How to run an RPG VII: Narrative Flourishes Part II - Bisociation, Twists and Symbolism

Last time, we talked about alternative narrative structures. This time, I want to talk about diving deeper into your narrative, and allowing your players to extract more meaning from it. These tricks can spice up any sort of narrative!

Bisociation

Something is two things at once, or to two different sides. Believing them both is the key to keeping the game realistically unreal. This “perceiving of a situation or idea . . . in two self-consistent but fundamentally incompatible frames of reference,” is what Arthur Koestler called bisociation.  -Kenneth Hite, "Two-World Minimum: Bisociation and the Art of High Weirdness", the Suppressed Transmissions

Kenneth Hite first introduced me to the concept of Bisociation. I understand that he didn't originate the concept, but he's always been the one I turn to to understand it. In the context of what he discussed, he was attempting to show you how to conjure "weirdness" in a campaign, but I've found the idea profoundly useful in all sorts of contexts.  I've also heard it referred to as "Cognitive Dissonance," wherein psychologists proclaim that people cannot believe two mutually contradictory things at the same time, but I say that's not only wrong, but that people like to believe that one thing is two things at once. It's cool and we get a charge out of it, and you can use it to give your games an extra charge and jolt that will delight your players.

We create bisociation by defining something to be simultaneously two things at once. In principle, we do this often, as objects can occupy more than one category at a time (you can be both an employee and a father at the same time, in different contexts). But here, we tend to mean something deeper and more symbolic than a venn diagram overlap.  We want to create a situation where the players can interface with something in two different ways, where they can adjust their view and "see it from another angle." A good way to think of this is "the man with two lives," or two completely different stories that turn out to be about the same thing.  

This can allow your players to interact with elements of your story on several levels at once.  Consider, for example, a story about a homecoming dance and the dramatic conflict to see who gets elected to homecoming royalty, as well as trying to work through your high school romances and figure out how to dance without embarrassing yourself. Consider also a fantasy story about a society that chooses a sacrifice to its bloodthirsty diet, a man and a woman, and treat them as royalty for a day before killing them, where the heroes seek to rescue the condemned from their sacrifice while the victims, treated like royalty, have no idea what danger they're in.  Now, can we combine these two stories in an urban fantasy game, where the homecoming royalty are also the sacrificial royalty-for-a-day of a sacrificial ceremony? Yes, we can, and we can draw on both sides of the story for tension: the hero is both trying to woo his or her romance for the date while also trying to warn the royalty of the impending dark sacrifice and foil the agents of the dark gods!

In principle, this should be done with several in setting elements at once.  With our homecoming dance example, the homecoming dance is a real thing occurring within the setting, while the sacrificial ritual is also a real thing occurring within the setting. We tell two different stories about the same event at the same time.  Nothing limits us to just one element of bisociation.  We can layer story after story atop our particular element (for example, the homecoming dance and the sacrificial ritual might both be monitored by a conspiratorial governmental agency to see how the student body reacts to it: who figures out what's really going on? This means the whole thing also acts as a test, with characters wandering around the school posing as college recruiters but are, in reality, conspiratorial recruiters).  We can do this in parallel or in sequence. While in parallel, the setting elements have always been multiple things at once, but when we do it in sequence, we reveal the layers of a mystery, often in the form of a twist.

The Twist

The core idea of bisociation is that something can be simultaneously two things at once.  Humans are categorizing creatures, and we categorize by context.  We see something in one context, and then understand it in that context.  Then we see the same thing in a different context, our understanding of that thing can completely flip.  When that happens, we get quite a jolt of pleasure, a frisson, because we enjoy that sort of revelation.

You see this a lot in humor.  For example:

Two men go hunting in the woods.  One suddenly clutches at his chest, gasping for breath, and falls over.  The other hunter, in a panic, pulls up his mobile phone and calls 911. "Help," he cries "My friend just died of a heart attack."
The 911 Operator responds "First, make sure he's dead."
She heards a gunshot and then the hunter responds "Okay, what next?" 

