Myth, Magic, and the Logic of Dreams
I was listening to the Dead Letters podcast newest episode about Mythic Bastionland. I tend to disagree with them about most things, but I find that this provokes me to think about why, which is often fruitful, so I'm glad the show exists.
There's a claim they (specifically Misha) made about MB's approach to the mythic and the sublime, which I will quote a bit of. First, from their Veins of the Earth episode:
MISHA: I have a chip on my shoulder about the concept of the sublime. This book is full of the sublime. And I'm going to define "the sublime" here because I think different people use it differently. To me... the sublime is elements of the world, elements of, like, fiction, which appear tantalizingly beyond comprehension.
The sublime is always tantalizing. You always want to understand the sublime... And, like, it's compelling to see, but it's, like, terrible for play because, like, play is interaction. The GM has to understand it to, like, run it, you know? Anything that is sublime is, like, not an object you can play with.
Misha returns to this concept in the discussion of MB's surreal elements, saying:
MISHA: This really felt like it illustrated the difference between, like, fantasy and mythic gameplay to me... is that a fantasy world is, like, a world that works the way that you think it does; right?... Like, the basic idea of magic is what if reality worked the way that, like, common sense, kind of, says that it does. It feels like if I, like, hate a person really bad, they should burst into flames. So what if reality really worked that way?
I think the big thing that makes a mythic game different is that it doesn't work that way; right? Like, a mythic setting... is one where things, kind of, don't make sense. Things just happen... It is, like, big and sublime.
More talk about sublimity follows, but this episode doesn't have captions up yet and I already do transcription work for my day job.
Misha makes a couple claims that I think are interesting and worth interrogation:
- There is a desire in art to engage with that which cannot be fully grasped (the sublime).
- In the context of tabletop roleplaying games, the more one engages with such an element, the more understood it is and thus the less sublime it becomes through a process of what we might call disenchantment.
- Fantasy elements are not necessarily opposed to a (high-agency, OSR-esque) tabletop roleplaying game because they operate on logic and common sense. Thus, they can be mastered by the players without the loss of what makes them "fantastic."
- Mythic elements are, on some level, opposed to a (high-agency, OSR-esque) tabletop roleplaying game because, like the sublime, they cannot be mastered by players without losing what makes them "mythic."
I think this argument is very compelling, but I disagree with it. Nonetheless, I think the framework of these claims allows me to structure my thoughts about this matter in a better way, so I'm glad Misha made it.
The End of Magic
There's a fairly obscure academic book about magic I read a while back called The End of Magic, by Ariel Glucklich. Misha's comments quite closely echo Glucklich's claims, but there's a subtle distinction I think is worth making. Glucklich argues that "a distinct and universal magical phenomenon does indeed exist ... called the 'magical experience.' It is not an objective category ... but a psychological quality like imagination." For Glucklich, "magic" in the way it's practiced by modern day mystics and healers is not objective, like science; nor is it concerned with metaphysics, like religion. Magic manipulates perceived connections in the material world which are "magical" because they are unapparent except to the intuition of the magical experience. Putting these intuitions into practice yields the kind of sympathetic magical rituals we're familiar with from, i.e., stories of witchcraft.
This is why I want to subtly poke at Misha's claims. Magic does not operate on logic: science does. The spells of a D&D wizard are demonstrably powerful, repeatable, and have set rules for how they manifest, and in this way do not really resemble the way that magic has been historically understood in the real world. A Magic Missile has more in common, in that sense, with a sci-fi ray gun than the evil eye.
This is because there is a subtle but important distinction between logic and intuition. When we suddenly fall ill, we may feel that it is somehow our neighbor's fault, or that we are being punished for some misdeed, even though we have no logical proof that either is the case. The "magical experience" would say that our jealous neighbor has put a hex on us, or perhaps we have been cursed for unknowingly stepping on a jinn's tail.
The "magical experience" tells us that if we feed sweets to an idol of a river goddess, our catch will be better; that if we stab needles into a doll that looks like an enemy, they will feel pain or die. Critically, these things cannot be measured. When the catch remains poor, when the enemy prospers, this does not mean the magic was ineffective or not real. We keep feeding the idol, we keep stabbing the doll. "Eventually, it will work," we say. Maybe next year.
