What Roleplaying Games Reveal About How Myths Are Made

‍If you found this site through the surprisingly popular long essay I wrote on what myths are and how they work, you may have noticed something on the way in. The essay talks about Campbell, Eliade, memetics and strange attractors, whereas on our podcast we talk about stress tracks in Mothership, lifepaths in Burning Wheel, and whether a vampire should have forty-six hit points.

To some, this might read as an incongruity, but it’s actually the fundamental point.

Here I'm going to give a run-through of the observations we've made over the past two years of this project, and how, if anything, my initial thesis has been borne out more than I expected in play, even though in the process I've found a great number of surprises.

The short version up front: a tabletop roleplaying campaign is not a metaphor for mythology. It is a mythology, running at the smallest population that can sustain one, and it is one of the only places we know of where you can watch the machinery work in real time.

What We Mean by Mythology

Myths “collectivize our sense of self, of character, of meaning, of context." They are “a meaning that we participate in creating." They “arise as relationships, points of intersection." Whether a myth is factually true turns out to be beside the point. What matters is whether a group can orient itself by it.

On our podcast we reached more or less the same definition in its first hour, by a different road.

In episode one (00:01:00), I said a myth “has that element of a communal, relational idea, where I know what Loki is, you know what Loki is," and that you relate over that shared reference.

When I pressed, in episode two (00:01:09), on whether the word was too grand for a game about a goblin afraid of the dark, the conclusion was that “what I mean by myth in general is just a collective story that people use to orient themselves." A few minutes later (00:10:37), the conversation reached for celebrities as the obvious modern case: they are “almost like the gods of our time that we get to watch them with all their quirks," and we make our own narratives out of them.

Put the two definitions side by side and the only variable left is population size.

A pantheon orients a civilization. A franchise orients a fandom. A campaign orients five people for two years. All three are collective stories a group participates in creating, uses to locate itself, and revises as relevance shifts. The campaign is the case where you can name every participant and every revision has something resembling a timecode. This is an observation that has only solidified throughout this process, especially as we've gone back through actual plays in transcript form. On the podcast, we've thus far done only short one-shots to explore an element of a new system, but I've also spent years translating the BLACKOUT campaign into novel form and listening through transcripts from the second season of The Witchhunters campaign.

So the podcast isn't a departure from the theory. It's a type of fieldwork that has the added benefit of being fun.

What Game Design Already tells us About Myth

My theory essay ended with an admission. We have a rich vocabulary for how myths function and almost no formal tools for how they are made: who gets to add to the story, how a new element survives or dies. The essay gestures at literary analysis, psychology, neurology and memetics, and says the tooling lags.

In a sense, those tools exist. They have been written, argued over and play-tested for fifty years, and they are in roleplaying game rulebooks, because a rulebook has to solve the problem of collective story-making well enough to run on a Tuesday night with four tired adults. This is not to say that a D&D campaign is identical to any other story codified by a group and passed on “by mouth" (Mythos), but there is more overlap than one might at first think.

Take the questions a theorist of myth might ask, and where the hobby has already answered them. A few examples:

Who may assert a fact into the shared story? Burning Wheel has a mechanic called a wise. A player might say “the Citadel has a servants' stair on the east side," and roll. If the roll succeeds, the stair exists. During our Burning Wheel session (00:38:57) Scott described his whole method in one sentence: if something matters, “I'll just have you roll for it and let the dice adjudicate whose truth we're bringing into the story." That is a formal procedure for distributed authorship, with a cost attached.

When does something become canon? Across four of our episodes, all of which are ad hoc and recorded live, we kept returning to the same rule: nothing exists until it comes to the table. Prep documents, secret backstories and the GM's notes are drafts. Only what is spoken in play, in front of everyone, is real. I admitted on the player agency episode (01:35:42) to hating this rule if it becomes prescriptive or universal, because I'm a writer and most of what I make best happens between sessions, but I concede the fundamental point regardless, at least as a rule of thumb. In Dungeon World a secret door exists only if a player searches for one and succeeds.

