Posts
I want to open by
saying that I love Imogen Heap's music. Her more recent work is an excellent
fusion of avant-garde and pop sensibilities (which is a weird and compelling
combination). One of these tracks is called "Neglected Space" and
narrates the thoughts of a house as it is built, abandoned, and reinhabited.
The video accompanying the track features beautiful ink-painted graphics which
add to the poetic feeling of the piece.
The relevance to
D&D is this: imagine that every constructed space features an accompanying
spirit, an entity that receives all of the emotional energy expended upon the
building, remembering everything that has happened within it. These memories
shape the "personality" of the structure. As the spirit gains
definition (through the acquisition of memories), the relationship between the
spirit and the structure shifts - the structure becomes an extension of the
spirit. The architecture seeks to perpetuate the types of memories possessed by
the building - a place of evil will try to accommodate those who commit acts of
cruelty within it, while a home full of warmth and cheer will be unfriendly to
the bandits that massacred the family living there.
One of the
consequences of Alexis' and my expanded conception of the bard is that the
bard's singular ability, bardic music, makes absolutely no sense for any bard
that doesn't work with music. Why can a sculptor help people fight better
through the playing of music? It doesn't make a lot of sense. I'd like to have
each discipline allow the bard to interact with the world on a regular basis
through the lens of their medium.
The idea of a
building's spirit gives us the answer for architectural bards. Such a bard has
the ability to interface with, in some limited capacity, the spirit of a
structure. Through such communion, the bard can glean information about the
current and previous states of the building by listening to it.
More importantly,
the bard can project memories into the spirit of the structure, causing its
architecture to shift accordingly (since the building is an extension of the
spirit) - the bard can remove a lock, create a doorway, cause the flooring to
weaken in a strategic place, etc. These projections last a limited time, after
which the building might reject or act against the bard.
Thoughts? Obviously,
I am not presenting any rules here, only the impetus for them, but this feels
weird and cool and similar-but-different to what arcane spellcasters can do
(with things like stoneshape and the like).
Do all objects created by sapient beings develop these spirits? Swords, books, ships, plows, hoods?
ReplyDeleteIf so: in what ways do a bard's abilities interface with these myriad objects?
If not: what makes a building special?
That's an excellent question, Ars.
ReplyDeleteW.r.t. buildings, it is the bard's study of architecture that allows them to interface with the spirits of structures (I need a better term for that) - there is absolutely no reason why such spirits could not occupy other objects. We'll say that they do.
Perhaps that is the origin of 'magic' objects, and/or perhaps interfacing with those kinds of spirits is the province of the sculptor or potter. There's a lot to unpack there. I had best get started. Thank you for the question!
I found your blog after checking in on Alexis Smolensk's Tao of D&D blog. You're a musicologist and you play RPG's--very cool! (I'm a philosophy professor who plays old school D&D on occasion.)
ReplyDeleteThe idea of wizards working through different artistic media is very cool, but perhaps the term 'bard' should be reserved for those who create magic through song and music (because of the customary use of the term), and other terms used for wizards who work in different media (such as 'artificer', 'dramaturge', or what have you).
Out of curiosity, what rules set are you using?
Also, what are your musicological interests, and do they play a role in your gaming? Years ago I had an idea to introduce Mozart's Magic Flute as a source of magic power and lore in my D&D campaign, but I never developed it.
Hi Jon! Welcome!
ReplyDeleteReverse order: My musicological interests are a little scattered - I like looking at Renaissance and Baroque sacred music and I also am interested in how American musicals interact with history and cultural memory (there's a really cool dichotomy between how things were and how we remember those things to have been, which totally appears in D&D).
My scholarship totally informs how I think about D&D and the design of my gameworld, and I am working through how to create and depict a world and its peoples as a poststructuralist, being as minimally essentialist as possible. If you look at some of the posts with "Catholic" in the title, I've drawn inspiration from some late-medieval sources to talk about how a divine singer (a mix between bard and cleric) has a historically-justified role in the D&D-verse and has a unique niche in the cultural landscape.
I love the Magic Flute and I feel super dumb for not thinking about it in D&D terms until your comment. Thank you!
I have run my world in two rulesets: heavily hacked LotFP (which is an oldschool retroclone) and my own set of custom rules that sort of mix OD&D and Runequest. I have a set of internally-consistent rules and I'm working on getting a dedicated group of players to test them out. Because I'm gaming in a special-snowflake-rules perspective but writing for an audience that does not use my rules, I have to observe this tension between what I do and interpreting it in an OD&D/AD&D-friendly manner.
The term 'bard' is a victim of that. I use the term 'artist' in my world, but since bard is the widely-accepted one... I would like a specific term for each type of artist, and bard is obviously the music-specific one (with actor, writer/author/dramatist, chef, sculptor, dancer, potter, etc.).
And it's great to meet another academic! This hobby could use more of us!