Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “Gygaxian Naturalism” from 2008 by James Maliszewski (Grognardia).
Next week we’ll discuss “Gygax and the old school” from 2008 by Wayne Rossi (Semper Initiativus Unum). You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
I don’t know if I have a lot to say for this one. I like the fact that Gygaxian Naturalism makes an attempt to simulate a world beyond the bounds of purely “gameable” bits. I also like monster manuals that provide details on a creature’s environment and behavior rather than pure stats. As a plus, these kinds of elements tend to be system agnostic.
One of the biggest pluses I see with it is it gives players another way to interact with and reason about the game world. If their characters see a dragon in the sky, they may start to search for its hoard.
There’s plenty to engage with in regards to Gygaxian Naturalism, but while I think this post defined the term, I don’t feel like it does more than that.
That said, I do love sparing use of Gygaxian Naturalism. As a minimal example, if you have an enemy keep to invade and want a discrete rear entrance, you can put a midden behind the keep. It adds tons of sensory info to the scene and helps define what rooms will be near it, but functionally is still just a second entrance to let sneaky players infiltrate the keep.
The practice of finding a reason for the dungeon to be the way it is really helps with both building and running the dungeon.
one hundred percent, and i think this is the thing that draws me to gygaxian naturalism, establishing the logic of the world gives players opportunities to be clever and punch above their weight class.
On of the things I find interesting about James’ approach to Gygaxian Naturalism here is that he highlights “naturalistic” monster design in the monster manual/monster lists rather then the overall approach to naturalistic setting design that Gygax discusses in the DMG. The DMG version is perhaps an explanation of Gygax’s theory around his monster placement system, but it’s more a general philosophy around creating unrealistic but coherent settings.
Gygax specifically focuses on having explanations for “why” about the game world while be less serious with “how” and applying this idea to location design. James also notes this but with less emphasis then I would or which I remember was common when using the term in OSR circles.
While Gygax doesn’t use this examples I take his point to means things like including farms or another source of food around a keep in the wilderness, but not worrying too much issues of logistics and supply. That a settlement has a relationship with source of sustenance is important, but the exact details of how much food is created or needed. This both allows the referee and game world to threaten that food supply (or PCs to notice it and take their own actions) but it doesn’t bog down in the minutia of the logistical details. It’s naturalistic, but only to the extent needed to be playable, not a simulation.
To me - especially in the context of dungeon design - that is creating a sort of “Gygaxian ecology” where the relationships between inhabitants of the fictional space can be deduced and players can respond to them is the key to Gygaxian Naturalism.
Conversely I’m less enamoured with a more taxonomic focus - detailing monster lair contents and such in rule books, because I think it can (as in the case of the wilderness encounter tables in the back of the DMG, or monster manuals generally) become prescriptive and prempt referee setting design. The monster manual approach says what all of a kind of creature are like in the entire multiverse of D&D - all bandits have this breakdown of equipment and this sort of leadership cadre … all giants have these kind of monstrous pets etc. These rules do create a default setting, which would be good if they were acknowledged as setting creation, but to me it seems like early D&D at least didn’t do that, and this sort of naturalism generally remained at a very high level which tends to homogenize the fantasy world … rather contrary to the advice Gygax himself gives earlier in the DMG.