You Can't Go Home Again
But you can try in fantasy
Escapism, cozy horror, and RPGs
I had a fun experience recently. I wrote an article about the problems that increased housing prices and gentrification have been causing in my hometown, and my boss got an email in which someone called me the “Biblical spies,” those evil characters who were sent to the Land of Israel and came back with sneakily negative compliments about it, all true but also intended to keep the Israelites from entering the Land. The spies, of course, were destroyed (Jewish tradition says that their tongues extended to their navels and worms crawled down from their mouths to their stomachs), except for Joshua and Caleb, who defended the Land.
It wasn’t that great an article, folks. Nothing that grand.
The person who wrote that email, I will say, is not a nice person. An illustration: he once tried to pressure a relative of mine into forgiving the rabbi who had tried to break the order of protection she had against her abusive husband—and this pressure took place on the third day after she miscarried a full-term baby the week before her due date.
Guess whether I care about his Biblically-informed opinions of me.
But I will say that his reaction and some of the other reactions to that article reminded me of why I lost the sense that I belonged anywhere a long time ago. Certainly my hometown was not a good place. This gent with the spies email was just one of the people from that town I had to deal with during that whole period, and it put me off most of them. I’ve never quite found a sense of home and safety since.
And that’s part of why I love a good story or experience about a place you can indeed belong.
A hole in the ground
There’s an upcoming video game about playing as hobbits in the Shire, and beyond every other criticism one might have about it, I can’t help but view it with disdain because it misses the stuff I like about the Shire parts of the Lord of the Rings.
It feels as though lots of LOTR fans younger than me seem to love the idea of an idyllic Shire where everyone, I don’t know, cuts grain and smokes pipes, to me the best parts of the Shire experience is when there is horror just outside the door.
The best scenes at Bag End are when Frodo realizes that he will have to leave because there is something terrible that is there with him, or even better, the scene the night when he is leaving and we know, from reading further on, that there is a Black Rider just down the lane questioning the Gaffer. Farmer Maggot’s house is cozy because the hobbits are being chased. So is Crickhollow, and the moment when Fatty Bolger realizes that the house is surrounded makes all of the fun times the hobbits had the night before have an edge. Tom Bombadil’s house is safe, but there are queer things outside. The Prancing Pony is a place of refuge—but not quite safe itself. And so on.
I’ve written about cozy horror before, and I still think that what I love about it is the two feelings, the one of having a home and the other of knowing that there are terrible things outside. The importance of a home is only emphasized when there are dark creatures outside the windows. A hot bath at Crickhollow is all the more comforting when you know there are Nazgul down at the Brandywine, trying to find a way across.
Hey, have a list
Here’s a quick list of some media that gives me that “make or find a home, with some terror outside” feeling:
The Wind in the Willows (I hardly need to explain this; go read it again)
Firewatch (that fire tower is an amazing home, especially because it can be violated)
Children of Men (both the farm scene and the scenes at Michael Caine’s house involve places of refuge that aren’t as safe as they initially seem)
The House in the High Woods (oh, boy, this one, with its Dickensian safety—yes, a weird phrase—and its horrors)
Mouse Guard (the comic, that is, which like other mouse-y media such as Redwall and The Secret of NIMH, has both shelter and extreme peril intertwined)
Death in Space (you get a spaceship or a space station to live in and fix up, yay, but you live in the least of friendly universes)
Vaesen (you get a castle as homebase, and you get to keep going out of the nice warm castle to deal with vaesen and, sometimes worse, people)
Dolmenwood (just listen to the 3D6 Down the Line podcast playthrough of Dolmenwood to see how a warm inn or a caravan you can drive around the forest make everything better and also creepier)
Please drop me your examples of media with these themes. I’m always on the lookout for them.
Giving your players a home
I think it’s obvious that in an RPG, allowing your players to have a home is only going to enhance the experience. Your players may be wandering around the forests and cities of Symbaroum, but if they have a nice warm hole to crawl into, the nasty parts outside will hit that much harder. And so too with all games.
Sometimes it can also involve a cozy time of year, like The One Ring does with winter. If you’re playing through a long, grim campaign like The Darkening of Mirkwood, a break during the winter, to recharge in various ways, is an amazing thing.
And your players will often find a way to their own home. In our lengthy Longwinter PBP game, my players took over the chalet of their missing cousin Viktor, located in the village of Pey Dimna, up a valley deep in the barony of Brezim. This village is kind of remote, even in a setting like Brezim. It’s up what ends up being a closed “culdesac” of a valley, far from any of the three largest towns of the region. And could there be anything more cozy, even as a deadly winter settles in?
Lots of us can’t find a comforting home here in the real world, but it can be comforting to find one in an imagined world, as well.