Belle-Île-en-Mer : awesome inspiration

When I was a kid, I often went on holidays on the island of Belle-Île-en-Mer (Brittany, France), situated 15 kilometers (about 9 miles) off the coast of Morbihan. The whole island basically fits in a 6-mile hex, and it takes the better part of a day to cross it on foot. Circling it takes 3 to 4 days.

Here I jot a few notes on what's cool and interesting there. I have long wanted to create some kind of module, adventure or sandbox there. When I was a kid, we often went there around the time of Halloween, and it was ripe for autumnal adventures.

So. On this tiny hex, you can find :

- 4 villages, including a fishing harbor, a military harbor with a seaside huge citadel, an ancient abbey, a secluded village... and none of them gets along, 

- almost a hundred hamlets comprised of family farms (about 2d6 houses each), 

- a whole system of cisterns and fortifications around the citadel, including weird sewers and buried places where no one has set foot in three or four centuries,

- a magic / witch forest,

- at least three menhirs,

- a small lake, some ponds, an orchard, 

- 20+ beaches lodged in small coves between sharp cliffs, including : one with hellish waves, one with weird seashells and small bits of explosives washed ashore by a sunken WW1 ship, one with a weird marsh, one infested with jellyfish and venomous fishes, one renowned for it's lethal currents, one that's almost impossible to access unless you cross a maze of brambles and thorn-trees...

- at least one sunken 17th-century galleon with rumors of treasure and gold, 

- three lighthouses and one meteo station,

- the ruins of at least three other lighthouses and semaphors, and one windmill, 

- several seaside caverns and grottoes, including a giant one that's closed because the waves and rocks are too dangerous, another nicknamed the Vazen pit or the Devil's pit, and another that was used by pirates and English soldiers for smuggling and clandestine operations, 

- one islet that gets cut off the island when the tide comes, where you can get trapped for 6 hours if you're not careful, 

- a cove named "Borderune" (Runeside) with a rock looking like a giant bear, 

- wild boars sometimes, 

- all manners of strange mushrooms, in autumn there's an annual display of the weirdest, biggest, most colorful mushrooms found by people in the preceding weeks, 

- traces of occupation and encampments from both Bronze Age people and Roman soldiers,

- a dozen small seaside forts, ruined or occupied, one once built and owned by a famous actress, 

- a former orphanage / child prison that's full of ghosts and awful stories, 

- lots of bunkers built by the Nazis and left in place along the coast, 

- a tiny airport, a ranch...

Belle-Île-en-Mer means "beautiful island in the sea", which does sound a bit precious. But it's former names, most meaning the exact same thing, are all very inspiring : Vindilis in Latin, Guerveur in Breton / old French, Kalonessos in Greek...

Of course the island is exceptionally packed with stuff, and of course most of these places might be of little interest for a more epic or lengthy campaign. But it shows how much stuff you can pack in small distances such as a single traditional 6-mile hex, and Europe is certainly a great inspiration for this.

As for me, I'm definitely in the mood for making something out of this...

Genre distinctions in speculative fiction

This article was originally a response in comment of this post over at Grognardia, where James Maliszewski discusses Lovecraft and "the changing meaning of literary genres".

Since the comment was too long (thanks, Blogger), I've decided to make it its own post.

It mostly talks about the evolution of speculative fiction genres in the French-speaking world, as I understand it. Enjoy !

Literary genre questions are interesting, because they vary by language and literary traditions, even if not by much, as you'll see.

In the French-speaking sphere, at the time Jules Verne wrote (second half of the 19th century), there was an overall distinction of three genres :

- le merveilleux (the wondrous, the supernatural), which had elements of fairy tales and magic : fairies, dragons, witches, talking animals, faraway lands shrouded in myth and mist, etc. So that's the fantasy & fairy tales sphere.

- l'anticipation (... anticipation, alright), which was speculative fiction aimed at imagining possible futures. So it covers sci-fi, but not fantasy with sci-fi trappings. Jules Verne's novels are most of the time in this category.

- le fantastique (the fantastical, the weird), which is the irruption of the weird into the normal life. It broadly maps to weird tales and horror, and was a very popular genre in France from basically 1820-1920. Seriously, there's so much stuff.

There was also the "feuilletons" : at the turn of the century, they were serialized stories published in journals. If they met success, they were then collected and published as full-length novels, and then adapted for theatre plays. Much like, nowadays, a comic book will have movies and novelizations. Those feuilletons were the bit earlier, French equivalent of pulps, and their genres were mostly :

- historical (all things Dumas, for example),

- crime stories (see Arsène Lupin),

- and adventures of characters with peculiar powers who were fighting crime or exploring Mars. They're precursors, sometimes direct ancestors of super-heroes and planetary romance stories.

