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!

A Fist full of Post Apocolypse

 I freaking love post-apocalyptic settings.  A good high concept setting for a campaign is like good science fiction, it will ask questions about how humans will change when faced with a fundamentally different experience of life.

Also if you have a post-apocalyptic setting you no longer need to come up with any justifications for why there are so many dungeons populating the world.  They exist because they are as much a part of the environment as mountains and forests.

Below I present to you a number of post-apocalyptic settings that have been bouncing around my brain for a while.  Some are readily inspired by other works others just came to me while swiping right while on the loo!

The Godfall

• Countless generations ago God fell to earth.  At least it was assumed to be God (or at least a god).  It hurtled through space and smashed into the planet creating an unbridled extinction event.
• The impact created earthquakes and tsunamis on an unprecedented scale.  The dust from the impact shot into the stratosphere darkening the skies.  Civilization was snuffed out.
• The corpse of God now rests in a vast crater/fault in the planet that runs almost completely from pole to pole.
• The body of God is rotting, the juices of its decay are seeping through the rocks and soil alike.  All things touched by the rot mutate into new forms.  Occasionally these are benign or even beneficial but all too often they are dangerous and horrific.
• Around the crater (the so-called Godfall) are the Faultlands.  An area that saw the worst of the tectonic upheaval.  It is full of faultlines, mountains chains, deep jungles, and volcanoes.
• The Faultlands are heavily under the influence of God's rot, the creatures here are changed and dangerous.
• A stoic few decide to make a pilgrimage to the Godfall so that they may mourn the death of God and view its corpse.

The Overgrown City

• The lost generations of the past had such ambition.  They built THE CITY, the only city, a city that covered every last square meter of the world.  The generations past lived in peace and richness until the Great Dying happened.  This is a mysterious event that is only remembered through oral histories.  The stories speak of a terrible plague from the sky, people dying in the billions and some speak of creatures crawling out of the corpses of the dead and dying.
• The city has lain abandoned for uncountable generations, and like all abandoned cities nature reclaims it.  Atop the ruins of the old world is The Green an endless rainforest that carpets the world.  The world is verdant with life, even the dark streets below the trees.  The life that has evolved in The Green is caught in a hyper-aggressive evolutionally arms race (almost by design it seems).  These creatures are dangerous and often immiscible with human existence.
• Humanity was a micron away from extinction and yet against the odds through the years the survivors clung on.  They have reclaimed a corner of the city, and their numbers grow but The Green around them threatens to always swallow them whole.
• Archonaughts, hunters, and explorers step into The Green to plunder it for past riches or the bounties of the things that dwell in canopy, root, and branch.

The Unobserved World

• This one makes sense if we assumed the world is flat.
• The apocalypse has been a slow burn, but it has also been utterly devastating to the civilizations of the world.  It all began when a mountain in the wilderness just disappeared.  In its place was a vast hole in the world that cut all the way down to the endless void of space.
• This pattern repeated with increasing frequency.  Entire chunks of land would vanish leaving only a hole in reality.  However, there was always one curious common factor.  No one saw what happened.  The land that disappeared was always unseen and uninhabited.
• The results were devastating entire oceans drained away, forests and farmland lost their topsoil and slowly much of the world was eroded down to the bedrock.  As a result, civilization collapsed.
• A few bastions of once-mighty empires hold on.  In this strange pockmarked landscape.  Each guards their agriculture fiercely and bizarre ritual magic seeks to give mages omniscient sight so that no more of the world can vanish unseen.