Welcome back part 3: Virtuality & Phantasy

So, I’ve hinted in previous posts that the action now takes place in a village called Frampton Gurney. But what kind of a place is that?

As you’ll see when I soon manage to get the new build out for you to play with, Frampton Gurney isn’t much of a place at all, yet. It’s more of an idea.

The premise for it is that we, a small, local society of ‘phantasmagoricists’, own a modest Victorian building, which used to be the parish rectory. This is the society’s headquarters. The gardens of this house have been turned into a kind of nature reserve, and each garden will be given a different theme.

This alone should stimulate a few questions: What is a phantasmagoricist? What is such a society anyway? Why is it based in a rectory? What goes on beyond the house? What is it all going to look like, and why?

All good questions, to which I may not yet have good answers!

Let me try to set the scene by telling you a little story:

It was around 1907, I think, when the Reverend Samuel Dunmore heard the timid knock on the rectory door that was about to change his life.

His parishioners often secretly referred to Samuel as “the Not Very Reverend Samuel Dunmore”, given that he was much more interested in the natural world of plants and animals than he was in the supernatural one that was meant to be his job. But he always tried his best for them, and so they loved him anyway.

On this particular morning, he opened the creaky rectory door to discover a slight, somewhat elderly lady standing before him, looking flustered amid several heavy wooden crates. Miss Alice, as she was known, was here to inquire whether the young reverend would be willing to look after her mock turtles for her, since she felt she was now getting too old for that sort of thing.

Samuel, of course, readily agreed, and that same afternoon he started to build a little cactus garden for them, down by the lake. He had always felt they were more like desert tortoises than turtles, in truth, and assumed this was how they’d acquired the adjective, ‘mock’. Nonetheless, there was clearly quite a story behind them in some mysterious way, and one behind Miss Alice, too.

As a lifelong worrier, it didn’t take Sam very long to start fretting about what would have happened to the mock turtles if Miss Alice hadn’t rescued them. He had heard her mention other strange creatures, too, now that he thought about it. Just briefly, in passing, as if she assumed everyone would understand what she was talking about. People would often nod knowingly, but none of them did understand, really; they just didn’t want to offend her.

What had become of these other creatures, he wondered? Especially since nobody apparently cared much about them in the first place, and they would easily be forgotten. Stories do fade, and their characters fade with them. Miss Alice was clearly fading too, and time might be running out. So what had actually happened to the borogroves, the boojum birds, the gryphons? Had anybody been kind to the slithy toves, or were they simply too slithy for their own good? Given that he had always felt a little misunderstood and neglected himself, Samuel decided he should try to find out.

To cut a long story and two world wars short: By the end of his long, eccentric, and slightly isolated life, Samuel’s beloved menagerie had grown substantially, at least in his own mind. At various times the gardens had even been open to the public, not that many of them showed up. His collection included such rare creatures as the wildly mischaracterized marsh-wiggles, from Narnia, and a few of the less showy, but much easier to look after, relatives of dragons and unicorns. There may even have been a pushmi-pullyu at some point, and perhaps, as some of the older villagers of today have hinted, the odd hobbit. Alongside he mock turtles, Samuel built them all safe homes, tucked away among the rectory’s secret gardens and wild patches.

In his wealthier years, our Not Very Reverend Samuel also founded and endowed an earnest, charmingly parochial ‘learned society’ in Frampton village, where it still meets today on the last Tuesday of every month. The Society was dedicated, in its rather touchingly amateurish way, to the noble cause of “researching, observing, and caring for neglected creatures from children’s fantasy stories, while there is still time.”

Here in the Twenty-first Century, in an age when antiquated books have largely given way to computer games, and even these are often discarded without a moment\’s thought for their inhabitants, I stand before you as the third and current president of this august, if slightly tattered institution: the Frampton Gurney Phantasmagorical Society.