Of course, all of these genres were served with a healthy dose of pulpy, fast-paced, drama-filled, cliff-hanging adventure fun — that's what they were for. 

Then there was an after-war snobby backlash against all of this. Feuilleton stories, anticipation and the fantastique were either elevated to the "good literature" pantheon, or thrown in the trash or the "roman de gare" ("train station novels") category (and that's why we don't have real French super-heroes anymore. What a loss).

The merveilleux was relegated to children stories, despite a centuries-long tradition.

What was left of non-children comics, fantasy and sci-fi was relegated to the marges, where a whole counter-culture grew around them in the 70-80s, blending them to create a fun science-fantasy-weird hodge-podge. That was expressed in comics and zines that were marginal at the time, but have grown in popularity and recognition since then. Métal Hurlant / Heavy Metal would be the most famous one.

So, for a long time, all of speculative fiction was basically divided in this manner :

- "for kids" stuff,

-  "officially great" literature contained many great pieces of sci-fi and weird, even though rarely advertised as such,

- what was called "science-fiction" and was the counter-culture corner, almost at the back of bookstores. (Plus some pulp-like novels only sold in train stations and the like, mostly spy and crime stories, adventure novels, or things like Bob Morane where a modern spy/agent has pulpy adventures spanning various genres.)

Nowadays, it's all much more recognized, save perhaps for the 1900-1920 super-heroes who have only begun to be unearthed in the last 20 years. In the recent years, publishers have mostly adopted the American genre distinction, with sci-fi, fantasy and horror being clearly labeled next to each other. Here you'll have Lovecraft sitting in horror, Howard sitting in fantasy, and sci-fi being more about the trappings than the anticipation side.

Meanwhile, pulp, the weird, and old folk tales are non-existent, save for anthologies and collections of older texts identified as such.

The "young adult" sections will regroup a lot of stuff, not ignoring genres and sub-genres, alas, even using their fine distinctions as marketing arguments. But at least it places a lot of things under the same umbrella.

Most of this all will be dubbed "SFFF" in literature studies, meaning "Science-fiction, fantasy, fantastique" (much like our initial, historical three-part distinction).

And still, in the general literature sections, you'll find Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, R. L. Stevenson, Alexandre Dumas, Maurice Leblanc, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Franz Kafka, and many other authors that we have decided to integrate in the "classics", which they rightly are, but without noting them as belonging to particular genres.

I would personally push to either integrate more things into standard fiction, or widen the definitions of genre fiction to encompass more authors and genres, forgotten or subsumed by time and fashions.

But, anyway : what is most important, in the end, is that the realm of speculative fiction is more accepted and alive than ever !

OSR origin story : my turn !

 So back in november, Jenx over at Gorgon Bones posted about his coming into the OSR and invited others to do the same.

Since I was planning a post in this vein at some point, why not now ?

I've succinctly described my role-playing background in my opening post, so let's build on that.

I'm a 30-year-old French man, not raised in a particularly geek household (at least not in the tabletop RPGs and video games kind), so I haven't been exposed to the now-classic D&D kind of fantasy at an early age. That's why you won't see much fondness here on this blog for actually old-school modules and rulesets — they're just not part of my fantasy / RPG upbringing. I'm no TSR grognard and it shows.

My own exposure to fantasy, science-fiction and RPG concepts was made through several ways :

- in childhood, many contacts with the traditional European, Polish and French body of fairy tales, fables and bedtime stories, along with bits from other cultures of the world, and a healthy dose of Matter of Britain (and France, and Rome, and Greek myths) by way of tales and simple cultural osmosis ;

- inventing a parallel world in our garden where my younger brother and I would weave stories blending various toys and the garden's micro-landscapes ;

- from childhood to adulthood, extensive travels and holidays in Brittany, Germany, Poland, and various French mountains and countrysides ;

- a long-time habit of playing board games, including slightly fantasy-themed ones like Labyrinth ;

- discovering Game Boy games at school, so you can thank Zelda : Link's Awakening for introducing me to the whole "you adventure with a sword in a weird fantasy setting" thing, and Pokémon Blue for familiarising me with the concepts of HP and levels (and cool monsters) ;

- reading adventure comics and novels : looking back on it, it's mostly XIXth century anticipation (Jules Verne, Herbert George Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle...) and XXth century comics of the French-Belgian world. Among those you'll find fairy tale / fantasy (the Smurfs), series blending contemporary adventures with pulp and sci-fi stuff (Tintin, Blake & Mortimer, Yoko Tsuno, Les Petits Hommes, Le Scrameustache, Bob Morane...), and other things (Gaston Lagaffe and its yé-yé / hippie protagonist in an uncaring 70's Belgium, for example) ;

