The Bones of Earth: Creating Maps
November 03, 2017, 04:24:46 PM
The Bones of Earth: Creating Maps
By Jubal
By Jubal
I originally wrote most of this post for the now-defunct Exilian Academy a few years ago, but figured it could also sit here and get a new set of readers: it's simply a brief overview for setting designers, be you writers or game devs, looking at how to make realistic feeling earth-like geography. A lot of this is really about re-applying basic observations of our own reality, and working out the underlying rules that make them make sense and look right for our readers & players. At some point I may repost the follow-up article for worlds with geography very unlike our own, but even for most of those this should be useful.
A Planet's Bones: Plate Tectonics
This is an awfully high school teacher way of looking at things, but the old adage that a planet is kind of like an onion and has layers is actually pretty useful for a fantasy setting designer. The reason our Earth is the way it is and has the geography it does has a lot to do with the way it is made up - and so this leads us on to plate tectonics.
Our planet is made up of big plates of rock, floating on a molten core of magma (Note: it's magma under the surface, lava when over the surface). The plate boundaries are shown above. So why is this important? The seas and mountains we have are often determined by where the plates are, and so it's by understanding this system that we can work out what's going to look right in terms of our own maps.
The basic thing to take away from this is that any really big mountains, any earthquake zones, and most volcanoes have to occur on a plate boundary or former plate boundary. (I say most volcanoes; Hawaii is in the middle of the Pacific plate where some magma has forced its way through the crust, but due to the volcano basically just being a hole through which some magma pours there isn't much in terms of internal pressure.)
Secondly, plate boundaries go in lines. This is why it looks kind of weird if you try and make a mountain range that's just perfectly circular with mountains in the middle and hills around the edge; imagine taking a piece of paper or cloth, putting your hands flat on the edges, and then pushing it together. That's what the earth is doing, and so you need to make it look like that's what's happened. This certainly doesn't mean you should try and map out all the plate boundaries in your world (though feel free to): if your world is of as old an age as our own there will in any case be plenty of mountain ranges that no longer have active plate boundaries next to them. The key thing is to think in natural lines.
A related feature to note is that peninsular regions are often bounded by mountains (India with the Himalayas, Italy the Alps, Iberia the Pyrenees) - this is because the peninsula is slowly shoving itself into the continent nearby. Mountains along shorelines are common, too, as a dense oceanic plate pushes itself down beneath (the Andes and Rockies fall into this category).
A Planet's Bloodstream: The Water System
Tectonics are one of the two major factors in land formations; the other is water. Water, in its various forms, has huge effects on the land around it. The three main forms of water we need to worry about are the river, the ocean or lake, and the glacier.
Rivers are always a key feature. The only really important thing to remember is that water flows downhill, and so any land area can be divided into "river basins" where all the water is heading for one river. Not all rivers have to start in the mountains, but many do; if your river flows in a direction other than towards the sea or a large lake without an obvious natural obstacle, it will look pretty darn odd. The edge of a river basin is called the watershed; watersheds can be important features in themselves, for example between the Waveney and Little Ouse River sources in the UK lies a thin watershed which is the only land bridge between Norfolk and the rest of England. Rivers are also notable in that they cause erosion and have different formations in different places; in the plains a river is likely to be deep, wide, and meandering, in the mountains it will be straight and fast-flowing, cutting out a steep-sided valley or gorge. The ends of rivers tend to have wide estuaries or deltas; putting a river going at right angles across the coast into the sea tends to look odd, particularly for large or major ones.
Oceans and lakes are important parts of any map. The first vital thing to note is that they are not standalone features; any major body of water must be fed by rivers and streams. Secondly, the rules of gravity still apply; a lake is likely to be at the bottom of a basin of rivers, or along a route to the sea where the way out is only thin (and so the water backs up into a lake). Coastlines are often a more difficult thing to work on, but do not need to be inherently difficult; remembering indentations where the estuaries and mouths of rivers are helps, as does noting that coastlines are rarely straight. They tend to be formed of bays with jutting headlands between them – harder rock forms headlands, softer soils and rocks will be eroded to make bays.
Glaciers are the last thing to note. When visiting many mountain ranges, you will see that they valleys are not as steep as you might expect if a fast flowing but thin river or stream had cut them. Huge U-shaped valleys are more likely the result of long-melted glaciers, huge walls of ice rolling down. These will also have deposited rocks not native to the local area (moraine) and formed canoe-shaped hills pointing in the direction of the glacier (drumlins). This characteristic set of features is common particularly in northern Europe or mountain regions since the ice ages, and remembering these can help add some realism to your features.
An Example: A Look at Middle-earth
If you take a look at a map of Middle-earth:
Examples include the long lines of mountains; the Ered Luin are good candidates for being on a current plate boundary, and all of the ranges generally fit together well in naturally flowing lines and curves (the right-angle over the Anduin where the Ered Nimrais meet the Ered Duath is odd, but not impossibly so). Note the water basin inside Mordor due to the Ered Duath and Ered Lithui; the water flows inland and therefore has to form the Sea of Nurnen. The river Lune in Eriador is an excellent example of a river basin lying between two sets of hills; the lake above the falls of Rauros shows how the water would have backed up before breaking through in the famous waterfall formation. The Brandywine, Greyflood and Isen all have large and visible estuaries rather than going into the sea at right angles, and note the large delta at the mouths of the Anduin.
Whilst it's possible to get these features right just from guesswork and a gut feel of how maps should look, it's certainly helpful to have these basic geographical features in mind when working out the shape of your world. I hope you've found this helpful - now get out there and get world-building!
The Best Dialogue of the Mabinogion
October 27, 2017, 11:05:36 PM
The Best Dialogue of the Mabinogion
By Eadgifu the Fair
By Eadgifu the Fair
When you think about the Mabinogion, if indeed you do think about the Mabinogion – the collection of medieval Welsh prose tales found in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest – you might think about magical boar hunts, or the birds of Rhiannon singing, or sheep that change colour. You might think about euhemerized deities or depictions of a fictionalised pre-Roman Britain. But it might not occur to you to think about dialogue, and that would be a shame, because as Brynley F. Roberts would put it, 'Realistic natural dialogue which enlivens the narrative is a feature of all the tales'; or as I would put it, the dialogue of the Mabinogion can be really, really funny.
In this article I use Sioned Davies' excellent translation; all the pictures are by Alan Lee.
Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet
Pwyll begins as the story of how Pwyll, lord of Dyfed, won the friendship of Arawn, king of Annwfn (the Otherworld); but the latter half is devoted to Pwyll's relationship with his wife Rhiannon. Let's be honest, at that point it might as well be called Rhiannon, because Rhiannon is the best character in it – and a large part of that is her dialogue. Here's her first encounter with Pwyll, after we've discovered that she rides past the same mound every day, and no-one can catch up with her:
Yeah. That's the face of a woman who knows her horse is better than your horse.
Quote'Groom,' said Pwyll, 'I see the rider. Give me my horse.' Pwyll mounted his horse, and no sooner had he mounted his horse than she rode past him. He turned after her, and let his spirited, prancing horse go at its own pace. And he thought that at the second leap or the third he would catch up with her. But he was no closer to her than before. He urged his horse to go as fast as possible. But he saw that it was useless for him to pursue her.
Then Pwyll said, 'Maiden,' he said, 'for the sake of the man you love most, wait for me.'
'I will wait gladly,' she said, 'and it would have been better for the horse if you had asked that a while ago!'
This is the first thing she says in the story. This is the best entrance anyone has ever made into a story. It's almost the best piece of dialogue in this story, but Rhiannon surpasses herself later on! Her ex-fiancé comes to Pwyll, disguised as a suppliant, and asks for a favour; Pwyll agrees to give him anything in his power.
