Mood & Setting

Setting the Mood in Role-playing
"A cold rain falls slowly from a grey, overcast sky. You are wet and shivering. It has been several days since you have glimpsed the sun and water stands in puddles everywhere you look." Thus I have often described the opening of another session set in my own dark world of Dreadmoor. Choice of words can paint a picture as brightly or as gloomy as the referee desires. By choosing our verbal or written descriptors we can set the mood for the evening's play. Shared mood helps bring the players into the scene, suspending disbelief and immersing the players in the fictional action at the table. What starts out in the imagination of the referee is transferred to the imagination of the players and a collective, shared "reality" is created in which the PCs come alive and interact with "their" world. The referee of course must tell the players what the PCs see, hear, feel, smell, taste, etc. By choosing descriptors deliberately and carefully, mood as well as objects appear in the players imagination.
When setting mood, the referee's description of light and shadow plays a significant part. Light is often warm or cool, harsh, bright, dim, grey, orange, red, blinding and so forth. The quality of the light, along with temperature, humidity and air movement can create a reaction in the players who imagine their own experience with those environmental qualities and in doing so conjure memories, feelings and moods. Pacing, how fast we speak, can also greatly affect mood as can tone of voice.
I have remarked in past posts on the connection between literature and roleplaying. Nowhere is this connection more obvious to me than in how the referee or author must bring the player or reader into the fictional action through words, painting a mental picture. Some authors do this better than others and as a referee I frequently borrow from such authors. I recently re-read The Broken Sword, pictured above, written by Poul Anderson. The Broken Sword is set in a fantastic world that co-exists alongside our earthly Britain somewhere around the tenth century of the common era. Elves and trolls are real, witches cast spells and gods influence the lives of men and women in Poul Anderson's version of a viking tale. The first half of this book is simply excellent, the last half is more uneven and if it were not for this, I believe more of us would be reading The Broken Sword.
The action in The Broken Sword mostly takes place at night under moon-light or star-light, often during winter with a cold wind driving a stinging snow. The action is unseen by most humans, those without the witch-sight which allows them to see into the realm of fairy, that parallel world where elves and trolls go about their business just out of mortal sight. The Broken Sword has lots of mood and atmosphere that takes the reader out of the comfort of the living room and into a magical place we can almost believe exists. Just what we want to do when playing at our fantastic hobby!