Back in the thread Episode 126: The friends you leave in shallow graves Our Roger posted
The variety in Our Roger’s examples illustrates the fact that this scheme of settings overlaps with a choice of genres on each side. On the realistic side (where the PCs typically originate) you can have an espionage, military, criminal investigation, academic, criminal, adventure, or family-drama frame. And on the irrealistic side you can have a gothic-horror, cosmic-horror, science fiction, or weird-story conceit. (Neither list is exhaustive.) I’m going to refer to the setting in real-world history and geography, and the natural (if sometimes not strictly realistic) background of characters before they encounter the irrealistic as the “mundane” half of the campaign premise, and the Bell-Westian¹ conceit as the “marvellous” half.
When theorists and critics discuss fantasy they often distinguish “high fantasy” as being set in a wholly fictional world that has no substantial connection to mundane geography, history, societies etc.. And fantasies connected to the mundane by a flimsy conceit that they are in the distant past (e.g. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Howard’s Hyboria), the remote future (e.g. Vance’s Dying Earth), or on a planet distant in space (e.g. MZ Bradley’s Darkover, E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros) may be included in that category or classified a science-fantasy. Fantasies that have settings in or characters from the mundane world are commonly divided into three categories: portal fantasy, intrusion fantasy, and wainscot fantasy. In portal fantasy characters from the mundane world go somehow to another place or plane where fantasy elements abound (e.g. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). In intrusion fantasy fantasy thingies come somehow from another world or plane into the mundane world. Wainscot fantasy supposes that fantastic or horror elements such as wizards (e.g. Harry Potter) or vampires (e.g. Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles”) have been here all along, in hiding or disguise.
Consideration of SF and cosmic horror alongside the fantasy and gothic horror will quickly discover analogues to high fantasy (in a far future where contemporary Earth culture and recorded history have faded into insignificance, in a galaxy far, far away etc.), portal fantasy (space opera and planetary romance in which the protagonists come from a recognisable Earth), intrusion fantasy (alien visits and invasions), and even (though rarely) wainscot fantasy. (In Edgar Pangborn’s wonderful A Mirror for Observers Martians have been living among us for centuries, in disguise.) It will also discover the “history of the future” settings, which develop a fictitious future setting that is clearly and relevantly derived from the mundane world but supposes that it has been changed substantially by the development of technology and the advance of time. And besides those it will also discern the “wonderful/terrible invention” subgenre, a significant addition to the gamut of wonders for Bell-Westian reality-plus.
It seems to me that the main attraction of a “reality plus” setting is that it takes maximal advantage of Ken Hite’s Dictum¹: “when you devise a fantasy setting, always start with Earth: it’s the most detailed and consistent, best-documented, and most thoroughly playtested setting of all, and it has the best maps”. Portal fantasy and portal SF (such as E.R. Burrough’s Barsoom), future-history SF, and alt-history with a radical divergence or an early divergence point have their compensating charms, but do not allow players such varied and well-rooted characters, and do not allow adventures to take place in well-detailed places and over such well-established geography. Bell-Westian “reality plus” consists substantially of marvellous intrusions, wainscot marvels, and marvellous inventions, where the marvellous can be fantasy-based, science-fictional, gothic-horror, cosmic horror or whatever irrealis you care for — even blended or ambiguous if your reality-suspenders are elastic enough.
From Our Roger’s anecdotes I gather that he tends towards plus-ups to his reality that involve him in considerable world-building behind the scenes. That is, not the sort of world-building that produces material that the players have to get over as a barrier to entry before character generation, but rather of elements that the PCs will discover through play, revealing a consistent big picture. Any “reality plus” that involves a wainscot society or big conspiracy calls for that society or conspiracy to be designed before it can be discovered. (Attempts to make those things up on the fly seldom pan out well.) But even the “marvellous inventions” subgenre calls for work sometimes: Our Roger had to devise the magic system quite carefully for his “magic is discovered during WWII” campaign.
One step away from the necessity of doing at that work is a campaign that is blessedly free from any big picture. Back in the half-forgotten days of my undergraduacy at ANU I ran two campaigns set at Walpugis University (the sort of shabby university at which Professor Challenger or Indiana Jones might have been able to get tenure); the first was set in the 1920s and involved episodic encounters with lost colonies of Classical civilisations in the Congo, revivified mummies, the Ark of the Covenant, a Frankenstein’s monster in the medical-school basement, an expedition to Maple White Land, a vampire, and other such pulp and horror staples; the second was set in the 1950s and featured sci-fi based marvellous inventions and discoveries, such as a lightning cannon, a zombifying fungus, alien artefacts in an archaeological dig, a Neanderthal on the football team, giant ichneumon wasps parasitising the undergrads etc. — all constituting dangerous irruptions disordering the world and having to be destroyed, or else irreproducible one-offs without important consequences. On TV in the 1960s to 1970s “spy-fi” genre featured serial encounters of intelligence-agent protagonists with sci-fi inventions, each a one-off innovation, none upsetting the status quo of heroic normality.
As a further step away from strenuous world-building you have campaigns of serial adventure in which “reality-plus” marvellous intrusions and inventions are included along with merely heroic adventures. This was far from unknown in adventure and pulp stories before the genres of mystery, espionage, fantasy, horror, and scientifiction established their standards, in about the 1940s. For example Sherlock Holmes has scores of adventures that are mostly in heroic reality, and then in The Adventure of the Creeping Man we get a science fiction premise. Leslie Charteris’ “The Saint” has I think over a hundred adventures in heroic realism, among which there stick out two stories about inventions of SFnal weapons and (I think) one about transmuting base metals into gold. Furthermore, I’m going to suggest that Raiders of the Lost Ark implies that Indiana Jones had a long career of adventures in heroic realism before his plus-up with the honest-to-God Ark of the Covenant, and that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull cheerfully chucked any consistency of his irrealistic premises to what winds (where, in my view, they belong).
Have any of us run or played in “reality plus” campaigns where consistency of the big picture was not a consideration? What about R+ campaigns in which “realistic” heroic adventure was intermixed with marvellous intrusions, inventions, and discovery?
¹ In my view Bell-Westian “reality plus” is a sub-category within Ken-Hitean “start with Earth” settings. The Ken-Hitean setting in general may have started with Earth and then wrought drastic changes to it, as including post-apocalyptic settings and divergence-point alternative-history. The Bell-Westian setting specifically has left everything up to the beginning of the campaign as it is, at least to the extent that characters can have well-developed background and places in the world based on substantial research.