Quote'Friend,' said Pwyll, 'what is your request?'
'The woman I love most you are to sleep with tonight. And it is to ask for her, and for the preparations and the provisions that are here that I have come.'
Pwyll was silent, for there was no answer that he could give.
'Be silent for as long as you like,' said Rhiannon. 'Never has a man been more stupid than you have been.'
If I'm honest, I think this is the best line in all of the Mabinogion. But that might just be my overwhelming love for Rhiannon speaking. Pwyll must have been pretty impressed by this too, though, because at this point he starts calling her arglwydes – 'lady' – again, while she doesn't call him arglwyd ('lord') again until he's fixed this mess.
Branwen uerch Lyr
It's difficult to pick funny dialogue out of Branwen because Branwen is not a funny story. Strange, yes, but dark: its climax is a battle which leaves almost all of Ireland dead, and only seven men of the British army alive. It focuses on Bendigeidfran, king of Britain, his sister Branwen and her ill-fated marriage to Matholwch, king of Ireland, and their brother Efnysien, an inveterate troublemaker. One of its major themes is the power of communication, whether that's Branwen teaching a starling to speak so that she can use it to ask for rescue, Bendigeidfran's head continuing to speak after it's been cut off, or Efnysien – a character with a poisonous tongue if ever there was one – sacrificing himself to destroy the Cauldron of Rebirth, which can bring dead men back to life, but mute.
So it's not surprising that really the only funny line in Branwen is from Efnysien, right before he commits the crime that sets off the final battle:
Quote'Why does my nephew, my sister's son, not come to me?' said Efnysien. 'Even if he were not king of Ireland, I would still like to make friends with the boy.'
'Let him go, gladly,' said Bendigeidfran. The boy went to him cheerfully.
'I confess to God,' said Efnysien to himself, 'the outrage I shall now commit is one the household will never expect.' And he gets up, and takes the boy by the feet, and immediately, before anyone in the house can lay a hand on him, he hurls the boy head-first into the fire.
It's a horrible act! It's an awful moment, right after the British and the Irish had made peace! But it's just such a cartoon villain thing to say that it still makes me laugh: 'They'll NEVER suspect my plans!' Efnysien, by the way, is the name of either Crabbe or Goyle in the Welsh translation of Harry Potter: I haven't figured out which.
Manawydan uab Lyr
Manawydan is just as strange as Branwen – less dark, but just as weird and ominous. It's the story of Bendigeidfran's only surviving sibling, Manawydan, who returns to Britain only to discover that his brother's throne has been usurped by Caswallon. He decides not to fight Caswallon, and retires to Dyfed instead with Pwyll's son Pryderi, becoming the widowed Rhiannon's second husband. (The timing of Manawydan is... wonky: if this is pre-Roman Britain, where it's supposed to be set, Dyfed shouldn't exist yet.)
And then everything in Dyfed disappears, leaving only Manawydan, Rhiannon, Pryderi and his wife Cigfa.
There isn't much the four of them can do at this point, so they decide to go travelling in England, which also shouldn't exist yet. Manawydan and Pryderi resolve to take up crafts to support the group, and that leads to this delightful exchange:
Quote'What craft shall we take on?' said Pryderi.
'We will make shields,' said Manawydan.
'Do we know anything about that?' said Pryderi.
'We will attempt it,' he said.
Of course, in the story, they're so good at this – just as with every other craft they try – that they immediately become a roaring success, and the townsmen plot to kill them, forcing them to flee to the next town. Maybe we should all resolve to answer the question Do I know anything about that? with I will attempt it. On the other hand, it might lead to being driven out of town, so maybe not.
Math uab Mathonwy
Blodeuedd at her creation by Gwydion: the face of a woman bent on murder
There's just the one hitch: no-one asked Blodeuedd how she felt about this, and she falls for local nobleman Gronw Pebr as soon she meets him. So the logical next step is for her to figure out how to kill Lleu, which she does thus, in conversation with him:
Quote'I am thinking about something you would not expect of me,' she said. 'Namely, I am worried about your death, if you were to go before me.'
'Well,' he said, 'may God repay you your concern. But unless God kills me, it is not easy to kill me,' he said.
'Then for God's sake and mine, will you tell me how you can be killed? Because my memory is better than yours when it comes to avoiding danger.'
You wouldn't think it could get less subtle than that, would you? But then comes this titbit, when Blodeuedd has led Lleu to his death-trap, and all that's missing is the (necessary, for some reason) billy-goat:
Quote'Lord,' she said, 'these are the animals you said were called billy-goats.'
'Yes,' he said, 'have them catch one and bring it here.'
Really, Lleu? CATCH ONE AND BRING IT HERE? Your wife is pretending not to know what a goat is, and you still think nothing's up?
Lleu's luck holds good, though, and instead of dying, he turns into an eagle. His uncle Gwydion finds him, changes him back into a man, and helps him to get revenge on Blodeuedd and Gronw Pebr – Gronw Pebr is killed by a spear, but Blodeuedd is turned into an owl and her name changed to Blodeuwedd. Blodeuedd means flowers where Blodeuwedd means 'flower-face', a term for the owl, so yes, this whole episode is one giant excuse for a pun.
Owain, or Iarlles y Ffynnon
This story is one of several that takes place in or around Arthur's court, and it begins with the men of Arthur's court exchanging stories to amuse each other, inspiring Owain to go seek out the black knight he hears tell of in Cynon's story. The preamble gives you a pretty good idea of what kind of dialogue to expect in the rest of the tale:
QuoteThen Arthur said, 'Men, as long as you do not make fun of me,' he said, 'I would like to sleep while I wait for my food; and you can tell each other stories, and Cai will bring you a jugful of mead and some chops.' And the emperor slept. And Cynon son of Cludno asked Cai for what Arthur had promised them.
'But I want the good story that I was promised,' said Cai.
'Sir,' said Cynon, 'it is better for you to fulfil Arthur's promise first, and afterwards we shall tell you the best story we know.'
Cai went to the kitchen and the mead cellar, and came back with a jugful of mead and a goblet of gold, and his fist full of skewers with chops on them. And they took the chops and began to drink the mead.
'Now,' said Cai, 'you owe me my story.'
'Cynon,' said Owain, 'give Cai his story.'
'God knows,' said Cynon, 'you are an older man and a better storyteller than me, and you have seen stranger things; you give Cai his story.'
'You begin,' said Owain, 'with the strangest story that you know.'
When Cynon has told his story, Owain leaves the court to seek the black knight Cynon spoke of, and strikes him a mortal blow upon finding him. Later he finds himself in the castle of the dead knight, and falls madly in love with the knight's widow. He also runs into Luned, the best character in this story:
QuoteOwain asked the maiden who the lady was.
'God knows,' said the maiden, 'a woman you could say is the most beautiful of women, and the most chaste, and the most generous, and wisest and noblest. She is my mistress, known as the Lady of the Well, the wife of the man you killed yesterday.'
'God knows,' said Owain, 'she is the woman I love best.'
'God knows,' said the maiden, 'there is no way she loves you, not in the very slightest.'
Luned, you're on thin ice.
Quote'Luned,' said the countess, 'how can you be so bold, seeing that you didn't come and visit me in my grief? And I made you wealthy. That was wrong of you.'
'God knows,' said Luned, 'I really did think you would have more sense. It would be better for you to start worrying about replacing your husband than wish for something you can never have back.'
'Between me and God,' said the countess, 'I could never replace my lord with any other man in the world.'
