Beyond the Elder Peaks

Sgëno, Portalites! You may know me from the Forgotten Realms campaign I DM, The Crusade. For a long time, I’ve wanted to try out some new systems, particular in some real-world settings, and this Christmas I finally got my hands on one that looks like it will work: The Savage World of Solomon Kane, using Pinnacle’s Savage Worlds system.

You see, I rewild. Earth skills (a.k.a., “primitive skills”) play a huge part in that, but that only gives you a beginning. A huge part of rewilding involves becoming native to a specific place. And that, too, involves a lot of things you might naturally think of, like tracking and hiking and getting in plenty of “dirt time.” But ask any traditional person, and they’ll tell you that the most important things they have that connect them to their family and land come from their traditions, and the stories they tell.

RPGs can do more than simply emulate ritual they can become a ritual discourse. We use songs and stories to resolve questions and harmonize ourselves with the patterns and rhythms around us. Animists recognize how stories act like people, acting in accordance with the local land and the passing seasons like anyone else; they come and go as they please. Hence, why I have so long advocated for an RPG campaign in a real-world setting: so that I could use the RPG to begin the rudimentary foundations of a ritual and mythic discourse, and begin harmonizing with the legends, stories, rhythms and patterns of the land we’ve begun reconnecting with.

This presents a rudimentary and rushed summary; I wrote on this subject far more fully in “The Fifth World Manifesto,” declaring the RPG we still continue working on.

So, that gives me a few goals for this campaign:

1. Help my “tribe” begin to develop some personal myths they can connect through.
2. Use those personal myths to connect them to the myths and legends of our land.
3. See what I can do to weave stories that reflect seasonality and locality, i.e., play “winter stories” in winter, “spring stories” in spring, and so on.
4. Develop my ability to speak with E-Primitive. Robert Anton Wilson explained E-Prime admirably in “Toward Understanding E-Prime,” and David Abram described the ways in which native languages connect them to their place incredibly in Spell of the Sensuous, which I tried to capture some of in my review. So, what some rewilders have dubbed “E-Primitive” combines some of those ideas to try to rehabilitate the English language, and use our language to draw us deeper into relationship with the other-than-human world, rather than alienate us further from it. Breaking that down a bit, when I say I want to develop my ability to speak E-Primitively, I mean:
   1. Don’t use the verb “to be.”
   2. Use more verbs and fewer nouns.
   3. Emphasize synaesthetic description.
5. Rehabilitate my nigh-broken ability to tell stories. This one may not need nearly the explanation as previous points, but it still presses the point that I feel most sharply. I don’t think that I tell stories very well right now, and I desperately want to change that. The only way to do that, as far as I know, involves trying.

So, now you see what I hope to get out of this campaign. Hopefully next my players will write up what they hope to get out of it. The next OOC post will talk about the mythology we’ve started playing with here; the local legends we’ve woven in, as well as the stories of Solomon Kane.