Transcript
So a bit ago I went on vacation to visit my daughter in Minnesota <snap> and while there my daughters friend invited us to go kayaking on a small lake. And there was a very specific thing that happened that inspired today’s writing exercise.
Exercise in world-building? I don’t know exactly what to call it but we’re gonna take a mundane experience and use it for fantastical inspiration. Or, you know, we’re just gonna be creative and have fun making shit up for D&D!
INTRO
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we create lore out of thin air and we use real life as a writing prompt! And we salute our patrons for their steadfast support of whim and whimsy!
So, we’ve all heard that thing about “writing what you know.” Cool. But ain’t nobody said “write what you know exactly word for word with no embellishments or imagination.” Right? This is where we get to tell tall tales, stretch the truth, flesh out that shower idea – you know what I’m talking about. All the best ideas occur in the shower. Where you don’t have a your waterproof notebook to write ‘em down so you forget ‘em as soon as you get out.
This is an example of capturing lightning in a bottle. Which is definitely NOT hyperbole … okay, it most certainly is.
First, I’ll tell you where the idea came from and then we’ll write out the little story it inspired. My daughter and I drive out to this lakeside community outside Minneapolis and meet her friend’s parents in the driveway of their awesome house. It’s awesome because it’s on this forested hillside overlooking this small lake that’s surrounded by other properties. Now, I’m from Southern California, so to me this actually looks like a big lake but I really have no sense of what makes a lake big or small. Here it is on Google maps, you tell me.
To get from the house and driveway down to the water where the kayak dock is, we have to traipse down several flights of pretty steep wooden stairs, going down through the trees and stuff clinging to the side of this equally pretty steep hillside. At the bottom there’s a tall wooden pier extending out maybe 20 feet over the water, about 3 feet above it. The kayaks are on these racks built into the hillside, and they’re stored horizontally and keel up. Keep the rain out, right? There are a pair of single seaters and a two-seater on the racks. My daughter’s friend and her dad are taking the two-seater and we’re getting the singles.
Her dad is super cool and apparently goes kayaking all the time. But it must have been, I don’t know, late in the season or something, or, come to think of it, he probably just doesn’t give a fuck about what’s coming next. He’s a braver man than me for sure.
It takes two of us to get a kayak pulled off the rack and carried over the pier and dropped into the lake. Yes, I wish I had photos or video of all this, but I just didn’t know I’d be telling you dear viewers about all this until it was much too late. Professional!
So I’m dragging my end out onto the dock and I’m wondering when we’re gonna set the thing down so we can clean it out. Because it’s full of webs and I can see spiders crawling all over the place. But the guy just swipes once at the webs and then instructs me to help him lower it into the water and we drop it in the lake. And he says, “Hop in, I’ll hold it steady this oar.”
Now, like every sane person in the world, I have a bit of arachnophobia. A smidge. A skoash. And my brain is screaming but I find myself just climbing down into this horror show like I’m having an out of body experience. While I’m climbing down I’m trying to brush out more webs with my oar but that isn’t really working and I see a big spider dart away up under the front deck, you know, where my feet and legs are gonna go. I’m just sorta running on autopilot, kinda like that military mindset kicking in where you just gotta do this nutty thing that’s in front of you and everyone else is doing.
To clarify, it wasn’t an actual out of body experience. I’ve had one of those, an actual out of body experience and it involved a heroic volume of tequila … but that’s a story for another time. And probably another channel.
So I’m trapped in this kayak, my daughter and I both in our separate little floating spider islands, and I’m trying to row and look for spiders at the same time. I literally watched a little one spin a web from the deck of the kayak to my knee – I was wearing jeans, I always wear jeans – cause you never know when a spider is gonna wanna climb on you – and as we paddle out further I keep trying to keep my feet from extending too far down into the kayak and I keep looking for that big one I saw scurry up inside there and it’s just like a waking nightmare.
My daughter and I knew we weren’t crazy because her friend, who’s in the two-seater with her dad, keeps yelping periodically and batting at spiders in THEIR kayak. And then we go on this two hour kayak ride, us and the arachnids, touring around this admittedly very pretty lake. And yes I discovered later that I got bit twice. Someone in the group said there weren’t any poisonous spiders in Minnesota but I suspect that’s BS.
