(Just a little content warning here: dystopian fiction is often a tool to approach troubling aspects of human experience in a new context - by giving us a fictional, speculative world, we can perhaps shed some of our preconceptions, but it's rare that a work of this genre is pure speculation. They're also often Rorschach tests, in which people will often see those they disagree with politically as representing the closer equivalent to the powerful within a dystopian regime. But the genre remains a potent one.)
Dystopian fiction is a pretty popular genre. In the 20th Century, we had novels like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 (the book more than any other that created the adjective "Orwellian," though Animal Farm deserves credit here as well,) up to the massive demand for Young Adult fiction around ten years ago sparked by the popularity of The Hunger Games.
One thing that you'll notice with this genre is that they tend toward the science fiction end of the speculative fiction spectrum. But I don't think that dystopian fiction need be confined to that side.
Fantasy stories are filled with evil empires, usually a conquering force that has deposed the familiar order of an earlier regime (which is typically cast as better) and that the heroes must fight against. The Empire in the Star Wars series is a totalitarian and dystopian regime, led in accordance with the Dark Side of the Force.
But genre-wise, Star Wars isn't really dystopian fiction. While a lot of people argue it's a Western, I don't think that's true either (even if Tatooine serves as the interplanetary equivalent of the western frontier, I think Star Wars is really just high fantasy in sci-fi drag).
I think that dystopian fiction, in order to qualify, needs to convey the sense of oppression that the protagonists endure as part of a society built to break them. In fact, most dystopian fiction is filled with downer endings, where the heroes fail not only to upend the system, but to even survive it.
While Brave New World pre-dates it, 1984 is really the quintessential dystopian story. The world of 1984 was inspired by Stalinist Russia, but while the USSR at least claimed to be working for the betterment of its citizens, promising a perpetually-delayed socialist utopia, Orwell's Oceania is seemingly cruelty and oppression for oppression's sake.
In that sense, I think that the most dystopian possible setting in D&D would be the Nine Hells. It's literally the plane that blends law and evil in equal parts. While the Hells (or Baator if you're old school/still worried about the Satanic Panic) has to serve a few inspirations, and thus also wants to work in Dante's Inferno and a lot of Christian ideas about the actual hell that a lot of Christians literally believe in, I think that it makes the most sense to portray it as the ultimate Orwellian dystopia. There are elements of that, for sure - I don't remember where, but I think that maybe in the DMG they describe the plane having countless imps whose job is simply to watch everything and report back to the archdevils and ultimately Asmodeus.
Dystopian fiction I tend to think of as the brutal, totalitarian regime kind of "world I don't want to live in" while post-apocalyptic fiction (the quintessential example being Mad Max, or rather the Mad Max sequels, because the first one is weirdly pre-apocalyptic) is what I think a chaotic evil world situation would be like - basically, the Hells are 1984 while the Abyss is Mad Max.
Dystopian fiction actually comes in a fairly wide variety of flavors and styles, though, because ultimately the genre is about exploring problems the author sees in society and taking them to a logical extreme that leads to dehumanization and misery. Brave New World imagines a society that is literally drugged into complacency, allowing the most privileged members of society to lead meaninglessly hedonistic lives at the expense of an exploited and engineered underclass. 1984 is about a society in which any element of human pleasure and reason is stamped out, where the entire society is built around brainwashing, surveillance, and gaslighting to break down trust between individuals. The Hunger Games is about dehumanizing the working class to entertain the elite while inflicting misery on them to keep them from rising up.
Half-Life 2, the 2004 video game, does a remarkable job of tossing the player character, Gordon Freeman, into an Earth that has been conquered by an extra-dimensional alien empire, which is treating the entire planet and its human population as a resource to be extracted and used.
So, what about in Ravenloft?
Each domain in Ravenloft is actually pretty ripe for dystopia. The very structure of it lends itself well to dystopian elements. First off, you have the Darklords. While the Darklord of each domain is taken there and locked away by the Dark Powers as some kind of punishment, the world itself conspires to make the region supernaturally miserable. The Darklord, thus, is always left in a state of frustrated goals - like Sisyphus, they are forced to remain at a task they are doomed to fail.
But aside from their inability to succeed in the thing they most want, they are also given near-absolute power within their realm. The Dark Powers might be thought of as good for removing such wicked individuals from the Prime Material Plane (though why they haven't scooped up Acererak is beyond me) except that the other poor souls caught within these domains are left to suffer under the oppressive rule of the tyrants.
I'll confess that I haven't read through all the bios in by 2nd Edition pdf of the Ravenloft setting book, and will probably just wait until next month when I can go through Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft to get the updated versions. But having read Curse of Strahd years ago and now playing in it, it's interesting to consider to what extent it's dystopian.
Certainly, there's an oppressive atmosphere throughout Barovia. Everything is touched by Strahd's evil. But I don't know that I'd say it has the same degree of totalitarian oppression you'd expect from a true dystopian setting.
Strahd's effect on Barovia is partially supernatural, but I think to a large extent the simple fact that he's there and essentially unkillable has made the citizens of Ravenloft act in more dystopian ways. Vallaki has its enforced celebrations that sap the energy of an already exhausted citizenry. The solutions proposed by the Abbot in Krezk are totally crazy.
I think we could build a Ravenloft domain that functions more like a classic dystopian story.
First off, many of these take place in urban environments. Freedom is usually one of the main victims of a dystopian setting (again, law + evil generally means no to freedom) and freedom is often represented by nature, which tends to be harder to come by in urban environments by definition. A domain of dread that is just one city (or even just a part of a city that was swallowed by the mists) would be a good place to start.
