest properties of a thing (its color, shape, temperature, and so on), so too might one manipulate something through its occult properties. If this conception of magic seems familiar, it should. It’s the reason wizards require material components to cast spells.

Many D&D campaigns treat magic as a kind of alternate science, but in fairy tales there is more to it than that. Chesterton’s examples include Pandora’s Box and the Garden of Eden, after all. In fairy tales, the incomprehensible conditions of faerie magic are typically moral. Cinderella receives a coach and a wardrobe upgrade, but they come with a curfew. Faerie magic can make men into frogs, but faeries are, Chesterton says, “slaves of duty.” The essential fabric of the land of faerie is morally significant because its conditional joy – its magic – is as fundamental to it as are the empirical facts about its winding rivers and ancient groves. In fact, morality is even more fundamental to the fairy tale because, like principles of necessity, fairy tale morality exists here in our world as well. In fairy tales, we learn from Sleeping Beauty how “the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death may be softened to a sleep.”⁸ From Cinderella we learn that humility is praiseworthy, from Beauty and the Beast that lovable things must first be loved, and from the Frog Prince that promises must be kept. Accordingly, faerie lands are not simply internally consistent alternate realities. They are certainly that, but they are also magical realms whose hidden principles make joy and happiness conditional on our good behavior.

The Consolation of Fantasy

The notion that fantasy has morality in its DNA may leave some readers squirming and other readers skeptical. Conan, Elric, the Black Company, and nearly the whole of Westeros are quite amoral, but they are clearly within canon of fantasy literature. Are these characters not examples of an adult art form that leaves behind the black and white moralizing of the nursery? Seriously, when was the last time anyone started character creation by choosing an alignment? Morality tales are perhaps useful for the moral formation of children, but fantasy has grown up since Tolkien first gave his talk on fairy stories.

Except that it hasn’t. Or to be more precise, Tolkien understood fantasy as something already fully grown. Fantasy succeeds when it transports us to an imaginary land, and we escape the grayer parts of our own for a little while. Escapism is frequently described negatively (especially in relation to fantasy role-playing), but Tolkien reminds us that there are nobler escapisms. Beyond the desire to be free of traffic noise or workplace drudgery, there is also the desire to escape injustice, pain, sorrow, and, greater than these, death. This last is the most ancient desire for escape, and it is in that desire that the literary value of fantasy is born. Fairy tales are replete with deathless beings, narrow escapes from certain doom, and the eternal joy implicit in the phrase, “happily ever after.”

Tolkien writes that the “consolation of the happy ending” is necessary to the fairy story because its literary function is the opposite of tragedy. This opposition may seem strange to students of literature. Literary scholars typically identify comedy as tragedy’s opposite because comedy inverts the structure of tragedy. In a tragedy, a good and noble person (a Danish prince or a Scottish king, say) is brought low as the result of a tragic flaw in their character. Comedy inverts this outcome by exalting a foolish or unworthy person (a sarcastic bachelor who vows never to marry or a worldly gravedigger, say) in spite of his or her flaws. Tolkien’s insight about how fantasy works is that it functionally resembles tragedy, but that it succeeds as fantasy when it subverts the tragic end without breaking the internal principles of the story. Tragic heroes (and the best player-characters) are noble, flawed, and might be destroyed by choices consistent with their character, except that the story subverts this outcome with the consolation of the happy ending. The opposition to tragedy is not the inversion of the protagonist’s nobility but the unexpected consolation of the protagonist’s outcome.

Tolkien’s term for this consolation is “eucatastrophe,” which describes “the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’” of the happy ending. D&D players know it as the natural twenty (or the villain’s critical failure) in the last encounter. Grown readers may feel an urge to dismiss such sudden turns as naive or convenient, but what Tolkien has in mind is neither of those things.

It is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure … it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.⁹

Eucatastrophe is not a happy ending brought about by contrivance, for that would violate the fantasy world’s internal consistency. Nor is eucatastrophe the happy ending made possible by sanitizing the fantasy world of danger or evil, for doing so would undermine the value and poignancy of the sudden turn. In fact, Tolkien sees the literary value of fantasy as dependent on not cheating the reader of that value.

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.¹⁰

Eucatastrophe – the consolation of the fairy tale in its highest or most complete form – is only possible when it actually is a consolation. That is, it is only possible when goodness is requited and evil is thwarted. That Frodo’s will is finally broken by the power of the ring at the precipice of Mount Doom is a mark of Tolkien’s commitment to consistency, but it is Gollum’s fall that is the story’s miraculous grace. Sauron is destroyed at just the moment when his last stroke would have destroyed Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Pippin, and the remaining strength of Gondor and Rohan. Suddenly, at the moment when destruction seems most certain, the monstrous army streaming from the Black Gate falls into disarray, and the eagles bear Frodo and Sam away from the destruction of Mount Doom. The sudden turn from tragedy to joy is complete, and Lord of the Rings is elevated as a work of literary fantasy for the ages.

Worldbuilding as Moral Expression

Now back to the table. Ancient creation epics are about the formation of the world and the filling of it with creatures who call it home. Similarly, Dungeon Masters create planes, worlds, regions, cities, and dungeons. These are filled with NPCs to aid, complicate, and oppose the characters’ journey through them. Running through all of these is magic, which beats at the heart of the world of fantasy. It runs through veins of mithril and lifts monstrous dragons on mighty wings. With each choice, the development of a fantasy world (and subsequent campaign) reveals something about the mind of the DM who creates it. When the DM brings dragons to life with an initiative roll, when he lays empires low with a powerful artifact, or when he ends an age with the death of an arch-lich, he enchants his players with adjectives, and they escape into his world if he has been careful and consistent in thought and description. All this is already well known to most DMs, but less well known is that DMs also communicate their moral assumptions to their players in the nature and action of their world as well.