The jolt of humor comes from the original context that the operator has, which is uncertainty whether or not the victim is actually dead and seeking to verify this fact.  The jolt comes from realizing that the hunter could easily interpret this as a command to kill. The operator's statement is two things at the same time, and recognizing that simultaneous, bisociative nature of the statement is what drives the humor of the joke.  You can find it in all sorts of punchlines ("I just finished a puzzle in 6 months when the box said 2-5 years.").

A twist works in the same way. The nature of a "twist" is the sudden recontextualization of previously revealed knowledge.  We thought something was one thing, but once we have all available evidence, we can see it in a new light.  Thus, we need to lay down the basic evidence for both contexts at once, without revealing their interconnected nature until the right moment.  Once the players see that connection, this allows them to look at the first context in a new light and connect it, suddenly, to the next context. Their perspective suddenly shifts: a twist.

We perform this by creating an obvious context, the assumed truth that the players interact with. Using our homecoming example, we have the announcements for the high school dance, people asking one another out, the mounting dramatic conflict over who will be selected as the homecoming royalty and the various factions backing each candidate.  At the same time, we lay down the evidence of a second, seemingly unrelated context: the presence of a cult seeking human sacrifices to bring back some dark god.  We then draw the players along a path of evidence that shows the two are, in fact, connected: we learn that the cult has attempted to sacrifice students in the past, we learn that their previous, successful sacrifices have all been carefully selected from the populace and treated as royalty for a day, then that the attempted sacrifice of students were homecoming royalty, and that the cult is trying to same thing here, and then the homecoming royalty suddenly becomes recontextualized as ritual, sacrificial royalty.

The trick here is creating the two different-but-interconnected contexts without making the connections between the two obvious until the moment of revelation.  The two contexts must exist for the whole narrative, as the point of the twist is suddenly shifting perspective: we cannot suddenly spring an entirely new context on the players ("Suddenly, half the student body is revealed as aliens.  This was actually about aliens the whole time!") or we'll confuse them and it feels more like a retcon than a twist.  Second, the connection between the two contexts should be plausible.  The players should be able to make the connection themselves, once they have all the evidence.  Finally, we want to control, or at least influence, when the connection is made.  This is best done by making the original context obvious and intuitive and the second connection counter-intuitive if you lack all the information.  This means you often need something about the second context that has at least one element that seems to not fit the original context.  There might be no obvious connections at first, or explicit reasons why it wouldn't be so ("Who would expect that the chief officer in charge of the investigation was, himself, the perpetrator.")

Symbolism

Similar to bisociation, but more mundane, is the use of symbolism and metaphor.  In this case, the thing is not literally two things, but rather, something stands in for something else, or the players are meant to draw metaphorical parallels between the two.

Symbolism acts like a narrative emulsifier.  An emulsifier acts as a binding agent between hydrophilic and hydrophobic substances, such as soap which will bind to greases and fats but then dissolve in water, allowing you to wash away something that normally wouldn't dissolve in water.  With symoblism, we draw can draw our players attention to parallels between a real thing (which they understand) and a fantastical thing (which operates by its own rules), they can find a way to use their understanding of the real to allow them to manipulate the fantastical and unreal.

One obvious use for this, one explicitly handled by bisociation, is to add a layer of magical to the real.  Consider the example of the "homecoming dance" above.  The players will intuitively understand the nature of a homecoming dance, but with the additional layer of the sacrificial ritual, we allow the players to interact with a fundamentally unknown thing (how this magical thing works) by drawing deeper inferences from its real-world parallel: we can understand and interact with the fantastical via the real.  But we can also do the reverse.  Fantasy settings and sci-fi settings surround us with the fantastical.  By grounding them with a real-world parallel (for example, drawing a parallel between a galactic emperor and a Roman emperor, or between an order of space knights and the Templars), we give the players a handle with which they can interact with the fantastical.

