The Discarded Image - C. S. Lewis - Discussion Thread

[tetramorph]

Admin Pete and todd:

Chapter 1. The Medieval Situation

"But the Middle Ages depended predominantly on books." p. 5.

I think this sums up his point in this chapter. Unlike previous ages with culture, oral tradition, myth and ritual, nor our own which (pretends to) prefer empirical knowledge, the medievals looked for authorities and found them in books. Thus their world was the systematization of what they found in books, sometimes disregarding any evidence to the contrary!

I think this could prove beneficially informing for role-playing sages and other such types. I think it could even influence the way we understand "magic" and how best to role play it as well. As opposed to earlier ages and fay folk, human magic users are always busily studying and systematizing (quoting and rules lawyering!) from old books and scrolls and scraps of knowledge half-remembered.

[bhoritz]

I would even say on "approved" books. The search to expand the corpus of books by rediscovering texts is more a renaissance than medieval thing. I have found lots of ideas in "Testaments of Time" by Leo Deuel (it is quite dated but for mining gaming ideas, it is still a treat).

[todd]

My favorite quote from the first chapter: 

At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted "a place for everything and everything in the right place". Distinction, definition, tabulation were his delight... There was nothing which medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

[tetramorph]

Yes, the card index!

We all want to play original edition but a medieval scholar would have totally played Pathfinder!

[todd]

Sept 8, 2015 13:59:16 GMT -5 tetramorph said:

Yes, the card index!

We all want to play original edition but a medieval scholar would have totally played Pathfinder!

Actually, probably 4E All index cards all the time!

[Admin Pete]

I am not going to type out the whole thing, but I found the paragraph that begins in the middle of page six "The contribution of the barbarian ..."  and ends at the middle of page 7 "...to the very mode in which literature exists." to be fascinating. The relics of the 'barbarian' have an impact on English literature all out of proportion to their representation in what remains of the former times and yet it is the impact of this remnant to which we owe our hobby and most if not all fantasy literature.

[tetramorph]

Admin Pete, yes, nice. Although, intersestingly, it was the Francophone world that preserved and reintroduced the Arthur legends back into England - and they developed their own "French Matter" around Charlemagne.

But, I always wind up agreeing with Lewis (smart thing to do, in my opinion). There is something special in our retention of a more barbarian language. A gift to be grateful for.

[hengest]

Modern English has words from such a variety of languages that it reminds me of the crazy smorgasbord of sources for the original LBBs discussed (or proposed to be discussed) in another thread. Surely the impression Modern English would make on a competent and educated user of Old English, familiar with Greek, Latin, and Romance languages (if we could find such a person) would be "bizarre and macaronic jargon". But we think it works, more or less. So, I imagine, the sources for Gygax and company could look to certain people.

Also, this is a fantastic idea for a thread. I've long wanted to hear people talk about the Lewis / Tolkien spring as a source for modern RPGs and much of modern pop culture, but it seems not to come up that often.

I know Tolkien is said to have disliked the macaronic (Father Christmas and fauns? Why not?) makeup of Narnia, and my adult taste can't argue against that. But I get the feeling that the apparently garbled mass of material in those books was to Lewis not really a "sub-creation" in Tolkien's sense -- a self-consistent world -- but more a place outside of time where those creatures and people interacted because there were no temporal or cultural barriers to prevent it.

[tetramorph]

Thanks, hengest! Grab a copy and join us!

I read a post over at the web site for Seven Voyages of Zylarthen where he saw Narnia as more "0e" than Middle Earth just exactly because it was a more "gonzo" mish-mash of crazy!

The more I play 0e, the less I care for what the "adult" in me says about how serious and "believable" and "consistent" my campaign world needs to be and the more I just love the gonzo, crazy, free-for-all of it!

I guess, there are times for consistency and for coherence. Then there is a time to crash a flying saucer into witch mountain and watch the little green men from mars slowly emerge!

[tetramorph]

bhoritz, todd, Admin Pete, hengest:

Chapter 2. Reservations

There is a lot of goodness going on in this chapter and it is difficult to separate my vocational and avocational interests in it!

The stuff about theory and his connection to one of my favorites, Owen Barflield, is really the tops for me. Also, I am not sure (if I may dare to disagree with CSL!) that I entirely agree with his attempt to separate the received cosmos from "legit" Christianity. I am particularly fond of the Christian cosmos and I think that they do fit well together. But I will follow my own rules and pick only one quotation and one point!

"An artist needs some anatomy; he need not go on to physiology, much less to biochemistry." p. 21.

