Towns and Traveling (RPG & IRL)
I meant to post something yesterday to mark Free RPG Day, but I’m out on the road with a couple pals this weekend to celebrate the three of us turning 40 this summer/growing one year closer to obsolence. Free RPG Day basically anniversaries this Substack; I launched it on FRPGD 2022 by sharing my first (self-)published adventure, “Catch the Rainbow,” and last year I posted a free monster manual of Essence20 stats for all my ridiculous teen angst creatures from Saved by the Morph, which had then just released. Unfortunately for y’all, this year I’ve got no properly produced free stuff to share — I’ve been too busy on paid things I owe people! Fortunately for y’all(/me), I did just release two new TTRPG zines, That Rug and Dustland Saga: The Road of Wrath, which I think are pretty neat, and those links will take you to buy them if you’re interested!
Speaking of Dustland Saga (which, in case you missed a couple of my posts here, aims to map a John Steinbeck-esque travel narrative onto a Final Fantasy-style game): being out on the road this weekend has me thinking more about RPG traveling tropes, and I thought this would be a good space to share those thoughts!
I’ve always thought it was kind of weird that RPG towns tend to end up being defined by just one thing (henceforth called the One Thing), a thing that intrudes on most of the interactions you’ll have when you visit them. Take my all-time fav, Final Fantasy VI — you’ve got Narshe (the mining town), Mobliz (the frontier town), Nikeah (the port town), Jidoor (the rich people town), Zozo (the thieves’ town), etc. There are definitely a couple more “general purpose” towns thrown in to kind of establish a baseline of how people live (South Figaro’s maybe the best example), but by and large, every place you go has a definitive feature that influences the story beats you experience and the conversations you have there.
Even though I thought the reason for this narrative shorthand was obvious even when I first played the game at 10 years old, it always felt kind of unrealistic to me. Actual towns aren’t good for just one thing, you know? People have full lives everywhere you go, lives that may not even touch on the One Thing a town is known for. And yet — 30 years later, the more I travel, the more I realize this civic shorthand may not be all that off base.
So this weekend, I’m trekking through some less-traveled parts of the United States’ heartland. My friend Ben has a deep love of rural stories, and he put together a list of small towns with interesting pasts in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri he’s been wanting to visit. What’s striking me about our destinations is that: 1) we’re pretty much conceptualizing these towns by their One Thing and 2) the parts of the town that activate to bring in visitors like us largely align with that One Thing, too, roping the lives of the real people there into a singular definitional function, at least when they have to interact with folks like us.
Our key destinations so far have been:
Nauvoo, IL, a Midwest bastion for Joseph Smith’s Mormon church (including a massive temple), and the last place he actively led a congregation before his death at the hands of rivals
Chillicothe, MO, “the home of sliced bread!”
Winterset, IA, the location of The Bridges of Madison County
It’s this last example that I find most interesting. I’ve never read or seen Bridges, but I understand the general premise of the story — an unfulfilled Midwestern housewife meets an alluring, stony Artist who’s come to town to photograph the region’s famed covered bridges. The two have a brief, passionate tryst while her husband is away, which ends up impacting her feelings on romance for the rest of her life. Steamy!!
So, naturally, one may think that Winterset’s One Thing is the covered bridges — and in a literal sense, this is true. But there’s also a kind of emotional One Thing underneath the surface of Winterset that my friend Ben explained to me1: that, because of how the steamy story of Bridges caught on with an entire generation of Americans, Winterset has kind of taken on the reputation of a place illicit lovers go to celebrate their romance. There’s an Oprah episode from 1993, after the novel was released, where she interviews people who’ve come to Winterset, and a number of their stories are the same — they’re celebrating love unshackled from the bonds of mundanity. Nice work if you can get it.
Isn’t that fascinating? There’s a way in which Winterset, Iowa is a town defined by infidelity! What does that do to the spirit of a town? How does that impact the people passing through it, as well as the people living there? What a wild premise for a town in an RPG that would be!
Here is my point: yes, for sure every town that dots the landscape is full of people who don’t regularly interact with the One Thing we think about when we visit a place. But during an experience where the act of visiting is centered — say, for instance, on a vacation or in a role-playing game — it actually feels pretty dang realistic, if not fair or just2, to define a location by a singular outstanding element.
So here I am, coming down squarely on the side of RPG towns being designed with a One Thing — not only is it economical storytelling, it’s largely emotionally true to the experience of traveling through an unfamiliar landscape. I’m also here to say, make sure you include a town full of cheating lovers in your next game. That just sounds fun as hell.
~~The Plugs Section~~
Speaking of Dustland Saga: The Road of Wrath, my printer just about doubled my ordered on accident, so now I have a handful of spare physical copies that I wouldn’t mind parting with! If anybody missed the Kickstarter and is interested, I’m happy to sell them for the same Kickstarter price — $18 — and I can even cover shipping. Let me know if you’re interested!
This comes from Ben’s research into The Bridges of Madison County for his podcast, Questioning the Canon, in which Ben and co-host Felicia (a high school English teacher) look at whether some of the most celebrated books of all time really deserve their accolades.
I’m not currently equipped to write about ethical tourism, but I do think it’s important to consider where and how we approach the places we travel for leisure.