Dead Empires | Running the Game

there's a scene it's only a couple of paragraphs long it's easy to miss in the first book of Tolkien's epic romance the Lord of the Rings or depending on your point of view the second book that illustrates Tolkien's worldview I don't mean I don't mean his philosophy I mean the way he saw the world around him and one of the persistent themes of the book it happens only a couple of pages after an earlier moment where Bilbo reads a poem in Rivendell this is an unremarkable thing to do it's a poem called arendelle which i think of as being a slightly inferior version of a better poem that Tolkien wrote that had nothing to do with Lord of the Rings Bilbo reads this poem and then he mentions to Frodo that he had asked Aragorn to help him with it and Aragorn said no man you're on your own and the actual quote is something like if you have the cheek to compose verses about arendelle in the house of Elrond that is your own affair this is a guy who has risked his life to help Bilbo and Frodo but he's not willing to help Bilbo compose a poem we don't know why it's somewhat mysterious thing for airborne to sing well we're about to find out why Aragorn said that it's in the chapter called the Council of Elrond and we have just found out about the Battle of the last Alliance and the way it is presented to us this is intended to be perceived by us as an epic battle and sort of the beginning the antecedent of all the events that happen in this trilogy that's how it's presented to us and then Tolkien kind of pulls the rug out from underneath us this is from the chapter the Council of Elrond thereupon Elrond paused a while inside I remember well the splendor of their banners he said if you're called to mean the glory of the Elder Days and the hosts of Beleriand so many great princes and captains were assembled and yet not so many nor so fair as when thanked or awed room was broken and the elves deemed that evil was ended forever and it was not so you remember said Frodo speaking his thought aloud in astonishment but I thought he stammered as Elrond turned toward him I thought the fall of Gil glad was long ages ago so it was indeed answered Elrond gravely but my memory reaches back even to the elder days arendelle was my sire who was born in Gondolin before its fall my mother was ill wing doctor of D or son of lúthien and doriath I have seen three ages of the west of the world and many defeats and many fruitless victories many defeats and many fruitless victories Elrond said and I think in that instance we're listening to Tolkien many defeats and fruitless victories notice that he doesn't say anything about victory his that meant anything from L Ron's point of view and maybe from tokens there are none the Lord of the Rings was written during World War two and Tolkien served in World War one he was one of the guys that took care of the horses I think he fought at the Battle of the Somme which is like you know an apocalyptic event and it's easy and tricky to impose modern politics happening at the time contemporaneous with the writing of this on Tolkien but I think he was mostly used in World War two and the Battle of the last Alliance as an example because he felt like all of this whatever this is this war or this civilization was a pale echo of a better world a better civilization that had long passed so if you've been paying attention while you're reading the book you have the set up of Bilbo reading this poem about a guy that just sounds like he could be Odysseus or anybody else any mythic character from Greek history called arendelle and this is not a name that means anything to us at this point and then we find out that Elrond was the herald of gill glad and then he's like 3,000 years old and he was at the Battle of the last Alliance and not only was he at the Battle of last Alliance he was at the first battle the great battle he was at thank Oram when Morgoth was destroyed Sauron is a pale echo of Morgoth the Battle of the last Alliance in fact the events of the Lord of the Rings everything that happens in here were meant to understand and will be constantly reinforced over the trilogy is a pale echo of greater things that had happened earlier like the Battle of the last Alliance which itself is a pale echo of earlier more vital more important struggles which were in vain tells you a lot about how Tolkien thought and that experience of knowing Elrond having met him in the hobbit when probably he wasn't the herald of Gilad Gilad backed and probably Tolkien didn't know that he had really anything to do with the legendarium he had invented The Silmarillion but writing this sequel he sort of had to bring all these elements of The Hobbit into middle-earth and now we start to understand this vast gulf of time that exists between these characters that we think we know Elrond and the events that they're talking about in that phenomenon of the kind of the bottom of your stomach dropping out as you're reading this and you're like oh my god how old is Elrond is called a time abyss it's called that in in genre criticism and it's a good term because it's a neat moment if you can capture it when the reader or the players begin to understand that there are many layers and many ages to the world and that the events that they're dealing with now pale in comparison to earlier arguably more vital events of course we're not j.r.r tolkien we didn't grow up in the 1800s in I think it was born in South Africa we here in the 21st century West regardless how cynical we may be we still believe in progress we still expect science for instance to cure eventually the various ills that we suffer from but Tolkien didn't think that way he viewed for instance World War Two as a pale echo of a more vital struggle World War one but he also this attitude of his goes back way before that it goes back to stuff like the Industrial Revolution dark satanic Mills sort of the eyesore but the whole point of Saruman is that he sees machines as just being another way for the people in power to exploit the masses and this belief this attitude of tokens goes all the way back to 1066 where the Normans invading London from Tolkien's point of view they eradicate the authentic English culture of which only scraps now survived so tokens very different than we are he writes the Lord of the Rings to make one point we are Dungeon Master's and whether it's obvious to us or not the world of Dungeons and Dragons is a post-apocalyptic world it takes place after the fall of some great Empire that was more advanced and richer than the one that we find ourselves in now how do we know that because of what's in the Dungeon Master's guide there is a bunch of treasure in there at some point in the past people were able to make things like Holy Avengers and you know staffs of power I feel like we're almost done and I just did the intro we as Dungeon Master's when we are making our world for the first time we have a lot of stuff we have to worry about we need to have we need a town and we did a video about that which I think maybe we could do a new one of because I watched that recently and I think there's a better version of that video to be made but we also have a dead Empire to invent because we've got all these magic items and gold we have to bury in dungeons and temples who made them why was why was it possible to make these items then and it's obviously much harder to do now in fact it's so hard then rather than instead of us go make these things we are going