This is pub week post four, technically…not only is it going up in a week that is no longer publication week by any stretch of the imagination,* it’s less about my book and more of an excuse to yammer about D&D and Shakespeare. It’s about something I realized while I was editing Twelve Tasks, though, so TECHNICALLY it’s relevant. The D&D connection is also not actually a connection! Starting with my shaggy dog story about D&D is a useful point of reference for me, but YMMV.
D&D is the best-known of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPG). For anyone unfamiliar (I assume many people nerdy enough to be reading a fantasy author blog will be familiar at least in passing 🙂 ) D&D is the game where you can be a fighter, wizard, rogue, cleric, and so on, and you go on adventures where outcomes are decided with the help of dice rolls. The number of “character classes” expands if you’re using modern additions to D&D or homebrewing your own story world, but the core of D&D was inspired by books in the sword & sorcery genre of the mid-late 20th century, and that means character classes boil down to different kinds of magic-users, fighters with weapons, or the “rogue”/”thief.” The adventure is guided by whichever of your friends has agreed to be the Dungeon Master (DM) while players narrate what their own characters do. Situations with uncertain outcomes are decided by rolling dice. (The dice are an adulthood improvement on “My magic stick beats your magic stick” “No, my magic stick beats YOUR magic stick.”)
When playing D&D, it’s easier and more fun to play some kinds of narratives than others. The scaffolding created by the game’s rules “wants” you to be adventuring and killing monsters in a sword and sorcery world, or a setting with similar rules even if that setting is a modern urban fantasy city or an asteroid in space. There’s perennial controversy because D&D is positioned as the default, quintessential TTRPG even though there are hundreds of thousands of other TTRPGs out there that would suit some gaming groups better. That means that if you read the writing of people who want to boost indie games but also want to drown out the “D&D sucks and no one actually enjoys it” people, you’ll be reading the “D&D is fine and some people do enjoy it” counterargument over and over, which is true and an important point and mercifully not what this post is about.
If you play narratively-inclined D&D for a while, or watch popular D&D actual play shows (Critical Role, Dimension 20, et cetera), you will notice something.
Remember the character classes we were just talking about? One of them is “warlock,” a magic-user who gets their power from a powerful patron being. There are also paladins and clerics, who are gifted their power from a divine being. Several character classes with a powerful being who has so much influence over their lives, and some other fiddly stuff about how D&D words, means that D&D has slightly more of a tendency than other story worlds to involve stories about interpersonal abuse. That’s not every game or every actual play show, and the rules of those character classes certainly don’t require the relationship in question be questionable. Since my skills at noticing that kind of overarching meta-analysis are hit or miss, however, it was fun to gain the realization that like D&D’s rules incentivize certain kinds of play, its character classes create a world more likely to have that kind of story.
I was feeling pleased about thinking that out some time around early 2023, and then Baldur’s Gate III released. This was phenomenal timing to make me feel very smug about the whole thing. 2023 video game Baldur’s Gate III (which took the world by storm far beyond D&D players) has the conceit that all of its main characters are the recent survivors of an abusive relationship. I wasn’t the only one who noticed the D&D thing! Cool.
To me, where this tendency of the D&D story world gets interesting is the question of specificity. Most heroic fantasy stories have a hero who fights a villain. Am I really noticing something about D&D, or is a powerful villain and a hero who is in something like an abusive relationship with the villain not that different from “The hero fights the villain?”
Even if it’s only a twitch away from the generic “The hero fights the villain,” I think a story world’s tendency to tell stories that echo abusive relationships tells us something about the story world.
Having gotten through this entire shaggy dog (shaggy displacer beast) story:
Romeo & Juliet is one of the points of reference for The Twelve Tasks of the Enchanter of Linen; the main connection is that Niselt and her love interest have weirdo dialogue no one else would find “romantic” to show that they’re in sync with each other. To crib from my bonus edition backmatter essay, I am not a scholar of Shakespeare by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a card-carrying member of what we could call the Shakespeare fandom (a term that, like the fandoms for modern TV shows, includes strongly worded notes as much as love letters), and that means that I end up doing the thing of spending so much time thinking about his plays as the accessible mainstream movies of their day (and enough time thinking against venerating this one guy as the greatest writer of all time) that I forget about the Shakespeare = high art association in today’s world and lose track of tripping hazards like “Talking about Shakespeare sounds pretentious.” Here we go again, but don’t worry, I only have one or two pretensions and I keep them in another room with their food and water bowls when guests come over.
I was doing a final round of editing on Twelve Tasks and got to Chapter Eight, where Niselt has discovered a problem and doesn’t know how to enchant some cloth she was given. She and her neighborhood enchanter friends have agreed that this probably resulted from municipal petty corruption, and Niselt is using the technical language of their shared trade to expound on how she doesn’t know what to do next, saying “We all know that if you ignore retrolinear multiplicity spacing you end up with a shucked enchantment, and this is like a worse version of that!”, while Virhun is going “bro, the municipal corruption.” Their, uh, dynamic felt weirdly familiar after my latest Shakespeare analysis-reading plunge, and it hit me for the first time that this is a dynamic that happens A LOT in Shakespeare. There’s R&J, where Romeo and Juliet are pretty savvy but Romeo still underestimates the feud and what a dick Tybalt will be. There are more dramatic examples, like Cordelia (no relation) in King Lear and Hotspur in Henry IV–characters who can’t or won’t partake in the cynical maneuvering that those around them are all too aware of. It’s a theme that even comes up in plays that aren’t “about” it, like the shock of the falsely accused characters in Much Ado and The Winter’s Tale when their loved ones begin to treat them awfully. Although Othello and The Merchant of Venice are not plays I want to invoke casually as part of a fun thing I noticed, the experience of assuming the world will be less vile than it is is very much a part of how Othello and Shylock’s characters are drawn, even while they lack a realistic center of character as the racist and antisemitic portraits that cause surprisingly varied problems all the way to the present. Many, many people do not want to believe that the people around them are manipulative or dangerous or unjust or just casually corrupt, and that’s something Shakespeare’s writing seems to have observed over and over even in people he failed to comprehend in other ways.
I said that the shaggy dog story about D&D was kind of relevant! Noticing this about Shakespeare’s body of work for the first time reminded me of my experience with the D&D thing because it’s also almost but not quite generic. “A guileless or innocent person who is contrasted with manipulative, evil person” is just a twitch away from a generic “Good versus evil” story, but it’s still not quite the same as the more general theme of “Good hero versus evil villain.”
*Oh hey, it might be comically after release week but this post does mark being caught up! I’ve done all the pub week posts I really wanted and the website, newsletter, free sample, and contact form are all (knock on wood) functional. I might do more blog posts this week but it will be whatever random thing pops into my head. Since my ebook workflow involved doing my italics manually I’m thinking about doing “Every italicized word in The Twelve Tasks of the Enchanter of Linen in one post,” so don’t encourage me.
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