Flying Koala Games: Word Magic

Word Magic

As a GM, your stock-in-trade is words. You may use music, or candles, or props to enhance your game. But the basis for any tabletop role-playing game is words. What words you use can really affect your PCs perceptions of your game.

I’m not just talking about good flavor text here. I’ve met many a GM who knows, in theory that a "damp, dripping dungeon smelling of mold and fear" is more evocative than "Uh, it’s dark, and the walls are wet. Wet stone. There’s a kind of off odor around here." In practice, most tend to say the second more than the first, either because they think the first one sounds too funny or they’re making it up as they go along and flavor text is the least of their worries.

So yes, flavor text is great, and it is a sort of word magic. But you’ll find plenty written about it in all sorts of "How to GM" publications, so I’m not going to dwell on the point.

No, I’m talking about those special, shining words that conjure up worlds just by saying them. They’re steeped in all sorts of cultural referents that your players instantly sieze upon. Many have romantic or horrific connotations that immediately play into the fantasy you’re trying to create.

They’re great words, and we’ll talk about a few examples in a bit. But there’s a problem with them - they’re magic, and everyone loves magic. So everyone uses them. They become rather clichéd. You have to watch how you use them, so you don’t end up sounding trite instead of archetypical.

I had this pointed out to me in a humorous way recently. I’m a member of the SCA, a medieval re-creation group. We have a lot of households - unofficial groups of people with similar interests getting together. They tend to have names like Darkyard, Red Wolf, or Bloodguard. One group put up a sign announcing themselves: House Dark-Wolf-Moon-Blood-Shadow-Harp-Dragon-Oak, or something like it. They took all the magic words that get overused and put them all up onto the sign, just to make the point.

So tread carefully.

A Magic Word: Shadow

Let’s start with Shadow. Gamers love Shadow. Many feel marginalized and at the edges of their social groups - in the shadows, as it were. Or perhaps overshadowed by the football stars and prom queens. Whatever the reason, the Shadows are glamorized as a dangerous, edgy place to be, an in-between place filled with possibilities and magic.

Just a glance through some D&D canon will give a bunch of examples of shadow-things. There’s shadow magic, of course, as well as shadow dragons and even shadow elves. We can’t forget shadows themselves, the undead creatures. There’s a prestige class: Shadow Dancer, or something like it. Ninja, ever popular, are shadow-walkers. Elminster lives in Shadowdale. Thieves’ guilds make take a name like The Shadow Stalkers or Silver Shadows or something similar.

By now, your eyes may be crossing every time you see the word "shadow," I’ve used it so much in the paragraph above. It sounds silly. So you’ve got the first rule of word magic:

Use magic words sparingly.

If the elven NPC thief is named Shadow Dreamer, don’t also hand out a magical Cape of Shadows, send the PCs to a dwarven keep named Stoneshadow, make the major villain a shadow mage, or otherwise invoke the cool factor of Shadow.

Two Words Are (Sometimes) Better Than One

The two magic instruments of high fantasy are probably the lute and the harp. Pick up a fantasy novel about a musician, and eight times out of ten, he will be playing one of those two instruments. Of those eight times, I’d guess six would be harps, rather than lutes.

This qualifies Harp as a magic word, as is Harper. Would the secret do-gooder society of the Forgotten Realms sound as cool if it were the Flautists? Hardly. They’re the Harpers because of the magic in that name.

Harps unfortunately suffer from overuse. Many bards, PC and NPC alike, have a harp skill tucked away somewhere, because many players and GMs associate one with the other. Harps lose some of their magic when there’s one being played soulfully in every tavern.

Let’s say you want to introduce a magical harp into your game. You thought you might name it after a famous NPC - "Gilda’s Harp," perhaps - but that just doesn’t sound interesting enough. The word "harp" by itself doesn’t have enough power.

