Dungeon Erasure
29 July 2024
Contents
- Contents
- Intro
- What is Erasure?
- Setup
- Dungeon Erasure - Winter
- Summing Up: Winter Crag station
- Final Thoughts
Intro
After my last post on seeding dungeons with tarot cards I was reflecting on how much I enjoy incorporating art in my creative process. I've done this before with music and this sort of spiritual throughline has left a mark on me. Mining the details of a piece and the way they move me before translating them into an explorable space is a method for me to connect with art in a way that I really would never experience outside of this hobby, and on top of that I just think it's fun!! Now that I've done music and tarot, I've been idly brainstorming how to draw other media into this journey. Today, I'd like to try my hand at erasure poetry.
What is Erasure?
Basically: the creation of poetry by erasing or blacking out an existing piece. That piece can be anything from existing poems to an MtG card to the Declaration of Independence to every page of Infinite Jest, one by one..
Truthfully I have always been a little bit wary of erasure. Even though Danez 100% got her ass I feel what Jane is saying in that tweet - it feels icky to "silence" an author. What I'm hoping for with this post is to perform several different erasures on the same piece in order to see it from several unique angles while still, in some way, preserving more of the original. I'm not well experienced in doing this, so I don't expect the final results to be a major departure from the tone / content in the original piece, but I'm always happy to be surprised!
Setup
The work I'll be erasing is one of my favorite poems: Winter, by Michael Earl Craig.
My basic plan here is to perform a different erasure on this poem for each step of the classic dungeon checklist from Goblin Punch. I'll be editing in MS Paint like a true auteur. It's a short poem, which may be a problem, but it's so vivid and sharp that I don't think I'll have too much trouble filling things out. When I'm done, I'll put it all together into a bite-sized dungeon.
Dungeon Erasure - Winter
Something to Steal
Something to be Killed
Something to Kill You
Different Paths
Someone to Talk To
Something to Experiment With
Something the Players Probably Won't Find
Summing Up: Winter Crag station
1 - the trainyard
- In the trainyard it is late, lamps light the trainmen and a small grey owl.
2 - fog-rest
- A long umber fog-rest. In its newly runed lamps one sees the thoughts of the trainman's cat Stamina.
3 - soaked red stage
- Long thought to be exctinct soaked men on horseback. In the brunette-colored lamps one of the men has a thought: all kin harbor rain. The man crunches gentlemen on stage dressed as a farmer.
4 - the other side
- Out the other side of the trainyard the train shudders, nearly thirty years late to the farm.
5 - icy harbor
A kind of cow from a fog-soaked forest. Its red light like sin in the icy harbor. The cow continues out the other side of the man. Stamina 30.
In the lamplit icy harbor the rainman's crest gently pleas to you. (The cow is led by a dreamer.)
6 - the young dreamer
A small grey infant ever so icy. The rain runs in her dish. Now, nearly thirty ladies and gentlemen introduce you to the young dreamer.
A statue of two shaking hands in the trainyard with its newly brunette-colored coal cars. One like a king, the other shudders in gentle pleasure.
Final Thoughts
Well, that's something. I think of the processes I've done on this blog, this one felt the most self-indulgent. But, wow, it came out so dreamy! What's a fog-rest? What does it mean for the cow to be coming out the other side of the man? No clue, but that's still enough for me to work with on game day! I chickened out in the final write-up and added some extra punctuation / changed some capital letters rather than sticking firmly to my text, but even without that I really like what came out here.
Something I loved about this is that with each new step on the checklist I got more familiar with the poem, letting me comb through it with new eyes each time and find words/phrases in unexpected spots. If I ran this back from the top right now I think, while the setting would still be this weird foggy train station, I'd still be able to find new, interesting details.
Would I do this again? No, or at least not on the regular. It's a lot of work even if I enjoyed it. And, tbh, I still don't quite feel right about performing erasures. Probably if I did this again I would erase either my own work or something in the public domain just to assuage my own stomach. It does make me think that an erasure game jam could be fun. What would it look like for a bunch of people to comb through, say, the old TSR adventures and find new life in the ancient texts?
If you liked this, I'd love to hear any suggestions on other forms of media to mine inspiration from. I'm always happy to experiment!