One of Lewis' main points is that the model was pervasive and enduring because a poet may know, for example, all about the influences of the planet without ever having heard of the epicycles and eccentrics well known to a medieval astronomer. Poets need something different than philosophers, and both from craftsmen. And no one is better than the other: don't compare apples and oranges.

At any rate, with regards to the game: this give me some hope! I do not and, in the end, cannot know everything I would like to about the medieval world and our shared common heritage of "fantasy" (what the medievals would have called "romance"). But perhaps I can have that level and type of knowledge appropriate to what I do: game.

[hengest]

I, too, will go with only one quotation from Chapter 1 of The Discarded image, and the bit from some RPG material that I immediately thought of.

Ch. 1 "All the apparent contradictions must be harmonized. A Model must be built which will get in everything without a clash; and it can do this only by becoming intricate, by mediating its unity through a great, and finely ordered, multiplicity."

"One of the basic assumptions of this tome is that what has been written in the past is true, and our job is to explain it. The chief reason is that the AD&D system is a living and dynamic system that is built upon the foundation of its past. While the game can absorb any amount of new material, casting off pre-existing material often damages the system. My purpose is to reveal the mysteries of the AD&D game without voiding a majority of them." Manual of the Planes, Foreword, Jeff Grubb, 1986

Apart from those quotes, which I hope speak for themselves and add a mote of interest to the "index card" remarks above, I will say that one of the things that drew me to D&D was the notion that there could be a world in which things made any sense at all, a world for which there could be a reference document. While this document contained far from everything, the very idea that one could roll on a table and have some idea in advance what the outcomes might be was amazing to me. I don't think that's the core of what I find attractive in D&D, because plenty of systems have some die-based mechanic, and I don't care for them so much. But that is something. To me, a consciously maintained and 'healthy' Model is terribly absent in the world that I know, and that's one itch that Tolkien's "sub-creation" and fantasy RPGs scratched (even though there is so much beyond the borders).

As tetramorph said, the "gonzo mish-mash of crazy" smushed into a system can be very attractive. The mish-mash makes the Model more obvious?

[tetramorph]

hengest, you said, "The mish-mash makes the Model more obvious" and I really like that.

I think the strength and firmness of the model is what allows the freedom of entertaining the mish-mash, fearlessly.

In the end, it is all going to work out. There is order.

And this is going to come up again when we move from his chapter on the heavens, down to his chapter on the earth going through his chapter on the longaevi. The model is strong enough to support seeming-contradiction and grey-areas. Even welcome them. They become the "exception that makes the rule."

[hengest]

By the way, tetramorph, I first read Barfield about 7 years ago and he has hardly left my mind since. Maybe after this book, there might be interest in a read-along for Saving the Appearances? Somehow it seems relevant to the board...

[tetramorph]

hengest, I love Barfield and Saving the Appearances. It is key to my own vocational work.

But I am having trouble envisioning how it could contribute to general gaming conversation.

I am open to it. Convince me!

[robkuntz]

"One of the basic assumptions of this tome is that what has been written in the past is true, and our job is to explain it. The chief reason is that the AD&D system is a living and dynamic system that is built upon the foundation of its past. While the game can absorb any amount of new material, casting off pre-existing material often damages the system. My purpose is to reveal the mysteries of the AD&D game without voiding a majority of them." Manual of the Planes, Foreword, Jeff Grubb, 1986

Wow. This quote has so much disparity, contradiction and assumptions laced into it that I do not know where to begin in responding to it. I never read the Manual of the Planes, but must now pick up a used copy just to read JG's Foreword to see if other such "gems" are present.

Great discussion on Lewis, btw.

RJK

[hengest]

Chapter 4. The Heavens

"The really important difference [between medieval and modern conceptions of the universe] is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt."

Considering the role-playing and world-building (or world-exploring, world-enjoying) aspects of the fantasy RPGs I have played, I can say with fairness that the characters are usually completely modern TV and novelistic personalities "re-skinned" for a medieval-flavored pageant. They are loyal (or not) to their gods as we are to our jobs, and they want either nothing but in-game advancement (or whatever "roley" excuse there is for it) or some goal of what would be called "character growth" in a book club. That's all cool, but this quote is a pretty easy-to-swallow pill that holds such a striking distinction from the modern worldview -- could be interesting to consider from a gaming perspective what's plausible behavior given a practically and theoretically finite universe.

