Bringing Black Swans to The Table

 The reason I have always preferred being a GM over a player is the sheer scope of creative tools at my disposal.  I get to craft a world and everything within it.  When I got back into TTRPGs a few years back I started as a player and I had a blast, however, 5e just didn't enthrall me the way that old AD&D book I bought off a classified ad when I was a teenager.  I was desperate to try something with more bite.  And holy shit I discovered Fire on The Velvet Horizon by the OSR power couple Patrick Stewart and Scrap Princess and then a few months later I am rapidly running out of book space.

The OSR community seems to excel at creativity and that is why I love it.  Weird and wonderful settings are my jam, so I want to help add to that.  This topic may well stretch over a series of posts because it is a fantastically deep concept that I think can be applied to any RPG under the sun.  What we will be looking at is a consideration of Black Swan Events and how we can consider it in your games.

Black Swan Events out of Context

A Black Swan Event is a term coined by Nassim Taleb in his book of the same name (The Black Swan).  To describe simply it is an event that occurs that has a huge impact (physically, politically, economically, etc.), it comes as a surprise to those who observe it, and it is something that is rationalised in hindsight.  It is perhaps better to consider the following examples:

• The Aztecs coming into contact with Europeans
• The Black Death
• 9/11
• The assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand

In each of these historical cases, the people of the time did not predict the horror that was about to occur, and when it happened the effect of the event was so huge it changed the course of the world.  I think is the most important aspect of the Black Swan event is the out-of-context nature of what is happening.  The people suffering under its effect have no way of understanding either the scale or nature of the change about to occur because of the out-of-wack nature of the event.

The late and very great author Iain (M) Banks had a similar take on these kinds of events, he referred to them as Outside Context Problems, in essence, a challenge faced by a group to which they have no contextual understanding.  This is how he described it in his book Excession.

"The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests."

-Iain M. Banks, Excessions (1996)

A land beset by Black Swans

Hopefully, the concept makes more sense now.  Basically, they are the big surprise occurrences in history upon which the axis of human civilsation shifts.  They carry with them a myriad of complications, changes, and maybe even plot hooks.

In my previous post, I described a series of post-apocalyptic settings, in each case the world been affected by a black swan event.  The corpse of a god colliding with a planet like a meteorite, a terrible plague taking humanity to breathe away from extinction, and a world where unobserved regions of landmass simply disappear leaving nothing but the void of space.

Black Swan events are a magnificent way to throw conflict, weirdness, and real peril into your campaign, and because it is RPGs are only limited to your imagination they can be as weird and as outlandish as you like.  They don't have to be violent (though often the consequences of them lead to violence), they just have to usher in irresistible change.  

Here are a few examples of black swan events for "Generic Fantasy World"

• The Sorcerer King just got murdered by a slave!  Everyone thought that he was immortal, and well if he ain't immortal then his barons and guards are certainly not!
• A  deligation of daemons has appeared at the outskirts of the city.  They want a formal end to hostilities.  It turns out there was a massive revolution in hell and they overthrew the Overfiend and have instituted some kind of democracy!
• The sun has gained sentience and is now demanding daily sacrifices.  Wherever its light goes it sees, and like some mad dictator, it NEEDS to be loved at all times.  Only on the nights when no moon is in the sky do people party.
• Unbeknownst to the world above for the last 50 years, the Morlocks had been hollowing out the earth underneath the greatest cities of the world.  Then on one fateful day in unison, they kicked out all of the supports, and all of these cities, their governments, and royalty fell into sinkholes of awesome size.  The survivors were immediately set upon by the morlock troops who are now intent on enslaving the surface.

Ways to use Black Swan Events

The way I see it there are a few ways to implement black swan events:

1. They are great historical events that add a bit of flavor to your setting's history.  You would only need a few to give a sense of a living breathing world with a sense of dynamic history and change.
2. Throw one into an existing campaign.  It will radically shake up the world and everything within it.
3. They can provide the backdrop for a setting.  The main high concept feature upon which you build your game world around.

Next post I will be attempting the first stage of the implementation of a black swan generator.  I think I am gonna call it the M.E.G.  The Massive Event Generator.  I like the ring of that!