History Through Storytelling

Last night, LC and I were in Waterstones Glasgow where Alan Lee was doing a book signing as part of a tour to promote "Beren and Lúthien", the 'new' J.R.R. Tolkien book. (Like with "Children of Húrin", it's constructed from various drafts and notes that he left. Unlike the previous book, though, it doesn't appear Tolkien left any real ending to the extended version of this story, so it will be curious to see how that is handled.)

While at the event, I found myself considering the Silmarillion, the history of the First Age of Middle Earth, and also the handling of history in RPG books (especially setting books).

Very frequently, I've found that setting books do two things that I don't much care for: firstly, they seem almost duty-bound to present a whole bunch of crappy fiction throughout the book. This is generally intended to set the scene and provide flavour, which would be a noble end if it wasn't generally awful.

And then, secondly, when the book finally gets around to presenting history, it does so as a dull recounting of facts, probably starting with a thousand-year timeline, followed by a lengthy essay detailing what happened in the various ages. Again, it's information that absolutely is relevant to the setting... it's just deadly dull. (Or, at least, that's the case far too often.)

What occurred to me last night is that, actually, the first of these problems is quite possibly the solution to the second.

The thing is, if you take an average person (that is, someone who hasn't studied history), and quiz them on the past, you'll almost certainly find that they don't know nothing about history, but that what they do know is probably a bunch of fragments, a number of stories (generally around the 'great men'), all very disorganised and rather unreliable. Go back in time to a period before literacy was near-universal, and it becomes even more of a mess.

So... why not present the history of your RPG setting in the same way?

If I recall correctly (which is unlikely, since it was nearly a decade ago that I read this), one of Tolkien's intentions when presenting the history of Middle Earth, was that he'd have four long-form stories making up the tent-poles of his mythology (of which "Children of Húrin" and "Beren and Lúthien" are two), plus a whole bunch of other, shorter stories to round it out.

So, I could envisage an RPG presenting the history in much the same way - instead of the crappy fiction at the chapter breaks, present at each of them a two-page short-form version of one of a dozen historical tales for the setting. Instead of the standard ten pages of history, present a one-paragraph synopsis of a bunch of other stories. And then, for those who are particularly keen, present a book "The History of {Setting}", giving fictionalised accounts of the history of the world - focussing heavily on the heroes and villains, the big acts and events... and not so much on the minutae or even the dates. Just a rough chronology where this story happens some time after that story, but who really knows?

This has the potential advantage of being a little more interesting, it makes the history of the world a source of flavour rather than just data, it presents it in a manner that most of the characters in the setting would know it... and it also has the key advantage of making it all usefully ambiguous and unreliable, allowing the DM to run with it in all manner of ways.

Of course, maybe it's a crazy idea. Given that nobody much seems to be publishing settings these days (except Golarion, which has the history pretty well documented), I guess we're unlikely to find out.