I devoured books of mythology and books of painting; I got something from those which I didn't get from school--a sense that I was delivered into a world where ideas had physical form." He slips one of his favorite volumes, The Book of Hours, from the shelf, opening it to a detailed illuminated painting of medieval French country life invaded by three haloed angels. "I get a thrill from that. It's what art does best-- remind me that we're living in a world which is full of metaphor...the status quo is a lie, because look, there are angels s itting in the corner, and one of them has a werewolf on its knee."
Clive Barker, in an interview with Douglas Winter (Jones 25).

Introduction

Worlds within worlds. Multiple frames of reference. Subversion. Inversion. Diverse perspectives juxtaposed like the facets of a jewel. Such qualities, alluded to in Barker's above description of a medieval illuminated manuscript, could well apply to role- playing games, both in terms of the content of the games and in terms of the opinion regarding the worth of such games. Branded by some as devil worship, lauded by others as an imaginative art form, and dismissed by still others as a childish past-time, r ole-playing games seem to defy neat categorization.

What is a role-playing game? In his book Heroic Worlds, Lawrence Schick defines role-playing games as "quantified interactive storytelling" (Schick 10). Such games are "quantified" because character abilities and action resolutions are "defined by numbers or quantities" that are "manipulated following certain rules" (10); "interactive" because "[p]layer decision-making drives the story forward" (10); and "storytelling" because the object of the game is to tell a story "with a group for an author, a story that grows organically and is acted out, is experienced by its creators" (11). While many board games contain the suggestion of a story in their structure (for example, the symbolic armies of chess or the implied journe y of chutes and ladders), such games cannot be considered storytelling games because "plot is subordinate to score or position" (10). In Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds, Gary Fine notes that a role-playing game "combines the expressive freedom of fantasy with the structure characteristic of games. It is neither as rule-governed as games...nor as free-floating as fantasy" (Fine 3).

Role-playing games grew out of miniature war gaming. War games simulated historical battles by moving formations of cardboard counters or metal figurines across mapped landscapes laid out on tabletops (Schick 16). Game movement was determined according to set rules and a player's ability to maneuver his "troops" to his strategic advantage within the game's set rules (Fine 8-9). Players identified not with individual characters but with a particular army or a nation (Fine 8). However, in the early 1970s, several war gaming players began to devise games set in fantasy worlds where monsters roamed, magic worked, and players could adopt heroic character personas (Schick 18). These innovations enabled players to participate in a kind of structured communal fiction more akin to Robert E. Howard's "Conan" stories and J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Ring than to a historical re-creation of Napoleonic warfare.

My own experiences with role-playing games were brief if entertaining. Back in the early 1980s, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with other college freshman and sophomores. Dungeons and Dragons was a role-playing game that was first published in 1974 by a company called Tactical Studies Rules, but is better known simply as TSR (TSR has since been bought out by Wizards of the Coast). Dungeons and Dragons was set in an imaginary feudalistic world populated by characters drawn from medieval romance, fantasy literature, folklore, and mythology. The rules regarding the story's environment, the characters within the environment, and the actions of the characters were set forth in "modules"-- books that structured the various environments, characters, and actions that could occur within a particular game world. Stories were composed on the spot as players, acting within the roles of their chosen characters, reacted to situations generated by a gamemaster, a sort of meta-storyteller, who controlled the game based on the rules of the gaming module as well as his or her own personal creativity. Maps were drawn to illustrate the characters' locations spatially within this fantasy realm and dice were thrown and tallied in conjunction with a character's power statistics to determine the outcome of battles with various monsters.

It was, basically, an opportunity to get together with friends and talk, joke, snack, and create an enjoyable-- if usually routine-- story: meetings in village taverns, dark forests to be negotiated, and labyrinth-based dungeons containing vast amounts of treasure; all surrounded by dangerous traps, evil characters, and deadly beasts designed to keep the heroic players from their goal. However, by the time I became an upperclassman, I had lost interest in role-playing; time to move on from roguish thieves, wise mages, nasty trolls, and cute elves to more serious concerns.

It wasn't until several years later that role-playing caught my attention again. A friend of mine was deeply involved in gaming and happened to have with him a large, soft-cover book with the words Vampire: The Masquerade on the cover. Intrigued by the title, I opened it. It was a role-playing book written by Mark Rein, Graeme Davis, Tom Dowd, Lisa Stevens, and Stewart Wieck. It was published by a company called White Wolf. Dark, brooding, and rather chilling, it dealt with the concept of a society of vampires existing in our own world in secret.

The framing style of this conceptual world combined punk with Gothic, cutting-edge technology with antiquarian sensibilities, and darkly romantic ambiance with urban decay. It postulated a secret world within our world, operating with its own history, politics, logic, and laws, a part of-- yet apart from-- our familiar world. A spectrum of moral possibilities were open to the vampiric characters of the players, from good to evil to every shade in-between. However, the ethical timbre chosen by the player would be merely one facet in a complex, perpetually shifting moral structure. The characters in the game dwelt in a realm of moral, sexual, and political twilight, where good, however strong, would always be menaced; where blood and eroticism mingled; and where secret conspiracies expanded from vast networks whose origins were unimaginable. No cute elves here.