'Yes, you could,' said Luned; 'marry someone as good as he, or better.'
'Between me and God,' said the countess, 'if I were not repelled by the thought of putting to death someone I had brought up, I would have you executed for proposing something as disloyal as that to me. And I will certainly have you banished.'
'I am glad,' said Luned, 'that your only reason is that I told you what was good for you when you could not see it for yourself. And shame on whichever of us first sends word to the other, whether it is I to beg an invitation of you, or you to invite me.' And with that Luned left.
The countess got up and went to the chamber door after Luned, and coughed loudly. Luned looked back; the countess beckoned to her. And Luned came back to the countess.
'Between me and God,' said the countess to Luned, 'what a temper you have.'
I can't decide which is my favourite moment here: Luned's total dismissal of her mistress' grief, or the countess' cough to get her attention. Either way, somehow Luned's logic works, and the countess marries Owain. One can only hope he was nicer to her than to her late husband.
Geraint uab Erbin
Geraint is another of Arthur's knights, who spends the first half of his story being brave and honourable and making good decisions, and the second half being the worst asshole alive. The first half of the story tells how he won and married his wife, Enid. For a while all is well, and then in the second half, he starts to doubt her faithfulness (for no reason whatsoever, I might add). So he makes the logical decision to take Enid on a road trip into England (another anachronism – England only ever enters these tales when the mood is turning scary and hostile) and forbid her to speak to him. Enid does her best, but can't stop herself from trying to warn him when she hears people plotting to kill him. Geraint takes offence at this. I know. I don't know why she stays with him either.
So it's very satisfying when Geraint, while seriously injured, runs into his fellow knight Gwalchmai (known for being polite and having good sense, and thus a rare character), and Gwalchmai drags him to see Arthur, who treats his temper tantrums with the respect they deserve:
Quote'Geraint,' said Gwalchmai, 'come and see Arthur: he is your lord and your cousin.'
'I will not,' he replied. 'I am in no state to go and see anyone.'
[Gwalchmai arranges for him to see Arthur anyway]
'Lord,' said Geraint, 'greetings.'
'May God prosper you,' said Arthur, 'and who are you?'
'This is Geraint,' said Gwalchmai, 'and by choice he would not have come to see you today.'
'Well,' said Arthur, 'he is ill-advised.'
[Arthur talks to Enid, the first person to say something nice to her for months, probably]
'Lord,' said Geraint, 'we shall be on our way, with your permission.'
'Where will you go?' said Arthur. 'You cannot go now unless you want to go to your death.'
'He would not allow me to invite him to stay,' said Gwalchmai.
'He will allow me,' said Arthur, 'and furthermore, he will not leave here until he is well.'
'I would prefer it, lord,' said Geraint, 'if you would let me leave.'
'No, I will not, between me and God,' he replied.
Most of all, I love this exchange because it proves that the trope of Petulant Manchild With Weapon Refuses Medical Aid is at least a thousand years old.
(If you're anxious about the fate of Enid, Geraint does eventually realise he's been wrong all along, although he never apologises. I know. He's the worst.)
Culhwch ac Olwen
Culhwch is like a fairy tale, if a fairy tale had, among other things, a strange fascination with pigs and the concept of shaving. Many scholars of medieval Welsh see it as a parody of fairy- or folk-tales: I like to see it as the medieval Welsh equivalent of Shrek. Culhwch is destined to marry no woman except for Olwen, daughter of Ysbaddaden Bencawr ('Chief Giant'). He invokes the help of Arthur, who happens to be his cousin, in first finding and then winning her. Here's an excerpt in which the party sent to look for Olwen encounter Culhwch's aunt, who's excited to meet her nephew:
QuoteThey made for the gate of the shepherd Custennin's court. She heard them coming. She ran joyfully to meet them. Cai snatched a log from the wood-pile, and she came to meet them to try to embrace them. Cai placed a stake between her hands. She squeezed the stake until it was a twisted branch.
'Woman,' said Cai, 'had you squeezed me like that, it would be useless for anyone else ever to make love to me. That was an evil love.'
No comment.
When Olwen is found, she reveals that her father will only live until she finds a husband, which is a fairly common motif for the daughters of giants, but not usually one they're so blatantly aware of! Her father sets Culhwch several impossible tasks before he will give Culhwch Olwen's hand in marriage: one of these is the hunting of the boar Twrch Trwyth, a king who was turned into a boar for his sins. Ysbaddaden must be shaved for his daughter's wedding, and only the comb and shears that lie between Twrch Trwyth's ears can do this.
Much to Ysbaddaden's displeasure, Arthur helps out and Culhwch returns triumphant, and Caw of Prydyn comes to shave Ysbaddaden, leading to this exchange:
QuoteAnd Culhwch said, 'Have you been shaved, man?'
'I have,' he replied.
'And is your daughter now mine?'
'Yours,' he replied. 'And you need not thank me for that, but thank Arthur, the one who arranged it for you. If I'd had my way you never would have got her. And it is high time to take away my life.'
Now, I'm not saying I'd like to be a giant who was fated to die when his daughter got married, but if I were, I think I'd like to go out on a note so ironic that I told her fiancé, It is high time to take away my life...
FURTHER READING
Charles-Edwards, T., 'Honour and Status in Some Irish and Welsh Prose Tales', Ériu 29 (1978)
Davies, S., The Mabinogion (2007)
Mac Giolla Chríost, D., Welsh Writing, Political Action and Incarceration: Branwen's Starling (2013)
Roberts, B. F., Studies on Middle Welsh Literature (1992)
To Adventure - The World of Adventure Game Design
October 21, 2017, 12:08:22 AM
To Adventure?
The World Of Adventure Game Design
By Jubal
The World Of Adventure Game Design
By Jubal
This week's Exilian Article, brought to you by Tiny Bertrella Slugkin.
What are these? Firstly and most importantly, adventure games tend to have inventories, object interaction, and puzzles. These form the core of the gameplay, which is mainly about puzzle solving: enemies are there to be avoided or tricked, rather than destroyed by a more militarily powerful player. In general a classic adventure game has no consistent/regularly used combat mechanic; the aim is to work through all the different puzzles (or some of them, in branching or open-world adventures) in order to complete the game. This in turn is part of what gives adventure games their specific feel - the lead character is rarely a combat-heavy or powerful figure (or if they are, as with the lead of the early King's Quest games, they are put in situations where this is of little use to them). This strongly differentiates them from RPGs, which tend to involve heroes who have the combat abilities to directly take on enemies. Many adventure games have a fairly clear plotline, even if there are choices as to exactly how it unfolds in different versions. Death is usually not a major issue or severely punished, though this can vary.
Another theme of adventure games that it's worth mentioning is light-heartedness. One can make dark point and clicks, of course, especially if they're escape the room type puzzles, but they're somewhat limited in scope; object-interaction gameplay, plus a physically weak character, plus a lot of easier task/puzzle ideas needing character interaction, all add up to it being easier to make adventure games in a chatty, talkative setting. Dark adventure games risk leaning too heavily into other mechanics, and for good reason: if you're in a war-zone, or a house with zombies in it, you're going to need to either spend vast amounts of time sneaking or give the character weapon abilities, both of which dilute the core mechanical theme of the genre.
Space Quest: the snarky parser perfected?
The difficulty of providing high variation (and thus replayability) and the problems of massively multifaceted object interactions are elements that may put some developers off the adventure genre, and indeed there are very few story-driven adventure games coming out of bigger studios nowadays - they're a feature of hobbyist and indie gaming markets primarily. When bigger designers do make adventure games, they often try to rely on non-adventure gaming mechanics, with disastrous results - the Matt Smith era Doctor Who adventure games being a very particular case in point, where many games relied purely on the "sneak" mechanic plus a few minigames. Doctor Who is the sort of setting that could be great for adventure gaming, but without the sort of classic object-interaction and character-interaction puzzles that make up traditional adventure games the recent DW series felt a bit flat.
