At this point, I didn’t want to write this post in particular, because it’s mostly a crossover event. September was planned to have a general theme about Stories within Stories, mainly tying-in with the release of my newest small TTRPG game Reel To Real, a game where you’re talking about movies from a personal perspective within a larger discussion forum, simulating viewer questions for a Q&A session and using prompts to select movies and discussion points. So it’s multiple layers of stories stacked over another. Then on the other hand, in recent days I came across the notion of a personal curriculum, a month-long (or quarter-long) side-project to research specific topics while journaling about some of the findings and what can be derived from that. Think of it like, creating your own 101 lecture class on a specific topic. For this month, I selected a „Systems as Stories“ as my first step into this personal curriculum topic and did some research on it… and let me say, there had been some overlap.
What are systems and rituals in this context?
I think since this is a personal curriculum topic, it’s a loosely definition of a system in a society. For example, basic necessities like transportation, energy, food delivery, water distribution all have different stories to tell.
- Transportation: In my area, there used to be a tram-line across the entire region until they were built back and replaced by streets for cars and eventually reclaimed as places for pedestrians to walk across without cars. Or just think about the stories about construction of transportation hub like the BER airport or Stuttgart 21.
- Energy: There’s a recent trend emerging from centralized energy creation centers in power plants towards distributed energy production by wind mills or solar energy. Then again, you might think of water turbines being a first source for energy creation or to bring machines into motion alongside a river. Nuclear energy creation has also lots of different stories to tell
I can go on for the different areas, but these systems have different stories, for example how they have been built and created, how did they expand, what happens if something goes wrong and what happened when they were no longer needed. Take water distribution in Roman culture where aqueducts have been used to bring water from high-rise areas down to cities and what happens once the Roman Empire crumbles. Ideas and knowledge about seemingly standard critical infrastructure forgotten by history overnight and the remaining infrastructure in constant decline because of no maintenance. It took centuries to regain that knowledge and improve it. As a result, you could see disruption of local processes (like windmills having no water to operate their wheels or no water for local baths) and side-effects like swamps getting created where the water lines start to crumble as the water pours out in droves. Some people think of infrastructure as being a boring topic, but it’s clearly not, if you think about the potential crisis that appear when those systems start to crumble. We have seen in the last couple of years many examples of bridges seemingly collapsing in an instance or discussions when a new infrastructure project takes too long to complete. So there are a lot of story potentials.
Rituals
Switching over to rituals, we can see many examples where our daily lives are being guided by rituals and protocols. In Western nations that have a Christian foundation, one of the most simple rituals is the Eucharist ritual during a mass. It’s a recreation of the Last Supper, when Jesus Christ was dining for the last time with his apostles. The entire mass is centered around this ritual that symbolically blesses a piece of bread and wine, seemingly turning it into Christ’s flesh and blood, thus creating a connection to Jesus Christ. By eating the bread and drinking the wine, it’s a ritual blessing for everyone that participate in the Eucharist (though it does seem quite cannibalistic if taken literally). But it creates a sense of community that is shared among everyone in the mass, reciting the core values, the core telling of Christianity in a repeatable, world-wide scalable ritual (if you’re really considering it without judgement). That being said, it’s a great way to think of those rituals for worldbuilding and storytelling.
- What brings people together regularly in a large mass?
- What might be the original reason that brought them together? What has happened and how did they decide to commemorate this event or circumstance?
- What steps does the ritual entail?
- Who organizes the ritual and what is their goal?
Switching from religion to secular, recently we had seen the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Since the devastating attack of islamic terrorists on American signs of power and wealth and the death of around 3000 people, there have been several festivities established that commemorate the victims of this vicious attacks. At Ground Zero, where once the twin towers were standing, the list of names of people is read out every year at the time when the planes hit the World Trade Center buildings. It’s a moving realization of the „Never Forget“ theme that came out of that tragedy. With the 9/11 attacks seemingly occuring only „recently“ in history, one could think about, what this ritual will look like in 100 years, in the year 2101. Will the people in the future still „never forget“ something they had no experienced themselves? Will the festivities eventually stop? Will it be continued as is and embedded into new additions to the ritual? Or will the reading of the names a staple of the ritual while the knowledge of what has happened at that day are only present for those that have read the story of 9/11 in history books?
Jumping back to a different secular ritual is the transition of power once a new president (or elected official) is elected. Back in the old days, i.e. when the USA was just in its infancy, a new President was sworn in, the Inauguration procedure was a simple oath-taking ceremony. Over the centuries, the Inauguration has become a fixed point in time, occuring every January 20th following an election on the first tuesday in November. On Inauguration Day, the oath-taking is only one small part of a day-long celebration of American democracy (at least it was until now, more or less) that has the old President leaving the White House, welcoming in the incoming new President and their spouse, before eventually convening on the steps of congress in front of a large crowd, taking the oath of office and do other things like holding a speech about the incoming four years of government. But then, you might ask yourself, what are the parts of this ritualistic transition of power, how have they been established and what has happened in history that might have made them significant to add. But then, from a storytelling perspective, the question comes up what happens if those parts of a ritual are interrupted and disrupted. There are two prominent examples that we have seen in recent years. Remember that those oath-taking procedures are signs of a democratic society, showing people in the country that the system is still active and resilient and there’s a continuation of power. Anti-democratic forces try to disrupt those rituals as best as they can, either by subverting the rules and using loop holes for disruption or outright violent attacks. You might guess what I’m hinting at…
- Loop hole disruption: In Germany, after a parliamentary election, there’s a given procedure until the elected government can be sworn in. Usually, there’s the election of internal officials that are managing the parliament. Before that, the oldest member of Parliament becomes a temporary parliamentary president. They are usually holding a small speech, before electing the parliament managers. In 2024, the Thuringian election showed a victory of the AfD party, however, all other democratic parties managed to create an all-democratic-party-coalition of all other parties in parliament that was bigger than the AfD’s block. However, the eldest member of Parliament was still a member of the AfD. This person then managed to completely derail the entire constitutionary process of parliament, bringing the country close to a constitutional crisis. Only after asking the local supreme court in an emergency call brought clarity to the situation and made the elder-president allow to continue the peaceful election of the officials.
