This is written as a contribution to the RPG Blog Carnival's May 2024 Prompt: "It's not easy being green". You can find the host of the prompt at the blog RPGWandering and the RPG Blog Carnival here. What's In A Garden?
Gardens are deeply rooted in what it means to be human; it speaks to planning, intent, and laboring upon the natural world for a desired result. Every culture in our world holds to itself some kind of garden in social functions (albeit there are exceptions to this, such as Indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea who's social metabolic relationship to their home forests is such that they simply do not enact a form of control that many societies consider foundational to a garden). Their ubiquity hints at importance, and as all near-universal features of human cultures and societies, they make for good elements of world building.
At their core, as in all things, gardens are teeming with contradictions and opposing forces; between life and death, decay and growth, and all the myriad array of social markings that we bring into them. In turn, gardens are prime for storytelling; conflict, betrayal, protection, despair, and hope. From a creative's perspective, the garden can be and has been an effective narrative and conceptual tool for our worlds and stories. In this post, I've conjured up a kind of archetype of a garden strongly based off of my engagements with the media referenced throughout. This is Anemone: The Forsaken Garden.
Anemone: The Forsaken Garden
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| Still Life of Roses, Tulips and Anemones by Elias Van den Broeck |
Anemone the Forsaken Garden has everything to do with hardship, betrayal, neglect, suffering, and destitution. In particular, the forsaken garden calls upon us to ask the question: Who's life is sacrificed for such beauty? Who's hand bleeds from tending? Who's heart was broken amongst the roses? What remains enrich this soil? Anemone encourages the emphasis of drama, poverty, romance, and unfamiliarity within the familiar. Its uniqueness, for me, lies in a somber inverting of beauty and comfort; all which is nice has at its core a kind of rot and agony that upholds it, or otherwise the positive is warped in such a way that one can't approach it comfortably. While there's so many narrative routes one can take with the Forsaken Garden, I'm especially fond of those that walk us through the arteries of a fictional world. This is a great vehicle for immersing players in the contradictions of a stratified society in an organic and theatrical manner. The enjoyment of one class or strata(s) is predicated logically and literally on the suffering of another's. By creating a space for narration that details who labors and who enjoys/who is fed, Anemone can wind itself through the guts of class society, and returns to us a morbid and familiar stage trashed with the refuge of class. put it another way, "Look how beautiful this tulip is. Now look at the corpse it springs from and try to relate to it the same way".
I think Rowan Rook & Decard's RPG Spire: The City Must Fall and its Strata Sourcebook approach a kind of Anemone brilliantly by bloating the garden to monumental proportions and designating it as the source of food for a massive and hungry city. Grant Howitt And Chris Taylor describe the Garden District as a "choking biomass" (Strata Sourcebook, p. IV). In their storytelling, the Garden District is a dense and labyrinthine place by nature of its sheer size; indeed, it calls into question how big a garden can be and how much it can support before it ceases to hold the same cozy, familiar connotations that they traditionally do. And that's part of why I love their telling of the garden; they take the familiar and invert it, offering just enough glimpses of the original and its warming connotations and so much of the weird, massive, and unnerving that you're left with something eerily distended. It goes deeper than reimagining the garden's scale, too; many of the oppressed under-class of this arcology, the Drow, become deeply fixated with the Garden in a way that blurs the lines between obsession and trance. In a society where there they are pressed upon and dehumanized routinely, the Garden becomes a site of refuge for many of the Drow who work there; in its raw silence, they gain a sense of reflection that's created space for a reassertion or affirmation of self-worth. I really enjoy how they've taken this, too, and destabilized it in a way that presents horror and unnerving devotion that would cause players to stop and evaluate what the space means to an NPC. In my opinion, that is a hallmark of good world building. It's also worth noting how they have an entire section of the Garden District dedicated to the growing of mushrooms from hanging corpses, which is metal as fuck and the vision that I carried with me in writing this.
Inspired by Spire and my own personal reflections, here's this to spur your creativity:
1d6 Forsaken Gardens:
1: Holloway Herbals. Mr. Holloway is known throughout the city for his monopoly upon medical herbs, having successfully bought out the competition (mothers and women of the community). The entirety of medical practice in the city depends on Holloway because of this. Recently, he has taken to a war of aggression against local harvesters stealing yarrow from the river which runs through the heart of the City. Experiencing failures on this front, Holloway has begun to restrict the sell of medicinal herbs, causing their price to skyrocket while the practice of medicine in the city begins to collapse. If one were to enter the gardens during this time, they would see a field of rotting plants on the brink of death, left to rot and die as Holloway plans for the following season.
2: The Druid's Destitution. The Barons and the proprietary classes of the wealthy residential Saintsgate disctrict treasure their local park. It's filled to the brim with exotic flora from across the world, including some of the rarest magical plants touched by the arcane energies of the Weave. Rumor has it that the life force of druids is drained by a resident necromancer to fuel the soil of these magical plants. Druids from the Black Forest deep in the heart of Morrow are stolen from their homes to act as forced laborers in the capital city's gardenlands.
3: Dreamspinners - The Silk Gardens is a beautiful enclosed glasshouse home to a rare breed of spider; the Dreamspinner. It's said that the silk it produces, if consumed, can allow people to commune with the dead in their dreams. Located in a town racked by the aftermath of natural disasters, addiction to Dreamsilk has become an epidemic and the Silk Gardens lies at the heart of it. While innocent in its public face, the Silk Gardens has deep ties to the criminal underground.
4: A Witch's Plot. Bewitching bouquets are sold at a local herbary known as A Bed of Roses. Gwynnedd is famous for her alluring flowers; lovers travel from across the lands to her garden in hopes of winning the hearts of others. Recently, those gifted bouquets from the garden have begun to die horrible, gnashing deaths. Gwynned is desperate for help in uncovering the root of this issue.
5: The Toiling of the Laborer - A garden of a massive estate in the countryside who has been plagued by the curse of its old master and architect, the owner of the estate. It's considered the most beautiful garden in the kingdom; however, its beauty hinges on blood sacrifice. Those who labor the gardens are forced to spill their blood into the soil to satiate the landlord's hunger. In turn, the garden grows vibrant and beautiful. What's off, though, is that the estate has begun to run out of laborers to drink the blood of, and the garden has begun to overtake the surrounding countryside, spreading at a rapid rate.
6: Briar's Maze. Something untended and wild has taken over the local library's communal garden. The garden's main attraction is Brigid's Maze: Once known for being a cherished attraction to poor, working class youth in the city of Lucaria, it has now become overgrown with briars and thickets, and is a serious thorn in the eyes of locals. It has grown in complexity, and a handful of children have since gone missing in its spiraling annals. Some of the local street urchins can tell you of its new nickname, Briar's Maze, and how it calls to sleeping youth, whispering promises of their innermost desires being found at its center.
Ideas of Worth
Originally, I was going to write on more archetypal gardens: One of these included Anemone's narrative opposite of Sanctuaries (Sunflowers/Irises). Dominated by themes of preservation, cultivation, care, and tending, Sanctuaries have everything to do with communities and the slow, caring eye and touch that gardeners possess (the bane of many dystopian fantasies). I had also planned on writing on Gardens as Thresholds to other worlds, as well as Walled Gardens that act as fortresses, in both crude and subtle ways. I decided to hold off on that for now, but a bulk of that writing remains completed, though unpolished.
Suggested Media & Reading
Gardens - Touch Grass
Perdido Street Station by China Miéville for its writing of the Glass House setting within its wonderful, disgusting world.