So, we've talked a bit about adventure games, what makes them distinctive, and I've introduced a (very brief) summary of the genre's development. What are some things to think about when making adventure games?
- Puzzles. A good adventure game needs good puzzles! I think this is a genuinely hard element, especially if you want to appeal to both genre-savvy players who will have high expectations of what they might be able to combine, and newer players who may get stuck more easily with object interaction. This is one reason I like the idea of putting in secondary routes through the game that use items/characters in more unexpected ways. One thing that's emerged in gaming since the golden era of adventure gaming is achievement systems, which are BRILLIANT when combined with multiple-route games, as they encourage players back to try and find the more hidden routes.
- Place. That is to say, both the setting of the adventure, the position of the character with regard to that setting, and the position of the player with regard to their character. Is the adventure something where you want the player to feel very strongly that they are the character, or something where they are telling the character's story? Will speech be reported, making more of a storyline feel, or direct, making things more close to hand?
- Playtesting. Adventure games probably require more testing than most genres, because the player has a large but limited set of options. Object types are usually fairly unique in adventure games and players expect to be combining them and thinking outside the box, unlike RPGs where actually despite a wider range of inventory possibilities there's a limited range of types of item each of which has one clear use (food, armour, weapon, weapon supplies, maaaybe potions/potion making kit). I don't think there's any better way to do out of the box testing than with real players.
Who knows where your game could end up? Mine ended up with an adipose in a forklift.*
*I am not legally responsible if your adventure also leads to inappropriately qualified aliens in charge of industrial vehicles and machinery.
With these three core elements in mind, constructing a story-driven plot and then working an adventure round it is the next step. In general, I tend to do this one screen or location at a time - focussing first on general exploration, and any puzzles related to exploration, and then moving on to the more general puzzles that require hopping between areas. This may be quite different if your adventure game is more strictly linear in some way and a higher proportion of the puzzles involve the player character physically advancing through the game (as is the case in escape the room point and clicks like the great flash classic, The Mystery of Time and Space). I find that looking at exploration first works well, though, because it lets you as a designer think through setting and theme more easily early on and then working out puzzles that fit around that feel. Adventure games, for all that the object interactions are hard to sort, can be nice from a development perspective in that they can be built quite sequentially and in quite a modular way. To put it another way, tweaking one puzzle doesn't usually affect all the other puzzles in the game, whereas in a strategy game or stat-driven RPG, tweaking one player stat early on subtly affects their entire character development from that point onwards.
I hope this has been a good overview of some of the history, problems and ideas around adventure games - in future articles I'd like to go more specifically into how to design particular puzzle mechanics and settings that will work well with the genre (not least because I have a lot of game ideas that I'm never going to get done myself, so throwing them at other people is the best chance they have, in what may become a sort of bizarre orphanage for game themes). I love playing adventure games, and if you've got one that I haven't tried then I'd love to see what other people are coming up with!
I do think that there's a lot to be said for adventure games as a genre - their history of light-heartedness and the easy ways in which observational humour and satire can be worked into the genre make them the perfect antidote at times like the present when the world is all too grimdark. They allow for strong interactions and character crafting compared to many RPGs & combat adventures where the story is often something that has to be packed around the gameplay rather than driving it. Getting started making simple adventures isn't hard - why not give it a go yourself? You never know where you might end up!
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October 17, 2017, 11:13:30 PM
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The Evocation of Place
October 13, 2017, 06:41:54 PM
The Evocation of Place
By Jubal
By Jubal
Hello, Exilians! Today I'm going to talk about a writing phenomenon called evocation of place, and look at how we create places and use limited sets of markers as cultural filler in our work, as well as thinking about what gives those markers that power and how we can use it (and avoid misusing it) better.
To start with, let's meet a few examples...
QuoteIuri looked over the fence and out over the snow-covered wilderness beyond, a wasteland of tall trees and scattered rocks that seemed to stretch out into some forgotten eternity. He had a name for the wilderness, and the name was "home".
QuoteThe sun glinted on the Ariazza, the city's guardian statue of a golden lion, as a long, sleek galley flew past it and out of the city's harbour. The flag of the republic flew proud above the mast, and aboard the ship, a small company of men stowed their pikes and boxes of crossbow bolts and settled down for the voyage.
QuoteHer name was Siabhe, and she was a witch. She'd known it since she was six, and had felt the call as she walked across the moor past one of the cairns; she certainly knew it now as she stood atop the hill, her red hair fluttering in an autumn breeze that bit and whipped around her ankles as it shot inland from a grey, angry sea.
You don't necessarily need to say "Venice" to conjure up the image...
There are some key elements it's worth picking out as being critical to creating evocations. Names are a classic one, because different languages may well have familiar spelling and naming patterns. Regionally specific items/markers are a second – a hat could exist anywhere, but a torc, or a toga, or a camel, or an elk, all give a regional specificity that gives the reader pegs to hang their ideas about a place on. Climate is a third: had I replaced the word "snow" with "sand" in Iuri's passage, the entire feel and evocation of place changes dramatically. It's worth thinking about all these when you introduce new places, as they allow relatively sparse fragments of text or hints to build up a much wider picture for the reader.
This "evocation of place" is one of the most powerful – and dangerous – tools in the hands of a writer. Fictional cultures, whilst never being perfect analogies of real ones, are in general constructed from rearranging elements we know and understand, with additional twists, additions, and edits. Fictional cultural development is, in short, usually a process of editing rather than first-principles creation. This is why evocations of place are so useful in narratives or in the visual look of a person or place; they act as cultural filler without the author having to spend laborious extra time fleshing out more detail, and, allowing the writer to unfold any additional elements at their own pace.
Indeed, it's almost impossible to not evoke places as a writer, because we construct our worlds in the way described above – a set of evocations of places and cultures are operating in our heads as much as on the page. There are, however, great risks to the use of these techniques, and ones we should think about more carefully. Let's look at a couple more evocations of place:
QuoteThey called the child Vakhtang when he was born – after a hero from half-forgotten days, from before the world had turned and the Kadjis had been driven back into the wilderness. He grew tall upon the mountainside, and learned the name and call of the planets and the whip-crack of a hunting bow and the whoosh and sound of the long rushing river that curled and snaked a thousand miles to some far-off sea.
QuoteShe was as big as a great boulder, and strong – not just in the force of her muscles, but in all she radiated from her, in the sharp ambition of her eyes, in her voice and cry and all that she was. A thousand camels were kept in her fields, a giant guarded her gate, and they called her Dahabo, for there was little she liked more than the gathering of gold.
Many people from North America or Europe (as I am myself) might have struggled to place these two, despite them if anything being more specific than the first three. The first is from the Caucasus nation of Georgia – Vakhtang Gorgasali, the wolf-head, was one of their earliest semi-mythic kings, and the warrior-wizard Kadjis are the villains of the greatest medieval Georgian epic, the Knight in Panther Skin. The second is heavily Somali – beside the Somali name Dahabo, giants and camels are both prominent in Somali myth, and the description here of Dahabo is quite a close analogy to some descriptions of the warrior-queen Araweelo, the central character of one of the main cycles of traditional Somali tales.
