Abetting the Setting

"My theories are borrowed from somewhere else
And I've never had too many to talk about
'Cause you were real quick and you were quick to point out, well
That was borrowed too"

 

Ugly Casanova - Diggin' Holes

 

 

From my first swipes at Europa Universalis 4 I wasn't crazy about the far larger density of scripted events compared to #3. Granted this is partly a matter of taste, being a bigger fan of strategy than of historical re-enactment, but such events can quickly overshadow whatever theme you had intended for your campaign. Aragon, for instance, gets several major freebie options for peaceful annexation during its early game (Naples, Navarre, Castile) whose overwhelming benefit dictated my early strategy of maxing diplomacy (national focus, +2 advisor) but going on a charm offensive instead of the naval/trade offensive I had originally envisioned. I will say though, I may wrinkle my nose at the implementation but at least Paradox maintains solid justification throughout, avoiding veering from the game's historical grounding, consistently feeding greater immersion and not tossing random shit at the wall to see if it sticks.

 

Which is not to say sticking to central theme completely avoids weirdness. Take Old World:

It's a Boss Baby prequel, just roll with it.

History, after all, is verifiably weird in many places, child monarchs being the least of it. On the other hand, Old World's enfilade of early monotheisms has repeatedly tempted writers to place more emphasis on the supernatural than feels natural to a naturalistic setting. It's a given that your citizens would believe nonsense, quite another to make it a verifiable in-game force. The blessed/cursed attributes (altering your ruler's random positive/negative event chance) always struck me as out of place, and the newer natural disaster expansion plays around with prophetic dreams and such. Still they cultivate a light touch, thankfully, where more amateurish developers tend to smack you in the face with such digressions.

 

Vagrus is a fantasy RPG set in a Romanesque evil empire with half-elves, half-dragons, half-ants and several other halves, all shooting fireballs and swashing their bronze buckle(r)s. Yet when I traveled to the obligatory Thousand and One Nights expansion, I was greeted with this.

Yes, everyone's fighting over oil wells. As in petroleum. Crude, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. Mullah lubricant. Whatever happened to olives and sesame? Instead of the simplistic and anachronistic Arabs=Oil, why not dip into middle-eastern references more appropriate to the old-timey setting like the spice trade or the silk road, which would've meshed so much better with Vagrus' core caravan-management motif, or hell, why not Arabs' obsession with horses? Or a Persian-themed demon-slaying fire cult aping Zoroastrianism? Or a militarily brilliant lame upstart princeling denied noble title for lack of lineage but expanding a namesake empire off said spice/silk trade. Or dive even deeper to show locals pouring libations to their dead relatives in Ereshkigal's domain? Or if you want to go the Egyptian route, a lizard cult evoking Sobek, since you've already got lizard mounts and nonsensical dinos as random encounters? Why the fuck with the derricks out of nowhere?

 

Sure, Vagrus already featured occasional modern elements like your dwarf companion's pistol, but that at least was presented as a rarity and even then just a primitive flintlock that takes an extra round to reload and is painfully inaccurate, as early firearms were. (At least it doesn't blow up in his face as they were wont to do. Don't ask me where he's getting the powder.) Even if you wanted black viscous petro-oleum in your game, you could've stuck to ancient surface extraction and the odd shallow well; crude, unrefined fuel and tar seeing limited local use, not a full-blown mechanized industry over which wars are fought.

 

It's worth comparing how Tolkien for example got away with his own anachronisms, like the bomb at Helm's Deep and the pterosaur mounts. For one, they're very limited in scope. For another, they're contextualized as departures from the norm showing the unnaturalness of both Saruman's futurism and Sauron's brutish, prehistoric primitivism. Yes, yes, you're allowed to roll your eyes a bit at the Shire's cozy Edwardian provincialism (not to mention the books' larger monarchist/medievalist slant) but that secure grounding allows small departures from such norms to spice without glutting. Coherence matters. (Just please don't look for it on this blog.)

 

You might raise an eyebrow, for instance, at Cyberpunk 2077 throwing Buddhist monks into its dingy futuristic mix... but dinginess makes a fine fit for those sworn to poverty, so there you have the same angle of building on an existing theme. The first quest you encounter concerns two brothers targeted by a street gang for forcible mechanical implantation.

You can later revisit the dilemma: though the artificiality of the modern world is opposed to their sought purity, they don't see it as an absolute impediment, merely a lengthening of the path.

Thus it becomes just another angle on Night City's culture of excess, bringing everything back to the central theme. It contrasts nicely with punk rage as well:

As another series of seemingly chance encounters has a monk feeding you meditations on your elemental constituents... via a neural interface. And that's all. A quest consisting of sitting peacefully in various damp, airy, sunlit meadow cutscenes... and don't spoil the ending for me 'cause I don't think I've finished it yet. But once again, though seemingly random, this element feeds back into the game's central theme of raging against the machine - both in rage and machine. And honestly, you could probably substitute Franciscans for the same effect, were you able to turn to facets you actually need for your narrative and downplay or throw out whatever superficialities or heavy-handed moralizing fundamentalists would want included. It's not as if William Gibson didn't do the same with voodoo themes forty years ago.
 

However, many of the worst cases of such digression are not meant to integrate with the rest of the story at all, but are thrown in to browbeat the audience with a supposedly all-important moral lesson. It's harder to find anything made in the 2010s which doesn't fall in that trap, but as just one example within the medium of games, try Dead State which among other ill-advised soapboxing gave us the NPC companion Karen, who turns out to be in the early stages of pregnancy and demands an abortion. Because it's her body, her choice, full stop, and only an anti-abortionist filthy-male-pig-reactionary-loser-fundamentalist-etc. would deny her this absolute right.

Great?

Now don't ask me what the hell this has to do with blasting zombies' heads off.

 

Of course, there could have been endless ways to work the issue into the plot of your survival shelter, as a pregnancy would raise any number of practical and ethical concerns relevant to the situation.

Do you have adequate medical facilities?

Can your makeshift tribe provide the material resources to ensure an infant's care? Have you looted any baby formula and diapers?

Can you other scavengers afford to support her while she's bloated to uselessness or has a parasite attached to her nipples? And is it fair to ask that of you?

Would someone else be willing to raise the child after birth, lessening her burden?

Are you in a secure location where you can start a long-term community?

For that matter, as you have zero information about the world at large, might you assume humanity has been wiped out and you desperately need every scrap of genetic diversity you can get to rebuild the species? 

Never mind all that because our real priorities are having her take umbrage at the very notion of possibly maybe questioning her choice, browbeating you for not supporting her enough and breaking up with her boyfriend and self-inducing an abortion with a random pill overdose (meant to make her look heroic) because woman right, man wrong, nothing else matters. That they named this bitch "Karen" just a few years before that became a meme is just icing on the cake.

 

Maybe your story can accommodate an inexplicable dinosaur or oil rig or some superstitious blather, maybe it cannot. Cases differ. I suppose the real question to ask yourself is: are you being a Karen about it?

 

 

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P.S.: Don't forget to lube your mullah!