So that’s the experience that inspired this idea of a mythological fairy tale sorta thing, like one of those demi-god origin stories told by Native Americans or some bit of a Viking saga. I just saw this image of some crazy ancient dude in heavy dreadlocks sailing across a lake at midnight under a full moon in a wooden canoe type of thing full of spiders. And figured I should write it out ‘cause it could work as a good bit of lore or something.
Which we can write up now, just riffing on whatever comes out of the old noggin, stream of consciousness style – which is probably how most of us do our first draft stuff, right? All you need is that one image, that one idea, that one detail and from there, you just spool it out, see where the river runs.
Now, we all have our own styles and influences and whatever, so what I come up with will certainly be different from what anyone else does and there’s no right or wrong, there’s just creativity and having fun and “just doing your thing”.
So here’s what I punched out, while listening to some select tracks from the Brittania score that I wish I could play here while I read this but you know, that’s frowned upon.
Uhm-hartha Wynya-Shäkt, the father of many son-eating daughters, was cast afar in the rage of his wife, the Starkiller, the Siren’s Wrath, She Who Cannot Forget Nor Forgive. Uhm-hartha found himself stranded in the middle of a great moss forest, the trees so dense not a single ray of sunlight reached the ground. Wandering through the ever-twilight, Uhm-hartha finally discovered the edge of a lake, a lake full of shining light.
Stood upon the rocky shore, he saw a star pulled down from the velvet heavens and drowned in the waters below. His wife, murdering the very stars in her rage at the world. He heard the cries of the people in all their many lands, their anguish at losing their skyward maps, their very way in the world rising like heat on the edges of his vision.
He knew he must put a stop to the Siren’s Wrath before the sky went as black as her gorgeous heart.
And so he circumnavigated the rocky shore in the hopes of finding a path to follow. But he only found the twilit wood was itself an island in the starfall lake. He needs must cross the far waters and gain the other side.
He spied an ancient, felled and hollow tree thick with moss and bramble, which he rolled over to find brimming with spiders and their eggs. He collected an offering of live beetles and bid the spiders if they would like to see a new world.
Queens from the various tribes emerged from the scuttling morass of web and leg and presented their various markings of death and warning to the moss-cloaked man. A bargain was struck and the queens of arachnid bade the human find a staff from which the smallest of them might ride high in the night to witness this journey across the fallen rain.
Uhm-hartha Wynya-shäkt watched another star yanked from its perch in the heavens and drowned and went into the woods to find his staff. When he returned he held aloft a gnarled and mossy branch into which he had rammed the cloven hoof of a stag’s carcass he’d found mouldering among the roots of a massive tree, sprouted with moon fungi and golden lace.
The various spider queens of small and tiny stature took to the staff and Uhm-hartha dragged the makeshift canoe to the water’s edge and stepped inside. He pressed with the staff to push away from the rocky bank and a thousand spiders swarmed the mossy top of the ancient water-borne log. Those spider queens of the large variety scaled Uhm-hartha’s legs and arms and the giant queens unfolded their long legs and bristled up over his shoulders and together they crossed those shining waters, the grave of the dying stars lighting their wake.
The reflection of Uhm-hartha Wynya-shäkt’s passage, the first Druid, can be seen in the night sky, that bright river of stars that divides the heavens and shows us our way when we are lost.
Well, that’s all kinds of messy, but it definitely captures that initial idea I had, and that’s all I need for now. I can noodle with this all I want. That bit at the end about this being the first druid, that just sorta popped up in the flow of things and I could really run with that. Obviously here I’m going for this kind of oral history, mythology vibe, kind of intentionally not paying attention to logic or details, really more going for flavor and that sort of weird thing myths and old fairy tales have of feeling sorta untethered to reality in anyway, untethered to logic. It’s like more about flavor than anything else. It’s a myth, so we don’t worry about technical or scientific details, or even details in general.
This little thing can become part of my world-building, it could pop up in a short story, it could inspire a miniature paint scheme or a scratch build or whatever, who knows?
So, see if you’ve got a memory of some experience that you could use as a jumping off point in writing something creative. I mean, really all I’m saying is – go write something short for fun and don’t worry about the details, see what happens.
See ya!