------------

tetramorph, this is especially for you regarding Saving the Appearances (anyone else who reads below this spot and may not have checked out Barfield, if this looks like silly jargon, sorry. But the book is more than silly jargon and you may enjoy it even if we don't have a thread about it here). The quote is from the same chapter of The Discarded Image:

"Certainly we must never assume without special evidence that such personages [Jupiter and Venus] are in Gower or Chaucer the merely mythological figures they are in Shelley or Keats. They are planets as well as gods. Not that the Christian poet believed in the god because he believed in the planet; but all three things -- the visible planet in the sky, the source of influence, and the god -- generally acted as a unity on his mind." (105 in this edition, part B of this chapter)

To me, one of the most striking lessons in Saving the Appearances is the notion of a pre-existing unity of 'ideas' that for moderns have largely been crystallized into various more or less specific notions. That one notion -- far from all there is to be had in the book -- seems relevant at least to ruminations about gaming, as one may consider each at-all-fleshed-out character to be a 'shard' of the player, as is his / her table personality.

Another closely related reason to check it out is his extended explanation / discussion of participation. In Chapter 6, 'Original Participation', OB says that "it is characteristic of our phenomena...that our participation in them, and therefore also their representational nature, is excluded from our immediate awareness." This seems worth studying in relation to players' participation in the shared RPG world and in relation to the characters' (if we're going for medieval types instead of re-skinned moderns) participation in / of their phenomena.



The final reason is that I have for some time suspected that RPGs (tabletop especially, but even LARPing) are one of the most visible seeds of what Barfield calls 'final participation', in which we (will?) participate phenomena consciously. I'm not sure about this, but so it seems to me. What do you think?



Looking forward to talking about the Longaevi.

[hengest]

Admin Pete, tetramorph

Chapter VI: The Longaevi

"They are marginal, fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model does not assign, as it were, an official status. Herein lies their imaginative value."

These few sentences remind me of why I find Lewis's essays much easier to read, although I far prefer Tolkien's fiction. Lewis opens with a take that, with another writer, might be a paraphrase you say to yourself half-aloud at the end to try to fix some of the central ideas in your mind. Just this first paragraph is worth holding on to, even if you don't go any farther.

"Marginal, fugitive creatures..." this reminds me of the bit in Shippey's The Road to Middle-Earth that says

...my guess is that the most stirring lines to Tolkien must have come, not even from Beowulf, but from the fragment Waldere, where an unknown speaker reminds the hero that his sword was given by Theodoric to Widia 'because Wayland's child let him out of captivity, , hurried him out of the hands of the monsters'. Somewhere in the Dark Ages, this seems to suggest, there must have been a legend, a story of hos the Gothic king *Thiudoreiks was stolen away to the land of giants, to be rescued after long adventures by his faithful retainers Widia and Hildebrand. Why did the giants take him, where and how did they live, what were their relations with humanity? Once upon a time many people must have known the answers: the story survives in a decadent form in the medieval German romances of Das Eckenlied, Sigenot, Laurin and others, while there is an intensely irritating scrap of a Middle English poem on the subject tucked into a dull sermon on humility:

Summe sende ylues, and summe sende nadderes:
summe sende nikeres, the bi den watere wunien.
Nister man nenne, bute Ildebrand onne.

'Some sent elves, and some sent serpents,
some sent sea-monsters, that live by the water.
No one knew any of them, but Hildebrand alone.'

What it must have been like in Old English -- a poem not about monsters erupting on humanity, as in Beowulf, but about men going into the heart of the monsterworld, for adventures in the 'Ettenmoors' themselves! But fate had snatched the prospect (almost) into utter oblivion)

(pg 17, 1982 edition -- originally pointed out to me by my colleague Kevin)

And if that doesn't sound like a hexcrawl...

[tetramorph]

Okay, so now I am ready to move on to ch. 5. "The Heavens."

This is so important and so applicable to play that I am going to have to break the chapter down into relevant chunks. Also, although I hate the distinction theoretically, practically speaking it is sometimes useful to distinction between "fluff" and "crunch." Most of what Lewis is doing here in the DI is more applicable to campaign "fluff." But I believe some of it may affect mechanical decisions or even provide clever accounts of mechanics that already exist in the game. This is true, I believe, especially with regards to "influence" and D&D "Vancian" magic.

A. The Parts of the Universe

"Thus while every falling body for us illustrates the 'law' of gravitation, for them it illustrated the 'kindly inclining' of terrestrial bodies to their 'kindly stede' the Earth, the centre of the Mundus." p. 92. Lewis does a lot of work to help us to get the feel of the difference between a natural philosophy based upon a theory of influence as opposed to our modern "empirical" natural philosophy based upon law. And he gives a really great "touche" (very Lewis-like) when he shows how our modern talk of "law" is just as metaphorical about inanimate objects as "influence," if not more so. But the medieval human being lived and moved in a world absolutely brimming with overlapping confluences of influence. All the stars and their signs, the seven planets including the various phases of the moon, the four elements, all overlapped and flowed in and out of each other, creating new situations every moment, day, season, etc.