How is authority distributed, and what happens when one person has too much? The hobby has a name for the failure mode: the cult-of-personality GM, whose game is fundamentally their creation, and their word is inviolable. It also has a lineage of designs built to prevent it, from Apocalypse World's rule that the GM only acts when the dice say so to the practice several of us have adopted of never rolling dice as GM at all. We argue this out in episode two (00:14:53) and again in episode four (00:36:31). These are constitutional arrangements. They decide who holds the microphone.

How is failure authored? In most fiction, failure is imposed by the author. At a table, imposed failure can feel like theft. So horror games in particular have evolved ways to let the person who loses control narrate the loss: Cthulhu Dark lets you describe your own madness, Blades in the Dark lets you resist any consequence at a price you choose. In a Wicked Age keeps a literal list of characters who lost and owes them the next spotlight. We cover the first two in the Blades in the Dark session (01:52:54) and the Owe List in the player spotlight episode (00:31:57). Each is a mechanism for making a group's story tragic without making the player a victim of it.

What compels the small, repeated behaviors that become culture? Coriolis makes prayer a reroll. Within an hour of our first session, the players were praying constantly, then asking why their characters would, then answering the question in character. A ritual in-world, reified by player behavior. The rule made it a habit, and the habit made it feel real (we get into it around 02:28:07).

The third author

One feature of the table has no equivalent in any other collaborative fiction that I’m aware of.

In a writers' room, people hold the pen in turns. At a table, the default mode is that the GM holds primary authority over the world and the players hold primary authority over their characters, and then there is a third participant who can overrule both at any moment and who wants nothing. The dice. (Or the cards, in the games that use them).

We worked this out on the exposition episode (00:39:35), and it maps directly onto the theory essay's most useful idea: that myths behave like strange attractors, structures a system tends toward without anyone steering it.

Nobody steers a myth or a die roll. The randomizer is a selection pressure that belongs to no participant, which is why a campaign can surprise the person running it, and why the story that emerges is the group's rather than the GM's. As with any other myth, interpretation plays a primary role here.

Rules Follow cosmology

Our tagline is “Rules shape choices. Choices shape shared myths." That is true, but it hides a step for the sake of pithiness.

Rules are not upstream of the myth. They already are one.

The most mocked mechanic in the hobby, alignment, makes sense once you read it as cosmology rather than personality. In the D&D multiverse the alignments are actual places. Devils and demons fight a war along that grid. Alignment is a passport, a statement about where a soul comes from and where it goes, and read that way it stops being a leash on behavior and becomes the afterlife stakes of the setting. We spent two hours on this (the passport reading starts at 01:17:18), and nobody changed their mind about the mechanic. Everyone agreed on that.

So the bridge runs in both directions. If you came here for myth, you can read a rulebook as blueprint for the creation of a type of experience, and a type of (imaginal) world. Bad Decisions by Design explores this in the other direction, reading the Alien franchise's corporate incentives as a rule system and then showing how to build the same dials into a scenario.

If rules follow a world’s cosmology, do they also ultimately lead to it? I’d say that at least in a sense, yes.

Variation is the thing

In Nosferatu as Folklore, I argued that a myth is not a fixed object but a lineage of retellings, and that the variations are the point. Folklorists have an index for this: tale types that keep their shape across cultures while every telling changes the details.

The hobby has a folk version of the same insight. On our Dragonlance session (02:19:29), I observed that nobody has ever played the exact same D&D. Every table's real ruleset is the printed book plus decades of house rules, misremembered errata, and calls made on the fly, and fifty years of that is how the design actually operates. I discuss this in more depth in the first two installments of the Rules in Practice series. Part one sets up the premise of the series, which has become a near-universal observation: no two groups play the same game, and the difference is not in the rules.

The published game is the tale type. Your table is the variant. This is the same mechanism of transmission, so that even a game long out of print is still alive.

It also explains a thing that surprised us about rules-light games. Their promise is accessibility: fewer rules, less to learn, get to the story faster.

In practice we found how much this hinges on a preexisting shared understanding of the world, or at least the genre being engaged with. A samurai game works if you already know Mifune. A grimdark dungeon zine works if you have decades of dungeon context in your head. Ask a new player “what do you do?" with no rules and no shared reference and you typically get silence.

While it would certainly be easier for GMs if every player was the same in this regard, the truth is that players are frequently fundamentally different in what they need to connect and make decisions, and those differences can be mutually exclusive. What’s worse, at many tables they go undiscussed.