This is, of course, completely untrue. Every word of it. But I hope it paints a picture. I did once belong to a fairly parochial learned society myself, dating back to 1850, so it’s a world I feel I understand. But I’ll tell you about that another time. For now, let me list some of the key ideas:

• Frampton Gurney is meant to be a small village, somewhere in the West Country of England, where I grew up (it’s always best to write about places we know, even if the readers aren’t familiar with them). I want it to seem cozy and quaint; somewhere to get away from the horrors of the real world. There should be bunting hanging over the village green during the summer fete, and a Christmas tree in the snow.
• It’s on the coast, and has a small harbor where ships can dock; perhaps carrying creatures or useful objects to and from other people’s worlds. There’s also a tiny railway; narrow-gauge and quaint; something visitors to the gardens might hypothetically take rides on. All along I’ve had model railways in my mind, partly because modellers are experts at fitting lots of world into a tiny space, and partly because who doesn’t love model railways? There’s no real use for a train any more (the new world is much more compact than the last one you saw), but I just want to hear that “choo-choo”, see the smoke, and play around with cute furnishing from my childhood, like signal boxes and level crossings. Thomas the Tank Engine was a fantasy creature, I suppose, but he could talk, so that’s going too far.
• The society’s headquarters are in the parish rectory, because that’s the kind of place they would be. People of a scientific and naturalistic bent, as with our hero, the Not Very Reverend Dunmore, often went into the clergy. It was respectable and safe, particularly for oddballs. “The role of country parson could allow a young man the opportunity to marry, employ servants, and keep a carriage“, and even Charles Darwin yearned for that.
• The gardens are more or less wasteland at the moment, but the idea is for each of several gardens to represent a different biome, themed very loosely on a location from Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century fantasy stories. Currently, the first region is based on ‘Wonderland’ (or at least, the temperate Oxfordshire grasslands where Alice fell down the rabbit hole). The second is planned to be ‘Narnia’; a cold, boreal forest environment. Third is a Japanese ‘Dragon Garden’, where we might keep, you know… dragons. I haven’t picked a story for that, yet. And the fourth is a tropical zone (or as tropical as England can get), loosely based on the floating island from Doctor Doolittle’s travels. All of this may change, but that’s what I have in mind.
• The historical periods I have in mind are late Victorian to early Edwardian, say 1880 to 1910. This is the relatively graceful and modern Art Nouveau period, rather than the stark and heavy High Victorian period. I think I’d like to see an element of Steampunk, though – not massive cogs and stovepipe hats, but something of the Rube Goldberg, Heath Robinson variety. Maybe a little bit of Caractacus Potts, but not much. My personal hero, a guy called Herbert Balch, was a cave explorer and archeologist around 1907, and if I was able to go back and live in another time, that’s probably when I would choose.
• You may have noticed a bit of pathos, here and there. It’s set in Frampton Gurney, not Victorian London; they’re oddball fantasy creatures, not splendid ones; he’s a hesitant (not very) Reverend, not the Bishop of Bath and Wells. This is deliberate. As a bit of an oddball myself, those are the people and creatures I love and care about. My work has always tended to attract them, and I’m proud of that. I love people who try hard, even if they don’t succeed. I love people who are vulnerable and real, curious and thoughtful, quirky and independent-minded. I want this place to be for them. I’d like to make it a safe and relaxing place for them, with creatures who deserve their love and interest. Well-adjusted, self-assured, totally neurotypical people are very welcome too, but they’ll have to learn to fit in.

I should say that all of this is optional from a user’s point of view. I’ve been building virtual worlds for half a century, and I’ve learned that they need a location in time and space, a history, and, at root, a geology. Without these they become incoherent. So this is the history I’ve decided to go with. But it’s also science, also philosophy, also a simulation, also more or less a video game. Pick whatever bits you like!

Okay, so that’s a lot of information and it barely scratches the surface of what’s happened over the past two years, but hopefully it gets you somewhat up to speed. What you’ll see when you get a build in your sticky hands is nowhere near what I’m aiming for, but hopefully you can at least see where it’s heading.