Another advantage of this trick is it allows us to draw on more sources of inspiration and thus to create a multi-layered narrative by drawing on many different strands.  The most obvious elements are mythical and historical parallels.  With a mythical parallel, you can draw upon the logic of fairy tales, legends and myths to give an otherwise mundane story element an otherworldly feel.  With a historical parallel, you can borrow from the logic of history and sociology to lend your element a realistic feel.  It also gives us as creators an obvious framework with which to work.  If the galactic emperor is like a particular Roman emperor, we can draw inspiration from the Roman's achievements and life story when creating the achievements and life story of our emperor.

Nothing prevents us from combining bisociation and symbolism together into a particularly heady mixture. Indeed, Bisociation can be seen as a form of symbolism.  For example, our Galactic Emperor could be associated with both a specific Roman Emperor (perhaps Augustus) and the Greek Titan Chronos.  We can draw on the history of the specific Roman emperor, but we can also cast the character's destiny around that of Chronos: the Emperor may have overthrown the order that came before it (like Augustus did too), but he's doomed to have his own order overthrown by his own offspring, literal or metaphorical.  Thus, he must consume them to prevent this from happening.  He might do this by purging the minds of his heirs after a particular age and then possessing them psychically, as only he and his heirs have the proper genetic material to control the machinery of the Empire, and our story begins when the prince of the Emperor manages to escape with the help of a stand-in of Gaia. These multiple forms of inspiration can allow us to rather easily and simply create relatively unique stories, simply by looking at how the interactions of various stories might work.

Themes

Bisociation and symbolism act as an unstated undercurrent to the whole narrative.  The story may be about X, but bisociation and symbolism give it greater meaning and multiple dimensions for the insightful player to ponder.  We can treat both of these as variations of themes.  A theme is any guiding principles for the structure, what the story is "about" in a metaphorical, rather than literal sense.  Examples might include:

• The necessary clash of cynicism and realpolitik with idealism in politics.
• Fatherhood, legacy, and the passing on of the torch
• The differences and tensions between how men and women see themselves and how they see one another when it comes to relationships, romance and sex
• Man's inhumanity to man; the tension between the need to cooperate with your most natural competitors if you want to get ahead.
• The interplay between the four elements of fire, earth, air and water.

These can be as profound, or as simple, as you want.  What matters, though, is that they tend to naturally create interesting questions for you to explore.  A good theme can guide the design of your story.  You can base events and characters on particular elements of a theme.  For example, if you chose a theme of legacy and fatherhood, then you should probably have at least one father/son duo in your campaign somewhere.  

Similarly, if you chose an elemental theme, you can create factions or NPCs who are primarily inspired by those elements.  Critical questions and tension can turn on these themes, creating situations where the players find themselves confronted with the core questions of that theme.  For example, if you took the theme of cynicism and idealism in politics,  your adventure might culminate with the players forced to make a huge, sweeping choice between a cynical, brutal solution to a political problem, or a suboptimal but idealistic choice, and find themselves standing in the shoes of the very politicians they, themselves, defeated as failing to live up to their ideals (this was the central theme of Fable 3).

You can think of a theme as a guiding principle of a session, campaign or story, the basic, one line idea that you can return to when seeking inspiration.  It's not actually important that your players understand the theme. You can make it explicit to them in a variety of ways, if you want them to play with it intentionally ("This game is about family, so I want every one your characters to explicitly have some living family members"), but that's not necessary.  Indeed, many movies, books and TV shows have themes that the audience never explicitly grasps until some critic explains it to them (and they may well be seeing a theme that isn't there).  There's also no limit on the number of themes you have in a story, but multiple themes can clutter up a story a lot faster than multiple bisociations or symbols will.  If you want multiple themes, a better approach would be to have tangential themes ("This is a story about fatherhood, with an elemental motif") or have "sub-themes" that explore more explicit aspects of the central theme ("This is a story about family, and this arc will explore motherhood in more detail"), or to have sequential themes ("the last story was about family; this story is about man's inhumanity to man.")