Dream Logic
There's a connection between the intuition of the magical experience and a kind of dream logic, or accepting seemingly illogical things as they are laid before you. My experience of Mythic Bastionland is that play bounces between the mundane, everyday logic of warbands, famines, and the seat of power; and the surreal, dream logic of the myths where great beasts can speak, rivers can appear and disappear, and stone statues can commit heinous deeds. These occurrences may be illogical to a modern-day player, but they aren't fundamentally different from the kinds of events that real-life magic and folktales consist of: if humans and animals are made of the same physical stuff, why shouldn't an animal be able to speak and have an identity? if the proper rituals can cause a river to flood, or prevent it from doing so, why wouldn't you be able to move it? if a construct can have an effect on someone far away, what's preventing the construct from getting up and physically doing that itself?
I think it's important to recognize that the experience of being a questing knight in MB is not that much different from being a dungeoncrawler in a given OSR game. If dungeoncrawling is exploring a mythic underworld with its own rules that you progressively become more familiar with (monster strengths and weaknesses, trap tells, arcane devices with obscure functions), Mythic Bastionland is the same in the overworld. The structure of Myths maintains this cycle of learning: each Myth is a discrete story that has its own internal logic, which allows the players to understand that Myth better as it progresses, while simultaneously preventing knowledge of one Myth from being too applicable to another. The Seers also serve a load-bearing function here, as a means of reinforcing the weirdness of the setting and breaking the players' expectations that everything must be logical and as a set of known interpreters who can translate the logic of the myths into something the players can more readily understand if they get stuck.
Even so, as players gain (real-life) experience playing the game, they become more attuned to this dream logic. In a game I've been playing recently, we arrived at an obelisk covered in spiderwebs, and my genuine first thought was "surely we're about to talk to the ancient spider who tends this monolith." The obelisk was just a random setting detail, but I think that instinct tells you something about how MB managed to adjust my expectations. One of my favorite things about MB is that it is one of the few games I'm aware of that really attempts to engage with the sublime, the surreal, and the mythic in a way I think works. In the game I've been playing, sublime elements are always present, but we have never needed to completely tame or understand them, and I think this approach has basis in real-world myths.
Myth
I want to interrogate the idea that "the mythic" is opposed to high-agency and OSR games because my instinct tells me that dungeons and dragons are both mythic elements. For me, the mythic is not exactly the same as the sublime; it is not necessarily unknowable, just beyond human scale. I think there is potential for disenchantment, where players get so powerful or so used to seeing dragons that they no longer inspire awe, but I don't think the prospect of players encountering a dragon, or even slaying one, is antithetical to the "mythic" style. People in myths constantly interact with magical creatures and even gods, often outwitting or outright slaying them, though usually by using their wits rather than going toe-to-toe (Beowulf notwithstanding).
Even when mythic elements have an explanation, they don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. In the Odyssey, it's not really important why the Cyclops, Circe, or the Laestrygonians exist; what is salient is the fact that Odysseus and his men are completely out of their depths, and yet must attempt to prevail over them anyway. What defines myths, in my view, is this idea that things outside of everyday human experience nonetheless affect human affairs. We don't need to know why The Elf exists, but he's a pain in our ass, and someone's got to duel him.
One final thing is I think you can do some sleight of hand to preserve the sublime simply by locating it outside of the players' ability to gain additional knowledge of it. A lot of video games put really cool, weird stuff in their skyboxes (I'm thinking of the giant white dragon on the first main planet of Jedi: Fallen Order), and I think a similar principle can be used in TTRPGs, though the sublime can't be physically accessible or able to be mastered by the PCs. Things happening outside the players' control, as counter as it (supposedly) is to OSR best practices, is a good way to introduce the sublime: in my MB campaign, our knights went to the Fae Realm to rescue a knight's son and returned to the Realm a full Age later. Another way to implement the sublime is to keep it in the past: a random detail I added to a scene in a PBP implied that the statues of a tower in the Fae Realm were guards that had been turned to stone; that felt sublime to me, since we had no way to know how that would have happened or even if that was true for sure. What's important is the sense that you are only experiencing a portion of something vast. In this way, I think "the mythic" and "the sublime" are both facets of "the cosmic."
Conclusion
Personally, I have loved my time in Mythic Bastionland, and I think most of Deep Letters' critiques don't really stand up once you get the game running.1 I think how the mythic and sublime is handled in games is a very fertile ground for further inquiry, though, and I would be very interested in hearing about any other games that operate on this dream or surreal logic. I also appreciate Dead Letters for giving me so much to mull over.