What does success look like? Under what conditions do people flourish? What is the basis of joy? What is best in life? Okay, granted, most D&D players answer that last question with a rote barbaric catechism, but who really thinks the right answer is crushing our enemies, seeing them driven before us, and hearing the lamentation of their women? DMs don’t just write the physical parameters of the world, they write its story as well. They turn the wheel of fortune and preside over the fates of their world’s inhabitants. What they write tells us something about their moral assumptions. The DM cannot say of the death of a noble character or the final victory of an evil character that he was constrained by the bounds of realism when it was that same DM who established the bounds of the real in the fantasy world in the first place. Remember that fantasy succeeds when it satisfies the desire to escape into a different kind of world, but Chesterton’s Doctrine of Conditional Joy and Tolkien’s concept of eucatastrophe remind us that, at its heart, fantasy is about satisfying the desire to escape sorrow, injustice, and death, not the cultural or technological trappings of everyday life. In a very real sense then, to the extent that DMs build and campaign in fantasy worlds, their sub-creation expresses moral assumptions according to the principles at work (hidden or manifest) in those worlds.

Players express moral assumptions on the scale of the individual character as well. When players build characters, they imagine a being with a particular moral outlook (an alignment). Motivated and directed by that alignment, that character then makes morally significant decisions during the course of the game. Players expect that on some level their characters are worthy of success, whether or not they succeed in looting the room or beating the villain in the final encounter. So, building a character is in essence expressing assumptions about what is worth rewarding in life. This does not imply that only paladins are permissible character choices. Robin Hood is certainly not overly obsessed with obedience to law, and within certain constraints, heist movies and thief fiction (for example, Scott Lynch’s excellent Gentleman Bastards books) present us with credible heroes who exhibit personal virtues, if not wholly social ones. Imagine for contrast the player who felt the poignant joy Tolkien describes above (the catching breath, the beating heart, and the keen tears of joy) as his evil-aligned character burned down an orphanage and tortured small children for the sheer (and literal) hell of it. Such actions would make the character morally repugnant, and because of what a character is, they would make the player who idealizes them so as well.

Thus, at the table, players and DM together sub-create worlds and the characters who inhabit them. They express their moral assumptions to one another in the choices that both players and DM make at the table. Justice, generosity, compassion, loyalty, hatred, greed, selfishness, and the whole panoply of human experience are woven into the story (and the deep structure) of any fantasy world. Whatever great deeds the characters accomplish and whatever rewards or punishments follow from the contingent principles (manifest or hidden) that govern the world consistently, the sub-creative choices made by the gaming group as an ensemble is as formative to their shared world – to their fantasy ideal – as any song of creation.

Missed Opportunities

With all this talk of moral expression and sub-creation at the game table, there is a footnote in the history of D&D that should not go unmarked. In the 1980s, a little before D&D’s second edition went into development, media reports linking D&D to teen suicides began emerging. 60 Minutes ran a segment about it as concern grew among parents and educators. Religious groups became concerned that children were being exposed to (or worse, were participating in) witchcraft and Satanism. There was a kind of irony in this because some of D&D’s most influential creators – Gary Gygax and Tracy Hickman – were themselves people of faith. Perhaps the high water mark of the “D&D scare” among the faithful was the “Dark Dungeons” tract published by Jack Chick, which depicted an inevitable descent into Satanism and suicide for innocent souls ensnared by D&D.

Thankfully, people eventually noticed that millions of kids were playing D&D without descending into Satanism and suicide, and studies showed that suicide rates among gamers were actually lower than the national average. Panic among parents and educators eventually subsided, and Dungeons & Dragons joined comic books, heavy metal, and Socrates in the list of those unjustly accused of corrupting the young.

This last association with Socrates (and philosophy by extension) is perhaps the most informative parallel, because philosophy furnishes a set of tools with which to think about the way the world is, and the way it might be. It interrogates our moral intuitions and offers us the same question we answer in our sub-created characters. How is it best to live, and what kind of life is worthy of success? Philosophy helps us answer these questions in our world, and in any world to which we might escape as sub-creators. We may have good or bad answers in any of these. Thus, it is an unfortunate irony that the parents and educators so deeply concerned over the influence of Dungeons & Dragons failed to see that its sources in fairy tales merely furnished them with an alternative presentation for materials that had been used for centuries to teach morality to children. Perhaps we can forgive them to the extent that fairy tales do not typically invite us to play in them. The invitation to do so is a heady liberty after all, and liberties imply corollary responsibilities that children could be unprepared for if left to their own devices. Still, to the extent that Dungeons & Dragons allows us to build worlds and collectively escape into them for a little while, Tolkien and Chesterton remind us that if these are fantasy worlds in the truest sense, we are likely to return from them better than when we left.

Notes

1. Monte Cook, Uniting the Editions: Part 1 (Jan. 30, 2012). Available at http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20120130. Accessed Jan. 21, 2014.

2. J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in A Tolkien Miscellany (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), pp. 108–109.

3. Ibid., p. 109.

4. Ibid., p. 128.

5. Ibid.

6. G.K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland,” in Orthodoxy (1st pub. 1908; New York: Doubleday, 2001), p. 46.

7. Ibid., p. 53.

8. Ibid., p. 47.

9. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” pp. 135–136.

10. Ibid., p. 136.