“Come, my friends,
– “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”
Storytelling comes in many forms, and it’s intriguing to consider the development of those forms throughout history. There was a time people were suspicious of the written word because they thought it made the youth lazy and less skilled in the oral traditions, in verbal rhetoric. There was a time people thought cinema could never be real art, and then it was television, and then it was rock n’ roll.
I don’t know who these people are, but they seem to guard the gates of “art” very closely. They should get a hobby, and here’s my suggestion for them: Break out the dice.
For the last four years I’ve had a blast exploring collaborative storytelling, specifically through tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder. It’s true, these are games. Characters use swords, dice are rolled, numbers added, and dragons may or may not be involved. But TTRPGs are more than just games, and this is coming from a writer. Let me explain.
In many ways my writing had stagnated until I got into D&D. I had many ideas, surely, but I was experiencing acute choice paralysis when it came to them. Writing is hard, and when it feels like it isn’t going anywhere, it can be disheartening. It’s difficult to write or outline a story when you’re not quite sure the story is ready to be taken off the backburner yet, and that if you just had a platform in which to explore and develop your ideas consequence-free, they might grow very naturally.
About time I get to that interesting title, huh?
Enter Thalassia.
Tides on the Oceansphere is one day going to be the title of a fantasy novel, but for now it’s the title of the Pathfinder campaign that I run on a weekly basis, as well as our YouTube channel where we post videos of our sessions. It follows the adventures of four characters: Sambhaji, Iloden, Vasilios, and Maw, as they explore the titular setting of Thalassia—the Oceansphere—contending with pirates, nobles, monsters, and all sorts of eldritch forces along the way.
But Thalassia is more than just a bit of fun fantasy nonsense that we like to get together and play on the weekends. Over time I’ve realized that the setting has become a platform for me to explore all kinds of fascinating ideas while bouncing off of my friends, receiving creative input from them through the actions of their characters and giving back plot development and character intrigue in return. Sometimes it feels less like a group of friends hanging out and more like a storyboarding room for a popular television show, with a dash of improv theater thrown in.
Thalassia explores themes of class, environmentalism, fear, wealth disparity, the consumptive nature of humanity, the cycle of generational violence, religion, the evils of war, the relationship humans have with monstrousness and with nature, and much, much more. In constructing this story I’ve probably learned more about storytelling than I have in any other creative setting. I taught myself both video editing and limited graphic design in order to deliver a more fully-realized world, which along the way has grown and grown until I’m not sure I could even fit the entire plot into a single novel. In other words, I may have rolled enough dice and crafted enough dungeons to stumble my way into a trilogy worth of content. Oops.
At the very least, tabletop storytelling provides an excellent narrative space in which to volunteer ideas and exercise your creative muscles. It’s a platform for exploring and developing the psychology of the characters you create, finding out what makes them tick and what challenges them. It allows you to try out new story tones, explore new worlds, and grow new talents within yourself, talents like voice acting or improvisation.
It’s pure creation, is what it is, even if it isn’t “real art”.
But then again, what the hell do “they” know?
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