Campbellian Roleplaying

[Jackal]

As I've mentioned in other posts, the TFT house rules that evolved in our games over a couple decades turned into a full-fledged OSR. I'm hoping writing it all down will have been a complete waste of time!

But there are some parts of it that worked VERY well, and are unlikely to find a place in a TFT reboot.

The best of those bits was a framework for "Campbellian Roleplaying", as SJ termed it elsewhere. To whit, an extract for your comment ... and perhaps a bit of lobbying on my part to see more concrete adventure writing guideline in a future ITL ...?

The Hero’s Quest
“… a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight…” (Joseph Campbell, 1949)

With the publication in 1949 of Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell gave the world the greatest storytelling gift ever known: a grand synthesis of the structure and function of every element in every myth ever told.

It’s hard to over-estimate its impact. We have Star Wars and The Matrix and Lost to thank for it, certainly. But he also formalized our understanding of why works like The Lord of the Rings and Homer and the Orpheus myths and the Brothers Grim and Mickey Spillane and a million other stories resonate with us: even those works written millennia before our times are illuminated and made accessible in ways unimaginable before Campbell spelled it all out.

Campbell’s formal structure & elements are the key to creating engaging adventures.

Campbell identified 17 separate elements spread across three broad structures. For simplicity sake, we have distilled this down to 10 elements grouped into three structures:

Departure:
The Call: Life Out of Balance
Aid
Crossing the Threshold

Initiation (aka The Wyrd):
Road of Trials
Meeting with the Goddess
Atonement
Granting of the Boon

Return:
Flight
Re-crossing the Threshold
The Answer: Rebirth of the World

How does this help us?

Each element is a plot point or a chapter strung together in a common narrative structure. You, as GM, craft a story made up of plot points that satisfy each element’s criteria. This is essentially what Campbell did with the myths he illuminated. The specifics of each plot point – the who, what, when, where, why & how – is up to you to flesh out.

But rather than expend effort re-writing Campbell, perhaps an illustrated example, with each element marked, demonstrating how the structure is linked narratively would be best: to whit, the following Sample Adventure Outline which took me all of five minutes to dream up. (All praise to my Muse!)

Major NPCs & Locations Are Capitalized, (with Elements in parenthetical italics).
 
Sample Adventure Outline: Fecund Soil
You are a freedman. Captured by the Romans in battle, you, a Germanic tribesman, were brought to Rome and trained for the games. Many, many Spartacus/Gladiator/Ben Hur adventures later, you have been given your freedom, whereupon you decide to return to the village of your birth.

But all is not well in your village beyond the Rhine. Without its warriors, lost in battle all those years ago, Strange Raiders have taken to looting the pitiful hamlet at will. Few people are left.

One of those who has not given up is a Girl. She is young, perhaps in her late teens or early twenties, but she is the only person holding together what’s left. She is proud but needs help desperately – and so, turns to you. (The Call)

In exchange for your agreeing to put an end to the raids once and for all, and to punish the Raiders, the Girl offers you a magic crystal which shines a light in darkness that only the holder can see, illuminating foes and evil doers alike. (Aid)

You agree to help the Girl and the other villagers, and depart with the crystal and as many rations as you can carry and the village can spare (which isn’t many), trekking for several days down an old road – hardly more than a path and a sorry excuse for even that compared with the great stone-paved roads slowly crisscrossing the Imperial territory you left behind – until you traverse a High Pass and enter a strange, Dark Land. (Crossing the Threshold)

The Dark Land has many dangers. Wolves, spiders, haunted glades, bog wraiths, violent storms: all conspire to hamper your progress and sap your strength. Your magic crystal proves its worth again and again. (Road of Trials)

But you persevere until, just as a starless night falls, you come upon a Hidden Place: a vale where dusk seems never to end and the water soothes your aches and heals your wounds, and rest restores you. And therein you find … Her. (Meeting with the Goddess)

She is more Other by far than anything you’ve ever encountered. Ancient and beautiful and young and terrifying, She is beyond your ken.

She has been watching you. How, She never says. But She knows why you are here and what you seek. You don’t know why, and She never explains, but She offers you a wondrous Boon if you will defeat her enemy, the Goblin King and his Raiders: Her enemy and yours!

You accept Her offer, and, with heavy heart, take your leave of Her.

You travel out of the Hidden Place and beyond the hills seeking the Court of the Goblin King. His minions – Strange Raiders, indeed – harry your path, set ambushes, use fantastic creatures and allies to attack you, make camping dangerous and threaten to overwhelm you with every encounter.

Eventually, exhausted and half dead, you come to the Hall/Camp/Cave the goblins call home. With stealth and guile and strength of arms, and a supreme faith in destiny, you defeat the Goblin King in personal battle, scattering his army in disarray. There, you find plunder, and more: villagers you remember from your youth enslaved by the goblins, now freedmen like you. The goblins flee, never to return … or do they …? (Atonement)

The path is clear as you and your rescued friends make your way back to Her. Shadows flee at your advance. Nothing threatens you directly. But you are watched … and followed …

On entering the Hidden Place, She welcomes you with open arms and gives you a pouch of Fecund Soil: rich, glowing dirt that, when sprinkled over a patch of tired earth, gives it the power to bring forth ten-times the bounty it did before. And for you, She makes a gift of a curious amulet, strangely heavy, which sparks in the sun and feels always warm to the touch, but tells you nothing of it. (Granting the Boon)

After seemingly endless days of feasting and rest, which pass in no time, with ponies and carts to carry you back across the Dark Land, you make quick progress home, stopping only to settle scores perhaps, or fulfill a promise made on your way. (Flight)

Eventually, you come to the High Pass and cross over, back to your homeland. The air is clear and the sun shining. But your heart is heavy, your mood wistful: will you ever see Her again? Will you never return to that Hidden Place and find rest? (Re-crossing the Threshold)

Your party is greeted with cheers and feasting and dancing, with happy families joyously reunited, and you are accorded many honors. You bestow the Boon on the Girl, who spreads it over the fields and meadows, and at night ponder, alone, the strange amulet you now wear. (The Answer)

And so the village prospers, until one day …