- several old or not-so-old movies illustrating various fantasy domains : Jason and the Argonauts, The Neverending Story, Jumanji, Sindbad, Ghibli's Castle in the Sky, etc. I spent a non-negligible number of Saturday afternoons binging and re-binging Jumanji and Neverending Story with my brother ;

- and then, around the ages of nine to twelve, that's the explosion : Harry Potter books, borrowing the whole Lord of the Rings from a friend's mom after being gifted Fellowship of the Ring by chance, owning my own Game Boy Color with Tintin and Harry Potter games on it, scouring the library where my dad worked (and still works) for all the SFFF I could find, discovering  « chose your own adventure » books, and reading the weird sci-fi / sci-fantasy comics hidden in my dad's bookshelves (hello, Enki Bilal, hello, Mézières & Christin...). Add to this the GameCube with Zelda : The Wind Waker, a passion for hacking the stories of my video games and the mechanisms of my CYOA books, and my background was pretty much set.

So, everything was in place for me to discover and appreciate pen-and-paper RPGs. All the basic concepts were there : fantastical stories and worlds, role-playing in groups, or solo, inventing my own stuff, hacking stuff I found of interest, dice procedures to resolve play, and even levels and HP by way of video games first. (Those core D&D mechanical elements really had the time to permeate pop culture a lot already, even though it's even more ubiquitous 20-25 years later, of course.)

But I cannot seem to pinpoint the exact moment I discovered the existence of the classic format of playing RPGs. All I know is that, upon arriving in university and discovering the local gaming club, it seemed natural for me to join and play.

I actually did not play in group sessions very much at the time, and haven't much since. A railroady Talislanta one-shot at the club in 2012 and a short-lived D&D 4e campaign by a dear friend in 2013 convinced me of two things : first, railroading sucks. Second, D&D 4e was not for me and, to be honest, most complex or crunchy rules systems were not.

Retrospectively, I think that I bounced off 4e for several reasons. First is that we picked up the game to play, without knowing much about it, this specific edition, and how it was played. So I had no idea the game was supposed to have that tactical side of squares, powers and resources, synergies, etc. Second is my legendary cursed luck with dice : my cleric managed to miss hitting immobile enemies and nearly die against low-level animated wood puppets. (To be fair, the first bit is also a problem of rules adjudication.) And third, my (then undiagnosed) ADHD made it very difficult for me to grasp the different powers and elements of the character sheet, to reference and use them easily. I had a lot of trouble and it made the game difficult, for me and for my friends.

It's from then on that, still hooked on the potential of pen-and-paper RPGs, I tried to look for and devise simpler game systems. Things that carried flavor and promises of great adventures, but designed with simplicity and accessibility in mind. I'm not proud of my first tries, but that's what first tries are for. And I slowly opened up to the English-speaking RPG internet spheres, around 2013-2014.

This led me to take up the mantle of the GM and game initiator : once for a very fun one-shot Lasers & Feelings hack, once for a would-be campaign set in post-apocalyptic southern France, and once with the indie game House of Reeds that I translated and played one-on-one with my girlfriend-now-wife. I also got involved in freeform role-playing on a French language Skyrim forum. 

Since these, a few years have passed. I discovered and binge-read many OSR blogs (too many to quote here, but I'll make a list one of these days). What got me into the whole OSR thing was the joy to discover that, like me, there existed people who just wanted to play : stuff that was fast to set up, quick to resolve and adjudicate, free from the "character build" mindset that was too heavy for me, and all of it DIY-friendly. It felt like a perfect fit. 

I lurked on many forums, participated and commented on reddit (r/osr) sometimes. I wrote many drafts, many genres, many random tables, many ideas. I formed opinions on some games, some topics, and many aspects of what has come to be known as "the OSR", and also discovered the FKR movement, and its delightful radicality. I got interested in procedures, theoretical reflexions, and came back to solo role-playing, which was one of my earliest ways of playing. I tried blogging once or twice, but didn't commit. The itch stayed, though, as I regularly found myself wanting to say and develop things and share them with others.

So here we are now : I try to actually write, and actually post. I'll try to participate more in the scene, to my humble level. And, most of all, I'll try to play with what I write and discover, because this is why we're here, after all.

Am I officially an "OSR guy" ? I have no idea, since I didn't really ever played an OSR game, solo role-playing excepted. But it matters little : I know it broadly fits what I want, and I know I really appreciate what it has given to the whole hobby. 

Here's to many blogs, exciting adventures, inventive ideas and hours of play !