This is so great because it is just as cool if not cooler than 1e's crazy cosmology but it actually corresponds to what we used to believe! So, a cosmography for a campaign world:

Earth at the center, water on top, air on top of that, fire as an invisible barrier right at the orbit of the moon. Really, fire distinguishes the super from the sub lunar realms. Very cool. These would be the "locations" from which the elementals are called forth. And above the moon all is bathed in the quintessence, aether. Perhaps we would need to invent another elemental that only the highest level MUs could call forth: the Aether Elemental! (Please, someone imagine this and stat it out for me!)

The four contraries: hot/cold / / dry/moist: combine together to make the four sub-lunar elements: fire = hot + dry; air = hot + moist; water = cold + moist; earth = cold + dry. Again, this would be great for campaign flavor, but as someone dedicated to rules-light play, I cannot see this affecting game mechanics for players in any way. Perhaps for the ref for a table for discerning MU elements, etc.? Thoughts?

Now we actually have something for the spell "Contact Higher Planes" to correspond to!

Terrestrial or perhaps Ethereal, or perhaps Elemental (guiding spirit: Fortuna (see later chapters))
Lunar
Mercurial
Cytherian (Venus)
Solar
Martian
Jovial
Saturnine
Stellar (Astral)
Prime (Primal)

Then he launches into a great exposition of the different "feel" of the cosmos b/w us and the medievals. "The Medieval Model is vertiginous." (98). So "space," for us, is this vast endless sea of vacuum. The "cosmos" for them was full of light and music but, imaginatively speaking, equally vast. But with a clear "up / down" so that we get vertigo when we look up at night! I love that.

More to come when I comment on the next section, but I can see all this really helping to make sense of D&D's magic "system." The "influences" could be part of an account of what a MU "knows." Their knowledge is more intuitive than theoretical (sage's knowledge is the reverse, more theoretical than intuitive -- thus they do not (or rarely) cast spells and never adventure!). They "feel" the influences of planets, spheres and lay-lines. Thus they know how to move their hands and which words of power to shout in order to "cast" the spell they are "holding" in their "memory" into the terrestrial plane at the moment they need it. They may not even be able to explain what they just did. But due to powerful initiations into mysteries and to their own on-going experience of the use of such intuition they more and more just "get the feel" for casting a spell. Spell casting becomes a kind of intuitive channeling and shaping of comic influences all around. No sorcery. Very natural. They know how to run the martial plane through a "sluice" and gain power and pressure on that influence like a miner knows how to use a pick and a carpenter knows how to sink a nail.

[tetramorph]

Sept 21, 2015 15:04:52 GMT -5 hengest said:

Considering the role-playing and world-building (or world-exploring, world-enjoying) aspects of the fantasy RPGs I have played, I can say with fairness that the characters are usually completely modern TV and novelistic personalities "re-skinned" for a medieval-flavored pageant. They are loyal (or not) to their gods as we are to our jobs, and they want either nothing but in-game advancement (or whatever "roley" excuse there is for it) or some goal of what would be called "character growth" in a book club. That's all cool, but this quote is a pretty easy-to-swallow pill that holds such a striking distinction from the modern worldview -- could be interesting to consider from a gaming perspective what's plausible behavior given a practically and theoretically finite universe.

Zondervan, I know what you are talking about here.

Finding players willing to give that a try may be tough.

I wonder if there could be a simple, rules-light way to build in-game reward for such play?

Thoughts?

[hengest]

Regarding this from tetramorph

"They may not even be able to explain what they just did. But due to powerful initiations into mysteries and to their own on-going experience of the use of such intuition they more and more just "get the feel" for casting a spell. Spell casting becomes a kind of intuitive channeling and shaping of comic influences all around. No sorcery. Very natural. They know how to run the martial plane through a "sluice" and gain power and pressure on that influence like a miner knows how to use a pick and a carpenter knows how to sink a nail."

I can say that in terms of possible fluff / crunch, it reminds me of some of the Solo Heroes fluffcrunch from Sine Nomine.  It's an add-on for running Classic D&D modules with only one or two players without adjusting stats or the adventures themselves, giving the solo player a whole party's chance at surviving.  Not sure this is of interest here in general, but it adds a "fray die" each round of combat for the PC.  A fighter gets one die type, a cleric a lower number, and an MU a d4.  The number rolled is dealt as damage to an monster with HD equal to or less than that of the PC.  And when a PC deals damage, a point of damage is dealt as a whole Hit Die.  So one point kills a 1 HD creature, and overflow damage can be dealt to others.  I forget the flavor text, but I think it's something like "this represents general crashing around, lower-level incantations, etc."

