Verisimilitude and Holes in Walls

I run across a lot of talk of verisimilitude as a goal of running and writing for adventure-y games. Sometimes I’m on board with it, sometimes it feels like a weird way of saying simulationism while being one step removed from the original context of simulationism. I think at it’s worst it can manifest as a desire to reject out of hand certain types of play that don’t go out of their way to put on a show of being a certain (narrow) type of naturalistic.

I also don’t want to just write a blog post complaining about that because I don’t think it’s an actual problem what with the wide variety of stuff being made, much of which has probably long since outpaced my thoughts on the matter. Instead I want to talk about a particular example of things that I think dodge this pitfall while doing other stuff I think is cool.

It’s rad as hell when a game just lets you stumble into another world, or a place where the fundamental rules of how things work are different enough to be another world, by accident. I’m a huge sucker for stories about stepping over the wrong hole in the wrong fence and finding yourself in a place governed by poetics rather than logic. The most obvious versions of this in tabletop games are faerie realms, but it also feels like this is what is happening with certain dungeon crawling games reinterpreting the underdark of DnD as a “mythic underworld,” foregrounding its weird fiction inspirations even more.

Two works I really like that do things akin to this are Where the Wheat Grows Tall by Camilla Greer and Evlyn Moreau, and A Packet of Particular Peaks by L.F. OSR. I’d like to write about them more extensively in the future, for now suffice it to say that they are both very cool works and that they both do a lot of fun things with the changing of the rules of the world.