Later, a companion book to Vampire: The Masquerade came out called Werewolf: The Apocalypse. This module dealt with a secret society of werewolves. Werewolves were depicted as protectors of the wilderness, predators defending the few remaining virgin ecological spaces against urbane vampires who manipulated urban expansion in order to increase their "feeding" store, thus threatening the tribal werewolves' habitats. Yet, as in the vampiric module, werewolf character players could choose from a constellation of moral possibilities, with good and evil often found disturbingly twined together.

I was frankly impressed with the way both books in the White Wolf system took imaginary figures, already powerfully resonant, and set them in a nexus of equally multi-valent symbolic and political associations, thus amplifying the effect of these numinous figures by reflecting and refracting their status as focal points for converging yet contrary codes.

First Interview with David

David Veilleux and I are sitting in a cafeteria. We have been friends for nearly a year. We are both graduate students at Indiana University. I am a doctoral student in Folklore. I am working on a paper for a fieldwork class and David has agreed to be my "informant" regarding gothically-oriented role-playing games. Why are people drawn to such horror-laden games? How does role-playing differ from traditional storytelling?

David is in his early thirties, a French-Canadian studying music. He is married. Cheerful, gentle, and polite, he is quietly intense and professional regarding his career in classical music. He has been involved in a Gothic role-playing game called Ravenloft for several years. He began role-playing in high school. Though he enjoys playing characters in games, he has focused on acting as a gamemaster for the last three years, the person who creates and guides the narrative in which the players act out their characters' parts. He is an articulate and thoughtful speaker, with the slightest trace of a soft French accent beneath his words.

"Why do you play Gothic role-playing games? What draws you to it?" I ask him.

"Well, first of all, it's an escape," he says. "Its fun, exciting. Second, there is mystery to it. Uncertainty. Anything can happen. For example, this salt shaker," he picks up the salt shaker, "can look quite ordinary; but in a game, that can be deceptive. You might pick it up, and suddenly it may start talking to you. It may be helpful or it may be dangerous. Is it part of a trap? Is it a spell? Is it madness on your part? You never know. There is a lot of emotion involved, a lot of personal involvement and intensity which draws you into a story."

I ask him if he sees Gothic role-playing as the modern equivalent of storytelling by the hearth. "Not really," he says. "Role-playing deals with the ephemeral, creating something living, something in the now that is really not repeatable. It's building an experience."

"So... it's a repetition of unrepeatable moments that make up a game?" I ask.

"Yes," he says, "When a story line ends, you might have good memories of it, you might talk with others about it later, but essentially, you go onto the next story."

"Sounds kind of Zen," I say.

David laughs for a second. "I guess it is," he says.

Later that day David lends me the boxed set of the Ravenloft game for me to look at.

The Narrative Dimension In Gothic Role-Playing: The Gothic World View And The Psychology Of The Uncanny

Sitting in my room, I examine the box that David gave me. Made of thick cardboard, a large picture dominates its cover. A dark figure in a black cape with a high collar is depicted in the middle of what appears to be a cemetery, with a forest of barren, dark trees situated further back. The cloudy background, tinged with tones of blue and grey, suggests twilight, yet a hazy sun blazes directly overhead. Ghostly pale women float in the air around the mysterious male figure in the center. Directly behind him on a towering pedestal is an androgynous stone angel, kneeling on one knee, its face in its hands as if grief stricken. The look on the mysterious figure's face is serene. Above this scene, framed by red scrollwork, are Gothic letters, drawn as if chiseled from stone, reading "Ravenloft." The box is cheesy and strangely fascinating at the same time.

Ravenloft is a role-playing game from TSR, the same company that produced the Dungeons and Dragons games. TSR's Ravenloft game is distinctly different from White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade game. While both games center on the motif of the vampire, White Wolf's Masquerade emphasizes oppressively dark tales set in a contemporary world of urban decay and decadence, where good and evil are often hard to distinguish from one another and where players role-play at being vampires, often angst-ridden characters torn between their fading humanity and the power of their blood-lust. TSR's Ravenloft stories, on the other hand, are set in a quasi-medieval fantasy realm where good and evil are relatively clear and where players role-play mortal characters who fight against vampires.

Inside David's Ravenloft box are books, maps, and character sheets: the skeleton upon which players will create the flesh of a Gothic narrative through interactive role-playing. The large, soft-cover books in the Ravenloft boxed set, Realm of Terror and Domains and Denizens, are accompanied by various maps and sheets for character statistics, some blank and some filled. The books, both written by Bruce Nesmith and And ria Hayday, detail the structure of this imaginary world, including its history, its topography and other physical characteristics, the types of characters for players to create, the various powers associated with such characters, and statistics for dice roles. In addition, the two books feature explications of the nature of Gothic literature embedded in their instructional guidelines and artwork illustrating dark and gloomy castles, desolate landscapes, black clouds racing across the moon, and a host of macabre figures such as ghosts, werewolves, and various monstrosities. They are like recipe books: how to cook up a Gothic universe.