So pair it up with another magic word, even an overused magic word. What might be the powers of the Dream Harp? The Dark Harp? Would the Dragonharp be any different from a Harp of Dragons?

You can combine magic words for more powerful magic.

Different word orders evoke different images.

On the other hand, the Dreaming Harp of Dark Dragon’s Shadow is getting to be a bit much.

Keep "spells" short. More than two magic words may be asking for trouble.

Odd Couples Can Work

Some special words are all-purpose, with no particular tone attached to them. "Weaver" is a pretty good example - a killer sword might be Deathweaver, while a wand of sleep spells might be Dreamweaver. More often, though, words do have connotations - that’s what makes them so powerful in the first place.

Sometimes the connotations are contradictory. Depending on how you invoke, say, "Wolf," you might be conjuring up a snarling, howling pack of relentless pursuit and death, or a faithful but savage druid’s companion. But usually, the aspect of the word you want to invoke will be clear from the context in which you use it. (You can use this to fool your players on occasion, if you so choose).

As a variation on the technique above, mixing words with contradictory tones can spark PCs imaginations. Juxtapose something sinister with something innocent, something nasty with something noble. The Forgotten Realms city of Silverymoon is a place of goodness and hope; what might the city of Dark Moon be like? If a Shadow Harper is a good-aligned undead member of the FR secret society, could we imagine a Blood Harper? Is a fireoak more threatening than a normal oak?

This technique can handily darken a "nice" word and lend it some bite. Unfortunately, the reverse is rarely true. "The White Destroyer" doesn’t sound like an innocent, friendly Viking sort; it sounds like the smothering nothingness of oblivion. "White" doesn’t lighten "destroyer;" "destroyer" smudges "white."

Mixing word tones can create gripping images which tend to the Dark Side.

Using Word Magic In-Game

Remember the first rule: Use your Words of Power sparingly, or they’ll sound ridiculous instead of cool.

Think as far ahead as you’re comfortable thinking - the next game, the rest of the campaign, your entire game world. What do you want to highlight? Pick out the NPCs, places, magic items, monsters, or organizations that will have starring roles in your upcoming adventures.

What do you want them to stand for? Is the castle you’re thinking of the PCs’ retreat and the center of their enlightened empire? It would need a different name than the home of the campaign’s major cruel and twisted villain.

What magic words carry the right connotations for your needs? You might think of colors ("The Red Wizards of Thay"), animals ("blood hawks"), elements ("fire dancer"), and so on. Scan other gaming source material for magic words. You might have noticed that a lot of the examples given in this essay are from the Forgotten Realms; Greyhawk or the Monstrous Manual are just as good.

Mix up your magic words until you find a combination that sounds right to you. Take those word(s) off your list, or else you might end up with blood mages fighting the Red Bloody Pirates in the warm, salty waters of the Dragonsblood Sea.

Continue until all your major plot points have evocative names. Write them down somewhere, and announce them dramatically when the PCs encounter them.

A Final Observation

Some PCs will have an easier time remembering names built out of English words rather than Standard Fantasy Gibberish. They’ll also feel more comfortable pronouncing and using them, which will add to the ambiance of your game. ("Some," not "all" - some PCs surely prefer the exotic sound of made-up words or borrowed foreign words and names).

On the other hand, some PCs will resist any attempts at using "high falutin’" language. This will include magic words. My personal opinion is that these some of these gamers are afraid that they will sound silly if they say anything that sounds like poetry. Others just have no memory for any names at all. They will create their own shorthand descriptors for people, places and things. My game has seen "the bald chick," "the shapechanging dude," "the mirror-lens-thing," and "that gray forest-place" take the place of Irini the Bald, the Forms Master, the relic Revelation, and the Twilight Lands.

Others, though, will appreciate your efforts, so don’t let the more prosaic or forgetful ones get you down. Interesting and evocative names, chosen with an eye and an ear to tone and mood, can help to create expectations of your game world before the PCs have even begun to play.