to risk our lives and fight monsters to get them this is I think a lot of fun it's one of the fun parts of being Dungeon Master is answering the question hey what is the nature of my dead empire what were they like were they an evil empire and they were defeated and it was that's a good thing or it wasn't an earlier better age and we lament its passing I have my own answers to that in my game which I think some of you know if you've been following you know campaign Diaries and stuff like that but your answers are going to be personal to you and I think therefore more interesting do people remember that ancient Empire how ago was it this is almost like a checklist you could make were there legendary characters I bet there were I bet you can probably just sitting there at home think of an ancient fallen Empire in our world and name at least one or two of the people who ran it or in charge of it and who were famous and who are still famous it's been 2,000 years so think about who were the great emperors or kings or queens or leaders of your dead Empire and what did they stand for what do they represent and why did the Empire fall it is I think a fun question to answer and you will discover that spending only like you know 10 minutes 30 minutes in a in a Word document typing out your answers it's gonna pay off for the rest of your campaign it's gonna tell you exactly what do the swords and magic items look like what are these things named who used these things and why why were these magic items made and how are they deployed and when we when we recover them are we are we you know participating in the pillage of an ancient evil empire or are we resurrecting a positive my character and one of my first TV characters who was a paladin one of his quests was to find this ancient sword and shield which I sort of you know reinvented in my own campaign as the sword and shield of and rim I have my character was a paladin and this was an ancient dead empire that represented an era that was good and so for my character finding these items was a an axiomatic good thing to do but it would've been a very different thing and my character would have had very different goals if it had been an ancient evil empire think about the cultures here in the real world that have had or could have empires and the language they use and their mores and folk ways because that is great fertile ground for you to pillage and stick into your campaign my campaign has three earlier because I like things done in threes has three earlier ages the most recent of which was a Roman Empire Catalog the one before that was a Chinese Empire analog and the most distant and earliest one was like an Indian Empire analog and as a result that gives me three entirely different cultures to pillage steal from and layer into my world to give the players a sense of how old things are and once they are used to the more recent and more common roman empire analog when they start discovering names and artifacts from these earlier ages it will give them ideally if I'm a good dungeon aster that sense of a time of this and that thing that they thought they understood the Battle of the last Alliance being this old epic thing is actually itself only an echo of an earlier more important thing John Carpenter great director but a pale echo of Howard Hawks Chris Nolan ditto with Stanley Kubrick maybe you know Michael Mann in there somewhere that is the question before you is one of the fun things about inventing a world is you get to invent at least one maybe more knock yourself out dead Empires and your players I think will find that if you can instead of giving them a huge handout with all of this backstory if they start discovering these items and see in the dungeons the art from this ancient dead empire they will start to engage with your setting that's it folks that's the video you're dead Empire and the difference between why Tolkien did something similar and why we as Dungeon Master's might want to do something if you want to help support the channel you can come in pre-order there's a link below the strongholds and followers book which I am working or this is the mo this is literally the hardest I have worked I think professionally ever in my life I remember my my first was second week in videogames I pulled an all-nighter and I just did the same thing last week at work because not only do I have to get my stuff done I've also got all these other plates I have to spin and so we just started the third play test round where we distributed the adventure which is so far I think being pretty well received and we just dropped the new version of the warfare rules which is great because people are going to be testing these warfare rules for months moving forward ideally they will be deploying them and giving us feedback and we'll be able to tweak numbers and stuff like that so when we finally get to the sequel to strongholds and followers when we release kingdoms in warfare it will have already been somewhat rigorously tested we won't be starting from scratch I know I said a while ago that we're gonna make more in shorter videos because we got to keep the YouTube channel alive and vital the YouTube channel is the reason for all of the success of the Kickstarter and right now I'm so focused on the Kickstarter this sort of brings back memories right of the secret project I'm still focused on the Kickstarter right now and getting the manuscript done that it's easy to let everything else fall by the wayside and I don't want to do that we got to keep making videos and you're going to start seeing videos made in the we're getting pretty close to being able to shoot inside the office certainly I think this month you'll see something it will certainly be the stream there won't be the official stream it won't be the new D&D campaign but we'll do some stuff this video is a result of a question somebody asked on Twitter you can follow me there's a link below slash Matt Colville or at Matt Koval on Twitter and I said I wanted to do a monthly Q&A video the way Marcus Brownlee does mkbhd one of my YouTube heroes and it hasn't yet been a month so I'm not late on that video I think it might be in the next video because I think it's gonna be relatively low impact for me but there were a couple of questions that were not only were they really good questions they made me think this deserves its own video and so that this tweet is the one that made me think ah the answer to this question is important but it's a dual answer because Tolkien's motivations are not the same as ours you can follow me on Twitter at Matt Colville there's actually a official MC DM Twitter account at hello MC DM in case for instance you're not interested in the random stuff that I posted links to songs and stuff like that and you just want news about our products and announcements and the stream and stuff like that at hello MC DM also there's a subreddit you can come by and ask questions you'll get pretty good answers I think it's a pretty good community and every once in a while I stop by and see how things are going we've got our own discord and like I said earlier you can pre-order these strongholds and followers book which we are working very hard on and I think is going to be pretty special of course I would say that wood night until next time peace out

Channel: Matthew Colville

Views: 404,572

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Id: 4GqBTyXYCJE

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 08 2018