Pictures and Words

Generally when I’m writing about All-That-Is, (expanding the universe, starting a novel, exploring characters or ideas etc) I like to write in-universe, pretend that someone who actually lives there is describing whatever I’m describing, as if my piece of writing exists in All-That-Is itself.

It’s a really useful technique for a couple of reasons, but it’s not something that I came up with by myself. I stole it directly from the video game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which has been my single largest influence while creating All-That-Is.

The Elder Scrolls is a series of games that started in 1994 with a game called Arena. I’ve never played Arena, or the sequel, Daggerfall, but from what I’ve read about Daggerfall, one of its main draws the huge world in which it was set – the in-game area was around the size of Great Britain – and one of its main drawbacks was that the huge world suffered from complete blandness.

Creating a game area the size of Great Britain requires either ten thousand monkeys programming for ten thousand years, or a program that will auto-generate locations. You tell it that a room has four walls, two doors, and a window, and the program can randomly generate an unlimited number of extremely boring rooms.

Apparently that’s what they did with Daggerfall. There were thousands of towns, which were essentially made up of the exact same buildings, slightly rearranged every time. There were 20 real quests, and an infinite number of “go here and get this for me” quests.There were over 750 000 named characters you could talk to, all with the same six topics to talk about.

So when the company started work on their next game, Morrowind, they focussed on fixing these flaws. Instead of making the game as large as they could (Morrowind covers about 0.01% of the area that Daggerfall covered) their aim was to create a world where almost every city looked completely different to the next, a world of strong visual flavour.

They succeeded spectacularly.

From top to bottom, left to right: Ald'ruhn, Balmora, Sadrith Mora, Ald Velothi, the Zainab Camp, Vivec. Any Morrowind die-hards could recognise almost all of them without even having to think about it.

Compare those six buildings. Each of them is not only unique and gorgeous, but their design makes complete sense, culturally and structurally. The second you step into a city containing any one of those buildings, you’re instantly aware of where you are. This is not only useful when playing a game, but it shows how effectively they created a rich, beautiful world. (it didn’t stop at building design – there are dozens of creatures that you can fight, almost none of which you’ll have ever seen before, and some of which have their own food chains and life cycles. They invented architecture, animals, plants, geography…Morrowind is my single favourite game, largely because it’s so visually striking.)

Throughout Morrowind, you can find, buy, sell, and (most importantly) read books. There are around 6 full novels worth of books to be read in the game, and none of them is entirely reliable.

Because they’ve been written from the point of view of characters within the world, they contain the same inaccuracies and biases that real books written in and about the real world by real people contain: a book titled “The 36 Lessons of Vivec”, by Vivec, detailing his own adventures throughout the land is to be taken with a grain of salt. As a writer, you can safely put anything you like into that book, and not worry about it contradicting canon – like the film 300, it’s deliberately subjective.

But it’s more than the safety of unreliable narrators, it lends a sense of character to the world. By writing a book that exists within the world, you’re not only adding depth through the content of the book, you’re adding more information simply through the fact that it exists within the world. Someone who exists in All-That-Is must have had cause to write the book – they had motivation, they had a purpose, they have a target audience. And there’s no better way to flesh out a character than by writing as them, so we learn about the kind of people who inhabit the world as well.

The aim of this project (the All-That-Is RPG blog project) is to create the equivalent of a Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook – a book that the players can have next to them as they play, with everything that they need to create and play a character. I want this book to be written half in-universe and half out-of-universe: it’s going to be called The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is, with the idea being that it’s roughly (and I only just realised the similarity) the equivalent of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is is a book that Travellers (the name used for “Adventurers” in All-That-Is) can take with them anywhere, with a rough overview of all that they need to know. A bit about each of the different races in the world, a bit about each of the different countries, other travellers that they can expect to meet and band with, handy spells to learn, weapons to buy, different deities and their worshipper’s customs, etc etc.

Anything that is simply description (“A Barbarian is someone who survives on their wits” “Gnomes are the smartest of all the races” “The problem with casting magic while fighting a man with a big sword is that you’ll probably die” etc) is going to be written in-universe. Anything that involves numbers that the player needs to crunch, or dice that the player needs to roll (“To see if you succesfully cast a spell while fighting a man with a big sword, roll a six-sided die and hope that it comes up 7″) is going to be written out-of-universe.

For clarity’s sake, I’m going to use a number of different background colours. Without committing to anything, I’ll probably use an off-whitey/yellowy/parchment-coloured background for anything written in-universe (like this) and a grey/”stone” background for anything written out-of-universe (like this).

