Scribbles and Horrors

Here’s how it works: any character, at any time, can submit a Records Request Form to an institution or individual in the world.

After several weeks the character gets the fulfilled request in the mail. Depending on the amount of gold paid for the fee and the nature of the request the documents received may be useful or not. I post the fulfilled records requests on the campaign website for anyone to view: https://www.reduxodnd.com/records/

The documents mostly answer questions obliquely; they are archival records for the most part, produced for reasons other than adventuring. They are artifacts of a society which exists outside of the adventurers, one full of people who do not know and will never care about player characters. Players have to ask carefully and read carefully to find information they want, and it might not be there at all.

Records Requests in the real world aren’t nearly so fun to fulfill, but here I get to pick out exactly which sorts of documents “exist” meeting the criteria laid out in the form. I can be snarky or evasive, abstruse or helpful to my hearts content. I can sprinkle hints and red herrings, and there’s lots of room to be utterly ridiculous.

I don’t like explaining my world’s lore very much. I’m much more interested in how players react to my world than I am in rambling on and on about it. (What horror stories have been told of DMs for whom a D&D session is a long droning History of Place!) One could break up the lore into multiple conversations with various NPCs, but that’s fairly boring to me as well. Just droning in funny voices instead.

Records Requests let me make a little piece of world information–often quite small–and toss it to players like a hot potato. The players get a tangible document that’s immediately actionable, and I don’t have to worry about it after that.

OD&D can be thought of as several different games working together. There is The Mapping Game (Underworld flavored and Wilderness flavored), The Talking Game, and The Fighting Simulation Game:– Records Requests constitute part of The Paperwork Game. In The Paperwork Game the world is explored through mock bureaucracy. Other components of the Paperwork Game include drawing up plans for your castle, logistics accounting, letters, declarations of war and such, as well as contracts, claims, lawsuits, and so on.

An obvious problem with this practice is managing the volume: can I keep up with producing all the records which are produced in a timely manner? Dungeons and Dragons already takes up a tremendous amount of my time, and writing these documents is quite slow, slower than drawing maps or stocking rooms. There is also greater pressure to get them “right”.

On the other hand, documents will stick around. After a while there’ll be a big corpus of them, each one continuing to make my world rich and navigable. I have been playing with Records Requests for 3 months, and there are about 30 pages of written material. This isn’t a bad start. The material I’ve written has in fact been really helpful in my own understanding of the world, it’s social systems and how it approaches problems.

I have been struggling with finding ways to “pick” documents or document types which 1) are fun to write, 2) are at least somewhat connected to the request, and 3) can be written in a reasonable amount of time. With any kind of game it takes a while to get a feel for things; maybe I’ll get a knack for it as the process continues. If there’s a request for a copy of a novel, for instance, I won’t feel all that obligated to write a whole novel, but I may settle on a review.

There is a sweet spot of verisimilitude I am aiming for with these documents–I’m not doing the full “tea-stained treasure map” document forgery, but I am composing them on a typewriter in a formal style.

You could, perhaps, set up a whole game that’s just records requests and the correspondence between them, but I will leave discussing The Imaginary Historian’s Society for another time.