I find when you embrace co-creation or shared narration with your players it can sometimes lead to a pastiche, less like Middle Earth and more like Narnia. For instance, my hexcrawl setting was initially conceived of as Iron Age, but my players kept bringing Medieval elements into it.

In our first campaign, I’d constantly surprise them with the ramifications of that:

  • “I go to the town library.” “You can’t! Books are very rare; there’s no library in town. In fact, the only known library is the Shrine of Ogmalbo in the south.”
  • “I want to buy some plate armor.” “The dwarves of Drujjelej are known to forge plate armor, but you’ve never seen any.” (In a second campaign in this same world, a player started out with plate armor and I didn’t even notice. Oops, it is hard even for the GM to maintain a consistent setting.) 
  • “Where can I buy a mirror?” “There are brass mirrors and the rare silver mirror, but they are like seeing through a glass, darkly: they won’t reflect the way you want.”

By the time we got to the mirrors, the players were reflecting the setting back to me. They were in the swing of it and went on a quest for glass mirrors, which they found, carted across a desert, and started selling from their mirror shop. They became quite the sensation. (Then the beholder hidden beneath the palace created a network from their mirrors to spy on everyone in town. The PCs eventually figured it out when their plans kept getting foiled and beat the beholder in their final session.)

When roleplaying, it’s hard not to bring anachronisms in—germ theory, the printing press, etc.—things that are so obvious in retrospect that it is difficult to imagine a time when they weren’t obvious.

Dwiz at Knight at the Opera expands on this point—

Think about all the things that most DMs take for granted as existing in your “vanilla” setting even though they were actually either non-existent or very rare in medieval Europe:

  • Banks
  • Courthouses
  • Hospitals
  • Libraries
  • Orphanages
  • Museums
  • Prisons
  • Universities
  • “Inns” and other hotel-like establishments
  • “General stores” and “off the shelf” goods
  • Coffee
  • Tobacco
  • Oil lanterns
  • Surnames
  • Police
  • Clocks
  • National identity
  • “Childhood” as we understand it
  • “Race” as we understand it
  • Maps
  • In the early medieval period, capital cities
  • A standing army

And so on and on.

Mindstorm discusses creating a random table with 10 world anchors and then tying improv into one of these anchors: “Can a world spontaneously erupt from the minds at the table and follow a ley line of verisimilitude at the same time?” See Adding Congruency to Anti Canon Worldbuilding.

With my hexcrawl setting, I was envisioning myself as Tolkien, with a rich, mostly self-consistent world. My players were like C.S. Lewis and Narnia:

As George Sayer wrote about Tolkien’s attitude to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe: “[Lewis] was hurt, astonished, and discouraged when Tolkien said that he thought the book was almost worthless, that it seemed like a jumble of unrelated mythologies. Because Aslan, the fauns, the White Witch, Father Christmas, the nymphs, and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver had quite distinct mythological or imaginative origins, Tolkien thought that it was a terrible mistake to put them together in Narnia, a single imaginative country.”

Yet this falsely elevates Tolkien, whose own work had anachronisms (e.g., mailboxes, potatoes, picnics).

As a GM and as players, we may be collaborating to develop a “single imaginative country” but with a diversity of backgrounds, we should accept that it will tend towards pastiche.

See also: Anti-Canon in Stonetop

Photo by Shan Li Fang on Unsplash.