Next, there's dehumanization and isolation. This can happen either to an exploited underclass or the entire society, but any dystopia is going to have some system that is typically violently enforced to keep people from living ordinary lives. This can be achieved by breaking up family units and discouraging the building of friendships. Something in this society is built to make its citizens feel isolated - an individual can't stand up to a despotic regime alone, after all.
Then there's enforcement. The term "police state" is synonymous with totalitarianism, because it's a society in which the main representation of the state is its police - in other words, enforcers of order who are invested with the right to commit violence on the part of the state. While a healthy, functioning society has a government that provides services that benefit its citizens, a dystopia is one in which the only thing the government provides is violence.
Enforcement in a dystopia is arbitrary, but also common enough that the normal citizen will fear it. A member of that enforcement has every right to be brutal and violent to a citizen by their own discretion, and will sometimes make an example for no reason at all, to ensure that citizens are all compliant and unlikely to "give them a reason" to use force.
But who does the enforcing?
In a fantasy world like Ravenloft, it'd be easy to simply say that all the enforcers of this system are just monsters - inhuman, supernaturally cruel. But one of the creepiest aspects of dystopian fiction (and real totalitarian regimes) is that the lowest-level enforcers are typically recruited from among the oppressed. By creating a state of general misery, the dystopian regime creates the perfect recruiting tool - serve us and your status will be elevated. The regime doesn't even need to give them something as good as what existed prior to the takeover, as long as it's better than the typical civilian's life.
Finally, we have hierarchy. While it varies from story to story, oftentimes the actual figures in power within a dystopia remain shrouded in mystery. While 1984 has the propaganda tool of Big Brother, he's really more equivalent to Uncle Sam than an actual person. In the Half-Life series, the highest-up members of the Combine that we see are the Advisors, but their very title even seems to imply that they are only serving some more powerful group or entity, and for all we know, they could be several rungs down the ladder of power. Given the genre's tendency for downer endings, that mystery is often kept hidden, though a more triumphant take of it might see the leader unmasked and deposed. This, of course, can get subverted if it turns out that the leader in question was really just a figurehead for some power higher up.
Ok, all that being said, can we build a domain of dread around this?
First off, I think it's often a good idea with any D&D villain to start with some kind of supernatural flavor. And when it comes to dystopias that feed on paranoia and distrust, I can't think of a better monster to build it around than the Doppelgänger.
Naturally, the Doppelgänger as depicted in the Monster Manual is only a CR 3 monster, so you'd want to make some additional stat blocks for variants. Lazav, the Dimir Guildmaster in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravenloft, is a great model for a potential Darklord (though at CR 17 you need to either buff him if you want to take this to high levels or nerf him if you want to stick to tiers 1 and 2.)
On the other hand, I think you could even do something a bit unconventional - perhaps this Darklord isn't even conscious. One of the great ironies of totalitarians is that their cruelty usually comes out of fear of what should befall them if they ever lose power - so they grip to power as hard as they can. But this also means that the only way for other power-hungry people to gain power is to eliminate them. So while a powerful leader in a democratic society can simply accept a loss in an election or the end of their term limit and feel perfectly confident that they can just retire to a comfortable life outside of politics, the tyrant can only equate the end of their stay in office with death.
The Sisyphean task of retaining power in a totalitarian state is practically a Darklord's punishment already, but to make it truly hellish, I think we have a Darklord who, in performing the act that garnered the Dark Powers' attention, maybe incapacitated them in some significant way. Maybe they were a vainglorious leader who wanted adoration from the masses and could not stand to have anyone else hold the spotlight, but in their current state, they can't ever appear to their people.
I could imagine that our Darklord - we'll call them Lord Vesuvan (after MTG's Vesuvan Doppelganger) made a deal with the Dark Powers to gain absolute power and total control over their domain, but the cost was that they can take myriad different forms - all except their own.
Lord Vesuvan is gifted at controlling their domain, and has a network of spies and informants, including many doppelgangers that the Dark Powers gifted them with. I think that Vesuvan must be looking for something to fix their abilities - to finally allow them to be themselves once again (and maybe it goes farther - not only can they not appear as they once did, but they've forgotten key aspects of their own personal history). But any time someone comes along with the magical power that might help restore them, they grow too paranoid that this person could threaten their reign, and has them killed.
This is very rough-draft/brainstorm level stuff, but I could imagine that maybe Vesuvan has some special reason to fear powerful spellcasters - maybe they are also a wizard or sorcerer, and part of what makes them powerful enough to rule like this is their power. So even though they need (or at least think they need) some kind of powerful spellcaster to end their curse, anyone with that level of magical power could be a threat to them.
This then resonates on the ground level - maybe any sorcerers born in Vesuvan's domain is taken by his enforcers, perhaps to some kind of exploitative camp in which he tries to absorb their power without letting them grow powerful enough individually.
Depending on how deep you want to go, you could also have a famous resistance against him actually be one of his own plots at work (an element from 1984.)
If our Darklord is a powerful spellcaster, he might supplement his enforcers - both the coerced humanoids and his undercover doppelgangers - with a variety of magical beasts and constructs. Perhaps golems march down the streets of his domain broadcasting propaganda via Magic Mouth spells. And perhaps the sorcerers he's taken away are horrifically transformed to serve as inhuman weapons.
The party, arriving through the Mists, could serve as a catalyst for revolution. But if you want to get darker, the citizens of the domain might even try to stop the party, worried that upsetting the status quo will mean even more pain and suffering.
All of this goes a long way from the typical creepy abandoned houses and castles that Ravenloft usually goes for. And this genre isn't for everyone - in fact, I think I tend to find dystopian fiction a bit too depressing most of the time. But if you toss supernatural monsters on top of an oppressive state, it can make for a challenge that feels all the more heroic to overcome - and you also have the potential to have a really bleak game, if you're so inclined.
No comments:
Post a Comment