Review Fix chats with “Landscapes for Writers and Game Masters: Building Authentic Natural Terrain into Imagined Worlds” author Scott Rice-Snow, who discusses the project and why it’s a special one for him.
About Scott Rice-Snow:
Scott Rice-Snow is an emeritus professor of geological sciences at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, with published research in river, glacial, and karst geomorphology, as well as hydrology, geoarchaeology, and geoscience education. He also hosts the ground4inspiration.net website, documenting unique landscape features and their narrative/gameplay potential.
About The Book:
Landscape science tells fascinating stories, whether in fiction or a role-playing game. Earth’s varied terrain provides many examples of scene-specific challenges and resources for story characters, with distinctive land features, compelling locations, and intriguing traits. Landslides, floods, coastal erosion, glacier movement, and volcanism can deliver fresh plot points and alter the social character of an imagined region. Characters traveling different river types encounter very different puzzles, opportunities, and combat environments and the same variety awaits within other classic settings, such as caves, mountains, deserts, shorelines, and volcanic zones. Atypical landscapes such as tundra, karst, and vast glacier surfaces can breathe fresh air into any stories.
This handbook is a reference source for creative writing and game world building. It delves deeply into many landscape characteristics that help set the tone, shape character behavior, and drive the plot. Chapters are divided into diverse geographic environments, from rivers and shorelines to caves and volcanoes, and show how knowledge of the terrain can deliver plot points, add veracity, pose key problems, establish conflict, and lead into the next scene. Discover how authors and game masters effectively weave land and terrain into their stories.
Review Fix: What’s the main reason why you decided to do this book?
Scott Rice-Snow: So many caves on TV look like indoor hallways with lumps of papier-mâché stuck on the walls. So many deserts in the media are just fields of sand. From story to story the rivers, mountains, and volcanoes in described settings seem about the same. As someone who has studied and taught about these landscape features for most of my life, I know there is tremendous variety out there. Each type of mountain or cave presents a very different scene, distinctive challenges, and unique narrative opportunities. There are crucial differences in the types of landslides, volcanic eruptions, and coastal hazards as well. There is so much more for storytellers and game designers to work with!
I enjoy giving talks at game conventions about natural landscapes as story settings: their oddly shaped terrain features, their natural resources and hazards, and the ways they evolve over time. People running role-playing adventure games avidly note down new story hooks, puzzles, and character challenges that arise organically from the landscape. Genre fiction writers appreciate the opportunity to make their outdoor settings more unique, detailed, and varied. After I’d created about ten of these different ‘storytellers’ geology’ talks, it seemed like a natural next step to put them into a book.
Review Fix: Why is this topic so special to you?
Rice-Snow: I love the diversity and beauty of the world’s landscapes, and how the land’s form is intimately connected to nature’s sculpting processes. That’s been the focus of my research on rivers, glacial landscapes, caves, and water resources throughout my university career. Besides a scientific perspective, I’ve always been intrigued by the storytelling potential of unique terrain features. Our family has played D&D for many years, and a vacation visit to an unusual scenic place often involves excited speculations on the types of game encounters that might be set there.
Review Fix: What was the research process like for this one? And What did you learn that you weren’t expecting through this one?
Rice-Snow: Each chapter of the book has plenty more information and ideas than were in the original con seminar talk: I’ve been glad to bring in additional treasures from my teaching and field work experience. Then I thought of the follow-up questions GMs and writers might have. I often searched my reference books, the library, and online sources to fill in new facts: Exactly how fast do lava flows move? How deep are the meltwater drains on glacier surfaces? Could imperceptible soil creep move buried treasure across property lines in a few generations?
I also found that some of the things I thought were basic-level, and those I thought of as specialized topics for graduate seminar discussions, got mixed together in new ways when I started rummaging through the science to find useful hooks, puzzles, and metaphors for storytelling. I like providing creative people with shiny new tools, and it opens up my own appreciation of the things our landscapes has to teach us.
Review Fix: Who will enjoy this one the most?
Rice-Snow: In the book title I emphasize the ways landscape science knowledge can benefit game masters and novelists. In a college landscape science class I developed for non-geology students with creative aspirations, I’ve been amazed at the subtle, pivotal ways some of them worked details about the behavior of rivers, groundwater, and cave weather into their stories. Others developed memorable RPG campaigns and board games drawing on new terrain knowledge. But students’ imaginations were set on fire for a much broader variety of projects. I’ve seen students have eureka moments as their understanding of a natural place becomes more complex. From poetry to therapy, classroom instruction to theater staging, sculpture to music, architecture to baking, better earth science info leads to more creative, specific works.
Review Fix: Why should people pick this one up?
Rice-Snow: Anyone looking for inspiration for their storytelling is likely to find some gems here. The variety, authenticity, detail, and challenge in real-life landscapes can take any narrative to the next level. Many of the land features and conditions described in this book for deserts, woodlands, islands, and tundra are well known to the people who live there, but what if a fiction writer does not? The more fantastic elements a story has, the more helpful landscape science can be: aiding suspension of disbelief through real touchstones.
Review Fix: Why is this one special for you?
Rice-Snow: This book was written during the Covid pandemic and lockdown, in our family bubble. My ever-ready, ever-thoughtful chapter reviewers and editors were my wife Jennifer and daughter Duv. They brought forth a host of additional story application ideas, likely reader questions, and remembrances of striking details from the landscape sites we’ve explored together. Our two cats, Simon and Malcom, often sat with me (and only partly on the computer) through long winter typing sessions.
As an educator, I see games and storytelling as wonderful added ways to spread authentic experience and understanding of our world’s diverse terrain to a broader public audience. So many scientific bits of landscape knowledge become essential when someone in a story or game is in an outdoor scene fighting monsters, seeking life-saving resources, or looking for treasure. Geologic understanding can inspire new conflicts, challenges, and plot points.
I’ve published a couple dozen articles in scientific journals through my career, but this is my one book for the incredibly creative folks in the game and fiction writing communities, and I’m really proud to have made this contribution!
Review Fix: What’s next?
Rice-Snow: Another book is most likely to erupt from one of the game con presentations my wife Jennifer and I continue to develop. We regularly do talks at GenCon in Indianapolis and Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio. Our new talks present varied types of landscape-related topics. For example, we’ve recently given some seminars on GM at-the-table implementation of varied dangerous geologic terrain and events, in-classroom games for virtual landscape exploration, and especially inspirational and weird natural places in the mundane Midwest.
Review Fix: Where can people find out more?
Rice-Snow: Our website ground4inspiration.net gives writers and GMs a truly scene-specific focus on landscape features. We have more than 40 intensive boots-on-the ground descriptions of specific natural places, unusual sites where story chapters or RPG encounters could play out. What is it actually like to be in a mountain cirque, a lava tube, a grove of redwoods? What challenges lie in wait there? Each scene on the website is documented with field exploration notes, color photos, earth science perspectives, and lots of story suggestions. It also provides practical resources and suggestions for educators, game masters, artists, and leisure travelers that enjoy new terrain experiences.
Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add?
Rice-Snow: My current contact information is posted in the ‘About’ section of ground4inspiration.net . I do appreciate and reply to reader follow-up questions.
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