Shakespeare as Dungeon Master: Giving Minor Characters Depth
The secret to creating living fictional worlds.
Like Shakespeare, a good Dungeon Master fills their worlds with life.
Neither a dedicated DM nor Shakespeare are content with purely functional characters, characters who appear, advance the plot, and disappear without any sign of internal life. For lesser creators, a merchant is a merchant, selling and buying, and doing nothing more.
This video by Runesmith highlights that while one or two lifeless merchants in a DnD campaign may not seem like a flaw, meeting the same hollow merchant in town after town will quickly bore the players. Players can only see so many cardboard cut-outs before the world becomes cardboard.
The same goes for Shakespeare — he abhors a cardboard cut-out, even when he could get away with it. As Jorge Luis Borges says in 'The Enigma of Shakespeare':
[I]n Shakespeare’s work all the characters exist, even incidental characters. The apothecary, for example, who sells poison to Romeo and says, “My poverty, but not my will consents,” has already defined himself as a man in a single phrase.(trans. Esther Allen)
Shakespeare did not need to kindle this life in the apothecary. He did not need to give a motive and a conflict to a character so minor that you probably forgot he existed. DnD players won’t remember every merchant they meet, but in the moment they interact with a merchant with motive and conflict, the illusion of the world is strengthened.
In his video, Runesmith suggests a simple technique for fleshing out these minor characters. You must ask:
1) What are their weaknesses, their apparent flaws?
2) What is their need, the thing which when gotten will help them flourish?
3) What is their desire, a thing which they want but won’t help them flourish?
4) What is their enemy, what person, thing, organisation, or idea do they fight or want to fight.
In five minutes, you can conjure the first twitches of life into cardboard.
I know there’s some sceptical people out there, sceptical of all talk of story structure, writing exercises, sceptical of all ‘shortcuts’. I hear them moaning, ‘These formulas can only make formulaic things. What does this have to do with Shakespeare’s talent?’
Yes, characters made by Runesmith’s method, or any method, can be shallow, can be formulaic. And yet, shallow and formulaic characters are no problem for a DM or Shakespeare. As Runesmith says:
I think it’s good to hold on to your first concept for simple characters because they’re not that important, so you don’t need to put too much thought into them.
The apothecary in Romeo and Juliet is ‘not that important’. A guy driven to do bad for lack of money is neither original nor profound. It doesn’t have to be. If the play dallied too long on the apothecary, we’d see his shallowness — but as with merchants in DnD, we chat with them, and pass by.
Of course, we don’t remember Shakespeare for his formulaic characters. And yet, I don’t think this should push us away from formula. What begins as formula can, without our meaning it, become profound.
When people complain about these formulas, they miss the point of them. Formulas are not recipes. They are incantations for inspiration. Sometimes inspiration only returns formulaic blessings: other times it gives you far more than you ever asked for.
I’ll give you a case-study from Shakespeare.
While I can never know for certain Shakespeare’s creative process, I can make a pretty good guess for one of his late plays, The Two Noble Kinsmen.
If you haven’t read The Two Noble Kinsmen (and you haven’t), it’s about two horndogs fighting over a lesbian. This is barely facetious.
Importantly, it’s an adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales. We have none of Shakespeare’s original drafts, but comparing his plays to his sources is like comparing a finished draft to an early one.
In both Shakespeare’s play and Chaucer’s poem, one of the noble kinsmen, Palamon, is imprisoned for life. Chaucer saves him from this peril in two lines:
That, sone after the midnight, Palamoun, / By helping of a freend, brak his prisoun.
Well, isn’t that a letdown, a deus ex machina. Who is this friend? How did they break Palamon from prison? Why do we never hear about them before or after this?
Shakespeare knew this needed some polishing. He knew this purely functional ‘freend’ needed some life.
Shakespeare surely considered that this friend needed both the ability and the motivation to break Palamon free.
‘The jailor could let Palamon out,’ Shakespeare thinks. ‘But why would the jailor break the law to help a criminal. It needs to be someone near the jailor, with access to his keys — his daughter! And she lets Palamon out because she loves him!’
A character born of a formula: what type of person would be willing and able to do this.
But Shakespeare didn’t stop there. The formula had given flesh to a shade, but inspiration gave the incarnate shade a mind of its own.
Rather than falling out of the story, the jailor’s daughter appears throughout the play. She has a story arc, a happy(ish) ending, and she has five long, soul-searching monologues.
Plot-wise, none of this is necessary. After freeing Palamon, she does not affect main story. At most, she embodies the theme of the play from a different angle. The two noble kinsmen are destroyed by obsessive love, and so is (almost) the jailor’s daughter. The theme comes first from a prince’s perspective, now a commoner’s, first from a man’s, now a woman’s.
I doubt that Shakespeare planned this. I doubt he thought, ‘I must explore the theme of obsessive love from both the point of view of upper and lower class, from the view point of men and women, therefore I shall create a lower class female character, the jailor’s daughter, etc, etc.’
More likely, inspiration struck and kept on striking. As Shakespeare was fleshing out a side character, he realised how closely her scars and blemishes resembled his main characters’. He had serendipitously mirrored his themes in a side character, and chose to develop this accidental realisation. With workmanship alloyed by inspiration, Shakespeare created one of the play’s most impactful characters.
Don’t dismiss these writing exercises. Don’t think these ‘Build a character in five minutes’ exercises are (totally) bunk. I’m not saying you’ll write as well as Shakespeare, but by doing these exercises, by following these recipes for character creation, you’ll be surprised where inspiration takes you. At worst, you’ll have a formulaic but serviceable character for your DnD campaign or novel. At best, you might hit upon your most interesting character without even meaning to.