A modern statue of Vakhtang Gorgasali, from Georgia Guide
Older Anglosphere literature is certainly saturated with these sorts of evocations of false or constructed ideas of places, especially in colonial contexts - the "jungle savages" evocation being one of the most common. These more extreme examples may be easy to avoid, but modern writers often fall down such traps as well, especially if trying to evoke a place with limited words. Genericising to evoke "east Asia" or "Africa" is easy for western audiences and writers, all of whom have usually grown up with genericised ideas of those areas, but it's an absurd thing to do. It insults readers' intelligences and dims their curiosity; if someone is capable of understanding that evoking Germany and France, which share a border, involve cultural differences, it's hardly a stretch to appreciate that Somalia and South Africa, separated by about 1600 miles at their closest points, might also do so. Worse, it can condemn the interesting things about those cultures, and the genius of entire peoples past and present, to be lost in incoherent continental homogenisations.
These blinkers of experience and genericisation of the other are not new things in human understanding – nor indeed are they fundamentally a creation of the colonial period. Colonial era literature and ideas did, however, redraw those boundaries of where could be genericised, and subsequent globalisation has often led to those ideas being exported even to areas that were less involved in the active periods of military colonialism themselves. A good starting point when thinking about counteracting this is just to compare to some cultural areas you know better – if the place you think you're evoking seems unfeasibly or weirdly large, it probably is. We should recognise that and think about the places and contexts we're evoking in our work. I don't think there's an option to avoid evocation or simply ignore/obliterate cultures that we don't understand as creators – such an approach tends to ignore the impacts of those cultures on our own and erase people and ideas by whose inclusion we are strengthened in our work.
If you're a creator - and this goes for musicians and game developers and artists as much as writers, because cultural contexts are very much multi-sensory things - challenge yourself to think more about the places you evoke, what elements of a scene you use to invoke them and where they come from in your own mind. What elements, what learning, did you use to inform that scene and that creation? If – as I have done on numerous occasions – you decide that your basis looks rather threadbare, then it's a great time to do some reading and discover more (especially from writers native to any culture you're looking at) about what you're working with. Your readers or users, your writing, and your world may just get a little bit better as a result.
So, You Want To Write A Medieval Epic?
October 07, 2017, 12:54:13 AM
So, You Want To Write A Medieval Epic?
I've been reading a lot of epic poetry recently, for what must be my fairly considerable sins, and I was therefore inspired to pen this guide to aspirant writers:
So, you've been doing a bit of reading and you think you might like to write a medieval epic to secure your place among the immortal pantheon of poetic greats and exalt the unquestioned virtues of your race. No, I don't know why you would either in this day and age. But, if you're sure, answer the questions below to check:
Obviously, a good epic needs a rhyme scheme. Do you go for:
A: Something mostly like this // With rhyme and rhythm, and varying stress.
B: Why is this in words? Numbers are better.
C: 'As I was going to St Ives...'
You've read The Iliad as background research. What was your response?
A: The main problem was that there was too much plot and moral ambiguity, not enough fighting and Achilles wasn't OP enough.
B: Yes, fine as a feat of literary genius. But obviously totally inaccurate as a historical source.
C: I never knew Homer Simpson knew that many words.
Religion was an important part of medieval life. How do you feel about God?
A: He's amazing and great and the best thing evah.
B: The evidence suggests there's no such person.
C: Who cares? I'm a Belieber!
What's your favourite political system?:
A: Divinely-mandated Imperial monarchy.
B: Democracy.
C: Anarchy. Because I'm so edgy.
You find a horn lying on the ground. Do you:
A: Blow it so hard your head explodes?
B: Try to find out where the horn came from and return it to its original owner?
C: Ignore it, because you're glued to your smartphone?
Bums. What is your response?:
A: Snigger. And then feel guilty about thinking impure thoughts.
B: How immature.
C: Lol.
You are an innkeeper. A large party of travellers have just turned up at your inn. How do you react?:
A: Make friends with them, set them a challenge, and then leave with them to make sure they keep their word.
B: Endeavour to sell them as much food and drink as humanly possible to boost your cashflow.
C: Close up, because it's Strictly I'm a Celebrity X Brother on Ice tonight and you're not missing it.
You've started writing and spotted a major plot hole. How do you solve it?:
A: Your main character prays and God creates a deus ex machina so everything works out.
B: Spend hours trying to find a satisfying and practical way round it within the self-imposed constraints of your story.
C: Get pissed and forget about it.
Who is your main heroic character descended from?:
A: The Romans. Or the Trojans. Or the gods. Or some mixture of all three.
B: A historical dynasty that you've carefully researched to work out who the main players were in your chosen time period.
C: Who's that really old guy in all them films? Ganbledore?
At what level of outnumbering does your hero become concerned?:
A: Never. With God on your side, unnumbered legions of infidels pose no threat to your all-conquering sword.
B: It depends on the tactical situation, the morale of the troops and several other factors. In a defensive siege, maybe 10 to 1; in a pitched battle, perhaps 3:1; in an offensive siege, 1:1.
C: Never. Because the baddies can't shoot straight, no matter how broad a target they're presented with.
What is your attitude to barbarians, natives and other sundry peoples not related to your hero?:
A: Infidels who will all submit to the divinely-ordained rule of my hero, or be slaughtered.
B: All are equal members of the human race and the primary objective is to develop constructive and mutually-beneficial trade links and social interaction.
C: Bloody immigrants.
What is the role of women in your writing?:
A: They can have some supporting roles, but, ultimately, it's all about the men. They're just better.
B: They're as important as the men. In fact, I'm considering making the main character a woman.
C: There are no women. Just pneumatic wenches and females wearing minimal clothing.
You've reached the end! How have you finished your epic?:
A: The good guys win and set up a new Eden, whilst the baddies are all horribly punished, all in accordance with Biblical teaching.
B: There's a well-thought-out conclusion with an unforeseen twist that ties up all the plot strands.
C: Everything explodes.
THE RESULTS
Mostly As: you clearly have exactly the right mindset and skills to write a medieval epic. Get going and I look forward to reading your newly-minted piece of dubious historicisation!
Mostly Bs: you're far too sensible and rational to write a medieval epic. Have you considered a career in science?
Mostly Cs: why are you even reading this? Do you even know what a medieval epic is?
The Power of Rules
September 29, 2017, 10:58:10 PM
The Power of Rules
By Richard Buxton (rbuxton)
By Richard Buxton (rbuxton)
When I was young I met a girl who, like me, enjoyed writing fantasy stories. "Fantasy is very exciting," she declared, "You can put a dragon over here, a wizard in his tower over there. Anything can happen." I, in my cynical, childish way, disagreed. What was so creative, I wondered, about mashing up a load of fantasy clichés and seeing what came out? To me, the really exciting fantasy worlds were those where only certain things could happen. Where the laws of nature, though different to those of our own world, could be used to create all sorts of interesting characters and storylines. Even at that age I saw an irony here: was it possible that true creativity required rigid rules?
Some years later, I started work on my Demons saga, a trilogy of fantasy video games. The project never made to the screen, but it nevertheless kept my brain occupied on long car journeys. At the start of the story the hero, Dannial, has his soul forcibly removed. This comes to the attention of three warring demonic races, who all vie to fill Dannial with their own essence, thus turning him into one of their own.
Why am I using this half-baked project as an example? After sketching the plots of the first two instalments of the trilogy, I decided to think in more depth about the laws of nature of the universe I was creating. Why could some beings use magic, and others not? Why was each demon homeworld distinct? What was so important about a human's soul anyway? When I had made these decisions, an interesting thing happened: the third instalment wrote itself. The characters, their limitations and their access to sources of magic were so clear in my mind that I could weave them together with ease. I was very pleased with this but, when I looked back at the first two parts of the trilogy, I found that their plotlines no longer made scientific sense. If only I had created my rules at the start of the process!
