The Tombs of Atuan and What Belief Means for Clerics

“There are riches there; Thar tells me about them sometimes. Enough to fill the Godking’s temple ten times over. Gold and trophies given ages ago, a hundred generations, who knows how long. They’re all locked away in the pits and vaults, underground. They won’t take me there yet, they keep me waiting and waiting. But I know what it’s like. There are rooms underneath the Hall, underneath the whole Place, under where we stand now. There’s a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It’s like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.”

-The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin

I had read Ursula Le Guin before (The Left Hand of Darkness and Lathe of Heaven), but not the Earthsea books. I recently began to rectify that, and some elements of A Wizard of Earthsea, the first book in the series, made it in to several blog posts. Tombs of Atuan is the second book in the series.

Belief Is Not Either/Or 

In the background of the first third or so of Tombs of Atuan is a society where a (relatively) young theocracy built around a putative godking is co-opting and gradually replacing the old religion. But this is all understood and filtered through the perspective of a child who has basically never left the ritual shrine. The story does an excellent job of establishing this information organically; there are no lore dumps. Tenar, the protagonist, is instructed in part by servants of the godking who have their own motives. The godking doesn’t take an active role in the plot and isn’t an antagonist per se, but the worldbuilding really makes Tenar’s precarious position much more compelling. 

RPG settings sometimes explore this space, but usually with a more direct, head-on confrontation, like organized Christianity-style religion versus folkloric paganism. Or a pantheon of clear and unambiguous domains, where the life god is opposed to the death god, and it has always been thus. Tombs of Atuan is a reminder that it can be useful to focus more on the role of religion in people’s lives, how they navigate change, and what rituals are important to them.

Belief Is Ritual 

The wizard Ged, the protagonist of the first Earthsea book, appears in Tombs of Atuan as well. Ged’s magic (producing light, changing form, altering the weather) is recognizable as D&D magic, but Tenar doesn’t cast any spells. Her entire power is the ability to enact rituals, to interpret the will of suprahuman entities, to be protected from them, and to petition them. 

This makes them "feel" a lot different than wizards and clerics in modern-style RPGs, who have different spell lists but otherwise "work" largely the same. Whereas Ged's magic is proactive and transformative, Tenar's magic is reactive and divinatory. 

Belief Is the Attention of Ancient Things

For good or for ill, Tenar has the ear of… something that lives in the titular tombs. Whether these are gods or ghosts or genius loci or something else is not conclusively stated, and doesn’t need to be. Modern D&D draws a hard line between clerics and warlocks, but its easy to imagine that as a matter of public image. Ultimately, everyone who entreats the aid of the supernatural and the supernormal is taking chances with beings who are not and cannot be understood, and that should suggest a gravity and seriousness to the relationship that RPGs don't always deliver on. Belief is less about faith versus atheism, as in the modern world. Belief is more a matter of being willing to expose oneself to the dangerous and largely unknowable attentions of entities beyond mortal ken.

The RPG Revelation: GM as Interpreter and Medium

I can’t turn off my GM brain when listening to an actual play podcast. As entertaining as the content may be, and as much as I can appreciate different styles of GMing, it is hard for me not to listen to an RPG session unfolding and say “I would handle that situation so differently.”

With that in mind, listening to 3d6 DtL’s recently concluded Arden Vul campaign has been an interesting experience. About 90% of the time, I'm on the same page as Jon, the podcast's GM. He prioritizes player choice, adjudicates fairly, and isn’t afraid to present consequences when the PCs get in over their head. 

But the 10% where we do things differently is the interesting part. One example is that Jon is quite transparent when the text of the Arden Vul campaign doesn’t provide the answer to a question the players have proposed. At times he even says something like “Richard doesn’t say,” referring to Richard Barton, the module’s writer.

Early in listening to the show, this made me wince. While I try not to be too precious with verisimilitude, I do make an effort to preserve it. Why remind the players of the layers of artifice at work between the creation of the game and their experience with it? Not just that they are playing a game, but that the game is being mediated from the author through the GM, and that there is no easy, in-session way for the latter to seek clarity from the former.

But the more I heard of this approach, the more I warmed up to it. Because it is entirely viable to cast the GM less as the storyteller and master of all knowledge, and more as an interpreter and medium of exogenous content. 