- Violent disruption: Well, you might have guessed it. January 6th, 2021 is a day that still haunts us to this day. Usually, the Sixth of January date is a fixed milestone in the transition of one President to the next and has the formal certification of election results and counting the election results. In a normal transition of power, this is a rather boring process, but in 2021 this turned out to be a violent thing, when hundreds and thousands of MAGA protestors managed to violently attack Congress and manage to disrupt this seemingly simple ritual. The main hope of these attacks was to stop the correct certification of election results, seemingly hindering Joe Biden to officially becoming the next President. Obviously this violent attack only stopped the certification process momentarily, but still, had some protestors and police officers die after this incursion.
Those are just two recent examples of rituals that have been disrupted and what might happen when the ritual derails.
Bringing it all together
So, what do we do with this information? When you’re writing a story or creating your own TTRPG campaign setting, you might have situations that result in describing rituals and local systems. This can be great opportunities to bring in historic lore and backstory of the place and the ritual. What has happened in the past that resulted in that ritual that the players or POV characters experience. Imaging a local city celebrating a festivity named „Night of the Wolves“, a night where city inhabitants walk around in wolf masks, chanting, singing and dancing, and your characters would wonder what might happen. Only after asking one of the inhabitants, they might get the answer: Decades ago, a group of Werewolves were raiding the city, turning some of the inhabitants into Werewolves, leaving lots of people dead. Only after fierce defense actions, they managed to thwart the invasion, ending this crisis. In order to celebrate the victory against the attackers, people then would mask up as werewolves, seemingly mocking the invaders, honor the dead and survivors that have saved the city.
I hope I’ve given you some material to think about that you might include in your story or TTRPG campaign before we’re getting to a good way to analyse systems and rituals and adapt them.
A template for system analysis
So, how can you use this for your own worldbuilding? Let’s consider the following template:
Title:
Domain / Scale:
Where/When:
System Snapshot
- Purpose:
- Participants/Roles:
- Script & Objects:
- Cadence:
- Variants:
- Sources:
Meaning Layer
- Values:
- Power/Legitimacy:
- Identity/Comfort:
- Memory:
Friction & Failure
- Failure Modes:
- Afterlife:
Story Seeds
- …
- …
- …
RPG Hooks
…
Adaptation Notes
- Re-skin guide:
- Flag Sensitivity:
- Open questions:
An example. Let’s consider the above example of a peaceful transition of power.
Title: Oath of office
Domain / Scale: Political, societal. Can happen locally (Bürgermeister, Landrat, Landtag, Gemeindetag, etc.) but also on national level (Bundeskanzler, Bundestag, Landtag, Ministerpräsident, Bundespräsident, etc.) but also in other countries
Where/When: Whenever elections have taken place (or someone’s being replaced) and new officials come into office
System Snapshot
- Purpose: Statement of loyalty to the nation, showing to uphold an oath towards the Grundgesetz and citizens
- Participants/Roles: the official taking the oath of office, another representative (usually of the Judiciary branch or another elected official)
- Script & Objects: usually reciting a given text, placing hand on the Grundgesetz
- Cadence: formal gathering, part of initiation of a new elected governmental body
- Variants: every country has different versions of this, e.g. United States of America has this as a large gathering, while Germany has this as part of the founding session of a newly elected Bundestag
- Sources: […] for example a Wikipedia article on Oath of Office
Meaning Layer
- Values: political signal, democracy
- Power/Legitimacy: People who have been elected are now eligible to get to work in their role
- Identity/Comfort: showing stability of the transfer of power within the political system, a passing of the torch
- Memory: repetition, breaking news cycle „Bundeskanzler has been sworn in“, official start of a new government
Friction & Failure
- Failure Modes:
- „So wahr mir Gott helfe“, 2002, when Gerhard Schröder did not use this part of the oath of office
- AfD ruining democratic process of performing the political ritual, ridiculing transition of power process, disrupting it
- January 6th 2021
- Afterlife: Begin of a political term, political parties of all colors congratulate newly elected officials
Story Seeds
- The disruption of the oath. Politicians of an anti-democratic party consider the strict planned protocol of an oath of office taking
- The start of a new cycle. Following an oath of office, a newly elected official gets confronted with the reality of things that they did not know during the election cycle that are challenging their view of reality, the office and their plans for this term
RPG Hooks
- The party gets ahold of a plan of bandits or a conspiracy that wants to disrupt the oath of office ceremonies and they need to stop this. Will the party stop this or support the disruption.
Adaptation Notes
- Re-skin guide:
- Some ideas to change into your own world
- Flag Sensitivity:
- What might be considered offensive
- Open questions:
- See above: Thinking about what rituals could be used that feel different and appropriate to worlds