For some, this is helped by providing a character motivation. Others require a prescribed system that can be mastered and improved upon, which tells them what the optimal or even “right” move is. Some systems ask you to react to a change in the world, whereas others give you a systems outcome and ask you to interpret that within the narrative of that world.

The lightest games outsource their system to a body of tropes the player is assumed to carry, which is to say they are a bet that the table already shares a mythology. When the bet pays off it looks effortless. When it fails, “everybody are not professional writers," as Scott put it on Blank Page or Blueprint (00:42:40), and no rule is there to catch them.

The observations I then made in From Trope to Table came directly out of this, along with my ongoing work on the Fallen Cycle RPG, which is grounded in archetypes. A trope is a shared frame that can help the table access this common “myth” regardless of their playstyle preferences. Recognizing one lets everyone skip the setup and get to the choice. That is what a myth does for a culture and what a genre does for a group of five. In The Stranger Things piece I ran the same argument backward, reading a television show as a campaign whose plot follows table logic rather than plot logic.

Where mythic structures can fail at the table

Take the two beats in Campbell's monomyth that everyone can name: the refusal of the call, and the dark night of the soul.

Both are often absent from tabletop play. Refusal is missing because buy-in is the social contract; a character who says no to the adventure reads as a player who is being difficult. The dark night is missing for a more mechanical reason. Systems reward what they measure, and a character built to shoot well never has to face a question he can't shoot. Internal conflict has to be engineered against the grain of the reward system. The story structure episode goes through both (the dark night at 01:22:42, refusal at 01:26:21).

There are other issues with the monomyth if it's taken as prescriptive in any sense, but these two particular holes are more specific to RPGs and the types of stories these systems tend to support.

Advancement itself is part of the problem. Experience points reward continuity: keep doing what you do, get better at it. Myths are about transformation. Unknown Armies ties advancement to declared objectives and makes changing your objective cost you progress, which means becoming someone else is expensive in the rules the way it is in life. We took that apart on the horror wrap-up (00:14:55). Most systems mechanically punish the transformation their fiction is supposedly about.

Death is the oldest subject of myth, but it can be the hobby's most awkward mechanic. Either a beloved character is gone for a bad roll, or a spell reverses it for a fee, and both empty the event of meaning.

We have seen several better answers. Rōnin (00:25:33) sends a dead character to the underworld for a boss fight and returns them changed, once. Troupe play (00:30:33) makes the company the thing that advances, so a death becomes legacy rather than bookkeeping. And in Freemarket, where everyone is reprinted on death, the fiction still treated it as socially consequential even though the rules made it free (we compare the two on the death episode (02:23:28)). Gravitas turned out to be something the table supplies and mechanics can only support.

This is the working method of the show. Run the game. Ask what actually produced the effect: the rules, the setting, the people, or the rules getting out of the way. That is of course with the understanding that it is typically some mix of these things, but often one of them is doing the most work in a given instance.

When in doubt, find where the mechanism fails the story it is trying to tell. Then find the game that fixed it, and steal the fix.

The stories we keep telling

One finding only became visible after enough episodes had accumulated.

The vast majority of RPGs we gravitate toward have a dominant cosmology, and it is Gnostic. The world is an illusion and someone has woken up. I noticed it first in Whispering Vault (00:23:16), where reality is the dream of higher beings and the players hunt the ones who abandon their posts to enter flesh. This is, of course, deeply lodged in the World of Darkness, in Kult (00:22:47), in Invisible Sun, in my own Fallen Cycle setting. A cyberpunk one-shot (01:32:12) ended with the players discovering they were in a simulation and their bodies were on medical beds. A science fiction horror session (02:37:19) ended with a ship's AI finding religion and steering into the sun as a pilgrimage. Nobody planned a theme. The Matrix, Plato's cave and the sleeper who wakes keep arriving.

This is probably my own premise showing in the results. If myths are strange attractors, this is what one looks like from inside. A large population of storytellers, working independently, falling toward the same structure. The moral tension that results from this frame is obvious enough: the sleeper problem. The risk at some tables might be where the awakened character's contempt for the unawakened leaks into the player's contempt for everyone at the table who did not get the reference, although I've never actually encountered that at any of the tables I've sat around.