The GM is an interpreter in that they are taking an inherently incomplete text and attempting to translate it for the benefit of the players. Except perhaps for read-aloud text, everything in a published RPG product needs to be translated. Descriptive notes need to be translated into what the players can perceive. Tables need to be translated into actual events. A monster stat block must be translated into an in-fiction diegetic entity. And the text is partial, inevitably missing information that will come up in the game. The GM must emendate the text for the players, making reasonable decisions to fill in the blanks that the players will inevitably find. 

The GM is also a medium, in that they must intuit the will of the creator, going beyond what is on the page. Even a writer creating the most painstakingly thorough RPG product in the world is only going to anticipate a tiny fraction of the things PCs will do with that product. This is a feature, not a bug. The magic of roleplaying is that no matter how many times a new group runs Lost Mines of Phandelver or Keep on the Borderlands or any of the other most popular modules in the history of RPGs, the output is going to be different. The GM can act as medium, and allow the spirit of the creator to act through them. In a good RPG session, the writer is like a ghost that is dimly perceived, as the GM intuits their will beyond what was explicitly written on the page.

We can and should have strong opinions about the role of the GM. But we should also keep an open mind when observing how others run games. You never know what strange truths they may reveal. 

Frieren and What It Means to Play a Truly Ancient PC

Frieren, the manga and anime about the titular elf, is in many ways classic fantasy, using a lot of common fantasy vernacular to tell its story. A dragon is a dragon, a wizard is a wizard, and even a mimic can be used as a sight gag without explaining what a mimic is, and why it resembles a treasure chest. 

But Frieren also does several things that most classic fantasy does not, including taking seriously the idea that elves with extremely long lifespans would live fundamentally different lives than humans.

Of course, the concept of elves as long-lived beings is itself part of that common fantasy vernacular, and is drawn from Tolkien, who originated the idea of an "elf" as something distinct from the way the term was used in fairy tales, interchangeably with “gnome” or "fairy" and other depictions of magical fey folk. 

In The Fellowship of the Ring, when the members of the fellowship are talking about what is (to them) ancient history, Elrond can weigh in and say he was actually there. He witnessed those events firsthand.  This is a powerful way of illustrating the difference in how these people live. Frieren does the same thing, to great effect. 

But a lot of other fantasy derived from Tolkien tends to copy the aesthetics without incorporating the underlying worldbuilding. D&D rarely presents its elves as truly long-lived creatures, because elves are first and foremost PCs, and it is difficult to embed a PC in ancient lore, or think about what they might have been doing 300 years prior to the game's start.

But is there a way we could we create a more Tolkien/Frieren treatment for elvish PCs? I do not mean the “penalty to strength, bonus to charisma" kind of mechanics that D&D has sometimes applied to its ancestries. Instead, a simple layer of situational advantages and disadvantages could provide characters with hooks for understanding how their character’s age affects their place in the story. These could be literal advantages and disadvantages (applied to d20 rolls) or more abstracted tools for resolving situations.

Normal Lifespan

These creatures rarely live far beyond 100 years. The category includes humans, halflings, dragonborn, tieflings, and many other sapient creatures not otherwise known for long lifespans.

Disadvantage: Ignorant of history. You aren’t familiar with much of the world beyond your own experience. Unless you are a scholar or other specialist who has had a specific reason to learn something about the history of a person, place, or thing, you just don’t know it. You may know the history of your family over the past several generations, or the last century or so of events in the community where you grew up, but that’s about it.

Advantage: Unencumbered by the past. Longer-lived creatures do not expect you to know or adhere to customs, traditions, or obligations not expressly presented to you in any kind of formal social situation. A human among dwarves or elves can get away with a lot of behavior that those peoples would consider rude or even offensive in a venerable peer who should “know better.” A human or other normal-lifespan person can always throw off the obligations of country and clan if they choose to do so, and longer-lived peoples will simply view that as being the natural way of such short-lived people.

Extended Lifespan

These creatures can live to be several hundred years old. Dwarves and gnomes are the most well-known members of this category. Creatures of the land, of rock and stone, often belong to this category.

Disadvantage: Unforgotten Feuds. These people have long memories. Their lives are too long to allow for the quick passage of time from generation to generation to wash away disputes; but they are not so long-lived that such disputes will ever seem inherently trivial. A creature with an extended lifespan likely has at least one unsettled feud with a member of any large community they visit.