Let's look at another example: Ravnica, my favourite world from the card game Magic the Gathering. Ravnica consists of one giant city (think Coruscant, only fantastical) and is governed by ten independent guilds. Like any of the Magic the Gathering worlds, all things in Ravnica can be defined by their relationship to the five "colours" of Mana, loosely comparable to the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Each guild draws its power from precisely two colours of Mana, and its role in the governance of the city is defined by those colours.
The Izzet Guild, for example, is responsible for infrastructure and machinery, especially anything powered by steam. Its chosen colours, therefore, are Fire and Water. The guild's members are maverick scientists and mages known for their dangerous experiments. The guild's leader, meanwhile, is a knowledge-obsessed genius (a Water trait in the game) who also happens to be a dragon (Fire, duh). As you can see, the simple act of combining Fire and Water enabled the designers of Magic the Gathering to create a fascinating cast of characters and a whole aspect of Ravnica's society, both of which could function within the confines of the game.
When playing a game, the audience explicitly interacts with the laws of nature through the game's mechanics. The principle of following strict rules in fantasy, however, is equally applicable to other media. In books, for example, the laws are just as important, but, in general, only their noticeable effects end up in the narrative.
I believe that the empowering effect of rules is not limited to the creation of worlds. Picture two art lessons in a school (I work in education so apologies if this feels like a tangent). In one lesson, the teacher is strict and rigorously enforces the school rules; in the other, the children are ill-disciplined and their behaviour is poor. In which lesson are the children able to be more creative? Children, no matter what they tell you, crave (and flourish in) a stable environment. So my paradox appears once again: in order for children to be truly creative, they must be provided with rigid rules.
Hopefully I've convinced you that rules liberate, rather than restrict, a storyteller. Many storytellers would, of course, choose a different method of creating their world and, if this applies to you, I'd be interested to hear from you in the comments below. I am often accused (and justly so) of over-prescribing my rules, especially in my current "big" project: a board game in which players use the rules of the Greek myths to prove themselves the best god on Mount Olympus (you can read more about it here).
Thank you for reading, and please feel free to share any thoughts you have on this article!
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Two Cows in Ancient Greece
September 22, 2017, 08:54:20 PM
By Jubal
Hello there! This week, Exilian Articles takes its first foray into the dread world of "humour". For those who don't know, the Two Cows Theory (link to original) is a joke-format that discusses different social, economic, and political systems from the simple perspective of one person who own two cows. Under a socialist system, for example, the government may take both and then give you some milk. Under a fascist system, the government may take both and shoot you - and so on. But what would happen if we applied this principle to the great societies of human history? We sent our editor (Jubal), twenty-one cloned Greek peasants, and forty-three* cows back in a time machine to the heyday of ancient Greece in order to find out...
ATHENS
You have two cows. Your slaves tend the cows, and you drink the milk, write philosophy, and vote on things. You think this is a perfect democracy.
BYZANTION
You have no cows. Yet.
COLCHIS
You have one cow. It is incredibly shiny and everyone keeps trying to steal it. You long for a quiet life and some actual milk.
CORINTH
You have two cows. You build them a very fancy cowshed and sell aesthetically pleasing pots of artisanal milk to passers-by at extortionate prices.
DELPHI
You have two cows. You sacrifice them and try to prognosticate the future. The future turns out to involve you having no cows and no milk.
DEMOCRACY
You have two cows. You vote for the expropriation of cows from the wealthy. The resulting civil war kills half the cows in your city-state. You end up with two cows again.
ITHACA
You have two cows. You end up going to war for nearly a quarter of a century. You are surprised to find on your return that other people are drinking the milk. You kill them.
KNOSSOS
You have two cows. They bear your children.
LESBOS
You have two cows. They write beautiful romantic poetry for each other.
MACEDON
You have two cows. Everyone else thinks your cows are rubbish barbarian cows. You take all their cows as well just to prove a point. You keep going to more and more farms and taking their cows, only stopping when your cows refuse to swim across yet another river. You name seventy cowsheds after yourself along the way for no especially good reason. After your death, there are violent struggles over who owns the herd that last for generations. Your name will live forever amongst cowherds.
MESSENIA
You have two cows and dreams of freedom. The Spartans come - but at least they only take the cows.
MYCENAE
You have two cows. Your king makes you build a giant stone cowshed for them.
OLIGARCHY
You have four cows. Everyone else only has two. This gives you the right and ability to rule a state. And lots of milk.
OLYMPIA
You have two cows. You try and get them to have a wrestling match.
PERSIA
You have two cows. The satrap officially has a right to the milk. The satrap has no idea who or where you are. You drink the milk.
PLATONIC PHILOSOPHER-KINGSHIP
You have two cows. Your philosopher-king tells you what to do with the milk. He is right.
SPARTA
You have no cows. You go to Messenia and spear helots until they give you milk.
SYRACUSE
You have two cows. You put them in a bathtub to see how much the water rises by. You are so excited about the result that you forget about the milk.
THEBES
You have one cow and everyone else in Greece has two. This feels unfair, so you sell the milk to the Persians to annoy them. It doesn't help.
THEMISCYRA
You have two cows. You, and they, have a complete disdain for bulls.
TROY
You are given a large wooden cow. This goes badly for you.
So there you have it. Did you enjoy this confused wander through the world of ancient Greece? Comment below and let us know! We may fire up the time machine again sometime soon... see you then!
* What happened to Cow Forty-Three is a matter of dispute among scholars.
Books in the Seven Kingdoms: The Palaeography of Westeros
September 15, 2017, 11:07:04 PM
Books in the Seven Kingdoms: The Palaeography of Westeros
By Brigid Ehrmantraut (Leborcham)
By Brigid Ehrmantraut (Leborcham)
While we read of letters, documents, and a number of books in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF), the television adaptation Game of Thrones (GoT) allows us to peruse their physical incarnations. We know that in a pseudo-Medieval setting books are important for a number of reasons, not the least being their expense and effort to produce; however, they also play crucial roles in the ASOIAF/GoT storyline. We know that Tyrion is a voracious reader (especially of dragon-related material), that Samwell Tarly is sent to the Citadel partly because Castle Black's library is minimal at best, and that whatever Prince Rhaegar Targaryen read in a certain ancient book from Asshai dramatically influenced his decision to pursue military prowess and statecraft. The show itself frames its events through a work of recent history being produced at the Citadel, where the gyroscopic chandeliers match the decorations around the sun in the opening credit sequence.
A closer look at the props used on the show and the study of their writing styles (the field of history known as palaeography) can provide valuable insights about the wider world, state of literacy, and dissemination of knowledge in Westeros. While any books, letters, or handwriting visible onscreen have an admitted narrative purpose to fulfill, their appearance and contexts also offer valuable background information. As Westeros is in many respects Western Medieval Europe (more specifically, the British Isles) with dragons, comparisons with real world Medieval and Early Modern scripts will help elucidate their fictional counterparts in a number of case studies. From this information we can draw conclusions regarding the contents and dates of the books and letters in the series and by extension, Westerosi awareness of the Others/White Walkers, dragons, and other often-scoffed at supernatural elements.
Books: High Status Productions
Legends of the Long Night storybook from the Citadel library (S7)
The illumination, use of colored ink, and illustrations along the bottom of the pages mark this volume as a relatively expensive, luxury production. The script is a variety of 'Gothic textura', typical of Western European Mid to Late Medieval manuscripts (c. 1150+ AD).
