Welcome to the 15th edition of Forest of Distraction. If this is your first time visiting, this newsletter presents a small, weekly collection of geographic, historical, archaeological, cultural and/or artistic articles that have caught my attention at one time or another. As a fantasy writer, I am fascinated by the nooks and corners of our real world and constantly find inspiration for my own worldbuilding and storytelling — it’s my hope that these newsletters are an inspirational resource for other fantasy writers, too.
If you are not a fantasy writer or worldbuilder, these small distractions will widen your perspective and illuminate your understanding of our fascinating world, much like an explorer’s torch illuminates the dark underspaces of caves and dungeons.
OK, that was reaching. Not every issue of this newsletter has a theme other than “how cool is that”, but this underground-themed week was inspired by Jennifer Baldwin’s post about the Mythic Underground, and how dungeon crawling in role-playing game might present a different kind of narrative structure for fiction. As a one-time game designer myself, I have often mused on the challenge of bringing more narrative structure into a game, but never before considered bringing more dungeon-crawl structure (or lack of structure) into fiction. Definitely worth reading — scroll down to find it.
The Most Magnificent Cave on Earth
“Well,” replied Steele, “Carlsbad Caverns is known for one very big chamber called the Big Room, but here in Huautla we’ve got at least 12 rooms just as big . . . and one of them is twice the size of the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium! . . .
“You know, way back in 1987, a famous Swiss caver named Phillipe Rouillier approached me deep inside the cave and said, with his German-Swiss accent, ‘Bill, I do believe this is the most magnificent cave on earth.’ Thirty-two years later — after numerous stupendous additions to the cave, I hear more and more speleologists saying the same.”
Read more: Oaxaca’s Huautla Cave: ‘the most magnificent cave on earth’
As Below, So Above
“Most Mithraea are underground or excavated in the rock, so as to represent the mythical grotto in which the god was supposed to be born. They all look alike: a simple, small vaulted room with two benches on the side for the adepts. In the central niche is an altar supporting a relief with the central scene of the cult: Mithras stabs the primordial Bull with a dagger, while some animals—a dog, a scorpion, and a snake, probably representing the constellations— take active part. Mithras was also identified with the Sun and with Apollo in the syncretistic atmosphere of late paganism.
“While the archaeologists were working on their discovery, they noted a shaft in the vault, from which sunlight shone at midday near the altar. As the days went by, the light ray came closer and closer to the altar, until it shone directly on it on June 21st, the summer solstice. According to the philosopher Porphyry, who probably visited Caesarea in his youth and later married a Caesarean woman, the Mithraists believed that the soul entered the human body at birth and left it at death following the direction of the solstice. The Caesarea Mithraeum was then a faithful representation of the mythical cosmos!”
A Narrative of Exploration
“Perhaps this illustrates that playing a game and writing/reading a story are two very different pasttimes, and that while randomness might be fun in a game, it’s less fun in a story. I’ll accept that, for sure, but I do still wonder if it isn’t possible to borrow some of the qualities of the megadungeon—the randomness, the non-linear, non-static elements, the focus on exploration and the space itself—and apply them to a work of fiction. This type of fiction would definitely be avant garde/experimental and not something that would find mainstream success, but I still wonder if we might not find a kind of satisfaction and fun in a story that put setting and exploration at the center instead of a traditional narrative structure or character arc.
“What if a novel or story focused on the exploration of a place, not on the arc of a specific set of characters? Adventurers may live or die, and new ones may come into the dungeon to take their place, but the narrative is exploration-based and from the point of view of either an objective outside observer or from the dungeon itself, with the “explorer” really being the reader and not necessarily any particular character. The non-linear, non-static setting and the wandering monsters and factions within the dunegon would provide structure to the “narrative,” but there would be no attempt to wrangle a cohesive meaning into the story. Meaning and “theme,” so to speak, would emerge through the randomness and changing nature of the dungeon itself. Sort of like Sword and Sorcery meets Luis Bunuel…”