Realm of Terroropens with a quote from Milton's Paradise Lost that sets the tone of defiance within despair:

What hath the field be lost?
All is not lost; Th' unconquerable Will,
And courage never to submit or yield...
(Realm 6)

The two Ravenloft books work in conjunction with each other. Realm of Terror gives a general overview of the gothic genre, the world of Barovia, the characters that populate this imaginary world, and the rules of the game, while Domains and Denizens provides more interior categories and technical details on the above features. Realm of Terror especially spends a good deal of time in instructing how to build Gothic ambiance:

Early literature of [the Gothic] genre is replete with stories of mystery, fear, and desire; of vulnerable heroines imprisoned in a fortress, their purity and sanity assaulted by the evil lord of the manor.
(Realm6)

Modern horror routinely slices, dices, and disembowels its victims to create a sense of fear....Gothic horror, by contrast, relies on subtler techniques. It teases and taunts its victims with terrors shrouded in mist.
(Realm6)

In the Gothic tale, evil is something sinister and unknown. A dark mystery lies beneath the horror, and the protagonists are compelled to unravel it....With each step beyond their comfortable, day-lit world, they discover that reality is more twisted than they could possible have understood...
(Realm 6)

But what exactly is "Gothic" and how did it evolve? In The Female Thermometer, Terry Castle explores this question in detail. The fountainhead of Gothic literature lies in its power to evoke the uncanny; a creeping horror that arises from certain persons, things, and places (Castle 7). Castle equates the psychological state of the uncanny with optical illusions or retinal "ghosts" that seem to float up in space after one stares too long at a word or line of type (Castle 3). The uncanny subvert[ s] the distinction between the real and the phantasmatic-- plunging us instantly and vertiginously, into the hag-ridden realm of the unconscious. (Castle 5)

Castle traces the origin of Gothic uncanniness to the eighteenth century's "confident rejection of transcendental explanations, compulsive quest for systematic knowledge, and self-conscious valorization of 'reason' over 'superstition'" (Castle 10). Despite its much vaunted rationalism, the Enlightenment, Castle notes, was an age that contained Cagliostro as well as Voltaire, and Mesmer as well as Hume. The Enlightenment's rejection of the supernatural led to an estrangement between rational "reality" and things which did not fit into this logical framework. Aspects of the repressed, unclassifiable self eventually leaked out from the borders of the hidden personality into "reality," producing a fascination with eerie obsessions, weird fantasies, and strange motifs: dopplegangers, dancing dolls and automata, waxwork figures, detached body parts, and spectral images.

...the very psychic and cultural transformations that led to the subsequent glorification of the period as an age of reason or enlightenment-- the aggressively rationalist imperatives of the epoch-- also produced, like a kind of toxic side effect, a new human experience of strangeness, anxiety, bafflement, and intellectual impasse.
(Castle 8)

...the more we seek enlightenment, the more alienating our world becomes; the more we seek to free ourselves, Houdini-like, from the coils of superstition, mystery, and magic, the more tightly, paradoxically, the uncanny holds us in its grip
(Castle 15)

The woods are wild, rambling, and dense....Within these wild, desolate places lie the physical structures...castle, mansion, or tower...massive and gloomy, with vaulted ceilings, sweeping staircases, and endless hallways. Like vines whose sinewy arms ar e slowly strangling the garden, the Gothic setting suggests a sinister animation...
(Realm9)

The internal, moral level also unites contrary frames of reference. The fixed coordinates by which we guide our ethical decisions become lost in the catoptric theater of Gothic morality. Nesmith and Hayday write:

Purely supernatural plots are driven by the anti-heroes themselves: dark, fallen figures who are no longer human. Yet some part of them is attractive, perhaps more human than "decent" society, and therein lies the horror. Byron, Keats, Shelley-- some of the giants of the Romantic period...believed that the character of Satan in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost was the real champion of humanity....Because they [Gothic anti-heroes] so closely resemble humans... they are terrifying in a way Freddy Kreuger could never be....Though Dracula is devoid of virtue, he still has emotions and desires that are tragically familiar.... Mary Shelley's...creature has been rejected by his creator from the moment he first opened his prosthetic eyes.... [Mary Shelley's] monster protests: " I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed....[M]isery made me a friend..."
(Realm 8)

Villain and victim, hero and scoundrel, evil and good; the lines separating these categories appear crystal clear on the surface. Yet beneath this surface, the axes by which we judge these categories seem to shift ever so slightly, until we are no longe r quite as adamantly sure which is which...

The Ravenloft books epitomize Gothic literature in an abstract and condensed form. Yet, paradoxically, these books become the matrix for a concrete and expansive universe that can encompass as many Gothic tales as there are stories within people to tell. When combinations of such people get together to tell them interactively, the potential number of Gothic tales grows exponentially.

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