More Legends (S7)
The size of the hand, word and line spacing, and wide margins, along with the creamy, unblemished parchment further contribute to its high status, presumably intended to be read (possibly aloud given pre-modern reading practices, well marked sections and the size of the script), gifted, and/or flaunted by a wealthy patron.
Dragonglass book from the Citadel library (S7)
The frequent, detailed, and large in-set pictures in this manuscript also indicate a fairly high status production. The script is very readable to a modern audience, as it has much in common with a Renaissance or Early Modern 'humanistic minuscule' hand. Humanist minuscule emulated the Early Medieval 'Caroline minuscule' that was found in manuscripts containing Classical works. This represented a conscious (and anachronistic) attempt to reclaim the knowledge and aesthetics of ancient Rome, getting rid of the Gothic (sometimes called "blackletter" for the wide, well-inked strokes) letter forms of the mid to late Middle Ages. Assuming Westerosi palaeography even loosely follows that of Western Europe, this manuscript must therefore be a quite recent production, likely even more so than the copy of Legends.
More from the dragonglass book (S7)
Note the use of Arabic numeral 18. We have no idea what kind of number system is in use in Westeros or whether such a system, like Arabic numerals in early Renaissance Europe, was eventually adapted from other regions. Was there also an older, fustier system comparable to Roman numerals? If so, such numbering, like the Early Modern script of the manuscript, suggests a recent origin or at least recent copying.
Astronomy book—an outlier (S7)
How much do the characters in GoT/ASOIAF know about the physics that govern their world? Are the seasons really due to the planet's astronomical orbit, or are they the result of something more mystical? We simply don't know at this point in the series, but we do know that someone is willing to devote quite a bit of gold leaf and colored ink to finding out!
Documents and Chronicles
Robert Baratheon's will (dictated to Ned Stark) (S1)
Ned's handwriting has more in common with the Humanist minuscule from the dragonglass book Sam finds at the citadel than the stiffer textura of Legends. Given that and the subsequent scripts, we can assume these humanistic tendencies represent a later script development in Westeros as well as our world.
The Book of Brothers (chronicle of the Kingsguard) (S4)
Again, an easy to read minuscule hand. If we believe that the entries in the Book of Brothers (which chronicles the members and deeds of the Kingsguard) are written by the Kingsguard's current commander, then Westerosi (noble) knights have unparalleled penmanship. That it is quite a bit neater and more regular than Ned's handwriting above (or Theon's scrawl below) suggests that King's Landing and the general south of Westeros have access to more refined, up-to-date script practices.
Letters: Perhaps Handwriting Varies by Region?
Theon Greyjoy to Robb Stark (S2)
Theon gives us our most interesting and distinctive script. The many cursive (joined up) elements, vaguely crabbed letter heads, and expressively loose ascending and descending strokes and flourishes all put us in mind of Medieval chancery scripts, which were used for official documents. Real-world chancery scripts date primarily from the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries onward, depending on region; they indicate a growing, widespread, professional class of scribes and document writers. Does this mean that the Iron Islands (or even Winterfell, depending on where Theon learned his letters) see more documentary production than a bustling metropolis like King's Landing, or has this merely been adopted as a less regular regional style?
Tywin Lannister's handwriting (S3)
This is probably the closest to the fine writing in the Book of Brothers or the dragonglass book. More ligatures and irregularities (as well as curved-stroke d) suggest a slightly less formal and/or older style. This is a far more obvious product of a quill pen than the consistent, uniform thickness of strokes in the Book of Brothers.
Letters: Does handwriting vary with age?
Lyanna Mormont's letter to Stannis Baratheon (S5)
Lyanna Mormont is just a child in season five (albeit feisty beyond belief!), and her handwriting certainly reflects her youth. Any modern five year old could produce similar letter forms. However, we therefore know that on top of her general badassery, little Lyanna also writes her own letters, instead of relying on an older councillor or a maester.
Sansa Stark's letter to Robb Stark (S1/7)
Again, Sansa's hand is a little less regular and spindlier than those of the adults we have seen. Given that this is Sansa in Season 1, we are not surprised at the idiosyncrasies. On the other hand, Sansa, under extreme pressure in the wake of her father's arrest, still writes more in a standard southerner-style Humanist minuscule than her fellow northerners Lyanna or Theon.
Case studies from the show are wonderfully illuminating (pun intended), but what can we glean from the books' in-universe history, and what does this mean in a greater Westerosi context? In A Feast for Crows, Samwell Tarley tells Jon Snow, "The oldest histories we have were written after the Andals came to Westeros. The First Men only left us runes on rocks, so everything we know about the Age of Heroes and the Dawn Age and the Long Night comes from accounts set down by septons thousands of years later. There are archmaesters at the Citadel who question all of it" (Ch. 5). Using this as a basis for the rough history of literacy in Westeros, we can make the following conclusions about transmission of knowledge in the world of Ice and Fire...
All the manuscript scripts appear to essentially be the High Medieval Gothic textura or a later Humanist writing style. This means that even if records of the Dawn Age and the Long Night were first set to parchment thousands of years earlier, people (presumably maesters at the Citadel) are still reading and copying them in or near the present of the narrative. If they much predated the present, we might expect a script closer to that seen in Western Europe in the Early Middle Ages, in an uncial, half-uncial, or minuscule style. This could look like 'Caroline' minuscule (aspects of which survive in the Humanist minuscule of the show, as exemplified by the a with an upper top stroke), or 'English Square' minuscule (also represented to some degree in the series by the the curved top d). Even without the real world parallels, handwriting we see in the present in letters and documents indicates a messy but general progression towards late medieval and early modern Humanistic hands, with Ned and Tywin's hands showing a few Gothic elements or older letter forms, and Sansa's letter and the Kingsguard chronicle favoring more Humanistic styles. If longer texts did exist in an older script (or if any of the First Men's "runes on rocks" were extant), it is possible that scribes can no longer read either the language or the scripts themselves, which would be in keeping with the general lack of belief expressed for anything supernatural/suitably ancient by the southern elites of Westeros at the beginning of the series. Nonetheless, this seems to contradict the fact that some manuscripts do exist in what must be relatively recent, expensively-produced copies, as well as the Archmaester's credulous if disinterested response to Sam's account of the Others.
On the level of the study of the physical documents (codicology), the cleanliness of manuscripts and lack of bookworm holes or other signs of vermin also attest to their quite recent production. Given the vibrant colors and illustrations, it is not unreasonable to assume that the books Sam sees at the Citadel were produced for some noble patron, who must have shared this interest. If we were in a charitable mindset, we might suggest said patron was Rhaegar, following up on his literary discovery from Asshai. Perhaps he died before the copies were delivered. If they were intended for anyone else, we must wonder why their knowledge (or belief in the knowledge they convey) seems not to have spread beyond the Citadel library, and even there, not to have inspired much more than vague apathy in the minds of the maesters.
Handwriting in letters is wildly inconsistent though it appears that most of the nobility are literate from a young age. Cursive elements appear in ligatures joining letters, but text entirely in cursive seems unknown (Theon's chancery-esque hand and Sansa's letter to Robb come by far the closest). If writing were concentrated in secluded septs around Westeros, it would not be surprising if each location had developed its own house style. However, it is the maesters at the Citadel in Old Town who are responsible for the production of the books we see in the series. This disparity between hands is odd given that all maesters train in the same, single location and are predominantly tasked with education, particularly education of the noble classes. If Westeros followed the model of Western Europe (more specifically the British Isles and Ireland, which generally emerge as clear real-world analogues of the fictional people, places, and events), we might expect more uniformity in letter forms. On the other hand, the level of overall literacy represented is perhaps closer to that associated with the Renaissance or Early Modern Period: most characters in Westeros and Essos can read (Ser Davos and Gilly, who both learn to read in the course of the series, are interlopers from other social classes or regions/cultures). Literacy is common enough that copies of The Seven-Pointed Star (the biblical stand-in gospel of the widespread Faith of the Seven) are mentioned and passages known by heart, and lords and ladies tend to write their own letters and even wills rather than relying on the resident maester (more so in the show than in the books). Perhaps, adjusted for this ubiquity of literacy, the proliferation of personal handwriting styles makes a bit more sense; the value placed on individuality, be it personal acclaim, agency, or distinct authorship seems to have more in common with later periods of European history than Medieval norms.
