Five Things RPG Players Can Learn From A Sea Shanty Festival
I recently had a good time at a sea music festival. I’ve listened to a variety of nautical music on YouTube and Tidal, and even seen the Longest Johns play at a bar, but I’d never been to a festival like this before, and I didn’t know what to expect. I ended up feeling like someone who had only read about RPGs before, going to my first con and getting to play. It’s much more of an interactive, in-person hobby than I expected.
I was struck by just how similar the folk tradition of shanties and sea music is to RPGs, and I picked up on five things that maybe us dice rollers can learn from the capstan turners.
1. Sometimes it’s okay to use the wrong word just to get people’s attention.
A shanty is a specific kind of working song used on the ships of the 19th century to help smaller crews coordinate their pulling and pushing on specific tasks, like turning a capstan, raising a sail, or turning a pump. Other kinds of music sung by or about sailors are not shanties. There were no shanties in the Golden Age of Piracy, which ended in the 1730s. “The Wellerman” isn’t a shanty. It’s what’s called a forebitter: a leisure song sung aboard ships. But nobody wants to hear sea music, or knows what that is. Saying shanty fest instead of sea music fest gets more attention. It’s also better at conveying the key information: anyone who says they sing shanties will also know some forebitters, but “sea music” could mean all kinds of different things. In other words, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and call your strange experimental RPGs “D&D”.
2. It’s worth it to be an active, supportive part of the fun.
I’ve heard more than one person blame GM burnout on players who treat their GM like a paid performer there to entertain a crowd. A GM, so the wisdom goes, is just another player at the table, just with a slightly different role than the others. The responsibility for having fun – as well as the responsibility for scheduling, and the responsibility for safety – should be equally shared amongst all players.
At the festival, I got to see actual paid performers being treated like friends. Performers at different levels of skill and fame were cheered equally. Mistakes were treated with the sympathetic flavor of laughter. The crowd was always supportive, even when stormy weather threatened to blow away the tents or a fallen tree cut power to the lights and speakers. Bring that kind of energy to your gaming table and everyone will have a better time.
3. Your original character is fine.
Are you playing a thinly-veiled pastiche of a famous character? Did you not even bother to change their name? Don’t worry about it. This is just how people tell stories.
Sea music often reuses the same cast of characters: everyman sailor Abel Brown, the great Captain Stormalong, the girl in port Sally Brown, the villainous Larry Mar and his wife who drug and shanghai sailors, and either General Tailor or Santiano depending on where that 19th century shantyman’s political preferences lay.
I got to hear a particularly interesting talk about the ballad "Nell of Narragansett Bay". From the 1840s through the 1920s, there were dozens of popular ballads about little girls named Nell who died tragically in one way or another. All of these steal the character of Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, which was the Game of Thrones of its day. By the 1950s, they were showing up in “traditional local music” collections across America. Just because we live in a time of singular authors and copyright doesn’t mean we have to stop reusing characters like the storytellers of old.
4. Stories can be remixed infinitely.
Shantyman sang until the task was done, however much time that took. If they ran out of verses in a song, they either invented new ones on the spot or stole them from other songs. After a hundred years of working and a hundred more years of curation, there’s almost no such thing as an individual song. There are tunes, and there are refrains, and there are verses, but you can fit some version of most verses to almost any common tune and refrain. People did it in the 18th century and they still do today.
The same goes when running an RPG. You know around how much time you have to game with your friends and what pace you want to maintain. If you read a lot of RPGs, you can learn lots of different mechanics, plot elements, setting information, and all kinds of different challenges and puzzles. Make the systems and adventures you run work for you, not the other way around. Cut, paste, steal, and swap until you have the right tool for the job. There’s no reason you can’t use a clock in a Warhammer Fantasy game or give someone a point pool to spend in a Spire game or adapt the myth of the Green Knight in Cyberpunk – and having these elements to call on can be especially helpful when you reach the limits of your planning and need to improvise.
Likewise, a shantyman would stop singing as soon as the work was done, often with a sharp call as a signal. Once your adventure has its resolution, call it to an end. There’s no need to keep turning the capstan once the anchor has been raised.
5. Sea music gives a vision into what RPGs would look like without a WotC or a Hasbro.
I’ve had a lot of conversations about what the world of RPGs would look like without its most popular game or the single large publisher of that game. But what if we had never had a single flagship company? What if RPGs had always been made by many different independent designers, some full-time and some part-time?
It would look like the modern sea music community. There were multiple revivals of sea music in popular culture during the 20th century, but the festival I went to was the successor to one founded in the late 1970s; I got the sense a lot of the infrastructure and original community came together in the 70s, around the same time that RPGs were first becoming popular in the US. Like RPGs, a person can spend a lot of time on their own, practicing the music or studying the history, but the experience comes alive when you get a group together: one shantyman leads a song, while two or more people join in the refrain. Unlike RPGs, it doesn’t cap out at 6-8 people in the refrain; you can get as many people as your venue fits, but you can absolutely have a good time with 2-6 friends singing the refrains, just like an RPG group. Also unlike RPGs, or even other music genres, there is no big record label for shanty music; all but the biggest performers burn their own CDs and either haul them to festivals or hawk them on personal websites. Festivals are nonprofits, organized by the most dedicated fans.
So what does this look like? There would be no friendly local game stores, no tie-in cartoon, and no official motion picture. There would be no glossy magazines, although there might be some zines. There would be less physical merchandise. RPG players in the 20th century would have met via clubs or word of mouth, eventually getting onto the internet and social media when the digital age rolled around. There would still be festivals and monthly meetups where people gathered to play RPGs together, and there would still be weekly games hosted in people’s homes and accommodating third spaces. New RPGs and adventures would be passed around between GMs, sold at festivals, and perhaps appear in bookstores or catalogs. It would be much more normal for a GM to run original systems as well as original adventures. There would be a few people who could make a living publishing RPG material, but it would be extremely few, even compared to today. There would still be a wave of new fans brought into the hobby in the 2020s by charismatic younger streamers and social media stars; the shanty equivalent of Critical Role and Dimension 20 are performers like Nathan Evans, The Longest Johns, and Colm McGuinness (who has actually pivoted from shanties to D&D and other fantasy music recently). There would still be video games inspired by RPGs; shanties first show up in the soundtrack for Sid Meier’s Pirates in 1987 (incidentally, a game reviewed by Dragon magazine), and appear in modern games like Sea of Thieves and indie whaling simulator Nantucket. The hobby as a whole would probably be a bit smaller, with fewer players, but there still be enough to create communities in major cities and online. It would still exist, and people would still play some great games.
Some Bonus Music Recs
Hey, I’ve been talking about shanties for a while now. Would you like to hear some? South Australia is a true working shanty. Here’s an accompanied version of Rolling the Woodpile Down that I like to listen to when moving heavy boxes. Go To Sea Once More is a forebitter about a sailor’s hardships at sea and in port. The Vox Hunters are a shanty group I encountered for the first time at the festival, and who I really liked. If you’re a more energetic type, here’s a folk-punk version of Old Maui by the excellent Dreadnoughts. If you’re already a hardcore shanty fan, here’s a playlist I put together of more obscure songs you might not have heard before – as a warning, this list includes some very rough, low-fidelity festival recordings. And finally, if you’ve ever spent a little too long discussing RPGs online, here’s a song you might find all too familiar; it made me realize the true similarities of the hobbies and inspired this blog post.