Today it struck me that LOST has a lot of the elements I was always looking for in a D&D game. I’m not talking about smoke monsters, time travel and bug-eyed masterminds, although those things do keep me tuning in every week and watching past seasons on DVD. I’m talking about lost ruins and strange cultures. Allow me to explain.
One of the coolest things about the Bagginses in Tolkien’s works is the sense of wonder one gets seeing the world unfold through their eyes. They’ve heard stories about elves, dwarves, orcs and wizards, but to meet one is a big deal. It’s everything and nothing like you expected, and more. Most of us back in the day lot tht after the first two sessions playing D&D. Because we all took turns being Dungeon Master, we’d all memorized The Three Books and we knew what all of the races and monsters were. Granted, some of that was style of play (“You see an elf, what do you do? “Shoot him with my crossbow. How much gold does he have on him?”) and some of that was a lack of storytelling technique (even if your character had never seen an elf, it was never “You see a tall lithe figure with slightly pointed ears”). But we, as players, always knew even if our characters didn’t.
LOST has introduced us to an alien culture by inches. The Others, the Hostiles, Ben’s people, whatever you want to call the island cult, are different from the “adventure party” comprised mainly of 815 survivors. We meet them and assume they’re like us, but they’re not. We think we can fathom their motives and their culture from their actions, but we can’t. We assume they’re our enemies, but they might not be. Just as we think we’ve got a handle on who they are, then we meet their enemies, and the context changes. It’s Bilbo meets the elves, without Gandalf there to provide pat exposition. That is what I want relations between non-human races in a D&D setting to be. Scary, frustrating, fascinating, and worth the investment in time.
This brings us to ruins, or in the case of Lost, the DHARMA stations. Too often in D&D we know what the dungeons are, who built them and what purpose they served. Or, the exact opposite is true: don’t know, don’t care. We drew maps back in the day, and just tossed in monsters and treasures. I love that we’ve got some vague idea of what the stations were for, but because we can only base our judgments on what we’ve seen we can’t be sure. And because we assume a particular ruin is one thing, we overlook other things that might reveal it’s true purpose.
The last time I ran D&D I tried to do something like this. Understand, this was before LOST aired, so these were already things I wanted. I set the game in a “new world” that the standard races had colonized, so people could still play the stock character types. I had the continent peppered with remnants of a vanished culture that no one knew anything about, so their ruins and surviving structures were full of mystery.
I even had the lost race’s magic items work slightly differently. The two primary races on the continent were bugbears and gnolls, but they didn’t behave the way the players expected bugbears and gnolls to act.
If I ever run a D&D-type fantasy game again, I’m going to keep all of things in mind. The only thing I wouldn’t steal from LOST is the pacing.
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