Putting it into Practice

To continue with our Ranathim Monster Hunter story, we have several possible overarching themes we could use.  Our initial inspiration was the Witcher and the Mandalorian, both of which turn on fatherhood and legacy which makes that an obvious choice for our own story, but if we're going to include the mother, that might be less important.  We can certainly explore that theme if we want, but allow me to propose another one: the Keleni tend to be a deeply religious people, and our opponent in this fight is going to be a Cult.  In the last post, we mentioned the twin female characters of the ingenue (who "keeps the faith") and the femme fatale (who "fell from grace.") All of this suggests religious themes to me, in particular about what makes a religion good or bad, and when are their demands of sacrifice worthwhile and when are they inappropriate?

If we take this as our theme, the cult and their leader become the symbols for religions gone bad: they might be dogmatic, they might be hypocritical, and they might tear down the societies around them.  We can explore the impact of each of those themes in more detail in specific arcs of the campaign.  We might introduce a rival "good" religion, likely the faith of the Keleni woman, a religion that demands much from not just its followers but also from its leaders; it might have a flexible doctrine that accepts flaws and seeks to improve; it might seek to build up society and demand sacrifice only if it profits the many over the few.  The Keleni woman, in this context, becomes the person of whom a sacrifice is demanded, with the child being the sacrifice.  If we wanted to draw on parallels, we can draw upon the myths of Moloch and we might borrow from the more familiar Binding of Isaac; in this context, the mother might stand in for Sarai, which means that, perhaps, her husband heeded the call of the Cult and gave up their child, while she rejected it and seeks to reclaim her child.  The PCs might be stand-ins for the angels that stayed Abraham's hand and rescued the child and forbade the practice of child-sacrifice (though in this case, this "forbidding of the practice of child sacrifice" will be less a decree and more the unleashed fury of the PCs on the cult.")

We have a few possible interesting sources for bisociation.  The sacrifice of the child is the most obvious source for bisociation.  It's clearly unjust, and its injustice is the source of much of the tension of the story.  But what is the reason for it? Is the child, perhaps, evil, or the child's continued existence a danger to the world? We have to be careful with this approach, because we don't want to invalidate the sacrifice of the players or play them for chumps.  We could retain this idea of "the child must be sacrificed to retain the world order, and the child's continued existence threatens that world order," but maybe the world order is itself unjust and the PCs actions end up destabilizing a lot of things in the area, but mostly bad things, and as the world order collapses, something new and better springs to life.  We might borrow ideas from the Omen, but instead of the child being the equivalent to the "anti-christ," he is instead a stand in for a messiah; he only looks destructive because the world is so fallen and miserable.

A final bisociation I'd like to play with would be the Monster-Hunters as werewolves.  I discussed this idea that they use these necrotech suits to fight, combining the biotech of the Witcher with the unique armor of the Mandalorians.  But what if these necrotech suits were "alive" in a sense, like their own beings, and they granted their power to their bearer, similar to the wolf-pelts of werewolves (done exquisitely well in the Order, which suggests the Knights of St Christopher might not be a bad inspiration for our monster hunters).  This idea of bio-tech werewolves also suits the Benandanti well.  These were often described as werewolves or witches who used their dark powers "for good," monsters who hunted monsters, which fits our Monster Hunters well (they use necrotech to hunt down necrotech monsters).  The Benandanti were also marked at birth by a "caul," which is the the amniotic sac of the child over its face when its born; yet more squishy, yucky biotech references.  This also implies that bearing these necrotech suits is something of a curse, and if we go with the notion of the werewolf-as-infectious, perhaps too much association with these hunters can begin to corrupt others, which means they have to restrain themselves in specific ways, unless they want to induct someone new into their order or leave them bearing this curse in some way.