I’m not sure how focused or detailed I want to be with these blog posts, if they should flow from my head or if I should write them beforehand and post them later. But yeah, here goes this: from the ever deceitful heart.
There are two kinds of knowledge (just like they’re a binary amount of binaries, like two kinds of people, I guess), found knowledge and earned knowledge.
Found knowledge comes from the act of research, of reading books and watching videos and drinking coffee with old men, discovering more and more about the world around you through the knowledge that’s lying around. You can find out a lot about the Mongol Empire or the political situation of Shanghai in the 1930s or Japanese Christian persecution from reading books and drinking coffee. It’s a relatively painless way of understanding more of the world.
And then there’s earned knowledge, the knowledge you gain from putting your hand on the stove and burning your palms, or telling a girlfriend you love her too soon. It’s something that is earned; as Mark Twain said, “Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience the result of bad judgment.” And I think if you want to make something, you need a little of both. You need the knowledge of what already exists, and you need the experience of trying to create something that doesn’t.
I’m trying to write a game system, my very own fantasy heartbreaker. I see a place in the OSR community (not that I am a part of the OSR community) for a particular kind of game, like a hole missing in a puzzle. I’m killing my literary father, as Harold Bloom might put it, carving out what I see as a place my own DMing style might live. And the first step of that is recognizing what needs to be stolen and what needs to be built.
There’s something off-putting about the way B/X and old OSR retroclones use miles and feet and yards for travel, especially after reading Slumbering Ursine Dunes and getting my first taste of a proper point crawl. There’s a majesty to the Six Mile Hex, and simply allowing an adventuring party to cut their way across jungles and mountains, but there’s also a clumsiness to it as well.
The Ultra Violet Grasslands continued this fascination for me (and it’s where the blog title was inspired from) and I think it is an amazing book everyone interested in gonzo tabletop gaming should read. But I still feel there’s something missing. There’s a gap between the focus of travel days and the way rations work in UVG and the more modular use of quarter days and individual actions used in a game like Forbidden Lands. There’s a place for more refinement there, and a chance to tie it into more of the game.
Returning to knowledge, a lot of DMs (especially me) read our gamebooks and think that we have an understanding of the way the game is supposed to work. We forget that games are meant to be played, and we forgo the actual earned experience of playing the game. I’ve played UVG, but there are so many more games I need to play before I would feel comfortable leaving the world of found knowledge to enter the world of earned knowledge. However, as the good hymn says, “If you tarry ’til you’re better, you will never come at all.”
Go read Superhorse’s Superblog, he’s actually got rules and things you can bring to a game table, instead of pontificating about how before one can roll a die, one must first create the universe.