If we are to take any conclusion from this evidence, it should be incredulity at the overall ignorance and disbelief in the Others/White Walkers, dragons, and the supernatural in general given the obvious interest attested by recent manuscript copies and amazingly high level of (at least noble) literacy. Yes, we may call some manuscripts that deal with supernatural themes literature, as seems to be the case with Legends of the Long Night, but literature that matters to someone in a position to expensively rewrite or recopy it nonetheless. The dragonglass book on the other hand is a far more historical text, and also exists in what seems to be a very modern copy, complete with pictures of weapons apparently made by the Children of the Forest. Again, if that much is accepted as fact and attested in such an expensive, recent manuscript, why the greater disinterest in and disbelief in rumors and first-hand accounts of the supernatural? Westeros has not forgotten its past, and neither is it illiterate; it merely fails to connect the two with any critical thinking abilities. Or, of course, we can just blame HBO's research skills.
Further Reading
On calligraphy in Game of Thrones:
https://www.girvin.com/blog/the-bastard-letter-the-calligraphy-of-the-game-of-thrones/
On general Western European script history:
Latin Palaeography by Bernhard Bischoff, trans. Daibhm O. Cróinin and David Ganz, 1979.
On the history of Westeros:
The World of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, Elio M. García Jr. and Linda Antonsson, 2014.
A Forgotten Realm: The Empire of Trebizond
September 08, 2017, 11:18:00 PM
A Forgotten Realm: The Empire of Trebizond
By Jubal
By Jubal
The Byzantine World by 1265: Trebizond can be seen on the east of the map
The Empire was founded by two grandsons of the deposed Byzantine Emperor Andronikos I, a mercurial character whose life mostly involved sleeping and fighting his way around and beyond the Byzantine world and whose usurpation of the throne in 1182 led to a brief, bloody three year reign that culminated in his being physically ripped apart by the Constantinopolitan mob. His two grandsons, David and Alexios, grew up in Georgia thanks to their relation to the Bagrationid royal family there, and in 1204, with the unstable reigns of the Angelos dynasty in collapse, they launched a campaign against the tottering Empire.
It's a point of debate what David and Alexios wanted to achieve in the Empire, with scholars split between those who think a breakaway principality was the goal versus those who suspect that they hoped to use of the political turmoil to seat Alexios on the Imperial throne. Turmoil it certainly was - they must have initially intended the campaign to be against the Angeloi rulers, but whilst their campaign was underway the Latin forces of the Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople, creating an unstable Catholic principality around the city and an even more unstable power vacuum in which multiple claimants vied for the throne. Either way, David spearheaded a rapid campaign along the north Anatolian coast backed up by Georgian forces, which was eventually halted by a rival Imperial claimant, Theodore Laskaris, just a few days' march from Constantinople.
Many of these early gains, which alongside almost the entire south Black Sea shore included parts of the Crimean peninsula to the north, were lost over the next two decades. The Empire stabilised its borders in its eastern heartland (the area shown on the map above), shielded from other Anatolian rulers by the imposing Pontus Mountains and existing as a long, thin strip of land that was both trapped and protected between the mountains and the sea. This, for the next two centuries, was the Trapezuntine realm, a land where a patchwork of fishing, farming, and light industries like iron production were efficiently exploited to the benefit of the Emperors whose little string of ancient coastal towns formed the last testament to their family's once world-encompassing ambition. These towns, along with a wide array of smaller villages and monastic communities, probably mostly communicated by sea; the rugged shoreline terrain cut them off from one another by land.
The Citadel of Trebizond today (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Eugenios was, for inhabitants of the city, more than a distant figure of worship: the name was one of the most common to give babies born in the city, and numerous miracles attributed to the saint are recorded from during the period of the Empire. Alexios II, who ruled in the late 13th century, was later said (in a tale with echoes of Saint George) to have fought and slain a dragon with the saint's divine help, up in the rugged mountains of the Pontus – and perhaps, for the Trapezuntines who dwelt in their high shadow, that might have seemed half plausible.
Coin of Trebizond: St Eugenios (L), Emperor John I (R) (Image: Barber Institute of Fine Arts)
It was after the rise of the Ottoman sultans that the days of Trebizond's independence became truly numbered. In 1453, after the fall of Constantinople, Trebizond's position was more dependent than ever on a fragile network of alliances with the remaining independent rulers of northeastern Anatolia. In 1460 the Ottoman vassal-rulers of southern Greece, members of the Byzantine Palaiologan family, had their territories annexed; in the same year, John IV of Trebizond died, leaving his carefully constructed network of alliances between Turk, Greek, and Georgian alike to his younger brother David.
These alliances, however, proved no match for Sultan Mehmet II. In 1461 he revealed his goals by terrifying the Muslim ruler of Sinope, the best sheltered port on the southern Black Sea shore, into surrendering the city. Despite Sinope's powerful fortifications and large garrison, no ruler wanted to be besieged by a Sultan who just seven years earlier had breached Constantinople's famed triple wall for the first time in a thousand years. Mehmed then set his mind to the most dangerous of Trebizond's allies, Uzun Hassan, the husband of David's niece Theodora and ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu (sometimes known as the White Sheep Turks) who dominated much of what is now Iraq, Iran, and the southern Caucasus. Mehmed offered peace talks to the Aq Qoyunlu – but on the condition that Trebizond was excluded. Hoping this would be enough to isolate Trebizond, he headed for the city.
We will never know what would have happened if David had decided to fight (or if an assassination attempt on Mehmed, which may have been Uzun Hasan's doing, had succeeded) – hoping to save his family, he surrendered the city in August 1461 on the promise of a pension and estates in Thrace. Mehmed took 800 children to raise as new Ottoman janissaries, and relocated and split the population to prevent further rebellion. David had tragically miscalculated. As the heirs of Rome, his family were too strong a potential set of figureheads to be allowed to remain alive, and Mehmed searched for a pretext on which to have them executed. In 1463, in Constantinople - the city his ancestors had failed to capture a quarter of a millennium before - the last ruler of Trebizond was put to the sword alongside his sons.
Trebizond is little known and little-memorialised, beyond vague references in The Towers of Trebizond and in a few somewhat obscure historical novels. This may be because it's one of those places in history that almost nobody today feels a sense of ownership over, thanks to the 20th century removal of the Pontic Greeks, many of whom were forcibly resettled in northern Greece. Nonetheless, it's always fascinated me, and I wanted the chance to introduce you to it as well. It's a setting of contradictions: tiny and yet an Empire, exploiting the land and yet facing the sea, proudly Orthodox yet navigating a world of Turkish Muslim politics. Such a rich, unusual balance of place, power, and culture perhaps deserves rather more attention than it has done in the past, and to be drawn out of the dreams of century-old novelists and into the imaginations of today. So, next time you want some history to read, or some inspiration to write, remember the little Empire of Trebizond clinging to its rocky coast. Who knows - there might even be dragons in the mountains above.
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