Advantage: Appeal to the Old Ways. In their dealings with other creatures as old or older than them, people with extended lifespans can always appeal to an alternate system of resolution to resolve a problem. Depending on the culture or polity where the dispute takes place, it could be trial by combat, an appeal to the gods, or something more esoteric. The important thing is that the alternative definitively predates whatever the normal, contemporary resolution would be to a dispute. 

Long Lifespan

These creatures can live hundreds of years, approaching 1000. Elves, of course, fit into this category. Other people who are not immortal, but whose infusion of magic lends them to greatly expanded lifespans, can fit in this category (for example, the druid’s high-level Timeless Body ability in D&D 5E fits this fiction well). 

Disadvantage: People are like leaves in the wind. Like Frieren herself, people with long lifespans struggle to form lasting relationships with others. When they travel to a place they haven’t been recently, at least one person, organization, or institution has changed since they were last here. Someone has died. The government has changed. The customs and culture are radically different. This will always take the long-lived person by surprise, no matter how many times it happens. 

Advantage: I was there. There is always a chance that something that seems ancient, secret, and powerful to the younger peoples is recent, obvious, and mundane to a long-lived person. Even if they didn’t personally witness an event or know a historical figure, they always have a chance of knowing things that no one else remembers.  

The RPG Prestige: GM as Stage Magician

Is the GM a referee? Or are they a performer? Are they adjudicating a game? Or curating an experience?

I strongly dislike the RPG habit of fudging. A GM fudges when they alter die rolls or other randomized elements of the game to steer a session toward a favored outcome. I have previously written about my issues with it. But I also believe it is worth seriously thinking about why fudging is so compelling for many GMs out there.

And one possible reason is that some GMs think of themselves less like impartial adjudicators and more like stage magicians. The verisimilitude is not some external thing that all the people at the table can independently verify, but rather an illusion or trick that the GM is performing for the players. 

And the players, like an audience at a stage magic show, have agreed to be deceived. Most people in audience at a magic show are not there to "see through" or "figure out" the trick. They are there to suspend their disbelief and enjoy the performance. A GM who is working with a stage magician mindset will be much more likely to fudge than a GM who is thinking like a referee.

Magician gif by Jude Coram

Lie to Me 

There isn’t a hard line between these styles. Most DMs are concealing at least some part of their process from the players. Sometimes when a particularly exciting and strange thing happens in a session, a player will ask me, “did you plan that!?” I’m reluctant to explain specifically which aspects of a session's events were firmly rooted in prep contingencies, and which emerged almost completely from the session itself. 

That said, I’m generally not a fan of the stage magic approach to GMing, for several reasons.

The exclusive society. GMing with this idea of "the prestige" in mind reinforces the idea that running games is an exclusive skill available only to the select few who, like magicians, have been inducted into the society of GMs. There is a bright line between the magician and the audience at a magic show. Applying the same idea to GMing discourages players from running their own games.

No room for error. When the illusion of stage magic fails, there’s no easy way to get it back. If a magician blows a trick, the audience is not going to believe anything that follows in the performance. The spell has been broken. Likewise, once a player realizes that the verisimilitude of the game is an illusion maintained by the GM's fudge, they're never going to buy into the magic spell again.

At least, that's my own experience as a player. Once I’m aware of how and why the GM is fudging, the nearly limitless scope of potential that makes RPGs shine shrinks down. The game goes from limitless possibilities to only those possibilities that fit with what the GM has predetermined as acceptable outcomes. 

In contrast, GMing primarily as a referee or adjudicator gives the GM much more flexibility. They are conversing and negotiating with the players, not performing for them.

Buy-in is difficult. Getting players to consent to this deception without conceding it completely is difficult. For stage magic, it is baked into the very experience that the audience is signing up to be fooled. But the same is not true of RPGs, because of course many games do not feature the prestige at all. Some players may want to be fooled, while others (like me) view it as a dealbreaker. 

For My Next Trick

As strongly as I feel about this, I am not a one-true-way GM. As I discussed in the steelmanning post linked above, I can see various reasons why a GM might still choose to fudge.

Ultimately, if the players keep coming back to the stage magician GM’s game, and keep saying they’re having a great time… it is pretty hard for me to argue that the GM is doing something “wrong.” My one request for stage magician GMs is that they ask players to buy in to this arrangement at session zero. Simply advertising the GM's style at the outset solves many of the problems of unaligned expectations.