I’ll also need a third colour, (probably a dull blue like this) because I want to use content from the Open Gaming License:

In late 2000, the company that publishes Dungeons and Dragons decided to take the basic rules and principles of the d20 system (rolling a twenty-sided dice to determine failure or success, the idea of characters gaining more skills and feats as they level up…heck, the concept of leveling up) and release them under the “Open Gaming License”, allowing anyone to publish a game using those rules, provided they included a copy of the license somewhere.

The reasons for doing so are interesting and complicated, and Ryan Dancey, the man behind the Open Gaming License explains them really well in this interview. Basically sales of Pen-and-Paper Role-Playing Games were beginning to drop, and Dancey came up with the Open Gaming License to try to boost sales. The idea is that the more role-playing books being published, the more people who are going to be getting into the hobby, and since Dungeons and Dragons is the cornerstone of pen-and-paper role-playing, more people getting into the hobby means more D&D books sold.

I can’t tell you whether or not it worked, but they wrote the Open Gaming License in such a way that they can never take it back – the second it was published, everything was irrevokably released for other game-designers to meddle with, alter, and release as their own.

I really like the d20 system, and I love the idea of the Open Gaming License, so I’ve decided to do the All-That-Is RPG using the Open Gaming License content as my base.

One of the conditions of using Open Gaming License content is that you clearly mark what is original content, compared to what’s being used under license. There’s no one correct way to do this – some people use footnotes, underlining, have open content on specially marked pages – I’m planning on fairly drastically altering a large portion, so that last one definitely isn’t an option for me.

Since I’m already using a couple of different background colours, using one more to mark Open Gaming License content seems logical. (all of this is assuming that I end up with a nicely put-together pdf file or (best-case scenario) actual physical book. If my final product is a word document, I’ll probably just use underline or something basic like that.)

If you want to have a look at the Standard Reference Document, the base Open Gaming License content, it can be found here. (I’ll be using the 3.5 edition because that’s what I started working from in 2006, and so a lot of my notes so far are based around it and also because they drastically changed the License for 4th Edition content. I intensely dislike the 4th Edition license, but that’s a post for another time.)

Despite my taste for writing information in-universe, I won’t (tempting though it is) be using that style for these blog posts. It’s great if you want to set a mood, or build character, or create depth and flavour, but it’s not ideal for concisely sharing information. Another problem I’ve found with it is that you can’t explain concepts that don’t exist – for example, in All-That-Is, the wheel was never invented. Try explaining that while writing as an in-universe character.

Another problem about writing in-universe is that you sometimes get distracted by writing about the author who is writing whatever piece you’re trying to write. (say that ten times fast.) The original plan for my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel was to rewrite The Wizard of Oz (the original has fallen into the public domain) as a novel that existed in All-That-Is, called The Vizard of Az.

The original Wizard of Oz was written by Frank L. Baum, and was so popular that he wrote a number of Oz books – The Marvellous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, etc etc. In the later ones, the true ruler of Oz appears, a girl called Ozma. She has complete power over Oz, and is completely beloved by all. One of the first things that she does is ban magic: no one can use any kind of magic unless they have her express permission. Naturally, as she’s beloved by all, this suggestion is celebrated and they all come out and kiss her feet, etc etc etc.

The Vizard of Az books were going to be written as thinly veiled political analogies, for an idiotic dictator who really tried to ban magic. In the months leading up to November (the month of Nanowrimo, when I was going to write the first Az book) I started to write a backstory for the writer. You can find Frankel’s backstory here, and the backstory of the idiotic dictator here.

November came around, and I realised that having written Frankel’s story, I didn’t actually feel motivated to write The Vizard of Az at all. There was no need for it; the story of Frankel was done, and actually writing the novel was suddenly unnecessary. I still have all my notes for it, a couple of paragraphs of prose (including the opening) but the story didn’t need to be told. (instead, for my 2007 Nano novel, I attempted Basil Turret and the Prisoner of Algebra, a Harry Potter parody set in All-That-Is.)

I have a couple of notes around about who is actually going to be writing The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is in-universe, but I’m not allowing myself to do anything with them, for fear that it will render the actual Guide superfluous.

For more information about All-That-Is, check out The All-That-Is Wiki, my (unfinished) novels. or the All-That-Is-themed entries from my livejournal.

Next time: All-That-Is Races: Halflings and Peedlings

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