Accidental Hyperdiegesis and How to Harness It

A while back, Idle Cartulary wrote about hyperdiegesis, the process by which unexplained stuff is brought up to heighten the sense of their being a broader setting. Its rad as hell, you should go read it. What I'd like to talk about today is my own experience with accidental hyperdiegesis, and then some advice on how to use that in a home game. With that in mind, let's talk about The Heroes. 

I still get chills

The Heroes is a 2011 novel by dark fantasy author Joe Abercrombie, set around an invasion of the Kingdom of the North by The Union, and the battle that takes place at the titular heroes, a set of standing stones. Through the three days of the battle, it follows multiple perspectives on both sides, from the embittered warrior Curnden Craw to disgraced royal bodyguard Bremer dan Gorst, to raw recruits and diplomats. As a young man, I picked up the book in an airport when I was 13, and I fell in love with it. I'd never read a book that looked at fantasy this way, with mud and blood and guts and grit, and I obsessively read and reread it.

Part of this rereading process was that of discovery. As I continued to read, I gleaned little details, but ended up with more questions than answers. What was up with Shivers’ eye? Who was the Bloody Nine, and why was everyone so terrified of him? What the heck was Bayan, First of the Magi's deal? Were there more Magi out there? Slowly I put together a rough sketch of what was going on, but my mental map had a lot of blanks.

This is because The Heroes is the fifth book set in this world. 95% of the questions I had, were answered by the first four. They weren't mysteries, they were callbacks.

Applying this to your home game, particularly when starting small, is pretty simple and (in my opinion), enrich a game, particularly if you're willing to delegate authorship of the setting a bit among the various players. 

Before starting a game (assuming the classic village, small region, and dungeon setup), come up with a few evocative names for the wider world. Things like “Polvar, City of Worms” as the nearby big town, or “King Alan the Bright” for your local monarch. 

However, as Personabler puts it, having that kind of vagary risks isolating players from the world even more than just learning another setting. My solution for this is that when players come up with their backstories, ask them to keep it vague-ish and suggest/add something, so that way the details can be filled in later. “Sage from the Silver Cities, betrayed by a partner” or “Veteran of the War of Norman's Nose”, each add to the world. When those come up, ask your players what they think they are.

The benefits of this approach are obvious: it can help make the world feel more lived-in, opens things up for improvisation, and players often pay more attention to a setting they feel more ownership of. As a drawback however, some players don't like being put on the spot, and it pretty much shatters any sense of the world as an objective place that lives and breathes on its own.

For examples of games that do this well, Blades in the Dark has a system for contacts where the exact details of their nature and relationship are up to interpretation. Castle Grief's Kal-Arath is full of factions and locations that are intentionally vague, meant to be filled in through a combination of Oracles and player imagination. 

Have you ever used this technique? Sound off in the comments below, or skeet at me on Bluesky.