That's not a very heavy mechanic (roll a die) to add on, but it seems it could be used under the condition that the MU describe what in the environment is used or channeled to do whatever combat effect.  For example, an MU rolls a 2 and has 2 HD of damage to deal to some orcs, killing both.  The fluff explanation is that since they're in a dungeon where the dwarf had identified lots of iron ore in the earth, the MU gets the iron ore to sympathize with the orcs' iron helmets, which them slam themselves into the wall with such (brief) force that the orcs are killed by the trauma.  Or the MU is dealing with a stone giant in the mountains, say it's 8 HD.  The MU wins initiative and changes cold and dry to hot and try in the boulders the giant is going for.  The giant picks it up and burns himself, taking damage according to one simple die roll.

This is to "scale up" a single PC to make them have a chance at a dungeon designed for a party.  But I imagine one could adjust the mechanic without overpowering the PCs in your campaign.  It reminds me a little of the old White Wolf magic system, but I like this.

Wouldn't have to affect any book-spells, unless you allowed "research" to systematize an effect the MU uses often and make it into a spell.  Or maybe the "fray die", which is a kind of bonus in that system, could be adopted as a part of the MU's "prep" for the day -- the MU foregoes a certain amount of formal prep to stay flexible and a certain number of spell slots are instead dedicated to these die rolls that are more flexible but less predictable in terms of efficacy.

I haven't tried it, but I kind of like the idea of a simple mechanic that can go with various types of fluff / action.  Just different action-basis for an non-MU class.

As to a rules-light way to give rewards for "finite world" play, I really don't know.  Am sure someone else will have good ideas.  But in-world, it could be as simple as the PCs on their flying mounts accidentally overshooting the edge of the world (which they didn't know was there), or encountering "the very foundations of stone" deep down in a dungeon.  It turns out there are broad but very defined limits to the world.  How that would affect play, I don't know.

EDIT:"Waste Not, Want Not" XP (bonus) award system: The world is finite and people know it, from the lowliest fishmonger to the most powerful wizard. No one may know where the physical boundaries lie, but resources are not endlessly renewable. Mines yield little, a domestic pig has only 5 piglets per litter, clear-cut forest is not renewed. Find your own version of this. Not a low-magic but a low-mundanity world. Everything is precious. For all consumable items (wand with charges, quiver of arrows, ring of X, chalk) used in one adventure but not used up and carried over to the next, award 1/4 or 1/3 (or whatever) their GP value to the player as XP.

[tetramorph]

bhoritz, todd, Admin Pete, hengest, robkuntz, et al:

Ch. 5. The Heavens

B. Their Operations

"The statement that the medieval Church frowned upon this discipline [of astrology] is often taken in a sense that makes it untrue. Orthodox theologians could accept the theory that the planets had an effect on events and on psychology, and, much more, on plants and minerals." p. 103.

What, then, did the church fight against? To paraphrase: three things: a. lucrative but misleading "predictive" astrology, b. astrological determinism and c. anything that looked like the worship of heavenly bodies. He then goes into a wonderful description of the qualities possessed and, thereby, imparted, by each of the seven planets. He, unfortunately, does not do the same for the signs of the zodiac, etc., much to our loss!

Astrology was merely the acceptance that such great realities as the stars and the planets must have an influence on lesser bodies like our own. The lesser the reality the greater the influence, so, especially on minerals such as gems and the like (gold is the product of the sun "influencing" underground mineral deposits, etc.), then plants, the minds of unwise people and especially on mass societal events (guided, as usual, by the minds of many unwise people).

This influence creates a certain character that "harmonizes" with the character of the influencing planet. But it does not say what this character will produce or what choices in must make. Therefore, then as now, making predictions based upon astrology of particular concrete human decisions was and is frowned upon by the church as entirely misleading. The influence is obvious and "scientific." The power of prediction is a farce. This is in large part because the church ruled out determinism. And, of course, anything that smacked of idolatry.

Again, Lewis' way of reminding us our own western heritage about this stuff, especially the "influences" I think provides just excellent resources for imagining "magic" in fantasy settings. The central principle of alchemy, found on the Emerald Tablet, is "as above, so below." This could be used to truly interesting results with dungeon design. Imagine a dungeon of 9 levels, each deeper one corresponding to an ever higher heavenly sphere that "influenced" it. Going down, silver, quicksilver, copper, gold iron, tin, lead, gems, etc. Fun!

[Morose]

I followed a link to this thread and it requires some contemplation.